Sermon IV

When he beheld the city, he wept over it” — Lxikb xlx. 41.

A REMARKABLE incident occurred during the last unhappy, and — since it was waged between brethren, sprung of a common parentage, and holding a common faith — I will add, unnatural war between our country and America. We had taken a prize. A very gallant young of&cer was placed in command of her. Unfortunately for us, as the event proved, her original captain and part of his crew, were not transferred to another ship, but allowed to remain on board. The British lieutenant had a number of our own brave men sent along with him — a force sufficient to work the ship, and, in a fair stand up fight, to overpower the prisoners, should they attempt to retake the vessel. Hoisting British colors, they parted company wdth the captur- 11* ing ship, and with our officer on the quarter-deck made homeward with their prize. Onward the ship ploughs her way through the billows, and all seems safe. After some time, the American captain accosts our officer on the deck. He desires him to give up his sword and the command of the vessel. Surprised, indignant at such a strange and insolent demand, he prepares to resist. Whereupon the American, drawing a pistol from his belt to meet the other’s sword, conscious of his power, but unwilling to shed the blood of a gallant man, coolly added: — “You must surrender, your men are all drunk below.” The officer, however, did resist, and was shot dead. His life was thrown away; his gallant bravery was of no Intemperance had betrayed the ship — the men had all been drenched with rum and laudanum.

This story is as instructive as tragic. For that ship, won not by fair fighting, but a foul trick, carrying at her mast head foreign colors, with a new commander on her quarter-deck, liev ere t below in irons, and her head biought round, and bearing awaj to the coasts of the enemy, presents to my eye a picture of the fate of many. By the same instrumentality they are seduced — betrayed into the hands of the Adversary. By intemperance, also, they are “taken captive of the devil at his will.” Had there been no intoxicating liquors on board, had she sailed under the temperance flag, as it is called, that ship had not been lost, nor had her crew pined in foreign prison, nor had that gallant man, who had otherwise returned to his mother’s arms, rich with prize money, and wearing laurels on his brow, lain there — a bleeding corpse upon the deck. There is no doubt of that. No man will atteijipt to deny that. And we appeal to your candor, if this is not as true, that thousands of our fellow-creatures had never been lost, many a poor servant girl had never forfeited her character and lost her place, many a tradesman had never lost his employment and been reduced to beggary, many a merchant had never lost his business and become a bankrupt, many a woman had never lost her virtue and wrecked her peace, many a man and woman bad never lost both soul and body, if they had practised habits of abstinence. Drink has been their ruin. And their ruin had never been, if, so to speak, they had sailed the voyage of Kfe with no intoxicating liquors on board. That ruse de guerre so successfully played on the “high seas,” is one of Satan’s most common, e very-day services. These stimulants weaken the reason, while they inflame the passions. They qu’cken corruption, whilst they stupify conscience. And I believe — and who does not? — that but for the use of them, thousands would never have taken that first step in sin, which, step by step, and step

by step, has conducted their feet down to ruin.

Convinced as I am — and, as I presume you

are — of the innate depravity of human nature, I think that we have no need to increase the dangers of temptation and arm it with additional powers. They who carry gunpowder on board are careful of fires and lights — nor careless even of a spark, lest that, reaching the magazine, should blow the ship out of the «vater, and the crew into eternity. Believing as I do in the weakness of our nature, I think that we have little need by anything to increase our proneness to fall. The path of a man, even of a man on the highway to heaven, is never one of perfect safety, and is often one of imminent danger. It resembles those mountain-passes in the Higher Alps, where the narrow road, its broken surface, and the dizzy depths below, require a steady foot and the coolest head; one false, one stumbling step, and you are gone, over the rocks, sheer down a hundred fathoms, where the angry torrent foams in the bottom of a gloomy gorge, white as the snows it flows from; or — no happier fate — you are left lying, mid- way down, on some projecting crag, a mangled mass — a banquet for the vultures. Many such dangerous passes there are in the journey of life. The very next turn, for anything we know, may bring us on one. Turn that projecting point which hides the path before you, and you are suddenly in circumstances which demand that reason be strong, and conscience be tender, and hope be bright, and fliith be vigorous, and the prayer be ready to spring from our lips, “Lord, hold up my goings, that my footsteps slip not.”

I leave this part of my subject; but before I leave it, let me appeal to the love and a,nxieties of Christian parents — of every parent. If you believe, as a foolish mother once said to me, when gently warning her to guard her 3hild, “There is no ill, sir, about my child,” I have nothing now to say, but, God pity the child that has such a mother. Hoping better things of you, brethren, let me put it to you, whether you are not most likely to preserve your children from many temptations, and lay a good foundation for their well-doing, and your own parental comfort, by training them up in the early and entire disuse of what is the ruin of so many families, the curse of so many homes, and what, if not taught to .like, they have no craving for. Apply to this, as to other things, the lesson of holy Scripture, ‘’ Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” Surely, oh surely, we have no need, either for ourselves or children, to create temptations — rashly to court dangers which we can avoid. It is a hard fight at the best to get to heaven. We shall get fighting enough without challenging it. We should leave vaporing fools to repeat the bravado of the Philistine. Let no man step out from the ranks of the cross, even from the side of Christ, to bid defiance to the devil, saying, ‘’ Give me a man to fight with.” Our safety lies most, not in fighting but in fleeing temptation — in ever remembering this solemn truth, ‘’ The righteous scarcely are saved.”

These views I press on no man, but present to the candid and prayerful consideration of all. But if these views do not meet your favor, nor commend themselves to your conscience before God, if you think it best and wisest to leave yourselves and your children, and others, exposed to the terrible temptations which I think it Christian prudence to avoid, then there is the more need that you be fully armed for the battle. To save our country and our religion, there is the more need that you apply a prompt and effectual remedy to other two great evils, to which, as belonging to the sins and sorrows of the city, I now request your attention.

m. Ignorance, oi want of education.

First, Let us look at this evil as it exists among the lowest classes.

Our blessed Lord was born in a stable. And the stable which marked the beginning, like the cross which stood at the end of his life, has been always regarded as a prominent feature of his humiliation. Yet I have seen some who were born in even more humiliating circumstances. Many years ago — for the subject is not new to us — we were attempting to sound the depths of city-sins and city-sorrows. When engaged in this pursuit, we visited the police-office at dead of night. It was a chamber of horrors. There, lost, guilty, degraded humanity was represented by a wretched object dying beside the fire, in the last stages of consumption — the sister of a min-ITS SINS AJSTD SORKOWS* 133

ister of the gospel. She had led a life of the lowest infamy, and, a houseless outcast, was draining off there the dregs of a bitter cup. But if that and many other cases filled us with horror, some moved our pity; -none more than two sleeping infants, the twin offspring of a poor wandering creature who had given birth to them the day before within the walls of that police-office. What a fate was theirs 1 What an ominous beginning! What a life of hardship, cruelty, sin, and misery lay before these two unconscious innocents! The shadow of their birth-place was thrown black and forward on their future destiny. It needed no seer to stand by that rude crib and tell their fortune. They had hardly a chance in life. They had heaven in death; and nowhere had death looked less grim than in that grim birth-chamber, had he come and plucked these two buds from the parent-tree, that they might blow in heaven on Jesus’ breast.

These infants were types of a class, with which, although somewhat better born, yet in no way better bred, our large cities swar.n,

People — people who find it difficult enough, with all the appliances of a good education and religious training, to keep their children in the paths of honesty and rectitude — wonder that there is “so much crime. If they saw what some of us have seen, and knew what some of us have known, they would still wonder, but wonder there was so little crime. To expect from those who have been reared in the darkest ignorance, and in a very hot-bed of temptations, anything else but crime, is sheer folly. A man might as well wonder that he does not see wheat or barley growing in our streets — where plough never goes, and no seed is sown. What can a farmer expect to find in a field left fallow, abandoned to nature, to the floating thistle-down and every seed furnished with wings to fly, but evidence of his own neglect in a rank, vile crop of weeds?

Look at the case of a boy whom I saw lately. He was but twelve years of age, and had been seven times in jail. The term of his imprisonment was rjm out, and so he had doffed the prison garb and resumed his own. It was the depth of winter; and having neither shoes nor stockings, his red, naked feet were upon the frozen ground. Had jou seen him shivering in his scanty dress — the misery pictured on an otherwise comely face — the tears that went dropping over his cheeks as the child told his pitiful story — you would have forgotten that he had been a thief, and only seen before you an unhappy creature more worthy of a kind word, a loving look, a helping hand, than the guardianship of a turnkey and the dreary solitude of a jail.

His mother was in the grave. His father had married another woman. They both wer drunkards. Their den, which is in the High Street — I know the place — contained one bed, reserved for the father, his wife, and her child. No couch was kindly spread for this poor child, and his brother, a mother’s son — then also immured in the jail. When they were fortunate enough to be allowed to lie at home, their only bed was the hard bare floor. I say fortunate enough, because on many a winter night their own father hounded them out. Kuffian that he was, he drove his infants weeping from the door, to break their young hearts and bewail their cruel lot in the corner of some filthy stair, and sleep away the cold dark hours as best they could — crouching together for warmth, like two houseless dogs. A friend listened with me to that cruel tale; and when he saw the woe, the utter woe in that child’s face, the trembling of his lip, the great big tears that came rolling from his eyes, and fell on one’s heart like red-hot drops of iron, no wonder that he declared, with indig’ nation flashing in his eyes, “They have not a. chance, sir, they have not a chance.” In circumstances as hopeless, how many are here — in every large city of this kingdom!

Yonder castaway, who has seen the ship go down, with all her shrieking crew, and, floating away upon his raft, has been borne along by sea currents over a shoreless ocean, has got a chance. These weeds, that are swung by the waves and give verdure to the deep, these Bea-shore birds, on which his lank and hungry

ITS SINS AND SORROWS. IS/

dog stands ready to spring, indicate the neighborhood of land; and we almost seem to S’^e it looming through the fog-bank, on which his eye, kindling with hope, and shaded by his hand from the glare of the sun, is fixed, as he bends forward with such intent and eager gaze I But to the castaway of the land, however, “hope is none.” Kone, unless God in heaven pity him, and fill our hearts with one wave m the ocean of his infinite love. By the depraved habits of their parents, by the dangerous associations of the street, by their cold and nakedness, their hunger and houselessness, and most of all, I think, by the very hostility bred within them against a community that has only added punishment to neglect, and “persecuted them whom God had smitten,” they are impelled on evil. We do nothing to instruct them. We leave them exposed to temptations, before which the best of us would go down. Thus we first condemn them to crime, and then condemn them to punishment. And where is the justice of that? I have often felt, that h?d society meted out to me 12* the measure which she had meted out to them, I would have hated her, and sought vengeance for my cruel wrongs — unless this nature had been changed and mellowed and tempered by the grace of God. Thanks be to God, the eyes of the nation — long, too long sealed — are now opening to its duty. We hail the dawn of a better day. The time is coming, God speed it on! when, as they read how thousands of children, whom we left to grow up in ignorance and sin, were thrown into jail, were punished for crimes which their parents trained and their circumstances forced them to — were shut up, mere boys and girls, for weary months of solitude, within the four walls of a cell which they left stamped with infamy, and doomed to ruin — a succeeding generation will read the story of our inhumanity and injustice with feelings of astonishment and indignation. There is gross injustice in all this. We visit the iniquity of the fathers upon the children. We punish the innocent and let the guilty go free. And our treatment of these poor suffering creatures irS SINS AND SORROWS. 139

is calculated to excite feelings in every just and generous mind, if not as intense, yet akin to the horror with which we read, how in the days of George II. they brought out two infants, a boy of twelve and a girl of eleven years old, and strung them up on the same gallows before the face of an amazed and angry heaven.

Meanwhile, there are thousands, and tens of thousands, and hundreds of thousands, of the children of this land, who are growing up strangers to the benefits and blessings of education. Ignorance is their sole inheritance. And in regard to them, I may put into the mouth of our country the very complaint which the prophet puts into the mouth of God, “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.” They are punished for it, impoverished for it, imprisoned for it, banished for it, and hanged for it. The “voice heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping,” falls upon our ear. Rachel is weeping for her children. Victims of parental cruelty, I call on humanity to bless them wi+h the protection which she exteuds in this country to thd lower animals. Subjects in time past only of punishment, I next call on justice to sheathe the sword, and hft up her shield, and throw it over the heads of these unhappy children. And next I call on religion to leave her temples, and, like a mother seeking a lost child, to go forth to the streets, and gather in these infants for Jesus’ arms — save these gems for a Saviour’s crown.

Second, Let us look at this evil as it exists among the ivorhing classes.

The want of education is not confined to the lowest of the people. Many of the children of our working classes begin the business of life before they have finished that of education, and not a few of them even before they have begun it. The condition of our labor market lies as a heavy curse upon the nation. It is an evil poorly compensated by the growth of wealth, and that more general diffusion of the comforts of life in which we otherwise heartily rejoice. Unfortunately, infant labor is remunerating now-a-days in the way of work, as it used to be in the way of mendicancy. In consequence of this, God’s providence and man’s plans are in collision — in direct collision. Heaven and earth are at war. The roar of machinery deafens the ear of tender childhood. The boy grows pale upon the loom, and the girl grows stunted by the whirling wheels, who should be drinking in knowledge at its fountains, or rushing from school to play with the lambs upon the flowery sward, or chasing the butterfly by the laughing stream, or gathering health and strength, beauty and symmetry where the bee collects her honied stores, for working days and winter-time. The click of shuttles and deafening noise of the manufactory are in ears that should be filled with no sound but the shouts and laughter of play, the melody of singing birds, or the hum of the busy school. The harmony of nature is disturbed, and the effects of that disturbance on the physical, moral, and religious condition of our people are lamentable — and threaten to be more so.

Children are able to support lefore they have sense to guide themselves. Before God has fitted or ever intended them to be so, they are independent of parental control. Hence domestic discord, hence household rebellion, hence the defiance of parental authority. Too early removed from school, hence the spread of ignorance. Thrown in their very childhood into the company of hoary sin, hence their morals are corrupted. They are initiated into the mysteries of vice before they have the power to practise it. Without a parent’s hand to guide the reins, before reason and principle have bad time to assume their legitimate authority, the passions get it all theii own headlong way. And in the fate of a carriage which has none to drive, but strong wild horses to drag it on; or, in the fate of a bark which. Laving broken loose from her moorings, catches the gust in her wide-spread sail, ere helm is hung or helmsman stands by the wheel — in that inevitable crash, in that shattered wreck — are symbolized the fiite of many. Born in our great centres of manu-ITS SINS AxD SOKHC’WS. 143

facturi’, sent to work when they should be sent to school or continued at it, and earning wages sufficient to maintain themselves before reason is developed and principles are confirmed, the J laugh at parental control, and in seeking to be their own masters become the slaves of their own master passions.

This is neither time nor place to show the extent of this evil, unless to say that, while the most extraordinary errors may lurk under general statistics, the public judging by them alone, may cherish the delusion that all m right when much is wrong. The actual truth may be best arrived at by selecting some particular locality, and subjecting it to a close and searching examination. We have done so in the Pleasance — a district of the city where we are about to build a church, and where, through our missionary and his allies, we have labored for four years with such remarkable success. There are worse, far worse districts than that in this city There are many much worse in every large city in the kingdom. Yet there, in an area containing two thousand of a population, we found, when we entered on our labors, no fewer than two hundred children growing up without education — who should have been at school, and were not. Thej were not without schools, yet with these in the neighborhood tbej were without schooling. They had teachers within reach of them yet they were not taught. Now this is a very instructive fact. The plain and very important inference to be deduced from that fact is this, that while it is the duty of the state to provide the means of education, it is no less her duty to see that they are used. In the United States of America — a country where, perhaps, more than in any other, the value of education is thoroughly understood — the means of educating all the people are amply and in many instances freely provided. Yet by one of their last reports, complaints appear to come from every part of the country, that many parents neglect to send their children to school. This evil has begun to grow in America, which in our own land has reached so gigantic a size. Years of experience and observation, which were spent among the lower and lowest classes of the people, have produced in my mind the rooted conviction that, although public or private benevolence may plant schools in our streets, thick as trees in the forest, the evil never will be cured. From many a dark locality the city will continue to cry, “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge,” unless the state insist on this, that every child who should be, shall be at school.

From a system of trade which offers up our children in sacrifice to the Moloch of money, and builds fortunes in many instances on the ruins of public morality and domestic happiness — from the cupidity of some parents, and the culpable negligence of others — helpless rhildhood implores our protection. We laugh at the Turk who builds hospitals for dogs, but leaves his fellow-creatures to die uncured and uncared for. And we forget that dogs and horses enjoy by Act of Parliament, a protection from cruelty among ourselves,

which is denied to those whose bodies and whose souls we leave savage parents to neglect and starve. I lay it down as a principle, which cannot be controverted, and which lies, indeed, at the very foundations of society, that no man shall be allowed to rear his family, a burden, and a nuisance, and a danger to the community, lie has no more right to rear wild men and wild women, and let them loose among us, than to rear tigers and wolves and send them abroad on our streets. What four-footed animal is so dangerous to the community, as that animal which unites the uncultivated intellect of a man to the uncontrollable passions of a beast?

We have a right to insist that this shall not be. Some rights I may waive. I may waive my right to a fortune. I may waive my right to the honors and emoluments of my office. I may abandon my claim to a competent liv- png from those to whom I minister, and turn tent-maker like the great apostle. But if I have a right to interfere for the good of others, to shield the oppressed, to save the perishing, to instruct the ignorant — by any act on my part to benefit and bless my country — that is a right which I have no right to waive. God requires me to claim it and carry it into effect. Religion thus lends her holy sanction to the state, when she insists on a universal education. She commands society to take these children under its protection, and see to it, that all of them are trained through means of the school to be of service to the state. The parent who does not educate his children, should be regarded as a man who is not using his liberty, but is guilty of licentiousness. When will men cease to confound the two, and cease by applying the name of liberty to that which outrages the rights and destroys the liberties of others, to remind us of the saying of the celebrated woman who, when they were carting her to the guillotine, as the tumbril passed a statue that had been erected to Liberty rose to exclaim: — “0 Liberty, what crimes have been committed in thy name I”

To ally that sacred name to the culpable and cruel neglect of parents who neither do their duty to their children nor to the state, is to help the cause of despotism, and make the name of liberty “stink in the nostrils” of the people. Let our country apply a prompt remedy to this evil, and upon the land which, with judgment to distinguish between liberty and licentiousness, and humanity to espouse the cause of the wronged, spread her mother wings over the least of these little ones, we may expect the blessing of Him who folded infants in the arms that sustain the world, and said, “Suffer little children to come unto me, for of such is the kingdom of heaven.”

TV, The extent of irreligion in our large cities.

Much irreligion may be found among religious professors. To use a common saying, all is not gold that glitters. And there needs no other evidence of the fact, that irreligion does exist among religious professors, than the cold, callous, heartless indifference with which many hear of the sins and look upon the sorrows of their fellow-creatures. They could not do so if they were baptized into the nature as well as the name of Jesus Christ. In some cases the loss of a cattle-beast will affect the former, the loss of a few pounds on some speculation will distress the merchant, the loss of her raven locks, and the rose upon her cheek, and the fading charms that won admiration, will grieve the woman, more than the loss of immortal souls. Alas, the best of us have cause to pray for a deeper baptism in the spirit of Him, who, beholding the city, wept over it! Blessed Jesus! blessed Saviour, and blessed pattern! how didst thou leave the delights of heaven and thy Father’s bosom, on a mission of most generous mercy! Thy love grudged no labor! Thine eye refused no pity! Thy ear was never shut against the story of distress! Thy band was always ready to relieve the sufferer! From thy cradle to thy grave, thy whole life was passed in daily acts of loftiest self-denial, and, with the blood trickling down thy brows, and the heavy cross on thy lacerated back, upon thy way to Calvary, to save the vilest wretches and the chief of sinners, how dost thou turn round on us to 13* say, “If an J man will come after me, let Lim den;y himself, and take up his cross daily and follow me! For whosoever will save his life, shall lose it, and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it. For what is a man profited if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul? or, what shall a man give in exchange for his soul? For the Son of man shall come in the glory of his Father, with his angels, and then he shall reward every man according to his works.”

The best of us have come far short, no doubt, of thus following Christ. Defects are many and great — leaving us no hope of salvation, but in the mercy of the Father, and the merits of the Son. Nor do we deny that there is a numerous class who follow the banner of the cross, but are, so to speak, mere camp followers — never fighting in the front of battle, nor found, but on a day of parade, among the ranks of the fighting men. They are professors of religion, because it is r(^,pu table and respectable to be so; because it keeps qcet an otherwise uneasy conscience:

because it helps them on in the world. They hold some such place in the Christian, as was occupied in the Jewish host, by the mixed multitude which, although not of Israel, followed Israel out of Egypt. But if that be certain, no less certain is this, that while in some cases there is a profession of religion without its reality, there is in no case the reality of religion without its profession. There may be leaves and blossoms also on a tree which bears no fruit, but without leaves and blossoms there can be none. The tree which, in high mid-summer, when skies are warm, and birds are singing, and flowers are blooming, and woods are green, stands there a skeleton form with its naked branches, has no life in it. It must be a cumberer of the ground.

Now, bearing this in mind, what an appal» ling picture of irreligion do our large towns present! Many years ago it was alleged that in our own city, containing a population of more than one hundred and fifty thousand Bouls, there were not fewer than forty thousand who had sunk into practical heathenism Thej- key->t no Sabbath, they entered no house of God; bells might have been mute, pulpits silent, and churches shut for them. So far as they cared, or were concerned, the cross, with its blessed burden, might never have stood on Calvary. Just think of us, sitting at ease in Zion, with forty thousand neighbors perishing at our door — but one here, and another there, caring for their souls! Those who alleged this, those who had gone below to sound the well, and came up to report how the water was rising, were treated as alarmists. Th(^ sky was clear, the sea was calm, the ship wasi but slowly sinking, and so — all fears laughed away — the merry music struck up again, and the dance went on upon the deck. But since that period, another party has stept in — one not suspected of fanaticism or a sectarian spirit. The Government instituted a census, and its results have established the ability, and vindicated the integrity of those who were the first to sound the alarm. It is now proved, that not here only where between forty and fifty thousand go to no church — not in Glasgow only, where more than a hundred thousand go to no church — not in London only, where more than ten hundred thousand go to no chui’ch; but that in all our large towns there are to be found immense, formidable, and growing masses over whom religion has no hold — who have parted from their anchors, and broken loose from all religious profession. Nor is that all. The plague has extended from the towns to the country. Many rural districts, which, some years ago, were the homes of a devout and decent peasantry, are now filled with a mining or manufacturing population, who know no Sabbath, read no Bible, and care neither for Grod nor man.

But instead of roaming over either the whole town or country, look again at. that district of this city which we have begun to cultivate. In what state did we find its people, so far as attendance on divine worship was concerned? Well, upon entering on our work in the Pleasance — certainly, as 1 have already said, not the worst district of

164 Tj3E city:

the town — we found more than one-third of its two thousand inhabitants, more than six hundred of the whole two thousand people, passing on to the grave as careless of their souls as if they had none to care for — living without the profession of religion — living without God or hope in the world — living, to all practical intents and purposes, heathens in a Christian land.

We, like other congregations of our own church and of other churches which have labored in the same work, have had already fruit of our labors. Let all other congregations, to whatever denomination of Christiana they may belong, engage in a similar enterprise. Let each select their own manageable field of Christian work. Let us thus embrace the whole city, and cover its nakedness — although like Joseph, it should be robed in a coat of many colors. Let our only rivalry be the holy one of who shall do mostand succeed best in converting the wilderness into an Eden, and causing these deserts to blossom as the rose. Like those allies on Crimean fields who forgot their old quarrels, and buried the recollections of the past in oblivion, let us all sit down together before this great fortress. They co-operated for the common good. Rebuking our wretched jealousies, and presenting us with a heroic, I bad almost said a holy example of generous sympathy and indomitable energy, in the teeth of frost, and famine, and pestilence, and war, they clung to the rocks of that stormy shore. With mutual understanding and arrangements, they threw up their batteries, they pressed on their lines, they manned the trenches, they rushed to the assault — mingling the shouts of different nations in the same gallant charge, and the blood of different races in the same battle-field. And if nations, once hostile, there fought and fell together, there bled and died together, wby should not different churches come to as common and cordial an understanding. If we make a united, I believe, with God’s blessing, we shall make an irresistible assault upon these four formidable strongholds of Sin and Satan.

Let what we have done on a small scale in our selected district be done on a large one. We have brought the uneducated within the doors of the school. We have built up a Christian congregation out of a mass of ruins. We have gathered into the house of God many who were as sheep without a shepherd. We have done this by a devoted missionary — aided by Christian men and women who threw their energies into the work, and spent no small portion of their time among the dwellings of the people in household visitations. Let that which we have done on a small scale be done on a large one, and the lowest population of our cities may yet be raised, and the worst districts evangelized. This were done if every Christian family would select but one lost family as the object of their care, saying, Be that our work. It were done, if every convert would seek to make conversions; done, if every man who had himself reached the rock, would stretch out his hand to pull others up. The work before us — the work of raising and christianizing our masses — would be found, I believe, to be perfectly practicable, were it attempted in a systematic way, and on some such plan as this. Let the ministers or representatives of the different denominations within the city — Episcopalian, Baptist, and Independent, United Presbyterian, Free Church, and Established Church — meet, and form themselves into a real working Evangelical Alliance. Agreeing to regard all old divisions of parishes with an ecclesiastical right over their inhabitants as now-a-days a nullity, and so far as these are preventing Christian co-operation, and the salvation of the people, as worse than a nullity, let them map out the dark and destitute districts of the city — assigning a district. to each congregation. Let every congregation then go to work upon their own part of the field, and giving each some 500 souls to care for, you would thus cover “the nakedness of the land.” You would everywhere bring life into close contact with death, and cover the whole as the prophet with his own body did the dead body of the child. Every church - 14 going family would have to charge itself with the care of one single family, with seeing that the children of that careless, godless household were got to school, and its members were brought out Dn the Lord’s day to the church of the district, or their own place of worship, with visiting them in their sickness, and helping them over their difficulties, and by aL Christian kindness promoting both their temporal and eternal interests. In this way the work were not only practicable, but amid all its difficulties comparatively easy. It would prove a blessing to the families visiting as well as to the families visited. And I am confident that it would bring down the blessing of God on itself, and on our country — in a few years presenting a result which would astonish earth and gladden heaven.

I have no hope of accomplishing this object if the churches are to be laced up by their old rules, and people are to leave everything to ministers and missionaries. Why should not he that heareth, as well as he that preacheth, say, Come? W by should not they that are preached to, preach? Our Lord gave to the disciples. Yes; but they gave to the people. And why should not some who now, on Sabbath-days, enjoy two services in the house of God, content themselves with one, and at the time of the other go forth to give what they have got? The bread would multiply in their hands. People may tell me they are not learned — I reply, that to tell these poor sinners of Jesus, whether beneath the roof of a house or the open roof of heaven, needs no learning. They need nothing but the love of Christ, zeal for souls, and the use of theii mother tongue. Possessed of no qualificatiouv but these; endowed with the Spirit, and ordained of Heaven, see what the first Christians did! They conquered the world! See what the first Methodists did! They changed the face of England. See what the church in Hamburgh did! Twenty years ago, five Christian men met there in a cobbler’s shop. They also, when they beheld the city, wept over it. They resolved to form themselves into a church — a missionary church, with Hamburgh

160 THE crnr:

and its environs for the field of tlieii labors. “What their particular creed was, to what denomination of Protestants they belonged, ] am not careful to inquire. High above the regimental colors of that little band floated the royal banner of the Cross. They fought for the crown of Jesus. They toiled, they watched, they labored for the salvation of souls. One article of their creed, one term of their communion, was this: — That every member of that Christian church should be a working Christian. So, in the afternoons and evenings of the Lord’s day, they went forth io work, to gather in the loiterers by the highways and the hedges. Every member ihey gained was more than an accession to their numbers — he was an accession to their power. And with what results were their labors attended? These should encourage all other congregations and churches “to go and do likewise.” That handful of corn is now waving in the golden harvests of many fields. That acorn is now shot up into a mighty oak that nestles the birds of heaven and braves the tempest, and throws a broad shadow on the ground. The church which was at first constituted of these five men, who met in an obscure and humble shop, has, in the couise of twenty years, been blessed of God to convert many thousand souls, and bring some fifty thousand people under the regular ministrations of the gospel.

See what the Lord has wrought I In that experiment and its sublime results, in the rich effusion of the Spirit on the labors of these humble men and women — every one working in their own sphere, but all at work — who does not hear the voice of Providence saying, as it mingles with the songs of rejoicing angels, “Go and do likewise.” And should any Dne come to me with the news that such and such an office-bearer, or member of this congregation, was preaching in our streets, I would reply with Moses: A young man came running to say, “Eldad and Medad do prophesy in the camp,’’ and Joshua, jealous for Lis master’s honor, interposed, saying, “My lord

Moses forbid them.” How noble his answer I 14* “Enviest thou for me? Would God tbac all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that the Lord did put his Spirit upon them!”

Were such moral agencies established ovei all our cities, and wrought with the energy of men who trust in God, and are fired with the love of souls, were the churches to do their part in the matter of religion, and the state to do her part in the m.atter of education, our country might stand till the day of doom. Then it would appear, that although Britain bears no eagle on her banner, yet with her foot upon the ‘^ Rock of ages,” and her undazzled eye fixed on the Sun of Righteousness, in this respect she belongs to the eagle tribe, that she can moult her wings and renew her youth. “For what saith the Lord, Hast thou not known? hast thou not heard, that the everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary? There is no searching of His understanding; he giveth power to the faint, and to them that have no might, he increaseth strength. Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall; but they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”

But if this is not to be done, and nothing effectual is to be done to meet the evils that afflict our country, what “shall be the end of these things?” Unless they are met, met in time, and before the constitution sinks and loses all power to rally, the end of them must be the ruin of our land I Our cities, especially our large cities, being in this, as they are in every other country, the great centres of influence, if they increase in ignorance, irreligion, and immoral-ity during the next century as they have done in the past, those who fear the God of heaven and profess the faith of Jesus Christ will find themselves a weak minority We are just now rapidly moving on to such a dangerous crisis. That is the rock toward which the vessel of the state is drifting. And when that happens, i;

164 THE cirr:

needs no augur to tell “what shall be the end of these things.”

Take as types of their class the two largest cities in England and Scotland. Look at London and Glasgow. He must be blind who sees nothing alarming in the moral aspect of these commercial capitals. There, ignorance and irreligion are washing away the soil from beneath the lowest courses of the social fabric. Let that continue — let this undermining process go on till a convulsion come, and no power on earth can keep the pyramid from toppling over — burying throne and altar, and all that stands above, in a common ruin. The upper classes of society should know — God grant that they may not learn the lesson when it is too late I — that whatever be the distance between them, no elevation separates their interests from the lowest people; that there is a God who reigneth upon earth; and that, by a decree of Providence, as sure as those that rule the courses of tide or time, those who neglect the interests of others shall themselves suffer in the end. When the body of the peopie go down, they shall not perish alone; in til em down goes a mighty ship, creating in its descent a tremendous whirlpool to engulph the rank and wealth, the religion and liberties, of our land. We are most concerned for the great body c f the people, because it is in their virtues and piety that the power and permanence of kingdoms lie. They form the mass of the social fabric; and, although it will stand the shock, or survive the decay which destroys its lofty and more ornamental parts, let it be destroyed, and these are buried in the ruins. When the mass of the people cease to be pervaded with morality and piety (look at France, for instance), by a law as sure as that which, under certain conditions, changes wine into vinegar, the sweetest into the sourest things, liberty passes into licentiousness — an intolerable evil, from which to be relieved men submit their necks to the yoke of despotism. There is no choice for nations but the fear of God or the terror of man — the power of the Bible or the point of the bayonet When men die, corruption commonly begins after death; but when nations die, it always begins before it. And as in that man’s gangrened extremities and swollen feet, and slow circulation, I see the heralds of death approaching — in these godless masses, sunk in ignorance, lost to the profession of religion, and even to the decent habits of civilized society, I see the most alarming signs of a nation’s danger — unless remedies are promptly applied, the unmistakeable forerunners of a nation’s death. Unless early, active, adequate measures are employed to arrest the progress of our social maladies, there remains for this mighty empire no fate but the grave — that grave which has closed over all that have gone before it. AVhere are the Assyrian and Egyptian monarchies? Where is the Macedonian empire? Where the world-wide power of Kome? Egypt lies entombed amid the dust of her catacombs. Assyria is buried beneath the mounds of Nineveh. Rome lives only in the pages of history, survives but in the memory of her greatness and the majestic ruins of the “Eternal City.” Shall our fate resemble theirs? Shall it go to prove that Providence has extended the same law of mortality to nations that lies on men? That they also should struggle through the dangers of a precarious infancy; grow up into the beauty, and burn with the ardor, of youth; arrive at the vigor of a perfect manhood; and then, slowly sinking, pass through the blindness and decay of old age, until they drop into the tomb?

Under God, it depends upon ourselves whether that shall or shall not be our fate. Matters are not so far gone but it may be averted. A great French general, who reached the battlefield at sun-down, found that the troops of his country had been worsted in the fight. Unskilful arrangements had neutralized Gallic bravery, and offered the enemy advantages they were not slow to seize. He accosted the unfortunate commander. Having rapidly learned how matters stood, he pulled out his watch, turned bis eye on the sinking sun, and said, ‘’ There’s time yet to gain the victory.” He rallied the broken ranks. He placed himself at their head. And launching hem, with the arm of a giant in war, upon the columns of the foe, he plucked the prize from their hands — won the day. There is time yet, also, to save our country. There is no time to lose. To her case perhaps may be applied the words, which we would leave as a solemn warning to every worldly, careless, Christless man, “Behold now is the accepted time; behold now is the day of salvation.”