Grace started and looked at her watch. It was time; the bells had been ringing some minutes, and the hour was drawing nigh. She stole down to her father's side, very solemn and quiet, and took his hand. He turned and clasped her in his arms.
"God will bless you yet, my little one," he said, with an earnest look into her brave eyes, "for all you are to me."
Hand-in-hand they walked the short distance between their cottage and the meeting-house. The great trees stood protectingly round the little church, shading it like a temple, with broad shadows flung like curtains before its doors, as if to supplement the bareness in which human hands had left it. The people were crowding in; some stepped aside as the minister passed, making room for him; others nodded to him, and were startled at the unwonted look in his far-searching eyes. Grace, on the contrary, seemed almost defiant, as if she thought of nothing save the storm which one short hour would bring about her darling's head. The congregation seated themselves with that undertone of quiet rustling peculiar to country audiences. Grace sat directly facing her father; but she had turned herself so that her features were visible to those who sat in the nearest pews behind. Edward Seymour slowly came up the pulpit stairs, and stood before his people. One long, sweeping glance he gave them, then his eyes went upward, and a light came into them, as of something more than human.
The crowd was thrilled, and men and women gazed at each other inquiringly.
Then he began: "My friends, I have come to say farewell to you. This is no sermon, but an explanation which is due to you. I am not going to leave you for the city, nor for another flock, nor for the retirement of a college-life. It is not a man who has called me, it is not the world or my own interests that have bidden me leave you; it is God.
"Truly, 'God's ways are not our ways, nor his thoughts our thoughts.' If you will bear with me, I will show you how this has been borne in upon me, and will give you, what you have a right to hear, the brief history of the change which is calling me away from you."
The interest of his hearers was acutely, if not painfully, awakened; every one waited breathlessly for the novel experiences of one who had always seemed so strong in the belief he taught. Some thought he had turned to the Methodist views, some suspected him of Episcopalian leanings; of the truth, not one had the slightest inkling, for, to their minds, such a change was more irrational than suicide, and more awful a judgment than insanity.
Step by step, with clear, sharp-cutting words, he developed the doubts and fears of his soul; he dissected his life for the last year, and showered Bible texts upon his hearers in his rapid way that would have been impassioned had he let it be; and when, one after the other, he had sapped all the axioms his former teaching had rested on, and had carried the mind of his audience, against its will, out of the sphere of certainty, he then paused a moment, and said in a more gentle voice than he had used in his dogmatic course:
"And now, my friends, what remains to be said? This: to confess my mistake before you all, to humble myself at the feet of God, whom I have so long misunderstood and mistaught, and to ask your forgiveness for having given you, in my ignorance, stones when you asked for bread, serpents when you cried for food. You know the church which alone teaches all that God has now shown me to be true; you know that it is a church flouted and condemned, persecuted and poor—none other than the Holy Roman Catholic Church (here the stir was like an electric shock among the rapt audience, and Grace half rose up in her seat, and looked defiance from her flashing eyes upon her nearest neighbors), none other than was founded in the poverty of Bethlehem, the ignominy of Calvary, the secrecy of the catacombs.
"I have but few words left to say to you, my friends. We have walked together for many years, seeking God. I knew not that I had not found him; now I know that I walked in darkness and in the shadow of death. I pray that each of you, in God's appointed time, may be led, like me, to find him. I thank him that this grace should come with sorrow, exile, and poverty in its train. I take up the cross willingly, and leave home and country, and a beloved grave, and a people to whom my soul was knit, to follow humbly where God shall lead me. And now, once again farewell, and may God bless you, every one, and reward you for all that your friendship and your fidelity have ever done for him who was once your pastor."