STORIES of pocket Bibles that have saved life in battle are no novelty; but their commonness does not cheapen them, if they are true, and if their moral is not overdone.
In a recent Epworth League meeting a returned soldier told his experience with his pocket Testament. It was handed to him on the cars while on his way to the South with his regiment. He had taken a “treat” at the last station, and to use his own expression, was “feeling gay.”
“All right,” he said laughingly to the donor of the book, “I’ll carry it. It’ll be good to stop a bullet.”
Some weeks afterward came the fighting at Santiago, and on the day of the famous charge of the Rough Riders the young soldier was hit, and left lying among the wounded. He regained consciousness while under the surgeon’s hands, and heard him say, “That was a close call.” A Mauser bullet in his breast had been extracted. It had barely reached his heart, and stopped.
“What is it, doctor?” he whispered, but the busy surgeon had hurried on to his next patient. General Wheeler’s daughter was there, ministering to the bleeding men, and he beckoned to her and asked her to tell him about his wound. She brought his pocket Testament, which he had carried in his blouse, and showed him a hole through it made by the deadly lead, and told him how narrow his escape had been. Piercing the book in an oblique direction, the missile had found exactly resistance enough to arrest it at the danger line.
For the first time the reckless soldier took an interest in the gift he had accepted with a jest. He remembered with a strange throb the flippant remark he had made on the train. He kept the Testament near him, and in the tedious hours of his convalescence he often turned the leaves and noted the texts which had been crossed by the bullet.
There was one verse that he could not get beyond. The shot had cut through the middle of it, and left its scar there like an index.
“God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him might not perish, but have everlasting life.”
Many times a day he read the verse over, and thought about it. His life must have been worth saving, he said to himself, else he would have been underground with his buried comrades. But everlasting life! Something forever beyond and above fatal wounds. That meant more than the “accident” that saved one man. God has declared everlasting life to men, by Jesus Christ, His Son. The soldier became the pupil of his book. To believe is to accept. To accept is to be obedient. To obey is to make Christ the example and His teachings the rule of life. It was no delusion when his heart told him that he was willing to accept this formula and to “live by it.”
The story is not a remarkable one—in material or initial incident. Any other book than the New Testament would have diverted the shaft of death as easily; but its blow might not have pointed him to a word that brought a changed motive in life with it. Out of this distinction blossoms the lesson, and a natural circumstance takes an eternal character. Whether the means were casual or divine, the effect must be left to testify. The man who went to the war a scoffer came back changed in moral purpose. He had become a Christian, because he had become a follower of the Christ.
ANON.