I heard some people singing at a church prayer meeting the other
night,
'All for Jesus, all for Jesus,
All my being's ransomed powers,
All my thoughts, and all my doings,
All my days, and all my hours.'
and I kept wondering as I sat on the steps outside just what they
meant by it. It seems to me there's an awful lot of trouble in the
world that somehow wouldn't exist if all the people who sing such
songs went and lived them out. I suppose I don't understand. But
what would Jesus do? Is that what you mean by following His steps?
It seems to me sometimes as if the people in the big churches had
good clothes and nice houses to live in, and money to spend for
luxuries, and could go away on summer vacations and all that, while
the people outside the churches, thousands of them, I mean, die in
tenements, and walk the streets for jobs, and never have a piano or
a picture in the house, and grow up in misery and drunkenness and
sin."
The man suddenly gave a queer lurch over in the direction of the
communion table and laid one grimy hand on it. His hat fell upon the
carpet at his feet. A stir went through the congregation. Dr. West
half rose from his pew, but as yet the silence was unbroken by any
voice or movement worth mentioning in the audience. The man passed
his other hand across his eyes, and then, without any warning, fell
heavily forward on his face, full length up the aisle. Henry Maxwell
spoke:
"We will consider the service closed."
Chapter Two
Henry Maxwell and a group of his church members remained some time
in the study. The man lay on the couch there and breathed heavily.
When the question of what to do with him came up, the minister
insisted on taking the man to his own house; he lived near by and
had an extra room. Rachel Winslow said:
"Mother has no company at present. I am sure we would be glad to
give him a place with us."
She looked strongly agitated. No one noticed it particularly. They
were all excited over the strange event, the strangest that First
Church people could remember. But the minister insisted on taking
charge of the man, and when a carriage came the unconscious but
living form was carried to his house; and with the entrance of that
humanity into the minister's spare room a new chapter in Henry
Maxwell's life began, and yet no one, himself least of all, dreamed
of the remarkable change it was destined to make in all his after
definition of the Chri
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