Even the wild prayers for deliverance which may burst from the affrighted soul, what will they avail at the judgment?
Are they the cries of the contrite heart mourning for its sins against a holy, loving, and beneficent heavenly Father?
Are they not rather but as the shrieks of the criminal who sees no escape from his merited retribution?
Alas for him who postpones his day of repentance till face to face with the king of terrors.

It is he only who is strong in his great Deliverer who can see that icy beckoning hand, and amid the shrinking of human nature find himself calm in the strength which only God supplies.

If the agonies or the stupor of the sick-bed unfit the soul to seek peace with God in the dying hour, even so does the anguish of such fear as now bowed poor Hal to the earth.
As the English lad crouched in his terror, Blair knelt at his side and prayed earnestly for him to that God who seemed to the young Christian but the more surely at hand, for the tokens of his power that made that mighty ship quiver like a leaf in the autumn wind.
Worn out with the excess of his own strong emotion, Hal at length sank into a deep slumber, and rolled and tossed with the vessel like a lifeless thing.

Blair feared the poor boy had actually died of terror; but he soon convinced himself that there was yet motion in that heart which had throbbed so truly for him.
There was no sleep for Blair during that long wild night.

In the intensity of his excitement, his thoughts flew through his mind with a vividness and a swiftness that made him almost feel that he was tasting a new and higher kind of existence.