Look on the sunny side

by Ruth Lamb

The young Sunday-school teacher was very anxious about his infidel companion, and he told him so. He offered to lend him some good books, and the other said he was willing to read them. He took them in a pleasant way and read them; but without being in the least changed in his opinions. He only laughed as before, but when he returned the books, he said to his friend:

"I have read all you wished me; now it is only fair you should see my side of the question. You promised me you would read some of mine after I had done with yours. Here they are. Keep your word as I have done mine."

The poor young man had made this rash promise without asking counsel of God. He was too self-confident for that; and he could not bear for an infidel to reproach him with breaking even a rash promise. So he took the books and read them, after boasting that they and ten thousand such could not alter him or turn him from his faith. The result proved the folly of his boastfulness, and the vanity of trying to stand without a better strength than our own to hold us up so that we may be safe. He proved, by miserable experience, that there is no touching pitch without being defiled. Those wretched books, full of subtle arguments which he was not scholar enough to answer, or Christian strong enough to withstand, unsettled his mind, and he became a worse man by far than the companion who had been his tempter.

Time passed on and saw him worse and worse. An open blasphemer, an evil liver! At last he was laid on a sick bed without hope of recovery, and, surely, few more miserable sights have over been witnessed than his last days offered to those around him.

He raved about his former life, the faith he once possessed, and his present hopeless condition, and nothing gave him comfort. Many strove to remind him of God's love and mercy in Christ—of the Saviour's words of comfort to the dying thief on the cross; of the measure dealt out to those who began to work in the vineyard even at the eleventh hour.

"I know, I know," he would cry, "but there is no mercy for me. The dying thief had not been taught as I was. The labourers went into the vineyard at the eleventh hour; but they went when they were bidden. I left my work. I sinned against light and knowledge. There is no mercy for me now."

I am often called up, as you know, to go and pray with the sick and dying, and, in the middle of the night, a message came to ask me to go to this young man. Dear friends, that was the most dreadful experience I ever had, the only time I ever was restrained in prayer.

I knelt by the bedside, but it seemed to me as if the heavens were as brass above me. I longed to pray but no words could I utter. At last, I just said the Lord's Prayer, it was all I could say, and I got up from my knees compelled to own that I was unable to pray.

"I knew it, I knew it," the dying man cried. "I went wrong with my eyes open. There is no mercy for me."

I shall never forget that hour as long as I live, and whenever I hear the name of a professed atheist mentioned, that scene comes back to my mind, and I seem to hear again that despairing cry ringing in my ears. The poor man died before the morning. God grant that I may never see such another death-bed.