III

Mr. Frederick Charrington's story has been put on record by Guy Thorne. He was the son of the great brewer, the heir to more than a million pounds, and his time was very largely his own. He traveled and formed friendships. One of his earliest friends was Lord Garvagh. They traveled together, and, when they parted, Lord Garvagh asked Charrington if he would grant him one request. 'When you are quite alone,' his lordship pleaded, 'I should like you to read slowly and carefully the third chapter of John's Gospel!' Later on, Charrington met William Rainsford, and the acquaintance ripened into intimacy. 'Do you know what I wish you would do, Fred?' Rainsford said to him one day. 'I wish, when you are by yourself, that you would study the third chapter of the Gospel of John!'

'This is a very curious thing,' Charrington said to himself. 'My old friend, Lord Garvagh, and my new friend, Rainsford, both say exactly the same thing; and they both profess to be saved.'

Thus doubly challenged, he read the chapter with the closest attention, and was arrested by the words: 'Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God!' 'As I read,' he says, 'light came into my soul,' and he ever afterwards regarded that moment as the turning-point of his whole life.

Now, what did these men--these and a hundred thousand more--see in the strange, mysterious words that Jesus spoke to the aged ruler twenty centuries ago? That is the question, and the question is not a difficult one to answer.

A new birth!To beborn again! What can it mean? It can only mean one thing. 'I wish,' somebody has sung----

I wish that there were some wonderful placeCalled the Land of Beginning Again,Where all our mistakes and all our heartachesAnd all of our poor, selfish griefCould be dropped, like a shabby old coat, at the door,And never put on any more.

The words, if they mean anything, mean that thereissuch a place. A manmayhave a fresh start. In describing the greatest change that took place in his life--the greatest change that can take place in any man's life--Frank Bullen says: 'I love that description of conversion as the "new birth." No other definition touches the truth of the process at all. So helpless, so utterly knowledgeless, possessing nothing but the vague consciousness of life just begun!' Dr. Blund was thinking of the babes whose first breath he had seen drawn. So innocent; so pastless! Oh, to begin where they were beginning! Oh, to beborn again!'

Dr. Blund cannot begin where they were beginning.He cannot enjoy again--at any rate in this world--the opportunities of growth and development that were theirs. But he can beborn again! He can start afresh! Dr. Blund made that discovery on his deathbed, and, in talking of the dead doctor's experience, the young minister made the same discovery a day or two later. He felt his need; he turned in an agony of supplication to the Saviour whom he had so often preached; and he, too, entered into the new life.

'He made the great discovery,' Harold Begbie says. 'It had happened; the longed-for event had come; he stood by himself, all by himself, conscious now of the heart; no longer satisfied either with his own intellect or the traditions of a church. The miracle had happened. He had discovered the helplessness of humanity. He had discovered the need of the soul. He had begun at last to see into the heart of things.' He had beenborn again!

There are two kinds of progress. There is the progress that moves away from infancy towards youth, towards maturity, towards age and decrepitude. And there is a higher progress, a progress that moves towards infancy. 'Except ye be converted and become as little children,' Jesus said, 'ye shall not enter into the kingdom of God.' And the only way of becoming a little child once more is by beingborn again. It is the glory of the gospel that it offers a man that chance.

'Those words are the sheet-anchor of my soul!' said Hedley Vicars, a gallant young Army officer, as he sat talking to his sweetheart in the handsome drawing-room at Terling Place.

'Those words are more golden than gold!' exclaimed Miss Frances Ridley Havergal, and she ordered that they should be inscribed upon her tomb.

'Those words did give a great ease to my spirit!' John Bunyan tells us.

'Those words,' said old Donald Menzies, the mystic of Drumtochty, 'those words fell upon me like a gleam from the Mercy-seat!'

What words? Let us return to Hedley Vicars! He was only twenty-eight when he fell, leading his regiment--the Ninety-seventh--in action before Sebastopol. The enemy attacked suddenly under cover of the darkness. 'The men of the Ninety-seventh behaved with the utmost gallantry and coolness,' said Lord Raglan, in the historic dispatch that reached England on Good Friday, 1855. 'They were led by Captain Vicars, who, unfortunately,lost his life in the engagement; and I am assured that nothing could be more distinguished than the gallantry and good example which he set to the detachment under his command.' His biographer tells us that it was more than three years earlier--in November, 1851--that, whilst awaiting in his room the return of a brother officer, he idly turned over the leaves of a Bible which lay on the table. The words, 'The blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanseth us from all sin,' caught his eyes and profoundly impressed his mind. 'If,' he said, as he closed the sacred Volume, 'if this be true, I will henceforth live by the grace of God as a man should live who has been redeemed by the blood of Jesus Christ.' That night he could scarcely sleep; the great words repeated themselves again and again within his throbbing brain; they seemed too good to be true.

'All sin! All sin!'

'Cleanseth from all sin!'

'The blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanseth us from all sin.'

He never tired of telling of that wonderful experience. Miss Marsh, to whom he was engaged to be married, says that, almost as soon as they were first introduced to each other, 'he gave her an outline of the manner in which God had worked the great change in his heart. With forceful simplicity he told the point of the story; how the words, "The blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanseth us from all sin," became the sheet-anchor of his soul,adding, "Thus was I born again of the Word of God which liveth and abideth for ever!"'

Away back in the infancy of the world I hear one of the earliest of the Patriarchs uttering a great and bitter cry. 'I have sinned!' he cries; 'what shall I do?' And, as I turn over the leaves of my Bible, I find that question echoed again and again, generation after generation and age after age. Yet never once does it receive the slightest hint or suggestion of an answer. And, depend upon it, if the Son of Man had never come into the world, it would have echoed round the globe--still unanswered and unanswerable--until this day. 'O Plato, Plato!' cried Socrates, 'it may be that the gods can forgive sin, but, alas, I do not see how!' Nor anybody else. Job's question fell back upon his face; the universe could give him no reply. It is very striking. And so, here at the beginning of my Bible, I hear the first man's question; and, here at the end of my Bible, I hear the last man's answer!

'What shall I do? What shall I do?'

'I have sinned; what shall I do?'

'The blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanseth us from all sin!'

These two men--Job and John--present us, first with acomparison, and then with acontrast. It isinteresting to examine side by side their views of the sin that represented so terrific a problem.

Job thought of it as acontaminatingthing. He felt that his soul was soiled. 'What shall I do?' he cries, 'what shall I do? If I bathe myself in snow water and wash my hands never so clean, yet shalt Thou plunge me in the ditch and mine own clothes shall abhor me!' Every day of his life he thought he heard, morning and noon and night, the awful Voice of the Most High. 'Though thou wash thee with niter, and take thee much soap, yet thine iniquity is marked before Me, saith the Lord God.' He felt as Macbeth felt when advised to cleanse the stain from his guilty hands.

Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this bloodClean from my hand! No, this my hand will ratherThe multitudinous seas incarnadine,Making the green one red!

Job was like the old lama, in Rudyard Kipling'sKim, who, year after year, wandered through cities and rice-fields, over the hills and across the plains, always searching, but searching in vain, for the River, the River of the Arrow, the River that could cleanse from sin!

John, on the other hand, thought of sin as acondemningthing. The great word 'condemnation' occurs on almost every page of his writings. He feels that every man's sin carries its own conviction. It is like finger-print evidence; it speaks for itself;it needs no long procession of corroborating witnesses. There it is! It tells its own terrible tale, and there is no gainsaying it.

And yet, looked at in another way, the thoughts of these two men stand in sharp and striking contrast, the one with the other. 'I have sinned,' cried Job; 'what shall I do? What shall I do?'

But there is no reply. In the course of the stupendous drama that bears his name, Job scours sea and land, earth and sky, for some answer to the wild questionings of his soul. He climbs the summits of the loftiest mountains and thrids the labyrinth of the deepest mine; he calls to the heights of the heavens and to the depths of the sea. But there is no answering voice, and he is left to nurse his dumb and piteous despair. Every attempt that he makes to rid his soul of its defilement is like the effort of a man who, in trying to remove the stain from his window, rubs on the wrong side of the glass.

But, in contrast with all this, John saw the Cross! How could he ever forget it? Had he not stood beside it, gazed into the thorn-crowned face, and received from those quivering lips their last sacred bequest--the charge of the Saviour's mother? And, all through the eventful years that followed, John never tired of presenting the Cross as the only answer to the Patriarch's question. He may nothave perfectly understood it--no man ever yet comprehended all its heights and sounded all its depths! But it is easier to accept it than to reject it. For, if I reject it, I am confronted by an enigma even more unanswerable than Job's.

Oh, why was He there as the Bearer of sinIf on Jesus my guilt was not laid?Oh, why from His side flowed the sin-cleansing stream,If His dying my debt has not paid?

If, that is to say, the Cross is not the divine answer to the mystery of all the ages, then who shall attempt to solve the dark, inscrutable, impenetrable mystery of the Cross?

But it is! Experience proves it! In the course of his dazzling Apocalypse, John tells us that he saw a war being waged in heaven; and the hosts of righteousness overcame their powerful and sinister foes by the virtue of the blood of the Lamb. I do not know what he means--never expect to know in this world. But I know that, in this life, something very like it happens every day.

Martin Luther says that, in one of his periods of depression at the Wartburg, it seemed to him that he saw a hideous and malignant form inscribing the record of his own transgressions round the walls of his room. There seemed to be no end to the list--sins of thought, sins of word, sins of deed, sins of omission, sins of commission, secret sins, opensins--the pitiless scribe wrote on and on interminably. Whilst the accuser was thus occupied, Luther bowed his head and prayed. When he looked up again, the writer had paused, and, turning, faced him.

'Thou hast forgotten just one thing!' said Luther.

'And that--?' asked his tormentor.

'Take thy pen once more and write across it all: "The blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanseth us from all sin!"' And, at the utterance of those words, the spirit vanished and the walls were clean!

In hisGrace Abounding, Bunyan tells us of a period in his life during which his soul seemed to be held in fetters of brass; and, every step he took, he took to the sound of the clanking of chains. 'But about ten or eleven o'clock on a certain day,' he says, 'as I was walking under a hedge (full of sorrow and guilt, God knows), suddenly this sentence rushed in upon me, "The blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanseth us from all sin." At this I made a stand in my spirit and began to conceive peace in my soul, and methought I saw as if the tempter did leer and steal away from me, as being ashamed of what he had done. At the same time also I had my sin and the blood of Christ thus represented to me: that my sin, when compared to the blood of Christ, was no more to it than this little clod or stone is to the vast and wide field that here I see. This gave me good encouragement.'

Neither Martin Luther nor John Bunyan wouldobject to my setting them in the company of Donald Menzies. For, like them, Donald was at war with principalities and powers, with the rulers of the darkness of this world, with spiritual wickedness in high places. In the lonely anguish of that grim struggle it seemed as though, at the last, the gates of hell must have prevailed against him.

'Then,' he says, 'I heard a voice, oh, yes, as plain as you are hearing me: "The blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanseth us from all sin." It was like a gleam from the Mercy-seat, but I waited to see whether Satan had any answer and my heart was standing still. But there was no word from him, not one word. Then I leaped to my feet and cried, "Get thee behind me, Satan!" And I looked round, and there was no one to be seen but Janet in her chair with the tears on her cheeks, and she was saying, "Thanks be to God which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ!"'

'When I uttered those words,' says Luther, 'the evil spirit vanished and the walls were clean!'

'When I made a stand upon those words,' says Bunyan, 'the tempter did steal away from me and I entered into peace!'

'When I heard those words,' says Donald Menzies, 'I waited to see if Satan had any answer, but there was no word from him, not one word!'

This, surely, is what the seer means when he says that he saw all the hosts of evil routed and scattered by the virtue of the blood of the Lamb.

Down at the library yesterday afternoon I spent an hour in glancing through the various volumes of Southey'sCommonplace Book. And, among a vast assortment of musty notes that are now of interest to nobody, I came upon this: 'I have been reading of a man on the Malabar coast who had inquired of many devotees and priests as to how he might make atonement for his sins. At last he was directed to drive iron spikes, sufficiently blunted, through his sandals, and on these spikes he was to place his naked feet and then walk a distance of five hundred miles. He undertook the journey, but loss of blood and exhaustion of body compelled him to rest one day under the shade of a spreading tree. As he lay there, a missionary approached and began to preach the gospel. He announced as his theme the words: "The blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanseth us from all sin." Whilst the evangelist still preached, the man sprang up, tore off his sandals, and cried aloud: "That is what I want! That is what I want!" And he became a living witness to the fact that the redeeming blood of Christdoescleanse from human guilt.'

'That is what I want!' cried Southey's pilgrim on the coast of Malabar.

'That is what I want!' cried Luther in the Wartburg.

'That is what I want!' cried Bunyan at Bedford.

'That is what I want!' cried Donald Menzies at Drumtochty.

'That is what I want!' exclaimed young Hedley Vicars, as his startled eyes fell upon the tremendous words that seemed to leap from the Bible on the table. 'The blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanseth us from all sin.' 'That is what I want! That is what I want!'

Hedley Vicars appropriated the priceless gift held out to him, and his whole life was transfigured in consequence. His life--and his death! For, on that fatal night before Sebastopol, it was with Hedley Vicars as it was with the soldier with whom the poet has familiarized us. Everybody knows the story. Two men of God moved in the darkness across the field on which, that day, a battle had been fought.

And now they standBeside a manly form, outstretched alone.His helmet from his head had fallen. His handStill firmly grasped his keen but broken sword.His face was white and cold, and, thinking he was gone,They were just passing on, for time was precious,When a faint sigh caught their attentive ears.Life was still there, so bending down,They whispered in his ears most earnestly,Yet with that hush and gentleness with whichWe ever speak to a departing soul--'Brother! the blood of Jesus Christ, God's Son,Cleanseth from every sin.'The pale lips moved,And gently whispered 'hush!' and then they closed,And life again seemed gone.But yet once moreThey whispered those thrice blessed words, in hopeTo point the parting soul to Christ and heaven--'Brother! the precious blood of Jesus ChristCan cleanse from every sin.'Again the pale lips moved,All else was still and motionless, for DeathAlready had his fatal work half done;But gathering up his quickly failing strength,The dying soldier--dying victor--said:'Hush! for the angels call the muster roll!I wait to hear my name!'They spoke no more.What need to speak again? for now full wellThey knew on whom his dying hopes were fixed,And what his prospects were. So, hushed and still,They, kneeling, watched.And presently a smile,As of most thrilling and intense delight,Played for a moment on the soldier's face,And with his one last breath he whispered 'Here!'

The pale lips moved,And gently whispered 'hush!' and then they closed,And life again seemed gone.

But yet once moreThey whispered those thrice blessed words, in hopeTo point the parting soul to Christ and heaven--'Brother! the precious blood of Jesus ChristCan cleanse from every sin.'

Again the pale lips moved,All else was still and motionless, for DeathAlready had his fatal work half done;But gathering up his quickly failing strength,The dying soldier--dying victor--said:'Hush! for the angels call the muster roll!I wait to hear my name!'

They spoke no more.What need to speak again? for now full wellThey knew on whom his dying hopes were fixed,And what his prospects were. So, hushed and still,They, kneeling, watched.

And presently a smile,As of most thrilling and intense delight,Played for a moment on the soldier's face,And with his one last breath he whispered 'Here!'

'I have sinned! What shall I do?' cries this despairing soul at the beginning of my Bible.

'The blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanseth us from all sin!' answers the man who leaned upon the Saviour's breast and gazed full into the thorn-crowned face of the Crucified.

'That is what I want!' exclaims the man at Malabar, speaking, not for himself alone, but for each and all of us.

'Those words are more golden than gold!' saysMiss Havergal, as she orders them to be inscribed upon her tomb.

'They are like a gleam from the Mercy-seat!' cries Donald Menzies.

'They are the sheet-anchor of my soul!' Hedley Vicars tells his sweetheart. And he is a very wise man who, in the straits of his experience, stakes his faith upon that which such witnesses have tested and have found sublimely true.

Silas Wright was deprived by sheer modesty of the honor of being President of the United States. His is one of the truly Homeric figures in American history. By downright purity of motive, transparency of purpose, and the devotion of commanding powers to the public good, he won for himself the honor, the love and the unbounded confidence of all his fellows. It used to be said of him that he was as honest as any man under heavenor in it. He might have aspired to any office to which it was in America's power to call him. Only his extreme humility, and his dread of impeding the promotion of his friends, kept him from rising to a position in which his name would have taken its place with those of Washington and Lincoln. But he refused almost every honor. 'He refused cabinet appointments,' says Benton, in hisThirty Years' View. 'He refused a seat on the bench of the Supreme Court of the United States; he rejected instantly the nomination of 1844 for Vice-President; he refused to be nominated for the Presidency. He spent as much time in declining officeas others did in winning it. The offices he did accept were thrust upon him. He was born great and above office and unwillingly descended to it.' Whittier is very conservative in his choice of heroes. Those whom he commemorates in verse are not only great men, but good ones. And Silas Wright is among them. 'Man of the millions,' he says, in the lines that he penned on hearing of Mr. Wright's death:

Man of the millions, thou art lost too soon!Portents at which the bravest stand aghast--The birththroes of a Future, strange and vast,Alarm the land; yet thou, so wise, and strong,Suddenly summoned to the burial bed,Lapped in its slumbers deep and ever long,Hear'st not the tumult surging overhead.Who now shall rally Freedom's scattered host?Who wear the mantle of the leader lost?

The splendid personality of Silas Wright has been best revealed to us in Irving Bacheller'sThe Light in the Clearing. The book is partly history and partly commentary and partly fiction. Silas Wright, says Irving Bacheller, carried the candle of the Lord; and all the world rejoiced in its radiance.

Barton Baynes, the hero of the book--for whose actuality and historicity the author vouches--is an orphan brought up on a farm by his Uncle Peabody and Aunt Deel. Getting into all sorts ofscrapes, he makes up his mind that he is too heavy a burden on the affectionate and good-natured couple; and one night he runs away. Out in the darkness, however, he meets with strange adventures, loses his way, and at length finds himself in the hands of Silas Wright, the Comptroller. The Senator first falls in love with the bright-faced, open-hearted, intelligent boy, and then takes him back to his uncle's farm. From that moment the friendship between the two--the great man and the obscure country boy--grows apace. After a while the Senator visits the district to deliver an address, and he spends the night at the farmhouse. It is a great occasion for Bart; and after supper an incident occurs that colors all his life and strikes the keynote of the book. As Barton approaches Mr. Wright to say Good-night, the Senator says:

'I shall be gone when you are up in the morning. It may be a long time before I see you; I shall leave something for you in a sealed envelope with your name on it. You are not to open the envelope until you go away to school. I know how you will feel that first day. When night falls, you will think of your aunt and uncle and be very lonely. When you go to your room for the night I want you to sit down all by yourself and read what I shall write. They will be, I think, the most impressive words ever written. You will think them over, but you will not understand them for a long time. Ask every wise man you meet to explain them to you, for all yourhappiness will depend upon your understanding of those few words in the envelope.'

The words in the sealed envelope!

What are the mysterious words in the envelope?

And what if the sealed envelope contains atext?

In the morning, when Barton rose, the Senator was gone, and Aunt Deel handed the boy the sealed envelope. It was addressed: 'Master Barton Baynes; to be opened when he leaves home to go to school.' That day soon came. At the Canton Academy, under the care of the excellent Michael Hacket, Bart felt terribly lonely, and, in accordance with the Senator's instructions, he opened the note. And this is what he read:

'Dear Bart, I want you to ask the wisest man you know to explain these words to you. I suggest that you commit them to memory and think often of their meaning. They are from Job: "His bones are full of the sin of his youth, which shall lie down with him in the dust." I believe that they are the most impressive in all the literature I have read.--Silas Wright.'

Bart soon learned to love and admire the schoolmaster;hewas the wisest man he knew; tohim, therefore, he went for an explanation of the words.

'All true!' exclaimed Mr. Hacket, after reading the note. 'I have seen it sinking into the bones ofthe young, and I have seen it lying down with the aged in the dust of their graves. Your body is like a sponge; it takes things in and holds them and feeds upon them. A part of every apple that you eat sinks down into your blood and bones. You can't get it out. It's the same with the books that you read and the thoughts that you enjoy. They go down into your bones and you can't get them out.A man's bones are full of the sin of his youth, which lies down with him in the dust!'

But the best exposition of the text is not Michael Hacket's, but Irving Bacheller's. The whole book is a vivid and arresting and terrible forth-setting of the impressive words that Barton found in his sealed envelope.

All through the book two dreadful characters move side by side--Benjamin Grimshaw and Silent Kate. Benjamin Grimshaw is rich and proud and pitiless. Everybody is afraid of him. But Roving Kate is not afraid. Indeed, he seems to be more afraid of her. Wherever he is, she is there. She is wild and bony and ragged. She is, or pretends to be, half demented. She tells fortunes with strange antics and gesticulations, scrawling her prognostications upon stray slips of paper. But Benjamin Grimshaw is the main object of her attention. She hates him, and hates him all the more terribly becauseshe once loved him. For Roving Kate, the Silent Woman, was once Kate Fullerton, Squire Fullerton's pretty daughter. And Benjamin Grimshaw had loved her, and betrayed her, and spurned her, and married another. In the village cemetery you might have seen a tombstone bearing her name. Her father erected it to show that she was deadto himfor ever. Poor Kate had never known her mother. And so, in the course of the story, Benjamin Grimshaw had two sons, only one of whom he recognized. For Kate Fullerton was the mother of the other. And, in her shame and her anger and her hate, Kate resolved to follow the father of her base-born child all the days of his life; and there she stands--unkempt, repulsive, menacing--always near him, the living embodiment ofthe sin of his youth.

Amos Grimshaw, his petted and pampered son, comes to the gallows. He is convicted of murder upon the highway. The father is in court when the Judge pronounces the awful sentence. And, of course, Roving Kate is there. Ragged as ever, the Silent Woman is waiting for him as he comes down the steps. She shoots out a bony finger at him, as, bowed and broken, he passes into the street. He turns and strikes at her with his cane.

'Go away from me,' he cries. 'Take her away, somebody! I can't stand it! She's killing me! Take her away!'

His face turns purple and then livid. He reelsand falls headlong. He is dead! Three days later they bury him. Roving Kate stands by the graveside, strangely changed. She is decently dressed; her hair is neatly combed; the wild look has left her eyes. She looks like one whose back is relieved of a heavy burden. She scatters little red squares of paper into the grave, her lips moving silently. These are her last curses. Barton Baynes and his schoolmaster, Mr. Hacket, are standing by.

'The scarlet sins of his youth are lying down with him in the dust,' whispers the master to his pupil as they walk away together.

This is terrible enough--the thought of our sins surrounding our deathbeds and lying down with us in our graves--but the book contains something more profound and terrible still!

For, in addition to the grave of Benjamin Grimshaw, from which we have just turned sadly away, there are two other graves in the book. The one is a felon's grave--the grave of Amos Grimshaw. And what sins are these that are lying down with him in the dust? They are some of them his own; and they are some of them his father's; and they are some of them the sins of Roving Kate, the Silent Woman. Yes, they are some of them the woman's sins. For when Amos was but an impressionable boy, Kate had supplied him with literature by which she hoped to pollute and ruin him.

Out of the deathless hatred that she bore to the father, she longed to destroy the son, body and soul. She gave him tales that would inflame his fancy and excite his baser instincts, tales that glorified robbery, murder and villainy of every kind. If Amos Grimshaw had been a good man's son, and if ennobling influences had been brought to bear upon him, he might have lived to old age and gone down at last to an honored grave. But his father's example was always before him, and Kate's books did their dreadful work only too well. He became a highway robber; he shot a stranger on a lonely road. It came out in evidence that the deed had been perpetrated under circumstances identical with those described in one of the sensational stories found in the Grimshaw barn--the stories Kate had given him!

'It's the same with the books you read,' the schoolmaster had said, when Bart sought from him an explanation of the text in the sealed envelope; 'they go down into your bones and you can't get them out.'

And Kate's books had gone down into Amos Grimshaw's bones; and thus her sins and his father's sins lay down in the dust of the felon's grave and mingled with his own. No exposition of Silas Wright's text could be more arresting or alarming than that. My sins may overflow from my grave and lie down in the dust with my children!

And, on the very last page ofThe Light in the Clearing, we have an even more striking presentment of the same profound truth. For I said that, in the book, there is yet one other grave. It is a lonely grave up among the hills--the grave of the stranger who was shot by Amos Grimshaw that dark night; and this time it is old Kate who sits weeping beside it. For who was the stranger murdered upon the highway? It turns out to have beenKate's own son!

'It is very sorrowful,' she moans. 'He was trying to find me when he died!'

And so the murderer and the murdered were step-brothers! They were both the sons of Benjamin Grimshaw!

And, in this grave up among the hills, there lie down with poor murdered Enoch his own sins--whatever they may have been--and his father's sins--the sins that made him an outcast and a fugitive--and his mother's sins, the sins of the only being who loved him!

Yes, his mother's sins; for his mother's sins had slain him. In her hatred of Benjamin Grimshaw, she had moved Amos Grimshaw to become a murderer, and he had murdered--her own son!

'It is very sorrowful!' she moans.

It is indeed; sin is always sorrowful.

'Wherefore come now and let us reason together, saith the Lord; though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.'

It is best to make an end of them, and to turn from them, once and for all, that they lie down at last neither with us nor with our children.

The lecturer had vanished! A crowded gathering of distinguished scientists had been listening, spellbound, to the masterly expositions of Michael Faraday. For an hour he had held his brilliant audience enthralled as he had demonstrated the nature and properties of the magnet. And he had brought his lecture to a close with an experiment so novel, so bewildering and so triumphant that, for some time after he resumed his seat, the house rocked with enthusiastic applause. And then the Prince of Wales--afterwards King Edward the Seventh--rose to propose a motion of congratulation. The resolution, having been duly seconded, was carried with renewed thunders of applause. But the uproar was succeeded by a strange silence. The assembly waited for Faraday's reply; but the lecturer had vanished! What had become of him? Only two or three of his more intimate friends were in the secret. They knew that the great chemist was something more than a great chemist; he was a great Christian. He was an elder of a little Sandemanian Church--a church that never boasted more than twenty members. The hour at which Faraday concludedhis lecture was the hour of the week-night prayer-meeting. That meeting he never neglected. And, under cover of the cheering and applause, the lecturer had slipped out of the crowded hall and hurried off to the little meeting-house where two or three had met together to renew their fellowship with God.

In that one incident the man stands revealed. All the sublimities and all the simplicities of life met in his soul. The master of all the sciences, he kept in his breast the heart of a little child. Mr. Cosmo Monkhouse has well asked--

Was ever man so simple and so sage,So crowned and yet so careless of a prize?Great Faraday, who made the world so wise,And loved the labor better than the wage!And this, you say, is how he looked in age,With that strong brow and these great humble eyesThat seem to look with reverent surpriseOn all outside himself. Turn o'er the page,Recording Angel, it is white as snow!Ah, God, a fitting messenger was heTo show Thy mysteries to us below!Child as he came has he returned to Thee!Would he could come but once again to showThe wonder-deep of his simplicity!

Was ever man so simple and so sage,So crowned and yet so careless of a prize?Great Faraday, who made the world so wise,And loved the labor better than the wage!

And this, you say, is how he looked in age,With that strong brow and these great humble eyesThat seem to look with reverent surpriseOn all outside himself. Turn o'er the page,Recording Angel, it is white as snow!Ah, God, a fitting messenger was heTo show Thy mysteries to us below!Child as he came has he returned to Thee!Would he could come but once again to showThe wonder-deep of his simplicity!

In him the simplicities were always stronger than the sublimities; the child outlived the sage. As he lay dying they tried to interview the professor, but it was the little child in him that answered them.

'What are your speculations?' they inquired.

'Speculations?' he asked, in wondering surprise. 'Speculations! I have none! I am resting on certainties.I know whom I have believed and am persuaded that He is able to keep that which I have committed unto Him against that day!' And, reveling like a little child in those cloudless simplicities, his great soul passed away.

Faraday was a perpetual mystery. He baffled all his colleagues and companions. Nobody could understand how the most learned man of his time could find in his faith those restful certainties on which he so calmly and securely reposed. They saw him pass from a meeting of the Royal Society to sit at the feet of a certain local preacher who was notorious for his illiteracy; and the spectacle filled them with bewilderment and wonder. Some suggested that he was, in an intellectual sense, living a double life. Tyndall said that, when Faraday opened the door of his oratory, he shut that of his laboratory. He did nothing of the kind. He never closed his eyes to any fragment of truth; he never divided his mind into watertight compartments; he never shrank from the approach of a doubt. He saw life whole. His biography has been written a dozen times; and each writer views it from a new angle. But in one respect they all agree. They agree that Michael Faraday was the most transparently honest soul that the realm of science hasever known. He moved for fifty years amidst the speculations of science whilst, in his soul, the certainties that cannot be shaken were singing their deathless song. Like a coastguard who, standing on some tall cliff, surveys the heaving waters, Faraday stood, with his feet upon the rock, looking out upon a restless sea of surmise and conjecture. In life, as in death, he rested his soul upon certainties. And if you will ask what those certainties were, his biographers will tell you that they were three.

1.He trusted implicitly in the Father's love.'My faculties are slipping away day by day,' he wrote to his niece from his deathbed. 'Happy is it for all of us that our true good lies not in them. As they ebb, may they leave us as little children trusting in the Father of Mercies and accepting His unspeakable gift.'

2.He trusted implicitly in the Redeeming Work of His Saviour.'The plan of salvation is so simple,' he wrote, 'that anyone can understand it--love to Christ springing from the love that He bears us, the love that led Him to undertake our salvation.'

3.He trusted implicitly in the Written Word.'To complete this picture,' says Dr. Bence Jones, in bringing to a close his great two-volume biography, 'to complete this picture, I must add that Faraday's standard of duty was not founded upon any intuitive ideas of right and wrong, nor was it fashioned upon any outward experiences of time and place; but it was formed entirely on what heheld to be the revelation of the will of God in the written Word, and throughout all his life his faith led him to act up to the very letter of it.'

'On these certainties,' he exclaimed, 'I stake everything! On these certainties I rest my soul!' And, summing up the three in one, he added, 'For I am persuaded that He is able to keep that which I have committed unto Him against that day.'

It is wonderful how the universal heart aches for assurance, for confidence, for finality, for certainty. Mr. Dan Crawford tells of a cannibal chief beside whose deathbed an African boy was reading selections from the Gospel of John. He was impressed by the frequent recurrence of the words 'verily, verily.'

'What do they mean?' he asked.

'They mean "certainly, certainly!"'

'Then,' exclaimed the dying man, with a sigh of infinite relief, 'they shall be my pillow. I rest on them.'

Sage or savage, it is all the same. Bunyan's great night was the night on which he found that same pillow. 'It was with joy that I told my wife, "O, now I know,I know!" That night was a good night to me! I never had a better. I longed for the company of some of God's people, that I might have imparted unto them what God had showed me. Christ was a precious Christ to my soul that night; I could scarcely lie in my bed for joy and peace and triumph through Christ!'

'Those words shall be my pillow!' said the African chief.

'Those words shall be my pillow!' said the English scientist.

'Those words shall be my pillow!' cried John Bunyan.

'For I am persuaded that He is able to keep that which I have committed unto Him against that day!'

'He is able to keep!' That was the sublime confidence that won the heart of John Newton. It came to him in the form of a dream on his voyage home from Venice. I have told the story in full inA Bunch of Everlastings. 'It made,' he says, 'a very great impression upon me!' The same thought made an indelible impression upon the mind of Faraday, and he clung tenaciously to it at the last. 'He is able to keep'--as a shepherd keeps his sheep. 'He is able to keep'--as a sentry keeps the gate. 'He is able to keep'--as the pilgrims kept the golden vessels on their journey to Jerusalem, both counting and weighing them before they set out from Babylon and again on their arrival at the Holy City. 'He is able to keep'--as a banker keeps the treasure confided to his custody.

'I know whom I have believed,' says the margin of the Revised Version, 'and I am persuaded that He is able to guard my deposit against that day.'

'I know in whom my trust reposes,' says Dr. Weymouth's translation, 'and I am confident that He has it in His power to keep what I have entrusted to Him safe until that day.'

'I know whom I have trusted,' says Dr. Moffatt's version, 'and I am certain that He is able to keep what I have put into His hands till the Great Day.'

He will guard my treasure!

He will honor my confidence!

He will hold my deposit!

I know! I know! I know!

Faraday's text is an ill-used text. It is frequently mis-quoted. It occurred one day in the course of a theological lesson over which Rabbi Duncan was presiding.

'Repeat that passage!' said the Rabbi to the student who had just spoken.

'I know in whom I have----'

'My dear sir,' interrupted the Rabbi, 'you must never let even a preposition come between you and your Saviour!'

And when Dr. Alexander, of Princeton, was dying, a friend endeavored to fortify his faith by reciting some of the most familiar passages and promises. Presently he ventured upon the words:

'I know in whom I have believed, and----'

But the sick man raised his hand.

'No, no,' exclaimed the dying Principal, 'it is not "I knowinwhom" but "I knowwhom"; I cannot have even the little word "in" between me and Christ.I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that He is able to keep that which I have committed unto Him against that day!'

John Oxenham has expressed the same thought with an accent and emphasis well worthy of the theme:

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