Seite:Marsh Hallig 1856.djvu/200

200THE HALLIG.

  "My poor wife! my child! my child!" cried Hold,
aloud to Heaven. Beside him the men stood, sighing ;
and Oswald's despairing groans filled every pause. But
the troubled spirit which had oppressed the soul of the
pastor, and which had so paralyzed him who was gene-
rally filled with the joy of believing — perhaps because
he had been led by an impulse of vanity to assent to
this walk over the flats, rather than risk being thought
cowardly — this troubled spirit had with this cry reached
the acme of its anguish, and was now met, as it were,
by the lightning from heaven; "God has not given us
the spirit of fear, but of power and love." Then it
seemed as if Hold came forth in victorious triumph
from the shades of darkness and the bonds of death,
which had so long bound him ; and with a loud and
firm voice, he commenced a sort of exhortation ; rather,
indeed, in broken sentences, as the nature of the cir-
cumstances permitted, than in the connected form in
which we here present it.
  "Blessed be God, the Father of our Lord Jesus
Christ, the Father of mercy and the God of all com-
fort, who consoles us in all our sorrows, that we may
comfort those who are in every kind of affliction
with the comfort wherewith we are comforted by him.
Praised be the Lord in all his works, for his works are
perfect. At his command the waters rise and fall. He
blows upon the sea with the breath of his mouth, and
the waves shrink before him. He blows upon the sea
with the breath of his mouth, and it heaves and swells
obedient to his word ! and what he commands, that
comes to pass in good time. So this too is his hour.
It is his counsel which prepares this grave for us ; and