Christian fiction; Circuit riders -- Fiction; Domestic fiction; Spouses of clergy -- Fiction
"Don't look at me that way, William," I cried, "I can't do anything but
kiss you. I never did know where your God was, but you knew, and
you'll just have to go back the way you came to Him. All I know for
certain is that there is a God, your kind, or you could never have
lived the way you have lived, nor accomplished the things you have
accomplished. You couldn't have; you haven't sense enough. And for
this reason you'd better not try to think your way back. If God is
God, He is far beyond our little thinking. You had better feel your
way to him. It is what you call Faith in your sermons!"
Something like this is what I said to him standing before him with my
head on his breast, wiping the tears from my eyes. Really a
spiritually sick preacher is about the most depressing thing a woman
can have in the house. And when I looked at William, pale,
hollow-eyed, with his mouth puckered into a penitential angle I longed
to lay Horace Pendleton across my knees and give him what he deserved
for disturbing a better man's peace.
About the middle of Saturday afternoon, however, I knew that his clouds
were breaking. I heard him in his study singing:
"How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord,
Is laid for your faith in His excellent word."
[Illustration: I Heard Him in His Study Singing.]
Later on, at bed-time, he chose a cheerful psalm to read and I heard
the happy rustling of his wings in the prayer he made.
The next evening had been chosen for the initial service of the
protracted meeting and I remember his text:
"I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of
Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things,
and do count them but refuse that I may win Christ and be found in Him."
I remember it because I remember William so well that evening. He
fitted into it as if it was his home. The great words seemed to belong
to him. They were his experience literally. They had the authority of
another simple, faithful, brave life behind them besides that of St.
Paul. And the people who listened knew it. If William had made a
great name and fame for himself out of preaching, if he had earned
fancy salaries as the pastor in rich churches it would have been
different. I don't know, of course, but it seems to me in that case
they might have clanged a little like sounding brass and tinkling
cymbals.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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