Old Wells Dug Out

“And Isaac digged again the wells of water, which they had digged in the days of Abraham his father; for the Philistines had stopped them after the death of Abraham: and he called their names after the names by which his father had called them.” — Genesis xxvi., 18.

I]Sr Oriental lands a well of water is a fortune. If a king dug one, he became as famous as though he had built a pyramid or conquered a province. Great battles were fought for the conquest or defense of wells of water; castles and towers were erected to secure permanent possession of them. The traveler to-day finds the well of Jacob dug one hundred feet through a solid rock of limestone. These ancient wells of water were surrounded by walls of rock. This wall of rock was covered up with a great slab. In the centre of the slab there was a hole through which the leathern bottle or earthen jar was let down. This opening was covered by a stone. When Jacob, a young man of seventy years, was courting Rachel, he won her favor, the Bible says, by removing the stone from the opening of the well. He liked her because she was industrious enough to come down and water the camels. She liked him because he was clever enough to lay hold and give a lift to

one who needed it.

16 OLD WULL^ DUG GUT.

It was considered one of the greatest calamities that could happen a nation when these wells of water were stopped. Isaac, you see in the text, found out that the wells of water, that had been dug out by his father Abraham at great expense and care, had been filled up by the spiteful Philistines. Immediately Isaac orders them all opened again. I see the spades plunging, and the earth tossing, and the water starting, until the old wells are entirely restored; and the cattle come down to the trough and thrust their nostrils in the water, their bodies quaking at every swallow, until they lift up their heads and look around and take a long breath, the water from the sides of their mouths dripping in sparkles down into the trough. I never tasted such water in my life as in my boyhood I drank out of the moss-covered bucket that swung up on the chains of the old well-sweep; and I think when Isaac leaned over the curb of these restored wells, he felt within himself that it was a beverage worthy of God’s brewing. He was very careful to call all the wells by the same names which his father had called them by; and if this well was called “The Well in the Valley,” or “The Well by the Kock,” or “The Well of Bubbles,” Isaac baptized it with the same nomenclature.

You have noticed, my Christian friends, that many of the old Gospel wells that our fathers dug have been filled up by the modern Philistines. They have thrown in their skepticisms and their philosophies, until the well is almost filled up, and it is nigh impossible to get one drop of the clear water. These men tell us that you ought to put the Bible on the same shelf with the Koran and the old Persian manuscripts, and to read it with the same spirit; and there is not a day but somebody comes along and drops a brick or a stone or a carcass in this old Gospel well. We are told that all the world wants is development, forgetful of the fact that without the Gospel the world always develops downward, and that if you should take the religion of Christ out of this world, in one hundred years it would develop into the ‘’Five Points” of the universe. Yet there are a great many men and there are a great many rostrums whose whole work it is to fill up these Christian wells.

You will not think it strange, then, if the Isaac who speaks to you this morning tries to dig open some of the old wells made by Abraham, his father, nor will you be surprised if he calls them by the same old names.

Bring your shovel and pickaxe and crow-bar, and the first well we will open is the glorious well of the Atonement It is nearly filled up with the chips and debris of old philosophies that were worn out in the time of Confucius and Zeno, but which smart men in our day unwrap from their mummy-bandages, and try to make us believe are original with themselves. I plunge the shovel to the very bottom of the well, and I find the clear water starting. Glorious well of the Atonement! Perhaps there are people here who do not know what “atonement” means, it is so long since you have heard the definition. The word itself, if you give it a peculiar pronunciation, will show you the meaning — at-one-ment. Man is a sinner, and deserves to die. Jesus comes in and bears his punishments and weeps his griefs. I was lost once, but now I am found. I deserved to die, but Jesus took the lances into his own heart until his face grew pale and his chin dropped on his chest, and he had strength only to say, “It is finished!” The boat swung round into the trough of the sea, and would have been swamped, but Jesus took hold of the oar. I was set in the battle, and must have been cut to pieces had not, at night-fall, he who rideth on the white horse come into the fray. That which must have been the Waterloo of my defeat now becomes the Waterloo of my triumph, because Blucher has come up to save. Expiation! expiation! The law tried me for high treason against God, and found me guilty. The angels of God were the jurors impaneled in the case, and they found me guilty. I was asked what I had to say why sentence of eternal death should not be pronounced upon me, and I had nothing to say. I stood on the scaffold of God’s justice; the black cap of eternal death was about to be drawn over my eyes, when from the hill of Calvary One came. He dashed through the ranks of earth and heaven and hell. He rode swiftly. His garments were dyed with blood, his face was bleeding, his feet were dabbled with gore, and he cried out, “Save that man from going down to the pit. I am the ransom.” And he threw back the coat from his heart, and that heart burst into a crimson fountain, and he dropped dead at my feet; and I felt of his hands, and they were stiff; and I felt of his feet, and they were cold; and I felt of his heart, and it was pulseless; and I cried, “Dead!” And angels with excited wings flew upward, amidst the the thrones, crying, “Dead!” and spirits lost in black brood wheeled down amidst the caverns, crying, “Dead!” Expiation! expiation!

Cowper, overborne with his sin, threw himself into a chair by the window, picked up a New Testament, and his eye lighted upon this, “Whom God hath set forth as a propitiation through faith in bis blood;” and instantly he was free! Unless Christ pays our debt, we go to eternal jail. Unless our Joseph opens the king’s corn-crib, we die of famine. One sacrifice for all.

A heathen got worried about his sins, and came to a priest and asked how he might be cured. The priest said, “If you will drive spikes in your shoes and walk five hundred miles, you will get over it.” So he drove spikes in his shoes and began the pilgrimage, trembling, tottering, agonizing on the way, until he came about twenty miles, and sat down under a tree, exhausted. Near by a missionary was preaching Christ, the Saviour of all men. When the heathen heard it, he pulled off his sandals, threw them as far as he could, and cried, “That’s what I want; give me Jesus! give me Jesus!” Oh, ye who have been convicted and worn of sin, trudging on all your days to reap eternal woe, will you not, this morning, at the announcement of a full and glorious atonement, throw your torturing transgressions to the winds? “The blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth from all sin;” that was the very passage that came to the tent of Iledley Vicars, the brave English soldier, and changed him into a hero for the Lord.

Around this great well of the Atonement the chief battles of Christianity are to be fought. Ye Bedouins of infidelity, take the other wells, but do not touch this. I call it by the same name that our father Abraham gave it — the Atonement Here is where he stood, his staff against the well-curb. Here is where he walked, the track of his feet all around about the well. This is the very water that with trembling hand, in his dying moment, he piU to his lips. Oh, ye sun-struck, desertworn pilgrims, drive up your camels, and dismount! A pitcher of water for each one of you, and I will fill the trough for the camels. See the bucket tumble and dash into the depths; but I bring it up again, hand over hand, crying, “Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters!”

ISTow, bring your shovels and your pickaxes, and we will try to open another well. I call it the well of Christian comfort. You have noticed that there are a good many new ways of comforting. Your father dies. Your neighbor comes in, and he says, “It is only a natural law that your father should die. The machinery is merely worn out;” and before he leaves you, he makes some other excellent remarks about the coagulation of blood, and the difference between respiratory and nitrogenized food. Your child dies, and your philosophic neighbor comes, and for your soothing tells you that it was impossible the child should live with such a state of mucous membrane! Out! with your chemistry and physiology when I have trouble, and give me a plain New Testament! I would rather have an illiterate man from the backwoods who knows Christ, talk with me, when I am in trouble, than the profoundest worldling who does not know him. The Gospel, without telling you any thing about mucous membrane or gastric juice or hydrochloric ac “d, comes and says, “All things together work for gG^d to those who love Grod,” and that if your child is gone, it is only because Jesus has folded it in his arms, and that the Judgment-day will explain things that are now inexplicable. Oh! let us dig out this Gospel well of comfort. Take away the stoicism and fatality with which you have been trying to fill it. Drive up the great herd of your cares and anxieties, and stop their bleating in this cool fountain! To this well David came when he lost Absalom; and Paul, when his back was red and raw with the scourge; and Dr. Young, when his daughter died; and Latimer, when the flames of martyrdom leaped on his track; and M’Kail, when he heard the knife sharpening for his beheading; and all God’s sheep in all the ages.

After one of Napoleon’s battles, it was found that the fight had been so terrific that, when the muster-roll was called of one regiment, there were only three privates and one drummer-boy that answered. An awful fight that! Oh! that Christ to-day might come so mightily for the slaying of your troubles and sorrows that when you go home and call the muster-roll of the terrible troop, not one — not one — shall answer, Christ having quelched every annoyance, and salved every gash, and wiped every tear, and made complete extermination.

Now bring your shovels and pickaxes, and we will dig out another well — a well opened by our father Abraham, but which the Philistines have filled up. It is the well of Gospel Inviiaiion. I suppose you have noticed that religious address in this day, for the most part, has gone into the abstract and essayic. You know the word “sinner” is almost dropped out of the Christian vocabulary; it is not thought polite to use that word now. It is methodistic or old-fashioned. If you want to tell men that they are sinners, you must say they are spiritually erratic, or have moral deficits, or they have not had a proper spiritual development; and I have not heard in twenty years that old hymn,

“Come, ye sinners, poor and needy.”

In the first place, they are not sinners, and in the second place, they are neither poor ner needy! I have heard Christian men in prayer-meetings and elsewhere talk as though there were no very great radical change before a man becomes a Christian. All he has got to do is to stop swearing, clear his throat a few times, take a good wash, and he is ready for heaven! My friends, if every man has not gone astray, and if the whole race is not plunged in sin and ruin, then that Bible is the greatest fraud ever enacted; for, from beginning to end, it sets forth that they are. Now, my brothers and sisters, if a man must be born again in order to see the kingdom of God, and if a man is absolutely ruined unless Christ check his course, why not proclaim it? There must be an infinite and radical change in every man’s heart, or he can not come within ten thousand miles of heaven. There must be an earthquake in his soul, shaking down his sins, and there must be the trumpet-blast of Christ’s resurrection bringing him up from the depths of sin and darkness into the glorious life of the Gospel. Do you know why more men do not come to Christ? It is because men are not invited that they do not come. You get a general invitation from your friend: “Come round some time to my house and dine with me.” You do not go. But he says, “Come around to-day at four o’clock, and bring your family, and we’ll dine together.” And you say, “I don’t know as I have any engagement: I will come.” “I expect you at four o’clock.” And you go. The world feels it is a general invitation to come around some time and sit at the great Gospel feast, and men do not come because they are not specially invited. It is because you do not take hold of them and say, “My brother, come to Christ; come now — come now!” How was it that in the days of Daniel Baker and Truman Osborne, and Nettleton, so many thousands came to Jesus? Because those men did nothing else but invite them to come. They spent their lifetime uttering invitations, and they did not mince matters either? Where did John Bunyan’s pilgrim start from? Did he start from some easy, quiet, cozy place? No; if you have read John Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress,” you know where he started from, and that was the City of Destruction where every sinner starts from. Do you know what Livingstone, the Scotch minister, was preaching about in Scotland when three hundred souls under one sermon came to Christ? He was preaching about the human heart as unclean, and hard, and stony. Do you know what George Whitefield was preaching about in his first sermon, when fifteen souls saw the salvation of God? It was this: “Ye must be born again.” Do you know what is the last subject he ever preached upon? “Flee the wrath to come.” Oh! that the Lord God would come into our pulpits, and prayer-meetings, and Christian circles, and bring us from our fine rhetoric and profound metaphysics, and our elegant hair-splitting, to the old-fashioned well of Gospel Invitation. There are enough sinners in this house this morning, if they should come to God, to make joy enough in heaven to keep jubilee a thousand years. Why not come? Have you never had a special invitation to come? If not, I give it now: you, you, you, come now to Jesus! Why do you try to cover up that cancer with a piece of court-plaster, when Christ, the surgeon, with his scalpel, would take it all away, and it would ne-ver come again? Do you know

2-1 OLD WELLS DUO OUT.

that your nature is all wrong unless it has been changed by the grace of God? Do you not know that God can not be pleased with you, my dear brother, in your present state? Do you know that your sinful condition excites the wrath of God? “God is angry with the wicked every day.” Do you not know that you have made war upon God? Do you not know that you have plunged your spear into the Saviour’s side, and that you have punctured his temples, and spiked his feet, and that you have broken his heart?

Oh! is this what he deserves, you blood-bought soul? Is this the price you pay him for his long, earthly tramp, and his shelterless nights, and his dying prayer, and the groan that made creation shiver? Do you want to drive another nail into him? Do you want to stick him with another thorn? Do you want to join the mob that with bloody hands smote him on the cheek, crying, “His blood be on us and our children forever I” Oh, your sins! And when I say that, I do not pick out some man who may not have been in a house of worship for forty years, but I pick out any man you choose, whose heart has not been changed by the grace of God. Oh, your sins! I press them on your attention — the sins of your lifetime. What a record for a death-pillow! What data for the Judgment-day! What a cup of gall for your lips! Look at all the sins of your childhood and riper years, with their forked tongues and adder stings and deathless poignancy, unless Jesus with his heel shall crush the serpents. You have sinned against your God; 5^ou have sinned against your Jesus; you have sinned against your grave — ay, you have sinned against the little resting-place of your darling child, for you will never see her

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again unless you repent. How can you go to the good place, the pure place where she is, your heart unpardoned? You have sinned against a Christian father’s counsel and a dying mother’s prayer.

I saw an account the other day of a little boy who was to be taken by a city missionary, with some other boys, to the country to find homes. He was well clad, and had a new hat given him; but while the missionary was getting the other children ready to go, this boy went into a corner and took the hat he had thrown off, and tore the lining out of it. The missionary said, “What are you doing with that hat? You don’t want it. What are you tearing the lining out of it for?” “Ahl” said the boy, “that was made out of mother’s dress. She loved me very much before she died, and I have nothing to remember her by but the lining.” And so the boy tore it out and put it in his bosom. Oh! would you not like to have one shred of your mother’s religion to remember her by? Do not her prayers clamor for an answer this morning? Do you not see her hold her withered hands stretched out from the death-bed, begging you to come to God and be at peace with him? Would you not like to have the purity of your mother? Would you not like to have the comfort she felt in dark days? Would you not like to have some of that peace which she had in her last moments, when she looked up through her spectacles at you, and said she must go away, for Jesus called her, and you said, “Mother, we can’t spare you;” and the outcry of grief was answered by a long breath that told you it was all over? Oh, my God! let not m.other be on one side and father on the same side, and loved ones on the same side of the throne, and

I be on the other side. If we are this morning on the wrong side, let us cross over — let us cross over now. Blessed Jesus, we come, bruised with sin, and throw ourselves in the arms of thy compassion! None ever wanted thee more than we. Oh! turn on us thy benediction! Whatever else we lose or get, we must win heaven. “Lord, save us — we perish!”

Let us come around the old Gospel well. A good many of you came in these doors this morning carrying a very heavy burden. I do not know what it is — I can not guess what it is; but I noticed some of you, when you came in this morning, looked sad. It may be a home trouble you can not tell any body. How many have burdens on your shoulders and on your hearts! Come to the well; put down the pack right beside the well. Jacob’s well was one hundred feet deep, and cut through the rock; but this Gospel well is deep as eternity, and it is cut right down through the heart of the Son of God. Shovels opened that other well; spears opened this. You remember the old well-sweep in the country was made out of two pieces — one planted in the ground, and on it was swung a long beam, which we laid hold of in our boyhood and brought downward, and the bucket dipped into the water and came up full. So the cross of Jesus is made out of two pieces. I take one piece and plant it close by this good old well, and then swing on it the long piece, and I lay hold of it with my prayer, and I pull it down until the bucket strikes the bottom of the Saviour’s groans and the Saviour’s tears, and then I fetch it up, bubbling, foaming, brimming, sparkling, with the water of which, if a man drink, he shall never thirst.

*’ To the dear fountain of thy blood,
Incarnate God I I fly:
Here let me wash my spotted soul
From crimes of deepest dye,

“A guilty, weak, and helpless worm,
On thy kind arras I fall;
Be thou my strength and righteousnesSj
My Jesus and my all.”