The divine referred to, elated perhaps by his success, began to frequent the haunts of wit, and to associate with the literary, merely as literary men. He laid aside, or he merged for the time, those truths of God which alone can elevate, and went down to the level of those who think they can find something to make them blessed apart from the truth, and the favour of their God. From the excitement of wit there is scarcely a transition to the excitement of wine, and that followed next. A FELON. By a gradual descent, that man, at one time so ascendant, became a felon in his own eyes; he fled from the pulpit which he had begun to desecrate, and sought an asylum in Paris, where theatres—saloons of fashion—
“The midnight revel and the public show,”
became his haunts. For years his friends could find no trace of him; and when he was discovered, it was as one who lived by gambling—THE
GAMBLER’S
END.a degraded, wretched outcast. While he lived in that self-outlawed condition, a friend who had learned the truth from the fallen man’s lips, actually resorted to a hell, to make sure of the sad change which had come over his former teacher, and to his horror he found what he sought. He saw that minister of Christ taking part in the orgies of a Parisian pandemonium, and hastened with an aching heart, from that last retreat of the infatuated. That victim of his own heart was at length taken ill at Bordeaux; a surgical operation was declared to be necessary, and to escape from the pain, he blew out his brains with a pistol.
Need anything be said to enforce the moral of such a case? Everything but the Word of God controlling[T-12] the heart is feeble against passion, as a spider’s web against a storm. Everything else is fleeting as the sand of the desert, or veering as the mimic figures which tell the changes of the wind. The Word of the Lord alone endureth for ever, both in itself and its moral ascendency.
BLIND LEADERS.
Nor is it only in insulated cases, among ministers of religion, that such mournful truths are pressed upon our attention. In times of religious declension, such sad demonstrations of the insufficiency of all but grace and truth to tame the passions of men, may be seen almost upon a national scale. There is a man, for example, whom the grace of God has arrested amid a life of waywardness and guilt, and rendered a signal monument of mercy. In terms of his own confession, there was scarcely a sin which he had not committed, and as a fiery duellist, he was, in the eyes of God, a murderer. But the truth was at last felt in the conscience, and that man once so bold in iniquity, sought the society of those from whom he expected help on his way; with what result his biographer shall tell: BLIND
LEADERS. “Other proofs,” we read, “of the degraded state of the dominant party in the Church (of Scotland) might be mentioned, particularly a Presbytery dinner to which Mr. James Haldane was invited in Edinburgh, upon a special occasion, and to which he had gone, hoping for useful, perhaps spiritual, or at least rational conversation, on the topics in which he was now chiefly interested. Instead of this, the company were treated to bacchanalian songs, the folly of which was aggravated into something approaching to wickedness, by an admixture of ridiculous, if not profane allusions to their own sacred calling and functions. The burden of one song was the prescription of ‘a bumper of Nottingham Ale’ in the pulpit, at the different stages of a Presbyterian discourse. If, in the hey-day of youth and folly, while God was not in all his thoughts, he had been disposed to turn away from the convivial excesses of his associates at sea, how was he likely now to appreciate such approaches to the same intemperance, in connection with eternal realities, amongst the professed heralds of the Cross, whose duty it was to warn men to flee from the wrath to come?”[37] [T-13]
SPIRITUAL DEATH.
Painful and profoundly instructive as the incident now mentioned is, we have yet more humbling evidence of the danger to which men are exposed by their familiarity with sacred things. In the autobiography of the Rev. Dr. Hamilton of Strathblane, we read, “Many of the ministers of Scotland were genuine Socinians. Many of them were ignorant of theology as a system, and utterly careless about the merits of any creed or confession. They seemed miserable in the discharge of every ministerial duty.... When they preached, their sermons generally turned on honesty, good neighbourhood, and kindness. To deliver a gospel sermon, or preach to the hearts and consciences of dying sinners, was as completely beyond their power, as to speak in the language of angels. SPIRITUAL
DEATH. And while their discourses were destitute of everything which a dying sinner needs, they were at the same time the most feeble, empty, and insipid things that ever disgraced the venerated name of sermons.... They had no more religion in private than in public. They were loud and obstreperous in declaiming against enthusiasm and fanaticism, faith and religious zeal.... But though frightfully impatient of everything which bore the semblance of seriousness and sober reflection, the elevation of brow, the expansion of feature, the glistening of the eye, the fluency and warmth of speech at convivial parties, showed that their heart and soul were there; and that the pleasures of the table, and the hilarity of the light-hearted and the gay constituted their paradise, and furnished them with the perfection of their joy.”[38]
It is thus that men are degraded by the perversion of what was meant to ennoble. It is thus that of all the piteous spectacles which our world presents, few are more sad or distressing than that of a godless minister of religion; such a man
“Is branded to the last,