“If the Christ, to whom we have given ourselves to-night, should tarry,” she whispered, “and we are spared to dwell together on earth as husband and wife, dear Tom, may God answer all that prayer of yours abundantly.”
The cab turned a corner sharply at that moment. He looked through the window. They were within a few hundred yards of where he had given the driver orders to stop. Zillah would have, on alighting, only the length of a short street to traverse before reaching home, and he would take a hansom and drive back to the office. But the intervening moments before they would part were very precious, and love took unlimited toll in those swift, fleeting moments.
CHAPTER XIX.
TOM HAMMOND REVIEWING.
It was the morning after Tom Hammond had found Christ, and had closed with the great offer of redemption. He had scarcely slept for the joy of the two loves that had so suddenly come into his life.
During the sleepless hours, he had learned, for the first time in his life, the true secret of prayer, and that even greater secret, that of communion.
With real prayer there is always a certain degree of communion, but real, deep, soul-filling communion is more often found in seasons when the communing one asks for nothing, but, silent before his or her God, the sense of the Divine fills all the being, and if the lips utter any sound it is the cry, “My Lord and my God!”
Tom Hammond, reviewing all that God had revealed to him, learned in those first hours of his new birth the secret of adoring communion with God.
In the book of extracts he had been reading in the tube train at the moment when he had first heard of Major H——’s coming address on the Second Advent, he had come across one headed, “Frederick William Faber: The Precious Blood—chap. iv.” He had at the time been considerably impressed with the extract, though there was a certain note about it which he had failed to understand. In the flush of the great revelation that had come to his soul (in that little meeting at Spitalfields), he now found the book, and re-read the extract:
“I was upon the sea-shore; and my heart filled with love it knew not why. Its happiness went out over the wide waters, and upon the unfettered wind, and swelled up into the free dome of blue sky until it filled it. The dawn lighted up the faces of the ivory cliffs, which the sun and sea had been blanching for centuries of God’s unchanging love. The miles of noiseless sands seemed vast, as if they were the floors of eternity. Somehow, the daybreak was like eternity. The idea came over me of that feeling of acceptance which so entrances the soul just judged and just admitted into heaven.