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CHAPTER XXVI More Violence CLAYTON ROSE THE NEXT MORNING, and found his friends much better than he had expected after the agitation and abuse of the night before. They seemed composed and cheerful. "I am surprised," he said, "to see that your wife is able to be up this morning." "They that wait on the Lord shall renew their strength,"1 said father Dickson. "How often I have found it so! We have seen times when I and my wife have both been so ill that we scarcely thought we had strength to help ourselves; and a child has been taken ill, or some other emergency has occurred that called for immediate exertion , and we have been to the Lord and found strength. Our way has been hedged up many a time—the sea before us and the Egyptians behind us; but the sea has always opened when we have stretched our hands to the Lord. I have never sought the Lord in vain. He has allowed great troubles to come upon us; but he always delivers us." Clayton recalled the sneering, faithless, brilliant Frank Russel, and compared him, in his own mind, with the simple, honest man before him. "No," he said, to himself, "human nature is not a humbug, after all. There are some real men—some who will not acquiesce in what is successful, if it be wrong." Clayton was in need of such living examples; for, in regard to religion , he was in that position which is occupied by too many young men of high moral sentiment in this country. What he had seen of the worldly policy and time-serving spirit of most of the organized bodies professing to represent the Christian faith and life, had deepened the shadow of doubt and distrust which persons of strong individuality and discriminating minds are apt to feel in certain stages of their spiritual development. Great afflictions—those which tear up the roots of the soul—are often succeeded, in the 489 490 DRED course of the man's history, by a period of scepticism. The fact is, such afflictions are disenchanting powers; they give to the soul an earnestness and a power of discrimination which no illusion can withstand. They teach us what we need, what we must have to rest upon; and, in consequence, thousands of little formalities, and empty shows, and dry religious conventionalities, are scattered by it like chaff. The soul rejects them, in her indignant anguish; and, finding so much that is insincere, and untrue, and unreliable, she has sometimes hours of doubting all things. Clayton saw again in the minister what he had seen in Nina—a soul swayed by an attachment to an invisible person, whose power over it was the power of a personal attachment, and who swayed it, not by dogmas or commands, merely, but by the force of a sympathetic emotion. Beholding, as in a glass, the divine image of his heavenly friend, insensibly to himself the minister was changing into the same image. The good and the beautiful to him was an embodied person,—even Jesus his Lord. "What may be your future course?" said Clayton, with anxiety. "Will you discontinue your labors in this state?" "I may do so, if I find positively that there is no gaining a hearing ," said father Dickson. "I think we owe it to our state not to give up the point without a trial. There are those who are willing to hear me—willing to make a beginning with me. It is true they are poor and unfashionable; but still it is my duty not to desert them till I have tried, at least, whether the laws can't protect me in the exercise of my duty. The hearts of all men are in the hands of the Lord. He turneth them as the rivers of water are turned. This evil is a great and a trying one. It is gradually lowering the standard of morals in our churches, till men know not what spirit they are of. I held it my duty not to yield to the violence of the tyrant, and bind myself to a promise to leave, till I had considered what the will of my Master would be." "I should be sorry," said Clayton, "to think that North Carolina couldn't protect you. I am sure, when the particulars of this are known, there will be a general reprobation from all parts of the country. You...

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