 | | for his pillow. It seemed to me exactly the image of what every young man is like, when he leaves his home and goes out to shift for himself in this hard world. I tell you, Mary, that one man alone on the great ocean of life feels himself a very weak thing. We are held up by each other more than we know till we go off by ourselves into this great experiment. Well, there he was as lonesome as
I
upon the deck of my ship. And so lying with the stone under his head, he saw a ladder in his sleep between him and heaven, and angels going up and down. That was a sight which came to the very point of his necessities. He saw that there was a way between him and God, and that there were those above who did care for him, and who could come to him to help him. Well, so the next morning he got up, and set up the stone to mark the place; and it says Jacob vowed a vow, saying, 'If God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat and raiment to put on, so that I come again to my father's house in peace,
then
shall the Lord be my God.' Now
there
was something that looked to me like a tangible foundation to begin upon.
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| | ''If I understand Dr. Hopkins, I believe he would have called that all selfishness. At first sight it does look a little so; but then I thought of it in this way: 'Here he was all alone. God was entirely invisible to him; and how could he feel certain that He really existed, unless he could come into some kind of connection with Him? the point that he wanted to be sure of, more than merely to know that there was a God who made the world;he wanted to know whether He cared anything about men, and would do anything to help them. And so, in fact, it was saying, 'If there is a God who interests Himself at all in me, and will be my Friend and Protector, I will obey Him, so far as I can find out His will.'
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| | "I thought to myself, 'This is the great experiment, and I will try it.' I made in my heart exactly the same resolution, and just quietly resolved to assume for a while as a fact that there
was
such a God, and, whenever I came to a place where I could not help myself, just to ask His help honestly in so many words, and see what would come of it.
|
| | "Well, as I went on reading through the Old Testament, I was more and more convinced that all the men of those times
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