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Handful of Stars

<h2>XIV</h2> <h3>HEDLEY VICARS' TEXT</h3> <h3>I</h3> 'Those words are the sheet-anchor of my soul!' said Hedley Vicars, a gallant young Army officer, as he sat talking to his sweetheart in the handsome drawing-room at Terling Place. 'Those words are more golden than gold!' exclaimed Miss Frances Ridley Havergal, and she ordered that they should be inscribed upon her tomb. 'Those words did give a great ease to my spirit!' John Bunyan tells us. 'Those words,' said old Donald Menzies, the mystic of Drumtochty, 'those words fell upon me like a gleam from the Mercy-seat!' What words? Let us return to Hedley Vicars! He was only twenty-eight when he fell, leading his regiment--the Ninety-seventh--in action before Sebastopol. The enemy attacked suddenly under cover of the darkness. 'The men of the Ninety-seventh behaved with the utmost gallantry and coolness,' said Lord Raglan, in the historic dispatch that reached England on Good Friday, 1855. 'They were led by Captain Vicars, who, unfortunately, [Pg 161] lost his life in the engagement; and I am assured that nothing could be more distinguished than the gallantry and good example which he set to the detachment under his command.' His biographer tells us that it was more than three years earlier--in November, 1851--that, whilst awaiting in his room the return of a brother officer, he idly turned over the leaves of a Bible which lay on the table. The words, 'The blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanseth us from all sin,' caught his eyes and profoundly impressed his mind. 'If,' he said, as he closed the sacred Volume, 'if this be true, I will henceforth live by the grace of God as a man should live who has been redeemed by the blood of Jesus Christ.' That night he could scarcely sleep; the great words repeated themselves again and again within his throbbing brain; they seemed too good to be true. 'All sin! All sin!' 'Cleanseth from all sin!' 'The blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanseth us from all sin.' He never tired of telling of that wonderful experience. Miss Marsh, to whom he was engaged to be married, says that, almost as soon as they were first introduced to each other, 'he gave her an outline of the manner in which God had worked the great change in his heart. With forceful simplicity he told the point of the story; how the words, "The blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanseth us from all sin," became the sheet-anchor of his soul, [Pg 162] adding, "Thus was I born again of the Word of God which liveth and abideth for ever!"' <h3>II</h3> Away back in the infancy of the world I hear one of the earliest of the Patriarchs uttering a great and bitter cry. 'I have sinned!' he cries; 'what shall I do?' And, as I turn over the leaves of my Bible, I find that question echoed again and again, generation after generation and age after age. Yet never once does it receive the slightest hint or suggestion of an answer. And, depend upon it, if the Son of Man had never come into the world, it would have echoed round the globe--still unanswered and unanswerable--until this day. 'O Plato, Plato!' cried Socrates, 'it may be that the gods can forgive sin, but, alas, I do not see how!' Nor anybody else. Job's question fell back upon his face; the universe could give him no reply. It is very striking. And so, here at the beginning of my Bible, I hear the first man's question; and, here at the end of my Bible, I hear the last man's answer! 'What shall I do? What shall I do?' 'I have sinned; what shall I do?' 'The blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanseth us from all sin!' <h3>III</h3> These two men--Job and John--present us, first with a comparison, and then with a contrast. It is [Pg 163] interesting to examine side by side their views of the sin that represented so terrific a problem. Job thought of it as a contaminating thing. He felt that his soul was soiled. 'What shall I do?' he cries, 'what shall I do? If I bathe myself in snow water and wash my hands never so clean, yet shalt Thou plunge me in the ditch and mine own clothes shall abhor me!' Every day of his life he thought he heard, morning and noon and night, the awful Voice of the Most High. 'Though thou wash thee with niter, and take thee much soap, yet thine iniquity is marked before Me, saith the Lord God.' He felt as Macbeth felt when advised to cleanse the stain from his guilty hands. <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood Clean from my hand! No, this my hand will rather The multitudinous seas incarnadine, Making the green one red! </div> </div> Job was like the old lama, in Rudyard Kipling's Kim, who, year after year, wandered through cities and rice-fields, over the hills and across the plains, always searching, but searching in vain, for the River, the River of the Arrow, the River that could cleanse from sin! John, on the other hand, thought of sin as a condemning thing. The great word 'condemnation' occurs on almost every page of his writings. He feels that every man's sin carries its own conviction. It is like finger-print evidence; it speaks for itself; [Pg 164] it needs no long procession of corroborating witnesses. There it is! It tells its own terrible tale, and there is no gainsaying it. <h3>IV</h3> And yet, looked at in another way, the thoughts of these two men stand in sharp and striking contrast, the one with the other. 'I have sinned,' cried Job; 'what shall I do? What shall I do?' But there is no reply. In the course of the stupendous drama that bears his name, Job scours sea and land, earth and sky, for some answer to the wild questionings of his soul. He climbs the summits of the loftiest mountains and thrids the labyrinth of the deepest mine; he calls to the heights of the heavens and to the depths of the sea. But there is no answering voice, and he is left to nurse his dumb and piteous despair. Every attempt that he makes to rid his soul of its defilement is like the effort of a man who, in trying to remove the stain from his window, rubs on the wrong side of the glass. But, in contrast with all this, John saw the Cross! How could he ever forget it? Had he not stood beside it, gazed into the thorn-crowned face, and received from those quivering lips their last sacred bequest--the charge of the Saviour's mother? And, all through the eventful years that followed, John never tired of presenting the Cross as the only answer to the Patriarch's question. He may not [Pg 165] have perfectly understood it--no man ever yet comprehended all its heights and sounded all its depths! But it is easier to accept it than to reject it. For, if I reject it, I am confronted by an enigma even more unanswerable than Job's. <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> Oh, why was He there as the Bearer of sin If on Jesus my guilt was not laid? Oh, why from His side flowed the sin-cleansing stream, If His dying my debt has not paid? </div> </div> If, that is to say, the Cross is not the divine answer to the mystery of all the ages, then who shall attempt to solve the dark, inscrutable, impenetrable mystery of the Cross? <h3>V</h3> But it is! Experience proves it! In the course of his dazzling Apocalypse, John tells us that he saw a war being waged in heaven; and the hosts of righteousness overcame their powerful and sinister foes by the virtue of the blood of the Lamb. I do not know what he means--never expect to know in this world. But I know that, in this life, something very like it happens every day. Martin Luther says that, in one of his periods of depression at the Wartburg, it seemed to him that he saw a hideous and malignant form inscribing the record of his own transgressions round the walls of his room. There seemed to be no end to the list--sins of thought, sins of word, sins of deed, sins of omission, sins of commission, secret sins, open [Pg 166] sins--the pitiless scribe wrote on and on interminably. Whilst the accuser was thus occupied, Luther bowed his head and prayed. When he looked up again, the writer had paused, and, turning, faced him. 'Thou hast forgotten just one thing!' said Luther. 'And that--?' asked his tormentor. 'Take thy pen once more and write across it all: "The blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanseth us from all sin!"' And, at the utterance of those words, the spirit vanished and the walls were clean! In his Grace Abounding, Bunyan tells us of a period in his life during which his soul seemed to be held in fetters of brass; and, every step he took, he took to the sound of the clanking of chains. 'But about ten or eleven o'clock on a certain day,' he says, 'as I was walking under a hedge (full of sorrow and guilt, God knows), suddenly this sentence rushed in upon me, "The blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanseth us from all sin." At this I made a stand in my spirit and began to conceive peace in my soul, and methought I saw as if the tempter did leer and steal away from me, as being ashamed of what he had done. At the same time also I had my sin and the blood of Christ thus represented to me: that my sin, when compared to the blood of Christ, was no more to it than this little clod or stone is to the vast and wide field that here I see. This gave me good encouragement.' Neither Martin Luther nor John Bunyan would [Pg 167] object to my setting them in the company of Donald Menzies. For, like them, Donald was at war with principalities and powers, with the rulers of the darkness of this world, with spiritual wickedness in high places. In the lonely anguish of that grim struggle it seemed as though, at the last, the gates of hell must have prevailed against him. 'Then,' he says, 'I heard a voice, oh, yes, as plain as you are hearing me: "The blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanseth us from all sin." It was like a gleam from the Mercy-seat, but I waited to see whether Satan had any answer and my heart was standing still. But there was no word from him, not one word. Then I leaped to my feet and cried, "Get thee behind me, Satan!" And I looked round, and there was no one to be seen but Janet in her chair with the tears on her cheeks, and she was saying, "Thanks be to God which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ!"' 'When I uttered those words,' says Luther, 'the evil spirit vanished and the walls were clean!' 'When I made a stand upon those words,' says Bunyan, 'the tempter did steal away from me and I entered into peace!' 'When I heard those words,' says Donald Menzies, 'I waited to see if Satan had any answer, but there was no word from him, not one word!' This, surely, is what the seer means when he says that he saw all the hosts of evil routed and scattered by the virtue of the blood of the Lamb. [Pg 168] <h3>VI</h3> Down at the library yesterday afternoon I spent an hour in glancing through the various volumes of Southey's Commonplace Book. And, among a vast assortment of musty notes that are now of interest to nobody, I came upon this: 'I have been reading of a man on the Malabar coast who had inquired of many devotees and priests as to how he might make atonement for his sins. At last he was directed to drive iron spikes, sufficiently blunted, through his sandals, and on these spikes he was to place his naked feet and then walk a distance of five hundred miles. He undertook the journey, but loss of blood and exhaustion of body compelled him to rest one day under the shade of a spreading tree. As he lay there, a missionary approached and began to preach the gospel. He announced as his theme the words: "The blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanseth us from all sin." Whilst the evangelist still preached, the man sprang up, tore off his sandals, and cried aloud: "That is what I want! That is what I want!" And he became a living witness to the fact that the redeeming blood of Christ does cleanse from human guilt.' 'That is what I want!' cried Southey's pilgrim on the coast of Malabar. 'That is what I want!' cried Luther in the Wartburg. 'That is what I want!' cried Bunyan at Bedford. [Pg 169] 'That is what I want!' cried Donald Menzies at Drumtochty. 'That is what I want!' exclaimed young Hedley Vicars, as his startled eyes fell upon the tremendous words that seemed to leap from the Bible on the table. 'The blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanseth us from all sin.' 'That is what I want! That is what I want!' Hedley Vicars appropriated the priceless gift held out to him, and his whole life was transfigured in consequence. His life--and his death! For, on that fatal night before Sebastopol, it was with Hedley Vicars as it was with the soldier with whom the poet has familiarized us. Everybody knows the story. Two men of God moved in the darkness across the field on which, that day, a battle had been fought. <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> And now they stand Beside a manly form, outstretched alone. His helmet from his head had fallen. His hand Still firmly grasped his keen but broken sword. His face was white and cold, and, thinking he was gone, They were just passing on, for time was precious, When a faint sigh caught their attentive ears. Life was still there, so bending down, They whispered in his ears most earnestly, Yet with that hush and gentleness with which We ever speak to a departing soul-- 'Brother! the blood of Jesus Christ, God's Son, Cleanseth from every sin.' </div> <div class="stanza"> The pale lips moved, And gently whispered 'hush!' and then they closed, And life again seemed gone. [Pg 170]</div> <div class="stanza"> But yet once more They whispered those thrice blessed words, in hope To point the parting soul to Christ and heaven-- 'Brother! the precious blood of Jesus Christ Can cleanse from every sin.' </div> <div class="stanza"> Again the pale lips moved, All else was still and motionless, for Death Already had his fatal work half done; But gathering up his quickly failing strength, The dying soldier--dying victor--said: 'Hush! for the angels call the muster roll! I wait to hear my name!' </div> <div class="stanza"> They spoke no more. What need to speak again? for now full well They knew on whom his dying hopes were fixed, And what his prospects were. So, hushed and still, They, kneeling, watched. </div> <div class="stanza"> And presently a smile, As of most thrilling and intense delight, Played for a moment on the soldier's face, And with his one last breath he whispered 'Here!' </div> </div> 'I have sinned! What shall I do?' cries this despairing soul at the beginning of my Bible. 'The blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanseth us from all sin!' answers the man who leaned upon the Saviour's breast and gazed full into the thorn-crowned face of the Crucified. 'That is what I want!' exclaims the man at Malabar, speaking, not for himself alone, but for each and all of us. 'Those words are more golden than gold!' says [Pg 171] Miss Havergal, as she orders them to be inscribed upon her tomb. 'They are like a gleam from the Mercy-seat!' cries Donald Menzies. 'They are the sheet-anchor of my soul!' Hedley Vicars tells his sweetheart. And he is a very wise man who, in the straits of his experience, stakes his faith upon that which such witnesses have tested and have found sublimely true. [Pg 172] <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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