The effect of Pentecost.

Pentecost coming to a mission-worker will fill his heart with enthusiasm and energy, and give him a host of jewels washed from the mire and shining like meteors.  The same experience coming to a mechanic will fire him with a love for Jesus and a solicitude for souls that will make him pray and fast and weep and work for his fellow-laborers, for his neighbors, and for his friends.  The Spirit coming to a gifted singer will cause her to consecrate her voice, like Rachel Winslow in Sheldon’s “In His Steps,” so that with holy melody she will reach hearts hitherto hard and untouched.

The passion for souls.

One of the conditions of success in soul-saving is a passion for the salvation of immortal men and women.  Full salvation always brings this, and as long as a worker lives in its plentitude and enjoyment he is consumed with a burning, longing, panting thirst for souls.

The gigantic landslide.

The ministers of early Methodism and early Quakerism were not of the sort who congregate in groups and discuss the relative desirability of various appointments.  They did not spend their leisure in jesting, punning and guffawing, but in praying, studying, and working, for even their vacations were turned into days of toil.  They spent their all in one endeavor—­to save men from a yawning Pit and a lurid Hell.  Nowadays we live in perpetual relaxation and recreation.  Smooth, insipid preachers talk to shallow, giddy audiences, and the whole thing is on a gigantic landslide.  Lord, save! or death and damnation are sure.

The Uncertain faith.

There can be no successful denial of the assertion that real soul-absorbing earnestness in religion is dying out.  We sometimes mock at the Herculean labors of men like Owen, and Baxter, and Calvin, and Edwards.  But though these men were perhaps more or less legalistic and at times a little narrow, yet one thing is sure, they made religion the business of life, and went at it with zest, enthusiasm, and determination.  Your modern “Christian” has “certain intellectual difficulties”; is “not fixed in belief concerning Socinianism”; does “not like the old idea of the Atonement”; in fact, is in a state of fusion so far as his belief and faith are concerned.  Men do not give their life’s blood for matters in which they have only a half-faith.  But when one is convinced that men are dying in the dark and that their salvation depends in a measure on one’s activity and fidelity, then one is hot with zeal and fire from hat to heel and set to working for God and eternal souls.

Weeping over CHORAZIN.

This is the explanation of the zeal of men who are “burning for Jesus.”  This is the reason men so frequently wear out in short order after they are sanctified.  They are dipped in fellowship with Christ’s sorrow, and beholding Him weeping over modern Capernaums and Chorazins their hearts are melted at the sight, and they speed away to preach the gospel of the lovely Son of God.