The name of George Vigessimus Wigram will not be familiar to all our readers. He was an Englishman—one of those who in the early years of the nineteenth century was used of God to recover truths which had for centuries been almost lost sight of in the professing Church. The following is his account of the way God met him in grace and saved him.
"Good instruction as to the contents of the Bible was mine at school, under a 'John the Baptist ministry'—that is, the thunder of judgment. However I never knew the gospel until at the age of nineteen I went abroad already surfeited with animal pleasures of military life.
"With a Christian companion I spent a long day of sightseeing on the field of Waterloo in June, 1824. Arriving at an inn that night quite late, I went to my room. A thought suddenly came to me: 'I will say my prayers!' It was a habit of my childhood but had been neglected in youth. I knelt down by my bedside and found I had forgotten what to say. I looked up as if trying to remember.
"Suddenly there came on my soul something I had never known before. It seemed as though Some One, infinite and almighty, knowing everything, full of deepest, tenderest interest in myself— though utterly and entirely abhorring everything in and connected with me—made known to me that HE PITIED AND LOVED ME.
"My eye saw no one; but I knew assuredly that the ONE I knew not, and had never met before, had met me for the first time, and made me feel we were together.
"There was a Light no sense or faculty of my nature ever knew before. There was the Presence of what seemed infinite greatness, something of a class that seemed measureless and supreme, yet at the same time, making itself known to me in a way that I—as a man—could thoroughly feel, taste and enjoy. The Light made all light—Himself withal; but it did not destroy, for it was love itself; and I KNEW I WAS LOVED INDIVIDUALLY BY HIM.
"The exquisite tenderness and fullness of that love, the way it appropriated me—myself for HIM, in whom it all was, while the light from which it was inseparable in Him discovered to me the contrast I had been to all that was light and love.
"I wept upon my knees, said nothing and got into bed. Next morning my first thought was 'get a Bible.' I did so, and HENCEFORTH IT HAS BEEN MY HANDBOOK.
"My clergyman companion noticed this, and also my entire change of life and thought. We journeyed to Geneva where there was active persecution of the faithful going on. He went to Italy, and I found 'my own company' and stayed with those suffering for Christ. After fifty years of trial I can adopt to myself the following lines as descriptive of that night experience:
"Christ, the Father's great eternal,
Jesus once looked down on me,
Called me by my name external,
And revealed Himself to me;
With His whisper, life, light giving,
Glowed in me, the dark, the dead;
Made me live, Himself receiving,
Who once died for me and bled.”