er retreat and set thus under the consuming noonday of the
Justice of this Sun of white-hot Righteousness.

For, as she listened, it was all so miserably convincing; her own little
essays of intellect and flights of hopeful imagination were caught up and
whirled away in the strong rush of this man's argument; her timid
expectancy that God was really Love, as she understood the word in the
vision of her Saviour's Person,--this was dashed aside as a childish
fancy; the vision of the Father of the Everlasting Arms receded into the
realm of dreams; and instead there lowered overhead in this furious
tempest of wrath a monstrous God with a stony Face and a stonier Heart,
who was eternally either her torment or salvation; and Isabel thought,
and trembled at the blasphemy, that if God were such as this, the one
would be no less agony than the other. Was this man bearing false
witness, not only against his neighbour, but far more awfully, against
his God? But it was too convincing; it was built up on an iron hammered
framework of a great man's intellect and made white hot with another
great man's burning eloquence. But it seemed to Isabel now and again as
if a thunder-voiced virile devil were proclaiming the Gospel of
Everlasting shame. There he bent over the pulpit with flaming face and
great compelling gestures that swayed the congregation, eliciting the
emotions he desired, as the conductor's baton draws out the music (for
the man was a great orator), and he stormed and roared and seemed to
marshal the very powers of the world to come, compelling them by his nod,
and interpreting them by his voice; and below him sat this poor child,
tossed along on his eloquence, like a straw on a flood; and yet hating
and resenting it and struggling to detach herself and disbelieve every
word he spoke.

As the last sands were running out in his hour-glass, he came to harbour
from this raging sea; and in a few deep resonant sentences, like those
with which he began, he pictured the peace of the ransomed soul, that
knows itself safe in the arms of God; that rejoices, even in this world,
in the Light of His Face and the ecstasy of His embrace; that dwells by
waters of comfort and lies down in the green pastures of the Heavenly
Love; while, round this little island of salvation in an ocean of terror,
the thunders of wrath sound only as the noise of surge on a far-off reef.

The effect on Isabel was very great. It was far more startling than her