the general gravity told upon her, and she became conscious of what Dinah was saying.  The gentle tones, the loving persuasion, did not touch her, but when the more severe appeals came she began to be frightened.  Poor Bessy had always been considered a naughty girl; she was conscious of it; if it was necessary to be very good, it was clear she must be in a bad way.  She couldn’t find her places at church as Sally Rann could, she had often been tittering when she “curcheyed” to Mr. Irwine; and these religious deficiencies were accompanied by a corresponding slackness in the minor morals, for Bessy belonged unquestionably to that unsoaped lazy class of feminine characters with whom you may venture to “eat an egg, an apple, or a nut.”  All this she was generally conscious of, and hitherto had not been greatly ashamed of it.  But now she began to feel very much as if the constable had come to take her up and carry her before the justice for some undefined offence.  She had a terrified sense that God, whom she had always thought of as very far off, was very near to her, and that Jesus was close by looking at her, though she could not see him.  For Dinah had that belief in visible manifestations of Jesus, which is common among the Methodists, and she communicated it irresistibly to her hearers:  she made them feel that he was among them bodily, and might at any moment show himself to them in some way that would strike anguish and penitence into their hearts.

“See!” she exclaimed, turning to the left, with her eyes fixed on a point above the heads of the people.  “See where our blessed Lord stands and weeps and stretches out his arms towards you.  Hear what he says:  ’How often would I have gathered you as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!’...and ye would not,” she repeated, in a tone of pleading reproach, turning her eyes on the people again.  “See the print of the nails on his dear hands and feet.  It is your sins that made them!  Ah!  How pale and worn he looks!  He has gone through all that great agony in the garden, when his soul was exceeding sorrowful even unto death, and the great drops of sweat fell like blood to the ground.  They spat upon him and buffeted him, they scourged him, they mocked him, they laid the heavy cross on his bruised shoulders.  Then they nailed him up.  Ah, what pain!  His lips are parched with thirst, and they mock him still in this great agony; yet with those parched lips he prays for them, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’  Then a horror of great darkness fell upon him, and he felt what sinners feel when they are for ever shut out from God.  That was the last drop in the cup of bitterness.  ‘My God, my God!’ he cries, ’why hast Thou forsaken me?’

“All this he bore for you!  For you—­and you never think of him; for you—­and you turn your backs on him; you don’t care what he has gone through for you.  Yet he is not weary of toiling for you:  he has risen from the dead, he is praying for you at the right hand of God—­’Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’  And he is upon this earth too; he is among us; he is there close to you now; I see his wounded body and his look of love.”