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THE K I N G ’ S BUSINESS fool, and ten thousand times ten thousand 'others* who all in solemn chorus assert God told the truth, “ It is ill with the wicked.” But what about the other half of my text? “ Say ye to the righteous, ‘well.’ ” Start again where you started before, even when the world was young. Hear the voices of the first man to die, before he goes out to his God. Bet ter still, hear his eulogy pronounced four thousand years after he was killed: “ God had respect unto the of fering of Abel, and he being dead yet speaketh,” “ It is well with the right eous.” Or the seventh from Adam, Enoch; who had this testimony that he walked with God and he was not, for God took him, “ It is well with the righteous.” Hear Noah, rising hourly on the breast of the tumultuous waters nearer to heaven and God say, “ It is well with the righteous.” See Abra ham— called today by even Mohamme danism “ the Friend of God,” known wherever there is a Bible as “ the Father of the Faithful,” “ It is well with the righteous.” Think of Moses, looking at the treasures of Egypt, and then turning disdainfully from them away to the treasures of Christ; and the lengthened shadow of the man is Judaism, the platform upon which God built the cross of Cavalry, “ It is well with the righteous.” Or think of David, the most widely known utter ance in the Christian world trembling from his lip. “ The Lord is my Shep herd, I shall not want;” and ere he died he said, “ I have been young and am now old, but I never saw the right eous forsaken.” “ It is well with the righteous.” Or see Paul as the execu tioner’s sword gleams against the light of the sparkling sun, and the man about to die said, “ There is laid up for me a crown of righteousness,” “ It is well with the righteous.” Or hear Polycarp, led out to lions, as he said, “ Eighty and four years have I served my Lord Christ, and I know of no
when He said, “ It is ill with the wicked.” Bead your Shakespeare and watch a man as he looks at his mur derous fingers, and they flame red while he cries, “ All great Neptune’s waters cannot cleanse the blood from that hand,” “ Is it ill with the wicked?” Ask Browning as he tells you how Guido the murderer must have the lights about him for the darkness is full of ghastly weird shapes, “ Is it ill with the wicked?” Ask Coleridge as in his “ Ancient Mar iner” he writes: “ The very deep did rot, O Christ, That ever this could be, And slimy things did crawl with legs Upon a slimy sea,” “ Is it ill with the wicked?” Ask Jack Johnson in Chicago jail, put for loath some filthiness in the murderer’s cell, making such a wild racket in the dead of the night that they had to move him to another cell, and all his reason was, "The spirits of the murdered are about me!” “ Is it ill with the wicked?” Ask the men I have known, I can see one of them dying in delirium tremens, and I buried another who bore his in tolerable life as long as he could and then took it with his own hand, “ Is it ill with the wicked?” And you ask the men you have met. Said a man to me only last night as he told of the stories of the men he had known, and added, “ They are all dead,” “ Is it ill with the wicked?” Hear the curses pealing and reverberating down the pages of that Book telling what is the effect of sin here and" there, now and then, and say, “ Is it ill with the wicked?” Ask the men grown old, and every year, a year of shame, friendless ness, hopelessness, uselessness and doom, “ Is it ill with the wicked?” Hear the text and then I say listen to the voices of Adam, the drowned of the flood, Egypt, Pharaoh, Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, Achan, Saul, Sennacherib, Nebuchadnezzar, Belshazzar, Herod, Judas, Julian, Napoleon, Wilhelm the
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