"I cannot let myself think any evil of you, dear sister, in God's
chastising providence," said the clergyman. "Among the angels, in the
land that is awaiting me, I had expected to see the beautiful face
which has so often encouraged my preaching, and looked up at me from
Sabbath-school and church. You do not come to our meetings any more. My
dear, let us pray together in your affliction."
The old man knelt in the parlor and raised his voice in prayer--a clear,
considerate, judicial, sincere prayer, such as age and long authority
gave him the right to address to heaven. He was not unacquainted with
sorrow himself; his children had given him much concern, and even
anguish, and in Calvin was his last hope. A thread of wicked commonplace
ran through them all; his sterling nature in their composition was lost
like a grain of gold in a mass of alloy. They had nothing ideal, no
reverence, no sense of delicacy. Taking to his arms a face and form that
pleased him, the minister had not ingrafted upon it one babe of any
divinity; that coarser matrix received the sacred flame as mere mud
extinguishes the lightning. He fell into this reminiscence of personal
disappointment unwittingly, as in the process of his prayer he strove to
comfort Agnes.
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