He
persisted, knowing well what was at stake, and to my surprise Dr:
Pemberton and Mr. Gerald Stansbury cooperated with his decision. Nor did
Mr. Lodore oppose it, though losing thereby one of his most liberal
parishioners.
A great struggle was going on in my heart just then--that I think
would have perished in darkness, had I not found myself free and
emancipated from all fetters of custom and observance by our change of
residence.
From the shallow streams of conventional Christianity, moving with tardy
current, and full of shoals and sandbanks, I was drifting down, slowly
but surely, with that great ocean of deep and unsounded religion, to
which all profound natures, that have suffered, do, I believe--if left
to themselves--inevitably tend.
In this new land of promise--the golden California--lying like a bride
by the side of her bridegroom--the great Pacific Ocean--and shut away
by deserts and mountains, from all old conventional cliques and
prejudices of our Eastern cities, my soul took wing. What poetry was in
me found its outlet; what religious capacity God had endued me with,
went forth from the clash of cymbals and the sound of the sackbut, that
ever had reminded me, in all seasons of sorrow, or even of joyous
excitement, that I was one of an ancient people, astray in foreign
pastures--went forth (even as the compromise was made at first by Christ
and his apostles with the magnificent but soulless worship of the Jews)
to merge these sounds of ancient rite and form in the deep roll of the
organ, that fills the churches where the Host is present.
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