Some years before Mr Moody's return to Scotland,
a cloud of great affliction had cast its dark shadow over that happy
Christian home. Bella Darling, the youngest daughter, died in her
twentieth year, 3rd November 1875. At the early age of twelve she
had given her heart to the Saviour. She was a singularly bright,
devoted, and happy young Christian, as the published "Memorials" of
her brief life, which have been read by tens of thousands, have
amply proved. Those years of her converted life were literally
strewn with the golden fruits of her evangelism. We shall be
forgiven if we quote some passages regarding her, from a prefatory
note which it was our privilege to affix to those "Memorials." Those
who knew her best can testify that the picture is not
over-coloured:—
"Accepting present salvation as the free gift of
God through Jesus Christ our Lord, she walked in almost constant
sunlight, and became herself a 'Sunbeam' wherever she was known. Old
and young loved, and even venerated, the youthful believer. The joy
of the Lord was her strength. It raised her above the entanglements
and enticements of this world's insipid pleasures. 'The water which
Christ had given her' made her thirst no more for streams of false
delight, and it was in her a well of water, springing up into
everlasting life. With the roll of Christian assurance in her hand,
she felt Christ's 'yoke to be easy, and His burden to be light.'
"This again led to a cordial and unreserved
consecration of herself to God. There was no hankering after what
she had renounced. What does he who has received a crown care for
the dead leaves beneath his feet? Nor did she wish to hold back
anything from Him who had bought her with a price. Her rare gift of
sweet song was laid on her Redeemer's altar, and in the prayer
meeting, at the Sabbath morning breakfasts for the poor in the Drill
Hall, in hospitals and infirmaries, at the bedsides of the sick and
the dying, she was present with her radiant countenance and her
Christ-loving heart, often drawing tears from 'eyes unwont to weep.'
The strength of her Christian faith and love made
her bold and faithful in speaking and pleading for Christ. Her
letters to her former school companions and the friends of her
childhood show how intensely she yearned to win souls, and how
strongly she felt that her truest act of friendship was to lead
those whom she loved to the feet of Jesus.
"In her life of most active usefulness she never
became erratic, or imagined that she could do good only in
extraordinary services. She attended on her church duties with
exemplary regularity and unfailing relish; and in her minister's
class she was not only to the last a most diligent scholar, but by
her singing in the class choir did much to make its exercises both
edifying and attractive. The planet shed its light from its own
disc. If we measure the length of her life merely by the number of
years that she lived, it was indeed a short life—a very span; but if
we measure it by the amount of good that she did in it, then it was
a long life, and to her the 'early death became the earlier
immortality.'"
The first company of Jubilee Singers who visited
this country from America were men and women of intelligence and
piety, and had come for the purpose of raising, by means of a
series of musical entertainments, a fund which should help in
founding a College that would provide for their coloured brethren in
the United States the means of a higher education. They had lived
for a few weeks in Mr Darling's hotel, a short time before Bella's
fatal illness, and had enjoyed her sweet songs, but more than this
her simple-minded devotedness and the elevating and purifying
influence of her conversation. When the news of her death reached
Dumfries, eighty-four miles distant, whither they had gone, they at
once determined to be present at the funeral. It was a beautiful and
spontaneous tribute to the character of the departed young maiden. I
shall never forget the effect produced by their singing at the
funeral service. Without any pre-arrangement, but gently gliding in
with soft and solemn sound, they sang one or two hymns full of
pathos, in which the sentiment was wonderfully interpreted by the
music, and the whole company of mourners was moved to tears. Then
followed a hymn of hope and victory, in which the refrain was
repeated again and again, "She has laid down her cross, and taken up
her crown, and gone home,"— the earliest notes which were scarcely
audible gradually rising and swelling into the loudest notes of
triumph, the hearts of all rising with the music and the sentiment
of the hymn, until we seemed to enter into the joy of her who had
died in the Lord. These interesting and sympathising strangers soon
afterwards wrote thus worthily to the afflicted parents:—"God
permitted us to enjoy her pure and sweet companionship for a few
weeks, and then took her home to Himself, to give us a new incentive
to faithfulness in our duties, and to add a new strand to the golden
cord by which our hearts are drawn towards heaven."
