24. Useless Hiding
Useless Hiding
CHIEF END OF MAN.—Lady Glenorchy relates in her diary that, being seized with a fever, her life was threatened, and the question came to her mind: “What is the chief end of man?” “When I considered the answer to it,” she says, ‘to glorify God, and enjoy Him for ever,’ I was struck with shame and confusion. I found I had never sought to glorify God in my life, nor had I any idea of what was meant by enjoying Him forever. Death and judgment were set before me; my past sins came to my remembrance; I saw no way to escape the punishment due unto them, nor had I the least glimmering hope of obtaining pardon through the righteousness of another.” From this unhappy state she was shortly after delivered by believing on the Lord Jesus Christ.
INFIDEL LAWYER.—A skeptical lawyer had over the entrance to his private office-door the words, “God is nowhere.” One day his little girl, seeing it, began in her childishness to spell the words, and finally made them read thus; “God is now here.” As an arrow from the Almighty’s quiver this entered the infidel’s heart, and he became a believer and a Christian.
BELIEVE YOUR MOTHER.—The daughter of an infidel navy officer, just before dying, said in substance to her sorrowing parent, “Father, you always insisted that there was no God, but mother, before she died, always told me that there is. Now I, too, am about to die and enter the spirit world, whom shall I believe, you or mother?” “Child,” said the smitten father, “believe your mother.”
EXILED PERSECUTOR.—A cruel persecutor of God’s ancient people, after having been consigned to exile, suffered the torments of a guilty conscience. If he heard a soft step, he thought it was someone coming to smite him unawares, or if a hasty step, it was one coming quickly to kill him. If men spoke roughly to him he quaked with fear, or if kindly, he fancied it was a plot to beguile him. If they fed him sparingly it was to starve him, or if luxuriantly it was to fatten him like an ox for slaughter.
HOPELESS TASK.—Spencer tells of a village in England to which it was said God never came. Could such a place be found now, it would be more thronged than the most fashionable summer resorts. To reside where God’s eye could not penetrate, men and women would give much. THAT NAIL.—One day a man in walking through an old graveyard, noticed the sexton making an excavation, perhaps either digging a new grave on the site of an old one, or removing some remains. At all events, the grave-digger had thrown out a skull. The man noticed an old nail sticking in the skull. Dropping his handkerchief down upon it by way of hiding the mysterious and rusty nail from the sexton’s eye, he withdrew the nail from the skull. He then asked the sexton whether he knew anything about the person to whose body that skull belonged. O yes, the sexton was well acquainted with his history. It was the skull of a man who had died in his sleep many, many years before. Learning that the dead man’s aged widow was still living, he sought an interview with her. Confronting her with the mysterious nail, he said: “Woman, do you know that nail?” Struck as if with a message from another world, she confessed that she had murdered her husband in his sleep by driving that nail into his skull. During all these many years she had hid her crime from man, but not from God.