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a rushing wind on which forever rides the Lord, death or healing indifferently in His hands. Under this fury the saints bowed low, crying out “holy!” and tears fell. On the open deck sinners stood and watched, beyond them the fiery sun and the deep river, the black-brown-green, unchanging cliffs. That sun, which covered earth and water now, would one day refuse to shine, the river would cease its rushing and its numberless dead would rise; the cliffs would shiver, crack, fall and where they had been would then be nothing but the unleased wrath of God.
    “Who’ll be the first to tell it?” Father James cried. “Stand up and talk about it!”
    Brother Elisha screamed, “Have mercy, Jesus!” and rose from the piano stool, his powerful frame possessed. And the Holy Ghost touched him and he cried again, bending nearly double, while his feet beat ageless, dreadful signals on the floor, while his arms moved in the air like wings and his face, distorted, no longer his own face not the face of a young man, but timeless, anguished, grim with ecstasy, turned blindly toward heaven.
Yes, Lord
, they cried,
yes!
    “Dearly beloved …”
    “Talk about it!”
    “Tell it!”
    “I want to thank and praise the Lord, amen …”
    “Amen!”
    “… for being here, I want to thank Him for my life, health, and strength.…”
    “Amen!”
    “Well, glory!”
    “… I want to thank Him, hallelujah, for saving my soul one day….”
    “
Oh!
”
    “Glory!”
    “… for causing the light, bless God, to shine in
my
heart one day when I was still a child, amen, I want to thank Him for bringing me to salvation in the days of my
youth
, hallelujah, when I have all my faculties, amen, before Satan had a chance to destroy my body in the world!”
    “Talk about it!”
    “He saved me, dear ones, from the world and the things of the world. Saved me, amen, from cardplaying …”
    “Glory!”
    “… saved me from drinking, bless God, saved me from the streets, from the movies and all the filth that is in the world!”
    “I
know
it’s so!”
    “He saved me, beloved, and sanctified me and filled me with the blessed Holy Ghost,
hallelujah!
Give me a new song, amen which I didn’t know before and set my feet on the King’s highway. Pray for me beloved, that I will stand in these last and evil days.”
    “Bless your name, Jesus!”
    During his testimony Johnnie and Roy and David had stood quietly beside the door, not daring to enter while he spoke. The moment he sat down they moved quickly, together, to the front of the high hall and knelt down beside their seats to pray. The aspect of each of them underwent always, in this company a striking, even an exciting change; as though their youth,barely begun, were already put away; and the animal, so vividly restless and undiscovered, so tense with power, ready to spring had been already stalked and trapped and offered, a perpetual blood-sacrifice, on the altar of the Lord. Yet their bodies continued to change and grow, preparing them, mysteriously and with ferocious speed, for manhood. No matter how careful their movements, these movements suggested, with a distinctness dreadful for the redeemed to see, the pagan lusting beneath the blood-washed robes. In them was perpetually and perfectly poised the power of revelation against the power of nature; and the saints, considering them with a baleful kind of love, struggled to bring their souls to safety in order, as it were, to steal a march on the flesh while the flesh still slept. A kind of storm, infernal, blew over the congregation as they passed; someone cried, “Bless them, Lord!” and immediately, honey-colored Sister Russell, while they knelt in prayer, rose to her feet to testify.
    From the moment that they closed their eyes and covered their faces they were isolated from the joy that moved everything beside them. Yet this same isolation served only to make the glory of the saints more real, the pulse of conviction, however