Saved by Sankey’s Singing
Mrs. Emily Sullivan Oakey was a well-known writer but she is best remembered by her hymn, “Sowing the Seed by the Daylight Fair.” In the winter of 1876, W. O. Lattimore, who had been separated from his wife and child by drink and had become a miserable drunkard, stumbled in an intoxicated condition into Moody’s Tabernacle in Chicago. When he came to, he realized his mistake and was about to leave when Sankey’s solo held him. He was singing the stanza:
“Sowing the seed of a lingering pain,
Sowing the seed of a maddened brain,
Sowing the seed of a tarnished name,
Sowing the seed of eternal shame:
O, what shall the harvest be?”
These lines followed Lattimore even to the saloon and he returned to the Tabernacle and was converted. He went back to his family, engaged in active work at the Moody meetings, accepted the call to the ministry and was pastor of a flourishing church in Evanston, Illinois, for twenty years.
This hymn was doubtless suggested by the Apostle’s words: “Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”
The insight of Jesus is finely illustrated by