The Dying Need of the Church

“Behold, I will send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way before me: and the Lord, whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to his temple, even the messenger of the covenant, whom ye delight in: behold, he shall come, saith the Lord of hosts.” — Malachi iii., 1.

SOMETIMES a miuister’s subject is suggested by his artistic tastes; sometimes, by the occurrences of the previous week; sometimes, by a hearer who desires some particular religious theme discussed. My subject comes in no such way. It drops straight from God into my heart. Give me your prayerful and intense listening.

I want to show this morning, so far as God may help me, that the dying need of the Church universal is a mighty awakening. The ox in the pasturefield looks around, and perhnps comes to the conclusion that all the world is a clover-field. So we, standing in the midst of luxuriant religious advantages, might think, perhaps, that the earth is covered with the knowledge of God; but so far from that, if this platform were the world, so much of it as I now cover with my right foot would represent all that is conquered for Emmanuel. Or if this whole Tabernacle were the world, then one pew would represent so much of it as the grace of God has already conquered. Oh, there is need of a radical change! Something must be done; and I shall show this morning that the great — ay, as I have already said, the dying — need of the Church is a great awakening:.

I leai’n this need, in the first place, from the coldness in the majority of church meinhers. If a religious society have a thousand members, eight hundred of them are sound asleep. If it have five hundred members, four hundred are lethargic. If the Christians can rally — that is, the professed Christians — for communion-day, and succeed in not dropping the wine-cup, how many of them are satisfied? If it be a choice between Christ and the world, the world has it. You know it as well as I do. If a religious meeting be on a certain night, and on that same night there be an extraordinary operatic entertainment, or a social gathering, or a literary club, or a political meeting, or a Freemasons’ society, or an Odd-fellows’ association, you know which they go to. God there fairly demonstrating that while such professed Christians pretend to be on his side, they are really on the other side; for there is a point-blank issue between Christ and the world, and the world has it. You know very well, whether you are a professed Christian or not, that the dividing line between the Church and the world to-day is — like the equator, or the arctic or antarctic circle — an imaginary line; and that there are men and women sworn of God who sit discussing infinitesimal questions, “Shall we dance? Shall we play cards? Shall we go to the theatre? Shall we attend the opera?” while there are five hundred millions of the race going down to darkness unwarned. These sham Christians will go on, occasionally taking a little religion with the tip -end of their fingers, sauntering on lazily toward the bar of Christ, until they come in front of God’s swift revolving mill, and find themselves to be “the chaff which the wind driveth away.”

Ob, how much dead wood we have in all our churches!

302 THE BYIXG NEED OF THE CllUnCII.

The day of judgment will make a fearfid thinning- out among professed Christians. I suppose it will be found on that day that there are hundreds of thousands of men who have their names on the church books who really made religion a second-rate or third-rate thing; living for themselves, unmindful of God and the salvation of the race, and then tumbling over the embankment where Judas went, and Achan went, and where all those shall go who do not make religion the primordial thing — the first and the last matter of the soul. O worldly professor of religion, vacillating professor, idle professor, tremble before God to-day! Do you not know that if you die as you are, all the communion-tables at which you have ever sat will lift up hands of blood, crying for your condemnation? And your neglected Bible, and your prayerless pillow, will cry, “Go down! go down! You pretended to have religion, but you had none. Out of the seven days of the week, you gave not five hours to Christ. You broke your sacramental oath. Go down! go down!” And the fieriest and mightiest thunder-bolt of God’s indignation that is ever forged will smite you into darkness. I would rather be the man, in the last day, who has never seen a church, than you who professed to be so much, and to do so much, and yet did nothing! You shall perish in the way when God’s wrath is kindled but a little. O worldly professor of religion! — and there are hundreds of them here to-day, I am aiming at the mark — if you could now realize your true condition and 3’our true position before God, you would bite your lip until the blood came; you would wring your hands until the bones cracked; you would utter a cry that would send this whole audience to their feet with a horror. May God wake jom up, worldly professor of religion, before you wake up in the barred and flaming dungeons of a destroyed eternity! When you look abroad and see lethargy among the professors of religion almost all the world over, do you not see that there is a need that the bugles, and the cymbals, and the drums, and the trumpets of all earth and heaven call upon the Church to wake up the dormant professors of religion? “Awake, thou that sleepest; awake, and Christ shall give thee light.”

Still further, I see a need for a great awakening in the fact that those of us who preach the Gospel have so Utile enilaisiasm and zeal compared with what ive ought to have. Now, you. see, the gun kicks. It is a tremendous thing to stand before an audience on Sabbath-days, realizing the fact that the majority of them will believe what you say about God and the soul and the great future! Suppose a man asked of you the road to a certain place, and you carelessly and falsely told him, and afterward you heard that through lack of right direction that man wandered on the mountains, fell over the rocks, and lost his life. You could not forgive yourself You would say, “I wish I had taken more time with that man. I wish I had given him specific directions so he would not have been lost. How sorry I feel about it!” But, oh, to misdirect the eternal interests of a large congregation! How cold and stolid we stand in our pulpits, actually sometimes priding ourselves on our deliberation, when we have no right to be cold, and ought to be almost frantic with the perils that threaten our hearers; so much so that some of us give no warning at all, -and we stand Sabbath after Sabbath talking about “human development,” and we pat men on the back and we please them, and we hide eternal retribution, nnd we sing them all down through the rapids to the last plunge. Or, as the poet has it,

“Smooth down the stubborn text to ears polite,
And snugly keep damnation out of sight!”

Oh, my brethren in the ministry — for I see them always in the audience — my brethren in the ministry, we can not afford to do that way. If you prophesy good things, smooth things, to your people, without regard to their character, what chance will there be for you in the day when you meet them at the bar of God? You had better stand clear of them then. They will tear you to pieces. They will say, “I heard you preach five hundred times, and I admired your philosophic disquisition, and your graceful gestures, and your nicely molded sentences, curvilinear and stelliform, and I thought you were the prince of proprieties; but you didn’t help me to prepare for this day. Cursed be your rhetoric, cursed be your art! - I am going down, and I’ll take you with me. It is your fault; witness all the hosts of heaven and all the hosts of darkness, it is your fault, sir;” and the chorus will come up from all worlds, “Ilis fault! his fliult!” All of us who preach this Gospel need to speak as though the pulpit quaked with the tramp of eternal realities; as though beneath us were the bursting graves of the resurrection morn; as though rising above us, tier above tier, were the myriads of heaven looking down, ready to applaud our fidelity-, or hiss at our stolidity, while coming through the Sabbath air were the long, deep, harrowing groans of the dying- nations that are never dead. May God with a torch from heaven set all the pulpits of England, and Scotland, and Ireland, and the United States on fire! As for myself, standing here in this presence this morning, I feel as if I had never begun to preach. If God will forgive me for the past, I will do better for the future.

“‘Tis not a cause of small import
The pastor’s care demands;
But what might fill an angel’s heart,
It filled a Saviour’s hand.

“They watch for souls for which the Lord
Did heavenly bliss forego;
For souls that must forever live
In raptures or in woe.”

Still further, I see a need for a great awakening in the fact that the Jcingdom of God is making so slow progress. I simply state a fact when I say that in many places the Church is surrendering, and the world is conquering. Where there is one man brought into the kingdom of God through Christian instrumentality, there are ten men dragged down by dissipations. Fifty grog-shops built to one church established. Literary journals in different parts of the country filled with scum and dandruff and slag, controlled by the very scullions of society, depraving every thing they put their hands on. Three hundred and ten newspapers, journals, and magazines in New York, and more than two hundred of them depraving to the public taste, if not positively inimical to our holy Christianity. Look abroad and see the surrender, even on the part of what pretend to be Christian churches, to spiritualism and humanitarianism and all the forms of devilism. If a man stand in his pulpit and say that unless you be born again 3’ou will be lost, do not the tight kid-gloves of the Christian, diamonds bursting through, go up to their foreheads in humiliation and shame? It is not elegant. A mighty host in the Christian Church, positively professing Christianity, who do not believe in the Bible out and out, in and in, from the first word of the first verse of the first chapter of the book of Genesis down to the last word of the last verse of the last chapter of the book of Kevelation. And when, a few Sabbaths ago, I stood in this pulpit, and said, “I fear that some of this audience will be lost for the rejection of Christ,” there were four or five of the daily papers that threw up their hands in surprise at it.

Oh, we have magnificent church machinery in this country! We have sixty thousand American ministers; we have costly music; we have great Sunday-schools; and yet I give you the appalling statistic that in the last twenty-five years, laying aside last year, the statistics of which I have not yet seen — within the last twenty-five years the churches of God in this country have averaged less than two conversions a year each. There has been an average of four or five deaths in the churches. How soon, at that rate, will this world be brought to God? We gain two; we lose four. Eternal God, what will this come to? I tell you plainly that while here and there a regiment of the Christian soldiery is advancing, the Church is falling back. for the most part, and falling back, and falling back; and if you do not come to complete rout — ay, to ghastly Bull Eun defeat — it will be because some individual churches hurl themselves to the front, and ministers of Christ, trampling on the favor of this world and sacrificing every thing, shall snatch up the torn and shattered banner of Emmanuel, and rush ahead, crying, “On! on! This is no time to run; this is the time to advance.”

I see, still further, the need of a great awakening in the muUitudinous going-down of iniforgiven souU. Since many of you came on the stage of action, a whole generation lias gone into the gates of eternity. Your opportunity to act upon tbeni is gone. They have disappeared from the churches, from the stores, the shops, the streets, from the homes* Many of them are now — what is the use of my hiding the flct and being the coward in regard to it? no, I will tell you just as it is — many of them are going out of this world without one item of preparation. Their soul dropped fiat into the lost world. That is, if the Bible is true; and I am supposing it is. You, 0 Christian man! had an opportunity of meeting them. You did meet them. You talked with them on other subjects. You had an opportunity of saying the saving word, and you did not say that saving word. Just think of that! Oh, where is the fountain where, with sleeves rolled up, we may wash our hiinds from the blood of souls? There is no need, perhaps, of mourning over that just now. We can not change it. They are dead, and they are destroyed — those M’ho believed not in Christ — they are destroyed.

The only question is, whether, as Christian men and women, we can now interrupt the other procession that is marching down, and will, after a while, if unarrested by God’s grace, fiiU off. There are going out from our stores hundreds of thousands of clerks; going out from our factories hundreds of thousands of operatives; there are going out of our colleges hundreds of thousands of students; there are going out of our fields hundreds of thousands of husbandmen, to join the ranks of death. They are fighting their way down. They storm and take every impediment put in their way; and who will throw himself in the way of this stampede of dying men and women — who? — crying, “Halt! halt!” If there be eio-ht hundred millions of the race unblessed, and the churches average two souls saved in a year, will you let this generation go down, and the next, and the next?

Is it not time for something desperate? Inanimate solicitation will not do. They will not stop for that. You need a momentum gathered by a whole night’s wrestle with the omnipotent God. Oh, these dying souls! these dying souls! What shall we say to them? What shall we do for them? Catch them before they make the last spring. Put down every thing else, and run for their rescue. To-morrow may be too late. To-night may be too late. Three o’clock this afternoon may be too late. Now reach over the pew and seize that soul before it flashes out of your sight forever. Their house is on fire, and no ladder to the window. Their ship is going down, and no life-boat. O men and women of God, awake!’ awake! Fly! fly! Death! death! Judgment! judgment! Ileaven! heaven! Hell! hell! Oh that all rewards and punishments, all joys and sorrows, and the agonizing and rapturous vociferation of three worlds would arouse 3’ou to-day! The death-knell of a great multitude of souls is tolling now, and your hand is on the rope. O God! flame upon us these overwhelming realities! Kill our stolidity. Knock from under us our couches of ease. Consume our indifference, and throw us into the battle. An eternity of work — an eternity of work to do in ten years. Ay, perhaps in one year, perhaps in one month, perhaps in one day’, perhaps in one hour, perhaps in one minute, perhaps in one second, and this the last. But no one drops down, and so I think God is going to spare us to wake up out of our indolence and realize the truth that the dying need of tho Church to-day is a great awakening.

I need not rehearse in this presence what God has done for us as an individual church. You have heard with your own ears the cries for mercy, and you have seen the raining tears of repentance, for the last eighteen months, I do not believe that there is any church in this land that owes God more of gratitude than this church owes him to-day. But who can count the number of our permanent congregation who are not Christians? And what about the eighty or one hundred thousand souls of strangers that, during the last year, floated in and out our assemblages? and what about the eternity of those who are now, and will be this year, in our permanent congregation, and the eighty or one hundred thousand souls that during this cominsr twelve months will float in and out our services, and the vaster audience to whom this church preaches week by week on both sides of the sea through the Christian printing-press? Oh, I feel as if I should sink down, sometimes, I feel almost wild with the sense of responsibility. Shall I meet them at the last, and I know I have not half done my duty? Shall you meet them at the last, and I know that you have not done yours? 0 fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ, we must get on faster than this! We want not so much a shower of blessings as a deluge; not so much a regiment as a phalanx, as a battalion. Can you get it? Yes. Nothing conjectural about it; nothing adventitious about it. Yes, if you will pray for it, and toil for it, and be sure it is coming. If John Livingston, in a small church, in one service had five hundred souls brought to God, why may you not, in a larger church, have three thousand souls as easily as he had five hundred? It is the same Gospel. John Livingston did not save them. It is the same Holy Ghost. It is the same

great Jebovali. If John Knox could put the lever of prayer under Scotland until be moved it from end to end, shall you not by the lever of importunate petition move this whole city of Brooklyn, from the East River to New Utrecht, and from New Utrecht to Hunter’s Point? God can do, and he will do, it, if you mightily and relentlessly ask him to do it. Oh, fling body, mind, and soul, and eternal destiny into this one thing. Swing out and enlarge in your prayerful expectations. You asked God for hundreds of souls, and he gave them to you; and I sometimes heard you ask for thousands; and 1 am very certain that if you asked for thousands with the same faith that you had asked for hundreds, God would have given you thousands. There is no need, in this presence, of bringing the old stereotyped illustrations of the fact that God hears prayer, nor telling you about Ilezekiah’s restored health, and about Elijah and the great rain, and about the post-mortem examination of the apostle James, which found that his knees had become callous by much praying; nor of Richard Baxter, wdio stained the walls of his study with the breath of pra3’er; nor of John Welch and the midnight plaid; nor of George AVhitcfield flat on his face before God. No need of my telling you these things. I turn in on your own consciousness, and I review the memory of that time when your own soul was sinking, and God heard y’our cry; and of that time when your child was dying, and God heard your petition; and of that time when 3’our fortune failed, and God set in your empty pantry the cruse of oil and the measure of meal. I want no illustration at all. I just take a ladder with three rungs, and set it down at your feet. Oh that you would mount it, and, if you will look off, sec the salvation of ten thousand of your fellow- citizens.

“Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.” Put your right foot on the lower rung of that ladder, and your left on the second rung of it, and that will bring 3’our right foot on the top rung. Then hold fast, and look out and see the wave of the Divine blessing dashing higher than the top-gallants of your shipping. Oh yes, God is ready to hear.

I think the Lord puts on us, as a Church, a great responsibility. We set our hands to the work of evangelization. We are doing nothing else here. We do not want to do any thing else here but this work of evangelization; that is, we want to bring men and women to Christ, and bring them now.

I do not know how you feel, my brethren, but my heart is breaking with a longing that I have for the redemption of this people. If God does not give me my prayer, I can not endure it. I offer myself, I offer my life, to this work. Take it, 0 Lord Jesus! and slay me if that be best. Whether by my life or by my death, may a great multitude of souls here be born to God. If from the mound of my grave more can step into the kingdom of God than through my life, let me now lie down to the last sleep. But only let the people be saved. Lord Jesus, it is sweet to live for thee; methinks it would be sweet to die for thee. If in the Napoleonic wars six millions fell; if in the wars of the Roman empire one hundred and eighty millions fell, shall there not be a great many in our day who are willing to sacrifice, not only worldly ambition, but sacrifice all for Christ? I wish we knew how to pra3 I do not. I mean the prayer that always brings the blessing. I wish we might be so overborne with anxiety for the salvation of men that from ten o’clock at nioht until six o’clock in the morning sleep would fly from our e3’elicls. Oh for a whole night of prayer! I have a notion to try it. I will try it. Will you? Shall it be to-night, or to-morrow night, or the next night? If there come to your soul such a night as that — a sleepless night, because full of prayer to God for his blessing on your own soul and on the souls of others — then, let there be mourning that night. Break forth into weeping that night over your sins. O Church of God, cry aloud for mercy on your own souls and on the souls of others. Let there be wailing, wailing, wailing. Let there be shouting, shouting, shouting. But, lest God may not leave us a night for prayer; lest, before the setting of this day’s sun, our account be made up, let us now go down so low before God that there shall be no lower depth of humiliation. Oh for a blood-red prayer that will bow the heavens, and make all the unforgiven souls in this house surrender just now to the bleeding, groaning, dying Jesus — a blessing that shall shake this house as by tempest and earthquake! To your knees, to your knees, ye who know how to pray. But I can not lead you in such a ])raycr as that. Let every one pray for himself. Let the prayer be in silence, God only hearing. Every one praying for himself and praying for others, that even now the cloud of mercy may drop. Hush! all the voices. Let it be silent prayer!

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