WHILE driving out near an encampment of gipsies, I went in among them. After buying some of the skewers they were making, I learned that one of their number was ill. I begged to be allowed to see him. The father
asked—
“Did you want to talk about religion to him?”
“No.”
“What, then?”
“About Christ.”
“O! then you may go; only if you talk religion, I’ll set the dog on to you.”
In the caravan I found a boy alone, and in bed, evidently at the far end of the last stage of consumption. His eyes were closed, and he looked as one already dead. Very slowly, in his ear I repeated the Scripture,
“God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
I repeated it five times without any apparent response; he did not seem to hear even with the outward ear. On hearing it the sixth time he opened his eyes and smiled. To my surprise he whispered,
“And I never thanked Him; but nobody ever told me! I ‘turn Him many thanks—only a poor gipsy chap! I see! I see! I thank Him kindly!”
He closed his eyes with an expression of intense satisfaction. As I knelt beside him, I thanked God. The lips moved again. I caught, “That’s it.” There were more words, but I could not hear them.
On going the next day, I found the clear boy had died (or rather, had fallen asleep in Jesus) eleven hours after I left. His father said he had been very “peaceable,” and had a “tidy death.” There was no Bible or Testament in the encampment.
I left them one of each. The poor man wished me “good luck,” and gave me a little bundle of skewers the dear “boy Jemmy” had made.
It was apparently the first time that this boy ever heard of God’s salvation, but in his unquestioning faith, he took God at His word, and with his dying lips thanked Him, that He had so loved the world as to give His Son for him, a “poor gipsy boy.” God is satisfied with the finished work of Christ. This poor boy rested by faith in God’s Word, and it was instant and everlasting salvation. In eleven short hours he exchanged that wretched bed in a rickety, forlorn caravan, for the Paradise of God, where he is now tasting that God is as good as His word.
If you have not with your heart said, “Amen,” to God’s way of saving sinners, you are on the extreme verge of that death which God calls “eternal,” and He alone has the keys of hell and of death. But the grace of God that bringeth salvation is brought down to you—to your very level—today!
Will you walk past it, to the “great white throne” lying ahead of you, and thence to the fire which “never shall be quenched?” or will you pause and take it, and “turn Him many thanks?”
Dear young friend, may God forbid that anyone within your reach or mine, should ever have occasion to say, with regard to these everlasting realities, the awful words, “Nobody ever told me!”
ML 03/26/1922