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 field of Waterloo in June, 1824. Arriving late at night at—, I soon went to my bedroom.
It struck me, "I will say my prayers." It was the 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 some One, 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; 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 to know that we were together.
There was a light, no sense nor faculty my own human nature ever knew; there was a presence of what seemed 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: for it was love itself, and I was loved individually by Him. Oh, 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 a while on my knees, and said nothing, then got into bed. The next morning's thought was, "Get a Bible." I got one, and it was thenceforward my handbook. My clergyman companion noticed this, and also my 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, adopt to myself these 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 eternal,
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.”