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In the days of the Mutiny in India there was a young officer in the Royal Fusiliers who was seeking for light. He had tried the “glittering fantasies” but had found nothing there. “The more I read, the more weary I got. What were they? Fiction. What I wanted was fact, truth; yea, eternal truth. At last I threw them all away, and stuck more and more to my Bible. At length the light burst on my soul.
“I was riding back from mess one night upon my camel, grieving over the uselessness of my life for the glory of God and the good of man, when, as a ray from heaven, there came into my mind the verse, All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned everyone to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all? The iniquity of us all? Then all my iniquity—that means, all my sins of omission as well as commission—all laid by God on Christ, all borne away, all forgiven. Oh, the joy! Oh, the peace! I got down from my camel, ran to my room, and falling on my knees before God, praised and blessed Him and the Lord Jesus Christ. I have often since been grieved and distressed by sin, but I have, thank God, never, never lost that peace, the peace of free, full, and eternal forgiveness of sins through the blood of Christ.”
It was enough. Conscience and heart were at rest at last. And now as he says simply, “I was helped by being a soldier, for I had begun to read my Bible as I read the Queen’s Regulations, as if all its instructions were intended to be followed out.”
Those rays from heaven are continually falling, but God, who never makes two flowers alike, or even two leaves or two blades of grass, never repeats Himself in the history of souls; and this conversion on camelback does, I think, stand out with a delightful unusualness. I have chosen a tale of years ago rather than one more recent because it need not break off abruptly as a recent story must, leaving a question in the mind about the race still to be run. That young officer (Major Malan—the name looks back to the martyrs of Merindol) ran a straight race through good report and ill. His was the loving spirit that set many another on fire.