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
You who are seated in your Christian homes, compassed by moral and
religious restraints, do not realize the gulf of iniquity that bounds
you on the north and the south and the east and the west. While I
speak there are tens of thousands of men and women going over the
awful plunge of an impure life; and while I cry to God for mercy upon
their souls, I call upon you to marshal in the defense of your homes,
your Church and your nation. There is a banqueting hall that you have
never heard described. You know all about the feast of Ahasuerus,
where a thousand lords sat. You know all about Belshazzar's carousal,
where the blood of the murdered king spurted into the faces of the
banqueters. You may know of the scene of riot and wassail, when there
was set before Esopus one dish of food that cost $400,000. But I speak
now of a different banqueting hall. Its roof is fretted with fire. Its
floor is tesselated with fire. Its chalices are chased with fire. Its
song is a song of fire. Its walls are buttresses of fire. Solomon
refers to it when he says: "Her guests are in the depths of hell."
Our American communities are suffering from the gospel of Free
Loveism, which, fifteen or twenty years ago, was preached on the
platform and in some of the churches of this country. I charge upon
Free Loveism that it has blighted innumerable homes, and that it has
sent innumerable souls to ruin. Free Loveism is bestial; it is
worse--it is infernal! It has furnished this land with about one
thousand divorces annually. In one county in the State of Indiana it
furnished eleven divorces in one day before dinner. It has roused up
elopements, North, South, East, and West. You can hardly take up a
paper but you read of an elopement. As far as I can understand the
doctrine of Free Loveism it is this: That every man ought to have
somebody else's wife, and every wife somebody else's husband. They do
not like our Christian organization of society, and I wish they would
all elope, the wretches of one sex taking the wretches of the other,
and start to-morrow morning for the great Sahara Desert, until the
simoom shall sweep seven feet of sand all over them, and not one
passing caravan for the next five hundred years bring back one
miserable bone of their carcasses! Free Loveism! It is the
double-distilled extract of nux vomica, ratsbane, and adder's tongue.
Never until society goes back to the old Bible, and hears its eulogy
of purity and its anathema of uncleanness--never until then will this
evil be extirpated.
IV. Behold also in this giant of the text and in the giant of our own
century that great physical power must crumble and expire. The Samson
of the text long ago went away. He fought the lion. He fought the
Philistines. He could fight anything, but death was too much for him.
He may have required a longer grave and a broader grave; but the tomb
nevertheless was his terminus.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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