A Personal Testimony 109 circumstance that, as I was making my way to the door after the meeting, several persons greeted me with a pleasant word and a shake of the hand, and one inquired about my spiritual state. I went away from that meeting still in complete igno rance of the simple truth that my wretchedness was all due to the fact that I was an unreconciled and unpardoned sinner, and of the greater truth that there was One who had died for my sins, who had reconciled me to God by His blood, and through whom I could obtain forgiveness of sins and eternal life. Again I say that no natural explanation will account for the fact that I was constrained to return to a place so utterly devoid of attractions and so foreign to all my natural tastes and inclinations. The people were not in the social grade to which I had been accustomed, and I would have found nothing at all congenial in their society. And here I wish to call particular attention to a striking instance of the fact that God’s ways are not as our ways, and that the wisdom of man is foolishness with God. I should have supposed that, in order to convince me of the truth of the Bible and of Christianity it would be necessary to employ the best efforts of a faculty of the profoundest theologians, versed in all the arguments of skeptical philosophy, and able to furnish plausible replies to them. But God, in His wisdom, sent me to learn the way of everlasting life from a company of exceedingly plain, humble people, of little education, to whom I regarded myself as immeasurably superior in all the higher branches of knowledge. I t is true that these people knew very little of what is taught in colleges and seminaries.; but they did have that knowledge which is the highest and most excellent of all, that knowledge for which one of the most scholarly of men of his day was willing to sacrifice all his advantages, counting them but refuse, and to cast away all his brilliant prospects, saying, “I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord (Phil. 3:8).
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