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Show FROM DARKNESS TO LIGHT. Instances of men being suddenly brought from moral darkness into spiritual light are authenticated. The case of the celebrated Col. Gardner, an English soldier, is an illustration of this immediate transformation. <br><br> He was an atheist and a rake, whose ideal of life was sensual pleasure. One day, while meditating an act of gross [unreadable] he was as suddenly and a thoroughly transformed as was Saul of Tarsus. He became not only a theist, but an [unreadable] working Christian, whose subsequent life attested to the genuineness of the sudden change from darkness to light. <br><br> The believer in the Fatherhood of God, and in His being everywhere present? will have little difficulty in [unreadable] the source of such moral changes. <br><br> One almost as extraordinary as [unreadable] Gardner's occurred to an American soldier. It is reported in [unreadable line] Reminiscences of Dr. Channing? The narrator is a lady of culture, well-known in Boston, as is also the gentleman of whom the incident is told. <br><br> One day, in the summer of 1812, a young man entered Miss Peabody's book-store and asked for Kant's? works. His original and ocular remarks attracted her attention. He seemed versed in the history of religious doctrines, and was evidently a philosopher and a theologian. Conversation led to confidence, and he told the lady something of his personal history. <br><br> A graduate of West Point, he entered the army at nineteen, and was sent to fight the Florida Indians. He was fond of mathematics, of the science of war, military biography, and of Byron's and Shelley's poetry. Shelley's "Queen Mab" had been his gospel, and his theology was also Shelley's; namely that God is merely a complex of the laws of nature. <br><br> Events left him in command of a company of desperadoes. In order to preserve the prestige of his authority, he kept himself aloof from them, living alone in his tent. <br><br> One day, during a long interval between fightings with the Indians, he was meditating, in his tent, on his power over the brutal soldiers under his command. "These men," said he to himself, "are governed not by the complex of my thoughts, nor by the complex of the laws of nature, of which they know nothing, but by me - a self-determining force, a free spirit, a person." <br><br> Then suddenly this thought came to him "And God is behind the complex of the laws of nature - a self-acting, free, supreme, infinite Person, to whom all finite persons are responsible." <br><br> Starting from his seat, he seized "Queen Mab" and flung it out the door of his tent. Opening his valise, he took out the Bible that his mother had put into it when he left home. <br><br> As he opened the book his eye fell on the words quoted by Christ from Isaiah, the day He began His ministry: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me." <br><br> As he read, he though he heard the roar of artillery. Springing to his tent door, he saw, heard nothing. The roar was within his own soul. Reading the New Testament begot a desire to leave the army and become a minister of Christ. Honor forbade him to resign, he being in enemy's country. So he prayed that God would release him from his bonds. <br><br> He was stricken down by malarial fever. The surgeon said he should resign and go home to die. He did resign, came to Boston, and, instead of dying, recovered his health and began the study of theology. <br><br> Was it chance? Was it even his own thought that directed this lieutenant to the personality of God, and to the words of Isaiah? - Youth's Companion. |