REV. BERNARD GILPIN, in a small book, says a writer in the Gospel Magazine, gives an account of the life and some of the sayings of Richard Dore, a poor, good man, who, in his earlier days, was of Mr. Huntingdon’s congregation. After relating his call by grace and other features of his younger days, Mr. Gilpin goes on to say:—
“Before his acquaintance with the person he afterwards married, and at the very time he was under the strong hand of God in the beginning of his religious life, he had proposed to unite himself to one who, to use his own words, seemed ‘a quiet, innocent creature,’ but who was in truth a deeply designing hypocrite, and proved herself so by the profane ways she adopted in order to make him think her religious. Of these he was informed by someone who had detected them, yet his affections were so deeply entangled that he felt a sort of desperate determination to marry her, let the consequences be whatever they might, and began to make preparations accordingly. Just at that crisis he was reading in the Book of Proverbs, and these words struck to his heart as a message sent for his warning from God, ‘He goeth as an ox to the slaughter,’ etc. (Prov. viii. 22, 23). ‘These words struck me with a shivering at once. I was so terrified that I could not speak, and when a friend came in to see me I could hear nothing about it. However, I was effectually cured, and never wished to marry that wicked woman afterwards.’ After this providential escape he began to feel himself too secure. ‘For I was so ignorant and careless that I never thought about asking the Lord how I should go on, and so after all I got a hypocrite for my wife. I became acquainted with another woman, and married her at once. I remember feeling afraid to pray about it lest I should be hindered. She was a member of Mr. Huntingdon’s church, and I thought that was enough, for the minister, thought I, has such good eyes that no one can deceive him. I supposed he could see through people all at once. I was no sooner married and he heard of it than I found out he knew I had been deceived in her, for he said to me of her, ‘There is no Christ there.’ This cut me like a dagger, but proved true, for in about three weeks the war began, which went on till her death nearly forty years after. As long as ever she lived I had nothing but a continual dreadful trial with her. It is impossible to tell of the things I went through. . . . And now these troubles are as if they had never been.’ (Richard lived for twenty years after the death of his wife—lovingly looked after by his only daughter, a gracious woman.)” Mr. Gilpin says, “This distressing dispensation is calculated to enforce upon us terrible but most useful lessons. It seems as if the Lord by suffering it may have designed with holy severity this good man’s treacherous departure from a beginning that was right. He had just been providentially delivered from a similar snare, when, instead of the exhortation finding place in his heart, ‘Let him that thinketh he standeth, take heed lest he fall,’ we find him immediately forsaking the Lord his Counsellor, and blindly relying on the judgment of men. At the same time, let us remember that a good man is not one who commits no faults, and makes no mistakes, but one whose faults and mistakes are all overruled for good, and who in the end, through the fear of God, comes forth of them all.”