A few years ago I was preaching in Chicago on that text, “Arise, go up to Bethel and dwell there.” After the meeting a man asked to see me alone. I went into a private room. The perspiration stood in beads on his forehead. I said:
“What is it?”
He replied: “I am a fugitive from justice. I am in exile, in disguise. The government of my state has offered a reward for me. I have been hidden here for months. They tell me there is no hell, but it seems as though I have been in hell for months.”
He had been a business man, and having, as he thought, plenty of money, he forged some bonds, thinking that he could give his check any time and call them in, but he got beyond his depth and fell.
He said, “I have been here for six months. I have a wife and three children, but I cannot write to them or hear from them.” The poor man was in terrible mental agony.
I said, “Why don’t you go back and give yourself up and face the law, and ask God to forgive you?”
He said, “I would take the first train to-morrow and give myself up, except for one thing. I have a wife and three children; how can I bring the disgrace upon them?”
I, too, have a wife and three children, and when he said that, the thing looked very different.
Ah! if we could do our own reaping, it would not be so bitter, but when we make our little children or the wife of our bosom, or our old gray-haired mother, or our old father reap with us, isn’t the reaping pretty bitter? I don’t fear any pestilence or any disease as much as I fear sin. If God will only keep sin out of thy family, I will praise Him in time and in eternity. The worst enemy that ever crossed a man’s path is sin.
If a man comes to me for advice I always try to put myself in the place of the one to whom I am talking, and then to give the best advice I can. I said to this man,