He then looked fixedly upward; and as I followed his glance to the roof of the cave, his spirit passed away beyond the blue dome, beyond the stars and the sun, beyond the entire realm of nature, into the paradise of Moses and the prophets.
I spent the night in prayer and tears by my father’s dead body. Occasionally the young prophet broke in upon the stillness of the air with his silvery voice, chanting [pg 56]the sweet verses of Scripture. I was sorely tempted to rebel against the providence of God, which permitted such a good man as my father to be so cruelly dealt with. The presence, however, of the young prophet, was in itself a sermon, a blessing, a help to resignation. One could not be skeptical or even critical in his luminous atmosphere of peace and love. I reflected that there were many great mysteries which my youthful and inexperienced mind could not at present comprehend, and returning faith assuaged the grief it could not remove.
The next day about noon the young prophet offered a prayer over the corpse, and we consigned it to a humble grave dug by our own hands in a large cavern near by. I observed that there were four other graves in the same spot.
“Yes,” said John, meekly, “this is my little cemetery. Here I bury my dead in ground consecrated to the Lord. This was a robber who was wounded in a fray and left by his comrades. He dragged his bleeding limbs into the desert. I found him and bore him to my home. I preached to him the new gospel of repentance and faith, and he died in my arms weeping like a child over the sins of his youth. He who occupies that grave was a madman, who broke his chains, and drove every one from him with knives and stones until he met me in the wilderness. He followed me to my cave, and would sit contented at my feet hearing me sing or read or pray. Under that mound is a poor slave who fled, mutilated and frenzied, from a cruel master. I kissed the wounds I could not heal; and he died clasping my hands smilingly to his lips. And that last one is the grave of another [pg 57]poor leper like your father, forsaken even by his wretched companions—but not forsaken by the Lord, whose Word I obeyed when I tended him in his long illness.
“I call it consecrated ground,” he continued; “for these poor people are the children of God. The leper is cured of his leprosy; the slave is free; the madman is sane; the robber is forgiven.”
“What induces you,” said I, “to lead this strange, lonely life, so full of self-sacrifice, so full of terrors and dangers?”
“The Spirit of God!” he said, solemnly.
“Are you not afraid of the silence, the solitude, the darkness of the desert?”
He replied in the words of Scripture:
“The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life: of whom shall I be afraid?”