The End of Time.
A young man in giving an account of his conversion said, “One Sabbath, after attending divine service, and after the rest of the day spent in awful transgression, I returned home in the evening and joined the family, to whom my sister was reading a tract aloud. Contrary to my usual practice, I remained to hear it, and, with my sin fresh in remembrance, I listened with deep concern to its awful truths. It was entitled ‘The end of Time.’ The passages which particularly struck me were these:— ‘The end of time! Then shall the sinner’s heart give up its last hope. Men are completely miserable before death; indeed the vilest men are the most merry; but it will not be always so—their joy shall be turned into heaviness. Imagine the Judge upon the throne calling you to answer these enquiries at His bar, ‘How have you spent the many Sabbaths I have afforded? Did you improve your time well?’ Time shall end! How valuable then while it lasts, particularly to the unprepared! Every hour you have is a merciful respite. Go forth and meet your offended Sovereign! Seek Him while He may be found; call on Him while He is near. Go in the name of Jesus, plead His righteousness—His blood—His death—His intercession, and cry, God be merciful to me a sinner!’ The young man read the tract, and prayed over it. The Lord was pleased to open the eyes of his understanding, and to begin a good work in him.
The Last State Worse than the First.
A society on infidels were in the practice of meeting together on Sabbath mornings, to ridicule religion, and to encourage each other in all manner of wickedness. At length they proceeded so far, as to meet, by previous arrangement, to burn their Bibles! They had lately initiated a young man into their awful mysteries, who had been brought up under great religious advantages, and seemed to promise well; but on that occasion he proceeded the length of his companions, threw his Bible into the flames, and promised with them never to go into a place of religious worship again. He was soon afterwards taken ill. He was visited by a serious man, who found him in the agonies of a distressed mind. He spoke to him of his past ways. The poor creature said, “It all did well enough while in health, and while I could keep off the thoughts of death”; but when the Redeemer was mentioned to him, he hastily exclaimed, “What’s the use of talking to me about mercy?” When urged to look to Christ, he said, “I tell you it’s of no use now; ’tis too late, ’tis too late. Once I could pray, but now I can’t.” He frequently repeated, “I cannot pray; I will not pray.” He shortly afterwards expired, uttering the most dreadful imprecations against some of his companions in iniquity who came to see him, and now and then saying, “My Bible! Oh, the Bible!”
Dr. John Duncan’s Love of Holiness.
By REV. A. MOODY STUART.
THE unalterable and absolutely beautiful Law of God was his great root—principle; it was the object of his enthusiastic and boundless admiration. Antinomianism was the object of his dread, loathing, and hatred; he marked its subtle approaches with a wakeful jealousy, and he met it with an intense enmity when he discovered it seducing himself, or stealing upon his friends unsuspected by themselves or by others. He was jealous of part of the present lay preaching, as tinged with a less common form of error, which he characterised as an “Arminian antinomianism.” So also was he afraid of mere comfort. “Unmixed joy, that is not for earth, that has never been on the earth since Adam fell, unless, perhaps, in the Man of Sorrows, after His resurrection, when the load was off. Purifying work is sorrowful work: sorrow at the thought of being impure, yet joy at the thought of coming purity.”
His love of holiness was brought out further in his strong views of conscience. “If you address children,” he said, “you will find that what lays hold on them is everything that appeals to the conscience.” In speaking of men whose views of redemption were not very clear, but who were deeply conscientious, he said, “I can scarcely think that a man will perish who has a tender conscious.”
He was humbler than other men because his perception of holiness was clearer and his love of holiness more intense, and because there was no child of God on earth whom he looked on as so far from having attained it as himself. He used to say, “It’s best not to fall, but if you fall be sure to rise again; ‘a just man falleth seven times and riseth again’; ‘These things write we unto you that ye sin not; and if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father.'”
No man oftener described, or seemed to know so thoroughly, the conflict between the old man and the new in the child of God. A Bible that excluded the child of God from the seventh chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, would have been a strange and dark book to him. He would exclaim with a jubilant voice, “I delight in the law of God after the inward man,” and would add, “But some men have no inner man,” that being peculiar to the believer in Christ. But again the cry, “O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” was wrung out from the depths of a heart in which there was a perpetual war between good and evil. He read the words, “when Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear with Him in glory. Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth; fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, and covetousness, which is idolatry,” and he exclaimed, “What a Head! and what members!”
In answer to the question, “Can the tempting of Satan be distinguished from the seduction of sin?” he started up and replied, “O, yes; I’ve caught him at it, I’ve caught him at it.” But his strength lay in bringing out Paul’s personification of sin. In his preaching you witnessed the noble and inspiring sight, not of a picture of the field of battle, but rather of a portion of the great battlefield between evil and good, between gigantic evil and omnipotent good. The hearer was led into the heart of the conflict, and found himself standing in the great death-battle; in the scene of the last struggle of evil for existence, with all its terrible strength put forth before surrendering its life, and of the believers’ triumphant victory through his Lord Jesus Christ. “Will the carnal mind,” he asked, “lie down and submit to be slaughtered like a lamb? No, it will resist to the very last; it will only yield when grace has conquered it.” It was one of the peculiar and almost inimitable excellences of his preaching, that while he did not refer to his own past experience in the way of narrative, he enacted it over again at the moment, and intertwined it with the thread of a discourse that appeared to contain no personal reference.
But while he knew well that the war between good and evil in the child of God would never cease on earth, he was so jealous of holiness, and so earnest for its cultivation, that he did not care to speak too strongly against the false doctrine of Christian perfectibility in this world. “I have less quarrel,” he said, “with a man holding the false doctrine of perfection; but I would not like to see the man who thinks himself perfect.” He wished all men to press as near perfection as they could; and with his marked dislike to Wesleyan views on most points, and specially disagreeing with them regarding the old and new man in the believer, he would quote with zest their reproach against Calvinism, that “Death is the Genevan purgatory.” The substance of his own creed was, “There’s nobody perfect; that’s the believer’s bed of thorns; that’s the hypocrite’s couch of ease.” Among his last words on his death-bed he said, “Pray for me, pray for pardon, pray for purity.”