1 Peter 3

1 Peter 3:1

WIFE AND MOTHER. A MODEL IN BOTH (A Sermon to Women) 1 Peter 3:1-2; Judges 5:7. I WANT to speak as plainly today as is our wont in addressing the men. Our first text is addressed to the wives.“Ye wives, be in subjection to your own husbands; that, if any obey not the Word, they also may without the Word be won by the conversation of the wives”. In Peter’s mind the great work of the wife was to win her husband, and he understood that some graces were essential to that accomplishment.Affection is the first grace of a wife! The “subjection” mentioned in the text is not slavery, but the sweet service of love.“Love! of man’s life ’tis a thing apart, ’Tis woman’s whole existence.” And the model wife will make her husband feel that fact.She will set it forth in her tender care for him; in her tidy home; in her personal toilet; and in ten thousand unspeakable, yet eloquent, ways; and when there is opportunity she will whisper it into his ear in modest, yet unmistakable words. A woman, without this grace of affection, is a travesty upon her sex, and it’s a pity that she should ever be called a wife. Her coldness and indifference is a shroud for domestic happiness, and her cross looks and scolding words are nails for its coffin. Dr. Talmage says, “At the siege of Argus, Pyrrhus was killed by the tile off a roof, thrown by a woman; and Abimelech was slain by a stone that a woman threw from the tower of Thebes; and Earl Montfort was destroyed by a rock discharged at him by a woman from the walls of Toulouse. But without any weapon, save that of her cold, cheerless household arrangement, and slothful person, any wife may slay all the attractions of a home circle.”Her first duty is faithfulness.“Ye wives, be in subjection to your own husbands”. New Testament teaching makes no provision for the so-called innocent flirtations in which some wives delight. Our modern amusements are traps set for the feet of many silly women. If Paul and Peter were alive today, and happened upon one of our 19th century dances, they would wonder whether the wives of many had ever heard of this Scripture, “Be in subjection to your own husbands”.Somebody has criticized the old “square dance” by saying that “the only danger from it is that the devil can easily cut the corners off, and make it round,” and it is well known that when he has accomplished that, he has laid the dynamite for loosening the foundations of many a happy home. The average play, put before the devotees of the theater, mocks at virtue, sets the social evils in tempting perspective, and sends many a new wife back to her home, half convinced that happiness is to be had by the sale of herself and the deception of him whom she has sworn to love.It is often remarked that our elite homes are not so happy as those of the commoner classes. The reasons are not far to seek! Chastity is more esteemed by the middle classes than by those that live the lives of butterflies, and the houses of the former have the firmer foundation in consequence.I am not among those who believe that the world is growing better.

I see progress in the Church of Christ, but the gilded vices of the present day give to me no promise of a golden age, save as they suggest that Christ must shortly come. I doubt if there was ever a time when virtue was a thing of commerce as at this present hour.

Our social order and our commercial arrangements, just as certainly as our methods of amusement, are tending to the tearing down of the strongholds of womanhood.Some years ago, Mrs. Henderson, of New York, a young widow, was among the unfortunate women who are thrown absolutely upon their own resources for a living. When she discovered that her salary would not support her in the plainest living, and reached the point where the “propositions” of her employer must be accepted, or starvation grappled with, she said, “I prefer death,” and flung herself from the attic window of her lodging house.They brought up her corpse from the street and buried it, but for every one such there are hundreds of others that love life so tenaciously that they make the greater sacrifice, and instead of casting themselves down three stories to the street below, they plunge into the very pit, destroying the soul to save the body; and to escape a coffin, bury themselves in the shroud of sin and the deepest grave that this world knows.For some of these one can only feel the profoundest pity, but for the wife whose only temptation to fall is her own lust, one feels contempt instead; and the godless world, in its utter indifference to righteousness, rises with condemnation on its lips; for whatever our philosophies may be, all men feel that faithfulness is a wife’s first duty.The first privilege of a wife is service. One of the temptations to which many of them are peculiarly subjected is selfishness. If I were asked the besetting sin of the sex, among those who are in comfortable circumstances, I would mention “selfishness.”The young wife in a comfortable home is related to the other members of the house much as the youngest, prettiest, or weakest child is. Her very sex invites petting and indulgence.

If she is wise and energetic, that will only contribute to her character and increase her happiness; but if she is selfish and opinionated, it will tend to turn her head and bring her to believe that she is something special, and a domestic disaster is the consequence.“Little Lucy Grieve,” by Mrs. Humphrey Ward, “is a fair representation of this class.

Lucy loved David, and knew his splendid superiority; and yet she loved herself so well that she was willing to sacrifice his finest feelings, obliterate his spirit of benevolence, and destroy the remnant of affection he bore to his own unfortunate sister, that she herself might be the better dressed, more advanced in society, and the more indulged in selfishness.Almost daily we see Lucy’s character illustrated in the conduct of the living.I have read a good many poems that tenderly plead with men to remember the wife’s cares, and be careful not to forget the caress; the wife’s labors, and lend her a lift when possible; the wife’s weariness, and overcome it by entering the house with a smile. I love all such verses! They strike in my heart a responsive cord!There is very little danger that the women God has given us will be loved or served too well. But some of these days I intend to turn poet myself, and pen some lines to women about their duties to husbands—who delve eight to sixteen hours a day to dress them elegantly, provide them happy homes, and keep them in continual joy.A husband gets tired sometimes. A husband meets in business the most vexatious problems, and in recent times many a husband has struggled under loads too heavy to be borne by mortal man. With the casting up of accounts daily, he has seen the fortune that cost him years of ceaseless toil, being cut down, threatened with utter wreck, and himself about to be branded with bankruptcy.

I agree with Henry Ward Beecher that there is no suffering out of hell much more difficult to endure than the business man’s experience, when a few days sweep from him the fortune won by weary years of labor, or when the position which he has held in honor is about to be taken from him, or the character that he has made by a course of unimpeachable conduct is about to be brought into disrepute. For a woman to come short of sympathy in an hour like that, or to insist upon an expense in excess of the income, or to pack her splendid trunk and take herself to the seaside to sport, while he, who lives for her sake, suffers, is to accept the most devilish suggestion and sell out for a paltry price her part in his affection, who would lay life on the altar of sacrifice in proof of his love.When I was in Chicago, my brother, Dr.

F. T. Riley, told me how he had been called into a home to administer an antidote to a poison a man had just taken.When he entered the house he found the man hidden in a dark room, with the door locked. At first he refused him admittance, but finally consented to let him come in, and after much persuasion, confessed that he had just taken a half vial of the deadly stuff, and when the doctor attempted to administer the antidote, he fought to such an extent that my brother was compelled to call in several others to assist him. When the emetic had done its work and Dr. Riley asked why he had taken the poison, the man said, “I have been out of employment for weeks. For my wife and child I see no prospect of a livelihood. I have an insurance of $3000.

I have fixed it so that I am certain that it will come into their possession in the instance of my death, and I would rather die and let them live.”Does the average woman appreciate her husband’s love—the depth of it, the sacrifice to which it calls its subject? “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”If you would be beautiful indeed, if you would be helpmate for your husband, forget yourself; sacrifice for his sake; give him your sympathy in his time of trouble. For the man struggling against adverse circumstances, there is more assistance in the sympathetic manner of an affectionate wife, than any bank beneath God’s stars can bring him. Speak your love in the very hour of his struggle and save him.It will do no good to weep at his coffin, or cover his grave with the flowers of insurance money. Better one word while he lives than a thousand sobs after he has gone. Better the flowers of your affection for one minute while he is above ground, than perennial roses on his grave.But the most solemn duty of a wife is to save her husband. Our text says, “If any obey not the Word, they also may without the Word be won by the conversation of the wives” (1 Peter 3:1).Of course Peter meant ‘won to Christ!” No matter what else you do for him, you have largely failed in the life-effort unless you take him to Heaven with you.In that task, you must never tire.

In that effort, you must never despair. He may be indifferent to God’s Word; then you must be Christ’s epistle to him.

He may hate the preacher; then your life must preach. He may despise the sight of a church-house; then you must make home a sanctuary of God’s presence. Wherever he goes, whatever he is, your prayers must follow him and your faith must prevail.Years ago, in the city of Chicago, a man gambled away ten thousand dollars in a day on the Chicago Board of Trade, and followed his loss with a stupendous drunk. He sought out an attorney to see if he could not recover this money. The lawyer was a man of God, and cared more to bring this soul to Christ than to get a client for himself. Instead of pleading for him before the judge, he pled with him for Jesus’ sake.

In the course of his conversation he said, “I gave my Bible away today, have you one?” To which the sobered man answered, “Yes, but it’s down in my trunk somewhere. I have been a bad man, Mr.

B–, but God gave me a blessed wife, and in spite of all my indifference and opposition to the truth, she never lets me leave home without packing that Bible into my trunk.” The attorney went to the hotel room and fished it out of the trunk and found it a beautiful Book. There were many marked passages in it; perfumed ribbons and pretty pressed flowers between the pages, which that Virginia girl had laid there with her own loving hand. When, after midnight, as the Christian lawyer turned the leaves of that Bible, and read to him the passages which his own wife had marked, the man broke down utterly and said,“Oh, Sir, pray for me! I want to be a Christian. For fourteen years I have despised that Book and treated it with neglect, and also the interest and affection which my wife has evidenced in putting it in my trunk. But now, Sir, I want to be a Christian; I want to be saved!”“The Book which her own beautiful hand has prepared shall be a blessed Bible to me!”For fourteen years she had known that he was neglecting it, and yet for fourteen years she had gone right on putting it in his trunk at every departure, marking new places, shedding new tears upon the sacred page and putting up new prayers to God that He would hear.And lo! at last, in a far city, by a strange hand, God brought that Book forth and opened it before his eyes, and the perfumed leaves and ribbons wafted to him the full story of her love, while the printed words spoke the eternal love of God; and the man who had so long faced toward hell, turned about and faced toward Home and Heaven—her Heaven.THE MODEL MOTHER “A mother in Israel” The first evidence of a model mother is the maternal spirit. That spirit is a virtue today as never before. The generation of women that loved children lived to bear the most of us, but in most instances are not worthily succeeded. The philosophy of the “first social circles” of today is childlessness, and that wretched philosophy has so far prevailed that children are coming to be regarded as social inconveniences and domestic nuisances. This is not natural, but is a result of the frivolous views society entertains of happiness, and the flippant price it puts upon human life.Nature looks in the opposite direction, as you may know by beholding the baby girl when she is surrounded by her dolls. And if mothers were either broadminded or warmhearted, and so kept by Godly philosophies as to rightly instruct their daughters, not one in a thousand of young married women would have a spirit averse to maternity.

But alas for the wretched philosophy that many, otherwise beautiful, mothers have brought to their own daughters—a philosophy that makes married life itself a thing of unhappy apprehension, that makes God’s best gift to parents an unwelcome arrival, and renders those appointed to handle immortality in its plastic state, unwilling to touch it at all. And this is not the worst; this philosophy goes so far with many a modern woman that there is need that those of us who stand in the pulpit thunder the commandment, “Thou shalt not kill”, and we might add, “Thou shalt not destroy thyself,” for infanticide is also matricide.The model mother must also remember that it is her commission to make character.

It is not enough to bring the little life into the world. Beauty must clothe it. When the mother caresses her own baby, she ought to know that she handles precious material in plastic state, and must account for what comes of it.Life is a cycle and the teaching of today will come back to you in the fixed form of twenty years hence.Nero’s mother was a murderess. No wonder at Nero. Byron’s mother was proud, ill-tempered, and violent. Therein is the explanation of poor Byron himself. George Washington’s mother was noble and pure. Therein is the explanation of Washington’s graces.

Walter Scott’s mother loved poetry and painting, and Scott’s proudest literary efforts were the result. Wesley’s mother was a Godlike woman. No wonder that John and Charles were the Christian men they were. Charles Spurgeon’s mother was famed for her graces. To such mothers God gives such sons.In reading Gordon’s life recently, I came upon that passage wherein he says, in writing to his wife and children, “I have spent two days here, much of the time alone in the dear home where mother spent her last years. So far as seeming lonely, I should be glad to spend days here where everything reminds me of the beloved one.

I have many times gone into her vacant bedroom, and kneeled where she so often knelt and prayed for her children. Her family was her parish; to them she ministered, and for them she ceased not to pray to the end.” A.

J. Gordon—God’s first American minister—was what he was, largely in consequence of that mother’s work.The model mother lives to make character. But, as with the wife, so the model mother’s most responsible office is to save.If you succeed in all else and fail in that, you would not be satisfied, nor would your children call you “blessed”.One of the most astonishing things is the circumstance that some women are content to bring mortal souls into the world, and so little concerned to get them home to God. In my work as a pastor, it is not the least unusual to meet mothers that love society above the souls of their own children, that positively oppose their becoming religious, that prefer they should go to the house of mirth rather than the place of preaching, sit before the most questionable theatrical performance, rather than in the sanctuary of the Most High, accept the embraces of lecherous men, in the dance, rather than the love of the Son of God. I know this is severe speech; but I also know that it is none too strong to express the real in life.Years since, a mother found her boy frequenting the Y. M.

C. A., and becoming much interested in the subject of Christianity.

She was sorely disappointed at this discovery. She had her heart set on making him a social beau and sending him into what she called the “first circles.” She rushed him off to Yale, and shortly she had her desire and more, for he was not only a society man, but accepted with it its cigars, social glass, and attendant evils. When she learned that he was drinking heavily, she sought to reclaim him by sending him many letters, but he tore them up without reading them, saying, “When I wanted to do right, mother opposed it. I don’t know why she should be solicitous now seeing I am going the way that she chose for me.” Finally he went away to Chicago and this woman visited Mr. Moody and begged him to seek him out and try to accomplish his salvation. Moody made an appointment with him, but the young man failed to keep it.

He says, “I tried a good many times to reach him after that, but could not. While I was travelling one day on the New Haven Road, I bought a New York paper and read in great head-lines that he had been drowned in Lake Michigan.

His father came on and carried the body back to Boston. The broken-hearted mother, when she saw him lowered into the grave, said in sobs, ‘Oh, if I had only helped him when he wanted to be holy! If I could think now that he was in Heaven, I would have peace. It was my conduct that costs me all this, and my sorrow shall never cease.’ ”There are many mothers who have little disposition to see their children saved, but for their paltry frivolities, pay the price of these mortal souls.I thank God, on the other hand that there are many mothers who will never be satisfied unless they can bring up the last boy and the last girl God has given them, in the beauty of holiness, into Heaven.The quaint John Randolph said, “When I try to make myself an infidel, I feel the hand of mother on my head, and hear her prayers for my soul, and start back from all infidelity.”One winter, while aiding in a meeting in Illinois, an Englishman told me the story of his conversion, and said, “I came away to America a godless boy. One day I got a letter from my brother reporting the news. After having finished it, he added a postscript, ‘Mother is still praying for you.’ I could visualize her at the bedside on bended knees. From that hour I was under conviction of sin and could not be satisfied until I had found in Jesus my Saviour.”

1 Peter 3:2-6

THE SPECIAL OF WOMEN 1 Peter 3:1-6; 1 Timothy 5:6. DR. TALMAGE, when he was yet alive, said, “There are men who conclude that because man was made first and woman afterward, that woman was an incident in the universe, a sort of side issue.” He might have added that inasmuch as she was made from a mere rib from a man’s side, her secondary station was thereby suggested. But there is a positive argument which any woman suffragist would never forget, and the force of which even dexterous men would pause to deny, namely this—the order of creation in the Bible is from the lower to the higher, from grass to a man.God’s later work is in every instance His better work, and if that be true, man is not the climax of creation, but woman, for she was the last Divine endeavor.Again, it is more honorable to be made from the rib of a man than from the mud of the earth, hence women orators have the best of the argument.But whether one holds to the evolution theory or to the more biblical explanation of a direct creation, the one fact confirmed by either and each of them is voiced by Jesus when He said,“Have ye not read, that He which made them at the beginning made them male and female, “And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh”? (Matthew 19:4-5). If that statement be accepted as absolutely accurate, then our question is answered. If they are one flesh, women are as much tempted as men, and by nature would yield to exactly the same temptations; but by breeding, education, domestic and social environment, their temptations become different and special.I have chosen to apply our first text toTHE OF Youth is a hungry thing: its appetite for meats is not greater than its lust for emotional excitement. It pants for pleasure as the hart pants after the water brooks.Girlhood has a natural love of pleasure. That fact invites no condemnation whatever. It is a pure result of human health and a natural expression of life in excelsis. The lamb is quite as frisky as the kid, although sheep are the Bible symbols of saints, and goats equally so of sinners. And the wholesome, high-minded girl has within her very physical, mental, and emotional nature the same gleeful spirit—leaping for expression—that plays in the heart and life of her vicious contemporary.

Jane Adams is right in reminding us that this very force will either lift up and transform those who are really within its grasp, and set them in marked contrast to those who are either playing a game with it or losing it for gain, or else this beneficent current will carry them in wrong channels and take them to death and destruction when it should have carried them into the safe port of domesticity. He is an unwise father, and she is an unwise mother, who seeks for ever to suppress the emotion, and curb, and possibly destroy, the natural expression of adolescence.

The Apostle does not say that she that loves pleasure is doomed thereby—let us not misinterpret him; he says, “She that liveth in pleasure is dead while she liveth”; by which he means, of course, makes it the end and object of living.The danger is in abnormal development. The trouble is not that she loves pleasure; the trouble is that godless men and women, knowing that fact, have come to traffic in it. That is the explanation of dance halls and low theaters. The dance hall and the theater are not, and never were, a necessity born of youth’s love of pleasure. On the contrary, they represent solely the greed of gain. They were organized, not so much to meet a demand of the physical being, as to cultivate an appetite, and then fill the purse by feeding the same.It is a positive amazement to hear men speak of the drink-house as a social and physical necessity.

The social life of the saloon was never acceptable to any living mortal until his nature had first been vitiated; and it never catered to a natural appetite, but to a manufactured one. Not one boy in ten thousand is born with a lust for liquor; ninety-nine out of every hundred have been brought into such a lust by the vendors of beer and other intoxicants.

It exists, then, not to meet the necessity of its patrons, but to provide the luxuries for its owners; and as young men often take their first fatal steps in the saloon, so the majority of girls more often have their first suggestions of evil in the devilish dance-hall and the sensual show-house.If pleasure loving, then, is natural, pleasure living is peril. We have in this day some professed philosophers whose opinions are popular enough, who make up that crowd of near-eloquent, who are for ever discoursing upon living according to the natural bents of life. They are the fellows that have favored affinities instead of marriage; defended the saloon as the poor man’s club room; discoursed eloquently about the dance hall as the social center for the tenement house district, and the cheap theater as the school of art for the submerged; and all that, and all that!Why don’t they go the limit and say, “Since greed is a natural passion, gambling is to be the commercial order; since lust is a natural passion, pure love is to be abrogated; since anger is a natural passion, murder is but slightly immoral, if at all, and may be justified.” God pity the young woman who ever gives ear to such philosophies, or ever gives her thought over to the domination of such devilish suggestions. For awhile she may be going the giddy round, and it may look to the world as if she were having a good time; but the invariable end for her is written into the Apostle’s speech, “She that liveth in pleasure is dead while she liveth”.Our second text looks more largely toTHE MARITAL It is addressed to women who live in the married relation, and the Apostle speaks particularly of three things—illicit love, foolish pride, and failing religion.Illicit love! “Likewise, ye wives, be in subjection to your own husbands”. Society is not as badly smitten today in its youth as it is in its adult life. The recklessness of the girl in the dance hall does not so much menace the state and nation as does the more covered, yet accomplished, flirtation of wives and mothers who have forgotten the biblical law of subjection to their own husbands.To be sure, the frivolities of the former make possible the fickleness of the latter; and the man who finds his helpmate in a dance-hall or ball-room, should not even be surprised when in later life she develops other affinities. He took her from the school of deception, where the black arts were at the head of the curriculum, and that which was begun as a comedy will terminate as a tragedy, and neither the solemn ritual of the Episcopal service, the sacred vows voluntarily assumed, nor the earnest prayer of the performing preacher can save the happiness of the contracting parties.Bobby Burns, when he was ready to plight his troth to Mary Campbell, met her at the brook Ayr. They bathed their hands in the water and put them on the boards of a Bible and took their solemn vows. On the cover of the Old Testament of that Book to this day is Robert’s hand-writing, and the very words of Lev 19:12, “Ye shall not swear by My Name falsely, * * I am the Lord”.And on the cover of the New Testament, in his own writing, the words of Mat 5:33, “Thou shalt not forswear thyself, but shalt perform unto the Lord thine oaths”.But Bobby went his way in dissoluteness and must have broken the heart of the girl who gave him her hand under the spell of so holy a promise.And yet, dissoluteness upon the part of a man is certainly not worse than that upon the part of the woman; and when the day comes that she forgets to obey Peter’s injunction, to “be in subjection to your own husbands”, and adopts an illicit love, attempt deception as she may; and though she seek by every art of feminity to keep up the outward appearances of loyalty, the day of judgment is at hand; domestic affection is slain, the evidences of the true home are undermined, and destruction will speedily sit before its hearth in full possession of the whole house. This is one of the temptations of marital life.But Peter speaks of another:Foolish pride!“Whose adorning let it not be that outward adorning of plaiting the hair, and of wearing of gold, or of putting on of apparel”. From time immemorial most ministers have treated this Scripture as if Peter objected to the braiding of the hair, or to the wearing of jewels of gold, or to the putting on of apparel. Not at all; Peter is not saying you should not do these things. He is saying you should not be foolish enough to imagine that they are your chief adornment when you have put them on. It may be possible that the woman who braided her hair in that time was like the woman who blondeens hers now. The very act was a hint of her character. If so, then Peter would enjoin against it. And in that day, as in this, the way a woman wears her jewels is but a hint of what she is at heart, and the way she puts on her apparel is almost a positive proof of her purity or impurity. I passed a girl in the street.

She had on a long and flashy black coat, and a white dress under it. The combination was striking to say the least. She had on a black and white hat that was a marvel of modern creative genius—or folly. It was set on the back of her head in order that nothing might escape her vision. She had a pure white dog at-the end of a black chain, and every fellow she passed turned and looked and made remark. The two nearest me, as she went by, said, “My, what a beautiful dog!” And positively they were not to be blamed.

The meaning of her whole makeup was unmistakable, and any woman who puts up her hair after such a manner, puts on her jewels after such a manner, and puts on her apparel after such a manner as to make her a passing mark, should not be surprised if she receives insult; and, as a rule, she is neither surprised nor displeased.But that is not the most insiduous and objectionable feature of feminine pride. Any sin that is sufficiently stamped is more harmless in consequence.

Positively the modern style of woman’s dress, approved now by the largest circle of the sex, raises the question as to whether much social sanity remains. Take the abbreviated skirt, as an instance. Respect for the American woman has been depreciated by her adoption of this French importation. I am not saying that the woman of this day should be forced back to the long skirt of forty summers since; but I am saying that when a woman cannot sit down in a street car or even in the holy sanctuary without exposing the nether portion of her body, she is coming powerfully near the transgression of the Divine law, “The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man” (Deuteronomy 22:5). We have long had a saying that “one might as well be out of the world as out of style.” If this folly in woman’s dress goes much further, we will soon have a new one—“One might as well be in hell as in the style.”I know the folly of trying to bring the world to do the right thing. I might as well argue with the flesh and the devil, for these three are commonly classed together in Scripture.

But it would seem that Christian women need the injunction of the Apostle, for after all our squirming and twisting and arguing and explaining away our Bible, still we have it in plain language and we cannot get away from it.“I would that women adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety; not with braided hair or gold or pearls of costly array; but, which becometh women professing Godliness, with good works”. We cannot help putting the question asked by the writer, “Is any woman’s apparel modest that exposes her person like the apparel of some church women does?

Is it any use for a woman to claim and profess ‘purity’ whose scant apparel is shockingly suggestive of impurity, or costly array destructive of good works of Godliness?” Shamefacedness does not spell “brazen facedness”. Will any question the truth of what the “Christian Standard” once said:“It is no more probable that the time is coming when it will be learned with amazement and sorrow of more than one professed Christian that the Holy Spirit was not joking when He prescribed the kind of dress the Godly should wear. There may be some serious dress accounts to settle in the day of the great Assize Court.”Falling religion! It calls upon them to reveal“the hidden man of the heart, m that which is not corruptible, even the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, which is in the sight of God of great price”. The daughters of this generation can say what they like about the queer looks and homely appearance of the Puritan mothers, but we ask in all candor whether they expect to equal in character or in desirable accomplishments Harriet Newell, who gave herself to the redemption of India; Elizabeth Harvey who left her bright New England home for the life of Bombay, and the darkened heathenism, that she might illumine it; or Mrs. Lennox who breathed her last at Smyrna and cried as she faced her end, “Oh, how happy!” Or Mrs. Sarah D. Comstock, who sacrificed that she might save Burma, and who, when she gave up her children that they might come to America to be educated, kissing them, said, “Oh, Jesus, I do this for Thee.” Or even the mothers of the Wesleys, the Spurgeons, the Dwight Moodys, or the mothers of our Washington, our Jefferson, and Clay.It is an excellent thing that women have such character as to command respect under any and all environments, and such a religious purpose as to incite reverence in even Godless men.I stood in the chapel of Helen Chalmers in the most abandoned part of the city of Edinburgh, and I said as I looked upon the fearful surroundings, “Do you come here to hold services at night?” “O yes,” she said. “And do you never meet with an insult while performing this Christian: service?”To which she answered, “Never.” That young woman who has her father by her side, walking down the street with armed police at each corner, is not so well defended as that Christian woman who goes forth bearing in her very appearance the sign of the Cross, carrying in her heart the Word of God, and in her hand the Bread of Life.After all, the Apostle has struck the adornment that makes a woman the most blessed and safe in this world and gives promise of the next. It is that incorruptible apparel “of a meek and quiet spirit, which is in the sight of God of great price”.THE OLD TIME EXAMPLE “For after this manner in the old time the holy women also, who trusted in God, adorned themselves, being in subjection unto their own husbands”. The ancient woman’s example! As Sarah was an ensample to the women of Peter’s day, so the Godly mothers of yesterday are an ensample to the daughters of this hour. When I speak of “yesterday” I do not mean that all good women are in their graves; God forbid. But I do mean that the generation which gave us birth, however much we may have surpassed them in intellectual attainments, are yet our ensample in moral character and Christian accomplishments. One week I was called to visit three such women, members then of this body of believers, each of them upon a bed of affliction, and each perhaps nearing the end by reason of age. I speak of Mother Mears, Mother Russell and Mother Daniels. The mention of these names puts the spirit of reverence upon every youthful woman of this congregation who ever came into contact with them; and if she have a virtue left, compels her to say, “Let my last days be like theirs, so far as character and righteous conduct are concerned.” Deborah’s description is applicable here, “Mothers in Israel”, ensamples to younger women they were.Their adornment has been of the diviner sort.Trusting in God, they have“adorned themselves, being in subjection unto their own husbands: “Even as Sara obeyed Abraham, calling him lord: whose daughters ye are”. I went once upon a time into a house, the fortunes of which represented millions, and met there the mother and daughter. When the dinner was over and the evening had passed, and I was at my home, I was compelled to say, “That young woman was well dressed and good looking and an excellent conversationalist; but the true adornment of that house was in the mother’s quiet spirit, evident character and unquestioned accomplishments.And just as there is many a lad who thinks his father is an old fogy because he does not speak first class English, notwithstanding the fact that that father’s truer education is the outcome of sixty summers and his accomplishments have made the lad’s blessings possible, so there is many a lass or youthful married woman who laughs at the old time ideas of the grandmother in the home, when for her own sake she should be sitting at her feet, and learning of her how to be clothed in the incorruptible apparel “of a meek and quiet spirit, which is in the sight of God of great price”.I believe, as Dr. Talmage said, that such accomplishment is a certain product of allowing Christ to take full possession of the soul, remembering, “He would be your Friend in every perplexity, would comfort in every trial, would defend in every strait. And I do not ask you to bring, like Mary, the spices to the sepulcher of a dead Christ, but to bring your all to the feet of a living Jesus. His Word is peace. His look is love.

His hand is help. His touch is life. His smile is Heaven. O come then, in flocks and groups! Come like the morning light tripping over the mountains. Wreathe all your affections on Christ’s brow; set all your gems in Christ’s coronet; let this Sabbath hour rustle with the wings of rejoicing angels and the towers of God ring out the news of souls saved.”“This world its fancied pearl may crave, ’Tis not the pearl for me; ’Twill dim its luster in the grave, ’Twill perish in the sea. But there’s a pearl of price untold Which never can be bought with gold; O that’s the pearl for me.”

1 Peter 3:13

THE ’S ACCOUNT OF HIMSELF 1 Peter 3:13-17. SOME years ago in my pulpit, Dr. A. C. Dixon delivered a sermon entitled, “My Personal Experiences.” It related to his birth, education, conversion, call to the ministry, with notable incidents from his professional career. It was modestly done and made at once a pleasing and helpful impression.At that time one of our church officials urged me to do the same; but for reasons that seemed sufficient, I declined. Recently, in conversation with another official, whose judgment and counsel has been to me of the utmost value, it was suggested that, on some occasion, I should speak of my own pastorate, assigning to the larger company the reasons I had given him for conducting it along the lines it has been wont to go.

My message this morning is in consequence of that counsel.My conception of the ministry is that it should hide itself and reveal Jesus; and anything that looks to the exploitation of the person, or even the profession, rather than to the exaltation of Him who is Lord of all, is objectionable, and even offensive. I come, therefore, to this morning with trepidation, and yet clearly convinced that such a message has occasion at this juncture of our relations as pastor and people.It is not my thought this morning to reply to criticism. Your uniform kindness and your careful consideration render that absolutely unnecessary; but rather, to give the reason for the course taken, and incidentally to answer earnest and serious questions.The text compasses in a remarkable way what is in my mind. It presents—The Minister’s Conceptions; discusses—The Minister’s Conviction; and remarks upon—The Minister’s Conduct.THE ’S “And who is he that will harm you, if ye be followers of that which is good”? “Good” is the only adequate goal of the minister’s life. The great and even the Perfect example of the Gospel ministry was in the Man from Nazareth, and He “went about doing good”; and as has often been remarked, “His goodness was not of the negative quality, put of the positive,” rather; He did more than refrain from evil; He undertook and completed deeds of mercy. For the goody-goody minister we have difficulty even to retain respect. For the aggressively good man, either in the ministry or out of it, we have the profoundest reverence.When I first felt called to the ministry my conception of goodness was wholly different from what I now understand it. I felt that it meant leaving all the things for which the flesh lusted, and at that point I had my fight. The things I should have to give up, I saw clearly, and tenaciously they clung; the things I should have to take up, I knew not, nor dreamed, and the years that have intervened have revealed the fact that the giving up process was even easier than the taking up.Only recently there was a published interview with a successful minister.

He was asked what led him to enter the ministry; whether his churches had been exacting and unreasonable; whether he counted himself discredited in the community at large because he was a minister; what changes his theological views had undergone; what had been the greatest occasion of discouragement in his ministerial life; whether, if he was back at the beginning he would choose this profession again, etc.? I was interested in his replies.

They would be regarded by the average man as very well balanced and extremely sane, but there seemed to me to be a lack of harmony between the reply to the first question and the last. In answer to the first, “What led you to the ministry?” he said, “It was the conviction that it was the place where I could do the most good; therefore the place where God would have me.’ In answer to the last, whether he would again choose the ministry if he were at the beginning of his career, he said, “I do not know. I am in middle life; old age is creeping on. I am not a dollar ahead. The cost of living is increasing. I do not want to spend my last days at Fenton, Michigan in the home for pauperized ministers.”I know exactly how to sympathize with him.

I know of nothing more pathetic than a letter which reached me only last year from an old minister eighty years of age, who was about to be separated from his old wife, and put into the county poor farm, while she at the same time was going to the home of relatives who had volunteered to care for her. And yet for the life of me, I cannot admit that even that man missed the goal of life!

Better go down to a pauper’s grave and know that one’s profession had had its goal—“good,” than perish in a palace, having missed the mark of high morality and of universal helpfulness. “Who is he that will harm you, if ye be followers of that which is good”?But the minister’s conceptions must involve more than goodness.Courage is equally essential to his occupation.Peter writes,“But and if ye suffer for righteousness’ sake, happy are ye: and be not afraid of their terror, neither be troubled”. It is amazing how much interest the public have in the city firemen; let them go on dress parade, and they are assured of a crowd. The reason is not far to seek; their profession calls for courage, and the world admires the courageous man. When soldiers return from fierce battles and bloody fields, their appearance in the streets is a sufficient signal to have the same lined with the populace. They represent deeds of daring, and all men admire.The ministry is supposed to be a peaceful calling, but it ought never to be forgotten that Jesus Christ said, “I came not to send peace, but a sword” (Matthew 10:34). And no man ever preached the Gospel with effectiveness without having in him the heart of a warrior. And in proportion as he can dispense with fear and consent to serve for righteousness’ sake, does he copy his great example— Christ.Do you remember how Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, in, “A Singular Life,” describes Bayard, the minister of Angel Alley? “It was an April night, and sea and sky were soft in Windover.

A stranger stood in Angel Alley, hesitating before a door, which bore above it these seven words, ‘The Church of the Love of Christ.’ ‘What goes on here?’ the gentleman asked of a bystander. ‘Better things than ever went on here before;’ was the reply, ‘they’ve got a man up there. He ain’t no dummy in a minister’s choker.’”It takes a man to make a minister of the Gospel of the Son of God. When they said to John Knox, “All the world is against you,” the great Scotch preacher replied, “Then I am against all the world.” When they enjoined John Bunyan to pledge himself to preach no more, he answered, “I would rather stay in jail until the moss grows on my eyebrows.” And although the time has passed when the persecutions that used to be endured have to be met, the time has not come when the true minister of the Gospel meets no opposition and has no occasion for courage. On the contrary, he can never address himself to even the small questions of church administration without finding dissenters in his own church, nor espouse a great moral issue without seeing enemies rise out of the populace. If he is cowardly, he compromises, and the cause he knows he ought to advocate, dies in want of an apostle; if he is courageous, he advocates it, and takes the consequences that the cause may live.“Then to side with truth is noble when we share her wretched crust, Ere her cause bring fame and profit and ’tis prosperous to be just; Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside, Doubting in his abject spirit, till his Lord is crucified, And the multitude made virtue of the faith they have denied.” More often than perhaps we imagine, men mistake stubbornness for courage; and what we call, in modern parlance, “bull-headedness” for bravery. But the fact remains that the cause of Jesus Christ would make much more rapid progress if the ministers of the Gospel executed the courage of their convictions and “feared not fear,” since, as Henry Van Dyke says, “Courage is essential to guard the best qualities of the soul, and to clear the way for their action, and make them move with freedom and vigor.”“Courage, the highest gift, that scorns to bend To mean devices for a sordid end; Courage, an independent spark from Heaven’s throne, By which the soul stands raised, triumphant, high, alone; The spring of all true acts is seated here, As falsehoods draw their sordid birth from fear.” If we desire to be good, we must first of all be brave, that against all opposition, scorn, and danger we may move straight onward to do the right.Yet once more:The minister makes Christ his absolute Saviour and Lord.“But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts?” Now it is at this point that I propose this morning to answer some pertinent questions—questions that you as a people have a perfect right to ask; and questions that I, as your pastor, ought to answer.Here is one of them—“Why do you go away from us and spend so much time in evangelism as you do?”You would naturally expect that I have had reasons which were, to me at least, sufficient, and so they have been.First of all, it is a physical and mental necessity. These periods of evangelism have, without exception, been semi-rest occasions. If it were not for these I could not stand the strain of this pastorate. They are the only seasons of the year when I sleep when I please, walk, ride, golf, or give myself to other exercise at my pleasure, and am not under the whip every minute.In the next place, they break the dead level and the sameness in service, and, by their variety, recuperate. From them also I have brought the richest experiences of my life, in witnessing the power of the Gospel preached and dealing personally with men and women, and getting them to Christ; they are the most fruitful sources of effective illustration for home-sermonizing.Furthermore, I have never doubted that each such meeting held, makes its certain and desirable contribution to the First Baptist Church of Minneapolis. There are members of this church this morning who have come to us from Texas, a score at least, and members who have come to us from Iowa, from Wisconsin, the Dakotas, and for that matter, from almost every state in which such meetings have been held,—sometimes because they have been converted in these meetings; and at other times, because of the acquaintanceship made in connection with them.Again, it was only possible to propose certain great movements for the church at home and abroad and indorse them with effective subscriptions by reason of the revenue coming from these meetings.

In the times of my absence, aside from a short summer vacation, your committee has provided the best possible supplies, and I have paid for them out of my own purse. To offset these days of absence, I have brought to this pulpit from the Old World and the New, the best men I could possibly bring to it, for seasons longer and shorter, and have satisfied my own mind, at least, that I was not neglecting the home plant, and was investing in it as much as could be expected of the man that stood at its head.But beyond all of this, and infinitely beyond it all, is the fundamental reason for such work, namely, the Lordship of Jesus Christ.

He has the right to command my life as no one else on earth, or even in Heaven; and I have had as perfect a conviction from the day I was called to preach, that His will was evangelism as I have ever had that His will was a pastorate.In fact, both of these thoughts have been so strong in me that there has been an incessant struggle, a never-ending conflict as to whether I belonged to the one or the other. That this has had no financial consideration is absolutely certain from the fact that when there was only a slight money return, yet my heart hungered for it as much as it does today, and though my calls then were not one in ten to what I now receive, I gave almost, if not as much time, to evangelism then as now. It has been a very fire within my bones, and when one comes to me and tells me that if I would only stay at home this church would become much greater than it is, my people would be more content about it, the school would make more rapid progress, the city of Minneapolis would have a greater uplift through my ministry, I answer, “Perhaps it is all true, and yet it is no argument against the voice of the Lord—“This is the way, walk ye in it”. To even attempt it would be to have a heart so ill-content as to unfit me for the best service at home, and the conviction of duties undone, so clear as to unsettle the pastorate itself. I thank God for those poets who put into verse the very thoughts that have surged in me for expression. He knew my feelings who wrote:“Oft, when the Word is on me to deliver, Lifts the illusion and the Truth lies bare, Desert or throng, the city or the river, Melts in lucid paradise of air, “Only like souls I see the folk there under Bound who should conquer, slaves who should be kings, Hearing their one hope with an empty wonder Sadly contented in a show of things: “Then with a rush the intolerable craving Shivers throughout me like a trumpet call, Oh, to save these, to perish for their saving, Die for their life, be offered for them all.” I have no more question that my ministry in other cities is of God than I have that my ministry in this pulpit is of Him. And for me, that settles the issue.But Peter passes from “The Minister’s Conceptions of His Call,” to “The Minister’s Conviction of Truth.”THE ’S They should be clearly entertained. “But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and he ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear”. Never while I live shall I forget, nor indeed shall I cease to be grateful to, the man under whose oversight I did my first preaching and pastoral work. His voice had failed. For twenty-five or thirty years he had been the beloved pastor of one people, and even when he could not preach, they would not give him up. In my freshman year at college I was called to be the spokesman and brought into blessed fellowship with one of the best pastors God ever gave to a people—Mr. Monroe, of North Madison, Indiana.I was ignorant and timid correspondingly, and prefaced many of my assertions with the word “perhaps;” and one night as we sat alone in his study, he said, “Now, my boy, take the advice of your senior; quit that word ‘perhaps1; become clearly convinced of the Truth before you speak it, and then voice it absolutely.”Whether that has accounted for my dogmatism, I do not know, but fully am I persuaded that he was right about it. With my honored co-laborer, Dean Frost, I believe “the Truth is the most uncompromising thing in God’s world,” and that the man who is to minister in it must have clear convictions of what it is.In the day when John Tauler was the mightiest preacher of the hour, and when he was declaring that the very Lordship of Jesus Christ compelled his convictions and his utterances, they called him “Dr.

Illuminatus,” or the Doctor upon whom a great light had shined.No man will ever be worthy of that title whose convictions are not clearly entertained; and no man who does not himself hold a firm faith will ever bring the fellowship of believers to confidence in God. Charles Spurgeon says, “God uses the faith of His ministers to breed faith in their people.

You may depend upon it that souls are not saved by the minister who doubts. A preaching of doubts and questions can never save a soul for Christ. We must have great faith in the Word of God if we are to be winners of the souls of them who hear it.”Therein is the suggestion of another question—“Why should you speak so often against Higher Criticism when we have none of it in our body? It is a fact, is it not, that there is not an assembly between the seas that entertains so little hospitality for this so-called ‘New Theology.’ Why, then, drag it in?”Two or three suggestions: Has not the pew of this church come to its present attitude toward this deadly blighting thing by reason of what the pulpit has voiced? Is not the very air that we breathe laden with doubt, and shall the physician stay his hand even when health has been accomplished, provided the atmosphere in which his patrons live and move and have their being is filled with deadly bacteria? Shall he not attempt to exterminate that also and produce conditions of health?And shall the doctor of medicine be more considerate of those who trust their physical health to him than the doctor of theology of those who trust to him their souls?But over and above all this is the fact that this pulpit administers to a great body of young people, hundreds of whom are readers of the daily newspapers and the so-called sacred press, now secularized and skepticized, and the multiplied magazines; and to scores of others who sit before professors in grade, high schools, colleges and universities, where the reading of the Bible is not even permitted, and “the faith which was once delivered”, is flouted, and in the name of “science” the Scriptures are discredited.

Have I no serious and ever insistent obligation to this magnificent company of alert, thoughtful minds, who will, within the next few years, determine absolutely and forever what faith they will entertain?A man’s ministry is many-sided, and there are more people than a few who must be taken into the consideration of it. Once in Chicago, a church official, who since that time has swallowed absolutely the whole theory of the new theology, told me that he was in utter sympathy with my views, but did not believe it necessary to preach them so often.

Yet while that ministry was under the shadow of the great University, I opposed its wretched theology, and I certainly had my reward. Four young men, in attendance upon that school, were members of my church. One of them accepted its theology, gave up the thought of the ministry, and I know not how much faith remains.A second one, at the end of two years, gave up his training there because he could not accept its theology, and went to another school where he graduated, and bore his testimony to the fact that the pulpit of the Calvary Church, Chicago, had appealed to him as more conclusive than the arguments to which he listened for six days at school.A third, later a notable missionary to Assam, bore his testimony in our prayer meeting there, that his Saturdays on our mission field, and his Sundays, giving audience to the Word, was his salvation against the skepticism of the school where he was daily compelled to appear.The fourth one, now our neighboring pastor, went through the four years of the University, completing its entire course, and repudiated its new theology, and has proven himself correspondingly a power.Yes; I have had my reasons, and I am ready to give them to any “man that asketh”.I have also my reasons for speaking as often as I have against Christian Science. Just so long as not a family in my church can fall under any serious affliction but one of these proselyters appears and, without any invitation from anybody, sits down to his unscriptural and unholy work, my voice shall not be silent; just so long as their literature is forced upon those to whom I minister, just so long as the daily newspapers give more space to this cult than they do to the hundred churches, I shall continue to speak, unfolding by my ministry its utter falsity, showing that it is neither scientific nor scriptural, nor even sane; for I know of nothing more deplorable than this, that he who once knew the Truth should be turned to “believe a lie”.But the Apostle does not stop with the admonition that the Truth should be clearly understood; he makes another appeal, namely, this:Faith should be fearlessly expressed. On the one side I have no natural love for polemics; on the other, I have no disposition to avoid them at the expense of truth. I believe with Edmond Scherer, of France, that “as for natural religion, it exists only in books; that religions that have vital force and influence are positive religions—religions that have a church and particular rites and dogmas.”I think with him also that “it is impossible for a positive religion to have any other origin than a revelation.

It is necessarily the intervention of God in the destinies of man; an account of God’s part in creating and saving the world. It is that or nothing.”I know the pain of presenting an unpopular cause; and I know the unpopularity of preaching plain Truth; and yet I know the powerlessness of Truth compromised, for Truth compromised is Christianity crippled and dying.Paradoxical as it may sound, the most unpopular preacher that ever walked the earth was the Man from Nazareth; and yet He enjoyed the greatest popularity any man has ever known.

Unpopular enough while He lived to invite His death; and popular enough since that time to influence nineteen centuries; and that same popularity will yet bring the break of day.If there is one thing that the minister ought to pray it is in the language of the Moravian liturgy— “From the unhappy desire of becoming great, good Lord, deliver us.” But in the determination to know the Truth and to tell it, he ought to pray the same Lord to establish his heart and loose his tongue.And yet Peter is equally clear on another demand, namely,These convictions should be modestly advocated. Charles Spurgeon was famed the world over as a polemic or fighter, and yet Charles Spurgeon was the man whose mien was modesty itself; and whose contention for the Truth was in kindly words; and whose language was so simple that a little boy, hearing him, said to his mother, “Was that Mr. Spurgeon who talked? Why, he is not so great; I understood every word he said.”John Knox was a veritable son of thunder, but when on one occasion, the great congregation rose to pay him tribute, this bravest of all living apostles of the faith bowed his face in his arm, compressing into silence his utterances, and bursting into tears, fled in distress to his chamber.No Baptist minister of modern times was Gordon’s equal as a defender of God’s Truth; and yet, when on his twenty-fifth anniversary, the Clarendon Church did him honor, he went home to weep and to say to his wife, “Not unto me! Not unto me! Oh, that I could be hidden in the shadow of the Plant of Renown.”Peter summed it all up—conviction clearly understood, fearlessly expressed, and modestly advocated.But Peter concluded not, until he had spoken ofTHE ’S CONDUCT One’s conception and one’s deepest conviction are not in themselves sufficient; character is required; and conduct is the expression of the same. That is why Peter further continued, saying: “Sanctify the Lord God in your hearts; * * having a good conscience; that, whereas they speak evil of you, as of evil doers, they may be ashamed that falsely accuse your good conversation in Christ. For it is better, if the will of God be so, that ye suffer for well doing, than for evil doing”.The lessons to be gleaned from these words are clear.The minister’s conduct should satisfy his own conscience. That experience is basal to all success; without a good conscience, courage is impossible. If one will run the ages through he will find it is a fact that ministers have time and again been social reformers. He who said that “there was never a revolution in Europe without a monk back of it” was certainly near the truth.

And the revolutions wrought were commonly important in character, far-reaching in extent, and socially essential. The greatest single benediction that ever came to Romanism was Martin Luther’s Reformation.

His contribution to Protestantism itself hardly exceeded that which he made to Catholicism. His protests, and proven charges, improved Rome’s conduct and compelled her to make afresh the articles of her faith. It also released the conscience of man to worship God according to the dictates thereof. And Martin Luther could never have wrought what he did, would never have dared to undertake so colossal a task had he been without a clear conscience.R. F. Horton, the Old World critic, says some sane and sound things and among them, that “A man’s sermon is a fragment of himself.” To preach in the power of the Spirit requires a clear conscience.

The essentials of the Christian life are always and everywhere ethical and moral.Bishop Freeman, when he was in Minneapolis, employed the illustration of Francis Assisi who said to the young monk, “Let us go up into the town and preach.” They fared forth, walking together through the streets and even down dark, dingy alleys, and finally out to the very outskirts of the city and back, and had never said a word. On their return the young monk said to him, “Father, when do we begin to preach?” to which Assisi answered, “We have been preaching all the way.

The people know who we are and what we represent and when we pass by they look at us—it is a sermon.” It should be so if Peter’s injunction here is correct.John Watson, in his “Cure for Souls,” gives a report of a busy week and tells how he had spent the hours of the various days; what he did on Monday, what on Tuesday, what on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, every hour crowded to the utmost; and then when the rest day of others came, he found himself still in the harness compelled to drive on.But even the fullest employment of time, even the bearing of the heaviest possible burden, intellectual or physical, is not sufficient. As Peter here declares: one must have a conscience which makes it impossible to be evil spoken of, lest the very Gospel that he preaches should be shamed in the failure.Therefore, the still further essential is this:The minister’s conduct must discharge the Divine will.“For it is better, if the will of God be so, that ye suffer for well doing, than for evil doing”. The problem of life with too many preachers seems to be the discovery of an easy path, the getting by without criticism, the sort of success that brings no adversity.Such was not the early conception; nor indeed was it the experience of those men who were utterly faithful to the Lord. They were evil spoken of; they had to suffer; they had to endure as good soldiers of the Cross. There was no ignomy to which they were not subjected; no endurance they could escape; no persecution they passed around. They died daily, even as Paul declared. But in that circumstance they filled up the sufferings of Christ and rendered an effective ministry.The fact is that the ministry has become too much a mere profession; that the office itself is now attended by too many honors and emoluments; the will of God is too seldom assiduously sought.He was more than a poet who wrote:“The strong man’s strength to toil for Christ The fervent preacher’s skill, I sometimes wish; But better far to do God’s will. “No service in itself is small Nor great, though earth it fill; But that is small that seeks its own And great, that seeks God’s will.”

1 Peter 3:15

—OR WHY STAND FOR A SECT? 1 Peter 3:13-16. FOR several Sunday evenings we have given ourselves to the study of some of the creeds and cults that are now playing more or less conspicuous part in the religious thought of America. In the progress of these discourses I trust it has appeared to you that men’s doctrines have not been condemned because, forsooth, they were lacking my denominational label, or commended only when they spoke the shibboleths of the Baptist faith.“To the Law and to the Testimony: if they speak not according to this Word, it is because there is no light in them” (Isaiah 8:20), was deliberately chosen as the touchstone of these modern movements. Before this text, some fared unfortunately, and others with some favor; but all, we trust, with justice.The same Scripture provides a standard for the older arid better established beliefs, now embodied in the greater denominations. Hence our subject, “Why be a Baptist?”What of the creed of this company of people, and how far can it be shown to accord with the Sacred Word? It makes no difference that their present standing is enviable; even the strength of their numbers, and their increasing conquests, do not prove their doctrines “all Divine.”The question is a deeper and a higher one. The criterion before which they must stand or fall is made up of the fundamentals of the Christian faith.

How far do these people, who once suffered for righteousness’ sake, find it possible now to “give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you”, and yet stand strictly by the tests of Scripture?It shall be my endeavor at this time to answer that question, not in full—for neither the time nor the occasion would permit the review of Baptist doctrines. But thirty minutes will suffice for the selection and discussion of the few particulars by which this people are differentiated from other evangelicals.If you will pardon me, I want to give a personal reply to this question, “Why be a Baptist?” AND THE BOOK “Baptists believe that the Holy Bible was written by men divinely inspired, and is a perfect treasure of Heavenly instruction.” (New Hampshire Confession of Faith.)The Book warrants this belief. By consulting the marginal reading of your new version, you will find that the King James translation of 2 Timothy 3:16-17 is practically correct:“All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: “That the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works”. Peter, in his Second Epistle, said,“For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost” (1 Peter 1:21). These New Testament teachers were only reaffirming the faith of the Old Testament penmen. In 2 Samuel 23:2, we read of “David the son of Jesse,” * * “The Spirit of the Lord spake by me, and His Word was in my tongue”. While his greater son Solomon wrote of the “Word of God”, “Add thou not unto His Words” (Proverbs 30:6).The ecclesiastical air was never so full of flying definitions of the term “Inspiration.” Some believe in the plenary theory—that God gave to men the thought, and permitted them to clothe it in their own language; some in the progressive theory —that with advancing civilization, men have come into larger and larger light, and so have spoken to the world with increasing truthfulness; some in the theory of illumination—that God let in light upon certain minds in varying degrees and at different times, so that men of today are inspired in the same manner at least, if not in equal degree, with the Prophets and Apostles of Old and New Testament fame.But unless Baptists are willing to go back on every declaration of faith yet adopted by their churches, they are committed to another belief in the Bible, namely, that its thought and language alike are divinely inspired—else how can they say, “It has God for its author” and “Truth without any mixture of error for its matter.” Our fathers were content to let the critics rest in “an infallible Christian consciousness.” Romanists and Anglicans parade a faith in “an infallible Church while the Baptists boast—never failing—was in “an infallible Book.”It matters little to me how many of my brethren and sisters depart from this plain intent of the first article of Baptist faith. I find myself more and more in absolute sympathy with its sentences; and profoundly convinced that they present the sanest and most scriptural view of inspiration.Baptists believe all creeds and opinions should be tried by the Book. The Declaration of Faith adopted most largely by their churches contains this as the last sentence of the first article:“We believe that the Holy Bible * * is the supreme standard by which all human conduct, creeds and opinions should be tried.”John, in his First Epistle, 1 John 4:1, writes:“Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world”. Isaiah provides for us a crucible in which the true may be distinguished from the false:“To the Law and to the Testimony: if they speak not according to this Word, it is because there is Ho light in them” (Isaiah 8:20). That is a significant passage (Acts 17:11), where the Berean brethren are approved in these words:“These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the Word with all readiness of mind, and searched the Scriptures daily, whether those things were so”. Have you ever tried to imagine how rapidly Truth would advance, how speedily Christian unity would be compassed, and how shortly all man-made philosophies would die, if all the auditors of professed religious teachers turned at once to this Berean custom? As Dr. Behrends says of the Word of God, “It is the fixed and immovable center of Divine truth ‘for ever settled in Heaven’; it provides the basis of an infallible certainty, just as the sun, by its invisible but constant and efficient energy, secures the stability of the planetary system.”A few years since, the “Missionary Review” called attention to the fact that the native Christians in Japan had taken the matter of creed revision into their own hands, and in their synod, composed of the various Presbyterian bodies of that country, had fallen back upon the Apostles’ Creed, assigning as their reason for such action, this statement:“From these Holy Scriptures the ancient Church of Christ drew its confession; hence, we, holding the faith once delivered to the saints, join in that confession with praise and thanksgiving.”That day this section of the Presbyterian Church voluntarily adopted the first and most important article of Baptist faith; while at the same time taking a most scriptural step, in answer to Jude’s appeal:“Beloved, when I gave all diligence to write unto you of the common salvation, it was needful for me to write unto you, and exhort you that ye should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints” (Jude 1:3). To me, this is the solid rock—the only foundation stone—of the Christian’s creed. An infallible Book, the supreme standard of faith and practice; and such is the Baptist position.But again, “Why be a Baptist?”THE BIBLE AND THE NEW BIRTH There is another article common to the creed of Baptists everywhere, which has seemed to us fundamental to the Christian Church. They have expressed it in these words:“We believe that, in order to be saved, sinners must be regenerated, or born again; that regeneration * * is effected * * by the power of the Holy Spirit in connection with Divine Truth * * and that its proper evidence appears in the holy fruits of repentance and faith and newness of life.”Regeneration essential to salvation is a sine qua non of Scripture. How else interpret the language of Jesus,“Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again (or “from above”) he cannot see the Kingdom of God”. And again,“Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the Kingdom of God” (John 3:3; John 3:5). We say with the author of “The Old Testament Under Fire” that “salvation is the burden of Scripture;” that we are not to go to the Book for our chronology, or science, or even for our history, but to be made “wise unto salvation”.Was not that what Jesus meant when He said:“Search the Scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of Me” (John 5:39). The all-important theme of this God-breathed Book, namely, “The Way of Salvation,” was not left in darkness, nor even in honest disputation. By inspired penmen—Prophets and Apostles, God has affirmed and reiterated the necessity of the new birth. The doctrine of evolution, popular at this present time, by which the lower animal life is supposed to have given birth at last to the God-like man, has been selected by some so-called teachers as the method of Christian making. But if all the links that are missing to that theory—multitudinous as they are—were found, everyone, they would not bridge the greater chasm between the carnal and spiritual man. Christ separated spiritually forever from the thought of evolution when He said, “That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit” (John 3:6).Morality is a God-like thing; education is well worth the mind’s noblest endeavor; culture is so splendid that few ever possess themselves of its greater fortunes; but the combined wings of them all are too weak to carry the dead weight of an unregenerate soul into the Kingdom of God. If they brought it to the very door of that spiritual realm, they would not be allowed to cross the threshold with their burden, since God’s Word guards that entrance as effectually as the flaming sword defended the Tree of Life, saying, “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God” (1 Corinthians 15:50).This regeneration is wrought by the Holy Ghost, effected by the power of the Holy Spirit, in connection with Divine Truth.It may not be possible to explain the “How” of the Holy Ghost’s work.

In fact, when Christ told Nicodemus that he must be born of the Spirit, that ruler of the Jews could not understand just what Christ meant; nor did Christ Himself undertake the explanation. He only illustrated how mystery and Truth combine in one event.“Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again. “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit” (John 3:7-8). A little later He shows that birth of the Spirit is at one with belief on the Son, for when Nicodemus pressed him further, for explanation of the birth of the Spirit, He answered:“As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up: “That whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have eternal life” (John 3:14-15). The thought is in perfect keeping with what John had before said:“But as many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on His Name: “Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:12-13). The poet wrote well when he said:“How helpless guilty nature lies, Unconscious of its load! The heart, unchanged, can never rise To happiness and God. “Can aught beneath a power Divine The stubborn will subdue? ’Tis Thine, eternal Spirit, Thine To form the heart anew. “ ’Tis Thine the passions to recall, And upward bid them rise, And make the scales of error fall From reason’s darkened eyes; “To chase the shades of death away, And bid the sinner live; A beam of Heaven, a vital ray, ’Tis Thine alone to give. “O, change these wretched hearts of ours, And give them life Divine; Then shall our passions and our powers, Almighty Lord, be Thine.” Regeneration is evidenced in good works. “Its proper evidence appears in the holy fruits of repentance, and faith and newness of life.”This is a Baptist declaration, but also a Bible Truth. Paul wrote to the Galatians:“Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh. * * “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, “Meekness, temperance” (Galatians 5:16; Galatians 5:22-23). It was the Godly John who wrote,“Whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world” (1 John 5:4). And again he said,“Ye know that every one that doeth righteousness is born of Him” (1 John 2:29). Baptist people have made a sharp distinction between being saved by good works, and doing good works as a result of one’s salvation. The former idea they repudiate; the latter they have faithfully propagated. It is written,“Therefore by the deeds of the Law there shall no flesh be justified in His sight” (Romans 3:20). “For by grace are ye saved * *. “Not of works, lest any man should boast” (Ephesians 2:8-9). “Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone” (James 2:17). “Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble. “But wilt thou know, O vain man, that faith without works is dead”? (James 2:19-20). Henry Van Dyke says: “The world has small need of a religion which consists solely or chiefly of emotions and raptures. But the religion that follows Jesus Christ, alike when He goes up into the high mountain to pray, and when He comes down into the dark valley to work; the religion that listens to Him, alike when He tells us of the peace and joy of the Father’s House and when He calls us to feed His lambs; the religion that is willing to suffer as well as to enjoy, to labor as well as worship God, and has a heart to love man, and a hand to help in every good cause—is pure and undefiled”If there were time I should like to set before you that article of Baptist faith which refers to the organization and government of believers. But both because our hour is well spent, and we have already printed a discourse upon this subject, it seems better to turn your attention to the most distinctive tenet of the Baptist faith, namely:THE ’S BAPTISM “We believe that Christian baptism is the immersion, in water, of the believer, * *. To show forth in a solemn and beautiful emblem our faith in the crucified, buried and risen Saviour, with its effect in our death to sin and resurrection to a new life.”Believers only should be baptized. No difference what enters into the case of the individual to render wanting a personal faith in Christ, the existence of unbelief debars from the privilege of rightly receiving this ceremony. No pool or font was opened in the New Testament for infidel, imbecile or infant, for the very simple reason that baptism signifies what none of these has experienced, namely, “death to sin and the resurrection to walk in newness of life,” through the exercise of personal faith. In the entire Book, from Genesis 1:1 to Revelation 22:21, there is not one baby baptized.And yet, never in the history of the denomination have we taught, by the remotest suggestion, that dying infants were unsaved, for the identical reason that the Scriptures contain no insinuation of any such thing.Apprehensive mother, thou whose babe passed away before priest or preacher could be had to speak a traditional ceremony and sprinkle common water, be perfectly consoled in that the Son of God, Himself, said of children, “Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven”.Christian baptism is the immersion in water of a believer. Baptize means “to dip,” “to plunge,” “to wash,” “to bathe,” “to submerge,” “to immerse.” The baptisms of the Bible were baptisms everyone.

Read Matthew 3:5-6; Mark 1:9; Matthew 3:16; John 3:23; Acts 8:38-39; Romans 6:3-4.But, after all, the most important feature of this sacred ceremony is its spiritual significance. It is a profession of one’s faith. R. S. McArthur quotes from a clergyman of the Protestant Episcopal Church, these words: “The Baptist, in the baptistry, virtually announces his creed touching his personal faith in Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord, and His determination to follow Him in obedience to the teachings of the Gospel.”But no more certainly does baptism by immersion manifest a faith in the risen Christ, than it symbolizes our belief in the soul’s death to sin, and resurrection therefrom. The ceremony in which we are symbolically “buried with Him by baptism” raises us up from the water-grave to “walk in newness of life” For if we have been planted together in the likeness of His death, we shall be also in the likeness of His resurrection” (Romans 6:5). “Buried in baptism with our Lord We rise with Him, to life restored: Not the bare life in Adam lost, But richer far, far more it cost.” How beautifully an immersion symbolizes the entrance upon a new life, and an absolute repudiation of the old manner of living. Geikie, in his “Life and Words of Christ,” says of the Master’s baptism: “Can we question that such an act was a crisis in the life of our Lord? Holy and pure before sinking under the waters, He must yet have risen from them with the light of a higher glory in His countenance. His past life had closed; and a new era had opened.”Is this not true, in a symbol at least, of every man who receives the sacred rite in the same manner? When the fathers f(were all baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea” (1 Corinthians 10:2), were they not in the very act of leaving life in Egypt for ever, and were not their faces set toward the promised Canaan? So it should ever be!In baptism, we symbolize our allegiance to Christ as servants of His will, and soldiers of His Cross.

To receive this initiatory rite, into His visible Church, is to enlist once for all in the army of the Lord. The vows are then publicly taken; the armor is accepted; the flag under which we march chosen; and the leader and captain elected for time and eternity. No wonder Beddome, when contemplating this act, wrote the lines:“Witness ye men and angels, now Before the Lord we speak; To Him we make our solemn vow, A vow we dare not break:— “That, long as life itself shall last, Ourselves to Christ we yield; Nor from His cause will we depart, Or ever quit the field.” In our Civil War, men died clinging to the flag of “Stars and Stripes.” Right well did they know that to bear that in sight of the enemy’s line was to invite the hottest fire; and yet, no sooner did one brave soul fall than another wished the honor of standing in the deadly track to wave that symbol of union and liberty. To them it stood for a great principle, and must not be resigned so long as strength remained in the soldier’s arm.So our Kingdom of righteousness—the coming Kingdom of Christ—has its divinely appointed symbol. Christ gave it with His great commission, and in defense of that we ought to be willing to die—yea, many have died already. Do you wonder when we read, “There is ** one Lord, one faith, one baptism” (Ephesians 4:4-5)? Do you wonder, when you read again, “Repent, and be baptised every one of you” (Acts 2:38)? Do you wonder, when from our Master we hear, “Ye are My friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you” (John 15:14)? Will you obey your Lord?