POST NAUFRAGIUM TABULA.
The attitude of the heart and will towards God differs so much in men
whose past lives may have been equally guilty, that widely different
motives are presented to the one and the other by those who would be
God’s messengers to them. The voice of God is always the voice of love,
for God is love; but as he invites and persuades and reassures some, so
he uses terrors and denunciations with others, that, when they refuse to
be drawn, he may scourge and drive his wanderers home.
There is a wide difference between you to whom I have been speaking, who
are deeply persuaded of your own sinfulness, whose aching hearts conceal
much of secret pain and sorrow, and others of whom I am about to speak.
There are men around us who are daily poisoning the springs of our
social and national life. They are the children of luxury, prosperous
leaders in sin—heartless, self-indulgent, fashionable, audacious,
triumphant sinners, who are selling their strength, and health, and
rank, and manhood to Satan,—trading as long as they can on their
personal advantages, graceful manners, light wit, knowledge of all the
arts of seduction and ways of the world, and, if these fail, having
recourse to solid gold, the price of iniquity, the price of blood and of
souls. These men require costly sacrifices to be made at the shrine of
lechery. They drag with them into the whirlpool of destruction
everything they can lay their hands on that is sweetest and most
beautiful in creation. Their haunts are the “dark places of the earth,”
which are “full of the habitations of cruelty.” Cruel, ruthless, and
desolating, they dispense plagues and death wherever they move by the
very infection of their breath. Gentler natures, easily destroyed, and
hardly if ever restored, fall before their devouring lusts; the bodies
and souls of tender women are to them as though they had been expressly
designed and created to be destroyed and broken to pieces for the relief
of men’s basest needs, as sheep and oxen are provided to be slain for
the satisfying of their hunger. These are they who have “the
understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the
ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart; who,
being past feeling, have given themselves over unto lasciviousness, to
work all uncleanness with greediness;” “filthy dreamers, who defile the
flesh;” “speaking evil of those things which they know not; but what
they know naturally as brute beasts, in those things they corrupt
themselves.” “Clouds are they without water, carried about of winds;
trees whose fruit withereth, without fruit, twice dead, plucked up by
the roots; raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame;
wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness for
ever.”
“Speaking evil of those things which they know not” is frequently in the
sacred writings linked together with the practices of gross sensualists.
Experience confirms this observation; these sensualists are also the
cynics and scoffers, who continually sneer at the good of which they
know nothing. In all their speech they aim at lowering the moral
standard around them to the level of their own, and at reducing the
general tone to the colour of their own minds; and thus they succeed in
silencing the last whispers of conscience, which might disturb them in
the midst of their profligacy by bringing to them from time to time the
consciousness of a purer atmosphere not far off. They affect, until it
becomes a reality to them, a profound scepticism as to the existence of
any virtue, or possibility of virtue, or of any sincerity or
unselfishness in the world. They see nothing but their own selfish and
impure souls reflected in the society around them; they are unable to
see anything else, a total blindness having fallen upon them, as upon
the men of Sodom, from whose raging passions even the angels of God
needed to be sheltered. They have become dead to the perception of moral
worth and beauty. They are so given up to the flesh, that every thought
which presents itself to the mind, every sight, every sound, comes to
them loaded with heavy chains of impure and degrading associations. They
are so petrified in scepticism, that if Christ himself in all his divine
perfection of character were once again to appear among us, their
estimate of him would be that of the fashionable profligates of his own
time on earth, “a gluttonous man and a winebibber.” So tainted is the
whole being of such men with the poisonous atmosphere of their Circean
existence, that the divinest guests who should attempt an entrance into
their breasts would be changed by them into swine; to them all that is
best and sweetest in man, woman, or child, is born of evil, and tends to
evil.
And this moral blight is not reserved for those alone who are long
experienced in evil. In many lands, and now partially in our own, the
foulest vice is so instituted and organised as to supply a training in
impure principle and in guilty practice to our youth from their earliest
years. “It strikes our youth at that unhappy moment when first they
cross the threshold of the abodes of officially-regulated vice; and when
they recross that threshold to the purer air, O God! what fatal deed has
not been done! For them the spring of life has no more flowers; the very
friendships of their youth are polluted; they become strangers to all
the honourable relations of a pure young life: and thus it is that more
and more in these days we see stretching wider and wider around us the
circle of this mocking, faded, worn-out, sceptical youth, without
poetry, without love, without enthusiasm, without faith, and without
joy.”[4]
A dilution of this moral poison, this disbelief in God and in goodness,
creeps upwards into the higher moral strata; it is communicated from the
“lewd fellows of the baser sort” (for of the baser sort they are, though
often the proudest blood of the aristocracy flows in their veins), to
the minds of many who are worthy of a better creed; and we feel it
around us, entering our homes through the pages of many books and
writings, wherein these mournful cynics treat, in a hard and untruthful
spirit, of all the most holy relations of life, of the tenderest and
deepest secrets of the heart, as well as the deeper and more sacred
mysteries of Providence, of which, indeed, they cannot but speak falsely
and blindly, since they are ignorant of them, and have not the key
wherewith to unlock such knowledge. These also are guilty, though it may
be unconsciously so, of cruelty, because they rob men of hope, without
which earth is darkness; “because,” saith the Lord, “with lies ye have
made the heart of the righteous sad, whom I have not made sad;” because,
in envy of the good which they have not found or have forfeited, they
perpetually deny its existence, and spread around them the infection of
despair.
“A licentious age is parent of a cruel age,”[5] and in the case of the
individual, cruelty follows quickly as the twin-companion of profligacy.
It is not to himself alone that the impure man is cruel; indeed, so far
as this life is concerned, he constantly saves himself and his
reputation, while he destroys another. Men too commonly profess to
believe that to further degrade and oppress a being already degraded and
enslaved is a venial fault; that the sin of fornication is not the
“deadly sin” it has been pronounced to be, because, they say, they do
not destroy what is good, but only, under the force of temptation, take
a sinful advantage of a great evil already existing. This is a fatally
false judgment. The soul of the most forlorn outcast was redeemed by
Christ, and is dear to him. Most certainly the souls of women are as
precious to God as the souls of men; and God has never and nowhere said,
that that which brings certain and utter destruction to the souls of
women is a light offence on the part of men. Our Lord said, “It must
needs be that offences will come;” but he added those awful words, “Woe
unto _that man_ through whom the offence cometh.” No one can say that
any one man is responsible for the existence of the horrible fact that
thousands of women, of young girls, of mere children, are continually
dragged and driven to the fashionable markets of lust, and there slain
like sheep appointed for slaughter. The offence is distributed among
many, both of men and women, and the exact measure of the _woe_ shall
assuredly be dealt, by the God who judges not as man judges, to every
one who has put forward a hand, even once, to help to crush the
helpless, or to prevent the fallen from rising. The line is untenable
between the first seducer of a woman, and the men who, cowardly, rush in
when the victim is once down, to seize upon and devour her in their
wickedness, until every trace of the divine stamp of womanhood is
effaced. The case is as though a woman were buried alive by each man in
a crowd flinging on her a handful of earth, or as though she were
trampled to death by the marching over her prostrate form of a company
of soldiers. Though no one singly seems to kill, yet collectively they
kill her, and each one is guilty. The judgment of men of the world on
this matter is for the most part shallow, selfish, and cruel; and when I
look at the question in the light which Christ’s solemn words flash upon
it, then I see how falsely or how wickedly some men speak and act. It
avails not to plead, “The woman solicited me.” What if she had solicited
you to assassinate her? Would her solicitation justify you in that? And
after all, what is it that she wants of you when she solicits you? It is
your money: if you are disposed to give that freely, no law of God
forbids it; but the law of God forbids, and humanity forbids, your
buying of her the permission to degrade her body and ruin her soul.
“Sophistical defences all vanish in the clear daylight of truth. When a
_sale_ is hideously unnatural, intrinsically unlawful, productive of
cruel miseries to soul and body, the _purchaser_ also is guilty,—and
here is thrice guilty, beyond the seller; because _he_ is seeking for
carnal pleasure only; _she_ can have no pleasure, but much rather
misery, and is in quest of money only; nay, of the poorer women we may
say, they are in quest of a bare livelihood only. The fine flaunting
courtesans who are carried away by vanity, and obtain high prices from
rich profligate men, less deserve our pity in their present phase of
life; only that we know them to be on the fatal slope down which a large
number of them will be carried, when the men who have bought them one by
one abandon them, each justifying himself by the large sums which he has
paid! What, then, will a thoughtful man say is the legitimate price of
virtue? Either virtue is empty talk, or it is above all price. If any
hardened man hold virtue to be mere talk, stern fact replies, that at
least vice is a hideous fiend, a substantial and terrible reality, and
its propagators are agents of cruelty.”[6]
Your offence—my guilty brother—recall it! Though it be but that of which
men speak so lightly, of having helped to trample down in the dust, so
as to make rising again impossible for ever, one of those over whom the
multitude tread every day, it is recorded against you, and your portion
of the woe (you who set but one foot upon her), is waiting for you.
“Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish;” and the only true
repentance is a practical repentance, which hastens to make restitution,
to restore fourfold.
You are sceptical concerning these victims of men’s vices. To blacken
them, to speak of them as beyond all hope of restoration, seems perhaps
to lessen the uneasy sense of guilt which stirs at times within your
breast. As one who knows something of the heart of the outcast, I can
tell you that these victims on their part are sceptical concerning _you_
and the possibility of your redemption; and the doubt has assuredly as
much foundation to rest upon in the one case as in the other.
The minds of these poor women are frequently distracted with
speculations concerning the lives of their male partners in guilt. They
are perplexed to conceive how it is that a man can for years, for his
whole life perhaps, act a _double part_. They say, “We are sinners
indeed, but we are not _hypocrites_; we do not, after plunging into
impurity under cover of the darkness of night, take our place smilingly
in the daytime among pure men and women, and go to church, it may be, on
a Sunday. We receive all the blows and all the curses from society which
we deserve, and sometimes more; but these men! tell us, is it possible
for their consciences ever to be cleansed?” I wish to make it clear to
you that these poor women consider the reclaimability of profligate men
accepted by the world to be a doubtful possibility _because of the
hypocrisy of their lives_. Their estimate of that hypocrisy is, that it
must be death to the whole character. They feel themselves incapable of
practising such an hypocrisy, deeply sinful as they are. They see their
nightly male visitors received in society, courted by the world,
surrounded by wife and children, holding offices of responsibility; and
their poor souls are perplexed. Now, men who doubt the reclaimability of
fallen women look upon _unchastity_ as the one damning sin. The women,
on the other hand, look upon the _hypocrisy_ as the damning sin which
shuts a man out from hope of heaven, if not from the London
drawing-room. Thus, while one class of persons may be looking upon
another class as utterly vile and irreclaimable, the very class so
judged may be holding the same view with regard to their judges. Now,
let me recall to your minds the story of the Pharisee and the Publican:
the one would not so much as raise his eyes to heaven, but only said,
“God be merciful;” the other, you know, was a reputedly respectable
person. He who “knew what was in man,” asserted that the one was
justified rather than the other. We find this Divine Person more in
agreement with one of the judgments referred to above than with the
other. That quality of mind which made the attitude of the publican more
hopefully directed towards moral reformation than the other—namely, the
quality of _humility_—is not unfrequently found in the character of
outcast women. It is this honest humility, combined sometimes with a
passionate desire to seem no better than she is, which constitutes the
redeeming feature in the character of the poor outcast. She is not
acting a double part. I fear it may be said as truly now as it was said
long ago to persons who contemptuously speak of outcast women as a
hopeless class—“The publicans and the _harlots_ enter into the kingdom
of heaven before you.”
I would ask you who, after years of shameful wallowing in sin, have
taken to yourselves the comforts of home life, whose praises are in the
mouths of men, who are smiled upon by pure women, and caressed by loving
children, to come with me and look at this degraded woman, sobbing her
poor broken heart out in a corner of some hospital ward, consumed by
disease and misery. What was her life, and what was yours? She was
perhaps slain through her heart’s best affections. The abandonment of
herself to a person beloved was perhaps her first step to ruin; and who
shall say that that self-abandonment in woman, which will make her fling
herself away for another, is altogether devoid of some trace of
unselfishness, which men would do well to mark and shield in her, and to
imitate for themselves in a pure and good cause? What is there in such
an one which makes her a greater sinner than yourself? Be honest! She is
lost to society; you are petted by society. She is killed by the poison
she drank; you survive. No after sweetness, no late consolations of
home, nor the love of children, are reserved for her. She dies
prematurely, and her place knows her no more. Your own past life could
reveal sins as great before God as hers have been; and you are—I will
not say happy, for a little knowledge of the secrets of hearts forbids
me to use that word—but you are not in your coffin, in an unhonoured,
unvisited grave. You are alive, and counting your solid blessings around
you, and receiving the right hand of fellowship every day from the best
part of society, of which, may be, you become gradually soothed into the
belief that you are an honourable and worthy member. It would be vain to
say to you, “Put away your blessings, strip yourself of earthly goods,
come down into the dust, and proclaim yourself what you are.” I can but
say to you, and I do so with grief and shame for you, “Take, if you
will, all the delights of life, but take them in deep self-abhorrence
and confession to God who bears with you so far. Take them, but fear!
Your present prosperity is no sign of the favour of God towards you; it
is his frown, not his smile; wheresoever you go, whether alone or in
company, there is an invisible unbending finger pointing at you, and a
voice more awful than that of the seer of Israel saying of you, ‘Thou
art the man!’”
How fares it, I might ask of many, with the soul of her whom, having
cherished as a wife for a time, you put away when you deemed it
expedient to enter the estate of marriage, and with the souls of those
children, hers and yours, whose existence (unacknowledged perhaps by
you) cries every day to heaven against you? To you it is not difficult
to step back into paths of virtue, and to establish yourself in a home,
with a companion from whom you have been obliged to conceal the fact
that you have yourself lived in adultery up to the time when you made
the offer of yourself to her, and that your soul is stained with the
sins of inconstancy and treachery. But for her who is set aside, the
return to virtue is not easy. You dare not calmly contemplate _her_
future. You know that should she even escape being carried away by that
law of downward gravitation which so frequently governs the life of a
woman who has once erred, and should retire into seclusion, yet she goes
to her grave wronged, and marked with the world’s badge of shame. But I
ask not of any duty fulfilled in regard to her temporal state. I ask you
of her soul and eternal destiny. You think you have done well in
bestowing large gifts of money. Take heed lest God say to you, “Thy
money perish with thee!” because you have thought to atone with wretched
gold for a moral nature wrecked and an immortal soul betrayed! You have
tardily become convinced (you perhaps reply), that your relationships of
an immoral nature must be broken off; but when you have broken off
these, have you done all? Does God allow you to think only for your own
restored respectability and your own salvation, while she who shared
your guilt, it may be loved you truly, goes down to perdition? I beseech
you to consider that we shall be called to answer before God for the
souls of those with whom we have held close and intimate intercourse,
for those whose nature was weaker than our own, and who strengthened
themselves in sin by leaning against our stronger hearts; and that those
children, of whose being you are the author, will be confronted with you
in that awful day when it will not avail you any longer to ask, “Am I my
brother’s keeper?” Where is that woman, that child, whom you inoculated
with your vices, or in any way injured through the weakness and cruelty
of passion? Can you rest in peace one night upon your bed, until you
have sought out those whom you have injured, and moved heaven and earth
to repair the injury you have done? Or, if they have gone beyond your
reach into the darkness whence you can never recall them, can you rest,
enjoying your comforts and honours, until you have made restitution of
other souls to God for those whom you have destroyed? There may be
consciences more tender than your own, organisations more delicate than
yours, which are now suffering, year after year, pains and miseries and
darkness which _you_ brought upon them. There may be companions of your
youth who are now enduring the lifelong blight which you inflicted upon
them, and who, when they meet you in public places now, and see you
courted as leaders in society, are filled with contempt and hatred of
you, knowing not that your outward success is no sign of God’s favour.
You have brought souls into darkness and unbelief, causing them to ask,
“Are God’s ways equal?” “Why dost thou show me iniquity, and cause me to
behold grievance?... Wherefore lookest thou upon them that deal
treacherously, and holdest thy tongue when the wicked devoureth the man
that is more righteous than he?”
Men who have been selfish in the indulgence of their evil nature are too
often selfish even in repentance, content to recover themselves, with
scarcely a thought for those who have suffered through them. I have deep
sympathy with the sinful and sorrowful, and tempted and self-condemned;
but with this self-love which will flee even to the right source for
health and recovery, forgetting others, I have not the shadow of a
thought of sympathy. It moves my deepest scorn.
Wherever the true sorrow has penetrated, wherever the lesson of the
compassionate Saviour has been learned, however imperfectly, selfishness
disappears; those who have no deep care for, and make no active effort
for other sinners, especially for the victims of their own sin (if there
be such), are strangers to the true inner life, however correct, and
however highly praised, their outward life may be.
Few things are more sad to contemplate than the sight of men covering
their deep, unhealed wounds with a late-attained outward virtue and
decency, plastering their terrible griefs and diseases with the rewards
which belong to the virtuous. These things ought not to be. Yet among
those who have weakly, passionately, or in greediness of all that life
can give, clutched and gathered round them all that is sweetest and
best, there are some whose aching hearts still attest that they have
brought them no real health, that they are but external props to an
outward decency of conduct, leaving the deep sore untouched. To these I
would speak gently and sorrowfully, not in anger. You know well that you
are not healed by simply becoming outwardly moral. You know that only
the Infinite can penetrate the necessities of your immortal being, and
that only his hand can reach and apply healing to the deep wounds of
your soul. The remedies you have chosen are to your soul’s disease only
as the stimulants used for a person in consumption, which build him up
for a while, and bestow a false health, an unreal vigour, a temporary
excitement and fulness of the veins, which only make his decline more
rapid and death more sudden, when sooner or later the disease breaks
forth again. I beseech you, by the love of God, not to suffer these
present good things to withdraw your eyes from the only cure, the only
source of spiritual life and health. Better that you should suffer, that
your heart should ache, and that your old wounds should torment you
still, than that, in losing the sense of pain and shame, you should lose
your own soul. These good things may be a support to your weakness in
the regulation of your outward life, but they cannot give you eternal
life nor cleanse the moral nature.
O my erring brothers! be warned, and be aware before the night cometh of
the dangers of this later bliss, this earthly happiness or prosperity,
as you are aware of the perils into which your first choice of evil
brought you. There is an opiate in the purer cup which you now drink, as
there was poison in the former cup of intoxication which at first was to
you so pleasant, and afterwards stung like a serpent. Will you submit
that this opiate should cause you to slumber with the poison not cast
out, but working in you still—the poison which you can escape only by
deep cutting, and cauterising with the fire which he brings who came “to
bring fire on the earth,” who came to baptize us “with the Holy Ghost
and with fire”?
“Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there?” Is there
hope, not only for the erring and self-destroyed, but for the criminal
who has misled and destroyed another, upon whose head rests the guilt of
cruelty and treachery? With God all things are possible. “Nazarene, thou
hast conquered,” were the last words of Julian the Apostate, closing the
rebellion and defiance of a lifetime. The heart of the most scornful of
the rebels against his holy laws may, by the hand of God, with whom
nothing is impossible, be broken, softened, and laid bare to the kind
and healing dews of heaven. If at some happy season an angel should
descend and stir the deep waters of his soul, now so stagnant and
congealed beneath the upper froth, I believe they might prove to be
waters of healing. Would that he could hear through the dry air of the
wilderness where he is dying of thirst the Divine voice, “What aileth
thee?” and that his eyes might be opened to see close by his hand the
well of water which he knew not of. “I will give to him that is athirst
of the water of life freely.” “If any man thirst, let him come unto me
and drink.” Thousands are dying of thirst and of the fever which
accompanies it—dying with a deep well of water by their side, and with
words of profane mockery and despairing denial on their lips.
A strong yearning possesses my soul to stretch forth my hand to the most
hopeless creature that lives, to the wildest prodigal who ever fled from
his father’s house, to call him brother, and to speak to him of life and
of love. When there arose a mighty famine in that land, he began to be
in want, and would fain have filled his belly with the husks that the
swine did eat, “and no man gave unto him.” This, that “no man gave unto
him,” has often seemed to me the most sorrowful part of that story of
the Prodigal. These suicides rush downwards to destruction, and men fear
to put forth a hand to stop them, or hearts fail for want of love. We
too readily include them all in one hopeless class, supposed to be sick
beyond recovery, lost beyond recall. There is not one among us who
possesses in its perfection “the intuitive decision of a bright and
thorough-edged intellect to part error from crime.” But God does not
judge men in masses. He, and he alone, takes exact account of every
individual soul, with every particular of the circumstances, and the
forces without and within the man which combined to hurl him down to his
present estate of wretchedness. To us indeed they all appear as
wandering stars, but God alone knows to which among them the “mist of
darkness” is verily reserved for ever. There are moments of sanity and
of sadness, in which the eyes are opened to see that they are selling
their manhood and their immortality for—a mess of pottage!—moments in
which a little thing—a word, a look, a hand held out—might mature
disgust of self into the humble and firm resolve, “I will arise and go
to my Father.” But that little thing “no man gave unto him.”
I know that in speaking of life and of love to some of these, I may be
speaking into the ears of a corpse. The man is dead; he has died the
death of a suicide; his day of grace is past long before his natural
life is ended; he cannot be restored, not because God cannot or will not
restore him, but because there is no longer left in his will or
conscience or affections any spark of life or of power to respond any
longer to the calls of God. But love will not easily be persuaded that
the moment of death has arrived, nor that it is time to leave the bier
of the dead and to return among the living; love, like Rizpeh, will
watch with a constancy stronger than death by the silent corpses of the
“dearly beloved and longed for,” fiercely denying that they shall be
given as carrion to the wolves and the vultures. I do not know when life
becomes extinct. God only knows. But I know that “_charity never
faileth_;” that charity believeth all things, and hopeth all things;
that she holds on in faith and hope, hearing the words, “enthusiast!
fanatic!” uttered by those who have not made full trial of the
long-suffering of God, and with the cautionings and doubtful
questionings of some even of the followers of Jesus sounding in her
ears. None know what God can do, and is ready to do, for the maddest,
wickedest, vilest, and most self-destroyed of men or of women, save
those who can say of themselves, “_De profundis clamavi_,” who have
kneeled, in spirit, side by side with the Lord in the garden of
Gethsemane, and have seen his sweat as it were great drops of blood
falling down to the ground, and who, in that awful hour of love and
sorrow, have dared to say to him, “Lord, take of my heart’s blood also,
and let it be poured forth for thee and thine.”
“I am the resurrection and the life; whosoever believeth in me, though
he were dead, yet shall he live.” “I am come that they might have life,
and that they might have it more abundantly.” So spake the Holy One. The
soul of man is insatiable, for good or for evil. Fulness of life is
desired by all; the breaking up of the frosts of winter, and the
bursting forth of spring; the dreams of childhood restored, but restored
as actual possibilities for us to grasp. The human heart thirsts for
life, and for the utmost expansion of life.
The demoniac of Gadara, he who had the legion, seemed to possess life
enough; he never rested day nor night, every moment straining to the
utmost all the energies of his animal nature; no man could tame him,
none could bind him, for he had often been bound, and had torn his
fetters and broken his chains in pieces. Yet his dwelling was _among the
tombs_. There is enough of demoniacal energy among us, which is not
life, but a hideous mockery of life. Christ has not come to destroy
life, but to save it, and by his own divine energy to cast out the
demoniacal energy. “What a word is this!” it was said of him, “for with
authority and power he commandeth the unclean spirits, and they come
out.” Our Lord said, in his last conversation with his disciples, “This
sign shall follow them that believe: in my name shall they cast out
devils.” And before this his disciples had told him with gladness and
wonder, “Lord, even the devils are subject unto us in thy name.” It has
been recorded by historians of the earliest Christian times how the
Christians triumphed over evil spirits, how they insulted and tormented
the devil wherever they found him, making him remove his lodgings from
the bodies of men “by a writ of ejectment from the name of Jesus
Christ;” and how “Christians, of the meaner sort” even, did, without any
ceremony, but only by their prayers and calling on the name of Christ,
what was beyond the power of all the heathen sorcerers, with their
Ephesian letters and magical incantations.
Not only from possessed persons were the evil spirits driven forth, but
from every temple wherein they were worshipped as gods. Christ
overturned shrines and temples in abundance; he “spoiled principalities
and powers, making a show of them openly;” dethroned the false gods,
from the most brutish to the highest, and quenched the false lights with
the true.
“Torquetur Apollo
Nomine percussus Christi, nec fulmina verbi
Ferre potest.”...
Behold the power of Christ! the hope of those who are afflicted by the
indwelling of some demon of uncleanness, or haunted by beauty, or
dazzled by light which are not of God.
“Be not drunk with wine, but be filled with the Spirit.” For the
drunkards of earth, maddened by whatsoever powerful excitements, who
renounce their master-passion, God has in store “the new wine of the
kingdom.” They need not fear to faint and die beneath the sudden
withdrawal of what has been to them till now the sole sustaining
stimulant of life. It was said of the followers of Jesus, “These men are
full of new wine.” It is true! And there are such men among us at this
day; and through this divine inebriation, this new passion, the love of
Christ, which has cast out all opposing elements, you shall hear them
speak, not as they have hitherto spoken, but “with other tongues, as the
Spirit gives them utterance.”
The eye of faith and of love, surveying the infinite and eternal
possibilities of redemption for the ruined soul, shall see, not the
Magdalene only, not the woman only who was a “sinner,” but the still
guiltier one, stronger in wrong-doing and deeper in treachery, bowing
low before the all-conquering love. Lo! even
“Iscariot washes the Saviour’s feet,
And wipes them with his hair.”