e are hundreds going on with a half hope, not sure whether their
religion will stand them or not.

CONVERSION.

Mr. Moody's First Impulse in Converting Souls.

I want to tell you how I got the first impulse to work solely for the
conversion of men. For a long time after my conversion I didn't
accomplish anything. I hadn't got into my right place; that was it. I
hadn't thought enough of this personal work. I'd get up in prayer
meeting, and I'd pray with the others, but just to go up to a man and
take hold of his coat and get him down on his knees, I hadn't yet got
round to that. It was in 1860 the change came. In the Sunday school I
had a pale, delicate young man as one of the teachers. I knew his
burning piety, and assigned him to the worst class in the school. They
were all girls, and it was an awful class. They kept gadding around in
the school-room, and were laughing and carrying on all the while. And
this young man had better success than anyone else. One Sunday he was
absent, and I tried myself to teach the class, but couldn't do anything
with them; they seemed farther off than ever from any concern about
their souls. Well, the day after his absence, early Monday morning, the
young man came into the store where I worked, and, tottering and
bloodless, threw himself down on some boxes. "What's the matter?" I
asked, "I have been bleeding at the lungs, and they have given me up to
die," he said. "But you are not afraid to die?" I questioned, "No," said
he, "I am not afraid to die, but I have got to stand before God and give
an account of my stewardship, and not one of my Sabbath-school scholars
has been brought to Jesus. I have failed to bring one, and haven't any
strength to do it now."

He was so weighed down that I got a carriage and took that dying man in
it, and we called at the homes of everyone of his scholars, and to each
one he said, as best his faint voice would let him, "I have come to just
ask you to come to the Saviour," and then he prayed as I never heard
before. And for ten days he labored in that way, sometimes walking to
the nearest houses. And at the end of that ten days everyone of that
large class had yielded to the Saviour. Full well I remember the night
before he went away (for the doctors said he must hurry to the South),
how we held a true love-feast. It was the very gate of heaven, that
meeting. He prayed, and they prayed; he didn't ask them, he didn't think
they could pray; and then