Cessation of Experiment

“Thou shalt see greater things than these.” — John i., 50.

OX this, the fifth anniversary of my settlement as your pastor, I desire to tell the story of this church - — a story that has never yet been told. I tell it in answer to American and European letters, so numerous that, with the aid of a secretary, I have not been able to answer them. I tell it in recognition of the goodness of God. I tell it out of justice to the men and women who sit before me; out of justice to some who have already entered upon the white -robed congregations of heaven. It is a story of escapes, deliverances, losses, self-sacrificing achievement, wild tragedy, divine help, and of world-wide sympathy, that I do not think belongs to any other church of the century. There are passages that remind me of the going of the Israelites through the Red Sea. And yet it shall not be an epic, nor a lyric, nor a dithyrambic, but only a plain pastoral.

Seated in my Philadelphia home, the “call” came from this church. The eldership deceived me in nowise. They told me it was almost an extinct church. Nineteen members were all that could be rallied to a congregational meeting to make out the “call.” It was accepted, for the reason that the church was flat down; and I said to myself, “That will be just the place in which to try, on a large scale, a free church, without any established hinderances in the way.” And so, putting my trust in God, and confronting the derision of some of mj best personal friends at what they called a “wild undertaking,” I came to this, the fairest city under the sun. Blessed be her churches! Prospered be her commerce! Christianized be all her schools!

The first summer we enlarged the old chapel, and multiplied the seating capacity in every possible way. According to the most approved style, our pew-rents went up; and as the pew-rents went up, my heart went down. The next spring the unanimous cry was for a new church, and the trustees assembled to decide what it should be. With a suppressed excitement, such as I never before or since felt, I went into a neighbor’s parlor to lay before the trustees the plan of a free church. I tried to show them in that conversation that it is ungospel and unchristian to make a man’s financial qualification the test of pew-holding, and to show them that we had no right to knock down, under an auctioneer’s hammer, to the highest bidder, a man’s chances for heaven. There was a long pause. After a while one of the brethren remarked, “I have no doubt that a church on that plan would be the highest style of Gospel church; but where would we get the money to carry on such a project?” I replied, “Put your trust in Grod, and depend upon the voluntary subscriptions and contributions of the people. And since my own salary may be in the way, I now here, and for all time to come, discharge you of all financial responsibility to me personally. Give me a free church, and if you can not support me, then, by pen and lecturing platform, I will take care of myself.” “Well,” said one of the brethren, “if the dominie believes in the plan as much as that, I think we can afford to believe in it, and

I move we have a free church “— a resolution that passed with a unanimous “Aye.”

Then there came around about me a band of consecrated men and women sworn to do this work; and if I ever forget their fidelity to Christ, and their adherence to the good cause, may my tongue be forever still! The first question was to find a site for the building. Committees were appointed, and went up and down the city looking for a place, they having decided that we must have a place one hundred and fifty feet front by one hundred feet deep; and after weeks of searching, they found, within three doors of the old chapel, just the place — one hundred and fifty feet front by one hundred feet deep. Although the lot is larger now than it was then, that was the size of it then. The place was foreordained from all eternity to be the place where we should build. I was often asked, and I asked myself, “Why wasn’t that lot taken?” God was keeping it for us.

The next question to be decided was, Who shall be the architect? I went to one of the prominent architects of New York, and said, “Give us a church in amphitheatrical shape.” He figured on it a few weeks, and said, “An amphitheatrical building is not churchlyy I went to another distinguished architect, and said, ‘’Give us an amphitheatrical building, where the people can see each other’s faces instead of the back of the head, and where we can all be gathered as in a great home circle, and where nothing shall be angular.” He figured on it a while, and at the end of four weeks said to me that an amphitheatrical building would not be churchhj. One day a young man came into my room, and said, “Have you decided upon an architect for the building?” I replied, “No.” Said he, “Would I have any chance?” I replied, “Any man, young or old, who can give us an amphitheatrical church, where the people can all be seated in sympathy with each other, will be our architect.” Then I drew out on the back of a letter, in twenty strokes, the general idea, and said, “If you can bring that out with architectural skill, you will be our man.” So this plan was developed. That it was a good one, I take from the fact that there have been scores of churches since built on the same plan.

Then the trowel began to click, and the hammer to thump, and the building rose. As we were to build it for a temporary structure, to last but two years, in three months the whole affair was done; but, mark you, without having raised one dollar of contribution toward it. We depended upon the sale of the old church for the building of the new; but the purchasers of that building failed to meet their payments, and so the building came back upon our hands. Then, after the new building was done, we had to go through the work of attempting to pay for a church entirely completed, and some of you may know what tough work that is. Then we went on organizing — making hundreds of experiments in hundreds of things, because we had no precedent, no antecedent. Yet the work all the time progressed. At our very first communion in the old Tabernacle, more than ninety souls professed faith in Christ; at the second communion in the old Tabernacle, more than fifty souls; at the third communion in the old Tabernacle, more than forty souls; and that is the only way I know how to calculate the advancement of a church. Though you build a church as grand as St. Paul’s, of London, and have a line of carriages, with resetted coachmen, reaching from here to Prospect Park, I would abhor it if there were no conversions. That church is an accursed thing which knows nothing about soul-saving. Pull it down, and use its timbers and its stones for bowling-alleys and theatres. They are not so objectionable, because they pretend to be what they are; but a church which does nothing but rock souls into an eternal sleep under a gilded canopy is a gigantic hypocrisy, and defies the bolts of high heaven.

Well, the work went on. On the following summer we found that our Tabernacle was too strait for us, and so we enlarged it at an expense like building another new church. Meanwhile our church had sailed down into calm financial waters; and one December night the trustees of the church assembled to look over the affairs of the church, and they examined the income and the outgo, and saw that the next year they would have a positive surplus. They clapped their hands, and sat up very late that night talking the matter over, and they said, “This project of a free church, which some have caricatured and many have doubted, has proved to be a success.” It was about eleven o’clock at night when the sexton shut the door of the old iron-clad. Alas! that was the last night of the Tabernacle. That ark would never float any more souls into glory. Its work was done. And if, when a Christian man dies, the air is full of spirits coming and going, when a Christian church is about coming to its closing moments, I think that angelic spectators move forward and backward in the scene. I think that that night the air was full of them.

^Yhen next morning, at ten o’clock, the cry of fire was lifted, it was not a hoarse uproar, but it was a voice with tears in it. I said to a man the other day, “When did you become a Christian?” He replied, “When the old Tabernacle burned. I don’t cry often, I want you to understand, but I cried that morning, and I cried all day. Wasn’t it awful?” 0 Lord Jesus! great Head of the Church! what a day that was when thy children stood before their burning altar. Some sighed. Some wrung their hands. Some fainted. Invalids with unnatural strength got up from their couches and looked out at it. It was the death-throe of a church, its departing spirit spreading abroad wings of flame — its groan, the falling timbers. Let the firemen take off their glazed hats, and twenty thousand excited spectators bow down before the catafalque of fire. Dead! Dead! Ashes to ashes!

The loss was the more complete, because it was an iron structure on which we had not been able to get adequate insurance. So we were as thoroughly rubbed out as a sponge rubs out a sum from a boy’s slate at school. Then there came Sympathetic letters. I never got so many letters in one day in my life as I got on the following day. And then there came practical help. One thousand dollars from Dresden, Germany, where they make pictures. Help from Sheffield, England, where they make knives; from Glasgow, Scotland, where they make steamers; from Edinburgh, where they make scholars; from Paris, where they make — revolutions; from London, where they make every thing. It was not so much the amount they gave as the way they gave it. They said they had seen the fire in Yorkshire, and in old Essex, and among the Trossacks. They told us we were prayed for among the Manchester and Birmingham operatives. You know how it was in our own city. Twenty-C£S;SATIOS OF EXPEEIMENT. 421

six churches in as many hours were offered for our occupation. They offered us their main audience -rooms; they offered us their lecture-rooms; and what they did not offer us would not be worth mentioning. The demonstration of Christian brotherhood was so magnificent, that, as soon as I could get the cinders and the tears wiped out of my eyes, I said, “Well, brethren, I am glad the thing has burned up. We only built it for two years anyhow, and it was not large enough. Now let us rise up and have a larger and a better structure.”

To make the one year of our exile the more bearable, the Lord God came down with his spirit in the Academy of Music. Some people said, “You had better not go there; it is a theatre — a secular place.” But we went there, and had it dedicated. We dedicated the Director’s Room in that building by a prayer-meeting twice every Sabbath. We dedicated the “Greenroom” by cries of “What must I do to be saved?” We dedicated the platform by the story of a Saviour’s love, and never any thing else but that, morning and night. We dedicated the boxes by men and women who rose asking for prayers. We dedicated the main audience-room by five hundred and thirteen souls professing to have found the peace of the Gospel — -three hundred and seven of them connecting themselves with our church, the others going elsewhere, because we had as yet no home. And though that Academy of Music may be the scene of secular entertainments for many a year, there shall be no power in the voice o prima donna or in the blast of brazen instruments to drown out “St Martin’s” and “Coronation,” still rolling among those arches.

Meanwhile we selected a new architect — one who did

42-2 CESSATION OF EXPERIMEXT.

not think that an amphitheatrical building would be unchurchly; one who, after long experience in putting up some of the largest structures in England and the United States, brought all his achievements to a culmination in plans for this temple. The women — the Lord has written the record on high: I can not read it until I come up there — the women, by Fair, and by personal solicitation, raised money. The Board of Trustees brooded, after many a midnight, over the plans. The work went on, by what toil, by what hope deferred, by what anxiety, I can not tell, until on the 22d of February the veil was drawn from our eyes, and there rose before our vision this building, grander than our brightest anticipations, strong as the everlasting hills, and beautiful as a midsummer’s dream; offering seating capacity to several thousand more than any Protestant church in America.

There remained but two things to be tested: Can we pay for it? Will it be occupied? The first question you answered, when, on the opening day, you put in the Lord’s lap thirty-six thousand dollars, making a record for yourselves which, while it has won the admiration of Christendom, will be a page you will be glad of in the great day when Christ shall say, “Well done, good and faithful servant. Thou hast been faithful over a few things; be thou ruler over ten cities.” The other question was. Will all the pews be assigned? For, mind you, though we are a free church, we are neither a mob nor a rabble. Though the pews are all free from taxation, yet they are formally assigned, that every father and mother may have their family between them; that this Sabbath they may sit where they sat last Sabbath, and next Sabbath where they sat this Sabbatb; that a home feeling may be cultured; that the church may be organized, disciplined for practical Chiistian work, as it could not be if the pews were not assigned. We built the church so large that the trustees said, and I said, that if in one or two years we can assign all these pews to fomilies, we shall be satisfied. The church has been open only about six weeks; yet two weeks ago we completed the assignment of all the pews — a work that would have been done the night of the opening if there had been time; and so we find that, instead of the building being too large, it is already too small. Now, if this church shall ever doubt God’s goodness, or his willingness to take us straight through any righteous undertaking, then we deserve to have this building go down into the ashes of a ruin from which it shall never be resurrected, or swallowed of an earthquake that leaves not one brick or shingle behind. “Oh, give thanks unto the Lord for his goodness, for his mercy endureth forever.” “Not unto us, not unto us, O Lord! but unto thy name be the glory.” If God ever defended a church, if God ever led a church, if God ever blessed a church, if God ever saved a church — this is the church.

And now I demand of all those who are here to-day, and of all those to whom these words shall come, that they take this free church out of the list of experiments, and put it down in the list of accomplished facts.- There are two or three things we have proved.

In the first place, we have proved that free churches are a financial possibility. The reason that in like undertakings, in most places, they have failed, has been because they have been on a small scale, or because they have been in a mean structure, or because they have been with poor singing, or in a repelling neighborhood. Give a free church a fair chance, and the right kind of a neighborhood, and you shall gather within its walls all classes — the rich and the poor, the cultured and the ignorant. Just the kind of a church our Lord Jesus would favor: the rich and the poor meeting together, the Lord the maker of them all. Do you know this — that nine-tenths of the pew-renting churches in this country, at the end of the year, depend upon a few rich men to come and put their hands in their pockets up to the elbow, to meet the deficit? Now I contend that that is not the way to do. Throw the whole responsibility on the people, and they will meet it. They love to be trusted. Was there ever a grander illustration of the willingness of the people of this country to support a free church than on the twenty -second of February? Mind you, it was in the midst of great financial depression. Mind you, it was like the building of three churches in three years — the first Tabernacle built in 1871; the enlargement of that structure (which was almost like erecting another building, for expense) in 1872; then this structure in the early part of 1874. Do you believe that a church conducted on any other principle could have roused up enough sympathy to be able to build three churches in a little over three years? I trow not.

Oh, we were tempted, again and again, to go back to the old plan! I was offered, as some of you know, twenty thousand dollars per year salary, if I would allow or consent to the selling of the pews in the old Tabernacle; but we had consecrated ourselves to the work of building a free church, and we do not want any rest from it until we rest in Greenwood, the pleasant bed where I have a great many good friends sleeping this morning.

We proved another thing, and that is, that a free church can he made attractive to the refined and the cultured. The stereotyped objection, all over the world, to a free church has been, “You break down the barriers of society, and then the cultured and the refined will not come into such a place.” We have put the falsehood upon that objection to a free church. There is not anywhere — there is not in any church in this land or in England — more educated men and women, more professional men, more lawyers, doctors, artists, teachers, more men who can make an intelligent public address upon every question of finance, politics, morals, and religion; so that when a man introduces his family in this Christian association, he introduces them into the highest style of refinement. I have wandered up and down the world — and I suppose I have seen as much of it as any man of my age — and I now say that it is my highest ambition to have my own children worthy of the Christian, elevated society in which I have here introduced them.

Again, we have proved that the people will come to receive a literal and unvarnished. Gospel. The impression is abroad that you must fix up the Gospel to suit the age, instead of fixing up the age to suit the Gospel; and the young men coming out of our theological seminaries have the impression that they must palliate the prejudices of society, and must cover over the natural rottenness of the human heart, and that they must tell men what very clever people they are, and that they only.

1,26 CESSATION OF EXFERIMEXT.

need to be pressed in a little one way, and pulled out a little the other way, and then they will be all right. And they say, “All you want is development.” Is it? Development! You might as well go to a man bent double with the cramps of Asiatic cholera, and tell him that all he wants is development. It is a lie. He needs to have his disease killed, so that he may get well. Until our heart is changed by the grace of God, it is scabbed and ulcerous with a great leprosy; and it is not development we want, but it is the cure of an eating, loathsome, blasting, damning leprosy. Our whole nature throughout, and throughout, and throughout wrong, needs to be made over and over, and over again. I wish that every word of that passage could come down with five tons’ weight of emphasis — “Except a man be born again, he can not see the kingdom of God;” though he had given one hundred thousand dollars to religious institutions, though he never used a bad word in his life, though he paid all his debts, though he lived on the tip-top round of respectability — “Except a man be born again, he can not see the kingdom of God.” But so little do we hear about this doctrine of regeneration in this day, that it is almost considered indelicate for a man to read in a public assemblage the words of Christ to Nicodemus about the new birth. And as to there being any hell, if we make any allusion to that, it must be with exquisite circumlocution, as “the place of high temperature,” or “the world insalubrious,” or, as a minister recently called it, “the great elsewhere!” I say to the young men who are studying for the ministry — and there are thirty connected with this congregation — if you have any idea that it is necessary to preach an emasculated Gospel in order to get people to come and hear it, you make a vast mistake. An eminent minister of New York said to me some time ago, “I have a very large audience, but they are all Christians. I can not get the worldly people to come in and listen to me. I hear that a good many worldly people come to hear you. You must preach some very strange thing. What did you preach about yesterday?” “Well,” I replied, “I preached yesterday morning on ‘Seek ye the Lord while he may be found;’ and in the evening I preached about ‘Strive to enter in at the strait gate.’” Said he, “Is that all?” “Yes,” I replied, “that is all.” Oh, my friends, there is a judgmeyit-seai in every mans heart, which tells him that the Bible is true; and if it be true, the wicked and the righteous can not go to the same place. So I say, Young men who are entering the ministry, if you really want a fresh theme, if you really want a novel theme to preach about, preach the old Gospel. Do not preach about “development” — that is hackneyed. Do not preach about the Darwinian theory of the origin of our race — that is worn out. But if you want something new, really new — so new that tens of thousands of people in this day do not know any thing about it — then give them “Repentance” in the morning, and “Faith” at night; and in order to variety, next Sabbath give them “Faith” in the morning, and “Repentance” at night.

I believe that within the next twenty years there will be an earthquake amidst the American and English pulpits, and that those which have adhered to the old Gospel will stand, and that those which have preached any thing else will go dowru Paul cries out, with great empbasis, “If any one, though he be an angel from heaven, preach any other Gospel, let him be accursed.”

Where is Theodore Parker’s pulpit to-day? He was the most fascinating man I ever heard — a mighty man; but he denied the divinity of Christ, and denied the inspiration of the Scriptures. Where is his pulpit to-day? Boston tried to patch it up and prop it up; but when Theodore Parker died, his pulpit died with him. Where is the pulpit of Edward Irving, the most brilliant man that ever stood in the pulpit of England? He forsook the simplicity of his father’s faith, and when Edward Irving died, his pulpit died with him. Bat while those men were preaching, each in his day, the one in Boston and the other in London, there were self-sacrificing men in our Western wilderness preaching Jesus and the resurrection. They died of the malaria from the cancr brakes; but what became of their pulpit? It multiplied into five thousand other pulpits, and the song for which Bishop Asbury, and George Reynolds, and Jacob Kruber gave the pitch is still humming amidst the beechwoods beyond the bluffs of the Mississippi.

Now this church has been gathered and built as an exponent of a literal Gospel. So it shall stand. That the Lord has approved our plan in the past, i have only to state that eight hundred and ninety -two souls have connected themselves with this church through these five years; while by letters from all parts of this land, and from England, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, and the islands of the sea, we have an intimation that through your prayers, and the help that you have been able to give your pastor, thousands of souls have been brought into the kingdom of Christ. The old Gospel is the power of God and the wisdom of God unto salvation.

But now five years are gone. God has closed the fifth volume, never to be opened until the fiery fingers of the judgment shall open it, amidst a flying heaven and a burning earth. During those five years, a good many have gone out from us into the eternal world. Some of them, I fear, went unprepared. It is absurd for a man to preach a sermon in which he implies that all the dead are happy. Some of those who’ went out from us during the past five years into the eternal world gave no evidence of repentance. There was in their last struggle a look of terror about the face that I did not like. They mentioned, in their last moments, the name of father, or mother, or wife, or child, but they did not mention the name of Jesus —

“Jesus, the name high over all
In hell, and earth, and sky.”

They did not speak of him. I could not sleep nights, asking myself the question, “Was it my fault? Did I give them fair warning?” “God have mercy upon their soul,” would be an appropriate prayer this morning — if it were not too late I

But oh, how many of our friends, during these five years, have gone away in Christian peacefulness! The evening came on them with the soft step of the dew. There was sobbing in the room, and there were wailings that made the heart ache, and cries of “What will we do without father?” “How lonely the world will be without mother!” “Speak, my darling, once more! Do you know me? Say, my child, do you know me?”

4B0 CESSATION OF EXPERIMENT.

Ah I no wonder they made no response. How could they take your hand when Christ had it in both of his? How could they hear your voice when the heavenly escort, come to fetch them home, were in full chant? How could they see you in the turned-down light of the sick-room, when the morning of heaven was surging in upon their soul at full tide? See! see! there are angels in the room. Oh, those dying looks, those enchanted faces, those closing expostulations! If I could, this morning, bring those five years of Christian death-bed triumphs before you, you would spring to your feet shouting the glory; and those radiant ones who have gone up from your homes would seem moving up and down again through these yqtj aisles, and you would see their brows garlanded with joy, and their necks jeweled with light; and as they looked upon you, their countenances sympathetic for your loneliness, you would want to die too, so as to be with them. Do not Q,vy Do not cry! Parents, you will get back your child. Sorrowful orphans, you will see father again — you will see mother again. God will wipe away all tears from your eyes.

During these five years, thirty -two of our members have gone out of life, and they all went away in the sunrise. Blessed be God! I knew them here, and I will know them better there.

And now, as a church, we put out into a future unknown, so far as particulars are concerned; but we know one thing about it: “Thou shalt see greater things than these.” We have only just built the fort out of which we are going to fire upon the Lord’s enemies. We have only just planted the stake from which we are going to swing out in the offing the Gospel net. We really believe that, where we have had hundreds brought to God, we will have thousands. We mean to pray the church through. To God be the glory for the past! In God is our hope for the future. You and I may die — that will not have any thing to do with the cause. The cause will go on. The sorrowful will be comforted. The tempted will be delivered. The dead will be raised. There are going to be larger harvest- homes, and stronger doxologies, and more jubilant hallelujahs.

Oh, men and women! impenitent, committed to my charge, how can I give you up? If there be any power in prayer, in tears, in heart-breaking solicitations, you must come in. Oh, fire-crowned Sinai, unliraber now thy batteries! Oh, quaking Calvary, now plead thy love! Oh, Day of Judgment, now unsheathe thy glory! Oh, Heaven, display thy thrones! Oh, pit, flash forth thy terrors! And amidst the rising, and the falling, and the quaking, and the wailing, and the shouting, and the praying, as one billow of an aroused sea has been known to pitch a steamer with a thousand passengers high and dry upon the beach, so now this moment, with one great surge of penitence and praN^er, let all this audience be landed on the shore of eternal safety.

My heart overflows with emotion when I think that I have another pastoral year less of work to do. I am not tired. God has been very good to me all these years. Notwithstanding the work I have been called to do here in this church, and in the Lay College, and in the editorial chair — a combined work that many supposed and prophesied would crush me — I have never had a day of real sickness in my life, and a headache is to me unknown, save as some of my good friends, with their hands on their hot temples, have described it. God has been very good to me. I ascribe this health and prosperity first to God, and then to the two facts that I have a very good home, and a congregation who give me no annoyance. They are in sympathy with me and my work. If any of them do not like me, I have been too stupid to find it out. I thank you for all your forbearances toward me. I thank you for all the generosity with which you have met my worldly necessities. Above all, I thank you for the prayers that in public and private you have offered for me and mine. I hope to live and die with you. It is my highest ambition to be your servant for Jesus sake. And when it is time for me to rest, then I want to be carried out through these very streets by the men who sit before me to-day. Their arms are good and strong, and they will know how to let me gently down into the last sleep. Many of them are my children in the Gospel. They were good to me while I lived. I would not be afraid to trust myself in their arms when I am dead. And then, one by one, you will come out to the same silent neighborhood; and when the morning of the resurrection dawns, in its holy light we will wake up together, and as I cry, “Are you all here?” you will know my voice, for you have heard it so often, and you will answer, “All here!”

“I believe in the communion of saints and the life everlasting. Amen.”v>;j