One that sat on a throne with a rainbow round His head.  She saw also as if he bowed his head with his face to the paved work that was under the Prince’s feet, saying, I heartily thank my Lord and King for bringing me to this place.  You will easily see how ready this lone woman was with all that for his entrance who knocked and said, Peace be to this house, and handed her a letter of perfume from her husband’s King.  Then you will have remarked also some of the things this visitor from on high said to her of the place whence he had come.  He told her, to begin with, how they sometimes talked about her in his country.  She thought that she was a lonely and forgotten widow, and that no one cared what became of her.  But her visitor assured her she was quite wrong in thinking that.  He had often himself heard her name mentioned in conversation above; and the most hopeful reports, he told her, were circulated from door to door that she was actually all but started on the upward way.  Yes, he said, and we have a place prepared for you on the strength of these reports, a place among the immortals close beside your husband.  And all that, as you will not wonder, was the beginning of Christiana’s secret life.  After that morning she never again felt alone or forgotten.  I am not alone, she would after that say, when any of her old neighbours knocked at her door.  No, I am not alone, but if thou comest in God’s name, come in.

2.  And from that day a long succession of secret providences began to enter Christiana’s life, till, as time went on, her whole life was filled full of secret providences.  And not her present life only, but her discoveries of God’s secret providences towards her and hers became retrospective also, till both her own parentage and birth, her husband’s parentage and birth also, the day she first saw him, the day of their espousals, the day of their marriage, and the day of his death, all shone out now as so many secret and special providences of God toward her.  Bishop Martensen has a fine passage on the fragmentariness of our knowledge, not only of divine providence as a whole, but even of those divine providences that fill up our own lives.  And he warns us that, till we have heard the “Prologue in Heaven,” many a riddle in our lives must of necessity remain unsolved.  Christiana could not have told her inquiring children what a prologue was, nor an epilogue either, but many were the wise and winning discourses she held with her boys about their father now in heaven, about her happiness in having had such a father for her children, and about their happiness that the road was open before them to go to where he now is.  And there are many poor widows among ourselves who are wiser than all their teachers, because they are in that school of experience into which God takes His afflicted people and opens to them His deepest secrets.  They remember, with Job, when the secret of the Lord was first upon their tabernacle.