“I heard a Bible story read long ago about a blind man, and there was one verse I always remembered. It said: ‘If ye were blind, ye should have no sin: but now ye say, we see; therefore your sin remaineth.’
“I began to see that was just like me. I had always prided myself on seeing what was right and doing it. I had been a law to myself. But now I saw that was all wrong. I had no right to make my own laws. There had to be somebody wiser than I who could make the laws for everybody.
“I bought a Bible and began to read, and presently I began to see that there was something else back of it all that I hadn’t got at all yet. There was something bigger than federal laws. I had broken the law of the land and I could go and pay the penalty of that and wipe it out, but there was a higher law, a law of the universe, that my spirit had been breaking, and I didn’t see any way to wipe out that debt, pay that penalty. In fact, I didn’t know that higher law, and how was I to keep from breaking it?
“Then one day I came on a verse that said: ‘And this is his commandment, that we should believe on the name of his son Jesus Christ.’
“There it was! I hadn’t been doing that, and I was a sinner. I could see how God would be very angry with me about that. God, to be a God, holy and good and all that a real God would be, and I a little creature setting up myself to not believe on Him! It really seemed a reasonable offense. As I thought about it, it seemed greater than killing anybody, or robbing a bank, or forging, or any of the things we count sins in the world. It seemed—well—so contemptible in me. And the more I felt it, the more I didn’t like the feeling, and I kept on reading my Bible.
“My Bible is a pretty nice kind of a Bible. I suppose you all know about it. It is called a Scofield Bible and it has little explanations and notes here and there that lead you on and that let you in on the meaning of a word in the original Hebrew or Greek, and make it a lot plainer to a beginner like me. By and by, after I had worried about my sin a lot, I found that I didn’t need to worry at all—that my sin had all been prepared for, and the penalty paid; that Jesus Christ had set me free from the law of sin and death, and all I had to do was accept my pardon and go out unburdened.
“Well, there isn’t much more to tell. I took it. You better believe I did! If you had been as unhappy as I was you wouldn’t have wasted a minute in taking a pardon like that. Why don’t you, by the way, if you never have? It pays. I’m here to tell you it pays above everything else I’ve ever tried. If you don’t see it, just try it anyway, and you’ll find out.”
The audience rose to join in the closing hymn, and during that and the benediction Joyce’s heart was in a tumult of joy. She could not see the platform because the two men who stood in front of her were unusually tall, and some people had come in and were standing in the aisle beside her, crowding her from her position, but the instant the benediction was over she set herself to get up that aisle somehow. However, she might as well have attempted to throw herself out to sea when the tide was coming in. It was impossible to make any progress, and finally she slipped into the back seat and decided to wait. She must see Darcy at any risk, no matter if she lost the next train. She must tell him how glad she was!
There was a crowd around the platform. Likely people had come up to speak to him. His words rang over again in her heart as she waited, her eyes lighted with a great joy. At last the crowd thinned and she managed to work her way through and get to the front, but as she did so she saw several men going out a door back of the platform, and when she arrived there was but one man left up there, seemingly a janitor, picking up the books. Her heart sank.
“Oh, can you tell me where the speakers have gone? I must see one of them a minute, that last man, Mr. Sherwood!” she cried eagerly.