on, the only religion that
will be worth a snap of your finger when you come to die or appear in
the Day of Judgment. The devil built the college. Righteousness
captured it.

In some city there goes up a great club-house--the architecture, the
furniture, all the equipment a bedazzlement of wealth. That particular
club-house is designed to make gambling and dissipation respectable.

Do not fret. That splendid building will after a while be a free
library, or it will be a hospital, or it will be a gallery of pure
art. Again and again observatories have been built by infidelity, and
the first thing you know they go into the hand of Christian science.
God said in the Bible that He would put a hook in Sennacherib's nose
and pull him down by a way he knew not. And God has a hook to-day in
the nose of every Sennacherib of infidelity and sin, and will drag him
about as He will. Marble halls deserted to sinful amusements will yet
be dedicated for religious assemblage. All these castles of sin are to
be captured for God as we go forth with the battle-shout that Oliver
Cromwell rang out at the head of his troops as he rode in on the field
of Naseby: "Let God arise and let His enemies be scattered!" After a
great fire in London, amid the ruins there was nothing left but an
arch with the name of the architect upon it; and, my friends, whatever
else goes down, God stays up.

Why do the wicked live? That some of them may be monuments of mercy.

So it was with John Newton, so it was with Augustine, perhaps so it
was with you. Chieftains of sin to become chieftains of grace. Paul,
the apostle, made out of Saul, the persecutor. Baxter, the flaming
evangel, made out of Baxter, the blasphemer. Whole squadrons, with
streamers of Emmanuel floating from the masthead, though once they
were launched from the dry-docks of diabolism. God lets these wicked
men live that He may make jewels out of them for coronets, that He may
make tongues of fire out of them for Pentecosts, that He may make
warriors out of them for Armageddons, that he may make conquerors out
of them for the day when they shall ride at the head of the
white-horse host in the grand review of the resurrection.

Why do the wicked live? To make it plain beyond all controversy that
there is another place of adjustment. So many of the bad up, so many
of the good down. It seems to me that no man can look abroad without
saying--no man of common sense, religious or irreligious, can lo