14 THOMAS J. COMBER. 
and the school. Of these Tom and his cousin were 
the leaders. 
“ I then got the class to come to my house once a 
fortnight — when we had singing, a ten minutes’ talk 
on some good subject, and prayers by the lads them- 
selves. In connection with these meetings it was my 
habit to impress on them the absolute necessity of 
making their prayers real— th^.t they were not to ask 
for things which they might fancy were the proper 
things to plead for — but only for that which was the 
real longing of their hearts. ‘ Mind, if I catch you 
saying anything you heard the minister say last 
Sunday, or repeat the petitions of a deacon at the 
prayer-meeting on Monday, I ’ll stop you at once.’ 
This was the caution they got from their teacher, 
and only once did I have to stop one of the lads for 
wandering into meaningless words — and that lad was 
nol Comber. The burden of his cry was alway ‘ Lord, 
I want to be a missionary — to go into the darkness 
and bring Thy light into it — to tell the heathen of 
the Saviour who is waiting to help and save them as 
He has saved me.’ And sometimes he would speak 
of the difficulties in his way, which seemed almost 
insurmountable, caused mainly by his lack of early 
training. But he always cast them upon the Lord, 
and besought Him to make a way for him into the 
mission field. 
“From what he has told me, I believe his first 
conscious day of brightness and gladness, in the sense 
of sin forgiven and acceptance by his Saviour, was on 
an Easter Sunday morning, when our subject was the 
great commission, ‘Go ye into all the world and 
preach the Gospel to every creature ! ’ In the course 
of that lesson I told them how often I had lamented 
my not being a Christian till thirty years of age ; that 
had I taken Jesus for my Saviour in my boyhood, 
I was sure I should have been a missionary. And 
then I appealed to them as my lads — would not one 
of them go in my place and stead — stating how glad 
