The Story of Mary Neil - Page 2

the first it had fascinated her. "Has he been _here_
that he knows just how it feels?" she asked, wonderingly, and then
solemnly repeated:

"Saviour, what means this breadth of death,
This space before me lying;
These deeps where life so lingereth,
This difficulty of dying?
So many turns abrupt and rude,
Such ever-shifting grounds,
Such strangely peopled solitudes,
Such strangely silent sounds?'"

Her sufferings were very great, and sometimes the physical depression
exerted a definable influence on her spiritual state. Still she never
lost her consciousness of the presence of her Guide and Saviour, and
once, in the exhaustion of a severe paroxysm, she murmured two lines
from the same grand hymn:

"Deeper! dark, dark, but yet I follow:
Tighten, dear Lord, thy clasp."

Ah! there was something touching and noble beyond all words, in this
complete reliance and perfect trust; and it never again wavered.

"Is it _very_ dark, Mary dear?" her friend said one morning, the _last_
for her on earth.

"Too dark to see," she whispered, "but I can go on if Christ will hold
my hand."

After this a great solemnity shaded her face; she lost all consciousness
of this world. The frail, shadowy little body lay gray and passive,
while that greatest of all struggles was going on--the struggle of the
Eternal out of Time; but her lips moved incessantly, and occasionally
some speech of earth told the anxious watchers how hard the conflict
was. For instance, toward sundown she said in a voice strangely solemn
and anxious:

"Who are we trying to avoid?
From whom, Lord, must we hide?
Oh! can the dying be decoyed,
With the Saviour by his side?"

"Loose sands and all things sinking!" "Are we near eternity?" "Can I
fall from Thee even now?" and ejaculations of similar kind, showed that
the spiritual struggle was a very palpable one to her; but it ended in a
great calm. For two hours she lay in a peace that passeth understanding,
and you would have said that she was dead but for a vague look of
expectancy in the happy, restful face. Then suddenly there was a
lightening of the whole countenance; she stretched out her arms to meet
the messenger of the King, and entered heaven with this prayer on her
lips:

"_Both hands_, dear Lord, _both hands_.'"

Don't doubt but she got them; their mighty strength lifted her over the
dark river almost dry shod.

"Rests she not well whose pilgrim staff and shoon
Lie in her tent--for on the golden street
She walks and stumbles not on roads star strewn
With her unsandalled