I WAS coming along one of the worst streets in this very wicked city, at about two o’clock A.M., a week or two ago, when a woman of the town came up to me and said, “Are you an English Church clergyman, sir?” On my saying that I was, she said, “For the love of the Saviour, come with me; there’s a woman dying here without God.”
She was so earnest in her entreaty that I went with her; and though I knew the misery of the neighborhood, and that the police record was chiefly filled up from it, I was hardly prepared for what I saw. In a miserable log cabin, through whose roof you could count the stars, on a wretched straw pallet lay a bundle of rags, surrounded by other bundles as filthy. When I got accustomed to the struggling light, I distinguished the wasted form of a woman apparently about sixty, cloths round about flecked with blood, and her slender face showed me she was slowly bleeding to death from her lungs. Her surroundings were women, who, like herself, were sinners, yet each vied with the other in kindness to their sister in misfortune.
The poor woman looked eagerly at me, and, half raising herself, clutched my hand and gasped out, “The blood the blood!” They said she had raved like that for some days. It was no raving, however. At first I thought she referred to her bleeding, but she again said, “The blood! His blood!” I saw what she meant, and whispered to her, “Do you mean the blood of Christ?” “Yes, yes, if it cleanses.” “The blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth from all sin,” I answered. “That’s what I have wanted these forty years,” she cried.
On inquiry I found she was an Irish Roman Catholic, and that when she was twenty she was walking the streets of Dublin. Passing St. Andrew’s Church she peeped in one night, and heard the clergyman give out the words, “The blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin.” She left the porch, but through all her forty years of sinful life she remembered these words in part, and now they haunted her. I said, “Shall I go for your priest?”
“No,” she said, “he can do me no good.” I opened my Bible, and read her the passage, and spoke to her of the woman who had been a sinner, and of Him who had not rejected her, and again whispered in her ear the words she loved to linger on. “From all sin,” she said once more, and, clasping her hands together, she died.
These words of forty years ago had borne fruit, and I trust had caused her justification, though at the eleventh hour. It was five o’clock before I got home, and thought as I Saw the sun rising bright and glorious over the eastern waters of the lake, that his rays seemed to tell me of a blood that spoke better things than that of Abel, of a soul washed in it but a few moments before, and now singing the new song of Moses and the Lamb. It is a comfort to me that I had kept to the words of the Bible only, and not used my own. It is the best way in the end. E. K.