“A new heart will I give unto you; and a new spirit will I put within you; and I will take away the stony heart out of you and I will give you an heart of flesh.” — Ezekiel 36:26
I heard the missionary to the Red Indians in our Canadian territories tell how it felt to be in the grip of the death-freeze. It was seventy degrees below zero, and as the traces of the dogs that carried the sleigh across the black wastes got broken, he jumped off to repair them. Perspiring with the exertion, he felt his garments suddenly stiffen, and a chill such as he had never before felt in his experiences in these high latitudes seemed to creep to his very bones.
It was intensely cold, “and all at once,” he said, “music such as I had never before heard, seemed to descend from the skies. Oh, it was rapturous music! Can the angels, with their heavenly harps, equal what I heard? The snow began to appear as if covered with the jewels that deck the city, and the twigs of the frozen trees seemed all kinds of colors. It was just fairy-land.
A sensuous delight, a physical pleasure, began to steal over the whole body. The marks of the Indian attendants who had gone before, the tracks left by their snow, got transformed into beautiful couches, and a voice said, “Lie down and rest, and listen to the music.”
I was looking round to choose the couch upon which I should rest, when I heard a soft voice say, ‘Stop! You are freezing to death!’
I had only time to take the rope that bound my dogs to the sleigh and bind it around me, attaching myself to the sleigh, and to say in the Canadian French to the dogs, ‘March!’ They started and dragged me unconscious through the snow, battered and bruised, but safe.”
Ah, man! to freeze is sometimes just delicious. The devil takes care that the cold heart should never feel cold. He tells the birds to sing, and the flowers to bloom, and the demons to transform music. There is many a soul just freezing to death and the pleasures of a sensuous religiosity that will only damn him forever. The human heart is a stone until God warms it and regenerates it.
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J. Wilbur Chapan, “Present Day Parables.”