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THE SICK CHAMBER.
In the course of a month there was a good deal more of light in the smile
with which my darling greeted me when I entered her room in the morning.
Her pain was greatly gone, but the power of moving her limbs had not yet
even begun to show itself.
One day she received me with a still happier smile than I had yet seen upon
her face, put out her thin white hand, took mine and kissed it, and said,
"Papa," with a lingering on the last syllable.
"What is it, my pet?" I asked.
"I am so happy!"
"What makes you so happy?" I asked again.
"I don't know," she answered. "I haven't thought about it yet. But
everything looks so pleasant round me. Is it nearly winter yet, papa? I've
forgotten all about how the time has been going."
"It is almost winter, my dear. There is hardly a leaf left on the
trees--just two or three disconsolate yellow ones that want to get away
down to the rest. They go fluttering and fluttering and trying to break
away, but they can't."
"That is just as I felt a little while ago. I wanted to die and get away,
papa; for I thought I should never be well again, and I should be in
everybody's way.--I am afraid I shall not get well, after all," she added,
and the light clouded on her sweet face.
"Well, my darling, we are in God's hands. We shall never get tired of you,
and you must not get tired of us. Would you get tired of nursing me, if I
were ill?"
"O, papa!" And the tears began to gather in her eyes.
"Then you must think we are not able to love so well as you."
"I know what you mean. I did not think of it that way. I will never think
so about it again. I was only thinking how useless I was."
"There you are quite mistaken, my dear. No living creature ever was
useless. You've got plenty to do there."
"But what have I got to do? I don't feel able for anything," she said; and
again the tears came in her eyes, as if I had been telling her to get up
and she could not.
"A great deal of our work," I answered, "we do without knowing what it is.
But I'll tell you what you have got to do: you have got to believe in God,
and in everybody in this house."
"I do, I do. But that is easy to do," she returned.
"And do you think that the work God gives us to do is never easy? Jesus
says his yoke is easy, his burden is light. People sometimes refuse to do
God's work just because it is easy. This is, sometimes, because they cannot
believe that easy work is his work; but there may be a very bad pride in
it: it may be because they think that there is little or no honour to be
got in that way; and therefore they despise it. Some again accept it with
half a heart, and do it with half a hand. But, however easy any work may
be, it cannot be well done without taking thought about it. And such
people, instead of taking thought about their work, generally take thought
about the morrow, in which no work can be done any more than in yesterday.
The Holy Present!--I think I must make one more sermon about it--although
you, Connie," I said, meaning it for a little joke, "do think that I have
said too much about it already."
"Papa, papa! do forgive me. This is a judgment on me for talking to you as
I did that dreadful morning. But I was so happy that I was impertinent."
"You silly darling!" I said. "A judgment! God be angry with you for that!
Even if it had been anything wrong, which it was not, do you think God has
no patience? No, Connie. I will tell you what seems to me much more likely.
You wanted something to do; and so God gave you something to do."
"Lying in bed and doing nothing!"
"Yes. Just lying in bed, and doing his will."
"If I could but feel that I was doing his will!"
"When you do it, then you will feel you are doing it."
"I know you are coming to something, papa. Please make haste, for my back
is getting so bad."
"I've tired you, my pet. It was very thoughtless of me. I will tell you the
rest another time," I said, rising.
"No, no. It will make me much worse not to hear it all now."
"Well, I will tell you. Be still, my darling, I won't be long. In the time
of the old sacrifices, when God so kindly told his ignorant children to
do something for him in that way, poor people were told to bring, not a
bullock or a sheep, for that was more than they could get, but a pair of
turtledoves, or two young pigeons. But now, as Crashaw the poet says,
'Ourselves become our own best sacrifice.' God wanted to teach people to
offer themselves. Now, you are poor, my pet, and you cannot offer yourself
in great things done for your fellow-men, which was the way Jesus did.
But you must remember that the two young pigeons of the poor were just as
acceptable to God as the fat bullock of the rich. Therefore you must say to
God something like this:--'O heavenly Father, I have nothing to offer
thee but my patience. I will bear thy will, and so offer my will a
burnt-offering unto thee. I will be as useless as thou pleasest.' Depend
upon it, my darling, in the midst of all the science about the world and
its ways, and all the ignorance of God and his greatness, the man or woman
who can thus say, Thy will be done, with the true heart of giving up is
nearer the secret of things than the geologist and theologian. And now, my
darling, be quiet in God's name."
She held up her mouth to kiss me, but did not speak, and I left her, and
sent Dora to sit with her.
In the evening, when I went into her room again, having been out in my
parish all the morning, I began to unload my budget of small events.
Indeed, we all came in like pelicans with stuffed pouches to empty them in
her room, as if she had been the only young one we had, and we must cram
her with news. Or, rather, she was like the queen of the commonwealth
sending out her messages into all parts, and receiving messages in return.
I might call her the brain of the house; but I have used similes enough for
a while.
After I had done talking, she said--
"And you have been to the school too, papa?"
"Yes. I go to the school almost every day. I fancy in such a school as ours
the young people get more good than they do in church. You know I had made
a great change in the Sunday-school just before you came home."
"I heard of that, papa. You won't let any of the little ones go to school
on the Sunday."
"No. It is too much for them. And having made this change, I feel the
necessity of being in the school myself nearly every day, that I may do
something direct for the little ones."
"And you'll have to take me up soon, as you promised, you know, papa--just
before Sprite threw me."
"As soon as you like, my dear, after you are able to read again."
"O, you must begin before that, please.--You could spare time to read a
little to me, couldn't you?" she said doubtfully, as if she feared she was
asking too much.
"Certainly, my dear; and I will begin to think about it at once."
It was in part the result of this wish of my child's that it became the
custom to gather in her room on Sunday evenings. She was quite unable for
any kind of work such as she would have had me commence with her, but I
used to take something to read to her every now and then, and always after
our early tea on Sundays.
What a thing it is to have one to speak and think about and try to find out
and understand, who is always and altogether and perfectly good! Such a
centre that is for all our thoughts and words and actions and imaginations!
It is indeed blessed to be human beings with Jesus Christ for the centre of
humanity.
In the papers wherein I am about to record the chief events of the
following years of my life, I shall give a short account of what passed at
some of these assemblies in my child's room, in the hope that it may give
my friends something, if not new, yet fresh to think about. For God has so
made us that everyone who thinks at all thinks in a way that must be more
or less fresh to everyone else who thinks, if he only have the gift of
setting forth his thoughts so that we can see what they are.
I hope my readers will not be alarmed at this, and suppose that I am about
to inflict long sermons upon them. I am not. I do hope, as I say, to teach
them something; but those whom I succeed in so teaching will share in the
delight it will give me to write about what I love most.
As far as I can remember, I will tell how this Sunday-evening class began.
I was sitting by Constance's bed. The fire was burning brightly, and the
twilight had deepened so nearly into night that it was reflected back from
the window, for the curtains had not yet been drawn. There was no light in
the room but that of the fire.
Now Constance was in the way of asking often what kind of day or night it
was, for there never was a girl more a child of nature than she. Her heart
seemed to respond at once to any and every mood of the world around her.
To her the condition of air, earth, and sky was news, and news of poetic
interest too. "What is it like?" she would often say, without any more
definite shaping of the question. This same evening she said:
"What is it like, papa?"
"It is growing dark," I answered, "as you can see. It is a still evening,
and what they call a black frost. The trees are standing as still as if
they were carved out of stone, and would snap off everywhere if the wind
were to blow. The ground is dark, and as hard as if it were of cast iron. A
gloomy night rather, my dear. It looks as if there were something upon its
mind that made it sullenly thoughtful; but the stars are coming out one
after another overhead, and the sky will be all awake soon. A strange thing
the life that goes on all night, is it not? The life of owlets, and mice,
and beasts of prey, and bats, and stars," I said, with no very categorical
arrangement, "and dreams, and flowers that don't go to sleep like the rest,
but send out their scent all night long. Only those are gone now. There are
no scents abroad, not even of the earth in such a frost as this."
"Don't you think it looks sometimes, papa, as if God turned his back on the
world, or went farther away from it for a while?"
"Tell me a little more what you mean, Connie."
"Well, this night now, this dark, frozen, lifeless night, which you have
been describing to me, isn't like God at all--is it?"
"No, it is not. I see what you mean now."
"It is just as if he had gone away and said, 'Now you shall see what you
can do without me.'
"Something like that. But do you know that English people--at least I think
so--enjoy the changeful weather of their country much more upon the whole
than those who have fine weather constantly? You see it is not enough to
satisfy God's goodness that he should give us all things richly to enjoy,
but he must make us able to enjoy them as richly as he gives them. He has
to consider not only the gift, but the receiver of the gift. He has to make
us able to take the gift and make it our own, as well as to give us the
gift. In fact, it is not real giving, with the full, that is, the divine,
meaning of giving, without it. He has to give us to the gift as well as
give the gift to us. Now for this, a break, an interruption is good, is
invaluable, for then we begin to think about the thing, and do something in
the matter ourselves. The wonder of God's teaching is that, in great part,
he makes us not merely learn, but teach ourselves, and that is far grander
than if he only made our minds as he makes our bodies."
"I think I understand you, papa. For since I have been ill, you would
wonder, if you could see into me, how even what you tell me about the world
out of doors gives me more pleasure than I think I ever had when I could go
about in it just as I liked."
"It wouldn't do that, though, you know, if you hadn't had the other first.
The pleasure you have comes as much from your memory as from my news."
"I see that, papa."
"Now can you tell me anything in history that confirms what I have been
saying?"
"I don't know anything about history, papa. The only thing that comes into
my head is what you were saying yourself the other day about Milton's
blindness."
"Ah, yes. I had not thought of that. Do you know, I do believe that God
wanted a grand poem from that man, and therefore blinded him that he might
be able to write it. But he had first trained him up to the point--given
him thirty years in which he had not to provide the bread of a single day,
only to learn and think; then set him to teach boys; then placed him at
Cromwell's side, in the midst of the tumultuous movement of public affairs,
into which the late student entered with all his heart and soul; and then
last of all he cast the veil of a divine darkness over him, sent him into a
chamber far more retired than that in which he laboured at Cambridge, and
set him like the nightingale to sing darkling. The blackness about him was
just the great canvas which God gave him to cover with forms of light and
music. Deep wells of memory burst upwards from below; the windows of heaven
were opened from above; from both rushed the deluge of song which flooded
his soul, and which he has poured out in a great river to us."
"It was rather hard for poor Milton, though, wasn't it, papa?"
"Wait till he says so, my dear. We are sometimes too ready with our
sympathy, and think things a great deal worse than those who have to
undergo them. Who would not be glad to be struck with such blindness as
Milton's?"
"Those that do not care about his poetry, papa," answered Constance, with a
deprecatory smile.
"Well said, my Connie. And to such it never can come. But, if it please
God, you will love Milton before you are about again. You can't love one
you know nothing about."
"I have tried to read him a little."
"Yes, I daresay. You might as well talk of liking a man whose face you had
never seen, because you did not approve of the back of his coat. But you
and Milton together have led me away from a far grander instance of what we
had been talking about. Are you tired, darling?"
"Not the least, papa. You don't mind what I said about Milton?"
"Not at all, my dear. I like your honesty. But I should mind very much if
you thought, with your ignorance of Milton, that your judgment of him was
more likely to be right than mine, with my knowledge of him."
"O, papa! I am only sorry that I am not capable of appreciating him."
"There you are wrong again. I think you are quite capable of appreciating
him. But you cannot appreciate what you have never seen. You think of him
as dry, and think you ought to be able to like dry things. Now he is not
dry, and you ought not to be able to like dry things. You have a figure
before you in your fancy, which is dry, and which you call Milton. But it
is no more Milton than your dull-faced Dutch doll, which you called after
her, was your merry Aunt Judy. But here comes your mamma; and I haven't
said what I wanted to say yet."
"But surely, husband, you can say it all the same," said my wife. "I will
go away if you can't."
"I can say it all the better, my love. Come and sit down here beside me. I
was trying to show Connie--"
"You did show me, papa."
"Well, I was showing Connie that a gift has sometimes to be taken away
again before we can know what it is worth, and so receive it right."
Ethelwyn sighed. She was always more open to the mournful than the glad.
Her heart had been dreadfully wrung in her youth.
"And I was going on to give her the greatest instance of it in human
history. As long as our Lord was with his disciples, they could not see
him right: he was too near them. Too much light, too many words, too much
revelation, blinds or stupefies. The Lord had been with them long enough.
They loved him dearly, and yet often forgot his words almost as soon as he
said them. He could not get it into them, for instance, that he had not
come to be a king. Whatever he said, they shaped it over again after their
own fancy; and their minds were so full of their own worldly notions of
grandeur and command, that they could not receive into their souls the gift
of God present before their eyes. Therefore he was taken away, that his
Spirit, which was more himself than his bodily presence, might come into
them--that they might receive the gift of God into their innermost being.
After he had gone out of their sight, and they might look all around and
down in the grave and up in the air, and not see him anywhere--when they
thought they had lost him, he began to come to them again from the other
side--from the inside. They found that the image of him which his presence
with them had printed in light upon their souls, began to revive in the
dark of his absence; and not that only, but that in looking at it without
the overwhelming of his bodily presence, lines and forms and meanings began
to dawn out of it which they had never seen before. And his words came back
to them, no longer as they had received them, but as he meant them. The
spirit of Christ filling their hearts and giving them new power, made them
remember, by making them able to understand, all that he had said to them.
They were then always saying to each other, 'You remember how;' whereas
before, they had been always staring at each other with astonishment and
something very near incredulity, while he spoke to them. So that after he
had gone away, he was really nearer to them than he had been before. The
meaning of anything is more than its visible presence. There is a soul in
everything, and that soul is the meaning of it. The soul of the world
and all its beauty has come nearer to you, my dear, just because you are
separated from it for a time."
"Thank you, dear papa. I do like to get a little sermon all to myself now
and then. That is another good of being ill."
"You don't mean me to have a share in it, then, Connie, do you?" said my
wife, smiling at her daughter's pleasure.
"O, mamma! I should have thought you knew all papa had got to say by this
time. I daresay he has given you a thousand sermons all to yourself."
"Then you suppose, Connie, that I came into the world with just a boxful of
sermons, and after I had taken them all out there were no more. I should be
sorry to think I should not have a good many new things to say by this time
next year."
"Well, papa, I wish I could he sure of knowing more next year."
"Most people do learn, whether they will or not. But the kind of learning
is very different in the two cases."
"But I want to ask you one question, papa: do you think that we should not
know Jesus better now if he were to come and let us see him--as he came to
the disciples so long, long ago? I wish it were not so long ago."
"As to the time, it makes no difference whether it was last year or two
thousand years ago. The whole question is how much we understand, and
understanding, obey him. And I do not think we should be any nearer that if
he came amongst us bodily again. If we should, he would come. I believe we
should be further off it."
"Do you think, then," said Connie, in an almost despairing tone, as if I
were the prophet of great evil, "that we shall never, never, never see
him?"
"That is quite another thing, my Connie. That is the heart of my hopes by
day and my dreams by night. To behold the face of Jesus seems to me the one
thing to be desired. I do not know that it is to be prayed for; but I think
it will be given us as the great bounty of God, so soon as ever we are
capable of it. That sight of the face of Jesus is, I think, what is meant
by his glorious appearing, but it will come as a consequence of his spirit
in us, not as a cause of that spirit in us. The pure in heart shall see
God. The seeing of him will be the sign that we are like him, for only by
being like him can we see him as he is. All the time that he was with them,
the disciples never saw him as he was. You must understand a man before you
can see and read his face aright; and as the disciples did not understand
our Lord's heart, they could neither see nor read his face aright. But when
we shall be fit to look that man in the face, God only knows."
"Then do you think, papa, that we, who have never seen him, could know him
better than the disciples? I don't mean, of course, better than they knew
him after he was taken away from them, but better than they knew him while
he was still with them?"
"Certainly I do, my dear."
"O, papa! Is it possible? Why don't we all, then?"
"Because we won't take the trouble; that is the reason."
"O, what a grand thing to think! That would be worth living--worth being
ill for. But how? how? Can't you help me? Mayn't one human being help
another?"
"It is the highest duty one human being owes to another. But whoever wants
to learn must pray, and think, and, above all, obey--that is simply, do
what Jesus says."
There followed a little silence, and I could hear my child sobbing. And the
tears stood in; my wife's eyes--tears of gladness to hear her daughter's
sobs.
"I will try, papa," Constance said at last. "But you will help me?"
"That I will, my love. I will help you in the best way I know; by trying to
tell you what I have heard and learned about him--heard and learned of the
Father, I hope and trust. It is coming near to the time when he was born;--
but I have spoken quite as long as you are able to bear to-night."
"No, no, papa. Do go on."
"No, my dear; no more to-night. That would be to offend against the very
truth I have been trying to set forth to you. But next Sunday--you have
plenty to think about till then--I will talk to you about the baby Jesus;
and perhaps I may find something more to help you by that time, besides
what I have got to say now."
"But," said my wife, "don't you think, Connie, this is too good to keep all
to ourselves? Don't you think we ought to have Wynnie and Dora in?"
"Yes, yes, mamma. Do let us have them in. And Harry and Charlie too."
"I fear they are rather young yet," I said. "Perhaps it might do them
harm."
"It would be all the better for us to have them anyhow," said Ethelwyn,
smiling.
"How do you mean, my dear?"
"Because you will say things more simply if you have them by you. Besides,
you always say such things to children as delight grown people, though they
could never get them out of you."
It was a wife's speech, reader. Forgive me for writing it.
"Well," I said, "I don't mind them coming in, but I don't promise to say
anything directly to them. And you must let them go away the moment they
wish it."
"Certainly," answered my wife; and so the matter was arranged.
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