By Heyman Wreford.
I can fancy some of my readers saying, “Tell me, oh! tell me how I can be saved. Let a poor sinner know how he can find his Saviour. I want to know, I long to know, I must know, how I can be saved?” Thank God for this desire in your heart; and thank God that this wonderful knowledge may be yours now.
Think of it, my reader! Today you may be as sure of heaven as if you were there. The awful shadow of coming judgment may be lifted from your life; the dread uncertainty that dogs your footsteps may give place to assured and perfect peace. Last night, may be, you could not sleep; the spectre of your past life haunted your waking hours; accusing voices recounting your many sins made the long vigil of night a terror and reproach. The mysteries of the heavens, where stars were shining clearly, and where the moon’s soft radiance cast her silver shadows on the earth, brought no comfort to your soul. Their far-off splendor spoke of God, but what was God to you? The lonely wastes of eternity seemed to stretch before you, the dim pathways lit by fadeless fires that marked the immeasurable ways of God. But what was that eternity to you? And solemn voices, still, small voices, seemed to pass along the wondrous arch of heaven, and the resting earth seemed to hold communion with the watching skies; but these soft voices had no message for you. There seemed to be no possible link between you, the earth-born, and the eternal power that wrote its glories on the universe.
You felt that God was there, and you were afraid of God. You held communion with your soul, and the sorrows of death and hell laid hold upon you; you wanted to know where your dwelling-place would be when earth was done. You felt the narrow bounds of your life pressing in upon you. “A few short years, and this beating heart shall be still,” you said to yourself. “I am a dying man, in a dying world, but my soul will never die — will never die.” And as with clasping hands you walked to and fro in your silent room, your life seemed no wider or larger than the guarding walls around. “I shall die,” you cried, “and what then?” There was no answer in the silent skies, or from the sleeping earth; your soul made answer then: “The wicked shall be turned into hell.”
And then you knelt and tried to pray, but your heart was dumb, and the awful silence of a sinful life lay between you and God. And so the sleepless hours passed on, and at last the messengers of the coming day, with feet of light, shone in the eastern skies, and as you watched the marvelous transforming of the daybreak, you cried, “Thank God the day has come; would to God the Dayspring from on high would visit me.”
Ah! God was speaking to you in those quiet hours. He was making you feel that His power ruled the world, that heaven and earth, and darkness and light, and time and eternity, and heaven and hell, the power to save, and the power to destroy, were all His.
The Last Day You Will Live on Earth.
That day will come. Many of you will not welcome it, but it is near you―the great eclipse of death shadowing the sun of earthly life; the slowly beating wings of the terrible angel of death hovering over you, and you cannot flee from it. The inexorable word goes forth that you must die, and you must die. If death could have been bribed, men would have given millions for a few years’ lease of life; monarchs would have given their kingdoms, and kings their crowns, but no―when the hour comes for you to go, you must go. You dread the journey to eternity; you have made no provision for it; you have no chart or compass to direct you, no friend to meet you, no home to go to. You are leaving all your friends behind you; your wife holds your hand, your children weep around you, all are in tears beside your dying bed. The clock is ticking out the seconds, telling loudly of eternity. The shadows rest upon the hushed room, and the firelight gleams upon the wall. You look around, your eyes rest on the faces of your loved ones, and on the familiar objects in the chamber. You think of the quiet house, of the rooms downstairs, of the life indoors and out of doors, of the coming in and going out, and the daily living and the daily life.
How strange, and yet how terrible the thought that in a few hours you must say “Good-bye” to it all. “O my wife!” you cry, “cannot I stay longer with you? Wreathe your arms, your dear arms, round my neck, and keep me here; I cannot leave you and the children, and go alone into the darkness that I dread.” Vain is your appeal! The earthly love you cling to now, and which, may be, has strewn your way with flowers, can only be yours to the end of life. Take your last look at the beloved face, print your last kiss on the faithful, loving lips; press the trembling hands for the last time, and then, amid a storm of sobs and tears, with the eyes growing dim with coming darkness, and the ears growing deaf to all on earth, as you near eternity you must go alone out of this world into the world to come.
Oh! Why did you live without Christ? Why did you die without Him? All your life He has been saying “Come unto Me,” and now that you are dead without His love brightening your pathway, and lost because He has never found you, methinks I hear a solemn voice saying over your soulless body, “I would, but ye would not.”
Shall you die like that? Die in unavailing sorrow and regret; a Christless end to a Christless life.
You need not; you may be saved from such a death as that by faith in Jesus Christ now. Yes, in this dispensation God is speaking to the world by His Son. You and I, my reader, have to be saved or lost. We have to believe God or the devil. At any moment we may be in eternity, and what that eternity will be to each one of us is the problem you must face. —From “What must I believe to be saved?”