Elizabeth: the Disinherited Daughter | Page 4

prepared for a ball, she felt sure that her mode of dress had all this time been a hindrance to her; and she then and there concluded to reduce all to plainness, much like the people who had led her to penitence. The pride of dress and equipage seemed now to be about the last idol to give up, and, all of her own counsel, she did the work very thoroughly; and as to her abundant jewelry, the result of her spontaneous zeal was rather ludicrous. "Determined that it should never prove a snare to any other poor soul as it had to her," she passed it all under the hammer until there was nothing left but unseemly lumps of gold and silver; the precious stones were utterly demolished.
From that work this hitherto gaudy maiden came out as plain as a Quakeress, and hastened to the Methodist prayer meeting. Seeing her thus evidently taught of the Holy Spirit, they took hold of her case with new courage as she bowed with them crying for mercy. The prayers of the early Methodists were something wonderful, and this broken-hearted penitent drank into their wrestling spirit. They claimed for her the "exceeding great and precious promises," with mighty faith; she claimed these promises with them. They took hold on Jesus; she put her hand with theirs into His with a strong and steady grip, and He accepted her.
The conversion of Elizabeth was instantaneous, and exceedingly clear and powerful, and its assurance overwhelming. Her long night was at once turned into day, and that clear daylight was also a blaze of glory. Her joy was ecstatic. Her tall form, which had been gaudily adorned, but now attired for the meek and lowly Saviour, was at times prostrated by divine power, and her regenerated soul filled with the rapture of heaven. Night and day, for weeks, her only relief from ecstasy was by settling into solid peace, thus alternating from the quiet valley of "peace that passeth understanding" to the glory-crowned hilltops of "joy unspeakable."
After a sufficient time had elapsed to demonstrate the genuineness and unfading glory of her experience, Elizabeth wrote home a plain account of it, concealing nothing. This was the astounding and alienating letter that so stirred up things at the Cove.
CHAPTER III.
THAT ALARMING MESSAGE.
The Wards, at the Cove, continued to be much troubled over Elizabeth's letter. Had a note or a messenger announced her serious illness, or her elopement or sudden death, the first pang would have terminated in some sort of relief, or at least a breathing place; but this letter was suffocating, and the dense fog seemed to grow darker as it stretched into the future. "A religious fanatic!" "A Methodist lunatic!" "Has our darling set out upon such a life?"
"I'm afraid it will kill your father; it struck him dumb. I can't draw him into any conversation about her; and he is so angry!" Thus the troubled mother would talk and cry. The sisters and brothers listen to her, and, without comprehending "the prospect so awful in Betsey's future life," would keep dumb, like "daddy," and cry, like "mammy."
Finding no relief at home, Mrs. Ward consulted their aged parson, "Priest Huntington," and placed the ominous letter in his hands; and he took the troublesome document home for professional analysis. It is not to be supposed that the Holy Spirit left this letter to pass through such a crucible alone. The experience it told was substantially His work, and the hand that wrote it was not wholly without His guidance; and now the cultured mind which examined it was that of a logical analyst, however strong his prejudice. The old parson was struck with its simplicity and soundness, and hastened to the Cove to "pronounce Miss Elizabeth's experience genuine, and even wonderful," and that he believed her to be "one of God's chosen vessels to bear witness of His sovereign grace."
So favorable an opinion from such an authority greatly relieved the apprehensions of the family; all but the incensed father, who would neither talk nor allow others to talk to him about the absent one for several weeks.
All these were not only precious weeks to Elizabeth, but lengthened out a most valuable epoch of her life. At length the wily parson succeeded in getting to the stormy heart of this enraged and unhappy father, and portrayed in glowing colors the clearness of Miss Elizabeth's "effectual call" and "blessed hope," and managed to bridge over "that awful slough of Methodism" by descanting gravely upon some of the "mysterious leadings of sovereign grace." "And now, if our dear lamb of the Saviour can be rescued from those deluded people and carefully instructed in 'the doctrines of grace,' what an ornament she would be to our church with such a brilliant experience,