He was seized with his nightly trembling fit, with its usual accompaniment of direful fears, forebodings, and tragic visions of the past. Every evening brought a recurrence of these nervous spasms, which rudely broke in upon him at the same hour, regardless of how he might be occupied. His agony was fearful to behold. With loud groans he cried out to the living God for forgiveness and release.
“O God, spare me! Cleanse me from this awful blood-guiltiness! O Jesus of Nazareth, have mercy!”
There trooped in terrible procession before his mind the forms and faces of many innocent ones whom he had scourged and tortured. In the chill of a cold perspiration he cried out and implored that his eyes might be closed against a repetition of the scenes of the Holy City, but nothing could shut them out. With contortion [pg 270]of face, shaking of limb, and agony of soul, at length he sank, from thorough exhaustion into enforced quietude. After gradually reviving and recovering, he remained free, until the next evening again ushered in the same terrible experience.
“A thousand fantasies
Begin to throng into my memory,
Of calling shapes, and beck’ning shadows dire,
And airy tongues that syllable men’s names
On sands and shores and desert wildernesses.”
Amoz faithfully ministered to the necessities of Saulus, tenderly soothing him with brotherly sympathy, until long-sought quietude settled upon the little tent for the night.
The deep scars of sin and crime only can be healed by slow growth. The well-worn thought-channels of a mind which has done violence to laws of its own divine being cannot be filled and levelled by any sudden change of belief or doctrinal transformation. Well would it be for the world, if once it could be convinced that cause and effect can no more be severed upon the psychical and spiritual planes than in the material realm. There is no short cut or evasion in the moral economy. Nothing on earth can put away a state of consciousness in man but the growth of a different one, which only may gradually and lawfully displace it. It cannot be driven out forcibly or quickly. Character is formed of thought-habits, and their exercise and dominance give them ever increasing rigidity. A renewing of the mind consists of its activity projected into a higher realm. When the leading trend [pg 271]of a soul is discordant with the divine order and primal love, the outcome is sure to be a moral wrench difficult to repair.