A Hard Heart.

Wairarapa Standard, Volume XVIII, Issue 1672, 22 April 1885, Page 3

A Hard Heart.

Many of our readers will have heard of Robert Collyer, boru at Keighley, in Yorkshire, more than fifty years ago, at first a village blacksmith near likley, afterwards a Methodist preacher in America, now a Unitarian minister in the great city of Chicago, he has passed through as great changes “as any man need expect to experience in a lifetime. ” lie writes :—I remember in one of our lovefeasts in the Methodist Church of England, thirty years ago and more, a man got up and told us how he had lost his wife by the fever, and then one by one ail his children, and had felt as] calm and serene through it as if nothing had happened; not suffering in the least; not feeling a pang of pain; (ended and shielded, as he believed. by the Divine grace, and up iotbat moment, when he was talking to us, without a grief in his heart. As soon as he had done, the wise and manful old preacher who was leading the meeting got up and said, “Now, brother, go home, and into your closet, and down on your knees, and never get up again if you can help it until you arc a ucw man. What you have told us is not a sign of grace, it is a sign of the hardest heart I ever encountered in a Christian man. instead of your being a saint, you are hardly good enough for a decent sinner. .Religion never takes the humanity out of a man, it makes him more human, and if you were human at all such trouble as you have had ought to have broken your heart, i know it would mine, and I. pretend to be no mure a saint than other i-L-'r -e . so t warn you never tell such a story as that iur.lovcteast again.