In my Sunday afternoon meetings I often find that speakers and lecturers are dividing the crowd with me in other halls, or churches, in the same
city. Sometimes their subjects gladden me, and again I am disappointed
and grieved. But at one of my late appointments I had a rival at the 3
o'clock hour in a neighboring church whose subject and mission astonished
me. He was trying to start a Temperance Coffee Society. Not temperance
in coffee drinking, but coffee versus liquor.
So the notices had been duly read from church pulpits, and the church
members of different denominations gathered to hear a minister of the
Gospel preach the Gospel of Coffee. It was a coffee meeting, intending to
lead up to a Coffee Revival.
In another part of the city I was holding up the precious Blood of Christ
as the great and only remedy for any and all sin, for any and all habits,
and for any and all people. We had great liberty, Heaven smiled, the Spirit
fell upon the Word, and about fifty souls were saved and sanctified.
As we thought of the preacher around the corner, holding up coffee and
pointing to coffee as the hope and deliverance of the drunkard; then asking
for funds to start a coffee shop down town to deliver men from strong
drink, we had another view of the times, in the looking of the people in
every direction except the right one for help and deliverance; and in the
taking up of false Christs, and no Christs rather than the true and only
Redeemer for the rescue and salvation of the soul.
We would like to have seen some of the sermon notes of our Coffee Preacher. Doubtless the leading heads were: (1) Chicory, (2) Rio, (3) Java, (4) Mocha, with subdivisions of (a) sugar, (b) milk, (c) cream.
Then would come the exhortation and altar call, Come to Coffee. His musical instrument should not have been an organ, but a Coffee Mill.
Living Illustrations By B. Carradine.
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