7. Lack of love and mercy.--Prov. 21:13. X VICTORY FOUND AT THE close of this little volume it seems fitting to recount again a wonderful personal experience, narrated in The Sunday School Times of December 7, 1918. I do not remember the time when I did not have in some degree a love for the Lord Jesus Christ as my Saviour. When not quite twelve years of age, at a revival meeting, I publicly accepted and confessed Christ as my Lord and Master. From that time there grew up in my heart a deep yearning to know Christ in a more real way, for he seemed so unreal, so far away and visionary. One night when still quite young I remember going out under the trees in my parents' garden and, looking up into the starlit heavens, I longed with intense longing to feel Christ near me. As I knelt down there on the grass, alone with God, Job's cry became mine, "Oh, that I knew where I might find him!" Could I have borne it had I known then that almost forty years would pass before that yearning would be satisfied? With the longing to know Christ, literally to "find" him, came a passionate desire to _serve_ him. But, oh, what a terrible nature I had! Passionate, proud, self-willed, indeed just full was I of those things that I knew were unlike Christ. The following years of half-hearted conflict with sinful self must be passed over till about the fifth year of our missionary work in China. I grieve to say that the new life in a foreign land with its trying climate, provoking servants, and altogether irritating conditions, seemed to have developed rather than subdued my natural disposition. One day (I can never forget it), as I sat inside the house by a paper window at dusk, two Chinese Christian women sat down on the other side. They began talking about me, and (wrongly, no doubt) I listened. One said, "Yes, she is a hard worker, a zealous preacher, and--yes, she nearly loves us; but, oh, what a temper she has! _If she would only live more as she preaches!_" Then followed a full and true delineation of my life and character. So true, indeed, was it, as to crush out all sense of annoyance and leave me humbled to the dust. I saw then how useless, how worse than useless, was it for me to come to China to preach Christ and not _live_ Christ. But how could I live Christ? I knew some (including my dear husband) who had a peace and a power,--yes, and a something I could not define, that I had not; and often I longed to know the secret. Was it possible, with such a nature as mine, ever to become patient and gentle? Was it possible that I could ever really stop worrying? Could I, in a word, ever hope to be able to live Christ as well as preach him? I knew I loved Christ; and again and again I had proved my willingness to give up all for his sake. But I knew, too, that one hot flash of temper with the Chinese, or with the children before the Chinese, would largely undo weeks, perhaps months, of self-sacrificing service.