ling a plain and easy way for all men to become rich and
enjoy health and pleasure and this world's happiness, would it not be
studied by all men? And why is it that the Bible is not studied by the
masses and regarded more? Why are so many professors of religion
negligent in this matter? May it not be because they prefer all other
business and pleasures before this? If professors of religion throughout
christendom heartily believed the Scriptures even as they profess, they
would be more diligently studied, and in many instances treated with
greater respect. The faith of many is undoubtedly very weak. If the laws
of our country provided a plain way of escape from temporal death for
the benefit of the condemned criminal, as plain and pointed as the great
commission given to the apostles of Christ, would any condemned criminal
hesitate to obey or treat the stipulations of law as men are constantly
treating the precepts of the gospel of Christ? When a man believes the
Bible contains _the facts and truths_ which concern us infinitely more
than all earthly matters, his care and diligence should be, _to some
extent_, in harmony with his persuasion. At this point men _seem to be_
most strangely careless and grossly negligent. How few people do, or
will, understand that the terms of salvation are written as with the
beams of the sun? Is the trouble a low degree of faith, approximating
unbelief? The shadows are always the longest when the sun is lowest. Is
the sun of righteousness low in your spiritual heavens? Or have you
given him the uppermost seat in your affections? What think you of
Christ? Whose son is he?

When I tell you that thousands received the baptism of repentance for
the remission of sins, even before the Holy Spirit was given, and were
clean through the words spoken unto them, many are ready to cry out,
"These are hard and strange sayings--who can hear them?" Yet, strange as
it may seem, these facts have been upon record near _nineteen hundred_
years. Jesus said, "Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to
every creature; he that believeth and is baptized shall be saved, and he
that believeth not shall be damned." In the record of St. Luke, chapter
24, the condition of the new covenant, to which remission of sins is
promised, is expressed by the term _repentance_: "Thus it behooved
Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead, and that repentance and
remission of sins should be preached in his name among all