great armies.  The tragedy is only postponed to make the overthrow more impressive and climacteric.  Do not fret.  If God can afford to wait you can afford to wait.  God’s clock of destiny strikes only once in a thousand years.  Do not try to measure events by the second-hand on your little time-piece.  Sin and Satan go on only that their overthrow may at last be the more terrific, the more impressive, the more resounding, the more climacteric.

Why do the wicked live?  In order that they may build up fortresses for righteousness to capture.  Have you not noticed that God harnesses men, bad men, and accomplishes good through them?  Witness Cyrus, witness Nebuchadnezzar, witness the fact that the Bastile of oppression was pried open by the bayonets of a bad man.  Recently there came to me the fact that a college had been built at the Far West for infidel purposes.  There was to be no nonsense of chapel prayers, no Bible reading there.  All the professors there were pronounced infidels.  The college was opened, and the work went on, but, of course, failed.  Not long ago a Presbyterian minister was in a bank in that village on purposes of business, and he heard in an adjoining room the board of trustees of that college discussing what they had better do with the institution, as it did not get on successfully, and one of the trustees proposed that it be handed over to the Presbyterians, prefacing the word Presbyterians with a very unhappy expletive.  The resolutions were passed, and that fortress of infidelity has become a fortress of old-fashioned, orthodox religion, the only religion that will be worth a snap of your finger when you come to die or appear in the Day of Judgment.  The devil built the college.  Righteousness captured it.

In some city there goes up a great club-house—­the architecture, the furniture, all the equipment a bedazzlement of wealth.  That particular club-house is designed to make gambling and dissipation respectable.

Do not fret.  That splendid building will after a while be a free library, or it will be a hospital, or it will be a gallery of pure art.  Again and again observatories have been built by infidelity, and the first thing you know they go into the hand of Christian science.  God said in the Bible that He would put a hook in Sennacherib’s nose and pull him down by a way he knew not.  And God has a hook to-day in the nose of every Sennacherib of infidelity and sin, and will drag him about as He will.  Marble halls deserted to sinful amusements will yet be dedicated for religious assemblage.  All these castles of sin are to be captured for God as we go forth with the battle-shout that Oliver Cromwell rang out at the head of his troops as he rode in on the field of Naseby:  “Let God arise and let His enemies be scattered!” After a great fire in London, amid the ruins there was nothing left but an arch with the name of the architect upon it; and, my friends, whatever else goes down, God stays up.