"As Clifford's friend, may I crave the honour of offering my hand to your lordship?" inquired the Missionary.
"Certainly," replied the young nobleman (if such he was), and then the Christian visitor grasped his hand, and holding it with mild restraint, looked him full in the face, and said, "You are in danger, my lord. This dissipation will injure your person, your good name, your fortune, and perhaps your country. Be wise. Like a certain young ruler mentioned in the Gospel, approach the Lord Jesus, and ask, 'What shall I do to inherit eternal life?'"
A deep colour rose to the face of the young man, and he stepped hastily away; but turning back, as by sudden impulse, he again offered his hand to his reprover, and said, "I thank you, sir;" and was then lost in the crowd of the gay and dissipated.
"You are in danger my lord."
Some weeks after this event, the night visitor met the gentleman, and had tea with him in a café. As they sat together at the small round marble table, the Missionary observed, "To me it is astonishing that you can live such a life as you are doing; heaping up wrath against the day of wrath. From a child you have known the Holy Scriptures, and I am surprised that texts do not at times rise to your memory, and produce a fearful looking forward to judgment!"
"Such is not the case," he replied, "strange as you may regard it. There is only one matter of memory which ever troubles me, and that is the verses of a child's hymn which our mother used to teach us as we knelt at her side in the nursery,—
'Almighty God, Thy piercing eye
Strikes through the shades of night;
And our most secret actions lie
All open to Thy sight.'
"At times these verses flash across my mind at most inconvenient seasons, and destroy my enjoyment; they occurred when you first spoke to me in the saloon, and the other night I caught myself repeating them when playing an important game of billiards." The pocket Bible was produced, and the words solemnly read,—"He hath appointed a day in the which He will judge the world in righteousness by that Man whom He hath ordained; whereof He hath given assurance unto all men in that He hath raised Him (Jesus) from the dead."