“But all the time the inward Light revealed to me that I must not only renounce everything I knew to be sinful, but make restitution, so far as I had the ability, for any wrong I had done to others before I could find peace with God.

“The entrance to the Heavenly Kingdom was closed against me by an evil act of the past which required restitution.  In a boyish trading affair I had managed to make a profit out of my companions, whilst giving them to suppose that what I did was all in the way of a generous fellowship.  As a testimonial of their gratitude they had given me a silver pencil-case.  Merely to return their gift would have been comparatively easy, but to confess the deception I had practised upon them was a humiliation to which for some days I could not bring myself.

“I remember, as if it were but yesterday, the spot in the corner of a room under the chapel, the hour, the resolution to end the matter, the rising up and rushing forth, the finding of the young fellow I had chiefly wronged, the acknowledgment of my sin, the return of the pencil-case—­the instant rolling away from my heart of the guilty burden, the peace that came in its place, and the going forth to serve my God and my generation from that hour.

“It was in the open street that this great change passed over me, and if I could only have possessed the flagstone on which I stood at that happy moment, the sight of it occasionally might have been as useful to me as the stones carried up long ago from the bed of the Jordan were to the Israelites who had passed over them dry-shod.

“Since that night, for it was near upon eleven o’clock when the happy change was realised, the business of my life has been not only to make a holy character but to live a life of loving activity in the service of God and man.  I have ever felt that true religion consists not only in being holy myself, but in assisting my Crucified Lord in His work of saving men and women, making them into His Soldiers, keeping them faithful to death, and so getting them into Heaven.

“I have had to encounter all sorts of difficulties as I have travelled along this road.  The world has been against me, sometimes very intensely, and often very stupidly.  I have had difficulties similar to those of other men, with my own bodily appetites, with my mental disposition, and with my natural unbelief.

“Many people, both religious and irreligious, are apt to think that they are more unfavourably constituted than their comrades and neighbours, and that their circumstances and surroundings are peculiarly unfriendly to the discharge of the duties they owe to God and man.

“I have been no exception in this matter.  Many a time I have been tempted to say to myself, ’There is no one fixed so awkwardly for holy living and faithful fighting as I am.’  But I have been encouraged to resist the delusion