Dr. Spalding Finds Lesson in Life of Lew Wallace

1905

Says the Author's Christianity is a Miracle of Miracles.

"The Author of 'Ben Hur' Ready Meet Death" was the subject of a sermon preached by Rev. Dr. George Spalding at the First Presbyterian Church yesterday morning. Dr. Spalding took his text from the second epistle to Timothy, chapter 1 and verse 12, as follows: "I know whom I have believed and am persuaded that He is able to keep that which I have committed unto Him against that day."

In part Dr. Spalding said of General Lew Wallace: "He was a strange, wayward boy at home and in college, erratic in faith and conduct, but down under the foaming surface there were great profundities of conviction which had been placed there by a mother's ceaseless prayers. How the deeps of his soul heaved when, having enlisted his regiment, he received from the patriotic women of Indianapolis a stand of colors. Wallace before an immense crowd drew his soldiers upon the public square. Taking the flag in hand he shouted to his regiment, 'Boys, remember Buena Vista, where many of us fought. Down on your knees. Now let us swear before God to defend this flag with the last drop of blood.'

His Trip to Palestine

"This was the man who afterward fell under the influence of Ingersoll, who repeated to him the mistakes of Moses. 'Can you believe in miracles?' asked the skeptic. The answer was 'Ingersoll and I have been traveling in Palestine and I have taken the Bible as my best guide book from place to place. I am putting my believe into a story. I shall call it Ben Hur. I believe that the Christ of Palestine was the Son of God.'

"The Christianity which he lived out and left behind him is itself the miracle of miracles. And more and more through all the years after this great man knew in whom he believed. More and more this Christ was the interpreter of God and his own conscience. More and more he found God's reconciliation of righteousness and mercy in the forgiveness of his own great sin and guilt. And so when he lay there peering into death and the judgment of eternity, amid the laughter of his grandchildren, he received the announcement of his physician and with Christ before his eyes and Christ in all his convictions of unworthiness and with Christ in every love of his great heart he said with Paul of old, 'I am ready to meet my God.'

"Dear people, will not every one of you join with me in the prayer, 'Let me live the life of the Christian and let my last end be like his'?"

—The Post-Standard, Syracuse, NY, Feb. 20, 1905, p. 7.