‘Many years ago I wanted to go as a foreign mission‘ary,
but my way seemed hedged about. After a few years I went to live on the
Pacific coast. Life was rough in the mining country where I lived, and
this was my chance for missionary work.
I heard of a man over the hills who was dying of
consumption. “He is so vile,” they said, “no one can stand it to
stay with him; so the boys place food by him and leave him for twenty-four
hours. They’ll find him dead sometime, and the quicker the better. Never
had ‘a soul, I guess.”
The pity of it haunted me as I went about my work, and
I tried for three days to get some one to go and see him and find out if
he was in need of better care. As I turned from the last man, vexed with
his indifference, the thought came to me:
“Why don’t you go yourself? Here’s missionary
work, if you want it.”
I’ll not tell how I weighed the probable usefulness
of my going, or how I shrank from one so vile as he. It wasn’t the kind
of work I wanted.
At last one day I went over the hills to the little mud
cabin. It was just one room. The door stood open, and up in one corner on
some straw and colored blankets I found the dying man. Sin had left awful
marks on his face, and if I had not heard that he could not move, I should
have fled.
As my shadow fell over the floor he looked up and greeted me with a
dreadful oath.
“Don’t speak so, my friend,” I said.
“I ain’t your friend,” he said. “I never had any friends, and I
don’t want any now.”
I reached out, at arm’s length, the fruit I had brought him, and
stepping back to the doorway I asked him, hoping to find a tender place in
his heart, if he remembered his mother, but he cursed her. I asked him
if he ever had a wife, and he cursed her. I spoke of God, and he cursed
Him. I tried to speak of Jesus and His death for us, but he stopped me
with his oaths, and said:
"That's all a lie. Nobody ever died for others.”
I went away discouraged. I said to myself:
“I knew it was no use.”
But the next day I went again, and every day for two weeks, but he did
not show the gratitude of a dog. At the end of that time I said:
“I’m not going any more.”
That night, when I was putting my little boys to bed, I did not pray
for the miner, as I had been accustomed to do. My little Charlie noticed
it and said:
“Mamma, you did not pray for the bad man.”
“No,” I answered with a sigh.
“Have you given him up, mamma?”
“Yes, I guess so.”
“Has God given him up, mamma?”
That night I could not sleep, “The man dying, and so vile, with no
one to care!”
1got up and went away by myself to pray, but as my knees touched the
floor I was overpowered by the sense of how defective had been my prayers.
I had had no faith, and I had not really cared, beyond a half-hearted
sentiment. Oh, the shame, the sham, of my missionary zeal! I fell on my
face literally, as I cried:
“Oh, Christ, give me a little glimpse of the worth of
a human soul.”
I stayed on my knees until Calvary became a reality to
me. I cannot describe those hours. They came and went unheeded, but I
learned that night what I had never known before, what it is to travail
for a human soul. I saw my Lord that night as I had never seen Him before.
The next morning brought a lesson in Christian work I
had never learned before. I had waited on other days until the afternoon,
when, my work being all over, I could change my dress, put on my gloves,
and take a walk while the shadows were on the hillsides. That day, the
moment my little boys went off to school I left my work, and hurried over
the hills, not to see “that vile wretch,” hut to win a soul. There was
a human soul in the balance, and I wanted to get there quickly. As I
passed on, a neighbor come out of her house and said:
“I’ll go over the hills with you, I guess.”
I did not want her, but it was another lesson for me.
God could plan better than I could. She had her little girl with her. As
we reached the cabin she said:
“I’ll wait out here; and you’ll hurry, won’t
you?” I do not know what I expected, but the man greeted me with an
awful oath. It did not hurt me as it did before, for I was behind Christ,
and I stayed there. I could bear what struck Him first.
While I was changing the basin of water and towel for him, things which
I had done every day, and which he had used but never thanked me for, the
clea.r laugh of the little girl rang out upon the air like a bird’s
note.
“What’s that?” said the man eagerly.
“It’s a little girl outside who is waiting for me.”
“Would you mind letting her in?” he said, in a different tone
from any I had heard before.
Stepping to the door I beckoned to her, and then, taking her by the
hand, said:
“Come in and see the sick man, Mamie.”
She shrank back as she saw his face and said:
“I’se ‘fraid.”
But I assured her with, “Poor sick man! he can’t get up, and he
wants to see you.”
She looked like an angel, with her face framed in golden curls, her
eyes tender and pitiful, and in her hand the flowers she had picked from
the purple sage brush. Bending towards him she said:
“I sorry for ‘ou, sick man. Will ‘ou have a posy?” He laid his
great bony hand beyond the flowers on the plump hand of the child, and
tears came to his eyes, as he said:
“I had a little girl once, and she died. Her name was Mamie. She
cared for me. Nobody else did. Guess I’d been different if she’d
lived. I’ve hated everybody since she died.”
I knew at once I had the key to the man’s heart, and the thought came
quickly, born of that midnight prayer service:
“When I spoke of your mother and your wife you cursed them, and I
know now that they were not good women or you could not have done it.”
“Good women! Oh, you don’t know about that kind of
women. You can’t think what they was.”
“Well, if your little girl had lived and grown up
with them, wouldn’t she have been just like them? You would not have
liked to have her live for that, would you?”
He evidently had not thought of this, and his great
eyes looked off for a full minute. As they came back to mine he cried:
“Oh, no! no! I’d killed her first. I’m glad she
died.”
Reaching out and taking the poor hand I said:
“The dear Lord didn’t want her to be like them. He
loved her better than you did. So He took her away where she could be
cared for by the angels. He is keeping her for you. To-day she is waiting
for you Don’t you want to see her again?”
“Oh, I’d be willing to be burned alive a thousand
times over if I could just see my little gal once more, my little Mamie.”
Oh, what a blessed story I had to tell that hour, and I
had been so close to Calvary that night that I could tell it in earnest!
The poor face grew ashy pale as I talked, and the man
threw up his arms as though his agony was mastering him. Two or three
times he gasped as though losing breath. Then clutching me he said:
“What is that, woman, you said t’other day about
talkin’ to somebody out ‘o sight?”
“It’s praying. I tell God what I want.”
“Pray now! pray quick! Tell Him I want my little gal
again. Tell Him anything you want to.”
I took the hands of the child and placed them on the
trembling hand of the man. Then dropping on my knees, with the child in
front of me, I bade her pray for the man who had lost his little Mamie and
wanted to see her again. As nearly as I remember, this was Mamie‘s
prayer:
“Dear Jesus, this man is sick. He has lost his ‘ittle girl, and he
feels bad about it. I‘se so sorry for him, and he’s sorry too. Won’t
you help him, and show him where to find his ‘ittle girl? Do, please.
Amen.”
Heaven seemed to open before us. There stood One with the prints of the
nails in His hands and the wounds in His side.
Mamie slipped away soon, but the man kept saying:
“Tell Him more about it, tell Him everything—_but oh! you don’t
know.”
Then he poured out such a torrent of confession that I could not have
borne it but for the One that was close to us that hour, reaching out
after that lost soul.
It was the third day when the poor, tired soul turned from everything
to Him, the Mighty to save, “The Man that died for me.”
He lived on for four weeks, as if God would show how real was the
change. I had been telling him one day about a meeting, and he said:
“I’d like to go to meetin’ once. I never went to one of them
things.”
So we planned a meeting, and the boys came from the mills and the
mines, and filled the room.
“Now, boys,” said he, “get down on your knees while she tells
about that Man that died for me.”
I had been brought up to believe that a woman shouldn’t speak in
meeting, but I found myself talking, and I tried to tell the simple story
of the Cross.
After a while he said, “Oh, boys, you don’t half believe it, or you’d
cry; you couldn’t help it. Boys, raise me up. I’d like to tell it
once.”
So they raised him up, and between his short
breathing and coughing he told the story, and this, as well as I can
recall, is a part of what he said:
“Boys,” he said, “you know how the water runs
down the sluice-boxes and carries off all the dirt and leaves the gold
behind. Well, the blood of that Man she tells about went right over me
just like that; it carried off ‘bout everything. But it left enough for
me to see Mamie, and to see the Man that died for me. Oh, boys, can’t
you love Him?”
Some days after, I saw that the end was near, and as I
left him I said:
“What shall I say to-night, Jack?”
“Just ‘Good-night,’” he said, “and when we
meet again I’ll say ‘Good-morning’ up there.”
The next morning the door was closed, and I found two
men sitting silently by a board stretched across two stools. They turned
back the sheet, and I looked on the face of the dead, which seemed to have
come back nearer to the “image of God.”
“I wish you could have seen him when he went,” they said. “He
brightened up ‘bout midnight, an’ smiling said, ‘I’m going, boys.
Tell her I am going to see Mamie. Tell her I’m going to see the Man that
died for me’; and he was gone.”
(From "CALVARY'S CROSS" - a book published
in 1900)
