Pulpit Earnestness
It is recorded of the devoted Jolm Welch, that he used to keep a plaid upon his bed, that he might wrap himself in it when he rose during the night for prayer. Sometimes his wife found him on the ground, weeping. When she complained, he would say, “Oh! woman! I have the souls of three thousand to answer for, and I know not how it is with many of them.” Possessed with such a sense of responsibility to God, and to the people of his charge, how can any true minister of the cross withhold himself from an earnest devotion to his work of arousing souls, and pointing them to Christ? He feels his momentous responsibility during the week while preparing the beaten oil for the sanctuary. It covers him like a garment. It haunts him in the silent watches of the night. It absorbs his thoughts, and breathes out in every fervid utterance of his closet.
But it is in the pulpit that the earnest ambassador for Christ feels the long-suppressed solicitude break forth in an overflow of fervid and pathetic expostulations. Whatever is most powerful in argument, or most winning in entreaty, or most thrilling in appeal, he then seizes upon, and appropriates it to his mighty theme. He pleads. He warns. He invites. He points now to the yawning pit, red with the flames of wrath, and now to the cross, red with a Saviour’s blood. The very grandeur of his theme possesses him. It leads him away from the influences of time and sense about him. For the moment, he is no longer in this world. Its illusions have all passed away. He is surrounded by other and mightier auditors. The light of eternity plays about him, and reveals the tremendous pomp of the judgment scene. To his eye, the awful consummation has already come! The Judge is descending. The books are opening. The heavens are passing away with a great noise. The angels are separating the vast multitudes to the right hand and to the left hand of the Judge, and among them, he sees his own hearers. Some of them are crowned with the unfading crown; and some of them — appalling sight! — are driven away wailing to the gates of despair!
With such a spectacle before him, with the shrieks of his perishing neighbors ringing in his very ears, can any appeal be too importunate, can any entreaty be too earnest? Is it any wonder that he is ready to throw himself across the pathway of the blinded sinner, and beseech him not to commit the eternal suicide? Even if his overwhelming solicitude move him to tears, he feels that it is better for him to weep here than for his hearers to weep in hell.
It was with such emotions that the great. Apostle set before the trembling Felix the realities of a coming judgment, and startled the proud Agrippa on his marble throne. It#was with such emotions that the fervid Whitfield was borne on in his impassioned oratory, until his auditors became as “dead men beneath his feet.” Such was the intense agony of Bunyan when he “went to his people in chains to preach to them in chains; and carried that fire in his own conscience which he persuaded them to beware of”
If an undevout astronomer is “mad,”
how much more is a listless and stupid ambassador of the cross! Amid all the vast assemblage at the judgment-bar, who will appear to have been guilty of a stranger insanity than the unfaithful man who, with the vows of a minister of Christ upon his soul, and the truth of God in his hands, yet forbore to warn men of their coming danger! That sinners themselves were mad in this world, they will then, of themselves, confess. How they came to be guilty of such madness they can sonaewhat comprehend. But how any man who knew to what a hell they were rushing should have neglected to warn them against it, is enough to fill them with amazement and with horror. And as they turn away toward their long eternity of woe, Oh! how will they vent their fiercest imprecations upon that faithless man as a chief accomplice in their ruin!