Being detained over Sunday, Percy strolled out for a walk after his late breakfast. Centerville was not well provided with schools or other public buildings; but like the majority of large villages, it boasted several imposing church edifices.
The day was warm, and crowned with an Indian summer haze. As he strolled by a costly stone temple of worship, out through the open windows floated a voice so pure, so beautiful, so magnetic, that he paused involuntarily to listen. It was a woman's voice, singing the old familiar hymn, but it held a new meaning for him as he listened:
"Guide me, oh, thou Great Jehovah,
Pilgrim through a barren land!
I am weak, but thou art mighty,
Lead me with thy powerful hand."
Never in his life had Percy so realized his own finiteness, never had he so reverenced the Supreme Majesty of the Creator, as while he listened to that voice, singing the familiar words with indescribable pathos and passion.
Percy's fearless criticisms of creeds and dogmas had won for him, among people of illiberal thought, the undeserved reputation of an atheist.
The world is full of good-hearted, but short-sighted people, who brand any man as an infidel or lunatic, whose ideas of divine worship differ from their own.
Percy's whole nature was deeply reverential; but his conceptions of religion were too high and broad for the ordinary mind, accustomed to the well-worn ruts of thought to understand or even grasp. In his early boyhood, he had believed in every thing; church, woman, home, happiness. But one woman had wrecked him in mid-ocean; and he had thrown overboard all his old faiths in things human and divine, barely saving his life and reason.
Then, as time passed on, and his hurts healed, his inborn reverence for Something over and beyond himself returned. His belief in a future life was as fixed and firm as it was vague and undefined. But oftentimes he felt conscious of the near presence of his mother—the mother who had died when he was a youth and most needed her. And he knew that she lived, and loved him, and watched over him. It was her occasional presence, which convinced him, beyond the possibility of doubt, that death was only the gateway to a new life.
Always, when he was untrue to himself or his principles, her spirit fled away from him, and again she came so near, he could almost hear the rustle of her wings.
It was long months now, since she had come to him. Never in his dreams, never in his waking hours; and the sense of loneliness and longing was sometimes overwhelming.