The leaders in these revivals have been men of prayer
and faith and consuming love, but they have been men who knew
"the terrors of the Lord," and, therefore, they preached the
judgments of God, and they proved that the law with its penalties
is a schoolmaster to bring men to Christ (Gal. iii. 24). Fox, the
Quaker; Bunyan, the Baptist; Baxter, the Puritan; Wesley and
Fletcher, and Whitefield and Caughey, the Methodists; Finney, the
Presbyterian; Edwards and Moody, the Congregationalists; and
General Booth, the Salvationist, have preached it, not savagely,
but tenderly and faithfully, as a mother might warn her child
against some great danger that would surely follow careless and
selfish wrong-doing.
What men have loved and laboured and sacrificed as these men?
Their hearts have been a flaming furnace of love and devotion to
God, and an over-flowing fountain of love and compassion for men;
but just in proportion as they have discovered God's love and
pity for the sinner, so have they discovered His wrath against
sin and all obstinate wrong-doing; and as they have caught
glimpses of Heaven and declared its joys and everlasting glories
to men, so they have seen Hell, with its endless punishment, and
with trembling voice and overflowing eyes have they warned men to
"flee from the wrath to come."
Were these men, throbbing with spiritual life and consumed with
devotion to the Kingdom of God and the everlasting well-being of
their fellowmen, led to this belief by the Spirit of Truth, or
were they misled? Is it the prophet, weeping and praying and
preaching and fighting for God and men, to whom the Spirit has
always first spoken and revealed the things of God? Or is it the
philosopher, or dry-as-dust theologian, or the popular preacher
of smooth things, sitting in his study and among his books,
spinning out of his own mind his conceits concerning God's plan
and purpose in the universe?
Does Seneca or the Psalmist, Plato or Paul, Rousseau or Wesley,
the idolised, high-salaried, soft-raimented preacher of a wide
gate and broad way to life and Heaven, or the veteran soul-winner,
General Booth, more clearly make known the mind of God in
matters that are spiritual?
"The things of the Spirit.
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