Mustered In: Conversion
“And the angels echoed around the throne, Rejoice, for the Lord brings back his own.’”
Some incidents of childhood are cut into memory as inscriptions are cut into rock. No lapse of time wears them out, or tones down the sharp deep lines. One such is associated with the conversion of Uncle John. He had come out to see his parents and tell them what a Saviour he had found. We were at grandfather’s when he arrived. What he said we were too young to understand, and not one utterance can now be recalled; but the recollection of the scene that followed is perfectly distinct. All wept while his story was being told. Presently they knelt around the room, and two or three offered prayer. In the old homestead there was a holy quiet joy all day long. It was the history of the prodigal gone through again. Another runaway had come to himself and had returned to the Father’s house, and under the earthly father’s roof there was gladness devout and deep. Shall we doubt that it was the echo of a delight felt in, heaven over the repenting sinner.’*
Uncle John’s awakening, like everything about the man, was extraordinary. It is doubtful whether John Bunyan’s or John Newton’s was more powerful or profound. In the Baptist church a revival was in progress, and early morning meetings as well as evening services were being held. He was urged to attend these, but in the most decided way refused. Finally his cousin, Matthew Vassar, Jr., fairly hired him to go “just once.” He went, and readily promised to do the same again without reward. Before the second service was over, conviction deep and terrible took possession of his soul. For a week he was shaken by the powers of the world to come as trees are shaken by mighty winds. Say what we will about what old divines were wont to call “law work” in regeneration, John Vassar quivered and struggled for days in its stern grasp. Sin and the woe it merits were awfully real to him — so real, that on going home from one of the meetings and finding his wife asleep, he roused her with the cry, “How can you rest when your husband is going right down to hell?”
It was not the record of a profligate career which stirred shame and fear and pain. He had a fiery, ungov ernable temper, and had been given to terrible outbursts of profanity when provoked, but from other gross forms of wickedness he had been free. It was the consciousness of a state of heart radically wrong that lay at the bottom of his self-abhorrence and alarm; the persuasion that outside decency was not the holiness of God. The Holy Spirit was dealing with him, and hence he quailed. And when peace and pardon broke in, they did not come as the dawn of day. It was rather as if noonday sunshine were to flash out in the murky night. He obtained an assurance of sonship so bright and clear that nothing afterward darkened it for an hour.
In part, perhaps, such an experience would be natural to a temperament keyed so high. There could be no halfway emotion about the man, any more than there could be halfway work. Halfness went against the grain. But it was something more than mere natural intensity which glowed in his face and throbbed in the testimony of his tongue. There was a life hidden with Christ whose pulsations, at the first, as ever afterward, were strong as ocean’s undertow. Let this account for those positive ideas he held and urged concerning the doctrine of a new birth. Conversion was to him something definite and discernible. It was not a maybe and maybenot change. There was in his sight a line where living for self and Satan ceased, and living for God and godliness began; and that line he looked upon as sharply drawn. He could not have regarded it otherwise. Divine grace had stopped him as that light from heaven stopped Saul of Tarsus, and as suddenly and as squarely he had turned around. Christ’s image had been stamped upon his soul as the eagle is stamped on the bit of gold under the die of the mint; and whose he was, or what, he could not allow himself to question. That had been once and for ever settled. He was ‘twenty-eight years old when he thus found the Lord; rather let us say, when the Lord thus found him. It is the Saviour who is the chief seeker, and not the sinner.
Like every consistent convert he turned to the people of God and asked among them a brother’s place. On the 3d of April, 1842, he was welcomed into the fellowship of the Poughkeepsie Baptist church. Rev. Rufus “THE LAFAYETTE STREET HOUSE’
Babcock, D. D., who thus became his pastor, and was for many years his counseller and guide, could have told us much about the beginnings of this Christian life, had he been a little longer spared; but the venerated pastor reached the goal slightly ahead of his younger brother.
Rev. Edgar A. Van Kleek of Patten, Maine, for many years a most cherished friend, and at the time of Uncle John’s conversion himself a new recruit in the army of the Lord, gives us this glimpse of the man when as a rebel against God he was brought to lay down his arms:” I well remember the night when he was in such distress of mind, though I was only a child in the Christian life then. The meeting was in the little prayer-room of the La Fayette street house, and as many were interested it was filled. I sat next to him in the first seat as you entered from the door. I never saw a soul in such agony as he. The service closed and most of the congregation had retired. As a few were lingering, he begged them not to go but to stop longer and pray for him. He said he could not go out of the room till forgiveness had been spoken and peace had come. A half dozen of us remained and prayed that mercy might be extended and his burden lifted off. Then he broke out into petitions for himself, and such begging for salvation I never heard from the lips of any other penitent. Dr. Babcock stopped with us and tried to point out Christ. He was more calm before we separated, but not by any means at rest. The next night, however, he was rejoicing in a Saviour’s pardoning love. There was rapture on his face, there was glory in his soul. There was glory in that old prayer-room, too, as he told us that evening of God’s own peace and the preciousness of Jesus.
“After this a number of us were returning from a neighborhood meeting one night where the interest had been very deep, and we were all so full of joy that some began to sing along the street as we went toward home. This rather unusual manifestation of enthusiasm called out the remark that people would think us crazy if we did not keep more still; whereupon Brother Vassar — the child in grace father of the man — at once replied, ‘Let them think so; they said the blessed Jesus had a devil’”
So we behold Uncle John enlisted for the good fight of faith. How splendidly he fought it we shall see further along. How to fight it he is now to learn. Years are to be spent in the drill-room now.
But he has been mustered in.