“You mean what you prayed, that Peter and Bertie and Maria and I might have, this morning at family prayers. But how can I get it? If neither the schoolmaster nor you can teach me, and I can’t learn it myself, how am I going to get it?”
“Beg for it. When a man has nothing to buy bread with, and can’t work, he must beg. Get it where I got mine, on your knees.”
“But the minister says folks must feel that they are sinners, and confess their sins and ask forgiveness in the name of the Saviour. I don’t feel that way; don’t feel that I have got anything to confess.”
“You don’t?”
“No, sir. I can’t confess that I have lied, or sworn, got drunk, or stolen, or broken the Sabbath, or cheated anybody, because I never have. I know I am not bad, like the workhouse boys I was brought up with, nor like some folks here, and I never go to bed or get up but I say the Lord’s prayer.”
“What makes you say in the Lord’s prayer ‘forgive us our sins,’ if you have no sins to be forgiven; and what sense was there in putting it in the Lord’s prayer, that was made for the whole world, and you among the rest, if you have no sin?”
“I don’t know.”
“The reason you don’t feel that you have anything to confess is that you don’t know what’s inside of you. Everybody is the same way by nature. I used to be.”
“What must I do then?”
“Ask the Lord to send His spirit to show yourself, and if He does, you will see need enough to ask pardon. I hope you’ll think about it, James, for I never was so set upon anything as I am upon this. It is not an affair of the moment with me. I have had it in my mind from the first spring you were here till now, and it has grown upon me of late, because within the last six months I have begun to feel that I have not much longer to tarry here. I don’t think I shall see the leaves fall again.”