She went in and laid opened it and passed up the path where she played in childhood. She came to the steps and looked in at the fire on the hearth. Then she put her fingers to the latch. Oh! if that door had been locked she would have perished on the threshold, for she was near to death. But that door had not been locked since the time she went away. She pushed open the door. down on the hearth by the fire. growled as he saw her enter, but there was something in the voice he recognized, and he frisked about her until he almost pushed her down in his joy. In the morning the mother came down, and she saw a bundle of rags on the hearth; but when the face was uplifted, she knew it, and it was no more old Meg of the street. Throwing her arms around the returned prodigal, she cried, "Oh! Maggie." The child threw her arms around her mother's neck, and said: "Oh! Mother," and while they were embraced a rugged form towered above them. It was the father. The severity all gone out of his face, he stooped and took her up tenderly and carried her to mother's room, and laid her down on mother's bed, for she was dying. Then the lost one, looking up into her mother's face, said: "Wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities!" Mother, do you think that means me?" "Oh, yes, my darling," said the mother, "if mother is so glad to get you back, don't you. think God is glad to get you back?" And there she lay dying, and all her dreams and all her prayers were filled with the words, "Wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities," until just before the moment of her departure, her face lighted up, showing the pardon of God had dropped upon her soul. And there she slept away on the bosom of a pardoning Jesus. So the Lord took back one whom the world rejected. CHAPTER IV. WHOM I SAW AND WHOM I MISSED. "And the vale of Siddim was full of slime-pits."-Genesis xiv: 10. About six months ago, a gentleman in Augusta, Georgia, wrote me asking me to preach from this text, and the time has come for the subject. The neck of an army had been broken by falling into these half-hidden slimepits. How deep they were, or how vile, or how hard to get out of, we are not told; but the whole scene is so far distant in the past that we have not half as much interest in this statement of the text as we have in the announcement that our American cities are full of slimepits, and tens of thousands of people are falling in them night by night. Recently, in the name of God, I explored some of these slime-pits. Why did I do so? In April last, seated in the editorial rooms of one of the chief daily newspapers of New York, the editor said to me: "Mr. Talmage, you clergymen are at great disadvantage when you come to battle iniquity, for you don't know what you are talking about, and we layinen are aware of the fact that you don't know of what you are talking; now, if you would like to make a personal investigation, I will see that you shall get the highest official escort." I thanked him, accepted the invitation, and told him that this autumn I would begin the tour. The fact was that I had for a long time wanted to say some words of warning and invitation to the young men of this country, and I felt if my course of sermons was preceded by a tour of this sort I should not only be bet ter acquainted with the subject, but I should have the whole country for an audience; and it has been a deliberate plan of my ministry, whenever I am going to try to do anything especial for God, or humanity, or the church, to do it in such a way that the devil will always advertise it free gratis for nothing! That was the reason I gave two weeks' previous notice of my pulpit intentions. The result has been satisfactory. Standing within those purlieus of death, under the command of the police and in their company, I was as much surprised at the people whom I missed as at the people whom I saw. I saw bankers there, and brokers there, and merchants there, and men of all classes and occupations who have leisure, there; but there was one class of persons that I missed. I looked for them all up and down the galleries, and amid the illumined gardens, and all up and down the staircases of death. I saw not one of them. I mean the hard-working classes, the laboring classes, of our great cities. You tell me they could not afford to go there. They could. Entrance, twenty-five cents. They could have gone there if they had a mind to; but the simple fact is that hard work is a friend to good morals. The men who toil from early morn until late at night when they go home are tired out, and want to sit down and rest, or to saunter out with their families along the street, or to pass into some quiet place of amusement where they will not be ashamed to take wife or daughter. The busy populations of these cities are the moral populations. I observed on the night of our exploration that the places of dissipation are chiefly supported by the men who go to business at 9 and 10 o'clock in the morning and get through at 3 and 4 in the afternoon. They have plenty of time to go to destruction in and plenty of money to buy a through ticket on the Grand Trunk Railroad to perdition, stopping at no depot until they get to the eternal smash-up! Those are the fortunate and divinely-blessed young men who have to breakfast early and take supper late, and have the entire interregnum filled up with work that blisters the hands, and makes the legs ache and the brain. weary. There is no chance for the morals of that young man who has plenty of money and no occupation. You may go from Central Park to the Battery, or you may go from Fulton Street Ferry, Brooklyn, out to South Bushwick, or out to Hunter's Point, or out to Gowanus, and you will not find one young man of that kind who has not already achieved his ruin, or who is not on the way thereto at the rate of sixty miles the hour. Those are not the favored and divinely-blessed young men who come and go as they will, and who have their pocketcase full of the best cigars, and who dine at Delmonico's, and who dress in the tip-top of fashion, their garments a little tighter or looser or broader striped than others, their mustaches twisted with stiffer cosmetic, and their hair redolent with costly pomatum, and have their hat set farthest over on the right ear, and who have boots fitting the foot with exquisite torture, and who have handkerchief soaked with musk, and patchouli, and white rose, and new-mown hay, and "balm of a thousand flowers;" but those are the fortunate young men who have to work hard for a living. Give a young man plenty of wines, and plenty of cigars, and plenty of fine horses, and Satan has no anxiety about that man's coming out at his place. He ceases to watch him, only giving directions about his reception when he shall arrive at the end of the journey. If, on the night of our exploration, I had called the roll of all the laboring men of these cities, I would have received no answer, for the simple reason they were not there to answer. I was not more surprised at the people whom I saw there than I was surprised at the people whom I missed. Oh! man, if you have an occupation by which you are wearied every night of your life, thank God, for it is the mightiest preservative against evil. The But by that time the clock of old Trinity Church was striking one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, cight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve-midnight! And with the police and two elders of my church we sat down at the table in the galleries and looked off upon the vortex of death. music in full blast; the dance in wildest whirl; the wine foaming to the lip of the glass. Midnight on earth is midnoon in hell. All the demons of the pit were at that moment holding high carnival. The blue calcium. light suggested the burning brimstone of the pit. Seated there, at that hour, in that awful place, you ask me, as I have frequently been asked, "What were the emotions that went through your heart?" And I shall give the rest of my morning's sermon to telling you how I felt. First of all, as at no death-bed or railroad disaster did I feel an overwhelming sense of pity. Why were we there as Christian explorers, while those lost souls were there as participators? If they had enjoyed the same healthful and Christian surroundings which we have had all our days, and we had been thrown amid the contaminations which have destroyed them, the case would have been the reverse, and they would have been the spectators and we the actors in that awful tragedy of the damned. As I sat there I could not keep back the tears-tears of gratitude to God for his protecting grace-tears of compassion for those who had fallen so low. The difference in moral navigation had been the difference in the way the wind blew. The wind of temp |