WHEN the celebrated Scotch gentleman Mr. Brownlow North began to preach, he used to say to his audience, “I am not an authorized preacher, BUT A MAN WHO HAS BEEN TO THE EDGE OF THE BOTTOMLESS PIT, AND I WANT TO WIN YOU BACK.”
He moved in the highest circles of society. His life had been very fast and reckless, and until he was suddenly seized with the fear of death he appeared neither to fear God nor regard man.
Coming home one night from the card-table he was taken very unwell, and could not go to sleep. He thought his end had come. Death he dreaded. Judgment he was rightly in terror of. But
MEET GOD HE MUST.
Yet meet Him in his sins he dare not. Eternity, with all its solemn possibilities for weal or woe, stared him straight in the face. What a serious position to be in!
His past life had not been good. Sinner he was, and sinner he now felt himself to be. His sins came up before him, and in the man who, above many, seemed so utterly conscienceless, conscience now began to work with all its terrible force.
His sins rose up like a mountain before his eyes, and seemed like a terrible avalanche about to fall in judgment upon him. He became most miserable. Remorse burned in his bosom—the very foretaste of hell itself. When conscience begins to work in earnest, how unsparing it is to its victim!
The Bible that he neglected and perhaps even hated, because it condemned his sinful life, was the only Book he thought of turning to. Novels he had read in abundance, but these all failed him in the hour of his deep distress and need.
As for prayer: Did he ever pray except at his mother’s knee? Anyhow, never in real earnest until now. God’s mercy he had hitherto spurned, but now he pleaded for mercy. Good works he had none to show—his only plaint, his only cry—
GOD BE MERCIFUL TO ME A SINNER!
And was the cry of need refused? It might have been. He had no claim on God. All his life he had ignored God’s just and reasonable claims on him. But how different God is from man! He is so merciful that He receives the most hopeless and abandoned of sinners, yet so just that He gave His own Son upon the cross that He might righteously do so. “Who was delivered for our offenses, and was raised again for our justification” (Rom. 4:2525Who was delivered for our offences, and was raised again for our justification. (Romans 4:25)).
Out of the depths of misery and well-nigh of despair, Mr. North was heard. The mighty change in his after life proved what a miracle of mercy he was. His conversion to God and all such conversions are a standing proof of the existence of God. Nothing but a power above nature could have changed such a man or altered such a course as his was.
“GOD IS” was the burden of his preaching. He could speak from experience, and an ounce of experience is worth a ton of theory. It was no hypothesis, but a fact proven in his conscience and heart.
GOD IS. Solemn message! The existence and presence of God is a fact verified in the moral experience of tens of thousands. The knowledge of it strikes terror into most men if unrepentant when death comes to them.
It might be said of Mr. North as was said of Bunyan, the converted tinker and immortal dreamer, “He carried the same fire on his own conscience that he persuaded others to beware of.”
An infidel had put upon the wall of his own house the words “God is nowhere.” He asked his little daughter one day to read the words, if thereby he might instill the poison of infidelity into the child’s mind. To his great surprise she read, unwittingly dividing the last word,
GOD IS NOW HERE.
Like a barbed arrow it fastened itself on his conscience and went down to his very soul. For days together, everywhere he went, he carried the sense of the awfulness of God’s presence with him. No peace could be found until he turned to the God he had so wantonly belied and blasphemed and found pardon for all his sins. “Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.” Gilfillan said these were the greatest words ever written. Well might he sing—
“Who is a pardoning God like Thee,
Or who has grace so rich, so free?”
He found out what everyone will find some day, that with God we all must have to do, either in grace or judgment. “Whither shall I go from Thy Spirit? or whither shall I flee from Thy presence?” To hide is IMPOSSIBLE!
GOD IS EVERYWHERE.
His presence is like the sun, “nothing can be hidden from the heat thereof.”
Mr. North was most unsparing in his denunciation of sin, and ever sought to warn his hearers, whether high or low, of the effects that follow its awful course! “Be sure your sin will find you out” was a statement he had strongly verified in his experience.
Though multitudes thronged to hear him and listened with entranced minds to the burning eloquence that came from his lips, yet he solemnly warned them of their danger if they neglected God’s great salvation in Christ.
It is a great mistake to think that because Scripture speaks of judgment, and preachers urge their hearers with all earnestness to escape it, it is not love that prompts to this.
If a mother saw her child exposed to some danger unknown to the child, would not her love be shown in exposing the danger and warning her child to beware of it? If with entreaties and tears she sought to save her child, who would ever dream of blaming her?
GOD DELIGHTS IN MERCY.
His nature is love. As a consequence He must delight in mercy. Judgment is His strange work. But if men refuse mercy, judgment must be their everlasting portion.
In one sense conscience is a sort of tribunal. When it is active it ever calls men to account. It never cloaks sin unless it is hardened through its deceitfulness. It is a great mercy to fallen men to have such a faithful monitor. It is a keen detective when awakened.
Conscience has hindered many a man from going further into sin than his evil nature would have plunged him. We repeat, what a mercy to have a conscience, especially a sensitive, awakened one.
Next to saving a man’s soul, the greatest favor God can show him is to awaken conscience. When conscience is convicted and the soul plunged into sorrow for the past, repentance toward God is the sure result.
Repentance toward God and forgiveness of sins go together. “And that repentance and forgiveness of sins be preached in His name” among all nations, said the risen Saviour in His last commission to those who were to go out to all men and make it known. P. W.