The good man listened attentively to the child's
simple and modest statement of Christian experience, and then with an
awful, though kindly, solemnity of speech and manner said, "Harriet,
do you feel that if the universe should be destroyed (awful pause) you
could be happy with God alone?" After struggling in vain, in her
mental bewilderment, to fix in her mind some definite conception of
the meaning of the sounds which fell on her ear like the measured
strokes of a bell, the child of fourteen stammered out, "Yes, sir."
"You realize, I trust," continued the doctor, "in some measure at
least, the deceitfulness of your heart, and that in punishment for
your sins God might justly leave you to make yourself as miserable as
you have made yourself sinful?"
"Yes, sir," again stammered Harriet.
Having thus effectually, and to his own satisfaction, fixed the
child's attention on the morbid and over-sensitive workings of her own
heart, the good and truly kind-hearted man dismissed her with a
fatherly benediction. But where was the joyous ecstasy of that
beautiful Sabbath morning of a year ago? Where was that heavenly
friend? Yet was not this as it should be, and might not God leave her
"to make herself as miserable as she had made herself sinful"?
In a letter addressed to her brother Edward, about this time, she
writes: "My whole life is one continued struggle: I do nothing right.
Pages:
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59