He was like a thirsty land when at last the great rain is descending.
_Mr.B._ I suppose many people would have thought him crazy.
"I suspect the minister did, at first," said Mrs.B.
"And yet I suppose," said I, "he was never more rational.

Just think what it is for a poor sinner all at once to feel that the eternal God is his; that He will be a God to him! We hear of some people dying at the receipt of good news; and I have seen some so happy at this experience, of having a God to love and to love them, that, if the thing itself did not, as it always does, bring peace and inward strength with it, nature could not have sustained it." "Joy unspeakable," said Mr.B."And full of glory," said his wife, waiting a moment for him to finish the quotation.
"Now, my dear friends," said I, "that man on horseback, at his minister's door at midnight, had, at that moment, the first part of what is meant by the 'Abrahamic covenant.' How little way do these words go toward expressing the thing itself, and a man's feelings under it! There was a time when God made Abraham far more happy even than he did you on your way to the post-office that morning." Helen came along, just then, with a fruit-basket of apples, and I said to her, as she was going round with them, "Say again that verse in your hymn, which has these words in it, 'Thou art mine.'" So, while Mr.B.was paring his apple, Helen stood before him, and said: "O, might I hear thy heavenly tongue But whisper, 'Thou art mine!' Those gentle words should raise my song To notes almost divine." Mr.B.put his apple and knife down, and took his red bandanna handkerchief from under his plate, and, wiping his eyes, said: "Hymns always make me feel a good deal, especially Watts's.

I've read that hymn in meeting before the exercises began." _Pastor._ You know, by happy experience, what it is when that heavenly tongue whispers, "Thou art mine." _Mr.B._ I do, sir, if I know anything.
_Pastor._ Now, my dear friends, there is something awaiting you, which you seem not to have experienced, but which is as good as that.
"We would like to hear about it," they both replied.
"How should you like, Mrs.B.," said I, "to have your little boy become a sailor ?" "O dear!" said she, "I should have no peace from this time, if I thought he was to be a sailor." "But that," said I, "may be God's chosen occupation for him,--the way in which he will employ him to bring him to himself, and then use him to be a preacher to seamen, for example, and so to scatter the truth in many parts of the earth.

We are not our own, Mrs.B., and this dear boy was not given you, as we say, to keep.

'For thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.'" "I want him brought up at college," said Mrs.B., looking at your mother, who, she probably thought, would understand her motherly anticipations about her boy so far ahead.
"Well," said I, "let us send him to college.