BY THE LATE WILLIAM PARKS, OF OPENSHAW.
LAST week but one, I buried a young woman in our churchyard, whose remarkable call by grace is worth recording, for the benefit of those who take an interest in the things of eternity, and for the honor and glory of Him who alone can call out of darkness into marvelous light.
She very seldom came to church, though her parents have been members of my congregation for years, and walk in the fear of God. Both they and I had seen for a long while that consumption had placed its withering hand upon her, and we were convinced that she could not be a long, liver. In my occasional visits to the house, I would sometimes remark, ‘Margaret, you are looking very poorly, my dear child. To be faithful with you, I don’t think you are long for this world. It is a solemn thing to die, and not know where we are going to.’
To this she would reply, in the most hardened, unconcerned, scoffing tone, that she was not going to die just yet. She would say the same to the doctor. that attended her, and to her parents, who watched with pain the ravages which the insidious disease was making upon her.
She was very good-looking, and was very fond of dress. Indeed, her whole thought seemed to be concentrated upon her person. To give an idea of the absorbing vanity that possessed her, I may mention that a few months before she was laid aside by complete prostration, when she could hardly drag her legs along, she would go into town by the bus, to buy a new bonnet. ‘Bless me,’ I said to her poor grieving mother, when I heard of this infatuation, ‘Bless me! I should not be surprised if the wretched girl did not get back alive!’ ‘Nor me neither,’ observed her mother.
However, she did get back, and wore the bonnet.
Possessed of a high and resolute spirit, she would not give in, but kept crawling about the neighborhood, first to visit one of her relations, and then to have a chat with some of her friends.
Whenever I had an opportunity, I used to repeat my own view as to the result of her illness, but she took no heed. In fact, she was the most daring infidel for her years that I ever met with.
One day, however, a remarkable change came over her, and she said to her mother, ‘Mother, I wish to be good, but I cannot; and if I die now, I know I shall go to hell.’
The mother answered, ‘It is a good sign when we wish to be good, and feel and acknowledge our incapacity to effect any change in ourselves, for then we are driven to Christ, who alone can make us good.’
But not wishing to force religion even upon a dying child, the mother said no more, but silently watched her daughter’s movements, and listened to her musings (for she would now and then give expression to her thoughts in subdued prayer, and keep peering into the Bible and hymn-book).
After some days the young woman said, ‘I wonder would Mr. Parks come end read and pray for me?’ ‘I am sure he would, if he knew that you wanted him,’ replied her mother. ‘I do want him so much,’ she continued. ‘I want him to instruct me, for I am very ignorant; I want him to tell me about Jesus Christ.’
I was not in the neighborhood just then; so she begged that the superintendent of our Sunday school, who lives close by, should be sent for. He went, and read to her, and prayed. He came away astonished with her conversation, at her subdued manner, and the way in which she spoke of her bodily sufferings, as signifying nothing, in comparison with the sufferings of a soul.
My unbelieving reader will be ready to explain all this by the terrors of death, or by the power of affliction in bringing down the loftiest spirit. But stop! Many hundreds have been similarly afflicted, who have never winced, and have gone down to the grave without the cry, ‘What must we do to be saved?’ What is to account for the difference? There are but two answers, viz. (1) Either God the Holy Spirit has wrought the marvelous change; or (2) natural timidity, or weakness of character, has succumbed to the fear of death.
This latter, the subject of this notice had not. Naturally she was bold, fearless, and honest in her unbelief; so that if I had no other testimony of a work of grace in this young woman, I should be inclined to the belief that something more than nature had been influencing her.
When I first heard that a great change had taken place in this young person, I questioned its reality. I doubted; I disbelieved. I went, however, to see her. The interview I had with her amazed me. She spoke of having had the sweet sense of her Redeemer’s pardoning love. She said, ‘I keep having it, and then losing it; but I continued praying for it, and then I get it again. But do pray for me, for I am a poor sinful and ignorant creature.’
As I walked home that night, I began to suspect that she had been tampered with by some who have an awfully deluding power amongst them, of persuading dying people that they are saved; so I made strict inquiries upon the subject, and put the question pointblank to her mother, ‘Has anybody been reading, or speaking to her from —?’ ‘No; no one but yourself and the superintendent has ever spoken to her upon serious matters.’
That satisfied me; so I was the more deeply convinced that this was a work of grace.
Next time I saw her I observed ‘Margaret, you have been a very great and hardened sinner, and you now feel yourself to be perfectly helpless. If God were to require you to start and work and save yourself, what could you do?’
‘Eh! nothing. I can do nothing. It is Christ that must do all for me, or I can never be saved.’
‘Yes,’ I said; ‘Christ’s finished work, Christ’s work in your and my stead, is our only hope; and I pray God that He will bring home these great truths with power to your soul by His Holy Spirit.’
‘He has,’ she replied; ‘I believe He will save me.’
She lay for more than three weeks after this upon a bed of great bodily suffering. Indeed, for the greater part of this time she slept but little. Her poor legs had swollen to such a degree that she could not bear them beneath the clothes, whilst she sought rest for her emaciated body in continually twisting it and writhing. She sometimes groaned out her agony, and would ask us to pray that God would be pleased to release her from her pain; but upon being reminded that God in His wisdom knew best when to take her, she would reply, ‘I know that it is sin to be impatient; may the Lord give me patience not to murmur His will be done.’
In the Lord’s fixed time He took her out of this world; and if I must not be impervious to all convictions, if I must not reject all testimony but that to be afforded at the day of judgment, I cannot but believe that poor Margaret Pendlebury was a monument of grace.
Oh, how marvelous are the ways of the Lord!
What a wonder that a thoughtless, giddy, vain, pleasure-seeking, infidel woman should be converted without the usual means of grace, and that many pious moralists should be this moment as hardened as the nether millstone, though they have been listening to the word of God all the days of their lives Openshaw, January 28th, 1866.
W. P.