The next day I called, and found this lady quite broken down, and ready to pray and listen to my teaching.  I was most thankful, and greatly relieved after the night’s restlessness.  I had much happiness in pointing out the way of salvation as an experimental thing.  She knew, before I did, the doctrine of the A tenement, but she had had no experience of its real efficacy.  Now that her eyes were opened, she was in right earnest to know the reality of sins forgiven.  Soon she found this, though not yet the joy of deliverance; she knew the peace and shelter of the sprinkled blood (Exod. 12:13), but not yet the joy and liberty of being on the rock on the other side of the Red Sea (Exod. 15:  2).  I was sure that it would all come in due time, and therefore was able to take comfort, and also to comfort her.

I saw a good deal of her at that time, and one day she told me that a relation of hers, a clergyman, was coming to have it out with me for saying that she was not converted before.

“Certainly,” I replied, “I shall be happy to meet him, and hope you will be in the room.”

When the dreaded man arrived, we were introduced to one another.

“Well,” he said, “you are a very different-looking than to what I imagined.  I have heard a deal about you.  So you are a Puseyite turned Evangelical, eh?  I have often heard of people going the other way, but I must say I have never met a man who had come in this direction.”  He then asked about the results of my industry.

I told him what was the effect in my church and parish, and that the same signs followed the preaching of the Gospel wherever I went.  “I wish,” he said, “you would come and preach in my parish.  You know a great friend of mine at Veryam and have preached in his pulpit.  Will you do the same for me?”

“Oh, yes,” I said, “certainly, with pleasure.”

“Now, look at me, for I am a man of business:  when will you come?  Name your day.”

I looked at my pocket-book, and fixed upon a certain Monday.

Then he arranged that we should have a kind of missionary meeting, “In the course of which,” he said, “you can preach as much Gospel as you like.  If it goes well, we will have a lecture the next evening on ’Heart Conversion,’ and another the evening following, on something else.”  He was “quite sure noone would come to hear a sermon only.  It must be a missionary meeting, or something of the kind, to bring the people out.”

On the day appointed, the barn where we were assembled was well filled, and seeing that the people were interested, the vicar gave out, “Mr Haslam will lecture tomorrow evening on Heart Conversion.”