THE subject of our present narrative, Colonel James Gardiner, was born in 1668, the year of the English Revolution. His youth was one of wild recklessness, and, trained to the profession of a soldier, he fought three duels before reaching his majority. In the first battle fought for his country, in his nineteenth year, he was left wounded on the field. His conduct on this occasion will illustrate in some measure how seared his conscience had become by licentiousness and dissipation, even at that early age. Though dangerously wounded, he had not the slightest thought of repentance or his soul's eternal welfare ; his one concern was how to secure the gold he had about his person. Knowing the enemy would soon begin their loot, he gathered a handful of congealed blood and concealed the gold within it. Closing his hand upon the clotted gore, he held it tightly until it had cemented so that he could with difficulty release it. The French appeared the next morning, busy at their ghastly work.
Young Gardiner lay faint and utterly exhausted from the loss of blood. One of the soldiers was about to dispatch him, when another intervened, saying, "Do not kill that poor child." To secure himself, he told a deliberate and barefaced falsehood, saying he was a nephew of the governor of Hoy, a neutral town nearby. So intense were his sufferings while being carried to Huy, that he begged to be killed outright. Even now God was not in all his thoughts, and had he been a beast he could not have been more indifferent concerning death.
On his recovery and restoration to his country, he immediately plunged into still wilder excesses, and no manner of wickedness was too great for his hardened heart and conscience. "The goodness of God" failed utterly to lead him to "repentance." God spoke by saving "his life from perishing by the sword," but blinded by sin and Satan, he "perceived it not." (See Rom. 2 : 4 ; Job 33 : 18).
From this time until his thirtieth year the most criminal intrigues, it is said, formed the staple of his existence. So dissolute did he be-come, that he was notorious among his godless fellow-officers as "the happy rake." But all this time he was anything but "happy," as he afterwards confessed. "On one occasion," a writer says, "while his profligate associates were congratulating him on his criminal successes, a dog happened to enter the room, and the young soldier (as he well remembered after-wards) could not forbear groaning inwardly, "Oh, that I were that dog!"
His spiritual awakening occurred in the following remarkable manner : He had made a criminal appointment at twelve, one night in midsummer. The early part of the evening he spent in folly with his debauched associates. The party broke up at eleven, and he had still an hour to wait. To while away the time, he commenced reading a book called, "The Christian Soldier; or, Heaven taken by Storm," which his thoughtful mother had without his knowledge slipped into his portmanteau. The title appealed to his soldierly instincts, and he took it up expecting to derive some amusement from its military phraseology. Its contents, how-ever, made no impression on his mind. But God, who
"Moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform,"
had another way of making Himself known to this depraved sinner. His resources, by which He "withdraws man from his purpose," are in-finite. He can speak to man, as the inspired Elihu informs us, "in a dream, in a vision of the night." This He was pleased to do in the case of this profligate soldier. With the book still in his hand, a strange feeling seemed to take possession of him: serious thoughts, for the first time in his life, were awakened in his mind. Whether, at the time, he was awake or asleep, he could never afterwards determine; but this is what took place in that mysterious midnight hour: "He thought he saw an unusual blaze of light fall on the book which he was reading, which he first imagined might happen by some accident in the candle. But lifting up his eyes, he apprehended, to his extreme amazement, that there was before him, as it were suspended in the air, a visible representation of the Lord Jesus Christ upon the cross, surrounded on all sides with a glory. He was impressed as if a voice, or something like a voice, had come to him to this effect : O sinner, did I suffer this for thee ? and are these thy returns ? ' "
So powerfully did this apparition affect him that he became insensible, and continued unconscious he knew not how long. When at last he opened his eyes, he saw nothing unusual. He arose from his seat and commenced pacing the room, his mind almost overcome with a tumult of new-born emotions. So great was his mental agony that he could hardly keep his feet. He appeared to himself to be the vilest monster in God's universe, and the sins of his lifetime rose up before him in all their hideous-ness and enormity. Such a view had he of the majesty and holiness of God that he was only astonished that he had not been immediately struck dead in the midst of his wickedness. He saw himself as being abundantly worthy of eternal damnation, and wondered that God had at all spared him even to become awakened at length to his loathsomeness and guilt, after he had for years "despised the riches of His goodness, forbearance, and long-suffering" (Rom. 2: 4).
So great did his guilt appear to him that for months he despaired of ever obtaining mercy. It seemed almost a settled point with him that the wisdom and justice of God required that such a monstrous transgressor should, like the sinners of Sodom and Gomorrah, be "set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire." His sufferings occasioned by an al-most hopeless remorse became well-nigh unbearable. "The pains of hell gat hold upon him," and he now abhorred the licentious pleasures which had shortly before been his chief delight. This "godly sorrow, which worketh repentance," arose, as he afterwards testified, not so much from the fear of hell "as from a sense of that horrible ingratitude he had shown to the God of his life, and to that blessed Redeemer who had been in so affecting a manner set forth as crucified before him."
At last, peace came (as all true peace must ever come) by faith in the blood of Christ shed upon the cross. And faith came through the reading of that remarkable passage in Romans : "Whom God bath set forth a propitiation through faith in His blood, to declare His righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God ; to declare at this time His righteousness (justice), that He might be just and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus" (chap. 3 : 25, 26). That same justice which he at one time imagined must require his condemnation, he now saw to be vindicated, aye, glorified, in the saving of his soul through the substitutional sufferings of Jesus Christ, crucified for his manifold sins and unrighteousnesses. "Then did he see and feel the riches of redeeming love and grace in such a manner as not only engaged him, with the utmost pleasure and confidence, to venture his soul upon it, but even swallowed up as it were his whole heart in the returns of love, which from that blessed time became the genuine and delightful principle of his obedience, and animated him with an enlarged heart to run in the way of God's commandments."
"And indeed," adds his biographer, "when I consider how habitual all those criminal indulgences were grown to him, and that he was now in the prime of life, and all this while in high health too, I cannot but be astonished to reflect upon it ; and that he should be so wonderfully sanctified in body, as well as in soul and spirit, as that, for all the future years of his life, he from that hour should find so constant a dis-inclination to, and abhorrence of, those criminal sensualities to which he fancied he was before so invariably impelled by his very constitution that he used strangely to think, and to say, that Omnipotence itself could not reform him without destroying that body and giving him an-other."
Until the day of his death, a period of twenty-six years, Colonel Gardiner adorned the doctrine of God his Saviour in all things, doing "works meet for repentance." He fell at the battle of Preston-pans, in defense of the house of Hanover.
Little need be said by way of comment on this marvelous tale of grace. God "who is rich in mercy" saves whom, and by what means so-ever, He will. The cross enables Him to righteously show grace to the most guilty. And divine justice, which otherwise must have condemned the sinner to everlasting shame and misery, is in the gospel in the sinner's favor. The justified believer sings in his happy heart :
"Righteousness now counts me free !"
It is written, "The unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God," and the Scripture cannot be broken. Read in 1 Cor. 6 9, 10 a detailed list of characters who by the righteous-ness of God and the holiness of heaven must forever be debarred from the inheritance of the saints in light. But, all glory to the grace of God, there is salvation from this state of sin and guilt. The apostle says of the washed, sanctified and justified Corinthians, "AND SUCH WERE SOME OF YOU."