in your soul; his pardoning mercy can’t reach you until you open your heart to him, and say, ’I have done this great wickedness; O God, save me, make me pure from sin.’  While you cling to one sin and will not part with it, it must drag you down to misery after death, as it has dragged you to misery here in this world, my poor, poor Hetty.  It is sin that brings dread, and darkness, and despair:  there is light and blessedness for us as soon as we cast it off.  God enters our souls then, and teaches us, and brings us strength and peace.  Cast it off now, Hetty—­now:  confess the wickedness you have done—­the sin you have been guilty of against your Heavenly Father.  Let us kneel down together, for we are in the presence of God.”

Hetty obeyed Dinah’s movement, and sank on her knees.  They still held each other’s hands, and there was long silence.  Then Dinah said, “Hetty, we are before God.  He is waiting for you to tell the truth.”

Still there was silence.  At last Hetty spoke, in a tone of beseeching—­

“Dinah...help me...I can’t feel anything like you...my heart is hard.”

Dinah held the clinging hand, and all her soul went forth in her voice: 

“Jesus, thou present Saviour!  Thou hast known the depths of all sorrow:  thou hast entered that black darkness where God is not, and hast uttered the cry of the forsaken.  Come Lord, and gather of the fruits of thy travail and thy pleading.  Stretch forth thy hand, thou who art mighty to save to the uttermost, and rescue this lost one.  She is clothed round with thick darkness.  The fetters of her sin are upon her, and she cannot stir to come to thee.  She can only feel her heart is hard, and she is helpless.  She cries to me, thy weak creature....Saviour!  It is a blind cry to thee.  Hear it!  Pierce the darkness!  Look upon her with thy face of love and sorrow that thou didst turn on him who denied thee, and melt her hard heart.

“See, Lord, I bring her, as they of old brought the sick and helpless, and thou didst heal them.  I bear her on my arms and carry her before thee.  Fear and trembling have taken hold on her, but she trembles only at the pain and death of the body.  Breathe upon her thy life-giving Spirit, and put a new fear within her—­the fear of her sin.  Make her dread to keep the accursed thing within her soul.  Make her feel the presence of the living God, who beholds all the past, to whom the darkness is as noonday; who is waiting now, at the eleventh hour, for her to turn to him, and confess her sin, and cry for mercy—­now, before the night of death comes, and the moment of pardon is for ever fled, like yesterday that returneth not.

“Saviour!  It is yet time—­time to snatch this poor soul from everlasting darkness.  I believe—­I believe in thy infinite love.  What is my love or my pleading?  It is quenched in thine.  I can only clasp her in my weak arms and urge her with my weak pity.  Thou—­thou wilt breathe on the dead soul, and it shall arise from the unanswering sleep of death.