“Sank in Blissful Dreams Away”
“I am now in my seventy-third year, and just completing the fiftieth year of my ministry,” said the Rev. T. Ferrier Hulme, D.D., fraternal delegate from the Wesleyan Methodist Church of England to the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Kansas City, May, 1928. In closing his address he said:
“May I give you my experience? I have known Jesus for many years. I have been preaching for fifty years. Twelve years ago it seemed as if my work was done. I was laid low by a terrible illness, and had to undergo a major operation that might well have been fatal. My life was in the balance. I said: ‘Charles Wesley, What have you for me? Give me something short and sweet.’ And he gave me:
‘Jesus, the first and last,
On whom my soul is cast;
Thou didst Thy work begin
In blotting out my sin;
Thou wilt the root remove,
And perfect me in love.
Yet when the work is done,
The work is but begun;
Partaker of Thy grace
I long to see Thy face;
The first I prove below,
The last I die to know.’
“I repeated it to the last line, and then sank in blissful dreams away. When I came out from that nursing home, before I could walk, I just crawled to Charles Wesley’s grave near this home and gave God thanks for all that Charles Wesley had been to Christendom, and especially for what he had been to me.”
The following letter, quoted in part, from a woman who underwent an operation tells of the influence of