TWICE-BORN MEN
REMARKABLE CONVERSIONS OF WELL-KNOWN MEN
IN DIFFERENT AGES AND IN VARIED RANKS OF LIFE
Compiled by HY. PICKERING
A Rt. Honourable, M.P. and P.C.
THE RIGHT HONOURABLE SAMUEL SMITH, Privy Councillor, for twenty years M.P. for the County of Flint, passed away at Calcutta on 28th December, 1906, aged 70.
In the volume entitled “My Life Work,” he gives an account of his conversion as follows: “I had been carefully trained in religious knowledge in youth, was much interested in religious themes, and at times truly concerned about my personal convictions as touching the higher life. I had been a church member for several years, was a regular attendant at church, and attentive to the private exercise of religion, yet, as I afterwards discovered, there was something lacking, and this lack touched the very kernel of Christianity. A young man, a well-known cricketer in Birkenhead, WILLIAM P. LOCKHART, had just come out as a preacher to his fellows. He was advertised to speak in the old Egremont Assembly Rooms early in 1861, and I went with other young men to hear him. That address changed my life-current, and I believe it did so to others. I went in, supposing in a vague and general way that I was a Christian. I came out knowing that I was not, at least in the deeper sense of the word. The preacher’s merciless analysis showed how hollow was all religion that was not founded on living, personal faith in a living, personal Saviour. I saw plainly that I did not possess it. I discovered that the vital change was wanting, and that it must be obtained if I was to possess salvation (John 3.3).
“Dr. Temple, Charming, Martineau, and Robertson considerably influenced my religious views. There is much that is admirable in the writings of these great men but they lack the deeper note of New Testament theology. ‘The Blood of Jesus Christ, God’s Son, cleanseth us from all sin’ (1 John 1. 7). Is not the true explanation of these spiritual phenomena given in the words of Paul: “The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God, neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned’ (1 Cor. 2. 14)? It needs an inner revelation to show us that we cannot save ourselves, and that Christ is ‘able to save to the uttermost all that come unto God by Him!’ (Heb. 7. 25). When once the soul is enabled to see this, all fancied self-righteousness disappears, and the beauty and perfectness of God’s salvation shine into the heart. Is it not the fact that in every genuine case of conversion there is repeated the essence of our Lord’s words: ‘Except a man be born again he cannot see the kingdom of God’ (John 3. 3) ? The intellect cannot of itself discern spiritual truth: “The wisdom of this world is foolishness with God’ (1 Cor. 3. 19). These truths I had to learn through months of deep anxiety, but at last I got my feet on the Rock, and found that my experience was exactly expressed in the well-known lines of Toplady:
“Rock of Ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in Thee,” etc.
And I may add that now, fully forty years after, these lines just as truly express my faith.”