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, so far ! talked times. worth it. Do cey to- ) again, try to a good drunk is wife afraid id, and Lon. I 3onfess eard a loved sin in leave But I ;ent of don't i only do them harm. Now see how many a father will say he is laying up money for Sally and the chil- dren. If you could see Sally and the children a month after you are dead, Sally with her new teeth, and the children with fine clothes and new buggies, rackin' around, you would be astonished to see how they can get along without you. You would that. ' Brethren, let us turn our. attention to this thought, " Is my home the home of God ; and do our very children love God and keep his command- ments ? " Last year, when I was preaching in Nash- ville, Tennessee, the kind. Christian people of Ten- nessee tendered me an elegant home. I talked with my wife. She said, " Is that best for our children ? " I said, " I am afraid it is not best for the children. It may prove their ruin. I don't know. We are living in our little humble cottage, and all our chil- dren that are old enough are members of the Church, and fear God and keep his commandments." My wife said, " I would rather live in this humble cot- tage until God calls us from it. Let us do what is best for our children." So I said to my friends, " I cannot accept your kindness — God bless you." Then they said, " Your cottage shall be enlarged to a plea- sant home." When the work was finished, my wife said, " Husband, God gave us this house, through his people ; let us give it back to God." So we decided that at Christmas the pastor of the home church was to dedicate our home. And when the neighbors and kinsmen came the pastor stood up and said, " I dedicate this house to God." He dedicated my house to God just like the church yonder. I turned to my 20 Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. iiii! iliii children, and said, " This is God's house ; let us do nothing in it that we could not do at church." Thank God, after that nobody will ever ask me to let him play cards or dance in my house. When I gave my house to God I hunted the devil out. I wish every home in Toronto was dedicated to God. Christian people, hear me to-day. Give your houses to God. He is mighty good to us. Precious Father, precious Saviour, Holy Spirit, be a father and a brother to every one of us, and to each one of our children. I said at a meeting in my own town, " I want you to help me raise my children for heaven. How can you help me ? Have your children trained right, and there will be no bad children to lead mine off. Let us go into an eternal partnership and help ourselves, each other, and our children for heaven." I wish we would. I tell you, "brethren, the days are evil. There is not a father in this house that can go home and lay his hand on little Willie's sleeping head and say, " This boy will never be a drunkard." You cannot say as you look at little Mary, " She will never be the wife of a drunkard who will drag her down to death." You will have whiskey, and you will have it because you want it. This is a free country, and you can have things just as you want them. You don't want any trade on Sunday, and you don't have any. If you want prohibition, glory be to God, you can get that. I said to the liquor dealers of my town two years ago : " If my boy comes to your grocery and asks you for liquor, take him into your back yard and lay his head on a block and chop it off. But Sam p. Jones* Toronto Sermons. 21 Bt US do church." : me to When I out. I to God. • houses Father, and a of our Dwn, " I heaven, trained id mine id help eaven." ays are can go leeping akard." ihe will •ag her ad you a free u want ly, and ou can wn two ry and k yard r. But « don't give him drink. If you kill him his precious soul goes home ; but if you drench him with that stuff he is killed soul and body for time and eternity." People say prohibition does not prohibit. Well, there are murderers, notwithstanding the law against mur- der; but we have the fun of hanging a murderer every now and then. And so where there is a pro- hibitory law we can put the law-breakers in the peni- tentiary, and fun is the next best thing to religion. There are three classes of men whom God has never been able to do much with — the fool, the stingy man, and the lazy man. I have seen the Lord do his best with them and fail utterly. I speak that reverently, too. " It is more blessed to give than to receive." Listen. It is more blessed to be where you can give and give than to be where you have to receive and receive. Which would you rather be, an American or Canadian Christian, and give a thousand dollars to home missions — to be in a position where you can give and give — or to be the poor heathen Chinee, who is in the position to receive and receives ? Look at the living stream bearing its cupful of water gener- ously on to the river, giving life as it passes, and re- ceiving back the water from the sea through the kindly agency of the clouds, as contrasted with the pond which, seeking to hold to all it had, spread pestilence among the people until the sun dried it up. Here is a demonstration that God will see to it that he who gives all he has shall have all he wants. God help us to be noble, to be pious, to be gentle and lov- ing and true. The text says that Cornelius prayed to God alway. He got upon praying ground. Many I 22 Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. a man thinks he is on praying ground and on plead- ing terms, and never was within a thousand miles of it. When he began to pray, then it was God turned to him and said : " Your prayers and ahns have come up as a memorial." What do you want ? To learn the way of life. God found Peter asleep, and let down the four-cornered sheet with all manner of living creatures, saying : " Arise, Peter, kill and eat." A first, a second, and a third time, the command com- ing at last, when Peter still objected : " That which the Lord has cleansed that call not thou common." Even then the men from Cornelius were waiting. And Cornelius was baptized and received the Holy Ghost, and the water of life has been flowing upon a Gentile world from that day to this. SAYINGS. Give ! — Once there was a large pond of clear water. Beside it ran a happy little streamlet. The pond said to its neighbor : " Why do you run so rapidly away ? After a while the summer's heat will come, and you will need the water you now are wasting. Take example by me. I am saving all my forces, and when summer comes I will have plenty." The streamlet did not reply, but continued on its way sparkling and bright, rippling over white pebbles, and its waters dancing in the sunlight. By and by the summer came, with all its heat. The pond had carefully saved all its strength, not allowing a drop of water to escape. The rivulet had never changed its way, but had continued, making happy all that it had met, on its winding course. The trees locked Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. their green boughs overhead, and did not allow a sun ray to fall upon it. Birds built their nests and sang in these boughs, and bathed themselves in the pure water. Cattle drank of the living stream and de- lighted to stand upon the cool banks. But how was it with the pond ? It was heated by the fierce rays of the sun. Its waters bred miasma and malaria. Even the frogs spurned it, and it became bereft of every sign of life. The cattle deserted it and refused to drink of its waters. The little stream continued its journey, carrying its waters to the larger stream, to the rivers, and at last to the ocean, where God took it up in in- cense and kissed it and formed it into clouds. He harnessed the winds and hitched them to the clouds ; and they journeyed inland until they came to this little happy streamlet, and then the cup was tipped, and as the streamlet got back its own again, a still, small voice might have been heard, saying, " It is better to give than to receive." l';;?! Sermon II. "WHOSOEVER. " And the Spirit and the bride aay, Come. And let him that heareth aay, Come. And let him that is athirst come. And whoso- ever will, let him take the water of life freely." — Rev. xxii. 17. YOU see I get this text from the last page of this blessed Book. This is God's last message to man. And for fear that something might be added to, or that something might be taken from, the Scripture, God puts this fearful admonition : " For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book : If any man shall add unto these things God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book. And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and from the things that are written in this book." If I have been corresponding with a friend on any given subject, and he has written me a dozen or a hundred letters upon that subject — if I want to find his mind now concerning that, I will turn to the last letter received from him, the one bearing the most recent date. And now, if I want to know God's will concerning the race of man, I don't run back over Genesis, or Deuteronomy, or the pro- phecies of Isaiah, or the Epistle to the Romans by St. Paul^ — I run through the Book, and I turn to God's last words to man, and I see the fearful warn- Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. 25 him that id whoso- xii. 17. of this isage to I added >m, the " For I Drds of all add :in the if any )ook of out of at are md on >zen or ant to urn to earing know 't run pro- ms by irn to warn- ing added : " Don't any man take away these words. If he does, I will take away his part out of the book of life. And if any man shall add any thing to this book, then I will add unto him the plagues that are written in this book." And after all the fearful warnings, and judgments, and denunciations of the Scripture, thanks be to God, this is his last message : " And the Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. And whoso- ever will, let him take the water of life freely." It was a grand day in the world's history when the evening and the morning were the seventh day, and the sons of God and angels sliouted over a finished world. It was a grand day in the world's history when Adam and Eve, the first pair, stood before God, with their reason clear and perfect, un- ruffled by passion, unclouded by prejudice, and unimpaired by disease. It was a grand conception to them as they looked out over a finished world, and said that the flowers were God's thought in bloom ; that the rivers were God's thought imbed- ded ; that the mountains were God's thought piled up, and that the dewdrops were his thoughts in pearl as they mingle in loving tenderness and join together on the leaf of the rose. And wherever man looked around him, all nature, in its beauty and freshness, whispered back : " The hand that made me is divine." It was a grand, though sad, day in the world's history when it was announced through the moral universe of God that man had violated the law of God, and had brought misery and woe upon himself and upon his progeny forever. 26 Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. liiiii'f Ifc was a grand day in the world's history when God met the fallen and degenerate pair, and said to Eve : "The seed of the woman shall bruise the serpent's head." It was a grand day in the world's history when the last strong swimmer sank beneath the flood, and left Noah in his ark with his three sons and their wives, and two of every beast and bird to perpetuate the race upon the face of the earth. It was a grand day in this world's history when Pharaoh and his hosts, and all of his chariots and men, were swallowed up and engulfed in the Red Sea. It was a grand day in this world's history when a burning hail fell on Sodom and Gomorrah and all the plains thereof and destroyed the cities of the plain. It was a grand day in this world's his- tory when 185,000 soldiers under the blast of an angel's wing were wrapt in their winding sheets. It was a grand day in this world's history when Korah, and Dathan, and Abiram, and their wicked company, were swallowed up out of the sight of men. It was a grander day in the world's history when the old prophet of God stood on the hills of Judea with his spark in hand and let its beneficent rays shine down through seven centuries, and his voice was heard through the seven centuries, saying, " Simeon and Anna, prepare the cradle to rock the babe of Bethlehem." It was a grand day in this world's history when the star poised itself over the manger, and the wise men gathered about the babe of Bethlehem. There they looked upon an everlasting God lying asleep in Mary's arms, and the King of angels and God over all ble?sed for evermore as he was Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons, 27 len God to Eve : jrpent's history Lth the ee sons bird to th. It when )ts and le Red history norrah ities of I's his- of an ts. It Korah, npany, ■ when Judea t rays voice laying, ik the n this er the abe of asting ing of le was carried about in a virgin's arms, as they looked upon the King of angels as the carpenter's despised boy. It was a grand day in this world's history when, at twelve years of age, this God-man surprised all the wisdom of Jerusalem by his forethought and his intelligence. It was a grand day in this world's history when the Son of God notified his disciples, to whom he had been sent from the Father, that he must be crucified and buried, and that he would arise on the third day from the dead. It was a grand day in the world's history when he hung on a crors suspended between two thieves and cried out with a loud voice, " My God ! My God ! Why hast thou forsaken me ? " It was a grand day in the world's history when they buried this sacrifice in the grave of Joseph, and put the seal of the Roman govern- ment upon it, and put sturdy Roman soldiers around it to guard it. It was a grand day in the world's history when on the morning of the third day God summoned an angel to his side, because Christ himself had an- nounced the fact, " I am the sacrifice. I go to die for the world." And now the only question with his disciples and with all humanity is, "Will God accept the sacrifice ?" He has suff'ered and died. He is buried. Will he ever rise again ? Will God accept the sacrifice ? God told the angel to go to earth as swift as morning light and roll away the stone from the grave, and when he made his ap- pearance at the grave and rolled away the stone, the Son of God stood up in the sepulchre and took the napkins from his face and the grave clothes 28 Sam p. Jones* Toronto Sermons. :i!i l''!f l< \w from his body, and folded them up and laid them to one side, and walked forth from the tomb, the first- fruits of tlie resurrection. Then God accepted the sacrifice, and grasped the stylus in his own hand and signed the magna charta of man's salvation. And ever since that God-blessed moment it has been written : " Whosoever liyeth and believeth in me, shall never die." It was a grand day in the world's history when the Saviour of men stood yonder, surrounded by a company of five hundred, and a chariot descended from the skies, and he stepped into the chariot, and above moon and stars he disappeared, until it over- vaulted the very throne of God itseii. And as they stood gazing up into heaven, an angel flew back to earth and shouted aloud to them, "Why stand ye here gazing up into heaven ? As ye have seen the Son of man ascending, so shall he descend at the last day to judge the world in righteousness." That was a grand day in this world's history when the one hundred and twenty gathered in an upper room in Jerusalem, and they had prayed the first day and the second day and the third day, and until the tenth day. They were praying for the enduement of power from on high. Christ had told them : "Tarry ye here at Jerusalem until ye be endued with power from on high. It is expedient for you that I go away." I have often thought of that expression which Jesus used, " It is expedient. The best thing I can do for you is to leave the world and go home to the Father, and then the Spirit will come." Master, can there be anything better than thy presence ? Thou ll!!'™!' Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. 29 I them to the first- epted the wn hand salvation, has been h in me, )ry when ded by a lescended iriot, and 1 it over- l as they 7 back to d ye here le Son of last day )ry when an upper first day until the ement of : larry ;h power away." n which ng I can home to Master, e? Thou art the bread of life to us. Thou art the water of life to us. Thou art the door by which, if any man enter, he shall go in and out and find pasture. Thou art the truth and the way and the life. Master, is it expedient, is it best that thou go away ? He said : " It is expedient that I go to the Father." And on the morning of the tenth day, when the company gathered and prayed in that upper chamber, the Holy Spirit, the third person of the adorable Trinity, flew down to earth, and rushed in upon that com- pany like a rushing, mighty wind ; and Peter opened the door, and the company followed him down upon the streets of Jerusalem, and there, on the morning of the tenth day, he preached that memorable ser- mon in Jerusalem that won three thousand souls to Christ — more conversions through Peter in that one sermon than Christ had in all his ministry. And Christ knew what he was talking about when he said: "It is expedient for you that I should go away." God gave the Son, and the Son came to suffer, die, and to rise again. And now the Spirit comes to woo and beseech and implore and enlighten and convict and convert the world to God. It seems as if, after God had loved the race and called them to him and they had wandered oft', that they would have died without remedy, but God sent his Son to live among us, and to die for us, and to preach to us, and to in- struct us, and if he had stopped at that, man would have died without the benefit of his Saviour's death. But he didn't stop there. And now the Holy Ghost comes into the world — the third person of the ador- able Trinity — and every good resolution we ever have, iSi 30 Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. wM' lij'nnir ill and every good that ever inspired us, and every good deed ever done, we owe to the inspiration and influ- ence of the Holy Spirit of God. Thank God ! we have an ever present, omniscient, omnipresent God with us to-night. When I bid wife and children " good-bye " at home, God boards the train with me, and he is with me all the weary miles of my road from home. And then I am conscious God is at home with my family, and when 1 come into the Christian homes of this city there I find God present, and God is with the missionary in China, and God is with thousands and millions of people on earth. No wonder the blessed Christ said : " It is expedient for you that I go away. I will send the Comforter." 0, brother, sister, hear me to-night. Is there in your soul the desire to be good ? Is there a purpose to be good ? Is there a resolution to be good ? It was born under the touch of the divine Spirit upon these cold, dead hearts of ours. And the Spirit comes to woo. He comes to teach. He comes to implore. For when he shall come he will reprove the world of sin and of righteousness and of judgment to come. "Come, Holy Spirit, heavenly Dove, With all thy quickening powers, Kindle a flame of sacred love In these cold hearts of ours." Help us to walk close with God ! Help us, divine Spirit, ever to be tender and impressible ! Help us ever to hear and heed the Gospel of the Son of God ! The divine Spirit broods over the congregation to- night. He touched your heart to-day. He touched y h Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. 31 ery good id influ- niscient, bid wife ards the ry miles onscious 1 I come find God 1 China, ?ople on : "It is send the jhere in purpose od? It it upon it comes mplore. vorld of ?ome. divine lelp us »f God ! lion to- ouched your heart last night and day before yesterday. He has touched a thousand hearts or more, and called them to a better life in the last few days in this city. And the most fearful sin that you may commit is to wound the Spirit of God, to drive him out from your presence. The Book says : " Grieve not the Holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption." You may laugh at me. You may deride me. You may scoff at the Church. You may defy God and you may crucify my Saviour afresh and put him to open shame, but I warn you to-night : take heed how you trifle with the Spirit of all grace ! I have seen men reject and insult the divine Spirit, until I could almost hear the Spirit of God as he closed the gates of heaven forever in an immortal spirit's face. My friend, to-night, if there is in your soul the desire to be a Christian, nurse it, foster it, shield it. Keep it there and pray God to fan the spark into a living flame, that shall burn on and on when the stars have gone and when the moon shall turn to blood. Let you and I pray for this, and whatever others may do, God help us to be impressible and movable under the divine Spirit of grace. " The Spirit says,' Come." The third person of the ever adorable Trinity is the active agency in the world to-day to teach men, to move men, to stir men and use men, and but for his divine presence with me as I preach the Gospel, I declare to you the fact, that I would never have the heart to take another text in this world. O, how many struggles the earnest preacher may have in the world ! God only knows 32 Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. |!«l|i the burdens that I have carried on my own poor head since I landed in your city. God only knows the wakeful hours, the tears and the prayers that have gone up from my poor heart, and I say : *' God save the city ! God arouse the city ! God save our young women ! God save the fathers and mothers in this city !" And I can almost hear God as he whispers back: "I'll be with you, I'll stand by you." God arouse you ! And God help his Church to heed the wooing of the Spirit, and come to the help of the Lord, to the help of the Lord against the mighty. " The Spirit says, Come." Well, if God had stop- ped at this point — given his Son and sent his Spirit to woo men — we would have died without excuse. But God pushes his work on and on, until he shall say to a guilty world : " What more could I have done to my vineyard that I have not already done ? " God will never leave a stone unturned, God will never leave an effort unput-forth as long as a man is out of hell and out of the grave. And I tell you, my congregation, to-night, I know God is in earnest about the salvation of man, and I have felt thou- sands of times that the worst of sinners would re- joice if they were to see his face. God help men to look up to-night to see their Father's face with all the love of his heart as it beams forth, and hear his voice as he calls them to the better life. God loves you, and he has given you every manifestation of his love. He tells you in his blessed Book : " When my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up." I have seen a BftQ^her as she folJowed a wayward /■ f f cor i to < pre < mo -4 ( 1 sto % Co 1 La 1 m ^^ W^^J Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. 33 wn poor r knows hat have lod save r young s in this ?vhispers lu." God leed the ip of the ^hty. ad stop- is Spirit excuse, he shall I have done?" od will I man is you, my earnest It thou- ould re- men to with all lear his )d loves d that ad 3, and see lis books, old word ive to see 11 be bot- md there ' the Son I Georgia ig. The age him. ;t. I am ' — and I God that that sort jver died and the listen to iould see pon the Jve t<: .1 i elect r id, " No, of my ould see )uld you 5, " there in this " Well," Scriven believe li* -t ■*■, .^fe it was you ? " " Well," he said, " it may be there is somebody in this county now of my name." " Well," said he, " if you conld see it ' James B. Green, of Scriven County, and the Nineteenth District, and the year '67,' would you believe it was you? " "Well," he said, " I could not know definitely." " Now," said he, "my friend, God Almighty saw all the trouble, and he just put it into one word, and he said, ' Whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely.'" And the poor fellow jumped up and clapped his hands and said, " Thank God ! I know that means me." " And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely." Blessed be God ! It is for all of us. It is for all of us. " Whosoever will." Listen, brother. It isn't " Whosoever feels ;" it isn't " Whosoever is fit;" it isn't "Whosoever has repented ; " it isn't " Whosoever has got faith ;" it isn't " Whosoever does this or that or the other," but it is, " Whosoever will — will — will," God throws it all on the will, and I am glad he does. I know God traverses my emo- tional nature, and runs through hope and fear and desire and anxiety and dread and affection. God runs all through my emotional nature and my sensi- bilities. When God reaches intellect, he goes up through perception and conception and judgment and memory and reason, and all ^he faculties of the mind. God goes through them all, and asks me no questions. But when God goes to the door of the human will, he stands on tiptoe and knocks and says: " Behold, I stand at the door and knock, and if any man will open unto me I will come in and sup with 42 Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. Hi m& mm Ir,-: iiili!:;:: ill him, and he with me." Thank God, it is " whosoever will." And I like the conclusion : " Let him take the water of life freely." Blessed be God, ye thirsty men can drink ; and there is enough for to-day, enough for all of us, enough forever and evermore. Come and drink freely I There are some people who are afraid to start because they think they can't hold out. You'll never be any more scared along that line than I was. I don't believe anybody in Cartersville thought I was going to stick, and yet I've been sticking 14 years, and have more stickabiiity now than ever before. It's astonishing how stickabiiity will grow on a fellow if he'll stick to God. Some of you say, " But I can't go on. I'm sure I can't get to heaven." I'll give you an illustration. I was looking at a locomo- tive one day in Atlanta. I admire locomotives — always did. While I was walking around the loco- motive the engineer looked round and said to the fireman, " Have you got steam enough to start with ?" " Yes," he says. I walked round and looked up at the gauge and saw the locomotive had about 70 or 80 pounds of steam. I knew the locomotive carried 160 pounds, and I said to myself, '' That's not enough steam to carry so heavy a train as this is so far as Chattanooga, a distance of 170 miles." However, the train started, *nd before we got to the Chatta- hoochee River, a distance of only seven miles, we came to a stop, and putting my head out of the window I found that they were blowing off steam. They had more than they wanted. " Well, well," said I ; " the engineer didn't want to know if there 3. Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. 43 vrhosoever him take ye thirsty >r to-day, evermore. to start u'll never I was. I ^ht I was 14 years, 3r before, ow on a say, " But en." I'll a locomo- notives — the loco- id to the twith?" ed up at ut 70 or e carried t enough JO far as lowever, I Chatta- liles, we of the ff steam. 11, well," if there was steam enough to go to Chattanooga, but only if there was steam enough to start with. The engine generated steam faster running than standing still. Now if the engineer had stayed there in the station and kept his valve down until he had steam enough to take him to Chattanooga, his boiler would have been blown into ten thousand pieces. All the fellow wanted was enough to start with. There's a fellow says, " Oh, if I could get religion enough in my soul to take me to heaven." Why, you poor little fellow, if you were to get religion enough in you to take you to heaven, before you commenced getting there it would blow your poor little soul into ten thousand pieces. The question is, "Have I got enough to start ? Just enough to say wrong is wrong, and I will quit it ; right is right, and I will do it ? " And you won't have got ten miles before you will be blowing off steam and shouting, " Glory to God, I'm a saved man." ^ And there is another little word in there I like, that little word " let." " Let him take the water of life freely." Six thousand years ago God said, " Let there be light," and there was light. It was a word of command, and God looks out upon a famishing race with the water of life^in reach, and he says, " Let him come ; " and when God says, " Let him come," he says, " Go behind him,j powers and princi- palities, and clear the way. Let him take the water of life freely." God has taken down the mountains and filled up the valleys, and made you a straight and even and smooth way, so that you can drink and live forever, and if you perish, you perish because 44 Sam p. J'ones' Toronto Sermons. lil liil :^'!i^ you will not live. God never suffered a soul to be captured and carried away by the enemy of souls, and will never suffer you to die — as long as you look to Christ, or lean to Christ, or pray to Christ. God never suffered the devil to take possession of an im- mortal soul and drag it down to hell until that soul walked up to the feet of the devil and stacked its arms and said, " I surrender forever." Then God's own power and arm can never rescue you. God help you to-night to say, " God's goodness leadeth me to repentance, and I intend to lead a better life." SAYINGS. The Lost Soul! — Lost! lost! lost! lost! Brother, can you meet your dying minutes without making your peace with God ? If you can, you are a braver man than ever I want to be in time or eternity. When I was pastor, some fellows would growl because I didn't go to see them. . What do I "'ant to go to see you for ? The Book tells me to keep out of bad company. I suppose if we would visit our pastor when we are well and let him visit us when we are sick, the world would move along better. Be to him a helpmate, and not a drawback. You ought to cultivate your pastor's acquaintance, because it is likely to be broken up one of these days. What are You Doing ? — Whenever a man gets up before a community and proclaims his infidelity, then I have just one question to ask another party, and one to ask him. I say: " Infidel, what are you doing in this world ? " And the infidel steps up and says : " I'm fighting Christianity ; that's what I'm doing." 'lIlLi Hill Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. 45 oul to be of souls, you look ist. God )f an im- that soul icked its en God's God help bh me to Brother, ) making a braver Giity. Id growl o I ^^'ant i to keep )uld visit visit us ig better. ;k. You i, because m '■ft. "Christianity, what are you doing?" And Chris- tianity says: "T am rescuing the perishing and saving the fallen ; I am building almshouses ; I am founding churches ; I am speaking words of cheer to the race ; I am lifting up the fallen ; I am blessing the world ; I am saving men from hell ; I am saving them in heaven." Why, infidel, are you fighting almshouses, and orphans' homes, and churches, and happy death-beds, and pardon, and peace, and heaven ? Oh, get out of my presence, thou great beast! Don't you tell me you are fighting such things as that ! You ask me : " Mr. Jones, what's your business in Toronto?" I answer. It's to throw niy arms around every poor lost man, and bring him to peace, and happiness, and heaven. And now, opposers, what is your business ? What are you doing ? 1 gets up ity, then irty, and ou doing nd savs : doing." Sermon III. SO^WINa ATsTD RE.A.I*INGh. If m§. :;'!l "Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. For he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption ; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting." — Gal. vi. 7, 8. a BE not deceived," says the text; "God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man shall sow, that shall he also reap. For he that soweth to the flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption ; and he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting." We stand squarely on this proposition — that there are three absolute impossibilities in this life. There may be a thousand or more, but we know of three. In the first place we say that it is absolutely impossible for a man continuously and successfully to practise fraud upon his own soul. If you are a good man you know it, and if you are not a good man you know it. You may bring to bear your self -pride and the flattery of fawning friends, but down in your heart of hearts if you are not a good man you know it. I'm so glad God will not let a man lie down and sleep his way to hell. If you are not a good man, there are moments in your life when God breaks the silence of eternity, and makes you see yourself as you really are. Again we say it is absolutely impossible for a man to continuously and successfully practise a fraud upon his neighbor. /•get ' f con / kne — ^mai |myj : niar 4 f see i Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. 47 ever a man to his flesh bo the Spirit J. od is not jhall sow, 3th to the id he that reap life roposition ies in this but we that it is >usly and soul. If >u are not y to bear g friends, ire not a ill not let * If you your life ad makes we say it tinuously neighbor. 0, 7? If you are a good man your neighbor knows it ; if you are not a good man your neighbor knows it. If you are a generous man everybody in Toronto knows it; and if you are a stingy man, they've found that out too. I'd rather be known in my own community as a generous, whole-sonled sinner, than be known and read as a stingy, narrow, contracted Methodist. I've frequently had men say: "Well, Mr. Jones, I'd rather be a man outside the Church and tell the truth and have no religion, than be a man in the Church, professing religion, and not paying his debts." I say, " What do you want to be a fool and be like either for ? " I doubt I'm not only going to be in the Church and serve God and do my duty, 'but I'm going to do right by my neighbor, too. That's what it takes to make a whole man. You'll say, I treat my neighbor right, but I don't treat God right. Weighing things in a common-sense way, I'll say this, if I am going to mistreat anybody it'll be my fellow-man, for one may have some excuse for that, but no man has any excuse in earth or heaven for mistreating God. Now, what do you say ? What- ever you are, your neighbor knows it. It's astonish- ing how we know one another. If you will dress up in a disguise and go to your neighbor's house, and get him talking about you, about ten o'clock you'll come away saying, " Well, well, I'd no idea anybody knew as much about me as that man does." When a man's neighbors don't like him, I don't like him myself. If there's anybody can see the good in a man, it's his neighbor ; and if a man's neighbor can't see any good in him, it's because there's no good to ^ 48 Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. ■:!;;i!iii!i :''ili ! i ti!'!!! liiiiiiiiiiiiiiii see. Brother ! oh, brother ! you can't go on practis- ing a fraud on the community in which you live. Our Saviour said : " Ye are the light of the world ; a city that is set on a hill cannot be hid." And a good man is like that city set on a hill, his goodness will be known. Again, we say it is absolutely impossible to practise a fraud upon God Almight3^ He knows me ; knows every motive of my life. If you will keep these things before you — that you know your- self, that your neighbor knows you, and God knows you — it will save you many hypocritical acts. It will that. You bring a man to understand these things, and he's going to be as good on Wednesday as he is on Sunday, as pious in his store as he is on his knees. Yet there is a sense in which we can be something else than like the character we bear in the community. I'll say this much — there are some things you have hid that it's better for you they are hid. But your character is a blot on this community, in spite of the fact that that knowledge has never gotten out. The Saviour came down from the moun- tain-side on one occasion, and the multitude thronged about him, and there was a leper came up. And when the leper came up the multitude fell back. They were mighty glad to give him room. If the man sitting by you knew you as God knows you, he would move away from you too. I expect there are plenty of men in this audience, if your wives knew you like God knows you, they would give you the whole house, and go to a house where virtue reigns supreme in every part of the house. If there's a more awful hell for one man than for another, I. >. Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. 49 •n practis- you live. world ; a nd a good dness will mpossible ie knows you will low your- od knows acts. It and these 'Wednesday -s he is on ive can be ear in the are some 1 they are mmunity, has never ihe moun- thronged up. And :ell back. 1. If the ^s you, he there are ves knew e you the lue reigns there's a another, .-5* it is for that man who will come reeking home from a house of infamy and pillow his head by the side of a pure wife. And, j^oung men ! young men ! See to your life along that line ! When I was in Cincinnati the newspapers told of a young man who ran across his own sister in a house di ill- fame. And that night I faced the audience, and I said that that young lady had as much right in that house as the young man had. As I love the virtue of wife, and mother, and sister, so help me God, I'll maintain my own virtue. Young man ! young man ! I have more hopes for all other classes to reform than the married man and the young man who are persistently debauching their bodies in licentiousness. They are the most hopeless cases to whom the holy Gospel of Jesus Christ was ever poured out. We know each other. God knows us. Be not deceived ; God is not mocked, for whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap. Now, brethren, I suppose we have many nationalities here. We have many creeds, and men of no creed. But do you know, I have chosen a text that we can all meet on common ground? Do you know that atheists, and infidels, and believers, and all Jews and Gentiles, all meet in this text on common ground, and say it is solid ground — that whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap. Really, brethren, this would be as true if Hume the historian was the author of it as it is when God is the author of it. This text would be as true if Socrates was the author of it as it is true when St. Paul, under inspiration, was the author of it. This text is true whether there is any God at all 50 Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. ii;ii! iiiii!! or not. It is true whether man is immortal or not — that whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap. Now, this is true in the physical world about us, and this physical world is nothing but the visible photo- graph of the spiritual world. If I go into my field and sow wheat, from the moment it drops from my fingers until I garner it I don't expect anything to come but wheat. Well, now, brother, that is just as true in the moral universe as it is true in the physi- cal world about us. And I want you to notice the fact — the multiplying nature of seed. If I sow one grain of corn, I will reap eight hundred grains. Now, every work of your life is a seed, every deed of your life is a seed, not floating upon the rich soil of the Dominion of Canada, but in human hearts. And re- member, when once the seed drops from your hearts it is gone forever from your reach. A woman came to a Catholic priest and confessed, "I have talked among my neighbors and made trouble in my settle- ment." The priest gave her a basket of thistle seed and said, " Walk the highways between your neigh- bors* homes and scatter this thistle seed on the right and on the left." In an hour or two the woman came back and said, " I have done what you told me." The priest said, " Before I will absolve you I want you to gather up these thistle seeds and put them back in the basket." "Oh," said the poor, trem- bling woman, "I can never do that." And the priest answered, "Neither can you ever undo the mischief you did in that community." Oh, breth- ren, there are men slumbering in your cemetery from whose hand the seed of death and hell has m- WWi M Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. 61 or not— also reap, it us, and )le photo- my field from my ything to is just as he physi- Lotice the r sow one QS. Now, id of your oil of the And re- 3ur hearts nan came ve talked my settle- listle seed ur neigh- the right 16 woman L told me." ou I want put them >or, trem- And the undo the )h, breth- cemetery hell has fallen. They are producing and reproducing har- vests year after year — enough to make angels trem- ble as they look upon it. It is noji all of life to live, nor all of death to die. A man's influence lives on and on, and his character reproduces itself some- times in a radius of a hundred miles around. But one man says, " I have no influence." If I were to meet you to-morrow and drop my flnger in your face and say, " You haven't any influence in this town," you would be mad enough to knock me down. You oniy tell that lie when it's convenient for you to go on in your meanness. Did you ever notice that ? A man will give a hundred dollars for a terra-cotta Indian painted red, with a pipe in his mouth, to put in front of a cigar stand. What for ? For his influ- ence. Old fellow, if you've got no influence you had better turn into a terra-cotta arranofement and be painted and sell for a hundred dollars. Every man :m of us has influence. And brother, you have got enough f good influences in this town to put down a great ^many bad things. But you have got enough bad ,| influences in this town, too, which, if they are not I, checked, may damn hundreds of thousands of your .;^, people. We come back to the proposition that we I . want to be perfectly practical at the expense of every- thing except truth. I'm never going to give my con- 1 sent to being called a great preacher. I never tried to preach but one big sermon, and I bursted wide open on that occasion. No more big sermons for me. 1 want to preach little ones. The fact is that to come ■ down to the height of some of you fellows, I've got * to cut it pretty fine and warm it up and give it to f 4 52 Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. you a little at a time. " Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." Let's take the sin of pro- fanity. Oh ! y9u say, we haven't got much of that. I'll tell you ; I've heard as much profanity in Toronto since I came here as I heard in Cincinnati in days. You've pfot it. I tell you it's stalking you. .streets, and gentlemen walking the streets of your town can hear it, too. Profanity ! If you sow profanity you'll reap profanity. I've got more patience with all other sort of sinners, almost, than I have with profane swearera I've often thought : If you can't quit cursing, you ought to go like Robinson Crusoe and live on a desert island, with no one but goats to associate with. And a profane swearer is fit for nothing but to be butted to death by a r t. I'd hate to be the goat that had the nasty jol hand. I've said in America, many a time, that our railway companies are getting so good now they furnish us with all sorts of special cars, dining-cars, and smoking- cars, and so on ; now, if they'd only provide a curs- ing car, and let every foul-mouthed rascal that wanted to curse go there, it would be a protection to the decent travelling public and a good thing. Profanity ! Profanity ! Brethren, I say of all the excuseless sins in the world, profanity is the most excuseless. It has been said by an old preacher that when the devil fishes for sinners, for all other sorts of sinners he b&.its his hook, but for profane swearers he drops the naked hook and the fool grabs it. What do you want to curse for ? Do you think it's smart ? Think it makes people think more of you ? Listen ! If you're a profane swearer, you lack that much of being Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. 53 a gentleman, I don't care what else you are, or what else you arn't. I've been asked to talk to commer- cial travellers. A good many of you swear, my brethren. God deliver me from a cursing drummer, I wouldn't wipe my feet on him. I remember this incident : — Two men went together with different lines of goods. One sold goods at nearly every place they went to, and the other couldn't make a sale. The unsuccessful one, after awhile, asked how it was. The answer was, " You curse, I don't ; do you ever notice it ? I haven't swore an oath since we started. But we go into a place, the first thing you do is to commence spewing out your profanity. I see the proprietor looking at you as if he would say, *I wouldn't buy goods from you.' Quit cursing and see how it'll go." He left his profanity off, and after that he sold as many ^ lods as his competitor. Bro- ther, if you are going t hire a drummer, if you're a wholesale liquor dealer, get you a good cusser — that suits the line ; but if you are dealing in the neces- saries of life, if you are in a right trade, get you a man who will not be unfaithful to God, and he'll be faithful to you. I wish I could break you off swear- ing. Boys, stand up in your manhood and say, I've sworn my last oath. Quit it ! Quit it ! Quit it ! There's damnation in profanity. Sow profanity, reap profanity. Just look what a harvest we've got in America. Look what a harvest is coming on in this Dominion. We're gathering money and sending preachers to heathendom. One of our missionaries, who had been seventeen years in foreign lands, was returning with his son, a boy about that many years i litlii 54 Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. old. As they neared America there was an American on the ship who swore an oath in the presence of the young man. The father turned to him and said, " My boy here is seventeen years old. He was raised in a heathen land, and that's the first oath he ever heard in his life." Lot's get these heathens to send some missionaries here. I want all the money and men for foreign missions we jan get, but T want foreign missionaries to come here, for I believe they can teach us something. In some heathen languages there's not a single cuss- word in them. Of all the brutes in the world, one of the worst is the father who will swear before his children. Did you ever do that? There's not a brute that would thus debauch its young if it had the capacity. Sow profanity and reap pro- fanity, just as certain as when you sow wheat you'll reap wheat. Sow whiskey, and reap moral, upright, sober citizens ? There is not an old drunkard or bar- keeper in this town but will tell you that's a lie. Brethren, America has to be redeemed from whiskey, and I believe the day is not twenty yoars distant when our children will look back on these days when we legalized the trafiic as days of barbarism, and wonder why their parents ever legalized such an infernal traffic. Now, old fellow, you clap your hands like that outside and you'll do good. Sow whiskey, reap drunkards ! And don't you know, my brethren, every bar-room in this city is the recruiting offiv^r of hell, and going round inveigling your own children into hell. Well, my brethren, in the social world where does the drunkard come in as a neces- sary part of the concern ? What is a drunkard gopd Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. 55 for as a drunkard ? Is he good for anything in good citizenship, for anything to bless the community ? Well, brother, if they are no good in God's universe, what do you want to manufacture them for ? Yet you have two hundred manufactories in this town making drunkards. That's the way to look at it. If I were to come to the voters of this city and say : "Gentlemen, I'll give you $300 to let me debauch every boy you have," you would not even answer me. And yet you give two hundred people liberty to de- bauch some people's sons. Well now, brethren, the best way in the universe I know of to keep anybody from selling spoiled meat is for nobody to buy it. The best way to close the saloons is for every man to say : I'll die before I'll touch liquor. If you mem- bers of the Church were to quit drinking you'd shut up half the bar-rooms in town before Christmas. I mean all the churches of this city, for more than half the adults of this city belong to churches, and many of them like the "creetur" so well to this day that they never have quit drinking it. If you sow whiskey you will reap drunkards. Oh, withhold the seed, and never scatter another. God deliver old Canada from whiskey now and forever ! I have no special temptation to leave Ameiica, but I would love to settle in a dominion where it was unconstitu- tional to make it, or sell it, or drink it. I would like to live in just such a settlement. Brother, this text is a truism. If I sow profanity I will reap pro- fanity. If I sow whiskey I will reap drunkards. If I sow cards I will reap — honest, industrious citizens ? Cards make them industrious, you 56 Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. know. Brother, I can put up with almost any- other sort of a man except a man who, to in- dulge his depraved taste, will debauch his whole family by playing cards before the children. You can't play a game of cards in your own home and say that your boy will never b<3 a gambler. Not only is the whole tendency of card-playing hellish, but the idea that you want to play them never came from God. No Christian, as a Christian, is going to indulge in a practice that may debauch his children. One woman said to me, " My husband is a lawyer. He comes home at night tired, and I play cards with him for recreation." I said, " Take the fool to the asylum." In nearly every room in the lunatic as^dum they have a pack of cards. Cards are an institution run for the amusement of idiots. A game of cards is the game of starvelings, morally and in- tellectually. Now and then you will find a smart fellow playing a game of cards ; but he is an excep- tion to the general rule, and he ain't here to-night, so we won't speak about him. Sow cards, reap gamblers. Where are the hundred thousand gam- blers of America from ? I say that nine gamblers out of every ten come out of the homes of profess- ing Christians. Gamblers, as a class, are the most gentlemanly, refined men I have ever seen. My boys may gamble and die drunk ; but no child of mine shall ever say, " I saw my father drunk," or, "I saw my father play cards." I tell you, it's time parents in this town were burning these cards and telling their children, " I am praying for you. I am sorry I ever led you into a step like that." And parents, Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. 57 st any to in- whoie , You fte and '. Not hellish, r came oing to lildren. Lawyer. Is with to the lunatic are an \. game and in- i smart excep- »-night, s, reap d gam- .mblers )rofess- e most ■y boys f mine 'I saw Darents tellinor a sorry arents, above all things in the world, never go home with your breath stinking with beer and whiskey. Don't do that. A man whose innocent children call him father, and whose wife calls him husband, goes home and sits down in the family circle, and smells like an old mash-tub. You old hog, you. If there was a four-legged hog here I wouldn't have called you that, because he would have got mad. If you get a real old hog drunk in this town he would get out, and that would be the last you'd see of him ; but the two-legged hogs will swig it the year round and pay for the privilege. Boys, you are breaking your mother's heart — a boy that will jump upon his mother's heart with both boot heels, grinding the last drop out of it ! A man said to me, " Mr. Jones, I have got two boys that are killing my precious wife. They are besotted; and day after day I can see the lines deepening in their mother's face. What shall I do ? " " Well," said I, " if I had two boys who were killing their mother inch by inch, I would speak to them in some quiet moment and say, * You are killing your mother inch by inch ; if you are going to keep on, load your breech-loading guns, point them at your mother's tender temple, fire off every barrel and put your precious mother out of this torture. She is dying by the inch, boys; it would be a mercy for some of you to shoot her down.'" Don't kill your mother by the inch. And remember, parents, your children will be like you. Suppose you come home to me and ask : 'Which of your children will you give over to the flames of damnation ? " Oh, which one of my 58 Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. precious children could I lay my hands upon and say, "I am willing this one should be lost." What- ever I sow in my home I shall also reap. Oh, my brethren, be careful what kind of seed drops from your hand, right and left, as you go. You sow in time, but you reap through all eternity. Do you reckon God was ready to judge Tom Paine when he died ; that man who started evil influences from which the tide has been widening ever since ? No, sir, when the last trump shall sound, and all the erring ones, dragged down to infidelity and hell, shall stand with chattering teeth and looking with horrid aspect in the face of God, Tom Paine will see what he has done and will see the justice of the judgment God will pass upon him. It is time for us to think, not only what the result of our acts will be while we live, but what they will be after we are dead and buried. I have known men in Georgia, now dead for ten or twenty years, and yet the evil influence of their lives is cursing communities down to the present moment. When I look at a subject like this I'm so glad there's another side to this great question. If I sow to the Spirit, glory be to God, I shall of the Spirit reap life ever- lasting. Now, brethren, there is but one thing for us to do after we have been sowing on the bad side, and that is to change the sowing and commence sowing on the good side. In Cartersville, where I was raised, I was always a leader amongst the boys. I can't tell why, for many of them were smarter than I was, and many of Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. 59 them richer. But somehow I drifted ahead in all that was wicked and wild among the boys. But when I was converted, I commenced preaching right in my own community; and I have preached the Gospel there in tents, arbors, and churches, and on the streets of my town. I worked hard, and glory be to God, I can get as big a crowd to preach to in my own town as anywhere in the world. I worked to convert that community ; and brethren, two years ago this summer, the Lord gave me the last one of my youthful companions to go with me in the good work. They had been coming in in ones and twos every year, until now the last has come. I'd hate to think any poor soul was to be lost that I had helped in the downward course. Every man of us can go home to night and change the sowing. You can begin doing good where you have been doing wrong before. Don't stand here waiting for the iron to get hot, but strike it till it is hot, then fashion it as you want it. Don't wait for something to turn up, but get under it and turn it up. Don't stand on the bank of the River of Death and wait and shiver, afraid and chattering, but leap into the current and save others from being borne away and lost. I've talked a long time, I know. But will you forgive me — and I don't care whether you do or not — if I give you a little personal talk from my own experience along here. In February, 1879, I received a letter from my old grandfather, invit- ing me to attend at the celebration of his golden wedding, saying that he and his wife wanted all their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchil- 60 Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. dren to be present. On the day appointed we drove over and there were the generations assem- bled. My grandfather lived in a double log cabin, with one large room and one smaller one. He has been a poor man all his life, and a hard-working ^lan. We gathered that day in the large room and formed a double circle, and grandfather and grand- mother sat in the centre of the circle. And grand- father said, " Children, and grandchildren, and great- grandchildren, I want to give you a little history and statistics." Said he, " My father and mother both died when I was a small boy. I was bound out to a farmer till I was twenty-one years of age. At sixteen years of age the Methodists started a re- vival in our country ; I gave my heart to God and joined the Church, became a class-leader, an exhorter, and at twenty-one years of age a local preacher. About this time I was married, and now my wife and I have been living happily for fifty long years. The first time we moved into our humble home, after we were married, I had family prayers, and I have been praying in my family night and morning for fifty years. I have been preaching the Gospel for about fifty years. Many a time the devil has tempted me to quit, I was doing no good. But I kept on serving God and my generation the best I could. Now, here's the statistics: There's fifty-two of us in all — children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Twenty- two of them have crossed over ; sixteen of those that crossed over were infants, and I have God's word for it that they are safe in heaven. Six of them were adults — and the last of them literally shouted his way Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. 61 out of the world. Now the whole twenty-two are safe and over there. Thirty of us are alive, and every one of the thirty old enough to be in the . Church is in the Church and on the way to heaven, except one." " Now," said the old man, " it doesn't matter much whether I cross over there or stay here/' When I was going home, I said to my wife, "I have been wanting to get to heaven all my life, but now I feel that I cannot afford to miss it." Brethren, if per- chance I should be turned away from the gates of heaven, I will walk oft' the most disappointed man that ever the angels looked at. All my hopes, aspira- tions, and desires are pointed that way. All my money is in that bank, and if it don't break I believe I am a millionaire. Now, brethren, I want to say this to you. From that poor orphan boy bound out to a farmer fifty years ago, there are seven preachers preaching the Gospel. And to-day, while I am preaching the Gospel in Toronto, perhaps that grand old man is on his knees this very moment, saying, " God bless my grandson, and give him power with men and influence with God." I have said many a time, if God helped me to gather a million souls, I would cast them all at my old grandfather's feet and say: "Grandfather, take them to Christ; you are worthy to bear them to him in your own hands ;" for it has all come of the fact that I had a grand- father and a grandmother that kept me before the mercy-seat, though I went down to the very doors of death and hell. I have thought many a time that God in his infinite mercy let me go there* Maybe 62 Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. it was because he wanted me to go down to the very gates of hell and then pulled me back and said, " Go down again to the gates of hell and rescue every man that is degraded and fallen in this life." God permit me to use my knowledge of sin not only to humiliate me, but to learn how to reach men that are in the downward and hellward path. And now, brethren, I confidently look to the future, and the matter all rests with God, and all my hope is centred in this thought. My wife has my arm, marching right side by side into the kingdom. I want every child to fall into line and march along with us. And I say to you, the grandest sight the angels ever looked upon is a mother and father leading a whole family of children right into the kingdom of heaven. Friend, to-night will you hear the voice of the Son of God and be saved ? Brother, just look ! God is doing his best with us. Oh, look ! look ! In 1861 Beauregard rolled his guns out and opened fire on Fort Sumter ; and Sumter, full of Union soldiers, began to answer fire ; and shot and shell flew thick and fav$t from guns to guns. By-and- by the walls of the old fort began to crumble down, and by-and-by out of the centre of the old fort was run up a white flag, and Beauregard said, " Boys, go out with your boats and bring the men here, and don't hurt a hair of their heads." God has turned his guns against this world. Our fathers and our mothers have fallen in the warfare. Some of our property has fallen in this fearful warfare of rebellion against God. But oh, brother, while shot and shell have been turned against us, we have answered back Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. 68 to the ad said, rescue lis life." Lot only ten that id now, ind the centred arching by fire. God help us all to-night to run up the white flag right out of the centre of our heart ; and God will tell his angels, " Roll back your guns, don't fire any more, but fill your hands with heaven's bread and angels' food, and go down and feed these surrendered rebels." God help you to run up the white flag and say, "I surrender, I surrender to God to-night." Every man that says, " In my heart I would run up a white flag and surrender to God," stand up. I march !st sight I father nto the 'ou hear Brother, •h, look ! out and full of hot and By-and- e down, fort was Boys, go ere, and s turned and our e of our rebellion md shell red back Sermon IV. TO MOTHERS. ** And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God." — Rom, xii. 2. THERE are three words which we associate closely in this world — mother, home, and heaven. And yet we often ask the question, " What is home, even, without a mother ?" and " How may I ever get to heaven without a precious mother's hand and heart to guide me in the way of righteous- ness ? " Somebody said, " If I could ' mother ' this world, I could save this world." Another one said, " The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world." Some months ago, in one of the Eastern States of our Union of States, there was called together a mothers' convention. There they met in anxious prayer and advised as to the best means of training children. At the point that they were discussing the age at which we ought to begin with the child, one mother got up and suggested that they begin with their children at the age of six. Another mother said, " I think five years of age is old enough to begin with the child." Another mother said, " I begin with mine at four years of age." Another good mother said, " I begin taking my children into the closet at three years of age." Directly a good old mother in Israel stood up and said, " I tell you when to begin Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. 65 with the child — begin twenty years before the birth of the child, on its mother, and train her well, arid then all will be well with the child, and its mother will train it well." We simply look at the most prominent phases of history, and we may see what " mother " is to the world. Nero's mother was a bloody murderess, and she grave to this world one of the most heartless and cruel wretches the world ever saw. Lord Byron's mother was a proud, intellectual woman, and she gave to the world the proudest, most profligate auto- crat the world ever saw. George Washington's mother was a sensible, plain, good woman, and she gave to our country a man that we honor in history with the title of "father of his country." John Wesley's mother was a painstaking, prayerful, and consecrated woman, and John Wesley's mother gave a boy to the world that shall bless generations until God shall call the world to judgment. Mother! mother ! mother ! When I look at the history of King Josiah, see his surroundings, and see the depth to which the race had gone in depravity and wicked- ness, and see the worldliness and idolatry all around that boy in his youth, and I say, " Oh, wonder of wonders that he should have been such a boy in such an age." And when I look over cause and effect I can find the solution to the problem in the fact that Josiah was blessed with one of the best mothers a boy ever had. And this was the solution to the problem. How happened such a character in the world's history at that time ? Now I am free to confess that nobody appreciates the advantages 5 66 Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. to children of the Word of God and the Sabbath- school and the preaching of the Gospel more than I do. But if I had to make a choice to-day and say whether if I had to undergo my youth again, I would forego the advantages of the teaching of the Scriptures and the Sabbath-school, and the preach- ing of the Gospel, and a godless, wicked mother, or to find myself without the Bible and the Sabbath- school, but a precious, godly mother to fold her arms around me, I'd say, " Give me my mother, my precious mother." I'll risk my chances a thousand times in the arms and under the prayers of a Chris- tian mother, and give up all other means of grace that bring sinners to Christ. Oh ! the invaluable blessing of a good mother. Perchance nine-tenths of the redeemed in heaven were not there long until they began to tell the angels how the first steps towards the celestial state were directed by a kind mother's voice and a consecrated mother's life. Oh ! mother, mother, mother. The greatest blessing God can give your home is to give it a consecrated mother. The greatest curse that ever blighted an American home, or a home in this Dominion is a godless, flippant, careless, worldly mother I speak that advisedly. In very few instn d's history have children risen r of mothers. Where mother is cr ,6, an* ^^La^orless, and worldly, and flippant, you may exf !ct to find a family of children that do not think of God and are not directed by his blessed Word. Sister, if there is any being on earth that ough^ to be in harmony with her Father in heaven it Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. 67 ,bbath- tlian I ,nd say [jain, I of the preach - bher, or ibbath- )1(1 her tier, my lousand Chris- if grace valuable 3-tenths fig until it steps r a kind e. Oh! ing God secrated hted iT^ ton is a I speak 'd's of ■d) rless, o find a and are it ought is a mother. There are problems in your life that you never can solve without God to help you. There are difficulties in the management of your homes where human wisdom cannot direct you rightly. Of all the beings that ever lived on earth, mothers ought to be in right relations to God. You ought to be on time with God. You ought to be in harmony with God. ^^ou ought to have a room in your house for Jesus Christ, and provide room in the hearts of your chil- dren that they may take in Jesus Christ and be in right relations towards God. It is the most reason- able thing in the world that you ought to be in right relations to God. You know the vexatious incidents of home life ; you know the frequent giving away of patience. Recently I have said that in home affairs there is nothing like a wise, prudent, patient, and painstaking management, and if I want to be wise, prudent, and patient, I don't know any one that can help me except God. Right relations with God will always insure me the wisdom which cometh from above — patience, and all those graces that adorn human life. It is reasonable that you be reli- gious, because not only for your own sake personally and your own happiness personally, but see how your life would guide your children's life, and see what your life is before your children ; and above all things in the world, children, look to mother as the one spotless being in the universe. Mother ; she is the sweetest woman in the world. Mother ; she is the best woman in the world. Mother ; I would rather be like thee than like an angel ; and. javen it ] oh, if I am not what I should be, and my children 68 Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. become assimilated unto my character ! Oh, then, what a fatal mistake for me. I say that right rela- tions towards God will save you from many mis- takes and many perplexing cares, and many failures, and many things you would succeed in ; and to every mother present I say, if you have not done it before this, in the name of the worth of your soul and children, rush up into the presence of God and say : "Lord God, here I am ; take me just as I am and then make me just as thou would'st have me be." Really, when I see these things as they are I know God can do for every mother what she needs to have done. Is not that a blessed fact? Some mothers say: "Well, I am not fit to be a mother. That is the truth of it. I have the worst disposition. I have more weak- nesses than anybody." Well, sister, the God that made you knows how to strengthen up every weak point, and knows how to make you symmetrical, in the most blessed sense of the word. I remember reading a few months ago about Mr. Edison, the great inventor of the electric light. He is the most wonderful man now in our country in many regards. He agreed to furnish some publish- ing company a printing machine by a certain day, and just sixty-seven hours before the time for the delivery of the machine it was finished. He put it to work and it would not do its work, and Mr. Edison took it to pieces and worked on it, and put it together again, and it would not work. He took it down again, and put it together and adjusted it again ; but it would not work, and these sixty-seven hours, right straight without eating and without a :^m Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. 69 wink of sleep, he worked at that machine, and just at the hour for delivery the machine worked per- fectly, and he turned it over to the printers. Then, as soon as the work was accomplished, he went home, ate a meal of victuals, and laid down on his bed and slept twenty-seven hours without waking up. This is a fact given in his history. Now, sister, if Mr. Edison would spend sixty-seven hours in regulating that machine in order to make it work perfectly, in order that he might deliver it in time, don't you think that if God made you, and you are out of order, if you go to him, God will not only work sixty-seven hours, but he will lay aside all other machinery and he will spend eternity to get you straight. God made me and he knows how to put me in good working order, too. And that is what is the matter with some of you. You won't run. You won't keep time. Oh ! my sister, put yourself in the hands of God, and I believe he can take the most unlovable woman in this kingdom, the most unlov- able woman in this town, and can make her the most lovely and most lovable creature the world ever looked upon. He will make you not only so that you are beautiful in your character, but every- thing will look beautiful to you. I believe that. And really, if I am right in relation to God, and I love God with all my heart, love will reign in my home. True, I have a good deal of sympathy for every mother who has trouble about her children, fussing with each other and quarrelling, [and yet the children get the cue of such life from her and her husband. And now look innocent ; but at the yo Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. same time that does not help the matter a particle. Suppose I make a proposition that every woman who never was cross with her husband stand up. I won't make it because it will embarrass you. I never like to embarrass a crowd of ladies. The husband and wife quarrelled at the table, and the wife picked up a cherry tart and threw it at her husband's head and missed his head, striking a motto over the door — " God bless our home." The children said, " Mamma missed papa's head, but didn't she hit the motto.'' And just such things as that. Yet in going into a house and seeing these bright mottoes about, the first thing is to see if yoa have wings ; angels must live here. And just look at these mottoes. A nice motto is a nice thins: in the home. The matter of livinor bv and being regulated by such mottoes is the thing that will charm the angel's eye. Right relations with God will give you right relations at home. Right adjustment towards God will give you right adjustment towards your family ; and if a woman, I don't care who she is, should look to God for guid- ance in her home, it will be given her. Mother, you may think you get along well, but mark what I tell you, that the clouds and storms will come. Show me the life that has not been storm-swept ; show me the life that has not been miserable in every-day life. But listen. Whatever the past has been, mark what I tell you. You will need God in the future. The way to get ' d is to get in right adjustment towards him. The way to get into right adjustment is to go to the Lord and say, '* Lord, I give myself to thee ; it is all I can do. Here I am ; I will be thine from Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. n this time." I received a letter from one wife that said : " My husband don't want me to be a Christian, lie is afraid that in joining the Church I will gossip just like the other members of the Church." Why, the Bible contains more anathemas against gossip than anv other book in the universe ; and this man was afraid for his wife to join the Church, fearing that she will gossip — afraid for his wife to go into the foul atmosphere for fear that she will have malaria! Is that not * wonderful ? I remember that, when in Texas two years ago, I was struck down with ma- larial fever, and for three weeks I did not get out of bed, and I said : " I am sorry I came into this malarial district at this time of the year." They said : " There is no malaria here. This is the healthiest place in the world. When a man comes here with malaria in his system it develops it." That is the only way I can see the Church harm any person. The Church brings out very many things. These things come out, and you repent of it and get straight. There may be something in that. Right relations with God. I will say this, sister, a man that does not want you to love God and obey God is a man who is unworthy of the relation of husband to any good woman. That is the truth about it, and Mr. Finney says on one occasion a wife and mother came to him and said: "My husband told me last nij^ht if I came to this service he would kill me. What must I do?" Mr. Finney said: ''Your first duty is to obey God. My sister, God don't demand that you neglect anything at home in order to serve him, and he makes it your duty to be 72 Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. a worthy and good mother; but if you have done all your duty at home, and if you can come to church, come on." The next night she came to church, and when she got home her husband stood inside the door with a chop axe, and just as his wife opened the door he flew upon her with the chop axe. She ran up the steps and jumped on a shed, and ran over to a neighbor's house, where she spent the night. She thought, " He will be so sorry this morning about the way he treated me last night. I will' go home and hear his apology this morning." She went back, and as she entered the door he stood there with the same chop axe. In the darkness of night she had eluded him, but in'-daylight she ran up-stairs and he followed her. Just as she entered the room she fell on her knees and he raised the chop axe. She said : " God be merciful to him." As she said this he dropped the axe and fell on his knees, and she went to church that night and the husband was beside his wife. Sometimes it takes desperate means to bring some husbands to do their duty. That is the truth about it. " I beseech you, therefore, mothers, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living, whole, acceptable sacrifice unto God, for this is your reasonable service." Really, it is the only sensible thing any woman can do to get into right relations with C d, and get his help in every emer- gency. God can help you, mother, in the management of your children. I remember this little incident at my*own home. I walked in through the hall, and just as I walked into the house, wife and little Mary and Annie came out of the parlor. I saw the three "H^PB Sam p. Jones' Toiionto Sermons. 78 of them all were crying like as if f'\eir hearts would break. I said, " What in the world is the matter with you all," and neither one could speak. By-and- by the little girls got up and walked out of the room, and I turned to my wife and said, " Wife, what's the matter?" Then she said, "You know sometimes Mary and Annie disagree with each other and it is very painful to me," and she said, " I have switched them for it and I have admonished them, and this morning when they had a little disagree- ment, I got them both by the arm and went into the parlor and went down on our knees and told God all about it. God came down and broke their hearts into ten thousand pieces, and that did these girls more good than all the switches in Georgia." There is nothing like having such friendship with God. Go to the Lord and tell him all about it, and tell him to lift you out of all your troubles. Haven't you felt, " I will have to give it up. There is no use in talking. I cannot manage my children. I cannot." Haven't you felt that ? That is the saddest hour that ever came to a home in this country, when father and mother say to each other : " We give it up. We cannot manage them." Some of you may be one year, some of you may be two years, and some of you three years past that time when you can con- trol your children. Ain't that so ? Do you know that in some of the best driving horses I ever drove in my life I was warned of this fact — you may let them go at certain speed, and control them safely ; if you let them go at full speed and then check them, they'll fall to kicking the buggy all to pieces. And, 74 Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. sister, there's the point. Up to a certain point you can keep your children under your control ; but let them go beyond that point, and then try to put the check on, and they'll just kick creation all to pieces. I said something along that line one day to a congre- gation, and an old mother said : " There, that's just my case. I said to my daughter, * Daughter, you shall not go to that ball,' and she just kicked the chair clean across the room, and looked lik*^ she'd kick me." I wish these girls would kick some of these dudes out of the parlors, but don't let your poor old mother have any of the kicking. I don't mind having a trifling young man saying a girl has kicked him out, but I do hate to hear a mother say she has been kicked by her daughters. But I'll get to the girls Saturday, and have a talk with them. God pity the mother that has raised up a lot of kicking animals — animals that bite and kick too. Sister, let you and I maintain a Christian firm- ness in our homes. " Right's right ; I do it ! chil- dren, I want you to do it. Wrong's wrong ; I won't do it ! children, I don't want you to do it." A mother had a brother-in-law — T believe it was — who wanted her to send her daujjhter to a dancinij-school. He said : " There's a dancing-school beginning at the house of Prof. Arori." He was a hook-nosed French- man — I don't know how long he'd been out of the penitentiary. Can't say anything about that, but he started a dancing-school, and vv^hen this brother-in- law wanted to send the young lady there the mother, who was a Christian woman, said, " I am a widow, and not in a condition to pay for the dresses that my Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. 75 daughter would require if she learned dancing." The brother-in-law promised to buy the dresses. " But," said the mother, " I can't afford to pay for the tui- tion." And the brother-in-law promised to pay for that, too. Then the mother said, " Well, you send daughter to me, and if she wants to go I'll let her do so." The daughter came in all gleeful, and said : " Now, mamma, you said, if we understood each other, you'd let me go." And the mother said : " My daughter, I promised your Christian father, in his last moments, to train you for heaven. Now, daugh- ter, do j'OU think that dancing-school will help train you to meet your Christian father in heaven ? If you think so you can go to the dancing-school, but not otherwise. What do you say, daughter ? " And the daughter threw her arms around her mother's neck, and said : " Mother, if you made such a promise, I will never go to a place that dissipates my life and brings me out of harmony with God." Don't you see ? Sister, the fact that vou have children involves a pledge on your part that you will train your chil- dren for heaven ; for God never gave a woman a child to debauch it by sending it to a dancing-school kept by an old hook-nosed Frenchman — I don't know, as I said, how long he'd been out of the chain-gang — who came into the settlement with a fiddle on his back, and proposed to start an establishment to teach your children manners. God pity a mother that has to send her children to a dancing-school to learn grace and manners ! If I'd a mother in my church that sent her daughters to a dancing-school, I'd turn her out. Not the daughter — I'd not turn her out, 76 Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. but the old hypocritical mammy that sent her there If there is a thing in this world I have the profound- est contempt for, it's the infernal dancing-master going through the land despoiling the young people of our country. And I would send my child to a workshop to work at fifteen cents a week, half clad and half fed, before I'd send him to a dancing- school. God pity the mother that has no more esti- mate of the soul and best interests of her children than not only to agree that they should learn to dance, but to pay for it, and a Methodist at that ! The Catholic Bishop of New York said the other day that the confessional had shown him that nineteen out of twenty ruined women who came to the con- fessional got their ruin through the ball-room. Now, if that's so, how can you trust your daughter in such a place as that ? Awful fact ! Awful fact ! God pity a woman that will raise her daughter to dance to the tune of a fiddle with the arms of a lecherous young man around her person ! I know I have had girls go away from me and turn up their noses at me, and say Mr. Jones is vulgar. But, sisters, you never looked into the face of a man that estimated the virtue of your precious daughters higher than the man to whom you are listening puts it. Why I would build a wall a mile high around every girl in America, and say to her, " Now, you look out on the sea of humanity, and say, 'My person is as sacred from the touch of men as the innermost recesses of God's heart.' " Call that vulgar, and let your daugh- ters be hugged in a ball-room ! "Be not conformed to this world: but be ye trans- Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. 77 formed by the renewing of your mind." Now, we want not only right relations with God, but right re- lations towards this world. Let me say to you, you can't run with this world, and mix with this world in fashionable society, and be religious, and train your children religious, no more than you can fly ; and you know it. Be not conformed to this world. You see, just as soon as your husband gets a little prosperous, and builds a three-story house on a prominent street — did you ever notice how all society would take you up ? But as long as you were industrious and poor they had no use for you. I've got a contempt for any- body that runs for money. A moneyed aristocracy — people that have not anything but money — are the poorest people in the world to-day. "A man's a man for a' that " — and I don't care what sort of clothes he's got on, if he's an honest, industrious man he's as good as anybody. I am glad that sort of people (the moneyed aristocracy^ do sort of run by them- selves. I would hate them to come down among other people and run them like they do themselves. " We're going to have a sociable," or "We're going to have a dining." Suppose an invitation is sent to a good Methodist woman that loves God, and the first thing you know she is overwhelmed by the thought, " I will not be a lady unless I give a dining too," and the devil just whips you right in on that line. I won't go to anything that I won't have one just like it at my own house; I won't go to the theatre, because if they were to come in to my parlor and say some of the things they say on the stage of the average theatre, I would kick them out of my house. 78 Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. / A theatre manager came to me and said, " Jones, the theatre is run on this principle : everybody wants to go to the theatre and hear some old hag howl and cry a little." And I'll tell you another thing. You are raising your children in such a way that they will be out of reach of the Gospel before they are sixteen. The hardest people in Toronto are not the old drunkards and gamblers, but children between ten and twenty. How few of them give their hearts to God ! I will show you ten grey-headed people giving their hearts to God where you will find one child under fifteen years of age giving his heart to God. How is this ? Because mothers will fall riijht in line with the evil, and ruin their children, so far as re- ligion is concerned, before they are eighteen years of age. And I will tell you hov^ it works: — "Husband, our little girl is just eight years old, and I think I will give her a little party." " Well, wife, our child is too young to talk about parties, you are not going to start that already." " Oh, husband, just a little party." " Wife, our children are too young to be talking about parties yet." "Oh, that's theway with you,you're always cross and mean when I want the children to en- joy themselves." Then the husband says, " The best thing I can do is to surrender, she'll give me no rest for the next month if that don't happen." So she gets up a little party. What's a little party ? Nothing in the world but a big party with state clothes. They run a little party, and first thing you know there is a big party. And they go from the big parties to pro- gressive euchre, and from progressive euchre to the Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. 79 ball-room, and from the ball-room to the German — f mean the decent American called the German. I don't mean any race of people. I'm glad it ain't called American, but it's called German — I don't know why, I didn't name it. And on they go ; on they go. And now your daughter says, " Law me ! I can't see any harm in this thing ; my mother's as good a woman as ever walked on top of the earth, and she doesn't object to it." Mother thinks : " If I don't push my daughter into society when she is fifteen years old, she will be an old maid." Sister, you would have better died an old maid than to have been a mother of such a crowd as you have, maybe. There are many things worse than old maids. I tell you right now, I would rather be a happy old maid than a thousand miserable mothers. Be not conformed to this world : but be ye trans- formed, and be acceptable to the will of God. When our home is consecrated to God, and we talk to our children in the lines of the true teachings of Scrip- ture, I don't believe our children will want any such things as balls or parties. Now, I have talked this sort of talk in my own home for years. I can see what is running families. I haven't been living thirty- eight years for nothing. I have learned a few things. I tell you, I see just as plain as I see my hand before ray face what is the matter in all this land. Parents don't control their children, and you know they don't. Children are controlling parents three times in five all over this land, and whatever your children say you do, and what you tell your children not to do they will do it if they want to. ^ Ain't that a fact ? 80 Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. When you let your children get from under your grip you have done fearful damage to your child, to say nothing about adding misery to yourself. If you had done duty to your children that daughter would have been the brightest star in your view, and that boy would have been the pride of your house. So long as your children are satisfied with a dress and a hat and a party it is all right, and they are under your control, but as soon as they begin to long for something else, something more than that, they pass from under your control. I believe us Christian people ought to be like one of our Governor's wives, a country lady but a sen- sible woman, but who did not know much about town ways, and when she moved to the Capital she started her little children to school in red flannels. Well, they came home just mortified to death and said, " Mother, if you don't take off these red flannels we won't go to school. Red flannels are not the fashion at the school, and everybody laughed at us." " Mv dears," said the Governor's wife, " I never came to Milledgeville to follow the fashion ; I came here to set the fashions." Let us Christian mothers do as she did, not follow the fashion, but set the fashion of righteousness, and make the balance of the world follow us. Let's make it fashionable to love God and keep his commandments. Let's make it fash- ionable to do right, to stay away from the ball- rooms and from worldly places. Let's make it fashionable to go to prayer-meetings, and to have family prayers, and to read the Bible, and to serve God and do right — won't that be a good thing ? Oh, f ' Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. 81 if it could be made fashionable to love God, and keep his commandments ! Let's make it fashionable to do that, and make the rest of the world follow us in the fashion. Now, I have talked about an hour, I'll just give you these two illustrations, and you can take them home with you. I got one from your house, and one from yours. You will recognize the picture as soon as you see it, but you need not say anything about it. Now, here's a mother sitting in a room by the side of a sewing-machine quietly sewing, and little Annie, just five years old, comes into the room and says, " Mamma, please give me some scraps to make a doll's dress." And the mother says, " Why don't you go away and play. If you bother me any more I'll wear you out. Go away." And little Annie goes away ; and next day she comes back again and says, " Mamma, give me some thread for my needle, please," and the mother says again, " Go away ; you waste more thread than you are worth. You've bothered me quite enough ; now go away and bother Mrs. Brown." And little Annie says as she goes away, " I wish I was dead ; that is all the harm I wish. The Lord knows mamma never says a kind word to me. I wish I was dead." Next day Annie comes back to her mother and says, " Mamma, won't you please loan me your thimble?" And the mother says, " I shan't do it ; the last time I loaned you my thimble it took me two hours to find it. I'll wear you out if you ever bother me any more." And then Annie goes away again, and this day she says, " I wish mamma were dearEs' Toronto Sfrmons. America while- she was the President's wife. Law me ! it ain't whose wife you are, but what sort of a, wife that fellow has got where you live. That's it. A wife wrote me the other day : — " I have a good husband. He is a good business man, I have drunk wine with him at our table. I enjoyed seeing him drink, till one day the conviction came upon me that husband came home thatnighta little full of whiskey. The next morning I said, ' Husband, I have made up my mind to this : no more brandy or whiskey will be drunk at our house forever. If you come home again and I smell it on your breath, I am going to pack up my duds and go away from home, and you will never see my face any more.'" And she said, " From that day to this my husband has never drunk one drop of whiskey ; a id now he is a live business man in this town. " And I believe if that woman had not taken that step he would have been found lying drunk in a gutter one day, or would have been buried in a drunkard's grave. She said, " I said to my husband, if you ever drink another drop, and I smell it on your breath, I'll pack up such few things as are my own, and go away from you, and you'll never look in my face again while you live." And she meant it, too. Law me ! If your husband loves whiskey better than you, you had better get away from him, and the sooner the better. Well, now, I have said these things in an unpre- meditated sort of way. I had no idea of saying one- tenth of them when I began, and now I'll go on with the text and talk for some twenty or twenty-five minutes. I believe this is the sweetest passage in Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. 95 Law 't of » at's it. L good drunk Of him le that liskey. tide up 3y will I home ing to id you e said, drunk usiness voman found e been said to and I things you'll And d loves away unpre- Ug one- >n with ity-five jage in the Holy Scriptures, and the Lord help us to under- stand and appreciate it. Here it is. Here it is : — •* The Lord is my shepherd ; I shall not want." You know that is the first verse of the 23rd Psalm — the sweetest thing in the Book, and I am so glad that all our commentators agree that David is the author of this Psalm. It does not make much differ- ence who is the author of the 22nd Psalm, or of the 24th Psalm, or of the 40th Psalm ; but I am very glad they all agree that David is the author of the 23rd Psalm. Listen. " The Lord is my shepherd ; I shall not want." David, when he wrote this, his memory ran back to those days when it was his business to care for his father's sheep, and then he meant more by it than any other man I know since the days of David, or before the days of David, could have meant. "The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want." David remembered how he used to lead the sheep forth from the fold, and how when the little young lambs would get out on the high- way and stray away, he would go after them and carry them in his arms to the pasture. He remem- bered how he left some old sheep in the fold because it was too weak to go to the pasture ; and how, as he led the others forth in the morning, when the grass was wet with dew, and all green and tender, he would think of the old sheep which he had left back in the fold, and he would pluck up some of the green tender grass, and lay it by in the shadow of a tree or a rock ; and how, when he came l)ack that way in the evening, he would collect th§ gra^s £vnd 96 Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. carry it home to the fold in his arms and give it to the old sheep. And he remembered how, when thfc wild beast came and took off one of his lambs, he followed it and slew the wild beast, and brought home the young lamb to the fold. And when David remembered all these things, he said to himself, " If I am young, the Lord will carry me in his arms to the pasture ; and if I am old and decrepid, he will bring me the sweet grass of his grace, and I shall not want; he will prove to me the worth of his sovereign, omnipotent, and eternal love." And David remembered how the Lord would take care of him through every danger, and would protect him from the wild beasts of temptation ; that the Lord would come and rescue him, as D?>vid had rescued his sheep. " The Lord is my shepherd ; I shall not want." That meant a great deal. David thought, " Now, as it was my duty to look after my father's sheep, and as I attended to their interests and protected them, so in that sense is the Lord my Shepherd, and I shall not want. As God is infinitely more than I am, and I am infinitely more than a sheep, so, in that sense, the Lord is my Shepherd, and I shall not want. That is a sweet fact. There is a swreep of faith in it that I wish every one of us could make this morning — " I shall not want ! " shall not want anything that it is best for me to have, in time or eternity. No matter what God wants of me, I'd give it to him, and I'd rather the Lord had it than I'd keep it myself. Ii the Lord takes my husband, I'd rather he would do so if jie wants my Jii^sband, than V^ ]keep him. If Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. 97 ! it to m tYm lbs, he rought David If, " If rms to [le will I shall of his And take would tation ; D?>vid pherd ; David ter my iterests I Lord ,d I am ise, the That it that ag-"I lat it is matter and I'd elf. Ii 5uld do im. If the Lord takes my children, I'd rather he would do so if he wants them, than I'd keep them. I shall not want husband if God takes husband ; nor chil- dren if God takes children ; nor property if God tpkes property. I am my Father's child, and what he wills is best. That is the text, and that is the sentiment of the text ; and brothers, sisters, I have never found a finer expression of this idea than that found in the little book entitled " Stepping Heaven- ward " — a sweet little book that every wife ought to get, even if you have to deny yourself of some- thing else. It is by Miss Prentiss — " Stepping Heavenward " — and is the sweetest book I ever read in my life. This little incident is given there. A wife and her husband had been sitting up at night with dear Willie, their little boy of three or four years old, who was sick ; and wife had been upstairs, and when ehe came down about twelve o'clock her husband, who was a physician, was sitting by little Willie's side. And wife looked at her child, and then fell on her husband's bosom, and said with tears in her eyes, " Oh, husband, God is going to take our little Willie from us," and then she sobbed aloud. And husband, as soon as wife ceased to sob, turned to her and said, " Wife, don't talk that way, God shan't take little Willie from us ; if he's not better in the morning, we'll give him to God." Oh, what a sentiment was there in that ! If God wants him God shall have him. If God wants anything I have, he has been so good to me that I'll give it to him, and if I give it to him I shall not want it. for that spirit of resignation that says, " Precious Father, whatever 7 iff^ 9B Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. you want I don't want." " The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want." He will give me all that is neces- sary to have here. I will take that and go on. Then he says, " He maketh me to lie down in green pas- tures." " He maketh me to lie down ! " Oh, what a posture of ease and comfort ! David remem- bered how the sheep, when he led them forth to the fold, used to go in and feed on the grass until their appetite was perfectly satisfied, and then the sheep would lie down in the pastures ; that was the posi- tion they took when they were satisfied. "He maketh me to lie down in green pastures." Not in the rocks, where the wolves will devour me ; not out yonder, where there is nothing more to eat ; but right in the grass where I can get up and eat again ; or rather where I need not get up at all, but I can lie down and pick up all around me. " He leadeth me beside the still waters." Did you ever see a pic- ture of the sheep at the pools — the old sheep at the pool's brink drinking, and the little lambs playing around the edge of the pool, as the water reflects their images. It's the most perfect picture of con- tentment I ever saw. David says, " He leadeth me beside the still waters." And when God's people have eaten of his precious grass of grace unto perfect satis- faction, then they go down to the pools of salvation ; and when they have drunk they worship and rejoice, and say there is enough water for to-day ; enough water for to-morrow ; enough water for all ; enough water for evermore. Then again he said, " He restoreth my soul." David loses sight of the help right at that point ; and it wasn't much of a transi- Sam p. Jones' Tokonto Sermons. 90 pherd; I neces- . Then 511 pas- i, what emem- to the 1 their sheep e posi- " Not not s. ae ; at; but again ; it I can leadeth e a pic- 3 at the playing reflects of con- ieth me )le have ct satis- Ivation ; I rejoice, enough enough d, "He he help I transi- tion. He didn't have to jump far from a sheep to a man. We're mighty like sheep. The tendency of a sheep is to stray ofi'. Did you ever notice that ten- dency in yourselves ? When a sheep strays it's the most helpless thing in the world, and falls an easy prey to wild animals. And did you ever notice how helpless you were when passion and appetite came along and pounced upon you. When a sheep's lost, if you call it it will run the other way. Have you not been lost, and heard God call you, and then run the other way ? When a sheep's lost it can find its way any way except home ; and some of you, when you were lost, have found your way everywhere except to the roof of the old homestead, where peace and plenty and God the Father are. Oh, how much we are like sheep ! But David left the sheep and said, the Lord " restoreth my soul." That's what's the matter in this country. If anybody in this world ought to be all soul, it's a wife. I have heard folks say a big mouth is a good sign — sign of character ; a big nose is a good sign — sign of intellect ; big feet is a good sign — sign of mathe- matical genius. But I care nothing about a big nose, or big eyes, or big feet ; but I do like a great big soul. I want a soul big enough for God and the angels and all men to come in and live with me. I want a soul big enough for all the Methodists and Baptists and Presbj'^terians and Episcopalians and Catholics to come to my soul and have room to live. You see a lady looking so much after the physical, and she neglects her soul and prepares her person to look well ; and I have known a good lady take an hour to get m. I; 100 Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. ready, physically, to go to church, and never spend half a minute getting her scul ready to go. I wish we would prepare our souls to take in the bread of life, like wo prepare our appearance to take in the eyes of the world. I am not objecting to a woman being well dressed, but when a woman's always fix- ing up her person and neglecting her soul, it reminds me of a man that's building a house. And now he's putting all the gilt foil and paint on the scaffold that's going to be taken down in a few days and thrown aside forever. Oh, woman, the important thing is the adornment of your soul, the dressing up of your soul — that's the one eternal thing. That body will be taken down and laid aside as helpless as a doll when a child's tired of playing with it. It is your soul that shall lay your body down like a pile of chains. It is your soul that at last will push the doctor back and overleap the circle of friends, and mount above the stairs, and overvault the very throne of God itself. It is your soul that should have adorn- ment first. I went to the circus once when I was a boy. Never been since. You never catch me sneak- ing into a circus " to see the animals." Do you hear that ?. I have never lost my self-respect enough for that, to say nothing of religion. I was out in the country visiting one of my sick members. I walked in, and there met me at the door, husband. He was the saddest-looking man I ever saw. I took his hand ; I said : "Sir, how is your wife ? " " She is very sick, indeed, sir," he answered. I walked in. He carried me into his parlor and every piece of furniture was covered with dust. mw Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. 101 spend [ wish ead of in the sToman ^s fix- jminds iw he's cafibld ys and 3ortant. dng up That pless as . It is ! a pile ish the ds, and throne adorn- was a sneak- ou hear ugh for ny sick le door, I ever IS your swered. lor and h dust. Directly he carried me into the parlor his wife sent for me to come into her room. I took her fevered hand, and I looked into her feverish face, and I said, " Good sister, how are you this morning ? " " O," she says, " I am suffering so much." I looked around and her children ran into her room. Their mother said : " Do take these children out of here. I cannot stand that noise." And they carried the children out. Directly the dinner-bell rang and we walked into dinner. lb looked as if everything was pitched on the table. There was no knife at my place, and not a spoon on the table. I saw the husband preside and the children sat around the table. I came back into the family room, and read a chapter and prayed for that sick woman. How sorry I am ; but it is true. There is not one husband in a thousand who knows how to sympathize with a suffering wife. We prayed that God would comfort her and heal her, and I got on my horse and rode off, when I said, " That is the saddest home I was ever at in my life." About three months after that I was preaching in the country, and when I got through up rose a rosy, strong, fine-looking woman. She said : " Brother Jones, come home to dinner with me to-day." I said : " All right, I will go." She and her husband got into their buggy and drove off and I followed in my own buggy. We drove up to an elegant country house, and when we go up the steps I noticed three or four little fellows come out to meet their mother, and she sat down on the steps and gathered them in her arms and romped and played with them. I walked into the parlor. It was an elegant place. 102 Sam p. Jones' Toronto Serjions. Everything was elegantly arranged in that sitting- room. I walked into dinner, and there was a dinner that looked like it was set for a prince. I saw husband, wife, and children sit down to dinner. I said : " This was the happiest home I was ever at in mv life ; " but it was the same home I was at three months before. One time I was there wife was sick ; next time she was restored. Sister, that is just as true in a practical sense as it is in a physical sense. If you get your soul full of divine love and divine grace and go home, I tell you your husband will call in your neighbors to identify you before Saturday night, and they will all say, " I nev sr saw such a change in a woman in all my life." A woman who has backslidden and fallen, and a woman who has recovered herself and is filled with the love of God and the grace of heaven ; what a difference ! what a difference ! Sisters, if you want to take home the most charming place in the world, carry the Saviour home with you, and let him preside over every act of your life. Somebody said to me once, speaking of one of these meetings for women : " Jones, thank God, my wife went to that meeting. I never saw such a change in my life as has come over her since then." My! My ! What a blessing you have when you just make one home happy ! Sister, if you get right yourself you won't be long in getting your husband right. I'll tell you a little incident. When I was preach- ing down in Macon, Ga., I was staying with a family where the wife was a good Christian woman, and the husband, though one of the kindest husbands I Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. 103 sitting- dinner I saw ner. I 3r at in ,t three IS sick ; just as il sense, divine NiW call Eiturday such a. I an who vho has I of God what a •me the Saviour /ery act iking of nk God, 7 such a e then." rou. just it right husband preach - a family lan, and ibands I ever met with, was not a Christian, not a religious man One night the wife came home from church about ten o'clock. Her husband had not been there. He was a wholesale merchant and very busy and had gone to bed when he got home. "Well" he said, when his wife came into the room, " what sort of a meeting did you have ? " " Oh," she said, " such a grand meeting. Everybody enjoyed it but me." " Everybody but you, and why not you ? " he said. " I'm sure there's not a better woman in this town than you are, I know you are a Christian woman ! " "It was not on my own account, but on yours," she said. " On mine, wife ? Why, I'm going to be religious some day." " Yes," she said, " we have been married now for sixteen years, and all that time you have been going to be religious. Now, husband, you know how near you came to dying last summer, and how I v/restled with God in prayer, and ^. egged him that he would not take away my husband before he was saved, and how God spared your life, and here you are. Now, you can go to sleep, I am going into the other room alone to pray all night for you." "But wife," said the husband, "if you will pray all night for me why don't you stay here and do it ? " " No," she said, " I want to be alone with God," and stepped across the hall and into the room opposite and went down on her knees, and prayed until the clock struck eleven and twelve, and just as it was about to strike one o'clock, the door opened, and the husband came into the room and knelt down by her side and put his arm around her and said, "Precious wife, I am going to help you pray the 104 Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. balance of the night. I am the most miserable man in the world." And next morning when I walked down to the breakfast table I saw the happiest husband and wife in the country; and tv/elve month's later, when I went there, they were just as happy ; and twenty-four months later I again went back there, and they were just the same ; and to-day that man and wife are happy, on their way to heaven, and I tell you, wife, when you get into close harmony with God yourself, you are going to help your husband there. The Lord keep you to be what you ought to be, and help you to make your husband what he ought to be. Lord, come down here and bless every woman present, and send us away full of faith and the Holy Ghost ! I have not time to follow this subject further this morning, I have tired you already. God bless this service to us. The greatest blessing I can conceive of for your husband is that he shall have such a wife as that one I have spoken of. Now I want to keep you here about five minutes. I fancy if you have got an old bear of a husband that will growl with you if his dinner isn't ready, you can go. Before I was connected with the Orphans' Home in Georgia, I was riding along in the train with my wife — we were coming home from my wife's mother's place in Georgia — and at a junction a lady came in. She was dressed in deep mourning, and had a little infant child in her arms. She took the seat behind us, and my wife, with a woman's quick instinct, said, " Madam, you look sad." " Yes. I started with my husband and my precious baby ; we had started out to visit my mother and father in Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. 105 le man tvalked appiest tv/elve just as n went to-day vay to iio close bo help le what usband (re and full of » follow 'ed you greatest that he a of. linutes. usband ; ready, th the r in the •om my iction a urning, he took soman's " Yes. 3 baby ; ither in Georgia, and on the way my husband took ill and died. So, instead of going home on a pleasure trip, I am goinfr back a poor broken-hearted widow, with a poor little orphan child." When we got to her native town, her face was turned out of the window, and she was looking about her, and the big tears ran down her cheeks. And as I bade her good- bye, I said, " Suppose that it had been my wife that had slipped off from me, or I had died, and my wife had to take her poor little fatherless ones home." And I said, " God, thou art very merciful to me ; and irom this time henceforth I am going to do all I can for poor little orphans." Ladies, what you give to-day shall be a donation from the Toronto women — wives, and mothers, and daughters — to the little orphan ones of Georgia, and they will accept it gratefully, and may God's blessing be upon every giver. If any of you are opposed to the orphan children being helped, I won't keep you, but the balance of you stay. ■ [111 ■ 'Jlr Sermon VI. TO DATJGHiTERS. ""Whatsoever chmgs are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are p"re, whatso- ever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report ; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things." — Phil. iv. 8. THE girls of to-day are the women of to-morrow. These daughters growing up in the homes of Toronto are the future mothers and wives and women of this country. I am very much interested in our young people. I want to see our young girls grow up to be better women than our mothers and our wives are. I want to see our young men grow up to be better men than their fathers were. I want to see not only a great deal but a glorious im- provement in the gexieraliions which follow us. I want to see all our young girls grow up to be pleas- ing to a community and an honor to the world, but a stranger to society, so-called. I want to talk to you just as I would like some minister of the Gospel when he comes to my town to talk to rry daughters ; one who ha,s the best interests of my daughters at heart ; one who will give them such advice as will be good for them any time and good for them in eternity ; and I tell you, good, honest, plain truths will do you girls as much good as anything. I might say, I don't think all girls are earthly angels. I» don't want that impression to get out, that I think Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. 107 i honest, , whatso- eport; if on these Qorrow. )mes of es and ierested ng girls ers and n grow ^ere. I Dus im- us. I 3 pleas- rid, but talk to Gospel ighters ; ters at as will hem in truths might •els. I , ' think girls are all angels. Some of the stubbornest, Gross- est, meanest creatures I ever seen in my life were girls, and I wish some of that class were here this afternoon — we would give it them ; but as we have nothing but nice, good girls here this afternoon, you tell these cross, stubborn girls what I said the first time you meet them. Now, I don't think you are angels. I don't think you are the personification of perfection — if you will allow me just one big word while I am here. I don't think you are perfect in any sense of the word. But I believe that our girls are much better %an our boys. I believe our girls are a great deal more comfort to mother and a great deal more pleasure to fatiier than the boys are. Our boys are not the worst boy^ in the world ; there may be some worse. I am so glad that nearly every father and mother has got some comfort in some precious daughter for the waywardness of a godless son. I think the saddest c^ilamity that can befall a family is where the boys keep father saying, " Where is my wandering boy to-night ? " and then mother can sing the next verse, " Where is my wandering girl to-night?" There is a great deal in turning that song. All the wandering creatures in the world" are not boys. All that have strayed away from home influences are not boys. And I want to talk to you plainly on that. I want to build a wall around you as high as the stars, and keep you near the purity of your home and the blessed influences of the teaching of Jesus Christ. Some of you may think : " Well, I don't think Mr. Jones ought to talk to girls that way." Well, I am about the only fellow in the ., '1 , 1l . 108 Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. P -tT I. t country that will do it, and you should put up with one fellow that talks on right along. You know how you have been flatteret' and praised, and how fre- quently you have been referred to as the blossoming roses of the country, and beautiful pinks, and the elegant sunflower, and all that sort of thing. You have been touched off' on that line. Now let us get on the other side a little. And here's something that will help us ; and I have but one object in view, I speak the sentiments of my heart. There is not a girl here this afternoon that I wouldn't make you better, nobler, purer. There is not a girl that walks this earth who has lost her character that I don't look upon her without the pity and sympathy of a brother. God help us to look at these questions in a right light. We have selected, perhaps, one of the most comprehensive verses in this book. I need a good deal of territory to talk to so many girls, and I find all I need in the text. I suppose we may notice the last clause of the text first, " Think on these things." As a man thinks so he is. Tell me what you are thinking about to-day, and I'll tall you what you will be doing to-morrow. Our actions of to-day are ' our thoughts of yesterday. It is not so much what your name is, and how old you are ; but there is a great deal in " what do you think about." What is thought ? I am not much of a metaphysician, but I can see through a hole — through a broken window if there's any light on the other side. What is thought ? We will say, for the sake of argument, that a thought is the result of an impression upon one of the five senses. Of course, I don't go into intuitional thought. I 01 ts Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. 109 up with ow how low fre- ssoming and the y. You t us get ing that view, I is not a ake you kt walks I don't hy of a ons in a ! of the '. need a , and I y notice n these e what )u what to-day much t there What an, but idow if ought ? hought he five lought. I know God can reach my thought and mind with- out coming through any one of the five senses — but we will say this afternoon that thought is the result of an impression upon one of our five senses. I see something, it puts me to thinking ; I hear something, it puts me to thinking ; I touch something, it puts me to thinking; I taste something, it puts me to thinking. Well, I reckon I had better be careful what I see, if thought is the result of an impression on my eye. I had better be careful what I touch, if thought is the result of an impression on one of the five senses. Then I guess I'd better be careful what I do, because I'm responsible for my thoughts. Now, an idea is diflTerent from a thought in this — it is a developed thought ; a thought run out to a point where it is ready for the hand, and the foot, and the tongue. The diff'erence between the thought and the idea is this. Thought is the process by which I develop and systematise things so that I can take hold of the conception with my hand, or foot, or tongue. Now, I may not be so much to blame for a thought, but it is very criminal to work it out into an idea that is wicked, and have it ready for the hand, or the foot, or the tongue. "Tli*Dk on these things." It makes all the difference in the world where we live in our thought. Really, I partake of the nature of the thing I am looking at. If you bring a coffin in here, with a corpse in it, and open it before me, and I look down upon it with my mind and my eye, the first thing I know is my whole nature is saturated with the gloom of the corpse. I partake of the nature of the thing that I 110 Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. am looking at. Bring me a bouquet of beautiful flowers and put them in my mind, and let me gaze upon them, and the first thing I know my whole nature is saturated with the aroma and the beauty of the flowers. I partake o:? the nature of the thing I am looking at. God says, " I will keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on me." It's not so much who you are or what you wish, but what you are thinking about. If you live in impure thoughts you will be impure in your lives. If you have wicked thoughts you'll be wicked in your lives. Your life will partake largely of your thoughts. Hence the Apostle says, " Think on these things." What things ? First, whatsoever things are true. If I put my mind and eye and heart on the truth, and get it there, and saturate my whole nature with truth, when I speak I tell the truth as naturally as I live. If I put my mind and heart on falsehood, and get it there, and saturate my nature with false- hood, I begin to tell lies as naturally as I breathe. A truthful man is a grand thing, but a truthful woman is the grandest adornment of a home in this land. Let me tell you the honest truth, as I am talking this afternoon. If I ever had caught my wife in a downright falsehood — and I thank God I never did — or if I ever should catch her in a down- right falsehood, I should never again while I live have the respect ^or her that I have now. Well, now, all of you that are not going to die old maids are going to be somebody's wives. Do you hear that ? And I tell you another thing — if you tell stories before you're married, you'll tell stories after Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. Ill sautiful ne gaze whole auty of thing I him in ." It's sh, but impure If you ir lives, oughts, bhings." e true. e truth, re with •ally as sehood, h false- )reathe. ruthful in this I am it my God I down- I live Well, maids I hear Du tell s after you're married. A girl that is not truthful and reliable when she is sixteen won't be truthful and reliable at eighteen, and if she is not so at eighteen, when she gets old enough to marry she won't be a truthful girl ! What excuse can there be in the universe for a want of truth, except we have been thinking on the false and siding on the false side of the question, until our mind is saturated with falsehood, and out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh. The heart is full of falsehood, and so the mouth speaketh it. " Whatsoever things are true." A truthful child ! Mother, I heard a father one day, when his five children were out playing together and a disturbance occurred among them, and they all came to him, and, except the youngest, who remained silent, gave a different report of the afeiir. I heard the father say, " I took the little four-year-old boy and put him on my knee, and said, * Tell me how that thing was.' The little fellow couldn't talk plain, but he prattled away and did his best, splitting hairs all along, and when he got through telling about it, I said, ' Now, children, you are all wrong. This little fellow never told me a lie in his life, and I believe every word he says.' " How proud a father should be to be able to put his hand on the head of one of his children, and say, " Thank God, that child never told a lie in his life." Now, I am not going to accuse you all of doing a thing of that sort. The truth ! St. Paul said, " Whatsoever things are true." Tell the truth, no matter what the rest is to you. Be reliable. Let your word be as true as the word of T7^ i 112 Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. :l an angel. Die before you will make a false state- ment ; and the only way you can ever get there is to reach the point where truth lives in our hearts and in our minds. Then we will tell the truth as natur- ally as we breathe. Some time ago I said in the presence of a lady, speaking of a girl whom we saw, " That's a beautiful girl ; she has a sweet face. She is a nice girl, is she not ? " " Yes," said the lady, " with one exception. She can't tell the truth to save her life. She is the most unreliable creature I ever met." Do you hear that ? My ! my ! a pretty, nice, respectable girl, with a beautiful sweet face, but a miserable liar. "You can't depend on a word she says." I am glad that was not a Toronto girl. I have a better opinion of you all. Now, girls, I talked plain to your fathers, and to your brothers, and to your mothers, and let you and I talk plain to each other this afternoon. Do you know a girl that has told one story is on the way to tell as many more as the devil wants her to tell ? Be true to your word. Let it be known at the school, let it be known at your home, let it be known on the street, let it be known everywhere, that your word is as sacred as your heart. That's it. " What- soever things are true." It is a thing of joy to have anybody say of you : " There is the most truthful person I ever saw in my life." We have a little fel- low down in Georgia — he hasn't got much sense, just a passable amount — but he's the most interesting talker I ever listened to, and everything he says is the truth. If he tells what anybody says or did, he tells exactly what they said or did, and doesn't add Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. 113 state- e is to bs and natur- b lady, autiful is she eption. is the u hear :1, with "You ,d that lion of lathers, md let on. Do on the her to at the known bt your What- have ruthful tie fel- se,just resting says is did, he I't add anything to it or take anything away from it, and I repeat, he's the most interesting talker I ever listened to. That is one of the grandest traits in human character — a desire to represent things right, and to let falsehood be eliminated from life and tongue for ever. Truth ! truth ! I tell you this : If there's a mother here this afternoon will show me a truthful daughter, I'll show, you a daughter that's obedient. I tell you, girls, when you get up where God and man can bank on every word you say, you are loyal to your mother, you are good to your mother. No truthful girl will be false or cross or mean to her mother. No truthful girl will lie up in bed in the I morning until mother gets up and gets breakfast. If a girl is false to her mother she is false to everything that is noble. In one town in Georgia I knew a family of girls. Listen ! Their mother was a perfect slave for them. She cooked and ironed for these girls and did all the work about the house, and those girls just sat up and took care of their complexions and read trashy novels; and that mother just protected the com- plexions of those girls and would not let them go out anywhere. Why, if they came down into the kitchen mother thought their complexions would be spoiled, and sent them out again. Well, the mother got them the most beautiful complexions, and one of the girls married a barkeeper ; no, two of them married a barkeeper — at least, two barkeepers ; and one of them married a one-armed barkeeper — and all the others are old maids to this day. Didn't she come out wonderful with her girls ? Awful thought I Girls, 8 114 Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. be truthful ; be true to father, be true to mother, be true to the right, be true to everything that God tells you. That is the truth. The Apostle said, put your mind and heart on truth and keep it there, and only study the true side of life, of character, and of all things, and live on that side; and then he said, "Whatsoever things are honest!" Oh, an honest, open-hearted girl that never had a secret from mother, from brother, from father ; one of those honest- hearted girls that you can see through from her face to her heart ; I like that. Secrets have ruined many a girl. " I know something, and I ain't going to tell anybody." " I have a secret. I would not let ma know it for anything in the world. She would oppose it right straight. Mother has more old fogy opinions than anybody I ever saw in my life. I just know before I tell mother she will not like it at all." Mother won't like it. Especially if a girl has picked out one of those little perfumed, part-his- hair-in-the-middle, tooth-pick dudes in town. And you are satisfied mother won't like it. I will tell you another thing, girls. Listen ! Here are two young men come to town, both from the country, away out about forty miles from here. One comes to town. He has his old grey suit — an old grey wool suit — and a wool hat on, and he goes to clerk down here in a store. He is somewhat of an office boy at first, and he gets twelve dollars and a half a month. He boards with his aunt, who lets him stay with her for ten dollars a month, and that boy has to clothe himself on two dollars and a half a month — on two dollars and a half a month ! He goes m Sam p. Jones* Toronto Sermons. 115 her, be )d tells it your id only of all e said, honest, nother, tionest- er face 1 many to tell let ma would Id fogy life. I ie it at irl has irt-his- And ill tell two )untry, One an old oes to of an and a 10 lets d that half a e goes to prayer-meeting every Wednesday night, Sunday- school every Sunday morning. Two young ladies afterwards meet at a young lady's house, and they say : " Well, there goes that fellow. He is a plum duff, and my, I would never like such a thing as that to call on me." Miss So-and-so says : " He met me one day, and he was just talking about prayer and Sunday-schools all the time. He is the biggest fool I ever saw in my life. My, I just pass a young man who cannot talk anything but prayer- meeting." Well, that boy goes on. At the end of the first year he is here in town they raise his wages from twelve dollars and a half a month to forty dol- lars a month, but he is sticking to his plain clothes and his plain warp. He still goes to prayer-meeting and to Sabbath-school, and writes home to mother about two or three times a week, and on he goes. By-and-by, when that boy has been here five years, I notice his name as a man in the firm's name. He is a partner in the business. It goes on, and in two more years he is still prospering. He is building him a nice little cottage out here in the suburbs, and the girls in town wonder who is going to have that sim- pleton. Who is fool enough to marry him ? Well, bless your soul, girls, he has sense enough to go back where he came from to marry, too, if you will watch him. Sure enough he goes back to the settle- ment, with the old country church, right where he is raised, and he marries Mary Brown, the sweetest- spirited, nicest girl, and her character for right is as strong as her physical womanhood. He marries her and brings her into that beautiful little cottage, and 116 Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. i ':, ;i ; f, '.'. ' ■ r >i c '■ 1 ' '' she makes him a wife that is a wife indeed. She has joined the committee that has charge of the Orphans' Home over here, and then she is a consecrated woman trying to rescue the perishing, and save the fallen ; and she went to prayer-meeting with him every Wednesday night, to Sunday-school every Sunday morning. The next thing I see, that man now is a senior partner of that firm, and one of the leading business men of Toronto — a magnificent man. He is a member of the Church, and the Church looks upon him as one of its strongest props, and that man is an honor to Toronto, and his wife is a blessing to the poor and destitute of the town. He started in the old grey clothes, and every girl in town laughed at him, and said they did not want any such fellow as him, the Lord knows. Well, here comes another boy from the country. He comes slicked up, and dressed up the first day he gets into town. From the start he is to get $25 per month. He starts right in. He was invited to every parlor dance from the first wejk he got here. He is the very ideal of good, and girls said that he was just too irresistible for anything. He is as sweet as apple pie, and they begin to take up with him, and every girl is getting jealous of every other girl. Which one will catch him ? One got him and she married him. About two years afterwards I was at her mother's house, and when we sat at the table for dinner, there came down a pale, sad, and desolate looking girl about twenty-one years old. She gave me a cold, stifi" bow and sat there and ate like a corpse would eat, if I can imagine a corpse eating — only the jaws and hands moving. She got Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. 117 rphans' woman fallen ; every 5unday )w is a leading He is :s upon n is an to the in the rhed at How as ler boy dressed e start n. He it wpjk id girls yrthinor. ,0 take ous of One years fien we a pale, e years ere and corpse She got up and walked out of the room, and the poor old mother said to me : — " Mr. Jones, that is our unfor- tunate daui^hter who fell in love with a young dude here a few years ago and married him, and now he has run off and left her, poor child, and broke her heart." And now, girls, let me tell you, when you want to marry, don't run off with one of those little spider-legged dudes. I know where you get your dudes. The parlor dance is one of the best traps I ever seen to catch one in. You be what you ought to be at home ; be an honor to your mother and a blessing to your father. Know how to knit and how to make any garments, and get so you can play as well on the sfcovo as you can play on the piano. And work along that way awhile, and first thing you know some first-class young man will find out where you live. He will hunt you up. I reckon some of you think he's mighty slow about it. But hold your ground, ^irls; live right and do right, and be an honor to ^our home, and some of these days you will prove the words of the preacher. Be true to yourselves, true to God, and true to your mother; be an honest, transparent girl that everybody can see through — pure gold from head to foot. Then he said, "Whatsoever things are just." Well, now, justice is a great principle at home. Be just to your brother, be just to your sister, be just to your father, be just to your mother, be just to the young ladies with whom you associate. To be just in the best ocnse is one of the grandest principles in human nature aided by the divine grace. Be just 118 Sam R Jones' Toronto Sermons. .v' J towards everybody. Sometimes you young ladies are very unjust to the servants at your father's house. I can put up with every other sort of a girl but a young lady that is cross and mean to another young lady that has to work for her living. You know that if you are that sort of a girl, that servant girl is better than you are. If you are cross and mean to her in your father's house, I say that servant girl, is in the eyes of God, better than you are. Nothing suits you. I put up at houses sometimes and I watch 'em. I can tell a girl by how she speaks to a servant at the table or in the sitting-room. I can just watch how she treats her mother and how she talks to her brothers, and I can tell a girl before I have been in a house forty-eight hours whether she is coming up on the line I am talking about. I went to a house once where justice was a great principle. I just watched them there awhile. I had my wife with me. We were staying there two or three days, and I never saw anything like it in my life. Sisters v/ere just as kind and considerate with one another as could be, and you could see it wasn't any fixed-up pudding for show. It was that way all the time. You can tell the difference between the natural color and the paint on the cheek. I could see there was a perfect stream of kindness and justice flowing be- tween their hearts and lives all the time. I said to the lady of the house, her husband being present : "How many quarrels have you and your husband had since you were married?" She said, "We never had a quarrel." " How many unkind words ? " " We ladies ather's a girl nother You 1, that 3U are house, I God, 3Ut up !an tell at the h how to her )een in ing up house I just e with ■fs, and 's were ler as s:ed-up time. 1 color was a ig be- aid to •esent : isband never "We Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. 119 have never had an unkind word at our house since we were married." Then I said to the husband: " Do you tell me that that's true ? " He said, " Yes, sir ; my wife has never spoken an unkind word. I am afraid I have." " What did you say ? " He said, " I cannot remember." Then his wife said, " Husband, you know you never spoke an unkind word to me in my life." I went back to that house in about three months. They asked me, " Why didn't you bring Mrs. Jones ? " " Didn't want to, she's been throwing all you up to me ever since she was here before. I am sorry she ever came here at all. I can't cut up a bit without her reminding me about you." Ladies, seek to make your home attractive to your brothers, so that they won't want to leave it. Make home such an attractive place that mother will never have to sing, " Where is my wandering boy to- night ? " Maybe he is running away from his cross sister right then. " Whatsoever things are just." If you do unkindly to your sister, go and apologize. If you treat brother unkindly, go and apologize. If you have spoken crossly to your mother, go and tell mother you are sorry, ask her to forgive you, and tell her you won't do it again. " Whatsoever things are pure." I will give you this little incident to show you that to the pure all things are pure. A gentleman met me on the street, and said, " Jones, a man told me that he would never go and hear you any more ; that you were the most vulgar man he ever lUtened to." "Who was he?" "He's a bar- keeper In town." A bar-keeper, that lived in an atmosphere of vulgarity and wickedness, thought I 5 120 Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. was the most vulgar man he ever heard. " To the pure all things are pure." I was preaching at Springs. I talked about the fashionable dancing girls — shook *em round. They went away the mad- dest crowd you ever saw. Did you ever see a mad girl ? I reckon you've heard 'em. Well, sir, they just went away raving. I heard about what they said, and I said, " Girls, you left last night mad. I tried to talk to you in an honest, brotherly way about those ball-rooms over at that hotel. I talked candidly and plainly. I talked to you girls with a father's love and a brother's tenderness, and you went away mad. That pure, innocent girl that never went to a ball-room thought those remarks were so gracious ; it was so kind to talk that way to girls ; but you girls that have been waltzing round with the drunken young men, you think I am the most vulgar man you ever listened to." You see it ain't "Who's talking?" but it is "What does he say ? " and what sort of a girl is it out there listen- ing to him ? Do you get the idea ? " Oh, Mr. Jones, tell us what harm there is in dancing ? " Oh, dear ! There is not anybody since I have been here, to ask me to please tell them what harm there is in family prayers ? Nobody has asked me what harm I thought there was in paying your debts. Nobody has asked me to give my opinion of the harm there was in reading the Bible and doing the will of God. Nobody asked me that sort of a question. I will tell you another thing. Whenever you hear folks asking what harm there is in so and so, they already know there is harm, but think they may be able to argue Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. 121 To the kt — - ancing e mad- a mad ', they it they lad. I y way talked with a id you rl that emarks way to r round am the u see it oes he listen- Jones, , dear ! ask me family arm I obody there lof God. ill tell asking know argue around so as to make it appear that there is none in it. Girl, listen ! the Bishop of the Catholic Church of New York said that nineteen out of every twenty fallen girls, at the confessional, told him they got their downfall first at the dancing-room. Now, girls, are any of you idiots enough to ask the ques- tion again — " What harm is there in dancing ? " Can you hear a Catholic priest say nineteen out of every twenty fallen girls at the confessional state that they got their fall in a dancing-room ; that nineteen out of twenty fell in that way, and have you no more sense than to ask the question, " What harm is there in dancing ? " Then I will say another thing. I will talk plain to you. I will never get a talk to you again this side of the judgment, and I am talking straight from my text. " Whatsoever things are pure." Are pure, girls, listen ; listen to me. You mind whom you associate with. You cannot associate with the wicked without becoming contaminated. To save your life you cannot do it. A girl that will sit down in her parlor with a young man who drinks and is steeped in sin, she cannot sit down and talk with him with- out being contaminated to save her life. " Whatso- ever things are pure." The father is sitting alone in his study, and the daughter comes in and says : "Father, do you care if I go to the ball to-night?" He said : " No, daughter, I would rather you would not go." " Why, father ?" " Daughter, I don't like the company you will be in." She said : " Papa, I know the company ain't all first-class, but I, am not afraid of that hurting me." He says: "Daughter, :r 122 Sam p. Jones* Toronto Sermons I hT*- $ what is that on the hearth?" She says: "It is a dead coal." He said : " Pick it up." She picked it up in her fingers and her father said : " Daughter, does it harm you ?" She says : " No, sir." " Well," says her father, " throw it down." He says : " What is that on your fingers, daughter ?" She said : " It is smut." " Well, daughter, when you go into bad com- pany, if they don't burn you they will smut you every time." I will tell you another thing. That girl out there fifteen years old. There she sits back there. Ain't these fast girls mighty attractive to you ? Mother, you had better lay your daughter on the funeral pile and burn her into ashes, than let her run with some of these fast young ladies in this town. You mark what I tell you. There are girls in this city who will ruin any girl in the world that will run with them. Bad company will ruin young ladies just as bad company will ruin young men. That is the truth. Watch your company. Don't you ever go with any girl if she will do things that you won't do, and say things that you won't say. If you do, you will be saying those says and doing those things yourself. " Whatsoever things are pure." Then I give you a little advice along here. When you walk with a young man, especially in Toronto, with its gas lights and electric lights burning, you just say, " I am not afraid of falling ; I don't need to take your arm ; I am sure-footed." Well, I can see how you might take a young man's arm ; but the most despicable sight is a young lady that will let a young man take her arm. Are you afraid the girl will break her neck ? It's a scandal, a young lady Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. 123 It is a iked it ighter, Well," '« What « It is .d com- ut you That ts back tive to hter on let her is town. in this ^at will g ladies That is ou ever u won't you do, 3 things When 'or onto, ng, you need to can see but the rill let a the girl ng lady walking down the street with a young man, his arm inside of hers, and he grasping her wrist, and his arm playing between her arm and her body. It's one of the most disreputable, vulgar sights any good society ever tolerated in the world. Now, get mad with me for that. I say I can see how a young lady can take a young man's arm. That's all right, per- chance. But, young lady, you dare not, by the price of all that women hold inestimable — you dare not let a young man take your arm ; for I say to you, your protection of all that you call valuable in this world depends upon the fact that you keep your person as sacred as the heart of God. That is the reason I don't like these round dances. Young lady, listen ; when a young man puts his arm around you and dances with you, you are a pure, noble girl ; but you don't know what sort of a lecherous wretch has got his arms around you. You cannot tell to save your life. If I were going to walk into a room, whether fiddles are going or not ; if I walked into a room, whether they were dancing or not, and saw my daughter with the arms of a young man about her, I would slap them both down to the floor ; and I don't know which I would slap first. But I'll never see that. I trust God my daughter will have so much respect for her pure mother, if not for herself, that she will never be clasped in the arms of a young man dancing to the tune of a fiddle. You will say, " Mr. Jones, you are too rough." But girls, remember, you may have listened to emoother-tongued preachers, but you never looked in the face of a preacher that loved and prized your 124 Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. n- integrity more than I do. I love your character as I love the character of my precious daughters ; and I say to you, let your character, like your person, be as sacred as the heart of God. That's it. Girls are not particular enough* about who they go with. Don't go with a young man that drinks or doesn't live right. Oh, girls, I tell you we need some fathers in this country worse than we need anything else. Oh, that any man can lay around and drink Saturday night, and maybe spend the night in a shameless house, and then be found Sunday after- noon dressed up and perfumed and sitting in a parlor with one of the nicest young ladies in town. He is worth about $10,000 a year, and is able to keep a buggy, and has a nice little property, and so he can come into almost any home in town. I tell you what we need. We need some old daddies — fathers, I believe you call 'em up here — who will wait for the young man, and when he puts foot inside the porch will turn him round and kick him right out into the middle of the road, and say, " You can't come into my house, you disreputable wretch, no matter if you are worth all the money in the universe ; you can't come in here." And girls, when you strike a boy whose character is as sound as gojd, you look at him and say : " Oh, you ain't good-looking and can't come in." If you don't say it you've slung it at him many a time. Oh, girls, if I didn't have these men here I'd talk to you a little plainer on some things. Above all things, God deliver me from a girl that is not pure in her tongue. I might put up with a lot of smutty-mouthed and impure boys ; but my ! my ! iter as ; ; and 5on, be rls are with, doesn't I some ything [ drink it in a T after- i parlor He is keep a he can ell you •fathers, "or the porch into the ne into itter if se; you strike a look at id can't at him ;se men thinj[;s. that is th a lot ! my! Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. 125 how low down a girl will be when she becomes im- pure in her talk and conversation. Of course there's none of those girls here this afternoon, but if you find them, oh, do tell them what I said this afternoon — won't you, girls ? Impure ! I find I have gone on beyond forty minutes and beyond sixty minutes in my talk, but hear me a word on the last proposition — " Whatsoever things are of good report." Hear me, sisters ! When father comes home from the store in the evening mother says to him : " Father, Mary has been a most dutiful child to-day ; she is such a comfort to me." And when sister has retired, brother comes up and says to father: " Father, Mary is a ministering angel to me ; she is so good to me I'd rather die than hurt her feelings." That's a good report, ain't it ? Then father comes home in the evening, walking with little Mary, his daughter; she had called into the store on her way home from school and waited for him. " Mother," he says, " I wouldn't take ten mil- lion dollars in gold for our Mary. She's the sweetest kind of child, and is going to be just like you., mother ; she's going to be the grandest woman in this world. I thank you for such a child as Mary." That's a good report, ain't it ? Mother goes down town, and Mary's Sabbath -school teacher meets her and says : " Your daughter Mary is the sweetest and best child in the Sabbath-school, and a blessing to all that come near her. She always has her lessons perfect, and her conduct is a rebuke to every bad scholar." And the mother says in the evening to father : " Father, I've heard such a good report 126 Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. about Mary ; her Sabbath-school teacher says she'd the sweetest child in the school, and a blessing to all that come near her." Ain't that a good report ? The pastor meefcs the mother one day and says, " Where was Mary last Sunday night ?" " Mary's sick," says mother. " Sick ? I'm so sorry," he says ; " Mary's such a sweet child. It is a joy to me to see Mary sitting with you, so sweet and quiet. She has the sweetest face, and I can see her lips move as if she were praying for mc." Ain't that a good report now? And the school teacher meets father on the street, and says, " Mr. So-and-so, that little Mary of yours is an exception ; she's the sweetest child in the school ; you ought to be proud of her." And the father says, "I'm not proud of her ; I'm thankful to God for her." That's a good report about Mary, ain't it ? Law me ! " Whatsoever things are of good report." Girls ! Anything you hear about somebody else that's good and that you'd like to hear about yourself, just go and do like they did, and they'll talk about you the same way. Just look at these folks who have good reports going around of them. " Whatsoever things are of good report, think on these things." Girls, put your minds and hearts on things of good report. Live in these atmospheres, and may God crown you with blessing and everlasting life. Above all things, be obedient to mother. Who loves you better than anyone in this world ? Girls, you can answer that. Why, mother, mother, mother. That is so. Well, look at her. Who is it that wants you to be hap- piest and do best ? Girls, don't quarrel with mother. ItS-Sff^^i Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. 127 she** to all The Vhere " says Gary's Mary as the if she ; now? street, yours school ; r says, ►r her." .w me ! Girls ! 's good ust go ou the reports are of Is, put |report. ^n you things, jr than |r that. Well, [e hap- Lother. Stand up for her. Do comfort and be a blessing to your mother. And, girls, I will wind up with this expression. I have one child, a girl now in her fifteenth year. She will come and sit down and reason with me about anything she hears me say in the pulpit, and she will talk with me and get me to explain perfectly what I mean, and now she said this to me last December. I just throw it out to you girls. When her little associates there, of the same age as herself, next door, gave a Christmas tea- party to a little fellow of the same age who had been off to school, Mary was invited, and she brought the invitation to me. She says : " Now, father, I submit the question to you, and here it is. I am invited to supper, and now, shall I go ? " I read the note of invitation. I said : "Daughter, do you want to go?" She said just as honest and candid, " Father, if you want me to go, I want to go. If you don't want me to go, I don't want to go." And she said, " That is the secret of it. Your will is my pleasure about the whole matter." I pulled the child up to my heart, and I said, "Daughter, just speak your will;" and she said, " Father, I have no will at all in this matter. I will be happy to go or stay if you will be happy in my going or staying." That is the way for a daughter to talk. The father only says his will and his daughter is happy either way. Girls, father says you cannot go, and you sweep out of the room and run up stairs and pout for a week. " The Lord knows, he never did let me have any pleasure. I wish I was dead, that's all I wish." God pity the girl who does not know enough to submit such a 128 Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. I' ' t .". t m ■■'"J 'J. question to mother, who does not love mother enough. Now, children, I spoke of that little girl simply to show you if you run on that line father will talk about you just as I talk about that darling child. The balance of them are just about as bad as you are, but, thank God, that is one good one. Chil- dren, do right, live right. Mind these plain things. I could have told you a lot of ghost stories and had you all sobbing, but life ain't a life of ghosts. I don't want to scare you with ghosts, and make you laugh and cry over things that have no existence. But I have talked candidly and plainly, and may God sanctify the talk to the good of every one pre- sent. And now I want every young lady that say^ " God help me, I am going to lead a better life than I ever led before" to stand up. Well, thank God for such a sight. Little girls, elder girls, everybody, when you pray, pray that God may help me that I may be useful wherever I go to work in the name of Jesus Christ. mother ile girl father darling had as Chil- things. ,nd had 3sts. I ,ke you istence. id may )ne pre- at sayB ife than God for rybody, e that I name of Sermon Vll. TO MEN. ** I will arise and go to my father." — Lukb xv. 18. WE shall read a running comment on the Parable of the Prodigal Son : "And he said, A certain man had two sons ; and the younger of them said to his father, Father, give me the portion of goods that falleth to me. And he divided unto them his living. And not many days after the younger son gathered all together and took his journey into a far country, and there wasted his substance with riotous living. And when he had spent all there arose a mighty famine in that land, and he began to be in want. And he went and joined himself to a citizen of that country, and he sent him into his fields to feed swine. And he would fain have filled his belly with the husks that the swine did eat ; and no man gave unto him. And when he came to himself he said. How many hired servants of my father's have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger ! I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven and before thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son : make me as one of thy hired servants. And he arose and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran and fell on his neck, and kissed him. And the son said unto him: Father, I have sinned against 9 130 Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. ■■'■J heaven and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy son. But the father said to his servants, Bring forth the best robe and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand and shoes on his feet. And bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it, and let us eat and be merry. For this my son was dead, and is alive again ; he was lost, and is found. And they began to be merry. Now, his elder son was in the field, and as he came and drew nigh to the house he heard music and dancing. And he called one of the ser- vants, and asked what these things meant. And he said unto him, Thy brother is come, and thy father hath killed the fatted calf, because he hath received him safe and sound. And he was angry, and would not go in ; therefore came his father out and en- treated him. And he answering said to his father, Lo, these many years do I serve thee, neither trans- gressed I at any time thy commandment ; and yet thou never gavest me a kid that I might make merry with my friends ; but as soon as this thy son was come, which hath devoured thy living with harlots, thou hast killed for him the fatted calf. And he said unto him. Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine. It was meet that we should make merry, and be glad ; for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again ; and was lost, and is found."— Luke xv. 11-32. I never feel I am any kin to this older brother. Really, I don't know who he is. I don't know what place God intends he shall fill in the vast moral uni- verse. This much I know : we live in a fallen world. There are unfallen worlds, I reckon the inhabitants Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. 131 thy to rvants, nd put [ bring dt and 3 alive began 5 field, ) heard he ser- Ind he father eceived would nd en- father, trans- nd yet merry on was harlots, ^nd he and all should er was and is )rother. what al uni- world. bitants IV of these worlds ought to have kept their first estate, and they would not have had to cry out when God threw his arms around a wandering, wayward man that has spent his all with harlots. I suppose the unfallen worlds look on with astonishment and won- der, and they wonder why it is God should be so good to this fallen world when they never transgressed. Brethren, there isa moral universe all around us. This young man, the older of the two, occupies some place in that moral universe. I hope, I trust, I believe that there is such a thing as mercy to cover his case. We will leave him in the hands of God while we discuss the other brother this evening — the one that is kin to us ; the one we have known all our life. If this prodigal boy were not my brother I should never think I am a man myself. Let us take the parable just as it presents itself to us, and we will modernize it so that we can get hold of it and see it plainly ; for this is one of the most perfect pictures of human nature the world ever looked upon. This parabolic illustration of a thing is but the photograph, the portrait of it ; and here is one of the finest portraits of humanity that inspiration ever drew, for it is so lifelike — so like me, so like you, and so like every man of us. O, what a picture of human nature ! If Christ had never said another word but this I would have always looked upon the author of this parable as divine, for it stamps him as a divine person. " A certain man," he said, " had two sons, and the younger of them said to his father, Father, give me the portion of goods that falleth to me, 132 Sam p. Jones* Toronto Sermons. 1,4 ii;: mi'- \v And he divided unto them his living." I have heard preachers say some mighty hard things about this boy ; they said he was wicked, dissipated, and wild and profligate at home; that he was the worry of his father's heart, and gave his mother so much trouble. I don't know where they got that idea of this prodigal boy ; they didn't get it out of the XUble, sure. Look here now : if that young fellow was prodigal and wild, and dissipated and wasteful, and his father divided with him his living, his father was a fool to start with. We will put it in that shape. This younger brother (according to the laws in those days, the older brother inherited the estate, and the younger brother had no legal claim on his father), this younger brother comes to his father and says : " Father, give me the portion of goods that falleth to me," and ho immediately divided his livinfj. Without a word of remonstrance, or hesitancy, or advice, he turns over to this young fellow this great amount of property. The face of the parable shows that, up to that hour, the young man was praiseworthy, upright, industrious, and worthy of the confidence of his father, so far as all outward manifestations of his conduct were con- cerned. I repeat it: A man that has sense enough to accumulate a fortune, or sense enough to take care of an inherited fortune, is too wise to turn over a vast amount of property without a word of remon- strance or advice, to a wayward, dissipated, profli- gate boy. He wouldn't do that — no father would — and the very face of the parable shows that this have about 1, and worry much deaof f the fellow steful, g. his t it in to the ed the claim to his ;ion of iiately irance, young face ir, the itrious, far as Ire con- igh to e care over a remon- profli- ould — it this Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. 133 boy, 80 far as his father knew, was trustworthy. I have always felt sorry for this boy when I saw the preachers jump on him, and stamp on him, and beat and kick him. I have ! I feel sorry for many a poor sinner, too. I wouldn't touch a hair of your head, brother, if I could get the meanness out of you without doing it ; and every stamp and kick and jerk I make at you is to jerk and stamp and kick the meanness out of you. If I could go through this country with Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup and get more souls to Christ by having the sinners each take a teaspoon- ful, 1 would invest every nickel I have in that syrup. I would that ! I am for the efficient thing, for that which will make you cease to do evil and learn to do right. That's all I have against you. I haven't anything else against you, for I love you all as if you were my own brothers ; but, 0, how it makes me feel bad and sad to see the way you do ! It hurts me on your account, and on your wife's account, and on your children's account, and on account of humanity. I am ycur brother, and when you suffer I suffer ; when you rejoice I rejoice. I am happy at every happy man I meet ; I am sad at every dejected, sorrowful, sinful character I meet. I weep with those who weep, and I rejoice with those who rejoice. O Lord, lift us up here in this city, to where we can rejoice with those that rejoice, and where there will be none to weep with and mourn with, and none to feel sad over ! Let's catch the thought of this parable, and find our way back to God. "A certain man had two 134 Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. 'i '; 1 r sons. And the younger of them said to his father, Father, give me the portion of goods that falleth to me. And he divided unto them his living. And not many days after the younger son gathered all to- gether, and took his journey into a far country." We may imagine this father divided his portion to the younger son, and the young man then spent a whole week in getting everything in order for the journey. We may say that his property consisted of camels, and sheep, and horses, and servants ; and now he has spent the week in gathering all together ; and we will say when Saturday nii^ht comes all the plans have been perfected, and on Monday morning,. bright and early, this grand pageant, this vast caravan, drives out in front of the old homestead, and the young man calls a halt to all movement, and stops, and hushes everything into silence ; and he walks back up through the front gate, and up the avenue on to the porch of the old homestead, and he takes his father's hands, and says : " Good-bye, father !" and we can see that father look upon him with eyes of love and mercy, and say : " Good-bye, boy ! " and the tears course down his cheek ; and then the boy tuinfe to his mother to bid her good-bye, and the mother instinctively throws her arms about her boy, and says: "Good-bye, soii !" and then she imprints a thousand kisses on his face, and she says to him : " Son, remember the instructions of your youth." The young fellow then deliberately turns his back on father, and mother, and home, and walks out of the front gate, and bids the caravan move off, and Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. 136 they move off in graftd style. It is a wonderful pageant, and mother and father linger on the front veranda and watch the procession as it passes out of sight, and gradually winds its way over the brow of the hill and disappears from view. The father turns round and utters an earnest prayer, " God, look after my boy;" and the mother, with the tears running down her cheeks, says, "O, shall I ever see my boy again? " On the boy moves with his caravan, and I imagine about sundown he drives out on a beautiful camping- ground, pitches his tent, and arranges everything for the coming of the night ; and now I can see every- thing in order, and everything has been cared for, and now I see the young man as he unfolds his coat, spreads it out, and lays himself down for his night's rest, and turns his eyes to the her.vens above him, and he begins to think, "This is the first night I have spent from my home. This is the first night I have ever slept from beneath the roof of the old homestead. This is the first night I have been ,vhere I could not hear mother's voice, and couid not hear father's advice." I have wished many a time that that boy, before he went to sleep that first night, had settled it in his mind, " This is my first night from home, and by the grace of God it shall be my last, for co-morrow morning, when I arise I shall turn this caravan around, and will drive back to the old homestead." 0, if he had settled that, how many hours of hearts ache, and anguish, and desolation and misery that boy would have avoided ? O, poor, miserable, X if i 136 Sam p. Jones* Toronto Sermons. r' I v5 ,• wandering boy, I've thought a thousand times of you, and wished you had turned around and gore back. We see him next morning with renewed vigor rising early, and after a simple breakfast drives on and on, and the next evening the same scene is re-enacted. He goes to bed, and I think, " Well, young fellow, you see now this is your second night out. You're on your journey, two days away from home ; " and I wish that night the boy had settled it in his mind, " This is m}^ second night from home, and by the grace of God to-morrow night shall be my last. I will turn n y face on my journey and will go back, and in two days I'll reach the old homestead." That boy would have been away from home only four days if he had done that. But on and on and on he drives, each night repeating the same scene ; and at the end of the sixth day, Satur- day night, he picks him out a pleasant camping- ground on which to remain over Sunday. A boy never gets his own consent to break the Sabbath the first week he is away from home. The boy says, " I'll tie up here, and rest. It is father's Sabbath and mother's Sabbath, and I will reverence this day." The boy was only a week from home then, you see, and he couldn't afford to break the Sabbath. He^winds up his first week on Saturday night, and he goes to bed, and as he lies there look- ing up at the bright, cold stars in the heavens he says, " I am six days' journey from home." The next morning is the Sabbath, and the sun rises gloriously and bathes the scene in a sea of light, and as he (( Sam p. Jones* Toronto Sermons. 137 les of gore vigor res on jne is ' Well. night J from btledit home, all be 3y and he old y from But on ig the Satur- nping- ik the The ather's erence home ak the urday look- ins he e next iously as he looks around on that beautiful Sabbath-day he has the consciousness, ** This is the first Sabbath I ever spent from home ; this is the first Sabbath sun that ever rose on me when away from my father's house." I wish he had settled it that morning, and said, " By the grace of God as this is my first Sunday from home, it shall be my last Sunday from home." I've wished a thousand times this wayward boy had turned his train around the next morning, and driven back to the old homestead. If he had, he would have been out just one Sabbath from home, and tho next Sunday would have found him sitting by his mother's side, listening to her sweet voice, and by his father's side, listening to his words of counsel. 0, if had settled the thing that way, how many weeks of hard- ship he would have shunned, and how many hours and days of misery he would have avoided ! Monday morning finds him driving on and on, and I imagine that at the end of his second week's jour- ney he drove into a magnificent, fertile country, and as he looked at the beautiful land and surveyed the situation, he said : " I believe this would be a good place to settle down ; " but something suggested to him the thought : " Well, if you buy here and settle down, you won't get more than settled before the old lady 'J 1 come down here on a visit with the old man, and they'll want to break in on your arrangements and advise you how to run things, and they'll meddle with your affairs ; and if you're going to make out for yourself and create a name for yourself and build up a fortune, the best thing for you to do is to pick up and get to where they won't visit you." \ni\ 1?;^ 1S8 Sam V. Jones* Toronto Sermoj^S. ■I- i: ■ I , ' ■ . ' I .''i / 'i! ■i The fact is, the purpose of the boy's mind was this : he had been watching his father, and saw his old fogy notions and way of doing things, and he thought many a time, " If the old man would turn this thing over to me, I'd manage the thing better than he does." Yes, and some of you fathers who turned things over to your boys — where are you now ? If you don't mind your boys, some of you, they'll ruin you ! You can't afford to turn over to your son his part of the estate, and you mustn't let your boys bankrupt your wife, their mother, and their sisters. Well, the boy watched the old man until he thought the old man was stupid, and he thought his old fogy notions wouldn't do, and his idea was, " If father will turn his estate over to me, I will be able to double, and triple, and quadruple it in value in less than ten years. My idea is to buy a magnificent plantation, stock it well with fine stock, build me a palatial resi- dence, and arrange everything in first-class order, and when I get to counting the money, then I won't mind a visit from the old folks. But I'll want to have matters all arranged before they begin to meddle and interfere." Well, the prodigal boy drives on and on, and at the end of the third week he drives into another beautiful locality, and I imagine he says, " This suits me. This is magnificent ground here. I like this soil and climate. I like this altitude. I'll buy here." Then he begins to think, " Why there's a post-office in the settlement over yonder, and I won't be here three weeks before I'll get a long letter from father full of advice, and I'll get a long sentimental Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. 139 ,s this : dfogy lought } thing > does." ^s over I don't ! You of the )t your ihe boy Id man notions ill turn Die, and lan ten atation, ial resi- order, ; won't ^ant to igin to and at another lis suits ke this '11 buy Here's a I won't er from Imentai letter from mother, and thoy'll be doing nothing but advising and suggesting. The fact of the business is, if I'd wanted their advice I'd have stayed at home. I don't want to be meddled with and inter- fered with. I'm a whale, and if there's anything bigger than that, I'm that!" Boys, haven't you often felt that way ? Haven't you felt it crawling up your sleeve and running all over you, and you thought you were bigger than your father ? " Into a far-off country," and on he drove. I want to say another thing here. The boy's moving off in Style ; he's got plenty of money ; he's no poor man ; able to pay his way. I imagine him moving on with his great train of servants and stock, until at last he pulls up before a beautiful country place, and he says, "I guess I'll sleep in a mansion to-night. I'll tie up at this good man's house on the wayside here." Next morning, when the time comes for him to depart, he turns to the good man, and says, "What's your bill, old fellow?" The old man says, " Why, it's nothing. I'm glad to have you stay with me. I won't charge you a cent." The young fellow swells up, and he says, " You can't insult me, old man. I've got plenty of money. I'm no pauper in this country. I don't want to be insulted by having any man treat me like a pauper. Name your amount." That's the way 1 You've been there, haven't you, boys ? I'll tell you another thing ; whenever you strike one of these I'm-no-pauper fellows, if you'll put your dogs on his track they'll tree him at a hog-pen ! There's many a boy in this rink this evening that's il .m m rif I (}' 140 Sam p. Jones* Toronto Sermons. headed for the hog-pen ; and you'll never tui'n until you get there either, and some of you never ! " Able to pay my way ! " I imagine when his money did get scarce he sold some of his stock and still had plenty of money. . On and on the prodigal boy drove, and when he had reached a far-off country — then what ? He bought him a hundred thousand acres of the most fertile land in the settlement ; he built him a pala- tial residence and stocked his farm, and he was a prince in the land ! I've seen many a boy that thought he was a prince. But when he reached that far-off country, what did he do ? He spent all — not part of it — in riotous living ! Listen, again. When he had spent all there arose a mighty famine in that land. Did you ever notice, brother, when you're out of money it seems as if everybody else is out too ? Didn't you notice when you didn't have a thing in the world you couldn't get a man to be ' your friend ? Did you ever notice when a man had spent his all there was a famine to him, no matter what there was to other people ? Ever think of that, boys ? Oh, how true that is ! There is a family down town here; they haven't a dollar in the world, and there's a famine right here in Toronto for them. Every grocery in town is loaded down with flour, and meat, and all kind of eatables, but there's a famine in their home. And it was when they had spent all that their arose a mighfcy famine in this land. Now, brother, when you get to this point where you see the famine, where you see how this young I until " Able 3y did ill had len he ? He 3 most 1 pala- was a y that cached lent all again. famine . when else is have a to be an had matter ink of is a (liar in ere in loaded itables, it was nighfcy where young Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. 141 man ended, we'll leave the young man there, and let's you and I go back and come down round this line ! Brother, here's human nature ; let's see what there is in this for us. Let's see what's in this life- picture. When you were ten — and you were twelve — and you were fourteen — and you yonder sixteen, you were spotless boys, as pure as snow. You looked up to your father's God, and said, " Give me the spiritual portion that falleth to me," and God turned over to you your mother's prayers and your father's advice and Gospel influences, and the precious Bible given you by your mother, and all good influ- ences God turned over to you, and then you started into a far-off" country. Do you know that a man can live in the same house with his mother, and sleep in the next room to his mother, and yet be in a far-off" country from his mother ? Do you know that ? Do you know that a man may be in the world with God and yet be away from God ? Do you know that ? Oh, young man, I'm so glad that the purity of your mother and the sanctity of your home make you a great distance from it. I am so glad there's a place of purity for poor disconsolate ones on earth to resort to occasionally. Young man, listen ! You started out with your spiritual heritage ; you went on spending your sub- stance ; you threw away your father's advice, your mother's prayers. Oh, mother's prayers, how much they are worth ! You threw away the Gospel in- fluences of your younger days. You threw away all that was good. You have been scattering, scattering ! scattering it along the way, and there you sit to-day, ;li 142 Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. and you haven't a vestige of your spiritual heritage left you. All gone ! All gone ! " And when he had spent all, there arose a mighty famine in the land." Oh, boy, with the world full of Bibles, you haven't one ! With other mothers praying, your mother has gone from you forever ! With other fathers advising their children, your father has ceased to speak, and his lips are closed and cold in death ! Oh, how desolate is he who has spent his all in riotous living ! I was preaching once, and after preaching I said, " If there is a man in this house that feels in his heart, ' 1 haven't a thing left, I haven't a friend left in the world,' come up and give me your hand," and immediately one poor disconsolate fellow arose and walked up the aisle and took me by the hand, and with a face that spoke more than words could, he said : " Mr. Jones, I haven't a friend in the world. I haven't anything left on earth. It is all gone, all gone." Oh, brethren, there was a mighty famine in that man's land. Oh, what a thought ! Oh, what a thought ! He had wasted all ! Boys, where is the Bible mother gave you ? Where's the sweet lullaby of your cradle ? Fathers, where are the sermons that touched your hearts in your younger days ? Men of the world, where are the good influences that should have made you happy Christians ? All gone ! All wasted in riotous living ! *' And when he had spent all there arose a mighty famine in that land." My presiding elder told me this incident once : " In my district, some time ago, I was driving along the road, and I reached a country Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. 143 dfeag« i full Dthers rever ! your id and spent [ said, in his Qd left i," and se and id, and Id, he Id. I ne, all line in whskt a is the uUaby IS that Men of should le! All nighty old me le ago, Quntry orosa-roads grocery, and, as I drove along in front, a poor, desolate, trembling man walked out of the grocery and accosted me, and said : ' You don't recog- nize me, but I know you. We were college mates, and graduated in the same college class, twenty years ago. We joined Church at the same time, but when I came out of college I got into bad company, and I have been going from bad to worse ever since. I've been on a spree, drinking hard, and just now, when I went in that grocery, desolate and moneyless, the bar-keeper said he would give me a drink for nothing, and I took hold of the bottle, but my nerves were so unsteady I couldn't pour the whiskey out, and the grocery-keeper poured it out for me, and as I took the glass and raised it to my lips I felt my old mother's hand come down on my head, and she said : " * Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep ; If I should die before I awake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.' "My precious old mother had been in heaven twenty years, but I felt her hand just as I did in days gone by, and as she spoke to me I dropped the glass, and I walked out and met you.' " The presid- ing elder said that when he passed on (so he was told afterwards), that fellow walked back into the store and drank the stuff, and he was carried out a corpse. That poor mother followed her boy to the very gates of hell, and had her hand on his head as he foundered on the rocks of hell and sank forever. 0, my, how a man can squander all and spend all in riotous living ! " And when he had spent all," the ' ,i 1!| m '|1 m Mi J 4 ■»Bn 1, ,*' i,S 'I'lr^ i I'vai I if< • 144 Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. parable says, " there arose a mighty famine in that land." And the next thing he did he joined himself to a citizen of that country ; and when he joined himself to a citizen of that country that citizen put him into the field to feed swine. Recollect, that is a Jew ; that young man was a Jew. What more dis- reputable work could a Jew be put at than feeding hogs ? He put him into the field to feed swine. Look here, brother, when a man disposes of all ; when mother's prayers, father's advice, the Bible, all good influences, are disposed of, the next thing a man is going to do after he has disposed of all is to join himself to a citizen of this country, the devil ; and the devil puts him to work — puts him to blasphem- ing the God of his mother, violating the Sabbath of his mother ; puts him to drenching his body with liquid fluid ; which is but the essence of damnation. Now, here I have said before that God wants hu- manity to help him bring the world to Christ ; the devil wants humanity to help him damn the race ; and whenever a man joins himself to the devil, the devil puts him at the work of damning humanity ; and every wholesale liquor house, and every brewery, and every saloon, and every still-house in Toronto is an agent of the devil, doing his work. "And he joined himself to a citizen of that coun- try," and the devil pub him to stilling whiskey, and the devil put him to running a brewery, and the devil put him to opening a saloon, and the devil put him to the work of damning humanity — and that is the only work of every servant of the devil, damning humanity. Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. 145 1 that imself joined m put Eit is a re dis- 3eding )f all ; ble, all a man io join 1; and iphem- jath of r with nation, its hu- jt; the race; ^il, the lanity ; ewery, onto is coun- ey, and nd the jvil put that is winning ■ I go to the Legislature of Ontario. I say, " Gen- tlemen of the Legislature, I want you to make the sale of liquor in the Province of Ontario free, and with the freedom to sell it I demand the privilege of debauching the children of your wives, and cursing your homes." And I will tell you another thing : The Legislature of Ontario, if they were asked by the bar-keepers of Toronto the privilege of damning their own children, and breaking the hearts of the wives of that Legislature — what do you think the legislators would say to that ? From a legislator down to a scavenger, I would not vote for a man that touches, tastes, or handles whiskey to save my life. God save the legislatures from the fearful curse of being controlled by the liquor element in this country ! But " money makes the filly go;" you have heard that. Money makes the filly go. And I will tell you another thing: money makes the filly's son go, too. The earth swal- low me up before I would lend myself to any influ- ence and join any citizen of this country and help him to debauch and damn my race ! I would die by the inch ; I would walk up on a burning fire and be burnt to ashes before I would lend myself to an in-, fernal alliance like that. In Georgia (and I know it is true of other States) we have had men in the legislature that just stag- gered around town drunk, on both sides of the streets, and they staggered into the legislative halls drunk. They were not fit to be in the penitentiary, much less the legislature. God give us sober men — sober men to rule us and to make our laws ! God save our codes \0 (1\ 146 Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. '4'J ! and our statute books from the danger that liquor will do them all over this country ! "And he joined himself to a citizen of that coun- try." Whenever a le<^islator joins himself to a citizen of that country he is going to do some bad work. When any influential man joins himself to the devil he can play havoc among the rest of men. Now, listen again : " And he fain would have filled himself with the husks that the swine did eat." Now, you notice he went at the most disreputable job in the world, and when he went to feed the hogs he would eat the husks, and he fed the hogs on husks, and ate husks himself — ate the same husks he fed the hogs with. "He fain would have filled himself with the husks the hogs did eat." Did you ever notice the fact that just what th devil makes you feed other folks on he makes you eau yourself ? Did you ever notice that nine out of ten of these beer-drinking fellows are puffed up with beer, so that if you would stick something in them it would run out by the gallon ? Did you ever notice that nine bar-keepers out of every ten die drunk themselves ? Did you ever notice that ? If you feed other people on liquor, the devil will make you drink it. If you pour beer down other people, the devil will make you gulp it down, and away you go. God pity a man that just sits and feeds out damnation to others, and then sits and enjoys it himself. Ah, me, what an awful thought ! Just what you feed other folks on you will feed yourself with. You are a gambler, and you win other folks' money, and the 4eYil makes ^ou sit right down to the table, and Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. 147 iquor coun- itizen work, devil Now, imself V, you in the would nd ate e hogs bh the at th ^ou eau of ten with lem it notice drunk Du feed drink devil God }ion to 1 sit you You y, and le, and you lose it again. Did you ever notice that ? That's just as certain as we are in this house tl is evening. " And he fain would have filled himself with the husks that the swine did eat." O, how low down we get, how low down we get. I took a bar-keeper into the church once, and he said : " Jones, I never sold liquor but nine months, and I stayed drunk those entire nine months. I couldn't sell it without stay- ing drunk ; my conscience would not let mo." I like that ; that's a sign a fellow ha.s got some conscience. It is a sign his conscience is not dead. But there are men in this town that sell whiskey all the year round, cool, sober men. You who do this have no conscience ; your conscience is dead ; dead and buried forever, and God pity you ! " And he joined himself to a citizen of that coun- try." Some of us have joined urselves to a citizen of that country, and O, how fe. ful our lives are. What disreputable lives we lead every day. 0, young man, you never could hold up your head again in the presence of your poor mother if you could get your conscience aroused once more. O, think what awful lives we have led, and then think how pure and good our lives might have been. " And he joined himself to a citizen of that country, and he sent him into the field to feed the swine ; " and after this famine had pressed him sore, and he began to be in want, what then ? " And when he came to himself " — 0, brother, here is a point ; let us look a minute. " And when he came to himself." What is the matter with humanity ? What is the matter with you ? What was the matter with me ? Hi m m m. 148 Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. ■ Mi I look back fifteen years ago. What was I doing ? Wringing the blood out of my father's heart ; mak- ing my precious wife cry her eyes out, and my little innocent ones threatened with no home, and with orphanage, and with want. What was the matter with me ? Do you mean to tell me if I had been myself I would have done that way ? No, sir. I will tell you another thing : If you can get your eyes wide open this evening you will be turned around, a sensible man, end won't do as you are doing. A man of good, sound sense, to say nothing about religion, won't treat his wife as you treat her and Icve her as you love her, A man of good, hard sense won't treat his children as you treat j'^our children, and at the same time love his children as you love your children. I tell you there is something wrong with humanity. And that boy bid his father good-bye and started away, and spent weeks on the road, and spent months in feeding swine, and filling himself with th*^ husks that the swine did eat, and all at once his eyes got opened and he came to himself. Look here, I can't help believing that there was a strange infatuation had hold of him. I don't know how you feel about it, but when I look back I say, "I wasn't my- self, and there is no use talking about it." And every son in this country that is running in his mad career, he i* mad with his wickedness, his intellect is becloudeu, he doesn't see himself, and he doesn't see the truth as it is. Now, when that boy came to himself he said, " Why, sir, who am I ? What am I ? Where am I ? What am I doing h'^^re ?" Look here, it !iii# Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. 149 will do you some good if you will ask those questions this eveninof : " Who am I ? Where am I ? What am I doing here ? " O, brother, you are away from where you took your mother's hand the last time, you are away from where your father's advice would have led you. Where are you ? Joined to a citizen of that country feeding swine, damning humanity. "And when he came to himself." Just here let me say this much. I had gone along, and occasion- ally I had realized that I wasn't living right ; I saw that my wife was fading away in grief ; I saw that my father was dying by the inch. At last I looked around me and came to myself, thank God, and I glorify his name forever for that day in my history when I got my eyes wide open and saw the deeds of my life, and saw how wicked I was. 0, brother, * I thank God for getting my eyes opened th'at day ; and since then I have been sing- ing, " Happy day, happy day, when Jesus washed my sins away." I was a new man, a saved man, and I went right about and left off my wickedness from that day to this. And when he came to himself what did he do ? He said, " In my father's house even the servants have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger. Here I am starving to death, with the best father and the best home a boy ever had." And when he got his eyes open what did he say ? '* I will arise and go to my father." I will arise. Look here, that boy got the whole secret of the matter in that one expression — I will, I will, I will arise and go to my father. When he said that, the miles be- ■ii "i'r1& s 150 Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. tween him and his father's house melted away ; there was nothing between him and his father. " I will arise and go to my fafcher." I suppose the devil said to him, " Well, you are in a pretty fix now to go to your father." And did you ever notice this is just what the devil will do to you; he will take you by the heels and drag you through the mud-holes of sin, and then make you get up and look at yourself and tell you hat you ain't fit to go anywhere. Did you ever notice that ? O, what a mean old devil he is ! He said to this boy : " Just look at yourself now ; you ain't fit to go home ; you have no clothes and you are a thousand miles from home ; you have no shoes, how can you walk ? You haven't got a dollar to pay your way ; you have no hat to cover your head. Ain't you a pretty one talking about going home ? " But when that boy jumped up in his manhood and in his resolu- tion, and said, •* I will arise and go to my father,'' why, sir, there was God Almighty's excursion train run right up to the side of him, and it came to a dead halt, and God told him to get aboard, and that he would see him tho balance of the way. If you will say that this evening and mean it, God will do the rest. " I will arise and go to my father ; I am going, money or no money, shoes or no shoes, hat or no hat, miles or no miles, I am going." And now we see him start back — no shoes, no hat, no money, and a long way to go. Off" he starts and on he goes. And I imagine I see him when on the way he comes across the mansion where he had stopped some time ago, and where he had been insulted when Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. 151 way; . "I are in d you do to y you e you ,t you that ? s boy : to go )usand n you • way; you a , when L'esolu- ather/' 1 train e to a d, and ^y. It* t, God 'ather ; shoes, no hat, ts and le way topped 1 when the man did not want to charge him anything. I imagine he looks at that place, and says, " I believe I will not go in the front door, but I will get through the fence and go around behind the orchard ; I don't want to see those folks." And he climbs the fence and takes the back way around the orchard until he passes the house, and comes to a poor negro cabin, and he says, "Auntie, I wish you would give me some bread. I haven't got any money — haven't got a cent to pay you, but I have got the best father boy ever had ; and if you ever see my mother and can hear her thank you once for any favor shown her boy, you will be paid for it. Please, auntie, just give me a little bread." That colored woman gives him a pone of bread, and he turns around and goes to the roadside and lies on a pile of leaves and goes to bed. He learned that from the hogs. He is going to bed, now ; piles up in those leaves, and sleeps all night. The next day he passes on down the way ; and I imagine, as he went down the road, two neighbors were talking together, and one said ; " Do you remember that grand pageant going down this road some time ago, and the princely young fellow in his phaeton ? It was the talk of the neighborhood for a whole month." And the other one spoke up, and said: "Yes, he stopped at my house, and I insulted him the next morning, because I did not charge him anything." And then the first fellow said : " Did you see that dirty, vagabondish tramp go down the road this morning ? " " Yes," says the other. " Well," says the first, " there was something about his face that reminded me of that princely boy that came down » iHsiii IH 152 Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. :f1^ li; '1 W ' ■ t the road a few years ago. I don't know what made me, but I thought of that princely boy as this pauper and beggar." " 0, no," says the other, " that can't be that princely boy." "But I believe it was the very same fellow." Look here, citizens of this place. Here is a man who has been out West twenty years, and he comes back to your city, and a poor, bloated, besotted, drunken wretch staggers along the walk ; and that gentleman who has been living in the West twenty years says : " Who is that staggering along there ? " "That's Bill So-and-so, son of Colonel So-and-so." " That can't be he : Bill was one of the nicest young men in the city." "I tell you that is Bill So-and-so ; he has been a vagabond for ten years." " Well, well, I never saw such a change in a fellow in my life." You just let the devil get hold of some of them and keep thenx awhile, and their own folks won't know them. That's what's the matter. I will have nothing to do with a man that will despoil my countenance and ruin my health so that my own precious mother can't recognize me. And on and on he travels. He is going back now, and I tell you there is no distance, no hardships, no any thing to a fellow that is on his way back. And look at him now ; he is just as humble as a dog ; you can just say anything to him now ; you can't hurt his feelings. Why, he is perfectly will- ing to be kicked about by anybody. He feels that he has deserved it, and that 3 the difference between going away and coming back. O, my congregation, this evening, in all love and Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. 153 as a ; you will- that iween kindness, do you see yourselves in this picture as wandering off from God ? And how many have resolved : " I will go back ; I will go back." And this poor boy suffered in sin, until at last he says : " I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven and before thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son : make me as one of thy hired servants. And he arose and came to his father. And when he was yet a great way off his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran and fell on his neck and kissed him. And the son said. Father, I have sinned against heaven and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy son." I have thought about him many a time. I im- agine he came up the road near the old homestead. And I have seen that prodigal approach and look down toward the old homestead; and there was home, and peace, and plenty ; and there was the picture just as he had carried it from his youthful days — home, and peace, and plenty. And then he looked at the home, and then he looked at himself, and he says : " Just look at me ; I am not fit to go any further at all ; O, my, I believe I am willing to lie down and die; a place in the old cemetery will do me." And he sits down and says : " I can go no further; I won't go any further." And while he sat there his father saw him a great way off, the Bible says. His father saw him, and they were eyes of mercy that looked out that way ; and his father ran to him, and those were legs of mercy ?M\ ■'M m mt'' ■•;|r: ^'If;' 154 Sam p. Jones* Toronto Sermons. that carried that father ; and his father ran up to him and kissed him, and those were kisses of mercy that he imprinted on that poor boy's face ; and his father spoke to him, and those were words of mercy ; and the poor prodigal lifted up his face and said : " Father, I am no more worthy to be called thy son." And the father just clapped his hand over his mouth, and wouldn't let him say another word ; and he said^to the servants : " Bring forth the best robe and put it on him ; and put a ring on his hand and shoes on his feet ; and bring hither the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and be merry, for this my son was dead, and is alive again ; he was lost, and is found." O, precious Father in heaven, I can recall the day when I was a poor, wretched, ruined man, despairing, dissipated, godless, wicked, and when I had sought thee and prayed to thee, and thou didst not bless me, I broke down and said : " I give it up ; I am not worthy to go to my Father at all." And just when I broke down and said : " I give it up ; there is no hope for me, in sight of the old homestead," my Father in heaven saw me, and his eyes were eyes of mercy ; and he ran to me, and his feet were feet of mercy ; and he flung his arms around me, and his arms were arms of mercy ; and he spoke to me, and his words were words of mercy. And I said : " 0, Lord, nothing but sin have I to give." And God whispered back to me : " And nothing but love shall you receive." Blessed be God for the prodigal' a, return and wel- Sam p. Jones' Toronto Sermons. 155 come. Ring the bells of heaven, there is joy to-day. O, brother, every man in this house, every boy in this house, who wants to live and die under the roof of the old homestead in our Father's house, I want every one of you to stand up. Those who will say conscientiously : " I want to go back, and I want to live and die in my Father's house," stand up. Blessed be God. O, angels come and carry the news back that the prodigals are coming home. SAYINGS. Until twenty-five years of age I was the biggest fool you ever looked at, only when you look in the mirror yourself. Salvation in its highest sense is to love every thing God loves and hate ever thing God hates. What I love and what I hate determines what I am. I RATHER like the expression of that good old woman who cried out : " O, Lord, if you will only save me in this world, you shall never hear the last of it in the next." The Judgment Day. — Without such a day as this in the great future before us we might meet parties in heaven that would astonish us. We have known many a knotty, gnarly, hard-to-be-understood Christian in this world, and we have thought: "Well, if this man gets to heaven I would be surprised," and without such a day as that, if we should meet i; 156 Sam P. Jones' Toronto Sermons. such a man in heaven we would wonder through all eternity "how could this man have got there ;" but with a day like that before us, when God shall bring this brother before the great white throne, and shall strip him of all his idiosyncrasies, and shall show you all the pure gold of his character, and shall say to him: "Come, ye blessed," a universe will stand around and say "Amen" to t' is brother's commendation. DELIVERANCE FROM BONDAGE. A TEMPERANCE SERMON BT SAMUEL W. SMALL. T HOPE you will give me your prayerful attention 1. to-night. What I shall say shall be based on the sixteenth verse of the third chapter of Acts : "And his name, through faith in his name, hath made this man strong, whom ye see and know ; yea, the faith which is by him hath given him this per- fect soundness in the presence of you all." On one occasion there came into the market-place of a far Eastern city an aged, decrepid, and travel- stained man, who was a stranger to them all. He wandered through the vast bazaar without seeming to regard or take notice of the vast stores of mer- chandise, wealth, and accumulated wondrous handi- craft of the people. Aimlessly he threaded his way about in that multitude until he attracted the atten- tion of the people. Suddenly he stopped before one of the booths, where hung gilded cages, in which had been imprisoned birds of precious plumage and sweetest song. They were fluttering their little il i-it- 158 Sam Small's Great Temperance Sermon wings against the bars of their prison, and he lis- tened intently that he might haply catch some note of their song ; but they, thus imprisoned, refused to give forth any of the melody of their throats, but struggled and struggled impatiently and ineffectu- ally against their imprisonment. Suddenly the old man put his hands in the folds of his garment, and drew therefrom a coin of a strange realm. He asked the price of a cage. He bought it, and, opening the door, he turned the feathered songster loose, and it fluttered its wings, so long untried, and for a little while balanced its slight body in mid-air, until nature restored its powers of equilibrium, and then it mounted up, and up, and up, and with a glad song of joy circled above the heads of the multitude, until it caught sight of the distant cloud-capped mountain, vhere its home had been, and then, with its precious melody flowing from its soul, it winged its way into the far and ethereal distance, and was lost to sight. Thus one by one he bought these little birds, and thus one by one he loosed them, and they repeated the glad notes of surprise, and took the same course back to their native mountain fastnesses. He seemed to take a greater pleasure and a sweeter joy as each little prisoner regained its liberty, and the tears streamed down his travel-stained and dust-covered face. Those who stood by said to him, " Why dost thou do these strange things V He said to them in reply, with a look of charity and joy indescribable on his face, " I was once a prisoner myself, and I know something of the sweets of liberty." Deliverance from Bondage. 159 I, brethren, was once a prisoner myself, and now I have tasted something of the sweets of liberty in Christ, and with the precious coinage of his mercies and his promises I would stand before this multitude to-night and purchase from the willing hearts of men the liberty of their souls from a bondage more des- picable and deadly, and more repressive of the natural melody of men's souls, than were these gilded cages to the birds of this far Eastern mart. I have been under the bondage of sin, a bondage that was galling every moment almost ; a bondage from which there was eliminated every element of joy, and from which there seemed to be at times no avenue of escape. If you will pardon me, I will refer to myself. I will tell you something of my experience, because I would have my younger hearers know it, and know it to the good of their souls. I would have my fellow-men who are in middle life, with families, hear it. I would have these veteran fathers of this community hear it. I was well born. I was given by kindly parents all the true and the religious culture that a boy could have in a loving home. I was instructed in right speaking ; I was encouraged in right doing ; I was inspirited at times to consider myself a child of God, and to recognize in my youth my responsibility to him. And when I had left my mother's side, and had left my father's counsel, and left the old hearth tree and the family altar, and gone out into the avenues of the world, seeking, first, an education, and after- 160 Sam Small's Great Temperance Sermon ward position and prosperity, I fell into evil ways. With the strong and lusty passions of youth, with those whom I mingled I found there were courses and ways, there were allurements and temptations, that were strange to me ; and I stood reliant only upon myself, forgetting the prayers and teachings of mother and father, and I was eager for a place, eager for the pleasures of this world, eager for the happi- ness and the enjoyments that I saw about me. And thus I easily fell in wi jh allurements, thus easily fell from virtuous thoughts and virtuous acts, and from the virtuous course of my life. The great bane, as I look back over my life, and conjure up the recollections of my past — the great bane of all my sinfulness, the great m(»ving cause of all the moral iniquities I committed — was nothing more or less than this great gorgon-headed evil that is devouring so many of our fellow creatures, and sowing broadcast sin and sorrow over this fair earth — the sin of intemperance. I thought that it would be manly to do as nearly every man I saw about me did. I thought there would be some addition to my pleasure and experi- ence by going with them into their drinking places and indulging with them. I felt all the tinv " - had strengrth of will enough, that I had iou( acter enough, to protect me from the excr oliau could see other men had fallen into. I belie ed tb it when I reached a dangerous point, if I ever did, I could put on the brakes of my nature and stop. I went away to college, and there again fell into evil courses. I struggled at times ^jth the innate mfi Deliverance from Bondage. 161 thai ■i tba did, I "ll into Innate manhood that was in me, and attempted to throw off the growing appetite for these things. When I came away, after I had graduated, and began to enter among them and their pursuits, and endeav- ored to acquire a profession, I thought still that I must mingle with my fellow-men ; have some par- ticipation in their customs and in their habits ; that I must brincf mvself into some sort of ajjreement and harmony with their ideas of social enjoyments, and I yielded again and again to the temptations thus presented, and again and again I fell from my rectitude, and away from ideas that lingered with me of what was right and proper. And thus, day after day, these passions grew stronger and stronger within me. I could feel and see that I was falling, falling, falling all the time. I saw that there would not be left in me strength enough to save me, and I \yas conscious at times of the fearful length to which I had fallen ; but I would not look at the picture I knew I was presenting to others. I went on and on. T went on until I brought tears from the eyes of my precious mother, until I brought fearful lines to her face, until I brought grey streaks into her beautiful air, until I had brought the lines of care about her oving eyes ; and until I knew I was dragging, drop by drop, the life-blood from her devoted heart. I knew that my strong and manly father was suffering on my account tortures that he would not, in his courftL let the world know were gnawing at his hear id at his soul. I k jw how it went out to me ; how it followed 11 m md 111: ft' W 162 Sam Small's Great Temperance Sermon me abroad in other lands, and I knew that the fail- ing of his step and the silvering of his hair, and the deepening of the lines of grief about his mouth, that had so often spoken golden words of counsel, were due to the course and ways into which I had fallen, and to the apparent hopelessness of my ever coming out of them, and being reformed and being renewed in mind and in body. Oh, I shall never feel satisfied short of the ability in heaven to make obeisance at their feet and crave their pardon, which I know has long since been granted me, and which I shall ever see beam on their angelic faces until I am in my grave. I married a lovable woman. I married one who was proud of disposition ; one who had high and noble traits of character ; one who had quick and responsive sensibilities ; one to whom the very taint of anything that was disreputable was like a knife- stab to her heart ; but I disregarded the love and devotion of that precious wife. I went on and on, unheeding ^^r counsel, disregarding her prayers, and from day to day getting groF'ser and grosser in my appetites, and getting more brutal in my insen- sibility to her pleadings and her prayers. And when children came to bless my home, even the sio-ht of them in their little cradles, unconscious in the first moments of their life, and with the smiles of God drawing responsive smiles from them, I found it impossible for me to know that I was doing that which would sooner or latei bring shame and sorrow and degradation upon those innocent babes ; and as they grew from year to year their voices Deliverance from Bondage. 163 e fail- id the 1, that were fallen, oraing newed ability [ crave I been am on Qe who rh and ck and y taint knife- ve and md on, n-avers, sser in insen- And en the lous in smiles hem, I s doing me and babes ; voices came, and they prattled about me ; it was only at distant intervals that I began to regard the future that was stretching far off in the distance before them, and which I must make either one of peace and pleasure, or one of despair and wretchedness. And year after year I went on and on in this course of An and wickedness, and the light of my home went out. The love of my wife gave way, but the process of murder of affection could not last forever; and I saw at last, it seemed to me, tliat she had returned it to the sepulchre in which she had laid it away in its tear-bedewed cerements forever. I could see that the love and affection of my children were turning from me daily, seemingly by intuition. They saw I was not he who was appointed to be their father in the manifestations of fatherhood that I made to them. I could know, and know with a treble emphasis, that drove unutterable horrors jiito my soul, but it seemed only to drive me further and further into despair, that they would, at my coming, flee from my presence far away into the darkest and remotest parts of the house, for fear of the consequences of meeting their father. I had friends — friends in position, friends high in authority, friends who were true and steadfast to me ; but they, too, were unable to paint to me any picture that would allure me from the one I was painting with my own hand in the horrible colors of hell itself. They would point me to a goal that my bleared and confused vision would not see. They would endeavor to lift me up on planes of hope and sensibilities of ambition that I had ceased to be sen- 'iiiti :"?*!' 7fts »■: i 164 Sam Small's Great Temperance Sermon sible of, as being worthy of achievement. They would endeavor to control my appetite, and find it as useless as to bind with a cotton- woven string the raging lion of the arid and tempest-swept desert. I had at times my lucid intervals, when there would come memories of my mother's prayer, of father's counsel, of wife's tears, and of children's mute and helpless look ; and I would say to myself, " I will summon to my aid all the powers of my soul and manhood, and I will put under foot this monster of hideous mien tbit is dragging me down into degradation, into social ruin and taking a fast hold upon my soul, and which, sooner or later, will drag it a trophy into hell. I would summon all my powers, only to find that I was weaker than a babe in the arms of so strong a passion as I had awakened. I would go to physicians, and ask them in the name of my family and future to do something for me, if indeed there had been found medicines on earth to minister to a mind diseased and an appetite debauched; and they would exhaust their knowledge and their skill, and hundreds and thousands of dollars did I spend in the endeavor to reinforce will, man- hood, and my own powers of repression, but all in vain. There were antidotes that were published abroad in the world, and with the use of which cures are guaranteed, but all, all in vain. I spent hundreds and thousands of dollars, and days and hours of time, and I purchased aQv.jrtised efficient and warranted cures for drunkenness, and I was as faithful in the application of them as ever human being was ; but it w^s ail in vain 1 in vain 1 1 in vain ! ! ! 5J Deliverance from Bondage. 165 They ind it ig the rt. there er, of Idren's ayself, [J soul lonster a into ;t hold 11 drag ill my a babe ikered. in the Lng for nes on ^petite wledge dollars man- bn vain, abroad res are mdreds )f time, rranted in the lELs; but There was no medicament in them to cure my aroused passion and appetite. I went so far that my wife, under the laws then existing in Georgia, had written by the judge of the court in which I was the official short-hand reporter, a legal notice, couched in the language of the law, and had this notice served upon every dealer in liquors in the city of Atlanta, warning them, under penalty of the law, not to let me hi«ve their damning fluid over their counters ; and yet, outlaws as they were, disregarding my interest, di regarding my wife's pleadings and the tears of my children, and disre- garding the very law of the land, they still continued to supply me with the horrible draught for which my inmost nature seemed craving with insatiety. She even employed attendants and detectives,'|who followed me as I went about on my business in the streets of my city, and they followed me with the purpose, and were employed for the purpose, of keep- ing these men who would not keep the law them- selves from furnishing me with whiskey ; and yet I, in conjunction with them, was able to hoodwink and defy detectives and law. Further and further, deeper and deeper, I was sinking ; I was getting hopeless for business ; hope- less for all social standing; hopeless for all the temporal interests of this world ; hopeless for eter- nity ; and in the very madhouse of my disordered brain, and in my very soul, there seemed at times no avenue of escape at all from this self-imposed bondage, except through insanity on the one hand, and througrh suicide on the other. m m 166 Sam Small's Great Temperance Sermon I saw that my wife and children had given up all hope ; they did not know, from day to day, how I would come home to them. They had seen me brought there, day after daj'-, time after time, insen- sible and unable to recognize them," from the influence of this deadly and poisonous drug. They had seen me when I was brought in and laid on my bed covered with blood, and it seemed as though my days were indeed numbered, and that I would soon fall in the midst of my iniquity. They had seen me when I was brought home with the wounds of the knife and pistol on my body, and they had heard the rumors from the streets and dives of the dangers with which I had been constantly surrounded of late. To them it seemed as though there was no avenue, no loophole, of escape for me from a terrible death. There was not the sign of hope or spirit beaming out from their beautiful faces. They knew not, from day to day, whether 1 would live to greet them another day. They knew not whether, if my life was prolonged, they would be able to procure the very necessities of life from day to day. They knew not at what hour the very shelter that shielded them from the storm and from the heat would be removed from over their head, and they removed from under its shelter. There were visions of uncertainty, of t. i sheriff to dispossess, of the heartless landlord to distrain for rent, of the creditor to come and take all. There was no future ahead of them, except a future of impenetrable gloom, through which seemed to come nothing but warnings of deeper woe and agonies yet to come. I Deliverance from Bondage. 167 ip all low I m me insen- uence I seen y bed h my i soon en me )f the heard angers led of v^as no errible spirit ' knew ) greet if my ire the 3r that heat i they visions jss, of of the future etrable acr but come. 0, Lord, how good thou wast to me ! thou hast given me relief from that bondage at my seeking. At last there came a time when I seemed to have reached the limit. Something strange impelled me to take my little children, as a loving act — an act, it seemed to me, of reparation for neglects of weeks preceding — and go upon the train to Cartersville, where Brother Jones was preaching to immense audiences, and from which the report had come that there were many and many hundreds, and even thousands, who were coming back into harmony with God. And as I sat upon the platform, endeavor- ing to take in stenography the words as they fell from his lips, it seemed to me that God had inspired him to preach upon one certain line. He preached it with that faith which is his alone ; he preached it with that fidelity which is his distinguishing char- acteristic ; he preached with the earnestness and with the conviction that broke down the casements of my heart and went home to it. When he had finished, those words of Conscience ! Conscience ! Conscience ! and of Record I Record ! Record ! of God, the infinite, the all-seeing and the ever-judging God, came home to me. I went away from there troubled in mind and soul. I went home, and back into the devious ways, back into the bar-room, back into the open highways, back into the maddening pool, in order to get away from the torments I was suffering from an awakened con- science. But they would not leave me. I could find no solace where I had often found insensibility. I could find no relief in potations where I had often m if T—r 168 Sam Small's Great Temperance Sermon found indifference and capability to take on a cool exterior. There was nothing there to give me sur- cease from the sorrow in my bosom ; and I went on and on until the second day, on Tuesday, at noon, I went into my library-room, fell upon my knees, buried my face in my hands, and I pleaded with Christ that he would let me cling to his cross, lay down all my burdens and sins there, and be rescued and saved by his compassion ; that I might be washed in his blood, and that my sins, though they were scarlet, might be white as snow. I wrestled for four long hours, in as much agony as I ever suffered. At the end of that time, when I had reached a conclusion, when I had come to under- stand that there was nothing of earth that could avail me, least of all with Christ, then I gave myself entirely to him, made an unconditional surrender, and that moment he seized my soul. He dipped it in the stream which was white and pure, and the light of heaven shone in upon me. In my new-found joy, I rushed into the presence of wife and children. I proclaimed the glad tidings to their astonished ears, and they could hardly be- lieve it, though they saw that some great revolution had taken place. They knew not whether it was a surrender to Christ, or whether it had been a sur- render to madness. -, But when I went out that evening, I had three thousand circulars printed and distributed all over Atlanta, telling the people 1 had found my Saviour; I had made peace with God, and that I would live a life of righteousness ever after, and desired to make Deliverance from Bondage. 169 a proclamation for once and irrevocable. They gath- ered at seven o'clock upon the public streets that night, and there before them I proclaimed the fact, and, blessed be God, I have been proclaiming it ever since with increased joy, and with the certainty that my salvation is complete. Returning home, I could see that Jesus had knocked at the tomb of my wife's life, as he did at that of Lazarus, and bad called it forth in all its pristine strength and beauty, and its bloom and blos- som has been on my pathway ever since. I could see that my children had found tongue to sing the joy and praise, and their hearts had been set attuned, as they had never been before, to the melody of child- hood, sinirincr to the ears of fatherhood. I could see that there was gladness, wherever I went, upon the faces of friends and acquaintances : and, when the news had gone abroad in the L.nd, they who had known me abroad sent me their glad congratulations and their encouragement. Blessed be God, that from the day he reached down and lifted me up from the horrible pit and the miry clay, and established my feet upon the rock of Christ that is higher than we, I have been going on from joy to joy, a bird of liberty, singing the praises of my, Redeemer. And so, having been thus saved and thus healed, I would call you who are in that terrible bondage to seek relief of the same great Physician, and to draw your medicine from the same infallible spring. What are we doing with ourselves ? What 170 Sam Small's Great Temperance Sermon are we doing with these bodies of ours ? " What, know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own?" Fellow-men, fellow- men, let me bring you to the contemplation of the fact that these bodies of ours are the temples of the Holy Ghost, and that they were fashioned after the architecture of his great brains, by the great Being who is the architect of the universe. These bodies he made of the dust of the earth, and these bones of his rock ; he made us with veins and with arteries, and filled them with the blood from the seas of his providence ; he gave us breath, which, like the wind, cometh and goeth and scat- tereth ; which cometh we know not whence, goeth we know not where ; he gave us sight for all the beauties and the grandeurs of the world, and inflamed it with fire from the centre of his storehouse of fire; he gave us thoughts, like the clouds, for, like them, they move, and as they play in the sunlight of righteous- ness, are transformed into beauty, whether it be the beauty of the dawn, presaging what is to come, or the beauty of the sunset, presaging the glorious death toward which we tend. And we can make these minds of ours reflect the light of heaven, or they can have the light of heaven withdrawn, and be dark and dismal and foreboding as the storm-clouds, from which the mutterings of heaven come and roll the thunders of agony that spread destruction and death upon us. And in these temples he has placed the Holy Ghost in spirit for us, and we are its custodians, the priests of these Deliverance from Bondage. 171 temples ; and when we degrade and defile them, we are degrading and defiling the architecture of God and his chosen resting-place in us. 0, what a touching instance it was when the favorite son of TertuUian died ! His companions were bearing his corpse to the cemetery upon their shoulders, and as they went along, occupied with their thoughts of sorrow and grief, they stumbled by the way, when the grief -stricken father, noticing it, called out to them : " Young men, beware how you walk ; you bear upon your shoulders the temple of the Holy Ghost." So with us. We go about bearing with us the temple of the Holy Ghost, and we are recreant to our own creation, recreant to our own destiny, recreant to the great God who fashioned us, recreant to the great God who made us his temples, when we defile these bodies of ours, and ruin them with the licenses of our baser natures and our depraved appetites. One time Diogenes saw a young man going to a place of revelrj'', where drinking was the custom, and from which men who went in sober and rational beings emerged besotted, and not knowing their way. He seized upon the young man, carried him to his friends, and informed them that he had rescued their precious boy from a great and awful danger. So it would be well if we had friends who would thus rescue us. But there are times when friends, as I told you, can have no influence, and no Diogenes, however wise, however honest, however mindful of his neighbor, could restrain us from going into these places. 172 Sam Small's Great TEMrERANCE Sermon But how many Diogeneses it would take to seize upon those that night after night and day after day are going into these places of danger and ultimate death in the city of Toronto ! O, let us seek to save our- selves through the only influence, the only medica- ment, and the only Physician that this universe affords us ! What is intemperance doing ? It is not necessary to marshal here before you the figures ; you can see it all about you. Young man, you know that you started in your intemperate habits just as I did. You know what influences have led you ; you know what ambitions you thought you could cultivate by listening to them ; you know how you have run out and gone into these places with like ideas of strength and ability to control yourselves just as I had. And now you are buoyant in the consciousness that you think that at any time you can slap on the brakes of your nature, and save yourselves from degradation that you see upon the planes just below you. Beware, beware of that fatal cup. There are fathers, middle-aged ; they know what intemperance will do. They are listening to me to-night, and they started on that road just as I started; but if they have not reached the same length to which I went, they are on the high road to it. They can already know that they are not received where once they were welcome guests; they know that they are passed every day on the streets of Toronto by men who formerly regarded them with esteem and claimed them as friends. They know that avenues were Deliverance from Bondage. 173 once open to them of usefulness, and which are now closed upon them forever on account of their habits, their companionship, and their places of resort. They know that the happiness of their families, once com- plete, is now gone, apparently forever. They know that the blanched cheek of that wife, that the con- stant redness of eye when they enter home, that the fleeing children, are all evidences of the steady growth of the evil ; and they have grown just in proportion as they have gone deeper and deeper into this besotted condition. There are old men here to-night who have led a long life, it seemed, of moderation, and who thought that they were exemplifying the ability of a man to drink and drink and drink, and yet preserve his manhood and his honest position ; but they can see that their excesses are not only sapping the founda- tions of their health ; they can feel that they are untimely gray ; they can feel that they have diseases in them that they would not have had but for their intemperance ; and they can see before them no life that is leading them on and brightening their way as they go. But they are seeing, upon the other hand — and if they are honest with themselves, they will confess it to their souls — that they are losing their powers, and that sooner or later they, too, must sink into the lowest depths of degradation, and be un- timely cut off, and go to hell to everlasting death. Families and individuals — whole communities — prostrated. There is nothing that is so glaring about them as intemperance, which sweeps over them like the storm over a forest, day after day and night 174 Sam Small's Great Temperance Sermon I after night. Thank God that my city of Atlanta has redeemed herself under the white hanner of temperance, with the cross of Christ on it ! Thank God, she will shine as a city set upon a hill, giving a light to the nation ! Nearly twenty-five years ago misguided men in the South fired the first shot upon Fort Sumter that awakened the entire nation, and led to reform, and led to liberties, and led. to the release of slaves from bondage, led to what no man had contemplated as being capable of realization. It marshalled the most impregnable arms of this continent, and that shot reverberated all through civilization. I tell you that whatever were the disasters of war, it struck the shackles from six million slaves; but to-day, in a holier and grander cause, by the approving smile of God, old Georgia has fired a gun upon the Sumters of sin and intemperance that will arouse the whole nation. The army of God in this nation is on the march. And you may listen here ; and if you have not the courage and the Christian zeal, we will come and break down the barriers; we v,'ill pound down the forts of the demon of alcohol, and we will release you from this terrible bondage. Scientists are disputing and debating, when all history and all true science have demonstrated that no curse is greater upon a people than to have the saloons and the dissemination of these deadly com- pounds in the community. These whiskey dealers are outlaws; they are against the law; they are anomalous creatures, and the anarchists of the nine- Deliverance from Bondage. 175 teenth century. If they would disobey and disre- gard the laws in my case, they will do it in yours, and they will do it in the case of every precious son you have got, of every living father you have got, of every devoted husband you have got in this country. Churches meet in conventions, meet in conferences, meet in assemblies, meet in synods, and pass resolu- tions on the subject of temperance, and yet the very ministers, it seems, in places, are unwilling to enforce the declarations and laws of their own Churches against their own members, notwithstanding that ministers of the Gospel have been disrobed through its influences, and churches have been debauched. Is there anything needed to arouse the humanity and the patriotism of you people to the iniquities that are being thus committed in your midst, and the sad havoc that is being made in your homes ? If I to-night were to call around me a staff of bailiffs and furnish them with subpoenas, I could send them into the streets, and into the slums of this city, and from the palaces of your richest down to the humblest dwellings of your poorest, and examine the widows and the orphans that whiskey has made, and array them here by the hundreds, with their weeping eyes, with their dismal recollections, with their mourning, with their hearts crushed and bleeding, and they would say to you, "If you are meij, in the name of God and humanity, rise in your might and drive this monster out before he destroys and ruins your homes too." If we but heed these witnesses, and are true to ourselves, to our children, to humanity, and to God, m» 176 Sam Small's Great Temperance Sermon we can destroy this flaming monster, and soon be able to sing out to men and angels that our people are redeemed, regenerated, and disenthralled from the fatal powers of the dragon. Then we will be blessed by our Father in heaven with a posterity given to paths of righteousness and lives of Christian en- deavor and achievement. Our sons shall grow up in strength and honor, and wear the Christian armor. Their feet will be s\od with the preparation of the Gospel, their loins be girded about with truth, their bodies guarded by the breast-plate of faith, their shield be righteous- ness, their manly, sun-lit brows be crowned with the helmet of salvation, and their good right arras will wield the trenchant, victorious sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God. Our daughters will grow up in beauty and comeli- ness of Christian graces. Their feet will be sandaled with truth and faith ; their limbs be clothed with robes of purity, on which, in silver and gold and prismatic hues, will be embroidered the record of their good deeds ; their waists will be encircled with the golden girdle of strengthening prayer ; their bosoms shielded by the bodice of innocence covering the virtuous heart, on which burn vestal fires of love ; from their shoulders will drop the mantle of humility, and their hands mW dispense the golden showers of charity upon the one side and of mercy upon the other ; their throats will be wrapped with the pearls of precious -^ ords ; their lips will give forth sweet songs of praise to God ; their eyes will ever turn in trust to the great white throne, whose radiance Deliverance from Bondage. 177 )meli- daled with and their the )soms the ove ; lility, 3rs of 1 the earls weet rn in iance will glint in the folds of their tresses, and presage the crown of immortal life that shall press their brows in Paradise. And these two shall dwell in the splendors and happiness of the palace of purity, that rears its walls and dome around and over every true and consecrated Christian heart. They will go up to it over the broad white flag-stones of perfect desires; they^ will climb up its great steps of geometrically and syste- matically fashioned purposes and ambitions ; they will pass between the grand columns of strength and wisdom that stand before the Gate Beautiful, with its golden welcome, " All that is pure may enter in ; " and in the hall of consecration they will put on the insignia of their heaven-given prerogatives, and pass on into the rotund^, of a righteous life, and up into the throne-seats of honor in the East. From that exalted place they may contemplate with r&pture the idealized tableaux of the virtues of their lives. Here the picture of Truth — a fair maiden drawing from her exhaustless well the waters of sincerity that are poured out for the ennobling and refreshing of all people, and over her the glittering legend: 'Magna est Veritas et prevalehit.'' There is the tableau of Faith, clinging to the rock-rooted cross that towers heavenward, and around which the wild waves of worldliness, woe, and passion surge unavailing, their highest spray not touching even the hem of her gar- ments. Yonder is seen the fair form of Virtue, her beau- tif il feet standing amid the treasures of the upturned cornucopia of fortune, her hands folded in peace- 12 178 Sam Small's Great Temperance Sermon fulness across her lovely bosom, and her sfolden hair blown into a halo about her head by the breezes that are born in the hills of happiness. Here again is figured the faultless goddess of Justice, standing upon the uppermost pole of the earth, holding the scales of God's earthly impartiality, and weighing out the dues of men in harmony with eternal truth. Over her the constellations gather and glitter in the edict of Jehovah : " Fiat justitia, mat coslum ! " There again is the sweet face of Charity, swift-paced to carry succor and life to the hovel of the poor, the cots of the sick and cells of the wretched. And next corses the picture of gentle and tender-hearted Mercy, soothing the cares, relieving the burdens, reconciling the hearts, and ministering to the redem- tion of all the souls of God's children. And here is the grand portrait of the strong, manly apostle of Temperance, the embodiment of health, vigor, energy, and philanthropy; a giant in all good works, and approved servant of heaven. Over in the West is the grand horologe of Time, counting out the moments of life in a monotone paean of patience and labor, while its great pendulum swinjjs through an arc that reaches from the cradle to the tomb. In the centre is the Christian's altar, on which praises and prayers turn to worshipping incense and pervade the place with heavenly odors. Up in the high centre of the vast dome blazes the Sun of Righteousness, that lightens forever the splen- did scene. Looking into it, the eye of faith, strength- ened like the young eaglet's, can discern the trans- ON en hair zes that again is tending ing the eighing 1 truth, r in the dum ! " :t-paced oor, the I. And hearted mrdens, redem- here is •ostle of energy, ks, and f Time, onotone ndulum B cradle I which nse and Deliverance from Bondage. 179 figured cross of Calvary, pointing the soul to its home and rest around the throne of God in heaven. Who are these that thus reign and rejoice ? They are the Prince Christian, and Princess Christiana of the kingdom of God on earth. They are the heirs apparent to everlasting life in the imperishable pos- sessions of the King of kings ! God direct us with his wisdom to so live and use our lives as to endow our children with these titles and these palaces of purity on earth— these inheritances of the meek, and pure, and temperate, and dutiful, in " the city whose builder and maker is God !" I' izes the e splen- .rength- j trans- \'i ■^^m ^'i CANADIAN COPYRIGHT EDITION. SWEET CICELY; Or, JOSIAH ALLEN AS A POLITICIAN. A New Temperance Story BY JOSIAH ALLEN'S WIFE. A Work of Thrilling Interest! Over 100 Illustrations. Beautifully Bound. PRICE, SQUARE 12mo, ICLOTH, EX^^RA, $2.00. TRADE SUPPLIED. SOME OPINIONS OF "JOSIAH ALLEN'S WIFE." The Heratd, New York : " Her fun is not far fetched hut easy and spontaneous. She is now witty, now pathetic, yet ever strikingly original." The Home Journal, New York : " She is one of the most original humorists of the day." The New Era, Lancaster, Pa. : "Undouhtedly one of the trui it humorists. Nothing short of a cast-iron man can resist the exquisite, droll and contageous mirth of her writings." The Woman' IS Journal, Boston: "The keen sarcasm, cheerful wit and cogent arguments of her books have convinced thousands of the ' folly of their ways,' for wit can pierce where grave counsel fails. " /«/cr-Ocertn, Chicago, says : "Seldom has a writer combined such effective argument with keener liumor and more genuine pathos. There are hundreds of politicians who will be benefited, and see themselves as others see them, if they will read the chapters upon Josiah when the Senatorial bee got to buzzing in his bonnet, and when he concluded to expend the Entire year's crop of apples in buying votes enough to send him to Washington. His ideas of 'subsidies,' and ' free trade,' and 'woman's rights,' are as good specimens rf genuine humor as can be found iu the language." MISS FRANCES E. VVILLARD says : ** Modern fiction has not furnished a more thoroughly individual character than •Josiah Allen's Wife.' She will be remembered, honored, laughed and cried over when the purely 'artistic,' novelist and his heroine have passed into oblivion, and for this reason : Josiah Allen's U'ife is a • Creature not too bright or good For human nature's daily food.' She is a womnn, wit, philanthropist, and statesman all in one, and I ' prophesy' that Sweet Cicely's gentlet firm hand shall jead Josiah Allen's Wife onwara into hterary immortality." TORONTO: WILLIAM BRIGGS, 78 & 80 King Street East. a V. OQATUf 8 Bleury St, Montreal, Qu«. 8. f. B7ISTI8, Halite^ N.8 Shall We, or Shall We Not? A SERIES OF FITE DISCOURSES BY THE REV. HUGH JOHNSTON, M.A., B.D. SUBJECTS DISCUSSED : '.WINE'-* CARDS '-'THE DANCE '-'THE THEATIIE' •WHAT SHALL WE DO?' Paper, 160 pp., 25 Cents. ** Full of cogent argument and stirring and pointed appeal." — Daily Examiner, I'eterboro'. "Thoughtfully and reasonably written." — The Week. " The use of intoxicating liquors, card playing, dancing and theatre-going are discussed in these discourses in a practical, pointed, persuasive manner. They take strong ground on the safe side, which is the right side, and maintain it by strong arg,ument8." — Southern Christian Advocate. WILLIAM BRIGGS, 78 & 80 KING ST. EAST, TORONTO, C. W. COATES, Montreal, Qtn. S. F. HUESTIS, Halitax, N.S. C. .• ot? K BATES' appeal. " ing and )ractical, on the y strong RONTO, s. •AX, N.S. Every Young Ian Should Read TMs Book. ELEMENTS NECESSARY TO THK FORMATION OF BUSINESS CHARACTER. By JOHN MAODONALD, Esq., Toronto. PAfiENTS SHOULD PRESSNT IT TO THEIR SONS. IQmo. Cloth, 33 Cents. "The counsels of a successful merchant as to the elements of mercantile success cannot fail to be of great value to all who would attain such success. Mr. Macdonald estimates the number of busi- ness failures at 97^ per cent., and the number of successful men at only 2i per cent. But he thinks that the proportion might readily be reversed, and the failures reduced to 2^ per cent., while the suc- cesses should reach 97^ per cent. To show the means by which this may be accomplished is the purpose of this book. It is freighted with wise counsels, expressed in terse and vigorous language." — Methodist MaycrJne, July. " This book cannot fail to benefit every young man who is wise enough to make its precepts his." — The Week. "It is printed in handsome style, and contains much good advice." — Daily Witness. " Mr. Macdonald combines rare business capacity with con^'ider- able literary ability: . . . Is an extremely neat little volume, the circulation of which, in the mercantile community, especially among young men, cannot but be fruitful of good. The elements described are Honesty, Truth, Temperance, Energy, Thoroughness, and Diligence." — Montreal Gazette. "It is evidently the fruit of close thinking, wide observation, and practical experience." — Southern Christian Advocate. WILLIAM BBiaaS, FxLl3lisli@r, 78 AND 80 King Street East, TORONTO. C, \y. COATES, Montreal, Que. S. P. HUESTIS, Halifax, N.S. 5y Rev. Hugl Johnston, M.A., B.D. TOWARD THE SUNRISE: BEING SKETCHES OF TRAVEL IN EUROPE AND THE EAST. To which is added a Memorial Sketch of the REV. WM. MORLEY PUNSHON, D.D., LL.D. 12ino, Cloth. Illustrated. 469 pp. $1.20. The Practical Test of CMstianity : BEING THE SIXTH ANNUAL SERMON BEFORE THE THEOLOGICAL UNION OF VICTORIA COLLEGE. Paper Covers, 20 cents. " Daily Strengtli for Daily Liviiig. TIIIRTY SERMONS ON OLD TESTAMENT THEMES. )) WITH AN APPENDIX ON " Abrahani's Mistake in the Offering of Isaac* r5Y JOHN CLIFFORD, M.A., LL.B., B.S.C., F.G.S., D.D„ Minuter of Westboume Park Chapel, London. l2mo, Cloth, 459 pp. PRICE $2.26. " Dr. Clifford's " Dailj' Strength for Daily Living," is a volume of admirable dis- courses. They are fresh, vigorous, original, suggestive; the style is singularly exquisite, the thoughts striking and forcibly put, the truths vital and nutritive, and the themes in due relation to daily human life."— Hugh Jounston, M.A., B.D. WM. BRIGGS, 78 & 80 King St. East, Toronto. - C. vr. COAXES, Montreal, aue, 8. F. HIJE8TIS, Hnllfax, N.8, ;E: [i.D. ll union ing. !l D.D„ irable dia- singularly nutritive, a.A., B.D. JBTt N.St REV. J. CYNDDYLA N JONES. THE WELSH PULPIT OP TO-DAY. Edited by Rev. J. Ctnddylan Jone^, Author cif " Studiet in John," *' Studiea in Acts," and " Studie* in Matthew," Small octavo, cloth, 496 pages. $2.00. This is a much larger book than " Studies in John " or " Acts," and sells at only lii.OO. The English price of the book is $2.65. ** These are good sermons, some are very good, and in our judgment, one of the best is the timely discourse by the accomplished editor on the ' Life of Jesus,' domestic, social, industiial, and religious. . . . Welsh ministers have a high reputation for preaching amongst their English brethren, and this first series of Welsh sermons shows that it is well merited." — Methodist Recorder, England, *' The Welsh pulpit has always been a power— and perhaps it has never shown more decided evidences of power than at the present. Religion in Wales is a reality. The people not only give it the first place, but their action is not an affectation. Among such a people the pulpit ought to have an inspiration wliich would set it on Arc. 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