LIVING IN THE EIGHTH CHAPTER.
I was once expounding the seventh and eighth of Romans to a class of colored Bible women, deeply experienced as to their hearts, but very ignorant as I supposed in their heads. It was before I had learned this blessed secret I have been trying to tell you, and what I said I cannot possibly imagine now, but it was certainly something very different from my present position. After I had been talking quite eloquently for a little while, a colored woman interrupted me with, “Why, honey, ’pears like you don’t understand them chapters.” “Why, not, aunty?” I asked. “What is the matter with my explanation?” “Why, honey,” she said, “you talks as if we were to live in that miserable seventh chapter, and only pay little visits to the blessed eighth.” “Well,” I answered, “that is just what I do think. Don’t you?” “Laws, honey,” she exclaimed, with a look of intense pity for my ignorance, “why, I lives in the eighth.” I knew it was true, for I had often wondered at the holiness of lowly life, and for a moment I was utterly bewildered. But then I thought, “Oh! it is because she is colored and poor, that God has given her such a grand experience to make up.” And I almost began to wish I was colored and poor, that I also might have the same experience. But I rejoice to say to you to-day that, even if you are white and not poor, you yet may know what it is to abide in Christ, and to rejoice in all the blessedness of such abiding.—Sel.