Mark Levy – personal testimony
An address delivered at the Hebrew-Christian Conference, Mountain Lake Park, Maryland, USA July 28, 1903, by MARK LEVY, of London, England
So far as memory serves, my childish mind regarded the One of whom they sang as a good man, whose special object was the care and protection of little children, and instinctively my heart went out to Him in love. But at an early age, on being sent to school in one of our provincial English towns, and having to undergo as a Jew the ordeal of taunt and scorn, principally at the hands of strange boys, whom I was taught to regard as followers of Jesus, my love for Him quickly turned to dislike, which deepened into positive hatred of His name when the terrible persecutions of the Jews, at the hands of professing Christendom, was subsequently brought to my knowledge.
In early manhood, having failed to find spiritual consolation in the synagogue, I commenced reading the New Testament, and quickly realizing the glorious beauty of the character of Jesus, I came to the mental conclusion that He was the Messiah.
At that time there were living in Great Britain scores of clergymen of Hebrew birth. But, personally, I did not know there was a single minister of the Gospel of our own race living to whom I could go in my spiritual distress; for these sons of Judah had practically become Gentilized, and withdrawn their light from the congregations of Israel. The well-known names, in Christian circles, of Edersheim, Saphir, and other celebrated Jewish converts, I had never heard, although born in London, as were my parents.
In my despair I called upon one of the missionaries of the London Society for Promoting Christianity amongst the Jews, but was discouraged in my investigations. Thus all the national sources of aid were hidden from, or denied to, a despairing brother in Israel, because the Jews who had found Christ were lost to their race among the Gentiles and didnot “become as Jews to the Jews, to gain the Jews.”
After several years of sorrowful wandering in England, Australia and America, my convertion was accomplished, in God’s good time, through the gracious operation of the Holy Spirit, and I was baptized into Christ in the year eighteen hundred and eighty-seven, and confirmed within a few months by the late Rt. Rev. Bishop Whipple, of Minnesota.
Source:
Hebrew-Christian Conference, Mountain Lake Park, Maryland, U. S. A.. July 28, 1903