MR MOODY’S SERMON AND STYLE.

Globe, Volume IV, Issue 321, 23 June 1875, Page 3

MR MOODY’S SERMON AND STYLE.

( Daily News, March 10.) Mr Moody’s style of preaching, as demonstrated in this address, does not lack impressiveness of a kind. It is true that he is extremely|diffuse, that he is unconnected, rambling, and given to repetition. But he is full of pith, and manifests great earnestness. He is continually saying quaint racy things, such as we are quite unaccustomed to hear from a pulpit, such as are often intensely grotesque, and not unfrequently raise an audible laugh. The truth which he laid out to enforce and illustrate was that “ God’s ways were not as man’s ways,” and that He chose His instruments on a principle which to men appeared passing strange, and sometimes indeed absurd, from their human point of view. He said that what he feared most in coming to this work in London was lest many should be leaning on the arm of the flesh, and on the influence of a “ great meeting,” and so would be getting their eyes away from God. “There is no new Gospel,” he exclaimed ; “its the old story. The world of to-day is always running after something new; but if you come here expecting novelty, I tell you you’ll be disappointed.” Their message was the same as that of “ these ministers —and with us it is in weakness too; for there’s hundreds of men in London can preach better nor we can, What we want is to look right straight away from man, right straight up to God. If God’s going to work in London, He must work in His own way, and all we’re going to do is to mark out channels for the Holy Ghost. God will take His choice of instruments and means. There’s a mountain. God wants to thrash that mountain, Well, he don’t take up an iron bar ; He ketches hold of a little worm to thrash that mountain. When God was going to destroy the world, He did not warn a nation or the world, but a single man whom the nations held in contempt and jeer ad at. . . Why, God’s way of delivering the Children of Israel was different altogether from what ours would have been. We’d have sent an army, or if we’d been going to send a single man, we’d not have chosen one who’d been forty years at the backside of the desert. But he sent; a quiet humble kind of man, one whom we’d call, I suppose, a stuttering man, and He said ■ tell them I AM.’ That was a blank cheque which he was to fill in by and by with water from the rock and manna in the desert. The mail whom God works with most is always considered by the world the greatest fool, Enoch wasn’t a bright man to the world, but God said ‘ Come up here, Enoch ! ’ Noah was the laughing stock of his day. Look at Joshua, going tramping round the walls of Jericho blowing in horns —the most absurd thing in the eyes of the world—downright ridiculous. Why, what would the English Press have to say of such a crazy-like proceeding ? Fancy the Archinshop of Canterbury trapesing round London blowing horns ; He’d have had golden horns any how. Look at Samson—how he worked with the jawbone of an ass ; he slew a thousand men. We don’t like to go to work with the jawbone of an ass ; we’d prefer polished weapons. But if we are to be in earnest, we must grab up the first jawbone of an ass we chance on, and use it for God. . . . Look at the seeming absurdity of a raven sent to feed the Prophet, and then the Prophet sent for food, not to a palace with well-furnished tables, but to a poor widow, and she with a child.