Our American communities are suffering from the gospel of Free Loveism, which, fifteen or twenty years ago, was preached on the platform and in some of the churches of this country.  I charge upon Free Loveism that it has blighted innumerable homes, and that it has sent innumerable souls to ruin.  Free Loveism is bestial; it is worse—­it is infernal!  It has furnished this land with about one thousand divorces annually.  In one county in the State of Indiana it furnished eleven divorces in one day before dinner.  It has roused up elopements, North, South, East, and West.  You can hardly take up a paper but you read of an elopement.  As far as I can understand the doctrine of Free Loveism it is this:  That every man ought to have somebody else’s wife, and every wife somebody else’s husband.  They do not like our Christian organization of society, and I wish they would all elope, the wretches of one sex taking the wretches of the other, and start to-morrow morning for the great Sahara Desert, until the simoom shall sweep seven feet of sand all over them, and not one passing caravan for the next five hundred years bring back one miserable bone of their carcasses!  Free Loveism!  It is the double-distilled extract of nux vomica, ratsbane, and adder’s tongue.  Never until society goes back to the old Bible, and hears its eulogy of purity and its anathema of uncleanness—­never until then will this evil be extirpated.

IV.  Behold also in this giant of the text and in the giant of our own century that great physical power must crumble and expire.  The Samson of the text long ago went away.  He fought the lion.  He fought the Philistines.  He could fight anything, but death was too much for him.  He may have required a longer grave and a broader grave; but the tomb nevertheless was his terminus.

If, then, we are to be compelled to go out of this world, where are we to go to?  This body and soul must soon part.  What shall be the destiny of the former I know—­dust to dust.  But what shall be the destiny of the latter?  Shall it rise into the companionship of the white-robed, whose sins Christ has slain? or will it go down among the unbelieving, who tried to gain the world and save their souls, but were swindled out of both?  Blessed be God, we have a Champion!  He is so styled in the Bible:  A Champion who has conquered death and hell, and he is ready to fight all our battles from the first to the last.  “Who is this that cometh from Edom, with dyed garments from Bozrah, mighty to save?” If we follow in the wake of that Champion death has no power and the grave no victory.  The worst man trusting in Him shall have his dying pangs alleviated and his future illumined.