YORK RIVER SETTLEMENT
Henry Makes His Entrance
Henry Taylor’s older brother Bob was 17 at the time. They lived in a hemlock log house on lot 30, concession 8, in Carlow Township, about 40 or 50 yards from the Hastings and Renfrew boundary. Bob retired about 9 o’clock in the evening of September 19,1904. It was not destined to be the sleep of the blissful for, as Henry tells it, “ my father came to his bedroom with a lighted lantern and asked him if he would put the harness on the team of horses and hook them up to the buggy and go for grandmother.”
“ Bob said it wasn’t too long after he got back with grandmother until he heard me letting the first yells out of me. There’s not much use in arriving in this world if you don’t make yourself heard. Now I have just four more years to go to the year 2004 before I reach the 100 years.”
Henry continues. There is none of us who have anything to say about coming into this world, and nothing to say about going out of it, but God made it possible for us to know where we are going when we leave this life. When a person leaves one country for another they need a passport, so also you sure need one to go to the next life beyond the grave. I have had one of those passports now since about 2 o’clock on the 11th day of November, 1917, when I was a rebellious 13 year old teenager at my teenage brother’s funeral at the little Gospel Hall near Boulter.
Here is the text of the sermon John Gilchrist used that day – the 24th verse of the 5th chapter of St.John’s Gospel – “ Verily, verily, I say unto you, he that heareth My word and believeth on Him that sent me hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation but is passed from death unto life.” That passport didn’t cost me one cent; it was a free gift. But it cost God and His only Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, an awful lot for in order to get the ink to write out that passport Jesus Christ used His own blood. Now seeing that this passport cost God so great a price noone should ever use it for just a fire escape from the flames of Hell.