New Tabernacle SermonsTalmage, T. De Witt (Thomas De Witt)
Religion
New Tabernacle Sermons
Talmage, T. De Witt (Thomas De Witt)
Presbyterian Church -- Sermons; Sermons, American
The tragedy is only postponed to make the overthrow more
impressive and climacteric. Do not fret. If God can afford to wait you
can afford to wait. God's clock of destiny strikes only once in a
thousand years. Do not try to measure events by the second-hand on
your little time-piece. Sin and Satan go on only that their overthrow
may at last be the more terrific, the more impressive, the more
resounding, the more climacteric.
Why do the wicked live? In order that they may build up fortresses for
righteousness to capture. Have you not noticed that God harnesses men,
bad men, and accomplishes good through them? Witness Cyrus, witness
Nebuchadnezzar, witness the fact that the Bastile of oppression was
pried open by the bayonets of a bad man. Recently there came to me the
fact that a college had been built at the Far West for infidel
purposes. There was to be no nonsense of chapel prayers, no Bible
reading there. All the professors there were pronounced infidels. The
college was opened, and the work went on, but, of course, failed. Not
long ago a Presbyterian minister was in a bank in that village on
purposes of business, and he heard in an adjoining room the board of
trustees of that college discussing what they had better do with the
institution, as it did not get on successfully, and one of the
trustees proposed that it be handed over to the Presbyterians,
prefacing the word Presbyterians with a very unhappy expletive. The
resolutions were passed, and that fortress of infidelity has become a
fortress of old-fashioned, orthodox religion, the only religion that
will be worth a snap of your finger when you come to die or appear in
the Day of Judgment. The devil built the college. Righteousness
captured it.
In some city there goes up a great club-house--the architecture, the
furniture, all the equipment a bedazzlement of wealth. That particular
club-house is designed to make gambling and dissipation respectable.
Do not fret. That splendid building will after a while be a free
library, or it will be a hospital, or it will be a gallery of pure
art. Again and again observatories have been built by infidelity, and
the first thing you know they go into the hand of Christian science.
God said in the Bible that He would put a hook in Sennacherib's nose
and pull him down by a way he knew not. And God has a hook to-day in
the nose of every Sennacherib of infidelity and sin, and will drag him
about as He will. Marble halls deserted to sinful amusements will yet
be dedicated for religious assemblage. All these castles of sin are to
be captured for God as we go forth with the battle-shout that Oliver
Cromwell rang out at the head of his troops as he rode in on the field
of Naseby: "Let God arise and let His enemies be scattered!" After a
great fire in London, amid the ruins there was nothing left but an
arch with the name of the architect upon it; and, my friends, whatever
else goes down, God stays up.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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