From Jest to Earnest Part 35

"Miss Marsden, I have given you the right to speak to me very plainly.

I honestly wish light on this subject, and intend to settle this question at the earliest moment possible. G.o.d knows I do not wish to thrust myself unbidden into the sacred office. If I am not worthy of the calling, then the sooner I find it out the better, and so try to content myself with some humbler work. Not only from what you have said, but from the remarks and aspect of others, I am satisfied that my effort this morning was worse than a failure.

You have a mind of unusual vigor, and a good faculty in expressing your thought. Won't you give me a keen, truthful a.n.a.lysis of the whole service? It is to the world I am to preach; and I wish to know just how what I say strikes the world. I know that Christian doctrines have ever been unpalatable, but if there is something in my presentation of them that is going to make them tenfold more so, then I will be dumb. I would rather hide in a desert than drive one soul from G.o.d, as you intimated. You were brave enough to let me speak to you almost harshly, I fear; now see if I have not equal courage. Say the very worst things that you believe true, and you may help me very much towards coming to the most important decision of my life."

"O dear!" said Lottie. "I'm not fit to counsel a downy chicken. I wish you didn't take this matter so to heart You look as if I might be your executioner."

"You can be my faithful surgeon and do some wholesome cutting."

"Well," said Lottie, dismally. "I'd rather give you ether or laughing-gas first."

"That is more kind than wise," he replied, smiling; "in moral and mental surgery the patient should have all his faculties."

"There!" she exclaimed with animation, "we are ill.u.s.trating by contrast my chief complaint against your preaching. When you told me my faults you did so gently, and appeared pained in giving me pain; and now I am honestly sorry to say words that I know will hurt you. And I know my words will hurt and discourage you; for if the trouble were in you it might be remedied, but it is in what you teach, and of course you teach what you believe, and won't say smooth things, as I fear other ministers do sometimes. You represented G.o.d calm and unchangeable as fate, as unrelenting and unimpa.s.sioned.

In this spirit you portrayed Him taking up one life after another and putting it into the furnace of affliction, to see what He can make of it. You ill.u.s.trated His manner of doing this by the sculptor with his cold, unfeeling marble, by the refiner with crude ore, and by the surgeon, and you forgot to say that the last stupefies his patients before cutting. You gave me the impression that as soon as G.o.d set about making us better we should find ourselves in trouble, and that, like certain school-masters of the old regime, He had faith in nothing save the rod. You know the natural feeling of children towards such pedagogues. How can we help feeling hi the same way towards G.o.d? Then you presented G.o.d as full of inflexible purposes, but the oftener you told us that we could not help ourselves, and that there was no use in resisting, the move I felt like resisting. The idea of cutting and carving character out of quivering human hearts as if they were marble! The idea of putting one, like a lump of ore, into a crucible, and then coolly sitting by to see what becomes of it! I'm not a lump of ore, and if I need harsh treatment I want it done sympathetically, feelingly, or I shall become a Tartar instead of a saint. The tears in your eyes the other night, Mr. Hemstead, did me more good than all your wise words."

Hemstead looked as if a light were dawning upon him.

"You spoke of this life," continued Lottie, "as if it were nothing, and as if G.o.d didn't care--indeed approved of our having a hard time here, that we might be more sure of a good time hereafter.

You spoke of G.o.d as jealously watching, lest we should love earthly friends more than Him, and said that He was bound to be first, if He had to s.n.a.t.c.h away everything that we loved most. Therefore, even the mother must keep chilling her natural love for her child, or else G.o.d will make the innocent little thing suffer and die, just to give the mother a lesson. You said that we should hold all earthly possessions in fear and trembling, and that the harsher our experiences were, here, the better, if they only wean us from earth. If this is true, we had better have no possessions and form no ties. The monks and nuns are right. Let us shut ourselves up, and wear hair-cloth instead of merino, and catch our death of cold by moping around bare-foot at all unseasonable hours. All you said may be good religion, but it's mighty poor sense, and very unnatural."

Hemstead shaded his burning face with his hands.

"There, I knew I should hurt you. No doubt I seem very irreverent, but you have no idea how I am restraining myself for your sake. I'm just that provoked and indignant--Well, well, what's the use? As you said, we can't help ourselves, and into the fiery furnace Lottie Marsden will go before long; only there will be nothing left of me but a little cinder. Why couldn't the Being you call all-wise and all-powerful, devise some nicer way, one more in accordance with the nature He has given us? Suppose heaven is a grander place than this world, that is no good reason for hating the world. This earth is our present home, and it looks sensible that we should make the most of it, and enjoy ourselves in it. Suppose my father should say, 'Lottie, I want you to hate and despise your present home, because in five years I'm going to give you a palace; and if you can only fall downstairs once or twice, and have a fit of illness so as to get weaned from it, I shall be glad.'

"How strangely and monstrously unnatural all that kind of talk is when you come to put it into plain English!" proceeded Lottie after a moment, tapping the floor impatiently with her foot. "If you must preach such doctrines as you did this morning, I am sorry for you; and, if they are true, I am sorry for the world, myself included.

The trouble is not in you. I am sure you can make almost an orator in time, if you can get a theme that won't give men the shivers, and set their teeth on edge. I never understood religion and never liked it; and now that I do begin to understand it, I like it less than ever."

Hemstead sat down in his chair,--indeed he sank into it, and the face he turned toward her was white and full of pain.

"Miss Marsden," he said slowly, "I fear I have given you, and all who heard me, a very false impression of G.o.d and Christianity; and yet I thought I was speaking the truth."

"O, I knew you were honest. There isn't a dishonest fibre in your nature; but I wish you were all wrong. O, how delighted I should be if you were a heretic without knowing it, and we could find out a religion that wouldn't make one's blood run cold to think of it!"

"But my religion does me good, Miss Marsden. It cheers, sustains, and strengthens me."

"Now you see how inconsistent you are. You preach one thing, and feel and act another."

"I begin to see how I was misled in my sermon, and why what I said was so repugnant to you; and yet my mind is confused. It still appears to me that I developed the thought of the text. Christ said, 'I am glad I was not there, to the intent ye may believe.'

These words would seem to show that He regarded our transient pains as of very secondary importance compared with the accomplishment of His great purposes. Why did He not go to Bethany at once, if it were not so?"

"Well, it's an awful text, or you give it an awful interpretation.

Let me take the thought out of the realm of theology or religion, and bring it down to practical life. Suppose you go to New York to-morrow and remain a few days, and to-morrow night the house burns up, and I with it. Would your first thought be, 'I am glad I was not there to put out the fire or to rescue that naughty girl, Lottie Marsden, because her sudden death, for which she was all unprepared, will be a warning to many, and result in great good'?

I may be wrong, Mr. Hemstead, but I think you would get pretty well scorched before you would permit even such a guy as I am to become a warning to other naughty girls."

"I can't imagine myself leaving you in danger," said Hemstead, with a look that brought the blood into Lottie's face.

"I thought you would feel so," she continued heartily. "You can preach awfully against sinners, but when you come to put your doctrines in practice, you say as you did to me, 'I wish I could bear all for you.' Heaven knows I'm selfish enough, but I can at least understand and appreciate generous and kindly sympathy, and could be won by it. But this cool and inflexible elaboration of character, where only the end is considered, and all our timid shrinking and human weakness are ignored,--this austere asceticism which despises the present world and life,--is to me unnatural and monstrous.

I confess I never read the Bible very much, and have not listened when it was read. I have half forgotten the story of Lazarus. You left off where Lazarus was in his grave, and Christ was glad He was not there to prevent his death. But that was not all the story.

I think, if I remember rightly, Christ raised him to life. Come, get a Bible, and let us read the whole story, and see if we cannot find something that will not make the word 'gospel' a mockery."

"Won't you read it?" asked Hemstead, humbly, handing her the Bible.

"Yes, if you wish me to, though it seems very funny that I should be reading the Bible to you."

"I begin to have a hope that you will teach me more than I ever learned from it before," he replied earnestly.

As in sweet, unaffected, girlish tones she read the ancient story of human suffering and sorrow, the scenes pa.s.sed in seeming reality before the student. He was intensely excited, though so quiet. When one with a strong mind recognizes that he is approaching a crisis in life, there is an awe that calms and controls. Lottie, with her intense vitality, could arouse even a sluggish nature. But to earnest Hemstead, with his vivid fancy, and large faith, this beautiful but erratic creature reading the neglected Bible, to find for him a sweeter and sunnier gospel than he had preached, seemed a special providence that presaged more than he had dared to conjecture; and he listened as one who expected a new revelation.

Indeed his darkness was losing its opaqueness. Rays of light were quivering through it. Her plain and bitter words of protest against his sermon had already shown him, in a measure, that he had exaggerated, in his first crude sermonizing, one truth, and left out the balancing and correcting truth. Familiar with all the story of Lazarus, his mind travelled beyond the reader, and with mingled joy and self-condemnation he already began to see how he had misrepresented the G.o.d of Love. With intense eagerness he watched and waited to see the effect of the complete story on Lottie's mind.

When she came to the words, "Jesus said unto her, _I_ am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die,"--she stopped and said, "This is very remarkable language. What does it mean?"

"Read on; read to the end," he urged.

She caught his eager expectancy, and read, with an absorbing interest, the truth that now seemed stranger than any fiction.

When she reached the words, "He groaned in spirit, and was troubled,"

she raised her eyes in a quick glance of inquiry.

"Read on," said Hemstead, in breathless interest.

A moment later, the shortest verse in the Bible was upon her lips.

Then she ceased reading aloud, and the student saw her eyes hastily, as if she were unable to endure the momentary delay of p.r.o.nunciation, scanning the story to its end.

"Mr. Hemstead," she asked excitedly, "why did Jesus weep and groan, when in a few moments Lazarus would be alive, and the scene of mourning be changed to one of joy?"

With tears in his eyes, he replied, "There is One guiding you--guiding us both--who can answer that question better than I."

"We believe that Jesus Christ is G.o.d, do we not?" she half mused, half questioned, her brows contracting with intense thought.

"Yes," he said reverently.

"Why, Mr. Hemstead, don't you see--don't you see? This Being who is so keenly sympathetic, so tenderly alive to a spene of sorrow, that He weeps and groans, though knowing that joy is coming in a moment, is not the calm, pa.s.sionless, inflexible G.o.d you chilled our hearts with this morning. Why, this is the very extravagance of tender-heartedness. This is a gentleness that I can scarcely understand. What mother, even, would first weep with her children over a sorrow that she was about to remove with a word! And yet this all-powerful Jesus, who can raise the dead to life, seems to cry just because the others do,--just as if He couldn't help it,--just as dear, good Auntie Jane's eyes moisten when she hears of any one in trouble. Mr. Hemstead, there is surely a mistake somewhere.

How do you reconcile this Christ with the one you presented this morning?"

"I don't, and cannot."

"And yet He did say to His disciples, 'I am glad I was not there,'"

continued Lottie, in deep perplexity.

Hemstead paced the room excitedly a few minutes, and then exclaimed, "It's growing as clear and beautiful as the light."

"It seems to me flat contradiction," said Lottie, dejectedly.

"There are the words, 'I am glad I was not there '; and there is the fact that He let Lazarus die; and there also are the facts of His weeping and raising Lazarus: and, now I think of it, He performed many miracles equally kind, and helped and encouraged all sorts of people."

"Certainly He did," cried Hemstead. "Blind idiot that I was in developing a crude theological idea of my own, instead of simply presenting the G.o.d of the Bible! I can never thank you enough, Miss Marsden, for your strong good sense that has dissipated my fog-bank of words. I think I see the way into light. You have placed a clew in my hands which I trust will lead, not only me, but others into peace. I fear I did present to you a calm, unimpa.s.sioned, inflexible Being this morning,--a G.o.d of purposes and decrees and remorseless will; and I have felt before that this was the G.o.d of theology and religious philosophy, rather than the G.o.d of the Bible. Your words have shown me that I gave you a crude and one-sided view. Thoughts are thronging so upon my mind that I am confused, but it comes to me with almost the force of an inspiration that Christ's tears of sympathy form the key to the whole Bible."

"Well," said Lottie, in a low tone, "I can see how they might become the key to my heart. Come, Mr. Hemstead, I have been a heathen up to this time; and I hope you have been a heretic. If you can explain the Bible in accordance with Christ's tears, as He wept, when the kindest man living would have smiled, in view of the change so soon to occur,--then preach by all means. That is the kind of gospel we want. If I could believe that G.o.d felt with, and for, his creatures as tenderly as that, it seems to me that I could go to Him as naturally as I ever went to Auntie Jane in my troubles."

Hemstead was pacing the room, as was his custom when excited. His face was aglow with earnest, elevating thoughts. His ungainliness had utterly vanished; and Lottie acknowledged that she had never seen a n.o.bler-looking man. She felt that perhaps they were both on the threshold of a larger and richer life than they had ever known before. She saw dimly, as through a mist, that which her heart longed to believe,--the truth that G.o.d does care about His earthly children,--that He was not to her a mere shaping force or power, but a tender, gentle-hearted helper. Therefore she waited eagerly and hopefully for Hemstead to speak.