WE were schoolboys together, Albert and I. Our friendship started from the day we settled a difference with our fists in the playground, and although dissimilar in many ways, yet the love of a lark or adventure found us frequently together, and when school days were done and we had started our business life we often met. It was at this time that in the goodness of God I was able to speak to him of the One Whom I had found as my Saviour, but Who was as yet a stranger to him. He promptly treated such matters with lightness, and laughed at the idea of people making so much of religion as to make themselves peculiar; the result was that with tastes now so different a breach in our friendship occurred which, as time went on, gradually widened until we were far apart.
Now, after some years, in response to a message desiring me to see him, I found my companion in many a frolic, ill―so ill that the doctor had given up hope of his getting better―and lying there helpless, with time and opportunity to think, he had found that the world, the place of his pleasures, was fast slipping from his grasp, and he had no hope beyond; and so in his distress he sought relief by turning to the chum of earlier days, who had spoken to him of Christ and salvation―of life and death.
With others I shared the privilege of telling a willing listener the story―so old, but ever new―and his heart opened to it as the flower to the morning sun. It was his extremity and God’s opportunity. In implicit confidence he turned to Christ, a lost, guilty, undone sinner, and learned that in Him God’s grace brought salvation; and peace and rest possessed his soul.
The evening before he passed away I sat by his bedside―we were chums again, with much of common interest; how we talked together of the love that God has to us and of the manifestation of that wonderful love in the gift and death of Jesus, until heaven’s joys seemed very real and Jesus Himself drew near and our hearts rejoiced. But then I had to go. We were to meet no more on earth. As I rose to say farewell and held his wasted hand, he said, as best he could, “Goodbye, old chap; one thing gets over me―that after all I’ve been, He welcomed me! I served the devil well, so many years, and now at the end of all, when I cannot do the least for Him, ill and helpless and about to die, just as I am, He receives me!”
He could say no more, but tears of gratitude and gladness poured down the cheeks of my happy chum―and I went on my way with a deepened sense of the greatness of the grace of a Saviour-God. C. S. B.