Dr. A. Kuyper, theologian, journalist, statesman, Prime Minister of Holland, was a child of the manse. In Scholten’s classroom in the University of Leyden, “the inherited faith lost its root in my heart; it shriveled under the withering heat of unbelief. Of the old treasures, I retained nothing.”

Nevertheless he went into the ministry of the church. He was settled in the country parish of Beesd. In this hamlet there was a group of Christians, members of the State Church, yet leading their religious life apart from it, with a reputed tinge of oddity that ever clings to those who will not conform to the stereotyped and worldly. Kuyper called on them and found them distant. His views were antipathetic. Yet he persisted, and gradually they opened to him.

What did he discover among them? This intellectual superman himself answers: “Their conversation was not limited to the affairs of the village. They had interest in the spiritual matters. Above all they knew something. I could not measure my impoverished Bible knowledge, the fruit of university study, with that of these plain people. And not only in Bible knowledge. They had a consistent view of life.

“But what drew me most to them was that here the heart spoke – there was inner experience. I came back to them again and again. True, I did my best to function as parson but found that I had more inclination to listen, than to teach. After these contacts the Sunday sermons went better. But what vexed me most was their uncompromising spirit. Budge they would not, not an inch. I found myself ever at the fork of the way. Either must I take sharp position against them or go with them, without condition, putting myself under sovereign grace. I thank God that I did not oppose them. Their persistence brought blessing to my heart and the dawn of the Morning Star in my life.

A poor girl, Pietje Baltus, it was, who was Kuyper’s guide to the way of peace. In his first visit to her parents’ home the new dominie sat for two hours listening to the statement of the hope that was in her. She warned him that he, too, must have this hope if he would not perish eternally. She had prayed for him incessantly. “I could not relax until the Lord Himself came and took him from my soul,” she said, “and until I had the happiness of knowing that Christ had him in charge.”

What a contrast! This gifted, cultured son of the university, versed in all the philosophies, chatting in five languages with ease at his dinner-table (one of them being Latin which he spoke as his own Dutch), the very tip and terminal bud of European culture, and the unschooled but Spirit-taught peasant girl. Kuyper throughout life retained a profound gratitude to this intercessor and her photograph stood in his study till the end.

“Through the spirit of the time I was for long robbed of my childhood faith. There were years in my life in which the same hostility to the Gospel developed that I have observed in others. The trivial tone dominant in our seminaries suppressed the serious in me. But when hunger for bread came, when life began to be an earnest thing, then I realized in its dreadful depths, how poor and empty, how devitalized and comfortless, the new religion of our time had left me. As from an evil dream, I was awakened. My hands stretched for those things I had thrown away. In the recesses of my being, the warmth of the Gospel began to drive out the freezing chill of philosophy. I came to the conviction that the foolishness of the cross was the highest and only wisdom, and with a heart of thanksgiving I ranged myself with those who fought under its banner.”

The State Church was deeply cankered with rationalism. A large fraction holding to positive Christianity could stand it no longer and seceded, forming the Christian Reformed Church. The persecutions to which they were subjected are unbelievable.

Should Kuyper join them? He felt called rather to fight the battle for the faith within the church. The first thing was to bring to account the unitarianizing clergy. Those who denied the Son of God had retained house room in the church alongside those who confessed Him, and the demands of the creed were simply ignored. In no organization save a church could such irregularities be conceived of. The General Synod, in the interest of peace, slurred over the crying contradiction. “Church visitation,” by which the position of individual pastors was made clear, had become a nominal and wholly unreal function. Churches found themselves saddled with ministers whose unbelief scandalized and embittered them.

When Kuyper stood up in the Synod and denounced this condition of things the majority broke out in hissing and stamping. His cry was, “What belongs together must unite and what does not belong together must separate.” There must be no pact between belief and unbelief; no coalition with unbelievers.

Kuyper denounced the traditional disinclination of the Christian community to take part in public affairs. “The quiet in the land” should rise in active protest against the treason and trickery of theological liberalism. He began mobilizing the Christian vote. Then he got control of the semi-religious, semi-political, Amsterdam weekly, De Heraut, and started to inform and inflame men. He was, as his opponent, the Allgemeine Handelsblatt, called him, “the man with the ten heads and the hundred arms.” This pastor and superlative preacher was also the leading journalist of Holland.

For nearly fifty years he edited the daily De Standaard, making it a power for Christ in the life of the nation. The first number was purposely issued on the three-hundredth anniversary of the taking of Brill from the Spaniards, a great memory in the history of Dutch Protestantism. It was a fighting organ for evangelical Christianity. It aimed to train and shape characters for its defense. The rhythm of speech was inborn in Kuyper. The smallest paragraph of De Standaard was a polished diamond. The Sunday meditations, which he himself wrote, were read in every nook and hamlet and had an extraordinary influence in quickening the spiritual life of the nation.

An extension of the suffrage was the condition precedent to church reform. When this was effected the power of theological liberalism was broken in the great city parishes. But the General Synod was in modernist hands. This now deprived the presbyteries of power to refuse the communion to those denying Christ’s divinity and other central doctrines of the Gospel. It removed from the ordination vow of the pastors the last vestige of a creed. The only pledge now required was a vague promise to work for “the interests of the kingdom of God.”

Then they went a step further and refused to allow students from the Free University (which Kuyper established) to take the examinations for the pastorate. Although hundreds of parishes were without pastors they permitted them to remain pastorless rather than to admit evangelicals to the pulpits.

The answer to these arbitrary courses was a movement for organized resistance. The church council of Amsterdam, under KuyperÂ’s lead, invited deputies from the whole country to meet to pledge themselves not to call into their parishes any minister who was not from his heart loyal to the Church confession. Plans were drafted to organize outside the church a protesting ecclesiola, as in the old days of seventeenth century Arminianism. But the General Synod did not wait for this. It passed a resolution suspending Dr. Kuyper and those associated with him from their positions in the church.

A cry of indignation went through the country. Those who dared to defend the Gospel were to be driven out of the church while unbelievers, who publicly aired their anti-Christianity, were to retain their positions and were to be protected by the Synod against the protests of the parishes.

A great body of people rallied about Kuyper, now excluded from the Synod “as a disturber of the church’s peace.” They went out of the churches into halls. Finally fifty-six pastors and two hundred churches united as a doleerende church (a church with a grievance) insisting that they were still in the national church while protesting against the arbitrary and unrighteous action of the synodal hierarchy. In an astonishingly short time new church-buildings and manses sprang up all about the country. One hundred and sixty thousand members, the most devout and active of the parishes, rallied to the movement.

Dr. Kuyper appeared to be defeated but it was only apparently so. The Free church became the conscience of “the great church.” Its theological loyalty has reacted upon the older body. The revival of orthodoxy in this body has been due to the example of the protesting church and to Kuyper’s writings.

But the liberals had also captured the common schools and secularized them. The Bible was evicted. When Christian parents built Christian schools for their children the state schools were in many places kept open and the teacher paid, even though the entire school population had gravitated to the Christian school. And the parents were for decades taxed to support the empty school and the idle teacher.

Undismayed, Christians built “schools with the Bible” throughout Holland. In 1878 the liberals, by means of the Kappeyne School Law, attempted to crush them. Requirements were made for salaries, buildings, and so on, which it was thought could never be met. Four hundred and sixty thousand heads of families petitioned against this law, without result. Then under Kuyper’s leadership the Unie voor de School met den Bybel (the League for the School with the Bible) was organized and yearly collections taken. Later, as Kuyper’s influence became greater in the government, school taxes were readjusted so that a part, at least, went to the Christian schools.

Kuyper was a man of conflict, of righteous contention, but he was also a man of most devout piety. In his family he was as a priest. The children and servants were led into biblical truth by this profoundest of scholars at family prayers. Savants and statesmen, sitting at his hospitable board, may have felt surprised when their host knelt and called, as a child, on the heavenly Father.

No man was ever more bitterly attacked than he, yet, when he passed, his antagonists acknowledged his greatness ungrudgingly. There was simply nothing else to do. “Does he not stand,” wrote the very modern litterateur Franz Netscher, “with his abilities, his convictions, his powers of work, heaven-high above the cackling, gesticulating mediocrities, ever talking about ‘science,’ whom we allow to reign over us? Let us frankly confess that we envy this man of faith and look up to him.”

And his great opponent, the Handelsblatt of Amsterdam, wrote at his death: “The bells are tolling in the Netherlands. They are tolling from the towers of the churches, for the most part little churches, where rigid and substantial men go in with rigid faces to listen to rigid teaching and to comfort their souls with psalms. They are the mourning bells rung by Kuyper’s humble folk because of the great Kuyper’s death. They toll in the press of both parties and far over the limits of that land will they roll – that land which was often too small for Kuyper’s great figure. And the bells are ringing long and heavily in the hearts of thousands for whom Dr. Kuyper was more than a statesman, journalist, theologian, professor, author, leader, man. For to these he was a prophet sent of God who raised them out of the dust; who with God’s help, poured into their souls new power from God.

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New YearÂ’s Day, 1907, was a fitting day for the entrance of Brigadier Albin Peyron of the Salvation Army, into the life beyond, for few have more singularly experienced newness of life here in time. For many years he had been a Christian of the conventional sort. Then Christ brought him to a bitter experience which, accepted, passed into a blessing.

He was a rich businessman of Montpellier in the south of France. Back in the eighties, the Salvation Army came to his city, and an invitation to an all-night meeting was handed him on the streets. He went with his wife and fourteen-year-old son. The speaking was on the lines new to his Christian experience – of death to sin, deliverance from sin by way of the cross. At two o’clock in the morning he got up to go, stirred to the depths of his being, but his little son begged him to remain. Before morning dawned, the lad had given his heart to God.

The next day, M. Peyron went to the Army headquarters to proffer help in the expense of a meeting at the Montpellier Casino. When the hall filled, he noticed numbers of his business and church associates. The speaker sent down a lieutenant into the audience to ask him to come to the platform.

Then came the test. For a moment he was strangely agitated. He realized that this public adhesion meant a breach with the religious world, and the irreligious. But he did not flinch. He picked his way through the crowd to the platform.

The next morning very early, he was awakened by a strange sensation. It seemed as if billows of divine love were passing and re-passing over him. “I cannot doubt, after ten years, that I received that morning the baptism of the Holy Spirit and that the Lord in this way wished to show His approbation of my obedience in entering the path He had opened for me.”

Then followed active participation in the ArmyÂ’s work. Incessant public speaking in noisy gatherings, however, left him with an acute bronchitis. In November of 1884, he was asked to go to Lyons to hold revival meetings. Accompanied by a friend, Dr. C_____of Geneva, he spent a taxing week. The meetings were marked by numerous conversions. They continued till midnight; on Sundays the whole day was devoted to preaching. Result, a serious aggravation of the sickness. The doctor at Nimes, after careful auscultation, ordered absolute silence for months. He was to go to Cannes for rest and to use a slate to give the simplest orders.

But on the same day an invitation came to a little place in the Cevennes. The messenger who took it hardly dared present it, so great was M. PeyronÂ’s exhaustion. Yet he agreed to go the next day.

In the morning, before daybreak, he was again awakened with a marvelous flooding of the Spirit. His whole being was refreshed and invigorated. Rising from bed, he knelt down, sobbing and crying, when he heard a voice saying with the distinctness of a human voice, “As they went they were healed.” Then followed an arduous week; stormy meetings but many conversions. When he got back to Nimes he realized “with joy but not with surprise” that he was healed. The doctor, after a minute examination, expressed his utter astonishment. The bronchitis had disappeared and with it a tendency to asthma against which he had struggled for ten years with the daily use of arsenic. From that time on there was never a recurrence of these maladies.

Later came deliverance from sin as from sickness. Here is his testimony: “I can fix precisely the day when, kneeling beside a Salvationist who for years had traveled the way of holiness, I had the distinct impression that the Lord had taken from my soul the roots of sin, that He had purified me from all stains, all my idolatries. I besought Him for this blessing of entire deliverance, as I had prayed long for the grace of forgiveness. The sister who knelt beside me interrupted with, ‘Bless the Lord because He has granted your prayer.’

“ ‘But ought I not to wait until I realize it before thanking Him for it?’

“ ‘No,’ came the answer; ‘believe that He has given it. This mercy is obtained by faith.’

“ ‘Well, then,’ I cried, ‘I bless Thee, my Savior, because Thou hast taken sin out of my heart and hast given me a new heart and a pure heart.’

“And He did it. He freed me from evil. He made me literally free. That was nine years ago and I can say here to the glory of God that the sin which He took out of my heart has never returned. I do not mean to say that since that time I have never been tempted. On the contrary, I have been the mark of the adversary and attacked far more than before and at times these attacks have been terrible. But if Satan has come, and he has, he has had nothing in me. The Savior has removed all that inner correspondence with him which formerly existed, that traitor hidden within who opened the gate to the enemy. Satan still prowls around. I must watch. But, thanks to God, he prowls around and not within. Jesus guards the gates.”

Then the Lord made clear to him that he, man of wealth and station, should wear the insignia of the Army. The suggestion was never proffered by his Army friends. It was borne in on him by the Spirit. A week of cruel anxiety passed. “If I do this thing, I dig a trench between myself and my old friends in the church,” he would insist. “To what purpose the breaking of these bonds of friendship and influence?” But as he argued and protested he felt a shadow invading his heart. The joy of the Lord withdrew from him, and the power. He found himself unable to speak with any effect. But when he could say to himself, “Lord, if Thou givest me the cup to drink, I will obey,” light shone again. During the whole week he could neither eat nor sleep. “I do not exaggerate when I say that if it had lasted much longer I should have died.”

His wife thought him suffering from an obsession. Finally he gave in. Long after, he recalled the pang he felt when, in a mirror at the store, he saw the Salvation Army kepi on his white head. “My dear wife, who accompanied me, turned away in tears in order not to see it.

“A little later the Lord, Who wished to bring me to death, ordered me to go to the Stock Exchange in full uniform to sell En Avant (The War Cry) at five centimes a copy. He told me to visit the cafes Saturday evening to sell our humble Salvationist papers. It was a time of suffering but blessed to my soul.”

That which he had foreseen followed. His name was struck off from membership in the church. He was literally cast out of the synagogue. He was dismissed from the Committee of the Evangelical Alliance and obliged to give up a service he had led for the sick in the Protestant Hospital. His old friends ceased to call on him. When he appeared at the Bourse some turned away in disgust. Others smiled and put finger to forehead in significant gesture. Even his employees avoided him on the street. His sonÂ’s marriage engagement was broken.

“It was the road to Calvary, and if my Savior had not aided me I know not what would have happened.”

Nevertheless the Lord granted some alleviation. His children stood loyally by him. He tells us that in his earlier days he had been of an impatient and irritable disposition. He had to watch over himself lest he should break out. With care he was enabled to overcome outward manifestations. “But when I receive by faith inner purification I knew these feelings no longer. If irritating things occurred my serenity was not touched for a moment. I was free. ‘If therefore the Son shall make you free ye shall be free indeed.’”

The pearl of great price, he held to be the benediction of a pure heart. Christ brought it to us, but to obtain it we must “go and sell all” – pride, wealth, ease. “If thou wilt be perfect”

This condition M. Peyron applied to himself. Henceforth his every spare moment was devoted to the Lord’s work. His wealth was dedicated; he himself, henceforth, a mere trustee of it. Personal expenses, he reduced to a minimum. Money badly spent he felt to be a theft from God. He who formerly always traveled first-class on the railway, as financiers should, now took the third. The Army’s work in France, he backed financially. His large estate became a refuge for vagabonds whom the Army sent to him to mend and teach – and they could find plenty of the prince of this world’s finished product about Paris and other French cities.

With unwearied patience, Peyron undertook their restoration, fed them, clothed them, gave them work, prayed with them. At times there would be more than a hundred of these outcasts under his roof. He treated them as brethren, mingled freely with them in their work and in their leisure time. Many were converted and restored to useful life. There was also an orphanage of forty boys and girls which his eldest daughter managed.

One who knew him intimately describes the old-time courtesy with which he treated his poor. He would stand, charming and affable, his silver head uncovered, chatting with rough hoboes as if they were princes. Ever extremely busy, he never gave the impression of being so and was always ready to listen and consider. From five to seven in the morning daily he spent in prayer. “I cannot abridge these hours,” he said; “I need them for the solution of my problems.”

M. PeyronÂ’s Christian meditations are gathered in a volume which the Neuchatel professor, M. Rollier, thinks the best treatise on holiness of our time. Its value lies largely in its unquestioned reality. The writer had experienced what he teaches. He is no mere theoretician. It is a searching book and a comforting one.

The path of the Salvationist is hard for the flesh. M. Peyron felt that the Lord had called the Army into being as an agency for crucifying the “I” as quickly as possible, for making the will supple and plastic to Christ’s purposes. He describes how, in the quiet of his chamber in Paris, at a time when he was teaching the Army’s cadets, it was revealed to him through the Eighty-fourth Psalm that the Christian receives spiritual blessings that they may overflow to others. The soul that lives this life for others experiences an inner joy, an impression of glory, known only to those who have tasted it. It is a delicious weight of divine grace, the ineffable echo in the hidden depths of the inner man of the Father’s declaration. “This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.”

“Why are there so few who enter this path which leads from the cross to glory? Oh, if they only knew.”

M. Peyron remarks on the clever tactics of the “father of lies,” who impoverishes the present to enrich the past and the future. Renunciation, loss of goods, reproach, persecution, separation from the world – these things marked early Christianity and were suited to the time. Thank God, we live in better days, when the blood of the martyrs is no longer needed to water the kingdom’s seed. And as to purification from all sin, the life of liberty, holiness, divine love, spiritual power – these are the glorious prerogatives of the redeemed, the realization of which waits on the next life. That is Satan’s reasoning.

Not so did this soldier of Christ read his New Testament. Both the cross and the transcendent joy which follows are to be actual experiences of our earthly life. Those who have these experiences, he shrewdly observes in passing, are liberated from the doubts and doctrinal insanities that mark the Christianity of our time. The Salvation Army is not troubled with the heresies and vagaries that have so paralyzing an effect elsewhere.

These experiences constitute evidence that cannot be questioned. All the details of belief sink into the background as secondary things and give no further trouble to the mind.

“As I learned better Christ and the power of His resurrection, I found that what I had been promised was not half what I received from the divine contact. I beg those who read these lines to understand that this testimony does not come from a young enthusiast whose imagination has been fired by the reading of some book or by the story of another’s experience. It comes from one of ripe age who has been at grips with realities during a long life, one possessing some knowledge of men and the ideas of his time…Ah, well, I can say that the person of Christ has grown daily before my gaze, that His tenderness, His patience, have made themselves felt to me ever more and more; that the reality of God’s love and the communion of the Spirit have come to me with evidence which is simply irrefragable.”

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“Sweep a circle of three feet around the cross of Jesus, and you take in all that there was of Alfred Cookman,” wrote DeWitt Talmage after the death of this good man. It had not always been so with this talented but devoted minister. When only twenty years of age, Alfred Cookman had suffered serious spiritual loss while attending a ministerial conference by engaging in foolish and trifling conversation. This forfeiture of abounding grace, he sustained for ten long years, but the lessons learned by such failure were the means God employed in shaping this average Christian into a veritable saint who henceforth inscribed over his hands, his feet, his lips – “Sacred to Jesus”.

His father, George Cookman, a Yorkshireman, was converted at eighteen years of age. While undertaking a business engagement which took him across to America, he received a clear call from God to return to that land as a preacher of the Gospel. After spending a time in that country, he returned to Britain for his bride, Sarah Barton, whose home was on Doncaster. As a new convert, she had demonstrated her fidelity to her newfound faith in the way in which she had endured persecution at the hands of her aunt within her own home. She gladly left her affluent circumstances, to courageously venture forth with her husband, in February, 1827, to share the hardship of the new country.

Alfred was born in Columbia, Pennsylvania, in January, 1828. The consciousness of his parents in regard to their spiritual responsibility resulted in their giving the oldest of their six children to God in an especial way.

“I shall never cease to be grateful for the instruction and example of a faithful father and an affectionate mother,” Alfred wrote later. “I cannot call up a period in my life, even in my earliest childhood, when I had not the fear of God before my eyes. When about seven years of age, I persuaded my parents to let me attend a watch-night service. My father preached on the Second Coming of Christ. Thinking that perhaps the end of the world was just at hand, I realized for the first time, my unpreparedness for the trying scenes of the Judgment and trembled at the prospect. I date my awakening from that time.”

As a lad of eleven, Alfred attended one of his father’s services, where the penitent form was crowded with seekers. His heart, too, was moved upon by the Holy Spirit. As there seemed no room for him at the front, he made his way to a corner of the church. Here the earnest prayer of the weeping boy was, “Precious Saviour, Thou art saving others; oh, wilt Thou not save me?” He afterwards related his experience at that time:

“As I wept and prayed and struggled, a kind hand was laid on my head. I opened my eyes and found it was a prominent member and elder in the Presbyterian Church. He had observed my interest and, obeying the promptings of a kind, sympathising Christian heart, he came to encourage and help me. I remember how sweetly he unfolded the nature of faith and the plan of salvation. I said, ‘I will believe, I do believe; I now believe that Jesus is my Saviour; that He saves me, yes, even now,’ and immediately

‘The opening heavens did round me shine,
With beams of sacred bliss;
And Jesus showed His mercy mine
And whispered I am His.’”

With the incoming of spiritual life, Alfred yearned, though so young to help others and commenced a prayer service for lads his own age, several of whom were converted.

The same year, his father was appointed to Wesley Chapel at Washington, D.C., from which post he also was elected to serve as chaplain to the United States Senate. In 1841, he felt it his duty to visit his aged father in England. Alfred was asked if he should like to accompany him but, feeling a responsibility to his mother and the younger members of the family during his fatherÂ’s absence, he declined. Mr. Cookman sailed from New York for Liverpool, but the vessel did not reach its destination, and its fate never was determined. The tragedy, almost overwhelming in its effect upon the widowed Mrs. Cookman, brought out the best in AlfredÂ’s character. Manfully and bravely he attempted to take his fatherÂ’s place, and his mother remarked that eternity alone would reveal all that he was as a son and brother to the bereaved family.

The death of the husband and father necessitated a change of residence, and the city of Baltimore became the site of the Cookman home. Before he was fifteen, Alfred became a Sunday School teacher. The next year, he joined several other young men in the organization of a mission to sailors and poor children who frequented the docks of the harbour on Chesapeake Bay. They rented a room, which they named “The City Bethel”, and there they conducted services.

Alfred, though the youngest member of the group, so clearly demonstrated his ability as a speaker, as well as the divine touch upon his life, that friends began to recognize his ultimate call of God to the ministry. His first effort of note in this direction was the delivery of a funeral sermon at the death of a Christian friend, when he chose as his text, “To die is gain.”

So it was that, at eighteen years of age, Alfred Cookman said goodbye to his family and entered upon his ministerial career. Among his mother’s parting words to him was the exhortation, “My son, if you would be supremely happy or extensively useful in your ministry, you must be an entirely sanctified servant of Jesus.” This admonition made the most profound impression upon his mind and heart.

“Frequently I felt led to yield myself to God and pray for the grace of an entire sanctification. But then the experience would lift itself up, in my view, as a mountain of glory, and I would say, ‘It is not for me. I could not possibly scale that shining summit. And if I could, my besetments and trials are such, I could not successfully maintain so lofty a position.’”

His itinerary took him to various preaching appointments and, at one of these, his heart was gladdened by the arrival of Bishop and Mrs. Hamline for the purpose of dedicating a new church. This saintly man remained about a week, preaching several times with the unction of the Holy Spirit. He also conversed with Cookman in a pointed way regarding his need of sanctification. His exhortations had a most beneficial effect upon the young minister and drove him to earnest prayer. In his own words,

“Kneeling by myself, I brought an entire consecration to Christ. I covenanted with my own heart and with my heavenly Father that this entire but unworthy offering should remain upon the altar, and that henceforth I would please God by believing that the altar (Christ) sanctifieth the gift. Do you ask what was the immediate effect? I answer, peace – a broad, deep, full, satisfying and sacred peace. This proceeded not only from the testimony of a good conscience before God, but likewise from the presence and operation of the Spirit in my heart. Still I could not say that I was entirely sanctified, except as I had sanctified or set apart myself unto God.

“The day following, finding Bishop and Mrs. Hamline, I ventured to tell them of my consecration and faith in Jesus, and in the confession I realized increasing light and strength. A little while after, it was proposed by Mrs. Hamline that we spend a season in prayer. Prostrated before God, one and another prayed. While I was thus engaged, God, for Christ’s sake, gave me the Holy Spirit as I had never received Him before, so that I was constrained to conclude and confess,

‘Tis done! Thou dost this moment save,
With full salvation bless;
Redemption through Thy blood I have,
And spotless love and peace.Â’

“The great work of sanctification that I had so often prayed and hoped for was wrought in me, even in me. I could not doubt it. The evidence in my case was as direct and indubitable as the witness of Sonship received at the time of my adoption into the family of Heaven. Oh, it was glorious, divinely glorious!

“Need I say that the experience of sanctification inaugurated a new epoch in my religious life? Oh, what blessed rest in Jesus! Oh, what an abiding experience of purity through the blood of the Lamb! What a conscious union and constant communion with God! What increased power to do or suffer the will of my Father in Heaven! What delight in the Master’s service! What fear to grieve the infinitely Holy Spirit! What love for, and desire to be with, the entirely sanctified! What joy in religious conversation! What confidence in prayer! What illumination in the perusal of the sacred Word! What increased unction in the performance of public duties!”

But this sacred experience was marred when Cookman, present at his first conference of the Methodist Church, engaged with other ministers in conversation which quenched the Holy Spirit. He said later:

“Forgetting how easily the infinitely Holy Spirit might be grieved, I allowed myself to drift into the spirit of the hour. And after an indulgence in foolish joking and story-telling, I realized that I had suffered serious loss. To my next field of labour, I proceeded with consciously-diminished power.

“Perhaps to satisfy my conscience, I began to favour the arguments of those who insisted that sanctification, as a work of the Holy Spirit, could not involve an experience distinct from regeneration.”

Although the young minister no longer had the inward assurance of full salvation, his preaching during the next decade seemed most acceptable to the churches he pastored. He was the most popular preacher in the Conference, and was in demand on many platforms. Calls came from churches in the larger cities in rapid succession. But in spite of all the outward success, he was dissatisfied and realized that nothing could surpass personal godliness. Admonishing his young brother, who was contemplating entering the ministry, he wrote:

“Let no secret sin, no unwillingness to toil or sacrifice or suffer, debar you from the full realization of your privileges in the Gospel of God’s dear Son. However imperfect your mental and physical developments may seem to yourself there is no reason why, as a Christian, you should not rival a Fletcher, a McCheyne, a Summerfield, in their almost seraphic purity, zeal and devotion. Attend, then, to the all-important subject of personal piety in the first instance, and I have no fear for the rest.”

It was during the 1857 revival that swept across the American continent, that Alfred Cookman was challenged to retake his stand in defense of the doctrine of “Perfect Love”. He was pastoring at this time the church at Green Street, Philadelphia, and had come to acknowledge that much of his energy had been frittered away by the inner conflict that had raged within. The Spirit was leading him back to the simple faith of his first consecration, but was also directing him forward to a more mature understanding of the doctrine and experience. Of his restoration, he wrote ten years after:

“Oh, how many precious years I wasted in quibbling and debating respecting theological differences, not seeing that I was antagonising a doctrine that must be spiritually discerned, and the tendency of which is manifestly to bring people nearer to God!

“Meanwhile, I had foolishly fallen into the habit of using tobacco; an indulgence which, besides the palatable gratification, seemed to minister to both my nervous and social natures. When I would confront the obligation of entire consecration, the sacrifice of my foolish habit would be presented as a test of obedience. I would consent. Light, strength and blessing were the result.

“Afterward temptation would be presented. I would listen to suggestions like these: ‘This is one of the good things of God.’ ‘Your religion does not require a course of asceticism.’ ‘This indulgence is not especially forbidden on the New Testament page.’ ‘Some good people whom you know are addicted to this practice.’ Thus, seeking to quiet an uneasy conscience, I would drift back into the old habit again.

“After a while, I began to see that the indulgence at best was doubtful for me, and that I was giving my carnality rather than my Christian experience the benefit of the doubt. It could not really harm me to give it up, while to persist in the practice was costing me too much in my religious enjoyments.

“I found that after all my objections to sanctification as a distinct work of grace, there was nevertheless a conscious lack in my own religious experience – it was not strong, round, full, abiding. I frequently asked myself, ‘What is it that I need and desire in comparison with what I have and profess?’

“I looked at the three steps insisted upon by the friends of holiness – namely, ‘First, entire consecration; second, acceptance of Jesus moment by moment as a perfect Saviour; third, a meek and definite profession of the grace received’; and I said, ‘These are scriptural and reasonable duties. I will cast aside all preconceived theories, doubtful indulgences and culpable unbelief, and retrace my steps. Alas that I should have wandered from the light at all, and afterward wasted so many years in vacillating between self and God! Can I ever forgive myself? Oh what bitter, bitter memories!

“The acknowledgment I make is constrained by candour and a concern for others. It is the greatest humiliation of my life. If I had the ear of those who have entered into the clearer light of Christian purity, I would beseech and charge them with a brother’s interest and earnestness that they be warned by my folly. Oh, let such consent to die, if it were possible, ten deaths before they willfully depart from the path of holiness; for, if they retrace their steps, there will still be the remembrance of original purity tarnished, and that will prove a drop of bitterness in the cup of their sweetest comfort.

I again accepted Christ as my Saviour from all sin, realized the witness of the same Spirit and since then have been walking in the light – realizing that experimental doctrine of the fellowship and communion with saints. I humbly and gratefully testify that the blood of Jesus cleanseth me from all sin.

“ ‘As ye have therefore received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk ye in Him.’ That is, I understand, ‘Maintain the same attitude before God you assumed when you accepted Christ as your all-sufficient Saviour.’ I receive Him in a spirit of entire consecration, implicit faith and humble confession. The constant repetition of these three steps, I find, enables me to walk in Him. I cannot afford for a single moment even to remove my offering, to fail in looking unto Jesus, or to part with the spirit of confession.”

In 1851, Cookman was married to Annie Bruner. The union was a happy one, based, as Alfred remarked on the tenth anniversary of their wedding, upon the “stones” of love, truth, purity, kindness, fidelity, sincerity, constancy, thankfulness, holiness and Christ as the Foundation.

Notwithstanding constant religious and evangelistic activities of a most strenuous nature, Alfred Cookman was basically a family man. He took the utmost delight in his nine children. His letters to them during his enforced absences are full of fatherly affection and admonitions directed to their spiritual good. Two of them preceded him in death – a sweet baby girl, Rebecca, and his first-born son, Bruner, in his sixteenth year. To the great comfort of his parents, the lad had been a consistent Christian from the time of his conversion at ten years of age. Cookman regarded Bruner’s life as a “temporary loan” which “made earth more beautiful, Heaven more attractive.”

His speaking appointments necessitated absences from his loved partner. Once when his loneliness almost overwhelmed him, he wrote to her:

“I bowed my knee in prayer and sweetly realized that I was in the best of company. My compassionate Saviour came quickly to my relief, and the room was transformed into the audience-chamber of Deity. Oh, how unutterably sweet – how indescribably valuable, is the religion of the Lord Jesus!”

This unusual man received his strength at the Mercy Seat. His wife tells how she would remonstrate with him about his night vigils only to receive the answer that he could not rest while the burden of the people was upon him. Often he would wrestle in his study until the day broke. This intimate communion with the Lord affected his public prayers. One man in a service, hearing his impassioned pleading, opened his eyes, to see the minister kneeling with hands stretched toward Heaven, and then rising from his knees and reaching as high as he could. Then falling upon his knees again, he thanked God for the blessings asked for.

An intelligent young convert was impressed with the godly Alfred Cookman. “What sermon did you hear him preach?” he was asked. “I have never heard him preach, but I have watched him as he was walking along the street.”

Living as he did amid the struggles of the nation in regard to the great issues of secession and slavery, Cookman could not remain a silent onlooker. Before the breaking out of the Civil War, he delivered an anti-slavery sermon from Isaiah 8:12-13, “Say ye not, a confederacy, to all them to whom this people shall say, a confederacy; neither fear ye their fear, nor be afraid. Sanctify the Lord of hosts himself; and let him be your fear, and let him be your dread.” As he spoke, his face shone with a heavenly light, and his words were surcharged with divine emphasis and power.

During the conflict that ensued, he served the Christian Commission at the front, not only in a temporal way of alleviating the physical misery of the soldiers, but also by the distribution of Bibles and tracts, preaching and personal visitation.

It is not strange that Cookman’s arduous public life took a heavy toll of his strength. Instead of taking holidays, he would engage in strenuous efforts at some camp meeting. Although he felt his physical powers waning, he did not refuse any opportunity to lift his voice like a trumpet in behalf of the full Gospel. On October 22, 1871, he preached his last sermon. Announcing his subject and holding a faded leaf in his hand, he solemnly read the text, “We all do fade as a leaf.” (Isaiah 64:6) The congregation remarked afterward upon the unusual brightness emanating from his countenance. As he finished the address, he handed the leaf to a friend with the words, “The leaf and the preacher are very much alike – fading.”

He was so weak that two friends escorted him homeward. To them, he remarked:

“I know it is not popular to hold up the doctrine of holiness, but I thought I would do my whole duty then; I feel this may be my last opportunity.”

Among his final utterances were: “I am sweeping through the gates,” and “washed in the blood of the Lamb.” God gave this loving child of His, who spent only forty-four years in this vale of tears, such a glimpse of the efficacy of the cleansing of the “blood of the Lamb who was slain,” as seems to be granted to few on this earth. But this affirmation was more than a once-uttered act of witness. It was the theme of his sick room; it created the atmosphere that gathered in that sacred place.

Doubtless the same reality that caused the martyrs to sing in the flames, enabled the suffering preacher to exult in the fruits of Redemption as they applied to the vital needs of the hour. His feet were painful in the extreme because of a peculiarly violent form of rheumatism. He explained that if every bone in his ankles and the soles of his feet were a tooth, with the raw nerves throbbing acutely in each, it would be comparable to the pain he endured. But to him it was turned to blessing. Let us listen as he explains:

“I have known for many years what it is to be washed in the blood of the Lamb; now I understand the full meaning of that verse, ‘These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.’ I used to maintain that the blood was sufficient, but I am coming to know that tribulation brings us to the blood that cleanseth.”

When his mother had reminded him that the blessed Saviour had suffered in His feet, he commented, “You know the nails pierced His precious feet, and He can sympathize with me in my sufferings.”

Mr. Cookman had a vision of Heaven during his final illness. He declared it to have been more than a dream. He found himself just inside the gates and was first greeted by his grandfather who said, “When you were in England, I took great pleasure in showing you the different places of interest; now I welcome you to Heaven, my grandson, washed in the blood of the Lamb!” He was next received by his father, whose features were as distinct to him as they had ever been during his boyhood. The greeting was on the same note, “Welcome, my son, washed in the blood of the Lamb!” Then his brother George embraced him exclaiming, “Welcome, my brother, washed in the blood of the lamb!” And lastly his son Bruner repeated the refrain, “Welcome, my father, washed in the blood of the Lamb.” Each one of these in turn presented him to the Throne.

Cookman’s comment to his wife was, “That was abundant entrance.” Hear this advocate of cleansing through the blood proclaiming once more:

“The best hours of my illness were when the fierce fires of suffering were kindling and scorching all around me. It has convinced me that full salvation is the only preparation for the ten thousand contingencies that belong to a mortal career. Oh, how soothing to feel, hour by hour, that the soul has been washed in the blood of the Lamb, and to experience the inspiration of that ‘perfect love that casteth out fear that hath torment.’”

And so as the end approached, the same witness was given to all! To his physician it was, “Washed in the blood of the Lamb.” To a Presbyterian minister, he confessed to the assurance of full salvation, saying, “Such views of Christ’s presence with me – such views of His cleansing blood have I had never before!” To a dear colleague in the ministry, he said, “I have tried to preach Holiness; I have honestly declared it; and oh, what comfort it is to me now! I have been true to Holiness; and now Jesus saves me – saves me fully. I am so sweetly washed in the blood of the Lamb.” And to his brother, just before the end, it was, “Death is the gate to endless glory; I am washed in the blood of the Lamb.” Another loved one just heard him whisper, “This the sickest day of my life, but all is well; I am so glad I have preached full salvation: what should I do without it now? If you forget everything else, remember my testimony, ‘I am washed in the blood of the Lamb.’”

And so he passed through “the gates”, November 12, 1871, to join that great throng who are “washed in the blood of the Lamb.”

The words of Bishop Foster at Cookman’s funeral service could well have been voiced by many another, “The most sacred man I have ever known is he who is enshrined in that casket.”

Quotations By Alfred Cookman

“Christians never part for the last time! We separate, but it is as the angels do, going forth for the performance of the Divine will, but with the assurance that our home is before the Throne. Thank God, we belong to a sky-born, sky-guided, sky-returning race, and sweetly the peace-march beats, ‘Home, brothers, home!’”

“Unction is that subtle, intangible, irresistible influence of the Holy Spirit that seals instruction upon the hearts to which it is given. It is not the eloquent men of this world, the orators of great occasions, whose words linger longest in their influence upon the hearts of men. The unction may oftentimes be rather in the utterances of a humble disciple than in the delivery of a powerful sermon. For this I am more concerned than for anything else.”

“Let us be a holy people. Holiness is power. What the Church needs, what the world around is looking and waiting for, is more of power. We must have it for the fulfillment of our high and holy mission, viz., the spiritual conquest of the world.”

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“Poor Ann, she can never learn anything! ”exclaimed the schoolteacher in a despairing way. The small girl had been in the class just one week, but found the ABC’s so difficult to master that the conclusion was reached that effort on such a dull child was utterly wasted. So she was summarily dismissed, to return to her humble Irish cottage, with its thatched roof, in Ballamacally, County Armagh, Ireland. And yet, in mature years, Ann came to be known for wide knowledge of the Bible and a record of answers to her simple prayers of faith that silenced the most faithless and unbelieving caviliers.

Religion was unheeded in the home into which she was born in the year 1810. The six children who came to James Preston and his wife were forced to seek employment as soon as possible and, since Ann could not imbibe even the simplest principles of education, she was hired out for infant caring or cattle herding, for the most part, in families of the God-forgetting. Finally, she was taken into a Christian home, where the mistress was concerned about the spiritual welfare of all who came under her roof. At her invitation, the servant girl attended a Methodist class meeting, where some of the members were weeping because of their sins, while others were praising God for saving grace.

To Ann’s mind, so completely ignorant of anything spiritual, the service was repellent. However, she consented to go to a Methodist service in a private home the following Sunday. The text of the minister was that command of our Savior, “Thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.” That evening, hardly knowing why, she resorted to a small attic room and, kneeling by the only chair there, broke out into loud crying. Her mistress, suspecting the trouble, ascended the stairs with the question, “What is the matter, Ann?”

“I don’t know,” was the response. However, it was quickly followed by the confession, “Yes, I do. I see the sins I did from the time I was five years old, all written on the chair in front of me, every one. Worse than all, I see Hell open ready to swallow me.”

In the great agitation of her soul, now awakened to its true state before God, she retired to her own room where, until midnight, she continued to cry out to Him for mercy. Then, as the question, “No mercy, Lord, for me?” passed her lips, divine assurance was given her that through the blood of Jesus, her sins were washed away.

She picked up a New Testament lying on the table and, placing her finger on a verse, prayed, “Father, You Who has taken away from me this awful burden, couldn’t You help me read one of these little things?” And a miracle was wrought! Ann was able to read at least part of the verse, “Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again: but whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst.”

And eventually she, who had been condemned by her childhood teacher to life-long ignorance, was given the ability to read the Word of God. However for reasons known only to our Heavenly Father, He never opened the door of her mind to secular reading matter. One family, for whom Ann worked, refused to believe that such an unusual situation could exist. To test her veracity, they placed a newspaper in front of her, asked her to read a certain paragraph. She made no progress, until the word “lord” arrested her attention. Then she exclaimed, “It seems to me this word is ‘lord’, but it can’t be my Lord, for my heart does not burn while I read it.” Lord Roberts, who figured prominently in the South African War, was the gentlemen written about.

In the course of time, Ann was employed in the home of a Dr. Reid, whose wife was a Christian. When the family decided to move to Canada, she was invited to accompany them. Much to the grief of her parents, she consented. After a journey of two months, the Reids, with Ann, settled in Thornhill, Ontario, not far from the city of Toronto.

With all the changes, the religious life of the Irish servant girl seemed almost to have come to a standstill, although she still professed to be a Christian. Mrs. Phoebe Palmer, outstanding for her advocacy of the doctrine of holiness, was for a time leader of the class meeting in the Methodist Church at Thornhill. Ann reluctantly yielded to Mrs. ReidÂ’s persuasions to accompany her to the service.

She had been with the Reid family for about ten years, when the wife and mother suddenly passed away. The family of young children was left to AnnÂ’s care, and she was faithful to her trust until they reached maturity and left the home nest.

Neither Dr. Reid nor Ann had attained to any great degree of stability in the Christian life. She, to her sorrow, frequently gave way to violent outbursts of temper when the children tried her patience. Dr. ReidÂ’s inconsistency with the profession of religion he maintained annoyed Ann greatly at times. On occasion, in family prayers, to avoid hearing his voice, she placed her fingers in her ears. Sinning and repenting seemed to be the best she could hope for, until light from God showed her a life completely victorious over sin.

A young Christian visiting Dr. Reid was asked to conduct the regular family evening worship. As he read the 34th Psalm, the sixteenth verse spoke very strongly to Ann. “The face of the Lord is against them that do evil, to cut off the remembrance of them from the earth.” The young man, at her request, turned down the corner of the page upon which the verse was found. Ann went at once to her room, opened the Bible and began to pray that God would show her what it meant. The great enemy of souls whispered, “But you can’t read it.”

In simple faith she replied, “The Lord will give it to me.” Again a miracle took place. Ann could read the verse! Continuing in prayer, she asked, “What is evil?” Then followed such a revelation of the sin of her heart that Ann spent the rest of the night in earnest supplication for deliverance. The power of prevailing prayer was opened up to her and, like Jacob of old at daybreak, in agony of soul and clinging to God, she exclaimed, “I’ll die, but I’ll have it.” Rising from her knees, she went downstairs where she encountered the young guest who asked the reason for her distress.

“I want to be sanctified throughout – body, soul and spirit,” was her reply. He explained that faith in the promises of God would bring the holiness of heart for which she yearned and quoted the verse, “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.”

Again, Ann went to her knees, pleading, “Lord, I have been knocking all night. Open unto me! Open unto me!” And Heaven responded to her persevering prayer. At once her mourning was turned into joy and, for two hours, the little house was one of praise. Indeed, it was never again anything else, as Ann walked with God and was led deeper and deeper into the secrets revealed to those who fear Him.

It was at this time that she became known as “Holy Ann”, perhaps first in derision by some of the boys of the neighbourhood. As she realized the true meaning of the name, her prayer was, “Father, they are calling me Holy Ann. Please make me holy, so the children will not be telling lies.” Her simple petition found an answer in the fragrance of her humble and faithful Christian witness, permeating the lives of all she met. “Holy Ann” she became to the generation that knew her, and to succeeding ones as well.

Her answers to prayer were numerous. One of greatest interest is that concerning Dr. Reid’s well which always was dry for several months during the summer. His young sons were carrying water from a distance to supply not only family needs, but those of the stock as well. One day, as Ann was talking to her charges about a prayer-answering God and telling some of her own experiences, Henry Reid said in a bantering manner, “Ann, why don’t you ask your Father to send water in that well, and not have us boys work so hard?”

The question proved to be a direct challenge to her faith. Alone in her own room, she prayed, “Father, You heard what Henry said tonight. If I get up in class-meeting and say, ‘My God shall supply all your need according to his riches in glory by Christ Jesus’, the boys won’t believe I am what I profess to be, if You don’t send the water in the well.” Continuing to pray for some time, she received an assurance that her petition had been heard. With the words upon her lips, “Father, if I am what I profess to be, there will be water in the well tomorrow morning,” she went to bed and to sound sleep.

The next morning, Henry was preparing for his long walk to draw water for the needs of the day when, to his astonishment, Ann picked up two empty pails and walked to the well that he had remarked was “as dry as the kitchen floor.” In a few minutes, she returned to the house and the watching, incredulous lad, with the same two filled to the brim with clear water.

“What do you say now?” was Ann’s triumphant query to the surprised boy who, in turn, could only ask, “Why didn’t you do that long ago and save us all that work?” Years afterward a friend of Ann’s who knew the truth of the incident, said that from that time the well never was dry again, even in the hottest summer. Who can say that the day of miracles is past?

Ann’s long life of ninety-six years was filled with prayer and praise to God for what He had done for her and was able to do for others. Her declining years were spent in the homes of friends who regarded it an honor to minister to her. The Mayor of Toronto assisted at her funeral. The Sunday after her death he remarked, “I have had two honours this week. It has been my privilege to have an interview with the President of the United States. This is a great honour. Then I have been pallbearer to ‘Holy Ann’” (Ann Preston). And with no discredit whatever to President Theodore Roosevelt, he added, “Of the two honours, I prize the latter most.”

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In December 1934, on a lonely hill in China, John and Betty Stam, young American missionaries, still only in their late twenties, were led out to die at the hands of Red Soldiers. The reaction to such a tragedy throughout the world was at first one of benumbed shock. Then came the question into the minds of many, “Why such waste?” But as faith triumphed over seeming defeat, into Christian lands everywhere, came an upsurge of missionary zeal. It is probably true that more was accomplished for God in that supreme sacrifice than would have been possible had John and Betty lived to give years to normal missionary effort.

The parents of both these young martyrs met the news of their children’s death with the calm and fortitude one might expect of those whose lives had been long conformed to the will of their Heavenly Father. Dr. Scott, for many years a missionary in China, gave this tribute to his daughter and her husband: “John and Betty had heavenly perspective. Given that, all other things fall into their proper proportions.”

Back in Paterson, New Jersey, U.S.A., the home of the Stam family, the same submissive spirit prevailed. “Oh, why did they go there!” exclaimed one lady. “Because the love of Christ constrained them,” Father Stam replied. “We were glad to see them go, and would gladly have let them go again, because we look not at the things which are seen. They were not after money or comfort, but after souls.”

There had been a time, however, when John’s father had been reluctant to see his son go to China. He had fond dreams of the day when this able young man would take over the leadership of the mission which he himself had founded. This mission, known as “The Star of Hope”, had begun in an abandoned livery stable in the heart of Paterson. Later, grown to proportions never imagined, it reached hundreds of persons with the message of salvation through its outreach into asylums, hospitals, jails and homes of the poor. With such a work on his heart, it was only natural that Mr. Stam should long for it to be carried on by someone of the caliber of his son John. But, like the man of God he was, he laid this hope on the altar and told his son that he was only too glad to hear that he had offered himself to work among China’s millions.

John, however, had not always possessed this “heavenly perspective”. Family prayers, a happy Christian home atmosphere, the love and wise counsel of affectionate parents – all this could not give him a personal faith in the God his family so devotedly served, although it certainly laid a foundation for it.

And so when John graduated from the Christian Grammar School, he had not yet settled the spiritual issues of his life. He decided to take a course in business education, but the two-year program was rendered more or less unhappy by the restlessness within.

However, at fifteen years of age, he became awakened to the fact that he was indeed a sinner in need of divine forgiveness. He saw himself forever lost without the Savior and, in the spring of 1922, while in the college, seated at one of the desks, he terminated the raging within and gave himself completely to God for the performance of His will. From that time, he became an active Christian, although for six years after his conversion, he engaged in office work in both Paterson and New York. The trend of his life now shifted from material and worldly interests to those of a spiritual nature.

Of a reticent disposition, John had poignant struggles in regard to the open-air services led by his father. But, as he walked with God, his shyness and fear gave place to a joyful boldness in his effort to bring others to Christ. One summer, he and a younger brother engaged in outdoor witnessing practically every night.

JohnÂ’s new relationship to God not only changed his life in the spiritual sense, but also quickened his intellect. He began to take a new interest in the world around him, and, since at the time he was employed in New York City with its teeming millions, he had ample opportunity to observe human nature.

As this young man began to know God more intimately, the soul need of those around him became a matter of great moment, and the call to His service grew more and more urgent. He gave full-time effort to The Star of Hope Mission for a brief period and then enrolled as a student of the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. He had saved sufficient money to take care of all expenses for a time, and his parents expected to aid him when it became necessary. But the word of God to John at this period was, “Act as if I were, and you shall find that I am.” So he decided to learn to trust Him for everything during training, instead of waiting until his arrival upon a mission field.

He entered the Institute with enthusiasm and purpose, and excelled as a student, but it was his spiritual vision and qualities of leadership which marked him as a man designed of God for a position of responsibility in future Christian service. He was exceedingly prayerful and, during these busy years at the Institute, it was his habit to rise at five in the morning, spending time in communion with his Heavenly Father before the routine of the day. John wrote of his training at the M.B.I.:

“I count it a great privilege to be here, if only for the lessons I have learned of Him and of His dealings with men…The classroom work is blessed, but I think I have learned even more outside of classes than in them.”

The subject of the victorious life very much engrossed him at this period. “I think, sometimes, we excuse ourselves when we fail, because we realize that the flesh is weak,” he writes to his brother. “If we could really see sin as God sees it, what a fight would be put up!” Then he adds a quote from another teacher: “Reckon, reckon, reckon rather than feel; you take care of the reckoning, and God will make it real.”

It was at MoodyÂ’s too that his growing knowledge of his Master caused him to embark upon a life of complete faith and trust in His care. We can see the deep lessons learned in a letter written to his father, when John discovered that The Star of Hope Mission, which was entirely a faith mission, was going through financial difficulties:

“About twelve months ago, when I began to come to an end of the money I had taken to the Institute, I told the Lord that if I am to go to China I must know Him as the Answerer of prayer here in the homeland. May I mention some of the lessons I have had to learn?

“First, that it is all of grace. God does not reward us with what we need, because of our faithfulness. We are unprofitable servants at the very, very best.”

“Second, that it is useless to get down and pray unless we have searched the Word and let it search us (Psalm 139:23-24), even our thoughts toward others, our motives and desires. Once I had to wait three days for urgently needed help, to learn this lesson.”

“Third, that it not our faith we must depend on, but God’s faithfulness – our faith being only the hand held out to receive of His faithfulness.”

“Fourth, that if the answer does not seem to come, there may be something in me that causes God to delay in very faithfulness. His faithfulness causes Him not to answer me, in such a case. He cannot encourage His servant in a wrong attitude by answering his prayers, can He?”

“Fifth, that faith must be intelligently based upon the revealed will of God. Not because I have a supreme conviction that I need something or other, but because I find it is His will, I can pray with confidence.”

“Sixth, that I am not to expect the Lord to answer in just the way I suggest, or think best. Means and manner and everything must be left to the will of God. We keep on looking to our usual or possible sources of supply, forgetting that our real source of supply is the Lord, and that He can use anyone, anywhere, with equal ease and freedom.”

“How, I do thank Him for this past year! I would not have had it otherwise, for all the ease of a bank balance. How could I ever have learned to trust the Lord, even a little, if everything had gone smoothly? How could He have checked me up, had I not been entirely dependent upon Him? Of course, He knows what we need! We can have a blessed peace and rest without anything at all to depend on but His promises…The Book has become a new book to me, this last year.”

John then goes on to rejoice in the ever-widening knowledge of the character of his Lord. He revels in the promises of Matthew 6:33! “ ‘Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.’ That’s a business contract with two parties, God and ourselves. How poor would be our stay, if it were only the supplies in sight, or the people who usually send the money! It is not our work; it is His. His interest in it exceeds ours a thousandfold. As long as we are in His will, He cannot forget us. Could Mother forget her boys? Try as either of you or Mother might, you could not forget us…

“Dear Dad, what a blessed thing it is that God thinks it worthwhile to test us! Workmen only spend time and trouble on materials they can make something out of. God will perfect that which concerns us, Hallelujah!”

As the months rolled by, the vast land of China seemed to extend a beckoning hand, and the call to go there as a pioneer missionary became more and more urgent. Then it was that John began to attend the weekly prayer meetings for the work of the China Inland Mission. Here he met the girl who was to become his faithful wife and fellow martyr – the one whom God had prepared for him in His own school of learning and of suffering.
Elizabeth Alden Scott, although born in Michigan, U.S.A., had been reared in China. These stanzas, selected from a long poem written as a tribute to her missionary parents, show that theirs was indeed a happy Christian home.

“My words, dear Father, precious Mother,
May God select from His rich store.
I am, because you loved each other –
Oh, may my love unite you more!
But not content with mental culture,
Seeing my spirit mourn in night
You taught the Word and Way for sinners,
Until ChristÂ’s Spirit brought the light.
Your life for others, in each other,
Shines through the world, pain-tarnished here;
As faithful steward, Father, Mother,
Your crown shall be unstained by tear.”

Betty, as she was called, possessed a gentle, warm disposition. She passionately loved the many-faceted aspects of life, as has been revealed in the poetry that came from her pen at eighteen years of age and later. Toward the close of her high school years, the girl succumbed to an attack of inflammatory rheumatism which affected her heart to such an extent that, for a matter of months, complete rest and quiet were necessary. During that period, Betty acquired a deeper awareness of the spiritual side of life than she had previously known.

Returning to the States for further education, she entered Wilson College, Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, with a faith in God and eternal verities well-grounded. The gay, frivolous life which held charm for so many around her, had no attraction for her. Instead, she seriously and purposefully devoted herself to her studies and graduated with honors.
After one year at college, Betty had attended a summer Conference at Keswick, New Jersey. There she surrendered to Christ in such a way as she had scarcely believed possible. Her own words reveal the depth of this consecration:

“Lord, I give up my own purposes and plans, all my own desires, hopes and ambitions (whether they be fleshly or soulish), and accept Thy will for my life. I give myself, my life, my all utterly to Thee, to be Thine forever. I hand over to Thy keeping all of my friendships; all the people whom I love are to take a second place in my heart. Fill me and seal me with Thy Holy Spirit. Work out Thy whole will in my life, at any cost, now and forever. To me to live is Christ. Amen.”

In a letter to her parents she adds a further amplification of this consecration:

“I don’t know what God has in store for me. I really am willing to be an old-maid missionary, or an old-maid anything else, all my life, if God wants me to. It’s as clear as daylight to me that the only worthwhile life is one of unconditional surrender to God’s will, and of living in His way, trusting His love and guidance.”

A year late, after another twelve months of college life, she again writes:

“When we consecrate ourselves to God, we think we are making a great sacrifice, and doing lots for Him, when really we are only letting go some little, bitsie trinkets we have been grabbing and when our hands are empty, He fills them full of His treasures.”
At Keswick, Betty had also received a fresh vision of ChinaÂ’s need, of which, because of her background, she was already aware. This impelled her to pray that God would permit her to labor in that land, if He saw best. With foreign service a possibility, Betty enrolled at the Moody Bible Institute a year earlier than John Stam had done.

From someone who knew her while at the M.B.I. we get a further glimpse of this dedicated young woman: “Betty was quiet, never profuse, gently direct, and above the average in intelligence and culture. She was never hurried or ruffled. Her dress, while suited to the occasion, was never the least bit showy. She did not wear jewelry or frills and flowers. Her dark, straight hair, parted on one side, was worn in a knot at the back of the neck. I thought this very becoming to her. Her choice was evidently the simple life, with high ideals and a definite goal.”

But underneath the quiet calm of her outward demeanor, she was undergoing some searching experiences. “It almost seemed,” her father wrote, “as though, out of her peaceful, sheltered life, she had prescience of terrible things she would some day encounter for the Lord, and be called upon to suffer for His dear sake. Meanwhile, her real heart was in training for the tragic test.”

Uncertainty as to her future field of service lay at the root of some of this conflict. The lepers of Africa had been brought to her attention and the question came, Would she be willing to go to that needy land give herself to care for these sufferers? To give up China, and all that that entailed, cost her sensitive nature a great struggle. Yet finally, as Mrs. Howard Taylor puts it, “though it meant death to her loving, aesthetic spirit, she was enabled to offer herself even for this, if it were the will of God.”

In the following poem entitled, “My Testimony”, she expresses it thus:

And shall I fear
That there is anything that men hold dear
Thou wouldst deprive me of,
And nothing give in place?
That is not so –
For I can see Thy face
And hear Thee now:
‘My child, I died for thee.
And if the gift of love and life
You took from Me,
Shall I one precious thing withhold –
One beautiful and bright,
One pure and precious thing withhold?
My child, it cannot be.Â’

Still further however, had these testings to go, until, at last, this eager soul found her true rest in God. Her consecration at the Institute had gone much deeper than that at Keswick five years previously.

Eventually BettyÂ’s call to China became clearer and she knew that it was in that land that she must labor for her Master. Then it was that she had attended the prayer meetings where John Stam was a regular attendant. Since their ideals were similar, it was not strange that a regard for one another was begun. Which deepened with passing months.
During her last term at the M.B.I., Betty had applied for candidacy in the China Inland Mission. Since John had one more year of schooling, he was somewhat uncertain of his future and did not feel it would be fair to her to propose their engagement for a protracted period. So, without any definite understanding between them, Betty sailed for China in the Autumn of 1931. The parting for both was difficult. John wrote of it to his father:

“The China Inland Mission has appealed for men, single men to itinerate in sections where it would be almost impossible to take a woman, until more settled work has been commenced…Sometime ago I promised the Lord that, if fitted for this forward movement, I would gladly go into it, so now I cannot back down without sufficient reason, merely upon personal considerations. If, after we are out a year or two, we find that the Lord’s work would be advanced by our marriage, we need not wait longer.”

“From the way I have written, you and Mother might think that I was talking about a cartload of lumber, instead of something that had dug down very deep into our hearts. Betty and I have prayed much about this, and I am sure that, if our sacrifice is unnecessary, the Lord will not let us miss out on any of His blessings. Our hearts are set to do His will…but this is true, isn’t it, our wishes must not come first? The progress of the Lord’s work is the chief consideration. So there are times when we just have to stop and think hard.”

The father’s comment as he read this moving letter was: “Those children are going to have God’s choicest blessing!” Then he added, “When God is second, you will have second best; but when God is really first, you have His best.”

Betty was working in China at the time of JohnÂ’s graduation from Moody, and he had not yet been accepted by the China Inland Mission. However, in the summer of 1932, after a six weeksÂ’ stay at the Philadelphia home of the Mission, he was judged suitable and shortly sailed for China.

As soon as his future was assured, he wrote to Betty, expecting an answer before the date of his scheduled sailing. Since he received none, his voyage to China, by way of Honolulu and Japan, was somewhat clouded. Was he really sure of BettyÂ’s love and, what was more, was he willing for all the will of God? Before he reached his destination, however, he knew that he was indeed ready to accept His plan for the future. What was his joy then, on arriving at Shanghai, to find that, forced by circumstances and with no knowledge of his coming, she was there.

In accordance with the regulations of the Mission, John could not marry for a year, but the mutual love of the young couple was so true and so evidently born of God that they did not doubt His approval upon their relationship. Betty journeyed north to an inland station, and John went to language school.

The area where she, with others, was stationed, was troubled from time to time by bandits. But missionaries of the China Inland Mission never swerved from the path of duty, until certain of God’s will. Hard at work, endeavoring to master the Chinese language, John was concerned about Betty’s safety. “If we should go on before,” he wrote her, “it is only the quicker to enjoy the bliss of the Savior’s presence, the sooner to be released from the fight against sin and Satan.”

With the year of required language study and Gospel service ended on JohnÂ’s part, he and Betty planned for marriage. October 25, 1933, was the date selected. Never was there a sweeter bride, nor a bridegroom with a more noble Christian bearing. HeavenÂ’s blessing seemed to rest in a peculiar way upon everything taking place that lovely Autumn day at the home of BettyÂ’s parents in Tsinan.

After two weeks of honeymoon and a period of language study, it was decided that their permanent center should be the city of Tsingteh, sixty miles distant and a bulwark of heathenism. From this point, they walked to small towns over rugged mountains, scattering the Gospel seed and, with faith, looking forward to the joy of harvest. “The valleys just teem with villages,” wrote John. “Oh, that the Lord might have an assembly of true worshippers in each one.”

September 11, 1934, at Wuhu, was a memorable day for John and Betty, for it was then that a small daughter, Helen Priscilla, came to make her home with them.

But ominous clouds were appearing on the horizon of life. The Communist situation was worsening in China. In the district around Tsingteh, it was reported that small companies of bandits were posing a threat because of the drought, with a consequent shortage of food. John hesitated to take Betty and the baby back but, being assured by several Chinese magistrates that there was no cause for alarm, he decided to go. However, on the way they stayed a few days at Suancheng with their missionary friends, and little Helen was dedicated to God in a beautiful service. They reached their home at the end of November and were keenly anticipating their program of language study and evangelization.

On December 5th, utterly contrary to what had been expected, the Communists attacked Tsingteh, taking it the next day with practically no resistance, Betty was busy with the baby when word of the success of the Reds reached them. In no time at all, lawless men were looting the town, and the sound of repeated gunfire could be heard. The Stams, with their Chinese servants, knelt in prayer and, when the soldiers demanded entrance, greeted them courteously. Betty served them tea and cakes, as John endeavored to negotiate in regard to their demands for money.

But, intent only on evil to these foreigners, they bound and carried him to the Communist chief. A short time later, they returned for Betty and the baby. Despite the confusion, John succeeded in writing a letter to the Mission at Shanghai, although he knew that the demand for 20,000 dollars could not be met. The last paragraph said, “The Lord bless and guide you and, as for us, may God be glorified, whether by life or by death.”
Then a group of soldiers ordered John, who carried the baby, and Betty, on horseback, to a town about twelve miles away.

“Where are you going?” they were asked.

“We do not know where they (the soldiers) are going,” John answered simply, “but we are going to Heaven.”

When they reached their destination, they were confined and closely guarded for the night in a room off the courtyard of a spacious and abandoned Chinese home. John was tied with ropes to a bed post, but Betty was allowed to care for little Helen Priscilla.

The next morning, their outer clothing was removed and their hands tied tightly behind their backs. As they walked painfully along, the soldiers called out to any curious spectators to follow and see the execution of the foreigners. Outside the town, the doctor of the place, a Christian, called Mr. Chang, fell on his knees and pled earnestly for the missionariesÂ’ release. But in vain. Still he pleaded until it was discovered that he, too, was a follower of Jesus. This discovery meant that he joined his young friends in laying down his life for the Master, for John and Betty soon experienced the worst that their enemies could do. In a few brief moments, earth, with its sorrow, toil and tears, was over, and Heaven had begun.
Most astonishingly, the life of their three-month-old daughter was preserved. Betty had left her on the bed in a sleeping bag and had provided some extra clothing to which she had pinned two five-dollar bills. For nearly thirty hours, the baby lay there alone and apparently forgotten. After the excitement had subsided, and all that was mortal of John and Betty had been laid to rest by Chinese Christians, a friend ventured into the house where the little family had spent their last night together. There, just as her mother had left her, unharmed, lay the “Miracle Baby”, as she later became known. Eventually after many difficulties and risking their own lives in the process, Evangelist Lo and his wife, who had found the baby, delivered her in perfect health to her mother’s parents who bestowed all the wealth their love possessed upon the orphan child.

Writing of the courage of these Chinese Christians, BettyÂ’s father adds the following information:

“So remarkable were the courage and selflessness of Evangelist Lo and Mr. Chang that it is hard to believe that, only a few days earlier, both were rather uncertain in duty doing.

Evangelist Lo was timid and fearful, and Mr. Chang was rather unwilling to witness for the true and living God. But Betty and John had, last Autumn, sent out prayer requests for these ‘little ones in Christ’, and those prayers were wonderously answered in a Christ-like unselfishness and fervor of spirit and magnificent daring on the part of these two men that have thrilled the world.”

The martyrdom of the young missionaries struck a most responsive chord in the heart of Mrs. Howard Taylor, whose writings brought the work of China Inland Mission before the world in a most real sense. She felt led of God to write the story of their lives in a book she entitled “The Triumph of John and Betty Stam”. As a result, their consecration and devotion to God still sends out a fragrant and challenging influence.

Reprinted

Cesar Malan was not brought up an evangelical, far from it. His father, J. I. Malan, though of Huguenot background, was a son of the 18th century, with whom the Encyclopaedie of Diderot supplanted the Bible, and who in his “good sense” smiled at “enthusiasm.” The brilliant son, Cesar, thought he would be a Genevan pastor. Genevan pastors of the time were skeptics. “During my four years of theology,” wrote Malan, “I never heard a single word which could lead me to a belief in Christ’s divinity. They taught us only the dogmas of religion.” “The New Testament was not among the books required in our theological studies,” adds his fellow-student in divinity, Ami Bost, “they praised the majesty of the Scriptures, after the manner of Rousseau, but thought it presumption to base one’s religious and Christian faith upon the Word.”

It is not surprising then that, after his ordination, Malan confessed to little interest in Scripture. Once having taken the Bible with him to lighten a journey he “found its style antiquated and common-place.” Yet such is the chasm yawning between rationalist opinion and statement that, when in October 1810, at the age of twenty-three, he was inducted into the pastorate, he assented to the following formula:

“You promise before God and on the Holy Scriptures, open before you, to preach the pure Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, to recognize as sole and infallible rule of faith and conduct the word of God as it is contained in the holy books of the Old and New Testaement?”

Malan took oath before the church and upon the Bible which was still a sealed book to him.

For four years he was in darkness, describing himself later as, at that time, “an entire stranger to the evangelical doctrine of salvation by grace, establishing the righteousness of human merit, flattering man’s virtues, and showing him heaven as the infallible reward of his efforts. I preached only the morality of reason, the lies of an unbelieving heart.”

A passage from a sermon of the time illustrates this. It was on “The Natural Innocence of Man and the Justification of the Sinner by his Worth and his Virtues.”

“When seeing the virtues which you have attained, you will open without difficulty the way to new virtues and will taste secret and inexpressible delights. The consciousness of your progress will fill your hearts with a sweet hope and it will be, in increasing each day your precious treasure, that treasure of gold purified by fire with which one buys immortality, that you finally reach, full of heavenly emotions, the happy hour when you will return to the Creator your soul, beautified with virtues.”

We swim in the full sentimentalism of Rousseau, a sentimentalism which Channing introduced into New England. No wonder an outraged village pastor said to Malan, “Monsieur, it appears as if you did not know that to convert others you yourself must be converted. Your sermon was not Christian and I hope my parishioners have not understood it.”

Then came the great change which blotted out every trace of rationalism in his heart and mind. One evening, the reading of the fifth chapter of Romans made on him a profound impression. On the following day he was reading Scripture at his desk while his class was busied with study. The passage was the second of Ephesians. “When I reached the words, ‘For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God’ the very book seemed afire. I was so moved that I had to leave the room. I walked about the college court saying to myself, “I am saved.”

He compared his conversion to the feeling of a child when awakened by a motherÂ’s kiss.

Immediately he destroyed all his old sermons and with them his collection of classical writers, for he was a fine classicist, who in later life spoke Latin to Hungarian visitors and used nothing but Latin as vernacular to his eldest boy. At Easter, 1817, he preached in the Church of the Madeleine, Geneva, and made it the occasion to announce his new-found Christian faith.

“The church was too full for the audience that crowded it. It was toward evening. This enhanced the solemnity of the appeal which, for the first time, I addressed to the conscience of the unbelievers and Pharisees. They listened at first in profound silence, but the calm was of surprise and disgust. Signs of dissatisfaction showed themselves here and there as I displayed the falseness of human righteousness, exalting that of God alone by faith in Christ. Murmurs arose. Then pointing to a wall on the right of the pulpit, I said firmly: ‘If at this moment the mysterious hand which once, in Babylon, wrote silently the death-doom of a vicious king, should come out and write on this wall the story of your life; if the lines should truly declare what you had done and thought, far from the eyes of men and in the secret of your hearts, which of you would dare to lift his eyes?’”

At this moment many gazed at the wall. Others shrugged their shoulders. There was a movement of anger in the assembly. When the preacher descended from the pulpit he passed through the crowd of his fellow-citizens as a soldier running the gauntlet. “And they in the synagogue, when they heard these things, were filled with wrath, and rose up and thrust him out of the city.”

It was literally so, if not with violence. His parents turned against him, and his wife was profoundly grieved. The liberal theologian, Chenevier, led the pastors of the Venerable Company of Geneva to adopt a ruling which all young pastors should sign. They must pledge themselves not to preach on original sin, the action of grace, the manner in which two natures were united in Christ. This barred Malan from the pulpits of Geneva.

“The representatives of comfortable Christianity,” says Malan’s biographer in describing this episode, “who have invented a new theology which suits their lukewarm life, are able to dig in behind crushing majorities. Then courageous and consistent personalities, who refuse to take part in this infidelity, must detach themselves as franc tireurs.” They suspended Malan from his ministerial status. “He had substituted the Bible for the manual of religion.” When the Moderator finished speaking Malan arose, bowed to the Assembly, and left the hall without saying a word – that hall which he was never to re-enter.

“When I was near the door a pastor left his place and approached me before the whole assembly. He locked my hand and looked lovingly in my face. May the Lord remember this brother in the day of his distress.” A prophetic prayer! Eight years later this saint and doctor, Gaussen, went through the same experience of expulsion.

Malan left the city to preach at Ferne-Voltaire, the home of the great antagonist of Christianity. Presently a large wooden building was constructed, his Chapel of Witness. Then began a prodigious ministry, as author of hymns, tracts, catechism for young people. These were widely translated. Great numbers of visitors from other lands attended his preaching, so that he had to summarize his discourses, in English or German, for their sake. Some of these were New York Presbyterians and he relates that, when he introduced them to his little Latin-speaking boy, the latter in disappointed tone said, “Non sunt cum plumis” (They haven’t feathers,” that is, like North American Indians). The Revival, of which Malan was an early figure, brought back into the churches the custom of hymn-singing after a century of silence. Malan wrote music as well as words for his hymns. He supported himself by teaching. Each child had its own Bible and there was always one on the desk of the teacher. Though barred from city pulpits he had, nevertheless, a great Sunday School in Geneva.

All in all, he was a man of great spiritual influence whose departure beggared the church to that extent. “Malan incarnated the anguish which at periods torments the sons of the Reformed Calvinist Church when they feel that their church is no longer faithful to its glorious past, nor faithful to the divine Word which called it into being, nor faithful to the plans of God for the world.” They are the Fils Inquiets d’Eglise, “The Church’s Troubled Sons,” to use the title which a present-day Genevan group uses.

Malan’s was a well-rounded and long-continuing life of service. To the end he kept his lucidity of mind. Shortly before his death, he asked his eldest son to recite the 23rd Psalm with him. The latter began in Latin but the father interrupted with, “In Hebrew! In Hebrew!” and with hands joined and in low voice he repeated it with him.

Note:
A minor figure in the European revival was Jean Frederick Lobstein, a teacher of classics who, after his conversion, preached in the lands of the French tongue. The rationalist pastors of Switzerland lived easy lives, composing only five or six sermons annually. They persecuted the morniers, as they called the spiritually awakened, and through their official connections kept them out of the parishes. So Lobstein was obliged to preach first in a mission church in Odessa, then to serve among the scattered Protestants of Alsace-Lorraine. The Russian church had the same persecuting spirit as the modernists of France. “If,” said Lobstein, “I had happened to give the communion to a Protestant who had even once taken it in the Greek or Russian Church, I would have immediately been sent to Siberia.” Strange perversion of the spirit of Christ’s feast of love! Equally strange that which he reported as seeing, as a student in Berlin, in the Prussian Domkirche. Prussian princes coming to the Communion were given pieces of communion-bread twice as large as others!

Men would walk all night to attend Lobstein’s meetings. In arch-Catholic regions he preached the Bible, and circulated the Bible, and commended the Bible. “Then only is there hope that a community will revive,” he would say, “when the Bible is in every house, when every one realizes he has a soul, and that soul will die of famine if it is not fed with the good Word of God.” And again “if the preaching of the Gospel is not sustained by daily meditations on the Scripture at home.

He left a volume for personal religious meditation called Daily Hours of Reviving, which has, for a century, been much used on the European continent. He put truth in a sententious way. Thus: “The more a man is buffeted the more awake he remains. Faith lived in a fauteuil (armchair) is no faith but faith lived in a fournaise (furnace) brings out the gold.”

“May the Lord quiet in me the old man, who forever visits me with his calculations and his future projects…Teach me to put my knife to all my Isaacs.”

There was a cheery side to this devoted man. He was a concert flutist and often in the spring-time would, in the open air, play duets with warblers and finches in praise of the Creator.

Eighteenth century Europe was saturated with a rationalistic deism. It was the Era of the Enlightenment – of Bolingbroke, Semler, Voltaire, the Encyclopaedists. The churches of the Reformation were paralyzed by its infiltration. Then came, at the century’s close, great changes and renovations as when the sap rises in the tree trunks in springtime. Revival broke out in all lands, and the religious life of Europe was profoundly changed.

In England, the Wesleyan movement had transformed the life of the masses. The State Church lagged behind, but revival followed here also, an outstanding figure of which was Charles Simeon of Cambridge. In the full flow of his influence he was as Macaulay said, “more powerful in the English Church than any primate, and his sway extended to the remotest corner of England.”

His early years, however, were difficult enough. The spiritual life of the Established church was at an incredibly low ebb. The clergy were commonly drunken. Churches about Cambridge, in the absence of incumbents, were served by University fellows who rode out Sunday and contrived by hook or crook to accomplish three or even four morning services in succession. To expedite the process, a signal was at times concerted between parson and clerk; the hoisting of a flag assured the rider that there was no congregation and that he might pass on. Beneath the surface of common orthodoxy moved a strong current of free thought.

Simeon was converted when a student in Cambridge, after a period of intense spiritual distress. He was reading, during Passion Week, Bishop Wilson on “The Lord’s Supper.” Coming to a passage relating to the transfer by the Jews of their sins to the head of the sacrificial offering, the thought suddenly struck him, “May I, too, transfer all my guilt to another? Then, God willing, I will not bear it on my soul one moment longer. Accordingly I sought to lay my sins upon the sacred head of Jesus and on Wednesday began to have a hope of mercy; on the Thursday that hope increased; on the Friday and Saturday it became more strong; on Sunday morning, Easter Day, April 4, I awoke with the words upon my heart and lips: ‘Jesus Christ is risen today. Hallelujah!’ From that hour peace flowed in rich abundance in my soul.”

On his copy of the Self-Interpreting Bible of John Brown of Haddington, at the text, Deut.16:3, “That thou mayest remember the day when thou camest forth out of the land of Egypt all the days of thy life,” in the margin, in the hand of his old age, he wrote, underlining every word, “So must I, and God helping me, so will I, the Easter week, and specially the Easter Sunday in 1779, when my deliverance was complete.”

The leaders of the Evangelical Revival in the English Church were subjected to all sorts of insult and ostracism. John Venn was refused admission to Trinity College, Cambridge, because he was the son of the saintly Henry Venn. Simeon had been appointed rector of the Church of Holy Trinity, Cambridge. The parishioners, who were out of sympathy with his teaching, refused to go to hear him and locked the pew doors to keep out other worshipers. Seats had to be improvised in the aisles, which seats, on occasion, the parishioners threw out. This state of things continued for ten years!

The undergraduates at Cambridge delighted in nothing more than hooting Simeon. Those who supported and followed him – and presently a large group of converted students and townspeople attached themselves to him – were given the opprobrious name of “Sim.” Simeon later in life wrote:

“I remember the time that I was quite surprised that a fellow of my own college ventured to walk with me a quarter of an hour on the grass-plot before Clare Hall.”

If ever a man had the “without-the-camp” experience of bearing reproach it was Charles Simeon in his early Cambridge days. But he was not left comfortless.

“When I was an object of much contempt and derision,” he says, “I strolled forth one day, buffeted and afflicted with my little Testament in my hand. I prayed earnestly to my God that He would comfort me with some cordial from His Word and that, on opening the Book, I should find some text which should sustain me. The first which caught my eye was this, ‘They found a man of Cyrene, Simon by name; him they compelled to bear the cross.’ You know Simon is the same name as Simeon. What a word of instruction was here, a blessed hint for my encouragement! To have the cross laid upon me that I might bear it after Jesus. What a privilege! It was enough! Now I could leap and sing for joy, as one whom Jesus was honoring with a participation in His sufferings. Henceforth I bound persecution as a wreath of glory round my brow.”

In his correspondence occurs this quaint observation: “My dear brother, we must not mind a little suffering. When I am getting through a hedge, if my head and shoulders are safely through, I can bear the pricking of my legs. Let us rejoice in the remembrance that our Holy Head has surmounted all His sufferings and triumphed over death. Let us follow Him patiently. We shall soon be partakers of His victory.”

Simeon described the three great purposes of his preaching to be “to humble the sinner, to exalt the Savior and to promote holiness.” He was a great preacher of grace. Referring to Juvenal’s Naturam expellas furca tamen usque recurret (“you may drive out nature with the plow but she’ll come back”) he said cleverly and very truly, “If I could but put gratia in the place of furca I would knock his adage in the head.” For grace is indeed the infallible agency against moral weediness when the hoe of self-reform fails.

Mere mental essays he would have nothing of, and this explains the opposition of the time, for it is a curious fact that the immorality of the age demanded pulpit disquisitions on morality for its Sunday ration, or at least preferred them to the teaching of repentance and the new birth.

When Simeon traveled to Scotland to preach free grace and dying love, the Moderates pushed through the Assembly of the Scottish Church the regulation “that no minister who has not been ordained by some presbytery of the Church of Scotland shall ever officiate in any of its pulpits.” This was no mere incident in an ecclesiastical tariff war, no natural reply to the pretensions of Anglican succession. It was aimed directly at Charles Simeon and at him because he preached, in the spirit of Paul, the sacrificial death of Christ.

In spite of all opposition, however, Simeon’s ministry developed in extent and fruitfulness. “I must tell you,” wrote Bishop Burgess of Salisbury, “that wherever I go in my diocese it is generally those who think with you, who are the active men in their parishes.” One great result of his work was the establishment of the Simeon Trust, an institution that has powerfully contributed to anchor the Anglican Church to the evangelical faith. This was organized to buy up livings that were put in care of men of piety and evangelical views. Simeon was one of the historic group that met in 1799 at Aldersgate to plan the foundations of the Church Missionary Society.

His spirit was not controversial. “I am like a man swimming the Atlantic. I have no fear of striking one hand against Europe and the other against America. The number of those who are zealous in the cause of religion is not so great but they may find ample scope for their exertions without wasting their time in mutual contentions.”

His inner life was nourished assiduously. He invariably rose, even in winter, at four oÂ’clock and devoted the first four hours of the day to private prayer and the devotional study of the Scripture.

For twenty-five years he toiled unintermittently and then his health broke. Then for thirteen years he was so weak as to be unable to walk across the room. “I was often unable to speak and was forced to point to what I wanted. My whole system used to collapse as an infant’s and I hardly had any life in me.” This condition disappeared suddenly and without any evident physical cause. Ten more years of service followed.

“I cannot have more peace,” said Charles Simeon on his deathbed. When he was buried, the University, which had treated him so scandalously, paid him all the honors at its disposal. Fifteen hundred students attended the service, and every college chapel tolled its bell, the Vice Chancellor of the University expressing his regret that the great bell of St. Mary’s could not also be tolled, since its use was reserved for the royal family.

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The newly converted lad of seventeen, with several friends, was trudging along a dark and lonely road in Wales, to meet his pastor and study the Word of God. Suddenly, six youths, armed with sticks, sprang out from a place of concealment and ruthlessly attacked them. Christmas Evans was struck on his head in such a brutal fashion that he lost the vision in one eye. It seems that former companions, enraged at his complete abandonment of his former life of gross sin and drunkenness, had decided to trounce him in a way he would never forget. He was to be known in later years as the one-eyed preacher.

The early life of Christmas Evans gave no promise of his future as a minister of the glorious Gospel. The boy came into the home of a poor shoemaker and his wife, Samuel and Johanna Evans, Christmas Day, 1766, in Cardiganshire, Wales. The father passed away when the child was eight, leaving the family in abject poverty. A maternal uncle offered to assume the care of his small nephew. In later years Christmas said it “would be difficult to find a more unconscionable man than James Lewis in the whole course of the wicked world.” The lad was given no schooling in the six desperately unhappy years he spent with his drunken and cruel uncle and, until the age of seventeen, he could not read a word.

His life was miraculously preserved numerous times during adolescence. As an elderly man, he recounted the religious impressions of his youth.
“From my ninth year upwards the fear of dying in an ungodly state especially affected me, and this apprehension clung to me till I was induced to rest upon Christ. All this was accompanied by some little knowledge of my Redeemer; and now, in my seventieth year, I cannot deny that this concern was the dawn of the day of grace on my spirit, although mingled with much darkness and ignorance. During a revival which took place in the church under the care of Mr. David Davies, many young people united themselves with that people, and I amongst them.

“One of the first fruits of this awakening was the desire for religious knowledge that fell upon us. Scarcely, one person out of ten could, at this time, and in those neighbourhoods, read at all, even in the language of the country. We bought Bibles and candles and were accustomed to meet together in the evening, in the barn of Penyralltfawr; and thus, in about one month, I was able to read the Bible in my mother tongue, I was vastly delighted with so much learning.

“This, however, did not satisfy me, but I borrowed books and learnt a little English. Mr. Davies, my pastor, understood that I thirsted for knowledge and took me to his school, where I stayed for six months. Here I went through the Latin Grammar; but so low were my circumstances that I could stay there no longer.”

The night after the impairment of his sight, he had a singular dream. He seemed to see the world aflame, with its inhabitants summoned to final judgment. The cry, “Jesus, save me!” leaped to his lips, and the Son of God turned to him saying, “It was thy intention to preach the Gospel, but now it is too late, for the Judgment Day has come.” The impression made was so vivid that the young man purposed to enter the ministry.

Cottage meetings were much in vogue in Wales, and Christmas, in his ardent desire to proclaim the message of salvation that had reached his sinful heart, borrowed a book from his pastor and memorized one of the sermons it contained. He also learned a prayer. But his address and petition in a private home bid fair to establish his reputation as a preacher, until it was discovered that his words were those of others.

The church with which Christmas was affiliated was Presbyterian, though united with one of the Unitarian faith. But the young man, now twenty-three years of age and possessed of a growing desire to please God, was attracted to the more evangelical Baptist persuasion.

The call to Gospel ministry was “as burning fire” shut up in his “bones” but since his memorized message had proved a failure, upon his next attempt he selected a text at random and discoursed with no previous preparation. “If it was bad before, it was worse now,” was his analysis of the result. “So I thought God would have nothing to do with me as a preacher.”

However, through such humiliating experiences, God prepared His servant for future usefulness. Of this most difficult period, Christmas wrote:

“I was filled with most depreciatory thoughts of myself. I was brought soon to preach in company with other preachers, and I found them altogether better and godlier preachers than I was; I could feel no influence, no virtue in my own sermons…I traveled much in this condition, thinking every preacher a true preacher but myself; nor had I any confidence in the light I had upon Scripture. I have since seen God’s goodness in all this, for thus was I kept from falling in love with my own gifts, which has happened to many young men, and has been their ruin.”

His superiors had taken notice of his ability and, after ordaining him, offered him the pastorate of a church in Lleyn, a small village on Caernarvon Bay – the most discouraging place the Baptists had in Wales. Here he waited upon God for a deeper Christian life and the Holy Spirit came upon him with power. Confidence in prayer, a care for the cause of Christ and a new revelation of the plan of salvation were the results. In his humility he seemed utterly unaware of the effect of his ministry upon the parish.

“I could scarcely believe the testimony of the people who came before the Church as candidates for membership, that they were converted through my ministry; yet I was obliged to believe, though it was marvelous in my eyes. This made me thankful to God and increased my confidence in prayer. A delightful gale descended upon me as from the hill of the New Jerusalem, and I felt the three great things of the kingdom of Heaven, ‘righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost.’”

The whole area hitherto so dead and impervious to anything spiritual, was marvelously revived.

At the beginning of his two-year ministry at Lleyn, he married a devoutly spiritual young woman, Catherine Jones. She had a very real sense of her acceptance with Christ, a keen perception of character and reality. Hardship and poverty never daunted her, and out of her penury much was freely given to many needy ones about her. Catherine accompanied her husband on five of his arduous journeys across Wales.

Christmas Evans often preached five times on the Sabbath, walking a distance of twenty miles to reach the scattered appointments. Before leaving Lleyn he visited South Wales where he established a reputation for being the most outstanding preacher in the Principality, and was henceforth a much sought-after minister. It was there at an annual conference of the Association when all nonconformists met for business purposes, that services were also conducted for the local inhabitants. Sometimes the assembled congregations numbered as many as 15,000.

At Felinfoel, two well-known ministers were to preach, but they were late in coming. “Why not ask that one-eyed lad from the North? I heard that he speaks quite wonderfully,” someone suggested, and Evans, “a tall, bony, haggard man, uncouth and ill-dressed,” consented. As he took his stand in the pulpit, judging from his appearance, many thought a sad mistake had been made and decided to relax in the shade of the hedges around or to partake of the refreshments they had brought, until the appointees arrived.

In the words of his biographer, “He took a grand text: ‘And you that were sometimes alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works, yet now hath he reconciled in the body of his flesh through death, to present you holy and unblamable and unreproveable in his sight.’ Old men used to describe afterwards how he justified their first fears by his stiff, awkward movements; but the organ was, in those first moments, building, and soon it began to play. He showed himself a master of the instrument of speech.

“Closer and closer the audience began to gather near him. They got up and came in from the hedges. The crowd grew more and more dense with eager listeners; the sermon became alive with dramatic representation. The throng of preachers present confessed that they were dazzled with the brilliance of the language and the imagery falling from the lips of this altogether unknown and unexpected young prophet.

“Presently, beneath some appalling stroke of words, numbers started to their feet; and in the pauses – if pauses were permitted in the paragraphs – the question went, ‘Who is this? Whom have we here?’ The people began to cry ‘Gogoniant!’ (Glory!) ‘Bendigedig!” (Blessed!). The excitement was at its highest when, amidst the weeping and rejoicing of the mighty multitude, the preacher came to an end.”

Christmas Evans returned to Lleyn full of joy, but feeling that Providence was indicating labour elsewhere. He observed:

“I must now refer to my departure from Caernarvonshire. I thought I saw symptoms of the Divine displeasure on the Baptists there. Three things have borne down our interest: The want of practical godliness in some of the preachers that have been there; the absence of an humble and evangelical taste in the ministry, and the prominence of a sour condemnatory temper, burning up everything, like the scorching heat of summer, until not a green blade is to be seen; and, lastly, serious defects of character, both as to mind and heart, in many of the leading members.”

When invited to superintend the Baptist churches on the island of Anglesey, he complied, with the promise of a salary of seventeen pounds a year. He and his young wife rode to the new appointment on horseback. They settled at Llangefni, where a small cottage, fallen into disuse, was their only accommodation. The stable joined the house. The ceiling was so low that Christmas was forced to use caution when standing. The furniture was scanty. But in this humble place, some of his most powerful and eloquent sermons were born.

The pinch of poverty was felt to such an extent that Mr. Evans was obliged to print small pamphlets occasionally, selling them from door to door.

“It pleased God to bring two benefits out of my poverty; one was the extension of my ministry, so that I became almost as well known in one part of the Principality as the other; and secondly, he gave me the favour and the honour to be the instrument of bringing many to Christ, through all the counties of Wales, from Presteign to St. David’s, and from Cardiff to Holyhead. Who will speak against a preacher’s poverty, when it thus spurs him to labour in the vineyard?”

During the first part of his ministry in Anglesey, the Baptist societies became involved and almost engulfed in the Sandemanian controversy. Its leader, a brilliant man by the name of John Richard Jones, adopted certain practices of the primitive Christian Church in his services, such as the kiss of charity, the feast of love and foot washing. He severely criticized all religious bodies, enjoining such a complete separation from them that both he and his adherents became extremely uncharitable and indifferent to the needs of humanity at large. His following, though numbering only about 200 persons, caused great distress and dissension. Evans agreed with some aspects of the controversy but, in his zeal to refute the wrong, gave way to ill-feeling and bitterness. In regard to this, he confessed,

“The Sandemanian heresy affected me so far as to quench the spirit of prayer for the conversion of sinners, and it induced in my mind a greater regard for the smaller things of the kingdom of Heaven, than for the greater. I lost the strength which clothed my mind with zeal, confidence and earnestness in the pulpit for the conversion of souls to Christ. My heart retrograded in a manner, and I could not realize the testimony of a good conscience.

“Sabbath nights, after having been in the day exposing and vilifying, with all bitterness, the errors that prevailed, my conscience felt as if displeased and reproached me that I had lost nearness to, and walking with God. It would intimate that something exceedingly precious was now wanting in me. I would reply that I was acting in obedience to the Word, but it continued to accuse me of the want of some previous article. I had been robbed to a great degree of the spirit of prayer and of the spirit of preaching.”

The backbone of heresy was broken when, in strong faith and the power of the Holy Spirit, a certain minister, Thomas Jones, in a sermon at the Association of Baptists in 1802, dared to assail the arguments of the Sandemanians. “The religious ice-plant, religion in an ice house,” was dealt with in the light of Scripture, and revival came to Wales and to Christmas Evans.

His confrontation with God, which turned the captivity of his soul “as the streams in the south,” was described in a vivid way.

“I was weary of a cold heart towards Christ and His sacrifice and the work of His Spirit – of a cold heart in the pulpit, in secret prayer and in the study. For fifteen years previously, I had felt my heart burning within, as if going to Emmaus with Jesus.

“On a day ever to be remembered by me, as I was going from Dolgelly to Machynlleth and climbing up towards Cader Idris, I considered it to be incumbent upon me to pray, however hard I felt in my heart, and however worldly the frame of my spirit was. Having begun in the name of Jesus, I soon felt, as it were, the fetters loosening, and the old hardness of heart softening, and, as I thought, mountains of frost and snow dissolving and melting within me.

“This engendered confidence in my soul in the promise of the Holy Ghost. I felt my whole mind relieved from some great bondage; tears flowed copiously, and I was constrained to cry out for the gracious visits of God, by restoring to my soul the joys of His salvation; and that He would visit the churches in Angelsey that were under my care. I embraced in my supplications all the churches of the saints and nearly all the ministers in the Principality by their names.

“This struggle lasted for three hours; it rose again and again, like one wave after another, or a high flowing tide, driven by a strong wind, until my nature became faint by weeping and crying. Thus I resigned myself to Christ, body and soul, gifts and labours – all my life – every day, and every hour that remained for me; and all my cares I committed to Christ. The road was mountainous and lonely, and I was wholly alone and suffered no interruption in my wrestlings with God.

“From this time, I was made to expect the goodness of God to churches and to myself. Thus the Lord delivered me and the people of Anglesey from being carried away by the flood of Sandemanianism. In the first religious meetings after this, I felt as if I had been removed from the cold and sterile regions of spiritual frost, into the verdant fields of divine promises. The former striving with God in prayer and the longing anxiety for the conversion of sinners which I had experienced at Lleyn were now restored. I had a hold of the promises of God. The result was when I returned home the first thing that arrested my attention was that the Spirit was working also in the brethren in Anglesey, inducing in them a spirit of prayer.

At this period “under a deep sense of the evil of his own heart and in dependence upon the infinite grace and merit of the Redeemer,” he made a solemn covenant with God. In slightly abbreviated form it reads:
 

“1. I give my soul and body unto Thee, Jesus, the true God, and everlasting life.

“2. I call the day, the sun, the earth, the trees, the stones, the bed, the table and the books, to witness that I come unto Thee, Redeemer of sinners, that I may obtain rest for my soul from the thunders of guilt and the dread of eternity.

“3. I do, through confidence in Thy power, earnestly entreat Thee to take the work into Thine own hand, and give me a circumcised heart, that I may love Thee; and create in me a right spirit, that I may seek Thy glory.

“4. I entreat Thee, Jesus, the Son of God, in power grant me, for the sake of Thy agonizing death, a covenant interest in Thy blood which cleanseth; in thy righteousness, which justifieth; and in Thy redemption, which delivereth.

“5. O Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, take, for the sake of Thy cruel death, my time and strength and the gifts and talents I possess; which, with a full purpose of heart, I consecrate to Thy glory in the building up of Thy Church in the world.

“6. I desire Thee, my great High Priest, to confirm, by Thy power from Thy High Court, my usefulness as a preacher, and my piety as a Christian, as two gardens might to each other; that sin may not have place in my heart to becloud my confidence in Thy righteousness, and that I may not be left to any foolish act that may occasion my gifts to wither, and I be rendered useless before my life ends.

“7. I give myself in a particular manner to Thee, O Jesus Christ the Saviour, to be preserved from the falls into which many stumble, that Thy name (in Thy cause) may not be blasphemed or wounded.

“8. I come unto Thee, beseeching Thee to be in covenant with me in my ministry. Whatsoever things are opposed to my prosperity, remove them out of the way. Work in me everything approved of God for the attainment of this. Give me a heart ‘sick of love’ to Thyself, and to the souls of men. Grant that I may experience the power of Thy Word before I deliver it, as Moses felt the power of his own rod, before he saw it on the land and waters of Egypt.

“9. Grant me strength to depend upon Thee for food and raiment, and to make known my requests. O let Thy care be over me as a covenant-privilege betwixt Thee and myself, and not like a general care to feed the ravens that perish, and clothe the lily that is cast into the oven; but let Thy care be over me as one of Thy family.

“10.Grant, O Jesus, and take upon Thyself the preparing of me for death for Thou art God. There is no need for Thee to speak the word. If possible, Thy will be done; leave me not long in affliction, nor to die suddenly, without bidding adieu to my brethren, and let me die in their sight, after a short illness. Let all things be ordered against the day of removing from one world to another, that there be no confusion nor disorder, but a quiet discharge in peace.

“11. Grant, O blessed Lord, that nothing may grow and be matured in me to occasion Thee to cast me off from the service of the sanctuary, like the sons of Eli. Let not my days be longer than my usefulness. O let me not be like lumber in a house in the end of my days, in the way of others to work.

“12. I beseech Thee, O Redeemer, to present these my supplications before the Father; and oh, inscribe them in Thy Book with Thine own immortal pen, while I am writing them with my mortal hand in my book on earth. O attach Thy name in Thine Upper Court to these unworthy petitions; and set Thine Amen to them, as I do on my part of the covenant. Amen – Christmas Evans, Llangefni, Anglesey, April 10.”

Then he added, from a heart overflowing with love to God,

”I felt a sweet peace and tranquility of soul, like unto a poor man that had been brought under the protection of the Royal Family and had an annual settlement for life made upon him; and from whose dwelling painful dread of poverty and want had been forever banished away.”

What has been called the “Graveyard Sermon” established Evans’ reputation for all time to come. The “one-eyed man of Anglesey”, in a small dell amid the mountains of Caernarvonshire, stood “six feet high, his face very expressive, but very calm and quiet,” according to his biographer. “But a great fire was burning within the man. He gave out some verses of a well-known Welsh hymn and, while it was being sung, took out a small phial from his waistcoat pocket, wetting the tips of his fingers and drawing them over his blind eye. It was laudanum, used to deaden the excruciating pain which upon some occasions possessed him.”

His text was Romans 5:15, “If through the offence of one many be dead, much more the grace of God, hath abounded unto many.” He pictured the world as an immense graveyard, surrounded by massive walls, which enclosed the dying race of Adam. This sermon, translated into English, has become a veritable classic. Only a man who had spent much time in God’s presence could have obtained such a conception of the fall and redemption of mankind and delivered such a message.

Other sermons of the man were as imaginative and as powerful. But, aside from the natural eloquence that captured the hearts of the hearers, those who listened never were the same again. So certain was the preacher himself of the fact that eternal realities supersede those of time that he was able to transfer his convictions to others. He remarked once to a brother minister, “The doctrine, the confidence and strength I feel will make people dance for joy in some parts of Wales.”

In his ministry in Anglesey, Evans encountered unforeseen difficulties. Under his Spirit-inspired messages, congregations increased, with the resultant need of more chapels. And it was his responsibility to secure funds with which to build them. This meant travel by horseback for many miles throughout South Wales to seek the aid of more affluent churches. At one time, threatened with legal prosecution, because of some chapel debts, he described his reaction to the injustice:

“They talk of casting me into a court of law, where I have never been, and I hope I shall never go; but I will cast them, first, into the court of Jesus Christ. I knew there was no ground of action, but still, I was much disturbed, being at the time sixty years of age and, having very recently buried my wife. I received the letter at a monthly meeting, at one of the contests with spiritual wickedness in high places. On my return home, I had fellowship with God, during the whole journey of ten miles, and, arriving at my own house, I went upstairs to my own chamber and poured forth my heart before the Redeemer, Who has in His hands all authority and power.

“I was about ten minutes in prayer. I felt some confidence that Jesus heard. I went up again with a tender heart; I could not refrain from weeping with the joy of hope that the Lord was drawing near to me. After the seventh struggle, I came down, fully believing that the Redeemer had taken my cause into His hands and that He would arrange and manage for me. My countenance was cheerful, as I came down the last time, like Naaman, having washed himself seven times in the Jordan; or Bunyan’s Pilgrim, having cast his burden at the foot of the cross into the grave of Jesus.

“I well remember the place – the little house adjoining the meetinghouse at Cildwrn. I can call it Penuel. No weapon intended against me prospered, and I had peace, at once, to my mind and in my temporal condition. I have frequently prayed for those who would injure me that they might be blessed, even as I have been blessed. I know not what would have become of me, had it not been for these furnaces in which I have been tried, and in which the spirit of prayer has been excited and exercised in me.”

A series of trials assailed this devoted servant of God at this time. His wife and partner in tribulation was removed by death, and he was threatened by total blindness because of an illness which developed on a journey to the south and which kept him in Aberystwyth for some months under medical care. At one time there seemed little hope of retaining the sight of his one remaining eye. But through faith and patience, he was brought through to the glory of God and the advancement of His kingdom.

Misunderstandings among ministers, jealous of his influence and success, brought about the removal from Anglesey of this remarkable man. Younger pastors desired independence and advancement. “Heresy”, that convenient weapon, became the cry when many thought the old orator was departing from their Calvinistic heritage. Doubtless he had adopted a less extreme view as he had obtained further revelations of the grandeur of the atonement and of the scope of redemption. However, the basest of all instruments used to disparage this dear saint, was an accusation founded on a false report of an action performed thirty-four years previously. It is now apparent that Satan, whose kingdom Christmas Evans shook by the power of his ministry, was angry. But God doubtless used it to release him to preach the Gospel in other parts of Wales.

“Nothing could preserve me in cheerfulness and confidence under these afflictions, but the assurance of the faithfulness of Christ. I felt assured that I had much work yet to do and that my ministry would be instrumental in bringing many sinners to God. This arose from my trust in God and in the spirit of prayer that possessed me.

As soon as I went into the pulpit during this period, I forgot my troubles and found my mountain strong. I was blessed with such heavenly unction and longed so intensely for the salvation of men, and I felt the truth like a hammer in power, and the doctrine distilling like the honeycomb, and like unto the rarest wine, that I became most anxious that the ministers of the country should unite with me to plead the promise, ‘If two of you shall agree on earth as touching any thing that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is in heaven.’”

At sixty-two years of age, in 1828, he left Anglesey to accept the charge of a poor little church in Caerphilly. The enthusiasm of his welcome did much to alleviate any distress of mind at the change. The words, “Christmas Evans has come,” flew from cottage to cottage in the district. Incredulously, many asked, “Are you sure?” “Yes, quite sure. He preached at Caerphilly last Sunday.” Here, it is said, the eloquence and power of his sermons surpassed those of all previous efforts, and the wild hills of Wales, every Sabbath, witnessed eager men and women making their way to the chapel.

He spent brief periods at Caerphilly and Cardiff, and then moved to Caernarvon, which proved to be his last pastorate. The church consisted of only thirty members of the lowest class, with those few quarrelling among themselves. In addition, a debt of 800.00 pounds, half of which Evans was expected to lift, hung over the place. Although Christmas was seventy years of age and so frail he feared he should die on the way, he set out, with his second wife Mary and a young preacher, to do his duty.

The purpose of his mission was accomplished, but the effort required more physical energy than he possessed. His final message was at Swansea where, as he descended the pulpit stairs, those around heard him say, “This is my last sermon.” And it was. Through the following week, he suffered intermittently from physical exhaustion. Friday, July 19, 1838, he called his friends to his bedside. “I am leaving you. I have laboured in the sanctuary for fifty-three years, and my comfort is that I have never laboured without blood in the basin,” probably meaning he had not failed to preach a crucified Saviour. “Preach Christ to the people, brethren,” he continued. “Look at me. In myself I am nothing but ruin, but in Christ I am Heaven and salvation.” Then, repeating a stanza from a favourite Welsh hymn and waving his hand, with the words, “Good-bye! Drive on!” he sank back on the pillows. His friends tried to rouse him, but the angelic postman had obeyed the order – the chariot had passed over the everlasting hills.

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Preface
In our day of spiritual superficiality and anemic Christianity, characterized by sin-infested pulpits and indifferent pews, the subject of revival is nonetheless a popular one. Few who talk of it, however, have the faintest idea what a real moving of God is all about. Impressive financial holdings, ornate edifices of worship, statistical proofs of "success," and mind-boggling technological sophistications merely mask the spiritual bankruptcy within the Church as a whole today. We are indeed poor in spirit. The real problem is, we seem completely incapable of even beginning to recognize just how spiritually poor we have become. We lean to our own understanding, make peace with our pet sins, deem ourselves to be rich and increased with goods and in need of nothing, all the while piddling piously with ideas of revival.

But revival can never be piddled with. It is very, very costly. Duncan Campbell, in this heart-stirring message of personal and corporate revival, strikes the taproot of the genuine working of God among His people. Such revival is rare, priceless and exceedingly costly. Campbell captures the spirit of God’s desire to work, and carefully delineates both God’s sovereign moving and man’s responsibility to respond to the promptings of the Spirit of God.
This world has witnessed God’s sovereign dealings through the humblest of men, often at the darkest hours in history. We remember the rebirth of Martin Luther and the Reformation that followed. The Puritans obeyed God’s Word with abandonment in the midst of a wicked generation. The Spirit moved mightily upon the congregation of the dry preacher Jonathan Edwards and affected an entire generation. The eighteenth century saw the powerfully convicting work of Charles Finney, the nineteenth had its great New York prayer revival and the early twentieth century heralded a phenomenal spiritual awakening in Wales.
The cry of our day is, "Where is the Lord God of Elijah?" The question might better be asked, "Where are the Elijahs of the Lord God?"

While there is much prayer today, there is little of the humility that is behind it that characterized the life of Duncan Campbell. Here is a message by this great servant of our century. It is hot with the breath of God. It needs to be read and reread upon our knees until it burns its way into the hearts of the people of God and out through their lives. The truth is here to kindle the flame. Are we ignitable? May God once again drench us with the oil of the Spirit and set us ablaze!

Introduction
Now will you turn with me to a very familiar passage of scripture. You will find it in the book of Psalm. And together we shall read Psalms 85:

"LORD, thou hast been favourable unto thy land: thou hast brought back the captivity of Jacob. Thou hast forgiven the iniquity of thy people, thou hast covered all their sin. Selah. Thou hast taken away all thy wrath: thou hast turned thyself from the fierceness of thine anger. Turn us, O God of our salvation, and cause thine anger toward us to cease. Wilt thou be angry with us forever? wilt thou draw out thine anger to all generations? Wilt thou not revive us again: that thy people may rejoice in thee? Shew us thy mercy, O LORD, and grant us thy salvation. I will hear what God the LORD will speak: for he will speak peace unto his people, and to his saints: but let them not turn again to folly. Surely his salvation is nigh them that fear him; that glory may dwell in our land. Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other. Truth shall spring out of the earth; and righteousness shall look down from heaven. Yea, the LORD shall give that which is good; and our land shall yield her increase. Righteousness shall go before him; and shall set us in the way of his steps." (Psalm 85:1-13 KJV)

The Lord will bless that reading from His Word. Now, will you turn with me to verse 6. We might read verses 5 and 6, "Wilt thou be angry with us for ever? wilt thou draw out thine anger to all generations? Wilt thou not revive us again: that thy people may rejoice in thee?" I mentioned the other evening that I would be speaking this afternoon on principles that govern spiritual quickening, and I would also tell you something of how God in mercy met with me and brought revival to this heart and life of mine.

"Wilt thou not revive us again that thy people…thy people…may rejoice in Thee." These words of the Psalmist express the heart cry of many of God’s dear children today. There is without question a growing conviction in many quarters that unless revival comes, that is, a God-sent revival, other forces that are out to defy every known Christian principle will take the field.

Indeed, the observant eye can already see shadows around the world that are ripening and ripening fast for repentance and judgment. With that conviction there seems to be a growing hunger and so deep the longing that the cry of the prophet of old is frequently heard upon the lips of God’s children.

Our Only Hope is Revival
"Oh, that thou wouldest rend the heavens, that thou wouldest come down that the mountains might flow down at thy presence" (Isaiah 64:1,2). You will observe that in the prayer of the prophet two fundamental things are suggested. That unless God comes down, mountains will not flow and sinners will not tremble. But if God comes down, if God manifests His power, if God shows His hand, if God takes the field, mountains will flow … mountains of indifference, mountains of materialism, mountains of humanism, will flow before His presence, and nations, not just individuals, but nations, shall be made to tremble.

We haven’t seen nations trembling, but we have seen communities; we have seen districts; we have seen parishes in the grips of God in a matter of hours when God comes down!
It is true that we have seen man’s best endeavor in the field of evangelism leaving communities untouched. We have seen crowded churches. We have seen many professions. We have seen hundreds, yes, and thousands responding to what you speak of here as the altar call. But I want to say this, dear people, and I say it without fear of contradiction, that you can have all that without God! Now, that may startle you, but I say again, you can have all that on mere human levels!

Howard Spring was right when he wrote, "The kingdom of God is not going to advance by our churches becoming filled with men, but by men in our churches becoming filled with God." And there’s a difference! Oh, no! Crowded churches, deep interest in church activity is possible on mere human levels leaving the community untouched!

The Difference Between Evangelism and Revival
The difference in successful evangelism, (and I use the word ’successful,’) and revival is this: In evangelism, the two, the three, the ten, the twenty, and possibly the hundred make confessions of Jesus Christ, and at the end of the year you are thankful if half of them are standing. But the community remains untouched. The public houses are crowded, the dances, dancing ballrooms, packed. The theater and the picture houses are patronized by the hundreds. No change in the community!

But in revival, when God the Holy Ghost comes, when the winds of heaven blow, suddenly the community becomes God-conscious! A God-realization takes hold of young, middle-aged and old. So that, as in the case of the Hebrides Revival, 75% of those saved one night were saved before they came near a meeting!

"The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom." That is where the difference comes in between evangelism and revival, and that is why I say our only hope is not in crusades. Thank God for all that has been accomplished! Thank God for all that is being done through missions! I represent a mission in Scotland. We have also workers in Canada, and we thank God for all that is being accomplished through the efforts of ministers and evangelists and Christian workers, bringing one here and two there to a saving knowledge of Jesus. But our supreme need and the only answer to the problem that confronts the Christian church today is a visitation from God!

Revival at Berneray
Let me illustrate what I mean by an incident that happened, not in Lewis, or Uist, but on the small island of Berneray. I was addressing the Bangor Convention. The Bangor Convention is perhaps one of the largest conventions in Britain. I was sitting in the pulpit beside the chairman of the convention and the other speaker when I was suddenly gripped by the conviction that I had to leave the convention, and leave at once, and go to this island. I turned to the chairman and told my convictions, "Oh," he said, "you cannot leave the convention. You are down to giving the closing address with this convention!" So, to make a long story short, it was agreed that I should leave the convention. I left the following morning by plane to the city of Glasgow, and from Glasgow by plane to the town of Stornoway, and then by car across the island where a ferryboat met me and took me to this island of, say, 500 inhabitants.

On arriving, I met a young lad. I said nothing to the man who ferried me across. They were strangers to me. I was never on the island, and to my knowledge no one on the island had ever met me. But I was there. And I said to the man that met me, "Would you direct me to the nearest minister?"

"We have no minister on the island. Just now both churches are vacant."

"Would you then direct me to the nearest elder?"

"Yes, the nearest elder lives in that house on the hill."

So I said to the lad, "Do you mind going up to the elder and telling him that Mr. Campbell has come to the island? And if he asks, ‘What Campbell?’ tell him the Campbell that was on the Island of Lewis."

So that the young lad went up and after a few minutes came back and said, "Hector McKennon was expecting you to arrive today. And you are to stay with his brother. And he asked me to tell you that he has initiated a meeting at the church at 9:00 tonight and he expects you to address it."

The Secret of Revival at Berneray
Now, explain that as you will. Here was a man who on the morning of the day that I sat in the church of Bangor Island, decided to spend the day in prayer. He was concerned about the parish, particularly about the state of the young people growing up in a state of indifference to God and to the church. And his wife told me that on three occasions she went to the door of the barn where he was praying and she heard him pray, "God, I do not know where he is, but you know, and you send him."

About 10:00 that evening he was possessed of the conviction that God heard his cry and that I would be on the island on this particular day. Hence, the initiation that I would preach in the church at 9:00 that evening.

We went to the church. Quite a considerable congregation gathered – about 80. The service was a very ordinary service. Indeed, at the end, I wondered after all if I was led to the island. But there were men there nearer to God than I was. My dear people, we’ve got to be honest!

This old man that I already referred to came to me and said, "I hope you are not disappointed that revival has not come to the church tonight. But God is hovering over us, and He will break through any minute!"

Here was a man near to God! "The secret of the Lord is with them that fear Him."

God has Come!
We are now walking down from the church. The church is on a hillock, the main road is down about 300 yards below the church. The congregation is moving down and we are walking behind them when suddenly..oh, this is what I am getting at, noting the difference between evangelism and revival … suddenly, the elder stands, takes off his hat, "Stand, Mr. Campbell. God has come! God has come! See what is happening!" And I looked toward the congregation and I saw them falling on their knees among the heather. I heard the cries of the penitent. And that meeting that began at 11:00 that night continued on the hillside until 4:00 in the morning.

The island was suddenly gripped by God! Was it because Campbell went to the island? Banish the thought!

I thank God for the privilege, and how thankful I am that I was near enough to God in that pulpit to hear His voice. I have often thought of that. Oh, I’ve often thought of it! If I was out of touch with God – if I was in the place where I couldn’t hear the voice of the Savior, the voice of God, would Berneray have missed that mighty visitation that shook that island from center to circumference.

I question if there was one single house on the island that wasn’t visited that night! An awareness of God, a consciousness of God, seemed to hover over the very atmosphere! The very atmosphere seemed to be charged with the power of Almighty God! That is Revival!

Note the principle brought into operation. If my people called by my name, humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then will I in heaven hear, come, and heal their land.

There was at least one man on that island who fulfilled the conditions of that one passage of Scripture, and because he fulfilled the conditions, God, being a covenant-keeping God, must be true to His covenant engagements. And God, to vindicate His own honor, had to listen to the prayers of the parish postman who knelt in a barn for a day.

The principles that govern spiritual quickening …Oh, that God may find a people ready to fulfill and to comply with the governing principles relative to spiritual quickening.

The Origin of Revival
Now, let me touch first of all on the origin of revival. You have it in this verse. "Wilt Thou not revive us again."

My dear people, we do well to remember that in the whole field of Christian experience, the first step is, and remains, with God. We want to remember that. Thought, feeling, endeavor must find their basis, must find their inspiration in the sovereign mercy of God. Now I believe that. I believe it with all my heart.

I remember making that statement at a conference outside London some time ago. And at the close of the conference the chairman overhead a certain titled lady say, "That was a wonderful address that we listened to, but I don’t agree with all that he said, particularly to the sovereignty of God. But we must not forget that the dear man was born and brought up among the hills of Scotland, and that is his background and he can’t help it."

My dear people, let me say again, in the field of revival, God is sovereign! But, I hasten to say, that I do not believe in any conception of sovereignty that nullifies man’s responsibility. God is the God of revival, but we are the human agents through which revival is possible. And God found that man in the postman of Berneray.

I believe this to be the reason for so few making contact with Christ that is vital; to me, one of the most disturbing factors of present-day evangelism (let me say, present-day evangelism) is the over-emphasis on what man can do. "Come to the front. Raise your hand. Respond to the altar call. Come to Jesus and be happy!" God have mercy on us! I say, God have mercy on us! Man, in the final analysis, can do nothing but throw himself on the sovereign mercy of God! Oh, let’s get that clear. That is not Highland Theology. It’s New Testament Theology! It’s Old Testament Theology! I’m tired, positively tired of the gospel of simple believism!

The Difference Between Human Faith and Saving Faith
Oh, there is a difference between human faith and saving faith! I heard a prominent evangelist in Britain say something that really startled me. He said, "You exercise faith in a plane. You go into that plane and you exercise faith that that plane will take you to your destination. You go into a steamer and you exercise faith in the steamer and the captain and the crew to take you to your destination. Exercise that faith in the promises of God." Did you ever hear or listen to such nonsense? That is human faith! It is not given by God!
Oh, Calvin was right, and I love to quote him, although I am not an extreme Calvinist – though I’m a Highlander. Calvin said, "We are saved through faith alone, but the faith that saves is never alone." God is in it! Surely that is what Paul tells us in that great passage. "I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless, I live. Yet not I, but Christ, He liveth in me. The life that I now live in the flesh I live by the" — faith of Paul? Oh, no! That wouldn’t get him very far. "I live by the faith of the Son of God." The faith of God.

Harvests of Infidels or Believers?
Now, I’m convinced of this, that if this truth was stressed, there would be less appeals. If this truth was stressed, our crusades and campaigns would not be producing harvests of infidels.

If men and women would but recognize that glorious truth – "They shall seek me and shall find me when they shall search for me with all their heart." That means that they may not find Him tonight. They may not find Him tomorrow night. They may not find Him next week. They may not find Him for a month or for six months , but if they are seeking God with all their hearts, they’re going to find Him, or God is not true to His covenant engagement.
Oh, let’s get this clear. It comes into revival. That is why I could count upon my five fingers all that I spoke to about their soul during the whole of the three years I was in the midst of it. (1949-53).

You see, in the Northwest of Scotland, if you were to press yourself and your advance and your help upon an anxious soul, he would be inclined to believe that it was man’s work…just man’s work. And he would much rather be left to God so that God Himself would handle him. That is why we have known people for weeks and longer in distress of soul before light broke in upon them.

No Backsliders
You go back to those villages today – I’m glad I see Mr. McFarland of the Faith Mission here. He was up on Lewis not so very long ago. He was in a village that saw the mighty movings of God. I never spoke to one single person in that village in an endeavor to help them find the Savior! We just left them to God and God did it! That is why you haven’t a single backslider in that whole community. Oh, my dear people, when God does a work, He does it well! You can go back, and you can go back again, and you’ll find them pressing on with the God that revealed, not only Himself to them, but revealed Himself in them.
Salvation is of God

"God," said David, "God is the God of our salvation." The fact of ultimate reality surely is this, that salvation is of God!

I was asked recently to help a young woman. She was a nurse in Glasgow, now home in the Hebrides, and she was in terrible distress of soul, and the distress continued for a long period. Her father thought that perhaps a word from me might help her, so I called and I found the young woman in a terrible state, fearfully distressed about her soul. The sense of guilt, the sense of unworthiness, and behind it all, the question: "Am I in the covenant…Am I in the covenant?" So I knelt beside her and did my best to help her, and I quoted that great verse of Scripture that I so often quote, John 10:27, "My sheep hear my voice and I know them and they follow me and I give unto them Eternal Life and they shall never perish, neither can any man pluck them out of my Father’s hand." And I quoted it again, and I tried to point out the two supreme characteristics of the sheep for whom Christ died. They hear his voice and they follow Him!

Have you heard His voice? Oh, have you heard His voice, young people? Have you heard His voice? It is different from the voice of man! The voice of the Shepherd speaking the word of conviction, speaking the word of pardon, speaking the word of assurance, speaking the word of power. Have you heard the voice of the Shepherd?

I spoke along these lines, and then she looked at me through her tears and said, "Mr. Campbell, I thank you for your kindly words of counsel, but surely, surely, as a minister, you believe that a verse of Scripture won’t save you?"

Have you got it? Oh, have you got it?

Extensive Delusion About Salvation!
There are thousands today living under a self-created delusion, and a delusion given birth to in our evangelical crusades, who have nothing to rest upon but a verse of Scripture. Are you saved by a verse of Scripture?

Listen to the poet, "The promise can’t save though the promise is sure. It is the blood we get under that cleanses us through. It cleanses me now. Hallelujah to God! I rest on the promise but I’m under the blood!" That’s it! That’s it! "Beyond…beyond…the sacred page I see Thee, Lord…I seek thee, Lord…my spirit yearns for Thee, thou living Word."
Tell me, has the living Word spoken? Has the living Word spoken, or are you just holding on to a verse of Scripture?

So she said, "Surely you are not suggesting that a verse of Scripture will save me?" "My heart cries for Jesus!" That’s it! "My heart cries for Jesus!" And Jesus, four or five days after that, revealed Himself in her…revealed Himself in her! And she was gloriously saved. And today she rests upon the promise, she feeds upon the Word – that brings her to Jesus.

Revival Where the Bible Is Unknown
Oh, let’s get this clear. It is a truth we want to lay hold of. And it becomes so wonderfully real in revival. People have said to me, "But you see, Mr. Campbell, up there they know the Word of God and the Holy Spirit has ground to work on. They are not tied up with this doctrine and that doctrine and the other doctrine."

But listen friends. God sweeps into communities where the Word of God, to a large extent, is unknown. There are such communities in Britain, almost pagan. But I’ve seen God sweeping into such communities. For instance, the Midland of England just recently, sweeping into a godless community, and suddenly men and women understanding perfectly what it means to be born again and what it means to be sanctified, who, before the moving of God knew nothing or could not understand what Christ meant by saying, "You must be born again." That’s why I say there’s hope for any community when God takes the situation in hand.

In Evesham, in a pleasant vale through which the Avon flows, on December 16, 1837, the birth of a daughter, Elizabeth, gladdened the hearts of Thomas and Edith Foster. Little could they realize, as they looked at this small bundle of life, that she was destined to affect multitudes. For Elizabeth Foster Baxter became co-editor of the “Christian Herald” and, through her devoted Christian life and ministry in pen and word, brought salvation, holiness and healing to many.

Elizabeth had much to be grateful for in her fatherÂ’s Quaker background of sturdy faith and principle. Her mother was an ardent member of the Church of England and, in its atmosphere, the child was reared and trained. Into the home on High Street, in times of election, would come the Liberal Candidate. The little lass would silently repose under the table listening to the fortunes of parliamentary battle.

Of the religious influences of her home she said, “Born of God-fearing parents, who strictly observed the Lord’s Day and family prayers, I was nevertheless very ignorant of divine things. Like any other children belonging to the Church of England, I was taught the Church Catechism; and again and again I pondered over the words that in baptism I was ‘made a member of Christ, a child of God and an inheritor of the kingdom of Heaven.’ I could not tell what that meant, but I knew, if it meant anything, it must mean having to do with God, that there was a real something which I was sure had not taken place in me.

“Then I became much occupied with the promises made to God in my name by my godfather and godmother that I should ‘renounce the devil and all his works, the vain pomp and glory of this world, with all covetous desires of the same, and the carnal desires of the flesh, so that thou wilt not follow, nor be led by them.’

“What did this mean? It was a matter of supreme moment to me to know that I was let in for; how far was I personally responsible?”

After a confirmation class, Elizabeth remained behind to ask the Vicar if before she was confirmed, she was responsible for these promises. A hurried “Good morning”, as the “Vicar of Christ” took his leave, left her half bitter. The same question was put to two other clergymen, neither of whom gave a satisfactory answer. She said, “The question remained unsolved, and I remained unsaved.”

A governess was employed to instruct Elizabeth until she was eleven years of age. Then, for five years, she attended a boarding school at Woucester. During this time, she made good resolutions and practiced much self-control. She read her Bible, but it did not speak to her as she would have liked. Nor did she ever meet with anyone who could tell her how the boundless grace of God can swallow up her sin.

Her own words describe this difficult period in her life:

“To the world, I was a gay, thoughtless girl; but often I would get alone for hours together and cry to God to help me, with no clear idea of how help was to come. It was not sorrow for sin. I had not any particular sins on my conscience, but a general sense of being all wrong, more like a ‘fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indignation.’ On the other hand, I had a certain faith that God is love.’ If I could only have seen how His just wrath for sin could be reconciled with His love, I could have been at peace. My only idea of the sacrifice of Christ was that He died a martyr of His own holy life of love, which was misunderstood of men.”

The passing of her father, when she was only eighteen, affected her deeply. She had loved him as she had loved no one else on earth. At his grave, she vowed she would gladly yield up her seeing or hearing, if she could only know how sin could be put away. After his death, she spent some time with an uncle who was a vicar, in Suffolk. While there, she visited a dying girl who asked, “Miss Foster, do you know the way?”

She could only answer, “I would give all the world if I had it, to know the way. But, if I may shut the door, I think I can pray to God for both of us, that He will show us the way.” She then prayed, asking that they both might be shown the path to God’s salvation.

Within a short time, the dying girl sent her friend the message, “Tell Miss Foster that I have found the way.” Elizabeth’s unsatisfied heart experienced something akin to jealousy, and gladly would she have changed places with her. As she watched the funeral procession from the window, her aching heart caused her to sigh, “Oh, God, show me also the way to find Thee!”

Her prayer was answered through a former school friend, Caroline Smith, who recently had lost her father and wished to comfort Elizabeth in her loss. She herself had been shown the way to Christ through Rev. Robert Aitken of Pendeen. Caroline opened the Bible at Isaiah 53:6: “All we like sheep have gone astray … and the Lord hath laid upon him the inquity of us all.”

Elizabeth later said of this momentous and never-to-be-forgotten time:

“The words were familiar to me; but, as she spoke them, the Holy Spirit’s light came unto them. I saw all my sins were laid on Jesus; and my whole soul bowed in unutterable worship . . . Without a word, without a formal prayer, Jesus stood revealed to me as ‘just, and the justifier of him which believeth.’ I had what I had longed for – communion with God, in which Jesus would speak to me and I to Him.

“And for many nights I could not spare the time for sleep. He made it no difficulty to me to give up all for Him; it came quite natural. Dancing, acting, novels, fashionable dress, jewels, caricaturing, etc., died out of my life by the absorbing power of the new life within. It made me feel I possessed a knowledge which would save men from Hell, and almost all my time was spent in speaking with individuals and seeking to win them to Christ.”

She suffered misunderstandings from her family, and former friends passed her on the streets, as though she had committed a crime. But she clung to her Savior and witnessed everywhere for and to Him. Her heart, now bound in love to Christ, hungered for more and more of His grace.

God sends both books and people into our lives to help us discover greater heights and depths in the provisions of grace. Both came into ElizabethÂ’s life at this time of trial.

Of the books she said,

“Some months later, more than half a year later after my conversion, although I saw souls continually saved, yet I felt a need for a deeper work of grace. A number of the ‘Guide to Holiness’ was put into my hands, in which was an article by the late Mrs. Phoebe Palmer. I took it to the Lord and, then and there, was led to yield up myself a living sacrifice, and to accept the cleansing from all sin as far as I then understood it; and, in some way, accepted the Holy Ghost to possess me.”

An acquaintance with Rev. Mr. Aitken of Pendeen, a mighty man of God, proved to be an untold blessing, and Elizabeth wrote of him to this effect:

“He was a very great uplift in my spiritual life … I have in my day heard many blessed preachers of the Gospel, but none with the power from on high which was upon him. His great prayerfulness, his intensity, his knowledge of scripture and the presence of God, which was always with him, opened indeed a new vista in my spiritual life. There was a greater God-consciousness, a better understanding of the Bible and a deeper consecration to God and His service.

“For eight years after this time, my life seemed to be a going on from strength to strength. It was but a small sphere of labour which God gave me, in a little town and the surrounding villages, but He worked blessedly and gave me, through correspondence and through notes on the Scriptures, an increasing influence.”

In 1856, after the family home at Evesham had been broken up, she was asked by Rev. and Mrs. Pennefather to come to Mildmay. As a result of their invitation, she took charge of the deaconesses, devising the well-known Mildmay bonnet and deaconess dress, which she herself adopted from that time on. This work at Mildmay led her to the poor of East London, where, during the raging cholera epidemic, she ministered ceaselessly and sacrificially to the sick and the dying.

After two years at Mildmay, circumstances arose which brought about her resignation. As she fervently waited upon God to know the next step of her life, an offer of marriage from Mr. Michael Baxter surprised the thirty-one year old deaconess. He had written a book entitled “Louis Napoleon, the Destined Monarch of the World”, which created a sensation among Christians. Elizabeth had read it and had corresponded with its author. But it was at a Mildmay Conference, where she first met him. He always remembered his first glimpse of her, clad in black, carving at the dinner table, with the fair curls hanging about her shoulders.

The marriage was both happy and useful. We catch a glimpse of Michael Baxter in his biography, written by his son,

“Naturally affectionate, the enthusiastic evangelist longed for a wife sharing his hopes and interests, who would cooperate with him in his mission. For, even in love, his vocation was paramount and, while he craved a helpmeet, he much more desired one who, like himself, put God first, subordinating personal considerations, such as ease or wealth, to the great business of seeking to save the lost.

“His choice of a wife was thus decided by his longing for one who felt as he did about the search for the banished and the helpless lost. He was not one to choose lightly, nor apt to be deceived by less than real affection, and he waited until his fore-ordained bride was brought to him. But he looked out a while for his counterpart. Hence, when he met at Mildmay the lady who was to become his wife, it was with him a case of love, of all his love, at first sight, a grateful surrender of himself to the gift of God.”

On their honeymoon, the bride was attracted to the window of their apartment by a familiar voice speaking from outside. The bridegroom was holding an open-air service announcing a woman speaker for the evening. An so Elizabeth was enlisted early as a partner in his evangelistic efforts.

There were two children of this marriage. Rachel, a daughter, brought joy and gladness for only four brief months and then faded away, in spite of all that loving care could do. Michael Paget Baxter, a son, who was born the following year, survived his parents, carrying on the work of his father.

After five years of married life, another important development of God’s purpose in their lives was made apparent. Mr. Baxter, a great exponent of the second coming of Christ, had been publishing a small monthly magazine entitled, “Signs of our Times.”

When D. L. Moody campaigned in London, the Baxters decided to make the paper a weekly one in which they would keep the public informed of his evangelistic efforts. To the wife fell the business end of the new venture – reporting, proof-reading and book-keeping.
This, along with every-night dealing with anxious souls, resulted in overstrain and, that she might recuperate, necessitated a trip to Switzerland. And so a yet wider ministry was opened up for her in Europe. While holding services in Switzerland with effect, she met Baroness von Gemmingen from Gernsbach, Germany. An invitation from that lady for a friendly visit was extended.

Although calls from pastors for further evangelism in Switzerland were forthcoming, after a day of fasting and prayer, Mrs. Baxter’s impression deepened that God was leading to Germany. The words, “Go to Gernsbach” kept sounding in her soul.

“But, Lord,” she inquired, “how about the language? Thou knowest I cannot speak German.”
“Never can I forget the answer,” she wrote. “It was not in an audible voice, but in the depths of my soul came the answer, ‘I can, and I am going with thee.’”

The next morning, she told her husband how her soul had been exercised about the divine call to Germany. “You must do as God tells you,” was his reply.

Friends tried to dissuade her from this venture. “But, God, and my husband being one about it, simplified the matter to me,” she explained, “and I decided to go to Gernsbach.”
Nor did God fail His messenger in the problem of the language barrier, as Mrs. Baxter so remarkably records:

“I went downstairs to Frau von Gemmingen and told her that I believed God would have me go to Schauern that evening, and say a few words to the people there. For a long time she used argument after argument to dissuade me from going, and failing, she took me to her husband, who told me that if I went, I should only make a fool of myself, to which I replied that it did not matter to me how foolish I appeared so long as I did the will of God.

“He seemed not to understand or believe that God could thus lead me. Then the Baroness said: “There is the deaconess downstairs who teaches the infant school. You shall come to her, and if you can make her understand that you have a meeting in her schoolroom, I shall then believe God has sent you.’ A holy quiet came upon my spirit, and on reaching the room where the deaconess sat, enough German came to my lips to make my request, and she eagerly assented, and said she would gather the women together at the appointed hour.

“With a polyglot French and German Bible, God enabled me in the evening to give a little Bible teaching, which I was told, was understood by most. This was indeed truly of the Lord, as the Badische German is a special dialect which I had never before heard spoken; but surely it is as possible to trust the Lord to make people understand what He impels one to speak as it is to trust Him to enable one to teach or preach. He did both that evening, and one soul professed to find peace, and not one only, for her entire family followed her in course of time, turning unto the Lord with full purpose of heart.

“Two or three times during the half hour or more that I was speaking I turned to a friend who was with me to obtain a word; but this hesitation was only for a moment; the speech came, although I was not always acquainted with the full memory of the words which came to me. But the faces of the people showed me that they understood what was being uttered. This was the beginning of blessing; and several more meetings were held, all like the first. The Baron himself attended the second meeting, and was much surprised at what he saw. Yet at table, in the shops, or in any reading other than the Word of God, I could carry on no conversation in German.”

But God was fitting His instrument for an even greater field of service. To comfort others and bring healing, she herself must know the depths of pain and suffering. Stricken with a violent form of neuralgia, she spent whole nights in an agony of pain.
Letters to her husband at this time reveal the fact that she understood GodÂ’s purpose in this particular trial.

“March, 1880: I believe I am near the end of this time of suffering humiliation, for God is making more and more clear where I have been willful in my way of serving Him. He knows I only live to serve Him, but it must be in His way, His time, as well as His strength, bless Him.”

A few days later: “God is humbling me as never before. He is so faithful. Oh, that every vestige of self may be done away from me, and then God can have all His will with me. He cannot trust us with power according to the light we have while anything of self remains. I believe I shall praise Him to all eternity for this time of suffering. He would have taught me by other means, but I was not little enough, so He was obliged to use the rod. ‘Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.’”

Another entry, “Oh pray that my life may be all Gethsemane from henceforth. It gives me a sense of awe to be at ease from pain, as though my life must be more His than ever, and such intense sympathy with those who suffer that I seem to understand Christ.”

Those who have had a deeper experience of grace often make the mistake of enshrining it, instead of accepting GodÂ’s discipline, which is designed to reveal our nothingness and His Almightiness. Mrs. BaxterÂ’s writings never could have helped countless perplexed Christians, had she not known this divine reduction.

In article written in March, 1887, she said,

“I did not know how much I was occupied at that time with myself and my own holiness. I fell into spiritual pride. This opened the way for other sins of temper, etc. I was sorely disappointed with myself; I felt as though God had failed me. I had conceived a very high and ascetic standard, and I had fallen miserably below it; and though I cried to God for hours by day and hours by night, my old joy and peace did not return.

“In the year, 1873, I first saw ‘Gladness in Jesus,’ by the Rev. W. E. Boardman and, in reading it, my eyes were opened to see that I had been all this time dealing with myself, instead of acting truly to my first consecration of myself to God and letting Him deal with me. All my confidence in my own experience as a savior was gone. My old experience lived again, it is true, but I was on the divine side of it, seeing Jesus as my sanctification, Jesus dwelling in me to be patience in me, love in me, and all else I needed.

“From this time, God has been closely educating my conscience. While He keeps me from sinning as I trust Him, He teaches me from time to time His own views of sin, so that things which a year ago were not sin to me, are so now. But the conflict is transferred; the battle is the Lord’s. He cleanses, He helps, He fights. I trust and praise Him. He has taught me the same blessed faith for the body as the soul.”

An account of Mrs. Baxter’s life message would be incomplete without a few words concerning “Bethshan”, a home opened for healing and holiness. This Heaven-blessed establishment was a portion of the fruit of a concern among evangelicals regarding the part that healing plays in the ministry of the Holy Spirit.

Mrs. Baxter earlier had become acquainted with Pastor StockmayerÂ’s ministry at Hauptweil, Samuel SellerÂ’s at Mannedorf and that of others in Europe. As a result, she became exercised about a testimony in England, showing GodÂ’s faithfulness to all who trust Him for the needs of the body, soul and spirit.

Meanwhile, in America, Dr. Cullis of Boston, grief-stricken at the sudden loss of his young wife, had entered into a deeper union with God. In consequence, he was led to establish a home to prove GodÂ’s power to cure patients pronounced hopeless by the medical profession.

Rev. W. E. Boardman in England had likewise had a new infusion of grace and he could say; “I seem to float in God and in His will like a bird floats in the air, or a fish in the sea.” Often engaged in evangelistic work in America, he visited Dr. Cullis and observed the methods used in his work. Returning to London, he commenced a similar effort in rented premises in the Metropolis, which eventually resulted in “Bethshan.”

Mrs. Baxter, as GodÂ’s versatile handmaid, became involved and eventually was the prime mover of this refuge for the sick. She and her husband poured in financial aid, and Bible studies were daily conducted for those desiring to know more of GodÂ’s purposes in each difficulty. The deeper life of abiding in Jesus was opened to the sufferers, and great was the rejoicing of those who found healing of body as the greater need of the soul was met through the indwelling Comforter. Holiness and healing were dependent upon each other.
Writing about the work at “Bethshan”, she recounted, “Many were the healings which took place here, and many were the souls blest … The Rev. Andrew Murray of Cape Town was there as one of the guests. He went into the subject of the Lord’s healing very fully and was so convinced that he trusted the Lord himself for healing, helped many and afterwards wrote a book on the subject.”

When several valued associates were called to higher service, Mrs. Baxter realized that this type of ministry had fulfilled its purpose. Its testimony had been borne to the ends of the earth through the pages of the “Christian Herald” and personal witness, as well.
The perishing multitudes at home and abroad then became her deepest concern, which culminated in the opening of a Training Home where many young people received Christian education before obeying GodÂ’s call to the mission fields.

Accompanied by Pastor and Mrs. Stockmayer, Mrs. Baxter made a world tour, abundantly fulfilling the promise, “Ye shall be witnesses unto me …unto the uttermost part of the earth.” Her deep spiritual life also flowed out into forty books on Christian experience, besides numerous booklets and weekly commitments in articles and Bible studies for the “Christian Herald” and other papers.

Mrs. Baxter closed her useful life at the age of eighty-nine years. She had been widowed sixteen years when God took her on December 19, 1926, but her influence lives on in her writings. Before her death, she had voiced the words by which she wished to be remembered, and which were quoted in the special service book prepared for her funeral: “Whenever I may be called away from this world, I should like to have as my testimony, ‘God is faithful.’”

Quotation by Elizabeth Baxter

God reveals Himself as the great “I Am”, and the Lord Jesus, again and again, during the time of His ministry on earth, spake of Himself as “I Am”. Now, people almost always tell us what they are and how they feel. Some say, “I am ignorant!”; some, “I am so sinful”; some, “I am so stupid”; some “I am so timid.” But when the Holy Spirit takes possession of us, He shuts up all the “I am” of our nature and turns us to the one great “I Am” of God.
It is a glorious life in which God is the “I Am”, and in which we take our place by the side of Paul, and say, “I am nothing”; or go down even lower to Him Who was “meek and lowly in heart”, and say, “I can of mine own self do nothing” (John 5:30). It is a life in which we expect nothing from ourselves, and in which we know that God expects nothing from us, and if our fellow creatures do, it does not matter to us, because our “life is hid with Christ in God.”

The greatest hindrance is your trying to help God to do it, for there is one thing God will never do – He will never mix His work with yours. Yield yourself unreservedly to Him. You say, “I am weak”; and you are; but the true “I Am” joins on to that name of His, “the Almighty God.”

Where is He almighty? Where He dwells. Just let the Holy Spirit come into you and dwell within you, then His Almightiness walks about with you wherever you go. If Satan tempts you to the old sin, there is almightiness dwelling in Him Who dwells in you, and surely you need not doubt whether the temptation shall be overcome or not. God is equal to it, through you are not.

Shall the “I am” of our self-life be that of Paul, “I am crucified with Christ”? There is an end of me, an end of all my complaining of myself, an end of that old song of what I am – “I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live.”

From: They Knew Their God, Book One