PRACTICAL CHRISTIANITY.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXII, Issue 921, 22 November 1910, Page 4

PRACTICAL CHRISTIANITY.

The Archbishop of York, in his helpful volume entitled, “Some Thoughts on the Miracles of Jesus as Marks on the Way of Ifffe,” tells the following ; “ it was wet and wintry night in the slums of a great town. A woman rushed out from a miserable house of iniquity as I passed and clutched my arm. “ There’s a young man dying in the house: come and pray for him.” She led me through a kitchen filled with men and women, such as I pray I may never see again—too deeply drunk in stupor of drink and lust to notice us. At the top of a rickety staircase we reached an attic, where on a mattress on the floor a young man lay stretched, hollow and pallid, in the last stages of consumption. “Pray with him,” she whispered, and turned to go. I asked her to stay. “ My God, no,” was her reply. “ I’m a bad woman ; I won’t stay to spoil the prayer.” And she went. The young man told me his story. He had wandered into the town penniless, to die. The woman had met him and had pitied him. He was dying; he had nothing to give. her. But she took him to the attic : for three weeks she had nursed and tended him. With her earnings—God forgive them !—she had bought him simple delicacies; she had day after day fought her way with them through the wolves of the kitchen, and her face was bruised with the struggles: “God bless her ! ” he muttered. In a day he was dead. At the graveside there was but one other present with the clerk and the parish undertaker —the young woman, her shawl drawn over her head. At the end I turned to speak to her, and thank her, but she had gone in the pouring rain, and I could not overtake her, I never saw her again. But I thought of the words, “The publican and the harlot shall enter into the Kingdom of Heaven before you.” Could any life show at the great Day any such record of self-sacrifice and compassion ?