... ... “As I feel a little stronger this afternoon, I have propped myself up to try and comply with your request, and tell you a few incidents concerning my conversion. You wish that I should tell you how the Lord brought me to Himself, and I will most gladly do so, as briefly as I can.
“I have been a soldier, and served my Queen and country for twenty-one years. I was in the Crimean War, the Indian Mutiny, and in one of the campaigns on the northern frontiers of India, against some of the rebel Afghan tribes. During all this time I never received a scratch. This shows the wondrous mercy of the Lord towards one who way indeed all those years a reckless and wicked sinner.
“From other dangers, too, I was graciously preserved, for during the fourteen years of our stay in India, my regiment, the 71st Highlanders, was attacked three times by the Asiatic cholera, and hundreds of our men were swept away in a short space of time. Many, to right and left, fell by my side, taken away as in a moment, while I, hardened and careless, thought not at all of the mercy which preserved me alive, but rather boasted of my good luck in escaping while so many were stricken down.
“In January, 1873, I left the army and returned home, still a servant, yea, a willing slave to Satan, and I lived on in my wickedness until, early in the following year, Messrs Moody and Sankey came to England. In March they visited Glasgow, and I, like a great many, went to hear them, not from any desire to hear or to receive the gospel, but to gratify my curiosity, and perhaps have a good laugh at the Yankee buffoons, as I called these dear men of God.
“Mr. Moody spoke on the text, ‘Thou art the man,’ and the Holy Spirit made me feel even while he was speaking, that I was indeed the man who had sinned against God and done evil in His sight.
“That night God arrested me in my wickedness, but it was three weeks before I found peace, and my distress of soul during that time is indescribable. At last I was led to see the light through reading the fifth chapter of the first epistle of John, especially the tenth verse, ‘He that believeth on the Son of God hath the witness in himself: he that believeth not God hath made Him a liar; because he believeth not the record that God gave of His Son.’
“Since then I have enjoyed peace with God through faith in His dear Son Jesus Christ, and I may say that from the time when I was first brought to trust in the Lord Jesus I have had grace given me to live and labor for His cause and for His glory, and I can also say that during my two years of affliction I have found my dear Saviour more precious than ever. I have truly known His presence with me to strengthen me upon the bed of languishing, and now I am watching and waiting for my dear Lord to come and take me home.”
These lines were penned with difficulty as the writer lay propped with pillows on his bed of pain. The hand that wrote them is now still in death. Let them speak, then, with authority, as the last message sent by one who, while speaking of himself as “very feeble―my lungs almost gone,” could say that by God’s grace he was “ready and waiting,” either for the coming of the Lord to take him, with all His redeemed ones, to be with Himself forever, or, “if the Lord does not come before, to pass at one step from earthly sorrows to heavenly joy and glory: absent from the body, present with the Lord.”