Many years ago, Ebenezer Wooton, an earnest but eccentric evangelist,
was conducting a series of summer evening services on the village green
at Lidford Brook. The last meeting had been held; the crowd was melting
slowly away; and the evangelist was engaged in taking down the marquee.
All at once a young fellow approached him and asked, casually rather
than earnestly, 'Mr. Wooton, what must _I_ do to be saved?' The preacher
took the measure of his man.
'Too late!' he said, in a matter of fact kind of way, glancing up from a
somewhat obstinate tent-peg with which he was struggling. 'Too late, my
friend, too late!' The young fellow was startled.
'Oh, don't say that, Mr. Wooton!' he pleaded, a new note coming into his
voice. 'Surely it isn't too late just because the meetings are over?'
'Yes, my friend,' exclaimed the evangelist, dropping the cord in his
hand, straightening himself up, and looking right into the face of his
questioner, 'it's too late! You want to know what you must _do_ to be
saved, and I tell you that you're hundreds of years too late! The work
of salvation is done, completed, _finished_! It was finished on the
Cross; Jesus said so with the last breath that He drew! What more do you
want?'
And, then and there, it dawned upon the now earnest inquirer on the
village green as, at about the same time, it dawned upon young Hudson
Taylor in the hay-loft, that '_since the whole work was finished and the
whole debt paid upon the Cross, there was nothing for him to do but to
fall upon his knees and accept the Saviour_.' And there, under the elms,
the sentinel stars witnessing the great transaction, he kneeled in glad
thanksgiving and rested his soul for time and for eternity on '_the
Finished Work of Christ_.'