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!