(Ranny felt them about him, the waters and the tempest.)
"Other refuge ha-ave I none,
Hangs my helpless soul on Thee;
Leave—ah! leave me no-ot alone,
Still support and co-omfort me."
And as the infinite pathos and pleading of the tenor voice played on him, Ranny sank, lost and shelterless and alone, till at the word "Life" he rose again and exulted, he rose above himself, even to the point of singing.
"Thou of Life the fountain art,
Freely let me take of Thee;
Spring Thou up with-in my heart;"
sang Ranny.
"Rise to all eternity."
There was something about that hymn, and his own sudden crying out in it, that made him peculiarly susceptible to the influences of the Address. When the preacher rose in the pulpit, when he looked about him with ardent and earnest eyes in a face ravaged by emotion, when his wide and somewhat loose and mobile lips gave out the text, Ranny had an obscure foreknowledge of what would happen to him.
For he was not altogether virgin to the experience he was undergoing. It belonged to certain moods of his childhood and his adolescence when more than once, in Wandsworth Parish Church, he had been stirred mysteriously by the tender music of the Evening Service, and by the singing of certain hymns. There were layers upon layers of emotion sunk beyond memory in Ranny's soul. So that what happened to him now had the profound and vehement, though secret, force of a revival. The submerged feelings rose in him; they were swollen, intensified, dominated beyond recognition by the virile and unspiritual passion that leaped up and ran together with them and made them one. It gave them an obscure but superb sanction and significance.
For that incantation not only called up the past; with a still greater magic and mystery it evoked the future. It was a prophecy, a premonition of the things to be. It cried upon the secret, unseen powers of life. It brought down destiny.
"'Know ye not that your bodies,'" said the preacher—and he leaned out and looked to the young men on the right—"'your bodies'"—and he looked to the young men on the left—"'are the temples, of the Holy Ghost'"—and he looked straightforward and paused as if he saw invisible things.