I was sitting one day with a very brilliant lawyer in the city of Minneapolis, who was beginning to go down through drink. He was partly intoxicated this day. I said to him, “John, you ought to be a Christian.” “Oh,” he said, with a laugh, “I don’t believe as you do. I am one of these new theologians. I believe in the larger hope. Now, honor bright,” he continued, “do you believe in hell, Torrey?” “Yes,” I replied, “I do.” “Honestly, do you believe in hell?” “I do.” “See here, suppose I should drop down dead right here, what do you think would become of me?” I said, “John, if you should drop down dead right here, you would go to hell and you would deserve to.” He bristled up full of anger and said, “What have I done?” I said, “I will tell you what you have done. You have got your wife’s heart right under your heel, and you are grinding the life right out of it.” He could not deny it. He knew it was true. I said, “You are doing something worse. You are trampling under foot the Son of God who died on the cross of Calvary for you.”
How many a young man is killing his mother by his wild, reckless, dissolute life. I was once stopping in a beautiful home, fine house, spacious grounds, many servants, horses and carriages, lawns and parks, everything that money could buy. Now to have gone into that home and not have known what lay beneath the surface, one would have said, “The lady at the head of this house must be perfectly happy.” But I found out while I was there that the mother of the household, so far from being perfectly happy, was perfectly miserable. When all the rest of the household were asleep, she would arise in the silent hours of the night and walk up and down the broad halls of that mansion with a breaking heart. She could not sleep. She had a wayward boy in New York City and did not even know where he was. Some months afterward I stood by the grave into which that woman had been lowered, and that wayward son stood by my side. The doctor’s verdict was that that woman died from a stroke of apoplexy, but I said in my heart, “This woman died of murder, and this man beside me, her son, is her murderer.”
I told this story once in Melbourne, Australia, in the Town Hall at the businessmen’s meeting. Scarcely had I finished the story when a man thirty or thirty-five years of age in the back part of the room sprang to his feet and came rushing down the aisle crying aloud, “I am a murderer. I am a murderer. I have killed my mother.” He was a notorious infidel and drunkard. He had often blasphemed Christ from the public platform in that city, but this day the arrow went home, his sin was laid bare. He went into a side room and fell upon his knees and cried to God for mercy. After the meeting was over, I went and knelt by his side, where an aged Episcopal clergyman was talking to him. “Oh,” he said, “is there pardon for me? For one who has spoken so blasphemously as I have from the infidel platform in this city?” I showed him that there was pardon for the chief of sinners, that there was pardon for one who had killed his mother by his reckless life and even for one who had blasphemed the name of the Saviour who had died on the cross of Calvary for him, and done all he could to get others to blaspheme Him too, and that day he went away trusting in the Saviour, whom he had once blasphemed.
What joy there must have been in that mother’s heart that day in the Glory if word of her son’s conversion was taken to her.