Was it Chance? by Dr. Guthrie

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Dec 17, 1872

Was it Chance?

By Dr. Guthrie

I was in the habit of visiting a decent widow, as paralysis made it impossible for her to attend church. She was tended by a very dutiful daughter, who, working at a flax mill in the neighborhood, toiled hard, and contented herself with plain dress and simple fare that she might help to maintain her mother. Before leaving the cottage for her work, she was in the habit of heaping up the refuse of the mill in the grate and kindling it. She placed her helpless mother in a chair right before the fire, and as this fuel burned slowly away, the old woman was kept comfortable till her return.

It happened one day that I left my manse, and skirting the walls of the old church-yard, and passing the corn mill, with its busy sound and flashing wheel, I took my way down the winding dell to the cottage of the old woman, which stood in its garden, embowered among trees. But, having met a parishioner with whom I had some subject of interest to talk about, I called a halt, and sitting down on a bank of thyme, we entered into conversation. Ere the subject was half exhausted, the widow rose to my recollection. I felt, somehow, that I must cut it short, and hasten away on my visit. But the idea was dismissed, and the conversation went on. However, it occurred again and again, till, with a feeling that I was neglecting a call of duty, as by an uncontrollable impulse I rose to my feet, and made haste to the cottage. Opening the door, a sight met my eye that for a moment nailed me to the spot!

The erection of mill refuse which had been built from the hearth some feet up the open, wide chimneys, having its foundations eaten away, had fallen, and precipitating itself forward, surrounded the helpless paralytic within a circle of fire. The accident took place some minutes before I entered. She had cried out; but no ear was there to hear, nor hand to help. Catching the loose refuse about her, on and on, nearer and nearer the flames crept. It was a terrible sight for the two Wigtown women—martyrs—staked far out on the sands of Solway Frith, to mark the sea-foam crawl nearer and nearer them; it was more terrible still for this lone woman, in her lone cottage, without any great cause to die for, to sit there and see the fire creeping closer, drawing nearer and nearer, to her feet. By the time I had entered, it had almost reached her, where she sat motionless, speechless, pale as death, looking down on the fire as it was about to seize her clothes and burn her to a cinder. Ere it caught, I had time, and no more, to make one bound from the door to the hearthstone, and seizing her, chair and all, in my arms, to pluck her from the jaws of a cruel, fiery death.

By what law of nature, when I lingered on the road, was I moved, without the remotest idea of her danger, to cut short, against all my inclinations, an interesting conversation, and hurry on to the house, which I reached just in the nick of time—one or two minutes later, the flames had caught her clothes, and I had found her in a blaze of fire. Be it mine to live and die in the belief of a present and presiding, as well as a personal, God; in the faith which inspired my aged friend to thank him for her wonderful deliverance, and the boy to explain his calm courage on the roaring deep, in these simple but grand words: “My father’s at the helm.”—Dr. Guthrie.