Perhaps you think her gratitude to God for his great deliverance
would make her happy. So it did for a time, and then she forgot
her deliverer, and the still greater blessing she needed to ask of him.
How many there are just like her, who cry to God for help in adversity,
and forget him when the help comes. How many who promise God,
when they are in trouble and danger, that if they are spared they will
serve him, and, when the danger is past, entirely forget their vows.

Thus it was with Tidy. She had been brought out of the cotton-field,
and the misery that curtained it all round, into circumstances
of plenty and comparative ease; and, rejoicing that the first part
of her prayer was answered, she forgot all about the second and most
important petition, "O Lord, save my soul."

But God was too faithful to forget it. He allowed her to go on in her own
course a few years longer, and then he laid his hand upon her again.
He prostrated her upon a bed of sickness, and brought her to look death
in the face. Then the Holy Spirit began to deal powerfully with her.
She realized that she was a great sinner. It seemed that she
was standing on the brink of a horrible precipice, and her sins,
like so many tormenting spirits, were ready to cast her headlong
into the abyss of destruction. Whither could she flee for safety?

She found a Bible and tried to read; but it had been so long since she
had looked into a book that she had almost forgotten what she once knew.
It was impossible for her to read right on as we do; she could only pick
out here and there a word and a sentence. One day she opened the book
and her eye fell on the word "Come." She knew that word very well.
It made her think right away of the hymn, "Come, ye sinners,