Over in Canada there was a young girl leading a quiet life in the country. Report came to her of the greater gaiety of city life in Toronto. She said, “I will go to the city; it is too quiet here in the country. I will go to the city of Toronto, and enter into a life of gaiety.” She went to Toronto; she entered upon her gay life, and was soon caught, as so many another girl has been caught, in the whirlpool of sin, and went down into a life of shame. Days passed by; her conscience did not torment her very much. One night the Fisk Jubilee Singers were singing in Toronto, and a friend asked her to go and hear them sing. So she went to the church to hear the Fisk Jubilee Singers sing, and she enjoyed the concert very much until these black singers came to that song, the weird refrain of which runs:
“My mother once, my mother twice,
My mother she’ll rejoice.
In heaven once, in heaven twice,
My mother she’ll rejoice.”
As the strains of that refrain came floating over the heads of the audience up to where that poor girl sat in the gallery, it brought back recollections of her childhood. She was a little child again of four years of age. It was evening time. Her mother sat by the table in the sitting room. The lamp stood upon the table, and the open Bible was in her mother’s lap, and the mother was teaching her, an innocent golden-headed child of four, how to pray. The concert went on. Again the Fisk Jubilee Singers came to that refrain:
“My mother once, my mother twice,
My mother she’ll rejoice.
In heaven once, in heaven twice,
My mother she’ll rejoice.”
The hot blood rushed to the girl’s cheeks. She sprang from her seat in the gallery. Her friend tried to detain her, but she broke away and rushed down the gallery, down the stairway, out on to the streets of Toronto. On and on and on, as fast as her feet, now growing weary, could carry her; on and on and on, beneath the flickering gaslights of Toronto; on and on and on, out into the open country; and the next morning, when a farmer came to his white farmhouse door, there lay the poor girl clutching the threshold—dead. Hunted to death by her own conscience.
Woe be to the men and women whose conscience wakes up, who have no hiding place from their own conscience.