The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Christmas Miracle, by
Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)

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Title: The Christmas Miracle
1911

Author: Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)

Release Date: November 19, 2007 [EBook #23553]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Produced by David Widger

THE CHRISTMAS MIRACLE

By Charles Egbert Craddock

1911

He yearned for a sign from the heavens. Could one intimation be
vouchsafed him, how it would confirm his faltering faith! Jubal Kennedy
was of the temperament impervious to spiritual subtleties, fain to reach
conclusions with the line and rule of mathematical demonstration. Thus,
all unreceptive, he looked through the mountain gap, as through some
stupendous gateway, on the splendors of autumn; the vast landscape
glamorous in a transparent amethystine haze; the foliage of the dense
primeval wilderness in the October richness of red and russet; the
"hunter's moon," a full sphere of illuminated pearl, high in the blue
east while yet the dull vermilion sun swung westering above the massive
purple heights. He knew how the sap was sinking; that the growths of the
year had now failed; presently all would be shrouded in snow, but only
to rise again in the reassurance of vernal quickening, to glow anew in
the fullness of bloom, to attain eventually the perfection of fruition.
And still he was deaf to the reiterated analogy of death, and blind to
the immanent obvious prophecy of resurrection and the life to come. His
thoughts, as he stood on this jutting crag in Sunrise Gap, were with
a recent "experience meeting" at which he had sought to canvass his
spiritual needs. His demand of a sign from the heavens as evidence of
the existence of the God of revelation, as assurance of the awakening of
divine grace in the human heart, as actual proof that wistful mortality
is inherently endowed with immortality, had electrified this symposium.
Though it was fashionable, so to speak, in this remote cove among the
Great Smoky Mountains, to be repentant in rhetorical involutions and a
self-accuser in