Surely His grace will keep us from falling:
Passing from death to life at His call,
Blessed salvation once for all.”
The congregation rustled into their seats with the closing chorus and gave Joyce a full view of the people on the platform. A man with a good voice that could be heard out in the street was speaking now. He said:
“Before you go home I want you to listen to somebody else a moment. A dear brother came to me tonight wanting to tell me what Christ had done for him, and I have asked him if he will tell you what he told me. He says he is not a public speaker, but when I put it to him that he might help somebody else he consented.”
Some one stepped to the front of the platform and began to speak. A man just in front of Joyce rose up at that instant and put on his overcoat, and she could not see the platform for a moment, but the voice rang into her soul like a song of long ago.
“I don’t like to talk about myself,” said the speaker, “never did, but when your leader showed me a verse in my new Bible that said: ‘If thou confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved!’ I had to do what he asked, because I believe, and I want to confess.”
Joyce’s heart stood still with wonder and then went flying on in great glad leaps and bounds. There could not be two voices like that one. She stretched her neck to see, and when the man ahead of her sat down, there was Darcy Sherwood standing on the platform, with a new grave look upon his face, and he was saying the most wonderful thing:
“I’ve been a sinner all my life, but I never knew it until one day God sent a woman to look into my eyes and ask me what I was doing. I was in the bootlegging business then and doing pretty well. It had never occurred to me that there was anything like what you’d call sin about it. But it began to seem as if somehow God had got into that woman’s eyes and was looking at me. I saw that the breaking of the law of the land that had been made for the good of the land was a sin. I was a law-breaker and I was a sinner. And somehow that sin grew until it was the heaviest thing I had to carry around.
“I gave up bootlegging right away that night, but somehow that didn’t seem to make any difference. The sin was there just the same and it grew heavier and heavier on my soul. I never knew I had a soul before that.