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WEALDEN LIFE AND CHARACTER.
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himself gone to hear a certain preacher, with the conviction that what he said would settle his fate. He came home with the joyful assurance that he was safe. So with reference to a preacher narrating his own experience. He said that poor souls listened and said, "That is just how I feel. If that man goes to heaven—and I am sure he will—I shall go too."

But for a genuine specimen of a hyper-Calvinistic preacher and a hyper-Calvinistic sermon, what I saw and heard at a little chapel on Crowborough Common' could not be surpassed.

In the pulpit was a tall man, with a gaunt face, high forehead, and sad eyes, looking as if bowed down by deep mental distress. In low tones he opened the service by reading the psalm, "Why art thou cast down, O my soul?" Then a bluff old worthy, the very reverse of the minister, gave out the hymn, which was led off by a young man with an accordion. A prayer followed, picturesque and poetical in language, its imagery drawn from the Bible and " The Pilgrim's Progress." Then another hymn; and then the sermon, from the text, "Persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed." "How often," he said, "is a child of God wounded in the house of his friends! How I remember to have aggravated my dear old father! 'You old people,' says I, 'have some curious crotchets in your heads, but you are not to expect us young ones are going to take up with them all,—why, you don't know what you believe yourself.' As I turned away I saw the tear trickle down the old man's eye, and now I know that I persecuted that godly father. So, too, the devil sometimes comes between a man and his wife, and poor souls find that just where they ought to get most help, there they meet with nothing but cruel words and unkind insinuations, so that they are almost driven to distraction, and to doubt if the root of the matter be in them. Thus Job's wife said, 'Curse God, and die.' "Then he told a most apocryphal anecdote about a woman whose husband threatened to put her into a heated oven if she persisted in going to a certain chapel; however she went, came trembling home, begged for five minutes' prayer, her steadfast faith so affecting her persecutor that he gave up his cruel design. Then he dwelt on the antagonism there has ever been between two classes of men in the world. All are from one federal head, but God has chosen some for Himself, according