I exhorted three or four times each day throughout all the week, and brother W---- scattered books and tracts, and talked and prayed. Twenty-two were added to that church, and as many more joined other churches. Before this meeting began, that church was nearly broken up, and in six months after, the student to whom I have alluded was the pastor.
Ten years after, as I was passing through this region in a stage, one of my travelling companions told me he was one of the converts at a place where I had labored. We were alone in the stage when we reached the place of crossing a river near this church. The driver stopped to water his horses, and I handed tracts to two men that were working at the edge of the river. They looked at me a moment, and then caught my hands: “Oh, this is Mr. C----. It was your tracts and labors that God blessed to save our souls.” The stage-driver dropped his bucket and rushed to me: “Oh, is it possible I have been hauling Mr. C---- and did not know it? It was your tracts and labors which you began in the rain in Fayette county that God blessed to my soul.” Here were four men who had been led to Christ at different places, and now had met the one whom they called the instrument of their salvation. To God alone be all the glory.
As, in the providence of God, I have been brought into contact with thousands of persons who have told me with much candor the history of their own minds, and conversed freely in reference to the all-important subject of their salvation, I have thought it to be my duty to record some of the facts I have met, for the benefit and warning of others. That there is a point when the Holy Spirit, if wilfully and perseveringly resisted, ceases to strive with man, no one doubts who believes in his renewing and sanctifying agency; but too many take it for granted that this point is not reached till the close of life, and neglect or resist the strivings of the Spirit till he gives them up to hardness of heart and blindness of mind, perhaps many years before their earthly existence has terminated.
The first case I shall mention is that of a woman about thirty years of age, with whom I conversed in the presence of her mother. I inquired if she was a member of any church. She answered, “No.” I asked if she had not at some time felt concern for her salvation. “Yes,” she said, “I think but few have been more anxious on the subject than I was once.” I asked at what period of her life this occurred, when she gave me the following account of God’s dealings with her. “When I was about fifteen years old, I felt that I was a great sinner in the sight of God. Often my distress was so great that I could not sleep; and for three years I seldom had peace for a week at a time. I knew that the Holy Spirit was striving with me, and that I ought to yield my heart to his influence; but I thought it would cut off my pleasures in the midst of youth. I tried to banish the thoughts of eternity; but they would still return and interrupt my pleasure. I tried reading novels and romances; they gave me relief for a while, but my distress returned. At last I went to the ballroom--and I have never since had such feelings as before.” “And have you no fears,” said I, “that you have grieved away the Spirit of God for ever?” “Yes,” she replied, “I have no doubt of that, and that I shall be lost.” I proceeded to describe the state and misery of the lost, and appealed to her, by the prayers of her mother and the tears which were then falling from her sunken eyes, by the danger of an eternal separation from pious friends, by the glories of heaven and the agonies of the Son of God, now to make her peace with him and be saved. “All this,” she calmly replied, “has been tried upon me before. Nothing that you or any other man can say on that subject, can move me now. My doom is fixed.”