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NOWHERE AND EVERYWHERE.
Faber sprung upon Niger's back, and galloped wildly through the park.
His soul was like a southern sea under a summer tornado. The slow dawn
was gathering under a smoky cloud with an edge of cold yellow; a thin
wind was abroad; rain had fallen in the night, and the grass was wet and
cool to Niger's hoofs; the earth sent up a savor, which like a soft warp
was crossed by a woof of sweet odors from leaf-buds and wild flowers,
and spangled here and there with a silver thread of bird song--for but
few of the beast-angels were awake yet. Through the fine consorting mass
of silence and odor, went the soft thunder of Niger's gallop over the
turf. His master's joy had overflowed into him: the creatures are not
all stupid that can not speak; some of them are with us more than we
think. According to the grand old tale, God made his covenant with all
the beasts that came out of the ark as well as with Noah; for them also
he set his bow of hope in the cloud of fear; they are God's creatures,
God bless them! and if not exactly human, are, I think, something more
than humanish. Niger gave his soul with his legs to his master's mood
that morning. He was used to hard gallops with him across country, but
this was different; this was plainly a frolic, the first he had had
since he came into his service; and a frolic it should be!
A deeper, loftier, lovelier morning was dawning in Faber's world unseen.
One dread burden was lifted from his being; his fierce pride, his
unmanly cruelty, his spotless selfishness, had not hunted a woman soul
quite into the moldy jaws of the grave; she was given back to him, to
tend, and heal, and love as he had never yet dreamed of loving! Endless
was the dawn that was breaking in him; unutterably sweet the joy. Life
was now to be lived--not endured. How he would nurse the lily he had
bruised and broken! From her own remorse he would shield her. He would
be to her a summer land--a refuge from the wind, a covert from the
tempest. He would be to her like that Saviour for whom, in her wandering
fancy, she had taken him: never more in vaguest thought would he turn
from her. If, in any evil mood, a thought unkind should dare glance back
at her past, he would clasp her the closer to his heart, the more to be
shielded that the shield itself was so poor. Once he laughed aloud as he
rode, to find himself actually wondering whether the story of the
resurrection could be true; for what had the restoration of his Juliet
in common with the out-worn superstition? In any overwhelming joy, he
concluded, the heart leans to lovely marvel.
But there is as much of the reasonable as of to us the marvelous in that
which alone has ever made credible proffer toward the filling of the
gulf whence issue all the groans of humanity. Let Him be tested by the
only test that can, on the supposition of His asserted nature, be
applied to Him--that of obedience to the words He has spoken--words that
commend themselves to every honest nature. Proof of other sort, if it
could be granted, would, leaving our natures where they were, only sink
us in condemnation.
Why should I pursue the story further? and if not here, where better
should I stop? The true story has no end--no end. But endlessly dreary
would the story be, were there no Life living by its own will, no
perfect Will, one with an almighty heart, no Love in whom we live and
move and have our being. Offer me an eternity in all things else after
my own imagination, but without a perfect Father, and I say, no; let me
die, even as the unbelieving would have it. Not believing in the Father
of Jesus, they are right in not desiring to live. Heartily do I
justify them therein. For all this talk and disputation about
immortality, wherein is regarded only the continuance of consciousness
beyond what we call death, it is to me, with whatever splendor of
intellectual coruscation it be accompanied, but little better than a
foolish babble, the crackling of thorns under a pot. Apart from Himself,
God forbid there should be any immortality. If it could be proved apart
from Him, then apart from Him it could be, and would be infinite
damnation. It is an impossibility, and were but an unmitigated evil. And
if it be impossible without Him, it can not be believed without Him: if
it could be proved without Him, the belief so gained would be an evil.
Only with the knowledge of the Father of Christ, did the endlessness of
being become a doctrine of bliss to men. If He be the first life, the
Author of his own, to speak after the language of men, and the origin
and source of all other life, it can be only by knowing Him that we can
know whether we shall live or die. Nay more, far more!--the knowledge
of Him by such innermost contact as is possible only between creator and
created, and possible only when the created has aspired to be one with
the will of the creator, such knowledge and such alone is life to the
created; it is the very life, that alone for the sake of which God
created us. If we are one with God in heart, in righteousness, in
desire, no death can touch us, for we are life, and the garment of
immortality, the endless length of days which is but the mere shadow of
the eternal, follows as a simple necessity: He is not the God of the
dead, or of the dying, but of the essentially alive. Without this inmost
knowledge of Him, this oneness with Him, we have no life in us, for it
is life, and that for the sake of which all this outward show of
things, and our troubled condition in the midst of them, exists. All
that is mighty, grand, harmonious, therefore in its own nature true, is.
If not, then dearly I thank the grim Death, that I shall die and not
live. Thus undeceived, my only terror would be that the unbelievers
might be but half right, and there might be a life, so-called, beyond
the grave without a God.
My brother man, is the idea of a God too good or too foolish for thy
belief? or is it that thou art not great enough or humble enough to hold
it? In either case, I will believe it for thee and for me. Only be not
stiff-necked when the truth begins to draw thee: thou wilt find it hard
if she has to go behind and drive thee--hard to kick against the divine
goads, which, be thou ever so mulish, will be too much for thee at last.
Yea, the time will come when thou wilt goad thyself toward the divine.
But hear me this once more: the God, the Jesus, in whom I believe, are
not the God, the Jesus, in whom you fancy I believe: you know them not;
your idea of them is not mine. If you knew them you would believe in
them, for to know them is to believe in them. Say not, "Let Him teach
me, then," except you mean it in submissive desire; for He has been
teaching you all this time: if you have been doing His teaching, you are
on the way to learn more; if you hear and do not heed, where is the
wonder that the things I tell you sound in your ears as the muttering of
a dotard? They convey to you nothing, it may be: but that which makes of
them words--words--words, lies in you, not in me. Yours is the killing
power. They would bring you life, but the death in him that knoweth and
doeth not is strong; in your air they drop and die, winged things no
more.
For days Faber took measures not to be seen by Juliet. But he was
constantly about the place, and when she woke from a sleep, they had
often to tell her that he had been by her side all the time she slept.
At night he was either in her room or in the next chamber. Dorothy used
to say to her that if she wanted her husband, she had only to go to
sleep. She was greatly tempted to pretend, but would not.
At length Faber requested Dorothy to tell Juliet that the doctor said
she might send for her husband when she pleased. Much as he longed to
hear her voice, he would not come without her permission.
He was by her side the next moment. But for minutes not a word was
spoken; a speechless embrace was all.
It does not concern me to relate how by degrees they came to a close
understanding. Where love is, everything is easy, or, if not easy, yet
to be accomplished. Of course Faber made his return confession in full.
I will not say that Juliet had not her respondent pangs of retrospective
jealousy. Love, although an angel, has much to learn yet, and the demon
Jealousy may be one of the school masters of her coming perfection: God
only knows. There must be a divine way of casting out the demon; else
how would it be here-after?
Unconfessed to each other, their falls would forever have been between
to part them; confessed, they drew them together in sorrow and humility
and mutual consoling. The little Amanda could not tell whether Juliet's
house or Dorothy's was her home: when at the one, she always talked of
the other as home. She called her father papa, and Juliet
mamma;
Dorothy had been auntie from the first. She always wrote her name,
Amanda Duck Faber. From all this the gossips of Glaston explained
everything satisfactorily: Juliet had left her husband on discovering
that he had a child of whose existence he had never told her; but
learning that the mother was dead, yielded at length, and was
reconciled. That was the nearest they ever came to the facts, and it was
not needful they should ever know more. The talkers of the world are not
on the jury of the court of the universe. There are many, doubtless, who
need the shame of a public exposure to make them recognize their own
doing for what it is; but of such Juliet had not been. Her husband knew
her fault--that was enough: he knew also his own immeasurably worse than
hers, but when they folded each other to the heart, they left their
faults outside--as God does, when He casts our sins behind His back, in
utter uncreation.
I will say nothing definite as to the condition of mind at which Faber
had arrived when last Wingfold and he had a talk together. He was
growing, and that is all we can require of any man. He would not say he
was a believer in the supernal, but he believed more than he said, and
he never talked against belief. Also he went as often as he could to
church, which, little as it means in general, did not mean little when
the man was Paul Faber, and where the minister was Thomas Wingfold.
It is time for the end. Here it is--in a little poem, which, on her next
birthday, the curate gave Dorothy:
- O
- wind of God, that blowest in the mind,
Blow, blow and wake the gentle spring in me;
Blow, swifter blow, a strong, warm summer wind,
Till all the flowers with eyes come out to see;
Blow till the fruit hangs red on every tree,
And our high-soaring song-larks meet thy dove--
High the imperfect soars, descends the perfect Love.
Blow not the less though winter cometh then;
Blow, wind of God, blow hither changes keen;
Let the spring creep into the ground again,
The flowers close all their eyes, not to be seen:
All lives in thee that ever once hath been:
Blow, fill my upper air with icy storms;
Breathe cold, O wind of God, and kill my canker-worms.
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