the
temple of sin, and capture this world for God. We are very apt to
stick to the old modes of attack.

We put on the old-style coat of mail. We come up with the sharp, keen,
glittering steel spear of argument, expecting in that way to take the
castle, but they have a thousand spears where we have ten. And so the
castle of sin stands. Oh, my friends, we will never capture this world
for God by any keen saber of sarcasm, by any glittering lances of
rhetoric, by any sapping and mining of profound disquisition, by any
gunpowdery explosions of indignation, by sharp shootings of wit, by
howitzers of mental strength made to swing shell five miles, by
cavalry horses gorgeously caparisoned pawing the air. In vain all the
attempts on the part of these ecclesiastical foot soldiers, light
horsemen, and grenadiers.

My friends, I propose this morning a different style of tactics. Let
each one go to the forest of God's promise and invitation, and hew
down a branch and put it on his shoulder, and let us all come around
these obstinate iniquities, and then, with this pile, kindled by the
fires of a holy zeal and the flames of a consecrated life, we will
burn them out. What steel can not do, fire may. And I, this morning,
announce myself in favor of any plan of religious attack that
succeeds--any plan of religious attack, however radical, however odd,
however unpopular, however hostile to all the conventionalities of
Church and State. We want more heart in our song, more heart in our
alms-giving, more heart in our prayers, more heart in our preaching.
Oh, for less of Abimelech's sword, and more of Abimelech's
conflagration! I have often heard

"There is a fountain filled with blood"

sung artistically by four birds perched on their Sunday roost in the
gallery, until I thought of Jenny Lind, and Nilsson, and Sontag, and
all the other warblers; but there came not one tear to my eye, nor one
master emotion to my heart. But one night I went down to the African
Methodist meeting-house in Philadelphia, and at the close of the
service a black woman, in the midst of the audience, began to sing
that hymn, and all the audience joined in, and we were floated some
three or four miles nearer heaven than I have ever been since. I saw
with my own eyes that "fountain filled with blood"--red, agonizing,
sacrificial, redemptive--and I heard the crimson plash of the wave as
we all went down under it:

"For sinners plunged beneath that fl