Soft waves of bliss break through us.
"The peace with God." "The sense of sins forgiven." Methodists and
revivalists say the words, and the mocking world shoots out its lip, and
walks by smiling--"Hypocrite."
There are more fools and fewer hypocrites than the wise world dreams of.
The hypocrite is rare as icebergs in the tropics; the fool common as
buttercups beside a water-furrow: whether you go this way or that you
tread on him; you dare not look at your own reflection in the water but you
see one. There is no cant phrase, rotten with age, but it was the dress of
a living body; none but at heart it signifies a real bodily or mental
condition which some have passed through.
After hours and nights of frenzied fear of the supernatural desire to
appease the power above, a fierce quivering excitement in every inch of
nerve and blood vessel, there comes a time when nature cannot endure
longer, and the spring long bent recoils. We sink down emasculated. Up
creeps the deadly delicious calm.
"I have blotted out as a cloud thy sins, and as a thick cloud thy
trespasses, and will remember them no more for ever." We weep with soft
transporting joy.
A few experience this; many imagine they experience it, one here and there
lies about it. In the main, "The peace with God; a sense of sins
forgiven," stands for a certain mental and physical reaction.
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