I
'_Those words are the sheet-anchor of my soul!_' said Hedley Vicars, a
gallant young Army officer, as he sat talking to his sweetheart in the
handsome drawing-room at Terling Place.
'_Those words are more golden than gold!_' exclaimed Miss Frances Ridley
Havergal, and she ordered that they should be inscribed upon her tomb.
'_Those words did give a great ease to my spirit!_' John Bunyan tells
us.
'_Those words_,' said old Donald Menzies, the mystic of Drumtochty,
'_those words fell upon me like a gleam from the Mercy-seat!_'
What words? Let us return to Hedley Vicars! He was only twenty-eight
when he fell, leading his regiment--the Ninety-seventh--in action before
Sebastopol. The enemy attacked suddenly under cover of the darkness.
'The men of the Ninety-seventh behaved with the utmost gallantry and
coolness,' said Lord Raglan, in the historic dispatch that reached
England on Good Friday, 1855. 'They were led by Captain Vicars, who,
unfortunately, lost his life in the engagement; and I am assured that
nothing could be more distinguished than the gallantry and good example
which he set to the detachment under his command.' His biographer tells
us that it was more than three years earlier--in November, 1851--that,
whilst awaiting in his room the return of a brother officer, he idly
turned over the leaves of a Bible which lay on the table. The words,
'_The blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanseth us from all sin_,'
caught his eyes and profoundly impressed his mind. 'If,' he said, as he
closed the sacred Volume, 'if this be true, I will henceforth live by
the grace of God as a man should live who has been redeemed by the blood
of Jesus Christ.' That night he could scarcely sleep; the great words
repeated themselves again and again within his throbbing brain; they
seemed too good to be true.
'_All sin! All sin!_'
'_Cleanseth from all sin!_'
'_The blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanseth us from all sin._'
He never tired of telling of that wonderful experience. Miss Marsh, to
whom he was engaged to be married, says that, almost as soon as they
were first introduced to each other, 'he gave her an outline of the
manner in which God had worked the great change in his heart. With
forceful simplicity he told the point of the story; how the words, "_The
blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanseth us from all sin_," became the
sheet-anchor of his soul, adding, "Thus was I born again of the Word of
God which liveth and abideth for ever!"'