Rensselaer Republican, Volume 18, Number 8, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 October 1885 — Rev. Sam Jones on Depravity. [ARTICLE]

Rev. Sam Jones on Depravity.

I never go digging about Adam with a little “hoe” and a big “L” Digging around is not part of my work. Poor old Adim! Let him rest in common sense. There is 6,000 years between him and you. Let him alone. You have got about as much as you can do to tote your own skillet. As to whether depravity is total or •partial, I just want to say this: Every man of us has got enough meanness in us to damn us; and what a fellow wants with more, than that is more than I know. I tell you the biggest rascal in Waco ain’t in jail by a good deal. For I declare to you that but for the best influences on earth I might have been incarcerated in jail or the penitentiary. I reckon there are five hundred men can stand up now and say amen to that. The Episcopal Church has no funeral sermons, and I think we had better do away with them, too. We had better have none in this town,’ than to have one preacher that will stand up and preach a man to heaven who is in hell. Heaven is the center of gravity of all that is good, and hell is the center of gravity of all that is bad. There are not enough devils in hell to drag a good man down to hell; there are not enough angels in heaven to lift a bad man to paradise when he dies. God doesn’t bind a man hand and foot and cast him into hell; God can’t keep sinners out of hell; the devil cannot keep good men out of heaven. When a bad man dies, he not only goes to hell, drawn thither by the natural forces of spiritual gravity, not only by the approval of God and the angels, but he goes to hell with tbe common consent of every other man living on the face of the earth. I don’t care who you are; what’s your age; where you live; what’s your color —if you are outside of the atoning mercies of Jesus Christ through faith and good works, you have got enough meanness in you to damn you; and it is only a question of time whenyou will be damned —and damned forever. When the devil went at Adam, he fell the first lick he made; when he went for Job, Job stood like a rock until the devil had fired the last gun at him. ■