’souls to meet
    And glory crowns the mercy-seat.’

This is no fanciful picture.  It is an every night occurrence.  The old times of the evangelical revival are lived over again in that ‘glory-room,’ and hundreds are started upon a new and higher life.

But it is time to separate, and with a verse of the soldiers’ parting hymn the comrades go their various ways, and the blessed Sabbath’s services are over—­over, all except one service more, the service in the barrack room, where each Christian man kneels down by his bed-cot and commends his comrades and himself to God.  In the case of new converts this is the testing-time.  They must kneel and pray.  It is the outward and visible sign of their consecration to God.  A hard task it is for most; not so hard to-day as it was a few years ago, but difficult still, and the grit of the man is shown by the way he faces this great ordeal.  Persecution generally follows, but he who bears it bravely wins respect, while he who fails is treated henceforth as a coward.  This testimony for Christ in the barrack room rarely fails to impress the most ungodly, though at the time the jeering comrades would be the last to acknowledge it.

At the risk of appearing to anticipate, let me tell a story.

=Jemmie’s Prayer.=

In a nullah in far-away South Africa lay about a dozen wounded men.  They had been lying there for hours, their lives slowly ebbing away.  One of them was a Roman Catholic, who had been a ringleader of persecution in the barrack room at home.  Not far from him lay ‘little Jemmie,’ wounded severely, whom many a time the Roman Catholic had persecuted in the days gone by.  Hour after hour the Roman Catholic soldier lay bleeding there, until at last a strange dizzy sensation came over him which he fancied was death.  He looked across to where, in the darkness, he thought he could distinguish ‘little Jemmie.’  With difficulty he crawled across to him, and bending over the wounded lad, he roused him.

‘Jemmie, lad,’ he said, ’I have watched you in the barrack room and seen you pray.  Jemmie, lad, do you think you could say a prayer for me?’

And Jemmie roused himself with an effort, and, trying hard to get upon his knees, he began to pray.  By-and-by the other wounded soldiers heard him, and all who could crawl gathered round, and there, in that far-away nullah, little Jemmie ‘said a prayer’ for them all.  Surely a strange and almost ghastly prayer-meeting that!  As they prayed, some one noticed the flicker of a light in the distance.  They knew not who it was—­Briton or Boer—­who moved in the distant darkness.  Jemmie, however, heeded it not, but prayed earnestly for deliverance.  The light came nearer, and the wounded lads began to call with all their remaining strength for help.  And at last it came to them—­the light of a British stretcher party—­and they were carried to help and deliverance.