“How strangely things work, and there seem to be ways under them all that will work out in spite of us,” said father.

The Sabbath on which we had expected to go to hear the Reverend Hosea Ballou preach proved cold and rainy, and a month would elapse ere he came again.  We were impatient waiters, but the time came at last, on the Sabbath after the arrival of Matthias, and he was to come over and attend to the early milking, while Hal and Mr. Benton would have supper ready for us on our return.

That day was to me like a never-to-be-forgotten sunrise.  Although gleams of light had before this crossed my vision, never had so radiant a morning of perception opened the door of my soul.  New yet old, unknown yet longed for, those words fell like golden sun-rays into the room of my understanding; they bathed me with light, and baptized me with tenderness, while I stood at the fount of living inspiration.  That grand old man, then about seventy-two years of age, talked to the assembled congregation from this text:  “For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God; an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens” (Second Corinthians, fifth chapter and first verse).  It was all as natural as a part of himself could be, and he was a power.  Pure and dispassionate, the plea he made rested on the ground of revealed truth.  He told us of what the history of the past furnished, and carried us clear on into the life beyond.  “The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life; as in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive.”

It seemed to me then, and still seems, that he spoke with a power that was divine.  The tide of earnest thought and feeling that carried him with his subject out on the depth, carried also his hearers, and we were shown the way to the port of eternal life.  Oh, how he strengthened me!  His touching invocation reached, as it seemed, the very doors of heaven and swung them wide open, and when the people joined in singing the good old hymn, written by Sebastian Streeter, whose first verse runs as follows: 

    What glorious tidings do I hear
      From my Redeemer’s tongue! 
    I can no longer silence bear,
      I’ll burst into a song.

I cried almost aloud for great joy.  My father and mother were moved, and when they saw my tears united their own.  To our great surprise, after the service we learned that the professor was the guest of our cousin, Belinda Sprag, and at her house after dinner I had an opportunity to say to him: 

“Mr. Ballou, call me your child, for you have to-day baptized me.  I am a Universalist, I know, for I love your doctrine.”

“Bless you, my daughter,” was his reply.  “God finds His own through time.  May your young heart be made strong, and your life blossom with roses that have no thorns.”

That was great honor to me; the touch of that hand on my head; those words addressed to me.  We all went home, having had a feast of good things, and our blessed Clara, who had been the means of leading us to the light, sat all the way as in a dream, only saying: