“Lord, Thou art with Thy people still:  they see Thee in the night-watches, and their hearts burn within them as Thou talkest with them by the way.  And Thou art near to those who have not known Thee:  open their eyes that they may see Thee—­see Thee weeping over them, and saying ’Ye will not come unto me that ye might have life’—­see Thee hanging on the cross and saying, ’Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do’—­see Thee as Thou wilt come again in Thy glory to judge them at the last.  Amen.”

Dinah opened her eyes again and paused, looking at the group of villagers, who were now gathered rather more closely on her right hand.

“Dear friends,” she began, raising her voice a little, “you have all of you been to church, and I think you must have heard the clergyman read these words:  ’The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor.’  Jesus Christ spoke those words—­he said he came to preach the gospel to the poor.  I don’t know whether you ever thought about those words much, but I will tell you when I remember first hearing them.  It was on just such a sort of evening as this, when I was a little girl, and my aunt as brought me up took me to hear a good man preach out of doors, just as we are here.  I remember his face well:  he was a very old man, and had very long white hair; his voice was very soft and beautiful, not like any voice I had ever heard before.  I was a little girl and scarcely knew anything, and this old man seemed to me such a different sort of a man from anybody I had ever seen before that I thought he had perhaps come down from the sky to preach to us, and I said, ’Aunt, will he go back to the sky to-night, like the picture in the Bible?’

“That man of God was Mr. Wesley, who spent his life in doing what our blessed Lord did—­preaching the Gospel to the poor—­and he entered into his rest eight years ago.  I came to know more about him years after, but I was a foolish thoughtless child then, and I remembered only one thing he told us in his sermon.  He told us as ‘Gospel’ meant ‘good news.’  The Gospel, you know, is what the Bible tells us about God.

“Think of that now!  Jesus Christ did really come down from heaven, as I, like a silly child, thought Mr. Wesley did; and what he came down for was to tell good news about God to the poor.  Why, you and me, dear friends, are poor.  We have been brought up in poor cottages and have been reared on oat-cake, and lived coarse; and we haven’t been to school much, nor read books, and we don’t know much about anything but what happens just round us.  We are just the sort of people that want to hear good news.  For when anybody’s well off, they don’t much mind about hearing news from distant parts; but if a poor man or woman’s in trouble and has hard work to make out a living, they like to have a letter to tell ’em they’ve got a friend as will help ’em.  To be sure, we