480. A Passion for Souls

A Passion for Souls

Rom_9:3 : ’93I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh.’94

A tough passage, indeed, for those who take Paul literally. When some of the old theologians declared that they were willing to be damned for the glory of God, they said what no one believed. Paul did not in the text mean he was willing to die forever to save his relatives. He used hyperbole, and when he declared, ’93I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh,’94 he meant in the most vehement of all possible ways to declare his anxiety for the salvation of his relatives and friends. It was a passion for souls. Not more than one Christian out of thousands of Christians feels it.

All-absorbing desire for the betterment of the physical and mental condition of the world is very common. It would take more of a mathematician than I ever can be to calculate how many are possessed by an anxiety that sometimes will not let them sleep nights, planning for the efficiency of hospitals where the sick and wounded of body are treated, and for eye and ear infirmaries, and for dispensaries and retreats where the poorest may have most skilful surgery and helpful treatment. It is beautiful and glorious, this widespread and ever intensifying movement to alleviate and cure physical misfortunes. May God encourage and help the thousands of splendid men and women engaged in that work! But all that is outside of my subject.

In behalf of the immortality of a man, the inner eye, the inner ear, the inner capacity for gladness or distress, how few feel anything like the overwhelming concentration expressed in my text. Rarer than four-leaved clovers, rarer than century plants, rarer than prima donnas, have been those of whom it may be said, ’93They had a passion for souls.’94 You could count on the fingers and thumb of your left hand all the names of those you can recall who in the last, the eighteenth century, were so characterized. All the names of those you could recall in our time as having this passion for souls you can count on the fingers and thumbs of your right and left hands. There are many more such consecrated souls, but they are scattered so widely you do not know them. Thoroughly Christian people by the millions there are today, but how few people do you know who are utterly oblivious to everything in this world except the redemption of souls? Paul had it when he wrote my text, and the time will come when the majority of Christians will have it, if this world is ever to be lifted out of the slough in which it has been sinking and floundering for nineteen centuries. And the betterment had better begin with ourselves. When a committee of the ’93Society of Friends’94 called upon a member to reprimand him for breaking some small rule of the society, the member replied: ’93I had a dream in which all the Friends had assembled to plan some way to have our meeting-house cleaned, for it was very filthy. Many propositions were made, but no conclusion was reached until one of the members arose and said, ’91Friends, I think if each one would take a broom and sweep immediately around his own seat, the meetinghouse would be clean.’92’93 So let the work of spiritual improvement begin around our own souls.

Some one whispers: ’93Will you please name some of the persons in our times who have this passion for souls?’94 Oh, no! That would be invidious and imprudent, and the mere mentioning of the names of such persons might cause in them spiritual pride, and then the Lord would have no more use for them. Some one else whispers: ’93Will you not. then, mention among the people of the past some who had this passion for souls?’94 Oh, yes! Samuel Rutherford, the Scotchman of three hundred years ago, his imprisonment at Aberdeen for his religious zeal, and the public burning of his book, Lex Rex, in Edinburgh, and his unjust arraignment for high treason, and other persecutions purifying and sanctifying him, so that his works, entitled Trial and Triumph of Faith and Christ Dying and Drawing Sinners to Himself, and, above all, his two hundred and fifteen unparalleled letters, showed that he had the passion for souls. Richard Baxter, whose Paraphrase of the New Testament caused him to be dragged before Lord Jeffries, who howled at him as ’93a rascal’94 and ’93sniveling Presbyterian,’94 and imprisoned him for two years’97Baxter, writing one hundred and sixty-eight religious books, his Call to the Unconverted bringing uncounted thousands into the pardon of the Gospel, and his Saints’92 Everlasting Rest opening heaven to a host innumerable. Thomas ‘e0 Kempis, writing his Imitation of Christ for all ages. Harlan Page, Robert McCheyne, Nettleton, Finney, and more whom I might mention, the characteristic of whose lives was an overtowering passion for souls. A. B. Earl, the Baptist evangelist, had it. I. S. Inskip, the Methodist evangelist, had it. Jacob Knapp had it. Dr. Bacchus, President of Hamilton College, had it, and when told he had only half an hour to live, said, ’93Is that so? Then take me out of my bed and place me upon my knees, and let me spend that time in calling on God for the salvation of the world.’94 And so he died upon his knees. Then there have been others whose names have been known only in their own family or neighborhood, and here and there you think of one. What unction they had in prayer! What power they had in exhortation! If they walked into a home every member of it felt a holy thrill, and if they walked into a prayer-meeting the dulness and stolidity instantly vanished. One of them would wake up a whole church. One of them would sometimes electrify a whole city.

But the most wonderful one of that characterization the world ever saw or heard or felt was a Peasant in the Far East, wearing a plain blouse like an inverted wheat sack, with three openings: one for the neck, and the other two for the arms. His father a wheelwright and house-builder, and given to various carpentry. His mother at first under suspicion because of the circumstances of his nativity, and he chased by a Herodic mania out of his native land to live a while under the shadows of the Sphinx and Pyramid of Gizeh, afterward confounding the LL.D.’92s of Jerusalem, then stopping the paroxysm of tempest and of madman. His path strewn with slain dropsies and catalepsies and ophthalmias, transfigured on one mountain, preaching on another mountain, dying on another mountain, and ascending from another mountain’97the greatest, the loveliest, the mightiest, the kindest, the most self-sacrificing, most beautiful Being whose feet ever touched the earth. Tell us, ye deserts that heard our Saviour’92s prayer; tell us, ye seas that drenched him with your surf; tell us, ye multitudes who heard him preach on deck, on beach, on hillside; tell us, Golgotha, that heard the stroke of the hammer on the spikeheads, and the dying groan in that midnight that dropped on mid-noon, did any one like Jesus have this passion for souls?

But breaking right in upon me is the question, How can we get something of this Pauline and Christly longing for saved immortalities? I answer: By better appreciating the prolongation of the soul’92s existence compared with everything physical and material. How I hope that surgeon will successfully remove the cataract from that man’92s eye! It is such a sad thing to be blind. Let us pray while the doctor is busy with the delicate operation. But for how long a time will he be able to give his patient eyesight? Well, if the patient be forty years of age, he will add to his happiness perhaps fifty years of eyesight, and that will bring the man to ninety years, and it is not probable that he will live longer than that, or that he will live so long. But what is good eyesight for fifty years more as compared with clear vision for the soul a billion of centuries? I hope the effort to drive back the typhoid fever from yonder home will be successful. God help the doctors! We will wait in great anxiety until the fires of that fever are extinguished, and when the man rises from his pillow and walks out, with what heartiness we will welcome him into the fresh air and the church and business circles. He is thirty years of age, and if he shall live sixty years more, that will make him ninety. But what are sixty years more of earthly vigor compared with the soul’92s health for a quadrillion millenniums’97a millennium, as you know, a thousand years? This world, since fitted up for man’92s residence, has existed about six thousand years. How much longer will it exist? We will suppose it shall last as much longer, which is very doubtful. That will make its existence twelve thousand years. But what are twelve thousand years compared with the eternity preceding those years and the eternity following them? Time, as compared to eternity, like the drop of the night dew shaken from the top of a grass-blade by the cow’92s hoof on its way afield this morning, as compared with Mediterranean and Arabian and Atlantic and Pacific watery dominions.

I see the author of my text seated in the house, of Gaius, who entertained him at Corinth (not far from the overhanging fortress of Acro-Corinthus) and meditating on the longevity of the soul, and getting more and more agitated about its value and the awful risk some of his kindred were running concerning it, and he writes this letter containing the text, which Chrysostom admired so much he had it read to him twice a week, and, among other things, he says those daring and startling words of my text: ’93I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh.’94

Another way to get something of the Pauline longing for redeemed immortalities is by examining the vast machinery arranged to save this inner and spiritual nature. That machinery started to revolve on the edge of the Garden of Eden, just after the cyclone of sin prostrated its sycamores and tamarisks and willows, and will not cease to revolve until the last soul of earth shall get rid of its last sin and enter the heavenly Eden. On that stupendous machinery for soul-saving, the patriarch put his hand and prophet his hand and evangelist his hand and apostle his hand and Christ his hand, and almost every hand that touched it became a crushed hand. It was the most expensive machinery ever constructed. It cost more to start it, and has cost and will cost more to keep it running than all the wheels that ever made revolution on this planet. That machinery turned not by ordinary motive power, but by force of tears and blood. To connect its bands of influence, made out of human and Christly nerves, with all parts of the earth, millions of good men and women are now at work and will be at work until every wilderness shall become a garden, and every tear of grief shall be a tear of joy, and the sword of divine victory shall give the wound to the old dragon that shall send him howling to the pit, the iron gate clanging against him, never again to open. All that, and infinitely more, to save the soul!

Why, it must be a tremendous soul’97tremendous for good, or tremendous for evil; tremendous for happiness, or tremendous for woe. Put on the left side of the largest sheet of paper that ever came from paper-mill a single unit, the figure I, and how many ciphers would you have to add to the right of that figure to express the soul’92s value, each cipher adding tenfold? Working into that scheme of the soul’92s redemption, how many angels of God, descending and ascending! How many storms swooping on Lake Galilee! How many earthquakes opening dungeons and striking cataclysms through mountains, from top to base! What noonday sun was put on retreat! What Omnipotence lifted, and what Godhead was put to torture! All that for the soul! No wonder that Paul, though possessing great equipoise of temperament, when he thought what his friends and kindred were risking concerning their souls, flung aside all his ordinary modes of speech, argument and apt simile and bold metaphor and learned allusion, as unfit to express how he felt, and seizing upon the appalling hyperbolism of my text, cries out: ’93I could wish myself accursed;’94 that is, struck of the thunderbolts of the Omnipotent God, sunk to unfathomed depths, chained into servitude to Abaddon, and thrust into furnaces whose fires shall never burn out, if only those whom I love might now and forever be saved.

Mind you, Paul does not say, ’93I do wish.’94 He says, ’93I could wish.’94 Even in the agony he felt for others, he did not lose his balance’97’94I could wish myself accursed.’94 I could, but I do not. Only one being that ever lived was literally willing to give up heaven for perdition, and that was the Divine Peasant whom I have already mentioned. He was not only willing to exchange dominions of bliss for dominions of wretchedness, but he did so: for that he forsook heaven witness the stooping star and all those who saw his miracles of mercy, and that he actually entered the gates of the world of perpetual conflagration the Bible distinctly declares. He did not say, with Paul, ’93I could,’94 but he said, ’93I will; I do,’94 and for the souls of men he ’93descended into hell.’94

In these last days of the nineteenth century the temperature in the churches is very low, and most of the piety would spoil if it were not kept on ice; and taking things as they are, ordinary Christians will never reach the point where the outcry of Paul in the text will not seem like extravaganza. The proprieties in most of the churches are so fixed that all a Christian is expected to do on Sunday is to get up a little later in the morning than usual, put on that which is next to his best attire’97not the very best, for that has to be reserved for the levee’97enter the church with stately step, bow his head, or at any rate shut his eyes in prayer time, or close them enough to look sleepy, turn toward the pulpit with holy dullness while the preacher speaks, put a five-cent piece, or if the times be hard, a one-cent piece, on the collection platter, kind of shoving it down under the other coin so that it might be, for all that the usher knows, a five-dollar gold piece, and then, after the benediction, go quietly home to the biggest repast of all the week. That is all the majority of Christians are doing for the rectification of this planet, and they will do no more than that until, at the close of life, the pastor opens a black book at the head of their casket and reads, ’93Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord: they rest from their labors and their works do follow them.’94 The sense of the ludicrous is so thoroughly developed in me that when I hear these Scripture words read at the obsequies of one of the religious do-nothings in the churches it is too much for my gravity. ’93Their works do follow them.’94 What works? And in what direction do they follow them’97up or down? And do they follow on foot or on the wing? And how long will they follow before the catch up? More appropriate funeral text for all such religious dead-beats would be the words in Mat_25:8 : ’93Our lamps are gone out.’94 One would think that such Christians would show at least under whose banner they are enlisted. In one of the Napoleonic wars a woman, Jeannette by name, took her position with the troops and shouldered a broomstick. The colonel said, ’93Jeannette, why do you take such a useless weapon into the ranks?’94 ’93Well,’94 she said, ’93I can show at least which side I am on.’94

Now, the object of this sermon is to stir at least one-fourth of you to an ambition for that which my text presents in blazing vocabulary, namely, a passion for souls. To prove that it is possible to have much of that spirit, I bring the consecration of eleven thousand eight hundred and thirty-nine foreign missionaries. All English and American merchants leave Bombay, Calcutta, Amoy, and Pekin as soon as they make their fortunes. Why? Because no European or American in his senses would stay in that climate after monetary inducements have ceased. Now, the missionaries there are put down on the barest necessities, and most of them do not lay up one dollar in twenty years. Why, then, do they stay in those lands of intolerable heat and cobras and raging fevers, the thermometer sometimes playing at one hundred and thirty and one hundred and forty degrees of oppressiveness, twelve thousand miles from home, because of the unhealthy climate and the prevailing immoralities of those regions compelled to send their children to England or Scotland or America, probably never to see them again? O Blessed Christ! Can it be anything but a passion for souls? It is easy to understand all this frequent depreciation of foreign missionaries, when you know that they are all opposed to the opium traffic, and that interferes with commerce; and then the missionaries are moral, and that is an offense to many of the merchants’97not all of them, but many of them’97who, absent from all home restraint, are so immoral that we can make only faint allusion to the monstrosity of their abominations. Oh, I would like to be at the gate of heaven when those missionaries go in, to see how they will have the pick of coronets and thrones and mansions on the best streets of heaven. We who have had easy pulpits and loving congregations, entering heaven, will, in my opinion, have to take our turn and wait for the Christian workers who, amid physical sufferings and mental privation and environment of squalor, have done their work; and on the principle that in proportion as one has been self-sacrificing and suffering for Christ’92s sake on earth will be their celestial preferment.

Who is that young woman on the worst street in Washington, New York, or London, Bible in hand, and a little package in which are small vials of medicines, and another bundle in which are biscuits? How dare she risk herself among those ’93roughs,’94 and where is she going? She is one of the queens of heaven, hunting up the sick and hungry, and before night she will have read Christ’92s ’93Let not your heart be troubled’94 in eight or ten places, and counted out from those vials the right number of drops to ease pain, and given food to a family that would otherwise have had nothing to eat today, and taken the measure of a dead child that she may prepare for it a shroud, her every act of kindness for the body accompanied with a benediction for the soul. You see nothing but the filthy street along which she walks and the rickety stairs up which she climbs, but she is accompanied by an unseen cohort of angels with drawn swords to defend her, and with garlands twisted for her victories, all up and down the tenement-house districts. There was not so much excitement when Anne Boleyn, on her way to her coronation, found the Thames stirred by fifty gilded barges, with brilliant flags, in which hung small bells, rung by each motion of the wind, noblemen standing in scarlet, and wharf spread with cloth of gold, and all the gateways surmounted by huzzaing admirers, and the streets hung with crimson velvet, and trumpets and cannons sounding the jubilee, and Anne, dressed in surcoat of silver tissue, and brow gleaming with a circlet of rubies, and amid fountains that poured Rhenish wine, passed on to Westminster Hall, and rode in on a caparisoned palfrey, its hoofs clattering the classic floor, and, dismounting, passed into Westminster Abbey, and between the choir and high altar was crowned queen, amid organs and choirs chanting the Te Deums’97I say there was not much in all that glory which dazzles the eyes of history when it is compared with the heavenly reception which that ministering spirit of the back alley shall receive when she goes up to coronation. When she goes in, what welcome on the River of Life, its hanks of pearl lined with splendors seraphic, and in temples of eternal worship, whose music is commanded by swing of arch-angelic sceptre, and before thrones where sit those who have reigned a thousand years, but have just begun their dominion! Poor Anne Boleyn, in three years after that pageant, lost life and throne by one stroke of the headsman; but those who on earth have a divine passion for souls shall never lose their thrones. ’93They shall reign forever and ever.’94

But, after all, the best way to cultivate that divine passion for souls is to work for their salvation. Under God, save one, and you will want right away to save two. Save two, and you will want to save ten. Save ten, and you will want to save twenty. Save twenty, and you will want to save a hundred. Save a hundred, and you will want to save everybody. And what is the use of talking about it, when the place to begin is here, and the time is now? And while you pray I will in one minute tell all there is of it: Full pardon for the worst man on earth, if he will believe in Christ, whose blood can instantly wash away the foulest crimes. Full comfort for the most harrowing distress that ever crushed a human being. At your first moment of belief, a process by which the whole universe of God will turn clear around for your eternal advantage. For the mere asking, if the asking be in earnest, and you throw everything into that asking, complete solace and helpfulness for the few years of this life, and then a wide-open heaven, which you can reach in less time than it takes me to pronounce that imperial word, flashing with all the joy that an Infinite God knows how to bestow’97Heaven!

In this world God never does his best. He can hang on the horizon grander mornings than have ever yet been kindled, and rainbow the sky with richer colors than have ever been arched, and attune the oceans to more majestic doxologies than have ever yet been attuned; but as near as I can tell’97and I speak it reverently’97heaven is the place where God has done his best. He can build no greater joys, lift no mightier splendors, roll no loftier anthems, march no more imposing processions, build no greater palaces, and spread out and interjoin and wave no more transporting magnificence. I think heaven is the best heaven God can construct, and it is all yours for the serious asking. How do you like the offer? Do you really think it is worth accepting? If so, pray for it. Get not up from where you are sitting, nor move one inch from where you are standing, before you get a full title for it, written in the blood of the Son of God, who would have all men come to life present and life everlasting.

If you have been in military life, you know what soldiers call the ’93long roll.’94 All the drums beat it because the enemy is approaching, and all the troops must immediately get into line. What scurrying around the camp and putting of the arms through the straps of the knapsack, and saying ’93Good-by’94 to comrades you may never meet again! Some of you Germans or Frenchmen may have heard that long roll just before Sedan. Some of you Italians may have heard that long roll just before Bergamo. Some of you Northern and Southern men may have heard it just before the battle of the Wilderness. Some may have heard it in Cuba or in the far-off Philippines. You know its stirring and solemn meaning; and so I sound the long roll today. I beat this old Gospel drum that has for centuries been calling thousands to take their places in line for this battle, on one side of which are all the forces beatific and on the other side all the forces demoniac. Hear the long roll-call: ’93Who is on the Lord’92s side?’94 ’93Quit yourselves like men.’94 In solemn column march for God and happiness and heaven. So glad am I that I do not have to ’93wish myself accursed,’94 and throw away my heaven that you may win your heaven, but that we may have a whole convention of heavens’97heaven added to heaven, heaven built on heaven, and while I dwell upon the theme I begin to experience in my own poor self that which I take to be something like a passion for souls. And now unto God the only wise, the only good, the only great, be glory forever! Amen!

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage