The Spurgeon Series 1859 & 1860. Charles H. Spurgeon

with abhorrence and detestation. If you, my hearer, live in lust, and yet make a profession of religion, away with your profession, for it is an awful lie. Away with that profession, for it is an empty vanity! away with it! It will only add to your destruction, and cannot save you from the dreadful doom of the man who goes on in his iniquity. It is a happy thing for a man when he goes from the house of God, with the resolve that lust shall be abandoned, and every sinful pleasure cast away.

      7. There are, too, the gods of business, but I must not touch upon them, of course. The minister has nothing to do with business, or so he is told. Keep your counting house door bolted always, do not let the minister inside. But the minister knows why he is shut out. Is it not because there are secrets of your prison house which you do not wish to have revealed? There are things done which pass for honesty among tradesmen, that if put in the balance of the sanctuary are found very wanting. I wish that the result of our preaching upon our hearers should be such that their actions should be more upright and their conduct more Christ-like in their daily business. I have heard of a woman who once went to hear a minister, and when he called to see her on the Monday, he asked her what the text was. She replied, “It was a blessed sermon to me, sir, but I forget the text.” “Well, what was the subject, my good woman?” “Oh! I do not know; I forget now.” “Well,” he said, “it cannot have done you any good then.” “Yes it did,” she said, “for though I forgot the sermon, I did not forget to burn my bushel when I got home.” The fact was, she had a bushel that gave false measure to her customers, and although she forgot what the sermon was about, she did not forget to burn her false measure. If any of you are in business and have false measures, though you may forget what I say, do not forget to break your yard measure, and to have your weights set right, and to remodel your business, and “to do to others as you would have them do to you.” Break the gods of your business in pieces, if you have not followed with your whole heart the statutes of the God of Israel. If you cannot serve God in your daily business, then give such business up, or alter it so that you can.

      8. Say now, who is there among us who has not some image to break? I have thought sometimes that I had broken all mine at one time, for I have had the will to do it; but lo! I have walked through the temple of my heart, and I have seen in some dark corner an idol still standing. Let it be cast down, I have said; and I have used the sledgehammer upon it. But when I thought I had cleared it all away, there was still one gigantic figure standing there; for you may be sure that there is one idol of which we can never thoroughly cleanse our hearts though we try and though by God’s strength we give him a blow every day. It is the god of pride. He changes his shape continually; sometimes he calls himself humility, and we begin to bow before him, until we find we are getting proud of our humility. At another time he assumes the fashion of conscientiousness, and we begin to harp at this and complain at that, and all the while we are tampering with our own professed sanctity, and are bowing before the shrine of religious pride. We think sometimes we are praising God when we are praising ourselves, and we pray at times that God may prosper us in doing good, and our greatest desire is to be honoured, not that his name should be glorified. This idol must be cast down; but it is of such a form and such a shape, that I suppose it will fare like Dagon. When the ark was brought into the house, it is said Dagon fell upon his face to the ground before the ark of the Lord, and his head and the palms of his hands were cut off, nevertheless the stump of Dagon remained. So it will be with us, I fear; the stump of Dagon will still remain, do what we may. Then today let each of us go home to our closet and begin to open the door of the chambers of our hearts, and walk through them all, and say “What have I to break, what have I to knock down, what have I to destroy”; and let us be very careful that we do destroy all that we can get near. Oh my hearers! how I wish we were more watchful of the effects produced in ourselves by preaching.

      9. II. Let us now go a step further, and consider what it is to CUT DOWN THE GROVES. Groves are the places where those images have been set up. Note, there was nothing positively sinful in the grove. There could not be anything wrong in a cluster of trees. They were very beautiful — they were the work of God, but they had been used for an idolatrous purpose, and, therefore down they must come. Had some of the lax professors of this age been present, they would have said, “Break the god,” — that is good enough. Hammer away at him, dash him to pieces, but do not cut down the trees. You may use them for very proper purposes. Why, you may even go there to pray. There you may sit and refresh yourself, and beneath their grateful shade you may even worship the true God. “No,” say these reformers. “We will cut down the trees and all, because the images have been harboured under their shade.” Now, I am going to lift the axe to clear away some of the trees, where some of you at least have defiled yourselves with the false gods of this world’s idolatry. The first grove of trees, at which I must strike, is the theatre. I am told by some, that in the theatre there is much that might do good. There are plays, they inform me, that might be profitably heard, and I believe there are. I am told, again, that there is something so pleasant, so agreeable, so interesting in them that one might be instructed there: and that especially do the plays of Shakespeare contain such noble sentiments, that a man must feel his soul elevated and his heart expanded while witnessing their performance. Nevertheless, I will have this grove cut down, every bit of it. It is all very well for you to eulogize it; I will not argue with you; but false gods have been worshipped in these places, and are being worshipped still; so hew down every tree of them. Oh! you wish to have them spared, do you? Why, which tree in the whole grove is undefiled by a prostitute? Which theatre in the world is not the very den and nest of abominable iniquity, obscenity, and lust? Is it possible for any man to enter and come out of one of them without defilement? If it is possible, I suppose it is only so with men who are so bad that they cannot be made worse than they are, and therefore cannot be defiled. To the Christian mind, there is something hideous in the whole matter. He may believe that there were times when the theatre might have been profitable. He looks back to the days of the Greeks and Romans, and feels that then it might have been the instrument for civilization. But since those old times, he finds that the devil has become the god of the theatre, and the god that is diligently worshipped there is none other than Beelzebub. And therefore he says, “No; if I am a Christian, by the grace of God, I will never tread that floor again. Let others go there if they please. If they can find an interest under the shade of its trees, let them sit there; but I remember, in the days when I went there, I worshipped Bacchus, I worshipped iniquities of every shape. For me to go there, would be to put myself into temptations’ way. Therefore I will cut down the tree, I abhor it; I pass by on the other side, rather than come in contact even with its shadow.”

      10. Now, men may make whatever apologies they please, but the thing is clear to me, that no man can be a true child of God and yet attend those haunts of vice. I do not care though I may be thought too severe. We had better use severity than allow souls to perish unwarned; God himself has annexed to the theatre the warning of your own destruction; for, staring you in the face, there is a hand with these words written — “To the pit”; and, true enough, it is the short cut to hell, and to the pit that is bottomless. But there are other groves that must come down too; There is the tavern, — like the grove, a very excellent thing in itself; the tavern is needed in some places for the refreshment of travellers, and the inn is a great advantage of civilization; but, nevertheless, the Christian man remembers, that in the tavern, false gods are worshipped; he remembers that the company of the bar room is not the fellowship of the saints, nor the general assembly and church of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven. The Christian may have to go into the tavern, his business may sometimes take him there; but he will be like a man going through a shower of rain; he will carry an umbrella, while he is going through it, and he will get out of it as soon as he can. So will the Christian do, he will try and guard himself against evil while he is there, but not one moment longer will he stay than imperative necessity demands. The tavern, I have said, was originally an institute of civilization, and it is to this day a thing that cannot be given up, but, notwithstanding this, let no Christian, nor any pretender to Christianity, resort habitually to such places, nor let him sit down with the profane who generally assemble there. I believe there are Christian men who are often tempted into bad company by the benefit clubs and societies which are held in such places; if there are no benefit societies except those which are held in public houses, trust in God, and have nothing