GOOD instructions as to the contents of the Bible were mine at school at seventeen, 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 fields of Waterloo in June 1824. Arriving late at night at Link 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 the bedside, and found I had forgotten what to say. I looked up as if trying to remember, when suddenly there came over my soul a something I had never known before. It was as if a 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, made known to me that He pitied and loved myself.
My eye saw no one, my ear' heard no one, but I knew assuredly that One, whom I knew not, and had never met, had met me for the first time, and made me know that we were together. There was a light, which no senses or faculty of my own human nature ever knew. There was a presence of what seemed to me infinite in greatness, something altogether of a class that was 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; the way it 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 then jumped into bed.
The next morning's first thought was, “Get a Bible." I got one, and it was thenceforward my hand-book. My clergyman companion noticed this, and also the entire change of life and thought.
We journeyed together to Geneva, where there was an active persecution of the faithful going on.
He went on into Italy, and I found my own company—stayed with those who were suffering for Christ. I could quite now, after nearly 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.”
G. V. W.