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Come Ye to the Waters

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The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 9, 1866

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 28, No. 19.

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“Come Ye to the Waters.”

There is on record the case of a very wicked and hardened man, whose feelings were so touched by the soft notes of a dove, that he was by the Divine Spirit led to Christ and to a Christian life. In the incident below, the prattling of a babe was blessed to the same result. During a revival in a town in Ohio, a man who had been very worldly-minded was awakened, but for some time concealed his feelings even from his wife, who was a praying woman. She left him one evening in charge of his little girl, three years of age.
After her departure, his anxiety of mind became so great that he could not rest, and he began to walk the room in his agony. The little girl soon noticed his agitation of mind, and inquired, “What ails you, Pa?” He replied, “Nothing!” and endeavored to re-quiet his feelings, and divert his mind from the subject. But all in vain. Conscience would not hush up at his bidding. He could not calm the troubled deep of his sin-polluted heart.
After sitting a short time, he rose again, and commenced walking to and fro as before. Soon the attention of his little daughter was again arrested, and wondering, doubtless, at her father’s uneasiness, and ignorant of its cause, she looked up sympathizingly in his face, and inquired with all the artlessness and simplicity of childhood, “Pa, if you were dry, wouldn’t you go and get a drink of water?” The father started, as if a voice from Heaven had fallen on his ear! He thought of his thirsty soul, famishing for the waters of life. He thought of that living fountain, opened in the gospel, and he heard the voice of Jesus saying, “If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink!” “Ho! every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters.”
He thirsted:
“He longed to drink that crystal stream That flows the trees of life between— That its pure waters in his soul Might rise eternally to roll!”
He believed! and straightway fell at the Saviour’s feet, exclaiming in heart if not in words:
“Just as I am thou wilt receive; Wilt welcome, pardon, cleanse, relieve; Because thy promise I believe, O Lamb of God, I come, I come!”
From that hour he dates the dawning of a new light, and the beginning of a new life.
[Watchman and Reflector.