A Mother Answered with a Hymn
A missionary secretary of one of the Methodist churches in England once went to see a mother whose only remaining son had offered himself for foreign mission service. Two other sons had gone to the same country and there they had laid down their lives in the service of Christ and the natives. The secretary sympathetically referred to this pathetic fact, and wished to ascertain from the mother whether the last of her boys was to go with her full consent.
The mother grasped the trend of the visitor’s conversation, and, without waiting for the secretary to put the direct question, she very quietly repeated the lines she so often sang in church, which conveyed her spirit of surrender:
“Were the whole realm of nature mine,
That were a present far too small;
Love so amazing, so divine,
Demands my soul, my life, my all.”
There was no need for further questioning. The secretary said in my hearing, “I knelt with that mother and her boy and we had a tearful but beautiful season of prayer.”
It is not surprising that in the soldiers’ hours of danger, according to The War Romance of the Salvation Army, by Booth and Hill,[10]