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WHAT HELEN HEARD MORE
"A word you dropped the other day," said the curate, "set me
thinking of the note-worthy fact that belief in God and belief in
immortality cease together. But I do not see the logic of it. If we
are here without God, why may we not go on there without God? I
marvel that I have heard of no one taking up and advocating the
view. What a grand discovery it would be for some people--that not
only was there no God to interfere with them, and insist on their
becoming something worth being, but that they were immortal
notwithstanding! that death was only the passage of another birth
into a condition of enlarged capacity for such bliss as they enjoyed
here, but more exalted in degree, perhaps in kind, and altogether
preferable."
"I know one to whom the thought would not have been a new one," said
Polwarth. "Have you not come upon a passage in my brother's
manuscript involving the very idea?"
"Not yet. I read very slowly and pick up all the crumbs. I wish we
had had the book here. I should have so much liked to hear you read
from it again."
The gate-keeper rose and went to his cabinet.
"The wish is easily gratified," he said. "I made a copy of
it,--partly for security, partly that I might thoroughly enter into
my brother's thoughts."
"I wonder almost you lend the original then," said Wingfold.
"I certainly could not lend the copy to any man I could not trust
with the original," answered Polwarth. "But I never lent either
before."--He was turning over the leaves as he spoke.--"The
passage," he went on, "besides for its own worth, is precious to me
as showing how, through all his madness, his thoughts haunted the
gates of wisdom.--Ah! here it is!
"'About this time I had another strange vision, whether in the body
or out of the body, I cannot tell. I thought, as oftener than once
before, that at length I was dying. And it seemed to me that I did
die, and awake to the consciousness of a blessed freedom from the
coarser and more ponderous outer dress I had hitherto worn, being
now clad only in what had been up to this time an inner garment, and
was a far more closely fitting one. The first delight of which I was
aware was coolness--a coolness that hurt me not--the coolness as of
a dewy summer eve, in which a soft friendly wind is blowing; and the
coolness was that of perfect well-being, of the health that cometh
after fever, when a sound sleep hath divided it away and built a
rampart between; the coolness of undoubted truth, and of love that
has surmounted passion and is tenfold love.'
"He goes on to give further and fuller account of his
sensations,--ventures even on the anticipated futility of an attempt
to convey a notion of one of his new senses. I leave all that for
your own reading, Mr. Wingfold.
"'But where was I? That I could not tell. I am here was all I could
say; but then what more could I ever have said?--Gradually my sight
came to me, or the light of the country arose, I could not tell
which, and behold, I was in the midst of a paradise, gorgeous yet
gracious, to describe which I find no words in the halting tongues
of earth, and I know something of them all, most of them well. If I
say a purple sea was breaking in light on an emerald shore, the
moment the words are written, I see them coarse and crude as a boy's
first attempt at landscape; yet are there no better wherewith to
tell what first filled my eyes with heavenly delight.
"'The inhabitants were many, but nowhere were they crowded. There
was room in abundance, and wild places seemed to be held sacred for
solitude.'
"I am only picking up a sentence here and there, as I hasten to the
particular point," said Polwarth, looking down the page.
"'But the flowers! and the birds! and above all the beauty of the
people! And they dwelt in harmony. Yet on their foreheads lay as it
seemed a faint mist, or as it were the first of a cloud of coming
disquiet.
"'And I prayed him, Tell me, sir, whither shall I go to find God and
say unto him, Lo, here I am! And he answered and said to me, Sir, I
but dimly know what thou meanest. Say further. And I stood for an
hour, even as one astonied. Then said I, All my long life on the
world whence I came, I did look to find God when death should take
me. But lo, now--And with that my heart smote me, for in my former
life I had oftentimes fallen into unbelief and denied God: was this
now my punishment--that I should never find him? And my heart grew
cold in my body, and the blood curdled therein. Then the man
answered and said, It is true that in generations past, for so I
read in our ancient books, men did believe in one above them and in
them, who had wrought them to that they were, and was working them
to better still; but whether it be that we have now gained that
better, and there is nothing higher unto which we may look,
therefore no need of the high one, I know not, but truly we have
long ceased so to believe, and have learned that, as things are, so
they have been, and so they shall be. Then fell as it were a cold
stone into the core of my heart, and I questioned him no farther,
for I bore death in my heart, even as a woman carrieth her unborn
child. No God! I cried, and sped away into a solitude and shrieked
aloud, No God! Nay, but ere I believe it, I will search through all
creation, and cry aloud as I go. I will search until I find him, and
if I find him not,--. With that my soul would have fainted in me,
had I not spread forth my wings and rushed aloft to find him.
"'For the more lovely anything I saw, the more gracious in colour or
form, or the more marvellous in the law of its working, ever a fresh
pang shot to my heart: if that which I had heard should prove true,
then was there no Love such as seemed to me to dwell therein, the
soul of its beauty, and all the excellence thereof was but a
delusion of my own heart, greedy after a phantom perfection. No God!
no Love! no loveliness, save a ghastly semblance thereof! and the
more ghastly that it was so like loveliness, and yet was not to be
loved upon peril of prostitution of spirit. Then in truth was heaven
a fable, and hell an all-embracing fact! for my very being knew in
itself that if it would dwell in peace, the very atmosphere in which
it lived and moved and breathed must be love, living love, a one
divine presence, truth to itself, and love to me, and to all them
that needed love, down to the poorest that can but need it, and
knoweth it not when it cometh. I knew that if love was not all in
all, in fact as well as in imagination, my life was but a dreary
hollow made in the shape of a life, and therefore for ever hungry
and never to be satisfied. And again I spread wings--no longer as it
seemed of hope, but wings of despair, yet mighty, and flew. And I
learned thereafter that despair is but the hidden side of hope.'
"Here follow pages of his wanderings in quest of God. He tells how
and where he inquired and sought, searching into the near and minute
as earnestly as into the far and vast, watching at the very pores of
being, and sitting in the gates of the mighty halls of assembly--but
all in vain. No God was to be found.
"'And it seemed to me,' he says at last, 'that, as I had been the
wanderer of earth, so was I now doomed to be the wanderer of heaven.
On earth I wandered to find death, and men called me the everlasting
Jew; in heaven I wandered to find God, and what name would they give
me now?
"'At last my heart sank within me wholly, and I folded my wings, and
through years I also sank and sank, and alighted at length upon the
place appointed for my habitation--that namely wherein I found
myself first after death. And alighting there, I fell down weary and
slept.
"'And when I awoke I turned upon my side in the despair of a life
that was neither in my own power nor in that of one who was the
Father of me, which life therefore was an evil thing and a tyrant
unto me. And lo! there by my side I beheld a lily of the field such
as grew on the wayside in the old times betwixt Jerusalem and
Bethany. Never since my death had I seen such, and my heart awoke
within me, and I wept bitter tears that nothing should be true,
nothing be that which it had seemed in the times of old. And as I
wept I heard a sound as of the falling of many tears, and I looked,
and lo a shower as from a watering-pot falling upon the lily! And I
looked yet again, and I saw the watering-pot, and the hand that held
it; and he whose hand held the pot stood by me and looked at me as
he watered the lily. He was a man like the men of the world where
such lilies grow, and was poorly dressed, and seemed like a
gardener. And I looked up in his face, and lo--the eyes of the Lord
Jesus! and my heart swelled until it filled my whole body and my
head, and I gave a great cry, and for joy that turned into agony I
could not rise, neither could I speak, but I crept on my hands and
my knees to his feet, and there I fell down upon my face, and with
my hands I lifted one of his feet and did place it upon my head, and
then I found voice to cry, O master! and therewith the life departed
from me. And when I came to myself the master sat under the tree,
and I lay by his side, and he had lifted my head upon his knees. And
behold, the world was jubilant around me, for Love was Love and Lord
of all. The sea roared, and the fulness thereof was love; and the
purple and the gold and the blue and the green came straight from
the hidden red heart of the Lord Jesus. And I closed my eyes for
very bliss; nor had I yet bethought me of the time when first those
eyes looked upon me, for I seemed to have known them since first I
began to be. But now when for very bliss I closed my eyes, my sin
came back to me, and I remembered. And I rose up, and kneeled down
before him, and said, O Lord, I am Ahasuerus the Jew, the man who
would not let thee rest thy cross upon the stone before my workshop,
but drave thee from it.--Say no more of that, answered my Lord, for
truly I have myself rested in thy heart, cross and all, until the
thing thou diddest in thy ignorance is better than forgotten, for it
is remembered in love. Only see thou also make right excuse for my
brethren who, like thee then, know not now what they do. Come and I
will bring thee to the woman who died for thee in the burning fire.
And I said, O Lord, leave me not, for although I would now in my
turn right gladly die for her, yet would I not look upon that woman
again if the love of her would make me love thee one hair the less--
thou knowest. And the Lord smiled upon me and said, Fear not,
Ahasuerus; my love infolds and is the nest of all love. I fear not;
fear thou not either. And I arose and followed him. And every tree
and flower, yea every stone and cloud, with the whole earth and sea
and air, were full of God, even the living God--so that now I could
have died of pure content. And I followed my Lord.'"
The gate-keeper was silent, and so were they all. At length Rachel
rose softly, wiping the tears from her eyes, and left the room. But
she found no one in the closet. Helen was already hastening across
the park, weeping as she went.
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