The World's Greatest Books [Volumes 1-15, 17-20]

And then--driven out from their midst by the very Christian women who should have been the first to have held out a hand to save--I saw her turn away with a heart hardened into indifference, and plunge headlong into a bottomless gulf of ignominy and sin. Nor did the vision pass until, out of that seething vortex of lust and infamy, I saw arise the black phantom of a lost soul crying out unto God and His Christ for judgment upon the betrayer.

As these hideous spectres of the past came before me, I fell to the ground, borne down by a burden of agony greater even than the very damned in hell can bear. But even as I fell, that burden was lifted and borne away from me, and then I saw, as in a vision, One kneeling in prayer. And I, who had cried out that I could bear the burden of my sin no longer, saw that upon Him was laid, not only my sin, but the sins of the whole world, and that He stooped of His own accord to receive them. And as I looked upon the Divine dignity of that agonised form--forsaken of His Father that we might never be forsaken--I saw great beads of blood break out like sweat upon His brow, and I heard wrung 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 head, and a voice in my ear that whispered, "Son."

And as the word died away into a silence like the hallowed hush of listening angels, and I stretched forth my arms with a cry of unutterable longing and love, I say that He held one by the hand--even the one who had plucked me out of the abyss into which I had fallen--and I saw that it was Dorothy--Dorothy whom He had sought out and saved from the shame to which my sin had driven her, and whom He had sent to succour me, that so He might set upon my soul the seal of His pardon and of His peace.