their lurid palms under the wild night sky, and the cry of “Fire!” within, and “Fire!” without announces the terror, and the strangulation, and the doom of the Shechemites, and the complete overthrow of the temple of the god Berith.  Then there went up a shout, long and loud, from the stout lungs and swarthy chests of Abimelech and his men, as they stood amid the ashes and the dust, crying:  “Victory!  Victory!”

Now, I learn first from this subject the folly of depending upon any one form of tactics in anything we have to do for this world or for God.  Look over the weaponry of olden times—­javelins, battle-axes, habergeons—­and show me a single weapon with which Abimelech and his men could have gained such complete victory.  It is no easy thing to take a temple thus armed.  I saw a house where, during revolutionary times, a man and his wife kept back a whole regiment hour after hour, because they were inside the house, and the assaulting soldiers were outside the house.  Yet here Abimelech and his army come up, they surround this temple, and they capture it without the loss of a single man on the part of Abimelech, although I suppose some of the old Israelitish heroes told Abimelech:  “You are only going up there to be cut to pieces.”  Yet you are willing to testify to-day that by no other mode—­certainly not by ordinary modes—­could that temple so easily, so thoroughly have been taken.  Fathers and mothers, brethren and sisters in Jesus Christ, what the Church most wants to learn this day is that any plan is right, is lawful, is best, which helps to overthrow the temple of sin, and capture this world for God.  We are very apt to stick to the old modes of attack.

We put on the old-style coat of mail.  We come up with the sharp, keen, glittering steel spear of argument, expecting in that way to take the castle, but they have a thousand spears where we have ten.  And so the castle of sin stands.  Oh, my friends, we will never capture this world for God by any keen saber of sarcasm, by any glittering lances of rhetoric, by any sapping and mining of profound disquisition, by any gunpowdery explosions of indignation, by sharp shootings of wit, by howitzers of mental strength made to swing shell five miles, by cavalry horses gorgeously caparisoned pawing the air.  In vain all the attempts on the part of these ecclesiastical foot soldiers, light horsemen, and grenadiers.

My friends, I propose this morning a different style of tactics.  Let each one go to the forest of God’s promise and invitation, and hew down a branch and put it on his shoulder, and let us all come around these obstinate iniquities, and then, with this pile, kindled by the fires of a holy zeal and the flames of a consecrated life, we will burn them out.  What steel can not do, fire may.  And I, this morning, announce myself in favor of any plan of religious attack that succeeds—­any plan of religious attack, however radical, however odd, however unpopular, however hostile to all the conventionalities of Church and State.  We want more heart in our song, more heart in our alms-giving, more heart in our prayers, more heart in our preaching.  Oh, for less of Abimelech’s sword, and more of Abimelech’s conflagration!  I have often heard