“’T was
something like the burst from death to life;
From the grave’s
cerements to the robes of heaven;
From sin’s dominion,
and from passion’s strife,
To the pure freedom
of a soul forgiven;
Where all the bonds
of death and hell are riven,
And mortal puts on immortality,
When Mercy’s hand
hath turned the golden key,
And Mercy’s voice
hath said, Rejoice, thy soul is free."
The little party were soon guided, by Mrs. Smyth,
to the hospitable abode of a good missionary, whom
Christian charity has placed here as a shepherd to
the outcast and wandering, who are constantly finding
an asylum on this shore.
Who can speak the blessedness of that first day of
freedom? Is not the sense of liberty a
higher and a finer one than any of the five? To
move, speak and breathe,—go out and come
in unwatched, and free from danger! Who can speak
the blessings of that rest which comes down on the
free man’s pillow, under laws which insure to
him the rights that God has given to man? How
fair and precious to that mother was that sleeping
child’s face, endeared by the memory of a thousand
dangers! How impossible was it to sleep, in the
exuberant possession of such blessedness! And
yet, these two had not one acre of ground,—not
a roof that they could call their own,—they
had spent their all, to the last dollar. They
had nothing more than the birds of the air, or the
flowers of the field,—yet they could not
sleep for joy. “O, ye who take freedom
from man, with what words shall ye answer it to God?”
The Victory
“Thanks be unto God, who giveth us the victory."*
* I Cor. 15:57.
Have not many of us, in the weary way of life, felt,
in some hours, how far easier it were to die than
to live?
The martyr, when faced even by a death of bodily anguish
and horror, finds in the very terror of his doom a
strong stimulant and tonic. There is a vivid
excitement, a thrill and fervor, which may carry through
any crisis of suffering that is the birth-hour of
eternal glory and rest.
But to live,—to wear on, day after day,
of mean, bitter, low, harassing servitude, every nerve
dampened and depressed, every power of feeling gradually
smothered,—this long and wasting heart-martyrdom,
this slow, daily bleeding away of the inward life,
drop by drop, hour after hour,—this is
the true searching test of what there may be in man
or woman.
When Tom stood face to face with his persecutor, and
heard his threats, and thought in his very soul that
his hour was come, his heart swelled bravely in him,
and he thought he could bear torture and fire, bear
anything, with the vision of Jesus and heaven but just
a step beyond; but, when he was gone, and the present
excitement passed off, came back the pain of his bruised
and weary limbs,—came back the sense of
his utterly degraded, hopeless, forlorn estate; and
the day passed wearily enough.
