Thus it was that on a memorable June night, having ended his meeting and after-meeting, he rushed home, tired as usual, but with a strange light in his face which indicated an unusual glow in his heart.
"Darling," he exclaimed to his wife, "I have found my destiny!"
His unexpected words, like the touch of Ithuriel's spear, proved the quality of his life-mate's womanhood. For a moment she trembled under the test. While her husband poured out his burning words about the heathenism of London, and expressed his conviction that it was his duty to stop and preach to these East End multitudes, she sat gazing into the empty fireplace. The voice of the tempter--so she imagined--whispered to her, "This means another new departure, another start in life." She thought of five little heads asleep on their pillows upstairs, and remembered that she had already passed through more than one time of domestic anxiety. But no woman living at that time was more ready for acts of daring faith; few, if any, were so animated by scorn of miserable aims that end in self. After silently thinking and praying for some minutes, she said:
"Well, if you feel you ought to stay, stay. We have trusted the Lord once for our support and we can trust Him again."
Thus the die was cast, and the day ended with one of those scenes by which our common humanity is ennobled. "Together," he says, "we humbled ourselves before God, and dedicated our lives to the task that it seemed we had been praying for for twenty-five years. Her heart came over to my heart. We resolved that this poor, submerged, giddy, careless people should henceforth become our people and our God their God as far as we could induce them to accept Him, and for this end we would face poverty, persecution, or whatever Providence might permit in our consecration to what we believed to be the way God had mapped out for us."
One feels perfectly certain that these two modern apostles would have fulfilled their destiny even if they had stood alone; but it could scarcely have been so ample and glorious a destiny if God had not given them children who inherited their gifts and helped them to realise their ideals. It is the simple truth that the ruling passion of each of their eight sons and daughters has been the love of souls; each of them has exulted to spend and be spent in the service of Christ, which is the service of humanity; and if one of them has been too feeble in her health to be a militant Salvationist, the great Captain of our salvation accepts the will for the deed.