"This was so unlike any address to which I had hitherto listened on the subject of religion, that it instantly arrested my attention. Fresh from the pure fount of Truth came the words which Marino now uttered. Parched as I was with feverish thirst, with a force which I cannot describe came especially one blessed verse, which I have ever since regarded as the very breathing of infinite love—
"'And the Spirit and the Bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst, come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely.'
"That day,—that sultry, exhausting day," continued Raphael, clasping his hands as he spoke, "I regard as the birth-day of my soul. It was then first that I learned that there was pardon, full, free pardon, even for the chief of sinners; that there was love, infinite love, towards those for whom the Lord had died. I learned that I had been 'bought with a price,' and that I was no longer mine own. In the morning my soul had been even as your person now is. I had been shackled with my sins, galled, imprisoned, without power to shake off either the burden of my guilt or the dread of its punishment. I had seen before me a forest labyrinth of difficulties and temptations, and had no clue to guide me through it. The grand, glorious truth that the blood of the Savior 'cleanseth from all sin,' broke at once my chain and set me free; and henceforth God's Word was to be my guide to safety, to peace, and, I trust, hereafter—to glory."
There were some moments of silence, only broken by the ceaseless noise of the cicala and the sigh of the wind through the wood.
"Who was Marino," inquired Horace; "and how came so good a man to be working as a slave at the oar?"
"He had been sentenced to the galleys for a very different crime from any of which I had been suspected," replied Raphael. "Marino, as I learned afterwards from himself, had been a student of medicine, brought up in the Romish faith. Circumstances, or rather the leading of God's Providence, had taken him to England, where he had resided for years, and where he had acquired not only a knowledge of the languages, but of the truth which in your land is guarded and prized. Marino might have remained honored and happy amongst those whose communion he had joined, but he thought of the darkness of ignorance shrouding his own beautiful country; he thought of the bondage of superstition in which his fellow citizens groaned. Marino returned to be a missionary to his own people.
"Following the steps of his Master in the path of self-denying labor, he soon tracked the holy footprints through sufferings also. You know, doubtless, that with Italians it is held a crime to search the Scriptures; doubly a crime to teach others to do so. Marino for both offenses was sentenced for three years to the galleys. Alas! Broken down as he was, by hardship and trial, his life did not last out the term."
"Was it not much to be regretted," observed Horace, "that, instead of laboring where he could have labored in safety, this good man threw away freedom, and, as it proved, life itself, upon such a desperate venture?"
"I have no reason to say so," replied the Rossignol with deep feeling. "Marino was silenced from preaching the gospel to freemen, that he might carry the glad tidings to slaves! Who can say that he lived or that he died in vain? I was not the only wretched outcast over whose darkness he shed light, though to none was he such a friend, such a father as he was to me. When his spirit passed away, I felt that for the third time my earthly stay had been wrenched from my hold, but now I was not left desolate. Marino had led me to the Rock—the changeless—the everlasting!"
Raphael's voice faltered as he continued, covering his eyes with his hand: "When they dropped his lifeless remains into the sea, without funeral rite, without toll of bell, without even a coffin to shroud them; when the waves of the Mediterranean rolled over the spot where slept the friend I loved best upon earth, even then God sent thoughts of comfort—of triumph—into my soul. I knew that Marino would rise again, incorruptible, immortal, glorious; that the sea should give up her dead and the Savior reclaim His own. And I knew that there was something left also for me—an object in life, as well as a hope in death."