Rock of Ages: Augustus Toplady

    The year was 1756 and a young man of England visited his mother in Ireland. While there, he attended evangelistic services being held in a barn in the small village of Codymain. Here, at sixteen, he was converted. He testified: "Strange that I, who had so long sat under the means in England, should be brought right unto God in an obscure part of Ireland, midst a handful of people met together in a barn, and by the ministry of one who could hardly spell his own name. Surely it was the Lord's doing, and is marvelous." Two years after this event, "Rock of Ages" was published for the first time in The Gospel Magazine, of which Toplady was the editor.

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     Mrs. L.S. Bainbridge, a missionary to China, shared the following: "The Chinese women, it seems, are so anxious to 'make merit' for themselves, that they will perform any labor to escape the painful transmigrations of the next life. They dread to be born again as dogs or cats, and the highest hope possessed by them is to be reborn as men. In order to secure this, they do any and every meritorious act. One woman had excavated with her poor, weak hands a well twenty feet deep, and it was only after this achievement that she learned of the free gospel of salvation. She was now a woman of eighty, and, stretching out her aged and crippled fingers, we sang together, "Nothing in my hand I bring, Simply to thy cross I cling."

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