Slowly she grew strong.  One night she went to the sloping bank by the lake under the great pine trees to attend the twilight service.  The sky was crimson with the sunset and there was a wonderful path of light across the lake.  The songs and the beauty moved Mary’s soul.  She wanted something with all her heart that she had never wanted before.  She did not know what it (the great change) was at first, but before she slept she turned to another girl in the tent and expressed it as best she could—­“I want to be good,” she said.

Through the weeks that followed she saw in the faces, in the kindness and courtesy, in the good times she had never known, in the women who planned them and in the songs and talks at sunset a Person.  She heard His name often.  He represented all of the happiness and comfort she had ever known and one day with all the eagerness of an awakened soul she said, “I love Him.”  They told her what changes must come in the life of a girl who said those words and meant them, for they had seen the faults in her and they were many.  She was undaunted by all they said she must do, and answered in her uncouth fashion, “I’d die doin’ them fur Him.”

They wanted her to leave the mill but she said no, one of the girls was leaving and she was to have her place with lighter work.  She wanted to go back and tell the girls some things, she said.

Not three years have passed but Mary D——­ is a new girl.  She is attractive; one can scarcely believe unless he has seen it.  She is clean; she is happy.  Her friends secured a position for her father out-of-doors where he had loved to work as a boy.  Mary took him to the Mission and there he promised to begin the fight against his enemy.  The men in the Mission helped.  Regular pay made a decent home possible.  They have begun to live.

Overcome by the effects of ignorance and sin, failures as citizens, as individuals, as human souls, they met a Person and life was transformed.  If it were possible to replace in every factory for Mary D——­ who assented to the facts but passed them by as having nothing to do with her, Mary D——­ who met a Person and loved Him what a world of new moral forces we could create!

He was revealed to Mary D——­ not in the abstract which could not impress her but in the concrete which she understood.  O if only we could grasp the significance of that!

Ruth M——­ was a college junior with ancestry and wealth, brilliant, sarcastic, selfish.  She knew all the facts and accepted them.  She was a member of a church with which she had united at fourteen as had her mother and grandmother before her.  She did not think much about the facts, they had not greatly impressed her.  If questioned, she promptly stated that she believed this and that, she thought such and such things were probable though no one could prove them, and dismissed the subject to talk of her own plans and interests.