New Tabernacle Sermons

by T. De Witt Talmage

You do not tell him that, do you? No. You say to him: "Loan you money? No. You are down. You will have to go to the dogs. Lend you a shilling? I would not lend you five cents to keep you from the gallows. You are debauched! Get out of my sight, now! Down; you will have to stay down!" And thus those bruised and battered men are sometimes accosted by those who ought to lift them up. Thus the last vestige of hope is taken from them. Thus those who ought to go and lift and save them are guilty of stripping the slain.

The point I want to make is this: sin is hard, cruel, and merciless. Instead of helping a man up it helps him down; and when, like Saul and his comrades, you lie on the field, it will come and steal your sword and helmet and shield, leaving you to the jackal and the crow.

But the world and Satan do not do all their work with the outcast and abandoned. A respectable, impenitent man comes to die. He is flat on his back. He could not get up if the house were on fire. Adroitest medical skill and gentlest nursing have been a failure. He has come to his last hour. What does Satan do for such a man? Why, he fetches up all the inapt, disagreeable, and harrowing things in his life. He says: "Do you remember those chances you had for heaven, and missed them? Do you remember all those lapses in conduct? Do you remember all those opprobrious words and thoughts and actions? Don't remember them, eh? I'll make you remember them." And then he takes all the past and empties it on that death-bed, as the mail-bags are emptied on the post-office floor. The man is sick. He can not get away from them.

Then the man says to Satan: "You have deceived me. You told me that all would be well. You said there would be no trouble at the last. You told me if I did so and so, you would do so and so. Now you corner me, and hedge me up, and submerge me in everything evil." "Ha! ha!" says Satan, "I was only fooling you. It is mirth for me to see you suffer. I have been for thirty years plotting to get you just where you are. It is hard for you now—it will be worse for you after awhile. It pleases me. Lie still, sir. Don't flinch or shudder. Come now, I will tear off from you the last rag of expectation. I will rend away from your soul the last hope. I will leave you bare for the beating of the storm. It is my business to strip the slain."

While men are in robust health, and their digestion is good, and their nerves are strong, they think their physical strength will get them safely through the last exigency. They say it is only cowardly women who are afraid at the last, and cry out for God. "Wait till I come to die. I will show you. You won't hear me pray, nor call for a minister, nor want a chapter read me from the Bible." But after the man has been three weeks in a sick-room his nerves are not so steady, and his worldly companions are not anywhere near to cheer him up, and he is persuaded that he must quit life: his physical courage is all gone.

He jumps at the fall of a teaspoon in a saucer. He shivers at the idea of going away. He says: "Wife, I don't think my infidelity is going to take me through. For God's sake don't bring up the children to do as I have done. If you feel like it, I wish you would read a verse or two out of Fannie's Sabbath-school hymn-book or New Testament." But Satan breaks in, and says: "You have always thought religion trash and a lie; don't give up at the last. Besides that, you can not, in the hour you have to live, get off on that track. Die as you lived. With my great black wings I shut out that light. Die in darkness. I rend away from you that last vestige of hope. It is my business to strip the slain."

A man who had rejected Christianity and thought it all trash, came to die. He was in the sweat of a great agony, and his wife said: "We had better have some prayer." "Mary, not a breath of that," he said. "The lightest word of prayer would roll back on me like rocks on a drowning man. I have come to the hour of test. I had a chance, and I forfeited it. I believed in a liar, and he has left me in the lurch. Mary, bring me Tom Paine, that book that I swore by and lived by, and pitch it in the fire, and let it burn and burn as I myself shall soon burn." And then, with the foam on his lip and his hands tossing wildly in the air, he cried out: "Blackness of darkness! Oh, my God, too late!" And the spirits of darkness whistled up from the depth, and wheeled around and around him, stripping the slain.

Sin is a luxury now; it is exhilaration now; it is victory now. But after awhile it is collision; it is defeat; it is extermination; it is jackalism; it is robbing the dead; it is stripping the slain. Give it up to-day—give it up! Oh, how you have been cheated on, my brother, from one thing to another! All these years you have been under an evil mastery that you understood not. What have your companions done for you? What have they done for your health? Nearly ruined it by carousal. What have they done for your fortune? Almost scattered it by spendthrift behavior. What have they done for your reputation? Almost ruined it with good men. What have they done for your immortal soul? Almost insured its overthrow.

You are hastening on toward the consummation of all that is sad. To-day you stop and think, but it is only for a moment, and then you will tramp on, and at the close of this service you will go out, and the question will be: "How did you like the sermon?" And one man will say: "I liked it very well," and another man will say: "I didn't like it at all;" but neither of the answers will touch the tremendous fact that, if impenitent, you are going at eighteen knots an hour toward shipwreck! Yea, you are in a battle where you will fall; and while your surviving relatives will take your remaining estate, and the cemetery will take your body, the messengers of darkness will take your soul, and come and go about you for the next ten million years, stripping the slain.

Many are crying out: "I admit I am slain, I admit it!" On what battle-field, my brothers? By what weapon? "Polluted imagination," says one man; "Intoxicating liquor," says another man; "My own hard heart," says another man. Do you realize this? Then I come to tell you that the omnipotent Christ is ready to walk across this battle-field, and revive, and resuscitate, and resurrect your dead soul. Let Him take your hand and rub away the numbness; your head, and bathe off the aching; your heart, and stop its wild throb. He brought Lazarus to life; He brought Jairus' daughter to life; He brought the young man of Nain to life, and these are three proofs anyhow that he can bring you to life.