" We looked up
and bowed in reply to the salutation. "It is a beautiful morning,"
he continued, "and I should like myself to take a walk down on 'Main
Street,' but my folks have sent me here to be shut up because they
say I am crazy, but I am sure I am not crazy, and I can't see why
they should think so." And we thought the same as we listened to the
calm, pleasant tones of his voice, till he added, "It will soon make
me beside myself to be with this wild, screaming set; and it doesn't
do them any good either to shut them up here. What they want is the
Grace of God, and I'll put the Grace of God into them."
His voice grew wild and excited, but we knew that a whole volume of
truth had been uttered in those simple words: "What they want is the
Grace of God."
The Grace of God. How many has it saved--rescued--from madness! how
have prayer and watchfulness been blest in conquering self, in
subduing rampant passion and the wild, disorderly vagaries of the
brain!
As we listen, the low whispered prayer of a Hall when he felt the
billows of angry passion about to sweep over his soul, "O, Lamb of
God, calm my perturbed spirit," we feel that but for such
interceding prayer and that watchfulness which accompanied it, the
insanity to which he was temporarily subject would have won the same
mastery over the mighty powers of his mind as over those of Swift,
and the glory of his "wide fame" as well as the peace of his "humble
hope," would have been exchanged for the vagaries of the madman or
the drivellings of the idiot.
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