The Love That Prevailed

by Frank Frankfort Moore

And doubtless there were hundreds of the dwellers along the coast who would have been pleased if grief came to an enterprise that threatened their employment as smugglers or the agents of smugglers. Smuggling and wrecking were along the coast, and pretty far inland as well, regarded as a legitimate calling. Almost everyone participated in the profits of the contraband, and the majority of the clergy would have been very much less convivial if they had had to pay the full price for their potations. Preaching against such traffic would have been impolitic as well as hypocritical, and the clergy were neither. The parson who denounced his congregation for forsaking the service on the news of a wreck reaching the church was, probably, a fair type of his order. His plea was for fair play. “Let us all start fair for the shore, my brethren.”

Such men had a feeling that the man who had come to preach to the multitude would be pretty sure to denounce their fraud; or if he did not actually denounce it he might have such an influence upon their customers as would certainly be prejudicial to the trade. This being so, how could it be expected that they should not look forward to the failure of the mission?

And there was but a solitary man to contend against this mixed multitude! There was but one voice to cry in that wilderness—one voice to awaken those who slept. The voice spoke, and its sound echoed round the wide world.

He stood with bared head, with a rock for his pulpit, on a small plateau overlooking a long stretch of valley. On each side there was an uneven, sloping ground—rocks overgrown with lichen, and high tufts of coarse herbage between, with countless blue wild flowers and hardy climbing plants. The huge basin formed by the converging of the slopes made a natural amphitheatre, where ten thousand people might be seated. Behind were the cliffs, and all through the day the sound of the sea beating around their bases mingled with the sound of many voices. A hundred feet to the west there hung poised in its groove the enormous rocking stone of Red Tor.

Perhaps amongst the most distant of his hearers there was one who might never again have an opportunity of having the word that awakens spoken in his hearing. There might be one whose heart was as the ground in Summer—waiting for the seed to be sown that should bring forth fruit, sixtyfold or an hundredfold. That was what the man thought as he looked over the vast multitude. He felt for a moment overwhelmed by a sense of his responsibility. He felt that by no will of his own he had been thrust forward to perform a miracle, and he understood clearly that the responsibility of its performance rested with him.

For a moment the cry of the overwhelmed was in his heart.

“It is too much that is laid upon me.”

For a moment he experienced that sense of rebellion which in a supreme moment of their lives—the moment preceding a great achievement for the benefit of the world—takes possession of so many of the world's greatest, and which has its origin in a feeling of humility. It lasted but for a moment. Then he found that every thought of his mind—every sense of his soul—was absorbed by another and greater force. He had a consciousness of being possessed by a Power that dominated every sensation of his existence. That Power had thrust him out from himself as it were, and he felt that he was standing by wondering while a voice that he did not know to be his own went forth, and he knew that it reached the most remote of the people before him. It was like his own voice heard in a dream. For days there had been before his eyes the vision that had come to the prophet—the vision of the Valley of Dry Bones. He had seemed to stand by the side of the man to whom it had been revealed. He had always felt that the scene was one of the most striking that had ever been depicted; but during the week it was not merely its mysticism that had possessed him. He felt that it was a real occurrence taking place before his very eyes.

And now he was standing on his rock looking all through that long valley, and he saw—not the thousands of people who looked up to him, but ranks upon ranks and range upon range of dead men's bones, bleaching in the sunshine—filling up all the hollows of the valley forsaken of life, overhung by that dread legend of a battle fought so long ago that its details had vanished. There they stretched, hillocks of white bones—ridges of white bones—heaps upon heaps. The winds of a thousand years had wailed and shrieked and whistled, sweeping through the valley, the rains of a thousand years had been down upon them—hail and snow had flung their pall of white over the whiteness of the things that lay there, the lightnings had made lurid the hollow places in the rocks, and had rent in sunder the overhanging cliffs—there was the sign of such a storm—the tumbled tons of black basalt that lay athwart one of the white hillocks—and on nights of fierce tempest the white foam from the distant sea had been borne through the air and flung in quivering flakes over cliffs and into chasm—upon coarse herbage and the blue rock flowers. But some nights were still. The valley was canopied with stars. And there were nights of vast moonlight, and the white moonlight spread itself like a great translucent lake over the white deadness of that dreary place....

The man saw scene after scene in that valley as in a dream. And then there came a long silence, and out of that silence he heard the voice that said: “Can these dead bones live?”