Chapter 19. The Preacher Taught By The Pagan

________________________________________________
_ CHAPTER XIX. THE PREACHER TAUGHT BY THE PAGAN

We have said that Lottie Marsden was a pagan. That is not necessarily a reproach. Socrates was a pagan. But Lottie, in the main, was a very ordinary pagan, not better than the average. Her only superiority over other idolaters, and many nominal Christians, it might be added, was her practical common sense. The more she thought, the more unsatisfactory Hemstead's sermon grew, and the more sure she became that there was a wrong somewhere: in him, or her, or in religion itself.

Her whole nature revolted at the idea of God given that morning.

In her vivid fancy, she saw an unrelenting, unimpassioned, and yet all-powerful Being, from whom there was no escape, calmly subjecting one human life after another to the severest crucial tests. If one could endure them, all might be well. If, in the composition of one's character, there existed good metal, it would come out of the furnace fine gold perhaps; but if, as she feared might be true of herself, there was only dross, then the fiery trials awaiting would be as useless as cruel.

"Why couldn't an all-powerful God find a pleasanter and surer way of making us good?" she asked in bitterness. "I know there is something wrong in what Mr. Hemstead preached this morning. He is different from his own doctrines, and to my mind a great deal better. He was severe upon me, but not calmly and stonily severe. He looked as if he felt for me deeply, and would, even at cost to himself, give me aid if I tried to do right. If he had shown me my faults in the calm, cold distance of immeasurable superiority which he ascribed to God, I would not have listened to a word. But his voice was gentleness itself, and it evidently pained him to give me pain; but when he came to show our relations to God, I seemed to come into the presence of stony-hearted, stony-faced fate. If this is the real God that ministers preach about, little wonder that they have such a hard time of it in persuading us to love Him. Little wonder that people forget Him as long as they can. But Mr. Hemstead seems to want us to think of these awful things nearly all the time; and what's worse, to begin torturing and mortifying ourselves, even before God is ready to commence. No, I thank you. No such religion for me. If I must go into the fiery furnace, I won't go till I must."

She sprang up, and restlessly paced the room. "He's a very cheerful apostle of such a gloomy gospel," she thought. "Gospel! I thought 'gospel' meant 'good news.' I never heard worse than he told us this morning. If what he preached is true religion, he's a very inconsistent professor of it, and I would like to tell him so.

"What's more, I will if I can find him"; and acting upon the impulse she left the room.

The "miserable sinners," as the prayer-book has it, whom Hemstead had in fact made quite miserable for a time, grew more comfortable after dinner; and by three o'clock, so far from employing hair-cloth and scourgings, or even the mildest form of a crusade against the weaknesses of the flesh, were all dozing and digesting in the most luxurious manner. Lottie was the only "sinner" who remained "miserable"; but she was not more "out of sorts" than the one who, ex officio, as the world is prone to believe, Ought to have been calm and serene upon his theological height above the clouds.

As she entered the parlor with her velvet-like tread, she paused a moment to observe the Boanerges of the morning. As he sat alone before the fire, with his elbows upon his knees and his face buried in his hands, he looked more like a weak mortal than a "son of thunder." He did not look a bit like one who, with face as firm and inflexible as God's purpose, was anxious to step into the fiery furnace before it was ready.

She drew a few steps nearer, and stood over him with a curious expression on her face, which could so well mask or reveal her thought as she chose. She had come downstairs in a state of irritable and defiant protest against his doctrines, and with no little vexation at him for being their mouth-piece. If she had found him calmly pacing the floor, pondering on human frailty and folly, or if he had been reading judicially a semi-sceptical work, that he might demolish the irreverent author, she would have made an onslaught whose vigor, if not logic, would have greatly disturbed his equanimity and theological poise. But when she saw his attitude of deep dejection, and when twice he sighed long and heavily, her woman's nature was disarmed, and she began to think that his doctrines were as hard upon him as upon the rest. Instinctively she took his part against God, whose formative hand appeared too heavy for them both.

Therefore, instead of the hard, bitter words that she intended to speak, she said, with a little quaver in her voice. "Mr. Hemstead, I almost believe that you feel as bad as I do."

When he looked up she was sure he felt worse. But he seemed to try to forget his own trouble as he said kindly, "I'm sorry you feel bad."

"Well," said Lottie, sitting down on the opposite side of the hearth, while the fire, on which Hemstead had thrown some damp green wood, smoked dismally between them, "I do think you are a little sorry."

"Can I help you in any way? I wish you knew how gladly I would do so."

"Yes, I believe that, too. You don't look a bit as if you would like to throw me into a fiery furnace, and see if I would come out a lump of gold or a good-for-nothing cinder."

His only reply was a look of perplexed inquiry, but his gray eyes were so kind, and yet withal so full of dejection, that she again thought, "He is dreadfully inconsistent with his doctrines"; and she said, with a trace of archness in her tone, "I think you look as if you needed a little help and comfort yourself."

He turned away his face, but after a moment said, "You never spoke truer words, Miss Marsden."

Then Lottie, who before had felt in such need of cheer herself, forgot this need in her wish to help the great desponding man before her, whose mingled weakness and strength surprised her more and more. In a tone that would have softened flint she said, "I wish I were good enough to help you."

Then he perplexed her by saying, with sudden energy, "And I wish you were bad enough."

"What do you mean by that?"

"Pardon me," he said hastily. "My words were figurative, and exaggerated by deep feeling. I meant that I wished you, or some one, could be human and charitable enough to understand me, and help me to triumph over my weakness without condemning too severely."

"Well," said Lottie, with a little sigh of satisfaction, "I think I'm bad enough. I'm very human, anyway, and I think I'm in a mood to be charitable to-day; for, if my conscience tells me the truth, I'm awfully in need of charity myself."

He looked up quickly and hopefully as he said, "Then my sermon did you some good after all."

"Not a bit of it. I can have plenty of charity for you, but hot a particle for your sermon,--no more than I would for a thumb-screw of the Inquisition."

This unmeasured condemnation of the pet child of his brain,--a part of himself as it were,--of which he had been so proud, cut to the quick, and he flushed deeply and almost resentfully at first. But he made no reply, and sat lowering at the smoky hearth while he sank into a lower depth of despondency. Preaching was his chosen life-work, and yet this was the verdict against his first great sermon.

Lottie looked hopelessly at him, not knowing what to say or do next, and regretting that she had spoken so hastily and harshly.

At last he sighed: "I don't understand it. I had spent months over that sermon. I fear I have mistaken my calling."

"Well," said Lottie, rather brusquely, "I wouldn't feel so forlorn and miserable over that. I don't think it's much of a calling anyway."

"O Miss Marsden!" he ejaculated, in a shocked tone.

"I'm sincere in what I say," she continued earnestly, "Please don't misunderstand me. As far as I am a judge I think your sermon was well written, and it certainly was delivered effectively; for, though none of us liked it, we couldn't help listening. But its strongest effect was to make me wish I was an infidel and, like Mr. Harcourt, did not believe in anything. I honestly think that it will be a very poor calling to go out among the poor people on the frontier and preach such a gospel as you gave us this morning. In the name of pity, haven't they enough to contend with now? In addition to the scalping Indians, the border ruffians, the grasshoppers, and grinding poverty, are you going to give them a religion in which the furnace of affliction and the crucible of trial flame as the centre? Poor creatures! I suppose they are in hard and hot places most of the time, but don't make them think that God puts them there, and that there is no chance to get out till He is through with them. I can tell you beforehand, that people are not going to get into the fiery furnace and commence having a miserable time of it before they must. Let us be as comfortable as we can, while we can. If you feel that you have mistaken your calling--and I hope you have--I'm sure that father, at my request, will find you a better one in New York."

Poor Hemstead was as satisfied as Luther had been that this was a temptation of the devil; but before him was no such apparition as that against which the great reformer could hurl his ink-horn without leaving a spot.

With the lurid flash of Lucifer as he fell from heaven, the thought passed through his disquieted mind, "And in New York I might win the hand and heart of this beautiful girl." But every quality of his soul frowned so darkly on this thought, which held out Lottie Marsden as a bribe, that it soon skulked away. His mind reverted to the main difficulty, and he said, "Surely, Miss Marsden, I did not preach such a religion as you suggest."

"You surely did, Mr. Hemstead, as I could soon prove to you. I am glad you are so inconsistent a professor of your religion."

"Am I an inconsistent professor?" he asked sadly.

"Indeed you are," she replied; and both mischief and kindness lurked in her eyes. "You don't live up to your doctrines at all."

"Little wonder, then," he exclaimed, in bitter self-condemnation, "that all turn from my teaching."

She looked at him with a curious smile, as she thought, "What a child he is! He is but wax in my hands. If he should marry a cold-hearted, selfish woman, with a spice of petty, teasing malice in her nature, she could sit down quietly at his hearth and torture to death this overgrown man, with whole libraries in his brain. I could wring his soul now, by making him think that he had lived so unworthily that we could not listen to his most unworthy sermon."

She led him out of his strong self-condemnation into equal perplexity, by saying, "Unlike most of the world, you are so much better than your creed as to be utterly inconsistent."

He came and sat down near her, with such an appealing, helpless look that she laughed outright.

"Please don't laugh at me," he said, with the glimmer of a smile, "because this to me is a more serious matter than you or any one can understand."

"I don't laugh unfeelingly, I assure you," she said earnestly. "I never was more sincere in my life than I was this afternoon, but I am one of those ridiculous mortals who cannot take things coolly, and, as I said at dinner, there are times when I must either laugh or cry. I never passed a more miserable day in my life than yesterday. You, terrible magician, whom I have scarcely known for a week, have awakened in my heart a giant; and yesterday and to-day he has been shaking my soul with his mutterings and threatenings. I could always manage my conscience before, and snub it into quietness when it became unruly. But, as I said, from a whining child it has suddenly grown into a threatening giant, more harsh even than you the other evening. I went to church this morning, hoping to find some comfort, some remedy; but, bad as is the disease, the remedy seems far worse. I came downstairs this afternoon in no amiable mood with you or your theology, but was disarmed by seeing you in as bad a plight as myself. I fear your medicine will kill both doctor and patient. During the past week you have been a strong, genial man, with a human, genuine enjoyment of our every-day life. If you were a little blue and puritanical, it was in a common-sense way that I could understand, and your criticism of myself I think in the main was just. Anyway, you made me wish I was a better girl, and I was thinking how to begin; then came this awful Sunday, and your awful sermon, which made me both fear and hate God, and want to keep away from Him as far and as long as I can."

"Your words perplex and sadden me beyond measure," said Hemstead. "You belong to the very class that I had hoped to benefit,--those who admit that they are without faith, but who are not so averse to the truth but that they may be won by it. And yet you say that the whole force of my sermon is to make you wish that you could be an infidel. I cannot understand it. If I have mistaken my calling I could not make you or any one comprehend the depth of my sorrow, or the bitterness of my disappointment In the calling of the ministry it has ever seemed to me that I could work a century with enthusiasm. But in any other work I should be but a drudge, for my heart would not be in it You know how young men often feel about these things. One has a natural bent for the law, another for medicine, and another for business or science. I had fondly hoped that I was a predestined minister, and this hope has strengthened with years and become inwrought with every fibre of my soul. I was willing to commence in a very humble way, and anywhere that God would set me to work; but if the effect of my preaching is to drive people away from Him, the sooner I give it all up the better."

"How different our tastes and plans for life are!" said Lottie, musingly. "It appears strange that you should have set your heart so strongly on what is so dismal to me. And yet such is the evident depth of your regret that I do feel for you very much."

Hemstead rose and took a few abrupt turns up and down the room. Lottie watched him with increasing interest. He had shown her his weakness, and she perceived that he would also show his strength. After a moment he leaned on the mantel before her, and said in quiet, decisive tones:

"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. God 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 analysis 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 God, 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 illustrating 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 God calm and unchangeable as fate, as unrelenting and unimpassioned. 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 illustrated 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 God 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 God? Then you presented God 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 God 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 God 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 snatch away everything that we loved most. Therefore, even the mother must keep chilling her natural love for her child, or else God 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 God 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 passed 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 God 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 pronunciation, 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 God, 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, passionless, inflexible God 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 God 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, unimpassioned, inflexible Being this morning,--a God of purposes and decrees and remorseless will; and I have felt before that this was the God of theology and religious philosophy, rather than the God 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 God 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 nobler-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 God 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.

But he felt that the glad tumult in his mind rendered him unfit to be her guide just then, and therefore said: "Miss Marsden, I want to think calmly and carefully over what you have said. I want to take this briefest of all texts, 'Jesus wept,' as a lamp in my hand, and with it explore the rest of the Bible. Already it seems that it may be like carrying a light into a treasure vault, and that where before was darkness, gems and riches now will glitter."

"And I, who have had the good fortune to strike the light for you, am in the mean time to sit outside of the 'treasure vault,' and perhaps neither see nor get any of the 'gems.' I don't agree at all to your gloating alone over what may be discovered."

"And can you think I would wish to 'gloat alone'?" said Hemstead, reddening. "It will be my chief joy to bring back all I find to you."

"I'm not that kind of a girl," said Lottie, with a little emphatic gesture. "If I wanted something from the top of a mountain, I would not send a man for it, but would go with him after it. This helpless waiting, or languid looking on, while men do everything for us, is as absurd in one direction as the Indian custom of making the squaw do all the hard work in another. I don't see why we can't take this genial little lamp of a text, and do some exploring together. I will hold the lamp, and you do the looking. Here is the Bible, and there is your seat beside this dismal, smoking fire. I fear you have treated it as you did us this morning,--put on green wood."

"I think you are right in both cases," he said, his telltale color again suddenly rising.

"No matter, it was good wood in both cases, as you will see when it becomes ripe and dry."

"It will never do for me to become dry as a preacher, Miss Marsden."

"Yes, it will in my sense, for then you will kindle more easily, and therefore kindle others. But come, I am holding the lamp, 'Jesus wept.' Every thing you can find in the Bible that will confirm the hope of God's sympathy--that He cares for us as we are, with all our faults and weaknesses--will be most welcome."

Lottie was so positive and determined, and her manner so irresistible, that Hemstead had no thought, save that of compliance. She had that piquant imperiousness to which men are willing slaves when it is manifested graciously, and by a pretty woman. He was like a ship caught in a gale, and there was nothing to do but scud before it. At the same time, it seemed that she was driving him swiftly towards the haven and rest of a better and broader faith.

Therefore he sat down by the dismal, smoky hearth, but turned expectantly to her face, which, in contrast, was all aflame with hope and interest.

"The impression grows upon me," he said, "that you are being guided, and therefore you shall guide me."

"I want to settle the question," she replied, "whether I can love and trust God; or whether, as I feared this morning, I must dread and almost hate Him. It seems to me that the only thing religion does for Cousin Bel is to make her uncomfortable. If what you told us, and what she experiences, is true religion, then I shall ignore it and forget all about it as long as I can,--till God commences with me, and puts me by way of trial into the fiery furnace of affliction. I fear only a cinder would be the result. But if the natural explanation of these two words, 'Jesus wept,' is true, then God is kinder, gentler, and more sympathetic than any human friend. Prove to me that the One who, out of pure tender-heartedness, cried just because others around Him were crying, though even about to remove the cause of their sorrow, is the God of the Bible, and I will thank you, with lasting and unmeasured gratitude. Then your teaching will be a gospel,--good news in very truth. You say the Old and New Testaments both make one Bible, do you not?"

"Yes."

"Well it is the Old Testament that I most dread. It is so full of wars and bloodshed, and strange, stern rites. And then the old prophets say such awful things! Still, I admit that it's all very vague and dim in my mind. Can you find anything in the Old Testament that corresponds with the words 'Jesus wept'?"

The student rapidly turned the leaves of the large Bible upon his lap, and read:

"Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear Him.

"For He knoweth our frame: He remembereth that we are dust."

"That fits like light to the eye," exclaimed Lottie, with exultation. "What becomes of your sermon, Mr. Hemstead, in view of such texts? Truth is not contradictory."

"You shall see in a moment, Miss Marsden what becomes of my sermon," and he hastily left the room.

While Lottie was wondering at his action, he returned and threw the manuscript on the hearth. But while the green wood had been smoking so dismally, it had also dried and kindled; and Hemstead's heavy sermon, so far from quenching the rising flame, seemed just the encouragement needed to develop a cheerful blaze, in the midst of which it perished, like a narrow, sour, but sincere, well-meaning old martyr of former days.

In committing this unripe fruit of his brain--his heart had dictated but little of it--to the flames, Hemstead would have felt, a few hours earlier, as a Hindu mother might when casting her child to the crocodiles of the Ganges. Now with exultation he saw it shrivel, as its teachings had shrivelled within his own mind a little before.

"Like as a father pitieth his children," was a better gospel than "like as a sculptor chisels his marble," or "like as a surgeon cuts remorselessly with pulse unquickened, though the patient writhes."

Preacher and pagan stood together by the hearth, and saw perish the Gospel of Fear--of gloomy asceticism--which for so many centuries, in dim, damp cloisters and stony cells has chilled the heart and quenched the spirit.

And yet, to-day, in the broad light of Bible lands, and in the midst of the wholesome and suggestive duties of family life, do not many, under false teachings like that of Hemstead's sermon, find spiritual paths as dark and painful as those of ascetics who made self-mortification the business of life? Christ spake truly when He said, "Men love darkness rather than light." We fill the service of the Author of Light with gloom. The hermit thought he could best serve God in the chill and dimness of a cave; and the anchorite's cave has been the type of our shadowy, vault-like churches, and of the worshippers' experience ever since.

God is too wise and good to teach a religion utterly repugnant and contradictory to the nature He has given us. A child's hand may lead a multitude; a giant's strength can drive but few.

Christ's tears had fallen on the ice in Lottie's heart, and melted it away. It was now tender, receptive, ready for the seeds of truth. Hemstead's sermon had only hardened it.

Like the Hebrew mothers with their little children, she had pushed her way through frowning doctrines and stately attributes that appeared to encompass God, as did the rebuking disciples of old their gentle Master; and there seemed One before her who, like Jesus, was ready to take her in His arms and lavish upon her tenderness without limit.

The glow of the burning sermon lighted up the faces of the Preacher and one who could no longer be called a Pagan, for she stood before the altar of "the unknown God," and was strongly inclined to place her heart upon it. She believed, though as yet she did not trust. She understood but little of Bible truth, yet it was no longer a repellent darkness, but rather a luminous haze against which Jesus stood distinctly, tearful from sympathy.

As the obnoxious sermon sank into ashes, Hemstead turned and took Lottie's hand with a pressure that made it ache for hours after, and said: "Now you have seen what has become of my sermon and many of my old beliefs. The furnace of God's discipline shall no longer, as you have said, flame as the lurid centre of my Gospel; but Jesus Christ, as you have discovered Him, the embodiment of love and sympathy, shall be its centre."

With a smile upon her lips, but with tears in her eyes, Lottie replied, "And such a gospel would win even the border ruffians. Yes," she added hesitatingly, "I half believe it might win even such a little pagan as Lottie Marsden."

Just then a broad ray of light glinted into the room, and illuminated Lottie's face into such marvellous beauty that Hemstead was spell-bound. He was too intent on watching her to be aware that the ray rested on him also; but she exclaimed: "O Mr. Hemstead! you don't know how your face is lighted up by the setting sun. If I believed in omens, I should know that your successful work will be out on the frontier,--in the West, whence comes, after this dreary day, such a beautiful light, which suggests, I hope, the fame and glory you are to win there."

"This light from the West falls equally upon you," he said impulsively.

There was a sudden crimson in her face, deeper than that caused by the setting sun.

She gave him a quick, shy glance, to gather his meaning, but said, "Omens are only half-truths, I have heard."

Under a vague but strong impulse he had spoken foolishly, he thought; and suggested that, in seeking to change her character, his motive in part might be a presumptuous hope of his own. Therefore a deeper flush crimsoned his face; but he said quietly: "I believe that, in our day, omens are will-of-the-wisps of the imagination. What need is there of such fitful lights, when the sun of God's truth is shining in this Bible? Shall we explore farther?"

Again they sat down and sought to reconcile the apparently conflicting truths of God's mercy and justice,--of His severity and unutterable tenderness. Proofs of both were found upon the page of inspiration "as thick as leaves in Vallombrosa." It was clearly evident that God would make no terms with sin, whatever He might do for the sinner. But the Divine man, as He stands between justice and the erring, appeared to solve the problem. And if God's discipline was at times severe, and Christ was glad when faith-inspiring sorrow came, it was also seen that He could weep with the weak human children who cried under the rod, though heaven might result from the transient pain. _

Read next: Chapter 20. The Dawning Light

Read previous: Chapter 18. Hemstead's Heavy Gun And Its Recoil

Table of content of From Jest to Earnest


GO TO TOP OF SCREEN

Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book