These words were uttered with an energy of manner and a fluency of utterance which medical men know to be strongly characteristic of insanity, unless indeed where the malady is silent and moping.  The afflicted old man now discovered that his daughter’s mind had, in addition to her disappointment, sunk under the frightful and merciless dogma, which we trust will soon cease to darken and distort the beneficent character of God.  Indeed it might have been evident to him before that in looking upon herself as a castaway, Jane’s sensitive spirit was gradually lapsing into the gloomy horrors of predestination.  But this blindness of the father to such a tendency was very natural in a man to whose eye familiarity with the doctrine had removed its deformity.  The old man looked upon her countenance with an expression of mute affliction almost verging on despair; for a moment he forgot the situation of his wife and everything but the consequences of a discovery so full of terror and dismay.

“Alas, my unhappy child,” he exclaimed, “and is this, too, to be added to your misery and ours?  Now, indeed, is the cup of our affliction full even to overflowing.  O God! who art good and full of mercy,” he added, dropping on his knees under the bitter impulse of the moment, “and who wiliest not the death of a sinner, oh lay not upon her or us a weight of sorrow greater than we can bear.  We do not, O Lord! for we dare not, desire Thee to stay Thy hand; but oh, chastise us in mercy, especially her—­her—­Our hearts’ dearest—­she was ever the child, of our loves; but now she is also the unhappy child of all our sorrows; the broken idol of affections which we cannot change.  Enable us, O God, to acquiesce under this mysterious manifestation of Thy will, and to receive from Thy hand with patience and resignation whatsoever of affliction it pleaseth Thee to lay upon us.  And touching this stricken one—­if it were Thy blessed will to—­to—­but no—­oh no—­not our will, oh Lord, but Thine be done!”

It was indeed a beautiful thing to see the sorrow-bound father bowing down his gray locks with humility before the footstool of his God, and forbearing even to murmur under a dispensation so fearfully calamitous to him and his.  Religion, however, at which the fool and knave may sneer in the moments of convivial riot, is after all the only stay on which the human heart can rest in those severe trials of life which almost every one sooner or later is destined to undergo.  The sceptic may indeed triumph in the pride of his intellect or in the hour of his passion; but no matter on what arguments his hollow creed is based, let but the footstep of disease or death approach, and he himself is the first to abandon it and take refuge in those truths which he had hitherto laughed at or maligned.  When Mr. Sinclair arose, his countenance, through all the traces of sorrow which were upon it, beamed with a light which no principle, merely human, could communicate to it.  A dim but gentle and holy radiance suffused his whole face, and his heart, for a moment, received the assurance it wanted so much.  He experienced a feeling for which language has no terms, or at least none adequate to express its character.  It was “that peace of God which passeth all understanding.”