supplication to the Saviour whom he had so often preached; and he, too,
entered into the new life.

'He made the great discovery,' Harold Begbie says. 'It had happened; the
longed-for event had come; he stood by himself, all by himself,
conscious now of the heart; no longer satisfied either with his own
intellect or the traditions of a church. The miracle had happened. He
had discovered the helplessness of humanity. He had discovered the need
of the soul. He had begun at last to see into the heart of things.' He
had been _born again_!

There are two kinds of progress. There is the progress that moves away
from infancy towards youth, towards maturity, towards age and
decrepitude. And there is a higher progress, a progress that moves
towards infancy. 'Except ye be converted and become as little children,'
Jesus said, 'ye shall not enter into the kingdom of God.' And the only
way of becoming a little child once more is by being _born again_. It is
the glory of the gospel that it offers a man that chance.

XIV

HEDLEY VICARS' TEXT

I

'_Those words are the sheet-anchor of my soul!_' said Hedley Vicars, a
gallant young Army officer, as he sat talking to his sweetheart in the
handsome drawing-room at Terling Place.

'_Those words are more golden than gold!_' exclaimed Miss Frances Ridley
Havergal, and she ordered that they should be inscribed upon her tomb.

'_Those words did give a great ease to my spirit!_' John Bunyan tells
us.

'_Those words_,' said old Donald Menzies, the mystic of Drumtochty,
'_those words fell upon me like a gleam from the Mercy-seat!_'

What words? Let us return to Hedley Vicars! He was only twenty-eight
when he fell, leading his regiment--the Ninety-seventh--in action before
Sebastopol. The enemy attacked suddenly under cover of the darkness.
'The men of the Ninety-seventh behaved with the utmost gallantry and
coolness,' said Lord Raglan, in the historic dispatch that reached
England on Good Friday, 1855. 'They were led by Captain Vicars, who,
unfortunately, lost his life in the engagement; and I am assured that
nothing could be more distinguished than the gallantry and good example
which he set to the detachment under his command.' His biographer tells
us that it was more than three years earlier--in November, 1851--that,
whilst awaiting in his room the return of a brother officer, he idly
turned over the leaves of a Bible which lay on the table. The words,
'_The blood of Jesus