Lives of Poor Boys Who Became FamousBolton, Sarah Knowles
History
Lives of Poor Boys Who Became Famous
Bolton, Sarah Knowles
Biography
He also has great tact with his young converts. "Every man can do
something," he says. "I had a Swede converted in Chicago. I don't know
how. I don't suppose he was converted by my sermons, because he couldn't
understand much. The Lord converted him into one of the happiest men you
ever saw. His face shone all over. He came to me, and he had to speak
through an interpreter. This interpreter said this Swede wanted to have
me give him something to do. I said to myself, 'What in the world will
I set this man to doing? He can't talk English!' So I gave him a bundle
of little handbills, and put him out on the corner of the greatest
thoroughfare of Chicago, and let him give them out, inviting people to
come up and hear me preach. A man would come along and take it, and see
'Gospel meeting,' and would turn around and curse the fellow; but the
Swede would laugh, because he didn't know but he was blessing him. He
couldn't tell the difference. A great many men were impressed by that
man's being so polite and kind. There he stood, and when winter came and
the nights got so dark they could not read those little handbills, he
went and got a little transparency and put it up on the corner, and
there he took his stand, hot or cold, rain or shine. Many a man was won
to Christ by his efforts."
In 1860, when Moody was twenty-three, he made up his mind to give all
his time to Christian work. He was led to this by the following
incident. He says, "In the Sunday-school I had a pale, delicate young
man as one of the teachers. I knew his burning piety, and assigned him
to the worst class in the school. They were all girls, and it was an
awful class. They kept gadding around in the schoolroom, and were
laughing and carrying on all the while. One Sunday he was absent, and I
tried myself to teach the class, but couldn't do anything with them;
they seemed farther off than ever from any concern about their souls.
Well, the day after his absence, early Monday morning, the young man
came into the store where I worked, and, tottering and bloodless, threw
himself down on some boxes.
"'What's the matter?' I asked.
"'I have been bleeding at the lungs, and they have given me up to die,'
he said.
"'But you are not afraid to die?' I questioned.
"'No,' said he, 'I am not afraid to die; but I have got to stand before
God and give an account of my stewardship, and not one of my
Sabbath-school scholars has been brought to Jesus. I have failed to
bring one, and haven't any strength to do it now.'
"He was so weighed down that I got a carriage and took that dying man in
it, and we called at the homes of every one of his scholars, and to each
one he said, as best his faint voice would let him, 'I have come to just
ask you to come to the Saviour,' and then he prayed as I never heard
before. And for ten days he labored in that way, sometimes walking to
the nearest houses. And at the end of that ten days, every one of that
large class had yielded to the Saviour.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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