tihvavy of ^e tUoh^ml ^tmimry 
 
 PRINCETON • NEW JERSEY 
 
 PRESENTED BY 
 
 Mr. J*M. Nelson 
 BV 3797 .S5 1905 
 Smith, Gipsy, 1860-1947 
 As Jesus passed by 
 
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 As Jesus Passed By 
 
 And Other Addresses 
 
 By 
 GIPSY SMITH 
 
 UlUALOC 
 
 ^\^ 
 
 New York Chicago Toronto 
 
 Fleming H. Revell Company 
 
 London and Edinburgh 
 
Copyright, 1905, by 
 FLEMING H. PEVELL COMPANY 
 
 Eighth Edition 
 
 Kew York: 158 Fifth Avfenue 
 Chicago: 80 Wabash Avenue 
 Toronto: 27 Richmond Street, W. 
 London: 21 Paternoster Square 
 Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street 
 
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 AS JESUS PASS-^D BY 
 
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Copyright, 1905, by 
 FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 
 
Preface 
 
 After much pressure I have consented to 
 the publication of these Addresses. They were 
 delivered to crowded audiences with a burning 
 desire to bring those who heard them to an im- 
 mediate decision for Christ. Here they are, 
 practically as they were spoken, and if I am so 
 led, they will be preached again, for God has 
 been pleased to bless them to thousands. 
 Whether heard or read, my one desire is the 
 extension of Christ's kingdom all over the world. 
 
 Gipsy Smith. 
 
Contents 
 
 I. 
 
 As Jesus Passed by ; or. Follow Me 
 
 7 
 
 II. 
 
 Repent Ye ! .... 
 
 23 
 
 III. 
 
 Born Again 
 
 
 
 • 43 
 
 IV. 
 
 The Saviour of All . 
 
 
 
 . 61 
 
 V. 
 
 The Master's Touch . 
 
 
 
 • 79 
 
 VI. 
 
 Slay Utterly 
 
 
 
 97 
 
 VII. 
 
 He Went Away Sorrowful 
 
 
 
 117 
 
 VIII. 
 
 The Final Choice 
 
 
 
 135 
 
 IX. 
 
 Saved and Unsaved 
 
 
 
 151 
 
 X. 
 
 Gleaning for God 
 
 
 
 165 
 
 XI. 
 
 Hid With Christ 
 
 
 
 191 
 
 XII. 
 
 The New Life • • , 
 
 
 
 • 213 
 
AS JESUS PASSED BY; OR, 
 FOLLOW ME 
 
« And as Jesus passed by, He saw a man called Matthew, 
 sitting at the place of toll. And He saith unto him, Follow 
 Me. And he arose and followed Him." — Matt, g : g. 
 
AS JESUS PASSED BY; OR, FOLLOW ME 
 
 This is Matthew's modest way of telling all 
 generations how he was converted. Matthew 
 could have made a great deal more of that 
 epoch-making moment in his life. Sometimes I 
 think when he wrote just as much as my text he 
 would not write any more that day. Can you 
 not see between the lines what a story is there 
 untold? He does not even tell you that he lived 
 in a big house. He does not tell you that he 
 made a big feast. He does not tell you that he 
 invited all his old friends to come and meet with 
 Jesus at the feast. He leaves others to tell you 
 that little bit of the story. He simply says there 
 was a feast. Very modest is Matthew. He says 
 Jesus saw a man, and said to that man, " Follow 
 Me," and the man followed ; that is all. Some 
 of us at certain moments of our lives cannot trust 
 ourselves to tell all the story. We keep some- 
 thing back ; we cannot trust ourselves to put the 
 story into words. There are pages in every life 
 that will never be written. There are stories 
 9 
 
10 As Jesus Passed By; or, Follow Me 
 
 untold to mortal ear over which the angels re- 
 joice. There are moments when only the sky 
 and the sun, the moon and the stars, the birds 
 and the flowers, and the heaven eternal can hear 
 all we have to say of His wonderful grace and 
 mercy. We can only tell a bit of it, just a little 
 bit of it. I want you to think of this wonderful 
 moment — and it was a wonderful moment, a 
 moment when gospels were born, a moment in 
 which history began to breathe, a moment when 
 in his soul there was placed the germ-joy that 
 will make heaven pulsate with hallelujahs. It 
 was a wonderful moment in his life when he saw 
 Jesus standing there calling him by name, speak- 
 ing to him as a man would to his friend, appeal- 
 ing to him. 
 
 Why should Jesus go to this man ? Because 
 this man needed Jesus. I beheve deep down in 
 this man's heart he was longing for Christ. I 
 am not so sure that he had not heard John the 
 Baptist preach. I am not so sure that he was 
 not already a convicted sinner. I am not so 
 sure that he had not heard John say, " Behold 
 the Lamb of God ! " There were moments in 
 his life when he longed to get a look at that 
 dear face, to hear the music of that voice, and 
 
As Jesus Passed By : or, Follow Me 1 1 
 
 catch some inspiration from His life-giving mes- 
 sage, and to feel the touch that healed. And I 
 can imagine that even that day he could not see 
 his books for his tears. He was at his business, 
 you remember ; he sat at the place of toll, every- 
 thing in front of him, and while he was thinking 
 of the inward longings, while the soul-hunger 
 was gnawing, while the man within the man was 
 talking to him and setting in motion thoughts 
 and feehngs that were eternal, I can imagine him 
 saying, " Oh, shall I ever see Him ? " And 
 maybe he laid his head on his hands in his 
 grief, and at that moment Jesus said, ** Matthew, 
 Matthew, follow Me." You know Matthew was 
 ready to do it. He did it instantly, without 
 asking a question, without any hesitation. He 
 acted as though he had -made his plans as to 
 what he would do if he had the chance. He left 
 all. He does not tell you that, he leaves the 
 others to add that bit to the story ; and his all 
 was the possibility of becoming very rich. He 
 left it all : he left his books, he left his business, 
 he left his office, he left his position, he left his 
 friends, he left all to follow Jesus. Matthew 
 had counted the cost, and knew what he would 
 do if the chance came. Jesus knew it too. He 
 
12 As Jesus Passed By; or, Follow Me 
 
 knew where Matthew sat, just as He knew where 
 Nathanael prayed under the fig-tree. He knows 
 where you are, Matthew at the place of toll or 
 Nathanael under the fig-tree, or Zacchaeus in the 
 tree. He knows. He sees. There is no look 
 heavenward, there is no desire heavenward, there 
 is no aspiration after goodness, there is not an 
 honest struggle for a nobler hfe in your heart, in 
 your home, anywhere, everywhere, but what God 
 sees and God knows. And, Hsten to me, there 
 never is a good desire, there never is a noble 
 thought, there never will be an aspiration for a 
 holier hfe, but what is God-given and God-in- 
 spired. He knows. And He knows where you 
 sit, my brother. Here is a man handicapped, a 
 jewel in an unlikely place, here is a man that 
 nobody wanted, ostracized by his very profession, 
 separated from decent folk by his calling, unpop- 
 ular and hated. There he was; he never had 
 had a chance. The Church did not want him, 
 and when Jesus Christ took the trouble to save 
 him. The Church of his day did not want him, 
 and I am afraid there are some Churches in Eng- 
 land who would net thank you to fill them with 
 the harlots, the publicans, the gamblers, the 
 drunkards, and the sinners. And yet they are 
 
As Jesus Passed By; or. Follow Me 13 
 
 the sort that heaven opens its doors to. Don't 
 forget that. They are the people for whom 
 Christ died — not the righteous, but sinners. 
 And there are people who would sit in commit- 
 tee and dictate to the Son of God as to who 
 He is to Sfave. They did it in Matthew's day. 
 There are people who would sit in judgment on 
 the Christ of God. They would question the 
 authority of Omnipotence to save the sinner, 
 " This Man eateth with sinners." It shows how 
 much they knew of this Man and His mission to 
 the world. What does this story mean? It 
 means this : that for every man there is a chance. 
 The Christ I have to preach gives a chance to 
 the worst, to the most unlikely, to the most de- 
 graded, to the most hated, to the most sinful, to 
 the most despised, to the people who were born 
 into the world with the devil in their blood, the 
 blood of the gambler in their veins, the blood of 
 the harlot in their veins. And when I think of 
 it all and look at some people, the wonder to me 
 is that they are not worse than they are. God 
 have pity on the little boys and girls in the world 
 who are made drunk before they are a year old ! 
 God have pity on the child-life of to-day ! For 
 such Jesus came. 
 
14 As Jesus Passed By; or, Follow Me 
 
 And He chooses to find out about these peo- 
 ple, the people that nobody wants, and He says, 
 " I want you ; I am after you." It is a new way 
 of treating sinners. Did you ever think of it? 
 A new way of treating sinners, wrong-doers. 
 Prison for wrong-doers, the law courts for 
 wrong-goers ; the whole fabric of society is built 
 up to keep off wrong-doers, to keep away wrong- 
 doers, to keep out wrong-doers, to shut up and 
 shut off wrong-doers, and Jesus Christ comes 
 and opens His arms to them, and says, " Come 
 to Me ; I will receive you." That is the Christ 
 for me ! To set the prisoner free, to break the 
 chains of them that are bound, to open the 
 prison doors and say, " March out ; I will make 
 you free by My mighty power." It means a 
 \ chance for every man. And Jesus sees far more 
 in these people that are far from Him than we 
 have seen yet. If you and I had the eyes of 
 Christ we should see in the filthiest wretch that 
 walks the street something worth saving. If you 
 and I only had the vision of Calvary we should 
 never weary, we should never tire, we should 
 never lose heart, and we should never lose hope. 
 We should believe that for the worst there is a 
 
As Jesus Passed By; or. Follow Me 15 
 
 throne, a song, an anthem. May God help us to 
 believe our gospel ! 
 
 Why did Jesus go to Matthew? Because 
 Jesus knew that Matthew needed Him. No- 
 body could do for Matthew what Jesus could. 
 Don't forget that. Matthew had never had a 
 chance. Nobody but Jesus could give him one. 
 He was in a bad setting ; his whole life was a 
 tangle, his whole life was knots. Nobody wanted 
 him. And you know people like that. There 
 are some connected with you that you would 
 rather not see. You tremble when you see 
 them, and when their name is mentioned. There 
 are some names you do not talk about to others ; 
 you try to forget; you won't talk about them. 
 There is a skeleton in every cupboard. The 
 most of us here have somebody connected with 
 us that we do not like to mention ; we try to 
 forget ; and yet, God knows, the agony of it eats 
 the life out of us. They are the people who 
 need Him. 
 
 It is no good to say to some people, " Believe, 
 believe." They need somebody's fingers to un- 
 ravel the knots, to untie and straighten things 
 out ; and who is to do it ? Those whose whole 
 life has been cursed from their very birth, they 
 
i6 As Jesus Passed By; or, Follow Me 
 
 are handicapped in their very blood, and who is 
 to deliver them ? Can anybody do it ? Is there 
 no God who can do it ? Listen — the fingers 
 that weaved the rainbow into a scarf and wrapped 
 it around the shoulders of the dying storm, the 
 fingers that painted the Hly-bell and threw out 
 the planets, the fingers that were dipped in the 
 mighty sea of eternity and shook out on this old 
 planet, making the ocean to drop and the rivers 
 to stream — the same fingers can take hold on 
 these tangled lives and can make them whole 
 again, for He came to make the crooked straight, 
 and the rough places plain. Blessed be God, 
 Jesus can do for Matthew what nobody else can, 
 and He can do for you, my brother, what your 
 friends cannot do. He can take the desire for 
 drink out of you ; He can cure the love of 
 gambling that is eating the soul out of you ; He 
 can put out the fires of lust that are burning in 
 your being and consuming you by inches ; He 
 can take the devil of lying out of you, the devil 
 of cheating out of you, of fraud out of you, of 
 hypocrisy out of you. Jesus can do what no- 
 body else can ; the preacher cannot, the Church 
 cannot ; but the Lord Jesus, who loves you, is 
 mighty to save. 
 
As Jesus Passed By; or, Follow Me 17 
 
 Let me go another step. There was some- 
 thing that Matthew could do for Jesus that 
 nobody else could — and I say that reverently. 
 Jesus needed Matthew. Ay, and He needs you. 
 They looked at Him and said, " He is a sinner." 
 " Yes," said Jesus, " and he will write My first 
 Gospel." Only give him a chance; you do not 
 know what there is hidden in the drunkard. 
 There may be a preacher, there may be an 
 evangelist, there may be a gospel. You do not 
 know. Give them a chance; give them all a 
 chance. " A sinner." They were fond of using 
 these words. " He is a sinner." They used 
 them about the man in the tree. " Yes," said 
 Jesus, " he is a sinner, and he is a son of Abra- 
 ham." And it was Jesus who spoke on both 
 occasions. You would not have gone for a 
 scribe for the Son of God to a pubHcan. No ! 
 But Jesus has a wonderful way of showing what 
 He can do withunhkel^ material. A little child 
 cried just now. Its little voice in coming days 
 may startle the nation. The waving of its little 
 hand may marshal the hosts of God. Who can 
 tell ? That little boy at your side may become a 
 Spurg^on, a McLaren, a Whitefield, a Wesley. 
 Who can tell the possibilities of a child ? That 
 
1 8 As Jesus Passed By ; or, Follow Me 
 
 little girl may be a Mrs. Fletcher, a Florence 
 Nightingale, a Catherine Booth. Who can tell ? 
 And God wants them all. There are gospels 
 hidden away, untold yet, but they will shine out 
 and flash in letters, golden capitals, and make 
 the world glad with a great gladness. 
 
 You saw the sinner, Jesus saw the man. He 
 saw the sinner too, and He knew what the sinner 
 would be when grace had had a chance. The 
 world sees the face and the clothes and the 
 house, the street you hve in, where you work, 
 and reckons you up by how much your salary 
 is. Jesus does not reckon that way. See that 
 sailor — drunken, filthy, vile of lip and impure in 
 soul — a drunken sailor. Nobody wanted him; 
 nobody cared for him. God looked at him and 
 saved him ; and his name was John Newton, the 
 poet, the preacher, but God could see the theo- 
 logian, the preacher, in the drunken sailor. See 
 that man, a swearing tinker; so swearing, he 
 says of himself, that when he began to swear 
 his neighbours shuddered. Nobody wanted that 
 tinker. But God looked at him and saved him ; 
 and his name was John Bunyan, the immortal 
 dreamer. You would not have looked for the 
 " Pilgrim's Progress " in that swearing tinker. 
 
As Jesus Passed By ; or, Follow Me 1 9 
 
 God looked at that man, a publican — and you 
 know what a pubHcan is — helping his brother to 
 sell beer in Gloucester. God looked at him and 
 saved him ; and his name was George Whitefield, 
 the mighty preacher. Look at that man selling 
 boots and shoes in a shoe store in Chicago. God 
 looked at him and saved him, and when He 
 took the trouble to save him and that young 
 fellow offered himself to a Congregational Church 
 as a Church member, they saw so little in him 
 that they put him back on trial for twelve 
 months ; and his name was Moody. And Moody 
 has put one hand on America and another hand 
 on Britain, and they moved towards the Cross. 
 See that man, the plaything of the village, full 
 of devilry, mischief, roguery, fond of pleasure 
 and sin. Nobody cared for him except his 
 mates, and God saved him; and his name was 
 Peter Mackenzie, a sunbeam in the lives of thou- 
 sands. Look at this picture — a gipsy tent ; there 
 is a father and five httle motherless children, 
 without a Bible, without school. Nobody wanted 
 them — who does want a gipsy ? Nobody — out- 
 sider, ostracized, despised, and rejected. But 
 God looked on that poor father and those five 
 motherless little things and saw them in their 
 
20 As Jesus Passed By; or, Follow Me 
 
 ignorance and heathenism, hungry for God. 
 And He looked again, and He said, " There 
 are six preachers in that tent." And He put 
 those arms that were nailed to the tree round 
 the father and the children and saved them all ; 
 and I am one of them. It takes love to see. 
 Love saw more in Matthew than anybody ; and 
 sees more in you, my brother, than anybody 
 else ; and if no one wants you, He does, and if 
 no one loves you, He does. If no one cares, He 
 cares ; and if you think there is not a friend in 
 the world, you have more friends than you think, 
 and they are closer to you than you dream. God 
 is here, and He says, " Come to Me, follow Me, 
 and I will save you ; I will give you a chance for 
 this world and the next. Only follow Me." 
 
 Matthew never did a wiser or nobler thing 
 than when he took Christ home. Everybody 
 there had a chance of blessing that day. Think 
 of what it would mean for your home if you, my 
 brother, took Christ home with you. Your wife 
 and children would have a chance they have 
 never had before. If both of you — husband and 
 wife — bow at His dear feet together, what joy 
 there will be in heaven and on earth ! It would 
 mean your home for Jesus. You will give Christ 
 
As Jesus Passed By ; or. Follow Me 2 1 
 
 a chance with every child in your home by 
 taking Him there. Matthew took Jesus home 
 with him ; and He will go home with you if you 
 will ask Him, and He will go with you this 
 night. God help you ! 
 
 I can believe there are scores and hundreds 
 who mean to follow Jesus. Who will leave all 
 to follow Jesus? Who will sacrifice everything 
 for Jesus' sake ? Who will take their stand for 
 Jesus, and who will go home and say to their 
 friends, " I have come to tell you what great 
 things the Lord hath done for me " ? Jesus calls 
 to you. Will you follow ? 
 
II 
 
 REPENT YE! 
 
" Jesus came into Galilee, preaching, . , . saying. Re- 
 pent YE." — Mark J : 14, /j. 
 
II 
 
 REPENT YE! 
 
 The Bible, especially the New Testament, is 
 the handbook of repentance. It commands it, it 
 urges it, enforces it, repeats it, drives it in every- 
 where. Over sixty times repentance is enforced. 
 The great doctrine of repentance occupies a very 
 prominent place in the teaching of Jesus Christ 
 and His apostles. All the epistles were written 
 to show men how to do it, because there is no 
 such thing as vital communion, fellowship with 
 God, without it. And I want to speak plainly 
 about Bible repentance, and I pray God to help 
 me, for I have not anything pleasant to say. It 
 is far easier to congratulate than it is to expostu- 
 late. My business is not to speak smooth things, 
 but to say some things that you may resist fight, 
 get angry with ; and you may get angry with me 
 for saying them, but they are here, and it is my 
 business to say, " Thus saith the Lord." There 
 is no intelligent conversion without an intelligent 
 understanding of these words. May the Holy 
 25 
 
26 Repent Ye! 
 
 Spirit breathe light upon these truths, and help 
 us to see them ! For it is my business to make 
 you see what God means when He says, " Re- 
 pent ye." 
 
 I am afraid that in our zeal to get people into 
 the kingdom or the Church we have lowered the 
 standard. These words meant far more when 
 they were uttered than they do to-day with most 
 people. I am afraid the familiar way with which 
 we use them and the constant contact with them 
 and with the daily handling of them, we have 
 somehow allowed their edge to be worn off 
 They do not mean as much to us. The depth, 
 the breadth, the height, the length of these mighty 
 utterances do not search us and illuminate ancf 
 startle, and thrill and overwhelm as they used to. 
 But they do mean as much. If we have not 
 eyes to see and ears to hear, if by long contami- 
 nation with evil, and soothing the conscience 
 with opiates from hell, if crying, " Peace " where 
 there is no peace has brought a stupor upon us, 
 that is our reponsibility, not God's or His Word's. 
 God means as much by these words to-day when 
 He says, " Repent ye," as He did when they 
 were first uttered. I am afraid we have brought 
 them down, we have lowered them, we have 
 
Repent Ye! 27 
 
 pulled them from their heights down to the low 
 levels of our own poor experiences. But that is 
 not the way to climb with measured step the 
 hills of light, and walk in unbroken fellowship 
 with God. I am afraid that in our zeal to get 
 people into what we call the Church we have 
 been more anxious about heads than hearts. In 
 order to capture, we have compromised and lost. 
 We have been more concerned about filling our 
 Church registers than we have about the king- 
 dom. We have not sufficiently emphasized the 
 greatness of coming to Christ, and we have said, 
 *' It is only a step." Who told you so ? Only a 
 step to Jesus ? It is not true. It is not gospel. 
 Only a step to Jesus? Then it is a very big 
 step. We have made it a very little thing, and 
 we have multitudes ofpeople joining the Churches. 
 It is child's play. It used not to be. When I 
 came to Christ I came under the old Act. It 
 was a conflict, it was a warfare, it was a pilgrim- 
 age, it was a struggle, it was cutting off the 
 right arm and plucking out the right eye, it was 
 being maimed if necessary. It meant sacrifice. 
 There was a day in our calendar called Good 
 Friday ; there was a place called Calvary. It 
 meant coming out, being forsaken, abused, 
 
28 Repent Ye! 
 
 slandered, rejected, despised, hated, persecuted, 
 a fool for Christ's sake, sneered at, laughed at, 
 misrepresented, suffering the cross. What does 
 it mean now ? A picnic. It is a " social," it 
 is an entertainment, it is a guild, an ordinance ; 
 and with multitudes of people who call them- 
 selves Christians it means nothing more. We 
 have made it too easy, but Jesus never made it 
 so : He never deluded anybody. He never 
 cried " Peace " where there was no peace. He 
 knew the danger of saying " Peace " when the 
 soul was in anarchy and the will in rebellion, 
 and the whole man against God. He could not 
 cry " Peace." 
 
 ' No, He never made it easy. We have said to 
 anybody and everybody, " Only believe." The 
 New Testament does not say so. The devil 
 believes, and believes more than you do ; in 
 his heart he knows more about it. He believes ; 
 and if he says he does not, he is a liar, he is 
 shamming. He believes far more than any of 
 us, but he is not a saint. Jesus has never made 
 it easy. There was one man who came and 
 asked, " Are there few that be saved ? " and He 
 said, " Strive, struggle, agonize to enter in at the 
 strait gate." He never made it easy. Here is 
 
Repent Ye! 29 
 
 another man who came and said, " Lord, I will 
 follow Thee whithersoever Thou goest." But 
 Jesus knew he had not counted the cost, and 
 said, " Foxes have holes, and the birds of the air 
 have nests, but the Son of man hath not where 
 to lay His head." Here is another who came 
 and said, " Lord, what shall I do to inherit 
 eternal life ? " Jesus diagnosed the case in- 
 stantly, and put His finger on the weak spot of 
 his life and said, " If thou wilt be perfect, sell all 
 thou hast and give to the poor, and come, follow 
 Me." He did not make it easy. Here is another 
 man who came and said, " Lord, we know that 
 Thou art a teacher come from God ; for no man 
 can do these miracles that Thou doest, except 
 God be with him." Jesus said to him, " Ye 
 must be born again." And to the multitude of 
 people who listened to Him He said, " If any 
 man will be My disciple, let him take up his 
 cross and deny himself." He never made it 
 easy; and the man who makes it easy to be a 
 Christian preaches a mongrel gospel. Jesus 
 said, " Repent." John preached repentance. 
 He came to preach it. It had the first place in 
 his sermons. It was first and last with John, 
 " Repent, repent." You say it is too startling, 
 
30 Repent Ye! 
 
 sensational, vulgar ; but remember, it was God's 
 vulgarity. " Repent." No man who preaches 
 as John did will be popular. 
 
 They put John in prison for preaching repent- 
 ance, and so that the doctrine should not be 
 silent, as soon as John was shut up Jesus began 
 where John left off, and His first public sermon 
 to the world was on repentance. He knew 
 where to begin. " Repent ye," said Jesus. 
 That is His first utterance, and if you care to go 
 to His last before He left His disciples and was 
 received up yonder in the clouds. He gave them 
 the commission to go and preach repentance. 
 So that in the first and the last utterances of the 
 Son of God you have repentance enforced. And 
 when He was back again on the throne, when 
 angels and archangels had received Him with 
 the shouts of triumph and welcome which He 
 deserved, when He had been exalted as a Prince 
 and a Saviour to give repentance, as though He 
 knew that some of us would shrink from driving 
 it in, as though He knew that some of us would 
 be afraid to push it home. He said to Saul, 
 " Saul, you go to the Gentiles and make them — 
 make them — do works meet for repentance." 
 
 Jesus never made it easy. Let any man who 
 
Repent Ye! 31 
 
 ever tried honestly but one day in his hfe to 
 serve God with all his powers, let him tell me if 
 it was an easy thing to do. It is not easy. It is 
 a struggle, it is a fight. Jesus Christ on Calvary 
 is not a substitute for the Hfe He means you to 
 live, but the means by which you get the power 
 to live the life. No, there is no salvation with- 
 out repentance- This is the first step. First 
 things first. And the man who misses repent- 
 ance will miss everything. If your repentance is 
 shallow your religious Hfe will be shallow. If 
 your coming to Christ does not mean everything 
 you win not get everything. If your surrender 
 is not complete you cannot receive. If your 
 hands are filled you cannot take hold. It is only 
 those who come empty-handed that can cling. 
 It is only those who turn from darkness to light 
 that understand God. It is only those who leave 
 the devil who can receive God. No, we must 
 repent. 
 
 " Then," you say, " what is repentance ? " 
 Listen — it is not conviction. It is possible to be 
 convicted without repentance. Why, it is hardly 
 possible to meet and talk with anybody in these 
 days but at some moment of their life's history 
 they have been convicted of their need of Christ. 
 
32 Repent Ye I 
 
 It is hardly possible to meet with anybody who 
 does not know what he ought to do and what he 
 ought to be. You cannot meet and talk with 
 any man that has not light about these things ; 
 but light is not Ufe. 
 
 What brings you to a mission service ? Deep 
 down in your conscience, the soul of you, the 
 man of you, back of everything, hid away that 
 nobody else can see, there is a real cry in your 
 soul for God. That is conviction. That is God- 
 given ; that is Holy Ghost-brought, that is the 
 result of the light that flashes over the cliff-tops 
 of eternity, that is the soul's awakening. It is 
 one thing to be awake, it is another thing to get 
 up. You have often heard your minister preach. 
 Maybe you have been hearing him for years. 
 Perhaps you sit in the gallery or away back in 
 one of the pews, or near to him, and every time he 
 preaches and you hear him, you go home and 
 say, " My pastor is right ; I ought to be a Chris- 
 tian, I know I ought," and you feel beneath the 
 powerful pleadings of your own pastor, beneath 
 the pleadings of the evangelist, you know God's 
 claims, you admit them, you feel them. They 
 are right, they are reasonable, and you ought to 
 surrender. That is conviction. But it is one 
 
Repent Ye! 33 
 
 thing to be convicted and another thing to re- 
 pent. Conviction is not repentance. 
 
 What is repentance ? It is not sorrow. Sor- 
 row for sin is one element of repentance, but 
 you can be sorry without repentance. There is 
 a kind of sentimental sorrow, a sorrow at the 
 thought of coming retribution and exposure, 
 which is mean, selfish, devilish, and is not healthy 
 and life-giving. There is a sorrow that weeps at 
 funerals and sentimental plays, and weeps be- 
 neath the ordinary preaching and the special 
 preaching. There are multitudes of people who 
 think they are not far from the kingdom because 
 their tears come easily; they whisper all sorts 
 of sweet messages to themselves because they 
 can weep. They tell themselves they are not 
 hard, and therefore there must be hope for them, 
 and all the while they are holding on to for- 
 bidden things and walking in forbidden paths, 
 and keeping company with those who are des- 
 troying them and leading them far from God. It 
 is no good to cover God's altar with tears while 
 your heart is in rebellion. It is no good to hold 
 out one hand apparently to the Cross with the 
 other holding on to a black hand behind you. 
 You cannot hold Dagon in one hand and the 
 
34 Repent Ye! 
 
 Ark of the Covenant in the other. You cannot 
 serve God and mammon. It is no good to sing 
 on Sunday with your face towards the Cross and 
 on Monday with your feet towards the beershop. 
 I sat in a home a few days ago playing with a 
 boy of ten. His face was bright as the sun. 
 He looked as happy as any child in the home, 
 calling me " Uncle." Presently his mother had 
 missed something, and she came in and said, 
 "Jack, have you taken so-and-so?" His head 
 dropped. " Jack, have you taken so-and-so ? " 
 No answer. " Jack " — and she came and put 
 
 her hand on his shoulder — " did you take " 
 
 " Yes, mother ; " and he began to cry. Oh, he 
 was sorry; he did look sorry; he sobbed as 
 though his heart would break. What for ? He 
 was just as guilty five minutes before, and he 
 knew he was. What made him sorry? Sorry 
 that he had sinned against his mother? No. 
 Sorry that he had sinned against God? No. 
 Well, what was his sorrow ? He was sorry be- 
 cause he was found out. And there are multi- 
 tudes of professing Christians whose religious 
 sorrow is no deeper. That is the sorrow that 
 worketh death. There is a godly sorrow, sorrow 
 because I have sinned against God. " Against 
 
Repent Ye! 35 
 
 Thee, Thee only, have I sinned, and done this 
 evil in Thy sight. . . . For Thou desirest 
 truth in the hidden parts, honesty where no eye 
 but Thine can see, transparency where no light 
 but Thine can penetrate." There is a sorrow 
 that means death. There is a sorrow for sin that 
 worketh life. Which is yours ? 
 
 What is repentance ? Listen. It is not prom- 
 ising to be better. There are plenty of people 
 who have been promising to be better ever since 
 they can remember, from boyhood or girlhood. 
 When God has laid His hand upon them, as 
 He does in a thousand ways, they are ready to 
 promise, and do promise. Where are you, you 
 who have been making promises till your hair is 
 gray and broken every one of theqi, and angels 
 beholding your shattered promises have shud- 
 dered to the tips of their wings ? You are fur- 
 ther from God than ever you were in your life, 
 with all your promises. Your psalm-singing and 
 your hymn-singing, and your church-going, and 
 your offerings, and all the rest of your religious 
 paraphernaha, are so much mockery because you 
 have not walked the straight and blessed path 
 of obedience and trust. 
 
 It is not enough to promise. It means more 
 
36 Repent Ye! 
 
 than that If it is not conviction, if it is not 
 sorrow, if it is not the desire to be better and 
 the promise to be better, what is it ? What is 
 repentance ? Is it crying ? No. Is it excite- 
 ment ? No. Is it emotion ? Is it kneeling 
 down and groaning? No. Is it going and 
 hearing preachers ? No. 
 
 What is it ? Listen. Jesus Christ tells you in 
 that beautiful picture in the fifteenth of Luke. 
 It is a wonderful chapter. There are three cases 
 in that chapter — the silver, the sheep, and the 
 son. The sheep was lost out of the fold, the 
 silver was lost in the house. The sheep was lost 
 without any intention of being lost, but it was 
 lost. The silver was lost in the house through 
 somebody's carelessness, and it may be there is 
 somebody lost in your house, in your pew in the 
 church, through somebody's carelessness. God 
 help you to find out who that somebody is ! 
 The son was lost, and it was his own fault. He 
 was a prodigal before he left home. He was a 
 rebel before he got a penny of his fortune. He 
 was as bad in heart and in mind before he re- 
 ceived a cent of the money as when he had spent 
 it all. He was guilty the moment he said to 
 himself, " I will demand the portion of goods 
 
Repent Ye! 37 
 
 that falleth to me." When the sheep went astray 
 a man went after it. When the silver was lost 
 a woman went after it. When the son went 
 astray nobody went after him. How is that? 
 Remember who told the story. Nobody went 
 for him. How is that ? Because he was a man, 
 because he was a moral agent, because he was 
 accountable to God for his own act. Why did 
 not the father gather his servants with the eider 
 brother, why did he not gather his neighbours 
 together, and say, " Look here, I have lost my 
 boy, let us go and find him and bring him back 
 in spite of himself"? Why did he not? Be- 
 cause if they had brought him back again he 
 would have been a prodigal still, he would have 
 been a rebel inside the house as well as out of it, 
 for no man comes till he returns; and heaven 
 and the Bible, Christ and Calvary, the Holy 
 Ghost and eternity stand absolutely defeated be- 
 fore the citadel of the human will. Do not for- 
 get it. Listen. The prodigal went astray, took 
 every step from the homestead of his own delib- 
 erate choice, step by step away up into the far 
 country, and he had to come to himself, he had 
 to come back every inch of the way, and he did 
 not send a letter home to his father and say, " If 
 
38 Repent Ye! 
 
 you will send the old chariot I will come home," 
 and he did not ask anybody to give him a lift. 
 He had to walk back every inch his own self, 
 step by step, with bleeding feet and aching head, 
 and broken heart. He had to do it. *• But," 
 you say, " the father ran to meet him, did he 
 not?" Yes, he did, and He will run to meet 
 you when He sees you coming, but you must 
 come. Coming is repentance. It is the response 
 of the will. Repentance is the response of the 
 enlightened, redeemed man to the call of God, 
 the *♦ I will " of the soul. It is putting your hand 
 on your heart and getting hold of what has been 
 your curse, the thing that has chained you. It 
 is getting hold of the thing that has made hell 
 of earth for you, the sin of your heart — for I 
 have discovered that there may be a dozen sins 
 in a man's life, but there are not a dozen that 
 predominate; there is one overmastering, pre- 
 dominating, all-prevailing sin that enslaves and 
 damns, and if that sin goes everything goes. It 
 is putting your hand in your heart and plucking 
 that out by the hair of its head and saying to 
 God, " That it is, and I will die before I will sin 
 again." Have you repented in that fashion? 
 Don't talk about Church membership, don't ir\ 
 
Repent Ye! 39 
 
 suit God by talking about the Communion until 
 you have done this : this is the first thing and 
 the others will not be expected until you have 
 done this. 
 
 " Repent ye/' make a full surrender to 
 God. 
 
 Brother, listen to me once more. Repentance, 
 when it is done, is such a beautiful thing that 
 Jesus Himself said, " There is joy in heaven over 
 one sinner that repenteth." Have you repented 
 along that line ? There are some of you who do 
 not understand how it is you have no peace and 
 no joy in your profession. I know, just as well 
 as if I lived with you, I know if you have no joy 
 and no peace in your professed faith it is because 
 you have never turned to God wholly. Some of 
 you say, " I want peace." Never mind peace ; 
 do as you are told, and peace will come. There 
 are some people more concerned about nice feel- 
 ings, happy feelings, ecstasies and joys, and all 
 the rest of it, than they are about putting God in 
 His place. You put God in His place, and you 
 will have peace ; you honour God, and you will 
 have peace. 
 
 A dear fellow came to me when I was in 
 South Africa, and he said, " Sir, I want to get 
 
40 Repent Ye! 
 
 relief from a guilty conscience," and he had an 
 awful story to tell, a story that made me shudder. 
 He unfolded a page in his history that I dare not 
 tell you. Then he said, " Sir, I want God's par- 
 don." I said, " My brother, how do you expect 
 to get it ? " He said, " By an honest attempt to 
 undo the past." " Then," I said, " turn your face 
 that way and wait for peace." " But," he said, 
 " that will mean prison, and it may mean a Hfe- 
 time in prison." I said, ** Turn your face that 
 way. It is no good to talk about peace while 
 there is wrong to be righted, while there are 
 stripes that need to be washed ; it is no use to 
 talk about peace till you get right with God. 
 The kingdom of God is not meat and drink, 
 but righteousness and peace." Righteousness, 
 that means rightness, wholeness, harmony — and 
 then the music. There will be no music till the 
 instrument is put in tune. You know where 
 you have to yield ; you know the point of con- 
 troversy between you and God; you know the 
 thing that has hindered you, you know the thing 
 that robbed you, you know the thing that has 
 darkened your sky, you know the thing that has 
 come in between you and God, you know the 
 thing about which you have persisted in having 
 
Repent Ye! 41 
 
 your own way and not God's. When you yield 
 on that thing, you will repent. 
 
 Will you do it now ? " But," you say, ** I 
 am a Church member." Never mind. You say 
 there is some one near that knows you. Never 
 mind. You say people expect better things of 
 you. Never mind. Be honest. Put God in 
 His right place. Turn from sin to God, from 
 darkness to light — and you can do the turning. 
 The Spirit enlightens, the Spirit breeds tender- 
 ness, the Spirit coaxes, woos, tries to win. God 
 the Holy Ghost is doing His work in your heart, 
 but, brother, you must submit. When you sub- 
 mit wholly, that is repentance. God help you 
 to do it ! 
 
Ill 
 
 BORN AGAIN 
 
** Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again." 
 
Ill 
 
 BORN AGAIN 
 
 In my last address I spoke about repentance, 
 and I tried to show you that repentance is some- 
 thing that we must do if we mean to be saved, 
 that God commands it, that it is a universal com- 
 mand, that it is immediate. 
 
 Now my theme goes a little further. I want 
 to speak about something that must be done in 
 us by the power of the Holy Spirit, for " Except 
 a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom 
 of Godr 
 
 Then, if that be true, I am not surprised that 
 Jesus said with all the emphasis of the Godhead 
 to this man, " Ye must be born again!' You may 
 read it this way, if you will — " Ye must be born 
 anew," or this way, " Ye must be born from 
 above." Whichever way you take it, it means a 
 new creature, the heart all wrong made right ; it 
 means the source of the life must be put right 
 and in harmony with God, and the life flowing 
 out of it purified, new created. The centre must 
 45 
 
46 Born Again 
 
 be in harmony with the will of God. " A new 
 creature," " a new creation," the life above brought 
 into and lived out upon earth. 
 
 Now there are many people who think the 
 Lord can make them good somehow or other 
 just when they are going to die. Now I claim 
 if the Lord can do that just when I am going to 
 die He can do it while I am living, and if He 
 cannot do it while I am living He cannot do it 
 when I am going to die. And I claim that the 
 Lord can make every man and every woman 
 good, so good that He can look from His throne 
 on the work of His hands and pronounce it 
 good, and be pleased with it. Some of you say, 
 " I don't believe it." I do. If He could make 
 \dam good out of nothing He can make you 
 good out of what is left. On reading these 
 words, please put the emphasis on the words must 
 and again. " Ye must be born again!' Now 
 don't fight me because I bring this old fashioned 
 truth and press it home upon your conscience. 
 Don't get angry with me because I try to make 
 you face the great doctrine of the new birth. 
 Don't turn up your nose and act as though you 
 had outgrown this. This man probably knew 
 more than you do, and perhaps he was a far bet- 
 
Born Again 47 
 
 ter moral man than you are, and probably he 
 had a better standing in the Church and in so- 
 ciety than any of us. But Jesus Christ could not 
 spare him, and did not spare him. He loved him 
 too much to compromise. He did not lower the 
 standard, and He could not make the way into 
 the kingdom of His grace easy, not even for a 
 master in Israel. Do not, I beseech you, think 
 that this is an old-fashioned theme. I know 
 it is, but it is the only theme. I know it is an 
 old story, but it is the only story. If you have 
 got a soul and an appetite, it is as new as the 
 sunshine that streams through the gates of the 
 morning. It is as fresh as the dewdrops that 
 hang Hke so many of God's diamonds, sparkling 
 in the sunshine. It is as beautiful as the rose., 
 on a June morning, it is as fresh as a breath fror^i 
 the hills of God. It is not stale, it is not played 
 out, it is not old-fashioned. It is a spring that 
 rjever runs dry ; it is a power, and the only power, 
 mat can break fetters and can snap chains, that 
 can open blind eyes and cure wounded lives, 
 that can hush storms and still tempests. It is 
 the power that can lift men from sin and ruin, 
 utter and complete, back again to God. Oh, for 
 the power to emphasize it ! 
 
48 Born Again 
 
 I know there are some people who think we 
 are antiquated when we preach the new birth — 
 old-fashioned, harmless perhaps, but a little to be 
 pitied. Brother, they will sing about this around 
 the steps of the throne. Old-fashioned ? It is 
 the song that keeps heaven warm. The central 
 attraction of the skies is He who hung on the 
 nails. As you walk down some picture gallery 
 and view a special masterpiece of some old artist, 
 world-famed and celebrated, so when you reach 
 heaven, if you get there, and walk through the 
 picture-gallery of the skies, the picture that will 
 stand out and outshine and live and thrill and at- 
 tract its millions will be the picture of the cross 
 and its dying Saviour. Don't think you have got 
 beyond the teaching of the new birth, and don't 
 dare to say we do not need that. Don't you ? 
 What, not after that company you kept last Sat- 
 urday ? Don't you ? What, not after what hap- 
 pened to-day in the city ? Not after what you 
 did to-day in your office or home ? Why, some 
 of you have got a letter in your pocket that you 
 would be ashamed to let me see. God reads 
 every line. Listen : " Ye must be born again." 
 That is what is the matter with you. You want 
 a new heart. God looks at the heart. 
 
Born Again 49 
 
 This is not my word ; Jesus said it. That is 
 what I want you to see, that if you turn up your 
 nose at the message or sneer at the preacher 
 when he announces the text, " Ye must be born 
 again," or if you think you have got beyond it, 
 that it is out of date, and old-fashioned, will you 
 remember that He who is the Jewel for which 
 this vast universe is the mere setting turned aside 
 from the manufacture of worlds and the control- 
 ling of the universe, stepped aside from it all to 
 whisper this into the heart of dying humanity. 
 Jesus said it — not the preacher, but Jesus. 
 
 And this doctrine does not belong to the 
 Methodist Church any more than it does to 
 the Baptist Church, and it does not belong to 
 the Episcopalian Church any more than it does 
 to the Salvation Army. They all preach it — 
 that is, if they are loyal to Christ — and they live 
 it as they follow Him. They cannot help it. 
 This is as old as the hills, a little older than the 
 Church. John Wesley preached from this text, 
 but he did not invent it, and the Methodist 
 Church is the monument and the outcome of that 
 mighty preaching. George Whitefield preached 
 from this text, and preached from it three hun- 
 dred times, but he did not invent it. General 
 
^o Born Again 
 
 Booth, one of the most wonderful men God 
 ever gave to the world, who with his band of 
 consecrated followers has belted the globe with a 
 golden cable of song of salvation, and will take 
 tens of thousands from the slums and sewers of 
 city life to walk the streets of the New Jerusalem in 
 white, he preached from it, but he did not invent 
 it. It is no human invention. Jesus Christ 
 said it. Do not forget that. If you will reahze 
 who uttered these words you will learn to respect 
 them, and you will uncover your head and bow 
 before them ; if, then, you cannot comprehend 
 the infinity of them, you will in silence cease 
 your criticism. If you would fathom their depths 
 and scale their heights and measure their im- 
 mensity, if you do not grasp all they mean, you 
 will be silent ; you will say in your heart, " If 
 God has a message in them for me, then. Holy 
 Spirit, make it plain." 
 
 Now will you notice, please, to whom He 
 said it ? To whom did Jesus say these words ? 
 A drunkard? No. A harlot? No. A mur- 
 derer? No. An outcast of society ? No. A 
 poor gipsy ? No. I think if Jesus were to come 
 and speak a message to a gipsy tent, knowing its 
 past and how much it has been despised, how 
 
Born Again 51 
 
 little people have cared, and how little people 
 have done to save its occupants, He would speak 
 very tenderly. To whom, then, did Jesus say 
 these words ? Listen. A church member. So 
 you see it is possible to be a church member 
 without being born again. Henry Drummond 
 said during the second Moody campaign, in 
 writing to his friend Professor Barbour, " The 
 enquiry room this time, as before, reveals the 
 awful fact that the vast majority of Church 
 members know nothing about the new birth. 
 They know the letter of the law as well as they 
 know their own names, but they are as ignorant 
 of free grace as a Hottentot." It is possible to 
 have your name down in the Church register 
 without having it in the Lamb's Book of Life. It 
 is possible to take the cup of communion and 
 never take the cup of salvation. Jesus uttered 
 these words first of all to a member of the 
 Church, an office-bearer of the Church of his 
 day, a member of the inner circle, a prince, 
 leader, and master in the Church, but he was 
 not born again ; not a child, an old man. 
 Think of that. It startled him, it made him 
 think ; and I would to God you would think. 
 If I can only get a man to think, I have done 
 
52 Born Again 
 
 something. The greatest difficulty a preacher 
 has is to get men to think. 
 
 When Christ said these words to this man 
 he began to think in a moment, and he said, 
 "What, can a man be born when he is old?" 
 That is a very pertinent question. It is possi- 
 ble to be saved when you are an old man. 
 It is possible, but it is improbable. It is possible, 
 but it will be difficult. You ask my brethren in 
 the ministry how often they see a gray-head join 
 the Church, man or woman. For every gray- 
 head that comes to them for Church membership 
 they will tell you that fifty under twenty-five 
 will come. And I have seen a few hundreds, a 
 few thousands, come to Christ ; the exception is 
 a gray-head. The majority of people who come 
 to Jesus are under twenty-five, and if you go 
 over twenty-five, to thirty, you will have less. 
 If you go between thirty and forty you will have 
 less, and if between forty and fifty you will have 
 less still, and if between fifty and sixty less again, 
 and if you go between sixty and seventy you 
 may write it down wonderful when they come. 
 What does it mean, gray-heads ? It means that 
 you can say " No " to Christ till you lose the 
 desire to say " Yes." That is what it means. 
 
Born Again 53 
 
 " Can a man be born when he is old ? " Try to 
 learn the piano when you have passed sixty, and 
 see if it is easy when your joints are grown fixed 
 and stiff. And if it is not easy, what about this, 
 the hardest study of all, the study to show your- 
 self approved unto God ? Don't think, my friend 
 growing old, that you can crowd out of your life 
 the things of God, the things of the day of judg- 
 ment, the things of right, and holiness, and heaven 
 — don't think that you can shut them out of your 
 life, and then crowd them into the last five minutes 
 of your existence. Eternal matters will demand 
 a little longer attention. " Can a man be born 
 when he is old ? " Listen. Yes, he may, for 
 when God says it, it must be. He says it may 
 be. But it will be a miracle. I rejoice if a 
 gray-head comes to Christ, but I rejoice more 
 if a boy comes. 
 
 Some time ago I was in a large testimony 
 meeting in connection with the Church of which 
 I am a member, and a man got up and told us 
 how God had saved him, and he had been a 
 burglar and spent so many years in prison. 
 When he sat down up got his chum who sat be- 
 side him, and he told us with trembling voice 
 and with tears that in 1881 he was before the 
 
54 Born Again 
 
 grand jury for murder, and that he had been in 
 prison about twenty years, but God had saved 
 him. He said, " The jury knew I was guilty, but 
 the drink was in me. The judge knew it too ; 
 the drink was in me when I did it, and my youth 
 saved me from hanging, and God has saved me." 
 When he sat down another man rose, and he 
 said, " I had been a drunkard for twenty years, 
 and the Lord saved me." And when he sat 
 down up got another, and he said, " I have been 
 a coiner of base money, and God has saved me." 
 And then another got up and told us he had 
 been a prize-fighter and fought so many battles 
 and won every time, and God had saved him. 
 And then another man got up and said, " I have 
 had a checkered career. I have ridden about 
 Manchester with the present Prime Minister, and 
 I have ridden in the police van. I have been a 
 publican, and I have swept the floors for other 
 publicans. I have been drunk on champagne, 
 and I have begged a penny for a drink. I have 
 dined with aldermen, and I have begged a crust 
 in the street." And then he told us how Jesus 
 had saved him. So they went on, and I could 
 not sit still any longer. I got up and said, 
 " Men, listen. God has done wonders for you. 
 
Born Again 55 
 
 but don't forget He did more for this gipsy boy 
 than all of you put together : He saved me be- 
 fore I got there." Prevention is better than 
 cure. I believe a fence at the top of a precipice 
 is better than a hospital at the bottom. *' Can a 
 man be born when he is old ? " Yes, he may, 
 but God save the children ! 
 
 " Ye must be." Then I can understand some 
 of you saying, just as this man said, •' Lord 
 Jesus, blessed Jesus, I don't want to intrude, but 
 how is it to be ? Tell me how it works. Ex- 
 plain it. I cannot see it." No, and you never 
 will see it. " I cannot understand it." No, and 
 you will never understand it, but He will. Your 
 finite mind grasp the Infinite ? Don't expect it. 
 " If I could only see it, if I could only see 
 through the process, I would believe it." But 
 you never will see through the process of it. 
 You can believe yourself through, you can obey 
 yourself through, you can conform to the pur- 
 pose and the will of God and get through, but 
 you will never get through on your own specu- 
 lating and asking impertinent questions. That 
 is not the way. 
 
 ♦* Oh," says a man, " tell me about this thing, 
 show me how the new birth works." You ex- 
 
56 Born Again 
 
 plain electricity to me, or sit in the dark till you 
 understand it, and never ride in an electric car 
 till you can understand it. Explain the dew- 
 drop, tell me how the thunder and the hghtning 
 slumber in the dewdrop. You cannot tell. An- 
 alyze the raindrop. You cannot, but God fath- 
 ers it. Tell me how He kisses the Httle bit of 
 black earth in your garden, and after He has 
 kissed it a bunch of primroses blooms. Tell me 
 how He did it, or stop your quibbles about this. 
 Here is an easy one. Tell me how He came to 
 my gipsy tent, when there was not a Bible, be- 
 fore I could spell my name, before I had ever 
 heard of Him. That is the wonder. Tell me 
 how He got hold of my father, that grand old 
 saint, when he was rough and raw, drunken, 
 swearing, wild, and Hon-like. Tell me how God 
 in Christ got hold of him and won the children 
 and saved us all and made these eyes, these 
 inner eyes of my life, see Him and know He was 
 my Saviour. Tell me how, will you ? I do not 
 know how, but I know He did it, and that is 
 enough to go on with. Never mind the how of 
 it. It must be — must be. 
 
 Well now, let me stop here and ask this ques- 
 tion — Are you born again ? Can you close your 
 
Born Again 57 
 
 eyes at this moment and say, " Yes, I know 
 whom I have beheved, and am persuaded that He 
 is able to keep that which I have committed unto 
 Him against that day " ? Can you say, " For 
 what the law could not do, in that it was weak, 
 God, sending His own Son in the Hkeness of 
 sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the 
 flesh, that the righteousness of the law might be 
 fulfilled in me. For the law of the Spirit of life 
 in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law 
 of sin and death " ? Can you say that ? 
 
 " No condemnation now I dread, 
 
 Jesus and all in Him is mine ; 
 Alive in Him my living head 
 
 Clothed in His righteousness divine. 
 Bold I approach th' eternal throne, 
 And claim the crown through Christ my own." 
 
 Can you say it ? Are you born again ? What 
 did you say — you are a Church member ? That 
 is no substitute for the new birth. What did you 
 say — you are an office-bearer ? Are you a mas- 
 ter of Israel, and know not these things ? Dare 
 you walk about God's heritage, with unclean 
 hands handling holy things ? Dare you strut in 
 God's house with a filthy heart ? O God, find us 
 out! 
 
^8 Born Again 
 
 Are you born again? What did you say — ' 
 you are a Sunday-school teacher? You would 
 not be a Sunday-school teacher in my Church if 
 I were a minister unless I had evidence that you 
 were born again. I would refuse to let any class 
 of boys and girls be led by a blind leader. You 
 have no right there till you are born again. 
 
 Are you born again? Have you got the 
 witness within ? Lord Jesus, help us to be 
 honest! Now have you the witness of the 
 blessed Spirit that speaks within, that gives the 
 knowledge the head cannot, that gives the assur- 
 ance that the world knows nothing about, that 
 makes glad and warm the heart and bright and 
 cheerful the life, that gives confidence and hope 
 and heaven ? Have you got it ? Because if you 
 are born again you have got it. 
 
 Listen. Here are some of the new birth 
 marks : ** He that is born of God loveth the 
 brethren." Is that mark on you ? Here is an- 
 other : "He that is born of God abideth in 
 Him." That is another mark. Is that on you ? 
 Here is another : " He that is born of God over- 
 cometh the world." Is that mark on you? 
 Here is another : " He that is born of God keep- 
 eth himself in the love of God." Is that mark 
 
Born Again jg 
 
 on you ? Here is another : " He that is born 
 of God hath the witness in himself." 
 
 Now you may go to church. There may be 
 movement — you can make a dead body move if 
 you put enough batteries underneath it — but if 
 there is movement and you are not born again it 
 is only the movement of a galvanized corpse. 
 " Ye must be born again." Are you born again ? 
 Are you sure of it ? Can you look Him in the 
 face by faith and say — 
 
 " My Jesus to know, and to feel His blood flow — 
 'Tis life everlasting, 'tis heaven below " ? 
 
 Our fathers and mothers sang that, and God for- 
 bid that we should ever outgrow the song. Do 
 you know it ? Have you the witness ? because 
 you will have it when you meet the conditions. 
 Have you seen a mother with her new baby, her 
 first baby ? One of the most beautiful sights in 
 the world is a pure mother with a beautiful baby. 
 Her heart is its school, its nursery. The baby 
 Hves and moves and has its being in her love. 
 In the day she watches it, in the night she 
 dreams of it. It is first and last thought with 
 her. She feeds it, she fondles it, coaxes it, talks 
 to it, tells it a thousand things that the baby 
 
6o Born Again 
 
 understands, or seems to. And, loved and 
 petted and fondled, in a few months baby, 
 taught and loved by the mother's heart, lisps, 
 " Dada." Exactly ; and just hke that the Holy 
 Ghost comes down into the new-born, new- 
 surrendered, new-believing, obedient heart and 
 coaxes it into saying, " Abba, Father, my Lord 
 and my God." This is the new birth. 
 
 You may know the glorious bliss, you may 
 know the triumphant victory, you may have the 
 new song in your soul now. You may put your 
 foot on the neck of your foe this hour. You 
 my stand up God's man, God's woman, free for- 
 ever, now, if you will meet the conditions. God 
 help you ! " It must be." Stop your arguing, 
 stop your questioning; that is the old way of 
 defeat and failure, doubt and unbehef. That is 
 the devil's way. Listen to me. Come to Jesus 
 this hour, bow before Him and say to Him in 
 your own way, " Lord Jesus, whatever there is in 
 this message for me, help me to receive it." 
 That is the way. Do not think you can live the 
 new life with the old heart. It cannot be. A 
 new life means a new heart, and you will get it 
 all at the Cross. 
 
IV 
 
 THE SAVIOUR OF ALL 
 
"A man with an unclean spirit." — Mark $ : 2, 
 "A certain woman, which had an issue of blood twelve 
 years." — Mark ^ : 2^. 
 
 "One of the rulers of the synagogue, Jairus ... be- 
 sought Him, saying, My little daughter lieth at the point of 
 death." — Mark ^ : 22^ 3j, 
 
IV 
 
 THE SAVIOUR OF ALL 
 
 I WANT to Speak about the three hopeless cases 
 in the fifth chapter of Mark's Gospel. It is a 
 chapter of incurables, if we speak after the man- 
 ner of men. The first is the man possessed by 
 the devil. We are told he had his dwelhng 
 among the tombs. No man could bind him ; 
 that he had often been bound with fetters and 
 chains but had shaken them off like cobwebs ; 
 that he was in the tombs and mountains night 
 and day crying out in his misery, cutting himself 
 with stones in his agony ; that he was a terror to 
 the neighbourhood, wounded, naked, stripped, 
 ostracized, alienated, lonely, suffering, sad, pos- 
 sessed by the devil. And this is but a sample 
 case of what the devil would do with every man 
 if he had his way. This is a photograph, a full- 
 length photograph, taken by God's camera in all 
 its ugly detail, in all its mass of misery of what 
 the devil would do with you and with me but for 
 the hand that keeps him back. For the devil is 
 
 63 
 
64 The Saviour of All 
 
 like God in this, he is no respecter of persons. 
 When you see a poor creature in the gutter, vile 
 of lip, bloody of cheek, blear-eyed, lost in mind, 
 heart, body, soul, you can say to yourself, " I 
 would be there but for grace." The devil de- 
 lights in ruin, discord, destruction ; and I verily 
 believe he is devil enough, if he had his own way, 
 to put his foot on London, strangle it, and then 
 chuckle like the fiend he is over the havoc he has 
 wrought. Oh, there is a devil to fight. Some 
 people say there is no devil. There is a good 
 deal that is like one, and you cannot travel very 
 far without seeing a good deal of devilishness. 
 And if you say there is no devil you must for- 
 give me if I tell you it is because you never 
 tried to do right. It is easy to swim with the 
 stream. A dead fish can do that. It takes a 
 living fish to go against the stream. When a 
 man is asleep in stupor you may put chains 
 about him and he is insensible, he does not 
 know. But he does know when he wakes up ; 
 and if to-night you make up your mind that, 
 God helping you, you will hate the wrong and 
 turn your back on it, and set your face Godward 
 and heavenward to do right, you will be con- 
 vinced there is a devil before the morning. 
 
The Saviour of All 65 
 
 There is a devil, and he means your ruin. 
 But, blessed be God, Jesus is not only God's 
 Lamb slain, He is the Lion of the tribe of Judah, 
 and He lives to destroy the power of the devil. 
 
 In this first case the man whom friends and 
 neighbours could not tame, the man that no 
 power on earth had managed to grip and hold in, 
 Jesus the Saviour in a moment transformed, 
 turned his hell into heaven, his darkness to light, 
 and made him a son of God, an heir of heaven. 
 
 And Jesus is still that — Lord over devils ; and 
 if the devil is in. you Jesus can cast him out. 
 Whatever devil possesses you, whatever of de- 
 structiveness, ruin and evil is in you, whatever of 
 night and despair, chains and darKness are upon 
 you, whatever devil has got hold of you and rules 
 you and is destroying you, whatever that devil is, 
 Jesus Christ will conquer if you will but give 
 Him a chance, for He is still the wonder-work- 
 ing Jesus. 
 
 The second case is one of disease ; and mark 
 you, this case was as bad as could be. She had 
 suffered for twelve years with a shamefaced dis- 
 ease, and nobody could help her. All the med- 
 ical men around had tried, and they were not all 
 frauds. There were those who would have healed 
 
66 The Saviour of All 
 
 if they could. They would have made a reputa- 
 tion if they could have diagnosed her case, if 
 they could have arrested and healed. But they 
 failed. Their fingers were not long enough, 
 they could not reach the mischief, they did not 
 understand it, it was beyond them. Their sym- 
 pathies might be ever so great, but they were 
 baffled. She suffered many things of many phy- 
 sicians. She tried them all, and when her hopes 
 rose a little with some expectation of relief it was 
 only to fall back again into a deeper disappoint- 
 ment, a greater mental suffering. But on the 
 heels of everybody else's failure Jesus proves 
 Himself Lord over disease. And Jesus is still 
 that. Some day there will be no disease ; some 
 day there will be no raging epidemic ; some day 
 there will be no fever ; some day there will be 
 perfect health, robust, round, full-orbed, strong 
 health. We shall be like Him — and He is healthy 
 enough — for we shall see Him as He is. And in 
 proportion as we get like Him here disease will 
 disappear, for Jesus Christ came to destroy the 
 works of the devil. If there had been no sin 
 there would have been no disease. There would 
 have been no suffering if it had not been for the 
 breaking of the law. You may give me those 
 
The Saviour of All 67 
 
 three letters and I will spell all the misery and 
 suffering, all the pain and agony, every woe and 
 pang and heartache — S-i-n. And you cannot 
 say " sin " without hearing the hiss of the serpent. 
 Take sin up into the fields of glory, let it climb 
 the streets of light, let it take up its abode in 
 God's fair fields of health where the flowers never 
 fade and where the sun always shines, let sin take 
 its roots in the glory, and you will have to build 
 a graveyard, for " the wages of sin is death." Sin 
 makes you pinched in face, sin makes the eye re- 
 cede, sin makes the step infirm and faltering, it 
 makes the hand nerveless and unsteady, clouds 
 the brow, dims the eye, and weakens the heart. 
 Sin is the greatest heart disease the world ever 
 knew. Sin darkens the morning and clouds the 
 evening. Sin — the Lord help us to see it as He 
 sees it ! But, blessed be God, one interview with 
 Jesus cured this woman's ills ; one Hving, vital 
 moment of contact with Him ended her trouble. 
 And Jesus is still Lord of disease. 
 
 That is not all. You can do something with 
 the man if the devil is in him, for if a man is 
 filled with the devil there are moments in his life 
 when you can reach him, there are moments in 
 the worst man's life when, if you know how to 
 
68 The Saviour of All 
 
 take him, you will arrest him. For there is, if 
 you dig deep enough, in every man the bed- 
 rock, built by the fingers that built the eternities, 
 and it is our business to find it. There is in 
 every man the spark that will blaze when suns 
 faint and go out like sparks fi-om a blacksmith's 
 anvil. Every man is therefore worth saving. 
 
 You can do something with the poor, weakly, 
 suffering body of a woman while she is aHve, for 
 the doctors will tell you that while there is life 
 there is hope, but what are you going to do with 
 a dead body ? — and the third case is death. The 
 woman had suffered twelve years, how long the 
 devil had been in that man I do not know, but 
 the httle child was twelve years old, and she was 
 dead. Ay, but Jesus is never conquered ; He is 
 always the conqueror. He is always equal to 
 every emergency. You never knew Him de- 
 feated ; and if you want to see Him at His best 
 you want to see Him with a difficult case. And 
 He went up to that little child and got hold of 
 her hand. And He looked her in the face and 
 He said, " Damsel, arise." If He had said 
 *' Arise," without saying " Damsel," there would 
 have been a general resurrection ; they would 
 have all come to see which one He meant. But 
 
The Saviour of All 69 
 
 that eye of His which is the Hght of the world 
 went into the gloom beyond and singled out that 
 little spirit and said, " Damsel, arise." And she 
 sat up, and He said to her mother, " Give her 
 something to eat." So that in the third case He 
 proved Himself Lord of death. In that one 
 chapter of forty-three verses you have got all you 
 need — Lord over disease, devils, and death, the 
 all-conquering Christ, gospel enough to save the 
 world. 
 
 That is the programme of redemption. Let 
 me turn it round once more. The man, the 
 woman, the child — what does it mean ? This — 
 Jesus is the man's Saviour ; that is what it means. 
 There is not a man that can do without Him. 
 There is not a man that does without Him. You 
 may think you do, but no man lives without 
 Jesus. You may not acknowledge Him, indeed 
 you may deny Him, but He is there, nearer than 
 the seat you are sitting on, nearer than the 
 clothes you wear, nearer than the food you eat, 
 • nearer than the child you love and about whom 
 you put your arms, nearer than the friend on 
 whose arm you lean. You may deny, but He is 
 there ; you drink from His fountain, you feed 
 from His table, you walk about His world, every 
 
yo The Saviour of All 
 
 bit of which is marked by His own cross. You 
 cannot do without Him, and you do not do with- 
 out Him. If you think you can, will you prove 
 it by creating a planet and then go and live on 
 it? Don't talk about doing without Him while 
 you depend on Him for every breath you draw. 
 He is the man's Christ, and, brother, no man is 
 at his best till he is Christ's. No man can be, no 
 man can do, what God means him to be and to 
 do till he is Christ's man. And it is not a 
 childish thing to be a Christian. It is a manly 
 thing, it is a noble thing ; it is not a weak thing 
 — if you think it is, try it. If you think it is a 
 weak thing to be a Christian, make up your 
 mind to be one and go and tell them where you 
 work to-morrow that you have given your heart 
 to God, and you will see it takes courage and 
 moral force, backbone and will-power, and in- 
 telligence. Cotton wool won't do it, jellyfish 
 won't do it ; cowards won't do it ; it will take a 
 man to do it. You try it. You think it is a sen- 
 timental thing to be a Christian. Try it. Re- 
 ligion is all right for Sunday-schools, mothers' 
 meetings, and parsons, some of you think. It is 
 a manly thing, it is a noble thing, it is a brave 
 thing to be a Christian. Don't forget it, Christ 
 
The Saviour of All 71 
 
 is a man's Saviour. The strange and wonderful 
 thing to me is that it does not matter who the 
 man is or where he comes from, what his 
 nationality, what his education, birth or breed- 
 ing, what his culture, or what his outlook may 
 be, the moment he looks into the face of Jesus 
 he says, " My Lord and my God." Every man 
 sees in Him all he needs. When he does see 
 Him, whether he be a gipsy in his tent or a 
 prime minister, whether he be a collier or a king, 
 it does not matter, the man that looks into the 
 face of Jesus has found the spring that never 
 runs dry, and he can say with that illustrious 
 saint — 
 
 « Thou, O Christ, art all I want, 
 More than all in Thee I find." 
 
 He is the man's Saviour, and the wickedest 
 thing in the world, men, is to know that and to 
 refuse to serve Him. That is the sin that damns. 
 You need not get drunk, you need not let loose 
 your passions, you need not be a sower of un- 
 cleanness. You can be a respectable, church- 
 going, well-dressed, moral sort of man, and re- 
 fuse the claims of the Son of God, refuse to allow 
 Him the right of way within and without of your 
 
72 The Saviour of All 
 
 life, refuse to give Him the right place, refuse to 
 fall down and worship Him and enthrone Him 
 within you. That is the sin which damns — the 
 sin that sets Him at nought, the sin that refuses 
 to love and to obey. O man, father, brother, 
 young man, I covet your manhood for Christ. 
 He is worthy of your best thought, your purest 
 thought, your noblest thought, your most brilliant 
 thought, your most lofty conception, your glad- 
 dest day, your strongest heart-throb, your most 
 manly moment. Give Him the alabaster box of 
 precious ointment. All He has given you, re- 
 turn it to Him in love and gratitude and con- 
 secration, I beseech you, for He is the man's 
 Saviour. 
 
 Ay, but that is not all ; He is the woman's 
 Christ too. Jesus has not forgotten the women. 
 Some of you men say that religion will do for 
 women. Thank God, it will ; and it is a blessing 
 some of them have got a bit of religion. They 
 do not get much comfort from the man they 
 have to call husband. It is a blessing some 
 women have got Jesus to look to, or I do not 
 think they could live at all. Have you forgotten 
 that you promised God at His altar to take care 
 of her you call wife? how you promised to 
 
The Saviour of All 73 
 
 shield her, to love and honour ? Have you for- 
 gotten that you promised God in the most public, 
 solemn manner before His altar and' the record- 
 ing angel that you would forsake everything for 
 that woman ? Have you forgotten it ? because 
 God will make you remember it some day. 
 God has not forgotten it. She is nearly dead. 
 Do you know it, O man? Listen. There is 
 another way of murdering a woman beside blow- 
 ing her brains out or cutting her throat. Poor 
 woman, suffering woman, weeping woman, your 
 hair gray long before it ought to be, your face 
 pinched and your back bent, and you do not 
 know what it is to have a moment's peace, and in 
 your sleep you dream of misery, full of tears and 
 disappointments and agonies — Jesus knows, my 
 sister. God help you to make Him your friend ! 
 He knows. He knows. When sometimes you 
 smile — and you are forced to smile because others 
 are there — when you have got sorrow enough 
 behind, storm enough behind that smile to 
 wreck a navy, He knows. He is the woman's 
 Christ. If you will let Him, He will kiss your 
 tears into jewels. The sun of His love will light 
 up your face once more, and if the wrinkles do 
 not go He will make them beautiful, and if your 
 
74 The Saviour of All 
 
 back does not straighten He will give you grace 
 to bear the burden and the flowers of paradise 
 shall bloom again in your poor, wasted life, for 
 the " wilderness shall blossom, it shall blossom 
 abundantly." Ay, He is the woman's Saviour. 
 I do not know how any woman can turn her 
 back on Jesus or keep Him out of her life. It is 
 a sad thing when a woman says " No " to Christ, 
 but when she is the cause of her children saying 
 " No " it is sadder still. O mothers, O sisters, 
 for Christ's sake and for your children's sake 
 and for your husbands' sake open your heart to 
 Jesus ! Let Him take the throne-place in your 
 heart. Nobody will be as true as He, nobody 
 will stand by you as He will. You can tell Him 
 what you cannot tell anybody else. You love 
 Him, you serve Him, you follow Him, and 
 though others sneer and frown and treat you 
 coolly and despise and call you a sinner. He will 
 say, " Woman, thy sins are forgiven thee." He 
 is the woman's Christ. 
 
 But that is not all. If I stopped there it would 
 not be complete. He is the baby's Saviour, 
 He is the child's Christ, He is the cradle Christ. 
 And if you want to beat the devil you must 
 fight him with the cradle. Oh, that every mother 
 
The Saviour of All 75 
 
 would bring her babies to Jesus ! " But," you 
 say, " they are so little." Yes, but He is the 
 God of little things. He painted the rainbow — 
 yes, but He kissed the daisy into being too. He 
 put the wings on the archangel, but He feathered 
 the sparrow. The mighty ocean — yes, but He 
 makes that out of the same material that He 
 makes the dewdrop. He is the God of little 
 things. Don't despise the children. I would 
 that I could take the dear little hearts and twist 
 them into a garland of beauty and in all their 
 innocence place their young affections on the 
 head of my Lord. " Suffer little children to 
 come unto Me." Jesus has not forgotten them. 
 God save the children ! Don't hinder them, 
 don't stop them, don't get into the way of them ; 
 let them come. 
 
 He is the man's Christ. Brother, is He your 
 Christ ? He wants to be, He will be if you will 
 take Him, He will be if you will follow Him, He 
 will be if you will come out from what He hates, 
 forsake that which grieves Him, that which 
 killed Him. Forsake it, follow Him, and you 
 will find that Jesus Christ can do for a man 
 what you never dreamed He could. 
 
 Woman, sister, you of the weary life, you of 
 
76 The Saviour of All 
 
 the disappointments, you of the sleepless nights 
 and weary days, you of the heart faintness and 
 hunger, Jesus waits to come into your life and 
 transform it into a thing of beauty. Will you 
 let Him? 
 
 And He is the child's Christ, and the children 
 understand Him. Don't stop the children from 
 coming. I have a letter in my possession from a 
 high Government official in one of the colonies 
 of South Africa, written a few days after my 
 mission in his city, in which he says : " You 
 will be sorry, I know, and will sympathize with 
 us, I am sure, when I tell you that our sweet 
 little Winnie has gone home." Who was Win- 
 nie ? She was a sweet little thing of ten. She 
 attended our mission, and as intelligently as you 
 could she gave herself to Christ. A beautiful 
 child, she came with her mother to call on us, 
 and when she left me she put her face up and 
 kissed me, and she said, " Oh, sir, you have 
 helped me, you have helped me." And if I 
 went to South Africa to do nothing else but help 
 that little girl, it was worth the journey. Just a 
 few days passed, and she sickened with small- 
 pox, and all that skill and money and physician 
 could do was done to save her, but it was no use. 
 
The Saviour of All 77 
 
 When her mother and father were weeping she 
 said, " Don't weep ; I am going to Jesus." And 
 then as they watched her she heard the angels 
 calling, and she said, ** I am here ; don't you 
 know me ? I am Winnie, I am one of Gipsy 
 Smith's little converts, and I am quite ready, I 
 am quite ready, and I am coming." And she 
 went to be with Him forever. 
 
 He is the children's Saviour. He is the 
 woman's Saviour. He is the man's Saviour. 
 The Saviour for us all. Let us seek Him. 
 
V 
 THE MASTER'S TOUCH 
 
"And Jesus, immediately knowing in Himself that virtue 
 [strength, life], had gone out of Him, turned Him about in the 
 crowd and said, Who touched My clothes? And His disciples 
 said unto Him, Thou seest the multitude thronging Thee, and 
 sayest Thou, Who touched Me ? " — Mark 5 .• jo, 31 
 
THE MASTER'S TOUCH 
 
 In my last address I tried to speak to you 
 from the three cases given in the fifth chapter of 
 Mark's Gospel, and I tried to show you that in 
 this chapter of incurables Jesus proved Himself 
 Lord over devils, disease, and death. And then 
 we turned the jewel round and caught another 
 flash of its beauty, and we saw that Jesus is the 
 man's Christ, the woman's Christ, and the child's 
 Christ. Now I want to speak about the middle 
 case, this woman who had suffered many things 
 of many physicians and was nothing bettered, 
 but rather grew worse. So Mark says. When 
 Luke tells the story he leaves that bit about the 
 doctors out, but then he was a doctor himself. 
 Mark has no scruple; and he says practically 
 that all her attempts at healing, though they 
 were many, and though they were the best she 
 could procure, though she consulted the best 
 skill, the wisest of the physicians, all her at- 
 tempts only aggravated, tantalized, excited hopes 
 8i 
 
82 The Master's Touch 
 
 that only ended in despair, and she was worse 
 when they finished their attempts than before 
 they started. 
 
 And that woman but represents multitudes. 
 Perhaps you are longing for spiritual heahng, for 
 soul satisfaction, you are groping for light. You 
 are trying to climb up out of the slough of your 
 despond ; you desire to get your chains broken 
 and your fetters snapped. You say you want 
 the assurance of sins forgiven, to be in possession 
 of peace with God. You believe there is some- 
 thing for you that Christians talk about, and 
 that the Bible describes in the death and resur- 
 rection of the Son of God, somehow in a vague 
 fashion believing it is for you, but never getting 
 it, hunting after but never finding, hungry for 
 and yet never satisfied, always thirsty and never 
 getting a drink of the living stream. Oh, how 
 many quacks some of you have consulted, how 
 many earthly nostrums you have been prepared 
 to take, how many spiritual physicians you have 
 listened to ! And some of you spend your time 
 in hunting up religious quacks. 
 
 There has not been a preacher in town for 
 twenty years that you have not heard. You 
 boast that there has not been a mission held any- 
 
The Master's Touch 83 
 
 where within reach but what you have been 
 there. You are front-seaters, bench-warmers, 
 religious tramps. Don't smile — I want you to 
 see yourselves. You have been prepared to 
 listen to anybody, any fad, any big person, any 
 sensational story, any man-made message, any 
 new thing. But you do not get healing that 
 way. You have not got healing that way ; and 
 if I could see you through God's microscope, the 
 microscope of Calvary, I should see you worse 
 to-day than you were ten years ago, with all 
 your attempts at redemption. With all your 
 attempts to become holy and righteous you are 
 worse to-day than ever you were. And you 
 have come to hear this preacher. But at the 
 beginning let me be plain with you. I cannot 
 save you. That is beyond me. But I know 
 One who can, and there is none like Him. He 
 is the only Physician, He is the greatest Physi- 
 cian, He is the most wonderful Physician, He is 
 the cure-all when He has charge of the case. 
 He is never baffled. He can diagnose every case. 
 He goes to the root of the mischief. There is no 
 mistake with Him. He never makes a blunder. 
 He never apologizes. He never asks to be ex- 
 cused if you are conscious of sin and long for 
 
84 The Master's Touch 
 
 healing. Give Him the right of way with your 
 case, and He will make a cure, complete, eternal. 
 But He must have His way, then He heals. 
 And all the poor, broken-down attempts at 
 social, religious, and spiritual reform that you 
 have seen, and all the backsliding, and the falls, 
 and the blunders that you have seen around you, 
 have all come about because Christ has not had 
 His way. Give Christ His way, and He will 
 heal completely. 
 
 No, my friends, your cure is the woman's. 
 That may sound an old-fashioned thing to say, 
 but there is more truth in it than you have 
 realized yet. Listen. The woman's cure is 
 your cure. Her cure came on the heels of 
 everybody else's failure. Christ's cure always 
 comes there. When people get to the end of 
 things, then Jesus Christ bares His arm and 
 shows His omnipotence, and declares Himself 
 the mighty Saviour. He is a wonderful Jesus. 
 Oh, it is not a quack you want, it is a specialist. 
 It is not the preacher you want, it is not the 
 missioner, it is not the lovely influences of a 
 mission, it is not the beautiful hymns we sing, it 
 is not seeing some great talker, some orator, 
 some great brilliant speaker, it is not being 
 
The Master's Touch 85 
 
 familiar with books or schools ; it is Jesus — 
 Jesus. It is not the Bible, for " the letter 
 killeth." You may be familiar with it, you may 
 have gone through it I do not know how many 
 times, but till it goes through you you will not 
 be any better. It is not in tramping to and 
 from church. It is not in performance, it is 
 not in ritual. Heahng is in the presence of 
 Jesus. 
 
 Soon after my father's conversion our tents 
 were just outside Cambridge. My father could 
 not read the Bible in those days, he was only a 
 rough gipsy man, but he was saved, and he did 
 the next best with his motherless children before 
 he went to bed, he used to sing and pray every 
 night. And, you know, when he and five 
 children started to sing you could hear us a few 
 fields away, and those dark, winter nights — I 
 can see my father now — he would say, *' Before 
 we go to bed, my dears, we will have a hymn or 
 two," and he would strike off. We had no idea 
 that the people in the cottages across the fields 
 heard the songs and came a little nearer to catch 
 the words, or that they stopped while he prayed. 
 It was a strange thing to hear a gipsy man pray 
 in his tent. These people never expected it. 
 
86 The Master's Touch 
 
 And one woman, we heard afterwards, was 
 smitten in her conscience about her sin, and 
 she said, " Here is a rough gipsy man praying, 
 and he is not praying for me to hear him, for he 
 does not know I am here ; he is not praying for 
 other people to hear, for he does not know that 
 anybody can hear him. Here is a gipsy man 
 praying. How is it ? I was brought up in a 
 Sunday-school, my mother was a good woman, I 
 came from a Christian home, and I am a mother 
 and never pray for my children." The arrow of 
 conviction pierced her soul, and she went home 
 with it sticking there, and it did not come out 
 easily. For some time she said nothing about 
 it, she kept quiet, but she suffered something of 
 the agony that David must have felt when he 
 said, " While I kept silence my bones waxed 
 old . . . for day and night Thy hand was 
 heavy upon me. My moisture is turned into 
 the drought of summer." And I tell you when 
 the light of God's hoHness shines into a guilty 
 soul it blisters it. One night her husband came 
 home from work, and he saw there was some- 
 thing the matter, he had noticed it for some 
 days, and he said, " Mary, what is the trouble ? " 
 She did not answer. " Mary, are you ill ? " and 
 
The Master's Touch 87 
 
 still she kept quiet. " Very well, I knew it was 
 so, I have seen a change in you for some days," 
 he said ; " I will fetch the doctor," and away he 
 went. As soon as he had got outside the door 
 she sent her boy to the old tent, and when he 
 got to the tent he said to my father, " Sir, my 
 mother heard you pray some weeks ago and she 
 has never been happy since, and she wants to 
 know if you will come and pray with her." And 
 father said, " Of course I will," and away he 
 went, and when he got there he found the poor 
 woman crying for mercy. It was not long be- 
 fore the plan of salvation had been pointed out 
 to her and she was rejoicing in Christ. She had 
 met the condition, and her burden had rolled 
 away. Her tears had become telescopes through 
 which she could see Jesus. Presently the doctor 
 came with the husband. She looked up at the 
 doctor and she said, " Doctor, I have found Him, 
 I have found Him ! " He said, " My good 
 woman, whom have you found ? " " Oh, sir," 
 she said, " my poor soul has been hungry for 
 Jesus, and I have found Him." " Well," said the 
 doctor, " you don't need me, for you have the 
 best Physician the world ever saw." 
 
 And that is what I want to say to you : it is 
 
88 The Master's Touch 
 
 not this poor thing you want, it is Jesus. It is 
 not these ministers. We are only fingers point- 
 ing, we are only voices crying ; but, blessed be 
 God, we do point and we do cry and we tell you 
 in one concentrated, consecrated voice at this 
 moment — 
 
 «' Only Jesus 
 Can do helpless sinners good." 
 
 Only Jesus ; and all the efforts of your own will 
 only end in misery. You may hear preachers, 
 you may say prayers, you may go to church, 
 you may take communion, you may listen to 
 quacks, you may hunt up religious nostrums, 
 you may read books, you may long for healing 
 and desire peace, and wonder when it is coming 
 to you. It will never come till you come to 
 Christ. Five minutes' honest, definite, intelligent 
 dealing with Jesus Christ w^ill cure your mischief, 
 and nothing else will. That is the first thing I 
 want to say. 
 
 The second is this, that there is a tremendous 
 difference between thronging Jesus and touching 
 Jesus. There were six hundred thousand people 
 left Egypt for the promised land who never 
 reached it. Two men out of the crowd reached 
 it. They were touchers, the others were throng- 
 
The Master's Touch 89 
 
 ers ; the others bleached their bones in the wil- 
 derness. There were many people at the Pool 
 of Bethesda, but it was the one that stepped in 
 first after the troubling of the water that was 
 made whole; the others were throngers. Here 
 is a multitude of people at this very moment 
 crowding Jesus, speculating about Jesus, excited 
 about Him, criticising Him, elbowing Him, but 
 one woman touched Him, and that made all the 
 difference. 
 
 Which are you ? Have you touched Him, or 
 are you a thronger ? Some of you throng Him 
 on Sundays, you throng Him in the Sunday- 
 school or church. And you throng Him at 
 missions, and you have been doing it, some of 
 you, till your hairs are gray. In the name of 
 God I tell you — and I tell you to startle you, I 
 tell you to awaken you — in God's name I tell 
 you, church-goer, you are a thronger ; you have 
 never touched Him yet, multitudes of you. If 
 you had, your Hfe would be different, for what- 
 ever Jesus touches is glorified. 
 
 Which are you now? You know deep in 
 your heart. Don't make any excuse, don't 
 shuffle ; don't, I beseech you, get away from 
 the main issue. Have you come into living, 
 
90 The Master's Touch 
 
 vital, saving contact with the Son of God ? Be- 
 cause you will know if you have. I don't believe 
 that doctrine which says you can be a Chris- 
 tian without knowing it. I believe that is a sop 
 from hell to soothe your conscience into saying 
 " Peace " where there is no peace. You cannot 
 be awake without knowing it; you cannot eat 
 your dinner without knowing it ; you cannot go 
 to church without knowing it; and you must 
 not tell me that a man can be born again and 
 made a new creature, have his chains broken, his 
 night turned into day and his bHndness to sight, 
 his hell into heaven, and not know it. Listen. 
 This woman knew, so will you when you have 
 touched Him. This is one of the surest things 
 in God's world, for a man that can look up into 
 the face of Jesus, and say by faith, " Thou art my 
 Saviour," has got in his soul the joy that will 
 some day make heaven pulsate with hallelujahs ; 
 the man that could look up into the face of Jesus 
 and say, " Thou art my light and my song, my 
 sins are put away, my chains are broken, my 
 Lord and my God," is sitting in the twiHght of 
 the coming glory. If he is not in heaven, he is 
 in the ante-room, and he is as safe as though he 
 had been there a thousand years. For when 
 
The Master's Touch 91 
 
 God gets hold of a man He does not let go His 
 grip. The Lord God Almighty take hold of you ! 
 
 Have you touched Him ? Do you know this ? 
 I am not asking what else you know — are you 
 sure about this thing ? Blessed assurance ! Re- 
 ligious certainty is the certainty of religion. It 
 is the ground, the bed-rock, the indestructible 
 rock beneath a man's feet upon which he can 
 stand and say to the world, " Rage on, toss on, 
 howl on, ye storms, and peal, ye thunders, and 
 flash, ye lightnings, and break up, O ribs of 
 nature, but it will be but the rocking of an in- 
 fant's cradle as it lulls me to rest in the arms of 
 Him who saves me, and keeps me by His grace." 
 Have you got it? "Blessed assurance, Jesus is 
 mine ! " Do you know it? Are you sure of it ? 
 Because that is what He calls you to. 
 
 You say, "Are you not forcing something 
 that is not in the story ? " No, it is all here. 
 The woman came in the crowd behind, and I 
 can hear her as she comes limping, stooping, 
 catching her breath, hardly voice enough to 
 speak out loud, saying in a whisper, but saying 
 it, " If I can only touch the hem of His garment 
 I shall be healed " ; as much as to say, " There is 
 power enough in the threads of His coat to save 
 
92 The Master's Touch 
 
 an old woman." That is the faith that con- 
 quered Deity. " Only let me get to Him, and I 
 shall be a new woman." Listen. She knew she 
 was not healed, yet she says, " I shall be," and 
 she touched, and what followed ? She was made 
 whole. The next verse says, '< And Jesus, know- 
 ing in Himself that power had gone out of Him, 
 turned in the crowd." What does that teach ? 
 This, my brother, this old-fashioned, despised 
 doctrine, but it is going to have a resurrection in 
 all the churches in England, this — His Spirit 
 answers to my spirit, and tells me I am born of 
 God. That is the doctrine. It is no new story. 
 Jesus knew, and the woman knew ; and Jesus will 
 know and you will know, when you plough your 
 way through the crowd — whatever the crowd 
 may be for you — and insist on touching Him. 
 
 Have you touched Him ? I know you are a 
 member of the Church, but have you touched 
 Jesus ? I know you are a professor, but are you 
 a possessor ? Can you say — 
 
 " Life immortal, heaven descending, 
 Lo, my heart the Spirit's shrine, 
 God and man in oneness blending, 
 Oh ! what fellowship divine ! 
 Full salvation, 
 Raised in Christ to life divine." 
 
The Master's Touch 93 
 
 ■ Amazing grace, 'tis heaven below 
 
 To feel the blood applied, 
 And Jesus, only Jesus, knows, 
 
 My Jesus crucified " ? 
 
 Is that your experience ? — for that is what He 
 calls you to, to put your feet on the neck of 
 your foe, and to bound with gladness. Have 
 you touched Him ? If not, get a little closer 
 now. 
 
 And if you have touched Him, that leads me 
 to the next thing. If you have touched Him 
 you must confess Him. There is no such thing 
 as getting healed and then being ashamed of the 
 doctor. The man who is ashamed of the doctor 
 is not worth healing. But there is no such thing 
 as being a smuggler here ; there is no such thing 
 as playing hide-and-seek here. You must con- 
 fess Him ; He will see to that. If you are to 
 get all He wants you to have. He will see you 
 meet the conditions. She began in the crowd 
 behind, she ended up on her knees in front of 
 Him, where all grateful souls end. He said, 
 "Where is she that touched Me?" and He 
 looked round about to see her that had done 
 this thing; and mark, He turned round, and 
 when He turned round she was there. Don't 
 
94 The Master's Touch 
 
 you see, it was not as difficult as she thought. 
 She thought she would get at His back ; He 
 gave her His face, and she knelt at His feet, 
 and they made a ring there on the highway, 
 and that was the inquiry-room, and she told 
 Him all the truth. Nobody hindered her, no- 
 body checked her. She poured out her heart 
 and her tears, and she told Him everything. 
 He listened patiently, and when she had finished, 
 and when she had told all, and He knew she had 
 told the whole. He said, " Daughter, thy faith 
 hath saved thee ; go in peace." 
 
 If you want to have peace as an accompani- 
 ment, peace as a friend and companion, peace 
 as the bloom and blossom of things, the music 
 ineffable sounding forth in the hfe, let Jesus 
 Christ come in and take the throne, and you 
 will get peace. 
 
 Men and women, come out of your hiding. 
 Never mind the crowd; Christ is here, and 
 you can touch Him if you will. You can get 
 where there is always room for another in His 
 presence, at His feet. He will make room if no- 
 body else does. He will see that you get a place 
 right in front of Him, if you only make up your 
 mind to struggle. 
 
The Master's Touch 95 
 
 " But," you say, '' what can I do ? " What 
 could she do ? She would not have been healed, 
 she was not healed, without an effort, and you 
 will never be saved without an effort. She 
 seized her opportunity. Will you? Here was 
 the Christ passing by. She made Him see her. 
 She had only to touch the hem of His garment, 
 but there was more in that touch than you think. 
 The Lord help you to touch Him the same way, 
 and you too will be made whole. Your night 
 will break into lovely dawn, your misery into 
 music, your tears will be kissed into jewels, your 
 heartache into soul rapture, your Hfelong agony 
 will end in the joy of the presence of the risen 
 Christ. 
 
 Oh, touch Him ! Do not throng Him longer. 
 It ends all one way — it spells failure, it spells 
 loss, it spells agony. But touching means life. 
 Oh, how I thank God I have touched Him ! 
 I do not know as much as some of you, but I 
 know this, I had not your chance, your oppor- 
 tunities, but I got this one — I let nobody cheat 
 me out of this — and I shall never forget how I 
 knelt as a gipsy boy and said, " O God, I want 
 to love Thee, I want to be saved, I want to be 
 good, and I will be saved, and I will follow 
 
96 The Master's Touch 
 
 Thee." I do not know how, but I touched 
 Him at that moment, and He accepted, and He 
 touched me. 
 
 God help you to touch Him in the same way, 
 and the grace that turned the gipsy-tent into a 
 palace will change your life from the poor miser- 
 able thing it has been into a thing of beauty and 
 praise forever. 
 
VI 
 
 SLAY UTTERLY 
 
« Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than 
 the fat of rams." — / Sam, /j, from ver. /j. 
 
VI 
 
 SLAY UTTERLY 
 
 I TAKE those words as a starting-point. What 
 I wish to say is more in the form of an exposi- 
 tion of the whole of the verses which I read just 
 now for the lesson. You who are familiar with 
 this story will remember that for a long time the 
 Amalekites had been a source of trouble and 
 bloodshed to the children of Israel. God's 
 patience had borne long not only with Israel 
 but with their tormentors, and God decreed that 
 these sinners, the Amalekites, should be punished. 
 At this point their sin was very aggravated, the 
 measure of their iniquity was running over, and 
 the word of the Lord came through the prophet 
 to the king that these sinners were to be punished, 
 wiped out, and Saul and his army were to be the 
 instruments of judgment for the punishment of 
 these rebels. For there is a limit to God's mercy. 
 The man who sets out to fight Him will lose. 
 The man who makes up his mind to defy God to 
 the utmost will find he swears by a cause that 
 will end in failure. 
 
 99 
 
100 Slay Utterly 
 
 Saul marshalled his army of 210,000 men to 
 slay a nation. The battle is over. We have not 
 time to speak of that. Again the word of the 
 Lord came to the prophet, and this time it is 
 changed. You listen to it, put your ear close to 
 it, and you will hear pathos indescribable. You 
 will hear the falling of tears ; you will see a 
 shower of blood. Through these words there 
 seems to rumble the woe of a broken heart. 
 Listen. " Saul is turned back from following 
 Me. He hath not performed My command- 
 ments. He has turned his back on Me, the man 
 I honoured, the man I Hfted up, the man I ex- 
 alted, the man I crowned with possibilities stupen- 
 dous, the man I chose from out from among his 
 brethren, the man in whom I invested so much, 
 and from whom I expected so much, the man 
 who might have done so much as My represent- 
 ative. Saul — he is turned back from following 
 Me. He hath not performed My command- 
 ments." I tell you these words seem to glisten 
 with the tears of a disappointed God. " He has 
 turned back." If God were going to write a 
 Httle bit about you and me, I wonder what He 
 would say. He did speak out about this man. 
 If He were to speak out about the preacher, I 
 
Slay Utterly loi 
 
 wonder what He would say. If God were to 
 write on my forehead, not what you think I am, 
 not what I seem to be, but as I am with Him, I 
 wonder how many of you would listen to me ; 
 and yet my Lord knows me. I wonder if God 
 were to speak out about these preachers what 
 He would say — these singers, these office-bearers, 
 these Sunday-school teachers. You who take 
 communion and parade your rehgion, I wonder 
 what God would say if He were to write in black 
 capitals what we are across our face ; I wonder 
 how many of us would stop for our neighbours 
 to see. God knows every man at his worst. 
 You may deceive the preacher, you may deceive 
 the missioner, and the preacher and the missioner 
 may deceive you. God sees, God knows, and 
 God judges, not according to our poor ideals, not 
 according to our own limited notions and pre- 
 conceived ideas of what goodness, holiness, salva- 
 tion, being saved, Christianity, mean, but accord- 
 ing to His eternal purpose in Christ Jesus from 
 the foundation of the world. Would He say that 
 you have turned back ? For He sees the heart. 
 There is such a thing as heart-backsliding, when 
 nobody save God knows. You can backslide 
 without the preacher knowing it ; you can back- 
 
102 Slay Utterly 
 
 slide without your employer finding it out ; you 
 can backslide in a distant city, and it is astonish- 
 ing what some people think they can do with 
 impunity when they get out of the immediate 
 community in which they are known. When 
 they go for a holiday then they throw off re- 
 straint. " Nobody knows me, and I can do as I 
 Hke." Can you? Not while God sits on His 
 throne, without being haled up before the great 
 white throne some day to give an account of every 
 thought as well as every deed. God knows. He 
 sees the public backslider and He sees the secret 
 backslider, and He knows every inch that is 
 turned back. He knows it ; it is noted down on 
 high. Don't think that God is so busy manag- 
 ing worlds, and throwing out planets, fixing stars, 
 and controlling the universe, that He has not 
 time to think of you. God sees everything you 
 do. All else was made for you. He knows 
 you ; the climax of His power, the ideal life He 
 wants you to live — He knows when He is de- 
 serted, and when you fall short of it, and when 
 you forget Him, and when you are a rebel. God 
 knows. 
 
 Saul turned back. Poor Samuel could not 
 sleep that night. He cried unto the Lord all 
 
Slay Utterly 103 
 
 that night, and many a minister has had the same 
 experience. Do you know what turns the preach- 
 er's hair gray ? It is not work, it is worry. 
 Work is pleasure, when a man has no care and 
 burden, no pain and anxiety. Do you know 
 what kills the preacher ? Do you know what 
 digs the grave for the preacher ? Do you know 
 what makes the preacher look an old man long 
 before he ought ? I will tell you — the inconsist- 
 ency of his flock, the backsliding of office-bearer 
 and communicant, the worldliness, the want of 
 godliness — that kills the preacher. 
 
 He cried unto the Lord all night. Poor 
 preacher! God pity the preacher who has to 
 minister to a Church that is more worldlike than 
 Christlike ! God pity the preacher whose flock 
 runs after the world sooner than the prayer- 
 meeting ! God pity the preacher that has to 
 minister to a Church that hves for the superficial, 
 the social, and out of touch with God ! That 
 will kill the preacher. He cried unto the Lord 
 all night, and when the morning came (because 
 the secrets of the Lord are with them that fear 
 Him) God spoke again, and said to Samuel, 
 " Saul is coming home, and he is coming that 
 way, go and meet him"; and Samuel went to 
 
104 Slay Utterly 
 
 meet the returning backslider, and when Saul 
 saw him coming he did what all shams do, he 
 put on his religious face. He put on the face 
 that goes to missions and conventions. We are 
 all more or less guilty, for it is fashionable to put 
 on a sort of religious face, a sanctimonious look 
 and a sanctimonious tone in the voice and atti- 
 tude. Some of you know all about it. There 
 would have been a Bible on the table if Saul had 
 had one, if he had been at home when the 
 prophet was coming ; and you have had a Bible 
 on the table when the preacher has called, as 
 though you had been reading it. You had 
 never been looking at it, but you wanted him to 
 think you had. " Blessed be thou of the Lord," 
 said Saul. Don't you hear the tone ? Don't 
 you see he knew the language of Zion ? " Blessed 
 be thou of the Lord, I have performed the com- 
 mandments." " Then — listen — what is that ? 
 Where did you get those sheep from ? Where 
 did you get those oxen from ? If you have per- 
 formed the commandments, if you have put the 
 sword in up to the hilt, if you have spared noth- 
 ing that was condemned to die, where did you 
 get those sheep? What meaneth the bleating 
 of the sheep in mine ears and the lowing of the 
 
Slay Utterly 105 
 
 oxen ? " " But," said he, '' I did not do that, it 
 was the people." Is that out of date ? Don't 
 try to appear better than you are, or the sheep 
 will bleat, the oxen will low. God has a strange 
 way of exposing fraud. He knows how. When 
 you are found out, play the man if there is any 
 manhood left in you ; do not blame anybody. I 
 know we begin to blame everything but the real 
 cause of the trouble and of the mischief. If I 
 come to some of you men and ask why you are 
 not a Christian whom would you blame ? You 
 know Christ's claim on you. You know He 
 died for you, you know He demands your love 
 and your service, and He wants you to be good 
 and hate sin, He wants you to be deHvered from 
 it, for He died that He might make you good. 
 How is it you are not as pure as the sunbeam, as 
 sweet as the dewdrop, as lovely as the sun-kissed 
 heights of the Alps, as enchanting as the air of 
 a spring morning when wafted by an angel's 
 wing ? Because God makes all these, and He 
 can make you as beautiful. That is His purpose. 
 Calvary means that, that God wants to make you 
 as beautiful as He has made all nature and even 
 the crown of it. How is it you are not like 
 that ? Do you say, " Well, sir, I had a bad start, 
 
io6 Slay Utterly 
 
 and if you had had my bringing up you would 
 have been as bad." " My mother was wrong, 
 my father was wrong," a poor fellow said to me 
 on Huddersfield platform one winter's night 
 waiting for the mail train. I had been preaching 
 in Leeds. I got hold of this poor fellow and I 
 talked to him. He was a commercial traveller, 
 and he said, " It is no good to talk to me, sir ; I 
 am a drunkard," and he looked like one and 
 smelt like one. He said, " The drink has got me 
 by the throat, sir ; no hope for me. My mother 
 died of drink, my father died of drink ; I was 
 born with the devil in me." '* Well," I said 
 " you can be born again, and this time with the 
 devil out of you." Jesus undertakes your case ; 
 He is a match for you. He is the friend of sin- 
 ners, He is the Saviour of sinners. If you were 
 perfect you would not need Him. He comes to 
 those who are bad, and it does not matter how 
 bad you are, Jesus Christ can grapple with your 
 case ; and though it may be difficult, He can 
 make you a new creature, for He is a mighty 
 Saviour. Do not blame your parents, do not 
 blame your environment, because if you lived in 
 a palace without a new heart you would make 
 the palace a slum. You do not cure a patient 
 
Slay Utterly 107 
 
 of smallpox by putting him into clean sheets ; 
 and if you put a pig in a parlour I know which 
 will change the quickest. I know men who 
 were converted and changed their residence 
 three times within a year, and each time into a 
 better neighbourhood and into a bigger house. 
 What a man is inside he is outside. He makes 
 his own environment, and sin did not begin in a 
 slum, it began in a garden. Talk about a garden 
 city : surely if any man had a chance from his 
 environment Adam had. Don't blame your en- 
 vironment if you are not a Christian ; do not 
 blame your mother, do not blame your father. 
 You may have had a bad start, but you will not 
 be held responsible for the start, you will be held 
 responsible for the finish. You will not be held 
 responsible for what your parents did, but for 
 what you did. Do not blame society, for you 
 are a part of society, and if society is not right 
 you be right and show society what you think it 
 ought to be. Don't blame the Church, because 
 most of you do. You say, " Find me a perfect 
 Church, and I will join it.'* Well, emigrate, go 
 to some little South Sea island where there are 
 no inhabitants and found a Church, and when 
 you get there it will not be perfect five minutes. 
 
io8 Slay Utterly 
 
 None of us are perfect in the Church, and if you 
 find me a perfect Church in this land I will have 
 to stay out, for I am not perfect by any means, 
 but I am trusting in a perfect Saviour. It is not 
 what I am, but what He is. I am not what I 
 was ; I know there is a difference. I am not 
 what I want to be. Don't blame the Church. 
 The Church is the place where men should come 
 who want to learn to be better than they are, and 
 who believe in the power of Almighty God to 
 make them new creatures. Don't blame the 
 minister. Don't blame us, for we are only 
 human, and if you think we have not got re- 
 hgion you get it and show us what it ought to 
 be, and if you can show us anything better than 
 we have we will sit at your feet. Don't blame 
 the devil, for the devil can only tempt, he can- 
 not make you sin. No man sins till he consents. 
 He can tempt but he cannot make. Listen. 
 You are a man, and all these years of your man- 
 hood you have managed to resist God the Father, 
 God in His holiness, God on His throne, God 
 with all His power, with all His wisdom, with 
 all His burning, scorching purity. You have 
 managed to resist Him, you have managed to 
 resist the Son of His love, the sacrifice of His 
 
Slay Utterly 109 
 
 heart, the atonement of the Cross, the redeem- 
 ing blood and pardoning blood. You have re- 
 sisted that. You have resisted the Holy Ghost, 
 the Regenerator of the heart. You have resisted 
 the Trinity successfully, and when you want to, 
 you will resist the devil by the same personal 
 will-power. You can when you want to. Pray 
 for the desire so that you will look yourself to- 
 night square in the face, pull yourself up, pull 
 yourself round, face yourself, compel attention, 
 demand thought. Whatever else you do, look 
 yourself in the face, if you are not Christlike, and 
 good, and holy, and say at this moment, if you 
 are wicked, unclean, lying, crooked, bad-tempered, 
 if that is your condition it is because you love to 
 be so, and you are content with it. It is your 
 own fault and not your neighbour's, and not your 
 master's, and not your servant's, and not the 
 people about you, and not the Church, and 
 not your father, and not God, and not His Son, 
 and not the Spirit. It is because you have got 
 a heart that is deceitful above all things and 
 desperately wicked. That is the plain truth, 
 and may God help you to see it. 
 
 Now if you read this history a little closer you 
 will see what God means when He says, " Slay 
 
no Slay Utterly 
 
 utterly." All the trouble, all the rejection, all 
 the loss to Saul and the kingdom for time and 
 for eternity, all lay in that — he was not willing 
 to slay to the death. No, he must spare the best 
 of the sheep and the best of the oxen. No 
 harm in a few sheep, no harm in a few prize 
 cattle — they are all right ; but God said, " Slay, 
 slay utterly." 
 
 And is not the same spirit eating the life out 
 of us, killing our power, and spoiling us all along 
 the Hne for life and service because we are not 
 wilHng to obey ? What did that request mean ? 
 *' I know I ought to be saved," said the writer of 
 one of the requests for prayer sent to me in a 
 recent mission, " but I am not wiUing to make 
 the sacrifice." Then there will be no salvation 
 till you do. You must slay to the death. If it 
 is gambling — and it is with some of you — slay 
 it. Would to God I had my way with drink and 
 gambling, I would set fire to both. For the 
 sake of generations unborn I would destroy it 
 forever. There are some of you mothers who 
 would not give up your drink to save your 
 children from becoming drunkards and your 
 daughters harlots. There are some of you 
 fathers who would not stop your gambling to 
 
Slay Utterly ill 
 
 prevent your boys from becoming assassins, but 
 you will be held responsible at the judgment 
 day for children who are born of half-damned 
 parents. They are scathing words, I know, but 
 they are true. You may think it is awful to 
 utter them, it is more awful to demand that they 
 should be stated. It is more awful to be the sin- 
 ner. Your drinking and your gambling must 
 go, your pride, your selfishness, your meanness, 
 your bad temper, your un-ChristHkeness must 
 go. Slay to the death your love of pleasure, 
 your love of show, your love of appearing more 
 than you are. God wants you to be as sweet 
 and as lovely and as transparent as the breath of 
 heaven's own morning. That is God's purpose. 
 Slay to the death. 
 
 And if some of you are to do that you must 
 disgorge what you have in your pocket, for 
 some of you are living on that which belongs to 
 other people. Some of you are in offices you have 
 no right to hold. Some of you are living a double 
 life, and slaying to the death means uncovering, 
 confession, coming out and being true at whatever 
 cost, and slaying to the death. Do you mean to 
 face it ? It is not singing hymns and going to 
 church and saying a few prayers and then living 
 
112 Slay Utterly 
 
 as you like. That is blasphemy, that is mock- 
 ery. Obedience — a tremendous word — obedi- 
 ence is better than sacrifice. There is something 
 better than communion. There is something 
 better than going to church, there is something 
 better than walking down the aisle on Sunday 
 morning very circumspectly and giving the im- 
 pression that you are a saint. There is such a 
 thing as doing right — that is rehgion. It is not 
 in silk hats and frock coats and beautiful dresses, 
 it is not going to church parade and making the 
 thing a show ; that is humbug and cant in the 
 eyes of people who make no profession at all. 
 It is being Christlike that tells for time and 
 eternity. 
 
 Obedience is a divine command. Some of 
 you will have to decide to-night. You will 
 decide between the oxen, the sheep, Agag the 
 Amalekite, the world, the flesh, the devil on the 
 one hand, and Jesus and suffering, the cross and 
 heaven on the other. Which shall it be ? You 
 have to decide. This man, Saul, decided for the 
 oxen and the sheep. He lost a crown, he lost a 
 kingdom, and he lost God. The kingdom and 
 the crown would not have been much, but to 
 lose God, that is hell. If you have God you 
 
Slay Utterly 113 
 
 can afford to lose a good deal, but to lose all and 
 God, that is hell enough. May God save you 
 from losing Him ! Which will you have ? 
 
 I was trying to preach on this truth a few 
 years ago, and at the close of the inquiry meet- 
 ing the wife of one of the ministers came to see 
 me. She said, " There is a young lady there 
 wants to speak to you ; she refuses to go away. 
 Nobody seems to be able to help her ; she will 
 speak to the preacher." I said, " I will go with 
 you," and we went into the room. I went to the 
 other end of the room and spoke to this poor 
 thing. She said, " Sir, I want to confess an 
 awful sin. I am a mother, and I fathered my 
 child on an innocent man. He was a student in 
 one of the theological colleges studying for the 
 ministry, and I blighted his life as well as 
 branded him. I took him through three courts 
 and won my case, but I have a bit of hell inside. 
 He was dismissed and disgraced, and he is as 
 innocent as you are. What am I to do ? " 
 
 " Do ? " I said ; " do right." 
 
 She said, " I have no peace." 
 
 " And you never will have peace," I said. " In 
 this world you may have pardon on condition, 
 but there is no such thing as peace for you, for 
 
114 S^^y Utterly 
 
 you will never forgive yourself that wrong." I 
 could not spare her. I had to be faithful in 
 order to save her. I said — 
 
 " You must take off that brand as publicly as 
 you put it on — ^just as publicly." 
 
 " Oh, sir ! " she said, " he will send me to 
 prison." 
 
 I said, " If it means prison, and you go to 
 prison, you will go with the consciousness that 
 you made an honest attempt to undo the wrong, 
 but for you the way to heaven is via that con- 
 fession, and there is no such thing as joy or peace 
 in God for you without taking up your cross." 
 
 I shall never forget the effect my words made 
 on that poor thing. She bent, she collapsed, and 
 my heart ached for her. Yet I dare not heal the 
 hurt of that poor thing slightly, nor cry '^ Peace " 
 falsely. I had to b^; faithful, and as I knelt be- 
 side her I said — 
 
 " When you are willing as far as lies in your 
 power to undo the wrong, God will help you, 
 and He will not forsake you." 
 
 Presently she bit her lip till it bled, and, clasp- 
 ing the chair in front of her, she said, " O God, 
 I will do it if it means prison." 
 
 It was not an easy path for that poor thing, 
 
Slay Utterly 115 
 
 but she walked it bravely. She went back to 
 the court — and I am speaking of what was in 
 all the London papers — she went back to the 
 court, and had the court revise the whole case, 
 and in that crowded court she said, when they 
 asked her why she made this confession, " Be- 
 cause I gave my heart to God, and I had to take 
 this course to clear my conscience of its guilt." 
 
 Her confession relieved her own heart of its 
 burden, cleared an innocent man, and made an 
 impression on that city which is felt to-day. The 
 only path of peace is the path of righteousness. 
 
 Slay utterly, put away the evil thing, obey 
 God. Put Him in His right place, and the joy 
 and peace will come. 
 
 Will you do it now ? You will obey His Word 
 or reject it. 
 
 Which will you do ? Saul rejected and lost a 
 kingdom. If you are not careful you may lose 
 your soul. 
 
VII 1 
 
 HE WENT AWAY SORROWFUL 
 
" But when the young man heard that saying, he went away 
 sorrowful; for he had great possessions," — Matt, ig: 22. 
 
VII 
 
 HE WENT AWAY SORROWFUL 
 
 When the young man heard that saying ! Do 
 you know what that saying was ? Jesus had just 
 said to him that he must sell all, give all, leave 
 all, and follow Him all the way; that he must 
 make a complete surrender of himself and all he 
 possessed to Christ and for the purposes of His 
 kingdom. As he heard that saying he went 
 away, for he had great possessions, and they 
 were great hindrances. He was a rich man, and 
 it is not easy for a rich man to be an out-and- 
 out Christian. A rich man may be a Christian, 
 and some are splendid Christians ; but in my 
 judgment it takes far more grace to keep a rich 
 man than it does to keep a poor man. I know 
 many good men who are also rich men, and their 
 riches are consecrated to the service of God and 
 men. But riches make it easy for men to go 
 wrong and to do wrong. That is why the Book 
 says, " Set not thy heart upon them." " You 
 cannot serve two masters." " You cannot serve 
 God and mammon." 
 
 119 
 
120 He Went Away Sorrowful 
 
 I want especially to speak to you about three 
 words in the centre of this verse : " He went 
 away." He, the rich young ruler, the aristo- 
 cratic, cultured, refined, moral, popular, attractive 
 young ruler, with a beautiful character and many 
 magnificent points about him — he went away. 
 
 I would like you first of all to remember that 
 he came to Jesus. It is something to come. 
 Nobody can see Jesus as the Lord but by the 
 Holy Ghost. Nobody will desire to come to 
 Christ but by the Holy Ghost. No one takes an 
 intelligent step towards Jesus but as the direct 
 result of the prompting of the Spirit of God. 
 No man can come to Jesus Christ except the 
 Father draw him. Some do not come when 
 they are drawn. I do not think we sufficiently 
 emphasize this side of the Gospel truth — that 
 every upward look, every holy desire, every 
 thought of goodness, every aspiration for a 
 nobler life, does not come from the heart within, 
 for that is a sink of iniquity. It is the work of 
 the blessed Spirit which God has given to con- 
 vict the world of sin. of righteousness, and of 
 judgment. 
 
 The fact that you are here is a proof that God 
 is calling you, that He is trying to win you, is 
 
He Went Away Sorrowful 121 
 
 coaxing you, arousing you, startling you, making 
 you anxious about these things, and leading you 
 to desire them. 
 
 What do we sing sometimes. " Every virtue 
 we 'possess, and every victory won." What is 
 the next line ? "And every thought of holiness, 
 are His, and His alone." Have you found in 
 your heart a desire for Jesus Christ ? You must 
 nurse it and coax it. It is God's blessed Spirit 
 given to lead you from dark darkness to light. 
 Do not resist it, but yield to its pathos and power, 
 and it will lead you through the dungeon to the 
 palace, from the prison to the freedom of the 
 gospel ; from misery to the joy of His salvation, 
 from the thraldom of the devil into the glorious 
 hberty of God's dear children. It will lead you 
 all the way. And when you begin do not stop, 
 go on. Do not listen when some try to stop 
 you. Do not halt by the way. Turn not to the 
 left hand nor the right. I know there are those 
 who will be foolish enough, wicked and diabol- 
 ical enough to oppose you and to slander you. 
 Move steadily on with your eyes upon the Cross. 
 Let it not be said of any of you that he came so 
 far and then went away again. Now this man 
 came to Jesus. It is something to come. Some 
 
122 He Went Away Sorrowful 
 
 of you have never done even that. You have 
 never moved an intelligent step towards Jesus 
 Christ. You have taken a good many steps the 
 other way. You have gone so far that when 
 you turn and look back at the distance between 
 you and goodness, and God, and heaven, you are 
 alarmed. If you dare stop and look back you 
 are alarmed at the picture that presents itself; 
 you are startled at the distance you have travelled 
 down the wrong road. Stop a moment and 
 listen. Have you ever taken an honest step to- 
 wards the light ? Have you ever taken an intel- 
 ligent step towards Jesus Christ? Have you 
 ever moved honestly towards a better life ? This 
 man did. He came to Christ. But he not only 
 came, he came running. It looks as if he was 
 an earnest, enthusiastic seeker after truth. Re- 
 member who he was — an aristocratic, rich young 
 ruler, a popular, educated man, whom everybody 
 in the city knew ; and yet, in broad daylight, that 
 man was seen running to Jesus. Walking was 
 not fast enough. He came, says one of the 
 writers, running to Jesus. And I tell you that 
 when we are in earnest after God and heaven 
 and eternal life, and when our eyes are open to 
 see the exceeding sinfulness of sin, like Bunyan's 
 
He Went Away Sorrowful 123 
 
 pilgrim, we shall put our fingers in our ears and 
 flee from the city of destruction towards the land 
 of light, and love, and hberty. We shall run 
 crying, " Life ! " The Lord help us to be in 
 earnest ! The young man ran ; he seemed to be 
 in earnest. 
 
 Watch hirn ! When he gets to Jesus he 
 kneels, so that it looks as though he were hum- 
 ble. It is a good thing to kneel. It is not a 
 weak thing nor a mean thing to kneel. It may 
 be childlike, but it is not childish. It takes a 
 man to do it when there are other folk looking 
 on. It is not a fooHsh nor a sanctimonious thing 
 to kneel. There are some who think it is, and 
 they do not, will not, kneel in consequence. 
 They never pray. You prayed once when you 
 were at your mother's knee. But there are some 
 of you who have never prayed since you said, 
 " Gentle Jesus, meek and mild " ; " Jesus, tender 
 Shepherd, hear me." Some of you have never 
 prayed since you felt your mother's hand upon 
 your head, except to ask God to blind you, to 
 damn you, to paralyze you, to strike you dead. 
 Some of you can do that. You contaminate 
 God's pure air with your oaths and curses. You 
 might have been to hell for your education, and 
 
124 He Went Away Sorrowful 
 
 had the devil for your schoolmaster. You have 
 mastered the language of the pit so perfectly. 
 May God help you to quit your swearing ! It is 
 a mercy God has not heard those awful prayers. 
 
 I say again that it is not a childish thing to 
 pray. It is a beautiful thing to pray ; a manly, 
 an ennobhng thing. It is an act that Jesus is 
 pleased to see. When a man turns from his sin, 
 his ' rebellion, his uncleanness, his drunkenness, 
 his lying, his pride, his wicked abominations, and 
 his lust, and gets upon his knees to pray, the Son 
 of God looks over the battlements of the skies, 
 and says, " Behold, he prays." Do not think it 
 is a childish thing to pray. It is the way to 
 heaven. This man prayed. 
 
 If you look at him a little closer, you will see 
 he seems not only in earnest and humble, but as 
 if he is honest he opens his heart to Jesus. He 
 seems to say, " Just tell me what to do. I want 
 eternal life. I know I have not got it. I feel a 
 hunger that has never been satisfied, that I have 
 never been able to appease. There are thoughts 
 in me which I do not understand. There are 
 depths in my being I have never been able to 
 fathom, heights I have never been able to scale, 
 immensities I cannot measure. I somehow feel 
 
He Went Away Sorrowful 125 
 
 I want life, eternal life. What shall I do to get 
 it ? O man of sorrows, Jesus of Nazareth, good 
 Master, tell me what I am to do." And Jesus 
 led him step by step. He tried him by the law ; 
 and the young man said, " All these have I kept 
 from my youth up ; but I do not feel satisfied. 
 Something is missing. What lack I yet ? " And 
 Jesus said, " Hear, then ! Sell that — t-h-a-t — 
 thou hast and give to the poor y and come and fol- 
 low Me; and thou shalt have treasure in heaven." 
 Look, listener. He ran to Jesus and seemed 
 enthusiastic; he knelt to Jesus and seemed 
 humble. With honest frankness he confessed 
 his heart's need to Christ; and if he take but 
 one step more, he will be saved. If he make 
 a surrender of himself and his possessions, 
 the angels will sing for joy, and the Church of 
 God will be the richer for all time. If he be 
 honest, brave, courageous, and whole-hearted, 
 and just step over the line, what joy for time and 
 eternity he will create. But listen, immortal 
 spirit. See yourself, will you ? He came there, 
 but he went away. Do you not see how much 
 you can do, and yet do nothing ? Do you not 
 see how far you can climb, only to fall into the 
 infinity of horrors ; how much you can seem to 
 
126 He Went Away Sorrowful 
 
 know and yet be a fool ; how moral and attractive 
 and beautiful it is possible to be in the eyes of 
 the world, and yet be bad enough to turn your 
 back on Christ, and go your own way ? Is not 
 that a full-length portrait of yourself? You may 
 be in this house to-night. You may have come 
 to talk with Jesus. These wonderful privileges 
 may be yours, and yet you may go away. 
 
 Is it possible for a man to talk with Jesus, to 
 look into the face of Jesus, to handle Jesus, and 
 yet to go away? Yes, this young man did it, 
 and went away. You can do more than that. 
 You can live with Jesus and not know Him. 
 Judas did for three years, and then sold Him for 
 thirty pieces of silver. Some of you have sold 
 Him for less than that. Judas had a field out of 
 the bargain. " : ou have got nothing. Listen. 
 You can do more than live with Him. You can 
 die in His presence, and never know Him. The 
 thief did, and cursed Him in his dying moments. 
 You can have a great many privileges and yet 
 go away. What are you doing, my brother? 
 Is that your history ? If this young man had 
 only stepped across the line, if he had only 
 declared himself, how differently the story would 
 have read. If he had looked upon the sacrifice 
 
He Went Away Sorrowful 127 
 
 which Jesus commanded him to make, and then 
 looked on Jesus and on heaven, and thought of 
 all it meant; of the height, the length, the depth, 
 the breadth, the eternity, the joy, the honour, the 
 usefulness for time and eternity that comes to a 
 man who is associated with, and living in and for 
 Emmanuel ; if he had taken just that one step, 
 he might have written an epistle, he might have 
 been an evangelist of the early Church. If he 
 had come into the kingdom with all his in- 
 fluence and all his magnificent character and 
 capabilities, he would have swept hundreds and 
 thousands into the kingdom of God. All that 
 was lost because he did not come. And when 
 you stand at the bar of God you will be held 
 responsible not only for what you have done, but 
 for what you might have done if you had been 
 on the right side. God has made certain invest- 
 ments in you, and He expects some return now 
 and by and by ; and woe be to the man or woman 
 who meets with a disappointed Christ. You 
 know what happened to that fig-tree. He 
 cursed it. He did not die for it. He died for 
 you. He was disappointed, and He cursed the 
 tree at night, and in the morning it was dead. 
 I want you to think. " He went away." 
 
128 He Went Away Sorrowful 
 
 Where did he go to ? Back to his riches ; but 
 his riches did not satisfy him, and they never 
 would. Riches are convenient. They may 
 gratify you to a large extent. They may 
 give you opportunities for pleasures and prefer- 
 ments. They may help you to widen your out- 
 look for a httle, or may bHnd your outlook. 
 Riches are convenient, but they do not feed the 
 man within. A soul cannot be fed on bricks 
 and mortar. The man who rides in carriages 
 and drives the fastest horses, who drinks the 
 most sparkling wines, and sits in the fastest 
 company does not revel in these things long. 
 He turns away from them, wearied and tired, 
 and sick at heart. A lady said to me a little 
 while ago, " I can have all I want, as far as 
 money is concerned," and a big tear rolled down 
 her cheek ; " I can have my delights, my fine 
 clothes, my carriage, and my box at the opera 
 or the theatre. I can have my fashions and my 
 fashionable society," and sh-e shook like a tired 
 bird ; " but I am weary of it all. I want Jesus. 
 These things do not satisfy me." If gold could 
 feed a soul, then happy would that man have 
 been who went down in that seething whirlpool 
 and left two millions of money behind him. 
 
He Went Away Sorrowful 129 
 
 There was not a ripple to mark the place where 
 he sank. His millions made him a suicide. 
 
 A millionaire died a little while ago and left 
 twenty millions. His own family said he was 
 the most miserable wretch they ever knew. You 
 cannot satisfy the man within with riches. You 
 are not built that way. You are built with dif- 
 ferent material, the material out of which God 
 builds the planets, out of which God builds the 
 eternities. When worlds go out Hke sparks 
 from a blacksmith's anvil, when those planets 
 are split-wheels on the highroads of the eter- 
 nities, you will still exist. Why do you not try 
 and feed your soul on things eternal ? Why feed 
 on air, and " spend your money for that which is 
 not bread and your labour for that which 
 satisfieth not " ? " Eat jq that which is good, 
 and may your soul delight itself in fatness." 
 His riches could not help him. When he left 
 Jesus, he left the riches of the skies. He left 
 the treasures that never fade away. His riches 
 could not help him, and they cannot help you. 
 
 Where did he go ? Did he go to his friends ? 
 Who could take the place of Jesus? He had 
 left Him. His friends were as badly off as he. 
 He had not found in his friends what he had 
 
130 He Went Away Sorrowful 
 
 wanted, or he would not have come to Jesus. 
 The true friends of this world are few and far 
 between. False friends bless you while the sun 
 shines ; they applaud you whilst your pockets 
 are full, you cheek red, your eye clear, and your 
 brain brilliant; but let sorrow come, let the 
 cyclone of misery strike you, the avalanche of 
 failure fall upon you, and then where are your 
 friends ? They do not know you. The friend- 
 ships of the world are poor. Do not think you 
 will find a substitute in humanity for Jesus Christ. 
 He is " a friend that sticketh closer than a 
 brother." 
 
 Where did he go? Back to his pleasures? 
 They faded, and passed away with the evening. 
 They were gone with the morning cloud. They 
 perished in the using, faded hke the flowers, and 
 went out with the light. There is a certain 
 amount of gratification in worldly pleasure, I 
 know, but it does not last. Wait till the bloom 
 has gone from your cheek ; it can never be put 
 back. You may try, but we know when it is not 
 real. When the eye grows dim, you can never 
 light that fire again. Wait till the brain refuses 
 to think, till the hand trembles, and the step is 
 infirm. What then ? Where are the pleasures 
 
He Went Away Sorrowful 131 
 
 then ? You may call them up, but they will re- 
 fuse to come; you may thunder, but they will 
 be deaf; you may ask the pleasures of the world 
 to fulfill their part of the contract, the bargain 
 they promised to give you ; but they are bank- 
 rupt, they are sold up and empty. 
 
 The pleasures He gives are forevermore. 
 " His ways are ways of pleasantness, and all His 
 paths are peace." 
 
 Where did he go ? Did he go to heaven ? 
 Come now, you are an intelligent man ; I appeal 
 to your judgment and your conscience. Did he 
 go to heaven ? Remember Jesus Christ was 
 there. This young man came to Jesus, but he 
 went away when he was told what to do to get 
 into the kingdom. Did he go to heaven ? No, 
 he left that when he left Jesus. If you could 
 cHmb the steps of gold, get through the gates of 
 pearl, '.nd search for him, you would search in 
 vain. If you looked across the landscape of 
 eternal beauty you would not find him ; if you 
 looked at the processions of triumph you would 
 not find him there ; if you looked through the 
 many mansions you would not find him ; if you 
 looked for him among the multitude which John 
 saw, which no man can number, that " have 
 
132 He Went Away Sorrowful 
 
 washed their robes and made them white in the 
 blood of the Lamb," you would not find him 
 there. He is not known to the Lion of the tribe 
 of Judah. And if you went and said to Jesus, 
 " Master, where is that young ruler ? The last 
 time I saw him was in that evangelistic service, 
 and he seemed concerned. He ran, he was 
 moved, he prayed, he wept, he asked then what 
 he was to do to be saved, he seemed very prom- 
 ising. Where is he ? " I think Jesus would say, 
 " Do you not know that he went away ? He 
 might have been here, but he left this when he 
 left Me. I am the way, the truth, and the life. 
 No man cometh to the Father but by Me." 
 There is no other way given under heaven 
 whereby we can be saved. The man who refuses 
 to take that course, morning, noon, and night, 
 goes out into the darkness, the deep, dark night, 
 the starless, hopeless, eternal night. 
 
 " He went away." Jesus comes to you now, 
 my brother, to you, my sister, with a voice full 
 of pathos, full of pleading, full of love for you, 
 full of power to save you. 
 
 He knows what you are thinking, what you 
 are feeling. You are concerned about your soul, 
 because His Spirit is striving with you, making 
 
He Went Away Sorrowful 133 
 
 you think of eternal things. In the Hght of this 
 young man's case, now that you are on the point 
 of turning one way or the other, He says to you, 
 " Will ye also go away ? " Can you in the face 
 of that ? Dare you go away ? If you dare. 
 Some day you will hear Him say, " Then they 
 went away, now they must go into the outer dark- 
 nessJ' You must settle it with yourself. No- 
 body can hinder you if you will come ; nobody 
 can make you come unless you will. How can 
 I help you to do it ? I plead with you for Jesus 
 Christ's sake not to go another step in the wrong 
 direction, not to take another step away from 
 Jesus. If you cannot get to Him because you 
 feel too feeble, if you feel too paralyzed and 
 physically unable to take a step towards Him be- 
 cause of sin, then turn your face to Him. Do 
 not turn your back upon Him, for that means 
 death. Fall upon your knees, looking unto Jesus. 
 Pray now. You say, " I cannot pray." Say this 
 prayer, " Lord, help me," and if you cannot say 
 it all, say " Lord." If you cannot say even that, 
 then LOOK, for " There is life for a look at the 
 Crucified One, There is life at this moment for 
 thee." 
 
 With all the power of my being, for Christ's 
 
134 He Went Away Sorrowful 
 
 sake, for the sake of the Cross, for the sake of 
 the bloody sweat, for the sake of the grief and 
 shame, do not go away. Move towards Him, 
 and let it be now, remembering that " there is 
 joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth." 
 
VIII 
 THE FINAL CHOICE 
 
" And as he reasoned of righteousness and temperance (or, 
 as the Revised Version has it, ' self-control ' ) and judgment to 
 come, Felix trembled (or, was terrified), and answered. Go 
 thy way for this time : when I have a convenient season (and 
 please note the little word * more ' which you so often put in 
 when you quote this verse is not in the verse at all : it is often 
 quoted, ' "When I have a more convenient season ' ; the word 
 «more' is not there) — when I have a convenient season I will 
 call for thee." — Acts 24.: 2^. 
 
VIII 
 
 THE FINAL CHOICE 
 
 This is a wonderful picture. I wish I could 
 paint it. Three people — one God's prophet, 
 God's messenger, the other two a man and a 
 woman who were living a very sinful hfe. Paul 
 is in prison, awaiting his trial, and these two 
 want some new excitement, something to amuse 
 and something to entertain. Time, though they 
 live in sin, hangs heavily. They are spending 
 their money for that which is not bread, and their 
 labour for that which satisfieth not, and like the 
 man of whom we read that longed for some new 
 pleasure, and offered a reward to anybody who 
 would invent one, these two want something else 
 to excite, something to pass away the time, and 
 so they send for God's prophet that he may en- 
 tertain them. Says the verse that precedes this 
 one, " He sent for Paul and heard him concerning 
 faith in Christ." And it needs courage to preach 
 to one man, or to two people. There are those 
 who can preach to the crowd. It takes a man 
 with the vision of the Cross to preach to two 
 people ; to see that a little child may be a nation ; 
 and when we have the right spirit we shall see in 
 137 
 
138 The Final Choice 
 
 one person something worth preaching to. If 
 you are sent to preach the truth, you must be 
 unsparing and faithful, you must declare the 
 whole counsel of God. It takes courage to 
 preach to the man who sits in a high position, 
 when he is close to you, when he is in his own 
 house and you are sitting at his table, or in his 
 own room face to face. 
 
 That was the picture. There sat Drusilla, there 
 sat Felix, and here stood Paul, and he may have 
 had the chains on him, the chains that told of 
 suffering for Christ's sake. Paul never had a 
 better chance than then of making a friend of 
 one who could help him when the trial came on. 
 His enemies were outside, his accusers were away. 
 Those who were thirsting for his blood were not 
 in this little, quiet meeting amongst the three. If 
 he will only flatter, if he will only congratulate 
 instead of expostulate, if he will fawn upon Fehx 
 and toady to him, if he will compromise he may 
 capture this man at any rate, and he will have a 
 friend at court when the day of trial comes. 
 
 But, listen, Paul was not made of that material. 
 He could suffer, he could die, but he could not 
 sin, he could not trim. His message was burning 
 in his very soul, his message had come down to 
 him as " Thus saith the Lord." And he seemed 
 
The Final Choice 139 
 
 to take in the whole situation, and to realize that 
 this was his only chance of deaHng personally, 
 pointedly, piercingly with this sinner in front of 
 him and the other sinner beside him. And so 
 he reasoned — of the Cross ? Not to begin with. 
 Of the shed blood? Not to begin with. Did 
 he preach from this text, " God so loved the 
 world, that He gave His only begotten Son " ? 
 Not to begin with. Did he say, " He that be- 
 lieveth on the Son shall be saved " ? No. He 
 reasoned of righteousness, he talked about God's 
 holiness. He talked about God's love for right- 
 eousness and holiness, and how it was His pur- 
 pose to hft men into that atmosphere. And he 
 would talk about God's hatred for sin, and he 
 made sin appear sin. He did not excuse sin ; 
 he meant Felix to see and feel the awfulness of 
 his own sin. He reasoned of rightness, whole- 
 ness, Godlikeness, purity. He brought him up 
 to face the blazing light and the scorching 
 presence of God's purity. He talked of right- 
 eousness. I do not think that that side of 
 the truth in these days is enforced as it ought 
 to be. We have preached the love of God till 
 some are lovesick. You know God's love ; what 
 you need to be told, and what I mean to tell you 
 before I get through, is that God hates sin as 
 
140 The Final Choice 
 
 much to-day as when Christ hung on the nails to 
 put it away, and that He does not look upon sin 
 with the least degree of allowance. 
 
 He reasoned of righteousness to a man who 
 was unrighteous. He talked about self-control 
 — temperance — to the man who was intemperate, 
 and whose passion was running wild. The man 
 within was riot. His whole being was in a state 
 of anarchy, a rebel. 
 
 He talked of righteousness, judgment; and as 
 I have tried to enforce before, religion that hon- 
 ours God is right-doing, walking straight, holding 
 a constant witness to the cleansing power of the 
 precious blood. It is not hunting up meetings 
 and preachers and going to conventions, taking 
 your pencils and writing down in little note- 
 books pretty little sayings, beautiful little ex- 
 tracts, pretty thoughts. It is letting them blaze 
 in your life when the convention is over, when 
 the meeting is past, when the Sunday is gone, 
 Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Fri- 
 day, Saturday, three hundred and sixty-five days 
 in the year all aglow, warm with holiness unto 
 the Lord. Righteousness — " The kingdom of 
 God is not meat and drink, but rightness — right- 
 ness." It is turning from darkness to light, from 
 the power of Satan to God. It is the wicked 
 
The Final Choice 141 
 
 man forsaking his wickedness in conformity to 
 the will of God. Righteousness — not going to 
 church, nor being christened, or confirmed, or 
 baptized, or taking communion. All that will 
 fall into the proper place, but first of all right- 
 eousness, rightness, right relationship with heaven, 
 readjustment with God, putting me in my right 
 place with God, and God in His right place in me 
 and in all my concerns. What we want is sin 
 dethroned, self dethroned, Christ honoured and 
 Christ glorified not only among the angels, not 
 only among the saints who march around the 
 steps of the throne, not only among those who 
 have washed their robes and made them white in 
 the blood of the Lamb, and are singing the song 
 of Moses and the Lamb, but down here in the 
 city, in your home, in your workshop, in your 
 business — rightness, righteousness in your yard 
 measure, righteousness in your weights and scales, 
 righteousness in your ledger; to handle your 
 ledger with as much religious feeling and fervour 
 as you take your seat in the pew on Sundays and 
 handle the communion cup — this is what the 
 gospel means. 
 
 I tell you this is a mighty, sweeping gospel. 
 It is an unsparing gospel where sin is concerned. 
 ** He reasoned of righteousness, of temperance, 
 
142 The Final Choice 
 
 and of judgment " — judgment, don't forget it, 
 judgment here and judgment yonder. Do not 
 forget that " God hath appointed a day in which 
 He will judge the world." Do not forget that 
 there is a great white throne, and that we will 
 have to stand before it. Do not forget that we 
 shall stand as we are and not as we seem to be, 
 and that we will have to give an account of the 
 deeds done in the body. And do not forget that 
 it will not be a mock judgment, it will be a right- 
 eous judgment, that God will be the judge, and 
 that He will render to every man according as 
 his work shall be. Oh, to have listened to this 
 preacher, to have heard Paul as he waxed fiery, 
 flaming as he talked of righteousness and of 
 judgment ! Oh, to have seen the flash in his eye, 
 and the pointed finger and the erect figure as he 
 shook and the chains rattled, while he lifted as 
 high as he could that hand, pointing to the great 
 white throne ! Oh, to have seen him as he pealed 
 out the truth upon that man like a mighty thun- 
 der-clap into his conscience and into his brain 
 until he shook, until the seat shook on which he 
 sat, until he clutched it and said, " Hold ! that 
 will do, Paul. I know it is true, I have heard as 
 much as I can carry, I have got as much as I can 
 bear ; that will do. Go back to the dungeon. It 
 
The Final Choice 143 
 
 is not convenient. I know it all, I feel it all ; I 
 know what I ought to do. My soul, my con- 
 science, my better self, my illuminated judgment, 
 everything — God the Spirit, your word and your 
 presence, and these clanking chains — tells me 
 what I ought to be and what I ought to do, but 
 it is not convenient. When it is convenient I 
 will send for thee." Cannot you hear him march- 
 ing down that corridor ? Cannot you hear the 
 rattle of those chains ? and don't you hear the 
 slamming of the door that shuts the old saint up 
 — glorious old Paul — in that dungeon for Christ's 
 sake? Listen. The slamming of that door is 
 but the echo of another door which closed itself 
 forever against these two when Paul was ordered 
 off. When he went their chance went with him. 
 Oh, how different the story might have read ! 
 How blessedly it might have ended ! How tri- 
 umphantly it ought to have ended ! But the 
 man hugged his sin and would not yield. 
 
 Now why did not Felix become a Christian ? 
 He might have been an apostle, he might have 
 been an evangelist, he might have written an 
 epistle. It takes a saint to do that. He might 
 have left a message which would have blessed the 
 world, he might have left a decision that would 
 have been an inspiration for all time. But he 
 
144 '^^^ Final Choice 
 
 went the other way. He decided against Paul 
 and Paul's Christ. And surely if any man in the 
 world ever had a fair chance of salvation Felix 
 had. With the world shut out and with that 
 great soul-winner in front of him, with nobody 
 to interrupt, nobody to come between, nobody 
 but Paul and His Master facing him and the 
 plan of salvation in front of him, and the heav- 
 ens opening above him, and the light stream- 
 ing down upon him and God speaking through 
 His saint, surely no man ever had a better 
 chance of life eternal than this man. Surely, 
 my brother," my sister, you cannot look in the 
 face of God one day and say, " I should have 
 been a Christian if I had an opportunity." You 
 cannot say that because you have this blessed 
 hour in which to yield to God. If you never 
 had a chance before you have one now, and if 
 you never had anybody to talk to you about 
 these things you have some one now. You 
 cannot plead at the great white throne that you 
 never had a chance. Felix cannot. Surely no 
 man ever had a better preacher than Paul, the 
 prince of preachers. There was no trimming 
 about Paul. There was no stooping to suit his 
 people. He was not afraid of the man. in the 
 chariot and he did not despise the man in the 
 
The Final Choice 145 
 
 gutter. Why, Paul, glorious old Paul, he said 
 himself, " I determined to know nothing among 
 you save Christ and Him crucified." There was 
 no mongrel gospel with Paul. There was no 
 water and milk gospel with Paul. It was the 
 pure, unadulterated, unchanging, living message. 
 Surely you cannot say when you get to the white 
 throne, if you have not a wedding garment on, 
 you cannot say, " Well, if I had only heard the 
 pure gospel I should have been saved " ? You 
 cannot say that ; you have had it from the pulpit, 
 you have had it from the lips of your own minis- 
 ters, you have heard it till you can go to sleep 
 under it. You are hardened by the process of 
 listening to it. For this mighty gospel, what 
 it does not soften and weld, it hardens. It is the 
 savour of life or of death. You know it, and 
 you are familiar with it. You have had the gos- 
 pel as faithfully as ever Paul preached it. 
 
 Surely this man might have been saved, for he 
 was convicted. He felt more than he wanted to 
 feel. He trembled, but, mark this — he trembled, 
 but the woman did not. That is striking. I 
 have often seen two people sit together under the 
 same sermon, and I have seen one shake and 
 tremble and weep beneath the power of God, and 
 I have seen the other rebellious and hard and 
 
146 The Final Choice 
 
 hindering ; I have seen one want to come, and 
 I have seen the other pull him back. When a 
 woman does set herself against Christ, she does. 
 I have not been an evangelist for a quarter of a 
 century, without finding out that when a woman 
 does come to Christ, she comes all the way. I 
 believe this man would have been saved, yea, I 
 know he would, but for that woman. Felix trem- 
 bled ; she did not. He felt, he was convicted, he 
 was awake, he knew, he was concerned, he was 
 wrought upon. Haven't you been there ? Is not 
 your conscience, my sister, my brother, with me 
 y at this moment? Don't you feel your sin ; don't 
 you see something of its wickedness ; don't you 
 realize something of its damning power ; don't 
 you see how it is spoiling you, how it is robbing 
 you of your manhood ; don't you see how your 
 life is embittered ; don't you see how it is leading 
 you away from God and rightness ? Don't you 
 see it ? I know you do. That is the Spirit at 
 work within you. Your conscience and your 
 judgment are bearing me witness. Don't you see 
 that you can get as far as trembling conviction, 
 and yet stop and refuse to take the decisive step ? 
 Why do you not yield? I want to push that 
 question till I get an answer. Why didn't Felix 
 surrender ? If he heard the gospel from the lips 
 
The Final Choice 147 
 
 of that faithful man and felt its awful import, if 
 that stupendous opportunity was his in which he 
 might have built a throne, why did he take the 
 dungeon? If the hour was his in which he 
 might have set an anthem ringing around the 
 throne, why did he forge the chain ? If the hour 
 was his in which he might have decked the brow 
 of Emmanuel, why, in the name of everything 
 that is good, did he grovel in the dust and allow 
 hell to drive over him its chariots and to grind 
 him to powder? Why? Don't you see the 
 damning effects, the deluding effects, the destroy- 
 ing effects of sin ? The reason is given in one 
 word — sin, his own sin. Beside him sat another 
 man's wife with whom he was living. Are you 
 surprised that Paul talked of righteousness ? 
 How could he talk of anything else ? Could God 
 smile on that ? He talked of righteousness. I 
 should think so. And Felix knew if he became 
 a Christian that woman must go home to her 
 husband; at any rate, she must go from him. 
 He knew that, and he looked at her, and in that 
 look he lost his soul. He said, " No, it is not 
 convenient. When it is I will call for thee." 
 But he never did, he never had another chance. 
 Samson lost his strength through a woman. 
 The daughter of Herodias danced Herod into 
 
148 The Final Choice 
 
 the pit. Drusilla was the chain that bound this 
 man for time and for eternity. "^Vhat is binding 
 you ? What is fettering you ? What is getting 
 you by the heart and Hfe? . /hat has gripped 
 you in its clutch? What is it? You know. 
 You know. Who is it? You know, and God 
 knows. The truth will out some day. The 
 truth will out, for every man has some special 
 sin. It may not be lust for a woman, but it may 
 be lust for gold, it may be lust for drink, it may 
 be appetite in another form, it may be ambition, 
 which is just as damning. What is it? Every 
 woman has her own sin. It may not be lust for 
 a man, but it is lust of some sort, and there are 
 some women who will sell their souls and the 
 souls of their children for dress and trinkets. 
 May God save you. Listen — it is a choice be- 
 tween sin and hoHness. It is a tremendous 
 choice, but there can be no two opinions about 
 it, if you look at it wisely and well. It is a 
 choice between the low and the high, the 
 earthly and the heavenly, time and eternity, 
 the perishable and the imperishable, the tinsel 
 and the real gold, the passing moment and 
 the heaven that awaits those who will only obey. 
 Men and women, sons and daughters of the 
 Lord Almighty, rise to the occasion. Don't 
 
The Final Choice 149 
 
 mingle for yourselves the bitter drink, don't fly 
 in the face of your eternal interests. Don't fight 
 against God. Don't hug your sin. Don't play 
 the fool — don'- God wants to save you, and 
 He will save you. He would have saved that 
 man if he had come, but he did not, and because 
 he did not God could not. *' Ye will not come 
 unto Me that ye might have life." " How often 
 would I have gathered you under My wing . . . 
 and ye would not." 
 
 It is not God's fault. If a man goes to hell — 
 whatever hell may mean, I pray you may never 
 find out, but whatever hell is — I do not know — 
 but whatever it is, if a man goes there, it is be- 
 cause he will not accept God's remedy. You 
 cannot charge God with your destruction ; you 
 must charge it home to your own will in the 
 choice of evil, in your own wicked, rebellious, 
 God-dishonouring, God-hating, Christ-rejecting 
 life ; you must charge yourself. I cannot hear 
 my Lord libelled without protest. Some of you 
 say, " Do you think God is a God of love, to 
 send a man to hell ? " God does not send him 
 there ; he sends himself. You don't go to hell 
 because you are a sinner, but because you refuse 
 to walk over the bridge that God has built and 
 made it possible for you to go the other way. 
 
150 The Final Choice 
 
 You refuse God's grace ; you refuse the way of 
 salvation. God wants to save you from your 
 sin, and He will save you now if you will submit. 
 Will you give up your sin ? You don't want 
 me to name your sin. If I did know it I would 
 hold it before you till you loathed it ; I would 
 make you face it ; I would hold it in front of 
 you till you ran away from it; I would make 
 you see your own sin, in spite of yourself, were 
 it in my power, till you yielded and gave your- 
 self wholly to Jesus Christ. 
 
 My brother, my sister, let this be a time of 
 real surrender, when you turn from the wicked 
 thing, the thing that God hates in your life, the 
 thing that has made you all you are, the thing 
 that is destroying you day by day. Turn from 
 that, and turn from it now, and you will hear 
 Him say to you as you come, though your 
 coming is faltering, though it is weak, if it is 
 coming, if it is turning from sin, if it is yielding 
 to God your heart, your life, all there is, with no 
 reservation, the whole being, absolute, entire, if 
 it is a real surrender, you will hear Him say, 
 " Thy sins are forgiven thee " ; and if your ears 
 were a little keener, then you would hear the 
 angels singing, " The dead is alive, and the lost 
 is found." 
 
IX 
 
 SAVED AND UNSAVED 
 
«* The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not 
 saved." — Jer. 8 : so. 
 
IX 
 
 SAVED AND UNSAVED 
 
 The two last words in this verse are those 
 which I wish to speak to you about. I will not 
 ask you to follow me through the textual wind- 
 ings of these words, but simply to think of some 
 of the things they suggest. I want you to listen, 
 you whom these words specially describe, for 
 whatever you or I may think, there are only two 
 classes of people : there are the saved and there 
 are the unsaved. The people who are really 
 Christ's by an intelligent decision, surrender, and 
 living, vital faith ; those who have passed from 
 death unto life ; those who are described by the 
 words of the apostle, " There is therefore now no 
 condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus " ; 
 those who are described by that wonderful word, 
 " Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it 
 doth hot yet appear what we shall be; but we 
 know that when He shall appear we shall be like 
 Him, for we shall see Him as He is." Those 
 who are born again and have the witness within 
 153 
 
154 Saved and Unsaved 
 
 that they are accepted in the Beloved; those 
 who can say, with the poet — 
 
 « Amazing grace, 'tis heaven below 
 To feel His blood applied, 
 And Jesus, only Jesus know. 
 My Jesus crucified." 
 
 Those who can say with Wesley : — 
 
 « No condemnation now I dread ; 
 
 Jesus, and all in Him, is mine ! 
 Alive in Him, my living Head, 
 
 And clothed in righteousness divine, 
 Bold I approach the eternal throne. 
 And claim the crown, through Christ my own." 
 
 Those who are hidden in Him by faith, and who 
 can say with the apostle, " For the law of the 
 spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free 
 from the law of sin and death : for what the law 
 could not do, in that it was weak through the 
 flesh, God sending His own Son in the likeness 
 of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the 
 flesh that the righteousness of the law might be 
 fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but 
 after the spirit. For the law," says the apostle, 
 " in Christ Jesus hath made me free." There are 
 many among those I am addressing who know 
 what that experience is ; they have come to Cal- 
 vary by faith ; they have bathed His feet with 
 
Saved and Unsaved 155 
 
 their tears, they have wiped them with the hair 
 of their head ; they have heard Him saying just 
 as really and truly as He said it to the woman 
 who did it, " Thy sins are forgiven thee " ; and 
 you came from the Cross singing, " I will love 
 Him because He first loved me." They are those 
 among you — I say it on the authority of the 
 Word of God — who have passed from death unto 
 life, who know Jesus saves them, who have con- 
 signed themselves and handed themselves over to 
 be Christ's men and women ; they have sealed 
 the contract ; they are God's property, and they 
 sing, " Not my own, but saved by Jesus, I am 
 His " ; my Hfe is His and must flow along His 
 channels, my words must be spoken as in His 
 presence, and my all must be done as for eternity. 
 There are those who know that they are saved. 
 
 "Ye are saved by grace." It is all of free 
 grace, perfect love working on behalf of those 
 who are perfectly worthless. It is not by works 
 of righteousness which we have done, but ac- 
 cording to His mercy. No work of our own 
 would accomplish this ; we are not saved by 
 works, but we are saved for works. You cannot 
 be saved by your works, but you cannot be saved 
 long without works. You cannot build a house 
 
136 Saved and Unsaved 
 
 without materials, and you cannot live a new life 
 with an old heart ; you must know Christ in 
 your own heart before you can claim those 
 mighty words in capitals— SAVED BY GRACE. 
 My heart saddens as I think of the multitude 
 who are not really saved. And God knows. He 
 sees the innermost heart. " Behold, thou desireth 
 truth in the inward parts," says the Psalmist. 
 God can turn the light on in the most dingy cor- 
 ner of every heart and life, and though there 
 may be the profession and the cloak of religion 
 and the outward garb, going to church, hymn- 
 singing, Bible-reading, and all these things, yet 
 the heart itself may be like a cage of unclean 
 birds ; though the outward platter be clean, there 
 may be rottenness and corruption within. That 
 was the charge our Lord brought against the 
 people who thought themselves saved and who 
 did not want the Light when it came, but re- 
 jected it. Some of you are in the same state ; 
 indeed, you have got angry with me for telling 
 you the truth. You would rather be left alone ; 
 you don't thank me nor anybody else for telling 
 you the truth, and the devil within you cries out, 
 as it did to the Son of God, " Let us alone, tor- 
 ment us not." And that is the sad part of it to 
 
Saved and Unsaved 157 
 
 me, that here in the dawn of the twentieth cen- 
 tury, with hght, with education, with respectabil- 
 ity, with church-going, and a sort of sentimental 
 concern for all these things, that you should lis- 
 ten to me, while on your poor scared conscience, 
 on your poor, worthless and wasted life, and even 
 church-going respectable life, there is written, as 
 by the finger of God, those two words on you — 
 on you, my brother, and on you, my sister, 
 though you were at church last Sunday — Not 
 Saved ; and the ink in which they are written 
 was distilled by your own iniquity, which makes 
 it all the blacker. 
 
 Yet you know it need not have been so ; you 
 might have been saved. Some of you come 
 from the best homes ; you had the best training 
 possible. Love ! yes, the tenderness of a mother's 
 love, and all that that means ; a father's love, and 
 all that that means ; the sweetest and most beau- 
 tiful surroundings were yours ; you were born, 
 cradledj and nurtured in a home filled with good- 
 ness, and in your veins there flows the moral 
 blood, the moral momentum — the result of a 
 godly ancestry; in your veins there flows — in 
 some of you — the blood of saints and martyrs ; 
 and yet you are not saved. Think of your 
 
158 Saved and Unsaved 
 
 opportunities, of your Sunday-school days, your 
 church days. You have been Hfted to the gates 
 of gold with the superior weight of advanced 
 opportunity. You cannot plead ignorance at 
 the bar of God ; the very angels would cry out 
 against you, and say, " We flew to that man on 
 errands of mercy " ; the sun, the moon, and the 
 stars would cry out ; the rocks, the streams, and 
 all nature would join in the chorus, " Away with 
 him, for he knew better." If you had been born 
 in a gipsy tent where there was no Bible I could 
 pity you, but you come from homes where a 
 Bible was in every room, where you were just 
 saturated with a mother's influence. It might 
 have been different; it ought to have been, for 
 you had the hght — light enough to save a 
 nation. Think of it ; think of it. God help us 
 to think ! Think of all that has been lavished 
 on you, of all the hopes that have been centred 
 and focused upon you ; think of all that God has 
 done for you, of the trouble He has taken, of the 
 patience with which He has borne with you. 
 Think of the mercy He has showed you, of all 
 the life given to you ; and remember He has 
 spared you for one purpose — to save you, and 
 somehow or other you have managed to thwart 
 
Saved and Unsaved 159 
 
 and frustrate His designs until to-day. Not 
 saved — and salvation cost so much, purchased 
 so dearly. If you want to know how dearly, go 
 a long way back. Sin is old, but the Blood is 
 older : God had a Lamb slain before the founda- 
 tions of the world ; and if you want to know how 
 much it cost God to save you, go back to the 
 beginning, away back over the mighty sea of 
 time; and if that is too far go to Calvary, to 
 Bethlehem, to Nazareth, to Gethsemane. Did 
 you ever think of it ? It was no sudden sorrow 
 that overtook Him ; it was a long-looked-for and 
 anticipated agony. When He worked on that 
 carpenter's bench and took hold of that piece of 
 timber. He must have thought of the piece that 
 would be a cross upon which He would hang. 
 And when He took up that hammer, don't you 
 suppose He thought of another hammer that 
 would strike Him ; and when He handled those 
 nails, don't you think there were other nails in 
 His mind that would pierce His hands and feet ? 
 And when He took the knots out of that timber, 
 don't you think they would remind Him of the 
 thorns that would pierce His lovely brow ? Ah, 
 He must have thought of it; He knew it all; 
 yet He faced it all, and did not turn to the right 
 
i6o Saved and Unsaved 
 
 nor to the left. When His loved ones tried to 
 prevent Him going to that bloody tree, He set 
 them back and set His face towards Calvary. 
 Born in another man's stable ; buried in another 
 man's grave; His first pillow, straw, and His 
 last, a crown of thorns ; His first companions, 
 cattle, and His last, thieves; His first resting- 
 place, somebody else's manger, and His last, 
 somebody else's cross ; and it was for me, for 
 you. Have you ever thanked Him ? Have you 
 ever gone on your knees and showed your grate- 
 fulness ? You have cursed Him, taken His name 
 in vain, rejected Him and spurned Him, and 
 spurned His followers and ridiculed or criticised 
 unmercifully, but you have never thanked Jesus. 
 That is the damning sin — ingratitude. Don't 
 forget ! My brother, there is nothing that has 
 cost God so much as this, and yet there is noth- 
 ing which you have treated with such contempt. 
 Don't be afraid of the Cross ; I know it is your 
 humiliation, but it is also your salvation. I 
 know it shows up your darkness and your sin, 
 but it is the key which unlocks the gates of gold 
 and invites everybody to come in and share the 
 bounties of God's love. I would rather be Gipsy 
 Smith this side of the Cross than Adam on the 
 
Saved and Unsaved l6l 
 
 other side. If we sin we have an Advocate with 
 the Father. They used to go to the Cross to 
 die, now they go to hve ; it used to be the place 
 of death, but now it is the place of life. Flash- 
 ing out from that Cross with its outstretched 
 arms inviting the world, I hear words — words 
 sweeter than any music the world has ever 
 Hstened to — crying, *' Him that cometh unto Me, 
 I will in no wise cast out." God help you to 
 come ! 
 
 Think of it in this light : Not saved, and salva- 
 tion so important. If your sin was base and black 
 enough, cruel enough to tear Jesus from the 
 Throne and nail Him to the accursed tree — and 
 He was obedient even unto death — what will 
 your sin do with you if you do not get rid of it ? 
 It will have no mercy. Unless you are saved 
 according to God's plan, you are lost ; there is no 
 other Name, no other Way, no other Salvation, 
 and if you miss this, you miss all ; your salvation 
 depends upon that Cross ; your emancipation 
 depends on that surrender ; your hope for this 
 life and for the life to come hangs on that Cross. 
 Pull that down and you are doomed ; the world 
 has absolutely nothing instead to offer you. Turn 
 your back on this, and you are lost forever. 
 
l62 Saved and Unsaved 
 
 Think of it in this hght : Not saved, and your 
 chances of being saved going, passing away. 
 Some of you have less chance now than you ever 
 had in your life, and if you miss this opportunity 
 you may never have another ; you can never tell 
 how near Death may not be ; and if you let this 
 chance go by, God help you, for it may be your 
 last on earth. My brother, my sister, be saved 
 now ; Jesus calls and wants to save you, but even 
 He cannot save you against your will. He has 
 seen your heart moved and made tender, and 
 you have gone away unsaved. He has had to 
 say, " Ye would not come unto Me that ye might 
 have life." If I could save you, I would ; if my 
 arms were strong and long enough I would bear 
 you all to Jesus. If one word of mine could do 
 it, I would speak it ; if anything I could do would 
 bring the unsaved gathering to my Lord, how 
 gladly would I work a miracle ! But it is be- 
 yond me, and there are some things Jesus can- 
 not do ; and one of them is that He cannot save 
 a soul against its will ; and unless some of you 
 make haste He will have to tell you some day 
 that He would have saved you, but you thwarted 
 Him; He longed to do it, but you would not 
 have it ; you resisted to the bitter end. 
 
Saved and Unsaved 163 
 
 When my father was a young man, a band of 
 our people, the gipsies, fifty or more of them, 
 had been picking a field of hops on a farm near 
 Tunbridge. Some of you may be old enough to 
 remember it, for it is a matter of history, and if 
 you have ever occasion to visit Tunbridge, ask 
 to see the monument they erected to my people. 
 These gipsies had finished one field, and were 
 crossing to another field on the other side of 
 the Medway. They mounted the wagon — men, 
 women, and children — and away the horses 
 started, and with jokes, songs, and laughter 
 made merry music to the other toilers in the fields 
 as they passed. As they turned a bend in the 
 lane they saw the old rotten wooden bridge over 
 which they hoped to pass safely. The water 
 was in flood and flowing over the roadway, and 
 when the women saw it they were frightened, 
 and some of them screamed — for gipsy women 
 are only like other women — and before the 
 drivers could stop the horses, startled by the 
 screams, ran away, crashing into the sides of the 
 old structure, and instantly they were all thrown 
 into the flowing river current. A brave young 
 gipsy seized one of the horses drifting down, and 
 watched for one who was dearer to him than any 
 
164 Saved and Unsaved 
 
 one in the world — his mother — and the gipsy- 
 boy loves his mother. Presently he saw her, 
 and after many struggles he reached her. But 
 she seized him in such a way that he could not 
 manage to save her, and at last she sank. When 
 the day of the funeral came there were thirty- 
 nine gipsies buried, and people gathered from all 
 the countryside to show their sympathy with 
 these poor people. Forgetting the crowd and 
 the clergyman, the poor lad crept down into the 
 trench which contained the coffins, and, kneehng 
 beside his mother's, he cried : '* Mother, mother, 
 I tried to save you ; I did all a man could do to 
 save you, but you would not let me." And if 
 some of you don't mind, Gipsy Smith will have 
 to cry at the Bar of God, " I did all a man could 
 do to save you, but you would not let me " ; and 
 if you don't mind, Jesus Christ will have to say, 
 " I did all a God could do to save you, but you 
 would not let Me." 
 
 " O be saved, His grace is free ; 
 O be saved, He died for thee." 
 
X 
 
 GLEANING FOR GOD 
 
« Now Peter and John went up to the temple at the hour of 
 prayer." — Actsj : i. 
 
GLEANING FOR GOD 
 
 A TALK TO CHRISTIAN WORKERS 
 
 If Peter and John had been absent from that 
 particular prayer-meeting I think they might 
 have been excused, especially if you think for a 
 moment of the wonderful times through which 
 they had just passed. For if ever men in the 
 world had their minds and hearts crowded with 
 food for reflection, with something to take up 
 their mind and occupy their attention, these men 
 had. Peter and John had just witnessed the cru- 
 cifixion ; they had just witnessed the resurrec- 
 tion ; they had just witnessed the ascension ; they 
 had just witnessed the fulfiUing of the promise, 
 " I will pour out My Spirit upon all flesh." They 
 now knew, as they never did know, never could 
 have known without that experience, what Jesus 
 meant when He said, " It is expedient for you 
 that I go away, for if I go not away, the Com- 
 forter will not come ; and when He is come. He 
 shall abide with you forever." They now knew 
 167 
 
1 68 Gleaning for God 
 
 something of what Jesus meant when He said, 
 " Tarry at Jerusalem until ye receive the promise 
 of the Father." They now knew something of 
 what He meant when He said, " Ye shall receive 
 power after the Holy Ghost is come upon you." 
 They had waited in that upper room in obedient 
 prayer, believing prayer. They were all there, 
 and they were all of one mind and of one heart, 
 and they waited till the dawn of Pentecost kissed 
 their brow and bathed their hearts and filled their 
 spirits. 
 
 When it was noised abroad that this mighty 
 indwelling, this reinforcement, this tide, this in- 
 definable something had taken possession of these 
 men, when it was noised abroad in the city, you 
 know the result. The people flocked in their 
 thousands, and when they looked at these men 
 they could not understand it. They saw some- 
 thing in them that they had never seen before. 
 They felt something about them which they had 
 never felt before. They were changed ; marvel- 
 lously changed. They were bold, such boldness 
 as they had never witnessed. They took knowl- 
 edge of their boldness, and their speaking moved 
 them and surprised them, for they all heard them 
 speak in their own tongue, wherein they were 
 
Gleaning for God 169 
 
 born, and yet they were unlearned and ignorant 
 men. And they said, " What meaneth this ? 
 This is what it means. They are not themselves j 
 they are not responsible; they are drunk." I 
 wonder if anybody would ever come to your 
 quiet, sedate, orthodox, refined, smooth, poetic, 
 beautiful service and say, " You are drunk." 
 I wonder if anybody would ever come up into 
 your church and look at your minister and look 
 at your professing Christians and say, " They are 
 all drunk together." The fact is, we are too 
 sober. That is what we are trying to avoid. We 
 do not want people to say that ; we want them 
 to go away and say, " That is just beautiful." 
 The people will not say it is just beautiful if we 
 are faithful. We want people to go away and 
 say, " Oh, I did enjoy that ! " I never heard of 
 anybody enjoying a surgical operation, and that 
 is what every sermon ought to be. It ought to 
 be a piercing to the quick. It ought to be a stir- 
 ring of the man within. It ought to be the un- 
 doing of things and making us feel and realize 
 what we are in the presence of Almighty God. 
 
 " They are drunk," that is what they said. 
 Does not that piece up with what they said of 
 the Lord ? They said His disciples were drunk J 
 
lyo Gleaning for God 
 
 they said of Him, " You must excuse Him to-day, 
 He is not all there, He is beside Himself," prac- 
 tically, " Jesus is insane," because He forgot to 
 eat bread, because He forgot all those who had 
 natural claims and ties upon Him. Because in 
 the service of God, in the glorying of His father 
 and in the doing of His will, and in the redemp- 
 tion of the world, He tarried not nor turned not 
 to the right nor to the left until all might be ac- 
 complished, they said, " He is beside Himself." 
 I wonder if anybody in the world ever got the 
 impression that you were insane ; you had got so 
 much God, so much religion, so much of the 
 Spirit of Jesus ; you were so unselfish, so Christ- 
 like, so Calvary-possessed that they said you 
 were insane ? The fact is, we are all too sane. 
 
 They said, " These men are drunk with new 
 wine." " No," said Peter, for it is astonishing 
 how 'cute at hearing Holy Ghost-filled people 
 are — " no," he said, " we are not drunk. You 
 are wrong. We are not drunk, as ye suppose. 
 We are more sober than you think. But listen : 
 this that you see, this that you hear, this mighty 
 movement that you are feeling, this lightning 
 flash, this illumination, this arrest of the atten- 
 tion, this evicting of sin, this crying for God, it 
 
Gleaning for God 17 1 
 
 is not wine. This is a fulfillment of the promise, 
 ' I will pour out My Spirit upon all flesh.' " 
 
 Now, listen : if that first httle picture of the 
 early Church that you have in this chapter, or 
 the preceding chapter, on the day of Pentecost, 
 if that was God's ideal church, will you paint 
 that picture as it was, and as it ought to be, and 
 will you paint the picture of the Church of God, 
 so called, to-day, and will you put the two side 
 by side, and dare any man in his sane mind and 
 in his sane moments say this is as that ? Dare 
 any man say that the Church to-day — and when 
 I speak of the Church I use the word in the 
 sense that the Bible ufees it — dare any man say 
 the Church to-day is that ? I think if we are 
 honest we shall say that we have fallen from 
 grace. May God help us to get back again ! 
 You cannot read your Bible, you cannot read 
 these Acts of the Spirit through the Apostles, 
 you cannot read of these wonderful days of the 
 first Church without feeling, " If that is God's 
 ideal, where are we ? " And do not blame any- 
 body, because we are part of the society. The 
 Church of God is made up of units, and you and 
 I are units of that great Church, and we are re- 
 sponsible in our degree and in our capacity and 
 
172 Gleaning for God 
 
 according to our light, we are responsible for the 
 general condition of things. The Lord open our 
 eyes that we may see as these men saw. 
 
 When a mighty Spirit came and took posses- 
 sion of them, and Peter had spoken a little bit, 
 three thousand people fell and cried for mercy. 
 That was a wonderful day's work, was it not ? 
 Three thousand conversions in a day! And 
 then they say sometimes, " You must not count 
 converts." Well, they counted them this time, 
 and Jesus says there is joy in heaven over one ; 
 if He counts one He counts three thousand. 
 And on the heels of that wonderful ingathering 
 of souls, three thousand of them, they had a 
 big collection. So you see the collection is as 
 religious as getting people converted. Don't 
 ever turn blue when the collection is made or 
 announced, because the collection is as religious 
 as Calvary, and until you know how to give you 
 do not know what Calvary means. The collec- 
 tion is scriptural, and when a man puts his 
 check -book on God's altar and says, " Here, 
 Lord, here is my name ; fill in that check just 
 as you like ; you know how much I can afford 
 and you know how much I can give ; fill it in for 
 what you like," you may know he is not far from 
 
Gleaning for God 173 
 
 the kingdom. Giving means grace, and when a 
 man gets from God he must give to God. 
 
 Now, if Peter and John had come together 
 and said, " Look here, brethren, we liave had all 
 these wonderful experiences and we have seen 
 three thousand people converted, and we have 
 so many converts to look after and to form into 
 
 a Church " I can believe that this was not 
 
 neglected by Peter and John, because as a rule 
 the Lord knows the people with whom He can 
 trust three thousand converts ; the Lord knows 
 the Church nowadays where He can trust new- 
 born babes. If the Lord gave some Churches 
 that I could name new-born babes they would 
 have to put out their nursing, for they have 
 neither food nor clothes for them, and no at- 
 mosphere that they could breathe. The Lord 
 knows the people He can trustVith^ converts. 
 I can believe Peter and John did just exactly 
 what I am saying they did — all that men could 
 do to conserve what they had captured. If Peter 
 and John had got together and said, " Now, look 
 here, there is all this collection to be invested and 
 stored, and taken great care of ; all our Church 
 coffers are full, we must have committees and 
 trustees and all the rest of it," that would not be 
 
174 Gleaning for God 
 
 neglected either, we know. I am sure Peter and 
 John did not handle it, because a Httle later they 
 had none. Now, fancy Peter and John, with the 
 cross in their view, with the resurrection shining 
 Hke a star in their sky, with the ascension fresh 
 in their memory, with this mighty power of the 
 Holy Spirit upon their lives, and the cry of three 
 thousand souls in their ears. And yet Peter and 
 John, who saw all that in the morning, could not 
 stay away from the week-night prayer-meeting, 
 and therein hes the power of their victory. You 
 let me see the week-night prayer-meeting of any 
 Church in your neighbourhood, and I will gauge 
 its spiritual life. The week-night prayer-meet- 
 ing is the spiritual thermometer of any Church, 
 and if you will tell me how often you go to a 
 week-night prayer-meeting I will tell you where 
 you are, and if you will let me hear you pray in 
 pubhc, and give me a chance to put my finger 
 on your spiritual pulse, I will diagnose your spir- 
 itual life. There never was a day in the history 
 of the world when the Church was so rich in 
 many ways as she is to-day. We never had such 
 magnificent preaching as we have to-day. We 
 never had such a multitude of splendid preachers 
 as we have to-day. There have been times when 
 
Gleaning for God 175 
 
 we have had fewer great preachers, and they 
 stood out Hke mountain-tops, but the average 
 man to-day is preaching the Gospel of the Son 
 of God full and free. There never was a day 
 when we had such magnificent church buildings 
 as we have to-day. There never was a time 
 when men were putting their hands deeper in 
 their pockets to give their gold to the cause of 
 God as they are doing to-day. There never was 
 a day when you had such magnificent singing, 
 Church singing — and do not think I am down on 
 music, because I learned my music from God's 
 choirs in feathers : the thrush, the nightingale, 
 the skylark, the linnet. When God's choirs be- 
 gin to sing everybody else must be silent. I do 
 not mean vocal gymnastics, either, I mean sing- 
 ing — singing. There never was a day when the 
 Church had such magnificent singing as she has 
 to-day. There never was a day when the Church 
 of God was giving so much to save the masses as 
 she is doing to-day. Why, you remember, and 
 so do I, ten or twelve or twenty years ago the 
 mission-room was in a back street, a Httle low- 
 ceilinged place, if it was not down in a cellar, 
 with the windows broken, and the forms all crazy 
 and wanted mending, an old asthmatical cabinet 
 
176 Gleaning for God 
 
 organ in a corner with one pedal gone, and 
 twenty or thirty young ragged urchins running 
 about, and two or three young ladies to keep 
 them quiet. And if you had anybody whom you 
 had to let preach somewhere, and you did not 
 want him in the Churches, somebody like Gipsy 
 Smith, you sent him to the mission-room. And 
 in the school of the big church, if you had a set 
 of old hymn-books or Bibles that you could no 
 longer go on with — books with half the pages 
 missing — and an old instrument that you could 
 manage with no longer, somebody got up and 
 asked, " What shall we do with the old one ? " 
 And some economic brother said, " Oh, send 
 it to the mission-room," and you expected to 
 convert the slums by that cheap method. You 
 have changed all that, thank God. You are 
 spending thousands upon thousands on mission- 
 halls, and you are giving your grandest instru- 
 ments, your best singers, and your mightiest 
 preachers to reaching the masses. All that is 
 changed, and some of us have seen it changed. 
 I wish we could change our prayer-meetings too. 
 The weak spot in the Church of God is its 
 prayer-meetings. You can crowd your school- 
 rooms with entertainments, you can crowd them 
 
Gleaning for God 177 
 
 with dramatic performances — and some of our 
 Churches have them. I wish I could have my 
 way with such churches. I would either convert 
 the folk in them or I would set fire to the build- 
 ings. I would not allow God's house to be dese- 
 crated by worldly methods. You cannot save 
 humanity with the devil's tools. You can crowd 
 your churches with worldly things, but try to 
 get the people to a prayer-meeting, they have 
 got asthma, they have got a cold, they cannot 
 come out at night. Some society leader invites 
 them to dinner, and you hear nothing about the 
 cold or the asthma, and they can go out in a 
 dress too short at the top and too long at the 
 bottom. Is it true ? Is that a fancy picture ? 
 Listen — we are playing at religion. We are 
 playing at it, the Lord help us to love it. 
 
 These men went to the prayer-meeting, and I 
 want you to see that if the Church is to do any- 
 thing in any neighbourhood for Jesus Christ she 
 must put her prayer-life right. There is no sub- 
 stitute for prayer. Get all the learning, get all 
 the culture, get all the gifts and all the grace, all 
 the harmony and all the poetry, all the archi- 
 tecture and all the political and social influ- 
 ence, and grapple with it all and consecrate it 
 
lyS Gleaning for God 
 
 at the feet of Jesus, but remember there is no 
 substitute for prayer. Peter and John went up 
 to the house of prayer at the time appointed. 
 Do you go to the prayer-meeting ? It is a poor 
 Church that does not know how to pray. Where 
 are our heads of famihes on prayer-meeting night, 
 where are our business men on prayer-meeting 
 night, where are our Sunday-school teachers and 
 superintendents, our choir leaders, on prayer- 
 meeting nights ? Listen, men and women ; all 
 the rest will not count for a row of pins, not so 
 much, for there is not as much point about 
 what you do. It will amount to nothing if you 
 do not pray. You may preach till doomsday to 
 your children, and your servants, and to the 
 people you have influence over about going to 
 church; when it is prayer-meellng night, and 
 they know you could go and you do not go, and 
 that you have no desire to go, all your preach- 
 ing is of no use. It is the practicing that tells. 
 
 These men went to a prayer-meeting. And 
 please remember it was Peter and John who were 
 going together. Peter was not John, and John 
 was not Peter. They were two opposites. 
 They were as wide apart as men could be by 
 disposition and in thought, but they went to- 
 
Gleaning for God 179 
 
 gether. And it is getting Peter and John to- 
 gether at the prayer meeting that brings victory. 
 It may be that there are two men in your Church, 
 if you could only get them on their knees at the 
 prayer- meeting you will have a revival. It may 
 be two women. I mean those people who have 
 not spoken to each other lately. They are the 
 two I mean. If you could only get them to- 
 gether at the prayer-meeting what a glad day 
 it would be for the minister and for the congrega- 
 tion! If you could only get these people to- 
 gether ! Well, you say, they do come occa- 
 sionally. Yes, I know, one in this corner and 
 one in that corner. Both will pray, and they 
 will pray at one another. Have you ever heard 
 it? Have you ever noticed five or six people in 
 a prayer-meeting in a room ? They are as far 
 apart as the walls will let them get, and they are 
 all saying, " Where two or three are met to- 
 gether," and if the walls were another mile apart 
 they would be off. I do not know whether you 
 see these things. They make me feel — well, I 
 cannot help seeing them, these two men. 
 Brother, find your Peter, will you? That 
 would be a revival. Find your John, that 
 would be a revival. Go and shake hands with 
 
i8o Gleaning for God 
 
 the man you have not spoken to lately, shake 
 hands with the woman you have not been 
 on friendly terms with. That is what I mean 
 by getting together. 
 
 In a large Church I made that statement not 
 long ago. At the close I wanted to speak to one 
 of the officials when he came into the vestry for 
 his hat, and I said, " Will you wait a minute, I 
 want to speak to you ? " He said, " Don't stop 
 me now, I am in a hurry." I said, " What is the 
 matter ? " " Well," he said, " I am going to do 
 just what you have told me." I said, " What is 
 that?" He said, " I am going to speak to a 
 brother office-bearer that I have not spoken to 
 for five years, and it is all my fault, and while 
 this Divine impulse is upon me I will do it be- 
 fore I get from it. I am going to find my 
 Peter." And he had got him in a front pew at 
 night where everybody in that crowded church 
 could see him, and he wanted to rise and sing, 
 " Praise God, from whom all blessings flow." 
 The spirit of strife between those two men had 
 torn the Church to shreds. You find your Peter, 
 find your John. Peter and John went together. 
 It is a good thing for you Christians of all de- 
 nominations to mix up a little. You have been 
 
Gleaning for God l8i 
 
 living too far apart; and the nearer we get to 
 Christ, the closer we shall get to each other. 
 We have to live together when we get to heaven. 
 Some of us had better learn how down here. 
 All that is beautiful is together. Do not forget 
 it. They went together at the hour of prayer. 
 
 Now, I want you to notice this, that Peter and 
 John could be heard. I know they would when 
 they said their prayers on their knees. They 
 would be heard ; I w^ill tell you why. They hved 
 their prayer. If you want the Lord to hear you 
 say " Our Father " on your knees you live our 
 Father on your feet. If you- want the Lord to 
 hear you when you get into the temple, you hear 
 somebody else's prayer before you get into the 
 temple. If you want the Lord to see you in the 
 temple, see somebody who needs you before you 
 get to the temple. If you want the Lord to put 
 His hand on you in the temple, put your hand 
 on some one before you reach the temple. 
 These men started a little bit earlier, and gained 
 a little bit of extra time on the way, to look out 
 for some one they could find to take with them 
 into their pew. I wonder how many of us do 
 that ? I wonder if any of you ever start ten min- 
 utes earlier on Sunday morning. I wonder if 
 
i82 Gleaning for God 
 
 you do ever see a poor cripple outside, paralyzed, 
 crippled, handicapped, demoralized, degraded, 
 cursed by sin ; I wonder if you ever take time to 
 speak to that person and say, " Look here, I have 
 a book and I have a seat, and you come and sit 
 with me ; come along." For there are lots of 
 people who will never come to church till they 
 are carried. Do not forget that. This man 
 would not have been at the door if he had not 
 been carried there. Somebody loved him, some- 
 body cared for him ; he was lifted to that spot, 
 and when Peter and John came along they saw 
 him. Yes, listen : these are the men that God 
 can trust with a bit of victory. They had eyes 
 for three thousand, and they had eyes for a crip- 
 ple. They had eyes for people who had houses 
 and lands and money, and they had eyes and 
 heart and hands for the poor fellow who wanted 
 something. That is the man the Lord can trust. 
 Have we eyes for the cripple, have we eyes for 
 the harlot, have we eyes for the drunkard, have 
 we eyes for the jail-bird, have we sympathy for 
 the cursed ? There are thousands outside our 
 Churches and you have libelled them, miserably 
 slandered them, hurled insult at them for their 
 injury. Have you tried to save them ? There 
 
Gleaning for God 183 
 
 is in the worst in your city just as much as there 
 was in you to which grace can appeal if you will 
 only speak your gospel. God help you to act ! 
 There they are. How many of us try to save 
 and rescue the perishing ? It is easy to sing in 
 the cushioned pew, or in the drawing-room with 
 crewel-work slippers on. That is not religion, 
 that is sentiment, that is dreaming. If you want 
 to save the perishing you must go and handle 
 them. Who is willing to do it ? We talk about 
 the non-church-goers, what about the non-going 
 Church ? We slander people when we say they 
 do not want the Church. It is nonsense, it is not 
 true. I will not hear them libelled. They do 
 want God, they do want the Bible, they are not 
 hostile to Jesus Christ, but they do hate the poor 
 caricature they see of Him in the lives of so many 
 of us who profess to follow Him ; they hate that, 
 but they do not hate Jesus ; they respond to 
 Jesus, and they know Jesus when they see Him. 
 And I have lived to learn that there are far more 
 people who will come and sit in your pew if you 
 ask them than you dream of. 
 
 I do not know what you do in your town when 
 there is an election, but I know what they do 
 where I live. It does not matter how far a man 
 
184 Gleaning for God 
 
 lives from the polling-booth, the candidate goes 
 and sees him, if he has a vote, if he is on the 
 register. They go and knock at his door, and 
 they do not open it till it is answered. They 
 treat him with respect. He is a voter. If the 
 wife comes to the door, they ask to see the hus- 
 band, and then they are invited to sit down, and 
 if there is a bird in the cage it is the finest bird 
 that ever was ; if there is a little flower in the pot 
 — well, it is a beautiful flower, and if he has got 
 some chickens they go and look at his chickens ; 
 and if there is a dog, they pat the dog ; and if 
 there is a baby, they don't forget to kiss the 
 baby, though it is not over clean. They have 
 their eyes on the vote, and if the man is not at 
 home they go again and again and again till they 
 are sure of him, or the other man is, and when 
 the day of polHng comes they are so anxious to 
 get the man up to the scratch that they don't 
 wait for him to walk, they send a carriage or a 
 motor car. Is that true ? How much do you do 
 when you want him to come to Church ? You 
 never invite him, you never go and see him, you 
 never tell him there is a service ; the only thing 
 you do is to pull a piece of rope, and tell him by 
 that piece of brass or metal that there is a service 
 
Gleaning for God l8j 
 
 going on, and the fellow says that " when they 
 wanted my vote they could come and see me, 
 now they want me converted they don't know 
 me." And the working man sees through the 
 fraud, and it is time he did, and it is time you 
 saw it. Listen : there are more cripples will re- 
 spond to the touch of real sympathy than any of 
 you dream of. You do not know what is in 
 them; you have never dived, you have never 
 dug, you have never searched. There are more 
 than you think. A little while ago I stood in a 
 wonderful mine in Kimberley — a diamond mine. 
 I was taken down 2,520 feet, and they gave me a 
 pick and I brought down some of that blue mould 
 carrying the diamonds to my feet. Some of it 
 crumbled, and I searched with the electric light, 
 but I could see no diamond. Yet in that ground 
 there are diamonds of countless value, and God 
 put them there. Somebody was riding through 
 your streets one day with Ruskin and said, 
 " What disgusting stuff this London mud is ! " 
 Ruskin said, " In that mud there are the sand and 
 soot and water and lime out of which God makes 
 opals and sapphires and diamonds." And if God 
 can make opals and sapphires and diamonds out 
 of London mud. He can make something out of 
 
i86 Gleaning for God 
 
 the poor cripple that lives next door to you, if 
 you will only help God to save him, and that is 
 your business and mine now. Fasten your eyes 
 on somebody. If they are crippled you know 
 not what is there. Give it a chance. Smile on 
 it, love it, help it ; it will surprise you. There 
 may be a lump of humanity, all dwarfed, twisted, 
 crooked, never had a chance yet, remember ; 
 cursed in its birth, made drunk in its mother's 
 milk, born with the blood of the harlot, the 
 drunkard and the thief in its veins. In God's 
 name have pity on such ! Christ died for the 
 worst. If you believe it, live as though you did, 
 and help them back to God. 
 
 Peter and John fastened their eyes on this poor 
 cripple, and that was the dawn of the eternal 
 day for the poor fellow. They said, " Look on 
 us," and he did, and he expected something im- 
 mediately — and there are lots of folk who have 
 looked at you and expected something. Have 
 they been disappointed ? " Look on us." And 
 then Peter made a beautiful little speech, and 
 preached a nice little sermon. He said, " In the 
 name of Jesus of Nazareth, rise up, and walk." 
 Now, you and I might do that until further orders. 
 But Peter did not stop there. Throwing back 
 
Gleaning for God 187 
 
 the robe he bared his arm, and got near enough, 
 and he picked him up by the right hand and 
 lifted him up. I wonder what some of you 
 would do with a poor cripple. You will have 
 to stoop if you would lift. Good stoopers are 
 needed in the Church. When I was a gipsy, I 
 lived in my tent. I never slept in a house till I 
 was seventeen. I was just a gipsy boy, and when 
 I was travelling the counties of Cambridge and 
 Essex and Suffolk and Norfolk, I used to see the 
 farmers go into the fields with their wagons and 
 carry the golden grain to the ricks, and when the 
 stackyards were bursting with prosperity then 
 the farmers would open the gates of the fields and 
 let the parishioners go in, and do you know what 
 they called it ? Gleaning. I noticed, when I 
 was only a boy, that good gleaners had to be 
 good stoopers. And, brothers, if you go out 
 into God's fields to glean cripples for Him, you 
 must stoop. If you are going to help anybody 
 you will have to stand a little higher than they 
 are, or you won't hft them far. Make sure of 
 your standing. Peter got hold of him by the 
 right hand and lifted him up, and there are mo- 
 ments in a man's life when a lift of that sort will 
 lift him not only for time, but for eternity. I 
 
i88 Gleaning for God 
 
 have got hold of men's hands in South Africa 
 and looked them in the face, and they have never 
 said one word, just gripped their hand, and it 
 has been the touch of their mother's grief again, it 
 has been the touch of their home, and I have seen 
 big tears fall like bubbles on a mountain stream. 
 I tell you there is something indescribable in the 
 touch of a human hand. Take your glove off, 
 handle these poor things for Christ's sake. It is 
 all very well to say, ♦' Oh, you believe in the 
 Lord Jesus." 
 
 Listen : you have got good blood in your 
 veins, you have got the moral momentum of a 
 godly ancestry coursing through your veins, you 
 were brought up in a Christian home, you have 
 had the advantages of education, of Church life, 
 ministers in charge of your Sunday-school, 
 teachers to visit you. Christian parents to love 
 you. You have everything in the world to help 
 you to believe, yet there are moments when it 
 takes all the time to get you to believe. Have 
 pity on those who have not had your chance. 
 It is all very well to say, " Believe, believe." You 
 have got to become Jesus Christ in human form, 
 and let them handle you, and believe in Him as 
 He reveals Himself through you. God help us 
 
Gleaning for God 189 
 
 to do it. The cripples will be saved when the 
 Church handles them. 
 
 He went to church — of course he did. He was 
 a cripple. And there are lots of people who will 
 come into church leaping and dancing for joy- 
 when you go and handle them. That is the way 
 in for them. That is the way in ; the way into 
 your pew is through your hand and through your 
 heart, and through your eyes and through your 
 legs and through your life. The way to God for 
 some of these people is by you. They will come 
 fast enough, only give them a chance, and make 
 you feel you want them. They feel you want 
 their votes. When they come to church they 
 look at the pews and see the little notice boards, 
 so to speak, with names on them, as much as to 
 say, " Keep off the grass," and if twenty or thirty 
 of them got to church before some of you were 
 there and got into your pew from the slums be- 
 fore you reached it, some of you would turn up 
 your nose and call the deacons or the office- 
 bearers and say, " This is my pew." Then we 
 talk about the non-church-goer. The Lord save 
 us from cant and humbug. Don't you monopo- 
 lize any little bit of God's heritage. It does not 
 belong to you. It is His. His house is open for 
 
IQO Gleaning for God 
 
 the world. Give Him a chance in His own house, 
 and give those a chance that need Him most. 
 Poor cripple, of course he got more than he 
 sked for. He asked for alms, and the Lord gave 
 him legs. It is always a surprise ; Jesus always 
 gives more than we ask, and you and I, who 
 have tried to love Him for years, find every day 
 a glad surprise. We thought we could not stand, 
 but we walked. We thought we could not walk, 
 but we ran. We thought we couid not endure, 
 but we are living. We thought we should never 
 hold on, but here we are, blessed be God. 
 Brother, live your gospel, and the cripples all 
 around you will touch your hand, and through it 
 they will catch the pulse of the love which went 
 to the cross, which is strong enough to save the 
 world. God help us to do so. Amen. 
 
XI 
 
 HID WITH CHRIST 
 
" If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which 
 are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. Set 
 your affection on things above, not on things on the earth. 
 For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God. 
 When Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall ye also 
 appear with Him in glory. 
 
 " Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth ; 
 fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupis- 
 cence, and covetousness, which is idolatry : for which things' 
 sake the wrath of God cometh on the children of disobedience : 
 in the which ye also walked some time, when ye lived in 
 them. But now ye also put off all these ; anger, wrath, malice, 
 blasphemy, filthy communication out of your mouth. Lie not 
 one to another, seeing that ye have put off the old man with 
 his deeds ; and have put on the new man, which is renewed in 
 knowledge after the image of Him that created him: where 
 there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircum- 
 cision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free : but Christ is all, 
 and in all." — Col. j .■ /-//. 
 
XI 
 
 HID WITH CHRIST 
 
 A TALK WITH CHRISTIAN BEGINNERS 
 
 I WANT if I can to emphasize some very whole- 
 some truths this morning, especially for the sake 
 of those who have just set out to serve the Lord. 
 I will take as the basis of my remarks Col. 3, 
 verses i to ii. 
 
 Now look at the first verse — " If ye then be 
 risen with Christ, seek those things which are 
 above." As much as to say, " You have pro- 
 fessed faith in Christ, you have taken your stand 
 in the most public and solemn way possible, and 
 declared yourselves to be on His side. You 
 have taken upon yourselves the great name of 
 Christian. Now," says the apostle, " if that is 
 so, we shall expect to see it in your hfe." It is 
 not enough to stand up, you must keep up. It 
 is not enough to stand, you must walk. It is not 
 enough to have a name, you must have a life. 
 For if Christianity be anything, it is a progressive 
 life. When once you have accepted Jesus Christ 
 193 
 
194 Hid With Christ 
 
 as your Saviour from sin, when once you have 
 made Him your Lord and your kmg, then you 
 must, if you are to be loyal, true, honourable, 
 then you must dedicate every moment of your 
 life to His service. You must let it be seen 
 everywhere that you are now not your own, but 
 that you belong to Him, that the profession you 
 made the other night or years ago when you 
 said, " As for me and all I am concerned with 
 and have any authority over, I will serve the 
 Lord," that profession must be lived out. Every 
 day and every hour of every day, not only in 
 the Church but in the home, in the workshop, in 
 the business, in the office, in the political arena, 
 in pubUc and in private, I am Christ's man, I am 
 Christ's woman, and I must act, I must live, I 
 must walk, I must so conduct myself, so transact 
 my business, so think and so speak that the 
 Divine stamp will be on me and will be felt and 
 seen everywhere. I must live with this ever be- 
 fore me, " I am risen with Christ, and by my life, 
 my neighbours, my friends, my servants, my mas- 
 ter, my acquaintances and relatives must see that 
 my heart is set on things above. 
 
 You say you have been in the inquiry-room, 
 you had your name taken down as an inquirer, 
 
Hid With Christ 195 
 
 you knelt and prayed with those who tried to 
 help you, and you really did on your knees hon- 
 estly and intelligently seek to give yourself to 
 Jesus Christ. Did you think that the battle was 
 over then ? If you did you never made a greater 
 blunder. It is only beginning. That was the 
 initiative, that was the first step, that was the 
 turning, that was the yielding, that was acknowl- 
 edging the facts of the case. Now the fight will 
 begin, and it will be a fight ; it will be a conflict 
 from here till the great white throne is in view. 
 But remember, you are not alone. They that 
 are for you are more than all that can be against 
 you. You joined the Church a long time ago ? 
 You took communion, and you are perhaps an 
 office-bearer, a deacon, a Sunday-school teacher, 
 and go to church regularly ? Is that all the evi- 
 dence that you have of the new-born life ? Have 
 you nothing else to say for yourself but that you 
 take communion and go to church twice on a 
 Sunday, and you are a Sunday-school teacher 
 and occasionally — for such miracles do some- 
 times happen — you go to the week-evening 
 prayer-meeting? Is that all the evidence you 
 have that you are a King's son ? If ye then be 
 risen with Christ let us see the resurrection life 
 
196 Hid With Christ 
 
 or we won't believe your profession, and if I were 
 your pastor I would not believe in your professed 
 Christian life unless I knew by your beautiful 
 walk that God had saved you from sin, and that 
 you were seeking to walk as becometh the Gospel. 
 I wonder if your wife knows you have been 
 in the inquiry-room — and she is a good judge. 
 I wonder if your husband knows that you have 
 been in the inquiry-room, my sister. He will 
 know every time he comes home from work if 
 you are a real Christian woman ; he will come 
 home a little faster than he used to to get a look 
 at you. Just as sure as the sun rises and shines 
 and kisses the earth into beauty, when God 
 touches the human life He transforms it from sin 
 to grace. I do not care how bad the man is 
 that you live with, I do not care how bad the 
 woman is that lives with you, or how bad the 
 workmates are that you work with, deep down 
 in their hearts they will admire the beautiful thing 
 God makes. I wonder if your employer knows 
 that you are born again, because he will if you 
 are. The man who is really born again will 
 watch his religion in the minutest details of his 
 life. His religion will be seen in the little things. 
 Everybody will know that you are born again 
 
Hid With Christ 197 
 
 who knows you. You remember that wonderful 
 instance in the life of the Son of God when that 
 leper came to Him and said, " Lord, if Thou wilt 
 Thou canst make me clean," and Jesus said, " I 
 will; be thou clean," and He touched him and 
 his leprosy departed from him, and then Jesus 
 said to the man, " Tell nobody ; see that no man 
 know it, but go, show thyself to the priest, and 
 offer for thy cleansing according as Moses hath 
 commanded for a testimony unto them." I think 
 that man said, " Blessed Jesus, I shall tell the 
 first man I meet." He could not help himself. 
 A leper cleansed and nobody know it ! It could 
 not be. And if you are a new man in Christ 
 Jesus, I tell you somebody is going to know it. 
 And thank God for it. 
 
 •< Seek those things that are above." Let your 
 life be in harmony with your profession. That 
 is what it means. It is not enough simply to 
 have your name put down somewhere, to join a 
 club, or an educational institution, or a social 
 meeting-house. It means living a life that shall 
 be in harmony with the law of God, that shall 
 glorify God, that shall be God-honouring, that 
 shall be a witness for His glory in the world in 
 which you live, that shall be saying quietly 
 
198 Hid With Christ 
 
 though you never say a word, " My Hfe is what 
 God has made it, and He can do the same for 
 you," beautifully lived, beautifully clean, full of 
 music, full of God, and that life will be a sermon 
 unanswerable, and many a man will listen to a 
 sermon Hke that who would never listen to one 
 from the pulpit. They will see that sermon lived 
 out when they wiirnot read Matthew, Mark, Luke, 
 John, the Acts, and so forth. . But though they 
 will not look into these things, they will search 
 your life, and they will take knowledge of you 
 that you have been with Jesus. And what the 
 world wants more and more of to-day is the 
 faithful sermon lived in workshop, market-place, 
 warehouse, bank and shop and store and railway 
 train and street car, the life which is Christlike. 
 God means us to live, and I pray God that life 
 may be seen in you and seen in me more and 
 more. 
 
 And the apostle goes on. You have to live this 
 life for this reason — for your life, the old life, the 
 selfish, sinful life, the old life of unbelief and sin, 
 the old life of world and flesh and devil, and seek- 
 ing your own, the old life is dead. The Lord 
 help you to bury it. Some of you stick to the 
 corpse and drag it about with you. You are like 
 
Hid With Christ 199 
 
 Lazarus — you are out of the grave, but you want 
 the grave-clothes off. If you are risen with 
 Christ, the old life is dead. You know the apos- 
 tle said on one occasion, " Christ died for me.'' 
 Then he said again, " I am crucified with Christ." 
 So Paul was only preaching what he realized, 
 what he experienced. Christ took my place, 
 Christ hung on the cross for me, and bore the 
 shame and the curse for me. He paid the debt for 
 me. " He loved me, and gave Himself for me." 
 Oh, the mystery of it ! oh, the length and breadth 
 and depth and height of it ! — He died for me. 
 And oh, the next step is still more wonderful. 
 " I am crucified with Christ." The old man dead 
 with Christ. And then he goes on to say in 
 another place, " I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth 
 in me." And then he says, " I can do all things 
 through Christ which strengtheneth me." So 
 that He not only pays my old debts off, but He 
 puts me in the position that I need never get into 
 debt any more. He gives me a life which shall 
 enable me to do these things, to walk before 
 Him, and to please Him, and I have the testi- 
 mony that my life is accepted in Christ Jesus. 
 " For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ 
 in God," hidden away in the heart of God. I 
 
200 Hid With Christ 
 
 shall never forget when as a young disciple I 
 grasped that thought for the first time. I cannot 
 tell you the comfort it was to me. I cannot tell 
 you the strength it brought me. I cannot tell 
 you the courage it gave me when I realized that 
 my salvation did not depend on my feelings or 
 my thoughts or my frames or my surroundings, 
 my success or my failures, but my salvation de- 
 pended on my living faith and my honest obedi- 
 ence in a living Christ. Will you grip that, you 
 who have just trusted Jesus as your Saviour? 
 The mission is soon over, the missioner soon 
 gone, and the dark days come — the days of 
 fighting, the days of conflict, the days when 
 you stand alone, the days in which there is 
 no light. The day will come in which you have 
 to stand alone to face the foe single-handed, 
 and have to fight hard if you mean to win, with- 
 out a scrap of feeling, without any sensation of 
 joy or peace, when you have to go at it with the 
 facts before you, with God's unalterable word 
 staring you in the face, and to stand by it in 
 spite of suffering. And I tell you it will be a 
 source of strength to you in that moment if you 
 can close your eyes and say to the devil and the 
 world and the flesh and everything that seems to 
 
Hid With Christ 201 
 
 be against you, " Look here, my life is hid with 
 Christ in God, and it does not matter how I feel 
 or what I am, it all depends on what He is." 
 God help you to believe that. Mind you, I am 
 supposing that you will honestly seek to do right, 
 and I am supposing that you will honestly keep 
 your faith settled, grounded in God ; I am hon- 
 estly supposing that you will neither turn to the 
 right nor to the left nor listen to the voice of the 
 tempter. But I am now speaking of the days 
 that will come ; for they come to us all, and they 
 come to me — days when I have not much feel- 
 ing, days when I am weary and tired, days when 
 I am alone and have to fight the devil alone. 
 Ah, there are times when I am too tired to pray, 
 when if my salvation depended on my getting on 
 my knees and praying for an hour I could not do 
 it, and the Lord knows I could not do it. I never 
 passed through such physical, mental, or nervous 
 strain in my life as during my recent mission in 
 South Africa, and there were many nights when 
 I got home from my work too tired to kneel 
 down and pray — nights when I could not sleep. 
 And you know the devil generally comes when a 
 man is down, and the devil says to him, " Where 
 is your feehng now, where is your happiness now 
 
202 Hid With Christ 
 
 where is your joy now, where is your shouting 
 feeling now ? " And do you know what I do on 
 these occasions when I am too tired to pray? 
 I just throw myself on the bed and say, " Blessed 
 Jesus, we are on the same old terms ; it is all 
 right, my life is hid with Christ in God." Don't 
 be afraid. Jesus says, " I give unto My sheep 
 eternal Hfe, and no man shall be able to pluck 
 them out of My Father's hands." No man shall 
 pluck them out. Don't walk out. Have sense 
 to stay in the safe place, the sure place ; stay 
 there. The devil may tempt, but you know you 
 need not yield ; you can resist him. Jesus does 
 not undertake to save you from temptation, but 
 He undertakes to save you in it, to keep you 
 from yielding. Do not think you have more 
 temptation than you can stand? With every 
 temptation that comes God comes, for He says, 
 " Ye shall not be tempted above that ye are able 
 to bear, and with the temptation I will make a 
 way of escape." God comes as soon as the devil. 
 Don't you think that the devil can run faster than 
 God ? God is ahead of him all the time, and if 
 you will believe it. He will hold you and He will 
 keep you. 
 
 And nobody can rob you of this assurance if 
 
Hid With Christ 203 
 
 you will make up your mind to hold it with a 
 steady faith, with an obedient faith. I shall 
 never forget a little bit of my own experience 
 soon after my father's conversion. He and his 
 two brothers — the three gipsy men — were all 
 converted in one week, and it was a rare thing 
 to see three gipsy men — my father was the least 
 of the three, and he stood six feet — it was a rare 
 thing to see those big fellows transformed by the 
 grace of God, and wherever they were seen 
 people wanted to see them again and listen to 
 their beautiful testimony, for it was a wonderful 
 work of grace that was done in and for those 
 three men. In 1874 they were invited down to 
 Portsmouth for a week's mission, and between 
 Portsmouth and Southampton they liked them 
 so well that the week became three, four, five, 
 and it was six weeks before they came home, 
 and you know when father was away from our 
 tent mother was away too, for he was both to us. 
 Mother was gone. The other tents had their 
 mothers, we had not, and oh, those six weeks 
 did seem a long time to us who were motherless. 
 And one morning a letter came to say they 
 would be home to-morrow, and we were ready 
 for them at six o'clock in the morning. We 
 
204 Hid With Christ 
 
 did not know anything of trains, and it was night 
 ere they came. And when father came into the 
 old tent we all made way for the baby girl to go 
 to him first, as was our custom, and he sat down 
 and put his arms round her and kissed her and 
 fondled her. She was the baby, and he had not 
 seen her for six weeks. The others of us were 
 waiting our turn, but she had father too long for 
 some of us. It was my turn next, and I think I 
 felt it more than the rest; my boyish heart 
 longed for love and sympathy, for I never got 
 over my mother's death. I longed for the touch 
 of my father's hand and heart, and she did not 
 come out, and I said at last, for I could stand it 
 no longer, " Come out, come out, it is my turn ! " 
 She rolled her black eyes at me, and said, " You 
 get me out of my father's arms if you can." 
 " Well," I said, " I cannot do that, but there is 
 room for me, and I am coming in," and I crept 
 in, and oh, the joy that seemed to steal into my 
 boyish heart as I felt those dear arms about me ! 
 My brother, my sister, God's arms, your Father's 
 arms are about you if you will but believe it. 
 Your life is hid with Christ in God. 
 
 Seeing this is so, I want you to notice this es- 
 pecially — there is some very straight talking here, 
 
Hid With Christ 205 
 
 no trimming about Paul, no attempt at saving 
 people's feelings or preconceived notions. He 
 puts in the knife with no asking if he may. Paul 
 is a wonderful spiritual surgeon, and he begins 
 the operation without any questioning. He says, 
 " Mortify " — make dead — " your members which 
 are upon earth." As the Spirit reveals to you 
 more and more the life of Jesus, and as you be- 
 come acquainted with His Word, when you 
 take the next step and walk humbly with your 
 God, and you detect in your heart and life ele- 
 ments of the world, the remnants of evil, any 
 roots of bitterness, as you detect unruly members, 
 evil members in your life, says the Holy Ghost 
 through this wonderful apostle, " Make them 
 dead," kill them, put the knife in, slay utterly ; 
 mortify, self-suicide, that is what it means. Kill 
 self, kill the world, kill the flesh, kill the devil, 
 mortify, " make dead your members which are 
 upon the earth." Then he names the black list : 
 fornication — and he is talking to the children of 
 God — fornication, uncleanness, passion, evil de- 
 sire, the evil look, the evil spring, the passion 
 within, the impure thought, the suggested thing 
 that is wrong ; though it may seem beautiful — 
 slay it, kill it. Your life within is to be a 
 
2o6 Hid With Christ 
 
 slaughter-house for all that God hates. " For 
 which things* sake," he says, " the wrath of God 
 Cometh upon the sinner and the disobedient." 
 And if a man will allow any of these things to 
 live in his life, any Amalekite is allowed to lift 
 his doomed head in your life, remember the 
 sheep will bleat and the oxen will low, and there 
 will be death to somebody. You and I have to 
 die to sin or to die with sin. Sin must die or I 
 must. The Holy Ghost and the sin of the past 
 cannot live in the same heart. One will go out. 
 Therefore he says, " Make dead." 
 
 " Buried with Christ and raised with Him too, 
 What is there left for me to do ? 
 Simply to cease from struggling and strife, 
 Simply to walk in newness of life." 
 
 That is our business. We are to turn from 
 the things we used to love, and of which we 
 are ashamed to-day to think of. We are to 
 turn from them in loathing and disgust and 
 walk the straight life with the Son of God. 
 
 Then in the eighth verse he makes this state- 
 ment — ** Put off all these." How thorough Paul 
 is ! He seems to leave nothing. He enters into 
 every detail. " Put off these things — anger, you 
 must not be angry, you should be sweet and 
 
Hid With Christ 207 
 
 beautiful, full of smiles, full of sunshine; you 
 must not frown or feel like it, you must not get 
 angry, you must not slam doors and knock 
 things over and stamp about the house as though 
 you would shake creation, because that is not 
 like Jesus. You have to be like Him. Put off 
 anger. And if grace cannot sweeten your 
 temper it cannot do much. Mind your temper. 
 Keep a bit in its mouth and a kicking-strap on 
 too. The Psalmist says in one place, " Be not 
 as the horse or the mule, which have no under- 
 standing but whose mouth must be held in with 
 bit and bridle." And there are some people who 
 need a kicking-strap as well as a bridle and they 
 are called Christians. " Put off anger." I have 
 seen people turn red in the face and swell at 
 the neck and bite their lips — what a storm was 
 raging! — and they managed to keep it in — 
 that is, it was silent — and when it was over 
 they said, " I didn't say anything, did I ? " 
 No, but you looked daggers, and you did more 
 harm with that five minutes' explosion than you 
 did good in a year of your Christian life. That 
 is the thing that makes it difBcult for the person 
 who lives with you to be a Christian, that is the 
 thing that hinders you winning for Christ, and 
 
2o8 Hid With Christ 
 
 you would win them if you were even and if 
 grace had had its perfect work within you. If 
 God has saved you from big sins He can save 
 you from your temper. I know He can. Trust 
 Him even for that. Put off anger, wrath. What 
 is the difference between wrath and anger? 
 There is a difference, a very big difference. 
 Wrath is anger with the Hd off, and then you 
 say things, you splutter, then you are not re- 
 sponsible for what you do say, and you would 
 give your right arm to unsay some things. 
 Years ago you made a wound that has never 
 been healed, you made a breach that has never 
 been bridged, and those hot, cutting, wrathful 
 words did what will never be undone this side 
 of the gates of pearl. They may be forgiven, 
 but undone never. Somebody has said that — 
 
 " Boys flying kites haul in their white-winged birds, 
 But you cannot do that when you are flying words. 
 Thoughts unexpressed may sometimes seem as dead, 
 But God cannot kill them when once they are said." 
 
 Put off wrath. There are members of Churches 
 who have lost friends — dear friends. You would 
 have rather lost your right hand than lose them, 
 and you lost them through the cutting word 
 that you have never been prepared to take 
 
Hid With Christ 209 
 
 back. They flew high, they flew straight, they 
 went into the very soul of your friend, they were 
 cut to the quick. It was your withering word 
 that did the mischief. Put off wrath. 
 
 Something else — what is it ? Malice. " Put 
 ofl" malice." Is there any difference between 
 wrath and malice ? Yes, malice is wrath cooled 
 down, settled into what? Hatred, murder — and 
 nobody can be a child of God with murder in the 
 soul ; the Book says if I hate my brother I am a 
 murderer. You have done the deed inside if you 
 hate anybody: you are a murderer. Put off 
 anger, put off wrath, put off malice, and be at- 
 tractive, lovable, full of the spirit of Jesus : " there 
 was no guile found in His mouth," and you are to 
 be like Him. 
 
 Then He makes another statement. He says, 
 " Lie not one to another " — lie, not, and He is 
 talking to believers. Be truthful, do not tell any 
 lie, any business lie, any society lie, or any other 
 kind of lie, white He or black lie — and the whitest 
 lie I ever knew was as black as the devil. Lie 
 not. Don't put in your window, " SelHng off at 
 a great sacrifice " if it is not so. It may be a 
 sacrifice to the other fellow, not to you. You do 
 not exist for philanthropic purposes. Tell the 
 
210 Hid With Christ 
 
 truth. Don't tell people you are glad to see them 
 when you are not. Don't ask people to stay for 
 tea when you do not want them, and don't ask 
 people to call and see you just because it looks 
 the proper thing to do, if in your heart you do 
 not mean it. Lie not. Lots of people in the 
 Church of God cannot get on in their spiritual 
 hfe because of the spirit of lying. Don't tell the 
 preacher you enjoyed his sermon when you did 
 not. If you do enjoy the sermon tell him so 
 once in a way, it will help him to preach better 
 next time. But lie not. Be truthful. Say noth- 
 ing rather than equivocate or talk double. And 
 it means be honest, too. This " lie not " means 
 honesty in life and character as well as in words. 
 It means paying your debts. It means making 
 restitution. On the Monday morning after the 
 first Sunday I preached in Johannesburg a gentle- 
 man walked into the house of a leading Dutch- 
 man, took out of his pocket a gold watch and 
 said, " The watch is yours. I stole it from you 
 eight years ago. I heard Gipsy Smith yesterday 
 and I got converted, and now I must give back 
 this watch. It does not belong to me." That is 
 religion. 
 
 Some years ago in one of my missions in a vil- 
 
Hid With Christ 211 
 
 lage a Yorkshireman professed conversion, a 
 rough man, a drunkard, a swearer, a gambler, 
 and he joined the Methodist Church. One of 
 his pals of years ago called on him and said — 
 
 " Jack, I hear thou's gotten converted." 
 
 " Yes," said he, " I have." 
 
 " And joined t' Church ? " 
 
 " Yes, and joined t' Church." 
 
 " Well, Jack," he said, " you remember so many 
 years ago you borrowed a sovereign off me ? " 
 
 " Oh, yes," said Jack, " I remember very well." 
 
 " Well," he said, " now you are a Christian I 
 shall expect that sovereign back." 
 
 " Oh," said Jack, " the Lord has pardoned my 
 sins, and that is one of them." 
 
 I was not long in finding out Jack and I said, 
 " Jack, that may be a very convenient sort of 
 Gospel, but if you are a Christian you will pay 
 that man his sovereign if you sacrifice a coat to 
 do it." 
 
 Then the apostle said something else. " Put 
 away filthy communications " — blasphemy, filthy 
 talking. Listen again : if you are a Christian you 
 will never tell another filthy tale. If you are a 
 Christian you will never listen to another filthy 
 tale. If you are a Christian, young man, young 
 
212 Hid With Christ 
 
 woman, you will never listen to another smutty 
 joke. There are scores, hundreds of young peo- 
 ple who have lost their hold on God and become 
 backshders, and old people too, because they in- 
 dulged in smut. Put filthy communications out 
 of your mouth. Say nothing that needs to be 
 whispered. Listen to nothing that you would 
 not like your mother to hear. Tell nothing you 
 would not like Jesus to listen to. Do not say 
 anything about your neighbour that you would 
 not like to say face to face. Keep your tongue, 
 keep your speech, keep your mouth, keep your 
 heart, keep your body, keep your hfe for Jesus' 
 sake. 
 
 And He who calls you to this beautiful life 
 will put His wing around you if you will but 
 trust Him and obey Him. And all the strength, 
 and all power, and all the wisdom, and all the 
 ChristHkeness He will breathe into you, and you 
 will become for Christ a great power for good 
 and for all blessing to all about you. Amen. 
 
XII 
 
 THE NEW LIFE 
 
 A MESSAGE TO NEW CONVERTS 
 
 I WANT to have a talk with you about the new 
 life and the way you are to live it. Do not think 
 your decision for Christ means the fight is all 
 over ; it is only beginning. But remember all 
 about you are forces Divine ; you will no longer 
 walk or battle alone — God, the Almighty God, is 
 for you, and just as sure as He sits on the throne, 
 you will overcome all opposing forces if you will 
 trust and obey. Do not be afraid to believe this. 
 Tell yourself this is true. Go over your sur- 
 render to God very often. 
 
 " Sing it aloud when you wake in the morning, 
 Meet the new day with its jubilant strain, 
 No condemnation, for Jesus hath found you." 
 
 Saved you — you are His. " By grace have ye 
 been saved " (Eph. 2 : 5). Let there be no doubt 
 about this ; be sure this is so at the beginning. 
 " He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting 
 213 
 
214 The New Life 
 
 life " (John 3 : 36). Press hard on the word hath ; 
 claim the assurance now ; let the certainty of 
 these words be your hope, your joy, and strength. 
 God says it, and it must be so, and no power on 
 earth can gainsay it or overthrow it for a mo- 
 ment. 
 
 You have yielded yourself to Jesus, you are 
 born again, you have accepted Him as your 
 Saviour for time and eternity. He who bore 
 your sins on Calvary has now broken their power 
 and saves you from the guilt and power of sin. 
 You are accepted in the beloved ; you are no 
 longer an alien or afar off, you have been brought 
 nigh by the blood of His Cross. You are now 
 the child of God. As ye have therefore received 
 Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk ye in Him, rooted 
 and built up in Him, and stablished in the faith, 
 as ye have been taught, abounding therein with 
 thanksgiving (Col. 2 : 6, 7). You are now in 
 Him, as the branch is in the vine, part of Him. 
 Keep every channel of your being open, and in 
 sympathy with your root and head, that every 
 part of you may be filled with the life Divine. 
 Never let the vine be ashamed of the branch, or 
 even feel it to be a dead weight ; be filled with 
 life and health and there will be beauty and fruit. 
 
The New Life 215 
 
 Abide in Him, keep your roots in Him, and you 
 may grow. Abiding means fellowship with 
 Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Allow nothing to 
 break this communion or intrude for a moment 
 between you and your beloved. Hold a constant 
 witness to the cleansing power of the precious 
 blood ; live at the foot of the cross. Keep heart 
 and mind fixed upon Him by an habitual obedi- 
 ence. The need for this is made very clear in 
 the Master's words, " If ye keep My command- 
 ments ye shall abide in My love, even as I have 
 kept My Father's commandments and abide in 
 His love" (John 15:10). Obedience is abiding. 
 Love must obey, because it rests in the eternal 
 love. Oh ! the blessedness which can and does 
 say, " I know whom I have believed, and am per- 
 suaded that He is able to keep (or guard) that 
 which I have committed unto Him against that 
 day" (2 Tim. I : 12). Surely this must prompt 
 fruitfulness and every good work (John 15:8; 
 I John 2 : 36). 
 
 Cultivate moral backbone. Be able to stand 
 for Christ. Let there be constancy in your 
 character, firmness of mind. Fix your whole 
 being upon God to know and understand Him. 
 Daniel was greatly beloved because he set his 
 
2l6 The New Life 
 
 mind and heart upon God. The Divine heart 
 felt it could depend upon Daniel, and knew he 
 would be true and loyal, and anywhere and all 
 the time. The heart of God longs for those in 
 whom He can deHght (Matt. 3 : 17), and upon 
 whom He can depend. He desires all who love 
 Him to be strong, pure, and holy in heart and 
 life ; nothing else will or can bring Him glory 
 and give Him joy. These are some of the un- 
 changing facts of God's Word. Those who 
 understand, believe, and obey these things will be 
 calm, strong, holy and peaceful, fully assured of 
 God's pardon and cleansing, and will be humble, 
 grateful, bold to speak, and ready to do any and 
 every service for the glory of God and the good 
 of humanity. 
 
 " Let your Hght shine before men." Never 
 fail to witness for Christ, in your home, first of 
 all, not only in word but in deed ; in the Church 
 amongst fellow Christians, and in the world, never 
 be ashamed of Jesus. You are to be a witness 
 for Him — this is His desire for you. " Let the 
 redeemed of the Lord say so." " Ye shall be 
 witnesses unto Me " (Acts i : 8). " They over- 
 come by the blood of the Lamb and by the word 
 of their testimony" (Rev. 12 : 11). There are 
 
The New Life 217 
 
 thousands of professing Christians who have no 
 joy, because they bear no witness for Christ. 
 Oh ! for the boldness of Peter when he said, 
 " We cannot but speak the things which we have 
 seen and heard " (Acts 4 : 20). As far as you 
 can, undo the past. If there is anything wrong 
 in the past of your Hfe, and you can put it right, 
 do so without delay. If you have taken any- 
 thing from any man, restore fully, or go as far as 
 you can in that direction; this is right. Not 
 only forsake sin, but confess it, for that will put 
 you right with the man you have wronged, as 
 w«ll as bring you into close relationship with 
 God. For God requireth that which is past " 
 (Eccles. 3 : 15). The jailer at Philippi took Paul 
 and Silas " the same hour of his conversion and 
 washed their stripes!' He could not wait till 
 morning ; when morning came he was rejoicing 
 in God. Joy always follows stripe- washing. Let 
 all those who know you see your religion means 
 doing right all along the line. This may mean 
 time and trouble, and even suffering, but the soul 
 made right with God must get right with man. 
 " If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live 
 peaceably with all men" (Rom. 12 : 18). " The 
 wicked borroweth and payeth not again, but the 
 
2l8 The New Life 
 
 righteous showeth mercy and forgiveth " (Psa. 
 37 : 2i). "Render therefore to all their dues" 
 (Rom. 13:7). " Owe to no man anything but to 
 love one another " (Rom. 13 : 8). Let your 
 conscience be clear on this matter. Have noth- 
 ing hidden away in your life which will not bear 
 the light. The kingdom of God is righteousness, 
 peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost (Rom. 14 : 17}. 
 Righteousness first : the rest will follow. 
 
 Bible-reading must be done. If you are to 
 grow, you will need " the sincere milk of the 
 Word, that ye may grow thereby " (i Pet. 2 : 2). 
 One of the great needs of to-day is more real 
 knowledge of the Word of God. " Let the Word 
 of God dwell in you richly in all wisdom " (Col. 
 3 : 16). Rise in time in the morning to read your 
 portion ; the day will be all the brighter because 
 you have looked into the living Word. Seek some 
 truth by which to fight the battles of the day. Hide 
 it in your heart, delight in the law of the Lord, 
 then when Satan assaileth or difficulties arise you 
 will have your sword with which to fight the 
 enemy, for the power of the Word will be within 
 you. By taking heed to His Word you will be 
 able to live clean and pure, noble and strong 
 (Psa. 119:9). 
 
/ 
 
 The New Life 219 
 
 Cultivate the habit of prayer. The abiding in 
 Him means a life of prayer. Get into the habit 
 of talking to God as you would your dearest and 
 closest earthly friend; speak to Him — only 
 *• speak and He will hear," for He is so near to 
 the heart that has fully surrendered and is fully 
 trusting Him. You need not go through a great 
 many high-sounding sentences in order to pray — 
 indeed, sometimes there is far more in silence 
 than in words, when one bows in heart and in 
 spirit before the Lord. And, mind you, you can 
 talk with God all the time — in the private place, 
 in market, mart and office, schoolroom, bank and 
 drawing-room, kitchen and factory, God is there, 
 near, always — blessed be God ! — to those who 
 hang upon Him. Do not be discouraged because 
 you cannot make long prayers ; the most effectual 
 prayers I ever heard were short. All the prayers 
 recorded in the Bible were brief; but they kept 
 on praying, praying always ; live in the spirit of 
 prayer, that is the ideal life. You cannot be 
 always on your knees. I cannot ; and God does 
 not want us to, either. There are duties which, 
 when done faithfully, are prayers. When the 
 heart and eye are single, every act may be a 
 prayer. All work well done, and done unto the 
 
220 The New Life 
 
 Lord, may be obedience to the words, " Pray 
 without ceasing" (i Thess. 5 : 17). 
 
 Dont lose heart because you are tempted. You 
 will be more conscious of temptation now you 
 have given yourself to God and are trying to do 
 right. The devil is now your bitter enemy ; he 
 will seek to trip you at every step. He would 
 delight to overthrow you ; your fall would be a 
 great victory for him. But, remember, you are 
 not alone. Jesus is not only for you, He is 
 within you, and all about you, as a wall of fire ; 
 you have nothing to fear ; the Mighty One lives 
 to bring you through the temptation more than 
 conqueror. You do not fight alone, or you would 
 fail. The Lamb slain before the throne is also 
 the Lion of the tribe of Judah, and He lives to 
 give victory again and again. Be not afraid ! 
 But you say, " Suppose I am overtaken and fall 
 into sin, what am I to do then ? " Go back to 
 God instantly for pardon and cleansing. The 
 command is " Sin not " ; " but if any man sin we 
 have an advocate with the Father" (i John 2). 
 If a little child should go out, just after being 
 washed and dressed and made beautifully clean, 
 and fall down into the mud, and spoil the clean 
 clothes and cut his hands and face, you know 
 
The New Life 221 
 
 what that child would do, do you not? He 
 would get up crying, all dirty and bleeding, and 
 would run back to mother — his best friend — and 
 tell her all about the fall, the cut hands and face, 
 and she, like the mother she is, would wash and 
 cleanse, heal and kiss him; the mother heart 
 could do no less. God is better than a mother. 
 Try Him. Do not lie there ; get up and go to 
 Him for pardon and healing, and He will say to 
 thee, " As one whom his mother comforteth, so 
 will I comfort thee" (Isa. 56: 13). 
 
 Be glad in the Lord. Have some sunshine 
 in your voice, some song in your soul. When 
 there is a song in your soul, it will be heard in 
 your voice; your religion should never make 
 children and dogs run away from you. Do be 
 attractive. Let the morning shine in your face, 
 and the song the angels sing in your voice. Do 
 not live in the shade. " Forget not all His bene- 
 fits " (Psa. 103 : 2). Count your blessings, think 
 of all God has done for you, and you will have 
 joy — the cream — and good milk always gives 
 cream. 
 
 Be out and out for Christ ; do not sit on the 
 fence. If you are at once altogether decided to 
 follow Jesus anywhere and everywhere, it will 
 
222 The New Life 
 
 make it much easier for you and everybody else. 
 Take stand against everything doubtful. Do 
 nothing and go nowhere where Jesus cannot go 
 with you or smile upon you. Let your Hfe be 
 the Christ life. Do as He wills; in all things 
 seek His glory, not the wishes of those around 
 you, but God first in all things. You will not 
 please all the people, I know, if you are to be 
 what He wills ; but this is in the business (i John 
 3 : i). As the world knew Him not, so it will not 
 know you, if you are like Him. Hot saints are 
 sure to make lukewarm folk mad. 
 
 Remember you are saved to serve. Christ Him- 
 self came, not to be ministered unto, but to min- 
 ister, and to give His life a ransom for the world. 
 You, too, must be of service to some one if you 
 would enter into the joy of the Lord. Try to 
 register some bit of honest work for Christ and 
 man, every day you live. There may be tears 
 and heartache in the work, but remember Christ's 
 life was service for you. If you are His, you 
 must serve. All He did was done because He 
 loved. " I must work," said Jesus. If you have 
 His Spirit, can you be selfish and idle ? " As 
 many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are 
 the sons of God " (Rom. 8 : 14). You may be 
 
The New Life 223 
 
 saying, " What can I do ? " Do the little things. 
 Begin in the home, speak lovingly, act gently. 
 Serve those who are near you — father, mother, 
 sister, brother, wife, husband, child. Sink your 
 own will and rights for their good, do not seek 
 all the good for yourself. Always be willing for 
 those about you to share with you, and ever be 
 willing to deny yourself. A heart filled with the 
 love which " never faileth " will in the end win 
 great victories. We possess most truly when we 
 give most away; we save ourselves only when 
 we lose ourselves for Christ's dear sake. Let this 
 mind be in you. 
 
 I have one other word to say to you ; it is this : 
 Co7inect yourself at once with the people of God; 
 join a Christian Church, where you can take root 
 and grow. You will need all the help you can 
 get from Christian fellowship, and you ought to 
 be ifnparting help and hope to others. Be an 
 active Church member, keep awake, and wide 
 awake. Help to bear your share of all the bur- 
 den of the Church life. Attend its ordinances, 
 be regular at the services, and, above all, do at- 
 tend the week-night prayer-meeting. Take part 
 in all its services and life. Do not be silent when 
 you should be heard. Be a shining, bright beam 
 
224 '^^^ New Life 
 
 of God's sunshine, as beautiful as the coming of 
 spring, as warm and hfe-giving as summer, and 
 as full of fruit and benediction as the autumn. 
 
 vSi 
 
Date Due 
 
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