I HAD just taken my seat in a railway carriage, when another passenger entered and took a seat opposite to me. We began to talk to each other almost immediately. This was favorable, as his journey ended at the next station. On a remark that he made about the severity of the weather, and the general state of things in agriculture, I replied that notwithstanding the development of science and the great advance in the various branches of knowledge, it was still utterly beyond the power of men to cause the sun to shine upon the earth when there was darkness, or the rain to fall (unless under favorable circumstances) when the earth was parched with drought, to which he readily assented. In the course of conversation I found that my fellow-passenger was a subject of the saving grace of God.
I was interested in him, and inquired how he had first been enlightened. He said that it was on the battlefield while lying wounded during the Boer War. “I was shot through both my thighs, and also through my right arm at the elbow,” he said, “and I lay for hours helpless; then I was told that my case was a hopeless one. At that moment, and while alone in my extreme weakness and helplessness, my mother’s advice, ‘My boy, trust in, the Lord,’ came to my mind. There and then I turned to the Lord and asked Him to heal me, and to let me see my mother again. He answered me. I recovered; and, though maimed, I have seen her, and now I am able to speak of God’s goodness.”
“Ah!” said I, “things came into your mind at that time that you had little thought of, and perhaps had long forgotten.”
“Yes,” said he, “everything!”
“Your guilt, and your sins against a holy God.”
“Yes, I went through deep waters, and I felt my need as a sinner.”
“I did,” said he. “Then my younger brother, who for some time after my return, home manifested carelessness as to what concerned his soul, and at times showed a disposition to ridicule these things, fell ill and died. But the Lord met with him while ill, and gave him ‘peace in believing.’ Just before his death he took mother’s hand into his, saying, ‘Mother, I wish I could take you with me out of this world of sin and sorrow. I am going home. God is ready to take me, and I know I am going to be with Him.’”
How wonderful are God’s ways, and how blessed to have eyes to see them!
In the case here related, one brother returned home, taken out of the jaws of death, as the messenger of peace to the other, who, though then in perfect health, was so soon to pass through death into the regions of life and peace, into the presence of the God Who had saved his precious soul from never-ending misery.
Reader, do not wait for a death-bed nor for any future event. Trust in the Lord NOW: for “NOW IS THE DAY OF SALVATION.” E. H.