But there was something better in store. Girlish days swept by much
as usual--the rapid growth of warm thought and feeling making each
revolving year a continuous springtide, an opening summer. At
nineteen, Annie Macpherson looked out on a world that always promises
more to youthful eyes than it ever fulfils. Eager hope was drawing
much on a future whose furthest horizon was Time. Suddenly a shadow
fell. A word spoken by a friend was the vehicle of a divine message.
A more distant and awful horizon arose to view: Time with its hopes
and joys, like a thin mist in early morning, vanished in the light of
eternity; and quickly from that young heart, pierced with a new
sorrow, went up the prayer, "God be merciful to me a sinner!"
How little the world understands that same old prayer. Yonder afar
off stands a man who, having trafficked in all iniquity, having
matured in wickedness, and perfected himself in the fine art of
dodging truth and conscience, is at length found out in the thicket
of his own vices by a bull's eye that glares on him like hell. Well
it befits such an one, even the world admits, to smite upon his
breast and cry for mercy. But for a girl in her teens, an innocent,
merry-hearted, pure-minded young thing, to raise a cry for mercy like
a very publican or a prodigal, is confounding to the world's sense of
propriety and measure in things; and hence that world is angry, and
in effect repudiates the need of so much mercy, of so much abasement
and urgency in a case like this.
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