the Week of Proper 28 / Ordinary 33
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Bible Dictionaries
Transformations of Grace
Spurgeon's Illustration Collection
or
A short time ago the manufacturers of lighting gas were puzzled to know how to dispose of the coal-tar left in the retorts. A more useless, nauseous substance was hardly known to exist. Chemistry came to the rescue, and to-day not less than thirty-six marketable articles are produced from this black, vile, sticky slime: solvents, oils, salts, colours, flavours. You eat a bit of delicious confectionery, happily unconscious that the exquisite taste which you enjoy so keenly comes from coal-tar; you buy at the druggist's a tiny phial of what is labelled 'Otto of Roses,' little dreaming that the delicious perfume is wafted, not from 'the fields of Araby,' but from the foul gas retort.
Christianity is a moral chemistry. Well wet e it for nations if it held a higher place among their social economics. Tarsaving is all well enough, but soul-saving is better. Grace transforms a villain into an honest man, a harlot into a holy woman, a thief into a saint. Where fetid exhalations of vice alone ascended, prayer and praise are to be found; where moral miasmata had their lair, righteousness and temperance pitch their tent. 1very sort of good thing is produced by godliness, and that too in hearts once reeking with all manner of foulness. Should not this stay every persecuting hand, hush every railing tongue, and incite every sanctifted spirit to continued and increasing energy.
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Spurgeon, Charles. Entry for 'Transformations of Grace'. Spurgeon's Illustration Collection. https://www.studylight.org/dictionaries/eng/fff/t/transformations-of-grace.html. 1870.
