The mystery
aroused no wonder in their thoughts, for the blindness of habit, which
passes generally for the vision of faith, had paralyzed in youth their
groping spiritual impulses.
On the following Sunday, before leaving for fresher fields, Mr. Mullen
preached a sermon which established him forever in the hearts of his
congregation, and in the course of it, he alluded tenderly to "the
exalted Christian woman who has been recently removed from among us to a
brighter sphere." It was, on the whole as Mrs. Gay observed afterwards,
"his most remarkable effort"; and even Sarah Revercomb, who had heard
that her daughter-in-law was to be mentioned in the pulpit, and had
attended from the same spiritual pride with which she had read the
funeral notice in the Applegate papers, admitted on her way home that
she "wished poor Judy could have heard him." In spite of the young
woman's removal to a sphere which Mr. Mullen had described as
"brighter," she had become from the instant of her decease, "poor Judy"
in Sarah's thoughts as well as on her lips.
To Abel her death had brought a shock which was not so much a sense of
personal regret, as an intensified expression of the pity he had felt
for her while she lived.
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