Page:Memorials of Capt. Hedley Vicars, Ninety-seventh Regiment by Marsh, Catherine, 1818-1912.djvu/75

Rh "cottage reading" every Sunday evening, and conducted the little service with them on the following evening in the servants' hall at the Rectory. The next day he went to read and pray with a Roman Catholic who was then seriously ill, and saw him again, once or oftener, on each succeeding visit to us.

Not many weeks after the news of Captain Vicars' death had spread a general sorrow over Beckenham, this man expressed a wish to attend one of the evening cottage readings. "I have thought so much of the Bible," he said, "since Captain Vicars told me what it was to him, and how those words about the blood of the Lord Jesus gave him peace."

On the day just referred to, he met at dinner a young naval officer, who was then at the outset of his Christian course. It seemed to be the easiest thing possible for Hedley Vicars to fall in with the current of those first fresh feelings, and to show where lay the rocks and quicksands to be avoided. The union of becoming seriousness with perfect ease and simplicity in this religious conversation seldom failed to engage the interest of those who met him. His genuine humility, combined, as it was, with manly frankness and a cheerful, spirited address, gave a charm to all that he said.

But the thing which distinguished him from the generality even of other Christians, was the close, personal, friendlike knowledge he possessed of his Saviour. "Some of his expressions, in conversation and correspondence," remarked one of his friends, "almost startled me into the inquiry — Is it only a difference in degree, or wholly a difference in kind, from these faint prayers of mine, when he speaks as if he had not only spoken to his Saviour, but had been answered back again by a living friend?"

Before his next visit to us, we met him several times in London. There we found him teaching in