THE KING’S BUSINESS
93
foundation,” were his words. Hull squats on the ancient sandbanks of the river Humber. With its lightly constructed houses squinting off the plumb, the town seems nervously flinging out its arms and clutching at anything or everything to keep it respectably upright. Of those im mense mountains of towering rock- masonry not one is to be seen. Shifty, fickle, unstable sand! “There is no foundation.” Like this is the unsteady, unsure bottom the so-called “Church” has purchased with the price of the Blood; like this the auctioned lot she has dared to exclusively ticket the Name of God upon. Sacramentarian- ism, so subtly increasing to-day, is just such a sandbank, and it is" left by the rapidly receding river of grace, and on this sloppy delta of devil’s delusion voices intoning by the ten thousand advise you to build. Be ware, beware, “There is no founda tion.” It is of man, not of God. The Sacraments seal grace, but grace must first be there to seal. Before you cook your hare, you surely must catch him. You cannot build a house from the roof downwards; you must begin at the bottom. Sacramentarian- ism begins with the chimney-cans, the slates, and the rain-piping, then comes down to the colored windows and walls of the “dim religious light,” and would fain finish the ornate build ing, but—the foundation where? the foundation what ? Debris and priestly deception, a molten mass of thin, por- ridgy, gruelly sand you could sail a boat in, but never think of building upon. “There is no foundation,” and when the house falls, great is the fall thereof. And yet poor souls per sist in giving their very all for this worthless lot, this sandy, rockless patch. They will hug for very life the grim old heresy of ex opere op- erato —the doing done of the Church of corruption. In France you notice
below the knob of a bell-pull on the doors of the cathedrals and churches this boldly inscribed' inscription, “Night-bell for the Sacraments.” Dy ing churchly sinner, dark night in the streets of the city, but a darker night in thy priestly-poisoned depart ing soul! What’s to be done ? Pull the night-bell for the Sacraments! Ring up the Roman rogue, and let him hurry to mumble thee away in that dreaming sleep of eternity! With his “extreme unction” he will safely ferry thee over to thy home in—• hell! O thing of infernal folly! O awful madness! to cram eternity into a dying gasp and to build eternity on a half-crown’s worth of profes sional priestly mud! High Church Sacramentarianism is not the founda tion of God. It is man’s invention— nay, it is the Devil’s. It is the “patent medicine” of the shaven and shorn “Supreme Quack” of the Seven Hills, that Vicar-General and Vicegerent of Satan! And yet this childish thing is spreading like wild fire south of the Tweed, and unceremoniously oust ing Protestant truth from its evan gelical _pedestal. Oh, for Wycliffe and Ridley and Latimer to protest to the death again! If John Bunyan were to write now the “Pilgrim’s Progress,” he would revise and change one passage of it. He would certainly bring out the Pope from the skull-thresholded cave, and would give him more effectual work to do than to sit and grin and gnash his teeth at the passers-by. That for England, but in the land where John Knox thundered from St. Giles we have not yet been thus far left to our foolish selves. Signs ominous and foreboding do multiply around, but, thank God, as in the brave days of old, the Queen’s throne would not yet buy the flung footstool of her Most Gracious Majesty Jenny Geddes! This, as it is : however, like a chem-
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online