ng from Him a
cry of such unutterable anguish as never before rose from human lips.
And at that cry the vision passed, and I awoke to find myself in hell
once more, but in my heart there was a stirring as of the wings of
hope--the hope which I had deemed dead for ever.

_Could_ it be--O God of mercy! was it possible that even now it might
not be too late?--that there was indeed One Who could make my sin as
though it had never been?

But to this hope there succeeded a moment when the agonised thought,
"How if there be no Christ?" leapt out at me, like the darkness which
looms but the blacker for the lightning-flash; a moment when hell got
hold of me again, and a thousand gibbering devils arose to shriek in my
ear: "And though there be a Christ, is it not now too late?"

I reeled at that cry, and the darkness once more closed in around. A
horde of hideous thoughts, the very spawn of hell, swarmed like vermin
in my mind; there was the breath as of a host of contending fiends upon
my face; a hundred hungry hands seemed to lay hold on me, and to strive
to drag me down and down to a bottomless pit that opened at my very
feet, and into which I felt myself slipping. With a great cry to God I
strove to rise, but my strength failed me, and I had fallen back into
the abyss had not one, white-robed as the morning, come suddenly to
succour me by stretching forth a hand of aid; and so--beating and
battling like a drowning man for breath--I fought my way out, and fell
sobbing and faint upon the pit's brink. And with a great cry of anguish
I prayed aloud, "Lord Christ! I am foul and sinful! I do not know that I
love Thee! I do not even know that I have repented of my sins! I only
know that I cannot do the things I would do, and that I can never undo
the evil I have done. But I come to Thee, Lord Jesus, I come to Thee as
Thou biddest me. Send me not away, O Saviour of sinners."

As I made an end of praying, I looked up and saw standing beside me One,
thorn-crowned and with wounded side, _Whose features were the features
of a man, but Whose face was the face of God_.

And as I looked upon that face I shrank back dazed, and breathless, and
blinded--shrank back with a cry like the cry of one smitten of the
lightning; for beneath the wide white brows there shone out eyes, before
the awful purity of which my sin-stained soul seemed to scorch and to
shrivel like a scroll in a furnace. But as I lay, lo! there came a
tender touch upon my h