“Oh! how fervently should I thank Heaven who has given to me such a monitor in the hour of temptation! Pardon me, my Alice, if by giving way to impulse I have wounded your sensitive spirit, and that in the moment when passion held its sway, I slighted the divine lesson of forgiveness, through your influence first impressed upon my soul. Nay, dearest, look not thus surprised, for it was really by your means that the wish to quell the thirst for revenge upon my brother, entered my heart; and if you will listen a few seconds I can explain to you the words that at present may well seem mysterious. You will doubtless remember, Alice, that some months before our marriage, I experienced a severe fit of illness. One pleasant Sabbath evening shortly after I was declared convalescent, I was reclining upon a sofa in the sitting-room at your uncle’s residence. My spirits were just then very much depressed—I felt inwardly fretful and uneasy—and as is not uncommon at such a time, many little circumstances which before had been almost forgotten, rose up in my mind, and woke anew in my bosom sensations according to their nature, of pain, anxiety, or indignation. Among other things came forcibly to view the memory of the grievous wrong I had received at the hands of him who should have been a parent to me; and a feeling of the deepest hatred toward my brother stole to my heart, together with a hope that at some future time a chance might be mine of returning him measure for measure of the unkindness which he had so unsparingly dealt out to me. “At that instant, Alice, you re-entered the room from which you had been a few minutes absent, and at the request of your uncle, opened the family Bible and began your usual Sabbath-evening duty of reading a series of chapters from the holy book. There was a passage in the first which you read that affected me strangely—for it came as a reproof from Heaven delivered to me through the medium of one of earth’s angels. It was the following—‘Avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath, for it is written, vengeance is mine; I will repay saith the Lord. Therefore, if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink; for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head.’ The sentences awed me, coming upon my ear as they did at a period when my spirit needed the precious warning and rebuke contained in them, and I breathed a silent prayer to Heaven for strength to enable me to heed it. The hour of my trial has arrived, and to-day have I again felt the promptings of the tempter. You cannot imagine with what force these old feelings have been driven back upon my soul, but, Alice, your voice has once more stilled the tempest, and I know that I have passed the ordeal in safety.”