a furnace door, behind which is a glowing fire. You have in your hand a bar of iron; it is
I. THE BAPTISM WITH FIRE
about this way: "One of the best things about it is that the Bible is a new book. The Bible used to be just the stupidest book I ever read, and I didn't believe it was the Word of God at all. I did believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ, because your lectures compelled me. But The Bible was a stupid book. But oh, now God is showing me such wonderful things in the Bible."
Now be honest. Are there not some of you to-night that profess to be Christians, to whom the Bible is a stupid book? If you would tell the honest truth, would you not rather read a novel than the Bible? You do read the Bible, because you think you ought to: but you get no enjoyment out of it. What you need is a baptism with the Holy Ghost and fire, and that would make the Bible a new book; glory would shine from every page.
5. The next thing that fire does is, fire makes warm, it makes to glow. You stand before a furnace door, behind which is a glowing fire. You have in your hand a bar of iron; it is cold, and black, and forbidding, and there is no beauty in it. But you take that cold, dark, forbidding bar of iron, and you open the furnace door and thrust it into the glowing fire. Soon it is warm, then it becomes red hot and glows with marvelous beauty, and you have the cold bar of iron glowing with fire. You and I are cold—oh, how cold we are! and the Lord Jesus takes us and He plunges us into the fire of the Holy Spirit. We begin to grow warm, and soon we glow, glow with love to God, glow with love to Christ, glow with love to the truth, glow with love for perishing souls. Men and women, the great need of the day is men and women on fire. Brethren, that is what we need in the pulpit, ministers on fire. What cold men most of us preachers are! Orthodox enough, it may be, and we present the most solemn truth with great force of reason and great beauty of rhetoric and most convincing eloquence; and our audiences sit there and admire our strong preaching, but they do not repent of their sins. Why not? Because we are not on fire. We convince the intellect, but we do not melt the heart. But put a minister who is on fire in the pulpit. Wesley was such a man, Whitefield was such a man; Charles G. Finney was such a man—put a man on fire in the pulpit, and the audience will melt. But we need that kind of people in the choir as well. What beautiful choirs we have nowadays. Why, they sing almost like angels, and people sit there admiring them but nobody is converted by their singing. But when we get a man on fire to sing, or a woman on fire to sing, or a choir on fire to sing, something is brought to pass. That is what we need in our Sunday School classes. We need a young man or a young woman to teach a Sunday School class, and they know the lesson capitally and study all the latest "helps," and make the lesson tremendously interesting, but the boys and girls and men and women in their classes are not converted because the teachers are not on fire. Oh, men and women of London, the need in London more than anything else to-night is a baptism with fire on the minister, a baptism with fire on the elders, a baptism with fire on the deacons, a baptism with fire on the choir, a baptism with fire on the Sunday school teachers, a baptism with fire on the personal workers, and a baptism with fire upon the men and women in the