[34] He was ever near us, enlightening our ignorance, guiding our wanderings, comforting our sorrows with a love unwearied by faults, unchilled by ingratitude, till at last He should present us faultless before the throne of his glory with exceeding joy.I sat intent and absorbed. Oh! how much I needed just such a friend, I thought to myself. Then the awful fact came over me that I had never had any conviction of my sins, and consequently could not come to Him. I longed to cry out “I will,” when father made his passionate appeal, “Come, then, and trust your soul to this faithful friend.” Like a flash it came over me that if I needed conviction of sin, He was able to give me even this also. I would trust Him for the whole. My whole soul was illumined with joy, and as I left the church to walk home, it seemed to me as if Nature herself were hushing her breath to hear the music of heaven.
As soon as father came home and was seated in his study, I went up to him and fell in his arms saying, “ Father, I have given myself to Jesus, and He has taken me.” I never shall forget the expression of his face as he looked down into my earnest, childish eyes; it was so sweet, so gentle, and like sunlight breaking out upon a landscape. “ Is it so?” he said, holding me silently to his heart, as I felt the hot tears fall on my head. “ Then has a new flower blossomed in the kingdom this day.”
If she could have been let alone, and taught “to look up and not down, forward and not back, out and not in,” this religious experience might have gone on as sweetly and naturally as the opening of a flower in the
