naut wet with the blood of those sacrificed to their
avarice. Some of them are like Caligula, who wished that all the
people had only one neck that he might strike it off at one blow. Oh,
the slain, the slain! A long procession of usurers and libertines and
infamous quacks and legal charlatans and world-grabbing monsters. What
apostleship of despoliation! Demons incarnate. Hundreds of men
concentering all their energies of body, mind, and soul in one
prolonged, ever-intensifying, and unrelenting effort to scald and
scarify and blast and consume the world. I do not blame you for asking
me the quivering, throbbing, burning, resounding, appalling question
of my text, "Wherefore do the wicked live?"

In the first place, they live to demonstrate beyond all controversy
the long-suffering patience of God. You sometimes say, under some
great affront, "I will not stand it;" but perhaps you are compelled to
stand it. God, with all the batteries of omnipotence loaded with
thunderbolts, stands it century after century. I have no doubt
sometimes an angel comes to Him and suggests, "Now is the time to
strike." "No," says God; "wait a year, wait twenty years, wait a
century, wait five centuries." What God does is not so wonderful as
what He does not do. He has the reserve corps with which He could
strike Mormonism and Mohammedanism and Paganism from the earth in a
day. He could take all the fraud in New York on the west side of
Broadway and hurl it into the Hudson, and all the fraud on the east
side of Broadway and hurl it into the East River in an hour. He
understands the combination lock of every dishonest money-safe, and
could blow it up quicker than by any earthly explosive. Written all
over the earth, written all over history are the words, "Divine
forbearance, divine leniency, divine long-suffering."

I wonder that God did not burn this world up two thousand years ago,
scattering its ashes into immensity, its aerolites dropping into
other worlds to be kept in their museums as specimens of a defunct
planet. People sometimes talk of God as though He were hasty in His
judgments and as though He snapped men up quick. Oh, no! He waited one
hundred and twenty years for the people to get into the ark, and
warned them all the time--one hundred and twenty years, then the flood
came. The Anchor Line gives only a month's announcement of the sailing
of the "Circassia," the White Star Line gives only a month's
announcement of the sailing o