_Robinson Crusoe_ was written in 1719; exactly a century later _The
Monastery_ was published. And, significantly enough, the text which
shines with such luster in Daniel Defoe's masterpiece forms also the
pivot of Sir Walter Scott's weird story. Mary Avenel comes to the climax
of her sorrows. She seems to have lost everything and everybody. Her
life is desolate; her grief is inconsolable. Her faithful attendant,
Tibbie, exhausts herself in futile attempts to compose and comfort the
mind of her young mistress. Father Eustace does his best to console her;
but she feels that it is all words, words, words. All at once, however,
she comes upon her mother's Bible--the Bible that had passed through so
many strange experiences and had been so wonderfully preserved.
Remembering that this little Book was her mother's constant stay and
solace--her counselor in time of perplexity and her comfort in the hour
of grief--Mary seized it, Sir Walter says, with as much joy as her
melancholy situation permitted her to feel. Ignorant as she was of its
contents, she had nevertheless learned from infancy to hold the Volume
in sacred veneration. On opening it, she found that, among the leaves,
there were texts neatly inscribed in her mother's handwriting. In Mary's
present state of mind, these passages, reaching her at a time so
critical and in a manner so touching, strangely affected her. She read
on one of these slips the consoling exhortation: '_Call upon Me in the
day of trouble, and I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify Me._'
'There are those,' Sir Walter says, 'to whom a sense of religion has
come in storm and tempest; there are those whom it has summoned amid
scenes of revelry and idle vanity; there are those, too, who have heard
its still small voice amid rural leisure and placid contentment. But
perhaps the knowledge which causeth not to err is most frequently
impressed upon the mind during seasons of affliction; and tears are the
softened showers which cause the seed of heaven to spring and take root
in the human breast. At least, it was thus with Mary Avenel. She read
the words--"_Call upon Me in the day of trouble, and I will deliver
thee, and thou shalt glorify Me_"--and her heart acquiesced in the
conclusion: Surely this is the Word of God!'
In the case of Mary Avenel, the resultant deliverance was as dramatic as
in the case of Robinson Crusoe. I turn a few pages of _The Monastery_,
and I come upon this:
'The joyful news that Halbert Glendinning--Mary's lover--still lived was
quickly communicated through the sorrowing family. His mother wept and
thanked heaven alternately. On Mary Avenel the impression was
inconceivably deeper. She had newly learned to pray, and it seemed to
her that her prayers had been instantly answered. She felt that the
compassion of heaven, which she had learned to implore in the very words
of Scripture--"_Call upon Me in the day of trouble, and I will deliver
thee, and thou shalt glorify Me_"--had descended upon her after a manner
almost miraculous, and recalled the dead from the grave at the sound of
her lamentations.'
I lay _this_, written by Sir Walter Scott, in 1819, beside _that_,
written by Daniel Defoe in 1719. In the mouths of two such witnesses
shall every word be established.