Page:Life and Select Literary Remains of Sam Houston of Texas (1884).djvu/257

 of the professed religious conversion of such men as General Houston. The prophet of the Old Testament realized this when he asked, 'Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? Then may ye also do good that are accustomed to do evil' (Jer. xiii. 23). It is yet more to be expected that 'Israelites, indeed,' like Nathaniel, men 'in whom there is no guile,' will ask, 'Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?' (John i. 46-47.) When men who have for years been under the control of passion and worldliness profess to have experienced a religious change, their conduct will, undoubtedly, be more closely scrutinized than that of men outwardly moral. Yet it is ever to be remembered that men of blood, and of towering appetites and passions, like David and Saul of Tarsus, become the most manifest marks of the power of God to redeem fallen human nature; the one, 'a man after God's own heart,' though a murderer and an adulterer; the other, 'breathing out threatenings and slaughters,' yet a 'chosen vessel to bear Christ's name to the Gentiles,' though the churches of Judea could not believe for years 'that he was a disciple.'

"Shortly after the annexation of Texas as a sister State to the American Union, the tall form of 'Sam Houston,' as he was familiarly called, draped in his Mexican blanket, as a shield against the blasts of winter, at Washington, was seen one Sabbath morning entering the sanctuary of the Baptist church on E Street, near the City Hall. Frankly approaching the pastor alter service, he said that respect for his wife, one of the best Christians on earth, had brought him there. When the hope was expressed that feelings deeper, and obligations more imperative than those which bound him in devotion to a companion so worthy, would soon bind him to the house of God, a warm pressure of the hand, and a hearty response to the suggestion, showed that there were convictions beyond what were avowed that struggled in his mind. From that time, for twelve years, always in the morning, and often at night, he might be seen seated in a pew near the pulpit. For a time, mechanically, and from habit, he appeared provided, as in the Senate, with his pocket-knife and bit of pine, carving some little work for his own or other children, yet frequently arrested in his employ, and, looking up intently to catch some connection of thought that struck him in the sermon. In a few months the service seemed to absorb all his thoughts, and the whole outline of the discourse was so noted, that he could write it down in his Sunday evening letter to his wife.

"Not many months after, a sermon from the text, 'Better is he that ruleth his spirit than he that takelh a city' (Prov. xvi. 32), seemed to rivet his attention. The fixedness of his gaze naturally drew the preacher's to him, and the interest manifested by the hero of so many battles gave, doubtless, a turn and an unction to some suggestions thrown in by the speaker and observed by the special hearer, though none others in the audience took notice of it. Often afterward General Houston referred to that sermon as having fastened convictions of his own need and duty upon his mind from which he could never rid himself.

"As the sermon referred to seemed to have been blessed in convincing him of his sinful need, so a series of evening discourses on Old Testament examples of Christian faith, delivered some months yet later, had the effect of guiding him to the grounds of hope, and of Christian redemption for men of his character and life. After separate discourses on Paul's catalogue, in the 11th chapter of