The Way to Life

Lay hold on eternal life. — 1st Timotht vi. 12.

On the deck of a foundering vessel stood a negro slave — the last man on board, he was about to step into the life-boat at her last trip. She was alreadyloaded almost to the gunwale; to the water edge. Observed to bear in his arms what seemed a heavy bundle, the boat’s crew, who had difficulty to keep her afloat in such a roaring sea, refused to receive him unless he came unencumberd. ard alone. He pressed to his bosom what he carried in his arms, and seemed loth to part with it. They insisted. He had his choice — either to leap in and leave that behind him, or throw it in and stay to perish. He opened its folds; and there, warmly wrapt round, lay two children whom their father, his master, had committed to his care. He kissed them; bade the sailors carry his affectionate farewell to his master, and tell how he had faithfully fulfilled his charge; and then, lowering the children into the boat which pushed off, the dark man stood alone on that sinking deck — and bravely went down with the foundering ship. Such arms slavery binds; such kind hearts it crushes! A noble and touching example that of the love that seeketh not her own! yet it shews how the means of salvation may be inadequate to the occasion. So no poor sinner need perish, nor lose eternal life. There is room for all in Christ. Our cry to the perishing, Come to Jesus Come;” yet there is room.’

While there is eternal life in the gospel sufficient for all, none are specially excluded from its benefits. Those only are excluded who exclude themselves, and refuse to be saved on God’s own terms. His proclamation of mercy to a lost, rebel world, is clogged with no exceptions. After our brave men had crushed that terrible revolt which some years ago shook our Indian Empire to its foundations, and filled many of our homes with grief, an amnesty was proclaimed, but not to all. Some were by name excluded from its grace; and, as might have been expected, these desperate men fought it out to the last in the fastnesses and deadly jungles of Nepaul. They did not come in to accept the amnesty. There was no reason why they should. It was not for them. Heads of the revolt, and guilty of cold-blooded murders, as well as of the blackest treachery, there was no hope of mercy held out to them; and so, standing to their arms, they resolved to spin out their lives to the last thread, and sell them at the dearest price. What a contrast to this, the gospel! Whatever be men’s sins and crimes, none are excluded, by name or by character, from the amnesty which God proclaims, from the benefits of eternal life, “Whosoever cometh unto me,” says Jesus, “I will in nowise cast out;” on no account; for no crimes — no depth of guilt — no length of resistance to my gracious offers j let him come with all the sins on his head which any man ever committed or it is possible for man to commit; let him come in life’s last worthless hour, I will not turn away from him — from the vilest, hoariest sinner; I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked — nor am I willing that any should perish, but that all should come to me and live. Thus, though the words of my text are addressed to a man of God, they admit of a wider than their first application; and, therefore, to those that are not, as well as to those that are, men of God, in his great name we address this call. Lay hold on eternal life. There is enough of it to supply the wants of all. No child of Adam stands excluded from its precious blessings.

I. Consider our need of eternal life.

Greatest gift of God! eternal life is deliverance from eternal death, the curse of a broken law, and the doom of a burning hell. Eternal life is eternal blessedness — the pardon of sin’s guilt, and freedom from its tyrannous power; the pleasures of a pure heart, and the enjoyment of peace with God; joy without any bitter admixture, and riches without wings; health that never sickens, life that never dies, and a glory hereafter that never fades away; perfect holiness in the likeness, and perfect happiness in the bosom of God. These are what we need; and how great is our need of them?

How great our need, was once well expressed by Rowland Hill. A preacher, who threw his whole soul into his work, he was challenged for the vehemence of his Toice and manner. Unlike some whose dull, cold, tmimpassioned manner in the pulpit, led an infidel to say that he doubted whether the preachers themselves believed in a hell, he spoke like a man :svho saw the people hang over perdition; and heard their long, piercing shrieks, as one after another they lost their hold, and dropped into the fiery gulf. Exception being taken, as I have said, to his energy and vehemence, Hill told how he had once seen a vast bank of earth, below which some men were at work, suddenly rend asunder; and leaving its bed, precipitate itself forward to bury them alive before they could utter a cry, or move a foot to escape. And who then, he asked, found fault with me, because, in my anxiety to save them, my cries for help were loud enough to call the neighborhood to the rescue, and be heard a long mile away. Left there, they perished, miserably perished — needing what God, not man, always is, “a very present help in trouble.” The moral of the story is very plain. These poor men, buried below a mass of earth, gasping for air, choking for want of breath, in instant danger of perishing, did not stand in greater, nor so great, need of strong arms to dig them out, as all men do of eternal life.

Sin has brought death into this world; and we are all of us involved in the calamity — buried in the ruins of th.e fall. We may not have sinned as others have done; that is very possible. But in vain the Pharisee thanks God that lie is “not as this publican;” in vain the self-rigliteous, shrinking from the touch of sfpme low and loathsome outcast, says. Stand aside, I am holier than thou. Ah, pity rather than pride is the feeling with which the best men regard the worst; conscious, as they are, that they would have been no better than others, had they been left to themselves, and exposed to as great temptations! All by nature lying under the same sentence of condemnation, pride, which is not for angels, still less befits felons — those whose crimes have brought them to a common prison, and doomed them to a common death.

But, though we have sinned less than others, we cannot be saved by merit; even as, thank God, though we have sinned more than others, we may be saved by mercy. How idle to talk of other men being greater sinners than we are — to flatter and deceive ourselves with that! He drowns as surely who has his head beneath one inch of water, as he who, with a mill stone hung round his neck, has sunk a hundred fathoms down. Let the strain of the tempest come, and the ship that has one bad link in her cable, as certainly goes ashore to be dashed to pieces on the rocks, as another that has twenty bad. It is, no doubt, by repeated strokes of the woodman’s axe that the oak, bending slowly to fate, bows its proud head and falls to the ground, and it is by long dropping that water hollows the hardest stone. But those who speak of great and little, of few or many sins, seem to forgot that man’s ruin was the work of one moment, and of one sin. The weight of only one sin sank this great world into perdition; and now all of us, all men, lie under the same sentence of condemnation. Extinguishiiig every hope of salvation t’lrough works, and

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