y one I knew, as once I was.'
After the singing of the hymn, 'Rock of Ages,' another man addressed
the meeting. He had been a drunkard, a homeless wanderer, who slept
night after night on the Embankment till fortune brought him to this
service and to the Penitent-Form. Since that time, two and a half
years before, no drink had passed his lips, and once again, as he
declared, he had become 'a self-respecting, respectable citizen.'
Then a dwarf whom I had seen at work in the Spa Road Elevator, and who
once was taken about the country to be exhibited as a side show at
fairs and there fell a victim to drink, gave his testimony.
Another verse, 'Could my tears for ever flow,' and after it, in rapid
succession, spoke a man who had been a schoolmaster and fallen through
drink and gambling; a man who, or whose brother, I am not sure which,
had been a Wesleyan preacher, and who is now employed in a Life
Assurance Company; a man who had been a prisoner; a man who had been a
confirmed drunkard, and others.
Always it was the same earnest, simple tale of drink and degradation,
passed now for ever; of the Penitent-Form; of the building up of a new
self, and of position regained.
More singing and an eloquent prayer which seemed to move the audience
very much, some of them to tears; an address from a woman Salvation
Army Officer, who pleaded with the people in the name of their
mothers, and a brief but excellent sermon from Commissioner Sturgess,
based upon the parable of the Marriage of the King's Son as recorded
in the 22nd chapter of St. Matthew, and of the guests who were
collected from the highways and byways to attend the feast whence the
rich and worldly had excused themselves.
Then the great and final invocation to Heaven to move the hearts of
these men, and the invitation to them to present themselves at the
Penitent-Form. Lastly a mighty, thundering hymn, 'Jesu, Lover of my
soul,' and the ending of the long drama.
It was a wonderful thing to see the spiritually-faced man on the
platform pleading with his sordid audience, and to watch them stirring
beneath his words. To see, also, a uniformed woman flitting to and fro
among that audience, whispering, exhorting, invoking--a temptress to
Salvation, then to note the response and its manner that were stranger
still. Some poor wretch would seem to awaken, only to relapse into a
state of sullen, almost defiant torpor. A little while and the leaven
begins to work in him
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