The Living Sacrifice

The race of sacrificing saints has not yet departed from the face of the earth. Abraham was not the last believer, who, at God’s command, laid a beloved child upon God’s altar. Such deeds of love are yet enacted.

IT have in my recollection at this moment one, who, like Anna of old, “served God with fastings and with prayers night and day.” To her, as unto Elkanah’s praying wife, a son was given, the son of many hopes. He was the subject of baptismal vows and consecrating prayers. As he grows up to man’s estate, the parent’s eye beholds with joj the rising staff and stay on which her old age is to lean when “desire shall fail, and the grasshopper become a burden.”

But at length a voice comes from heathen lands — the voice of perishing humanity — the death-cry of djdng souls; and with it comes the command of God unto her, as she “waits for the redemption of Israel,” Take now thy son thine only son, whom thou lovest, and send him to the place of lohich I shall tell thee; the Lord hath need of him. These seem, at first, to be stunning words. The struggle is a struggle of life and death; but the answer of faith is, “Here he is; do with him, Lord, as seemeth thee good.” The sacrifice has been made. The parting word has been spoken amid heart-wrung tears and sobbings, and he has gone “bound in spirit” to heathen shores.

When many weary months and years have rolled on, the tidings come to that mother’s ears from those distant lands, that God has owned the labors of that son by a copious return of blessings. Benighted souls have been enlightened; the dead have been restored to life; the darkened idolater has become a worshipper of Abraham’s God; broken-hearted penitents have been guided by the widow’s son to the Saviour — his mother’s Saviour. That stripling, whom her faith laid on the missionary altar, has become the spiritual father of many souls, and in “her seed” a whole heathen people may yet be “blessed.” “Merciful God!” she exclaims, with streaming eyes, and her “poor old heart” breaking with joy, “it is enough! it is enough! let now thine handmaid depart in peace, for mine eyes have witnessed thy salvation!”