The White Life

The Rev. W. E. Biederwolf is one of the most
successful evangeHsts of. the present day. If one
feature of his work should be
more emphasized than another
it is his ability to influence men.
This chapter is an abridgement
of his sermon on the “White
Life.” God has used it to turn
the attention of thousands unto
Himself in many cities and
towns where it has been delivered. As a result of it hundreds have accepted Jesus
Christ as a Savior.

“Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way?” — Psalm 3: 9.

Scripture — 2 Sam. 18.

David is king of Israel and Absalom his own boy is arch-conspirator against the throne. David has fled from Jerusalem and gone to a city beyond the Jordan, while close at hand in the forest of

•Tliis address (“White Life No. 2”) is not the “White Life” as published in booklet form, which is wholly a personal purity talk; the two serve different purposes.

Ephraim a hard-fought battle is in progress, and at the head of Israel’s army is the king’s own son. Great issues are involved; the throne of David and his life as well are at stake. The king is at the gate of the city while the watchman has mounted the wall to look for coming news of the battle. As he looks he sees two men running alone; he has no sooner told the king below than the men arrive in breathless haste with tidings from the field. The fortunes of the day have been with David’s troops. The enemy has suffered defeat, the rebellion has been crushed, and its leader, with three arrows through his heart, is hanging by his hair among the boughs of an oak. But while the returning troops are shouting their songs of triumph, the king, broken-hearted, goes up to the chamber ‘over the gate to weep, and as he goes thus he says: “O, my son, Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!”

David was weeping over a wasted life. What splendid opportunities this young man did have for a bright and honorable career! He had had all that any young man could have. Fortune had smiled upon him and laid at his feet all the wealth, the culture and knowledge of an oriental monarchy. What prospects for the years to come, but what a miserable failure he made of it all! And he’s not the only young man of whom I know or you know who has had opportunities just as good as his, but whose sun has gone down at high noon and whose life has been wrecked just as sadly as this one of which we speak.

Absalom’s career might briefly be summed up by saying: “He was a fast young man.” He was rich. It might have been better for him if he had been poor. If wealth is the gift of fortune, then the smile of fortune often makes a man unfortunate. You may not have to work for your living, but you do have to work for your character, and the man who has his living made for him has a pretty hard row to hoe if out of the God-given material of his own self he carves and chisels a character that shall stand the test both of time and of eternity. Money is all right if honestly acquired. Get all you can, but don’t can all you get. Use it for God and your family and it will bring a blessing into your life, but remember that great wealth has kept more young men away from a pure life than ever has the want of it.

Great wealth led Absalom, as it does so many young men today, into high life, and high life led him, as it does so many young men to-day, into a fast life, and fast life is invariably the macadamized road to hell. Young men, let your ambition rise higher than to be a mere pet in society. Life is a battle, a real stern conflict, and a good many of us have already found it out, and it’s not going to be fought with quaker guns and toy pistols, and there isn’t any room for the feather-brained dude, the young man with more collar than culture.

“The young man who would
Be a woman if he could;
But since he can’t does all he can
To show the world he’s not a man.”

And the young man who finds his chief delight in the wine room and the bilHard room and the cheap theatre will find himself enervated for the struggle and defeated in the contest.

Now, if we had time, we might easily see that Absalom was guilty of all the sins peculiar to his time and long years after this scene occurred his old white-haired and broken-hearted father took up his pen and wrote these words: “Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way?” Now David knew what he was writing about from bitter experience; and if there is one man in this audience or in all this city whose life can’t be made a little whiter and a little cleaner and a little more Christlike by the grace of God, he’s not like the rest of us poor fellows. God help us! and God help him too, for I verily believe that no man’s life is so unclean as he who with brazen face will boast that he needs no cleansing whatsoever. God give us honest hearts just now.

SABBATH DESECRATION.

What about Sabbath desecration? The former holy hush of God’s best day has given way to the rabble rush for pleasure and the greed for gold. If a man had given you six dollars, it would be pretty mean to steal his seventh and last one, wouldn’t it? And it seems to me the same principle ought to keep a man from using God’s seventh and sacred day in a way to please himself when God has already given him six days in which to attend to the business and pleasures of this world. It may be there are some here who have already desecrated this day, and I want to ask you, if God lets you live to see the light of another Sabbath, that you will spend its sacred hours so that at the going down of its sun you can say, I have lived this day just as I would have lived it had I known I was to meet my God at its close.

PROFANITY.

What about the sin of profanity — this high crime of taking the name of God in vain with almost every sentence that some men utter? I wonder if there’s anybody here that needs to have his way cleansed from a thing like that? I sometimes feel a sense of pity for the victim of’ certain habits, but there’s no sin that’s so absolutely senseless and so little to be excused as this habitual scorching the lips with the name of the most holy God in profanity. The man who does it without effort or desire to cease from it is low-grained in his fiber and altogether unworthy of being recognized as a gentleman. You’re not having any trouble to understand me, are you? It’s a sad commentary on men when a mother can’t send her child down the street on an errand unless he has his little heart sowed full of the seeds of profanity before he gets back. I heard a father the other day utter a most damnable oath before his little seven-year-old boy.

Man, you’d better be dead and in your grave than to be living- with those given to you by God and be guilty of a thing like that.

INTEMPERANCE.

What about the sin of intemperance; this awful vice that holds in its clutch 250,000 of the once fairest of our land, and sends 70,000 of them every year down into a drunkard’s grave? I read the other day that the beer drank in this country every year would fill a canal forty feet wide and fourteen feet deep and twenty miles long. I know a lot of fellows who’d like to swim in a canal like that. It is told of Jonah in the Bible that he ran away from God and entering a ship to go down to Tarshish he paid the fare thereof, i don’t know what he paid; he was a prophet and may be he traveled on half rates, but anyhow the distance was short and it only cost him a trifle for his passage, but you know that he paid pretty dearly for that trip before he got through with it. And so many a young man has taken his first glass of intoxicating liquor and paid the price thereof, or had some other fellow pay it for him; only a few cents, five or maybe ten, but if he could have looked down the pathway of time for twenty years and seen the awful cost of that first glass he would have shrunk from it as from a viper in his path.

GAM BUNG.

What about gambling? I wonder if there is any need of a cleansing in this place from a thing like that? No doubt there is, and a great need of it too, unless this place differs from most others where I am privileged to speak in these days; and some of those engaging in it can ill afford to spare the few dollars that ought to go to cheer and brighten the homes and the hearts of the wives and little ones, I think a gambler is about the meanest, lowest, most disreputable thing that passes for a man of anything that breathes under the sun. The man who with a black heart under a white shirt front will take another man’s money on the plea that he ran a chance of losing his own — with every cent he wins and with every penny he loses his infernal passion is fanned into a fiercer flame until he will sacrifice on the altar of his lust, his money, his honor, his home, his love, and what were once his loved ones, and then will rattle his dice and shuffle his cards on the coffin of his victims and pocket the blood red gold of his murdered kindred. Judas was a gambler, and he sold his Christ for thirty pieces of silver, and I read in the Bible that they took the money and bought a graveyard with it, and called it in the Syriac language Aceldema, which means “The Field of Blood.” And this afternoon, over every race course, over every faro table and gambling device; over every church fair or anywhere where a man or woman wins or loses what otherwise would not be theirs, simply because they have taken a risk and chanced to hold the lucky number, I would write the words “Blood Money,” and brand everyone thus engaged as a dishonest man or a dishonest woman.

IMPURE IMAGINATION.

What about the sins of the imagination? Oh, these imaginations of ours, how often they are unholy; this fairy land, the enchanted ground, the place of odorous flowers and rosy clouds and balmy breezes where all unseen and undiscovered this subtle power creates unholy scenes of lust and dream those ravishing, venturesome dreams, and entertaining the bewitching thought rolls it over and over in the mind like a sweet morsel under the tongue until the deed has been dotle and the sin committed a thousand times over in the heart although restraint may be practiced in the outer life. An impure imagination can pierce through anything to see a forbidden object; it can lend beauty to beastliness and transform a loathsome vice into a bewitching charm, and once let an impure imagination be thus brought into play and it will set the whole of a man’s sensual nature on fire with Hell. There is not one fallen man or fallen woman — and notice I speak of a fallen man just as I do of a fallen woman; God only knows which one has fallen the lowest, but I utterly loathe this sentiment that would stone the woman and let the man go free, that would trod the victim of his lust down in the mire and let the man wipe his lips and step back into decent society — but I say you will not find one such man or woman whose fall did not lie through a polluting preparatory process in which the imagination was indulged in the forbidden sweets of sin. “Think well and do well will follow thought.”

UNHOLY CONVERSATION.

What about these lips of ours and the sin of unholy conversation? In the presence of a depraved prostitute you can hear words that would disgrace the foulest denizen of the lowest pit of Hell, but how men of fairly decent type can scorch their lips with the selfsame stuflf is enough to make a pure man sick in his heart. A private in the army said to me: “Chaplain, what shall I do? The last thing I hear at night in our tent and the first thing in the morning is nothing but the foulest smut and indecency”, and my own ears were compelled to listen to literal battles of language to see who could put the filthiest things in the dirtiest dress. And the young Cuban lads that hung around the lines of the regiments, picking up a few words of Americano, that is supposed to stand for the best and most exalted that civilization can show, the very first words they were taught were those expressive of the dirtiest and foulest things that a rotten heart could imagine. Father, if you have a pure-hearted boy you might better with thanksgiving see him go down to his grave than to see him forming associations with such fetid vultures of moral disease, and better go there yourself than to live and be uttering such corruption in his presence. If I had a boy I’d rather see him living in the slimy air of some foul dungeon with lizards and scorpions and venomous toads, if his heart were pure, than to have him dwell with men who deem a little smut and indecent stories things to laugh at, and then to see in the end a whole nest of hissing vipers wriggling in his heart. Foul language spreads contagion worse than smallpox, and it can’t be quarantined, but goes from lip to lip and heart to heart with its withering, damning curse; like a slimy serpent it winds its venomous coils about holy manhood and pure womanhood, and drags them through sensual mire down to Hell, Where is the man who will take upon himself the vow of a white life? Let him begin with a white tongue.

UNHOLY ACTION.

And now one step farther. What about the sins of unholy action? Do any of us need to have our way cleansed from that? Young men, boys, may I say a word to you as an elder brother? There is a sin that is blighting our young manhood in its early morning and reliable physicians who are in a position to know say it is well-nigh universal. Let me ask you to be warned and to shrink from it as you would from a viper in your path, for it will sting you to death.

“keep thyself pure.”

And now but one thing more, and I refer to the human scoundrelism that looks upon a woman as the legitimate prey of a man’s beastly passions and polluted appetites; the blackheartedness that sacrifices the pearl of a woman’s chastity to swinish lust; the foul seducer of virtue who, under the promise of speedy marriage, will take advantage of that which is best in a woman — her love — and then fling her aside and let her lie scorned and unhelped in her shame. When Paul wrote to Timothy, he said: “Keep thyself pure,” and the doctrine that impurity is a necessity is a damnable fallacy. If there is a man in your city who calls himself a doctor and will tell your young men that such a thing is a health essential, he isn’t fit to go into a decent home in your town; and if there is such a one here now, who would dare to say a thing like that, let him stand up and say it now; and before God and man you are a liar! God would never have said, “Thou shalt not,” if it were necessary to do so, and all reason and best medical authority declare it to be a chief source of physical debility. He who is not pure is not a man, and out of respect to animals we must not call him a brute. I am not speaking of the man who is falling short, about the man who is making an honest fight against the unholy passions of his life, but about the thing that passes for a man and has given himself up to that which is vile and unclean, and will even gloat over his work when it is done. Is there anything white about a man who will enter a home and with all his gentility and palavering smoothness win the esteem of the parents and the confidence of the daughter and blast it by his infernal rapacious lust? Is there anything white about a brother who expects his sister to be purer than himself? Is there anything white about a man who expects his wife to be pure and is not pure himself? Sam Jones said it, and it is true, “If there is any place in Hell deeper and darker than another it ought to be for that man who will go home at night from a house of shame and pillow his dirty old head by the side of his sweet, virtuous wife.” And I call upon you ‘to enter into a crusade against the foul-mouthed man, to boycott the impure boaster and the betrayer of innocence until the blush ot shame can never come to the face of your daughter or your sister because society tolerates such men to move within its circle.

Two things ought to be said just here: All these things increase just like the weeds in a garden, unless they are rooted out. Out in California where they drive the stages down the steep mountain sides, it is necessary to put the brake on hard lest the coach plunge down upon the haunches of the horses. There was some time ago a very godless driver who had been for forty years on a certain route. He was a vile, profane man, who often boasted that he feared neither God, man nor the devil. At last he was on his deathbed, and as he lay there his friends noticed him kicking out with his right foot as if he were reaching for something. They thought it too warm and took off most of the covers, but still he continued to reach out with his right foot. They spoke to him but received no response. At last his old chum, Joe, came and said: “Bill, what’s the matter? Isn’t there something I can do for you?” And, looking up into Joe’s face with a look that Joe said he never could forget. Bill said: “My God, I’m speeding down the hill and I can’t find the brake.” Speeding down hill and I can’t find the brake! Young men, put on the brake at the top of the hill, and stand to-day in the strength of God and your manhood and you can live a life that an angel would be proud to own.

The other thing is this: We’re all guilty! You may not be a gambler, I may not be a profane man, and you may not be an impure man, but we all of us are sinners and have within us the root of sin from which these things spring. We are not perfect, and we need to have our lives cleansed. How shall it be done? Listen. “As a man thinketh in his heart so is he.” “Out of the heart proceedeth evil thoughts and such like.” If the fountain head of a stream is unclean, how can you expect clean water to flow down the river? And if the heart is unclean, how are you going to have pure thoughts to dwell in the mind and pure words to fall from the lips and pure actions to characterize the life? And now listen. “If we confess our sin He is faithful and just to forgive us our sin,” — thank God, it makes no difference about the past, — “and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness,” You’ve tried to win the victory alone and you know how you’ve failed, but listen again. “The Spirit of the life of Christ makes me free from the law of sin and death.” Believe it and try it.

And now I want you to listen to four or five brief reasons why every man of us ought to live the White life, the Christ life, which is the Christian life.

The first is, it is the manly life. I have never heard of but one man who ever gave any real reason for not being a Christian, and he frankly confessed that he wasn’t man enough. It takes a man to be a Christian; anybody can live the other kind of life. There are some men who are daring to refuse the surrender of their lives of God, thinking to do just as they please, as long as they please, and expecting God to save them when they get a good ready to let Him. Man, if you’ve ever thought a thing like that, never think it again and lay claim to being a real man.

Second, it is the reasonable life. I have heard of a man who said he was going to decide this thing in a reasonable way, and that he would write down on one piece of paper all the reasons why he ought to be a Christian, and on another all the reasons why he ought not to be a Christian, and then he would weigh the matter in a rational way and decide like a reasonable man. And so he began. He wrote first the reasons why he ought to be a Christian, and his pen just flew down the paper and up on the other side until it was all full of reasons; and then he began with the reasons why he ought not to be a Christian. He put down the figure one and there his pen stopped. He could not think of one single reason why he ought not to be a Christian. And you can’t either. There are no such reasons. Some men talk and act as though the gospels were unworthy the endorsement of a thinking brain, but, friends, the brains of the world are marshalled on the side of the gospel. Mr. Gladstone was a brainy man, wasn’t he? and he said: “Forty years have

I been in the service of my country, and I have come in contact with sixty of the master minds ot the kingdom, and they were all Christians but three or four.” Your martyred president was not too brainy to be a Christian. The present president is not too brainy to be a Christian. No, brother, come with all your intellect to-day and you will find yourself in agreeable company as far as brains go.

In the third place, it is the life of great blessing. Every man who has tried it knows tl/is is true. Why, man, you can lie down to sleep every night with heaven in your soul if you’re living a Christian life; and oh, what it would mean for the home if father and husband were only a Christian.

In the fourth place, it is the heavenly life. Paul says: “They that do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of Heaven.”

I have read the story of a man upon whom the drink habit had fastened its terrible grip; it took his wife and child from a beautiful home to a miserable garret. One day a message came to him while in a drunken stupor, saying to him that if he wanted to see his little boy alive he must come at once. It sobered him instantly, and, going home, he found his boy with but an hour of life before him. He had been playing in the street and was run over by a large wagon and terribly crushed. As the father came and knelt at the cot, the little fellow took his hand and said: “Father, I can’t die till you promise me you will give up your sin and meet me and mamma in Heaven.” “And,” said the man, “with his hand in mine I promised God

I’d make an honest effort to give up my sin, and promised my boy I’d meet him in the better world, and ever since that time I have felt the clutch of my little boy’s hand pulling me higher and higher, and I know I can’t help reaching Heaven at last.” And, man, if you ever reach Heaven, if in your redeemed state you ever meet again those you love, it will be when you take your stand for God with the other Christian men of this community, and by His help make an honest effort to forsake your sin.

Let me now mention a last reason, and it seems to m’e it ought to stir all that is best and noblest in every man here. It is this: others need your help. There are men here who could stand up to-day and say: “I mean henceforth to be a Christian man,” and your whole family would come running into the kingdom of God; but because you have not had the courage or have not had the concern to take your stand boldly on the side of God, you have been standing in the way of those whom God has given you.

I said this one time in Ohio, and a man well on in years came to me at the close of the meeting and said: “Did you mean what you said?” And I replied, I did most certainly mean that very thing; and as I took the big man’s hand (for he was an unusually large fellow) his lips began to tremble and a tear stole in his eye as he said: “And to think of it that last year my nineteen-year-old boy was taken from me, and in all his life he had never heard his father pray.”

And I said: “Mr. Patton, give your heart to God to-night.” And he replied: “By the help of God I mean to be a Christian.”

The next night when the invitation was given I saw him coming down the aisle with a young lady, and when he reached the front he said: “Mr. Biederwolf, this is my daughter.” The next night I saw that young lady sitting with another and across the aisle was Mr. Patton with an elderly woman, and while the opportunity was being given for people to come to Christ I looked down among those who stood at the front, and there stood this man with the other just mentioned, and calling me to him, he said, “Mr. Biederwolf, this is my other daughter and this is my wife,” and there he was with his entire family inside the kingdom of God, because he had done at last what for many long years the Spirit of God had been constraining him to do.

There are men here this afternoon who have been blighting the faith of your wives and by your indifference to the things of God have been throwing wet blankets on the endeavor of the mother to train the little one in the way of Christ; there are fathers here to-day whose children not only have never heard you pray, but in whose little hearts the tender sprout of faith and love is being frozen by your disposition toward Christ and the concerns of the soul.

Oh, man, you’ve been worse than the Chinese, for while they dwarf the feet of their little ones you have been dwarfing their souls and crushing out of their hearts every inclination to be pure and holy and Christlike. Father, in God’s name, what do you mean? You’ve all doubtless heard the story; I tell it only because it is so forceful, the story of a man going out to his barn one wintry morning after a fresh fall of snow. He did not know his little six-year-old boy was following until he heard the little voice behind him, saying: “Papa, I’se putting my feet in your tracks,” and looking back he saw the child stretching out his little legs and putting his foot in the place made by his father’s in the snow. Oh, father, that very thing is true of your child to-day; putting his feet in your tracks; which way are those tracks leading?

Mrs. J. K. Barney has been called “the prison angel”; and she has befriended more prisoners perhaps than any other woman of our day. Entering a New England prison one day, the warden said to her: “Mrs. Barney, there is a young prisoner dying; we have sent for his mother, but there has been a wreck on the old Cape Colony Road and she cannot arrive before her boy is dead. Won’t you be a mother to him?” Mrs. Barney knew what that meant; she went up to his bed and talked to him about God, and heard him say his faith was in Christ. Then he said: “Mrs. Barney, they tell me mother can’t get here until after I am gone; .won’t you say to her for me that I asked her to kiss me and say she would forgive me for all my sins against her?” and a few moments after the young man was dead. About an hour later the old train came rolling in. The mother’s first inquiry was for

i=;i her boy, and when told he was gone, she had to be fairly carried up the stairs to where he lay. Mrs. Barney delivered the message and what do you suppose the mother did? Just what your mother would done if you had lain in the young man’s place. She lifted back the sheet, and while tears streamed from her eyes she kissed his pale face and said: “Jo. your mother has come and she forgives you, but, O God, his father.”

“Mrs. Barney,” she said, “I suppose you think that this is a strange prayer to make, but when this boy was but nine years old I heard him utter an awful oath, and when I reproved him for it, he said: ‘Why, mamma, I heard papa say that last night,’ and when he was but twelve I found him half intoxicated, and with these arms I carried him into the home and held him until the stupor had worn away, and heard him say that the one who gave him the drink was his father. Mrs. Barney,” she said, “that was the beginning; this is the end,” and stooping down, she kissed him again and said: “Joe, your mother has come and she forgives you, but, oh, my God, the father.”

Listen, men, while I tell you something better than that. A young lad of fourteen lay dying and the broken-hearted father was kneeling by the bedside. “Willie,” he said, “I have a sad message for you; the doctor tells me you are dying.” The little boy closed his eyes just a minute and then, as a sweet smile stole across his face, he opened them and said: “Papa, I’m not afraid to die and when I die I’ll hurry up and find out Jesus and tell Him I had the best papa in all the world because you taught me all my days to love Him.”

Oh, father, if your boy were taken from you to-night could he say a thing like that about you? When the time comes that I must stand by the open grave of those I love I want to be able to lift my face to Heaven and say that while they were with me I did all I could to help them be as God would have them be. Don’t you? And God knows I could not say that, and you could not say it, unless we have been earnest and positive Christian men ourselves; and when the time comes when I must meet them again in the presence of the God of us all, I want that they shall be able to witness before Him that I was a help and not a hindrance to them on their way to Heaven. Don’t you? And if you do, will you say, “From this day I mean as far as I can to live the life I believe God wants me to live”?