Blair Collection > Rhys Lewis, minister of Bethel

i84 I^HYS LEWIS.
know that as -well as I do. Would that Paul lent me his
authority and the mantle he left behind him at Troas ! You
should see directly that others besides William the Coal aud
myself were delivered over unto Satan."
Mother, quiet and self-possessed, heard him right through ;
at which I was greatly surprised, for I remembered a time
when she would not have suffered him to go on in this way for
half a minute without setting upon him fluently and un-
sparingly. Indeed had Bob dared speak as now some six
months previously, I doubt whether, strong a man as he was,
she would not have boxed his ears. Now, however, she
listened attentively to every word he said, and were they
the last he spoke from his deathbed, her face could not have
been more serious and sorrowful. She appeared as one who
had let go her every hope, as one who, cast down by despair,
endeavoured to look calm and resigned in the face of doom. I
was only a lad ; but from childhood upwards my mother had
drenched me with religious ideas and the terms of divinity, and
I think I was then quite as competent as I am now to grasp
the bitterness of her disappointment and her sorrow. I was
able to follow and understand her words and feelings as she
answered Bob in such sentences as : —
"Well, my son, I never expected to live to hear you talk like
that; although I must admit having feared it was to this it
would come. I have tried to listen to you carefully, fearing I
should misunderstand and misjudge you. I can never teil you
what my feelings were when you were taken to jail — wrong-
fully I know, thanks for that. But in the midst of many a
night, when everybody else was fast asleep, I lay thinking of
you, tiU I feared my heart would burst asunder before the
morning ; and I now faiicy, if I'd not tried to believe your im-
prisonment was something in the Lord's hand to bring you
back to the fold, that my heart would indeed have broken. Your
words to-night have disappointed me much, and hurt me
cruelly. It is evident your soul has gone into a far off
country, and I much fear you will be left to yourself. I am
loth to believe that God's Spirit does not wrestle with your
mind. But remember, my son, there is a danger that you may
vex Him, aud that there's an end to the patience even of the