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I MUST GO TO WILLIE

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Pacific Press Publishing Company · OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA · Sep 26, 1900

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 26, No. 39.

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“I MUST GO TO WILLIE.”

DURING our Civil War there was a woman in Maine who received a letter which ran thus: “Willie is sick; he is dying.” The mother read the letter, and looking up to her husband, said:—
“Father, I must go to Willie.”
“No, wife, you can not go,” he replied. “You know there is a line of bayonets between you and Willie.”
She did what the Christian mother always does when her boy is in peril. She spread that letter before the Lord, and prayed all night. Next morning she said:—
“Father, I must go to Willie. I must.”
“Well, wife,” he said, “I do not know what will come of this, but of course if you will go there is the money.”
She came down here to Washington, and the President—Abraham Lincoln—who had to brush away a tear as he wrote, handed her a paper and said:—
“Madam, that will take you to the enemy’s line, but what will become of you after you get there I can not tell.”
She took the paper and came down to the line and the picket; she handed him the pass, and he looked at it and at her, and said:—
“We don’t take that thing here.”
“I know it,” she said; “but Willie, my boy, is dying in Richmond, and I am going to him. Now shoot!”
He did not shoot, but stood awed and hushed in the presence of a love that is more like God’s than any other that surges in the human soul in its deathless unselfishness.
All that mother thought of was her boy. Smuggled through the lines, she went down to the hospital. The surgeon said to her:—
“Madam, you must be very careful; your boy will survive no excitement.”
She crept past cot after cot, and knelt at the foot of the one where her boy lay, and putting up her hands prayed in smothered tones, “O God, spare my boy!”
The sick man raised his white hands from under the sheet; the sound of his mother’s voice had gone clear down to the brink of the valley and shadow of death, where the life of the young man was going out in its ebbing tide. Raising his hand, he said:—
“Mother, I knew you would come.”
That boy is a man to-day, saved by a mother’s love.—The Progressive Age.