foam reached her feet; slowly, slowly it rose to her ankles, to her knees, to her breast, to her lips. She was face to face with the horror of violent death, yet she would not give way. What sustained her? Clear and high her voice was heard singing the words of the 25th Psalm-'Remember not the sins of my youth, nor my transgressions. Let me not be ashamed, for I put my trust in Thee.' 8. Again, in 1679, two Scotchmen were executed on the false charge of complicity in the murder of Archbishop Sharp, whom neither of them had ever seen. They were poor, uneducated men, and they walked side by side to the terrible scaffold without a tremor or a complaint. What sustained them? It was the nineteenth verse of the 34th Psalm-Many are the troubles of the righteous: but the Lord delivereth him out of them all.' 'God hath not promised,' said one of them, 'to keep us from trouble, but to be with us in it; and what needs more? I bless the Lord for keeping me to this very hour; for little would I have thought a twelvemonth since, that the Lord would have taken me, a poor ploughman lad, and have honoured me so highly as to have made me first appear for Him, and now hath keeped me to this very hour to lay down my life for Him.' 9. But there are forms of slow-consuming agony and long-continued horror which are more terrible to bear in every way than the brief spasm of martyrdom; and even under such awful burdens of anguish the promises contained in the Scriptures have been found all-sufficient to support and to console. During the Indian Mutiny in 1857, not a few of the sufferers realised what a new force came into the words of Scripture at the hour of need. 'A young English baronet, Sir Mountstuart Jackson, with Lieutenant Burnes, Mrs. Orr, Miss Jackson, and some little children were trying to escape from Seetapore, and went through sufferings almost unspeakable, as they struggled forward, mostly by night, ragged, tattered, ill, and with matted hair. The only comfort which came to them in their tribulation came from the Word of God. They had no Bible among them, but, one day, some native medicines were brought to Mrs. Orr wrapped in a piece of printed paper which proved to be part of a leaf of the Book of Isaiah. And the message which came to them through Mohammedan hands was this..."they shall obtain gladness and joy; and sorrow and mourning shall flee away. I, even I, am He that comforteth you: who art thou, that thou shouldest be afraid of a man that shall die, and of the son of man which shall be made as grass; and forgettest the Lord thy maker, . . . and hast feared continually every day because of the fury of the oppressor, as if he were ready to destroy and where is the fury of the oppressor? The captive exile hasteneth that he may be loosed, and that he should not die in the pit, nor that. . "1-and there the bit of paper was torn off. But the words of love thus strangely and mysteriously brought to them, comforted and strengthened them in the midst of their sorrow. The torn fragment of a text which came to them through heathen hands seemed like a promise of deliverance.' 2 10. Can there be abysses of misery deeper even than this? Yes! one of the most tragic death-scenes of which I have ever read was that of Captain Allen Francis Gardiner and his poor companions on Picton Island in 1851. They died of slow starvation. While thousands of useless men live in hard-hearted self-indulgence, this brave and blameless sailor was actuated by the one burning desire to 1 Is. li. 11-14. 2 Sir J. Kaye, Sepoy War, iii. 488. spread the truth of God among the degraded heathen of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, who are some of the very lowest of the human race. Landing with one or two companions on the wintry, storm-swept, hungry coast of Picton Island, deserted and abandoned by the rescue which should have come, these poor men slowly starved to death in longcontinued agony. Did their faith fail under those frightful circumstances? It failed not! They continued in mutual and jubilant trust in God. 'Asleep or awake,' wrote one of them-poor Richard Williams-in his diary, 'I am happy beyond the poor compass of words to tell.' In August 1851, after weeks of ravening hunger and freezing cold, Allen Gardiner wrote, 'God has kept me in perfect peace.' And so, unmurmuringly trustful to the last, they died of hunger, and when their bodies were found a month afterwards, the captain and sailors who had gone too late to rescue them, cried like children; but it was found that Allen Gardiner had painted upon a rock beside the cavern in which these hapless ones had taken refuge, a hand pointing downwards, and underneath it the words, 'My soul, wait thou only upon God.' Surely before that royal throne of unmoved affliction kings might lay down their crowns, and bow their heads in humblest reverence! 11. And even when death comes upon men suddenly, 'terrible and with a tiger's leaps,' it is in the words of Scripture that they find their strength and hope. Even at such awful moments they have been enabled to exclaim, 'Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him.' In 1863 there was a terrible earthquake in Manilla. The great cathedral of the city was shaken down over the heads of the worshippers assembled in it. Owing to some peculiarity of the vaulted roof, which for a time upheld the masses of superincumbent ruin, some of the congregation FEAR OF DEATH 309 were not immediately killed, though they were maimed and terrified. But the rescue of the survivors was at once seen to be hopeless. To touch the ruins was to bury them alive. A throng of people was assembled outside the walls, and they distinctly heard the voices of the doomed multitude within. A low, deep, bass voice, doubtless that of the priest, was heard within, uttering the words, 'Blessed are the dead that die in the Lord;' at which the hearers burst into a passion of sobs, for deep groans were wrung from the speaker by some intense pain. But, immediately afterwards, the same voice spoke to those who were thus in the very valley of the shadow of death. It spoke in a calm and even tone, and the listeners outside distinctly heard the words, 'The Lord Himself shall descend from Heaven with a shout. and the dead in Christ shall rise first.' 12. In the Civil War between the Northern and Southern States of America, after one of those disastrous battles, they found the body of a poor Southern soldier. He was a youth, and he had been shot on the field; but as he lay there with the life-blood ebbing from his wounds, he had drawn out his Bible and it was found in his dead hands, and the rigid fingers were still pressed upon the words, 'Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil. For Thou art with me. Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me.' 'What a history a collection of Bibles would give us,' says the Archbishop of Armagh, 'if we could only have it! One would represent to us the sigh from a penitent, and one the song from a saint, and one would have its story of strength for some one who was tempted, and through one Christ's heart of fire melted the icicles round some heart of ice.' CHAPTER XXI SPECIAL CONSOLATIONS OF SCRIPTURE. "That through patience and comfort of the Scriptures we might have hope.'-Rom. xv. 4. 'I see that the Bible fits into every fold and crevice of the human heart. I am a man, and I believe that this is God's book because it is man's book.'-HALLAM. MARTYRDOM and the accumulations of overwhelming tragedy only befall the few; but many forms of sorrow -'bitter arrows from the gentle hands of God'-strike the lives of every one of us. Shakespeare, in his allobserving genius, has twice enumerated some of them. Thus in Hamlet' he says, There's the respect That makes calamity of so long life; For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, The insolence of office, and the spurns That patient merit of the unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? who would these fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, |