‘Then let the last dread trumpet sound,
And bid the dead arise;
Awake, ye nations underground,
Ye saints, ascend the skies.’
And as Mary sang she felt sublimely upborn with the idea that life is but a moment and love is immortal, and seemed in a shadowy trance to feel herself and him past this mortal pain far over on the shores of that other life, ascending with Christ all glorified, all tears wiped away, and with full permission to love and to be loved for ever. And as she sang, the Doctor looked upward and marvelled at the light in her eyes and the rich bloom on her cheek, for where she stood a sunbeam, streaming aslant through the dusty panes of the window, touched her head with a kind of glory, and the thought he then received outbreathed itself in the yet more fervent adoration of his prayer.
CHAPTER XXXIX.
Our fathers believed in special answers to prayer. They were not stumbled by the objection about the inflexibility of the laws of nature, because they had the idea that when the Creator of the world promised to answer human prayers, He probably understood the laws of nature as well as they did; at any rate, the laws of nature were His affairs and not theirs. They were men very apt, as the Duke of Wellington said, to ‘look to their marching-orders;’ which, being found to read, ‘be careful for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication let your requests be made known unto God,’ they did it. ‘They looked unto Him, and were likened, and their faces were not ashamed.’ One reads in the memoirs of Dr. Hopkins how Newport Gardner, one of his African catechumens, a negro of singular genius and ability, being desirous of his freedom, that he might be a missionary to Africa, and having long worked without being able to raise the amount required, was counselled by Dr. Hopkins that it might be a shorter way to seek his freedom from the Lord by a day of solemn fasting and prayer. The historical fact is, that on the evening of a day so consecrated his master returned from church, called Newport to him, and presented him with his freedom. Is it not possible that He who made the world may have established laws for prayer, as invariable as those for the sowing of seed and raising of grain? Is it not as legitimate a subject of inquiry when petitions are not answered, which of these laws has been neglected?
But be that as it may, certain it is, that a train of events were set in operation this day which went directly towards answering Mary’s morning supplication for guidance. Candace, who on this particular morning had contrived to place herself where she could see Mary and James in the singers’ seat, had certain thoughts ‘borne in’ on her mind, which bore fruit afterwards in a solemn and select conversation held with Miss Prissy at the end of the horse-shed by the meeting-house, during the intermission between the morning and afternoon sermons.