THE MAYOR AND THE RAGPICKER.
By G. Campbell Morgan
You get a man to the Master, and I do not care if he is up there, or down there, or where he is; the man that is cultured and refined and scholarly, or the man who is ignorant and debased and vile—get him to Christ and He will fill him. Shall I tell you where and how the Lord taught me that lesson in my own work? I am bound to confess there was a time in my evangelistic work that I had an idea that Christ could satisfy the man that was down there in the slums, but I was always a wee bit afraid if into the inquiry room came a man of position and culture, and I tell you the Lord gave me one of the most wonderful illustrations of the absurdity of my fear that I ever had. I was conducting special meetings in a town of the Midlands that shall be nameless, and there came into the inquiry room a ragpicker, a great, gaunt old man, that had grown hoary in the service of sin and Satan, an awful character, but God had shown him his heart-hunger and had revealed the Christ to him; and there in our inquiry room that man knelt, and I knelt by him, and I felt at home as I spoke to that man of the blood that cleanseth from all sin. I felt it was just what he wanted. And presently somebody touched me on the shoulder, and said: “Here, won’t you speak to this man?” And I looked around, and there, kneeling next to me, was the mayor of the city, a man about as old as the ragpicker, but a man who had all the marks of culture and refinement, a man of position. I happened to know that six weeks before the mayor had sentenced this man to a month’s hard labor, and this man had got out a fortnight ago, and there they were, side by side, and I had to turn from the ragpicker and talk to this man. Presently the light that had broken there broke here, and I found that the blood that was needed there was sufficient here. He filled them both. And the most blessed part of it is, when that man got up he went over to that man and said: “Well, we didn’t meet here last time.” It was the mayor that had said it, and the old fellow looked up. He had no idea who was there, and he said: “No, we will never meet again like we did the last time, praise God!” What a scene it was! It is in my memory to this day.—G. Campbell Morgan.