Page:The English Peasant.djvu/350

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TYPICAL ENGLISH PEASANTS.

"I went into the tool-house in all the agonies of the damned, and returned with the kingdom of God established in my heart. happy year! O happy day! blessed minute! sacred spot! Yea, rather blessed be my dear Redeemer, who 'delivered my soul from death, mine eyes from tears, and my feet from falling.'"

He now tried to go to work, but for that day at least it was impossible.

"Jesus Christ had come; it was the year of jubilee with me, and the earth must bring forth of herself, for I could not till the ground. The servant was now freed from his master, and my hands were delivered from the pots. My soul had got on the wings of a dove; she had fled to keep holy day, and I was determined to keep holy day also. I therefore left the garden, and went to Sunbury-common, where I could walk as many miles as I pleased without being molested; and there I blessed and praised God with a loud voice, without anybody listening to the glorious converse which I held with my dear Redeemer.

"When I came there I was amazed, for the whole creation appeared in such embroidery as I had never before seen. 'His glory covered the heavens, and the earth was full of His praise.' Indeed, 1 could not compare myself to anything, unless it was to one who had been shut up in a dark cell from the moment of his birth till he arrived at the age of twenty or thirty years, and then was turned into the world on a glorious sunshiny day, and placed on an eminence, where he could survey the greatest part of the world at one view."

When he came home in the evening, "I went," he says, "into the house laughing, crying, and saying to my dear Redeemer, 'I have heaven enough. What can heaven be more? What can it add to this? I desire no other heaven; I have enough.' I took the Bible down to read, and as soon as I opened it was so amazed, that I did not know it to be the same book; the glorious light shone in all the dark and obscure passages, for the day-dawn and the day-star had risen in my heart.

Few ever exercised faith more simply and entirely than Huntington now began to do.

Not long after the great event lately recounted had taken place, he left Sunbury, and took a situation as gardener to the owner of