Free, pure, and vital as the light,
God's message to our race;
Like genial gales the Spirit's might,
Sovereign, mysterious grace.
Breathe forth, O wind, and to new birth
Quicken the bones of death;
Regenerate this withered earth;
Give to the dying breath.
It is pleasant to add to this account, that satisfactory evidences were given that some, during these services, were brought to the saving knowledge of "the truth as in Jesus." And it may be mentioned as a singular circumstance, that an old man one hundred and three years of age attended on this occasion, who had been carried in his mother's arms to this same spot to hear Whitefield preach just a century before.
The last centenary service to which we shall make reference, is the one held at the Bristol Tabernacle, November 25, 1853. The sermon on The Character of Whitefield, by the Rev. John Angell James, was from the text, "This one thing I do." Phil. 3:13. In it he said:
"We hear much in our days about the adaptation of the gospel to the age. There is no word I more hate or love, dread or desire, according to the sense in, or the purpose for which it is used, than this word adaptation as applied to preaching. Now, if by adaptation be meant, more philosophy, and less Christianity; more of cold abstract intellectualism, and less of popular, simple, earnest statement of gospel truth; more profound discussion and artificial elaboration addressed to the learned few, and less of warm-hearted appeal to the multitude, may God preserve us from such adaptation, for it is high-treason against truth and the salvation of souls. But if by this be meant a stronger intelligence, a chaster composition, a sterner logic, a more powerful rhetoric, a more correct criticism, and a more varied illustration, but all employed to set forth the gospel as comprehending those two great words, redemption and regeneration, let us have it; we need it; and come in ever such abundance, it will be a blessing.
"Adaptation! the gospel is adaptation, from beginning to end, to every age of time, and to all conditions of humanity. It is God's own adaptation. It is he who knows every ward of the lock of man's nature, who has constructed this admirable key; and all the miserable tinkering of a vain and deceitful philosophy can make no better key, nor can all the attempts of a philosophizing theology make this key better fit the wards of the lock.
"Adaptation! was not the gospel in all its purity and simplicity adapted to human nature as it existed in commercial, scholastic, philosophical Corinth? And did not Paul think so when he determined to know nothing there, but 'Christ, and him crucified?' Was it not by this very gospel, which many are "beginning to imagine is not suited to an intellectual and philosophical age, that Christianity fought its first battles, and achieved its victories over the hosts of darkness? Against the axe, the stake, the sword of the gladiator, and the lions of the amphitheatre; against the ridicule of wits, the reasoning of sages, the interests, influence, and craft of the priesthood; against the prowess of armies, and the brute passions of the mob, Christianity, strong in its weakness, sublime in its simplicity, potent in its isolation, asking and receiving no protection from the sceptre of the monarch or the sword of the warrior, went forth to do battle with the wisdom of Greece and the mythology of Rome. Everywhere it prevailed, and gathered its laurels from the snows of Scythia, the sands of Africa, the plains of India, and the green fields of Europe. With the gospel alone she overturned the altars of impiety in her march. Power felt his arm wither at her glance. She silenced the lying oracles by the majesty of her voice, and extinguished the deceptive light of philosophy in the schools, till at length she who went forth forlorn and weeping from Calvary to the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, ascended, upon the ruins of the temples, the idols, and the altars she had demolished, to the throne of the Cæsars, and with the diadem on her brow, and the purple on her shoulders, gave laws to the world from that very tribunal where she had been dragged as a criminal and condemned as a malefactor.[3]
"Adaptation! is not justification by faith the very substance of the gospel, and was it not by this doctrine that Luther effected the enfranchisement of the human intellect, from the chains of slavery which had been forged in the Vatican; achieved the liberation of half Europe from the yoke of Rome, and gave an impulse to human thought and vital Christianity which has not yet spent itself, and never will, till it issues in the jubilee of the nations and the glories of the millennium?
"Adaptation! did not Whitefield move this kingdom almost to its centre, and equally so our then great transatlantic colony to its extremities, fascinating alike the colliers of Kingswood and the citizens of the metropolis; and by this mighty theme enable myriads to burst the chains of sin and Satan, and to walk abroad disenthralled by the mighty power of redeeming grace?
"Adaptation! is not this gospel now proving its power in heathen countries to raise the savage into civilized man, the civilized man into the saint, and in this ascending scale of progression, the saint into the seraph?
"And yet, with these proofs of the power of the gospel to adapt itself to every age of the world, and to every condition of humanity, there are those who want something else to effect the regeneration of mankind. 'And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me.' So said the Saviour of men. The cross is the great moral magnet for all ages and all countries, to draw men from barbarism to civilization, from sin to holiness, from misery to happiness, and from earth to heaven; and it were as rational to say the loadstone had lost its original power of polar attraction, and the mariner's compass is an old, stale invention, and must now be replaced with some new device, better adapted to the modern light of science, as to suppose that the doctrine of the cross had become effete, and must give way to some new phase of theological truth.