Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE'LONELY'GOD nigh. MAN lay on his bed at midnight, and dreamt that he stood alone by the sea, and that his hour of death was From the gates of night and across the sea there blew a wind that made him shiver less with physical cold than with a sense of soul desolation and loneliness ; a wind which chilled the heart of him even more than the body. And as he looked up to sky and stars his lonely spirit, losing itself in the infinite abyss, turned sick and giddy at the thought of dying, and reeled shuddering to earth again. Then the man thought of the woman he loved, the wife of his heart and mother of his children, and that if he and she might but die together—if he might but set out with her hand in his, he should no longer fear to make death's journey; and, even as he so thought, he awoke with pounding heart and panting breath; awoke to shudder at the darkness and the loneliness, and with a nameless fear lying at the centre of life, like the lurking shadow of an unknown, unseen foe. As he lay he heard the low breathing of his sleeping wife, and with a sigh of relief, and with all sense of lonesomeness gone, the man closed his eyes and fell asleep. Again he dreamed a dream in which he thought that he stood in the presence of God. Whether he had been borne to the infinite regions which stretch on and away, and yet away, and yet again away, beyond the limits of our universe; or whether he were still on the earth ; or had soared to a distant star, or to the vast and void sky spaces that liebetween the worlds; or had crept into the narrow chamber ol the human soul,—the man knew not, but he was aware in some wonderful way of all that was taking place on all God's myriad worlds. He saw circling planets sweep faster and faster on their ever-narrowing o...