nd
trustworthy, showing not only industry but unusual aptitude for business
It was with special pleasure that I learned that he was turning his
thoughts to the subject of religion. During the services in the little
Pine-street church he would sit with thoughtful face, and not seldom
with moistened eyes. He read the Bible and prayed in secret. I was not
surprised when he came to me one day and opened his heart. The great
crisis in his life had come. God was speaking to his soul, and he was
listening to his voice. The uplifted cross drew him, and he yielded to
the gentle attraction. We prayed together, and henceforth there was a
new and sacred bond that bound us to each other. I felt that I was a
witness to the most solemn transaction that can take place on earth--the
wedding of a soul to a heavenly faith. Soon thereafter he went to
Virginia, to attend college. There he united with the Church. His
letters to me were full of gratitude and joy. It was the blossoming of
his spiritual life, and the air was full of its fragrance, and the earth
was flooded with glory. A pedestrian tour among the Virginia hills
brought him into communion with Nature at a time when it was rapture to
drink in its beauty and its grandeur. The light kindled within his soul
by the touch of the Holy Spirit transfigured the scenery upon which he
gazed, and the glory of God shone round about the young student in the
flush and blessedness of his first love. O blessed days! O days of
brightness, and sweetness, and rapture! The soul is then in its
blossoming-time, and all high enthusiasms, all bright dreams, all
thrilling joys, are realities which inwork themselves into the
consciousness, to be forgotten never; to remain with us as prophecies of
the eternal springtime that awaits the true-hearted on the hills of God
beyond the grave, or as accusing voices charging us with the murder of
our dead ideals! Amid the dust and din of the battle in after-years we
turn to this radiant spot in our journey with smiles or tears; according
as we have been true or false to the impulses, aspirations, and purposes
inspired within us by that first, and brightest, and nearest
manifestation of God. Such a season is a natural to every life as the
April buds and June roses are to forest and garden. The springtime of
some lives is deferred by unpropitious circumstance to the time when it
should be glowing with autumnal glory, and rich in the fruitage of the
closing year. The lif