IN August, 1849, I completed my twenty-first year. I cannot recall a single religious impression previous to that period.
I was not grossly immoral, disposed rather to pride myself on my morality: but I was entirely godless: God was not in all my thoughts. I mingled little with men, and so knew little of the infidelity of the day, yet I was infidel at heart: I had an infidelity of my own, one of its leading features was a vapory idea of the grandeur of man.
The first religious impression I can recall was about two months after the above date: I had caught a had cold, and one night after I had gone to bed, the thought arose in my mind, What if this cold were to settle on my lungs, and I were to die? I tried to shake it off, but it stuck by me for a time and made me uncomfortable, till I dropped off to sleep. In the morning I awoke better, and it was forgotten.
It was the custom of my father's house to dine early on Lord's days, after which my habit was, in summer, to spend the afternoons out on a rocky knoll, on a hill side, in the midst of a plantation of spruces, where, with a panorama before me, and but rarely interrupted, I could be alone with my thoughts and my book; in colder weather, I spent them by the fireside in my own room, which was in, a little cottage detached from the house.
It must have been on the first or second Lord's day after my cold, that on rising from dinner, I went to a bookcase to select a book.
Side by side with my favorite Shakespeare stood five duodecimo volumes of Dwight's “Theology." For years they had stared me in the face, and their title was quite familiar, but I had never dreamed of looking within, nor, I believe, had any one in the household. How they came there I never knew, but they had a mission from God. My hand was raised to take down a volume of Shakespeare, when something within whispered, ' Take that other.' I threw the thought from me, but it returned, and after a few minutes of inward strife I carried off the first volume of Dwight.
The hand of God was upon me.
I sat down in my chamber, before the fire, opened the book, and began to read an argumentative discourse on the existence of God, but little fitted, one would have said, for the conversion of a soul; yet it was God's word for me.
Deistical in my thoughts I had long been, but I had never questioned the existence of God. Now, however, from a dreamy idea, He seemed to become to me all at once a living reality, a personal Being, with whom I had to do; and I soon found myself on my knees before Him. For what I asked I have no recollection; but I went on reading and praying from day to day: I was thoroughly awake now, and in earnest for salvation.
How many days thereafter I cannot now say, nor what the direct agency, but never shall I forget the impressions that filled my soul when it first came home to me that there was a Man in the glory of God; that the Son of the Eternal had really taken humanity upon Him, had lived, died, risen, and ascended into heaven, and sat clown on the throne. It was like the rising of the sun on midnight darkness; my soul reveled for a season in the glory of the thought, whose grandeur shone out for me all the more vividly against the dark background of my previous dreams of human greatness. I now for the first time saw where the human greatness was. I believed that Jesus was the Christ, the Saviour, the Son of God. Scripture has since taught me that I must then have been born of God. (1 John 5:11Whosoever believeth that Jesus is the Christ is born of God: and every one that loveth him that begat loveth him also that is begotten of him. (1 John 5:1).) 1JO 5:11Whosoever believeth that Jesus is the Christ is born of God: and every one that loveth him that begat loveth him also that is begotten of him. (1 John 5:1)
That salvation was through Christ, and only through Him, had now become for me a certainty, but I was far as yet from seeing it mine in Him. I still thought that my doings, and above all my repentance, had a part to play in the matter of my personal salvation, with the application of His salvation to me.
All was yet misty; and the grand effort of my soul became to repent of the past, and to live well for the future. I wanted above all things to feel repentant: I thought if it were real in me, I should weep over my sins, and I tried hard (thank God, in vain) to wring tears from my tearless eyes. Had I been allowed to shed one tear, I might have rested on my repentance instead of Christ. What mercy in that which then appeared to me so sad!
I went forward at once, and partook of the weekly "sacrament," and in the course of the next week called on the bishop under whose teaching I then sat with my parents, to ask counsel of him. I was advised to go home, take a sheet of paper, write down all my sins, and repent of them! How little thought that dear man, any more than myself, how he was then helping the devil! How little he knew what that delusive counsel might have cost my soul, but for the grace, the free, sovereign grace of God!
I attempted to follow out his advice, but I had not half covered the page of foolscap before me, when the conviction of the hopelessness of the task caused me to lay down the pen, and sent me again to my knees and my efforts.
It must have been somewhere in the second or third week of my soul exercise, that, as I was kneeling one evening beside a chair, pleading for pardon, and striving after feeling, there flashed into my soul the thought, "What am I doing? God says He forgives sins for Christ's sake, and here am I trying to wring it out of His hand by my repentance.”
It was light from on high. My prayers were instantly turned into praises. My load was gone. I knew my sins were forgiven.
My soul was at peace. The child looked up into his Father's face and knew his Father.
I do not know whether I then used the words “Abba! Father!" but perfectly well do I recollect that the Fatherly character of God took then, and held ever after, a prominent place in my soul.
The name acquired for me then, as it has ever since retained, an inexpressible sweetness; I delighted to repeat it over and over.
Night after night I went out into the open air, like a bird let loose, and in the solitude of the midnight, skipped and leaped rather than walked along the road for hours, gazing delightfully up into the starry heavens, with the thought that these were all my Father's; that He had made them all, and that He dwelt above there, and filled all things, and yet cared for and loved me! and I poured out my joyous soul in praises and prayers and thanksgivings.
Besides the Scriptures I read other books; among them I recall specially, Pike's “Early Piety "; but Dwight was my pocket companion: he was in danger of becoming an idol. My first quarrel with him was when I came to his thoughts on "Assurance." He made that an attainment, and a rare one, a something to grow out of a long life of piety, and a watchful self-scrutiny; while I, a mere neophyte, felt it in my soul, fresh and clear and bright, from God and from His word.
Christ had by that time become too precious, and His work (though still in many ways hazy) too clearly my foundation for that teaching: Dwight lost authority over me. From that day to the present, my assurance has never wavered. Much and sadly have my experiences tossed to and fro; but that was always as a rock rising above the surface of the waves: it was CHRIST.
R. H.