The year had run its course. The bells were ringing their merry peals bidding farewell to its closing hours, and in a hushed and shrouded room lay one, on a bed of suffering and death, whose long-neglected opportunities were past; for whom no more the months and years of earth would be, and who was going into eternity a Christ rejector, without God and without hope; behind him the wasted years of life, before him the blackness of darkness forever.
He had long been ill. Over and over had God’s people sought for opportunity to speak to him of Christ, but all in vain; for with the constant hope of getting better he had refused to see anyone who wished to talk to him of salvation. He knew not and he cared not for the Christ of whom they desired to speak. But, in his blind unbelief and folly, he closed the doors of his heart against Jesus and His followers.
At last the writer one day gained admission into his house, through his wife, and unknown to him. While she was relating downstairs the sad tale of his continued refusal to allow her to admit any Christian, a shout was heard from the lips of the dying man, and the wife hurried into the room where the husband lay. She called quickly to me to come, and entering the room, I saw that he was suffering severe pains—they were the pains of death, and the poor sufferer knew it. His daughter was lying on the bed beside him, and was pleading with him in these words: “Oh, father, do pray to Jesus.” But there was no response to her loving appeal. Presently, with his eyes fixed on a corner of the room, he said, “Hark! Hark! Hark! I hear their cries, but I cannot reach.”
A few minutes passed in the awfully solemn silence of that sick room, and again it is broken by the voice of the poor sufferer. Placing his hands behind his head and leaning back upon his pillow, he says, in tones of terrible sadness, the language of his aching hopeless heart, “This is a long journey. I don’t know where to go, and I don’t know what to do. And I cannot turn to the right now.”
These were his last words, for his eyes then closed in death, and he was gone. Where?
T. H. T.