SITTING for a few moments on Plas Mara, Rosario, a stranger in a strange land, I was aroused from my reverie by a stranger accosting me. “Beg pardon, sir; but are you English?”
“Yes.”
I was not long in discovering that my would-be friend was a drunken sailor. After a good many disjointed sentences, with which he tried to tell me his past history—doubtless a black one—he paused, and then, as though addressing some one unseen, said, weeping, “Why don’t you take me out of this?” “Oh, let me die, there is nothing in this world for me!” Then turning toward me he continued, “I wish I was in the grave, I should be at rest there.”
Oh! how my heart ached for the poor fellow, drugged with the opiates of Satan, dreaming in vain of a rest in the grave from the terrible reproaches of conscience and the rebuffs of a selfish world. Rest! thought I. What a vain delusion! Rest, with a guilty past and an accusing conscience? Impossible. What infinite mercy God did not answer his request, and usher his Christ-less soul into a lost eternity, there and then.
He had tried the world and its varied attractions, as perhaps few of my readers have, spending time, money, and bodily strength in pursuit of those pleasure-phantoms so cleverly devised by Satan, only to find, when everything was gone, his character blasted, his body ruined, and that there was “nothing in the world” for him. There he stood on the verge of eternity, longing to get away from that dread accuser, a guilty conscience.
What a sample of the world’s votaries today. Careless and gay among their own company, and yet the poor bruised heart longing for true rest. How true are the words of the blessed Son of God, “Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again: but whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.” (John 4:13, 14). Perhaps my reader has for years been seeking to slake his thirst at the streams of a Christless world, finding, alas! like this poor sailor, that the world has no rest to offer. Listen to the words of one whose greatest delight was to heal the broken-hearted and relieve the oppressed, “Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” (Matt. 11:28). Rest, unchanging and eternal, through the finished work of the Lord Jesus Christ. Rest, not in the sensual things of this world, not in the grave, but in the Christ of God revealing the Father.
J. W. H. N.