THE KING’S BUSINESS
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about 75 years of age who got up and in the gravest way said that he was just waiting for God to take him; that he had lived his life; that God had been good to him; and it all summed up in the statement that re ligion was a good thing to die by. I sat away back, and I had always a great fashion of talking to myself; and I said: ‘Well, old man, you can’t touch me; you have lived your life; you haven’t any sympathy with a big boy; it has passed over my head.’ “Soon after a younger fellow got up, he was perhaps '35, and he said: ‘You have heard an old man tell you that religion is good to die by; I want to tell you that it’s good to live by. I have just begun the Christian life. Two years ago I was converted; I had just begun business, and I had a pre judice against religion. They told me that a man had to have a face a yard long, and couldn’t smile, or do any thing that would make him happy. You see, I was deceived about that. I am a great deal happier since I be came a Christian, because it settles things.’ He said: . ‘I am a better business man; a great load has rolled off my heart, and I can give myself more to my work.’ “I listened to him, and I said to myself: ‘There you are. You want to be a business man, and he tells you how you can be a better business man. He tells you that religion is good to live by. Another man tells you it’s good to die by.1 “I waited in that meeting till every body went out except the janitor and the old minister, and as he came down the aisle he met a, country boy coming up, and I was the chap. I simply said to him: ‘I have settled tonight to give my heart to God.’ And he reached but his hand-—dear old John Chambers—and he said: ‘God bless you, my son! You will never regret it,’ That was the whole business. I
didn’t wait to get 'some feeling. I accepted the fact that I was a sinner and that there was a Savior for sin ners, and I came to Him simply on the proposition that the gift of God is eternal life.” " Dr. Bonar on Conversion Now the marvellous thing in con version is, that while all is supernat ural (being the entire work of the Holy Ghost), all is also natural. You are perhaps expecting some miracu lous illapse of heavenly power and brightness into the soul; something apart from Divine truth and from the working of man’s powers of mind. You have been expecting faith to de scend like an angel from heaven into your soul, and hope to be lighted up like a new star in your firmament. It is not so. Whilst the Spirit’s work is above nature, it is not against nature. He displaces no faculty; He disturbs no mental process; He does violence to no part of our moral framework; He creates no new organs of thought or feeling. His office is to set “all to rights” within you; ,so that you never feel so calm, so true, so real, so perfectly natural, so much yourself, as when He has taken possession of you in every part, and filled your whole man with heavenly joy. Never do you feel so perfectly free —less con strained and less mechanical—in every faculty as when He has “brought every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ.” God lays a little on us every day, And never, I believe, on all the way Will burdens bear so deep, Or pathways lie so threatening and so steep, But we can go, if by God’s power We only boar the burden of the hour, —George Kliogle.
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