This touching incident was told the writer some years ago as being authentic.
IT was during the last war that a dying soldier was brought into a military hospital, and laid in one of the beds. He realized his condition, for when he had recovered from the exhaustion of being carried in, he turned to the man in the next bed, and said: “Matey, I’m going West, can you help a fellow with a bit of religion?”
“I’m afraid I can’t.” replied his neighbor, “but there’s a lady comes here Thursdays to talk to us chaps about religion, p’r’aps she could help you.”
“That’s all right,” said the sinking man, “but I’m not sure that I’ll be here on Thursday.”
Back came the reply, removing the last gleam of hope from this soul on the verge of eternity, “I’m sorry, I can’t help you.”
But God has His own means of reaching hearts, and possibly
Someone was Praying
for this lone warrior in his dire need, for it was evident when he again spoke that the Holy Spirit had been taking his thoughts back over the long years in which he’d left God out of his life, to his mother’s knee, or perhaps to the Sunday School.
These were his words: “There’s a bit of a verse comes back to my mind, friend, p’r’aps you could tell me if its part of a hymn, or in the Bible: it goes like this,” then, very softly, he repeated that heart-softening text learned in childhood’s days, but recalled now in his dying hour: “ ‘Suffer the little children to come unto Me, and forbid them not; for of such is the Kingdom of God!’”
“Oh, that’s in the Bible all right,” was the confident reply, and again a silence fell upon them.
When at length it was broken, it was a very subdued voice which asked the last question that it would ever ask down here, for life’s flame was beginning to flicker, and would soon be going out altogether. “It’s like this, matey, He wanted the little ones to come, I wonder would He have me? Anyway I’m going to ask Him.”
Then he quietly pulled the sheet up over his head, and—the sheet did not come down again. Surely that petition was not in vain.
For thanks be unto God that the One Whom He gave to be the Saviour of the world has said: “Him that cometh unto Me, I will in no wise cast out!”
What an incentive to the Christian reader this narrative should be in the realm of expectant prayer. There may, at this very moment, be numbers of our dear lads, who, like this man, are lying nigh to the gates of death, it may be in hospital or away in some lone corner of the battlefield, and such we can serve in the highest possible way, by asking God to recall some word of His learnt long since, but by no means lost if His Holy Spirit recalls it to them with the like result as the above.
E. G. CARRE.