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"How could the damnable thing ever happen?" he exclaimed, passionately. "She was a true, honest girl; and Pendlam is not a bad man." "He is a man," I said, "who verily thinketh no evil. He has imagination, intellect, spirituality; but he wants balance. From the first, I saw that his powers needed centralizing. He had no hold upon integral truth, but snatched here a fragment and there a fragment.
"My dear John Henry," I interrupted, "allow me to say that you are quite mistaken. If I know any thing of affinities, there is none between Susan and myself; no more, I judge, than there is between you and the gentleman I met going out, as I was coming in. "Oh, Clodman! You saw him?" cried Pendlam.
We must first be obedient, before we can be free. You see where I am," said Pendlam. Here a young woman came forward, and, with tears in her eyes, thanked her pastor for the glorious truths he had that day preached. "They are not my truths; they are the Lord's; I am but his mouthpiece," answered Pendlam, well pleased. A gray-haired deacon now approached.
You wouldn't have caught me walking with you, if I had known!" She shook her Sunday things indignantly; and there was another general smile, as she took these representatives of her piety abruptly out of the room. "Ail this is very interesting," said Pendlam, recovering his equanimity. "I wonder what sort of a sermon I shall preach next Sabbath?" We were invited to stay to luncheon.
He was the fellow who had flogged Pendlam four years before. Extremes had met. The temperance missionary and the infuriate liquor-dealer stood upon the same platform. Soon after, we took our leave. We walked up and down in the fresh air. How sweet, how cool it seemed, after an hour spent amid the heated breaths of the packed audience!
But where the mind is kept in the receptive condition without the aid of the external form of prayer, this becomes like a scaffolding after the house is built. Step by step, I have been led to this high spiritual plane." Susan, as of old, sat and sighed. Pendlam found my magnetism so attractive, that it was impossible for me to obtain a minute's conversation with Susan alone.
My theatre-going friend pulled up suddenly in his ambling discourse concerning the merits of the last actress, dropped his voice to a whisper, touched my arm, and pointed with his cane. "Look! the Reverend John Henry Pendlam!" "Coming out of a bar-room! Ho, ho! Sir Reverend!" "He is on no base errand," replied Horatio. "He goes about carrying the Gospel into these dens.
He was clapping furiously, and looking about upon the audience to see who else was cheering, when he suddenly stopped, his hands asunder, his countenance transfixed with an alarming expression. I thought he had clapped himself into a fit. "Horatio!" I cried, "Horatio! what's the matter?" "Look! look!" "Where?" "Yonder! by the pillar!" "Don't you see? Pendlam!"
"Directed! by what authority?" "By the Spirit. Some beautiful use is to be fulfilled. I see where you are," added Pendlam; "from your stand-point it must look absurd enough." I sat down, and endeavoured to reason with him. But I found it impossible for a person upon my plane to reach with any argument a person upon his. In vain I recapitulated his successive trials and failures.
His sermons, lectures, and conventions are of too much importance for him even to think of his wife and child." I looked to see poor Susan writhe with pain under these harsh words. But she merely heaved a sigh, and let fall a tear on the babe, which she had taken from its grandmother's arms. "I will speak to Mr. Pendlam," she said, as she hastily left the room.
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