By the Skin of the Teeth

“Iam escaped with the skin of my teeth.” — Job xix., 20.

JOB had it hard. What with boils, and bereavements, and bankruptcy, and a fool of a wife, he wished he was dead; and I do not blame him. His flesh was gone, and his bones were dry. His teeth wasted away until nothing but the enamel seemed left. He cries out, “I am escaped with the skin of my teeth.”

There has been some difference of opinion about this passage. St. Jerome,and Schultens, and Doctors Good, and Poole, and Barnes, have all tried their forceps on Job’s teeth. You deny my interpretation, and say, “What did Job know about the enamel of the teeth?” He knew every thing about it. Dental surgery is almost as old as the earth. The mummies of Egypt, thousands of years old, are found to-day with gold-filling in their teeth. Ovid, and Horace, and Solomon, and Moses wrote about these important factors of the body. To other provoking complaints, Job, I think, has added an exasperating toothache, and, putting his hand against the inflamed face, he says, “I am escaped with the skin of my teeth.”

A very narrow escape, you say, for Job’s body and soul; but there are thousands of men who make just as narrow escape for their soul. There was a time when the partition between them and ruin was no thicker than a tooth’s enamel; but, as Job finally escaped, so have they. Thank God! thank God!

Paul expresses the same idea by a different figure when he says that some people are “saved as by fire? A vessel at sea is in flames. You go to the stern of the vessel. The boats have shoved off. The flames advance; you can endure the heat no longer on your face. You slide down on the side of the vessel, and hold on with your fingers, until the forked tongue of the fire begins to lick the back of your hand, and you feel that you must fall, when one of the life-boats comes back, and the passengers say they think they have room for one more. The boat swings under you — you drop into it — you are saved.

So some men are pursued by temptation until they are partially consumed, but after all get off — “saved as by fire.”

But I like the figure of Job a little better than that of Paul, because the pulpit has not worn it out; and I want to show you, if God will help, that some men make narrow escape for their squls, and are saved as “with the shin of their teeth?

It is as easy for some people to look to the Cross as for you to look to this pulpit. Mild, gentle, tractable, loving, you expect them to become Christians. You go over to the store and say, u Gran don joined the Church yesterday.” Your business comrades say, “That is just what might have been expected; he always was of that turn of mind.” In youth, this person whom I describe was always good. He never broke things. He never laughed when it was improper to laugh. At seven, he could sit an hour in church,. perfectly quiet, looking neither to the right hand nor to the left, but straight into the eyes of the minister, as though he understood the whole discussion about the eternal decrees. He never upset things, nor lost them. He floated into the king¬ dom of God so gradually that it is uncertain just when the matter was decided.

Here is another one, who started in life with an uncontrollable spirit. He kept the nursery in an uproar. His mother found him walking on the edge of the house-roof to see if he could balance himself. There was no horse that he dared not ride — no tree he could not climb. His boyhood was a long series of predicaments; his manhood was reckless; his midlife very wayward. But now he is converted, and you go over to the store and say, “Ark¬ wright joined the Church yesterday.” Your friends say, “It is not possible! You must be joking.” You say, “Ho; I tell you the truth*. He joined the Church.” Then they reply, “There is hope for any of us if old Ark¬ wright has become a Christian!”

In other words, we all admit that it is more difficult for some men to accept the Gospel than for others.

I may be preaching to some who have cut loose from churches, and Bibles, and Sundays, and who have come in here with no intention of becoming Christians them¬ selves, but just to see what is going on; and yet. you may find yourself escaping, before you leave this house, as “with the skin of your teeth.” I do not expect to wTaste this hour. I have seen boats go off from Cape May or Long Branch, and drop their nets, and after a while come ashore, pulling in the nets without having caught a single fish. It was not a good day, or they had not the right kind of a net. But we expect no such excursion to-night. The water is full of fish; the wind is in the bright direction; the Gospel net is strong. 0 Thou who didst help

Simon and Andrew to fish, show ns to-night how to cast the net on the right side of the ship!

Some of you, in coming to God, will have to run against skeptical notions. Itfis useless for people to say sharp and cutting things to those who reject the Christian religion. I can not say such things. By what process of temptation, or trial, or betrayal you have come to your present state, I know not. There are two gates to your nature: the gate of the head, and the gate of the heart. The gate of your head is locked with bolts and bars that an archangel could not break, but the gate of your heart swings easily on its hinges. If I assaulted your body with weapons you would meet me with weapons, and it would be sword-stroke for sword-stroke, and wound for wound, and blood for blood; but if I come and knock at the door of your house, you open it, and give me the best seat in your parlor. If I should come at you to-night with an argument, you would answer me with an argument; if with sarcasm, you would answer me with sarcasm; blow for blow, stroke for stroke; but when I come and knock at the door of your heart, you open it and say, “Come in, my brother, and tell me all you know about Christ and heaven.”

Listen to two or three questions: Are you as happy as you used to be when you believed in the truth of the Christian religion? Would you like to have your children travel on in the road in which you are now travel¬ ing? You had a relative who professed to be a Christian, and was thoroughly consistent, living and dying in the faith of the Gospel. Would you not like to live the same quiet life, nd die the same peaceful death? I hold in my hand a letter, sent me by one who has rejected the Christian religion. It says, “I am old enough to know that the joys and pleasures of life are evanescent, and to realize the fact that it must be comfortable in old age to believe in something relative to the future, and to have a faith in some system that proposes to save. I am free to confess that I would be happier if I could exercise the simple and beautiful faith that is possessed by many whom I know. I am not willingly out of the Church or out of the faith. My state of uncertainty is one of unrest. Sometimes I doubt my immortality, and look upon the death-bed as the closing scene, after which there is nothing. What shall I do that I have not done?” All! skepticism is a dark and doleful land. Let me say that this Bible is either true or false. If it be false, we are as well off as you; if it be true, then which of us is safer?

Let me also ask whether your trouble has not been that you confounded Christianity with the inconsistent character of some who profess it. You are a lawyer. In your profession there are mean and dishonest men. Is that any thing against the law? You are a doctor. There are unskilled and contemptible men in your profession. Is that any thing against medicine? You are a merchant. There are thieves and defrauders in your business. Is that any thing against merchandise? Be¬ hold, then, the unfairness of charging upon Christianity the wickedness of its. disciples. We admit some of the charges against those who profess religion. Some of the most gigantic swindles of the present day have been carried on by members of the Church. There are men standing in the front rank in the churches who would not be trusted for five dollars without good collateral

security. They leave their business dishonesties in the vestibule of the church as they go in and sit at the communion. Having concluded the sacrament, they get up, wipe the wine from their lips, go out, and take up their sins where they left off. To serve the devil is their regular work; to serve God a sort of play-spell. With a Sunday sponge they expect to wipe off from their business slate all the past week’s inconsistencies. You have no more right to take such a man’s life as a specimen of religion than you have to take the twisted irons and split timbers that lie on the beach at Coney Island as a specimen of an American ship. It is time that we drew a line between religion and the frailties of those who profess it.

Do you not feel that the Bible, take it all in all, is about the best book that the world has ever seen? Do you know any book that has as much in it? Do you not think, upon the wThole, that its influence has been beneficent? I come to you with both hands extended toward you. In one hand I have the Bible, and in the other I have nothing. This Bible in one hand I will sur¬ render forever just as soon as in my other hand you can put a book that is better.

To-night I invite you back into the good old-fashioned religion of your fathers — to the God whom they worshiped, to the Bible they read, to the promises on which they leaned, to the cross on which they hung their eternal expectations. You have not been happy a day since you swung off; you will not be happy a minute until you swing back.

Again: There may be some of you who, in the attempt after a Christian life, will have to run against powerful passions and appetites. Perhaps it is a disposition to anger that you have to contend against; and perhaps, while in a very serious mood, you hear of something that makes you feel that you must swear <5r die. I know of a Christian man who was once so exasperated that he said to a mean customer, “I can not swear at you my¬ self, for I am a member of the Church; but if you will go down stairs my partner in business will swear at you.” All your good resolutions heretofore have been torn to tatters by explosions of temper. Now there is no harm in getting mad if you only get mad at sin. You need to bridle and saddle these hot-breathed passions, and with them ride down injustice and wrong. There are a thou¬ sand things in the world that we ought to be mad at. There is no harm in getting red hot if you only bring to the forge that which needs hammering. A man who has no power of righteous indignation is an imbecile. But be sure it is a righteous indignation, and not a petulancy that blurs, and unravels, and depletes the soul.

.There is a large class of persons in midlife who have still in them appetites that were aroused in early man¬ hood, at a time when they prided themselves on being a “little fast,” “high livers,” “free and easy,” “hale fellows well met.” They are now paying in compound interest for troubles they collected twenty years ago. Some of you are trying to escape, and you will — yet very narrowly, “as with the skin of your teeth.” God and your own soul only know what the struggle is. Omnipotent grace has pulled out many a soul that was deeper in the mire than you are. They line the beach of heaven — the multitude whom God has rescued from the thrall of suicidal habits. If you this day turn your back on the

wrong, and start anew, God will help you. Oh the weak¬ ness of human help! Men will sympathize for a while, and then turn yon off. If yon ask for their pardon, they will give it, and say they will try yon again; but, falling away again under the power of temptation, they cast you off forever. But God forgives seventy times seven; yea, seven hundred times; yea, though this be the ten thousandth time, he is more earnest, more sympathetic, more helpful this last time than when you took your first mis¬ step.

If, with all the influences favorable for a right life, men make so many mistakes, how much harder it is when, for instance, some appetite thrusts its iron grapple into the roots of the tongue, and pulls a man down with hands of destruction! If, under such circumstances, he break away, there will be no sport in the undertaking, no holiday enjoyment, but a struggle in which the wrestlers move from side to side, and bend, and twist, and watch for an opportunity to get in a heavier stroke, until with one final effort, in which the muscles are distended, and the veins stand out, and the blood starts, the swarthy hab¬ it falls under the knee of the victor — escaped at last as with the skin of his teeth.

The ship “Emma,” bound from Gottenburg to Harwich, was sailing on, when the man on the lookout saw something that he pronounced a vessel bottom up. There was something on it that looked like a sea-gull, but was afterward found to be a waving handkerchief. In the small boat the crew pushed out to the wreck, and found that it was a capsized vessel, and that three men had been digging their way out through the bottom of the ship. When the vessel capsized they had no means of

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escape. The captain took his penknife and dug away through the planks until his knife broke. Then an old nail was found, with which they attempted to scrape their way up out of the darkness, each one working until his hand was wellnigh paralyzed, and he sank back faint and sick. After long and tedious work, the light broke through the bottom of the ship. A handkerchief was hoisted. Help came. They were taken on board the vessel and saved. Did ever men come so near a watery grave wuthout dropping into it? How narrowly. they escaped — escaped only “with the shin of their teeth?

There are men who have been capsized of evil passions, and capsized mid ocean, and they are a thousand miles away from any shore of help.* They have for years been trying to dig their way out. They have been digging away, and digging away, but they can never be delivered unless to-night they will hoist some signal of distress. However weak and feeble it may be, Christ will see it, and bear down upon the helpless craft, and take them on board; and it will be known on earth and in heaven how narrowly they escaped — “escaped as with the skin of their teeth?

There are others who, in attempting to come to God, must run between a great many business perplexities. If a man go over to business at ten o’clock in the morning, and comes away at three o’clock in the afternoon, he has some time for religion; but how shall you find time for religious contemplation when you are driven from sunrise until sunset, and have been for five years going behind in business, and are frequently dunned by creditors whom you can not pay, and when, from Monday morning until Saturday night, you are dodging bills that G 2

you can not meet? You walk day by day in uncertain¬ ties that have kept your brain on fire for the past three years. Some, with less business troubles than you, have gone crazy. The clerk has heard a noise in the back counting-room, and gone in, and found the chief man of the firm a raving maniac; or the wife has heard the bang of a pistol in the back parlor, and gone in, stumbling over the dead body of her husband — a suicide. There are in this house to-night three hundred men pursued, harassed, trodden down, and scalped, of business perplexities, and which way to turn next they do not know. Now God will not be hard on you. He knows what obstacles are in the way of your being a Christian, and your first effort in the right direction he will crown with success. Do not let Satan, with cotton-bales, and kegs, and hogsheads, and counters, and stocks of unsala¬ ble goods, block up your way to heaven. Gather up all your energies. Tighten the girdle about your loins. Take an agonizing look into the face of God, and then say, “Here goes one grand effort for life eternal,” and then bound away for heaven, escaping “as with the sJcin of your teeth.”

In the last day it will be found that Hugh Latimer, and John Knox, and Huss, and Ridley were not the greatest martyrs, but Christian men who went up incorrupt from the contaminations and perplexities of Wall Street, Water Street, Pearl Street, Broad Street, State Street, and Third Street. On earth they were called brokers, or stock-jobbers, or retailers, or importers; but in heaven, Christian heroes. No fagots were heaped about their feet; no Inquisition demanded from them recantation; no soldier aimed a pike at their heart; but

BY TEE SKIN OF THE TEETH. y 55

they had mental tortures, compared with which all physical consuming is as the breath of a spring morning.

I find in the community a large class of men who have been so cheated, so lied about, so outrageously wronged, that they have lost their faith in every thing. In a world where every thing seems so topsy-turvy, they do not see how there can be any God. They are con¬ founded, and frenzied, and misanthropic. Elaborate arguments to prove to them the truth of Christianity, or the truth of any thing else, touch them nowhere. Hear me, all such men. I preach to you no rounded periods, no ornamental discourse; but I putTny hand on your shoulder, and invite you into the peace of the Gospel. Here is a rock on which. you may stand firm, though the waves dash against it harder than the Atlantic, pitching its surf clear above Eddystone Light-house. Do not charge upon God all these troubles of the world. As long as the world stuck to God, Gnd stuck to the world; but the earth seceded from his government, and hence all these outrages and all these woes. God is good. For many hundreds of years he has been, coaxing the world to come back to him; but the more he has coaxed, the more violent have men been in their resistance, and they have stepped back and stepped back until they have dropped into ruin.

Try this God, ye who have had the blood-hounds after you, and who have thought that God had forgotten you. Try him, and see if he will not help. Try him, and see if he will not pardon. Try him, and see if he will not save. The flowers of spring have no bloom so sweet as the flowering of Christ’s affections. The sun hath no warmth compared with the glow of his heart. The waters have no refreshment like the fountain that will slake the thirst of thy soul. At the moment the rein¬ deer stands wfith his lip and nostril thrust into the cool mountain torrent, the hunter may be coming through the thicket. Without crackling a stick under his foot, he comes close by the stag, aims his gun, draws the trigger, and the poor thing rears in its death-agony and falls backward, its antlers crashing on the rocks; but the panting hart that drinks from the water-brooks of God’s promise shall never be fatally wounded, and shall never die.

This world is a poor portion for your soul, oh business man! An Eastern king had graven upon his tomb two fingers, represented as sounding upon each other with a snap, and under them the motto, “All is not worth that.” Apicius Coelius hanged himself because his steward in¬ formed him that he had only eighty thousand pounds sterling left. All of* this world’s riches make but a sma-ll inheritance for a soul. Bobespierre attempted to win the applause of the world; but when he was dying, a woman came rushing through the crowd, crying to him, “Murderer of my kindred, descend to hell, covered with the curses of every mother in France!” Many who have expected the plaudits of the world have died under its Anathema Maranatha.

Oh, find your peace in God. Make one strong pull for heaven. No half-way work will do it. There some¬ times comes a time on shipboard when every thing must be sacrificed to save the passengers. The cargo is nothing, the rigging nothing. The captain puts the trumpet to’ his lip and shouts, “Cut away* the mast!” Some of you have been tossed and driven, and you have, in your effort to keep the world, well-nigh lost your soul. Until you have decided this matte/, let every thing else go. Overboard with all those other anxieties and burdens! You will have to drop the#sails of your pride, and cut away the mast. With one earnest cry for help, put your cause into the hand of him who helped Paul out of the breakers of Melita, and who, above the shrill blast of the wrathiest tempest that ever blackened the sky or shook the ocean, can hear the faintest imploration for mercy.

I shall go home to-night feeling that some of you, who have considered your case as hopeless, will take heart again, and that with a blood-red earnestness, such as you have never experienced before, you will start for the good land of the Gospel — at last to look back, saying, “What a great risk I ran! Almost lost, but saved! Just got through, and no more! Escaped by the skin of my teeth?