Frank Higgins is a pastor, preacher, friend and brother to his heterogeneous flock. Their concerns are his interests and they know that if they need assistance this minister will extend it gladly. The following incident will illustrate this point:
A. M. was a man who had followed the camps for years. In his years of logging he had acquired a little property, was happily married, and several children came to lighten his home. His wages were above his expenditures and he was making financial progress. But if you wish to introduce a change in the even march of progress, introduce drink. This is what A. did.
A HOMESTEADER'S SHACK
It was then the old, old story of retrogression through alcohol. The property he prized as the fruit of industry gradually passed into other hands and a darker side of life was seen, in which the woodsman, his wife and children were all involved. The saloons handled his wages and a respected man sank into the maw of appetite.
In one of the saloons the Rev. F. E. Higgins found the rum-soaked Scotchman on the verge of delirium tremens. The missionary took the helpless man to his home in the forest and began to nurse him back to health and sobriety. Two days and nights he sat beside the bed until the drunken visions passed and reason began to return.
While the missionary was attending his self-assumed patient he gathered every piece of the man's clothing into a bundle and sent them over to the home of a neighbor. Not a single garment belonging to the man was left in the house. It was a course of heroic treatment that was in store for the patient.
When M. began to regain his reason he was besides himself for liquor, but there was none to be had. Leaping from the bed he sought in all parts of the house for his clothing so he could return to the saloons and quench the consuming thirst, but no successful find rewarded his diligence. He begged for his clothing, but the man who sat beside his bed was deaf to entreaty. It was a seige in which the besieged could not even claim the primitive fig leaf. If the watcher had not restrained him he would have rushed out of the house, but the man who had sent his clothes away never relaxed his vigilance The house was a prison.
The hours passed and the man became milder. The Sky Pilot drew out memories of better days; the long-closed chambers of memory slowly opened, and with the return came the recollections of the days when freedom crowned the life and evil habits were as yet unborn. Such remembrances create the desire to reproduce again the life of freedom. While M. was sighing for the past joys, Mr. Higgins was pointing him to the One who said, "I came that ye might have life, and have it more abundantly." At last in the shadow of the sin absorbing Cross the brawny preacher and weakened slave knelt side by side. To him who proclaimed liberty to the captive and to them that are bound they prayed, and when they arose two freemen clasped hands in friendship and Christian fellowship.
M. realized that while he was free, yet sin had weakened him, so he gathered his belongings together and with his family left the place of his temptation and fall and emigrated to Manitoba. While I write, a letter is on my desk. It is from M.'s wife telling of his later life. She who wrote the letter was a Catholic, but she tells of the God-given strength that came to M., how during the years since his conversion he had lived under the sustaining grace of Christ. "Both my husband and son united with the Presbyterian Church here, and when at last they brought the father from a northern camp, bruised and dying, his faith held fast to the Savior who took him from the pit."