J. Wilbur Chapman, one of the most successful pastor-evangelists of this generation, says that while in a revival-meeting, when a boy, his Sunday-school teacher touched him on the elbow, and said, “Do you not think you had better stand?” and that one touch, as much as anything else, pushed him into the kingdom.

Joseph F. Berry, whose name is a household word in the Methodist Episcopal Church, was led to Christ by two young friends who took the young printer to his father’s barn, and held a prayer-meeting with him, which resulted in a glorious conversion.

STUDY V.

The worth of A soul.

Memory Verse:  “For what is a man profited, if he gain the whole world,
    and lose his own soul?  Or what shall a man give in exchange for his
    soul?”—­(Matt. xvi, 26.)

Scripture for Meditation:  Luke xv, 1-10.

What is a life worth?  What is your life worth?  What is the life of your son or daughter or mother or wife worth?  What would you take for a life?  But if the life of a dear one be worth so much to you, what must be its value in God’s sight, who sees to what depths a soul may plunge and to what heights it may rise?  It may be a small matter to you that in yonder saloon is a man dissipated and drunken.  But what if he were your father or brother or husband?  It may be a very small matter to you that the boy whom you met on the street is puffing a cigarette and wears already upon his face the marks of an evil life.  But what if he were your boy or your brother?  Yet, in God’s sight, his life is as valuable as if he were your boy or your brother; and every soul is of infinite worth.

Jesus Christ set a high estimate upon human life when he left his Father’s throne and came into this sin-cursed world to suffer and die that he might redeem us from death.

The Church of to-day needs a new vision of the worth of a soul.  We need to stand beside Calvary and see the price that was paid there for human life.

John Keble, the poet-preacher of the English Church, said that the salvation of one soul is worth more than the framing of the Magna Charta of a thousand worlds.

It was meditation upon the words of the memory verse of this study that fired the souls of Ignatius Loyola and Francis Xavier with a holy enthusiasm to rescue the perishing multitudes.  Had their successors and disciples been, filled with the same enthusiasm, and kept themselves free from the machinations of politics, they would have long since evangelized the world, and Jesuitism would not have been “the scandal of Christianity.”

STUDY VI.

The death of A soul.

Memory Verse:  “Let him know, that he which converteth the sinner from
    the error of his way shall save a soul from death.”—­(James v, 20.)