MOODY'S PRODIGAL BROTHER.
Mr. Moody related the following personal experience in a sermon on the prodigal son:— "My father died when we were little children, and my good mother had a hard time with her large family of boys and girls. After a while one of the older boys took it into his head that he could make his fortune all alone by himself, and so he ran away. "For years and years we heard nothing of him. Sometimes it seemed as if my mother's heart would break. 'O, if I could only know he was dead,' she would sometimes say, 'it would be better than this! Maybe he is sick and in need, or maybe he has fallen in with wicked men, who will make him as bad as themselves. "We used to sit around the fire on the stormy winter nights and listen to the stories that mother used to tell us about our father, about what he said, how he looked, how he was kind to a friend, and lost a great deal of money by him, and so our little home was mortgaged, and we were poor; but if anybody had happened to speak the name of that lost boy, a great silence would fall upon us, the tears would come into my mother's eyes, and then we would all steal away softly to bed, whispering our good-nights, because we felt that the mention of that name was like a sword thrust to the heart of our mother. "After we got to bed we would lie awake and listen to the roaring of the wind among the mountains, thinking perhaps he was out in the cold somewhere. Maybe he had gone to sea, and while we were snug in bed he might be keeping watch on the wave-beaten deck, perhaps climbing the mast in just such darkness and storm. Now and then, between the gusts, a sound would be heard like the wail of the summer wind when it used to make harpstrings of the leaves and branches of the great maple trees in the dooryard, now soft and gentle, then rising louder and louder. How we would hold our breath and listen! Mother was sitting up to pray for her lost boy. Next morning, perhaps, she would send one of us down to the post-office to ask for a letter—a letter from him, tho she never said so. But no letter ever came. "Long years afterward, when our mother was growing old, and her hair was turning gray, one summer afternoon a dark, sunburned man, with a heavy black beard, was seen coming in at the gate. "He came up under the window first, and looked in, as if he were afraid there might be strangers living in the house. He had stopped at the churchyard, on his way through the village, to see whether there were two graves instead of one where our father had been laid so many years ago, but there was only one grave there; surely his mother was not dead. But still she might have moved away. Then he went around and knocked at the door, and his mother came to open it. "Years of hardship and exposure to sun and storm had made him strange even to his mother. She invited him to come in, but he did not move or speak; he stood there humbly and penitently; and, as a sense of his ingratitude began to overwhelm him, the big tears found their way over his weather-beaten cheeks. By those tears the mother recognized her long-lost son. He had come at last. There was so much of the old home in him that he couldn't always stay away. But he would not cross its threshold until he confessed his sin against it, and heard from the same lips which had prayed so often and so long for him the sweet assurance11that he was forgiven. 'No, no,' said he, 'I can not come in until you forgive me.' "Do you suppose that mother kept her boy out there in the porch until he had gone through with a long list of apologies, done a long list of penances, and said ever so many prayers? Not a bit of it. She took him to her heart at once; she made him come right in; she forgave him all, and rejoiced over his coming more than over all the other children that had not run away. "And that is just the way God forgives all the prodigal souls who come back to Him. O wanderer, come home! come home!"—Christian's Guide.