for a place in the Kingdom of Christ or venture as a humble guest
to His table. But oh, how I longed one day to be numbered among that
happy company! I thought no privilege on earth could compare with that.'

II

A couple of entries in his diary will complete our preparation for the
record of the day that changed his life. He is a youth of nineteen,
staid and thoughtful, but full of life and merriment, and the popular
center of a group of student friends.

_May 3, 1829._--Great sorrow, because I am still out of Christ.

_May 31, 1829._--My birthday is past and I am not born again.

Not every day, I fancy, do such entries find their way into the
confidential journals of young people of nineteen.

III

God's flowers are all everlastings. The night may enfold them; the grass
may conceal them; the snows may entomb them; but they are always there.
They do not perish or fade. See how the principle works out in history!
There is no more remarkable revival of religion in our national story
than that represented by the Rise of the Puritans. The face of England
was changed; everything was made anew. Then came the Restoration.
Paradise was lost. Puritanism vanished as suddenly as it had arisen. But
was it dead? Professor James Stalker, in a Centennial Lecture on Robert
Murray McCheyne--a name that stands imperishably associated with that of
Andrew Bonar--says most emphatically that it was not. He shows how, like
a forest fire, the movement swept across Europe, returning at last to
the land in which it rose. When, with the Restoration, England relapsed
into folly, it passed over into Holland, preparing for us, among other
things, a new and better line of English kings. From Holland it passed
into Germany, and, by means of the Moravian Brethren, produced the most
amazing missionary movement of all time. From Germany it returned to
England, giving us the Methodist Revival of the eighteenth century, a
revival which, according to Lecky, alone saved England from the horrors
of an industrial revolution. And from England it swept into Scotland,
and kindled there such a revival of religion as has left an indelible
impression upon Scottish life and character. It was in the sweep of that
historic movement that the soul of Andrew Bonar was born.

IV

'It was in 1830,' he says, in a letter to his brother, written in his
eighty-third year, 'it was in 1830 that I found the Saviour, or rather,
that He found me, and laid me on His