Somehow the mention of the lost sheep brought to her mind the little
lost child on the beach at Codrington Dolly, who had “putted on” her own
hat, who had wanted to be independent and to dig by herself. She had run
away from home, and could not find the way back. What a steep climb they
had had up the beach how the little thing's tiny feet had slipped and
stumbled over the stones, and just when they were most perplexed, the
father had found them.
Exactly how it all came to her Erica never knew, nor could she ever put
into words the story of the next few moments. When “God's great sunrise”
finds us out we have need of something higher than human speech there
ARE no words for it. At the utmost she could only say that it was like
coming out of the twilight, that it seemed as if she were immersed in a
great wave of all pervading light.
All in a moment the Christ who had been to her merely a noble character
of ancient history seemed to become to her the most real and living of
all living realities. Even her own existence seemed to fade into a
vague and misty shadow in comparison with the intensity of this new
consciousness this conviction of His being which surrounded her which
she knew, indeed, to be “way, and truth, and life. They shall hear
My voice.” In the silence of waiting, in the faithfulness of honest
searching, Erica for the first time in her life heard it. Yes, she had
been right truth was self-revealing. A few minutes ago those words had
been to her an unfulfilled, a vain promise the speaker, broad-hearted
and loving as he was, had doubtless been deluded. But now the voice
spoke to her, called her by name, told her what she wanted.
“Dolly,” became to her a parable of life. She had been like that little
child; for years and years she had been toiling up over rough stones
and slippery pebbles, but at last she had heard the voice. Was this the
coming to the Father?
That which often appears sudden and unaccountable is, if we did but
know it, a slow, beautiful evolution. It was now very nearly seven years
since the autumn afternoon when the man “too nice to be a clergyman,”
and “not a bit like a Christian,” had come to Erica's home, had shown
her that at least one of them practiced the universal brotherliness
which almost all preached. It was nearly seven years since words of
absolute conviction, words of love and power, had first sounded forth
from Christian lips in her father's lecture hall, and had awakened in
her mind that miserably uncomfortable question “supposing Christianity
should be true?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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