ast comers had found a place, and the talking had stopped, he
presently gave out his text, in a slow thunderous voice, that silenced
the last whispers:

"What shall we then say to these things? If God be on our side, who can
be against us?"

There were a few slow sentences, in a deep resonant voice, uttering each
syllable deliberately like the explosion of a far-off gun, and in a
minute or two he was in the thick of Calvin's smoky gospel. Doctrine,
voice, and man were alike terrible and overpowering.

There lay the great scheme in a few minutes, seen by Isabel as though
through the door of hell, illumined by the glare of the eternal embers.
The huge merciless Will of God stood there before her, disclosed in all
its awfulness, armed with thunders, moving on mighty wheels. The
foreknowledge of God closed the question henceforth, and, if proof were
needed, made predestination plain. There was man's destiny, irrevocably
fixed, iron-bound, changeless and immovable as the laws of God's own
being. Yet over the rigid and awful Face of God, flickered a faint light,
named mercy; and this mercy vindicated its existence by demanding that
some souls should escape the final and endless doom that was the due
reward of every soul conceived and born in enmity against God and under
the frown of His Justice.

Then, heralded too by wrath, the figure of Jesus began to glimmer through
the thunderclouds; and Isabel lifted her eyes, to look in hope. But He
was not as she had known him in His graciousness, and as He had revealed
Himself to her in tender communion, and among the flowers and under the
clear skies of Sussex. Here, in this echoing world of wrath He stood,
pale and rigid, with lightning in His eyes, and the grim and crimson
Cross behind him; and as powerless as His own Father Himself to save one
poor timid despairing hoping soul against whom the Eternal Decree had
gone forth. Jesus was stern and forbidding here, with the red glare of
wrath on His Face too, instead of the rosy crown of Love upon His
forehead; His mouth was closed with compressed lips which surely would
only open to condemn; not that mouth, quivering and human, that had
smiled and trembled and bent down from the Cross to kiss poor souls that
could not hope, nor help themselves, that had smiled upon Isabel ever
since she had known Him. It was appalling to this gentle maiden soul that
had bloomed and rejoiced so long in the shadow of His healing, to be torn
out of h