“I WISH you would go and see a poor woman in whom I am much interested,” said a lady, as she walked from the railway station with a friend who had just arrived. “Perhaps you would like to visit her at once,” she added, “before you come to my house; for she is very ill and very unhappy.” “You think her in danger?”
“Oh yes,” replied the lady, “she is going fast.”
“And not ready?” asked the visitor.
“A year or two ago,” replied the lady, “she attended some Gospel services, and seemed very much impressed by what she heard; but soon afterward she married, and appeared to put aside all serious thoughts. Now, poor thing, she knows the end is near, and longs to feel assured of her safety—but here we are at the cottage. I am glad you will speak to her.”
Ill, indeed, the poor young woman looked; but she gladly welcomed her visitor, and soon began to tell him something of her history.
“I have a deal of quiet time,” she said at length; “my husband is out all day at his work in the fields, and now that my poor baby is gone I have nothing to disturb me, so I just lie and think; I lie and think how I can reconcile God to me. I would give anything, sir,” she repeated earnestly, “to be sure that God was reconciled to me.”
“Let me read for you a few words from God’s own book,” said the stranger, gently.
There was a pause. At length the sick woman said, “Are those words really in the Bible?”
“Yes; they are no words of mine, they are God’s words— His message to you.”
“I have read my Bible, but I never read anything like that; let me see for myself,” she said, earnestly.
Raising herself slowly in her bed, and taking the open Bible in her trembling hands, she read, one by one, the words of the text. It was a solemn moment. God Himself was speaking by His Word to her soul. The entrance of that Word giveth light. As she read her anxious, troubled expression gave way to a look of quiet restfulness and content.
“I see it all now,” she murmured, as she returned the Bible and lay back upon her pillows. “I kept thinking and thinking how I could do something for God, something that would, maybe, reconcile Him to me. But now I see He has done all; nothing is left for me but to chuck myself, just as I am, on to Christ.” These were her words, spoken in the strong expressive idiom of her Northern speech.
N. N.