Virgin Saints and MartyrsBaring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
Religion
Virgin Saints and Martyrs
Baring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
Christian women saints; Martyrs
This neglect occurred once too often; a chill settled on her, and for
three weeks she was dangerously ill. Then it was that the people of
Walsall began to realise what she was, and the door of the hospital was
besieged by poor people come to inquire how their “Sister Dora” was.
At some time previous to her going to Walsall, her faith had been
somewhat disturbed by one who ought not to have endeavoured to subvert
her trust in Christianity. This gave her inexpressible uneasiness and
unhappiness. There seems to have been always in her a keen sense of
God’s presence, and confidence in the efficacy of prayer. She now went
through this terrible inner trial. An unbelieving artisan who was once
nursed by her, and had observed her critically and suspiciously, said,
when he left, “She is a noble woman; but she would have been that
without her Christianity.” There he was mistaken. It was precisely her
fast hold, which she regained, of Christianity that made her what she
was.
Happily she had one now of great assistance to her as a guide—a very
remarkable man, the Rev. Richard Twigg, of St. James’s, Wednesbury.
Every Sunday morning, when able, she walked over to St. James’s to Early
Communion. She found in Mr. Twigg a man of deep spiritual insight, and
with a heart overflowing with the love of God, and consumed with a
desire to win souls to Christ. He was a man with the spirit, and some of
the power, of an Apostle—a man who left his stamp on Wednesbury, that
will not soon be obliterated.
The struggle through which she had passed, the sense of _need_ in her
own soul for all that the Christian Church supplies in teaching and in
Sacraments had a great strengthening and confirming effect that never
left her; and the love of Jesus Christ became an absorbing personal
devotion that nothing could shake. It was this—the love of God—that made
her what she was, and endure what she did.
Some time after this she became deeply attached to a gentleman who was
connected with the hospital, and he was devotedly fond of her, and
proposed to her. But he was an unbeliever. Again she had to pass through
an agonising struggle. She felt, as Mr. Twigg pointed out, that to unite
her destinies with him was to jeopardise her recovered faith, and she
was convinced that to be true to her profession, above all true to her
Master, she must refuse the offer. She did so, and probably felt in the
end that peace of mind which must ensue whenever a great sacrifice has
been made for duty.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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