settling accounts in their sleep. They will finger their purses, and
grasp their swords, and all in their sleep. And not children but devils
will laugh as they hear the folly that falls from men's lips who are
besotted with spiritual sleep and drugged with spiritual and fleshly sin.
A dream cometh through the multitude of business. I had just got this
length in this lecture the other night when I went to sleep. And in my
sleep one of my people came to me and asked me if I could make it quite
clear and plain to him what it would be for a man like him after a
communion-time to begin to walk with God. And I just wish I could make
the things of the Enchanted Ground as plain to myself and to you to-night
as I was able to make a walk with God plain to myself and to my visitor
that night in my ministerial dream. I often wish that my business mind
worked as well in my study chair and in my pulpit as it sometimes does in
my bed and in my sleep. "Now, I beheld in my dream that they talked more
in their sleep at this time than ever they did in all their journey. And
being in a muse thereabout, the gardener said even to me: Wherefore
musest thou at the matter? It is the nature of the fruit of the grapes
of those vineyards to go down so sweetly as to cause the lips of them
that are asleep to speak." The reason my poor lips spake so sweetly
about a walk with God that night most have been because I spent all the
summer evening before walking with God and with you in the vineyards of
Beulah.
4. Listen to Samson, shorn of his locks, as he shakes himself off a soft
and sweetly-worked couch in The Sensual Man's Arbour:
"No, no;
It fits not; thou and I long since are twain;
Nor think me so unwary or accurst
To bring my feet again into the snare
Where once I have been caught; I know thy trains,
Though dearly to my cost, thy gins, and toils;
Thy fair enchanted cup and warbling charms
No more on me have power, their force is null'd;
So much of adder's wisdom have I learnt
To fence my ear against thy sorceries.
If in my flower of youth and strength, when all men
Loved, honour'd, fear'd me, thou alone couldst hate me,
Thy husband, slight me, sell me, and forego me;
How wouldst thou use me now, blind, and thereby
Deceivable, in most things as a child,
Helpless, thence easily contemn'd, and scorn'd,
And last neglected? How wouldst thou insult,
When I must live uxorious to thy will
In perfect thraldom! How again betray me,
Bearing my words and doings to the lords
To gloss upon, and censuring, frown or smile!
This jail I count the house of liberty
To thine, whose doors my feet shall never enter."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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