p. 6 | A Child the Agent of Deliverance by W. A. S.

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Sep 23, 1909

A Child the Agent of Deliverance

By W. A. S.

In the times of 1662, in England, when ministers were being ejected from the state churches for non-conformity, a Mr. Rogers was expelled from his church. He lived near a persecuting magistrate, Sir Richard Craddock. Being very bitter against dissenters, the magistrate set spies to watch Mr. Rogers, and was glad when he could summon him for preaching at a place near by. The preacher, and several of his friends who attended the service, were condemned to prison. The magistrate was in another room making out the papers.

Sir Richard had a little granddaughter, who had met Mr. Rogers and been petted by him. She was a wilful child, so hysterically impatient of restraint that she had once injured herself with a knife when contradicted. On this account, through fear that she would do something desperate, Sir Richard had given orders that she should be given her own way in everything. She came in and learned that her friend was to be sent to prison. The account, as quoted in an old volume of the Christian, continues:—

She ran immediately to the chamber where her grandfather was, and knocked with her head and heels till she got in, and said, ‘What are you going to do with my good old gentleman here in the hall?’

‘That is nothing to you,’ said her grandfather: ‘get you about your business.’

‘But I will not,’ she said; ‘he tells me you are going to send him and his friends to jail; and if you send him, I will drown myself in the pond as soon as they are gone; I will indeed.’

When he saw the child was peremptory, it overcame him. He stepped into the hall, with the mittimus in his hand, and said, ‘I had here made out your mittimus to send you all to jail, but at my grandchild’s request, I set you all at liberty.’

They all bowed and thanked him. Mr. Rogers stepped up to the child and laid his hand upon her head, and lifting up his eyes to heaven, said: ‘God bless you, my dear child! May the blessing of that God whose cause you now plead, though as yet you know him not, be upon you in life, at death, and throughout eternity.’

Many years after that, when Mr. Rogers had died, his son, Timothy Rogers, known as an author of a book on religious melancholy, was visiting the home of a Mrs. Tooley, of London, a lady famous in that day for her hospitality to religious workers. Here he told the story of his father’s deliverance. Mrs. Tooley listened with great interest, and said, ‘And are you that Mr. Rogers’s son?’

‘Yes, madam,’ he answered.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘as long as I have been acquainted with you, I never knew that before. And now I will tell you something you never knew before: I am the very girl your dear father blessed. It made an impression upon me I could never forget.’

Then she told her story. She had inherited her grandfather’s estate, and as a young girl had followed all the fashionable gaieties of the world. But there was no satisfaction in it. At the ancient Roman town of Bath, where she was visiting the springs for pleasure and health, an old doctor got her to promise to read the New Testament for her health. It made her only the more uneasy for the moment. Back to London she went. One night she had a dream about being in a place of worship, and she was so impressed that she told her lady companion that she was going to search for the church she saw in her dream. Sunday morning they started out and passed a number of churches. They came at last to the narrow lane called the Old Jewry, off Cheapside, and saw people going as if to church. The account continues:—

She mixed herself among them, and they carried her to the meeting-house, in the Old Jewry. So soon as she had entered the door, and looked about, she turned to her companion, and said, ‘This is the very place I saw in my dream.’ She had not long stood, till Mr. Shower, minister of the place, went up into the pulpit; as soon as she looked on him, she said, ‘This is the very man I saw in my dream; and if every part of it hold true, he will take for his text, ‘Return unto thy rest, O my soul.’’ When he rose to pray, she was all attention, and every sentence went to her heart. Then he took for his text that very passage; and there God met her in a saving manner; and she at last gained what she had long sought in vain elsewhere, rest in Christ to her troubled soul.

—W. A. S.