Again, Christ is a near refuge. When we are attacked, what advantage is there in having a fortress on the other side of the mountain? Many an army has had an intrenchment, but could not get to it before the battle opened. Blessed be God, it is no long march to our castle. We may get off, with all our troops, from the worst earthly defeat in this stronghold. In a moment we may step from the battle into the tower. I sing of a Saviour near.
During the late war the forts of the North were named after the Northern generals, and the forts of the South were named after the Southern generals. This fortress of our soul I shall call Castle Jesus. I have seen men pursued of sins that chased them with feet of lightning, and yet with one glad leap they bounded into the tower. I have seen troubles, with more than the speed and terror of a cavalry troop, dash after a retreating soul, yet were hurled back in defeat from the bulwarks. Jesus near! A child's cry, a prisoner's prayer, a sailor's death-shriek, a pauper's moan reaches him. No pilgrimages on spikes. No journeying with a huge pack on your back. No kneeling in penance in cold vestibule of mercy. But an open door! A compassionate Saviour! A present salvation! A near refuge! Castle Jesus!
Oh, why do you not put out your arm and reach it? Why do you not fly to it? Why be riddled, and shelled, and consumed under the rattling bombardment of perdition, when one moment's faith would plant you in the glorious refuge? I preach a Jesus here; a Jesus now; a fountain close to your feet; a fiery pillar right over your head; bread already broken for your hunger; a crown already gleaming for your brow. Hark to the castle gates rattling back for your entrance! Hear you not the welcome of those who have fled for refuge to lay hold upon the hope set before us?
Again, it is a universal refuge. A fortress is seldom large enough to hold a whole army. I look out upon fourteen hundred millions of the race; and then I look at this fortress, and I say that there is room enough for all. If it had been possible, this salvation would have been monopolized. Men would have said: "Let us have all this to ourselves—no publicans, no plebeians, no lazzaroni, no converted pickpockets. We will ride toward heaven on fierce chargers, our feet in golden stirrups. Grace for lords, and dukes, and duchesses, and counts. Let Napoleon and his marshals come in, but not the common soldier that fought under him. Let the Girards and the Barings come in, but not the stevedores that unloaded their cargoes, or the men who kept their books." Heaven would have been a glorified Windsor Castle, or Tuileries, or Vatican; and exclusive aristocrats would have strutted through the golden streets to all eternity.
Thank God, there is mercy for the poor! The great Doctor John Mason preached over a hundred times the same sermon; and the text was: "To the poor the Gospel is preached." Lazarus went up, while Dives went down; and there are candidates for Imperial splendors in the back alley, and by the peat-fire of the Irish shanty. King Jesus set up His throne in a manger, and made a resurrection day for the poor widow of Nain, and sprung the gate of heaven wide open, so that all the beggars, and thieves, and scoundrels of the universe may come in if they will only repent. I can snatch the knife from the murderer's hand while it is yet dripping with the blood of his victim, and tell him of the grace that is sufficient to pardon his soul. Do you say that I swing open the gate of heaven too far? I swing it open no wider than Christ, when He says: "Whosoever will, let him come." Don't you want to go in with such a rabble? Then you can stay out.
The whole world will yet come into this refuge. The windows of heaven will be opened; God's trumpet of salvation will sound, and China will come from its tea-fields and rice-harvests, and lift itself up into the light. India will come forth, the chariots of salvation jostling to pieces her Juggernauts. Freezing Greenland, and sweltering Abyssinia, will, side by side, press into the kingdom; and transformed Bornesian cannibal preach of the resurrection of the missionary he has slain. The glory of Calvary will tinge the tip of the Pyrenees; and Lebanon cedars shall clap their hands; and by one swing of the sickle Christ shall harvest nations for the skies.
I sing a world redeemed. In the rush of the winds that set the forest in motion, like giants wrestling on the hills, I see the tossing up of the triumphal branches that shall wave all along the line of our King as He comes to take empire. In the stormy diapason of the ocean's organ, and the more gentle strains that in the calm come sounding up from the crystal and jasper keys at the beach, I hear the prophecy: "The earth shall be filled with the knowledge of God as the waters fill the sea."
The gospel morning will come like the natural morning. At first it seems only like another hue of the night. Then a pallor strikes through the sky, as though a company of ministering spirits, pale with tedious watching through the night, had turned in their flight upward to look back upon the earth. Then a faint glow of fire, as though on a barren beach a wrecked mariner was kindling a flickering flame. Then chariots and horses of fire racing up and down the heavens; then perfect day: "Who is she that cometh forth as the morning?"
Come in, black Hottentot and snow-white Caucasian, come in, mitered official and diseased beggar; let all the world come in. Room in Castle Jesus! Sound it through all lands; sound it by all tongues. Let sermons preach it, and bells chime it, and pencils sketch it, and processions celebrate it, and bells ring it: Room in Castle Jesus!
Again, Christ is the only refuge. If you were very sick, and there was only one medicine that would cure you, how anxious you would be to get that medicine. If you were in a storm at sea, and you found that the ship could not weather it, and there was only one harbor, how anxious you would be to get into that harbor. Oh, sin-sick soul, Christ is the only medicine; oh, storm-tossed soul, Christ is the only harbor. Need I tell a cultured audience like this that there is no other name given among men by which ye can be saved? That if you want the handcuffs knocked from your wrists, and the hopples from your feet, and the icy bands from your heart, there is just one Almighty arm in all the universe to do everything? There are other fortresses to which you might fly, and other ramparts behind which you might hide, but God will cut to pieces, with the hail of His vengeance, all these refuges of lies.