Let me to thy bosom fly....”
Mona has known it all her life, yet it seems as if she had never understood it until now.
“While the gathering waters roll,
While the tempest still is high.”
She is in tears before she is aware of it. The sermon begins, and the vicar’s voice comes out to her in the open air and mingles with the twittering of the birds in the trees and the bleating of the lambs in the fields.
It is about the last days of Jesus—His death and resurrection, the hatred of His enemies and the desertion of His friends—all the dreadful yet beautiful story.
“He might have avoided His death, but He did not do so. He died of His own free will. Why? Because He was confirmed in the belief that His death would save the world.”
Jesus died to show that nothing mattered to man but the welfare of his soul. Riches did not matter, rank did not matter, poverty did not matter. It was nothing to Jesus that He was hated and despised and friendless and homeless and alone and cast out of the family of men. Nothing mattered to Him but love, and because He loved the world He died for it.
“And that is why all suffering souls come to Him—have been coming to Him through all the two thousand years since His pilgrimage here below—will continue to come to Him as long as the world lasts! ‘Let me to thy bosom fly.’”