ve was
on my side. I think I never felt so much as in this case the utter
powerlessness of human influence to bring the soul to God. He spoke
calmly of death; but when I asked him what was the ground of his hope
beyond the grave, he replied:

"I have never done any one harm; I have tried to live right."

I replied earnestly: "Do not trust to any such refuge as that."

I then warned him against any hope not founded on Christ alone. He
acknowledged that what I said was true, and seemed for a moment
disturbed. I cannot recall another conversation in our earlier
acquaintance, in which I was able to speak with any earnestness, or in
which he seemed at all impressed. I could only pray: "Lord, open his
eyes!" It is very wonderful to me, on looking back, to see how God was
leading him all this time. Once he told me of a sermon which he had
heard months before, upon the text: "Set thine house in order, for thou
shalt die, and not live." He had never been so impressed by a sermon;
he could not forget it.

Occasionally, I observed that his mind was well stored with the Prayer
Book version of the Psalms. Sometimes he would quote a petition,
telling me it had been specially upon his mind. Upon inquiry, I found
that at home in England, he had been a chorister boy at church. He has
since told me he used to sing the Psalms without any sense of their
meaning. Probably the words were never explained to him, or impressed
upon him in any way. It was a mere form of a church which confirmed its
members at fifteen years old, with very little cognizance of their
spiritual life. William, however, had not been confirmed. It would seem
from his subsequent life that the words he had chanted, from Sunday to
Sunday, had no effect on him, but now, in his last days, God was
bringing them home to his heart, over all the years of his
carelessness, and accomplishing that which he pleased. It has helped me
to believe that it is not in vain to store the mind of thoughtless
Sunday-school scholars with the Word of God, and that in the most
formal Christian Church the words of Scripture are not lost.

But all this time William's temporal wants were increasingly pressing.
His father had been obliged to sell their little stock of furniture,
and the house was broken up. One night his sister told me that William
had not so much as a place to sleep in. She took him in with her own
children for a few days. I recommended that he should go into St.
Luke's Hospi