WE have the satisfaction of presenting our Readers with another volume of FAITHFUL WORDS.
We have kept faith with you, dear friends, and told you true things. Every effort has been made to prevent any statement from appearing in our pages on the veracity of which you may not rely. It is necessary to reiterate this assurance, as, despite the yearly announcement heading our volumes, we have had private inquiries made whether all our stories are of real life.
It is not needful, in speaking of God’s ways in bringing sinners to Himself, and sustaining His children day by day, or in lighting up their dying hours with His joy, to resort to human coloring in order to give the record interest to the reader. For that such ways of His should be otherwise than fraught with the deepest interest is impossible. The more simply and humbly God’s ways with a sinner or a saint are told the greater is the charm of the story. Heaven will resound with sweet histories of the love of God. Each child of the innumerable family will have his own wondering tale to tell of divine love to himself. What eager listeners will there be in those radiant courts above! Happy, indeed, the servants of the Lord who, looking forward to rest in heaven, anticipate their hope and joy, and crown of rejoicing there, in sinners saved by their instrumentality on earth! And now, this very day, it is our gladness to know that thousands read the simple tales of God’s converting grace, and in His mercy learn by the testimony of their fellow-sinner’s words the saving efficacy of the precious blood of Christ.
We heartily thank our kind Correspondents for their past labors, which are not in vain, and hope they will send us a goodly store of true stories of holy living and holy dying, and papers suitable for old and young. The time is short, eternity is at hand, men are perishing, superstition and infidelity increasing, and the word to the Christian in the last hours of a closing day is, “Preach the word; be instant in season, out of season.” Thank God for the hundreds of thousands of sermons that have been preached, even by our Magazine, and for the happy instances of good He, by His Spirit, has permitted His truth thus circulated, to effect.
These are no days, Christians, for sleep and idleness. They are limes for the use of the sword of the Spirit, the word of God, with all prayerful earnestness and untiring zeal. Hundreds and thousands are yet to be won for God and His Son by the gospel. In our land, rich as well as poor, in sadly many instances, are utterly ignorant of the way of salvation. In numberless houses and cottages the truth is not even known, nor has it been so much as heard. Let the Christian awake. Had he an hundred lives to live he would not have one moment to waste in worldliness or selfishness, argument or idleness. Let Jesus, who died, who is risen, who is coming, be the constant stay of the Christian’s affections, and then out of the abundance of the heart his mouth will speak, and love will readily discover endless ways of reaching the souls of the unsaved.