"William! William!" I cried aloud. "What is the matter?"
"Hush, Mary," in a tragic whisper, "don't awaken the Pratts. I have lost the witness of the Spirit. I must close the meeting tomorrow, just as the people are beginning to be interested. But it would be blasphemy to go on preaching, feeling as I do!"
"How do you feel?" I whispered, thoroughly terrified.
"As if God had forsaken me!"
I had been in it long enough to know that the "witness of the Spirit" is the hero of the Methodist itinerancy, that a preacher without it is as sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal, that he is in a rôle of a great play which has been rejected by the "star." I wiped the mourning dew from William's brow, laid my face against his and wept in silent sympathy. I saw something worse than disgrace staring us in the face—William deprived of his definition, William just a man like other men. I had come of a worldly-minded family who supported the church and sustained a polite it somewhat distant relation to Heaven. Religion was our relief like the Sabbath day, but it was never our state of being. And I was blandly of the earth earthly, but I suddenly discovered that the chief fascination of William for me was that he was not of the earth earthly, that his dust was distressed and stirred by strange spiritual instincts very different from anything I had ever known. And probably nothing was further from the intention of Providence when I was created than that I should become such a man's wife. But I had one enlightening qualification for the position. I loved William. I was called to that as he had been called to the ministry. And now, as I laid my face against his as the rose lies above the coffin lid, I was concerned only for William's peace.
"William," I challenged, "have you been doing wrong? Something really and truly wicked?"
"I must have," he replied with egregious sincerity, "but I thought I had been observing all my obligations with particular care."
"Then it's all right," I said. "God would not trifle with you about the witness of His Spirit, especially at such a time as this!"
It was not often that I showed such boundless confidence in the Lord's ways, and I was indeed far from feeling as familiar with them as I pretended. But the affectation comforted him and certainly it was no injury to the Maker of the heavens and the earth. William fell asleep at once and awakened in the proper protracted-meeting frame of mind next morning.
Many times afterward he experienced the same catastrophe, and these have been the only occasions in my life when I have put on the whole armor of God so that I might go forth properly to battle with the powers and principalities of William's darkness.