ange to him. With the prayer it seems to him that all the religious
influences to which he has ever been subject are slowly and surely
converging their forces upon his mind; and, rapt as he is in the
preacher's utterance, there come to him shadowy recollections of some
tender admonition addressed to him by dear womanly lips in boyhood,
which now, on a sudden, flames into the semblance of a Divine summons.
Then comes the sermon, from the text, "My son, give me thine heart."
There is no repulsive formality, no array of logical presentment to
arouse antagonism of thought, but only inglowing enthusiasm, that
transfuses the Scriptural appeal, and illuminates it with winning
illustration. Reuben sees that the evangelist feels in his inmost soul
what he utters; the thrill of his voice and the touching earnestness of
his manner declare it. It is as if our eager listener were, by every
successive appeal, placed in full _rapport_ with a great battery of
religious emotions, and at every touch were growing into fuller and
fuller entertainment of the truths which so fired and sublimed the
speaker's utterance.

Do we use too gross a figure to represent what many people would call
the influences of the Spirit? Heaven forgive us, if we do; but nothing
can more definitely describe the seemingly electrical influences which
were working upon the mind of Reuben, as he caught, ever and again,
breaking through the torrent of the speaker's language, the tender,
appealing refrain, _"My son, give me thine heart!"_

All thought of God the Avenger and of God the Judge, which had been so
linked with most of his boyish instructions, seemed now to melt away in
an aureole of golden light, through which he saw only God the Father!
And the first prayer he ever learned comes to his mind with a grace and
a meaning and a power that he never felt before.

"Whether we obey Him," (it is the preacher we quote,) "or distrust Him,
or revile Him, or forget Him, or struggle to ignore Him, always, always
He is our Father. And whatever we may do, however we may sin, however
recreant we may be to early faith or early teaching, however unmoved by
the voice of conscience,--which is smiting on your hearts, as it is on
mine to-day,--whatever we are, or whatever we may be, yet, ever while
life is in us, that great, serene voice of the All-Merciful is sounding
in our ears, 'My son, give me thine heart!' Ay, the flowers repeat it in
their bloom, the birds in their summer