IT was the first week in August, and hundreds of boys and girls, and men and women too, were enjoying themselves on the beach and promenade of a fashionable watering-place in the south of England. Thousands too were thronging round the race-course at the other end of the town —all bent on happiness of some kind. The “pleasures of this life” and the “pleasures of sin” were being eagerly sought after by numerous crowds, but oh, how elusive they were proving! The former, “but for a season”; the latter, like apples of Sodom, fair enough outside, but only ashes when possessed. So it is not to the sun-lit beach, or to the gay throng and rabble on the race-course that I would ask the reader to accompany me, but to a narrow, dingy street in the center of the town, where—not duty, but the privilege of serving the Lord of glory—took the writer that afternoon.
Almost forgetting she held a Bible and bundle of tracts in her hand, she had just knocked at a door in the almost deserted street, when she was startled by a voice behind her saying, “Give me a tract, lady. And I want a gospel one,” with strong emphasis on the word “gospel.” Turning hastily, she found a rough-looking working man, his clothes covered with sawdust, pushing a truck, which he rested on the curb behind her. Choosing one entitled, “Saved for nothing,” she handed it to him, saying, “Will that suit you?” But she was not prepared for the burst of eloquence that followed. “Saved for nothing! Yes, that’s it, lady. But there are many who think they can be saved for something. They are like Naaman, who came to the man of God with his horses and chariots, and thought the rivers of his own land far better, than the waters of Israel. As the servants said to him, ‘If the prophet had bid thee do some great thing would’st thou not have done it?’ There was salvation waiting for him; yes, saved for nothing.”
“But it has cost God everything,” returned the writer.
“Yes, lady. It cost God His Son. I have not been well” (a statement his appearance fully confirmed), “and was lying down this morning, reading Colossians 1. It says there, ‘It pleased the Father that in Him should all fullness dwell, and in Him dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily,’ and I just lay back and closed my eyes, and said, ‘Blessed Lord, and of Thy fullness have all we received.’ Look at the crowds going up to the races. To them He is only a root out of a dry ground, but oh, I love that verse in the song of Solomon,— ‘He is altogether lovely.’ ‘Altogether,’ lady—all about Him!”
And as I looked at the calm pale face, lighted up with holy joy, and felt the clasp of that rough, toil-worn hand, in spite of the soiled clothing and the heavy truck, and the suffering body, I felt that I had met the happiest man in the town—a man, not only satisfied himself, but one whose cup was full to overflowing. And when I meet him again, as I shall do soon, in the glory of God, when the suffering and the toil is forever over, it will only be to find that the pleasure that was filling his heart that August afternoon is “pleasure for evermore.” Christ Himself “the God of the gladness of my joy.”
T.