Surely, if "He giveth his angels charge concerning us," that pure, heart-wrung petition floated upward on wings seraphic.
[CHAPTER XIX.]
A NEW YEAR'S GIFT.
"And why, if we must part, Lulu!
Why let me love you so?
Nay, waste no more your sweet farewells,
I cannot let you go—
Not let you go, Lulu!
I cannot let you go!"
—Mrs. Osgood.
On the following Christmas morning Mrs. Clendenon, Mrs. Winans and Lulu, together with the returned captain, all attended divine service at the Protestant Episcopal Church.
It seems strange how many of us become recognized members of the Church of Christ under religious conviction, without ever having any great and realizing sense of the saving power of God, not only in the matter of the world beyond, but in the limitless power of sustaining us among the trials of this.
This had been peculiarly the case with our heroine. She had for years been a member of the Episcopal Church, and, as the world goes, a dutiful member. But religion had been to her mind too much in the abstract, too much a thing above and beyond her to be taken into her daily life in the part of a comforter and sustainer. She had gone to the world for consolation in the hour of her trial. It had failed her. To-day as the glorious old "Te Deum" rose and soared grandly through the arches of the temple of worship, filling her soul with sublime pathos, she began to see how He, who had dimly held to her the place of a Saviour in the world beyond, is an ever-present Comforter and sustainer in the fateful Gethsemane of this probationary earth.
Captain Clendenon, as he sat by her side and heard the low, musical voice as it uttered the prayerful responses to the Litany, thought her but little lower than the angels. She in her deep and newly roused humility felt herself scarcely worthy to take the name of a long misunderstood Saviour on her lips. Few of the congregation who commented, on dispersing, relative to the pearl-fair beauty and elegant apparel of the Senator's deserted wife, fathomed the feelings that throbbed tumultuously beneath that pale calm bearing as they left the sacred edifice.