Page:Olney Hymns - 1840.djvu/19



Yet here, if ever, appeared a case beyond the reach of medicine or of counsel. Inveterate predisposition to mental derangement had been urged to agony at the existing crisis, in which was involved the failure of all the victim's plans for life, conceived in the credulity of youth and cherished with the poetry of hope. He had done nothing for himself, and he had frustrated all the efforts of his powerful connexions to serve him. To these disappointments of laudable ambition, alone sufficient to drive a fevered brain to frenzy, or plunge a self-tormenting mind in melancholy, were added, about the same time, the bereavement, by death, of a friend whom he loved as his own soul; and the loss, by something worse than death, of another object yet more beloved. In his own affecting words, he

When this sufferer found a sanctuary under the roof of one who merited from all who knew him the appellation which St. Paul bestowed upon Luke "the beloved physician"— the horrors which had previously exasperated his wild imagination to self-slaying rage had nearly subsided into gloomy tranquility. The direful visitation had left his mind, like the lake of Sodom after the storm of fire and brimstone had blown over, dark and motionless— a pool of death, which all the waves of Jordan, flowing into it, could not purify; which nothing, indeed, could heal but the waters of that river of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb. Nay, if there could be imagined a spot, in the region