Christian fiction; Love stories; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Nineteen twenties -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
“Before you go home I want you to listen to somebody else a moment. A
dear brother came to me tonight wanting to tell me what Christ had done
for him, and I have asked him if he will tell you what he told me. He
says he is not a public speaker, but when I put it to him that he might
help somebody else he consented.”
Some one stepped to the front of the platform and began to speak. A man
just in front of Joyce rose up at that instant and put on his overcoat,
and she could not see the platform for a moment, but the voice rang
into her soul like a song of long ago.
“I don’t like to talk about myself,” said the speaker, “never did, but
when your leader showed me a verse in my new Bible that said: ‘If thou
confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and believe in thine heart that
God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved!’ I had to do
what he asked, because I _believe_, and I want to _confess_.”
Joyce’s heart stood still with wonder and then went flying on in great
glad leaps and bounds. There could not be two voices like that one.
She stretched her neck to see, and when the man ahead of her sat down,
there was Darcy Sherwood standing on the platform, with a new grave
look upon his face, and he was saying the most wonderful thing:
“I’ve been a sinner all my life, but I never knew it until one day God
sent a woman to look into my eyes and ask me what I was doing. I was
in the bootlegging business then and doing pretty well. It had never
occurred to me that there was anything like what you’d call sin about
it. But it began to seem as if somehow God had got into that woman’s
eyes and was looking at me. I saw that the breaking of the law of the
land that had been made for the good of the land was a sin. I was a
law-breaker and I was a sinner. And somehow that sin grew until it was
the heaviest thing I had to carry around.
“I gave up bootlegging right away that night, but somehow that didn’t
seem to make any difference. The sin was there just the same and it
grew heavier and heavier on my soul. I never knew I had a soul before
that.
“I heard a Bible story read long ago about a blind man, and there was
one verse I always remembered. It said: ‘If ye were blind, ye should
have no sin: but now ye say, we see; therefore your sin remaineth.’
“I began to see that was just like me. I had always prided myself on
seeing what was right and doing it. I had been a law to myself. But now
I saw that was all wrong. I had no right to make my own laws. There had
to be somebody wiser than I who could make the laws for everybody.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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