and made sacred by the high mission given him of God, to which was now to be added the sanction of holy men.
So they made way for him, as the Florentines had made way for il Frate and as the people of God had made way for Francis Xavier when he left them to stir the heart of the East with his eloquence, and, alas! to die on the bleak sea-coast of China, clasping the crucifix to his breast and praying for those who had cast him out.
Cecils face, though pale, was calm and noble. All his nature responded to the moral grandeur of the occasion. It would be difficult to put into words the reverent and tender exaltation of feeling that animated him that day. Perhaps only those upon whose own heads the hands of ordination have been laid can enter into or understand it.
The charge was earnest, but it was not needed, for Cecils ardent enthusiasm went far beyond all that the speaker urged upon him. As he listened, pausing as it were on the threshold of an unknown future, he wondered if he should ever hear a sermon again,he, so soon to be swallowed by darkness, swept, self-yielded, into the abyss of savagery.
Heartfelt and touching was the prayer of ordination,that God might accept and bless Cecils consecration, that the divine presence might always abide with him, that savage hearts might be touched and softened, that savage lives might be lighted up through his instrumentality, and that seed might be sown in the wilderness which would spring up and cause the waste places to be glad and the desert to blossom as the rose.
