Godliness : being reports of a series of addresses delivered at James's Hall, London, W. during 1881Booth, Catherine Mumford
Religion
Godliness : being reports of a series of addresses delivered at James's Hall, London, W. during 1881
Booth, Catherine Mumford
Salvation Army -- Sermons; Sermons, English
Did you ever notice the tense in that passage--"He that believeth that
Jesus is come in the flesh"--not that He _did_ come, or _was_ come, but
that He _is_ come now. Oh! how people hate Jesus Christ in the flesh.
You may be ever so devout, ever so Pharisaic, till you come to Jesus in
the flesh, and then they will gnash on you with their teeth as they
gnashed on Christ. They can't resist such people. This is what the world
wants--holy people; and nothing else will do. We have tried everything
else. You Christian people from other divisions of the Lord's forces,
you have tried Bibles, and preaching, and singing, and services, and
Sunday-schools. I have been lately to a part of the country where they
told me that nearly every member of the population had passed through
their Sunday-schools, and yet there are men there who will drag a young
girl down a flight of stone stairs and kick her till she is black and
blue. The great mass of the people who took part in the Lancashire Riots
have passed through your Sunday-schools.
Now, I say, God is speaking to you in these things, if only you will
hear Him, and He is saying that the letter killeth, that
circumcision, and baptism, and forms, and ceremonies, and going to
chapel, and Bible reading, is all nothing, when there is no Holy
Ghost in it. You want a real, living embodiment of Christianity over
again, and if the Salvation Army is not going to be that, may God put
it out! I would be willing to pronounce the funeral oration of the
Army if I did not believe it was going to be that. The world is dying
for this.
I was so touched, yesterday, by hearing a story from Paris, told by
a young woman who has just returned, and was telling me about my
precious child. The story was this: A woman came, one morning, and
asked for the lady. They tried to put her off, and asked, "Will not
someone else do?" "No," said the woman; "I do want to see the lady
herself." They said, "You can't see her to-day--she is too ill!"
"Then," she said, "When can I see her?" They appointed a time the
next afternoon, and then this poor woman came, and she told this
story: "I did hear, six years ago, that there was somebody could take
the devil out. Now, see, I have got a devil in, and he do make me
wicked and miserable, and I do want him taken out, and I have been
running about these six years to find somebody who could pull him
out. I've been to lots of priests, but they could not pull him out
because they had a devil in _them_; and, you see when there's a
devil in me and a devil in them, we got to fighting, and they could
not pull him out." What a comment on "Jesus I know, and Paul I know;
but who are ye?" Of course, nobody can put a devil out who has a
devil in them. The poor old woman's sense told her this.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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