Tom Hammond cast his eyes over the letter which Mrs. Joyce had sent him, and which ran thus:
“Dear Sir,
“I gave you my word that if ever I was in special trouble or need I would write, or come to you for help.
“I did not promise you, however, that if any great joy or blessing should come to me, that I would let you know. I don’t think I believed any joy could ever possibly come into my life again. But joy and wondrous gladness have come into my life, and in an altogether unexpected way.
“You will remember how I said to you in parting, that morning, that your strong, cheery words had given me a clearer view of God than any sermon I had ever listened to. That impression deepened rather than diminished when I got home. My husband, I heard, had been sent to Wandsworth Prison for a month, for assaulting the police when drunk.
“And in this month of quiet from his brutalities, the great joy of my life came to me. I began to attend religious services from the very first night after my return home. I went to church, chapel, mission hall, and Salvation Army.
“One night I went to the hall of the Mission for Railway Men. A lady was speaking that night, and God found me, and saved me. All that I had ever heard from my dear father’s lips, when he preached about conversion, came back to me, and that night I passed from death to life.
“The subject of the address was ‘The Coming of the Lord.’ I listened in amazement as the lady speaker declared that, for this age, God evidently meant that this truth of the near coming of Christ should have almost, if not quite, the most prominent place in all public preaching.
“I was startled to hear her say that there were nearly three hundred direct references to the second coming of Christ in the Gospels and Epistles, and that there were thus more than double the number of references to that subject than even to that of salvation through the blood of the Atonement.
“With her Bible in her hand, she turned readily to a score of passages as illustrations of her statement, and all through her address she never made a statement without backing it up by Scripture. One thing she said laid a tremendous grip upon me, and led me to an immediate decision for Christ: she said, ‘How often is the possibility of sudden death advanced by a preacher as an incentive to unsaved souls to yield to God!