Pardon for all flows from His side;
My Lord, my Love, is crucified.”
Philip was greatly struck, alike with the warmth and energy of the singers and the directly evangelical character of the hymn. During his residence at Oxford he had, at first, been half inclined to accept the almost infidel views which at that time were tacitly held by not a few of the tutors and even the clerics of that famous university. A candid perusal of the Scriptures, however, for he was a genuine seeker after truth, and an attendance on the ministry of a godly and effective clergyman, who had rallied round him the evangelical element of the various colleges, rendered Philip utterly dissatisfied with the loose tenets he had been accustomed to hear. When he left college he was the subject of unavowed but strong conviction as to the importance and necessity of experimental religion, but as yet was very much at sea as to the Gospel plan of salvation. Philip noiselessly entered the kitchen, and took an unnoticed place among the rural worshippers.
Much to his surprise, he saw Nathan Blyth standing in the moveable pulpit, and, in obedience to his solemn invitation, “Let us pray!” Philip knelt with the rest, while Natty, who knew from happy and long experience how to talk with God, led their devotions in an extempore prayer, the like of which he had never heard before. Nathan’s sermon that night was founded on the text that stirred the heart and baffled the mind of the Ethiopian eunuch: “He was led as a sheep to the slaughter: and like a lamb dumb before his shearer, so opened he not his mouth:” and included the sable nobleman’s inquiry, “Of whom speaketh the prophet this? of himself, or of some other man?”
Of that “Other Man” Natty spoke as one who knew Him. He placed the atonement in a light so clear, and the love of the Atoner in a manner so impressive, that Philip found himself listening with a beating heart and a swimming eye. In plain, but powerful language, the speaker urged his hearers to accept the proffered gift of God. The congregation joined in singing that stirring hymn,—
“All ye that pass by,
To Jesus draw nigh;
To you is it nothing that Jesus should die?
Your ransom and peace,