Weep not over misspent youth, much may yet be done, even now. Crippled as you are, you may have a little work to show in return for His love. You may never have as much as others, but there is this consolation, you may love Him as dearly, obey Him as implicitly, follow Him as closely, and suffer for Him as gladly, as any of His church.
Sometimes I think you can know Him better for your very misery. Hear the ninety and nine telling the praises of the Good Shepherd; how he has led them, folded them, defended them. When all have spoken in concurrent testimony, the lost sheep, crippled, scarred, torn, speaks in tones low and full of pathos: “All you have said is true, but none of you know the dear Shepherd as I know him. I am the most unworthy of all, yet into the hills, among the wolves, in the dark night, through the cold streams, He came seeking me. I was bleeding, mangled on the rocks, ready to die. Through the pelting of the pitiless storm I heard Him call my name, saying, ‘Come home, come home.’ Tenderly he lifted me, gently bound up my wounds, patiently he carried me all the way. Ah, you know something of His love, but I know nothing else.”[else.”]
So it is. There is room in His mercy for all, and if there is no other gate into the city of refuge that you dare to enter, hold my hand and together we will go into this one, which he opened for us.
“Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.”
Transcriber’s Note
This text, frankly, is rife with errors. It is often not possible to attribute the errors of spelling and punctuation to the author or the printer. Generally, obvious punctuation errors (missing periods, unbalanced quotation marks, etc.) have been corrected, and noted in the table below.
Typographical mistakes (e.g. inverted or transposed letters, doubled syllables on line breaks, ‘halt’ for ‘half’, etc.) are also corrected and noted.