Now, I learn first from this subject the folly of depending upon any
one form of tactics in anything we have to do for this world or for
God. Look over the weaponry of olden times--javelins, battle-axes,
habergeons--and show me a single weapon with which Abimelech and his
men could have gained such complete victory. It is no easy thing to
take a temple thus armed. I saw a house where, during revolutionary
times, a man and his wife kept back a whole regiment hour after hour,
because they were inside the house, and the assaulting soldiers were
outside the house. Yet here Abimelech and his army come up, they
surround this temple, and they capture it without the loss of a single
man on the part of Abimelech, although I suppose some of the old
Israelitish heroes told Abimelech: "You are only going up there to be
cut to pieces." Yet you are willing to testify to-day that by no other
mode--certainly not by ordinary modes--could that temple so easily, so
thoroughly have been taken. Fathers and mothers, brethren and sisters
in Jesus Christ, what the Church most wants to learn this day is that
any plan is right, is lawful, is best, which helps to overthrow the
temple of sin, and capture this world for God. We are very apt to
stick to the old modes of attack.

We put on the old-style coat of mail. We come up with the sharp, keen,
glittering steel spear of argument, expecting in that way to take the
castle, but they have a thousand spears where we have ten. And so the
castle of sin stands. Oh, my friends, we will never capture this world
for God by any keen saber of sarcasm, by any glittering lances of
rhetoric, by any sapping and mining of profound disquisition, by any
gunpowdery explosions of indignation, by sharp shootings of wit, by
howitzers of mental strength made to swing shell five miles, by
cavalry horses gorgeously caparisoned pawing the air. In vain all the
attempts on the part of these ecclesiastical foot soldiers, light