Page:Mehalah 1920.djvu/291

Rh not see him, you shall never see him again. Give me back my pincers, and I will make an end of it all." "Elijah, you must trust me. I married you in self-respect, and I shall never forget the respect I owe to myself." "I cannot trust you," he answered, "because you are just one of those whose movements no one can calculate. I tell you what, Mehalah. God made most folks of clockwork and stuck them on their little plots of soil to spin round and run their courses, like the figures on an Italian barrel-organ. You look at Mersea Island, that is the board of such a contrivance, and on it are so many dolls; they twist about, and you know that if God turns the handle for ten minutes or for ten years, or for ten times ten years, they will do exactly the same things in exactly the same ways, just as He made them and set them to spin. But as He was making the dolls that were to twirl and pirouette His breath got into some, and they are different from the rest. They don't go according to the clockwork, and don't follow the circles of the machine, as set agoing by the organ-handle. God himself can't count on them, for they have free wills, and His breath is genius and independence in their hearts. They go where they list, and do what they will, they follow the impulse of the breath of God within, and not the wires that fasten them to the social mechanism. I do not know what I may do. I do not know what you may do. We have the breath of God in us. I am sure that you have, and I am sure that I have; but I know that there is none in your mother, none in such as George De Witt. The laws of the land and of religion are the slits in the board on which the dolls dance, and they only move along these slits; but you and I, and such as have free souls, go anywhere, and do anything. We have no law. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou canst not tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth; so is everyone that is born of the Spirit. I heard a preacher once explain that text, and he said that the wind was the Spirit of God and it went where it willed, and so all who were born of the Spirit followed their wills, and there was neither right nor wrong to them, for they were blown