Good instructions as to the contents of the Bible had been mine at school. At seventeen I had been under a "John the Baptist" ministry—a grim portent of hell-fire and damnation—but I never really knew God's love till, at nineteen, I was sent abroad to do my stint of military service.
Arriving late at my station, I soon went to my bedroom. The thought came, "I will say my prayers." It had been my habit in childhood, but neglected in youth.
I knelt down by my bedside, but found I had forgotten what to say. I looked up, trying to remember. My mind was a blank, my heart untouched. Suddenly there came to my soul something I had never known before. Could it be, I thought, that someone Infinite and Almighty—someone all-knowing yet full of the deepest, tenderest interest in myself, though utterly and entirely abhorring everything within and connected with me, was making known to me that He yearned over and loved me?
In the lonely quietness around me I waited expectantly. My eye saw no one; my ear heard no one; but in my inmost heart I knew assuredly that the One whom I knew not, and never had met, had met me, and that He was making me know that we were together.
His was a Presence that no sense or faculty of my own human nature had ever known; and this was a knowledge of Infinite Greatness, a Person altogether apart and supreme. God was making Himself known to me in a way that I, as a man, could thoroughly appreciate and enjoy.
For the first time I knew God as infinite love itself; and—wonder of wonders!—I was loved individually by Him. The exquisite tenderness and fullness of that love appropriated myself for Him, although in the revealing light of that love I now saw myself to be the unworthy object of all His counsels and purposes. I was condemned.
I wept there on my knees, for how long I do not know. The deep sense of my guilt and lost condition overwhelmed me, and I cried to God for mercy, pardon and peace. At last the warmth of His love enfolded me, and the precious sense of His acceptance of one so unworthy as I entered my sin-darkened heart. I was saved!
With "joy unspeakable and full of glory," I could now claim for myself these 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, the dead,
Made me live, Himself receiving,
Who once died for me and bled.”