INSTANCES OF SOUL-WINNING.
By Rev. J. W. Weddell
[Rev. J. W. Weddell, D.D., in the Examiner.] DR. H. CLAY TRUMBULL, lately deceased, himself a great soul-winner, introduces his little book on "Individual Work for Individuals," one of the most cheering and stimulating things ever written, by relating the incident of his conversion. It came about through a soul-winning letter addressed to him personally by a friend. Dr. Trumbull was then a young man, a clerk in a railroad office at Hartford. "Before I had read the last of this letter," he says, "I was on my knees in that lofty tower summit, asking forgiveness of God, and committing myself to a long-slighted Saviour. That was a turning point in my life course." He was led to it by the simple fact that a friend could think enough of him to speak to him about his soul. And so he gives it as his deliberate judgment that "the seeking of a single individual by a single individual has been God's chosen way of evangelizing from the beginning of the Christian ages, even to the present day." Here is a leaf out of the autobiography of a soul-winning pastor, one of the most successful that ever lived, Dr. C. L. Goodell, of St. Louis. I knew him to love him. "Across the street from my study there was once a beautiful house where a worthy family lived, as yet without a Christian hope. They were my parishioners and valued friends. Often in my study alone did I pray with the greatest of earnestness for their conversion, but in vain. One day, as I was looking from my window over their cultivated grounds and inquiring within myself why they did not become Christians, I saw the fountain playing in the yard, and it occurred to me that the water was carried there from a reservoir by a pipe laid to their home. I noticed, too, the street lamp on the corner of their grounds. I remembered that gas pipes communicated with that. Without these pipes laid directly to this house there would be neither water nor light there, however abundant the supply might be at the source. It flashed upon me like a revelation that my prayers were vain, alone. I resolved at once to carry the water of life and the light thereof straight into that home, praying as I went; and soon, by God's grace, it became a rejoicing Christian household. I had been waiting for God to convert that family. He had been waiting for me to carry His salvation there. That incident has ordered my whole ministry. I have prayed more than before, but I have charged myself with bearing special tidings to individual hearts, whether I spoke from the pulpit or along the wayside, and from house to house, as did St. Paul." Such is the record of one whom Dr. William M. Taylor called "the great heart of the Western pulpit," a happy, genial soul, yet always reaching out to win men to his Christ, and having marvelous success therein. We get the best cue to his blessed success in what his biographer, Professor A. H. Currier, says of him:—5 "For years, as he also confessed, he seemed in his work to be like a man standing up before four or five hundred empty bottles trying to fill them from the platform with a hose. The water dashed over them, and a little of it went in, but not much was accomplished. Then he tried a different way. He took up a bottle, put in a funnel and filled that bottle. Then he filled another. In other words, he worked with individuals, and in this way more was accomplished. One by one the souls were gathered in, hand-picked. Each one represented much prayer and labor, often for years."