e hem of His garment of grace, and
virtue came out of Him who wears that seamless robe, and who responds
even to the faintest contact of the soul that is groping after
salvation. And so we meet here another proof of the infinite variety of
God's working which, like the fact of that working, is so wonderful.
That Saturday evening in November, 1825, was to this young student of
Halle _the parting of the ways._ He had tasted that the Lord is
gracious, though he himself could not account for the new relish for
divine things which made it seem too long to wait a week for another
meal; so that thrice before the Saturday following he sought the house
of brother Wagner, there, with the help of brethren, to search the
Scriptures.

We should lose one of the main lessons of this life-story by passing too
hastily over such an event as this conversion and the exact manner of
it, for here is to be found the first great step in God's preparation of
the workman for his work.

Nothing is more wonderful in history than the unmistakable signs and
proofs of _preadaptation._ Our life-occurrences are not _disjecta
membra_--scattered, disconnected, and accidental fragments. In God's
book all these events were written beforehand, when as yet there was
nothing in existence but the plan in God's mind--to be fashioned in
continuance in actual history--as is perhaps suggested in Psalm cxxxix.
16 (margin).

We see stones and timbers brought to a building site--the stones from
different quarries and the timbers from various shops--and different
workmen have been busy upon them at times and places which forbade all
conscious contact or cooperation. The conditions oppose all preconcerted
action, and yet, without chipping or cutting, stone fits stone, and
timber fits timber--tenons and mortises, and proportions and dimensions,
all corresponding so that when the building is complete it is as
perfectly proportioned and as accurately fitted as though it had been
all prepared in one workshop and put together in advance as a test. In
such circumstances no sane man would doubt that _one presiding
mind_--one architect and master builder--had planned that structure,
however many were the quarries and workshops and labourers.

And so it is with this life-story we are writing. The materials to be
built into one structure of service were from a thousand sources and
moulded into form by many hands, but there was a mutual fitness and a
common adaptation to the