ABOUT a year ago I had occasion one night to pass through Charlotte Square, Edinburgh, on the way to the Caledonian Station. The night was wet and cold, with a piercing cast wind blowing from the Firth of Forth. As I was passing along, I heard a voice in the dark saying, “Will you buy a box of matches, sir?” I replied, scarcely looking from under my umbrella, “No, thank you, my boy.”
“You might,” the voice answered. There was something in the soft plaintive way in which this was said which attracted my attention, and impelled me to stop and speak to the boy. Looking at his pale thin face, which bore unmistakable evidence of being often hungry and his body poorly clad, I said, “Why are you out so late in such a cold wet night? You would be better at home.”
“I have no Name,” he answered.
“No home,” I said. “Where are your father and mother?”
“They are both dead,” he replied.
As I looked into that pale pinched face I felt a tear start to my eye—to me it told a tale of suffering and sorrow—and I said to him, “Would you like to die?”
“Na, I wouldna,” he answered.
“How is that?” I said.
“Because I’m no’ saved,” was his sad reply.
This answer was to me wholly unexpected, and yet one fraught with the deepest meaning. After speaking a little with him as to the way of salvation and the all-sufficiency of the work of Christ, I was compelled to leave him, as my train was almost due.
Perhaps if the same question was put to you, my reader, which was addressed to this boy, your answer might not be very widely different. How or when this boy learned that without salvation he dare not face the question of death or of meeting God I know not, but he knew that the question of his salvation had to be settled. Death is God’s appointment for man, and is “the wages of sin,” for we read, “It is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment.” It may be that you have (recognizing the fact that you must sooner or later die) made a will for the disposition of your property after death, but what about your soul after death? Your soul is you yourself—and you must live on through a never-ending ETERNITY, either with and like Christ, in perfect blessedness, or away from His presence in inexpressible anguish.
Which will it be with you? If you have not, up to the present, seriously considered this question, I would, with all love to your soul, beg of you to do so. The thought of the blessed God for all men is that they should be saved. “God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved” (John 3:1717For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved. (John 3:17)). Indeed, in the Epistle of John we read that “the Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world” (1 John 4:1414And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world. (1 John 4:14)). Every question of my sins has forever been settled; Christ died for our sins, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God. He was made sin, for us, He who knew no sin, in order that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.
Wonderful love, that Christ should leave the glory of God and come into this poor guilty world in order that man might have access into all the blessedness of the Father’s house, and that whilst still here we might know what it is to be delivered from the fear of death, and in spirit already enjoy a sweet foretaste of these joy which will be ours forever—not because of what we are, but altogether on the ground of what Christ by His death and resurrection has accomplished for us.
J. B.