A recent statistician says that human life now has an average of only thirty-two years.  From these thirty-two years you must subtract all the time you take for sleep and the taking of food and recreation; that will leave you about sixteen years.  From those sixteen years you must subtract all the time that you are necessarily engaged in the earning of a livelihood; that will leave you about eight years.  From those eight years you must take all the days and weeks and months—­all the length of time that is passed in childhood and sickness, leaving you about one year in which to work for God.  Oh, my soul, wake up!  How darest thou sleep in harvest-time and with so few hours in which to reap?  So that I state it as a simple fact that all the time that the vast majority of you will have for the exclusive service of God will be less than one year!

“But,” says some man, “I liberally support the Gospel, and the church is open and the Gospel is preached:  all the spiritual advantages are spread before men, and if they want to be saved, let them come to be saved; I have discharged all my responsibility.”  Ah! is that the Master’s spirit?  Is there not an old Book somewhere that commands us to go out into the highways and the hedges and compel the people to come in?  What would have become of you and me if Christ had not come down off the hills of heaven, and if He had not come through the door of the Bethlehem caravansary, and if He had not with the crushed hand of the crucifixion knocked at the iron gate of the sepulcher of our spiritual death, crying, “Lazarus, come forth”?  Oh, my Christian friends, this is no time for inertia, when all the forces of darkness seem to be in full blast; when steam printing-presses are publishing infidel tracts; when express railroad trains are carrying messengers of sin; when fast clippers are laden with opium and rum; when the night-air of our cities is polluted with the laughter that breaks up from the ten thousand saloons of dissipation and abandonment; when the fires of the second death already are kindled in the cheeks of some who, only a little while ago, were incorrupt.  Oh, never since the curse fell upon the earth has there been a time when it was such an unwise, such a cruel, such an awful thing for the Church to sleep!  The great audiences are not gathered in the Christian churches; the great audiences are gathered in temples of sin—­tears of unutterable woe their baptism, the blood of crushed hearts the awful wine of their sacrament, blasphemies their litany, and the groans of the lost world the organ dirge of their worship.

II.  Again, if you want to be qualified to meet the duties which this age demands of you, you must on the one hand avoid reckless iconoclasm, and on the other hand not stick too much to things because they are old.  The air is full of new plans, new projects, new theories of government, new theologies, and I am amazed to see how so many Christians want only novelty in order to recommend a thing to their confidence; and so they vacillate and swing to and fro, and they are useless, and they are unhappy.  New plans—­secular, ethical, philosophical, religious, cisatlantic, transatlantic—­long enough to make a line reaching from the German universities to Great Salt Lake City.  Ah, my brother, do not take hold of a thing merely because it is new.  Try it by the realities of a Judgment Day.