Page 94 - Living Epistles

After concluding my last service about ten o'clock that night, a poor man
asked me to go and pray with his wife, saying that she was dying. I readily
agreed, and on the way to his house asked him why he had not sent for the
priest, as his accent told me he was an Irishman. He had done so, he said, but
the priest refused to come without a payment of eighteen pence which the
man did not possess, as the family was starving. Immediately it occurred to
my mind that all the money I had in the world was the solitary half-crown,
and that it was in one coin; moreover, that while the basin of water-gruel I
usually took for supper was awaiting me, and there was sufficient in the
house for breakfast in the morning, I certainly had nothing for dinner on the
coming day.

Somehow or other there was at once a stoppage in the flow of joy in my
heart. But instead of reproving myself I began to reprove the poor man,
telling him that it was very wrong to have allowed matters to get into such
a state as he described, and that he ought to have applied to the relieving
officer. His answer was that he had done so, and was told to come at eleven
o'clock the next morning, but that he feared his wife might not live through
the night.

"Ah," thought I, "if only I had two shillings and a sixpence instead of this
half-crown, how gladly would I give these poor people a shilling! "But to part
with the half-crown was far from my thoughts. I little dreamed that the truth
of the matter simply was that I could trust God plus one and-sixpence, but
was not prepared to trust Him only, without any money at all in my pocket.

My conductor led me into a court, down which I followed him with some
degree of nervousness. I had found myself there before, and at my last visit
had been roughly handled. My tracts had been torn to pieces and such a
warning given me not to come again that I felt more than a little concerned.
Still, it was the path of duty and I followed on. Up a miserable flight of stairs
into a wretched room he led me; and oh, what a sight there presented itself!
Four or five children stood about, their sunken cheeks and temples all telling
unmistakably the story--of slow starvation, and lying on a wretched pallet
was a poor, exhausted mother, with a tiny infant thirty-six hours old
moaning rather than crying at her side, for it too seemed spent and failing.

"Ah!" thought I, "if I had two shillings and a sixpence, instead of
half-a-crown, how gladly should they have one-and-sixpence of it." But still
a wretched unbelief prevented me from obeying the impulse to relieve their