Good instructions, as to the contents of the Bible, were mine at school. At seventeen I was under a John the Baptist ministry; but I never knew the gospel till, at nineteen, I went abroad, full of the animal pleasures of a military life. I and my comrade spent a long and tiring day on the field of Waterloo in June, 1824.
Arriving late at Lens, I soon went to my bedroom. It struck me, "I will say my prayers" (it was a habit of childhood, neglected in youth). I knelt down by my bedside, but found I had forgotten what to say. I looked up, as if trying to remember, when suddenly there came on my soul a something I had never known before. It was as if someone, infinite and Almighty, knowing everything, full of the deepest, tenderest interest in myself, though utterly and entirely abhorring everything in and connected with me, was making known to me that He pitied and loved myself. My eye saw no one; my ear heard no one; but I knew assuredly that the One whom I knew not, and never had met, had met me for the first time, and made me know we were together.
There was a light no sense or faculty of my own human nature ever knew; there was a presence of what seemed infinite in greatness, something altogether apart and supreme, and yet at the same time making itself known to me in a way that I as a man could thoroughly feel, and taste, and enjoy. The light made all light, Himself withal, but it did not destroy, for it was love itself; and I was loved individually by Him. The exquisite tenderness and fullness of that love appropriated me myself for Him, in whom it all was; while the light, from which it was inseparable in Him, discovered to me the contrast I had been to all that was light and love.
I wept for awhile on my knees, said nothing, and got into bed. The next morning's first thought was, "Get a Bible." I got one, and it was henceforward my handbook. My clergyman companion noticed this, and also the entire change of life and thought. We journeyed on together to Geneva where there was an active persecution of the faithful going on; he went to Italy, and I found my own company—stayed with those who were suffering for Christ.
I could quite now, after fifty years trial, adapt to myself those few lines as descriptive of that night's experience:
"Christ, the Father's rest eternal,
Jesus, once looked down on me,
Called me by my name external,
And revealed Himself to me.
With His whisper, light, life-giving
Glowed in me, the dark and dead,
Made me live, Himself receiving,
Who once died for me, and bled."