THE TRIPLE ASSURANCE

"And it shall be, that whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved." -- Joel 2:32; Acts 11:21; Romans 10:13

There are some truths that God is satisfied with delivering once to the world; but this truth was so profoundly important that He gave it to us three times. It was first spoken by the mouth of the prophet Joel. Then it swept on down through the centuries to the time of Peter and the day of Pentecost; and years afterwards the Apostle Paul, writing to the Romans, and through them to the world, repeats this same truth. "And it shall come to pass that whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved."

I first call your attention to the infinite certainty of this truth. IT SHALL COME TO PASS. Men often say it shall come to pass; but it does not. Even the mightiest of men fall short in their ability and potency, and are not able to bring their mighty sayings to pass. The matchless Hannibal said, "Rome shall be destroyed ;" and he marched a great army from Spain across France, and over the Alps, and down into the plains of Italy, and won some wondrous battles, conquering every general that was brought against him. He brought his soldiers to the very walls of Rome, and sold dwellings and palaces and squares in the city of Rome to the highest bidders in his army. For some reason, however, he did not move against the city itself to take it by siege, but moved out to Capua. Meantime Roman gold bribed his own countrymen at Carthage, and they turned traitors; and in his old age Hannibal was conquered.

George the Third of England said, "It shall come to pass that the Colonies of America shall be taxed without representation ;" and that mighty realm made war on thirteen feeble Colonies skirting the Atlantic coast, and living for the most part in the wilderness and on the frontier in sparsely-settled communities. Yet, after seven long years of war, George the Third had to withdraw from this country the soldiers who had not surrendered, and was compelled to acknowledge to the world his defeat; and he lost the most precious jewels of the English crown.

The mighty Napoleon Bonaparte, one of the mightiest generals who ever went to battle, said, "It shall come to pass that Russia shall be humbled;" and he marshaled the mightiest army he ever headed, and marched into Russia and took Moscow. For some unaccountable reason he tarried that autumn one month around Moscow. The Russians burnt it, that it might not afford him shelter. Then, after the fatal delay, he started to march back to France. But God Almighty sifted down six or eight feet of snow upon him, and those Russian Cossacks followed him like a pack of hungry wolves, pouncing down on his frost-bitten soldiers and dogging them from behind, by day and by night, week after week, until that whole army was cut off, and but a few hundreds got back to France to tell the story of their shame and their defeat.

Napoleon the Third said, "It shall come to pass that Germany shall suffer humiliation ;" and he made war upon Germany, hurled his troops against the Germans, who were all too well prepared to meet him; and in seven short months he lost his crown and kingdom at the battle of Sedan, and the dynasty of Napoleon was cut off forever.

But, beloved, it is not so when God says, "It shall come to pass." He has infinite power to back up His words, and though the heathen rage, and the kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel against the Lord and against His anointed, and all hell lift itself up in malignant opposition, yet God's Word shall stand forever. "It shall come to pass that whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved" to the glory of His own dear Son. O, it is a mighty truth that the sinner wants to lay hold of; that, when God speaks, He has omnipotent power back of His lightest word, and He can make it good, and it shall come to pass without fail. It has never failed during the ages, and never will fail until the last soul is redeemed. "It shall come to pass that whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved."

Second. I want to call your attention to the infinite and impartial opportunity revealed in the text, "Whosoever." I am preaching these nights, you will remember, a "WHOSOEVER" GOSPEL; the delight of my soul, the joy of my life, to preach a "WHOSOEVER" GOSPEL to a sinning world. I would be sorry to be obliged to put any limitations into my sermons, or to preach any limited atonement, or any scrimp mercy, or any small display of love on the part of an infinite God. It would be so unlike God. Everything about Him is infinite, and why not His loving, and why not his plans for the redemption of the world, and why not His love? Why should not all comport with the infinity of Cod's own nature? The fathomless depths, the measureless reach of his infinite, matchless love!

Some people would have you believe, or at least their conduct seems to indicate that they think, that only nice, moral, respectable people can be saved. They will smile on the people that move in the elite circles of life, and run after a man whose wealth is counted by four or five or six ciphers. They will run after them and get them to attend "our" Church. They will tell what nice people they are, and how very refined they are, and they will say they will be a great acquisition to our Church. They will run after them, and they will run past five regiments of common people, and never give them a look, to get one of these rich people into "our Church," into "our set," into "our ecclesiastical swing."

But, beloved, there is nothing like that in God Almighty. He is after man as man, after every son and daughter of Adam, and every member of our fallen race. The vilest creature that crawls, like a worm, in the cesspools of city filth and corruption, is as dear to the heart of God, as the most refined and elegant person that you can find in the upper circles of city life. God is after man as man; and these incidental distinctions, that weigh so much with us, do not count at all with the blessed Lord. Glory be to His Name! He saves moral people; that is, once in a while he does, if they are not too conceited to let him; and he also saves the utterly broken, hopeless, downtrodden, if they will let him. They are a great deal more likely to let him save them than these proud upper circles are; for, from the very bitterness of their lives, they have found that the world can give them little. They look away from this unsatisfactory life up to the infinite realm and to the mansions that fade not away, which they hope to get by and by when they leave their earthly hovels of filth and wretchedness. The very low down. the offscourings of society, are far more likely to be saved than the upper circles; but God would gladly save every one. Glory to His Name!

There are highly respectable people, so respectable that they think they scarcely need to be born again. Indeed, they were so well born the first time, that they do not care anything about it. They go on and talk about their rank, and their ancestry, and the blue blood that flows in their veins; and they forget that their hearts are deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, however well born they may have been. Heaven does not come by natural inheritance. Bless the Lord! If it did, there would be small chance for most of us common folks. Jesus came down and ranked himself with the lowest classes. He came down to pillow His head, for the first time in this world, in a manger. Why, He was born lower down than I was. I was born in a pioneer's log hut in Michigan; yet it was a neat, comfortable house. But Jesus was born in a stable with the beasts of the stall; and so I, born in a hut on the frontier of Michigan, actually had a higher birth than my Lord did; and I do not know many people who have not had. You must remember, too, that the Bible reveals that there were three or four harlots in the ancestry of Jesus. You never heard Jesus boasting about his ancestry, did you? Jesus came to get under the lowest, that in lifting He might lift everything in humanity up.

There are also people who make a great deal of their education, and they are so conceited because they have spent a few years in college, and have learned a smattering of dead languages, and one or two modern ones, that you can hardly get near one of them. They go along through life looking askance at the poor, ignorant classes, for they think they are so low down and sunken in ignorance that they can not be saved. But God does not feel that way. He comes down to touch the poor, to teach the humble, to reach the lowly, to illumine with a heavenly radiance the minds of the most ignorant, and to flash the sunlight of his truth and joy and hope into the darkened souls of the people most densely benighted. O, it was so beautiful of God to look after the poor! It was so gracious in him to call the humble people around Him. It was so grand in Him not to invite the learned members of the Sanhedrin to be His disciples and His followers, but to go down to the Sea of Galilee and pick up some poor fishermen, some people that had never been to school, and did not know much about learning, and knew nothing about the upper walks of life. He came down to them, and said, "Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men;" and they became the grandest heralds of the cross, for the most part, that the world has ever seen.

Then some of us are so proud that we belong to the Caucasian race that we have a kind of despicable contempt for the darker-skinned families of the earth. O, this contemptible pride, this vile pride of petty little creatures, crawling around in the mire and filth of their sin-cursed humanity, and despising some other worm of the dust, because it carries a little different shade on its face!

Three weeks ago Sunday I spoke over in Kentucky to an audience, and there was there a dark-skinned sister who was a graduate of Michigan University, the greatest college in America, that last year turned out a graduating class of seven hundred and thirty-one. Yet that dark-skinned sister, a friend of mine, who heard me preach and got sanctified three weeks ago Sunday, was in a great religious meeting in Lexington a few years ago; and because she sat with some whiter sisters in that great public rink a policeman came and put her out of the building. There probably was not among all the cultured and elite in the city a woman that could have passed an examination with her before a Board of Educators. A Christian woman, a cultured woman, a woman with fine instincts, and fine sentiments, and fine feelings, could not go and sit down in an empty row of seats in a public building because it was not the right place in the house for people of her color. But, beloved, however we may feel about that, God does not have any such feelings. He tells us in the simplest language that "One is our Father in heaven, and all we are brethren;" -- and that "God hath made of one blood all the nations that do dwell upon the face of the earth."

Again, there are people of aristocratic lineage; the people that were born for the upper stations; born to be served by the multitude; born to look down with disdain, as many of them do, upon the common masses. But in the eye of God they are no dearer -- and no nearer, and no more eligible for the favors of His grace and riches of His love, and the inheritance bought by the blood of His Son, than the most common creature that walks the face of the earth. Dives in his palace, and Lazarus lying at his gate in poverty, the dogs licking his sores, and begging his bread, are alike precious to the heart of the living God; and they have a like claim to the inheritance purchased by the blood of His Son. Mary Magdalene had the same chance at grace, though possessed of seven devils, that Nicodemus had, cultured, rich, moral member of the Sanhedrin though he was; and the poor, dying thief on the cross had precisely the same chance to be saved that King Solomon had, sitting upon his throne, and living before the world in matchless splendor and glory. O, that is our God! Unlimited, impartial in His favors of grace, dying for all, and begging every poor, sin-sick, weary, sin-cursed soul to look unto Him and be saved! His words are, and they come down through the ages so sweet to our ear: "Look unto me and be ye saved, all ye ends of the earth, for I am God, and beside Me there is none else." If there is a man that shall ever hear these words of mine, or shall ever read them from the printed page, I want to say to him, that if he feels, in his lost and undone condition, that he belongs to the "ends of the earth," then I tell him that God says, "Look unto Me, and be ye saved all ye ends of the earth." O, this is a blessed salvation! It is an impartial gospel we have to read and to preach. It is a wonderful gospel. I am not surprised that men leave other employments and honor and fame, to go about the world glorifying such a Savior, and preaching such a gospel to a fallen world.

Now, thirdly, observe the means of God's deliverance. "Whosoever shall CALL on the name of the Lord shall be saved." In other words, the choicest blessings of God that ever fall to finite beings are given away for the asking. "Ask and ye shall receive. Seek and ye shall find. Knock and it shall be opened unto you. For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh, findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened." One of God's infinite "shall be's" that come to pass.

Thank God, salvation is not bought! The most of the world is poor, hopelessly poor, even in the richest countries on the globe. In this country, rich as it is, the richest nation in the world, the aggregate property belonging to each individual is about one thousand dollars apiece; and when you remember that thirty-three thousand millionaires own far more than half of the entire country, you can see how little there is left for the rest of us. The great mass of the people, if they had to pay one hundred dollars a piece for salvation, would go to hell from sheer poverty. And if that is so with us, what about India, where fifteen million starved to death in the famine two years ago in their hopeless poverty? What about the millions in India and China, where hundreds of millions always live in unappeased hunger, and do not know what it is, from their cradle to their grave, to have a month's provisions laid up for them beforehand? What about them? What hope would there be for the poverty-stricken, hollow-cheeked, hollow-eyed, submerged class, the mass of this world, if salvation had to be bought? Blessed be God, Jesus bought it, and He turns around and gives it away to whosoever will call upon the name of the Lord. O! what a gospel this is, beloved, isn't it, that I am preaching? And I thank God that I am not making it up either; it is right here. It is in the Book; and I am not going beyond the bounds of my commission when I stand and throw out these words of life and hope to the sinking, drowning, poverty-stricken, sin-cursed multitudes all over the wide globe. It is God's message to their souls, and poverty need not keep them away from God.

I remark once more that this salvation is not earned by good behavior. If man had to earn it by his doings, what would any of us do that had sinned once, even once? If we should never commit another sin, and should live absolutely perfect before God after that one sin was committed, what then? All that after-life of righteousness would not have one particle of effect to obliterate the result of that one sin. That one sin, unatoned for and un-forgiven, would damn a soul, no matter what he did afterwards; and so we could not by any possibility earn salvation. If we could, what would we be doing? Why, we would be performing every conceivable, imaginable kind of worse than Catholic penance. Self-mortification, self-flagellation, and infliction of tortures, to make our peace with God and buy His redemptive favors. I read only this week of a missionary that saw a poor Hindu rolling over and over and over and over along a road in India. He had started away up near the Himalayan Mountains, and was rolling to Ceylon, fifteen hundred miles away; and he had actually rolled eight hundred miles over and over and over, thinking that when he accomplished that absurd and foolish thing he would be saved. Beloved, if we were today thinking that our doings would earn salvation, we would be rolled back to the darkness of heathenism. We would be sleeping on spikes like the Hindu; or we would be hanging ourselves in mid-air; or we would be holding our hands up over our heads with the fist clenched, until the nails grew through the hand and came out on the back side of it, as many of those Hindus have done; or we would be throwing our babes to the crocodiles or wild beasts; or we would be doing some other horrible, senseless, and damnable thing to get peace with God. But God does not tell us to do anything of the kind. O no; we are not to try to buy salvation, and we need not try to earn it, and we need not try to deserve it. All we need to do is to bow before God, and confess our sin, and confess our shame, and call on the name of the Lord.

There is another thing I am grateful for. It is not any particular kind of call, not any particular kind of prayer. It is not a profoundly eloquent prayer that can reach the ear of God. David had poetic genius, and he might have written, and did write, some very beautiful prayers; but they were usually prayers of thanksgiving and praise. But when David was bowed down deep in shame on account of sin, he did not try to compose eloquent prayers; he moaned out from the depths of a conscience-stricken heart, "Heal my soul, O God, for I am sick." That was not a long prayer. Almost any one could pray such a prayer as that.

That poor publican that prayed the prayer that sent him down to his house justified, stood back in an obscure corner of the temple, and in his troubled soul he would not so much as lift up his eyes unto heaven, but smote on his breast, crying, "God be merciful to me a sinner." That is the kind of prayer God will answer. Peter, when he was sinking, cried out in the earnestness of a desperate need, "Lord, save, or I perish." The poor, dying thief on the cross, as he hung in dying agony by the side of the crucified Lord, had more faith than any one perhaps in the world at that time. When they were all giving up hope, he saw something kingly and royal, and more than human, in the dying Jesus; and in faith he sobbed out, "Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom." He got an answer, and before the sun set he was with his Savior in glory. O, what provisions of grace! The Syrophoenician woman, when her soul got desperately in earnest, reduced her prayer to three words, with nothing else about them but the eloquence of earnestness, with nothing to touch God's heart but the plea of helplessness. Her prayer was, "Lord, help me," "Lord, help me." Who can not pray that much of a prayer? and that is all God asks. It is not the length of the prayer, nor the eloquence of the prayer, nor the fine language of the prayer; but it is the sigh of a sin-stricken and broken-hearted soul, pleading for Divine help and grace which is the kind of prayer that opens heaven.

I wish to say a few words here about what is involved in this praying; for there are a great many people who read many eloquent prayers, and they say, "Lord, have mercy on us miserable sinners," and they go right on living their miserable, sinning lives the whole week following. But I want to tell you that such prayers do not go as high as the roof. Let me show you what is involved in this prayer that opens heaven. First, genuine, heartfelt, sincere repentance of sin is involved in it. Repentance is turning away from sin, and giving it up. Repentance is feeling Divine abhorrence for guilt, as God feels toward it. "Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts, and let him return to the Lord, and He will have mercy upon him; and to our God, and He will abundantly pardon." But, beloved, God will not have mercy and will not pardon while a man clings to his unforsaken sins.

That is the trouble with what Godbey calls the "devil's Churches." The preachers do not tell them in straight out-and-out language that they have to forsake sin and walk with God. They smile on their worldliness; they smile on their wretched, wicked customs. They do not preach the religion of one hundred cents to the dollar, and sixteen ounces to the pound, and purity of heart, and holiness of life, and separation from the world. The people are going to Church, reading their liturgies and enjoying themselves, while their paid opera-singers are singing the praises of God for them, because they are too lazy to sing themselves; and they have a sweet, little sermon preached to them; a little, lavender-scented gospel; a little sermonette. And the result is, they are fanned and coddled and patted and flattered, and waited upon, and sent off to hell by a palace-car on the limited express. By the way, I heard a man say that a sermonette was a good thing for a Christianette who was going to a heavenette. But, for my part, I would rather have sermons an hour long, that are red-hot and crammed full of gospel, and have purity in the pulpit and in the pew, and have them all get to heaven together, sweeping through the gates, washed in the blood of the Lamb.

Well, this kind of prayer also involves heart-faith. There is so much of the devil's counterfeit in religion nowadays, and you have to explain every term you use, and get it down to the gospel bedrock of truth. Some people in this city will read in the Catechism that there is a Trinity in the Godhead, just as they read ancient history; and they say, "Yes, we believe that." They believe that just as they believe that Julius Caesar lived. They read in the Catechism that Jesus died for them. "Yes, they believe that," just as they believe that Julius Caesar was stabbed to death in the senate-house, and the one truth does not affect them any more than the other. There is not one thing in it that will shape the heart and move the soul to righteousness.

But the faith that pleases God, the faith implied in my text, is the kind of faith that would take a cursing, swearing, lying Peter, and make him a holy man. It is the kind of faith that would take the persecuting Saul. and transform him into the holy, gentle, Christlike Paul. It is the kind of faith that would take seven devils out of Mary Magdalene, and fill her with the Spirit of Jesus Christ. It is the kind of faith that would take publicans and harlots, and make them fit companions for Jesus Christ, of whom Jesus said, "He is not ashamed to call them brethren." That is the kind of faith -- the faith that does something in the heart and the life. But ninety-nine hundredths of the keepers of the houses of iniquity and sin all over this country are Church members, and they will tell you, "Why, I believe; yes, I believe, I believe." A little intellectual head belief, that never touched the springs of moral action; never lifted them up into the bosom of Jesus; did not bring them to repentance: to the forsaking of sin; to the walking with God; to the dedication of their lives to His service; but leaves them still in the gall of bitterness and the bond of iniquity! Beloved, I am not preaching the devil's counterfeit conversion, or the devil's counterfeit prayers, or any form of the devil's counterfeit religion; but I am preaching the calling upon God for salvation that goes down to the depths of the soul, that brings Christ in, and casts the devil out, and brings victory and joy and hope and heaven to the soul. That is the kind of prayer you want to pray, and that is the kind of prayer that God answers, and he answers with an uttermost salvation.

Now, I come to the last truth of my text. Fourth, notice the kind of deliverance. He delivers from every form of sin that afflicts a child of God, and every form of evil, too. Why, God can bring temporal blessings in answer to prayer as much as is for our good. Deacon Edgerton, of the leading Congregational Church in St. Louis, for many years one of the most beneficent givers when he had money, one day got in a financial strait. He had to raise ten thousand dollars before noon or be bankrupt, and he had done everything, and pulled every string, and gone to every place, and sought every human helper, that he could know of, and could not get help. He hastened over to his pastor, and said: "Pastor, I am at the end of human help, so far as I can see. I must have help before noon, or become a bankrupt. Let us pray. And they knelt down in prayer, and at eleven o'clock, one hour before the ten thousand dollars was needed, a man from whom he never expected anything, brought him ten thousand dollars, and tided him over that crisis

Washington Allston was the first great painter this country ever produced. He went to England and painted some very fine paintings. I have seen one painting of his that they said was sold for ten thousand dollars. But somehow the pictures did not sell well for a time, and he had gone in debt at the stores to support his family, until the merchants had all refused to assist him. He was in awful straits. He was not a Christian. Most of the country at that time was in infidelity; very few Christians comparatively. Only one person in fourteen was a pro-fessed Christian at that time in this country. But he locked himself up one day in despair in his studio, and prayed this prayer: "O God, if there be a God, send some one to buy my pictures, that my wife and children ma'. not be obliged to starve for the want of bread." While he was praying there was a knock at the door, and a servant of Lord Stafford stood there, and he said, "Is your Angel Uriel sold?" "No, sir." "Well, here is a check for two thousand dollars for that picture from Lord Stafford," and the prayer was heard.

These are only some examples of what is occurring all around us. I could name to you people who come to these meetings who depend upon God for daily bread and for every little thing that comes to them; and one lady said: "It is so sweet to trust in God, and to see His wondrous deliverances. I never need a thing but what He brings it, and when the last thing is gone and the last money is gone, God always comes to the rescue." There was Spurgeon who ran an Orphanage, and sometimes they did not know where the breakfast was to come from. One night Spurgeon was telling God all about it. "Lord, what shall become of the dear children? You have put this work on my hands and on my heart, and there the children are, and we want some help." And while Spurgeon was praying that prayer, there was a man walking back and forth in the street, strangely impressed that he ought to go in and give the man in that house some money. He did not understand it; but he went in and gave a large sum of money, several hundred pounds, to Spurgeon, because God would not let him get by that house in the street of London until he did it. O, God has got His hand on things, and the people that learn to pray for the necessities of life get them! Most of us do not. We do not know how; we have not taken a full course in the school of prayer. We are only in the primer, when God wants us to go on into the higher languages of prayer, and into the philosophy of prayer, and into the political economy of prayer, and learn to pray down a mighty blessing from God when we need it. Look at Muller's life of trust. Running an Orphanage in England, and caring for the poor, and without any asking of other people for money, praying seven million dollars into his coffers to feed and educate orphans. A life of prayer and a life of trust! A life baptized with the Holy Spirit, and working wonders for God! Beloved, that is the way the most effective missionary work in the world is being run to day. Hudson Taylor is running a great missionary work in China, and has seven hundred missionaries under him, and he supports them, and he does not advertise it or ask for money; but the money comes, and the seven hundred missionaries have been supported. Well, there is something in prayer, isn't there?

Let us go on. It is a good thing to pray in national troubles. I remember how Washington, when his soldiers could be tracked across the snow at Yorktown by the blood from their bare feet, and he had a country that was in peril, was seen one day or night out in the bushes alone, kneeling in the snow of winter and pleading the wants of his country before God. You remember the darkest hours of the War of the Rebellion, when it seemed more than problematical whether the Nation could live; and you remember a guest was staying over night in the White House. He heard a sound in the night, and he opened his door and listened, and it was Abraham Lincoln kneeling in prayer, and he was praying in the most wondrous way. This guest walked into the room and knelt down by the side of Abraham Lincoln, as he poured out the agony of his soul, and told God he could not carry the burden of the great Nation, and God must help him and save this land to liberty and the cause of truth. O, it was then that the tide turned, and God brought deliverance. It pays to take things, large and small, to God in prayer.

God heals diseases in answer to prayer. This congregation does not need to hear this. You are taught that this is true; but through the reporters' work these words shall go forth, I know not where; and I want to put on record here my faith that the God that worked the miracles of healing in the olden days is living still, and the Jesus of Nazareth, though unseen, is treading the earth. He is coming to rebuke fever, and to drive away infirmities, and to make the physically sick well once more.

Let me give you some illustrations. When I was pastor in Allegheny City, there was a man who was a member of a Methodist Church only two squares from my Church. He was a Christian man; but there came over his lower limbs a creeping paralysis, and he doctored and doctored with many physicians. The last physician attended him six months; and finally he said. "Brother, do not waste another dollar on a physician, for you are hopelessly helpless in your lower limbs for life." About that time a lady was speaking in Christ Methodist Episcopal Church over in Pittsburgh about Divine healing. Some of his friends urged him to go there. He said I have no faith in it; but I will go over there and listen if you will get me there. He went over and listened; and somehow, as he heard the dear sister talk, God's Spirit opened the truth and increased the faith of the poor man, and he went home as best they could get him home that night. He got upstairs by the help of his wife and his crutches, and to his bed. He put his crutches in a corner, and then, lying helpless on the bed, he laid his case before God, and went to sleep. The next morning his wife got up as usual, and went down to get the breakfast; and while she was getting it he woke up, and the moment he awoke he knew he was healed. He leaped from his bed and dressed himself partially, and ran pell-mell down to the kitchen shouting, "Glory to God! Glory to God!" and scared his wife half out of her senses. She oughtn't to have been scared, a good Methodist you know; but she was. That is only one instance, and I could give you any quantity of instances that have come under my notice.

I was holding revival meetings in a town in Northern Ohio, and there was a woman who came to my meetings every day, and I went to her home for a meal to talk with her about her healings. The neighbors said I could believe every word she told me; it was wonderful. She said she had got doubled up with rheumatism until it took her half an hour to go ten rods to call on a neighbor. She could only step about three inches at a step, and she was nearly bent double. She doctored with the most famous physicians of the county, and they had all given her up. One day, when her boy was down town, she took the matter to God in prayer, and was healed. She was walking around the house when the boy came in, and he was so frightened that he got behind the stove, thinking it could not be his mother, and must be the devil or a ghost. "My son, you need not be afraid," she said, "it is your mother; and God has healed her."

A minister filled my pulpit one Sunday morning, and told me this at my dinner table. "I used to preach in Iowa; and I had the consumption, and the doctors had given me up to die, and I was so far gone that I could not speak except in a whisper. One Sunday the whole Church filed by my bedside to take their last look at their pastor, and bid me good-bye. I whispered the good-byes to all of them, expecting to be dead before another Sabbath. After it was all over and I was alone, God put this thought into my heart, "And they saw no man, but Jesus only;" and lying there all helpless, and feeling that I ought not to go away from my ministry and die in the middle of my life, I just looked in faith to Jesus, and rose up from that bed. The next Sunday I preached in my pulpit, and I have been preaching every Sunday since." O, beloved, God can do wonderful things! God can break the spell of physical sickness in answer to prayer.

At a camp-meeting in Kentucky last summer I too-k tea one evening with three ministers. One of them, Rev. E. J. T. -- of M____, told me he was sick twelve years with epilepsy. In his fearful convulsions he had often nearly died; and three times he had been laid out for dead. One Miss L____, of C____, prayed for him, and he was healed in two minutes. This story was corroborated by one of the other ministers.

When I was pastor of Olivet College Church, in Olivet, Michigan, Professor Joseph Esterbrook was a perpetual joy to my soul. He was a man of rare spiritual power, and the sweet odor of his piety made the religious atmosphere fragrant far and near. He was one of the best known Christian men in the State. This was the secret of it. About forty years before, he was dying with a cancer, which the whole medical faculty of Michigan University pronounced incurable. He then sought and obtained of the Lord a genuine baptism with the Holy Ghost. God not only cleansed his heart, but healed his body, and he lived just forty years. He had got near enough to Jesus of Nazareth to touch the hem of His garment, and virtue from the Son of man had gone into both his body and his soul. I have no theories on this subject; but I have seen so many cases divinely healed, that I know the Great Physician of Nazareth still lives; and for me to doubt that he can and does yet heal in answer to prayer would be a sin.

God can break the spell of physical appetites in answer to prayer. There are a great many sinners who say, "I am a drunkard, or I have got the tobacco habit on me; I can not break off." But there is no "can't" about it, if they will link their impotence to God's omnipotence, and let Him do the work for them. I tell you, if the bonds of appetite and passion will not break, when the soul touches God they do break. God can do it; He does do it. God does forgive the sinner, and cleanses his soul.

I have had gamblers converted in my meetings. I have had a lost woman converted in my meeting. It was the first night she heard me preach; and I magnified the grace of God, and said there was enough for everybody, and that no one could exhaust it; and she said to herself, if there is any such Savior and any such salvation as that, I will go and try Jesus tonight. She went to the inquiry room. She was never absent a single night after that during the series of meetings. Some time after, I heard from that same town, and that she had joined the Church, and was as sweet and good as any one. O, God can save everybody who will simply repent, and call and believe! "It shall come to pass that whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved."

A year ago last winter I was preaching in Chicago. I saw people -- hardened sinners -kneel on the stone floor in Chicago jail, and give themselves to Jesus. I saw the most profligate sinners kneel in the missions before the Lord, and seek and obtain salvation. I met two remarkable Christian men who were called the twin Toms, as they had both been rescued from the lowest depths four years before.

One of them, Tom Mackey, of Star of Hope Mission, started in life as a bareback-rider in a circus. Then he became a lightweight pugilist. Then he became a gambler; then a drunkard. Then he went about the country with a bulldog getting up dog-fights. He went lower and lower, till he became what they call in Chicago "a barrel-house bum." He picked up tobacco stubs in the streets, keeping one coat-pocket for wet stubs, and one for dry.

One day in a drunk he tried to kill his wife; and not succeeding, he started down Van Buren Street to drown himself in Lake Michigan. He passed by Pacific Garden Mission, and slept in his drunken stupor while the preacher preached. He waked up in time to hear the wonderful testimonies of the saved men. His heart was touched, and he lifted his hand, covered with a filthy, ragged sleeve, for prayer, and he was saved January 2, 1894. He went home and led his wife to Jesus; and since then they have been at the head of Star of Hope Mission. He has planted six missions, into which hundreds are converted yearly, and it is said that his converts already belt the globe.

The other man, up to forty years of age, was a notorious criminal, who had never earned an honest dollar. He had been an inmate of nearly all the famous prisons of this country and England. He got so low that he swept the walks in front of Chicago saloons for soup to keep from starving; and for three weeks he went to Pacific Garden, and sat up all night in a chair by the fire to keep from freezing. But he got converted in 1894, and now is associate editor of the Ram's Horn, one of the most effective Christian papers in the country.

I heard him speak in the mission, holding his babe in his arms. His wife told me that now he is a beautiful Christian man in his home, and all that he seems to be to the public. He said to me, "When I came to Christ I had nothing but a dirty shirt and a bundle of sins." He is author of the following hymn:

HE TOUCHED ME, AND THUS MADE ME WHOLE

To the feet of my Savior in trembling and fear,
A penitent sinner I came;
He saw, and in mercy he bade me draw near,
All glory and praise to his name!

Chorus:

He touched me and thus made me whole,
Bringing comfort and rest to my soul;
O, glad, happy, all my sins rolled away,
For he touched me and thus made me whole.

2
I knew not the tender compassion and love,
That Jesus my Savior had shown;
Though burdened with grief, his dear hand brought relief
He healed me and called me his own.

3
"My grace is sufficient," I heard his dear voice.
"O, come, and find rest for your soul;
From sin you to save, I my life freely gave,
I died that you might be made whole."

4
O, come my dear brother; he's waiting for you,
Your sin-burdened heart to console;
Your weary head rest on his dear loving breast,
He suffered and died for your soul.

O, the wondrous grace that can take a poor jail-bird, steeped in guilt and lost to shame, and make him a Christian editor, and put such a song in his heart, even praise to our God! The text is true. Blessed be the name of the Lord! "It shall come to pass that whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved."

A physician in Portland says that one Sunday night he was leaning on his hand in his office, studying a very critical case: and while he was in that attitude, just at the eventide, there was a knock at the door, and a fallen girl from a house of sin right under the shadows of a church near by said, "Doctor, come; Nellie is worse." I hastened over to the side of the poor, dying girl, dying from sin; and she looked up into my face, and said, "Doctor, is there no help for me?" "No, Nellie, you are past human help. Shall I not call a minister to come and see you?" "O doctor, do not leave me. I want you to stay with me ;" and just then the organ broke out, and they sang a sweet, familiar hymn in the church near by, known to the girl in childhood. As the sound wafted through the open windows and to the dying girl's ear, she listened, and the tears began to trickle down her cheeks, and she said: "O, would God I was a little innocent girl again at my mother's knee! Doctor, pray for me." He said: "It seemed as if the weight of a thousand worlds came on me; and though I was not a Christian, I got down and told Jesus all about it, and begged Him to see the tears of penitence and have mercy on the sinning girl. A light came into her face, and the peace of God settled upon her countenance, and she expressed her hope. But pretty soon she became delirious, and I knew the

end was near. She thought in her delirium that she was back again at mother's knee, and she was
saying her infant prayer, and she prayed:

"Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep;
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take,
And this I ask for Jesus' sake.

"O Lord, bless papa and mamma and little Nellie. Amen!" He said: "I could almost hear the rustle of the angels' wings as they swept down into that room to carry the girl home, and she passed away with a radiant look of a redeemed child upon her face. But O," he said, "the prayer that brought peace to Nellie, brought an unutterable burden to my own soul; and I went to my office, in all my morality and good standing, and got down on my knees and prayed to Nellie's Savior, and asked Him to be my Savior, too." And he said: "There is a light coming into my heart in answer to that prayer, that is the beginning of the eternal day of heaven." Beloved, it is true. "It shall come to pass that whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved." O, call, CALL. Whatever be your need, in body or soul, call, CALL IN PENITENCE, CALL IN FAITH. Call. CALL, and God will make good his promise, and "it shall come to pass." You shall be saved.