Perhaps the Gospels would not have interested me so much, if I had
begun with them first; but my Old Testament life seemed to have
schooled me, and brought me to a place where I wanted something higher;
and I began to notice that my prayers now were more that I might be
noble, and patient, and self-denying, and constant in my duty, than
for any other kind of help. And then I understood what met me in the
very first of Matthew: 'Thou shall call his name Jesus, for he shall
save his people from their sins.'
"I began now to live a new life,--a life in which I felt myself coming
into sympathy with you; for, Mary, when I began to read the Gospels, I
took knowledge of you, that you had been with Jesus.
"The crisis of my life was that dreadful night of the shipwreck. It was
as dreadful as the Day of Judgment. No words of mine can describe to
you what I felt when I knew that our rudder was gone, and saw those
hopeless rocks before us. What I felt for our poor men! But, in the
midst of it all, the words came into my mind, 'And Jesus was in the
hinder part of the ship asleep on a pillow,' and at once I felt He was
there; and when the ship struck I was only conscious of an intense
going out of my soul to Him, like Peter's when he threw himself from
the ship to meet Him in the waters.
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