carol, the rejoicing brooks, and
the seasons in their courses, all, all repeat it, 'My son, give me thine
heart!'

"Oh, my hearers, this is real, this is true! It is our Father who says
it; and we, unworthy ministers of His word and messengers to declare His
beneficence, repeat it for Him, 'My son, give me thine heart!' Not to
crush, not to spurn, not for a toy. The great God asks your hearts
because He wishes your gratitude and your love. Do you believe He asks
it? Yes, you do. Do you believe He asks it idly? No, you do not. What,
then, does this appeal mean? It means, that God is love,--that you are
His children,--straying, outcast, wretched, may-be, but still His
children,--and by the abounding love which is in Him, He asks your love
in return. Will you give it?"

And Reuben says to himself, yet almost audibly, "I will."

The sermon was altogether such a one as to act with prodigious force
upon so emotional a nature as that of Reuben. Yet we dare say there were
gray-haired men in the church, and sallow-faced young men, who nodded
their heads wisely and coolly, as they went out, and said, "An eloquent
sermon, quite; but not much argument in it." As if all men were to plod
to heaven on the vertebrae of an inexorable logic, and not--God
willing--to be rapt away thitherward by the clinging force of a glowing
and confiding heart! Alas, how the intellect droops in its attempt to
measure or comprehend the infinite! How the heart leaps and grows large
in its reach toward the altitude of Boundless Love, if only it be buoyed
with faith!

"Is this religion?" Reuben asked himself, as he went out of the church,
with his pride all subdued. And the very atmosphere seemed to wear a new
glory, and a new lien of brotherhood to tie him to every creature he met
upon the thronged streets. All the time, too, was sounding in his ears
(as if he had yielded full assent) the mellow and grateful cadence of
the hymn,

"Return, O wanderer! now return!"

XXXIX.

Reuben wrote to the Doctor, under the influence of this new glow of
feeling, in a way that at once amazed and delighted the good old
gentleman. And yet there were ill-defined, but very decided, terrors and
doubts in his delight Dr. Johns, by nature as well as by education, was
disposed to look distrustfully upon any sudden conviction of duty which
had its spring in any extraordinary exaltation of feeling, rather than
in that full intellectual seizure of the Divine Word, wh