But now I turn on this subject an intenser light. We have fifteen
hundred lights in this church, and when by electric touch they are
kindled in the evening service it is almost startling. But this whole
subject of "Clandestine Marriages and Escapades" I put under a more
intense light than that. The headlight of a locomotive is terrible if
you stand near enough to catch the full glare of it. As it sweeps
around the "Horseshoe Curve" of the Alleghanies or along the edges of
the Sierra Nevadas, how far ahead, and how deep down, and how high up
it flashes, and there is instantaneous revelation of mountain peak and
wild beasts hieing themselves to their caverns and cascades a thousand
feet tall, or clinging in white terror to the precipices! But more
intense, more far-reaching, more sudden, swifter and more tremendous
is the headlight of an advancing Judgment Day, under which all the
most hidden affairs of life shall come to discovery and arraignment. I
quote an overwhelming passage of Scripture, in which I put the whole
emphasis on the word "secret." "God shall bring every work into
judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good or evil."
What a time that will be in which the cover shall be lifted from every
home and from every heart. The iniquity may have been so sly that it
escaped all human detection, but it will be as well known on that day
as the crimes of Sodom and Gomorrah, unless for Christ's sake it has
been forgiven. All the fingers of universal condemnation will be
pointed at it. The archangel of wrath will stand there with uplifted
thunderbolt ready to strike it. The squeamishness and prudery of
earthly society, which hardly allowed some sins to be mentioned on
earth, are past, and the man who was unclean and the woman who was
impure will, under a light brighter than a thousand noonday suns,
stand with the whole story written on scalp, and forehead, and cheek,
and hands, and feet; the whole resurrection body aflame and dripping
with fiery disclosures, ten thousand sepulchral and celestial and
infernal voices crying, "Unclean! Unclean! Unclean!"
All marital intrigues and all secret iniquities will be published, as
though all the trumpets spoke them, and all the lightnings capitalized
them, and all the earthquakes rumbled them. Oh, man, recreant to thy
marriage vow! Oh, woman, in sinful collusion! What, then, will become
of thy poor soul? The tumbling Alps, and Pyrenees, and Mount
Washingtons cannot hide thee from the consequences of thy secret sins.
Better repent of them now, so that they cannot be brought against
thee. For the chief of sinners there is pardon, if you ask it in time.
But I leave you to guess what chance there will be for those who on
earth lived in clandestine relations, when on that day the very Christ
who had such high appreciation of the marriage relation that He
compared it to His own relation with the Church, shall appear at the
door of the great hall of the Last Assize, and all the multitudes of
earth, and hell, and heaven shall rise up and cry out from the three
galleries: "Behold, the bridegroom cometh!"