“There is a fountain filled with blood”

sung artistically by four birds perched on their Sunday roost in the gallery, until I thought of Jenny Lind, and Nilsson, and Sontag, and all the other warblers; but there came not one tear to my eye, nor one master emotion to my heart.  But one night I went down to the African Methodist meeting-house in Philadelphia, and at the close of the service a black woman, in the midst of the audience, began to sing that hymn, and all the audience joined in, and we were floated some three or four miles nearer heaven than I have ever been since.  I saw with my own eyes that “fountain filled with blood”—­red, agonizing, sacrificial, redemptive—­and I heard the crimson plash of the wave as we all went down under it: 

    “For sinners plunged beneath that flood
    Lose all their guilty stains.”

Oh, my friends, the Gospel is not a syllogism; It is not casuistry, it is not polemics, or the science of squabble.  It is blood-red fact; it is warm-hearted invitation; it is leaping, bounding, flying good news; it is efflorescent with all light; it is rubescent with all glow; it is arborescent with all sweet shade.  I have seen the sun rise on Mount Washington, and from the Tip-top House; but there was no beauty in that compared with the day-spring from on high when Christ gives light to a soul.  I have heard Parepa sing; but there was no music in that compared with the voice of Christ when He said:  “Thy sins are forgiven thee; go in peace.”  Good news!  Let every one cut down a branch of this tree of life and wave it.  Let him throw it down and kindle it.  Let all the way from Mount Zalmon to Shechem be filled with the tossing joy.  Good news!  This bonfire of the Gospel shall consume the last temple of sin, and will illumine the sky with apocalyptic joy that Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners.  Any new plan that makes a man quit his sin, and that prostrates a wrong, I am as much in favor of as though all the doctors, and the bishops, and the archbishops, and the synods, and the academical gownsmen of Christianity sanctioned it.  The temple of Berith must come down, and I do not care how it comes.

Still further, I learn from this subject the power of example.  If Abimelech had sat down on the grass and told his men to go and get the boughs, and go out to the battle, they would never have gone at all, or, if they had, it would have been without any spirit or effective result; but when Abimelech goes with his own ax and hews down a branch, and with Abimelech’s arm puts it on Abimelech’s shoulder, and marches on—­then, my text says, all the people did the same.  How natural that was!  What made Garibaldi and Stonewall Jackson the most magnetic commanders of this century?  They always rode ahead.  Oh, the overcoming power of example!  Here is a father on the wrong road; all his boys go on the wrong road.  Here is a father who enlists for Christ; his children enlist.