During the United States war of 1860-4, a chaplain of the Union army used to leave tracts and cards on the different beds in the hospital wards. A man who had sufficiently recovered from a wound to allow of his going out with his arm in a sling, coming in one day, found a card laid upon his bed.
“Who left that thing here?” was his surly question. “The chaplain,” answered a nurse. “I won’t have it here,” said the man, seizing the card.
As he was about to throw it from him, his eye caught the words, “We’re traveling home to heaven above! Will you go?”
“No, I won’t!” was his angry answer, as, in great wrath, he kicked the bit of card from him.
The occupants of the ward looked with surprise to see him, a moment later, deliberately pick up the card and read it carefully through. “We’re traveling home to heaven above! Will you go?” he read again and again. In fancy he saw his Green Mountain home, the country church where his now aged mother loved to worship; back turned the wheels of time, and he was a boy again singing with the father, dead, and the brothers, scattered, this same old hymn. In vain he tried to put the thought away. God had touched him. Taking a pencil he traced all around the margin of the card, “By the help of God, I’ll try!”
That night he went into the soldiers’ prayer-meeting, and there told of his fight with the card; again he said, “By the help of God. I’ll try!” A little later he went into battle — his last fight. When the conflict was over, as the bodies lying dead upon the field were searched for tokens to be sent to home friends, a packet was found on this man addressed to the home in Vermont; and the old mother, as with trembling hands she opened it, took out, with beating heart, the little black Testament which she had given her boy when he left her for the scene of war; then what joy was hers when she found the little, much-worn card, “We’re traveling home to heaven above! Will you go?” with its margin bearing the words, “By the help of God, I’ll try!” It was a voice of peace from the dead.
This is all You and I have to do, dear reader, in finding Christ. He is waiting to give us, His hand.