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19615	----	Transcribed from the Alexander Hislop & Company edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org THE DAIRYMAN'S DAUGHTER. BY LEGH RICHMOND. AUTHOR OF "THE ANNALS OF THE POOR," ETC. EDINBURGH: ALEXANDER HISLOP & COMPANY. EDINBURGH: PRINTED BY SCHENCK AND M'FARLANE, ST JAMES SQUARE. CHAPTER I. It is a delightful employment to discover and trace the operations of Divine grace, as they are manifested in the dispositions and lives of God's real children. It is peculiarly gratifying to observe how frequently, among the poorer classes of mankind, the sunshine of mercy beams upon the heart, and bears witness to the image of Christ which the Spirit of God has impressed thereupon. Among such, the sincerity and simplicity of the Christian character appear unencumbered by those obstacles to spirituality of mind and conversation, which too often prove a great hindrance to those who live in the higher ranks. Many are the difficulties which riches, worldly consequence, high connexions, and the luxuriant refinements of polished society, throw in the way of religious profession. Happy indeed it is (and some such happy instances I know), where grace has so strikingly supported its conflict with natural pride, self-importance, the allurements of luxury, ease, and worldly opinion, that the noble and mighty appear adorned with genuine poverty of spirit, self-denial, humble-mindedness, and deep spirituality of heart. But in general, if we want to see religion in its most simple and pure character, we must look for it among the poor of this world, who are rich in faith. How often is the poor man's cottage the palace of God! Many can truly declare, that they have there learned the most valuable lessons of faith and hope, and there witnessed the most striking demonstrations of the wisdom, power, and goodness of God. The character which the present narrative is designed to introduce to the notice of my readers, is given _from real life and circumstance_. I first became acquainted with her by receiving the following letter, which I transcribe from the original now before me:-- "Rev. Sir, "I take the liberty to write to you. Pray excuse me, for I have never spoken to you. But I once heard you when you preached at --- Church. I believe you are a faithful preacher, to warn sinners to flee from the wrath that will be revealed against all those that live in sin, and die impenitent. Pray go on in the strength of the Lord. And may He bless you, and crown your labour of love with success, and give you souls for your hire. "The Lord has promised to be with those whom He calls and sends forth to preach his Word to the end of time: for without Him we can do nothing. I was much rejoiced to hear of those marks of love and affection to that poor soldier of the S. D. Militia. Surely the love of Christ sent you to that poor man! May that love ever dwell richly in you by faith! May it constrain you to seek the wandering souls of men with the fervent desire to spend and be spent for his glory! May the unction of the Holy Spirit attend the word spoken by you with power, and convey deep conviction to the hearts of your hearers! May many of them experience the Divine change of being made new creatures in Christ! "Sir, be fervent in prayer with God for the conviction and conversion of sinners. His power is great, and who can withstand it? He has promised to answer the prayer of faith, that is put up in his Son's name: 'Ask what ye will, it shall be granted you.' How this should strengthen our faith, when we are taught by the Word and the Spirit how to pray! O that sweet inspiring hope! how it lifts up the fainting spirits, when we look over the precious promises of God! What a mercy if we know Christ, and the power of his resurrection in our own hearts! Through faith in Christ we rejoice in hope, and look in expectation of that time drawing near, when all shall know and fear the Lord, and when a nation shall be born in a day. "What a happy time when Christ's kingdom shall come! then shall 'his will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.' Men shall be daily fed with the manna of his love, and delight themselves in the Lord all the day long. Then, what a paradise below they will enjoy! How it animates and enlivens my soul with vigour to pursue the ways of God, that I may even now bear some humble part in giving glory to God and the Lamb! "Sir, I began to write this on Sunday, being detained from attending on public worship. My dear and only sister, living as a servant with Mrs ---, was so ill that I came here to attend in her place and on her. But now she is no more. "I was going to intreat you to write to her in answer to this, she being convinced of the evil of her past life, and that she had not walked in the ways of God, nor sought to please Him. But she earnestly desired to do so. This makes me have a comfortable hope that she is gone to glory, and that she is now joining in sweet concert with the angelic host in heaven to sing the wonders of redeeming love. I hope I may now write, 'Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord.' "She expressed a desire to receive the Lord's Supper, and commemorate his precious death and sufferings. I told her, as well as I was able, what it was to receive Christ into her heart; but as her weakness of body increased, she did not mention it again. She seemed quite resigned before she died. I do hope she is gone from a world of death and sin, to be with God for ever. "Sir, I hope you will not be offended with me, a poor ignorant person, to take such a liberty as to write to you. But I trust, as you are called to instruct sinners in the ways of God, you will bear with me, and be so kind to answer this wrote letter, and give me some instructions. It is my heart's desire to have the mind that was in Christ, that when I awake up in his likeness, then I may be satisfied. "My sister expressed a wish that you might bury her. The minister of our parish, whither she will be carried, cannot come. She will lie at ---. She died on Tuesday morning, and will be buried on Friday, or Saturday (whichever is most convenient to you), at three o'clock in the afternoon. Please to send an answer by the bearer, to let me know whether you can comply with this request, "From your unworthy servant, "ELIZABETH W---." I was much struck with the simple and earnest strain of devotion which this letter breathed. It was but indifferently written and spelt; but this rather tended to endear the hitherto unknown writer, as it seemed characteristic of the union of humbleness of station with eminence of piety. I felt quite thankful that I was favoured with a correspondent of this description; the more so, as such characters were at this time very rare in the neighbourhood. I have often wished that epistolary intercourse of this kind was more encouraged and practised among us. I have the greatest reason to speak well of its effect, both on myself and others. Communication by letter as well as by conversation with the pious poor, has often been the instrument of animating and reviving my own heart in the midst of duty, and of giving me the most profitable information for the general conduct of the ministerial office. As soon as the letter was read, I inquired who was the bearer of it. "He is waiting at the outside of the gate, sir," was the reply. I went out to speak to him, and saw a venerable old man, whose long hoary hair and deeply-wrinkled countenance commanded more than common respect. He was resting his arm upon the gate, and tears were streaming down his cheeks. On my approach he made a low bow, and said: "Sir, I have brought you a letter from my daughter; but I fear you will think us very bold in asking you to take so much trouble." "By no means," I replied; "I shall be truly glad to oblige you and any of your family in this matter, provided it be quite agreeable to the minister of your parish." "Sir, he told me yesterday that he should be very glad if I could procure some gentleman to come and bury my poor child for him, as he lives five miles off, and has particular business on that day. So, when I told my daughter, she asked me to come to you, sir, and bring that letter, which would explain the matter." I desired him to come into the house, and then said: "What is your occupation?" "Sir, I have lived most of my days in a little cottage at ---, six miles from here. I have rented a few acres of ground, and kept some cows, which, in addition to my day-labour, has been the means of supporting and bringing up my family." "What family have you?" "A wife, now getting very aged and helpless, two sons and one daughter; for my other poor dear child is just departed out of this wicked world." "I hope for a better." "I hope so, too, poor thing. She did not use to take to such good ways as her sister; but I do believe that her sister's manner of talking with her before she died, was the means of saving her soul. What a mercy it is to have such a child as mine is! I never thought about my own soul seriously till she, poor girl, begged and prayed me to flee from the wrath to come." "How old are you?" "Near seventy, and my wife is older; we are getting old, and almost past our labour, but our daughter has left a good place, where she lived in service, on purpose to come home and take care of us and our little dairy. And a dear, dutiful, affectionate girl she is." "Was she always so?" "No, sir: when she was very young, she was all for the world, and pleasure, and dress, and company. Indeed, we were all very ignorant, and thought if we took care for this life, and wronged nobody, we should be sure to go to heaven at last. My daughters were both wilful, and, like ourselves, strangers to the ways of God and the Word of his grace. But the eldest of them went out to service, and some years ago she heard a sermon at --- Church, by a gentleman that was going to ---, as chaplain to the colony; and from that time she seemed quite another creature. She began to read the Bible, and became sober and steady. The first time she returned home afterwards to see us, she brought us a guinea which she had saved from her wages, and said, as we were getting old, she was sure we should want help; adding, that she did not wish to spend it in fine clothes, as she used to do, only to feed pride and vanity. She said she would rather show gratitude to her dear father and mother, because Christ had shown such mercy to her. "We wondered to hear her talk, and took great delight in her company; for her temper and behaviour were so humble and kind, she seemed so desirous to do us good both in soul and body, and was so different from what we had ever seen before, that, careless and ignorant as we had been, we began to think there must be something real in religion, or it never could alter a person so much in a little time. "Her youngest sister, poor soul! used to laugh and ridicule her at that time, and said her head was turned with her new ways. 'No, sister,' she would say; 'not my _head_, but I hope my _heart_ is turned from the love of sin to the love of God. I wish you may one day see, as I do, the danger and vanity of your present condition.' "Her poor sister would reply, 'I do not want to hear any of your preaching; I am no worse than other people, and that is enough for me.' "'Well, sister,' Elizabeth would say, 'if you will not hear me, you cannot hinder me from praying for you, which I do with all my heart.' "And now, sir, I believe those prayers are answered. For when her sister was taken ill, Elizabeth went to Mrs ---'s to wait in her place, and take care of her. She said a great deal to her about her soul, and the poor girl began to be so deeply affected, and sensible of her past sin, and so thankful for her sister's kind behaviour, that it gave her great hopes indeed for her sake. When my wife and I went to see her, as she lay sick, she told us how grieved and ashamed she was of her past life, but said she had a hope through grace that her sister's Saviour would be her Saviour too; for she saw her own sinfulness, felt her own helplessness, and only wished to cast herself upon Christ as her hope and salvation. "And now, sir, she is gone; and I hope and think her sister's prayers for her conversion to God have been answered. The Lord grant the same for her poor father and mother's sake likewise!" This conversation was a very pleasing commentary upon the letter which I had received, and made me anxious both to comply with the request, and to become acquainted with the writer. I promised the good Dairyman to attend on the Friday at the appointed hour; and after some more conversation respecting his own state of mind under the present trial, he went away. He was a reverend old man; his furrowed cheeks, white locks, weeping eyes, bent shoulders, and feeble gait, were characteristic of the aged pilgrim. As he slowly walked onwards, supported by a stick which seemed to have been the companion of many a long year, a train of reflections occurred, which I retrace with pleasure and emotion. At the appointed hour I arrived at the church, and after a little while was summoned to the churchyard gate to meet the funeral procession. The aged parents, the elder brother, and the sister, with other relatives, formed an affecting group. I was struck with the humble, pious, and pleasing countenance of the young woman from whom I had received the letter. It bore the marks of great seriousness without affectation, and of much serenity mingled with a glow of devotion. A circumstance occurred during the reading of the burial service, which I think it right to mention, as one among many testimonies of the solemn and impressive tendency of our truly evangelical Liturgy. A man of the village, who had hitherto been of a very careless and even profligate character, went into the church through mere curiosity, and with no better purpose than that of vacantly gazing at the ceremony. He came likewise to the grave, and, during the reading of those prayers which are appointed for that part of the service, his mind received a deep, serious conviction of his sin and spiritual danger. It was an impression that never wore off, but gradually ripened into the most satisfactory evidence of an entire change, of which I had many and long- continued proofs. He always referred to the burial service, and to some particular sentences of it, as the clearly ascertained instrument of bringing him, through grace, to the knowledge of the truth. The day was therefore one to be remembered. Remembered let it be by those who love to hear "The short and simple annals of the poor." Was there not a manifest and happy connection between the circumstances that providentially brought the serious and the careless to the same grave on that day together? How much do they lose who neglect to trace the leadings of God in providence, as links in the chain of his eternal purpose of redemption and grace! "While infidels may scoff, let us adore." After the service was concluded, I had a short conversation with the good old couple and their daughter. She had told me that she intended to remain a week or two at the gentleman's house where her sister died, till another servant should arrive and take her sister's place. "I shall be truly obliged," said she, "by an opportunity of conversing with you, either there or at my father's, when I return home, which will be in the course of a fortnight at the farthest. I shall be glad to talk to you about my sister, whom you have just buried." Her aspect and address were highly interesting. I promised to see her very soon; and then returned home, quietly reflecting on the circumstances of the funeral at which I had been engaged. I blessed the God of the poor; and prayed that the poor might become rich in faith, and the rich be made poor in spirit. CHAPTER II. A sweet solemnity often possesses the mind, whilst retracing past intercourse with departed friends. How much is this increased, when they were such as lived and died in the Lord! The remembrance of former scenes and conversations with those who, we believe, are now enjoying the uninterrupted happiness of a better world, fills the heart with pleasing sadness, and animates the soul with the hopeful anticipation of a day when the glory of the Lord shall be revealed in the assembling of all his children together, never more to be separated. Whether they were rich or poor while on earth, is a matter of trifling consequence; the valuable part of their character is, that they are kings and priests unto God, and this is their true nobility. In the number of now departed believers, with whom I once loved to converse on the grace and glory of the kingdom of God, was the Dairyman's daughter. About a week after the funeral I went to visit the family at ---, in whose service the youngest sister had lived and died, and where Elizabeth was requested to remain for a short time in her stead. The house was a large and venerable mansion. It stood in a beautiful valley at the foot of a high hill. It was embowered in fine woods, which were interspersed in every direction with rising, falling, and swelling grounds. The manor-house had evidently descended through a long line of ancestry, from a distant period of time. The Gothic character of its original architecture was still preserved in the latticed windows, adorned with carved divisions and pillars of stone-work. Several pointed terminations also, in the construction of the roof, according to the custom of our forefathers, fully corresponded with the general features of the building. One end of the house was entirely clothed with the thick foliage of an immense ivy, which climbed beyond customary limits, and embraced a lofty chimney up to its very summit. Such a tree seemed congenial to the walls that supported it, and conspired with the antique fashion of the place to carry imagination back to the days of our ancestors. As I approached, I was led to reflect on the lapse of ages, and the successive generations of men, each in their turn occupying lands, houses, and domains; each in their turn also disappearing, and leaving their inheritance to be enjoyed by others. David once observed the same, and cried out, "Behold, thou hast made my days as an hand-breadth, and mine age is as nothing before thee: verily every man at his best state is altogether vanity. Surely every man walketh in a vain show; surely they are disquieted in vain: he heapeth up riches, and knoweth not who shall gather them" (Psal. xxxix. 5, 6). Happy would it be for the rich, if they more frequently meditated on the uncertainty of all their possessions, and the frail nature of every earthly tenure. "Their inward thought is, that their houses shall continue for ever, and their dwelling-places to all generations: they call their lands after their own names. Nevertheless, man being in honour abideth not: he is like the beasts that perish. This their way is their folly; yet their posterity approve their sayings. Like sheep they are laid in the grave; death shall feed on them; and their beauty shall consume in the grave from their dwelling" (Psal. xlix. 11-14). As I advanced to the mansion, a pleasing kind of gloom overspread the front: it was occasioned by the shade of trees, and gave a characteristic effect to the ancient fabric. I instantly recollected that death had very recently visited the house, and that one of its present inhabitants was an affectionate mourner for a departed sister. There is a solemnity in the thought of a recent death which will associate itself with the very walls, from whence we are conscious that a soul has just taken its flight to eternity. After passing some time in conversation with the superiors of the family, in the course of which I was much gratified by hearing of the unremitted attention which the elder sister had paid to the younger during the illness of the latter. I received likewise other testimonies of the excellency of her general character and conduct in the house. I then took leave, requesting permission to see her, agreeably to the promise I had made at the funeral, not many days before. I was shown into a parlour, where I found her alone. She was in deep mourning. She had a calmness and serenity in her countenance, which exceedingly struck me, and impressed some idea of those attainments which a further acquaintance with her afterwards so much increased. She spoke of her sister. I had the satisfaction of finding that she had given very hopeful proofs of a change of heart before she died. The prayers and earnest exhortations of Elizabeth had been blessed to a happy effect. She described what had passed with such a mixture of sisterly affection and pious dependence on the mercy of God to sinners, as convinced me that her own heart was under the influence of "pure and undefiled religion." She requested leave occasionally to correspond with me on serious subjects, stating that she needed much instruction. She hoped I would pardon the liberty which she had taken by introducing herself to my notice. She expressed a trust that the Lord would overrule both the death of her sister and the personal acquaintance with me that resulted from it, to a present and future good, as it respected herself and also her parents, with whom she statedly lived, and to whom she expected to return in a few days. Finding that she was wanted in some household duty, I did not remain long with her, but left her with an assurance that I proposed to visit her parents very shortly. "Sir," said she, "I take it very kind that you have condescended to leave the company of the rich and converse with the poor. I wish I could have said more to you respecting my own state of mind. Perhaps I shall be better able another time. When you next visit me, instead of finding me in these noble walls, you will see me in a poor cottage. But I am happiest when there. Once more, sir, I thank you for your past kindness to me and mine, and may God in many ways bless you for it." I quitted the house with no small degree of satisfaction, in consequence of the new acquaintance which I had formed. I discovered traces of a cultivated as well as a spiritual mind. I felt that religious intercourse with those of low estate may be rendered eminently useful to others, whose outward station and advantages are far above their own. How often does it appear that "God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; and base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are: that no flesh should glory in his presence" (1 Cor. i. 27-29). It was not unfrequently my custom, when my mind was filled with any interesting subject for meditation, to seek some spot where the beauties of natural prospect might help to form pleasing and useful associations. I therefore ascended gradually to the very summit of the hill adjoining the mansion where my visit had just been made. Here was placed an elevated sea mark: it was in the form of a triangular pyramid, and built of stone. I sat down on the ground near it, and looked at the surrounding prospect, which was distinguished for beauty and magnificence. It was a lofty station, which commanded a complete circle of interesting objects to engage the spectator's attention. Southward the view was terminated by a long range of hills, at about six miles distance. They met, to the westward, another chain of hills, of which the one whereon I sat formed a link; and the whole together nearly encompassed a rich and fruitful valley, filled with cornfields and pastures. Through this vale winded a small river for many miles: much cattle were feeding on its banks. Here and there lesser eminences arose in the valley, some covered with wood, others with corn or grass, and a few with heath or fern. One of these little hills was distinguished by a parish church at the top, presenting a striking feature in the landscape. Another of these elevations, situated in the centre of the valley, was adorned with a venerable holly tree, which had grown there for ages. Its singular height and wide-spreading dimensions not only render it an object of curiosity to the traveller, but of daily usefulness to the pilot, as a mark visible from the sea, whereby to direct his vessel safe into harbour. Villages, churches, country-seats, farm-houses, and cottages were scattered over every part of the southern valley. In this direction, also, at the foot of the hill where I was stationed, appeared the ancient mansion, which I had just quitted, embellished with its woods, groves, and gardens. South-eastward, I saw the open ocean, bounded only by the horizon. The sun shone, and gilded the waves with a glittering light that sparkled in the most brilliant manner. More to the east, in continuation of that line of hills where I was placed, rose two downs, one beyond the other, both covered with sheep, and the sea just visible over the farthest of them, as a terminating boundary. In this point ships were seen, some sailing, others at anchor. Here the little river, which watered the southern valley, finished its course, and ran through meadows into the sea, in an eastward direction. On the north the sea appeared like a noble river, varying from three to seven miles in breadth, between the banks of the opposite coast and those of the island which I inhabited. Immediately underneath me was a fine woody district of country, diversified by many pleasing objects. Distant towns were visible on the opposite shore. Numbers of ships occupied the sheltered station which this northern channel afforded them. The eye roamed with delight over an expanse of near and remote beauties, which alternately caught the observation, and which harmonised together, and produced a scene of peculiar interest. Westward, the hills followed each other, forming several intermediate and partial valleys, in a kind of undulations, like the waves of the sea, and, bending to the south, completed the boundary of the larger valley before described, to the southward of the hill on which I sat. In many instances the hills were cultivated with corn to their very summits, and seemed to defy the inclemency of weather, which, at these heights, usually renders the ground incapable of bringing forth and ripening the crops of grain. One hill alone, the highest in elevation, and about ten miles to the south-westward, was enveloped in a cloud, which just permitted a dim and hazy sight of a signal-post, a lighthouse, and an ancient chantry, built on its summit. Amidst these numerous specimens of delightful scenery I found a mount for contemplation, and here I indulged it. "How much of the natural beauties of Paradise still remain in the world, although its spiritual character has been so awfully defaced by sin! But when Divine grace renews the heart of the fallen sinner, Paradise is regained, and much of its beauty restored to the soul. As this prospect is compounded of hill and dale, land and sea, woods and plains, all sweetly blended together and relieving each other in the landscape; so do the gracious dispositions wrought in the soul produce a beauty and harmony of scene to which it was before a stranger." I looked towards the village in the plain below, where the Dairyman's younger daughter was buried. I retraced the simple solemnities of the funeral. I connected the principles and conduct of her sister with the present probably happy state of her soul in the world of spirits, and was greatly impressed with a sense of the importance of family influence as a means of grace. "That young woman," I thought, "has been the conductor of not only a sister, but, perhaps, a father and mother also, to the true knowledge of God, and may, by Divine blessing, become so to others. It is a glorious occupation to win souls to Christ, and guide them out of Egyptian bondage through the wilderness into the promised Canaan. Happy are the families who are walking hand in hand together, as pilgrims, towards the heavenly country. May the number of such be daily increasing!" Casting my eye over the numerous dwellings in the vales on the right and left, I could not help thinking, "How many of their inhabitants are ignorant of the ways of God, and strangers to his grace! May this thought stimulate to activity and diligence in the cause of immortal souls! They are precious in God's sight--they ought to be so in ours." Some pointed and affecting observations to that effect recurred to my mind, as having been made by the young person with whom I had been just conversing. Her mind appeared to be much impressed with the duty of speaking and acting for God "while it is day," conscious that "the night cometh, when no man can work." Her laudable anxiety on this head was often testified to me afterwards, both by letter and conversation. What she felt herself, in respect to endeavours to do good, she happily communicated to others with whom she corresponded or conversed. Time would not permit my continuing so long in the enjoyment of these meditations, on this lovely mount of observation, as my heart desired. On my return home I wrote a few lines to the Dairyman's daughter, chiefly dictated by the train of thought which had occupied my mind while I sat on the hill. On the next Sunday evening I received her reply, of which the following is a transcript:-- "Sunday. "Rev. Sir, "I am this day deprived of an opportunity of attending the house of God to worship Him. But, glory be to his name! He is not confined to time nor place. I feel Him present with me where I am, and his presence makes my paradise; for where He is, is heaven. I pray God that a double portion of his grace and Holy Spirit may rest upon you this day; that his blessing may attend all your faithful labours; and that you may find the truth of his Word, assuring us, that wherever we assemble together in his name, there He is in the midst to bless every waiting soul. "How precious are all his promises! We ought never to doubt the truth of his Word; for He will never deceive us if we go on in faith, always expecting to receive what his goodness waits to give. Dear sir, I have felt it very consoling to read your kind letter to-day. I feel thankful to God for ministers in our Church who love and fear his name; there it is where the people in general look for salvation; and there may they ever find it, for Jesus' sake! May his Word, spoken by you, his chosen vessel of grace, be made spirit and life to their dead souls. May it come from you as an instrument in the hands of God, as sharp arrows from a strong archer, and strike a death-blow to all their sins. How I long to see the arrows of conviction fasten on the minds of those that are hearers of the word and not doers! O, sir! be ambitious for the glory of God and the salvation of souls: it will add to the lustre of your crown in glory, as well as to your present joy and peace. We should be willing to spend and be spent in his service, saying, 'Lord, may thy will be done by me on earth, even as it is by thy angels in heaven.' So you may expect to see his face with joy, and say, 'Here am I, Lord, and all the souls thou hast given me.' "It seems wonderful that we should neglect any opportunity of doing good, when there is, if it be done from love to God and his creatures, a present reward of grace, in reflecting that we are using the talents committed to our care, according to the power and ability which we receive from Him. God requires not what He has not promised to give. But when we look back and reflect that there have been opportunities in which we have neglected to take up our cross, and speak and act for God, what a dejection of mind we feel! We are then justly filled with shame. Conscious of being ashamed of Christ, we cannot come with that holy boldness to a throne of grace, nor feel that free access when we make our supplications. "We are commanded to provoke one another to love and good works; and where two are agreed together in the things of God, they may say: "'And if our fellowship below In Jesus be so sweet, What heights of rapture shall we know When round the throne we meet!' "Sir, I hope Mrs --- and you are both of one heart and one mind. Then you will sweetly agree in all things that make for your present and eternal happiness. Christ sent his disciples out, not singly, but two and two, that they might comfort and help each other in those ways and works which their Lord commanded them to pursue. "It has been my lot to have been alone the greatest part of the time that I have known the ways of God. I therefore find it such a treat to my soul when I can meet with any who loves to talk of the goodness and love of God, and all his gracious dealings. What a comfortable reflection, to think of spending a whole eternity in that delightful employment--to tell to listening angels his love, 'immense, unsearchable!' "Dear sir, I thank you for your kindness and condescension in leaving those that are of high rank and birth in the world, to converse with me who am but a servant here below. But when I consider what a high calling, what honour and dignity God has conferred upon me, to be called his child, to be born of his Spirit, made an heir of glory, and joint heir with Christ, how humble and circumspect should I be in all my ways, as a dutiful and loving child to an affectionate and loving Father! When I seriously consider these things, it fills me with love and gratitude to God, and I do not wish for any higher station, nor envy the rich. I rather pity them if they are not good as well as great. My blessed Lord was pleased to appear in the form of a servant, and I long to be like Him. "I did not feel in so happy a frame for conversation that day, nor yet that liberty to explain my thoughts, which I sometimes do. The fault must have been all in myself; for there was nothing in you but what seemed to evidence a Christian spirit, temper, and disposition. I very much wished for an opportunity to converse with you. I feel very thankful to God that you do take up the cross, and despise the shame: if you are found faithful, you will soon sit down with Him in glory. "I have written to the Rev. Mr ---, to thank him for permitting you to perform the burial service at ---, over my dear departed sister, and to tell him of the kind way in which you consented to do it. I should mention that your manner of reading the service on that day had a considerable effect on the hearers. "Pray excuse all faults, and correct my errors. I expect in a few days to return home to my parent's house. We shall rejoice to see you there. "From your humble servant in Christ, "E--- W---." It was impossible to view such a correspondent with indifference. I had just returned from a little cottage assembly, where, on Sunday evenings, I sometimes went to instruct a few poor families in one of the hamlets belonging to my parish. I read the letter, and closed the day with thanksgiving to God for thus enabling those who fear his name to build up each other in faith and love. Of old time, "they that feared the Lord spake often one to another: and the Lord hearkened and heard it; and a book of remembrance was written before Him for them that feared the Lord, and that thought upon his name." That book of remembrance is not yet closed. CHAPTER III. The mind of man is like a moving picture, supplied with objects not only from contemplation on things present, but from the fruitful sources of recollection and anticipation. Memory retraces past events, and restores an ideal reality to scenes which are gone by for ever. They live again in revived imagery, and we seem to hear and see with renewed emotions what we heard and saw at a former period. Successions of such recollected circumstances often form a series of welcome memorials. In religious meditations the memory becomes a sanctified instrument of spiritual improvement. Another part of this animated picture is furnished by the pencil of Hope. She draws encouraging prospects for the soul, by connecting the past and present with the future. Seeing the promises afar off, she is persuaded of their truth, and embraces them as her own. The Spirit of God gives a blessing to both these acts of the mind, and employs them in the service of religion. Every faculty of body and soul, when considered as a part of "the purchased possession" of the Saviour, assumes a new character. How powerfully does the apostle, on this ground, urge a plea for holy activity and watchfulness! "What! know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own? For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God's" (1 Cor. vi. 19, 20). The Christian may derive much profit and enjoyment from the use of the memory, as it concerns those transactions in which he once bore a part. In his endeavours to recall past conversations and intercourse with deceased friends in particular, the powers of remembrance greatly improve by exercise. One revived idea produces another, till the mind is most agreeably and usefully occupied with lively and holy imaginations. "Lull'd in the countless chambers of the brain, Our thoughts are linked by many a hidden chain; Awake but one, and lo, what myriads rise! Each stamps its image as the other flies; Each, as the varied avenues of sense Delight or sorrow to the soul dispense, Brightens or fades: yet all with sacred art Control the latent fibres of the heart." May it please God to bless, both to the reader and the writer, this feeble attempt to recollect some of the communications I once enjoyed in my visits to the Dairyman's dwelling! Very soon after the receipt of the last letter, I rode, for the first time, to see the family at their own house. The principal part of the road lay through retired, narrow lanes, beautifully overarched with groves of nut and other trees, which screened the traveller from the rays of the sun, and afforded many interesting objects for admiration in the flowers, shrubs, and young trees which grew upon the high banks on each side of the road. Many grotesque rocks, with little trickling streams of water occasionally breaking out of them, varied the recluse scenery, and produced a romantic and pleasing effect. Here and there the most distant prospect beyond was observable through gaps and hollow places on the road-side. Lofty hills, with navy signal- posts, obelisks, and lighthouses on their summits, appeared at these intervals; rich cornfields were also visible through some of the open places; and now and then, when the road ascended a hill, the sea, with ships at various distances, was seen. But for the most part shady seclusion, and objects of a more minute and confined nature, gave a character to the journey and invited contemplation. How much do they lose who are strangers to serious meditation on the wonders and beauties of nature! How gloriously the God of creation shines in his works! Not a tree, or leaf, or flower, not a bird or insect, but it proclaims in glowing language, "God made me." As I approached the village where the good old Dairyman dwelt, I observed him in a little field, driving his cows before him towards a yard and hovel which adjoined his cottage. I advanced very near him without his observing me, for his sight was dim. On my calling out to him, he started at the sound of my voice, but with much gladness of heart welcomed me, saying, "Bless your heart, sir, I am very glad you are come; we have looked for you every day this week." The cottage-door opened, and the daughter came out, followed by her aged and infirm mother. The sight of me naturally brought to recollection the grave at which we had before met. Tears of affection mingled with the smile of satisfaction with which I was received by these worthy cottagers. I dismounted, and was conducted through a neat little garden, part of which was shaded by two large overspreading elm trees, to the house. Decency and order were manifest within and without. No excuse was made here, on the score of poverty, for confusion and uncleanliness in the disposal of their little household. Everything wore the aspect of neatness and propriety. On each side of the fire-place stood an old oaken chair, where the venerable parents rested their weary limbs after the day's labour was over. On a shelf in one corner lay two Bibles, with a few religious books and tracts. The little room had two windows; a lovely prospect of hills, woods, and fields appeared through one; the other was more than half obscured by the branches of a vine which was trained across it; between its leaves the sun shone, and cast a cheerful light over the whole place. "This," thought I, "is a fit residence for piety, peace, and contentment. May I learn a fresh lesson for advancement in each, through the blessing of God, on this visit!" "Sir," said the daughter, "we are not worthy that you should come under our roof. We take it very kind that you should travel so far to see us." "My Master," I replied, "came a great deal farther to visit us poor sinners. He left the bosom of his Father, laid aside his glory, and came down to this lower world on a visit of mercy and love; and ought not we, if we profess to follow Him, to bear each other's infirmities, and go about doing good as He did?" The old man now entered, and joined his wife and daughter in giving me a cordial welcome. Our conversation soon turned to the loss they had so lately sustained. The pious and sensible disposition of the daughter was peculiarly manifested, as well in what she said to her parents as in what she more immediately addressed to myself. I had now a further opportunity of remarking the good sense and agreeable manner which accompanied her expressions of devotedness to God and love to Christ, for the great mercies which He had bestowed upon her. During her residence in different gentlemen's families where she had been in service, she had acquired a superior behaviour and address; but sincere piety rendered her very humble and unassuming in manner and conversation. She seemed anxious to improve the opportunity of my visit to the best purpose for her own and her parents' sake; yet there was nothing of unbecoming forwardness, no self-sufficiency or conceitedness in her conduct. She united the firmness and solicitude of the Christian with the modesty of the female and the dutifulness of the daughter. It was impossible to be in her company, and not observe how truly her temper and conversation adorned the principles which she professed. I soon discovered how eager and how successful also she had been in her endeavours to bring her father and mother to the knowledge and experience of the truth. This is a lovely feature in the character of a young Christian. If it have pleased God, in the free dispensation of his mercy, to call the child by his grace, while the parent remains still in ignorance and sin, how great is the duty incumbent on that child to do what is possible to promote the conversion of those to whom so much is owing. Happy is it when the ties of grace sanctify those of nature. The aged couple evidently regarded and spoke of this daughter as their teacher and admonisher in Divine things, while at the same time they received from her every token of filial submission and obedience, testified by continual endeavours to serve and assist them to the utmost of her power in the daily concerns of the household. The religion of this young woman was of a highly spiritual character, and of no ordinary attainment. Her views of the Divine plan of saving the sinner were clear and scriptural. She spoke much of the joys and sorrows which, in the course of her religious progress, she had experienced; but she was fully sensible that there is far more in real religion than mere occasional transition from one frame of mind and spirits to another. She believed that the experimental acquaintance of the heart with God principally consisted in so living upon Christ by faith, as to aim at living like Him by love. She knew that the love of God toward the sinner, and the path of duty prescribed to the sinner, are both of an unchangeable nature. In a believing dependence on the one, and an affectionate walk in the other, she sought and found "the peace of God which passeth all understanding;" "for so He giveth his beloved rest." She had read but few books besides her Bible; but these few were excellent in their kind, and she spoke of their contents as one who knew their value. In addition to a Bible and Prayer-book, "Doddridge's Rise and Progress," "Romaine's Life, Walk, and Triumph of Faith," "Bunyan's Pilgrim," "Allein's Alarm," "Baxter's Saint's Everlasting Rest," a hymn- book, and a few tracts, composed her library. I observed in her countenance a pale and delicate hue, which I afterwards found to be a presage of consumption; and the idea then occurred to me that she would not live very long. Time passed on swiftly with this interesting family; and after having partaken of some plain and wholesome refreshment, and enjoyed a few hours' conversation with them, I found it was necessary for me to return homewards. The disposition and character of the parties may be in some sort ascertained by the expressions at parting. "God send you safe home again," said the aged mother, "and bless the day that brought you to see two poor old creatures, such as we are, in our trouble and affliction. Come again, sir, come again when you can; and though I am a poor ignorant soul, and not fit to talk to such a gentleman as you, yet my dear child shall speak for me; she is the greatest comfort I have left; and I hope the good Lord will spare her to support my trembling limbs and feeble spirits, till I lie down with my other dear departed kindred in the grave." "Trust to the Lord," I answered, "and remember his gracious promise: 'Even to your old age I am He; and even to hoary hairs I will carry you.'" "I thank you, sir," said the daughter, "for your Christian kindness to me and my friends. I believe the blessing of the Lord has attended your visit, and I hope I have experienced it to be so. My dear father and mother will, I am sure, remember it; and I rejoice in the opportunity of seeing so kind a friend under this roof. My Saviour has been abundantly good to me in plucking me 'as a brand from the burning,' and showing me the way of life and peace; and I hope it is my heart's desire to live to his glory. But I long to see these dear friends enjoy the power and comfort of religion likewise." "I think it evident," I replied, "that the promise is fulfilled in their case: 'It shall come to pass, that at evening time it shall be light.'" "I believe it," she said, "and praise God for the blessed hope." "Thank Him too, that you have been the happy instrument of bringing them to the light." "I do, sir; yet, when I think of my own unworthiness and insufficiency, I rejoice with trembling." "Sir," said the good old man, "I am sure the Lord will reward you for this kindness. Pray for us, old as we are, and sinners as we have been, that yet He would have mercy upon us at the eleventh hour. Poor Betsy strives much for our sakes, both in body and soul; she works hard all day to save us trouble, and I fear has not strength to support all she does; and then she talks to us, and reads to us, and prays for us, that we may be saved from the wrath to come. Indeed, sir, she is a rare child to us." "Peace be unto you and all that belong to you!" "Amen, and thank you, dear sir," was echoed from each tongue. Thus we parted for that time. My returning meditations were sweet, and, I hope, profitable. Many other visits were afterwards made by me to this peaceful cottage, and I always found increasing reason to thank God for the intercourse I there enjoyed. An interval of some length occurred once during that year, in which I had not seen the Dairyman's family. I was reminded of the circumstance by the receipt of the following letter: "Rev. Sir, "I have been expecting to see or hear from you for a considerable time. Excuse the liberty I take in sending you another letter. I have been confined to the house the greater part of the time since I left ---. I took cold that day, and have been worse ever since. I walk out a little on these fine days, but seem to myself to walk very near on the borders of eternity. Glory be to God, it is a very pleasing prospect before me. Though I feel the workings of sin, and am abased, yet Jesus shows his mercy to be mine, and I trust that I am his. At such times "My soul would leave this heavy clay At his transporting word, Run up with joy the shining way To meet and prove the Lord. "Fearless of hell and ghastly death, I'd break through every foe; The wings of love and arms of faith Would bear me conqueror through." My desire is to live every moment to God, that I may through his grace be kept in that heavenly, happy frame of mind that I shall wish for at the hour of death. We cannot live nor die happy without this, and to keep it we must be continually watching and praying: for we have many enemies to disturb our peace. I am so very weak, that now I can go nowhere to any outward means for that help which is so refreshing to my spirit. "I should have been very happy to have heard you last Sunday, when you preached at ---: I could not walk so far. I hope the Word spoken by you was made a blessing to many that heard it. It was my earnest prayer to God that it might be so. But, alas! once calling does not awaken many that are in a sound sleep. Yet the voice of God is sometimes very powerful when his ministers speak, when they are influenced by his Holy Spirit, and are simple and sincere in holding forth the Word of Life. Then it will teach us all things, and enlighten our mind, and reveal unto us the hidden things of darkness, and give us out of that Divine treasure 'things new and old.' Resting on God to work in us both to will and to do of his good pleasure, we ought always to work as diligent servants, that know they have a good Master, that will surely not forget their labour of love. "If we could but fix our eyes always on that crown of glory that awaits us in the skies, we should never grow weary in well-doing, but should run with patience, and delight in the work and ways of God, where He appoints us. We should not then, as we too frequently do, suffer these trifling objects here on earth to draw our minds from God, to rob Him of his glory, and our souls of that happiness and comfort which the believer may enjoy amidst outward afflictions. If we thus lived more by faith on the Son of God, we should endeavour to stir up all whom we could to seek after God. We should tell them what He has done for us, and what He would do for them if they truly sought Him. We should show them what a glorious expectation there is for all true believers and sincere seekers. "When our minds are so fixed on God, we are more desirous of glorifying Him, in making known his goodness to us, than the proud rich man is of getting honour to himself. I mourn over my own backwardness to this exercise of duty when I think of God's willingness to save the vilest of the vile, according to the dispensations of his eternal grace and mercy. Oh, how amiable, how lovely does this make that God of love appear to poor sinners, that can view Him as such! How is the soul delighted with such a contemplation! They that have much forgiven, how much they love! "These thoughts have been much on my mind since the death of ---. I trust the Lord will pardon me for neglect. I thought it was my duty to speak or write to him; you remember what I said to you respecting it. But I still delayed till a more convenient season. Oh, how I was struck when I heard the Lord had taken him so suddenly! I was filled with sorrow and shame for having neglected what I had so often resolved to do. But now the time of speaking for God to him was over. Hence we see that the Lord's time is the best time. Now the night of death was come upon him; no more work was to be done. If I had done all that lay in my power to proclaim reconciliation by Christ to his soul, whether he had heard or no, I should have been more clear of his blood. But I cannot recall the time that is past, nor him from the grave. Had I known the Lord would have called him so suddenly, how diligent I should have been to warn him of his danger. But it is enough that God shows us what _we_ are to do, and not what _He_ is about to do with us or any of his creatures. Pray, sir, do all you can for the glory of God. The time will soon pass by, and then we shall enter that glorious rest that He hath prepared for them that love Him. I pray God to fill you with that zeal and love which He only can inspire, that you may daily win souls to Christ. May He deliver you from all slavish fear of man, and give you boldness, as He did of old those that were filled with the Holy Ghost and with power! "Remember, Christ hath promised to be with all his faithful ministers to the end of time. The greater dangers and difficulties they are exposed to, the more powerful his assistance. Then, sir, let us fear none but Him. I hope you will pray much for me a poor sinner, that God will perfect his strength in my weakness of body and mind; for without Him I can do nothing. But when I can experience the teaching of that Holy One, I need no other teacher. May the Lord anoint you with the same, and give you every grace of his Holy Spirit, that you may be filled with all the fulness of God; that you may know what is the height and depth, the length and breadth of the love of God in Christ Jesus; that you may be in the hand of the Lord, as a keen archer to draw the bow, while the Lord directs and fastens the arrows of conviction in the hearts of such as are under your ministry! "I sincerely pray that you may be made a blessing to him that has taken the place of the deceased. I have heard that you are fellow- countrymen. I hope you are, however, both as strangers in this world, that have no abiding place, but seek a country out of sight. Pray excuse all faults, "From your humble servant in the bonds of the Gospel of Christ, "E--- W---." When I perused this and other letters, which were at different times written to me by the Dairyman's daughter, I felt that in the person of this interesting correspondent were singularly united the characters of an humble disciple and a faithful monitor. I wished to acknowledge the goodness of God in each of these her capacities. I sometimes entertain a hope that the last day will unfold the value of these epistolary communications, beyond even any present estimate of their spiritual importance. CHAPTER IV. The translation of sinners "from the power of darkness into the kingdom of God's dear Son," is the joy of Christians and the admiration of angels. Every penitent and pardoned soul is a new witness to the triumphs of the Redeemer over sin, death, and the grave. How great the change that is wrought! The child of wrath becomes a monument of grace--a brand plucked from the burning! "If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new." How marvellous, how interesting is the spiritual history of each individual believer! He is, like David, "a wonder unto many;" but the greatest wonder of all to himself. Others may doubt whether it be so or not; but to him it is unequivocally proved, that, from first to last, grace alone reigns in the work of his salvation. The character and privileges of real Christians are beautifully described in the language of our Church, which, when speaking of the objects of Divine favour and compassion, says: "They that be endued with so excellent a benefit of God, be called according to God's purpose in due season; they through grace obey the calling: they be justified freely: they be made sons of God by adoption: they be made like the image of his only-begotten Son, Jesus Christ: they walk religiously in good works; and at length, by God's mercy, they attain to everlasting felicity." Such a conception and display of the Almighty wisdom, power, and love, is indeed "full of sweet, pleasant, and unspeakable comfort to godly persons, and such as feel in themselves the working of the Spirit of Christ mortifying the works of the flesh, and their earthly members; and drawing up their minds to high and heavenly things: it doth greatly establish and confirm their faith of eternal salvation, to be enjoyed through Christ, and doth fervently kindle their love towards God." Nearly allied to the consolation of a good hope through grace, as it respects our own personal state before God, is that of seeing its evidences shed lustre over the disposition and conduct of others. Bright was the exhibition of the union between true Christian enjoyment and Christian exertion, in the character whose moral and spiritual features I am attempting to delineate. It seemed to be the first wish of her heart to prove to others, what God had already proved to her, that Jesus is "the Way, the Truth, and the Life." She desired to evince the reality of her calling, justification, and adoption into the family of God, by showing a conformity to the image of Christ, and by walking "religiously in good works;" she trusted that, in this path of faith and obedience, she should "at length, by God's mercy, attain to everlasting felicity." I had the spiritual charge of another parish, adjoining to that in which I resided. It was a small district, and had but few inhabitants. The church was pleasantly situated on a rising bank, at the foot of a considerable hill. It was surrounded by trees, and had a rural, retired appearance. Close to the churchyard stood a large old mansion, which had formerly been the residence of an opulent and titled family; but it had long since been appropriated to the use of the estate as a farm-house. Its outward aspect bore considerable remains of ancient grandeur, and gave a pleasing character to the spot of ground on which the church stood. In every direction the roads that led to this house of God possessed distinct but interesting features. One of them ascended between several rural cottages, from the sea-shore, which adjoined the lower part of the village street. Another winded round the curved sides of the adjacent hill, and was adorned both above and below with numerous sheep, feeding on the herbage on the down. A third road led to the church by a gently rising approach, between high banks, covered with young trees, bushes, ivy, hedge-plants, and wild flowers. From a point of land which commanded a view of all these several avenues, I used sometimes for a while to watch my congregation gradually assembling together at the hour of Sabbath worship. They were in some directions visible for a considerable distance. Gratifying associations of thought would form in my mind, as I contemplated their approach, and successive arrival within the precincts of the house of prayer. One day, as I was thus occupied, during a short interval previous to the hour of Divine service, I reflected on the joy which David experienced, at the time he exclaimed: "I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go into the house of the Lord. Our feet shall stand within thy gates, O Jerusalem. Jerusalem is builded as a city that is compact together: whither the tribes go up, the tribes of the Lord, unto the testimony of Israel, to give thanks unto the Lord" (Psa. cxxii. 1-4). I was led to reflect upon the various blessings connected with the establishment of public worship. "How many immortal souls are now gathering together, to perform the all-important work of prayer and praise--to hear the Word of God--to feed upon the Bread of Life! They are leaving their respective dwellings, and will soon be united together in the house of prayer. How beautifully does this represent the effect produced by the voice of 'the Good Shepherd,' calling his sheep from every part of the wilderness into his fold! As these fields, hills, and lanes are now covered with men, women, and children, in various directions, drawing near to each other, and to the object of their journey's end: even so, many 'shall come from the east, and from the west, and from the north, and from the south, and shall sit down in the kingdom of God'" (Luke xiii. 29). Who can rightly appreciate the value of such hours as these?--hours spent in learning the ways of holy pleasantness and the paths of heavenly peace--hours devoted to the service of God and of souls; in warning the sinner to flee from the wrath to come; in teaching the ignorant how to live and die; in preaching the Gospel to the poor; in healing the broken- hearted; in declaring "deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind." "Blessed is the people that know the joyful sound; they shall walk, O Lord, in the light of thy countenance. In thy name shall they rejoice all the day, and in thy righteousness shall they be exalted." My thoughts then pursued a train of reflection on the importance of the ministerial office, as connected in the purposes of God with the salvation of sinners. I inwardly prayed that those many individuals whom He had given me to instruct, might not, through my neglect or error, be as sheep having no shepherd, nor as the blind led by the blind; but rather that I might, in season and out of season, faithfully proclaim the simple and undisguised truths of the Gospel, to the glory of God and the prosperity of his Church. At that instant, near the bottom of the inclosed lane which led to the churchyard, I observed a friend, whom, at such a distance from his own home, I little expected to meet. It was the venerable Dairyman. He came up the ascent, leaning with one hand on his trusty staff, and with the other on the arm of a younger man, well known to me, who appeared to be much gratified in meeting with such a companion by the way. My station was on the top of one of the banks which formed the hollow road beneath. They passed a few yards below me. I was concealed from their sight by a projecting tree. They were talking of the mercies of God, and the unsearchable riches of his grace. The Dairyman was telling his companion what a blessing the Lord had given him in his daughter. His countenance brightened as he named her, and called her his precious Betsy. I met them at a stile not many yards beyond, and accompanied them to the church, which was hard by. "Sir," said the old man, "I have brought a letter from my daughter: I hope I am in time for Divine service. Seven miles is now become a long walk for me: I grow old and weak. I am very glad to see you, sir." "How is your daughter?" "Very poorly, indeed, sir: very poorly. The doctors say it is a decline. I sometimes hope she will get the better of it; but then again I have many fears. You know, sir, that I have cause to love and prize her. Oh, it would be such a trial; but the Lord knows what is best. Excuse my weakness, sir." He put a letter into my hand, the perusal of which I reserved till afterwards, as the time was nigh for going into church. The presence of this aged pilgrim, the peculiar reverence and affection with which he joined in the different parts of the service, excited many gratifying thoughts in my mind; such as rather furthered than interrupted devotion. The train of reflection in which I had engaged, when I first discovered him on the road, at intervals recurred powerfully to my feelings, as I viewed that very congregation assembled together in the house of God, whose steps, in their approach towards it, I had watched with prayerful emotions. "Here the rich and poor meet together in mutual acknowledgment, that the Lord is the Maker of them all; that all are alike dependent creatures, looking up to one common Father to supply their wants both temporal and spiritual. "Again, likewise, will they meet together in the grave, that undistinguished receptacle of the opulent and the needy. "And once more, at the judgment-seat of Christ, shall the rich and the poor meet together, 'that every one may receive the things done in his body, according to that he hath done, whether it be good or bad'" (2 Cor. v. 10). "How closely connected in the history of man are these three periods of a general meeting together! "The house of prayer--the house appointed for all living--and the house not made with hands eternal in the heavens. May we never separate these ideas from each other, but retain them in a sacred and profitable union! So shall our worshipping assemblies on earth be representatives of the general assembly and Church of the firstborn which are written in heaven." When the congregation dispersed, I entered into discourse with the Dairyman and a few of the poor of my flock, whose minds were of like disposition to his own. He seldom could speak long together without some reference to his dear child. He loved to tell how merciful his God had been to him, in the dutiful and affectionate attentions of his daughter. All real Christians feel a tender spiritual attachment towards those who have been the instrument of bringing them to an effectual knowledge of the way of salvation: but when that instrument is one so nearly allied, how dear does the relationship become! If my friend the Dairyman was in any danger of falling into idolatry, his child would have been the idol of his affections. She was the prop and stay of her parents' declining years, and they scarcely knew how sufficiently to testify the gratitude of their hearts, for the comfort and blessing which she was the means of affording them. While he was relating several particulars of his family history to the others, I opened and read the following letter:-- "SIR,--Once more I take the liberty to trouble you with a few lines. I received your letter with great pleasure, and thank you for it. I am now so weak, that I am unable to walk to any public place of Divine worship: a privilege which has heretofore always so much strengthened and refreshed me. I used to go in anxious expectation to meet my God, and hold sweet communion with Him, and I was seldom disappointed. In the means of grace, all the channels of Divine mercy are open to every heart that is lifted up to receive out of that Divine fulness grace for grace. These are the times of refreshing from the presence of the Lord. How have I rejoiced to hear a faithful and lively messenger, just come, as it were, from communion with God at the throne of grace, with his heart warmed and filled with Divine love, to speak to fallen sinners! Such an one has seemed to me as if his face shone as that of Moses did with the glory of God, when he came down from the mount, where he had been within the veil. May you, sir, imitate him, as he did Christ, that all may see and know that the Lord dwelleth with you, and that you dwell in Him through the unity of the blessed Spirit. I trust you are no stranger to his Divine teaching, aid, and assistance, in all you set your hand to do for the glory of God. "I hope, sir, the sincerity of my wishes for your spiritual welfare will plead an excuse for the freedom of my address to you. I pray the Giver of every perfect gift, that you may experience the mighty workings of his gracious Spirit in your heart and your ministry, and rest your all on the justifying and purifying blood of an expiring Redeemer. Then will you triumph in his strength, and be enabled to say with the poet: 'Shall I through fear of feeble men, The Spirit's course strive to restrain? Or, undismay'd in deed and word, Be a true witness for my Lord? 'Awed by a mortal's frown, shall I Conceal the word of God most high! How then before Thee shall I dare To stand? or, how thine anger bear? 'Shall I, to soothe the unholy throng, Soften thy truths and smooth my tongue, To gain earth's gilded toys, or flee The cross endur'd, my God, by Thee! 'What then is he whose scorn I dread, Whose wrath or hate makes me afraid? A man! an heir of death! a slave To sin! a bubble on the wave! 'Yea, let men rage, since Thou wilt spread Thy shadowing wings around my head: Since in all pain, thy tender love Will still my sure refreshment prove. 'Still shall the love of Christ constrain To seek the wand'ring souls of men; With cries, entreaties, tears to save, And snatch them from the yawning grave. 'For this, let men revile my name, No cross I shun, I fear no shame: All hail reproach, and welcome pain, Only thy terrors, Lord, restrain!' "I trust, sir, that you see what a glorious high calling yours is, and that you are one of those who walk humbly with God, that you may be taught of Him in all things. Persons in your place are messengers of the Most High God. Is it too much to say, they should live like the angels in all holiness, and be filled with love and zeal for men's souls? They are ambassadors in Christ's stead to persuade sinners to be reconciled to God. So that your calling is above that of angels: for they are _afterward_ to minister to the heirs of salvation; but the sinner must be _first_ reconciled to God. And you are called on from day to day to intercede with man as his friend, that you may win souls to Christ. Christ is ascended up on high, to intercede with his Father for guilty sinners, and to plead for them the merits of his death. So that Christ and his faithful ministers, through the operation of the blessed Spirit, are co-workers together. Yet without Him we can do nothing: our strength is his strength, and his is all the glory from first to last. "It is my heart's prayer and desire, sir, that you may, by a living faith, cleave close to that blessed exalted Lamb of God, who died to redeem us from sin--that you may have a sweet communion with Father, Son, and Spirit--that you may sink deep in love and rise high in the life of God. Thus will you have such discoveries of the beauties of Christ and his eternal glory, as will fill your heart with true delight. "If I am not deceived, I wish myself to enjoy his gracious favour, more than all the treasures which earth can afford. I would, in comparison, look upon them with holy disdain, and as not worth an anxious thought, that they may not have power on my heart, to draw or attract it from God, who is worthy of my highest esteem, and of all my affections. It should be our endeavour to set Him always before us, that in all things we may act as in his immediate presence; that we may be filled with that holy fear, so that we may not dare wilfully to sin against Him. We should earnestly entreat the Lord to mortify the power and working of sin and unbelief within, by making Christ appear more and more precious in our eyes, and more dear to our hearts. "It fills my heart with thankful recollections, while I attempt in this weak manner to speak of God's love to man. When I reflect on my past sins and his past mercies, I am assured, that if I had all the gifts of wise men and angels, I could never sufficiently describe my own inward sense of his undeserved love towards me. We can better enjoy these glorious apprehensions in our hearts, than explain them to others. But oh how unworthy of them all are we? Consciousness of my own corruptions keeps me often low; yet faith and desire will easily mount on high, beseeching God that He would, according to the apostle's prayer, fill me with all his communicable fulness, in the gifts and graces of his Spirit; that I may walk well-pleasing before Him, in all holy conversation, perfecting holiness in his fear. "If I err in boldness, sir, pray pardon me; and in your next letter confirm my hope, that you will be my counsellor and guide. "I can only recompense your kindness to me by my prayers, that your own intercourse with God may be abundantly blessed to you and yours. I consider the Saviour saying to you, as He did to Peter, 'Lovest them me?' And may your heartfelt experience be compelled to reply, 'Thou knowest all things, and thou knowest that I love thee supremely.' May He have evident marks of it in all your outward actions of love and humanity, in feeding his flock, and in the inward fervour and affection of all your consecrated powers; that you may be zealously engaged in pulling down the strongholds of sin and Satan, and building up his Church, sowing the seeds of righteousness, and praying God to give the increase; that you may not labour for Him in vain, but may see the trees bud and blossom, and bring forth fruit abundantly, to the praise and glory of your heavenly Master. In order to give you encouragement, He says, 'Whosoever converteth a sinner from the error of his way, shall save a soul from death;' and that will increase the brightness of your crown in glory. This hath Christ merited for his faithful ministers. "I hope, sir, you will receive grace to be sincere in reproving sin, wherever you see it. You will find Divine assistance, and all fear and shame will be taken from you. Great peace will be given to you, and wisdom, strength, and courage, according to your work. You will be as Paul: having much learning, you can speak to men in all stations of life, by God's assistance. The fear of offending them will never prevent you, when you consider the glory of God; and man's immortal soul is of more value than his present favour and esteem. In particular, you are in an office wherein you can visit _all_ the sick. Man's extremity is often God's opportunity. In this way you may prove an instrument in his hand to do his work. Although He _can_ work without means, yet his usual way is by means; and I trust you are a chosen vessel unto Him, to prove his name and declare his truth to all men. "Visiting the sick is a strict command, and a duty for every Christian. None can tell what good may be done. I wish it was never neglected, as it too often is. Many think that, if they attend the Church--the minister to preach and the people to hear--their duty is done. But more is required than this. May the Lord stir up the gift that is in his people and ministers, that they may have compassion on their fellow-sinners, that they may never think it too late, but remember that while there is life there is hope. "Once more, I pray, sir, pardon and excuse all my errors in judgment, and the ignorance that this is penned in; and may God bless you in all things, and particularly your friendship to me and my parents. What a comfort is family religion. I do not doubt but this is your desire, as it is mine, to say: 'I and my house will serve the Lord, But first obedient to his word I must myself appear: By actions, words, and temper show That I my heavenly Master know, And serve with heart sincere. 'I must the fair example set; From those that on my pleasure wait The stumbling-block remove; Their duty by my life explain, And still in all my works maintain The dignity of love. 'Easy to be entreated, mild, Quickly appeas'd and reconciled, A follower of my God: A saint indeed I long to be, And lead my faithful family In the celestial road. 'Lord, if thou dost the wish infuse, A vessel fitted for thy use Into thy hands receive: Work in me both to will and do, And show them how believers true And real Christians live. 'With all-sufficient grace supply, And then I'll come to testify The wonders of thy name, Which saves from sin, the world, and hell, Its power may every sinner feel, And every tongue proclaim! 'Cleans'd by the blood of Christ from sin, I seek my relatives to win, And preach their sins forgiven; Children, and wife, and servants seize, And through the paths of pleasantness Conduct them all to heaven.' "Living so much in a solitary way, books are my companions; and poetry, which speaks of the love of God and the mercies of Christ, is very sweet to my mind. This must be my excuse for troubling you to read verses which others have written. I have intended, if my declining state of health permit, to go to --- for a few days. I say this, lest you should call in expectation of seeing me, during any part of next week. But my dear father and mother, for whose precious souls I am very anxious, will reap the benefit of your visit at all events. "From your humble and unworthy servant, "E--- W---." Having read it, I said to the father of my highly valued correspondent: "I thank you for being the bearer of this letter; your daughter is a kind friend and faithful counsellor to me, as well as to you. Tell her how highly I esteem her friendship, and that I feel truly obliged for the many excellent sentiments which she has here expressed. Give her my blessing, and assure her that the oftener she writes, the more thankful I shall be." The Dairyman's enlivened eye gleamed with pleasure as I spoke. The praise of his Elizabeth was a string which could not be touched without causing every nerve of his whole frame to vibrate. His voice half faltered as he spoke in reply; the tear stood in his eyes; his hand trembled as I pressed it; his heart was full; he could only say, "Sir, a poor old man thanks you for your kindness to him and his family. God bless you, sir; I hope we shall soon see you again." Thus we parted for that day. CHAPTER V. It has not unfrequently been observed, that when it is the Lord's pleasure to remove any of his faithful followers out of this life at an early period of their course, they make rapid progress in the experience of Divine truth. The fruits of the Spirit ripen fast, as they advance to the close of mortal existence. In particular, they grow in humility, through a deeper sense of inward corruption, and a clearer view of the perfect character of the Saviour. Disease and bodily weakness make the thoughts of eternity recur with frequency and power. The great question of their own personal salvation, the quality of their faith, the sincerity of their love, and the purity of their hope, are in continual exercise. Unseen realities, at such a time, occupy a larger portion of thought than before. The state of existence beyond the grave, the invisible world, the unaltered character of the dead, the future judgment, the total separation from everything earthly, the dissolution of body and spirit, and their reunion at the solemn hour of resurrection--these are subjects for their meditation, which call for serious earnestness of soul. Whatever consolations from the Spirit of God they may have enjoyed heretofore, they become now doubly anxious to examine and prove themselves, "whether they be indeed in the faith." In doing this, they sometimes pass through hidden conflicts of a dark and distressing nature; from which, however, they come forth, like gold tried in the furnace. Awhile they may sow in tears, but soon they reap in joy. Their religious feelings have then, perhaps, less of ecstasy, but more of serenity. As the ears of corn ripen for the harvest, they bow their heads nearer to the ground. So it is with believers; they then see more than ever of their own imperfection, and often express their sense of it in strong language; yet they repose with a growing confidence on the love of God through Christ Jesus. The nearer they advance to their eternal rest, the more humble they become, but not the less useful in their sphere. They feel anxiously desirous of improving every talent they possess to the glory of God, knowing that the time is short. I thought I observed the truth of these remarks fulfilled in the progressive state of mind of the Dairyman's daughter. Declining health seemed to indicate the will of God concerning her. But her character, conduct, and experience of the Divine favour increased in brightness as the setting sun of her mortal life approached its horizon. The last letter which, with the exception of a very short note, I ever received from her, I shall now transcribe. It appeared to me to bear the marks of a still deeper acquaintance with the workings of her own heart, and a more entire reliance upon the free mercy of God. The original, while I copy it, strongly revives the image of the deceased, and the many profitable conversations which I once enjoyed in her company and that of her parents. It again endears to me the recollections of cottage piety; and helps me to anticipate the joys of that day when the spirits of the glorified saints shall be reunited to their bodies, and be for ever with the Lord. The writer of this and the preceding letters herself little imagined, when they were penned, that they would ever be submitted to the public eye. That they now are so, results from a conviction that the friends of the pious poor will estimate them according to their value, and a hope that it may please God to honour these memorials of the dead, to the effectual edification of the living. "Rev. Sir, "In consequence of your kind permission, I take the liberty to trouble you with another of my ill-written letters; and I trust you have too much of your blessed Maker's lowly, meek, and humble mind to be offended with a poor, simple, ignorant creature, whose intentions are pure and sincere in writing. My desire is that I, a weak vessel of his grace, may glorify his name for his goodness towards me. May the Lord direct me by his counsel and wisdom! May He overshadow me with his presence, that I may sit beneath the banner of his love, and find the consolations of his blessed Spirit sweet and refreshing to my soul! "When I feel that I am nothing, and God is all in all, then I can willingly fly to Him, saying, 'Lord, help me; Lord, teach me; be unto me my Prophet, Priest, and King; let me know the teaching of thy grace, and the disclosing of thy love.' What nearness of access might we have if we lived more near to God! What sweet communion might we have with a God of love! He is the great I AM. How glorious a name! Angels with trembling awe prostrate themselves before Him, and in humble love adore and worship Him. One says, 'While the first archangel sings, He hides his face behind his wings.' Unworthy as I am, I have found it by experience, that the more I see of the greatness and goodness of God, and the nearer union I hope I have had with Him through the Spirit of his love, the more humble and self-abased I have been. "But every day I may say, 'Lord, how little I love thee, how far I live from thee, how little am I like thee in humility!' It is nevertheless my heart's desire to love and serve Him better. I find the way in which God does more particularly bless me, is when I attend on the public ordinances of religion. These are the channels through which He conveys the riches of his grace and precious love to my soul. These I have often found to be indeed the time of refreshing and strengthening from the presence of the Lord. Then I can see my hope of an interest in the covenant of love, and praise Him for his mercy to the greatest of sinners. "I earnestly wish to be more established in the ways, and to honour him in the path of duties whilst I enjoy the smiles of his favour. In the midst of all outward afflictions I pray that I may know Christ, and the power of his resurrection within my soul. If I were always thus, my summer would last all the year, my will would then be sweetly lost in God's will, and I should feel a resignation to every dispensation of his providence and his grace, saying, 'Good is the will of the Lord: infinite wisdom cannot err.' Then would patience have its perfect work. "But, alas! sin and unbelief often, too often, interrupt these frames, and lay me low before God in tears of sorrow. I often think what a happiness it would be, if his love were so fixed in my heart, that I might willingly obey Him with alacrity and delight, and gradually mortify the power of self-will, passion, and pride. This can only arise from a good hope, through grace, that we are washed in that precious blood which cleanses us from every sinful stain, and makes us new creatures in Christ. O that we may be the happy witnesses of the saving power and virtue of that healing stream which flows from the fountain of everlasting love! "Sir, my faith is often exceedingly weak. Can you be so kind as to tell me what you have found to be the most effectual means of strengthening it? I often think how plainly the Lord declares--Believe only, and thou shalt be saved. Only have faith; all things are possible to him that has it. How I wish that we could remove all those mountains that hinder and obstruct the light of his grace; so that, having full access unto God through that ever-blessed Spirit, we might lovingly commune with Him as with the dearest of friends. What favour doth God bestow on worms! And yet we love to murmur and complain. He may well say, What should I have done more that I have not done? or wherein have I proved unfaithful or unkind to my faithless backsliding children? "Sir, I pray that I may not grieve Him, as I have done, any more. I want your counsel and your prayers for me in this matter. How refreshing is the sight of one that truly loves God, that bears his image and likeness! "But delightful as is conversation with true believers on earth, whose hearts are lifted up to things above, yet what is this to that happy day which will admit us into more bright realms, where we shall for ever behold a God of love in the smiling face of his Son, who is the express image of his Father, and the brightness of his glory! Then, if found in Him, we shall be received by the innumerable host of angels who wait around his throne. "In the meantime, sir, may I take up my cross, and manfully fight under Him who, for the glory that was set before Him, endured the cross, despised the shame, and is now set down at his Father's right hand in majesty! I thank you for the kind liberty you have given to me of writing to you. I feel my health declining, and I find a relief during an hour of pain and weakness in communicating these thoughts to you. "I hope, sir, you go on your way rejoicing; that you are enabled to thank Him who is the giver of every good gift, spiritual, temporal, and providential, for blessings to yourself and your ministry. I do not doubt but you often meet with circumstances which are not pleasing to nature; yet, by the blessing of God, they will be all profitable in the end. They are kindly designed by grace to make and keep us humble. The difficulties which you spoke of to me some time since, will, I trust, disappear. "My dear father and mother are as well as usual in bodily health; and, I hope, grow in grace, and in the knowledge and love of Jesus Christ. My chief desire to live is for their sakes. It now seems long since we have seen you. I am almost ashamed to request you to come to our little cottage, to visit those who are so far beneath your station in life. But if you cannot come, we shall be very glad if you will write a few lines. I ought to make an excuse for my letter, I spell so badly: this was a great neglect when I was young. I gave myself greatly to reading, but not to the other; and now I am too weak and feeble to learn much. "I hear sometimes of persons growing serious in your congregation. It gives me joy; and, if true, I am sure it does so to yourself. I long for the pure Gospel of Christ to be preached in every church in the world, and for the time when all shall know, love, and fear the Lord, and the uniting Spirit of God shall make them of one heart and mind in Christ our great Head. Your greatest joy, I know, will be in labouring much for the glory of God in the salvation of men's souls. You serve a good Master. You have a sure reward. I pray God to give you strength according to your day. "Pray, sir, do not be offended at the freedom and manner of my writing. My parents' duty and love to you are sent with these lines from "Your humble servant in Christ, "E--- W---." Epistolary communications, when written in sincerity of heart, afford genuine portraits of the mind. May the foregoing be viewed with Christian candour, and consecrated to affectionate memory! CHAPTER VI. Travellers, as they pass through the country, usually stop to inquire whose are the splendid mansions which they discover among the woods and plains around them. The families, titles, fortune, or character of the respective owners engage much attention. Perhaps their houses are exhibited to the admiring stranger. The elegant rooms, costly furniture, valuable paintings, beautiful gardens and shrubberies, are universally approved; while the rank, fashion, taste, and riches of the possessor, afford ample materials for entertaining discussion. In the meantime, the lowly cottage of the poor husbandman is passed by as scarcely deserving of notice. Yet perchance such a cottage may often contain a treasure of infinitely more value than the sumptuous palace of the rich man; even "the pearl of great price." If this be set in the heart of the poor cottager, it proves a gem of unspeakable worth, and will shine among the brightest ornaments of the Redeemer's crown, in that day when He maketh up his "jewels." Hence the Christian traveller, while in common with others he bestows his due share of applause on the decorations of the rich, and is not insensible to the beauties and magnificence which are the lawfully-allowed appendages of rank and fortune, cannot overlook the humbler dwelling of the poor. And if he should find that true piety and grace beneath the thatched roof which he has in vain looked for amidst the worldly grandeur of the rich, he remembers the declarations in the Word of God. He sees with admiration, that the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity, whose name is Holy, who dwelleth in the high and holy place, dwelleth with _him also_ that is of a contrite and humble spirit; and although heaven is his throne, and the earth his footstool, yet, when a house is to be built, and a place of rest to be sought for himself, He says, To this man will I look, even to him that is poor and of a contrite spirit, and trembleth at my word. (_See_ Isa. lvii. 15; lxvi. 1, 2.) When a house is thus tenanted, faith beholds this inscription written on the walls, _The Lord lives here_. Faith, therefore, cannot pass by it unnoticed, but loves to lift up the latch of the door, and to sit down and converse with the poor, although perhaps despised, inhabitant. Many a sweet interview does Faith obtain, when she thus takes her walks abroad. Many such a sweet interview have I myself enjoyed beneath the roof where dwelt the Dairyman and his little family. I soon perceived that his daughter's health was rapidly on the decline. The pale, wasting consumption, which is the Lord's instrument for removing so many thousands every year from the land of the living, made hasty strides on her constitution. The hollow eye, the distressing cough, and the often too-flattering red on the cheek, foretold the approach of death. What a field for usefulness and affectionate attention on the part of ministers and Christian friends is opened by the frequent attacks, and lingering progress, of _consumptive_ illness! How many such precious opportunities are daily lost, where Providence seems in so marked a way to afford time and space for serious and godly instruction! Of how many may it be said, "The way of peace have they not known;" for not one friend ever came nigh to warn them to "flee from the wrath to come." But the Dairyman's daughter was happily made acquainted with the things which belonged to her everlasting peace before the present disease had taken root in her constitution. In my visits to her, I went rather to receive information than to impart it. Her mind was abundantly stored with Divine truths, and her conversation was truly edifying. The recollection of it must ever produce a thankful sensation in my heart. I one day received a short note to the following effect:-- "Dear Sir, "I should be very glad, if your convenience will allow, that you would come and see a poor unworthy sinner. My hour-glass is nearly run out; but I hope I can see Christ to be precious to my soul. Your conversation has often been blessed to me, and I now feel the need of it more than ever. My father and my mother send their duty to you. "From your obedient "And unworthy servant, "E--- W---." I obeyed the summons that same afternoon. On my arrival at the Dairyman's cottage his wife opened the door. The tears streamed down her cheek as she silently shook her head. Her heart was full. She tried to speak, but could not. I took her by the hand, and said: "My good friend, all is right, and as the Lord of wisdom and mercy directs." "Oh! my Betsy, my dear girl, is so bad, sir. What shall I do without her? I thought I should have gone first to the grave, but--" "But the Lord sees good that, before you die yourself, you should behold your child safe home to glory. Is there no mercy in this?" "O, dear sir! I am very old and very weak, and she is a dear child, the staff and prop of such a poor old creature as I am." As I advanced, I saw Elizabeth sitting by the fireside, supported in an arm-chair by pillows, with every mark of rapid decline and approaching death. A sweet smile of friendly complacency enlightened her pale countenance as she said: "This is very kind indeed, sir, to come so soon after I sent to you. You find me daily wasting away, and I cannot have long to continue here. My flesh and my heart fail; but God is the strength of my weak heart, and, I trust, will be my portion for ever." The conversation was occasionally interrupted by her cough and want of breath. Her tone of voice was clear, though feeble; her manner solemn and collected; and her eye, though more dim than formerly, by no means wanting in liveliness as she spoke. I had frequently admired the superior language in which she expressed her ideas, as well as the scriptural consistency with which she communicated her thoughts. She had a good natural understanding; and grace, as is generally the case, much improved it. On the present occasion I could not help thinking she was peculiarly favoured. The whole strength of gracious and natural attainments seemed to be in full exercise. After taking my seat between the daughter and the mother (the latter fixing her fond eyes upon her child with great anxiety, while we were conversing), I said to Elizabeth: "I hope you enjoy a sense of the Divine presence, and can rest all upon Him who has 'been with thee,' and has kept 'thee in all places whither thou hast gone,' and will bring thee into 'the land of pure delights, where saints immortal reign.'" "Sir, I think I can. My mind has lately been sometimes clouded, but I believe it has been partly owing to the great weakness and suffering of my bodily frame, and partly to the envy of my spiritual enemy, who wants to persuade me that Christ has no love for me, and that I have been a self-deceiver." "And do you give way to his suggestions? Can you doubt amidst such numerous tokens of past and present mercy?" "No, sir; I mostly am enabled to preserve a clear evidence of his love. I do not wish to add to my other sins that of denying his manifest goodness to my soul. I would acknowledge it to his praise and glory." "What is your present view of the state in which you were before you felt seriously concerned about the salvation of your soul?" "Sir, I was a proud, thoughtless girl, fond of dress and finery; I loved the world, and the things that are in the world; I lived in service among worldly people, and never had the happiness of being in a family where worship was regarded, and the souls of the servants cared for either by master or mistress. I went once on a Sunday to church, more to see and be seen than to pray or hear the word of God. I thought I was quite good enough to be saved, and disliked and often laughed at religious people. I was in great darkness; I knew nothing of the way of salvation; I never prayed, nor was sensible of the awful danger of a prayerless state. I wished to maintain the character of a good servant, and was much lifted up whenever I met with applause. I was tolerably moral and decent in my conduct, from motives of carnal and worldly policy; but I was a stranger to God and Christ; I neglected my soul; and had I died in such a state, hell must, and would justly, have been my portion." "How long is it since you heard the sermon which you hope, through God's blessing, effected your conversion?" "About five years ago." "How was it brought about?" "It was reported that a Mr ---, who was detained by contrary winds from embarking on board ship, as chaplain to a distant part of the world, was to preach at church. Many advised me not to go, for fear he should turn my head; as they said he held strange notions. But curiosity and an opportunity of appearing in a new gown, which I was very proud of, induced me to ask leave of my mistress to go. Indeed, sir, I had no better motives than vanity and curiosity. Yet thus it pleased the Lord to order it for his own glory. "I accordingly went to church, and saw a great crowd of people collected together. I often think of the contrary states of my mind during the former and latter part of the service. For a while, regardless of the worship of God, I looked around me, and was anxious to attract notice myself. My dress, like that of too many gay, vain, and silly servant girls, was much above my station, and very different from that which becomes an humble sinner, who has a modest sense of propriety and decency. The state of my mind was visible enough from the foolish finery of my apparel. "At length the clergyman gave out his text: 'Be _ye_ clothed with humility' (1 Pet. v. 5). He drew a comparison between the clothing of the body with that of the soul. At a very early part of his discourse, I began to feel ashamed of my passion for fine dressing and apparel; but when he came to describe the garment of salvation with which a Christian is clothed, I felt a powerful discovery of the nakedness of my own soul. I saw that I had neither the humility mentioned in the text, nor any one part of the true Christian character. I looked at my gay dress, and blushed for shame on account of my pride. I looked at the minister, and he seemed to be as a messenger sent from heaven to open my eyes. I looked on the congregation, and wondered whether any one else felt as I did. I looked at my heart, and it appeared full of iniquity. I trembled as he spoke, and yet I felt a great drawing of heart to the words he uttered. "He displayed the riches of Divine grace in God's method of saving the sinner. I was astonished at what I had been doing all the days of my life. He described the meek, lowly, and humble example of Christ; I felt proud, lofty, vain, and self-consequential. He represented Christ as 'Wisdom;' I felt my ignorance. He held Him forth as 'Righteousness;' I was convinced of my own guilt. He proved Him to be 'Sanctification;' I saw my corruption. He proclaimed Him as 'Redemption;' I felt my slavery to sin, and my captivity to Satan. He concluded with an animated address to sinners, in which he exhorted them to flee from the wrath to come, to cast off the love of outward ornaments, to put on Jesus Christ, and be clothed with true humility. "From that hour I never lost sight of the value of my soul, and the danger of a sinful state. I inwardly blessed God for the sermon, although my mind was in a state of great confusion. "The preacher had brought forward the ruling passion of my heart, which was pride in outward dress; and by the grace of God it was made instrumental to the awakening of my soul. Happy, sir, would it be, if many a poor girl, like myself, were turned from the love of outward adorning and putting on of fine apparel, to seek that which is not corruptible, even the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, which is in the sight of God of great price. "The greater part of the congregation, unused to such faithful and scriptural sermons, disliked and complained of the severity of the preacher: while a few, as I afterwards found, like myself, were deeply affected, and earnestly wished to hear him again. But he preached there no more. "From that time I was led, through a course of private prayer, reading, and meditation, to see my lost estate as a sinner, and the great mercy of God through Jesus Christ in raising sinful dust and ashes to a share in the glorious happiness of heaven. And O, sir, what a Saviour I have found! He is more than I could ask or desire. In his fulness I have found all that my poverty could need; in his bosom I have found a resting- place from all sin and sorrow; in his Word I have found strength against doubt and unbelief." "Were you not soon convinced," I said, "that your salvation must be an act of entire grace on the part of God, wholly independent of your own previous works or deservings?" "Dear sir, what were my works before I heard that sermon, but evil, carnal, selfish, and ungodly? The thoughts of my heart, from my youth upward, were only evil, and that continually. And my deservings, what were they but the deservings of a fallen, depraved, careless soul, that regarded neither law nor gospel? Yes, sir, I immediately saw that, if ever I were saved, it must be by the free mercy of God, and that the whole praise and honour of the work would be his from first to last." "What change did you perceive in yourself with respect to the world?" "It appeared all vanity and vexation of spirit. I found it necessary to my peace of mind to come out from among them and be separate. I gave myself to prayer; and many a happy hour of secret delight I enjoyed in communion with God. Often I mourned over my sins, and sometimes had a great conflict through unbelief, fear, temptation, to return back again to my old ways, and a variety of difficulties which lay in my way. But He who loved me with an everlasting love, drew me by his loving-kindness, showed me the way of peace, gradually strengthened me in my resolutions of leading a new life, and taught me, that while without him I could do nothing, I yet might do all things through his strength." "Did you not find many difficulties in your situation, owing to your change of principle and practice?" "Yes, sir, every day of my life. I was laughed at by some, scolded at by others, scorned by enemies, and pitied by friends. I was called hypocrite, saint, false deceiver, and many more names which were meant to render me hateful in the sight of the world. But I esteemed the reproach of the Cross an honour. I forgave and prayed for my persecutors, and remembered how very lately I had acted the same part towards others myself. I thought also that Christ endured the contradiction of sinners; and as the disciple is not above his Master, I was glad to be in any way conformed to his sufferings." "Did you not then feel for your family at home?" "Yes, that I did indeed, sir; they were never out of my thoughts. I prayed continually for them, and had a longing desire to do them good. In particular, I felt for my father and mother, as they were getting into years, and were very ignorant and dark in matters of religion." "Ay," interrupted her mother, sobbing, "ignorant and dark, sinful and miserable we were, till this dear Betsy--this dear Betsy--this dear child, sir--brought Christ Jesus home to her poor father and mother's house." "No, dearest mother; say rather, Christ Jesus brought your poor daughter home, to tell you what He had done for her soul, and, I hope, to do the same for yours." At this moment the Dairyman came in with two pails of milk hanging from the yoke on his shoulders. He had stood behind the half-opened door for a few minutes, and heard the last sentences spoken by his wife and daughter. "Blessing and mercy upon her!" said he, "it is very true: she left a good place of service on purpose to live with us, that she might help us both in soul and body. Sir, don't she look very ill? I think, sir, we sha'n't have her here long." "Leave that to the Lord," said Elizabeth. "All our times are in his hand, and happy it is that they are. I am willing to go. Are not you willing, my father, to part with me into _his_ hands who gave me to you at first?" "Ask me any question in the world but that," said the weeping father. "I know," said she, "you wish me to be happy." "I do, I do," answered he; "let the Lord do with you and us as best pleases Him." I then asked her on what her present consolations chiefly depended, in the prospect of approaching death. "Entirely, sir, on my view of Christ. When I look at myself, many sins, infirmities, and imperfections cloud the image of Christ which I want to see in my own heart. But when I look at the Saviour himself, He is altogether lovely; there is not one spot in his countenance, nor one cloud over all his perfections. "I think of his coming in the flesh, and it reconciles me to the sufferings of the body; for He had them as well as I. I think of his temptations, and believe that He is able to succour me when I am tempted. Then I think of his cross, and learn to bear my own. I reflect on his death, and long to die unto sin, so that it may no longer have dominion over me. I sometimes think of his resurrection, and trust that He has given me a part in it, for I feel that my affections are set upon things above. Chiefly, I take comfort in thinking of Him as at the right hand of the Father, pleading my cause, and rendering acceptable even my feeble prayers, both for myself, and, as I hope, for my dear friends. "These are the views which, through mercy, I have of my Saviour's goodness; and they have made me wish and strive in my poor way to serve Him, to give myself up to Him, and to labour to do my duty in that state of life into which it has pleased Him to call me. "A thousand times I should have fallen and fainted, if He had not upheld me. I feel that I am nothing without Him. He is all in all. "Just so far as I can cast my care upon Him I find strength to do his will. May He give me grace to trust Him till the last moment! I do not fear death, because I believe that He has taken away its sting. And O, what happiness beyond! Tell me, sir, whether you think I am right--I hope I am under no delusion. I dare not look for my hope in anything short of the entire fulness of Christ. When I ask my own heart a question, I am afraid to trust it, for it is treacherous, and has often deceived me. But when I ask Christ, he answers me with promises that strengthen and refresh me, and leave me no room to doubt his power and will to save. I am in his hands, and would remain there; and I do believe that He will never leave nor forsake me, but will perfect the thing that concerns me. He loved me, and gave himself for me; and I believe that his gifts and calling are without repentance. In this hope I live, in this hope I wish to die." I looked around me, as she was speaking, and thought--Surely this is none other than the house of God, and the gate of heaven. Everything appeared neat, cleanly, and interesting. The afternoon had been rather overcast with dark clouds; but just now the setting sun shone brightly and somewhat suddenly into the room. It was reflected from three or four rows of bright pewter plates and white earthenware, arranged on shelves against the wall; it also gave brilliancy to a few prints of sacred subjects that hung there also, and served for monitors of the birth, baptism, crucifixion, and resurrection of Christ. A large map of Jerusalem, and a hieroglyphic of "the old and new man," completed the decorations on that side of the room. Clean as was the whitewashed wall, it was not cleaner than the rest of the place and its furniture. Seldom had the sun enlightened a house where order and general neatness (those sure attendants of pious poverty) were more conspicuous. This gleam of setting sunshine was emblematical of the bright and serene close of this young Christian's departing season. One ray happened to be reflected from a little looking-glass upon her face. Amidst her pallid and decaying features there appeared a calm resignation, triumphant confidence, unaffected humility, and tender anxiety, which fully declared the feelings of her heart. Some further affectionate conversation and a short prayer closed this interview. As I rode home by departing day-light, a solemn tranquillity reigned throughout the scene. The gentle lowing of cattle, the bleating of sheep just penned in their folds, the humming of the insects of the night, the distant murmurs of the sea, the last notes of the birds of day, and the first warblings of the nightingale, broke upon the ear, and served rather to increase than lessen the peaceful serenity of the evening, and its corresponding effects on my own mind. It invited and cherished just such meditations as my visit had already inspired. Natural scenery, when viewed in a Christian mirror, frequently affords very beautiful illustrations of Divine truths. We are highly favoured when we can enjoy them, and at the same time draw near to God in them. CHAPTER VII. It is a pleasing consideration that, amidst the spiritual darkness which unhappily prevails in many parts of the land, God nevertheless has a people. It not unfrequently happens, that single individuals are to be found who, though very disadvantageously situated with regard to the ordinary means of grace, have received truly saving impressions, and through a blessing on secret meditation, reading, and prayer, are led to the closest communion with God, and become eminently devoted Christians. It is the no small error of too many professors of the present day, to overlook or undervalue the instances of this kind which exist. The religious profession and opinions of some have too much of mere _machinery_ in their composition. If every wheel, pivot, chain, spring, cog, or pinion, be not exactly in its place, or move not precisely according to a favourite and prescribed system, the whole is rejected as unworthy of regard. But happily "the Lord knoweth them that are his;" nor is the impression of his own seal wanting to characterise some who, in comparative seclusion from the religious world, "name the name of Christ, and depart from iniquity." There are some real Christians so particularly circumstanced in this respect, as to illustrate the poet's beautiful comparison:-- "Full many a gem of purest ray serene The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear; Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air." Yet this was not altogether the case with the Dairyman's daughter. Her religion had indeed ripened in seclusion from the world, and she was intimately known but to few; but she lived usefully, departed most happily, and left a shining track behind her. While I attempt a faint delineation of it, may I catch its influence, and become, through inexpressible mercy, a follower "of them, who through faith and patience inherit the promises." From the time wherein I visited her, as described in my last paper, I considered her end as fast approaching. One day I received a hasty summons to inform me that she was dying. It was brought by a soldier, whose countenance bespoke seriousness, good sense, and piety. "I am sent, sir, by the father and mother of Elizabeth W---, at her own particular request, to say how much they all wish to see you. She is going _home_, sir, very fast indeed." "Have you known her long?" I inquired. "About a month, sir. I love to visit the sick; and hearing of her case from a person who lives close by our camp, I went to see her. I bless God that ever I did go. Her conversation has been very profitable to me." "I rejoice," said I, "to see in you, as I trust, a _brother soldier_. Though we differ in our outward regimentals, I hope we serve under the same spiritual Captain. I will go with you." My horse was soon ready. My military companion walked by my side, and gratified me with very sensible and pious conversation. He related some remarkable testimonies of the excellent disposition of the Dairyman's daughter, as they appeared from recent intercourse which he had had with her. "She is a bright diamond, sir," said the soldier, "and will soon shine brighter than any diamond upon earth." We passed through lanes and fields, over hills and through valleys, by open and retired paths, sometimes crossing over, and sometimes following the windings of a little brook, which gently murmured by the road-side. Conversation beguiled the distance, and shortened the apparent time of our journey, till we were nearly arrived at the Dairyman's cottage. As we approached it, we became silent. Thoughts of death, eternity, and salvation, inspired by the sight of a house where a dying believer lay, filled my own mind, and, I doubt not, that of my companion also. No living object yet appeared, except the Dairyman's dog, keeping a kind of mute watch at the door; for he did not, as formerly, bark at my approach. He seemed to partake so far of the feelings appropriate to the circumstances of the family, as not to wish to give a hasty or painful alarm. He came forward to the little wicket-gate, then looked back at the house-door, as if conscious there was sorrow within. It was as if he wanted to say, "Tread softly over the threshold, as you enter the house of mourning; for my master's heart is full of grief." The soldier took my horse, and tied it up in a shed. A solemn serenity appeared to surround the whole place; it was only interrupted by the breezes passing through the large elm-trees, which stood near the house, and which my imagination indulged itself in thinking were plaintive sighs of sorrow. I gently opened the door; no one appeared; and all was yet silent. The soldier followed; we came to the foot of the stairs. "They are come," said a voice, which I knew to be the father's "they are come." He appeared at the top. I gave him my hand, and said nothing. On entering the room above, I saw the aged mother and her son supporting the much-loved sister: the son's wife sat weeping in a window-seat, with a child on her lap; two or three persons attended in the room to discharge any office which friendship or necessity might require. I sat down by the bed-side. The mother could not weep, but now and then sighed deeply, as she alternately looked at Elizabeth and at me. The big tear rolled down the brother's cheek, and testified an affectionate regard. The good old man stood at the foot of the bed, leaning upon the post, and unable to take his eyes off the child from whom he was so soon to part. Elizabeth's eyes were closed, and as yet she perceived me not. But over the face, though pale, sunk, and hollow, the peace of God which passeth all understanding, had cast a triumphant calm. The soldier, after a short pause, silently reached out his Bible towards me, pointing with his finger at 1 Cor. xv. 55, 56, 58. I then broke silence by reading the passage, "O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? The sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin is the law. But thanks be to God which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ." At the sound of these words her eyes opened, and something like a ray of Divine light beamed on her countenance, as she said, "Victory, victory! through our Lord Jesus Christ." She relapsed again, taking no further notice of any one present. "God be praised for the triumph of faith!" said I. "Amen!" replied the soldier. The Dairyman's uplifted eye showed that the amen was in his heart, though his tongue failed to utter it. A short struggling for breath took place in the dying young woman, which was soon over; and then I said to her,-- "My dear friend, do you not feel that you are supported?" "The Lord deals very gently with me," she replied. "Are not his promises now very precious to you?" "They are all yea and amen in Christ Jesus." "Are you in much bodily pain?" "So little, that I almost forget it." "How good the Lord is!" "And how unworthy am I!" "You are going to see Him as He is." "I think--I hope--I believe that I am." She again fell into a short slumber. Looking at her mother, I said, "What a mercy to have a child so near heaven as yours is!" "And what a mercy," she replied, in broken accents, "if her poor old mother might but follow her there! But, sir, it is so hard to part!" "I hope through grace by faith you will soon meet, to part no more: it will be but a little while." "Sir," said the Dairyman, "that thought supports me, and the Lord's goodness makes me feel more reconciled than I was." "Father, mother," said the reviving daughter, "He is good to me--trust Him, praise Him evermore." "Sir," added she, in a faint voice, "I want to thank you for your kindness to me--I want to ask a favour; you buried my sister--will you do the same for me?" "All shall be as you wish, if God permit;" I replied. "Thank you, sir, thank you. I have another favour to ask: when I am gone, remember my father and mother. They are old, but I hope the good work is begun in their souls. My prayers are heard. Pray come and see them. I cannot speak much, but I want to speak for their sakes. Sir, remember them." The aged parents now sighed and sobbed aloud, uttering broken sentences, and gained some relief by such an expression of their feelings. At length I said to Elizabeth--"Do you experience any doubts or temptations on the subject of your eternal safety?" "No, sir; the Lord deals very gently with me, and gives me peace." "What are your views of the dark valley of death, now that you are passing through it?" "It is _not_ dark." "Why so?" "My Lord is _there_, and He is my light and my salvation." "Have you any fears of more bodily suffering?" "The Lord deals so gently with me, I can trust Him." Something of a convulsion came on. When it was past, she said again and again: "The Lord deals very gently with me. Lord, I am thine, save me--blessed Jesus--precious Saviour--his blood cleanseth from all sin--Who shall separate?--His name is Wonderful--Thanks be to God--He giveth us the victory--I, even I, am saved--O grace, mercy, and wonder--Lord, receive my spirit! Dear sir, dear father, mother, friends, I am going--but all is well, well, well--" She relapsed again. We knelt down to prayer: the Lord was in the midst of us, and blessed us. She did not again revive while I remained, nor ever speak any more words which could be understood. She slumbered for about ten hours, and at last sweetly fell asleep in the arms of that Lord who had dealt so gently with her. I left the house an hour after she had ceased to speak. I pressed her hand as I was taking leave, and said "Christ is the Resurrection and the Life." She gently returned the pressure, but could neither open her eyes nor utter a reply. I never had witnessed a scene so impressive as this before. It completely filled my imagination as I returned home. "Farewell," thought I, "dear friend, till the morning of an eternal day shall renew our personal intercourse. Thou wast a brand plucked from the burning, that thou mightest become a star shining in the firmament of glory. I have seen thy light and thy good works, and will therefore glorify our Father which is in heaven. I have seen, in thy example, what it is to be a sinner freely saved by grace. I have learned from thee, as in a living mirror, who it is that begins, continues, and ends the work of faith and love. Jesus is all in all: He will and shall be glorified. He won the crown, and alone deserves to wear it. May no one attempt to rob Him of his glory! He saves, and saves to the uttermost. Farewell, dear sister in the Lord! Thy flesh and thy heart may fail; but God is the strength of thy heart, and shall be thy portion for ever." CHAPTER VIII. Who can conceive or estimate the nature of that change which the soul of a believer must experience at the moment when, quitting its tabernacle of clay, it suddenly enters into the presence of God? If, even while "we see through a glass darkly," the views of Divine love and wisdom are so delightful to the eye of faith, what must be the glorious vision of God, when seen face to face? If it be so valued a privilege here on earth to enjoy the communion of saints, and to take sweet counsel together with our fellow-travellers towards the heavenly kingdom, what shall we see and know when we finally "come unto Mount Sion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels, to the General Assembly and Church of the Firstborn, which are written in heaven, and to God, the Judge of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect, and to Jesus the Mediator of the New Covenant?" (Heb. xii. 22-24.) If, during the sighs and tears of a mortal pilgrimage, the consolations of the Spirit are so precious, and the hope full of immortality is so animating to the soul, what heart can conceive, or what tongue utter its superior joys, when arrived at that state where sighing and sorrow flee away, and the tears shall be wiped from every eye? Such ideas were powerfully associated together in my imagination as I travelled onward to the house where, in solemn preparation for the grave, lay the remains of the Dairyman's daughter. She had breathed her last shortly after the visit related in my former account. Permission was obtained, as before, in the case of her sister, that I should perform the funeral service. Many pleasing yet melancholy thoughts were connected with the fulfilment of this task. I retraced the numerous and important conversations which I had held with her. But these could now no longer be maintained on earth. I reflected on the interesting and improved nature of _Christian_ friendships, whether formed in palaces or in cottages; and felt thankful that I had so long enjoyed that privilege with the subject of this memoir. I then indulged a selfish sigh for a moment, on thinking that I could no longer hear the great truths of Christianity uttered by one who had drunk so deep of the waters of the river of life; but the rising murmur was checked by the animating thought: "She is gone to eternal rest--could I wish her back again in this vale of tears?" At that moment the first sound of a tolling bell struck my ear. It proceeded from a village church in the valley directly beneath the ridge of a high hill, over which I had taken my way. It was Elizabeth's funeral knell. The sound was solemn; and in ascending to the elevated spot over which I rode, it acquired a peculiar tone and character. Tolling at slow and regular intervals (as was customary for a considerable time previous to the hour of burial), the bell, as it were, proclaimed the blessedness of the dead who die in the Lord, and also the necessity of the living pondering these things, and laying them to heart. It seemed to say: "Hear my warning voice, thou son of man. There is but a step between thee and death. Arise, prepare thine house, for thou shall die and not live." The scenery was in unison with that tranquil frame of mind which is most suitable for holy meditation. A rich and fruitful valley lay immediately beneath; it was adorned with cornfields and pastures through which a small river winded in a variety of directions, and many herds grazed upon its banks. A fine range of opposite hills, covered with grazing flocks, terminated with a bold sweep into the ocean, whose blue waves appeared at a distance beyond. Several villages, hamlets, and churches, were scattered in the valley. The noble mansions of the rich, and the lowly cottages of the poor, added their respective features to the landscape. Do any of my readers inquire why I describe so minutely the circumstances of prospect and scenery which may be connected with the incidents I relate? My reply is, that the God of redemption is the God of creation likewise; and that we are taught in every part of the Word of God to unite the admiration of the beauties and wonders of nature to every other motive for devotion. When David considered the heavens, the work of God's fingers, the moon and the stars which He has ordained, he was thereby led to the deepest humiliation of heart before his Maker. And when he viewed the sheep, and the oxen, and the beasts of the field, the fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, he was constrained to cry out, "O Lord, our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth!" (Ps. viii. 1.) I am the poor man's friend, and wish more especially that every poor labouring man should know how to connect the goodness of God in creation and providence, with the unsearchable riches of his grace in the salvation of a sinner. And where can he learn this lesson more instructively than in looking around the fields, where his labour is appointed, and there tracing the handiwork of God in all that he beholds? Such meditations have often afforded me both profit and pleasure, and I wish my readers to share them with me. The Dairyman's cottage was rather more than a mile distant from the church. A lane, quite overshadowed with trees and high hedges, led from the foot of the hill to his dwelling. It was impossible at that time to overlook the suitable gloom of such an approach to the house of mourning. I found, on my entrance, that several Christian friends from different parts of the neighbourhood had assembled together, to pay their last tribute of esteem and regard to the memory of the Dairyman's daughter. Several of them had first become acquainted with her during the latter stage of her illness: some few had maintained an affectionate intercourse with her for a longer period. But all seemed anxious to manifest their respect for one who was endeared to them by such striking testimonies of true Christianity. I was requested to go into the chamber where the relatives and a few other friends were gone to take a last look at the remains of Elizabeth. It is not easy to describe the sensation which the mind experiences on the first sight of a dead countenance, which, when living, was loved and esteemed for the sake of that soul which used to give it animation. A deep and awful view of the separation that has taken place between the soul and body of the deceased, since we last beheld them, occupies the feelings; our friend seems to be both near, and yet far off. The most interesting and valuable part is fled away: what remains is but the earthly perishing habitation, no longer occupied by its tenant. Yet the features present the accustomed association of friendly intercourse. For one moment we could think them asleep. The next reminds us that the blood circulates no more: the eye has lost its power of seeing, the ear of hearing, the heart of throbbing, and the limbs of moving. Quickly a thought of glory breaks in upon the mind, and we imagine the dear departed soul to be arrived at its long wished-for rest. It is surrounded by cherubim and seraphim, and sings the song of Moses and the Lamb on Mount Sion. Amid the solemn stillness of the chamber of death, imagination hears heavenly hymns chanted by the spirits of just men made perfect. In another moment, the livid lips and sunken eye of the clay- cold corpse recall our thoughts to earth, and to ourselves again. And while we think of mortality, sin, death, and the grave, we feel the prayer rise in our bosom--"O let me die the death of the righteous, and let my last end be like his!" If there be a moment when Christ and salvation, death, judgment, heaven, and hell, appear more than ever to be momentous subjects of meditation, it is that which brings us to the side of a coffin containing the body of a departed believer. Elizabeth's features were altered, but much of her likeness remained. Her father and mother sat at the head, her brother at the foot of the coffin. The father silently and alternately looked upon his dead child, and then lifted up his eyes to heaven. A struggle for resignation to the will of God was manifest in his countenance; while the tears rolling down his aged cheeks at the same time declared his grief and affection. The poor mother cried and sobbed aloud, and appeared to be much overcome by the shock of separation from a daughter so justly dear to her. The weakness and infirmity of old age added a character to her sorrow, which called for much tenderness and compassion. A remarkably decent-looking woman, who had the management of the few simple though solemn ceremonies which the case required, advanced towards me, saying: "Sir, this is rather a sight of joy than of sorrow. Our dear friend Elizabeth finds it to be so, I have no doubt. She is beyond _all_ sorrow. Do you not think she is, sir?" "After what I have known, and seen, and heard," I replied, "I feel the fullest assurance that while her body remains here, the soul is with her Saviour in Paradise. She loved Him _here_, and _there_ she enjoys the pleasures which are at his right hand for evermore." "Mercy, mercy upon a poor old creature, almost broken down with age and grief! What shall I do? Betsy's gone! My daughter's dead! O, my child! I shall never see thee more! God be merciful to me a sinner!"--sobbed out the poor mother. "That last prayer, my dear, good woman," said I, "will bring you and your child together again. It is a cry that has brought thousands to glory. It brought your daughter there, and I hope it will bring you thither likewise. God will in nowise cast out any that come to Him." "My dear," said the Dairyman, breaking the long silence he had maintained, "let us trust God with our child; and let us trust Him with our ownselves. 'The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord!' We are old, and can have but a little further to travel in our journey, and then--" he could say no more. The soldier, mentioned in my last paper, reached a Bible into my hand, and said--"Perhaps, sir, you would not object to reading a chapter before we go to the church?" I did so; it was the fourteenth of the Book of Job. A sweet tranquillity prevailed while I read it. Each minute that was spent in this funereal chamber seemed to be valuable. I made a few observations on the chapter, and connected them with the case of our departed sister. "I am but a poor soldier," said our military friend, "and have nothing of this world's goods beyond my daily subsistence; but I would not exchange my hope of salvation in the next world for all that this world could bestow without it. What is wealth without grace? Blessed be God! as I march about from one quarter to another, I still find the Lord wherever I go; and, thanks be to his holy name, He is here to-day in the midst of this company of the living and the dead. I feel that it is good to be here." Some other persons present began to take a part in our conversation, in the course of which the life and experience of the Dairyman's daughter were brought forward in a very interesting manner. Each friend had something to relate in testimony of her gracious disposition. A young woman under twenty, who had hitherto been a very light and trifling character, appeared to be remarkably impressed by the conversation of that day; and I have since had reason to believe that Divine grace then began to influence her in the choice of that better part, which shall not be taken from her. What a contrast does such a scene as this exhibit, when compared with the dull, formal, unedifying, and often indecent manner in which funeral parties assemble in the house of death! As we conversed, the parents revived. Our subject of discourse was delightful to their hearts. Their child seemed almost to be alive again, while we talked of her. Tearful smiles often brightened their countenances, as they heard the voice of friendship uttering their daughter's praises; or rather the praises of Him who had made her a vessel of mercy, and an instrument of spiritual good to her family. The time for departing was now at hand. I went to take my last look at the deceased. There was much written on her countenance. She had evidently died with a smile. It still remained, and spoke the tranquillity of her soul. According to the custom of the country, she was decorated with leaves and flowers in the coffin: she seemed as a bride gone forth to meet the bridegroom. These, indeed, were fading flowers, but they reminded me of that paradise whose flowers are immortal, and where her never-dying soul is at rest. I remembered the last words which I had heard her speak, and was instantly struck with the happy thought that "death was indeed swallowed up in victory." As I slowly retired, I said inwardly, "Peace, my honoured sister, be to _thy_ memory and to _my_ soul, till we meet in a better world." In a little time, the procession formed: it was rendered the more interesting by the consideration of so many that followed the coffin being persons of a devout and spiritual character. The distance was rather more than a mile. I resolved to continue with and go before them, as they moved slowly onwards. Immediately after the body came the venerable father and mother, {116} bending with age, and weeping through much affection of heart. Their appearance was calculated to excite every emotion of pity, love, and esteem. The other relatives followed them in order, and the several attendant friends took their places behind. After we had advanced about a hundred yards, my meditation was unexpectedly and most agreeably interrupted, by the friends who attended beginning to sing a funeral psalm. Nothing could be more sweet or solemn. The well-known effect of the open air, in softening and blending the sounds of music, was here peculiarly felt. The road through which we passed was beautiful and romantic. It lay at the foot of a hill, which occasionally re-echoed the voices of the singers, and seemed to give faint replies to the notes of the mourners. The funeral-knell was distinctly heard from the church tower, and increased the effect which this simple and becoming service produced. We went by several cottages; a respectful attention was universally observed as we passed: and the countenances of many proclaimed their regard for the departed young woman. The singing was regularly continued, with occasional intervals of about five minutes, during our whole progress. I cannot describe the state of my own mind as peculiarly connected with this solemn singing. I never witnessed a similar instance before or since. I was reminded of elder times and ancient piety. I wished the practice more frequent. It seems well calculated to excite and cherish devotion and religious affections. Music, when judiciously brought into the service of religion, is one of the most delightful, and not least efficacious means of grace. I pretend not too minutely to conjecture as to the actual nature of those pleasures which, after the resurrection, the reunited body and soul will enjoy in heaven; but I can hardly persuade myself that melody and harmony will be wanting, when even the sense of hearing shall itself be glorified. We arrived at the church. The service was heard with deep and affectionate attention. When we came to the grave, the hymn which Elizabeth had selected was sung. All was devout, simple, animating. We committed our dear sister's body to the earth, in full hope of a joyful resurrection. Thus was the veil of separation drawn for a season. She is departed, and no more seen, but she will be seen on the right hand of her Redeemer at the last day; and will again appear to his glory, a miracle of grace and a monument of mercy. My reader, rich or poor, shall you and I appear there likewise? Are we "clothed with humility," and arrayed in the wedding-garment of a Redeemer's righteousness? Are we turned from idols to serve the living God? Are we sensible of our own emptiness, and therefore flying to a Saviour's fulness to obtain grace and strength? Do we indeed live in Christ, and on Him, and by Him, and with Him? Is He our all in all? Are we "lost and found," "dead and alive again?" My _poor_ reader, the Dairyman's daughter was a _poor_ girl, and the child of a _poor_ man. Herein thou resemblest her; but dost thou resemble _her_ as she resembled Christ? Art thou made rich by faith? Hast thou a crown laid up for thee? Is thine heart set upon heavenly riches? If not, read this story once more, and then pray earnestly for like precious faith? But if, through grace, thou dost love and serve the Redeemer that saved the Dairyman's daughter, grace, peace, and mercy be with thee! The lines are fallen unto thee in pleasant places! thou hast a goodly heritage. Press forward in duty, and wait upon the Lord, possessing thy soul in holy patience. Thou hast just been with me to the grave of a departed believer. Now, "go thy way, till the end be; for thou shalt rest, and stand in thy lot at the end of the days." Footnotes: {116} An interesting account of a visit made to the Dairyman, appeared in the _Christian Guardian_ for October 1813, and which is here inserted:-- "It has rarely, if ever, fallen to my lot to trace the gracious dealing of God with greater advantage or delight, than in the narrative of the Dairyman's Daughter: and as the Isle of Wight had evidently furnished the author with the scenery he has so finely touched, I concluded that the pious subject of the little memoir had resided there, and determined that, when I next visited that delightful spot, I would make inquiry respecting her. At the close of April last year, I had occasion to go there. At the village of B--- I had the good fortune to learn her name, and the situation of the cottage that had been honoured with her residence and death; and being told that the old man, her father, whose name is W---, still lived there, I determined to find out his humble dwelling, and obtain an interview with the aged Dairyman. "It was with feelings not to be described that I visited the spot which had been so peculiarly honoured by the gracious presence of the Most High. On inquiry, I found that Elizabeth W--- died about eleven years ago; that her mother followed her in the same year; that one of her brothers (whom I did not see) lived in the same cottage; and that her father was about eighty years of age. The venerable old man appeared to wonder at the feelings of a stranger, but seemed thankful for my visit, and wept as I made past scenes again pass before his view. I was happy to find that his hopes were built upon the Rock of Ages; that his sure trust was in the Redeemer of sinners. We talked of the kind attentions of the Rev. Mr ---, of the happy death of Elizabeth, of the wondrous grace of God; and when I bade him farewell, and reminded him how soon he would again see his daughter, not, indeed, encompassed with infirmity, and depressed with disease, but "shining as the sun in the firmament," the poor old man wept plentifully, and little would he be to be envied who could have refrained. I looked back on the cottage until it could no longer be seen, and then went on my way rejoicing. "On the third of November last, being again in that district, I had the pleasure of repeating my visit to the good old Dairyman, who immediately recollected me. He told me many persons had been to see him since my former call, but he believed they were strangers, not inhabitants of the island. 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7957	----	OUT OF THE FOG A Story of the Sea C. K. OBER Introduction By Dr. Wilfred T. Grenfell FOREWORD Since I am permitted to consider myself in some way responsible for this narrative's being put on record, it is with the very heartiest good will that I accept the publishers' kind invitation to write a brief foreword to it. I have, during twenty years, been working against a problem that I recognized called for all--yes, and more, than--I had to give it. For I have been endeavoring, through my own imperfect attainments, to translate into undeniable language on the Labrador Coast, the message of God's personal fatherhood over and love for the humblest of His creatures. During these years, often of overwork, I have considered it worth while to lay aside time and energy and strength to improve the charting and pilot directions of our devious and sometimes dangerous waterways. How much more gladly shall I naturally avail myself of any chance by which to contribute to the knowledge of that seemingly ever evasive pathway leading to that which to me is the supreme motive power of human life--faith in the divine Redeemer and Master. The best helps to reach the haven we are in search of, over the unblazed trails of Labrador, are ever the tracks of those who have found the way before us. Just such to me is this simple and delightful story of Mr. Ober's. It has my most hearty prayers for its unprecedented circulation. WILFRED T. GRENFELL. [Illustration] OLD SALTS The lure of the sea prevailed, and at nineteen I shipped for a four-months' fishing trip on the Newfoundland Banks. These banks are not the kind that slope toward some gentle stream where the weary fisherman can rest between bites, protected from the sun by the shade of an overhanging tree; they are thirty to forty fathoms beneath the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, a thousand miles out from the Massachusetts coast. The life that had long appealed to my imagination now came in with a shock and a realism that was in part a disillusionment and in part an intense satisfaction of some of my primal instincts and cravings. Old salts are more picturesque and companionable spinning yarns about the stove in a shoemaker's shop than they are when one is obliged to live, eat and sleep with them for four months in the crowded forecastle of a fishing schooner. An ocean storm is a sublime spectacle, witnessed from a position of safety on the land; but a storm on the ocean, experienced in its very vortex from the deck of a tiny fishing boat, is thrilling beyond description. "Ships that pass in the night" make interesting reading; but if they pass near you, in a foggy night, on the Banks, they are better than the muezzin of the Moslem in reminding a man that it is time to pray. I recall with vividness the scene on such a night, and still feel the compelling power of the panic in the voice of the mild-mannered old sea dog on anchor watch, as he yelled down the companionway, "All hands on deck." In six seconds we were all there; and there was the great hulk of a two-thousand-ton ship looming up out of the night. She had evidently sighted our little craft just in time to change her course, and was passing us with not more than a hundred and fifty feet to spare. I can see them tonight, as they vanished into the fog--three men and a big Newfoundland dog, looking over the rail and down on us who, a moment before, were about to die. Storm, fog, icebergs, cold, exposure, the alert and strenuous life, with his own life the forfeit of failure, are a part of the normal experience of a deep sea fisherman. Two members of our crew were father and son, Uncle Ike Patch and his son, Frank. The old man had been a fisherman in his youth, but had been on shore for thirty years. When we were making up our crew, Frank caught the fishing fever and wanted to go, and his father decided to go along with him. They were out in their dory, one foggy day, and when the boats came back to the vessel from hauling their trawls, Uncle Ike and Frank were missing. We rang the bell, fired our small cannon, shouted and sent boats out after them. As night came on, we were huddled together in the forecastle, wondering about their fate, while the old fishermen told stories of the fog and its fearful toll of human life. It seemed a terrible thing for the old man and his boy to be out there, drifting no one knew where; and though we were accustomed to danger, there was a gloomy crew and little sleep on our schooner that night. In the morning the weather cleared and soon our missing boat came alongside; we received them as men alive from the dead. They had found shelter on another fishing vessel that happened to be lying at anchor not more than two or three miles away. There was reason for our solicitude, for we knew very well that a large proportion of the men who get adrift in the fog are never found alive. Shortly before this experience we had spoken a Gloucester vessel and learned that her crew had picked up, a short time before, one of the boats of a Provincetown schooner that had been adrift four days. One of the two men was dead and the other insane. Each day brought its own dangers, which the fishermen met as part of the day's work, thinking little of them when they were past, and ready for whatever another day might bring. But four months is a long time to be out of sight of land, on a fresh fish and "salt hoss" diet, with molasses instead of sugar in your tea, and fresh water too much needed for drinking purposes to waste in personal ablutions. We all swore that we would never go to sea again; and when, after gliding into harbor in the night, we looked, one clear September morning, on the seemingly unnatural green of the grass and trees of the old North Shore, I said to myself, "This is God's country, if there ever was one, and I, for one, will never get out of sight of it again." But I had tasted fog and brine, and the "landlubber's" lot was too monotonously tame for me. The next spring saw me on the deck of the same schooner headed for the Newfoundland Banks, the home of the codfish and the fog. A seafaring ancestry and a boyhood spent within sound of the surf doubtless had much to do with my love of the salt water. My grandfather was one of six brothers who were sea captains, and our family had clung to the North Shore of Massachusetts Bay almost since the first white settler had moored his bark in that vicinity, more than two hundred years before. My boyhood home was originally a fishing town, since changed to manufacturing, and was fragrant with traditions of the sea. Many of the neighborhood homes in which I visited as a boy had souvenirs of the ocean displayed on the mantelpiece or on the everlasting solitude of the parlor table. There were great conch shells that a boy could put to his ear and hear the surf roaring on the beaches from which they had been taken; articles made of sandalwood; curiously wrought things under glass; miniature pagodas; silk scarfs; bow-legged idols; and a wonderful model of the good ship Dolphin, or of some other equally staunch craft, in which the breadwinner, father or son, had sailed on some eventful voyage. These had all been "brought from over sea," I was told, and this gave me the impression that "over sea" must be a very rich and interesting place. But the souvenirs of the sea were not as interesting to me as its survivors. We had in our town, and especially in our end of it, which was called "the Cove," a choice assortment of old sea dogs who had sailed every sea, in every clime--had seen the world, in fact, and were not averse, under the stimulus of good listeners, to telling all they knew about it and sometimes a little more. Scattered through the Cove were many little shoemakers' shops, into which, especially in the long winter evenings, these old salts would drift. There around the little cylinder stove, with its leather-chip fire, leaking a fragrance the memory of which makes me homesick as I write about it, they would swap their stories of the sea, many of which had originally been based on fact. These old derelicts--and some of the younger seafaring men--were better than dime novels to us boys, for we could always question them and draw out another story. Some of them were unconscious heroes who had often risked their lives for their comrades and the vessel owners; and for the support and comfort of their families no dangers or hardships had seemed too great to be undertaken or endured. We boys held these old salts in high esteem, and never forgot to give to each his appropriate title of "Captain" or "Skipper," as the case might be. We also occasionally had some fun with them. We never thought of any of them as bad men, though some of them, by their own testimony, had lived wild and reckless lives. One or two, according to persistent rumor, had carried out cargoes of New England rum and brought back shiploads of "black ivory" from the West coast of Africa. Not a few of them were picturesquely profane. Old Skipper Tom Bowman had a very original oath, "tender-eyed Satan!" which he must have had copyrighted, as he was the only one that I ever heard use it. We boys would sometimes bait him, provoking him to exasperation, that we might hear it in all its original force and fervor. [Illustration: Old Salts Are More Picturesque and Companionable Spinning Yarns about the Stove in a Shoemaker's Shop than when One Is Obliged to Live, Eat and Sleep with Them] We knew his habits well. He eked out a scanty sustenance by fishing off the shore and would frequently come in on the ebb tide and leave his boat half way up the beach, going home to dinner and returning when the flood tide had about reached his boat, to bring it up to its moorings. So one day we dug a "honey pot" by the side of his boat, at the very spot where we knew he would approach it, covered it over with dry seaweed and about the time he was due we were lying out of sight, but within earshot, behind the rocks. He drifted down, at peace with all the world, went in over the tops of his rubber boots, and then, for one blissful moment, we had our reward. Some of these old salts were so thoroughly salted, being drenched with the brine of many stormy voyages, that they kept in good condition well beyond their allotted time of three score years and ten. Some were of uncertain age, but were evidently well beyond the century mark, as proved by the aggregate time consumed on their many voyages, the stories of which they had reiterated with such convincing detail. One of these, Captain Sam Morris, was patiently stalked by the boys through a long season of yarn spinning, careful tally being kept. When the tale was complete, the boys closed in on him. "How old are you, Captain Sam?" "Oh, I dunno, I ain't kep' count." "Are you seventy?" "I swan! I dunno." "Well, you were on the Old Dove with Skipper Jimmie Stone, weren't you?" "Sartin." "You were on the Constitution, when she fought the Guerriere, weren't you?" How could he deny it? "Well, weren't you with Captain Lovett on four of his three-year trading voyages to Australia and China?" "Course I was." "How about those trips 'round the Horn, on the clipper ship 'Mary Jane' from '49 to '55?" "I was thar." They kept relentlessly on down the list, and then showed him the tally. Allowing for infancy, an abbreviated boyhood on land, and the time they had known him since he had quit the sea, he was one hundred and thirty-five years old. The showing did not disconcert him, however. He was interested, but he had told those stories so often and had come to believe each of them so implicitly that he could not doubt them in the aggregate. He simply exclaimed: "Well, I'll be darned! I feel like a young chap o' sixty." But while some of these old sailors liked to "spin yarns" and some had their frailties, they were, as a rule, strong characters, rugged, honest, courageous, unselfish--real men, in fact, whose sterling qualities stood out in strong contrast against the unreality of many timid and non-effective lives about them. It was not their romancing, but their reality, and the achieving power of their lives that appealed to me as a boy, and I was drawn to the kind of life that had helped to produce such men. Then, too, the ocean itself, with its immensity, its mystery, its moods, the danger in it, and the man's work in mastering it, was almost irresistibly attractive to me. On graduating from high school I declined my father's offer to send me to college, thinking that the life I had in view did not require a college education. Then he made me a very attractive business proposition, but it looked to me like slavery, and what I wanted most was freedom. My father and mother were both Christians, but I had become skeptical, profane and reckless of public opinion. I had left home for a boarding house in the same town at eighteen, and at nineteen I had slipped the moorings and was heading out to sea. ADRIFT My second trip to the Banks was made in response to the same kind of impulse as that which drives the nomad out of his winter quarters in the springtime or brings the wild geese back to their summer feeding grounds. To one who really loves the ocean, the return to it after a period of exile on the land, is an indescribable satisfaction. There was at least one of our crew who experienced this emotion as our staunch little craft turned her nose to the blue water, and with all sail set and lee rail almost under water, leaped away from the petty restrictions of the shore into the practically limitless expanse of the Atlantic. In a week we were on the fishing ground and sentiment gave way to business. Our schooner was a trawler, equipped with six dories and a crew of fifteen, including the skipper, the cook, the boy and two men for each boat. Each trawl had a thousand hooks, a strong ground line six thousand feet long, with a smaller line two and a half feet in length, with hook attached, at every fathom. These hooks were baited and the trawl was set each night. The six trawls stretched away from the vessel like the spokes from the hub of a wheel, the buoy marking the outer anchor of each trawl being over a mile away. I was captain of a dory this year, passing as a seasoned fisherman with my experience of the year before. My helper or "bow-man" was John Hogan, a young Irishman about my own age, red-headed, but green at the fishing business. John's mother kept a little oasis for thirsty neighbors, in a city adjacent to my home town, and his father was a man of unsteady habits. But John was a good fellow, active and willing, and, though he had not inherited a rugged constitution, he could pull a good steady stroke. Soon after we reached the Banks, a storm swept our decks and nearly carried away our boats. As a result, the dories, particularly my own, were severely strained and leaked badly. For two weeks, however, we had no fog, but on the morning of the second of June, just as we went over the schooner's side and shaped our course for our outer buoy, a bank of fog with an edge as perpendicular as the side of a house moved down on us like a great glacier, though much more rapidly, shutting us in and everything else out from sight. It was ugly and thick, as if all the fog factories from Grand Manan to Labrador had been working overtime for the two weeks before and had sent their whole output in one consignment. We had just passed our inner buoy when the fog struck us, but we kept on for the outer buoy, as was customary in foggy weather, since it was safer to get that and pull in toward the vessel, rather than take the inner buoy, pull out, and find ourselves with a boatload of fish and ugly weather over a mile from the vessel. We had our bearings, I had often found the buoy in the fog and believed that we could do it again. We kept on rowing and knew when we had rowed far enough, though we had not counted the strokes; but we found nothing. "Guess we have drifted too far to leeward; pull up to windward a little. That's strange, we must have passed it, this blamed fog is so thick. What's that over there?" We zigzagged back and forth for some time and then realized that we had missed it and must go back to the vessel and get our inner buoy. This seemed easy, but we found that it is as important to have a point of departure as it is to have a destination, and not knowing just where we were we could not head our boat to where the vessel was. We shouted, and listened, rowed this way and that way but not a sound came to us through the fog, although we knew that the boy must be at his post ringing the bell, so that the boats could hark their way back to the vessel. I learned afterward that the tide that morning was exceptionally strong. I had noted its direction and made allowance for it, before leaving the schooner, but we were where the Gulf Stream and the Arctic Current are not very far apart and the resulting tides are strong and changeable. We were in the grip of two great elemental and relentless forces, the impenetrable fog, cutting off all our communications, and the strong ocean current sweeping us away into the uninhabited waste of waters. From my experience of the year before, I knew what it meant to be lost in the fog on the Banks, practically in mid-ocean; I understood that if the fog lasted for a week or ten days as it sometimes did, especially at that season of the year, it was a fight for our lives. I soon realized that we were lost and that the fight was on. We were certainly stripped for it, without impedimenta, no anchor, compass, provisions, water, no means of catching fish or fowl, and with rather light clothing, as we were dressed for work and not for protection against cold. But youth is optimistic and claims what is coming to it, with a margin for luck, and we started on our new voyage of discovery with good courage and a cheerful disregard of the hardships, dangers and possible death in the fog, with which and into which we were drifting. It would not be strictly accurate to say that we saw nothing during all the time we were adrift, but the things we saw were of the same stuff that the fog was made of. Early in the first day I saw a sail dimly outlined in the misty air. I called John's attention to it with a shout, and he saw it too, but, as we rowed toward it, the sail retreated and then disappeared. We thought that this was strange, for the wind was not strong enough to take a vessel away from us faster than we could row, and we were near enough to make ourselves heard. Soon, the sail appeared again, and again we shouted and rowed toward it, and again it glided away from us and disappeared, and again, and again, through the seemingly endless procession of the slow-moving hours of that first day, we chased the phantom ship. When night came on, there came with it a deepening sense of loneliness and isolation. The night was also very cold, the chill penetrated our thin clothing, and we were compelled to row the boat to keep ourselves, not warm, but a little less cold. The icebergs coming down on the Arctic Current hold the season back, and early June on the Banks is much like April on the Massachusetts coast. We tried to sleep lying down in the bottom of the boat with our heads in a trawl tub, but we were stiff with cold, the boat leaked badly, and it was necessary to get up frequently and bail out the water. The thought also that we might drift within sight or sound of a vessel, or within sight of a trawl buoy, made us afraid to sleep. The night finally wore away, the second day and night were like the first, the third like the first and second and the fourth day like another "cycle of Cathay." These four days and nights were like solitary confinement to the prisoner, the grim monotony and lack of incident contributing to the cumulative effect and accentuating the sense of helplessness and isolation. There was nothing to relieve the situation. We were like an army lying in trenches in the face of the enemy, waiting for the enemy's move. The fourth night we were startled by the sound of the fog horn of a sailing vessel. The wind was blowing almost a gale. We listened to get the direction, then sprang to the oars and rowed hard to intercept her, shouting, listening, rowing with all our strength, and willing, if need be, to be run down, in the chance of being seen and rescued. The horn finally sounded so near that it seemed that we could almost see the vessel, and we felt sure that they could hear our call. But our hearts sank as the sounds grew fainter and soon we were alone again with the wind and fog. The fifth day we heard the whistle of an ocean steamship. "We can surely head this one off," we thought, but she quickly passed us, too far away to see or hear. It was a bitter disappointment as this floating hotel, full of warmth, food, water, shelter and companionship, for the lack of each and all of which we were perishing, rushed by, so near, yet unconscious and unheeding, in too great a hurry to stop and listen to our cry for help. I have thought of this since, as I have hurried along with the crowd in the street of a great city and wondered, if we stopped to listen, what cry might come to us out of the deep. The fifth night the sea was running high. We were drifting with a trawl tub fastened to the "painter" as a drag to keep the boat headed to the wind, when it began to rain. I spread my oil jacket to catch the water, and we waited until we could collect enough for a drink, watching the drops eagerly, as we had tasted neither food nor water since leaving the vessel five days before. Just as we were about to drink, however, our boat shipped a sea, filling the oil jacket with salt water, and there was no more rain. Every day we passed great flocks of sea fowl floating on the water, coming frequently almost within an oar's length, but always just out of reach. We were in worse condition than the Ancient Mariner, with food as well as water everywhere about us, and not a morsel or a drop to eat or drink. Thirst is harder to endure than hunger, and yet hunger finally wakes up the wolf; and the time comes when even the thought of cannibalism can be entertained without horror. About this time John asked me, "Well, what do you think?" "Oh," I said, "I think that one of us will come out of it all right." He started, as if he thought that I had premature designs on him. "You need not be afraid," I said, "I'll not take advantage of you." He knew that I was the stronger and perhaps thought that if I felt as he did, his chances were very small. The sixth day, John seemed like a man overwhelmed with the horror of a situation that had gotten beyond his control. He cowered at the opposite end of the boat and had said nothing for a long time. Finally he opened a conversation with a person of whose presence I had not been conscious. "Jim," he said, "come, give me a piece." "Jim who?" I asked. "Piece of what? Where is he?" "Jim Woodbury," he answered, "don't you see him? There he is, hiding under that oil jacket. He's been there over half an hour, eating pie, and he won't give me any." I tried to laugh him out of his delusion, but the thing was real to him. Soon he jumped up and said: "I'm going on board; I'm tired of staying out here." "How will you get there?" I asked. "Walk," he answered, "the water ain't deep," and he started to get overboard. I caught him and pulled him back into the boat, not any too soon, for if he had gone overboard, the sharks would probably have gotten him, for they were not very far away. Every now and then I had seen their fins cutting the surface of the water, as they patrolled back and forth, waiting their time, or ours, as if they knew that it was only a question of time. Soon John started again to get overboard. This time I punished him so severely that he did not try it again. After that, I had to keep my eye on him constantly. His ravings about food were not particularly soothing to my feelings, for I was as hungry as he, only not so demonstrative about it. The seventh day drifted slowly by and the fog still held us captive. For a week we had had no food, no water, and scarcely any sleep; having our boots on continuously stopped the circulation in our feet with the same effect as if they had been frozen; we were chilled to the bone; my boat mate was insane. Since the whistle of the steamship had died away in the distance, two days before, no sound had come to us out of the fog but the voices of the wind and the swash of the waves. I knew the chart of the Banks and had a general idea as to where we were. There is a great barren tract on the Banks where few fish are found and fishermen seldom go, and we had drifted into this man-forsaken place. I had almost said "God-forsaken" too, but something began to shape itself in my mind about that time, that makes it difficult for me now to say this. Rather, as I look back on our experience, I feel more like claiming fellowship with the "wanderer" who called the place of his hardship "Bethel" because it was there, at the end of self and of favoring conditions, that he found God. THE PILOT I was near "the end of my rope"--I was not frightened, or discouraged; my mind was perfectly clear; I was not stampeded. Of course, I had thought of God and of prayer, but I was a skeptic, as I supposed, and considered both not proven. But the steady contemplation of the probability of death, for seven successive days, under conditions that compelled candor, raised questions that skepticism could not answer, and gave to my questions answers that skepticism could not refute. There comes a time, under such conditions, when common sense asserts itself and sophistry fails to satisfy. Since I made this discovery in my personal experience, I have learned that my case was not peculiar, but in keeping with a general law in human experience, long understood and admirably stated in the 107th Psalm. Such words as these have come "out of the depths" and it is sometimes necessary to go down into the depths to prove them to be true. "They wandered.... in a solitary way; they found no city to dwell in. Hungry and thirsty, their soul fainted in them. Then they cried unto the Lord in their trouble, and he delivered them out of their distresses, and he led them forth by the right way, that they might go to a city of habitation.... Such as sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, being bound in affliction and iron; because they rebelled against the words of God, and contemned the counsel of the Most High: therefore he brought down their heart with labor; they fell down and there was none to help. Then they cried unto the Lord in their trouble, and he saved them out of their distresses. He brought them out of darkness and the shadow of death, and brake their bands in sunder..... They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; these see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep. For he commandeth, and raiseth the stormy wind, which lifteth up the waves thereof. They mount up to the heaven, they go down again to the depths: their soul is melted because of trouble... they are at their wits' end. Then they cry unto the Lord in their trouble, and he bringeth them out of their distresses. He maketh the storm a calm, so that the waves thereof are still. Then are they glad because they be quiet; so he bringeth them unto their desired haven." I had drifted into the "secret place," the door was shut, and it was the right time and place for me to pray. I saw that my life had been a failure, that I was absolutely worthless, and that, if death came then, there was not one good thing that I had ever done that would survive. In fact, I could think of nothing in my life that was worth remembering. I was not so much concerned about my own salvation as for another chance to live and to do an unselfish work in the world. And so I did what I thought then (and think still) was the only sane thing to do, I signaled for the Pilot. That night the rain came. I spread my oil jacket and caught an abundance of water of which we drank deeply. With this refreshment came new hope and new courage for the final struggle, if safety could be gained that way. I reviewed the situation and considered one by one the possible courses we might take. We seemed to be shut in to three things. The first possibility was to row to land; but the nearest land, the Newfoundland coast, was nearly three hundred miles away, and I decided that we did not have the time or the strength to reach it. The second possibility was to be picked up by a passing vessel; but this did not look encouraging, for two had already passed us. The third and last hope was to find a fishing vessel at anchor, and within a reasonable distance. This last possibility seemed almost probable. But _how_ probable? Possibly within ten miles, probably within twenty-five, certainly within _fifty_, some fishermen were plying their trade, but _where_? There are thirty-two points of the compass, and by deviating one point at the center, a distance of fifty miles would bring us ten miles out of the way at the circumference. We could row fifty miles, but we cannot take chances. Yet there is a snug little fishing craft out there on the rim of the circle, waiting for us to find her! But _which way_ shall we go? I finally decided that this was a problem for the Pilot, and I left it with Him, satisfied that He understood His business and that if He had any orders for me, He knew how to communicate them. The eighth day came, and with it came an impulse to row the boat in a certain direction. This impulse was not unlike the thousands that had come to me before. There was nothing about it to indicate that its source was any higher than my own imagination. If this was a voice from above the fog, it was certainly a still, small one. It was unheeded at first, not unrecognized. Reason said that to conserve our strength we should sit still and wait for the lifting of the fog. Fear whispered that if I obeyed the impulse, we might be rowing directly away from safety. But the impulse persisted and prevailed. "Get up, John," I said, "we have a day's work ahead of us. We are going to row off in this direction." John responded automatically, fear acting in place of reason, but he was soon exhausted and lay down again. I kept on, however, resting now and then, and returning to the oars with the thought that fifty miles was a long distance and that we had a very small margin of time to our credit. Our course was with the wind, and nature worked with us all that eighth day and on into the night, as the pressure on me drove us toward our goal. About the middle of the eighth night I realized that I had reached the limit of my fighting strength. John was in worse condition than I, for I still had hope, but my hope was not in myself. Then I talked the situation over with the Pilot. We had nowhere else to go; we had come as far as we could; our time was nearly up--what of the night? and what of the morning? John was asleep; the world was a long way off: the sea and the mist seemed to have rolled over us and to have buried us ten thousand fathoms deep. But "out of the depths I cried," and I found the communication open. Between midnight and dawn the fog lifted and from the overhanging clouds the rain fell gently through the remainder of the night. John lay in his end of the boat, but I sat watching. Finally, as if in response to some secret signal, the darkness began its inevitable retreat and, as the night horizon receded, out of the gray of the morning, growing more and more distinct as the shadows fell away, appeared a dark object less than two miles distant, nebulous at first, then unmistakable in its character. It was a solitary fishing vessel lying at anchor, toward which we had been rowing and drifting unerringly all through the night and the day before. There it was! only a clumsy old fisherman, but it was the best thing in all the world to us, and it was anchored and could not get away! I do not recall the experience of any tumultuous emotion as this messenger of hope appeared on our horizon, but we knew that we were safe. How easy it is to write this simple word of four letters! but, to realize it, one must have a background of despair. Since that morning, the words "safe," "safety," "salvation," have always come to me freighted with reality. It is doubtful if any of the vessel's crew had seen our boat, as it was scarcely daylight and such a small object lying close to the water would not be readily discernible. I had thought, a few hours before, that my strength was entirely exhausted, but the sight of the vessel called out a reserve sufficient for the final effort. As I slowly brought our boat alongside, some of the crew were in evidence, getting ready for their day's work, and they seemed perplexed to account for our early morning call. But, when we came close to the vessel, our emaciated appearance evidently told the main outlines of our story. They called to the others in a foreign tongue and the whole crew crowded to the rail. One strong fellow jumped into our boat and lifted John up while others reached down to help. Then, with their assistance, I tumbled on board, stiff with cold and with feet like stone. They gave us brandy and took us to the warm cabin where breakfast was being prepared and it is difficult to say which was more grateful, the smell of food or the warmth of the fire. John was put into the captain's bunk. It was a good exchange for he was not far from "Davy Jones' locker." We had been on board only a few hours when the fog rolled back again and continued for some time afterward. The vessel was a French fishing brig from the island of St. Malo in the English Channel. None of the crew understood English and neither of us could speak French, but they understood the language of distress and kindness needs no interpreter. The captain showed me a calendar and pointed to the tenth of June, and when I pointed to the second he evidently found it hard to believe me, but John's condition helped to corroborate my statement. They let us eat as much as we wished, but nature protected us, for the process of eating was so painful at first that I felt like a sword swallower who had partaken too freely of his favorite dish. Fortunately, also, our hosts were living the simple life. Their menu consisted chiefly of sliced bread over which had been poured the broth of fish cooked in water and light wine, the same fish cooked in oil as a second course, bread and hardtack, and an occasional dish of beans, which seemed to be regarded by them as a luxury. They had an abundance of beer and light wine and in the morning before going to haul their trawls, coffee was served with brandy. Cooking was done on a brick platform, or fireplace, in the cabin, and the captain, the mate and all hands sat around one large dish placed on the cabin floor and each helped himself with his own spoon. A loaf of bread was passed around, each cutting off a slice with his own sheath knife. But notwithstanding simple food, frugal meals and primitive conditions, the hospitality was genuine and against the background of our recent hunger, thirst and general wretchedness, the place was heaven and our hosts were angels in thin disguise. In about ten days we were brought into St. Pierre, the French fishing town on the small rocky island of Miquelon, off the Newfoundland coast, the depot of the French fishing fleet and the only remaining foothold for the French of the vast empire once held by them between the North Atlantic and the Mississippi Valley. The American consul took us in charge, sending us to a sailors' boarding house and giving each of us a change of clothing. In another week we were sent on by steamer to Halifax, consigned to the American consul at that port. There John's feet proved to be in such bad condition that it was necessary to send him to the hospital, and, as gangrene had set in, a portion of each foot was amputated. He was "queer" for several weeks, but, with returning physical health, gradually recovered his mental equilibrium. After a few days in Halifax, I was sent on by steamer to Boston, bringing the first news of either our loss or our rescue. On reaching my home town I did not go to a boarding house; there was plenty of room for me in the home and I was contented to stay there for a while. The old salts received me as a long-lost brother, and while the official notice was never handed me, I was made to feel that somewhere in their inner consciousness I had been elected a regular member of the Amalgamated Society of Sea Dogs, and was entitled to an inside seat, if I could find one, about the stove of any shoemaker's shop in the Cove. The Banks were revisited in memory, and all the old fog experiences were brought out, amplified and elongated as far as possible, but it was conceded that we had established a new record in the nautical traditions of the Cove. It took several years for me to inch my way back to physical solvency from the effects of my exposure, and this delayed the carrying out of my plans, to which my fishing trips had been a prelude. The strange thing that I now have to record is that I soon forgot, or willfully ignored, my whole experience of God, prayer and deliverance, and became apparently more skeptical and indifferent than before. The only way I can explain this is that I had not become a Christian, and my dominant mental attitude reasserted itself when danger was past. I practically never attended church. My position and influence, however, were not merely negative; I was positively antagonistic to Christianity, and this attitude continued up to the April following. [Illustration: Dave Lived in a Beautiful Old Place Near the Shore and I Had Been in the Habit of Spending Many of My Sundays with Him] But while I forgot, I was not forgotten. God had begun a work in me, the continuation and completion of which waited on my willingness to cooperate, and the most powerful force in the world, that of believing and persistent prayer, was being released in my behalf. My mother was a woman of remarkable Christian character, with rare qualities of mind and heart, knowledge and love of the Scriptures, and a deep and genuine prayer life. Notwithstanding my lack of sympathy with her in the things most fundamental, she had confidence that the tide would turn with me. Her confidence, however, was not based on me. She knew the Lord and understood that it was not the sheep that went out after the Shepherd who was lost until it found Him. So she kept a well-worn path to the place of prayer. She was wise and said little to me on the subject, but I knew her life and what it was for which she was most deeply solicitous. She had taught me from the Bible as a boy, and many a cold winter night, though weary with a day filled with household cares, she had come to my room and "tucked me in" with prayer. My attitude toward Christianity in the winter following my second fishing trip on the Newfoundland Banks was different from that of the year before. Then I had been a skeptic, as I assumed, and declined responsibility for what to me was unknown and seemed to be unknowable. But, in the meantime, something had happened that had lifted this whole question with me from the realm of speculation to that of experience. The Pilot's response to my signal might, for the time, be ignored, but it could not be forgotten. But, by deliberately putting aside my convictions of God, prayer and deliverance, treating them as if they had no existence in fact, I had introduced an element of distrust of my own mental processes. The will had taken the place of judgment, and the result was confusion; I was in the fog. I never attended prayer meeting, but one Sunday night I was passing the chapel where such a meeting was being held. I had been there with my mother, as a boy, and while the meetings were "slow," they were pervaded with a true devotional spirit and a something real, though to me intangible and difficult to describe. Whether I was influenced by the memory of these boyhood glimpses into the spiritual world, or by the spirit of the scoffer and the cynic possessing me at that time, or by the still small voice that had pointed the way to safety only a few months before, I never fully knew, but I went in. The room was filled with people and a meeting was in progress, during which two men, old neighbors, whose lives I knew well, told the story of their recent conversion. One was Skipper Andrew Woodbury, a man of blameless life, but who had lived sixty-five years without religion. The other was my uncle by marriage, twenty years my senior, a close personal friend and familiarly called "Dave." I had been in the habit of spending many of my Sundays with him, as he was a non-church goer, companionable, genuine and open-hearted as the day. It was evident that he had found something that he wanted to share with his friends, and while I made light of it at the time, his testimony made a profound impression on me. Toward the close of the meeting the leader gave the invitation to those "who want to become Christians" to rise. No one stood up. Then he came within closer range and invited those "who would like to become Christians," but still no one responded. I was becoming interested and was almost disappointed when no one answered to this second invitation. Then he put up the proposition to those "who _have no objections_ to becoming Christians." "He will get a lot of them on this call," I said to myself, but to my surprise, no one stirred. "Well," I thought, "this is too bad, but why couldn't I help him out? I have no objections to becoming a Christian," and I stood up. I slipped out of the meeting ahead of the crowd, but in my room that night before I went to bed, I found myself on my knees, trying to pray. I did not succeed very well. "Oh, what's the use?" I said, "there's nothing in it." But I lay awake far into the night, thinking, feeling the beating of my heart, wondering what kept it going and "what if it should stop suddenly?" But in less than a day these impressions had passed. I laughed them off and kept on in my own way. For six weeks I steered clear of Dave, but I did not want to lose his friendship, and then, too, I was rather curious to find out what, if anything, he had really discovered. So, one Sunday morning in early April, I drifted down to his home, as I had done so many times before. I stopped at my father's house on the way, and after a short visit, went on to Dave's. It was a pleasant morning, and I left my overcoat at home, as I had but a short distance to go. Dave lived in a beautiful old farmhouse near the shore, overlooking the harbor, and our Sunday program had been walking along the beach, or sitting around the house smoking, eating apples, drinking cider and killing time in the most unconventional way possible. "It's too bad," I thought, "that Dave has got religion, it spoils all our good times"; but I was hoping to find him less strenuous on the subject than when I had heard him in the chapel six weeks before. But Dave's conversion was so genuine and his enthusiasm so real that it was impossible for me entirely to resist and beat back the impact of his testimony. I concealed my impressions, however, and told him that no doubt he needed it, it was probably a good thing for him, I wouldn't say a word to discourage him, but as for me, I did not need that kind of medicine. He urged me to go to church with him, but I declined his invitation so positively that he did not renew it. "I'll walk along with you as far as the corner," I said, but when we came to the point of parting an impulse came to me to go with him. "Walk slow, Dave," I said, "I'll go in and get my coat and go to church with you." We were both surprised, he, because he had given up all hope of my going with him, and I, because ten seconds before I had no thought of going. I have often thought of it since, and never without a sense of profound thankfulness for the impulse that came to me that bright Sunday morning, at the parting of the ways. I went with Dave to church that morning, came back and spent the afternoon with him and went with him again to the evening service, after which I remained for personal conversation. Dave had exhausted his ammunition, but the man who talked with me had been practicing the Christian life for twenty-five years and was a man of fine personality, culture and business experience. He knew the Gospel and also knew human nature, and mine in particular, while I knew that he was genuine. "Charlie," he said, "don't you think it is time for you to be a Christian?" "No," I answered, "I can't be a hypocrite; I can't pretend to believe what I don't believe." "What is there that you can't believe?" "Well, there is the Bible, for instance." "Don't you believe the Bible?" "About as I believe Robinson Crusoe." "Do you think the trouble is with the Bible, or with yourself? Don't you think that, if you had faith, as a Christian man, the Bible would be a different book to you?" "That looks easy; of course, if I had faith I would be just as you are. But how can a man believe what he does not believe?" "Did you ever hear about prayer?" "Yes, I have heard something about it." "Don't you think that there is something in it?" "Yes, I am inclined to think there is." (I could not honestly deny it in the light of my experience.) "Well, don't you think that if you were to pray to God for faith, God would give it to you?" This question touched the spring of memory, and conscience showed me what it thought of me. I was ashamed of my littleness and of my unscientific attitude of mind in wilfully ignoring the greatest facts of my experience, and I was also ashamed of my ingratitude. And so, in an unguarded moment, that is, in a moment when my will was off its guard and my judgment asserted its right to be heard, I gave my answer to the question and the answer was, "Yes, I believe that He would." And then came the question, "Won't you do it?" This question precipitated the fight of my life. I do not remember how long my friend waited for my answer, but judging from the struggle in my mind, it must have been a long time. What would it mean for me to answer this question in the affirmative? First, it would mean the sacrifice of my independence; next, it would mean fellowship with a lot of so-called Christians, whose Christianity was not of a manly type; third, it would mean a step in the dark, and this seemed to me to be unreasonable. On the other hand, it might mean the winning of something better than that which I called independence; it might also mean fellowship with the really great characters of the Christian Church, and these men had always appeared very attractive to me. With this last thought came the question, How did these men live the victorious life? and it was clear to me that they lived it by faith. Then came the thought, How did they begin to have faith? and it seemed to me that this step in the dark, which I hesitated to take, was probably the very step by which these great men had passed from a life of unbelief to their victory of faith. This last thought came as a revelation. It had always seemed to me that faith was an experience of the emotions or a satisfying of the intellect, and that one might _obtain_ faith by the _initiative of the will_ was a new idea to me. If this was true, the step in the dark was not unreasonable but scientific and psychological. I was certainly in the dark then. It could be no darker if I went forward in the path to which my friend invited me. I decided therefore to take the step and to pray for faith, hoping that in the process I should find a Christian experience. And so I answered, "Yes, I'll do it." My friend prayed with me and then I prayed, but all that I could say was "Lord, show me the way." I was not conscious of any special interest, I had simply willed to pray and wanted to believe. I had won the fight with myself, however, to the extent of getting the consent of my will to pray and to trust, but I realized that the battle with myself was only begun and I knew also that I had another fight ahead of me, or a series of them, with the conditions that hemmed me in and seemed to make the Christian life impracticable. One of these adverse conditions was my relations with the men in my boarding house. How could I go back and tell them that I had decided to do the thing that I had ridiculed and scoffed at in their presence? Of course this was pure cowardice; I was afraid of their ridicule. But the break was made easier for me than I feared it would be. I found on entering the smoking room of the boarding house, that "Uncle Dick Moss," a rank spiritualist, had the floor. He was on his high horse and was charging up and down the room in the midst of a bitter and blatant Ingersollian tirade against Christianity and the Bible. The crowd was cheering him on. The day before, this probably would have amused me and I might have followed him, supporting his arguments, or rather assertions--there were no arguments. But during the twelve hours that had just passed I had been facing realities and Uncle Dick's exhibition disgusted me. So when he had quieted down, I decided that it was time for me to run up my colors. If the break had to come, it had better come then. "Uncle Dick," I said, "you have been talking about something that you don't know anything about. Here you are swallowing spiritualism, hook, bob and sinker, and having trouble with the Bible and the only religion that can do the business that we need to have done. The trouble with you is that you are afraid that the Bible will upset your spiritualism, and you don't dare to investigate the Bible and stand by the result of your investigation. I'm tired of this whole business, and I have made up my mind to investigate the Bible and, if it is what I think it is, to try to live by it. I am going to be a Christian." A shout and a laugh went up. I was called "Deacon," and it was suggested that I lead in prayer or at least make a few remarks. But I had said enough to put myself on record and it was hardly to be expected that they would take me seriously on such short notice. When it came time to go to bed I felt that in order not to be misunderstood I must pray in the presence of my roommate. He was a cynic and a nothingarian and I felt sure that he would neither understand nor appreciate it. It was hard to bring it about, as he kept on talking in a way that seemed to give me no opportunity to turn the subject naturally. I was tempted to let it pass, but felt that, if I did, it would be fatal to my new-formed purpose. So finally, in almost an agony of awkwardness, I blurted out, "Jim, I don't care what you think about it, I'm going to pray." Jim proved to be entirely mild and agreeable about it, however, and gave me his blessing in a patronizing sort of a way. The next day I burned my bridges behind me by packing my trunk and going home. Up to this time I was conscious of nothing unusual. What things had taken place I had done myself and it had been entirely within my own option and power to do or not to do them. I had received the testimony of at least four witnesses of the fact of conversion and the reality of the Christian life; I had relaxed the opposition of my will and given my judgment a chance to act; I had taken advice from experience; I had prayed; I had turned my face toward the Christian life; I had cut loose from conditions unfriendly to Christian experience, and I was trying to be a Christian. But I was still in the fog. For the next three days I worked very hard trying to be a Christian. I attended a meeting each night, rose for prayer, prayed, did everything I was told to do, and as much more as I could think of. The burden of my prayer and of my requests for prayer was that I might have faith. I wanted to get something that I thought every Christian had, or must have in order to be a Christian, and so far as I knew, I was willing to pay the price. But nothing resulted, except the natural weariness from my own exertions. I was still in the fog. The fifth day was "Fast Day," a good old New England institution, with a prayer meeting in the morning, which I attended and at which I rose for prayer. In the afternoon was a union service, with a civic or semi-religious topic, but I attended it, as I did not want anything to get by me that might contribute to the solution of my problem. There was scarcely anything about the service that was calculated to make a spiritual impression. The address was poor, as also was the music. I tried to follow the argument, but finally gave it up and began to think about that which had been uppermost in my mind for the five days past. The thing baffled me; the object of my quest had eluded my every effort to grasp it. The experience of the five days was new, but it contained nothing but that which could be accounted for by purely natural causes. I reviewed the whole period to see if I had left out any essential part of the formula. Was it possible that my skepticism had been well founded, that there was nothing in the so-called "Christian experience" after all? It was about four o'clock in the afternoon of the fifth day since I had set my face toward the Christian life and I was still in the fog. But I was weary with the effort, and as I thought it over, I said to myself "What are you trying to do?" and the answer was, "I am trying to be a Christian." Then it dawned upon me that _trying_ was not _trusting_; that, if I succeeded in my effort, I should have only a self-made product and not the religion of the Bible and that it was unreasonable for me to expect the results of faith before exercising faith itself. I was stumbling at the very simplicity of faith. I was working to win what God was waiting to give, while my latent faculty of faith, the greatest asset in personality, was lying worthless through disuse. I thought of my experience on the ocean, when finally, helpless to help myself, I had left my whole problem with the Pilot and He had taken command and brought us through to safety, and so I deliberately gave up the struggle and said to myself, "It is right for me to serve God and to live for Him, and I will do it whether I have what they call an 'experience' or not." And, having settled the question, I dismissed it and waited for instructions. [Illustration: It Came as Quietly as the Daylight Comes When the Night is Done] And then something happened, for, from without, surprising me with its presence, like the discovery of a welcome but unexpected guest, there came into my life a deep, great, overflowing peace. I had never known it before, and therefore I could not by any possibility have imagined it; but, I recognized it as something from God. It was not sensational, it came quietly; as quietly "as the daylight comes when the night is done." It was not emotional, unless it was in itself an emotion. But emotions are transient and this had come to stay. With the peace, there came also something that seemed to be a reinforcement of my life principle, an achieving power, a disposition to dare and an ability to do that which hitherto had seemed impossible; and the petty pessimism of the past gave way before this new consciousness. With this deep incoming tide of peace and power came a clearing of the mental atmosphere, and I saw that the fog had lifted. When I saw this, I said to myself quietly, "I think I am a Christian," and almost immediately added, "I am a Christian!" The fog had passed, and the drifting was over; I had come within sight of land. What land it was I did not then know, but it proved to be a new world. How great it is I do not yet fully understand, but I have been exploring it thirty years and I think it is a continent. 
39231	----	[Illustration: Cover] JOEL: A BOY OF GALILEE. Works of ANNIE FELLOWS JOHNSTON The Little Colonel Series (_Trade Mark, Reg. U. S. Pat. Of._) Each one vol., large 12mo, cloth, illustrated The Little Colonel Stories $1.50 (Containing in one volume the three stories, "The Little Colonel," "The Giant Scissors," and "Two Little Knights of Kentucky.") The Little Colonel's House Party 1.50 The Little Colonel's Holidays 1.50 The Little Colonel's Hero 1.50 The Little Colonel at Boarding-School 1.50 The Little Colonel in Arizona 1.50 The Little Colonel's Christmas Vacation 1.50 The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor 1.50 The Little Colonel's Knight Comes Riding 1.50 Mary Ware: The Little Colonel's Chum 1.50 Mary Ware in Texas 1.50 Mary Ware's Promised Land 1.50 The above 12 vols., _boxed_, as a set 18.00 * * * * * The Little Colonel Good Times Book 1.50 The Little Colonel Doll Book--First Series 1.50 The Little Colonel Doll Book--Second Series 1.50 Illustrated Holiday Editions Each one vol., small quarto, cloth, illustrated, and printed in color The Little Colonel $1.25 The Giant Scissors 1.25 Two Little Knights of Kentucky 1.25 Big Brother 1.25 Cosy Corner Series Each one vol., thin 12mo, cloth, illustrated The Little Colonel $.50 The Giant Scissors .50 Two Little Knights of Kentucky .50 Big Brother .50 Ole Mammy's Torment .50 The Story of Dago .50 Cicely .50 Aunt 'Liza's Hero .50 The Quilt that Jack Built .50 Flip's "Islands of Providence" .50 Mildred's Inheritance .50 Other Books Joel: A Boy of Galilee $1.50 In the Desert of Waiting Net .50 The Three Weavers Net .50 Keeping Tryst Net .50 The Legend of the Bleeding Heart Net .50 The Rescue of the Princess Winsome Net .50 The Jester's Sword Net .50 Asa Holmes 1.00 Travelers Five Along Life's Highway 1.25 THE PAGE COMPANY 53 Beacon Street Boston, Mass. [Illustration: "'THEN TAKE YOURSELF OUT OF MY SIGHT FOR EVER'" (_See page 96_)] _NEW ILLUSTRATED EDITION_ JOEL: A BOY OF GALILEE By ANNIE FELLOWS JOHNSTON Author of "The Little Colonel Series," "Big Brother," "Ole Mammy's Torment," "Asa Holmes," etc. With Pictures by L. J. BRIDGMAN [Illustration] BOSTON THE PAGE COMPANY PUBLISHERS _Copyright, 1895_ BY ROBERTS BROTHERS _Copyright, 1904_ BY THE PAGE COMPANY _All rights reserved_ Eleventh Impression, October, 1910 Twelfth Impression, March, 1915 Thirteenth Impression, March, 1918 THE COLONIAL PRESS C. H. SIMONDS CO., BOSTON, U. S. A. PUBLISHER'S PREFACE IN this volume, it has been the purpose of the author to present to children, through "Joel," as accurate a picture of the times of the Christ as has been given to older readers through "Ben Hur." With this in view, the customs of the private and public life of the Jews, the temple service with its sacerdotal rites, and the minute observances of the numerous holidays have been studied so carefully that the descriptions have passed the test of the most critical inspection. An eminent rabbi pronounces them correct in every detail. While the story is that of an ordinary boy, living among shepherds and fishermen, it touches at every point the gospel narrative, making Joel, in a natural and interesting way, a witness to the miracles, the death, and the resurrection of the Nazarene. It was with the deepest reverence that the task was undertaken, and the fact that the little book is accomplishing its mission is evinced not only by the approval accorded its first editions by so many, from Bible students to bishops, but by the boys and girls here and in distant lands. LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE "'THEN TAKE YOURSELF OUT OF MY SIGHT FOR EVER'" (_See page 96_) _Frontispiece_ "HE LOOKED DOWN AT PHINEAS, AND SMILED BLISSFULLY" 34 "'I PEEPED OUT 'TWEEN 'E WOSE-VINES'" 82 "NOT A WORD WAS SAID" 104 "'WE TALKED LATE'" 139 "'YOU BUT MOCK ME, BOY'" 184 "A DARK FIGURE WENT SKULKING OUT INTO THE NIGHT" 203 "'THE STONE IS GONE!'" 233 JOEL: A BOY OF GALILEE. CHAPTER I. IT was market day in Capernaum. Country people were coming in from the little villages among the hills of Galilee, with fresh butter and eggs. Fishermen held out great strings of shining perch and carp, just dipped up from the lake beside the town. Vine-dressers piled their baskets with tempting grapes, and boys lazily brushed the flies from the dishes of wild honey, that they had gone into the country before day-break to find. A ten-year-old girl pushed her way through the crowded market-place, carrying her baby brother in her arms, and scolding another child, who clung to her skirts. "Hurry, you little snail!" she said to him. "There's a camel caravan just stopped by the custom-house. Make haste, if you want to see it!" Their bare feet picked their way quickly over the stones, down to the hot sand of the lake shore. The children crept close to the shaggy camels, curious to see what they carried in their huge packs. But before they were made to kneel, so that the custom-house officials could examine the loads, the boy gave an exclamation of surprise. "Look, Jerusha! Look!" he cried, tugging at her skirts. "What's that?" Farther down the line, came several men carrying litters. On each one was a man badly wounded, judging by the many bandages that wrapped him. Jerusha pushed ahead to hear what had happened. One of the drivers was telling a tax-gatherer. "In that last rocky gorge after leaving Samaria," said the man, "we were set upon by robbers. They swarmed down the cliffs, and fought as fiercely as eagles. These men, who were going on ahead, had much gold with them. They lost it all, and might have been killed, if we had not come up behind in such numbers. That poor fellow there can hardly live, I think, he was beaten so badly." The children edged up closer to the motionless form on the litter. It was badly bruised and blood-stained, and looked already lifeless. "Let's go, Jerusha," whispered the boy, whimpering and pulling at her hand. "I don't like to look at him." With the heavy baby still in her arms, and the other child tagging after, she started slowly back towards the market-place. "I'll tell you what we'll do," she exclaimed. "Let's go up and get the other children, and play robbers. We never did do that before. It will be lots of fun." There was a cry of welcome as Jerusha appeared again in the market-place, where a crowd of children were playing tag, regardless of the men and beasts they bumped against. They were all younger than herself, and did not resent her important air when she called, "Come here! I know a better game than that!" She told them what she had just seen and heard down at the beach, and drew such a vivid picture of the attack, that the children were ready for anything she might propose. "Now we'll choose sides," she said. "I'll be a rich merchant coming up from Jerusalem with my family and servants, and the rest of you can be robbers. We'll go along with our goods, and you pounce out on us as we go by. You may take the baby as a prisoner if you like," she added, with a mischievous grin. "I'm tired of carrying him." A boy sitting near by on a door-step, jumped up eagerly. "Let me play, too, Jerusha!" he cried. "I'll be one of the robbers. I know just the best places to hide!" The girl paused an instant in her choosing to say impatiently, although not meaning to be unkind, "Oh, no, Joel! We do not want you. You're too lame to run. You can't play with us!" The bright, eager look died out of the boy's face, and an angry light shone in his eyes. He pressed his lips together hard, and sat down again on the step. There was a patter of many bare feet as the children raced away. Their voices sounded fainter and fainter, till they were lost entirely in the noise of the busy street. Usually, Joel found plenty to amuse and interest him here. He liked to watch the sleepy donkeys with their loads of fresh fruit and vegetables. He liked to listen to the men as they cried their wares, or chatted over the bargains with their customers. There was always something new to be seen in the stalls and booths. There was always something new to be heard in the scraps of conversation that came to him where he sat. Down this street there sometimes came long caravans; for this was "the highway to the sea,"--the road that led from Egypt to Syria. Strange, dusky faces sometimes passed this way; richly dressed merchant princes with their priceless stuffs from beyond the Nile; heavy loads of Babylonian carpets; pearls from Ceylon, and rich silks for the court of the wicked Herodias, in the town beyond. Fisherman and sailor, rabbi and busy workman passed in an endless procession. Sometimes a Roman soldier from the garrison came by with ringing step and clanking sword. Then Joel would start up to look after the erect figure, with a longing gaze that told more plainly than words, his admiration of such strength and symmetry. But this morning the crowd gave him a strange, lonely feeling,--a hungry longing for companionship. Two half-grown boys passed by on their way to the lake, with fish nets slung over their shoulders. He knew the larger one,--a rough, kind-hearted fellow who had once taken him in his boat across the lake. He gave Joel a careless, good-natured nod as he passed. A moment after he felt a timid pull at the fish net he was carrying, and turned to see the little cripple's appealing face. "Oh, Dan!" he cried eagerly. "Are you going out on the lake this morning? Could you take me with you?" The boy hesitated. Whatever kindly answer he may have given, was rudely interrupted by his companion, whom Joel had never seen before. "Oh, no!" he said roughly. "We don't want anybody limping along after us. You can't come, Jonah; you would bring us bad luck." "My name isn't Jonah!" screamed the boy, angrily clinching his fists. "It's Joel!" "Well, it is all the same," his tormentor called back, with a coarse laugh. "You're a Jonah, any way." There were tears in the boy's eyes this time, as he dragged himself back again to the step. "I hate everybody in the world!" he said in a hissing sort of whisper. "I hate'm! I hate'm!" A stranger passing by turned for a second look at the little cripple's sensitive, refined face. A girlishly beautiful face it would have been, were it not for the heavy scowl that darkened it. Joel pulled the ends of his head-dress round to hide his crooked back, and drew the loose robe he wore over his twisted leg. Life seemed very bitter to him just then. He would gladly have changed places with the heavily laden donkey going by. "I wish I were dead," he thought moodily. "Then I would not ache any more, and I could not hear when people call me names!" Beside the door where he sat was a stand where tools and hardware were offered for sale. A man who had been standing there for some time, selecting nails from the boxes placed before him, and had heard all that passed, spoke to him. "Joel, my lad, may I ask your help for a little while?" The friendly question seemed to change the whole atmosphere. Joel drew his hands across his eyes to clear them of the blur of tears he was too proud to let fall, and then stood up respectfully. "Yes, Rabbi Phineas, what would you have me to do?" The carpenter gathered up some strips of lumber in one hand, and his hammer and saws in the other. "I have my hands too full to carry these nails," he answered. "If you could bring them for me, it would be a great service." If the man had offered him pity, Joel would have fiercely resented it. His sensitive nature appreciated the unspoken sympathy, the fine tact that soothed his pride by asking a service of him, instead of seeking to render one. He could not define the feeling, but he gratefully took up the bag of nails, and limped along beside his friend to the carpenter's house at the edge of the town. He had never been there before, although he met the man daily in the market-place, and long ago had learned to look forward to his pleasant greeting; it was so different from most people's. Somehow the morning always seemed brighter after he had met him. The little whitewashed house stood in the shade of two great fig-trees near the beach. A cool breeze from the Galilee lifted the leaves, and swayed the vines growing around the low door. Joel, tired by the long walk, was glad to throw himself on the grass in the shade. It was so still and quiet here, after the noise of the street he had just left. An old hen clucked around the door-step with a brood of downy, yellow chickens. Doves cooed softly, somewhere out of sight. The carpenter's bench stood under one of the trees, with shavings and chips all around it. Two children were playing near it, building houses of the scattered blocks; one of them, a black-eyed, sturdy boy of five, kept on playing. The other, a little girl, not yet three, jumped up and followed her father into the house. Her curls gleamed like gold as she ran through the sunshine. She glanced at the stranger with deep-blue eyes so like her father's that Joel held out his hand. "Come and tell me your name," he said coaxingly. But she only shook the curls all over her dimpled face, and hurried into the house. "It's Ruth," said the boy, deigning to look up. "And mine is Jesse, and my mother's is Abigail, and my father's is Phineas, and my grandfather's is--" How far back he would have gone in his genealogy, Joel could not guess; for just then his father came out with a cool, juicy melon, and Jesse hurried forward to get his share. "How good it is!" sighed Joel, as the first refreshing mouthful slipped down his thirsty throat. "And how cool and pleasant it is out here. I did not know there was such a peaceful spot in all Capernaum." "Didn't you always live here?" asked the inquisitive Jesse. "No, I was born in Jerusalem. I was to have been a priest," he said sadly. "Well, why didn't you be one then," persisted the child, with his mouth full of melon. Joel glanced down at his twisted leg, and said nothing. "Why?" repeated the boy. Phineas, who had gone back to his work-bench, looked up kindly. "You ask too many questions, my son. No one can be a priest who is maimed or blemished in any way. Some sad accident must have befallen our little friend, and it may be painful for him to talk about it." Jesse asked no more questions with his tongue; but his sharp, black eyes were fixed on Joel like two interrogation points. "I do not mind telling about it," said Joel, sitting up straighter. "Once when I was not much older than you, just after my mother died, my father brought me up to this country from Jerusalem, to visit my Aunt Leah. "I used to play down here by the lake, with my cousins, in the fishermen's boats. There was a boy that came to the beach sometimes, a great deal larger than I,--a dog of a Samaritan,--who pulled my hair and threw sand in my eyes. He was so much stronger than I, that I could not do anything to him but call him names. But early one morning he was swimming in the lake. I hid his clothes in the oleander bushes that fringe the water. Oh, but he was angry! I wanted him to be. But I had to keep away from the lake after that. "One day some older children took me to the hills back of the town to gather almonds. This Rehum followed us. I had strayed away from the others a little distance, and was stooping to put the nuts in my basket, when he slipped up behind me. How he beat me! I screamed so that the other children came running back to me. When he saw them coming, he gave me a great push that sent me rolling over a rocky bank. It was not very high, but there were sharp stones below. "They thought I was dead when they picked me up. It was months before I could walk at all; and I can never be any better than I am now. Just as my father was about to take me back to Jerusalem, he took a sudden fever, and died. So I was left, a poor helpless burden for my aunt to take care of. It has been six years since then." Joel threw himself full length on the grass, and scowled up at the sky. "Where is that boy that hurt you," asked Jesse. "Rehum?" questioned Joel. "I wish I knew," he muttered fiercely. "Oh, how I hate him! I can never be a priest as my father intended. I can never serve in the beautiful temple with the white pillars and golden gates. I can never be like other people, but must drag along, deformed and full of pain as long as I live. And it's all his fault!" A sudden gleam lit up the boy's eyes, as lightning darts through a storm-cloud. "But I shall have my revenge!" he added, clinching his fists. "I cannot die till I have made him feel at least a tithe of what I have suffered. 'An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth!' That is the least that can satisfy me. Oh, you cannot know how I long for that time! Often I lie awake late into the night, planning my revenge. Then I forget how my back hurts and my leg pains; then I forget all the names I have been called, and the taunts that make my life a burden. But they all come back with the daylight; and I store them up and add them to his account. For everything he has made me suffer, I swear he shall pay for it four-fold in his own sufferings!" Ruth shrank away, frightened by the wild, impassioned boy who sat up, angrily staring in front of him with eyes that saw nothing of the sweet, green-clad world around him. The face of his enemy blotted out all the sunny landscape. One murderous purpose filled him, mind and soul. Nothing was said for a little while. The doves as before cooed of peace, and Phineas began a steady tap-tap with his hammer. A pleasant-faced woman came out of the door with a water-jar on her head, and passed down the path to the public well. She gave Joel a friendly greeting in passing. "Wait, mother!" lisped Ruth, as she ran after her. The woman turned to smile at the little one, and held out her hand. Her dress, of some soft, cotton material, hung in long flowing folds. It was a rich blue color, caught at the waist with a white girdle. The turban wound around her dark hair was white also, and so was the veil she pushed aside far enough to show a glimpse of brown eyes and red cheeks. She wore a broad silver bracelet on the bare arm which was raised to hold the water-jar, and the rings in her ears and talismans on her neck were of quaintly wrought silver. "I did not know it was so late," said Joel, rising to his feet. "Time passes so fast here." "Nay, do not go," said Phineas. "It is a long walk back to your home, and the sun is very hot. Stay and eat dinner with us." Joel hesitated; but the invitation was repeated so cordially, that he let Jesse pull him down on the grass again. "Now I'll tickle your lips with this blade of grass," said the child. "See how long you can keep from laughing." When Abigail came back with the water, both the boys were laughing as heartily as if there had never been an ache or pain in the world. She smiled at them approvingly, as she led the way into the house. Joel looked around with much curiosity. It was like most of the other houses of its kind in the town. There was only one large square room, in which the family cooked, ate, and slept; but on every side it showed that Phineas had left traces of his skilful hands. There was a tiny window cut in one wall; most of the houses of this description had none, but depended on the doorway for light and air. Several shelves around the walls held the lamp and the earthenware dishes. The chest made to hold the rugs and cushions which they spread down at night to sleep on, was unusually large and ornamental. A broom, a handmill, and a bushel stood in one corner. Near the door, a table which Phineas had made, stood spread for the mid-day meal. There was broiled fish on one of the platters, beans and barley bread, a dish of honey, and a pitcher of milk. The fare was just the same that Joel was accustomed to in his uncle's house; but something made the simple meal seem like a banquet. It may have been that the long walk had made him hungrier than usual, or it may have been because he was treated as the honored guest, instead of a child tolerated through charity. He watched his host carefully, as he poured the water over his hands before eating, and asked a blessing on the food. "He does not keep the law as strictly as my Uncle Laban," was his inward comment. "He asked only one blessing, and Uncle Laban blesses every kind of food separately. But he must be a good man, even if he is not so strict a Pharisee as my uncle, for he is kinder than any one I ever knew before." It was wonderful how much Joel had learned, in his eleven short years, of the Law. His aunt's husband had grown to manhood in Jerusalem, and, unlike the simple Galileans among whom he now lived, tried to observe its most detailed rules. The child heard them discussed continually, till he felt he could neither eat, drink, nor dress, except by these set rules. He could not play like other children, and being so much with older people had made him thoughtful and observant. He had learned to read very early; and hour after hour he spent in the house of Rabbi Amos, the most learned man of the town, poring over his rolls of scriptures. Think of a childhood without a picture, or a story-book! All that there was to read were these old records of Jewish history. The old man had taken a fancy to him, finding him an appreciative listener and an apt pupil. So Joel was allowed to come whenever he pleased, and take out the yellow rolls of parchment from their velvet covers. He was never perfectly happy except at these times, when he was reading these old histories of his country's greatness. How he enjoyed chasing the armies of the Philistines, and fighting over again the battles of Israel's kings! Many a tale he stored away in his busy brain to be repeated to the children gathered around the public fountain in the cool of the evening. It mattered not what character he told them of,--priest or prophet, judge or king,--the picture was painted in life-like colors by this patriotic little hero-worshipper. Here and at home he heard so many discussions about what was lawful and what was not, that he was constantly in fear of breaking one of the many rules, even in as simple a duty as washing a cup. So he watched his host closely till the meal was over, finding that in the observance of many customs, he failed to measure up to his uncle's strict standard. Phineas went back to his work after dinner. He was greatly interested in Joel, and, while he sawed and hammered, kept a watchful eye on him. He was surprised at the boy's knowledge. More than once he caught himself standing with an idle tool in hand, as he listened to some story that Joel was telling to Jesse. After a while he laid down his work and leaned against the bench. "What do you find to do all day, my lad?" he asked, abruptly. "Nothing," answered Joel, "after I have recited my lessons to Rabbi Amos." "Does your aunt never give you any tasks to do at home?" "No. I think she does not like to have me in her sight any more than she is obliged to. She is always kind to me, but she doesn't love me. She only pities me. I hate to be pitied. There is not a single one in the world who really loves me." His lips quivered, but he winked back the tears. Phineas seemed lost in thought a few minutes; then he looked up. "You are a Levite," he said slowly, "so of course you could always be supported without needing to learn a trade. Still you would be a great deal happier, in my opinion, if you had something to keep you busy. If you like, I will teach you to be a carpenter. There are a great many things you might learn to make well, and, by and by, it would be a source of profit to you. There is no bread so bitter as the bread of dependence, as you may learn when you are older." "Oh, Rabbi Phineas!" cried Joel. "Do you mean that I may come here every day? It is too good to be true!" "Yes; if you will promise to stick to it until you have mastered the trade. If you are as quick to learn with your hands as you have been with your head, I shall have reason to be proud of such a pupil." Joel's face flushed with pleasure, and he sprang up quickly, saying, "May I begin right now? Oh, I'll try _so_ hard to please you!" Phineas laid a soft pine board on the bench, and began to mark a line across it with a piece of red chalk. "Well, you may see how straight a cut you can make through this plank." He picked up a saw, and ran his fingers lightly along its sharp teeth. But he paused in the act of handing it to Joel, to ask, "You are sure, now, that your uncle and aunt will consent to such an arrangement?" "Yes indeed!" was the emphatic answer. "They will be glad enough to have me out of the way, and learning something useful." The saw cut slowly through the wood; for the weak little hand was a careful one, and the boy was determined not to swerve once from the line. He smiled with satisfaction as the pieces fell apart, showing a clean, straight edge. "Well done!" said Phineas, kindly. "Now let me see you drive a nail." Made bold by his first success, Joel pounded away vigorously, but the hammer slipped more than once, and his unpractised fingers ached with the blows that he had aimed at the nail's head. "You'll soon learn," said Phineas, with an encouraging pat on the boy's shoulder. "Gather up those odds and ends under the bench. When you've sawed them into equal lengths, I'll show you how to make a box." Joel bent over his work with almost painful intensity. He fairly held his breath, as he made the measurements. He gripped the saw as if his life depended on the strength of his hold. Phineas smiled at his earnestness. "Be careful, my lad," he said. "You will soon wear out at that rate." It seemed to Joel that there never had been such a short afternoon. He had stopped to rest several times, when Phineas had insisted upon it; but this new work had all the fascination of an interesting game. The trees threw giant shadows across the grass, when he finally laid his tools aside. His back ached with so much unusual exercise, and he was very tired. "Rabbi Phineas," he asked gently, after a long pause, "what makes you so good to me? What makes you so different from other people? While I am with you, I feel like I want to be good. Other people seem to rub me the wrong way, and make me cross and hateful; then I feel like I'd rather be wicked than not. Why this afternoon, I've scarcely thought of Rehum at all. I forgot at times that I am lame. When you talk to me, I feel like I did that day Dan took me out on the lake. It seemed a different kind of a world,--all blue sky and smooth water. I felt if I could stay out there all the time, where it was so quiet and comforting, that I could not even hate Rehum as much as I do." A surprised, pleased look passed over the man's face. "Do I really make you feel that way, little one? Then I am indeed glad. Once when I was a young boy living in Nazareth, I had a playmate who had that influence over me and all the boys he played with. I never could be selfish and impatient when he was with me. His very presence rebuked such thoughts,--when we were children playing together, like my own two little ones there, and when we were older grown, working at the same bench. It has been many a long year since I left Nazareth, but I think of him daily. Even now, after our long separation, the thought of his blameless life inspires me to a higher living. Yes," he went on musingly, more to himself than the boy, "it was like music. Surely no white-robed priest in the holy temple ever offered up more acceptable praise than the perfect harmony of his daily life." Joel's lips trembled. "If I had ever had one real friend to care for me--not just pity me, you know--maybe I would have been different. But I have never had a single one since my father died." Phineas smiled, and held out his hand. "You have one now, my lad, never forget that." The strong brown hand closed in a warm grasp, and Joel drew it, with a grateful impulse, to his lips. Ruth came up with wondering eyes. She could not understand what had passed; but Joel's eyes were full of tears, and she vaguely felt that he needed comfort. She had a pet pigeon in her arms, that she carried everywhere with her. "Here," she lisped, holding out the snowy winged bird. "Boy, take it! Boy, keep it!" Joel looked up inquiringly at Phineas. "Take it," he said, in a low tone. "Let it be the omen of a happier life commencing for you." "I never had a pet of any kind before," said Joel, in delight, smoothing the white wings folded contentedly against his breast. "But she loves it so, I dislike to take it from her. How beautiful it is!" "My little Ruth is a born comforter," said Phineas, tossing her up in his arms. "Shall Joel take the pigeon home with him, little daughter?" "Yes," she answered, nodding her head. "Boy cried." "I'll name it 'Little Friend,'" said Joel, rising with it in his arms. "I'll take it home with me, and keep it until after the Sabbath, to make me feel sure that this day has not been just a dream; but I will bring it back next time I come. I can see it here every day, and it will be happier here. Oh, Rabbi Phineas, I can never thank you enough for this day!" It was a pitiful little figure that limped away homeward in the fading light, with the white pigeon in his arms. Looking anxiously up in the sky, Joel saw one star come twinkling out. The Sabbath would soon begin, and then he must not be found carrying even so much as this one poor little pigeon. The slightest burden would be unlawful. As he hurried on, the loud blast of a trumpet, blown from the roof of the synagogue, signalled the laborers in the fields to stop all work. He knew that very soon it would sound again, to call the town people from their tasks; and at the third blast, the Sabbath lamp would be lighted in every home. Fearful of his uncle's displeasure at his tardiness, he hurried painfully onward, to provide food and a resting-place for his "little friend" before the second sounding of the trumpet. CHAPTER II. EARLY in the morning after the Sabbath, Joel was in his accustomed place in the market, waiting for his friend Phineas. His uncle had given a gruff assent, when he timidly asked his approval of the plan. The good Rabbi Amos was much pleased when he heard of the arrangement. "Thou hast been a faithful student," he said, kindly. "Thou knowest already more of the Law than many of thy elders. Now it will do thee good to learn the handicraft of Phineas. Remember, my son, 'the balm was created by God before the wound.' Work, that is as old as Eden, has been given us that we might forget the afflictions of this life that fleeth like a shadow. May the God of thy fathers give thee peace!" With the old man's benediction repeating itself like a solemn refrain in all his thoughts, Joel stood smoothing the pigeon in his arms, until Phineas had made his daily purchases. Then they walked on together in the cool of the morning, to the little white house under the fig-trees. Phineas was surprised at his pupil's progress. To be sure, the weak arms could lift little, the slender hands could attempt no large tasks. But the painstaking care he bestowed on everything he attempted, resulted in beautifully finished work. If there was an extra smooth polish to be put on some wood, or a delicate piece of joining to do, Joel's deft fingers seemed exactly suited to the task. Before the winter was over, he had made many pretty little articles of furniture for Abigail's use. "May I have these pieces of fine wood to use as I please?" he asked of Phineas, one day. "All but that largest strip," he answered. "What are you going to make?" "Something for Ruth's birthday. She will be three years old in a few weeks, Jesse says, and I want to make something for her to play with." "What are you going to make her?" inquired Jesse, from under the work-bench. "Let me see too." "Oh, I didn't know you were anywhere near," answered Joel, with a start of alarm. "Tell me!" begged Jesse. "Well, if you will promise to keep her out of the way while I am finishing it, and never say a word about it--" "I'll promise," said the child, solemnly. He had to clap his hand over his mouth a great many times in the next few weeks, to keep his secret from telling itself, and he watched admiringly while Joel carved and polished and cut. One of the neighbors had come in to talk with Abigail the day he finished it, and as the children were down on the beach, playing in the sand, he took it in the house to show to the women. It was a little table set with toy dishes, that he had carved out of wood,--plates and cups and platters, all complete. The visitor held up her hands with an exclamation of delight. After taking up each little highly polished dish to admire it separately, she said, "I know where you might get a great deal of money for such work. There is a rich Roman living near the garrison, who spends money like a lord. No price is too great for him to pay for anything that pleases his fancy. Why don't you take some up there, and offer them for sale?" "I believe I will," said Joel, after considering the matter. "I'll go just as soon as I can get them made." Ruth spread many a little feast under the fig-trees; but after the first birthday banquet, Jesse was her only guest. Joel was too busy making more dishes and another little table, to partake of them. The whole family were interested in his success. The day he went up to the great house near the garrison to offer them for sale, they waited anxiously for his return. "He's sold them! He's sold them!" cried Jesse, hopping from one foot to the other, as he saw Joel coming down the street empty-handed. Joel was hobbling along as fast as he could, his face beaming. "See how much money!" he cried, as he opened his hand to show a shining coin, stamped with the head of Cæsar. "And I have an order for two more. I'll soon have a fortune! The children liked the dishes so much, although they had the most beautiful toys I ever saw. They had images they called dolls. Some of them had white-kid faces, and were dressed as richly as queens. I wish Ruth had one." "The law forbids!" exclaimed Phineas. "Have you forgotten that it is written, 'Thou shalt not make any likeness of anything in the heavens above or the earth beneath, or the waters under the earth'? She is happy with what she has, and needs no strange idols of the heathen to play with." Joel made no answer; but he thought of the merry group of Roman children seated around the little table he had made, and wished again that Ruth had one of those gorgeously dressed dolls. Skill and strength were not all he gained by his winter's work; for some of the broad charity that made continual summer in the heart of Phineas crept into his own embittered nature. He grew less suspicious of those around him, and smiles came more easily now to his face than scowls. But the strong ambition of his life never left him for an instant. To all the rest of the world he might be a friend; to Rehum he could only be the most unforgiving of enemies. The thought that had given him most pleasure when the wealthy Roman had tossed him his first earnings, was not that his work could bring him money, but that the money could open the way for his revenge. That thought, like a dark undercurrent, gained depth and force as the days went by. As he saw how much he could do in spite of his lameness, he thought of how much more he might have accomplished, if he had been like other boys. It was a constant spur to his desire for revenge. One day Phineas laid aside his tools much earlier than usual, and without any explanation to his wondering pupil, went up into the town. When he returned, he nodded to his wife, who sat in the doorway spinning, and who had looked up inquiringly as he approached. "Yes, it's all arranged," he said to her. Then he turned to Joel to ask, "Did you ever ride on a camel, my boy?" "No, Rabbi," answered the boy, in surprise, wondering what was coming next. "Well, I have a day's journey to make to the hills in Upper Galilee. A camel caravan passes near the place where my business calls me, as it goes to Damascus. I seek to accompany it for protection. I go on foot, but I have made arrangements for you to ride one of the camels." "Oh, am I really to go, too?" gasped Joel, in delighted astonishment. "Oh, Rabbi Phineas! How did you ever think of asking me?" "You have not seemed entirely well, of late," was the answer. "I thought the change would do you good. I said nothing about it before, for I had no opportunity to see your uncle until this afternoon; and I did not want to disappoint you, in case he refused his permission." "And he really says I may go?" demanded the boy, eagerly. "Yes, the caravan moves in the morning, and we will go with it." There was little more work done that day. Joel was so full of anticipations of his journey that he scarcely knew what he was doing. Phineas was busy with preparations for the comfort of his little family during his absence, and went into town again. On his return he seemed strangely excited. Abigail, seeing something was amiss, watched him carefully, but asked no questions. He took a piece of timber that had been laid away for some especial purpose, and began sawing it into small bits. "Rabbi Phineas," ventured Joel, respectfully, "is that not the wood you charged me to save so carefully?" Phineas gave a start as he saw what he had done, and threw down his saw. "Truly," he said, smiling, "I am beside myself with the news I have heard. I just now walked ten cubits past my own house, unknowing where I was, so deeply was I thinking upon it. Abigail," he asked, "do you remember my friend in Nazareth whom I so often speak of,--the son of Joseph the carpenter? Last week he was bidden to a marriage in Cana. It happened, before the feasting was over, the supply of wine was exhausted, and the mortified host knew not what to do. Six great jars of stone had been placed in the room, to supply the guests with water for washing. _He changed that water into wine!_" "I cannot believe it!" answered Abigail, simply. "But Ezra ben Jared told me so. He was there, and drank of the wine," insisted Phineas. "He could not have done it," said Abigail, "unless he were helped by the evil one, or unless he were a prophet. He is too good a man to ask help of the powers of darkness; and it is beyond belief that a son of Joseph should be a prophet." To this Phineas made no answer. His quiet thoughts were shaken out of their usual routine as violently as if by an earthquake. Joel thought more of the journey than he did of the miracle. It seemed to the impatient boy that the next day never would dawn. Many times in the night he wakened to hear the distant crowing of cocks. At last, by straining his eyes he could distinguish the green leaves of the vine on the lattice from the blue of the half-opened blossoms. By that token he knew it was near enough the morning for him to commence saying his first prayers. Dressing noiselessly, so as not to disturb the sleeping family, he slipped out of the house and down to the well outside the city-gate. Here he washed, and then ate the little lunch he had wrapped up the night before. A meagre little breakfast,--only a hard-boiled egg, a bit of fish, and some black bread. But the early hour and his excitement took away his appetite for even that little. Soon all was confusion around the well, as the noisy drivers gathered to water their camels, and make their preparations for the start. Joel shrunk away timidly to the edge of the crowd, fearful that his friend Phineas had overslept himself. In a few minutes he saw him coming with a staff in one hand, and a small bundle swinging from the other. Joel had one breathless moment of suspense as he was helped on to the back of the kneeling camel; one desperate clutch at the saddle as the huge animal plunged about and rose to its feet. Then he looked down at Phineas, and smiled blissfully. [Illustration: "HE LOOKED DOWN AT PHINEAS, AND SMILED BLISSFULLY"] Oh, the delight of that slow easy motion! The joy of being carried along without pain or effort! Who could realize how much it meant to the little fellow whose halting steps had so long been taken in weariness and suffering? Swinging along in the cool air, so far above the foot-passengers, it seemed to him that he looked down upon a new earth. Blackbirds flew along the roads, startled by their passing. High overhead, a lark had not yet finished her morning song. Lambs bleated in the pastures, and the lowing of herds sounded on every hill-side. Not a sight or sound escaped the boy; and all the morning he rode on without speaking, not a care in his heart, not a cloud on his horizon. At noon they stopped in a little grove of olive-trees where a cool spring gurgled out from the rocks. Phineas spread out their lunch at a little distance from the others; and they ate it quickly, with appetites sharpened by the morning's travel. Afterwards Joel stretched himself out on the ground to rest, and was asleep almost as soon as his eyelids could shut out the noontide glare of the sun from his tired eyes. When he awoke, nearly an hour afterward, he heard voices near him in earnest conversation. Raising himself on his elbow, he saw Phineas at a little distance, talking to an old man who had ridden one of the foremost camels. They must have been talking of the miracle, for the old man, as he stroked his long white beard, was saying, "But men are more wont to be astonished at the sun's eclipse, than at his daily rising. Look, my friend!" He pointed to a wild grape-vine clinging to a tree near by. "Do you see those bunches of half-grown grapes? There is a constant miracle. Day by day, the water of the dew and rain is being changed into the wine of the grape. Soil and sunshine are turning into fragrant juices. Yet you feel no astonishment." "No," assented Phineas; "for it is by the hand of God it is done." "Why may not this be also?" said the old man. "Even this miracle at the marriage feast in Cana?" Phineas started violently. "What!" he cried. "Do you think it possible that this friend of mine is the One to be sent of God?" "Is not this the accepted time for the coming of Israel's Messiah?" answered the old man, solemnly. "Is it not meet that he should herald his presence by miracles and signs and wonders?" Joel lay down again to think over what he had just heard. Like every other Israelite in the whole world, he knew that a deliverer had been promised his people. Time and again he had read the prophecies that foretold the coming of a king through the royal line of David; time and again he had pictured to himself the mighty battles to take place between his down-trodden race and the haughty hordes of Cæsar. Sometime, somewhere, a universal dominion awaited them. He firmly believed that the day was near at hand; but not even in his wildest dreams had he ever dared to hope that it might come in his own lifetime. He raised himself on his elbow again, for the old man was speaking. "About thirty years ago," he said slowly, "I went up to Jerusalem to be registered for taxation, for the emperor's decree had gone forth and no one could escape enrolment. You are too young to remember the taking of that census, my friend; but you have doubtless heard of it." "Yes," assented Phineas, respectfully. "I was standing just outside the Joppa gate, bargaining with a man for a cage of gold finches he had for sale, which I wished to take to my daughter, when we heard some one speaking to us. Looking up we saw several strange men on camels, who were inquiring their way. They were richly dressed. The trappings and silver bells on their camels, as well as their own attire, spoke of wealth. Their faces showed that they were wise and learned men from far countries. "We greeted them respectfully, but could not speak for astonishment when we heard their question: "'Where is he that is born king of the Jews? For we have seen his star in the East, and have come to worship him.' The bird-seller looked at me, and I looked at him in open-mouthed wonder. The men rode on before we could find words wherewith to answer them. "All sorts of rumors were afloat, and everywhere we went next day, throughout Jerusalem, knots of people stood talking of the mysterious men, and their strange question. Even the king was interested, and sought audience with them." "Could any one answer them?" asked Phineas. "Nay! but it was then impressed on me so surely that the Christ was born, that I have asked myself all these thirty years, 'Where is he that is born king of the Jews?' For I too would fain follow on to find and worship him. As soon as I return from Damascus, I shall go at once to Cana, and search for this miracle-worker." The old man's earnest words made a wonderful impression on Joel. All the afternoon, as they rose higher among the hills, the thought took stronger possession of him. He might yet live, helpless little cripple as he was, to see the dawn of Israel's deliverance, and a son of David once more on its throne. Ride on, little pilgrim, happy in thy day-dreams! The time is coming; but weary ways and hopeless heart-aches lie between thee and that to-morrow. The king is on his way to his coronation, but it will be with thorns. Ride on, little pilgrim, be happy whilst thou can! CHAPTER III. IT was nearly the close of the day when the long caravan halted, and tents were pitched for the night near a little brook that came splashing down from a cold mountain-spring. Joel, exhausted by the long day's travel, crowded so full of new experiences, was glad to stretch his cramped limbs on a blanket that Phineas took from the camel's back. Here, through half-shut eyes, he watched the building of the camp-fire, and the preparations for the evening meal. "I wonder what Uncle Laban would do if he were here!" he said to Phineas, with an amused smile. "Look at those dirty drivers with their unwashed hands and unblessed food. How little regard they have for the Law. Uncle Laban would fast a lifetime rather than taste anything that had even been passed over a fire of their building. I can imagine I see him now, gathering up his skirts and walking on the tips of his sandals for fear of being touched by anything unclean." "Your Uncle Laban is a good man," answered Phineas, "one careful not to transgress the Law." "Yes," said the boy. "But I like your way better. You keep the fasts, and repeat the prayers, and love God and your neighbors. Uncle Laban is careful to do the first two things; I am not so sure about the others. Life is too short to be always washing one's hands." Phineas looked at the little fellow sharply. How shrewd and old he seemed for one of his years! Such independence of thought was unusual in a child trained as he had been. He scarcely knew how to answer him, so he turned his attention to spreading out the fruits and bread he had brought for their supper. Next morning, after the caravan had gone on without them, they started up a narrow bridle-path, that led through hillside-pastures where flocks of sheep and goats were feeding. The dew was still on the grass, and the air was so fresh and sweet in this higher altitude that Joel walked on with a feeling of strength and vigor unknown to him before. "Oh, look!" he cried, clasping his hands in delight, as a sudden turn brought them to the upper course of the brook whose waters, falling far below, had refreshed them the night before. The poetry of the Psalms came as naturally to the lips of this beauty-loving little Israelite as the breath he drew. Now he repeated, in a low, reverent voice, "'The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.' Oh, Rabbi Phineas, did you ever know before that there could be such green pastures and still waters?" The man smiled at the boy's radiant, upturned face. "'Yea, the earth is the Lord's and the fulness thereof,'" he murmured. "We have indeed a goodly heritage." Hushed into silence by the voice of the hills and the beauty on every side, they walked on till the road turned again. Just ahead stood a house unusually large for a country district; everything about it bore an air of wealth and comfort. "Our journey is at an end now," said Phineas. "Yonder lies the house of Nathan ben Obed. He owns all those flocks and herds we have seen in passing this last half hour. It is with him that I have business; and we will tarry with him until after the Sabbath." They were evidently expected, for a servant came running out to meet them. He opened the gate and conducted them into a shaded court-yard. Here another servant took off their dusty sandals, and gave them water to wash their feet. They had barely finished, when an old man appeared in the doorway; his long beard and hair were white as the abba he wore. Phineas would have bowed himself to the ground before him, but the old man prevented it, by hurrying to take both hands in his, and kiss him on each cheek. "Peace be to thee, thou son of my good friend Jesse!" he said. "Thou art indeed most welcome." Joel lagged behind. He was always sensitive about meeting strangers; but the man's cordial welcome soon put him at his ease. He was left to himself a great deal during the few days following. The business on which the old man had summoned Phineas required long consultations. One day they rode away together to some outlying pastures, and were gone until night-fall. Joel did not miss them. He was spending long happy hours in the country sunshine. There was something to entertain him, every way he turned. For a while he amused himself by sitting in the door and poring over a roll of parchment that Sarah, the wife of Nathan ben Obed, brought him to read. She was an old woman, but one would have found it hard to think so, had he seen how briskly she went about her duties of caring for such a large household. After Joel had read for some little time, he became aware that some one was singing outside, in a whining, monotonous way, and he laid down his book to listen. The voice was not loud, but so penetrating he could not shut it out, and fix his mind on his story again. So he rolled up the parchment and laid it on the chest from which it had been taken; then winding his handkerchief around his head, turban fashion, he limped out in the direction of the voice. Just around the corner of the house, under a great oak-tree, a woman sat churning. From three smooth poles joined at the top to form a tripod, a goat-skin bag hung by long leather straps. This was filled with cream; she was slapping it violently back and forth in time to her weird song. Her feet were bare, and she wore only a coarse cotton dress. But a gay red handkerchief covered her black hair, and heavy copper rings hung from her nose and ears. The song stopped suddenly as she saw Joel. Then recognizing her master's guest, she smiled at him so broadly that he could see her pretty white teeth. Joel hardly knew what to say at this unexpected encounter, but bethought himself to ask the way to the sheep-folds and the watch-tower. "It is a long way there," said the woman, doubtfully; Joel flushed as he felt her black eyes scanning his misshapen form. Just then Sarah appeared in the door, and the maid repeated the question to her mistress. "To be sure," she said. "You must go out and see our shepherds with their flocks. We have a great many employed just now, on all the surrounding hills. Rhoda, call your son, and bid him bring hither the donkey that he always drives to market." The woman left her churning, and presently came back with a boy about Joel's age, leading a donkey with only one ear. Joel knew what that meant. At some time in its life the poor beast had strayed into some neighbor's field, and the owner of the field had been at liberty to cut off an ear in punishment. The boy that led him wore a long shirt of rough hair-cloth. His feet and legs were brown and tanned. A shock of reddish sunburned hair was the only covering for his head. There was a squint in one eye, and his face was freckled. He made an awkward obeisance to his mistress. "Buz," she said, "this young lad is your master's guest. Take him out and show him the flocks and herds, and the sheep-folds. He has never seen anything of shepherd life, so be careful to do his pleasure. Stay!" she added to Joel. "You will not have time to visit them all before the mid-day meal, so I will give you a lunch, and you can enjoy an entire day in the fields." As the two boys started down the hill, Joel stole a glance at his companion. "What a stupid-looking fellow!" he thought; "I doubt if he knows anything more than this sleepy beast I am riding. I wonder if he enjoys any of this beautiful world around him. How glad I am that I am not in his place." Buz, trudging along in the dust, glanced at the little cripple on the donkey's back with an inward shiver. "What a dreadful lot his must be," he thought. "How glad I am that I am not like he is!" It was not very long till the shyness began to wear off, and Joel found that the stupid shepherd lad had a very busy brain under his shock of tangled hair. His eyes might squint, but they knew just where to look in the bushes for the little hedge-sparrow's nest. They could take unerring aim, too, when he sent the smooth sling-stones whizzing from the sling he carried. "How far can you shoot with it?" asked Joel. For answer Buz looked all around for some object on which to try his skill; then he pointed to a hawk slowly circling overhead. Joel watched him fit a smooth pebble into his sling; he had no thought that the boy could touch it at such a distance. The stone whizzed through the air like a bullet, and the bird dropped several yards ahead of them. "See!" said Buz, as he ran to pick it up, and display it proudly. "I struck it in the head." Joel looked at him with increasing respect. "That must have been the kind of sling that King David killed the giant with," he said, handing it back after a careful examination. "King David!" repeated Buz, dully, "seems to me I have heard of him, sometime or other; but I don't know about the giant." "Why where have you been all your life?" cried Joel, in amazement. "I thought everybody knew about that. Did you never go to a synagogue?" Buz shook his bushy head. "They don't have synagogues in these parts. The master calls us in and reads to us on the Sabbath; but I always get sleepy when I sit right still, and so I generally get behind somebody and go to sleep. The shepherds talk to each other a good deal about such things, I am never with them though. I spend all my time running errands." Shocked at such ignorance, Joel began to tell the shepherd king's life with such eloquence that Buz stopped short in the road to listen. Seeing this the donkey stood still also, wagged its one ear, and went to sleep. But Buz listened, wider awake than he had ever been before in his life. The story was a favorite one with Joel, and he put his whole soul into it. "Who told you that?" asked Buz, taking a long breath when the interesting tale was finished. "Why I read it myself!" answered Joel. "Oh, can you read?" asked Buz, looking at Joel in much the same way that Joel had looked at him after he killed the hawk. "I do not see how anybody can. It puzzles me how people can look at all those crooked black marks and call them rivers and flocks and things. I looked one time, just where Master had been reading about a great battle. And I didn't see a single thing that looked like a warrior or a sword or a battle-axe, though he called them all by name. There were several little round marks that might have been meant for sling-stones; but it was more than I could make out, how he could get any sense out of it." Joel leaned back and laughed till the hills rang, laughed till the tears stood in his eyes, and the donkey waked up and ambled on. Buz did not seem to be in the least disturbed by his merriment, although he was puzzled as to its cause. He only stooped to pick up more stones for his sling as they went on. It was not long till they came to some of the men,--great brawny fellows dressed in skins, with coarse matted hair and tanned faces. How little they knew of what was going on in the busy world outside their fields! As Joel talked to them he found that Cæsar's conquests and Hero's murders had only come to them as vague rumors. All the petty wars and political turmoils were unknown to them. They could talk to him only of their flocks and their faith, both as simple as their lives. Joel, in his wisdom learned of the Rabbis, felt himself infinitely their superior, child though he was. But he enjoyed his day spent with them. He and Buz ate the ample lunch they had brought, dipped up water from the brook in cups they made of oak-leaves, and both finally fell asleep to the droning music of the shepherd's pipes, played softly on the uplands. A distant rumble of thunder aroused them, late in the afternoon; and they started up to find the shepherds calling in their flocks. The gaunt sheep dogs raced to and fro, bringing the straying goats together. The shepherds brought the sheep into line with well-aimed sling-shots, touching them first on one side, and then on the other, as oxen are guided by the touch of the goad. Joel looked up at the darkening sky with alarm. "Who would have thought of a storm on such a day!" he exclaimed. Buz cocked his eyes at the horizon. "I thought it might come to this," he said; "for as we came along this morning there were no spider-webs on the grass; the ants had not uncovered the doors of their hills; and all the signs pointed to wet weather. I thought though, that the time of the latter rains had passed a week ago. I am always glad when the stormy season is over. This one is going to be a hard one." "What shall we do?" asked Joel. Buz scratched his head. Then he looked at Joel. "You never could get home on that trifling donkey before it overtakes us; and they'll be worried about you. I'd best take you up to the sheep-fold. You can stay all night there, very comfortably. I'll run home and tell them where you are, and come back for you in the morning." Joel hesitated, appalled at spending the night among such dirty men; but the heavy boom of thunder, steadily rolling nearer, silenced his half-spoken objection. By the time the donkey had carried him up the hillside to the stone-walled enclosure round the watch-tower, the shepherds were at the gates with their flocks. Joel watched them go through the narrow passage, one by one. Each man kept count of his own sheep, and drove them under the rough sheds put up for their protection. A good-sized hut was built against the hillside, where the shepherds might find refuge. Buz pointed it out to Joel; then he turned the donkey into one of the sheds, and started homeward on the run. Joel shuddered as a blinding flash of lightning was followed by a crash of thunder that shook the hut. The wind bore down through the trees like some savage spirit, shrieking and moaning as it flew. Joel heard a shout, and looked out to the opposite hillside. Buz was flying along in break-neck race with the storm. At that rate he would soon be home. How he seemed to enjoy the race, as his strong limbs carried him lightly as a bird soars! At the top he turned to look back and laugh and wave his arms,--a sinewy little figure standing out in bold relief against a brazen sky. Joel watched till he was out of sight. Then, as the wind swooped down from the mountains, great drops of rain began to splash through the leaves. The men crowded into the hut. One of them started forward to close the door, but stopped suddenly, with his brown hairy hand uplifted. "Hark ye!" he exclaimed. Joel heard only the shivering of the wind in the tree-tops; but the man's trained ear caught the bleating of a stray lamb, far off and very faint. "I was afraid I was mistaken in my count; they jostled through the gate so fast I could not be sure." Going to a row of pegs along the wall, he took down a lantern hanging there and lit it; then wrapping his coat of skins more closely around him, and calling one of the dogs, he set out into the gathering darkness. Joel watched the fitful gleam of the lantern, flickering on unsteadily as a will-o'-the-wisp. A moment later he heard the man's deep voice calling tenderly to the lost animal; then the storm struck with such fury that they had to stand with their backs against the door of the hut to keep it closed. Flash after flash of lightning blinded them. The wind roared down the mountain and beat against the house till Joel held his breath in terror. It was midnight before it stopped. Joel thought of the poor shepherd out on the hills, and shuddered. Even the men seemed uneasy about him, as hour after hour passed, and he did not come. Finally he fell asleep in the corner, on a pile of woolly skins. In the gray dawn he was awakened by a great shout. He got up, and went to the door. There stood the shepherd. His bare limbs were cut by stones and torn by thorns. Blood streamed from his forehead where he had been wounded by a falling branch. The mud on his rough garments showed how often he had slipped and fallen on the steep paths. Joel noticed, with a thrill of sympathy, how painfully he limped. But there on the bowed shoulders was the lamb he had wandered so far to find; and as the welcoming shout arose again, Joel's weak little cheer joined gladly in. "How brave and strong he is," thought the boy. "He risked his life for just one pitiful little lamb." The child's heart went strangely out to this rough fellow who stood holding the shivering animal, sublimely unconscious that he had done anything more than a simple duty. Joel, who felt uncommonly hungry after his supperless night, thought he would mount the donkey and start back alone. But just as he was about to do so, a familiar bushy head showed itself in the door of the sheepfold. Buz had brought him some wheat-cakes and cheese to eat on the way back. Joel was so busy with this welcome meal that he did not talk much. Buz kept eying him in silence, as if he longed to ask some question. At last, when the cheese had entirely disappeared, he found courage to ask it. "Were you always like that?" he said abruptly, motioning to Joel's back and leg. Somehow the reference did not wound him as it generally did. He began to tell Buz about the Samaritan boy who had crippled him. He never was able to tell the story of his wrongs without growing passionately angry. He had worked himself into a white heat by the time he had finished. "I'd get even with him," said Buz, excitedly, with a wicked squint of his eyes. "How would you do it?" demanded Joel. "Cripple him as he did me?" "Worse than that!" exclaimed Buz, stopping to take deliberate aim at a leaf overhead, and shooting a hole exactly through the centre with his sling. "I'd blind him as quick as that! It's a great deal worse to be blind than lame." Joel closed his eyes, and rode on a few moments in darkness. Then he opened them and gave a quick glad look around the landscape. "My! What if I never could have opened them again," he thought. "Yes, Buz, you're right," he said aloud. "It _is_ worse to be blind; so I shall take Rehum's eyesight also, some time. Oh, if that time were only here!" Although the subject of the miracle at Cana had been constantly in the mind of Phineas, and often near his lips, he did not speak of it to his host until the evening before his departure. It was just at the close of the evening meal. Nathan ben Obed rose half-way from his seat in astonishment, then sank back. "How old a man is this friend of yours?" he asked. "About thirty, I think," answered Phineas. "He is a little younger than I." "Where was he born?" "In Bethlehem, I have heard it said, though his home has always been in Nazareth." "Strange, strange!" muttered the man, stroking his long white beard thoughtfully. Joel reached over and touched Phineas on the arm. "Will you not tell Rabbi Nathan about the wonderful star that was seen at that time?" he asked, in a low tone. "What was that?" asked the old man, arousing from his reverie. When Phineas had repeated his conversation with the stranger on the day of his journey, Nathan ben Obed exchanged meaning glances with his wife. "Send for the old shepherd Heber," he said. "I would have speech with him." Rhoda came in to light the lamps. He bade her roll a cushioned couch that was in one corner to the centre of the room. "This old shepherd Heber was born in Bethlehem," he said; "but since his sons and grandsons have been in my employ, he has come north to live. He used to help keep the flocks that belonged to the Temple, and that were used for sacrifices. His has always been one of the purest of lives; and I have never known such faith as he has. He is over a hundred years old, so must have been quite aged at the time of the event of which he will tell us." Presently an old, old man tottered into the room, leaning on the shoulders of his two stalwart grandsons. They placed him gently on the cushions of the couch, and then went into the court-yard to await his readiness to return. Like the men Joel had seen the day before, they were dressed in skins, and were wild-looking and rough. But this aged father, with dim eyes and trembling wrinkled hands, sat before them like some hoary patriarch, in a fine linen mantle. Pleased as a child, he saluted his new audience, and began to tell them his only story. As the years had gone by, one by one the lights of memory had gone out in darkness. Well-known scenes had grown dim; old faces were forgotten; names he knew as well as his own, could not be recalled: but this one story was as fresh and real to him, as on the night he learned it. The words he chose were simple, the voice was tremulous with weakness; but he spoke with a dramatic fervor that made Joel creep nearer and nearer, until he knelt, unknowing, at the old man's knee, spell-bound by the wonderful tale. "We were keeping watch in the fields by night," began the old shepherd, "I and my sons and my brethren. It was still and cold, and we spoke but little to each other. Suddenly over all the hills and plains shone a great light,--brighter than light of moon or stars or sunshine. It was so heavenly white we knew it must be the glory of the Lord we looked upon and we were sore afraid, and hid our faces, falling to the ground. And, lo! an angel overhead spake to us from out of the midst of the glory, saying, 'Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.' "And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, 'Glory to God in the highest, peace on earth, good-will toward men!' "Oh, the sound of the rejoicing that filled that upper air! Ever since in my heart have I carried that foretaste of heaven!" The old shepherd paused, with such a light on his upturned face that he seemed to his awestruck listeners to be hearing again that same angelic chorus,--the chorus that rang down from the watch-towers of heaven, across earth's lowly sheep-fold, on that first Christmas night. There was a solemn hush. Then he said, "And when they were gone away, and the light and the song were no more with us, we spake one to another, and rose in haste and went to Bethlehem. And we found the Babe lying in a manger with Mary its mother; and we fell down and worshipped Him. "Thirty years has it been since the birth of Israel's Messiah; and I sit and wonder all the day,--wonder when He will appear once more to His people. Surely the time must be well nigh here when He may claim His kingdom. O Lord, let not Thy servant depart until these eyes that beheld the Child shall have seen the King in His beauty!" Joel remained kneeling beside old Heber, perfectly motionless. He was fitting together the links that he had lately found. A child, heralded by angels, proclaimed by a star worshipped by the Magi! A man changing water into wine at only a word! "I shall yet see Him!" exclaimed the voice of old Heber, with such sublime assurance of faith that it found a response in every heart. There was another solemn stillness, so deep that the soft fluttering of a night-moth around the lamp startled them. Then the child's voice rang out, eager and shrill, but triumphant as if inspired: "Rabbi Phineas, _He_ it was who changed the water into wine!--This friend of Nazareth and the babe of Bethlehem are the same!" The heart of the carpenter was strangely stirred, but it was full of doubt. Not that the Christ had been born,--the teachings of all his lifetime led him to expect that; but that the chosen One could be a friend of his,--the thought was too wonderful for him. The old shepherd sat on the couch, feebly twisting his fingers, and talking to himself. He was repeating bits of the story he had just told them: "And, lo, an angel overhead!" he muttered. Then he looked up, whispering softly, "Glory to God in the highest--and peace, yes, on earth peace!" "He seems to have forgotten everything else," said Nathan, signalling to the men outside to lead him home. "His mind is wiped away entirely, that it may keep unspotted the record of that night's revelation. He tells it over and over, whether he has a listener or not." They led him gently out, the white-haired, white-souled old shepherd Heber. It seemed to Joel that the wrinkled face was illuminated by some inner light, not of this world, and that he lingered among men only to repeat to them, over and over, his one story. That strange sweet story of Bethlehem's first Christmas-tide. CHAPTER IV. Next morning a goodly train set out from the gates of Nathan ben Obed. It was near the time of the feast of the Passover, and he, with many of his household, was going down to Jerusalem. The family and guests went first on mules and asses. Behind them followed a train of servants, driving the lambs, goats, and oxen to be offered as sacrifices in the temple, or sold in Jerusalem to other pilgrims. All along the highway, workmen were busy repairing the bridges, and cleaning the springs and wells, soon to be used by the throngs of travellers. All the tombs near the great thoroughfares were being freshly white-washed; they gleamed with a dazzling purity through the green trees, only to warn passers-by of the defilement within. For had those on their way to the feast approached too near these homes of the dead, even unconsciously, they would have been accounted unclean, and unfit to partake of the Passover. Nothing escaped Joel's quick sight, from the tulips and marigolds flaming in the fields, to the bright-eyed little viper crawling along the stone-wall. But while he looked, he never lost a word that passed between his friend Phineas and their host. The pride of an ancient nation took possession of him as he listened to the prophecies they quoted. Every one they met along the way coming from Capernaum had something to say about this new prophet who had arisen in Galilee. When they reached the gate of the city, a great disappointment awaited them. _He had been there, and gone again._ Nathan ben Obed and his train tarried only one night in the place, and then pressed on again towards Jerusalem. Phineas went with them. "You shall go with us next year," he said to Joel; "then you will be over twelve. I shall take my own little ones too, and their mother." "Only one more year," exclaimed Joel, joyfully. "If that passes as quickly as the one just gone, it will soon be here." "Look after my little family," said the carpenter, at parting. "Come every day to the work, if you wish, just as when I am here; and remember, my lad, you are almost a man." Almost a man! The words rang in the boy's thoughts all day as he pounded and cut, keeping time to the swinging motion of hammer and saw. Almost a man! But what kind of one? Crippled and maimed, shorn of the strength that should have been his pride, beggared of his priestly birthright. Almost, it might be, but never in its fulness, could he hope to attain the proud stature of a perfect man. A fiercer hate sprang up for the enemy who had made him what he was; and the wild burning for revenge filled him so he could not work. He put away his tools, and went up the narrow outside stairway that led to the flat roof of the carpenter's house. It was called the "upper chamber." Here a latticed pavilion, thickly overgrown with vines, made a cool green retreat where he might rest and think undisturbed. Sitting there, he could see the flash of white sails on the blue lake, and slow-moving masses of fleecy clouds in the blue of the sky above. They brought before him the picture of the flocks feeding on the pastures of Nathan ben Obed. Then, naturally enough, there flashed through his mind a thought of Buz. He seemed to see him squinting his little eyes to take aim at a leaf overhead. He heard the stone whirr through it, as Buz said: "I'd blind him!" Some very impossible plans crept into Joel's day-dreams just then. He imagined himself sitting in a high seat, wrapped in robes of state; soldiers stood around him to carry out his slightest wish. The door would open and Rehum would be brought forth in fetters. "What is your will concerning the prisoner, O most gracious sovereign," the jailer would ask. Joel closed his eyes, and waved his hand before an imaginary audience. "Away with him,--to the torture! Wrench his limbs on the rack! Brand his eyelids with hot irons! Let him suffer all that man can suffer and live! Thus shall it be done unto the man on whom the king delighteth to take vengeance!" Joel was childish enough to take a real satisfaction in this scene he conjured up. But as it faded away, he was man enough to realize it could never come to pass, save in his imagination; he could never be in such a position for revenge, unless,-- That moment a possible way seemed to open for him. Phineas would probably see his friend of Nazareth at the Passover. What could be more natural than that the old friendship should be renewed. He whose hand had changed the water into wine should finally cast out the alien king who usurped the throne of Israel, for one in whose veins the blood of David ran royal red,--what was more to be expected than that? The Messiah would come to His kingdom, and then--and then--the thought leaped to its last daring limit. Phineas, who had been His earliest friend and playfellow, would he not be lifted to the right hand of power? Through him, then, lay the royal road to revenge. The thought lifted him unconsciously to his feet. He stood with his arms out-stretched in the direction of the far-away Temple, like some young prophet. David's cry of triumph rose to his lips: "Thou hast girded me with strength unto the battle," he murmured. "Thou hast also given me the necks of mine enemies, that I might destroy them that hate me!" A sweet baby voice at the foot of the steps brought him suddenly down from the height of his intense feeling. "Joel! Joel!" called little Ruth, "where is you?" Then Jesse's voice added, "We're all a-coming up for you to tell us a story." Up the stairs they swarmed to the roof, the carpenter's children and half-a-dozen of their little playmates. Joel, with his head still in the clouds, told them of a mighty king who was coming to slay all other kings, and change all tears--the waters of affliction--into the red wine of joy. "H'm! I don't think much of that story," said Jesse, with out-spoken candor. "I'd rather hear about Goliath, or the bears that ate up the forty children." But Joel was in no mood for such stories, just then. On some slight pretext he escaped from his exacting audience, and went down to the sea-shore. Here, skipping stones across the water, or writing idly in the sand, he was free to go on with his fascinating day-dreams. For the next two weeks the boy gave up work entirely. He haunted the toll-gates and public streets, hoping to hear some startling news from Jerusalem. He was so full of the thought that some great revolution was about to take place, that he could not understand how people could be so indifferent. All on fire with the belief that this man of Nazareth was the one in whom lay the nation's hope, he looked and longed for the return of Phineas, that he might learn more of Him. But Phineas had little to tell when he came back. He had met his friend twice in Jerusalem,--the same gentle quiet man he had always known, making no claims, working no wonders. Phineas had heard of His driving the moneychangers out of the Temple one day, and those who sold doves in its sacred courts, although he had not witnessed the scene. The carpenter was rather surprised that He should have made such a public disturbance. "Rabbi Phineas," said Joel, with a trembling voice, "don't you think your friend is the prophet we are expecting?" Phineas shook his head. "No, my lad, I am sure of it now." "But the herald angels and the star," insisted the boy. "They must have proclaimed some one else. He is the best man I ever knew; but there is no more of the king in His nature, than there is in mine." The man's positive answer seemed to shatter Joel's last hope. Downcast and disappointed, he went back to his work. Only with money could he accomplish his life's object, and only by incessant work could he earn the shining shekels that he needed. Phineas wondered sometimes at the dogged persistence with which the child stuck to his task, in spite of his tired, aching body. He had learned to make sandal-wood jewel-boxes, and fancifully wrought cups to hold the various dyes and cosmetics used by the ladies of the court. Several times, during the following months, he begged a sail in some of the fishing-boats that landed at the town of Tiberias. Having gained the favor of the keeper of the gates, by various little gifts of his own manufacture, he always found a ready admittance to the palace. To the ladies of the court, the sums they paid for his pretty wares seemed trifling; but to Joel the small bag of coins hidden in the folds of his clothes was a little fortune, daily growing larger. CHAPTER V. IT was Sabbath morning in the house of Laban the Pharisee. Joel, sitting alone in the court-yard, could hear his aunt talking to the smaller children, as she made them ready to take with her to the synagogue. From the upper chamber on the roof, came also a sound of voices, for two guests had arrived the day before, and were talking earnestly with their host. Joel already knew the object of their visit. They had been there before, when the preaching of John Baptist had drawn such great crowds from all the cities to the banks of the Jordan. They had been sent out then by the authorities in Jerusalem to see what manner of man was this who, clothed in skins and living in the wilderness, could draw the people so wonderfully, and arouse such intense excitement. Now they had come on a like errand, although on their own authority. Another prophet had arisen whom this John Baptist had declared to be greater than himself. They had seen Him drive the moneychangers from the Temple; they had heard many wild rumors concerning Him. So they followed Him to His home in the little village of Nazareth, where they heard Him talk in the synagogue. They had seen the listening crowd grow amazed at the eloquence of His teaching, and then indignant that one so humble as a carpenter's son should claim that Isaiah's prophecies had been fulfilled in Himself. They had seen Him driven from the home of His boyhood, and now had come to Capernaum that they might be witnesses in case this impostor tried to lead these people astray by repeating His claims. All this Joel heard, and more, as the earnest voices came distinctly down to him through the deep hush of the Sabbath stillness. It shook his faith somewhat, even in the goodness of this friend of his friend Phineas, that these two learned doctors of the Law should consider Him an impostor. He stood aside respectfully for them to pass, as they came down the outside stairway, and crossed the court-yard on their way to the morning service. Their long, flowing, white robes, their broad phylacteries, their dignified bearing, impressed him greatly. He knew they were wise, good men whose only aim in life was to keep the letter of the Law, down to its smallest details. He followed them through the streets until they came to the synagogue. They gave no greeting to any one they passed, but walked with reverently bowed heads that their pious meditation might not be disturbed by the outside world. His aunt had already gone by the way of the back streets, as it was customary for women to go, her face closely veiled. The synagogue, of finely chiselled limestone, with its double rows of great marble pillars, stood in its white splendor, the pride of the town. It had been built by the commander of the garrison who, though a Roman centurion, was a believer in the God of the Hebrews, and greatly loved by the whole people. Joel glanced up at the lintel over the door, where Aaron's rod and a pot of manna carved in the stone were constant reminders to the daily worshippers of the Hand that fed and guided them from generation to generation. Joel limped slowly to his place in the congregation. In the seats of honor, facing it, sat his uncle and his guests, among the rulers of the synagogue. For a moment his eyes wandered curiously around, hoping for a glimpse of the man whose fame was beginning to spread all over Galilee. It had been rumored that He would be there. But Joel saw only familiar faces. The elders took their seats. During the reading of the usual psalm, the reciting of a benediction, and even the confession of the creed, Joel's thoughts wandered. When the reader took up his scroll to read the passages from Deuteronomy, the boy stole one more quick glance all around. But as the whole congregation arose, and turned facing the east, he resolutely fixed his mind on the duties of the hour. The eighteen benedictions, or prayers, were recited in silence by each devout worshipper. Then the leader repeated them aloud, all the congregation responding with their deep Amen! and Amen! Joel always liked that part of the service and the chanting that followed. Another roll of parchment was brought out. The boy looked up with interest. Probably one of his uncle's guests would be invited to read from it, and speak to the people. No, it was a stranger whom he had not noticed before, sitting behind one of the tall elders, who was thus honored. Joel's heart beat so fast that the blood throbbed against his ear-drums, as he heard the name called. It was the friend of his friend Phineas, _the Rabbi Jesus_. Joel bent forward, all his soul in his eyes, as the stranger unrolled the book, and began to read from the Prophets. The words were old familiar ones; he even knew them by heart. But never before had they carried with them such music, such meaning. When He laid aside the roll, and began to speak, every fibre in the boy's being thrilled in response to the wonderful eloquence of that voice and teaching. The whole congregation sat spell-bound, forgetful of everything except the earnestness of the speaker who moved and swayed them as the wind does the waving wheat. Suddenly there arose a wild shriek, a sort of demon-like howl that transfixed them with its piercing horror. Every one turned to see the cause of the startling sound. There, near the door, stood a man whom they all knew,--an unhappy creature said to be possessed of an unclean spirit. "Ha!" he cried, in a blood-curdling tone. "What have we to do with Thee, Jesus of Nazareth? Art thou come to destroy us? I know Thee, who thou art, the holy One of God!" There was a great stir, especially in the woman's gallery; and those standing nearest him backed away as far as possible. Every face was curious and excited, at this sudden interruption,--every face but one; the Rabbi Jesus alone was calm. "Hold thy peace and come out of him!" He commanded. There was one more shriek, worse than before, as the man fell at His feet in a convulsion; but in a moment he stood up again, quiet and perfectly sane. The wild look was gone from his eyes. Whatever had been the strange spell that had bound him before, he was now absolutely free. There was another stir in the woman's gallery. Contrary to all rule or custom, an aged woman pushed her way out. Down the stairs she went, unveiled through the ranks of the men, to reach her son whom she had just seen restored to reason. With a glad cry she fell forward, fainting, in his arms, and was borne away to the little home, now no longer darkened by the shadow of a sore affliction. Little else was talked about that day, until the rumor of another miracle began to spread through the town. Phineas, stopping at Laban's house on his way home from an afternoon service, confirmed the truth of it. One of his neighbors had been dangerously ill with a fever that was common in that part of the country; she was the mother-in-law of Simon bar Jonah. It was at his home that the Rabbi Jesus had been invited to dine. As soon as He entered the house, they besought Him to heal her. Standing beside her, He rebuked the fever; and immediately she arose, and began to help her daughter prepare for the entertainment of their guest. "Abigail was there yesterday," said Phineas, "to carry some broth she had made. She thought then it would be impossible for the poor creature to live through the night. I saw the woman a few hours ago, and she is perfectly well and strong." That night when the sun was setting, and the Sabbath was at an end, a motley crowd streamed along the streets to the door of Simon bar Jonah. Men carried on couches; children in their mother's arms; those wasted by burning fevers; those shaken by unceasing palsy; the lame; the blind; the death-stricken,--all pressing hopefully on. What a scene in that little court-yard as the sunset touched the wan faces and smiled into dying eyes. Hope for the hopeless! Balm for the broken in body and spirit! There was rejoicing in nearly every home in Capernaum that night, for none were turned away. Not one was refused. It is written, "He laid His hand on every one of them, and healed them." That he might not seem behind his guests in zeal and devotion to the Law, the dignified Laban would not follow the crowds. "Let others be carried away by strange doctrines and false prophets, if they will," he declared; "as for me and my household, we will cling to the true faith of our fathers." So the three sat in the upper chamber on the roof, and discussed the new teacher with many shakes of their wise heads. "It is not lawful to heal on the Sabbath day," they declared. "Twice during the past day He has openly transgressed the Law. He will lead all Galilee astray!" But Galilee cared little how far the path turned from the narrow faith of the Pharisees, so long as it led to life and healing. Down in the garden below, the children climbed up on the grape-arbor, and peered through the vines at the surging crowds which they would have joined, had it not been for Laban's strict commands. One by one they watched people whom they knew go by, some carried on litters, some leaning on the shoulders of friends. One man crawled painfully along on his hands and knees. After awhile the same people began to come back. "Look, quick, Joel!" one of the children cried; "there goes Simon ben Levi. Why, his palsy is all gone! He doesn't shake a bit now! And there's little Martha that lives out near Aunt Rebecca's! Don't you know how white and thin she looked when they carried her by a little while ago? See! she is running along by herself now as well as we are!" The children could hardly credit their own sense of sight, when neighbors they had known all their lives to be bed-ridden invalids came back cured, singing and praising God. It was a sight they never could forget. So they watched wonderingly till darkness fell, and the last happy-hearted healed one had gone home to a rejoicing household. While the fathers on the roof were deciding they would have naught of this man, the children in the grape-arbor were storing up in their simple little hearts these proofs of his power and kindness. Then they gathered around Joel on the doorstep, while he repeated the story that the old shepherd Heber had told him, of the angels and the star, and the baby they had worshipped that night in Bethlehem. "Come, children," called his Aunt Leah, as she lit the lamp that was to burn all night. "Come! It is bed-time!" His cousin Hannah lingered a moment after the others had gone in, to say, "That was a pretty story, Joel. Why don't you go and ask the good man to straighten your back?" Strange as it may seem, this was the first time the thought had occurred to him that he might be benefited himself. He had been so long accustomed to thinking of himself as hopelessly lame, that the wonderful cures he had witnessed had awakened no hope for himself. A new life seemed to open up before him at the little girl's question. He sat on the doorstep thinking about it until his Uncle Laban came down and crossly ordered him to go to bed. He went in, saying softly to himself, "I will go to him to-morrow; yes, early in the morning!" Strange that an old proverb should cross his mind just then. "Boast not thyself of to-morrow. Thou knowest not what a day may bring forth." CHAPTER VI. WHEN Joel went out on the streets next morning, although it was quite early, he saw a disappointed crowd coming up from the direction of Simon's house on the lake shore. "Where have all these people been?" he asked of the baker's boy, whom he ran against at the first corner. The boy stopped whistling, and rested his basket of freshly baked bread against his knee, as he answered:-- "They were looking for the Rabbi who healed so many people last night. Say! do you know," he added quickly, as if the news were too good to keep, "he healed my mother last night. You cannot think how different it seems at home, to have her going about strong and well like she used to be." Joel's eyes brightened. "Do you think he'll do anything for me, if I go to him now?" he asked wistfully. "Do you suppose he could straighten out such a crooked back as mine? Look how much shorter this leg is than the other. Oh, _do_ you think he could make them all right?" The boy gave him a critical survey, and then answered, emphatically, "Yes! It really does not look like it would be as hard to straighten you as old Jeremy, the tailor's father. He was twisted all out of shape, you know. Well, I'll declare! There he goes now!" Joel looked across the street. The wrinkled face of the old basket-weaver was a familiar sight in the market; but Joel could hardly recognize the once crippled form, now restored to its original shapeliness. "I am going right now," he declared, starting to run in his excitement. "I can't wait another minute." "But he's gone!" the boy called after him. "That's why the people are all coming back." Joel sat down suddenly on a ledge projecting from the stone-wall. "Gone!" he echoed drearily. It was as if he had been starving, and the life-giving food held to his famished lips had been suddenly snatched away. Both his heart and his feet felt like lead when he got up after awhile, and dragged himself slowly along to the carpenter's house. [Illustration: "'I PEEPED OUT 'TWEEN 'E WOSE--VINES'"] It was such a bitter disappointment to be so near the touch of healing, and then to miss it altogether. No cheerful tap of the hammer greeted him. The idle tools lay on the deserted workbench. "Disappointed again!" he thought. Then the doves cooed, and he caught a glimpse of Ruth's fair hair down among the garden lilies. "Where is your father, little one?" he called. "Gone away wiv 'e good man 'at makes everybody well," she answered. Then she came skipping down the path to stand close beside him, and say confidentially: "I saw Him--'e good man--going by to Simon's house. I peeped out 'tween 'e wose-vines, and He looked wite into my eyes wiv His eyes, and I couldn't help loving Him!" Joel looked into the beautiful baby face, thinking what a picture it must have made, as framed in roses it smiled out on the Tender-hearted One, going on His mission of help and healing. With her little hand in his, she led him back to hope, for she took him to her mother, who comforted him with the assurance that Phineas expected to be home soon, and doubtless his friend would be with him. So there came another time to work by himself and dream of the hour surely dawning. And the dreams were doubly sweet now; for side by side with his hope of revenge, was the belief in his possible cure. They heard only once from the absent ones. Word came back that a leper had been healed. Joel heard it first, down at the custom-house. He had gotten into the way of strolling down in that direction after his work was done; for here the many trading-vessels from across the lake, or those that shipped from Capernaum, had to stop and pay duty. Here, too, the great road of Eastern commerce passed which led from Damascus to the harbors of the West. So here he would find a constant stream of travellers, bringing the latest news from the outside world. The boy did not know, as he limped up and down the water's edge, longing for some word from his absent friends, that near by was one who watched almost as eagerly as himself. It was Levi-Matthew, one of the officials, sitting in the seat of custom. Sprung from the same priestly tribe as Joel, he had sunk so low, in accepting the office of tax-gatherer, that the righteous Laban would not have touched him so much as with the tip of his sandal. "Bears and lions," said a proverb, "might be the fiercest wild beasts in the forests; but publicans and informers were the worst in cities." One could not bear witness in the courts, and the disgrace extended to the whole family. They were even classed with robbers and murderers. No doubt there was deep cause for such a feeling; as a class they were unscrupulous and unjust. There might have been good ones among their number, but the company they kept condemned them to the scorn of high and low. When a Jew hates, or a Jew scorns, be sure it is thoroughly done; there is no half-way course for his intense nature to take. So this son of Levi, sitting in the seat of custom, and this son of Levi strolling past him, were, socially, as far apart as the east is from the west,--as unlike as thorn and blossom on the same tribal stem. Matthew knew all the fishermen and ship-owners that thronged the busy beach in front of him. The sons of Jonah and of Zebedee passed him daily; and he must have wondered when he saw them throw down their nets and leave everything to follow a stranger. He must have wondered also at the reports on every tongue, and the sights he had seen himself of miraculous healing. But while strangely drawn towards this new teacher from Nazareth, it could have been with no thought that the hand and the voice were for him. He was a publican, and how could they reach to such depths? A caravan had just stopped. The pack-animals were being unloaded, bales and packages opened, private letters pried into. The insolent officials were tossing things right and left, as they made a list of the taxable goods. Joel was watching them with as much interest as if he had not witnessed such scenes dozens of times before, till he noticed a group gathering around one of the drivers. He was telling what he had seen on his way to Capernaum. Several noisy companions kept interrupting him to bear witness to the truth of his statements. "And he who but a moment before had been the most miserable of lepers stood up before us all, cleansed of his leprosy. His skin was soft and fair as a child's, and his features were restored to him," said the driver. Joel and Levi-Matthew stood side by side. At another time the boy might have drawn his clothes away to keep from brushing against the despised tax-gatherer. But he never noticed now that their elbows touched. When he had heard all there was to be told, he limped away to carry the news to Abigail. To know that others were being cured daily made him all the more impatient for the return of this friend of Phineas. The publican turned again to his pen and his account-book. He, too, looked forward with a burning heart to the return of the Nazarene, unknowing why he did so. At last Joel heard of the return, in a very unexpected way. There were guests in the house of Laban again. One of the rabbis who had been there before, and a scribe from Jerusalem. Now there were longer conferences in the upper chamber, and graver shakings of the head, over this false prophet whose fame was spreading wider. The miracle of healing the paralytic at the pool of Bethesda, when he had gone down to Jerusalem to one of the many feasts, had stirred Judea to its farthest borders. So these two men had been sent to investigate. On the very afternoon of their arrival, a report flew through the streets that the Rabbi Jesus was once more in the town. Their host led them with all the haste their dignity would allow, to the house where He was said to be preaching. The common people fell back when they saw them, and allowed them to pass into the centre of the throng. The Rabbi stood in the doorway, so that both those in the house and without could distinctly hear Him. The scribe had never seen Him before, and in spite of his deep-seated prejudice could not help admiring the man whom he had come prepared to despise. It was no wild fanatic who stood before him, no noisy debater whose fiery eloquence would be likely to excite and inflame His hearers. He saw a man of gentlest dignity; truth looked out from the depths of His calm eyes. Every word, every gesture, carried with it the conviction that He who spoke taught with God-given authority. The scribe began to grow uneasy as he listened, carried along by the earnest tones of the speaker. There was a great commotion on the edge of the crowd, as some one tried to push through to the centre. "Stand back! Go away!" demanded angry voices. The scribe was a tall man, and by stretching a little, managed to see over the heads of the others. Four men, bearing a helpless paralytic, were trying to carry him through the throngs; but they would not make room for this interruption. After vainly hunting for some opening through which they might press, the men mounted the steep, narrow staircase on the outside of the building, and drew the man up, hammock and all, to the flat roof on which they stood. There was a sound of scraping and scratching as they broke away the brush and mortar that formed the frail covering of the roof. Then the people in the room below saw slowly coming down upon them between the rafters, this man whom no obstacle could keep back from the Great Physician. But the paralyzed hands could not lift themselves in supplication; the helpless tongue could frame no word of pleading,--only the eyes of the sick man could look up into the pitying face bent over him, and implore a blessing. The scribe leaned forward, confidently expecting to hear the man bidden to arise. To his surprise and horror, the words he heard were: "Son, thy _sins_ be forgiven thee!" He looked at Laban and his companion, and the three exchanged meaning glances. When they looked again at the speaker, His eyes seemed to read their inmost thoughts. "Wherefore think ye evil in your hearts?" He asked, with startling distinctness. "Whether is it easier to say to the sick of the palsy, Thy sins be forgiven thee; or to say, Arise, and take up thy bed, and walk? But that ye may know that the Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins," here He turned to the helpless form lying at His feet, "I say unto thee, Arise, and take up thy bed, and go thy way unto thine house." The man bounded to his feet, and picking up the heavy rug on which he had been lying, went running and leaping out of their midst. Without a word, Laban and his two guests drew their clothes carefully around them, and picked their way through the crowd. Phineas, who stood at the gate, gave them a respectful greeting. Laban only turned his eyes away with a scowl, and passed coldly on. "The man is a liar and a blasphemer!" exclaimed the scribe, as they sat once more in the privacy of Laban's garden. "Only God can forgive sins!" added his companion. "This paralytic should have taken a sin-offering to the priest. For only by the blood of sacrifice can one hope to obtain pardon." "Still He healed him," spoke up the scribe, musingly. "Only through the power of Satan!" interrupted Laban. "When He says He can forgive sins, He blasphemes." The other Pharisee leaned forward to say, in an impressive whisper: "Then you know the Law on that point. He should be stoned to death, His body hung on a tree, and then buried with shame!" It was not long after that Joel, just back from a trip to Tiberias in a little sailing-boat, came into the garden. He had been away since early morning, so had heard nothing of what had just occurred; he had had good luck in disposing of his wares, and was feeling unusually cheerful. Hearing voices in the corner of the garden, he was about to pass out again, when his uncle called him sternly to come to him at once. Surprised at the command, he obeyed, and was questioned and cross-questioned by all three. It was very little he could tell them about his friend's plans; but he acknowledged proudly that Phineas had always known this famous man from Nazareth, even in childhood, and was one of his most devoted followers. "This man Phineas is a traitor to the faith!" roared Laban. "He is a dangerous man, and in league with these fellows to do great evil to our nation." The scribe and the rabbi nodded approvingly. "Hear me, now!" he cried, sternly. "Never again are you to set foot over his threshold, or have any communication whatsoever with him or his associates. I make no idle threat; if you disobey me in this, you will have cause to wish you had never been born. You may leave us now!" Too surprised and frightened to say a word, the child slipped away. To give up his daily visit to the carpenter's house, was to give up all that made his life tolerable; while to be denied even speaking to his associates, meant to abandon all hope of cure. But he dared not rebel; obedience to those in authority was too thoroughly taught in those days to be lightly disregarded. But his uncle seemed to fear that his harsh command would be eluded in some way, and kept such a strict watch over him, that he rarely got beyond the borders of the garden by himself. One day he was all alone in the grape-arbor, looking out into the streets that he longed to be in, since their freedom had been denied him. A little girl passed, carrying one child in her arms, and talking to another who clung to her skirts. It was Jerusha. Joel threw a green grape at her to attract her attention, and then beckoned her mysteriously to come nearer. She set the baby on the ground, and gave him her bracelet to play with, while she listened to a whispered account of his wrongs through the latticed arbor. "It's a shame!" she declared indignantly. "I'll go right down to the carpenter's house and tell them why you cannot go there any more. And I'll keep watch on all that happens, and let you know. I go past here every day, and if I have any news, I'll toss a pebble over the wall and cluck like a hen. Then if nobody is watching, you can come to this hole in the arbor again." The next day, as Joel was going in great haste to the baker's, whither his aunt had sent him, he heard some one behind him calling him to wait. In another moment Jerusha was in speaking distance, nearly bent double with the weight of her little brother, whom she was carrying as usual. "There!" she said, with a puff of relief, as she put him on his own feet. "Wait till I get my breath! It's no easy thing to carry such a load and run at the same time! How did you get out?" "There was an errand to be done, and no one else to do it," answered Joel, "so Aunt sent me." "Oh, I've got such news for you!" she exclaimed. "Guess what has happened! Your Rabbi Jesus has asked Levi-Matthew to be one of His followers, and go around with Him wherever He goes. Think of it! One of those horrid tax-gatherers! He settled his accounts and gave up his position in the custom-house yesterday. And he is getting ready for a great feast. I heard the butcher and the wine-dealer both telling about the big orders he had given them. "All the publicans and low common people that are his friends are invited. Yes, and so is your friend the carpenter. Think of that, now! He is going to sit down and eat with such people! Of course respectable folks will never have anything more to do with him after that! I guess your uncle was right about him, after all!" Both the little girl's face and manner expressed intense disgust. Joel was shocked. "Oh, are you sure?" he cried. "You certainly must be mistaken! It cannot be so!" "I guess I know what I see with my own eyes, and hear with my own ears!" she retorted, angrily. "My father says they are a bad lot. People that go with publicans are just as unclean themselves. If you know so much more than everybody else, I'll not trouble myself to run after you with any more news. Mistaken, indeed!" With her head held high, and her nose scornfully turned up, she jerked her little brother past him, and went quickly around the corner of the street. The indignation of some of the rabbis knew no bounds. "It has turned out just as I predicted," said the scribe to Laban, at supper. "They are nothing but a set of gluttons and wine-bibbers!" There was nothing else talked of during the entire meal. How Joel's blood boiled as he listened to their conversation! The food seemed to choke him. As they applied one coarse epithet after another to his friend Phineas, all the kindness and care this man had ever given him seemed to rise up before him. But when they turned on the Nazarene, all the stories Joel had heard in the carpenter's house of His gentle sinless childhood, all the tokens he had seen himself of His pure unselfish manhood, seemed to cry out against such gross injustice. It was no light thing for a child to contradict the doctors of the Law, and, in a case of this kind, little less than a crime to take the stand Joel did. But the memory of two faces gave him courage: that of Phineas as it had looked on him through all those busy happy hours in the carpenter's home; the other face he had seen but once, that day of healing in the synagogue,--who, having once looked into the purity of those eyes, the infinite tenderness of that face, could sit calmly by and raise no voice against the calumny of his enemies? The little cripple was white to the lips, and he trembled from head to foot as he stood up to speak. The scribe lifted up both hands, and turned to Laban with a meaning shrug of the shoulders. "To think of finding such heresy in your own household!" he exclaimed. "Among your own children!" "He is no child of mine!" retorted Laban. "Nor shall he stay among them!" Then he turned to Joel. "Boy, take back every word you have just uttered! Swear you will renounce this man,--this son of perdition,--and never have aught to say well of Him again!" Joel looked around the table, at each face that shone out pale and excited in the yellow lamplight. His eyes were dilated with fear; his heart thumped so in the awful pause that followed, that he thought everybody else must hear it. "I cannot!" he said hoarsely. "Oh, I cannot!" "Then take yourself out of my sight forever. The doors of this house shall never open for you again!" There was a storm of abuse from the angry man at this open defiance of his authority. With these two cold, stern men to nod approval at his zealousness, he went to greater lengths than he might otherwise have done. With one more frightened glance around the table, the child hurried out of the room. The door into the street creaked after him, and Joel limped out into the night, with his uncle's curse ringing in his ears. CHAPTER VII. PHINEAS, going along the beach that night, in the early moonlight, towards his home, saw a little figure crouched in the shadow of a low building beside the wharf. It was shaking with violent sobs. He went up to the child, and took its hands down from its wet face, with a comforting expression of pity. Then he started back in surprise. It was Joel! "Why, my child! My poor child!" he exclaimed, putting his arm around the trembling, misshapen form. "What is the meaning of all this?" "Uncle Laban has driven me away from home!" sobbed the boy. "He was angry because you and Rabbi Jesus were invited to Levi-Matthew's feast. He says I have denied the faith, and am worse than an infidel. He says I am fit only to be cast out with the dogs and publicans!--and--and--" he ended with a wail. "Oh, he sent me away with his curse!" Phineas drew him closer, and stroked the head on his shoulder in pitying silence. "Fatherless and motherless and lame!" the boy sobbed bitterly. "And now, a homeless outcast, blighted by a curse, I have been sitting here with my feet in the dark water, thinking how easy it would be to slip down into it and forget; but, Rabbi Phineas, that face will not let me,--that face of your friend,--I keep seeing it all the time!" Phineas gathered the boy so close in his arms that Joel could feel his strong, even heart-beats. "My child," he said solemnly, "call me no more, Rabbi! Henceforth, it is to be _father_ Phineas. You shall be to me as my own son!" "But the curse!" sobbed Joel. "The curse that is set upon me! It will blight you too!" "Nay," was the quiet answer; "for it is written, 'As the bird by wandering, as the swallow by flying, _so the curse, causeless, shall not come_.'" But the boy still shook as with a chill. His face and hands were burning hot. "Come!" said Phineas. He picked him up in his strong arms, and carried him down the beach to Abigail's motherly care and comforting. "He will be a long time getting over the shock of this," she said to her husband, when he was at last soothed to sleep. "Ah, loyal little heart!" he answered, "he has suffered much for the sake of his friendship with us!" Poor little storm-tossed bark! In the days that followed he had reason to bless the boisterous winds, that blew him to such a safe and happy harbor! * * * * * Over on the horns of Mount Hattin, the spring morning began to shine. The light crept slowly down the side of the old mountain, till it fell on a little group of men talking earnestly together. It was the Preacher of Galilee, who had just chosen twelve men from among those who followed Him to help Him in His ministry. They gathered around Him in the fresh mountain dawn, as He pictured the life in store for them. Strange they did not quail before it, and turn back disheartened. Nay, not strange! For in the weeks they had been with Him, they had learned to love Him so, that His "follow me," that drew them from the toll-gate and fishing-boat, was stronger than ties of home and kindred. Just about this time, Phineas and Joel were starting out from Capernaum to the mountain. Hundreds of people were already on the way; people who had come from all parts of Judea, and beyond the Jordan. Clouds of dust rose above the highway as the travellers trudged along. Joel was obliged to walk slowly, so that by the time they reached the plain below, a great multitude had gathered. "Let's get close," he whispered. He had heard that those who barely touched the garments of the strange Rabbi were made whole, and it was with the hope that he might steal up and touch Him unobserved that he had begged Phineas to take him on such a long, painful walk. "There is too great a crowd, now," answered Phineas. "Let us rest here awhile, and listen. Let me lift you up on this big rock, so that you can see. 'Sh! He is speaking!" Joel looked up, and, for the second time in his life, listened to words that thrilled him like a trumpet call,--words that through eighteen hundred years have not ceased to vibrate; with what mighty power they must have fallen when, for the first time, they broke the morning stillness of those mountain wilds! Joel forgot the press of people about him, forgot even where he was, as sentence after sentence seemed to lift him out of himself, till he could catch glimpses of lofty living such as he had never even dreamed of before. Round by round, he seemed to be carried up some high ladder of thought by that voice, away from all that was common and low and earthly, to a summit of infinite love and light. Still the voice led on, "Ye have heard that it hath been said, 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.'" Joel started so violently at hearing his own familiar motto, that he nearly lost his balance on the rock. "But I say unto you that you resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.... Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you." Poor little Joel, it was a hard doctrine for him to accept! How could he give up his hope of revenge, when it had grown with his growth till it had come to be as dear as life itself? He heard little of the rest of the sermon, for through it all the words kept echoing, "Bless them that curse you! Do good to them that hate you! Pray for them which despitefully use you!" "Oh, I can't! I can't!" he groaned inwardly. "I have found a chance for you to ride home," said Phineas, when the sermon was over, and the people began to file down the narrow mountain paths. "But there will be time for you to go to Him first, for healing. You have only to ask, you know." Joel took an eager step forward, and then shrank back guiltily. "Not now," he murmured, "some other time." He could not look into those clear eyes and ask a blessing, when he knew his heart was black with hate. After all his weeks of waiting the opportunity had come; but he dared not let the Sinless One look into his soul. Phineas began an exclamation of surprise, but was interrupted by some one asking him a question. Joel took advantage of this to climb up behind the man who had offered him a ride. All the way home he weighed the two desires in his mind,--the hope of healing, and the hope of revenge. By the time the two guardian fig-trees were in sight, he had decided. He would rather go helpless and halting through life than give up his cherished purpose. But there was no sleep for him that night, after he had gone up to his little chamber on the roof. He seemed to see that pleading face on the mountain-side; it came to him again and again, with the words, "Bless them that curse you! Pray for them that despitefully use you!" All night he fought against yielding to it. Time and again he turned over on his bed, and closed his eyes; but it would not let him alone. He thought of Jacob wrestling with the angel till day-break, and knew in his heart that the sweet spirit of forgiveness striving with his selfish nature was some heavenly impulse from another world. At last when the cock-crowing commenced at dawn, and the stars were beginning to fade, he drew up his crooked little body, and knelt with his face to the kindling east. "Father in heaven," he prayed softly, "bless mine enemy Rehum, and forgive all my sins,--fully and freely as I now forgive the wrong he has done to me." A feeling of light-heartedness and peace, such as he had never known before, stole over him. He could not settle himself to sleep, though worn out with his night's long vigil. [Illustration: "NOT A WORD WAS SAID"] Hastily slipping on his clothes, he tiptoed down the stairs, and limped, bare-headed, down to the beach. The lake shimmered and glowed under the faint rose and gray of the sky like a deep opal. The early breeze blew the hair back from his pale face with a refreshing coolness. It seemed to him the world had never looked one half so beautiful before, as he stood there. A firm tread on the gravel made him turn partly around. A man was coming up the beach; it was the friend of Phineas. As if drawn by some uncontrollable impulse, Joel started to meet Him, an unspoken prayer in his pleading little face. Not a word was said. For one little instant Joel stood there by the shining sea, his hand held close in the loving hand of the world's Redeemer. For one little instant he looked up into His face; then the man passed on. Joel covered his face with his hands, seeming to hear the still small voice that spoke to the prophet out of the whirlwind. "He is the Christ!" he whispered reverently,--"He is the Christ!" In his exalted feeling all thought of a cure had left him; but as he walked on down the beach, he noticed that he no longer limped. He was moving along with strong, quick strides. He shook himself and threw back his shoulders; there was no pain in the movement. He passed his hands over his back and down his limbs. Oh, he was straight and strong and sinewy! He seemed a stranger to himself, as running and leaping, then stopping to look down and feel his limbs again, he ran madly on. Suddenly he cast his garments aside and dived into the lake. Before his injury, he had been able to swim like a fish, now he reached out with long powerful strokes that sent him darting through the cold water with a wonderful sense of exhilaration. Then he dressed again, and went on running and leaping and climbing till he was exhausted, and his first wild delirious joy began to subside into a deep quiet thankfulness. Then he went home, radiant in the happiness of his new-found cure. But more than the mystery of the miracle, more than the joy of the healing, was the remembrance of that moment, that one little moment, when he felt the clasp of the Master's hand, and seemed wrapped about with the boundless love of God. From that moment, he lived but to serve and to follow Him. CHAPTER VIII. HIGH up among the black lava crags of Perea stood the dismal fortress of Macherus. Behind its close prison bars a restless captive groped his way back and forth in a dungeon cell. Sometimes, at long intervals, he was given such liberty as a chained eagle might have, when he was led up into one of the towers of the gloomy keep, and allowed to look down, down into the bottomless gorges surrounding it. For months he had chafed in the darkness of his underground dungeon; escape was impossible. It was John Baptist, brought from the wild, free life of the desert to the tortures of the "Black Castle." Here he lay at the mercy of Herod Antipas, and death might strike at any moment. More than once, the whimsical monarch had sent for him, as he sat at his banquets, to be the sport of the passing hour. The lights, the color, the flash of gems may have dazzled his eyes for a brief space, accustomed as they were to the midnight darkness of his cell; but his keen vision saw, under the paint and purple of royal apparel, the corrupt life of king and court. Pointing his stern, accusing finger at the uneasy king, he cried, "It is not lawful for thee to have thy brother's wife!" With words that stung like hurtling arrows, he laid bare the blackened, beastly life that sought to hide its foulness under royal ermine. Antipas cowered before him; and while he would gladly have been freed from a man who had such power over him, he dared not lift a finger against the fearless, unflinching Baptist. But the guilty Herodias bided her time, with blood-thirsty impatience; his life should pay the penalty of his bold speech. Meanwhile he waited in his cell, with nothing but memories to relieve the tediousness of the long hours. Over and over again he lived those scenes of his strange life in the desert,--those days of his preparation,--the preaching to the multitudes, the baptizing at the ford of the Jordan. He wondered if his words still lived; if any of his followers still believed on him. But more than all, he wondered what had become of that One on whom he had seen the spirit of God descending out of heaven in the form of a dove. "Where art Thou now?" he cried. "If Thou art the Messiah, why dost Thou not set up Thy kingdom, and speedily give Thy servant his liberty?" The empty room rang often with that cry; but the hollow echo of his own words was the only answer. One day the door of his cell creaked back far enough to admit two men, and then shut again, leaving them in total darkness. In that momentary flash of light, he recognized two old followers of his, Timeus bar Joram and Benjamin the potter. With a cry of joy he groped his way toward them, and clung to their friendly hands. "How did you manage to penetrate these Roman-guarded walls?" he asked, in astonishment. "I knew the warden," answered Benjamin. "A piece of silver conveniently closes his eyes to many things. But we must hasten! Our time is limited." They had much to tell of the outside world. Pilate had just given special offence, by appropriating part of the treasure of the Temple, derived from the Temple tax, to defray the cost of great conduits he had begun, with which to supply Jerusalem with water. Stirred up by the priests and rabbis, the people besieged the government house, crying loudly that the works be given up. Armed with clubs, numbers of soldiers in plain clothes surrounded the great mob, and killed so many of the people that the wildest excitement prevailed throughout all Judea and Galilee. There was a cry for a national uprising to avenge the murder. "They only need a leader!" exclaimed John. "Where is He for whom I was but a voice crying in the wilderness? Why does He not show Himself?" "We have just come from the village of Nain," said Timeus bar Joram. "We saw Him stop a funeral procession and raise a widow's son to life. He was followed by a motley throng whom He had healed of all sorts of diseases; and there were twelve men whom He had chosen as life-long companions. "We questioned some of them closely, and they gave us marvellous reports of the things He had done." "Is it not strange," asked Benjamin the potter, "that having such power He still delays to establish His kingdom?" The captive prophet made no answer for awhile. Then he groped in the thick darkness till his hand rested heavily on Benjamin's arm. "Go back, and say that John Baptist asks, 'Art Thou the Coming One, or must we look for another?'" Days passed before the devoted friends found themselves once more inside the prison walls. They had had a weary journey over rough hills and rocky by-paths. "What did He say?" demanded the prisoner, eagerly. "Go and tell John what ye saw and heard: that the blind receive sight; the lame walk; the lepers are cleansed; the deaf hear; the dead are raised; and the poor have the gospel preached unto them." The man stood up, his long hair hanging to his shoulder, his hand uplifted, and his eyes dilated like a startled deer that has caught the sound of a coming step. "The fulfilment of the words of Isaiah!" he cried. "For he hath said, 'Your God will come and save you. Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped. Then shall the lame man leap as a hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing!' Yea, he _hath_ bound up the broken-hearted; and he shall yet 'proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord!'" Then with both hands clasped high above his head, he made the prison ring with the cry, "The kingdom is at hand! The kingdom is at hand! I shall soon be free!" Not long after that, the castle blazed with the lights of another banquet. The faint aroma of wines, mingled with the heavy odor of countless flowers, could not penetrate the grim prison walls. Nor could the gay snatches of song and the revelry of the feast. No sound of applause reached the prisoner's ear, when the daughter of Herodias danced before the king. Sitting in darkness while the birthday banqueters held high carnival, he heard the heavy tramp of soldiers' feet coming down the stairs to his dungeon. The great bolts shot back, the rusty hinges turned, and a lantern flickered its light in his face, as he stood up to receive his executioners. A little while later his severed head was taken on a charger to the smiling dancing girl. She stifled a shriek when she saw it; but the wicked Herodias looked at it with a gleam of triumph in her treacherous black eyes. When the lights were out, and the feasters gone, two men came in at the warden's bidding,--two men with heavy hearts, and voices that shook a little when they spoke to each other. They were Timeus and Benjamin. Silently they lifted the body of their beloved master, and carried it away for burial; and if a tear or two found an unaccustomed path down their bearded cheeks, no one knew it, under cover of the darkness. So, out of the Black Castle of Macherus, out of the prison-house of a mortal body, the white-souled prophet of the wilderness went forth at last into liberty. For him, the kingdom was indeed at hand. * * * * * Meanwhile in the upper country, Phineas was following his friend from village to village. He had dropped his old familiar form of address, so much was he impressed by the mysterious power he saw constantly displayed. Now when he spoke of the man who had been both friend and playfellow, it was almost reverently that he gave Him the title of Master. It was with a heavy heart that Joel watched them go away. He, too, longed to follow; but he knew that unless he took the place at the bench, Phineas could not be free to go. Gratitude held him to his post. No, not gratitude alone; he was learning the Master's own spirit of loving self-sacrifice. As he dropped the plumb-line over his work, he measured himself by that perfect life, and tried to straighten himself to its unbending standard. He had his reward in the look of pleasure that he saw on the carpenter's face when Phineas came in, unexpectedly, one day, dusty and travel-stained. "How much you have accomplished!" he said in surprise. "You have filled my place like a grown man." Joel stretched his strong arms with a slight laugh. "It is a pleasure to work now," he said. "It seems so queer never to have a pain, or that worn-out feeling of weakness that used to be always with me. At first I was often afraid it was all a happy dream, and could not last. I am getting used to it now. Where is the Master?" Joel asked, as Phineas turned towards the house. "He is the guest of Simon. He will be here some days, my son. I know you wish to be with Him as much as possible, so I shall not expect your help as long as He stays." "If I could only do something for Him!" was Joel's constant thought during the next few days. Once he took a coin from the little money bag that held his hoarded savings--a coin that was to have helped buy his revenge--and bought the ripest, juiciest pear he could find in the market. Often he brought Him water, fresh and cold from the well when He looked tired and warm from His unceasing work. Wherever the Master turned, there, close beside Him, was a beaming little face, so full of love and childish sympathy that it must have brought more refreshment to His thirsty soul than either the choice fruit or the cooling water. One evening after a busy day, when He had talked for hours to the people on the seashore who had gathered around the boat in which He sat, He sent away the multitude. "Let us pass over unto the other side," He said. Joel slipped up to Andrew, who was busily arranging their sails. "Let me go, too!" he whispered pleadingly. "Well," assented the man, carelessly, "You can make yourself useful, I suppose. Will you hand me that rope?" Joel sprang to obey. Presently the boat pushed away from the shore, and the town, with its tumult and its twinkling lights, was soon left far behind. The sea was like glass, so calm and unruffled that every star above could look down and see its unbroken reflection in the dark water below. Joel, in the hinder part of the ship, lay back in his seat with a sigh of perfect enjoyment. The smooth gliding motion of the boat rested him; the soft splash of the water soothed his excited brain. He had seen his Uncle Laban that afternoon among other of the scribes and Pharisees, and heard him declare that Beelzebub alone was responsible for the wonders they witnessed. Joel's indignation flared up again at the memory. He looked down at the Master, who had fallen asleep on a pillow, and wondered how anybody could possibly believe such evil things about Him. It was cooler out where they were now. He wondered if he ought not to lay some covering over the sleeping form. He took off the outer mantle that he wore, and bent forward to lay it over the Master's feet. But he drew back timidly, afraid of wakening Him. "I'll wait awhile," he said to himself, folding the garment across his knees in readiness. Several times he reached forward to lay it over Him, and each time drew back. Then he fell asleep himself. From its situation in the basin of the hills, the Galilee is subject to sudden and furious storms. The winds, rushing down the heights, meet and clash above the water, till the waves run up like walls, then sink again into seething whirlpools of danger. Joel, falling asleep in a dead calm, awoke to find the ship rolling and tossing and half-full of water. The lightning's track was followed so closely by the crash of thunder, there was not even pause enough between to take one terrified gasp. Still the Master slept. Joel, drenched to the skin, clung to the boat's side, expecting that every minute would be his last. It was so dark and wild and awful! How helpless they were, buffetted about in the fury of the storm! As wave after wave beat in, some of the men could no longer control their fear. "Master!" they called to the sleeping man, as they bent over Him in terror. "Carest Thou not that we perish?" He heard the cry for help. The storm could not waken Him from His deep sleep of exhaustion, but at the first despairing human voice, He was up, ready to help. Looking up at the midnight blackness of the sky, and down at the wild waste of waters, He stretched out His hand. "_Peace!_" he commanded in a deep voice. "_Be still!_" The storm sank to earth as suddenly as a death-stricken raven; a great calm spread over the face of the waters. The silent stars shone out in their places; the silent sea mirrored back their glory at His feet. The men huddled fearfully together. "What manner of man is this?" they asked, one of another. "Even the wind and the sea obey Him!" Joel, looking up at the majestic form, standing so quietly by the railing, thought of the voice that once rang out over the night of Creation with the command, "Let there be light!" At its mere bidding light had flowed in across the darkness of primeval night. Just so had this voice thrilled the storm with its "Peace! Be still!" into utter calm. The child crouched at His feet, burying his face in his mantle, and whispering, in awe and adoration, "He _is_ the Christ! He is the son of God!" CHAPTER IX. AFTER that night of the voyage to the Gadarenes, Joel ceased to be surprised at the miracles he daily witnessed. Even when the little daughter of Jairus, the ruler of the synagogue, was called back to life, it did not seem so wonderful to him as the stilling of the tempest. Many a night after Phineas had gone away again with the Master to other cities, Joel used to go down to the beach, and stand looking across the water as he recalled that scene. The lake had always been an interesting place to him at night. He liked to watch the fishermen as they flashed their blazing torches this way and that. A sympathetic thrill ran through him as they sighted their prey, and raised their bare sinewy arms to fling the net or fly the spear. But after that morning of healing, and that night of tempest, it seemed to be a sacred place, to be visited only on still nights, when the town slept, and heaven bent nearer in the starlight to the quiet earth. The time of the Passover was drawing near,--the time that Joel had been looking forward to since Phineas had promised him a year ago that he should go to Jerusalem. The twelve disciples who had been sent out to all the little towns through Galilee, to teach the things they had themselves been taught, and work miracles in the name of Him who had sent them, began to come slowly back. They had an encouraging report to bring of their work; but it was shadowed by the news they had heard of the murder of John Baptist. Joel joined them as soon as they came into Capernaum, and walked beside Phineas as the footsore travellers pressed on a little farther towards Simon's house. "When are we going to start for Jerusalem?" was his first eager question. Phineas looked searchingly into his face as he replied, "Would you be greatly disappointed, my son, not to go this year?" Joel looked perplexed; it was such an unheard of thing for Phineas to miss going up to the Feast of the Passover. "These are evil times, my Joel," he explained. "John Baptist has just been beheaded. The Master has many enemies among those in high places. It would be like walking into a lion's den for Him to go up to Jerusalem. "Even here He is not safe from the hatred of Antipas, and after a little rest will pass over into the borders of the tetrarch Philip. We have no wish to leave Him!" "Oh, why should He be persecuted so?" asked Joel, looking with tear-dimmed eyes at the man walking in advance of them, and talking in low earnest tones to John, who walked beside Him. "You have been with Him so much, father Phineas. Have _you_ ever known Him to do anything to make these men His enemies?" "Yes," said Phineas. "He has drawn the people after Him until they are jealous of His popularity. He upsets their old traditions, and teaches a religion that ignores some of the Laws of Moses. I can easily see why they hate Him so. They see Him at such a long distance from themselves, they can not understand Him. Healing on the Sabbath, eating with publicans and sinners, disregarding the little customs and ceremonies that in all ages have set apart our people as a chosen race, are crimes in their eyes. "If they only could get close enough to understand Him; to see that His pure life needs no ceremonies of multiplied hand-washings; that it is His broad love for His fellow-men that makes Him stoop to the lowest classes,--I am sure they could not do otherwise than love Him. "Blind fanatics! They would put to death the best man that ever lived, because He is so much broader and higher than they that the little measuring line of their narrow creed cannot compass Him!" "Is He never going to set up His kingdom?" asked Joel. "Does He never talk about it?" "Yes," said Phineas; "though we are often puzzled by what He says, and ask ourselves His meaning." They had reached the house by this time, and as Simon led the way to its hospitable door, Phineas said, "Enter with them, my lad, if you wish. I must go on to my little family, but will join you soon." To Joel's great pleasure, he found they were to cross the lake at once, to the little fishing port of Bethsaida. It was only six miles across. "We have hardly had time to eat," said Andrew to Joel, as they walked along towards the boat "I will be glad to get away to some desert place, where we may have rest from the people that are always pushing and clamoring about us." "How long before you start?" asked Joel. "In a very few minutes," answered Andrew; "for the boat is in readiness." Joel glanced from the street above the beach to the water's edge, as if calculating the distance. "Don't go without me," he said as, breaking into a run, he dashed up the beach at his utmost speed. He was back again in a surprisingly quick time, with a cheap little basket in his hand; he was out of breath with his rapid run. "Didn't I go fast?" he panted. "I could not have done that a few weeks ago. Oh, it feels so good to be able to run when I please! It is like flying." He lifted the cover of the basket. "See!" he said. "I thought the Master might be hungry; but I had no time to get anything better. I had to stop at the first stall I came to." At the same time the boat went gliding out into the water with its restful motion, thousands of people were pouring out of the villages on foot, and hurrying on around the lake, ahead of them. The boat passed up a narrow winding creek, away from the sail-dotted lake; its green banks seemed to promise the longed-for quiet and rest. But there in front of them waited the crowds they had come so far to avoid. They had brought their sick for healing. They needed to be helped and taught; they were "as sheep without a shepherd!" He could not refuse them. Joel found no chance to offer the food he had bought so hastily with another of his hoarded coins,--the coins that were to have purchased his revenge. As the day wore on, he heard the disciples ask that the multitudes might be sent away. "It would take two hundred pennyworth of bread to feed them," said Philip, "and even that would not be enough." Andrew glanced over the great crowds and stroked his beard thoughtfully. "There is a lad here which hath five barley loaves and two small fishes, but what are they among so many?" Joel hurried forward and held out his basket with its little store,--five flat round loaves of bread, not much more than one hungry man could eat, and two dried fishes. He hardly knew what to expect as the people were made to sit down on the grass in orderly ranks of fifties. His eyes grew round with astonishment as the Master took the bread, gave thanks, and then passed it to the disciples, who, in turn, distributed it among the people. Then the two little fishes were handed around in the same way. Joel turned to Phineas, who had joined them some time ago. "Do you see that?" he asked excitedly. "They have been multiplied a thousand fold!" Phineas smiled. "We drop one tiny grain of wheat into the earth," he said, "and when it grows and spreads and bears dozens of other grains on its single stalk, we are not astonished. When the Master but does in an instant, what Nature takes months to do, we cry, 'a miracle!' 'Men are more wont to be astonished at the sun's eclipse, than at its daily rising,'" he quoted, remembering his conversation with the old traveller, on his way to Nathan ben Obed's. A feeling of exaltation seized the people as they ate the mysterious bread; it seemed that the days of miraculous manna had come again. By the time they had all satisfied their hunger, and twelve basketfuls of the fragments had been gathered up, they were ready to make Him their king. The restlessness of the times had taken possession of them; the burning excitement must find vent in some way, and with one accord they demanded Him as their leader. Joel wondered why He should refuse. Surely no other man he had ever known could have resisted such an appeal. The perplexed fisherman, at Jesus's command, turned their boat homeward without Him. To their simple minds it seemed that He had made a mistake in resisting the homage forced upon Him by the people; they longed for the time to come when they should be recognized as the honored officials in the new kingdom. Many a dream of future power and magnificence must have come to them in the still watches of the night, as they drifted home in the white light of the Passover moon. Many a time in the weeks that followed, Joel slipped away to his favorite spot on the beech, a flat rock half hidden by a clump of oleander bushes. Here, with his feet idly dangling in the ripples, he looked out over the water, and recalled the scenes he had witnessed there. It seemed so marvellous to him that the Master could have ever walked on those shining waves; and yet he had seen Him that night after the feeding of the multitudes. He had seen, with his own frightened eyes, the Master walk calmly towards the boat across the unsteady water, and catch up the sinking Peter, who had jumped overboard to meet Him. It grieved and fretted the boy that this man, of God-given power and such sweet unselfish spirit, could be so persistently misunderstood by the people. He could think of nothing else. He had not been with the crowds that pressed into the synagogue the Sabbath after the thousands had been fed; but Phineas came home with grim lips and knitted brows, and told him about it. "The Master knew they followed Him because of the loaves and fishes," he said. "He told them so. "When we came out of the door, I could not help looking up at the lintel on which is carved the pot of manna; for when they asked Him for a sign that they might believe Him, saying, 'Our fathers ate manna in the wilderness!' He answered: 'I am the bread of life! Ye have seen me, and yet believe not!' "While He talked there was a murmuring all over the house against Him, because He said that He had come down from heaven. Your uncle Laban was there. I heard him say scornfully: 'Is not this the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How doth He now say, "I am come down out of heaven"?' Then he laughed a mocking little laugh, and nudged the man who stood next to him. There are many like him; I could feel a spirit of prejudice and persecution in the very air. Many who have professed to be His friends have turned against Him." While Phineas was pouring out his anxious forebodings to his wife and Joel, the Master was going homeward with His chosen twelve. "Would ye also go away?" He asked wistfully of His companions, as He noted the cold, disapproving looks of many who had only the day before been fed by Him, and who now openly turned their backs on Him. Simon Peter gave a questioning glance into the faces of his companions; then he pressed a step nearer. "Lord, to whom shall we go?" he answered impulsively. "Thou hast the words of eternal life. And we have believed, and know that Thou art the Holy One of God." The others nodded their assent, all but one. Judas Iscariot clutched the money bags he held, and looked off across the lake, to avoid the searching eyes that were fixed upon him. These honest Galileans were too simple to suspect others of dark designs, yet they had never felt altogether free with this stranger from Judea. He had never seemed entirely one of them. They did not see in his crafty quiet manners, the sheep's clothing that hid his wolfish nature; but they could feel his lack of sympathetic enthusiasm. He had been one of those who followed only for the loaves and fishes of a temporal kingdom, and now, in his secret soul, he was sorry he had joined a cause in whose final success he was beginning to lose faith. The sun went down suddenly that night behind a heavy cloud, as a gathering storm began to lash the Galilee and rock the little boats anchored at the landings. The year of popularity was at an end. CHAPTER X. ABIGAIL sat just inside the door, turning the noisy hand-mill that ground out the next day's supply of flour. The rough mill-stones grated so harshly on each other that she did not hear the steps coming up the path. A shadow falling across the door-way made her look up. "You are home early, my Phineas," she said, with a smile. "Well, I shall soon have your supper ready. Joel has gone to the market for some honey and--" "Nay! I have little wish to eat," he interrupted, "but I have much to say to you. Come! the work can wait." Abigail put the mill aside, and brushing the flour from her hands, sat down on the step beside him, wondering much at his troubled face. He plunged into his subject abruptly. "The Master is soon going away," he said, "that those in the uttermost parts of Galilee may be taught of Him. And He would fain have others beside the twelve He has chosen to go with Him on His journey." "And you wish to go too?" she questioned, as he paused. "Yes! How can I do otherwise? And yet how can I leave you and the little ones alone in these troubled times? You cannot think how great the danger is. Remember how many horrors we have lately heard. The whole country is a smouldering volcano, ready to burst into an eruption at any moment. A leader has only to arise, and all Israel will take up arms against the powers that trample us under foot." "Is not this prophet, Jesus, He who is to save Israel?" asked Abigail. "Is He not even now making ready to establish His kingdom?" "I do not understand Him at all!" said Phineas, sadly. "He does talk of a kingdom in which we are all to have a part; but He never seems to be working to establish it. He spends all His time in healing diseases and forgiving penitent sinners, and telling us to love our neighbors. "Then, again, why should He go down to the beach, and choose for His confidential friends just simple fishermen. They have neither influence nor money. As for the choice of that publican Levi-Matthew, it has brought disgrace on the whole movement. He does not seem to know how to sway the popular feeling. I believe He might have had the support of the foremost men of the nation, if He had approached them differently. "He shocks them by setting aside laws they would lay down their lives rather than violate. He associates with those they consider unclean; and all His miracles cannot make them forget how boldly He has rebuked them for hypocrisy and unrighteousness. They never will come to His support now; and I do not see how a new government can be formed without their help." Abigail laid her hand on his, her dark eyes glowing with intense earnestness, as she answered: "What need is there of armies and human hands to help? "Where were the hosts of Pharaoh when our fathers passed through the Red Sea? Was there bloodshed and fighting there? "Who battled for us when the walls of Jericho fell down? Whose hand smote the Assyrians at Sennacherib? Is the Lord's arm shortened that He cannot save? "Why may not His prophet speak peace to Jerusalem as easily as He did the other night to the stormy sea? Why may not His power be multiplied even as the loaves and fishes? "Why may not the sins and backslidings of the people be healed as well as Joel's lameness; or the glory of the nation be quickened into a new life, as speedily as He raised the daughter of Jairus? "Isaiah called Him the Prince of Peace. What are all these lessons, if not to teach us that the purposes of God do not depend on human hands to work out their fulfilment?" Her low voice thrilled him with its inspiring questions, and he looked down into her rapt face with a feeling of awe. "Abigail," he said softly, "'my source of joy,'--you are rightly named. You have led me out of the doubts that have been my daily torment. I see now, why He never incites us to rebel against the yoke of Cæsar. In the fulness of time He will free us with a breath. "How strange it should have fallen to my lot to have been His playmate and companion. My wonder is not that He is the Messiah; but that I should have called Him friend, all these years, unknowing." "How long do you expect to be away?" she asked, after a pause, suddenly returning to the first subject. "Several months, perhaps. There is no telling what insurrections and riots may arise, all through this part of the country. Since the murder of John Baptist, Herod has come back to his court in Tiberias. I dislike to leave you here alone." Abigail, too, looked grave, and neither spoke for a little while. "I have it!" she exclaimed at length, with a pleased light in her eyes. "I have often wished I could make a long visit in the home of my girlhood. The few days I have spent in my father's house, those few times I have gone with you to the feasts, have been so short and unsatisfactory. Can I not take Joel and the children to Bethany? Neither father nor mother has ever seen little Ruth, and we could be so safe and happy there till your return." "Why did I not come to you before with my worries?" asked Phineas. "How easily you make the crooked places straight!" Just then the children came running back from the market. Abigail went into the house with the provisions they had brought, leaving their father to tell them of the coming separation and the long journey they had planned. A week later, Phineas stood at the city gate, watching a little company file southward down the highway. He had hired two strong, gayly-caparisoned mules from the owner of the caravan. Abigail rode on one, holding little Ruth in her arms; Joel mounted the other, with Jesse clinging close behind him. Abigail, thinking of the joyful welcome awaiting her in her old home, and the children happy in the novelty of the journey, set out gayly. But Phineas, thinking of the dangers by the way, and filled with many forebodings, watched their departure with a heavy heart. At the top of a little rise in the road, they turned to look back and wave their hands. In a moment more they were out of sight. Then Phineas, grasping his staff more firmly, turned away, and started on foot in the other direction, to follow to the world's end, if need be, the friend who had gone on before. It was in the midst of the barley harvest. Jesse had never been in the country before. For the first time, Nature spread for him her great picture-book of field and forest and vineyard, while Abigail read to him the stories. First on one side of the road, then the other, she pointed out some spot and told its history. Here was Dothan, where Joseph went out to see his brothers, dressed in his coat of many colors. There was Mount Gilboa, where the arrows of the Philistines wounded Saul, and he fell on his own sword and killed himself. Shiloh, where Hannah brought little Samuel to give him to the Lord; where the Prophet Eli, so old that his eyes were too dim to see, sat by the gate waiting for news from the army, and when word was brought back that his two sons were dead, and the Ark of the Covenant taken, here it was that he fell backward from his seat, and his neck was broken. All these she told, and many more. Then she pointed to the gleaners in the fields, and told the children to notice how carefully Israel still kept the commandment given so many centuries before: "When ye reap the harvest of your land, thou shalt not wholly reap the corners of thy field, neither shalt thou gather the gleanings of thy harvest. And thou shalt not glean thy vineyard, neither shalt thou gather every grape of thy vineyard, thou shalt leave them for the poor and the stranger." At Jacob's well, where they stopped to rest, Joel lifted Jesse up, and let him look over the curb. The child almost lost his balance in astonishment, when his own wondering little face looked up at him from the deep well. He backed away from it quickly, and looked carefully into the cup of water Joel handed him, for more than a minute, before he ventured to drink. The home to which Abigail was going was a wealthy one. Her father, Reuben, was a goldsmith, and for years had been known in Jerusalem not only for the beautifully wrought ornaments and precious stones that he sold in his shop near the Temple, but for his rich gifts to the poor. "Reuben the Charitable," he was called, and few better deserved the name. His business took him every day to the city; but his home was in the little village of Bethany, two miles away. It was one of the largest in Bethany, and seemed like a palace to the children, when compared to the humble little home in Capernaum. Joel only looked around with admiring eyes; but Jesse walked about, laying curious little fingers on everything he passed. The bright oriental curtains, the soft cushions and the costly hangings, he smoothed and patted. Even the silver candlesticks and the jewelled cups on the side table were picked up and examined, when his mother happened to have her back turned. [Illustration: "'WE TALKED LATE'"] There were no pictures in the house; the Law forbade. But there were several mirrors of bright polished metal, and Jesse never tired of watching his own reflection in them. Ruth stayed close beside her mother. "She is a ray of God's own sunshine," said her grandmother, as she took her in her arms for the first time. The child, usually afraid of strangers, saw in Rebecca's face a look so like her mother's that she patted the wrinkled cheeks with her soft fingers. From that moment her grandmother was her devoted slave. Jesse was not long in finding the place he held in his grandfather's heart. The old man, whose sons had all died years before, seemed to centre all his hopes on this son of his only daughter. He kept Jesse with him as much as possible; his happiest hours were when he had the child on his knee, teaching him the prayers and precepts and proverbs that he knew would be a lamp to his feet in later years. "Nay! do not punish the child!" he said, one morning when Jesse had been guilty of some disobedience. Abigail went on stripping the leaves from an almond switch she just had broken off. "Why, father," she said, with a smile, "I have often seen you punish my brothers for such disobedience, and have as often heard you say that one of Solomon's wisest sayings is, 'Chasten thy son while there is hope, and let not thy soul spare for his crying.' Jesse misses his father's firm rule, and is getting sadly spoiled." "That is all true, my daughter," he acknowledged; "still I shall not stay here to witness his punishment." Abigail used the switch as she had intended. The boy had overheard the conversation, and the cries that reached his grandfather as he rode off to the city were unusually loud and appealing. They may have had something to do with the package the good man carried home that night,--cakes and figs and a gay little turban more befitting a young prince than the son of a carpenter. "Who lives across the street?" asked Joel, the morning after their arrival. "Two old friends of mine," answered Abigail. "They came to see me last night as soon as they heard I had arrived. You children were all asleep. We talked late, for they wanted to hear all I could tell them of Rabbi Jesus. He was here last year, and Martha said He and her brother Lazarus became fast friends. Ah, there is Lazarus now!--that young man just coming out of the house. He is a scribe, and goes up to write in one of the rooms of the Temple nearly every day. "Mary says some of the copies of the Scriptures he has made are the most beautifully written that she has ever seen." "See!" exclaimed Joel, "he has dropped one of the rolls of parchment he was carrying, and does not know it. I'll run after him with it." He was hardly yet accustomed to the delight of being so fleet of foot; no halting step now to hinder him. He almost felt as if he were flying, and was by the young man's side nearly as soon as he had started. "Ah, you are the guest of my good neighbor, Reuben," Lazarus said, after thanking him courteously. "Are you not the lad whose lameness has just been healed by my best friend? My sisters were telling me of it. It must be a strange experience to suddenly find yourself changed from a helpless cripple to such a strong, straight lad as you are now. How did it make you feel?" "Oh, I can never begin to tell you, Rabbi Lazarus," answered Joel. "I did not even think of it that moment when He held my hand in His. I only thought how much I loved Him. I had been starving before, but that moment He took the place of everything,--father, mother, the home love I had missed,--and more than that, the love of God seemed to come down and fold me so close and safe, that I knew He was the Messiah. I did not even notice that I was no longer lame, until I was far down the beach. Oh, you do not know how I wanted to follow Him! If I could only have gone with Him instead of coming here!" "Yes, my boy, I know!" answered the young man, gently; "for I, too, love Him." This strong bond of sympathy between the two made them feel as if they had known each other always. "Come walk with me a little way," said Lazarus. "I am going up to Jerusalem to the Temple. Or rather, would you not like to come all the way? I have only to carry these rolls to one of the priests, then I will be at liberty to show you some of the strange sights in the city." Joel ran back for permission. Only stopping to wind his white linen turban around his head, he soon regained his new-found friend. His recollection of Jerusalem was a very dim, confused one. Time and time again he had heard pilgrims returning from the feasts trying to describe their feelings when they had come in sight of the Holy City. Now as they turned with the road, the view that rose before him made him feel how tame their descriptions had been. The morning sun shone down on the white marble walls of the Temple and the gold that glittered on the courts, as they rose one above the other; tower and turret and pinnacle shot back a dazzling light. It did not seem possible to Joel that human hands could have wrought such magnificence. He caught his breath, and uttered an exclamation of astonishment. Lazarus smiled at his pleasure. "Come," he said, "it is still more beautiful inside." They went very slowly through Solomon's Porch, for every one seemed to know the young man, and many stopped to speak to him. Then they crossed the Court of the Gentiles. It seemed like a market-place; for cages of doves were kept there for sale, and lambs, calves, and oxen bleated and lowed in their stalls till Joel could scarcely hear what his friend was saying, as they pushed their way through the crowd, and stood before the Gate Beautiful that led into the Court of the Women. Here Lazarus left Joel for a few moments, while he went to give the rolls to the priest for whom he had copied them. Joel looked around. Then for the first time since his healing, he wondered if it would be possible for him to ever take his place among the Levites, or become a priest as he had been destined. While he wondered, Lazarus came back and led him into the next court. Here he could look up and see the Holy Place, over which was trained a golden vine, with clusters of grapes as large as a man's body, all of purest gold. Beyond that he knew was a heavy veil of Babylonian tapestry, hyacinth and scarlet and purple, that veiled in awful darkness the Holy of Holies. As he stood there thinking of the tinkling bells, the silver trumpets, the clouds of incense, and the mighty songs, a great longing came over him to be one of those white-robed priests, serving daily in the Temple. But with the wish came the recollection of a quiet hillside, where only bird-calls and whirr of wings stirred the stillness; where a breeze from the sparkling lake blew softly through the grass, and one Voice only was heard, proclaiming its glad new gospel under the open sky. "No," he thought to himself; "I'd rather be with Him than wear the High Priest's mitre." It was almost sundown when they found themselves on the road homeward. They had visited place after place of interest. Lazarus found the boy an entertaining companion, and the friendship begun that day grew deep and lasting. CHAPTER XI. "WHAT are you looking for, grandfather?" called Jesse, as he pattered up the outside stairs to the roof, where Reuben stood, scanning the sky intently. "Come here, my son," he called. "Stand right here in front of me, and look just where I point. What do you see?" The child peered anxiously into the blue depths just now lit up by the sunset. "Oh, the new moon!" he cried. "Where did it come from?" "Summer hath dropped her silver sickle there, that Night may go forth to harvest in her star-fields," answered the old man. Then seeing the look of inquiry on the boy's face, hastened to add, "Nay, it is the censer that God's hand set swinging in the sky, to remind us to keep the incense of our praises ever rising heavenward. Even now a messenger may be running towards the Temple, to tell the Sanhedrin that it has appeared. Yea, other eyes have been sharper than mine, for see! Already the beacon light has been kindled on the Mount of Olives!" Jesse watched the great bonfire a few minutes, then ran to call his sister. By the time they were both on the roof, answering fires were blazing on the distant hilltops throughout all Judea, till the whole land was alight with the announcement of the Feast of the New Moon. "I wish it could be this way every night, don't you, Ruth?" said Jesse. "Are you not glad we are here?" The old man looked down at the children with a pleased smile. "I'll show you something prettier than this, before long," he said. "Just wait till the Feast of Weeks, when the people all come to bring the first fruits of the harvests. I am glad your visit is in this time of the year, for you can see one festival after another." The day the celebration of the Feast of Weeks commenced, Reuben left his shop in charge of the attendants, and gave up his entire time to Joel and Jesse. "We must not miss the processions," he said. "We will go outside the gates a little way, and watch the people come in." They did not have long to wait till the stream of people from the upper countries began to pour in; each company carried a banner bearing the name of the town from which it came. A white ox, intended for a peace-offering, was driven first; its horns were gilded, and its body twined with olive wreaths. Flocks of sheep and oxen for the sacrifice, long strings of asses and camels bearing free-will gifts to the Temple, or old and helpless pilgrims that could not walk, came next. There were wreaths of roses on the heads of the women and children; bands of lilies were tied around the sheaves of wheat. Piled high in the silver vessels of the rich, or peeping from the willow baskets of the poor, were the choicest fruits of the harvest. Great bunches of grapes from whose purple globes the bloom had not been brushed, velvety nectarines, tempting pomegranates, mellow pears, juicy melons,--these offerings of fruit and flowers gleamed all down the long line, for no one came empty-handed up this "Hill of the Lord." As they drew near the gates, a number of white-robed priests from the Temple met them. Reuben lifted Jesse in his arms that he might have a better view. "Listen," he said. Joel climbed up on a large rock. A joyful sound of flutes commenced, and a mighty chorus went up: "I was glad when they said unto me, let us go into the house of the Lord. Our feet shall stand within thy gates, O Jerusalem!" Voice after voice took up the old psalm, and Reuben's deep tones joined with the others, as they chanted, "Peace be within thy walls, and prosperity within thy palaces!" Following the singing pilgrims to the Temple, they saw the priests take the doves that were to be for a burnt-offering, and the first fruits that were to be laid on the altars. Jesse held fast to his grandfather's hand as they passed through the outer courts of the Temple. He was half frightened by the din of voices, the stamping and bellowing and bleating of the animals as they were driven into the pens. He had seen one sacrificial service; the great stream of blood pouring over the marble steps of the altar, and the smoke of the burnt-offering were still in his mind. It made him look pityingly now at the gentle-eyed calves and the frightened lambs. He was glad to get away from them. Soon after the time of this rejoicing was over, came ten solemn days that to Joel were full of interest and mystery. They were the days of preparation for the Fast of the Atonement. Disputes between neighbors were settled, and sins confessed. The last great day, the most solemn of all, was the only time in the whole year when the High Priest might draw aside the veil, and enter into the Holy of Holies. With all his rich robes and jewels laid aside, clad only in simple white, with bare feet and covered head, he had to go four times into the awful Presence. Once to offer incense, once to pray, to sprinkle the blood of a goat towards the mercy-seat, and then to bring out the censer. That was the day when two goats were taken; by casting lots one was chosen for a sacrifice. On the other the High Priest laid the sins of the people, and it was driven out into the wilderness, to be dashed to pieces from some high cliff. Tears came into Joel's eyes, as he watched the scape-goat driven away into the dreary desert. He pitied the poor beast doomed to such a death because of his nation's sins. Then came the closing ceremonies, when the great congregation bowed themselves three times to the ground, with the High Priest shouting solemnly, "Ye are clean! Ye are clean! Ye are clean!" Joel was glad when the last rite was over, and the people started to their homes, as gay now as they had been serious before. "When are we going back to our other home?" asked Ruth, one day. "Why, are you not happy here, little daughter?" said Abigail. "I thought you had forgotten all about the old place." "I want my white pigeons," she said, with a quivering lip, as if she had suddenly remembered them. "I don't want my father not to be here!" she sobbed; "and I want my white pigeons!" Abigail picked her up and comforted her. "Wait just a little while. I think father will surely come soon. I will get my embroidery, and you may go with me across the street." Ruth had been shy at first about going to see her mother's friends; but Martha coaxed her in with honey cakes she baked for that express purpose, and Mary told her stories and taught her little games. After a while she began to flit in and out of the house as fearlessly as a bright-winged butterfly. One day her mother was sitting with the sisters in a shady corner of their court-yard, where a climbing honeysuckle made a cool sweet arbor. Ruth was going from one to the other, watching the bright embroidery threads take the shape of flowers under their skilful fingers. Suddenly she heard the faint tinkle of a silver bell. While she stood with one finger on her lip to listen, Lazarus came into the court-yard. "See what I have brought you, little one," he said. "It is to take the place of the pigeons you are always mourning for." It was a snow-white lamb, around which he had twined a garland of many colored flowers, and from whose neck hung the little silver bell she had heard. At first the child was so delighted she could only bury her dimpled fingers in the soft fleece, and look at it in speechless wonder. Then she caught his hand, and left a shy little kiss on it, as she lisped, "Oh, you're so good! You're so good!" After that day Ruth followed Lazarus as the white lamb followed Ruth; and the sisters hardly knew which sounded sweeter in their quiet home, the tinkling of the silver bell, or the happy prattle of the baby voice. Abigail spent many happy hours with her friends. One day as they sat in the honeysuckle arbor, busily sewing, Ruth and Jesse came running towards them. "I see my father coming, and another man," cried the boy. "I'm going to meet them." They all hastened to the door, just as the tired, dusty travellers reached it. "Peace be to this house, and all who dwell therein," said the stranger, before Phineas could give his wife and friends a warmer greeting. "We went first to your father's house, but, finding no one at home, came here," said Phineas. "Come in!" insisted Martha. "You look sorely in need of rest and refreshment." But they had a message to deliver before they could be persuaded to eat or wash. "The Master is coming," said Phineas. "He has sent out seventy of His followers, to go by twos into every town, and herald His approach, and proclaim that the day of the Lord is at hand. We have gone even into Samaria to carry the tidings there." "At last, at last!" cried Mary, clasping her hands. "Oh, to think that I have lived to see this day of Israel's glory!" "Tell us what the Master has been doing," urged Abigail, after the men had been refreshed by food and water. First one and then the other told of miracles they had seen, and repeated what He had taught. Even the children crept close to listen, leaning against their father's knees. "There has been much discussion about the kingdom that is to be formed. While we were in Peter's house in Capernaum, some of the disciples came quarrelling around Him, to ask who should have the highest positions. I suppose those who have followed Him longest think they have claim to the best offices." "What did He say?" asked Abigail, eagerly. Phineas laid his hand on Ruth's soft curls. "He took a little child like this, and set it in our midst, and said that he who would be greatest in His kingdom, must become even like unto it!" "Faith and love and purity on the throne of the Herods," cried Martha. "Ah, only Jehovah can bring such a thing as that to pass!" "Are you going to stay at home now, father?" asked Jesse, anxiously. "No, my son. I must go on the morrow to carry my report to the Master, of the reception we have had in every town. But I will soon be back again to the Feast of Tabernacles." "Carry with you our earnest prayer that the Master will abide with us when He comes again to Bethany," said Martha, as her guests departed. "No one is so welcome in our home, as the friend of our brother Lazarus." The preparation for the Feast of the Tabernacles had begun. "I am going to take the children to the city with me to-day!" said Reuben, one morning, "to see the big booth I am having built. It will hold all our family, and as many friends as may care to share it with us." Jesse was charmed with the great tent of green boughs. "I wish I could have been one of the children that Moses led up out of Egypt," he said, with a sigh. "Why, my son?" asked Reuben. "So's I could have wandered around for forty years, living in a tent like this. How good it smells, and how pretty it is! I wish you and grandmother would live here all the time!" The next day Phineas joined them. It was a happy family that gathered in the leafy booth for a week of out-door rejoicing in the cool autumn time. "Where is the Master?" asked Abigail. "I know not," answered her husband. "He sent us on before." "Will He be here, I wonder?" she asked, and that question was on nearly every lip in Jerusalem. "Will He be here?" asked the throngs of pilgrims who had heard of His miracles, and longed to see the man who could do such marvellous things. "Will He be here?" whispered the scribes to the Pharisees. "Let Him beware!" "Will He be here?" muttered Caiaphas the High Priest. "Then better one man should die, than that the whole community perish." The sight that dazzled the eyes of the children that first evening of the week, was like fairyland; a blaze of lanterns and torches lit up the whole city. In the Court of the Women, in the Temple, all the golden lamps were lit, twinkling and burning like countless stars. On the steps that separated this court from the next one, stood three thousand singers, the sons and daughters of the tribe of Levi. Two priests stood at the top of the steps, and as each gave the signal on a great silver trumpet, the burst of song that went up from the vast choir seemed to shake the very heavens. Harps and psalters and flutes swelled with the rolling waves of the organ's melody. To the sound of this music, men marched with flaming torches in their hands, and the marching and a weird torch-dance were kept up until the gates of the Temple closed. In the midst of all the feasting and the gayeties that followed, the long-expected Voice was heard in the arcades of the Temple. The Child of Nazareth was once more in His Father's house about His Father's business. On the last great day of the feast, Joel was up at day-break, ready to follow the older members of the family as soon as the first trumpet-blast should sound. In his right hand he carried a citron, as did all the others; in his left was a palm-branch, the emblem of joy. An immense multitude gathered at the spring of Siloam. Water was drawn in a golden pitcher, and carried back to be poured on the great altar, while the choir sang with its thousands of voices, and all the people shouted, Amen and Amen! When the days had gone by in which the seventy bullocks had been sacrificed, and when the ceremonies were all over, then the leaves were stripped from the green booths, and the people scattered to their homes. Long afterward, Jesse remembered only the torch-light dances, the silver trumpets and the crowds, and the faint ringing of the fringe of bells on the priest's robes as he carried the fire on the golden shovel to burn the sweet-smelling incense. Joel's memory rang often with two cries that had startled the people. One when the water was poured from the golden pitcher. It was the Master's voice: "_If any man thirst, let him come unto me_." The other was when all eyes were turned on the blazing lamps. "_I am the Light of the World!_" Reuben thought oftenest of the blind man to whom he had seen sight restored. But Lazarus was filled with anxiety and foreboding; through his office of scribe, he had come in close contact with the men who were plotting against his friend. Dark rumors were afloat. The air was hot with whisperings of hate. He had overheard a conversation between the Temple police, and some of the chief priests and Pharisees. "Why did ye not take Him, as ye were ordered?" they demanded angrily. "We could not," was the response; "for never man spake like this man." He had seen the mob searching for stones to throw at Him. Though He had disappeared out of their midst unhurt, still Lazarus felt that some terrible disaster was hanging threateningly over the head of his beloved friend. CHAPTER XII. IT was with a deep feeling of relief that the two families watched the Master go away into Perea. Phineas still kept with Him. As the little band disappeared down the street, Ruth hid her face in her mother's dress and began to cry. "I don't want my father to go away again!" she sobbed. Abigail took her in her lap and tried to comfort her, although there were tears in her own eyes. "We will go home soon, little daughter, and then father will be with us all the time. But we must wait first, till after the cold, rainy season, and the Feast of Dedication." "What! another feast?" asked Jesse, to whom the summer had seemed one long confusion of festivals. "Don't they have lots of them down in this country! What's this one for?" "Grandfather will tell you," answered his mother. "Run out and ask him for the story. I know you will like it." Seated on his grandfather's knee, Jesse doubled up his little fists, as he heard how a heathen altar had once been set up on the great altar of burnt-offering, and a heathen general had driven a herd of swine through the holy Temple, making it unclean. But his breath came quick, and his eyes shone, as the proud old Israelite told him of Judas the Maccabee, Judas the lion-hearted, who had whipped the Syrian soldiers, purified the Temple, and dedicated it anew to the worship of Jehovah. "Our people never forget their heroes," ended the old man. "Every year, in every home, no matter how humble, one candle is lighted at the beginning of the feast; the next night, two, and the next night, three, and so on, till eight candles shine out into the winter darkness. "For so the brave deeds of the Maccabees burn in the memory of every child of Abraham!" The feast came and went. While the candles burned in every home, and the golden lamps in the great Temple blazed a welcome, the Nazarene came back to His Father's house, to be once more about His Father's business. Joel caught a glimpse of Him walking up and down the covered porches in front of the Gate Beautiful. The next moment he was pushing and elbowing his way through the jostling crowds, till he stood close beside Him. After that, the services that followed were a blank. He saw only one face,--the face that had looked into his beside the Galilee, and drawn from his heart its intensest love. He heard only one voice,--the voice he had longed for all these weeks and days. Just to be near Him! To be able to reach out reverent fingers and only touch the clothes He wore; to look up in His face, and look and look with a love that never wearied,--that was such happiness that Joel was lost to everything else! But after a while he began to realize that it was for no friendly purpose that the chief priests came pressing around with questions. "If Thou be the Christ, tell us plainly," they demanded. Then up and down through the long Porch of Solomon, among all its white marble pillars, they repeated His answer:-- "The works that I do in my Father's name, they bear witness of me. I and my Father are one!" "Blasphemy!" shouted a mocking voice behind Him. "Blasphemy!" echoed Pharisee and Sadducee for once agreed. The crowds pushed and shoved between the pillars; some ran out for stones. In the confusion of the uproar, as they turned to lay violent hands on Him, He slipped out of their midst, and went quietly away. Joel hunted around awhile for the party he had come with, but seeing neither Phineas nor Lazarus, started back to Bethany on the run. A cold winter rain had begun to fall. None of Reuben's family had gone into Jerusalem that day on account of the weather, but were keeping the feast at home. They were startled when the usually quiet boy burst excitedly into the house, and told them what he had just seen. "O mother Abigail!" he cried, throwing himself on his knees beside her. "If He goes away again may I not go with Him? I cannot go back to Galilee and leave Him, unknowing what is to happen. If He is to be persecuted and driven out, and maybe killed, let me at least share His suffering, and be with Him at the last!" "You forget that He has all power, and that His enemies can do Him no harm," said Abigail, gently. "Has He not twice walked out unharmed, before their very eyes, when they would have taken Him? And besides what good could you do, my boy? You forget you are only a child, and might not be able to stand the hardships of such a journey." "I am almost fourteen," said Joel, stretching himself up proudly. "And I am as strong now as some of the men who go with Him. _He_ gave me back my strength, you know. Oh, you do not know how I love Him!" he cried. "When I am away from Him, I feel as you would were you separated from Jesse and Ruth and father Phineas. My heart is always going out after Him!" "Child, have you no care for us?" she responded reproachfully. "Oh, do not speak so!" he cried, catching up her hand and kissing it. "I _do_ love you; I can never be grateful enough for all you have done for me. But, O mother Abigail, you could never understand! You were never lame and felt the power of His healing. You were never burning with a wicked hatred, and felt the balm of His forgiveness! You cannot understand how He draws me to Him!" "Let the boy have his way," spoke up Reuben. "I, too, have felt that wonderful power that draws all men to Him. Gladly would I part with every shekel I possess, if I thereby might win Him the favor of the authorities." When once more a little band of fugitives followed their Master across the Jordan, Joel was with them. The winter wore away, and they still tarried. Day by day, they were listening to the simple words that dropped like seeds into their memories, to spring up in after months and bear great truths. Now they heard them as half understood parables,--the good Samaritan, the barren fig-tree, the prodigal son, the unjust steward. There was one story that thrilled Joel deeply,--the story of the lost sheep. For he recalled that stormy night in the sheepfold of Nathan ben Obed, and the shepherd who searched till dawn for the straying lamb. It was only long afterwards that he realized it was the Good Shepherd Himself who told the story, when He was about to lay down His own life for the lost sheep of Israel. * * * * * Meanwhile in Bethany, Rabbi Reuben and his wife rejoiced that their daughter's visit stretched out indefinitely. Jesse openly declared that he intended to stay there always, and learn to be a goldsmith like his grandfather. Ruth, too, was happy and contented, and seemed to have forgotten that she ever had any other home. As the early spring days came on, she lived almost entirely out in the sunshine. She had fallen into the habit of standing at the gate to watch for Lazarus every evening when he came back from the Temple. As soon as she saw him turn the corner into their street, she ran to meet him, her fair curls and white dress fluttering in the wind. No matter how tired he was, or what cares rested heavily on his mind, the pale face always lighted up, and his dark eyes smiled at her coming. "Lazarus does not seem well, lately," she heard Martha say to her mother one day. "I have been trying to persuade him to rest a few days; but he insists he cannot until he has finished the scroll he is illuminating." A few days after that he did not go to the city as usual. Ruth peeped into the darkened room where he was resting on a couch; his eyes were closed, and he was so pale it almost frightened her. He did not hear her when she tiptoed into the room and out again; but the fragrance of the little stemless rose she laid on his pillow aroused him. He opened his eyes and smiled languidly, as he caught sight of her slipping noiselessly through the door. Her mother, sewing by the window, looked out and saw her running across the street. Jesse was out in front of the house, playing with a ball. "Who is that boy talking to Jesse?" asked Abigail of Rebecca, who stood in the doorway, holding out her arms as Ruth came up. "Why, that is little Joseph, the only son of Simon the leper. Poor child!" "Simon the leper," repeated Abigail. "A stranger to me." "Surely not. Have you forgotten the wealthy young oil-seller who lived next the synagogue? He has the richest olive groves in this part of the country." "Not the husband of my little playmate Esther!" cried Abigail. "Surely he has not been stricken with leprosy!" "Yes; it is one of the saddest cases I ever heard of. It seems so terrible for a man honored as he has been, and accustomed to every luxury, to be such a despised outcast." "Poor Esther!" sighed Abigail. "Does she ever see him?" "Not now. The disease is fast destroying him; and he is such a hideous sight that he has forbidden her to ever try to see him again. Even his voice is changed. Of course he would be stoned if he were to come back. He never seeks the company of other lepers. She has had a room built for him away from the sight of men. Every day a servant carries him food and tidings. It is well that they have money, or he would be obliged to live among the tombs with others as repulsive-looking as himself, and such company must certainly be worse than none. Sometimes little Joseph is taken near enough to speak to him, that he may have the poor comfort of seeing his only child at a distance." "What if it were my Phineas!" exclaimed Abigail, her tears dropping fast on the needlework she held. "Oh, it is a thousand times worse than death!" Out in the street the boys were making each other's acquaintance in the off-hand way boys of that age have. "My name is Jesse. What's yours?" "Joseph." "Where do you live?" "Around the corner, next to the synagogue." "My father is a carpenter. What's yours?" Joseph hesitated. "He used to be an oil-seller," he said finally. "He doesn't do anything now." "Why?" persisted Jesse. "He is a leper now," was the reluctant answer. A look of distress came over Jesse's face. He had seen some lepers once, and the sight was still fresh in his mind. As they were riding down from Galilee, Joel had pointed them out to him. A group of beggars with horrible scaly sores that had eaten away their flesh, till some were left without lips or eyelids; one held out a deathly white hand from which nearly all the fingers had dropped. Their hair looked like white wire, and they called out, in shrill, cracked voices, "Unclean! Unclean! Come not near us!" "How terrible to have one's father like that," thought Jesse. A lump seemed to come up in his throat; his eyes filled with tears at the bare idea. Then, boy-like, he tossed up his ball, and forgot all about it in the game that followed. Several days after he met Joseph and a servant who was carrying a large, covered basket and a water-bottle made of skin. "I'm going to see my father, now," said Joseph. "Ask your mother if you can come with me." Jesse started towards his home, then turned suddenly. "No, I'm not going to ask her, for she'll be sure to say no. I am just going anyhow." "You'll catch it when you get home!" exclaimed Joseph. "Well, it cannot last long," reasoned Jesse, whose curiosity had gotten the better of him. "I believe I'd rather take a whipping than not to go." Joseph looked at him in utter astonishment. "Yes, I would," he insisted; "so come on!" A short walk down an unfrequented road, in the direction of Jericho, took them to a lonely place among the bare cliffs. A little cabin stood close against the rocks, with a great sycamore-tree bending over it. Near by was the entrance to a deep cave, always as cool as a cellar, even in the hottest summer days. At the mouth of the cave sat Simon the leper. He stood up when he saw them coming, and wrapped himself closely in a white linen mantle that covered him from head to foot. It was a ghostly sight to Jesse; but to Joseph, so long accustomed to it, there seemed nothing strange. At a safe distance the servant emptied his basket on a large flat rock, and poured the water into a stone jar standing near. Last of all, he laid a piece of parchment on the stone. It was Esther's daily letter to her exiled husband. No matter what storms swept the valley, or what duties pressed at home, that little missive was always sent. She had learned to write for his sake. By all his friends he was accounted dead; but her love, stronger than death, bridged the gulf that separated them. She lived only to minister to his comfort as best she could. Simon did not send as long a message in return as this trusted messenger usually carried. He had much to say to his boy, and the sun was already high. Jesse, lagging behind in the shelter of the rock, heard the tender words of counsel and blessing that came from the white-sheeted figure with a feeling of awe. As the father urged his boy to be faithful to every little duty, careful in learning the prayers, and above all obedient to his mother, Jesse's conscience began to prick him sorely. "I believe I know somebody that could cure him," he said, as they picked their way over the rocks, going home. "'Cause He made Joel well." "Who's Joel?" asked Joseph. "A boy that lives with us. He was just as lame, and limped way over when he walked. Now he is as straight as I am. All the sick people where I lived went to Him, and they got well." Joseph shook his head. "Lepers can't be cured. Can they, Seth?" he asked, appealing to the servant. "No, lepers are just the same as dead," answered Seth. "There's no help for them." Jesse was in a very uncomfortable frame of mind, as, hot and dusty, he left his companion and dragged home at a snail's pace. Next morning Joseph was waiting for him out in front. "Well, did she whip you?" he asked, with embarrassing frankness. "No," said Jesse, a little sheepishly. "She put me to bed just as soon as I had eaten my dinner, and made me stay there till this morning." CHAPTER XIII. RUTH went every day to ask for her sick friend, sometimes with a bunch of grapes, sometimes with only a flower in her warm little hand. But there came a time when Martha met her, with eyes all swollen and red from crying, and told her they had sent to the city for a skilful physician. In the night there came a loud knocking at the door, and a call for Rabbi Reuben to come quickly, that Lazarus was worse. At day-break a messenger was sent clattering away to hurry over the Jordan in hot haste, and bring back from Perea the only One who could help them. The noise awakened Ruth; she sat up in surprise to see her mother dressed so early. The outer door was ajar, and she heard the message that the anxious Martha bade the man deliver: "Lord, he whom Thou lovest is sick." "He will come right away and make him well, won't He, mother?" she asked anxiously. "Surely, my child," answered Abigail. "He loves him too well to let him suffer so." But the day wore on, and the next; still another, and He did not come. Ruth stole around like a frightened shadow, because of the anxious looks on every face. "Why doesn't He come?" she wondered; and on many another lip was the same question. She was so quiet, no one noticed when she stole into the room where her friend lay dying. Mary knelt on one side of the bed, Martha on the other, watching the breath come slower and slower, and clinging to the unresponsive hands as if their love could draw him back to life. Neither shed a tear, but seemed to watch with their souls in their eyes, for one more word, one more look of recognition. Abigail sat by the window, weeping softly. Ruth had never seen her mother cry before, and it frightened her. She glanced at her grandfather, standing by the foot of the bed; two great tears rolled slowly down his cheeks, and dropped on his long beard. A sudden cry from Mary, as she fell fainting to the floor, called her attention to the bed again. Martha was silently rocking herself to and fro, in an agony of grief. Still the child did not understand. Those in the room were so busy trying to bring Mary back to consciousness, that no one noticed Ruth. Drawn by some impulse she could not understand, the child drew nearer and nearer. Then she laid her soft little hand on his, thinking the touch would surely make him open his eyes and smile at her again; it had often done so before. But what was it that made her start back terrified, and shrink away trembling? It was not Lazarus she had touched, but the awful mystery of death. "I did not know that a little child could feel so deeply," said Abigail to her mother, when she found that Ruth neither ate nor played, but wandered aimlessly around. "I shall keep her away from the funeral." But all her care could not keep from the little one's ears the mournful music of the funeral dirge, or the wailing of the mourners, who gathered to do honor to the young man whom all Bethany knew and loved. Many friends came out from Jerusalem to follow the long procession to the tomb. There was a long eulogy at the grave; but the most impressive ceremony was over at last, and the great stone had to be rolled into the opening that formed the doorway. Then the two desolate sisters went back to their lonely home and empty life, wondering how they could go on without the presence that had been such a daily benediction. The fourth day after his death, as Martha sat listlessly looking out of the green arbor with unseeing eyes, Ruth ran in with a radiant face. "He's come!" she cried. "He's come, and so has my father. Hurry! He is waiting for you!" Martha drew her veil about her, and mechanically followed the eager child to the gate, where Phineas met her with the same message. "Oh, why did He not come sooner?" she thought bitterly, as she pressed on after her guide. Once outside of the village, she drew aside her veil. There stood the Master, with such a look of untold sympathy on His worn face, that Martha cried out, "Lord, if Thou hadst been here my brother had not died!" "Thy brother shall rise again," He said gently. "Yes, I know he shall rise again in the resurrection, at the last day," she said brokenly. "That brings hope for the future; but what comfort is there for the lonely years we must live without him?" The tears streamed down her face again. Then for the first time came those words that have brought balm into thousands of broken hearts, and hope into countless tear-blind eyes. "I am the resurrection and the life. He that believeth in me shall never die. Believest thou this?" Martha looked up reverently. "Yea, Lord, I believe that Thou art the Christ, the Son of God which should come into the world." A great peace came over her troubled spirit as she hurried to her home, where the many friends still sat who had come to comfort them. A number of them were from Jerusalem, and she knew that among them were some who were unfriendly to her brother's friend. So she quietly called her sister from the room, whispering, "The Master is come, and calleth for thee!" Those who sat there thought they were going to the grave to weep, as was the custom. So they rose also, and followed at a little distance. Mary met Him with the same exclamation that her sister had uttered, and fell at His feet. He, seeing in her white face the marks of the deep grief she had suffered, was thrilled to the depths of His humanity by the keenest sympathy. His tears fell too, at the sight of hers. "Behold how He loved Lazarus!" said a man to the one who stood beside him. "Why did He not save him then?" was the mocking answer. "They say He has the power to open the eyes of the blind, and even to raise the dead. Let Him show it in this case!" It was a curious crowd that followed Him to the door of the tomb: men who hated Him for the scorching fire-brands of rebuke He had thrown into their corrupt lives; men who feared Him as a dangerous teacher of false doctrines; men who knew His good works, but hesitated either to accept or refuse; and men who loved Him better than life,--all waiting, wondering what He would do. "Roll the stone away!" He commanded; a dozen strong shoulders bent to do His bidding. Then He looked up and spoke in a low tone, but so distinctly that no one lost a word. "Father," He said,--He seemed to be speaking to some one just beside Him,--"I thank Thee that Thou hast heard me, and I knew that Thou hearest me always: but because of the people which stand by I said it, that they may believe that Thou hast sent me." A cold shiver of expectancy ran over those who heard. Then He cried, in a loud voice, "_Lazarus, come forth!_" There was a dreadful pause. Some of the women clutched each other with frightened shrieks; even strong men fell back, as out of the dark grave walked a tall figure wrapped in white grave-clothes. His face was hidden in a napkin. "Loose him, and let him go," said the Master, calmly. Phineas stepped forward and loosened the outer bands. When the napkin fell from his face, they saw he was deathly white; but in an instant a warm, healthful glow took the place of the corpse-like pallor. Not till he spoke, however, could the frightened people believe that it was Lazarus, and not a ghost they saw. Never had there been such a sight since the world began: the man who had lain four days in the tomb, walking side by side with the man who had called him back to life. The streets were full of people, laughing, shouting, crying, fairly beside themselves with astonishment. Smiths left their irons to cool on the anvils; bakers left their bread to burn in the ovens; the girl at the fountain dropped her half-filled pitcher; and a woman making cakes ran into the street with the dough in her hands. Every house in the village stood empty, save one where a sick man moaned for water all unheeded, and another where a baby wakened in its cradle and began to cry. Long after the reunited family had gone into their home with their nearest friends, and shut the door on their overwhelming joy, the crowds still stood outside, talking among themselves. Many who had taken part against the Master before, now believed on account of what they had seen. But some still said, more openly than before, "He is in league with the evil one, or He could not do such things." These hurried back to Jerusalem, to spread the report that this dangerous man had again appeared, almost at the very gates of the great Capital. That night there was a secret council of the chief priests and the Pharisees. "What shall we do," was the anxious question. "If we let Him alone, all men will believe on Him; and the Romans shall come and take away both our place and our nation." Every heart beat with the same thought, but only Caiaphas put it in words. At last he dared repeat what he had only muttered to himself before: "It is expedient for us that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not." While the streets were still full of people, Jesse crept up to Joel, as they sat together in the court-yard. "Don't you think it would be just as easy to cure a leper as to raise Rabbi Lazarus from the dead?" "Yes, indeed!" answered Joel, positively, "I've seen it done." "Oh, have you?" cried the boy, in delight. "Then Joseph can have his father back again." He told him the story of Simon the leper, and of his visit to the lonely cave. Joel's sympathies were aroused at once. Ever since his own cure, he had felt that he must bring every afflicted one in the wide world to the great source of healing. Just then a man stopped at the gate to ask for Phineas. Joel had learned to know him well in the weeks they had been travelling together; it was Thomas. The boy sprang up eagerly. "Do you know when the Master is going to leave Bethany?" he asked. "In the morning," answered Thomas, "and right glad I am that it is to be so soon. For when we came down here, I thought it was but to die with Him. He is beset on all sides by secret enemies." "And will He go out by the same road that we came?" "It is most probable." Joel waited for no more information from him, but went back to Jesse to learn the way to the cave. Jesse was a little fellow, but a keen-eyed one, and was able to give Joel the few simple directions that would lead him the right way. "Oh, I'm so glad you are going!" he exclaimed. "Shall I run and tell Joseph what you are going to do?" "No, do not say a word to any one," answered Joel. "I shall be back in a very short time." CHAPTER XIV. SIMON the leper sat at the door of his cave. He held a roll of vellum in his unsightly fingers; it was a copy of the Psalms that Lazarus had once made for him in happier days. Many a time he had found comfort in these hope-inspiring songs of David; but to-day he was reading a wail that seemed to come from the depths of his own soul: "Thy wrath lieth hard upon me, and Thou hast afflicted me with all Thy waves. Thou hast put mine acquaintance far from me. Thou hast made me an abomination unto them. I am shut up and I cannot come forth. Lord, I have called daily upon Thee. I have stretched out my hands unto Thee. Wilt Thou show wonders to the dead? Shall the dead arise again and praise Thee? Lord, why casteth Thou off my soul? Why hidest Thou Thy face from me?" The roll dropped to the ground, and he hid his face in his hands, crying, "How long must I endure this? Oh, why was I not taken instead of Lazarus?" The sound of some one scrambling over the rocks made him look up quickly. Seth never made his visits at this time of the day, and strangers had never before found the path to this out-of-the-way place. Joel came on, and stopped by the rock where the water-jar stood. Simon stood up, covering himself with his mantle, and crying out, warningly, "Beware! Unclean! Come no further!" "I bring you news from the village," said Joel. The man threw out his hand with a gesture of alarm. "Oh, not of my wife Esther," he cried, imploringly, "or of my little Joseph! I could not bear to hear aught of ill from them. My heart is still sore for the death of my friend Lazarus. I went as near the village as I dared, and heard the dirge of the flutes and the wailing of the women, when they laid him in the tomb. I have sat here ever since in sackcloth and ashes." "But Lazarus lives again!" exclaimed Joel, simply. He had seen so many miracles lately, that he forgot the startling effect such an announcement would have on one not accustomed to them. [Illustration: "'YOU BUT MOCK ME, BOY'"] The man stood petrified with astonishment. At last he said bitterly, "You but mock me, boy; at least leave me to my sorrow in peace." "No!" cried Joel. "As the Lord liveth, I swear it is the truth. Have you not heard that Messiah has come? I have followed Him up and down the country, and know whereof I speak. At a word from Him the dumb sing, the blind see, and the lame walk. I was lame myself, and He made me as you see me now." Joel drew himself up to his fullest height. Simon looked at him, completely puzzled. "Why did you take the trouble to come and tell me that,--a poor despised leper?" he finally asked. "Because I want everybody else to be as happy as I am. He cured me. He gave me back my strength. Then why should not my feet be always swift to bring others to Him for the same happy healing? He Himself goes about all the time doing good. I know there is hope for you, for I have seen Him cleanse lepers." Simon trembled, as the full meaning of the hope held out to him began to make itself clear to his confused mind: health, home, Esther, child,--all restored to him. It was joy too great to be possible. "Oh, if I could only believe it!" he cried. "Lazarus was raised when he had been four days dead. All Bethany can bear witness to that," persisted Joel. The words poured out with such force and earnestness, as he described the scene, that Simon felt impelled to believe him. "Where can I find this man?" he asked. Joel pointed down the rocky slope. "Take that road that leads into Bethany. Come early in the morning, and as we all pass that way, call to Him. He never refuses any who have faith to believe that He can grant what they ask." When Joel was half-way down the hill, he turned back. "If He should not pass on the morrow," he said, "do not fail to be there on the second day. We will surely leave here soon." Simon stood in bewilderment till the boy had passed down the hill; he began to fear that this messenger had been only the creation of a dream. He climbed upon the cliff and peered down into the valley. No, he had not been deceived; the boy was no mirage of his thirsty soul, for there, he came out into full sight again, and now, he was climbing the opposite hillside. "How beautiful upon the mountain are the feet of him who bringeth good tidings!" he murmured. "Oh, what a heaven opens out before me, if this lad's words are only true!" Next morning, after they left Bethany, Joel looked anxiously behind every rock and tree that they passed; but Simon was not to be seen. Presently Joel saw him waiting farther down the road; he was kneeling in the dust. The white mantle, that in his sensitiveness was always used to hide himself from view, was cast aside, that the Great Healer might see his great need. He scanned the approaching figures with imploring eyes. He was looking for the Messiah,--some one in kingly garments, whose jewelled sceptre's lightest touch would lay upon him the royal accolade of health. These were evidently not the ones he was waiting for. These were only simple wayfarers; most of them looked like Galileans. He was about to rise up with his old warning cry of unclean, when he caught sight of Joel. But where was the princely Redeemer of prophecy? Nearer and nearer they came, till he could look full in their faces. No need now to ask on which one he should call for help; indeed, he seemed to see but one face, it was so full of loving pity. "O Thou Messiah of Israel!" he prayed. "Thou didst call my friend Lazarus from the dead, O pass me not by! Call me from this living death! Make me clean!" The eyes that looked down into his seemed to search his soul. "Believest thou that I can do this?" The pleading faith in Simon's eyes could not be refused. "Yea, Lord," he cried, "Thou hast but to speak the word!" He waited, trembling, for the answer that meant life or death to him. "I will. Be thou clean!" He put out His hand to raise the kneeling man to his feet. "Go and show thyself to the priests," He added. The party passed on, and Simon stood looking after them. _Was_ it the Christ who had passed by? Where were His dyed garments from Bozrah? The prophet foretold Him as glorious in apparel, travelling in the greatness of His strength. No sceptre of divine power had touched him; it was only the clasp of a warm human hand he had felt. He looked down at himself. Still a leper! His faith wavered; but he remembered he had not obeyed the command to show himself to the priests. Immediately he started across the fields on a run, towards the road leading into Jerusalem. Far down the highway Joel heard a mighty shout; he turned and looked back. There on the brow of a hill, sharply outlined against the sky, stood Simon. His arms were lifted high up towards heaven; for as he ran, in obedience to the command, the leprosy had gone from him. He was pouring out a flood of praise and thanksgiving, in the first ecstasy of his recovery, at the top of his voice. Joel thought of the tiresome ceremonies to be observed before the man could go home, and wished that the eight days of purification were over, that the little family might be immediately reunited. Meanwhile, Seth, with his basket and water-bottle, was climbing the hill toward the cave. For the first time in seven years since he had commenced these daily visits, no expectant voice greeted him. He went quite close up to the little room under the cliff; he could see through the half-open door that it was empty. Then he cautiously approached the mouth of the cave, and called his master. A hundred echoes answered him, but no human voice responded. Call after call was sent ringing into the hollow darkness. The deep stillness weighed heavily upon him; he began to be afraid that somewhere in its mysterious depths lay a dead body. The fear mastered him. Only stopping to put down the food and pour out the water, he started home at the top of his speed. As he reached the road, a traveller going to Bethany hailed him. "What think you that I saw just now?" asked the stranger. "A man running with all his might towards Jerusalem. Tears of joy were streaming down his cheeks, and he was shouting as he ran, 'Cleansed! Cleansed! Cleansed!' He stopped me, and bade me say, if I met a man carrying a basket and water-skin, that Simon the leper has just been healed of the leprosy. He will be home as soon as the days of purification are over." Seth gazed at him stupidly, feeling that he must be in a dream. Esther, too, heard the message unbelievingly. Yet she walked the floor in a fever of excitement, at the bare possibility of such a thing being true. The next morning, she sent Seth, as usual, with the provisions. But he brought them back, saying the place was still deserted. Then she began to dare to hope; although she tried to steel herself against disappointment, by whispering over and over that she could never see him again, she waited impatiently for the days to pass. At last they had all dragged by. The new day would begin at sunset, the very earliest time that she might expect him. The house was swept and garnished as if a king were coming. The table was set with the choicest delicacies Seth could find in the Jerusalem markets. The earliest roses, his favorite red ones, were put in every room. In her restless excitement nothing in her wardrobe seemed rich enough to wear. She tried on one ornament after another before she was suited. Then, all in white, with jewels blazing in her ears, on her throat, on her little white hands, and her eyes shining like two glad stars, she sat down to wait for him. But she could not keep still. This rug was turned up at the corner; that rose had dropped its petals on the floor. She would have another kind of wine on the table. At last she stepped out of the door in her little silken-bound sandals, and climbed the outside stairs to the roof, to watch for him. The sun was entirely out of sight, but the west was glorious with the red gold of its afterglow. Looking up the Mount of Olives, she could see the smoke of the evening sacrifice rising as the clouds of incense filled the Temple. Surely he must be far on the way by this time. Her heart almost stopped beating as she saw a figure coming up the road, between the rows of palm-trees. She strained her eyes for a nearer view, then drew a long tremulous breath. It was Lazarus; there went the two children and the lamb to meet him. All along the street, people were standing in the doors to see him go past; he was still a wonder to them. She shaded her eyes with her hand, and looked again. But while her gaze searched the distant road, some one was passing just below, under the avenue of leafy trees, with quick impatient tread; some one paused at the vine-covered door; some one was leaping up the stairs three steps at a time; some one was coming towards her with out-stretched arms, crying, "Esther, little Esther, O my wife! My God-given one!" For the first time in seven years, she turned to find herself in her husband's arms. Strong and well, with the old light in his eyes, the old thrill in his voice, the glow of perfect health tingling through all his veins, he could only whisper tremulously, as he held her close, "Praise God! Praise God!" No wonder he seemed like a stranger to Joseph. But the clasp of the strong arms, and the deep voice saying "my son," so tenderly, were inexpressibly dear to the little fellow kept so long from his birthright of a father's love. He was the first to break the happy silence that fell upon them. "What a good man Rabbi Jesus must be, to go about making people glad like this all the time!" "It is He who shall redeem Israel!" exclaimed Simon. "To God be the glory, who hath sent Him into this sin-cursed world! Henceforth all that I have, and all that I am, shall be dedicated to His service!" Kneeling there in the dying daylight, with his arms around the wife and child so unexpectedly given back to him, such a heart-felt prayer of gratitude went upward to the good Father that even the happiest angels must have paused to listen, more glad because of this great earth-gladness below. CHAPTER XV. "I THINK there will be an unusual gathering of strangers at the Passover this year," said Rabbi Reuben to Lazarus, as they came out together from the city, one afternoon. "The number may even reach three millions. A travelling man from Rome was in my shop to-day. He says that in the remotest parts of the earth, wherever the Hebrew tongue is found, one may hear the name of the Messiah. "People pacing the decks of the ships, crossing the deserts, or trading in the shops, talk only of Him and His miracles; they have aroused the greatest interest even in Athens and the cities of the Nile. The very air seems full of expectancy. I cannot but think great things are about to come to pass. Surely the time is now ripe for Jesus to proclaim Himself king. I cannot understand why He should hide Himself away in the wilderness as if He feared for His safety." Lazarus smiled at the old man, with a confident expression. "Be sure, my friend, it is only because the hour has not yet come. What a sight it will be when He does stand before the tomb of our long dead power, to call back the nation to its old-time life and grandeur. I can well believe that with Him all things are possible." "Would that this next Passover were the time!" responded Reuben. "How I would rejoice to see His enemies laid low in the dust!" Already, on the borders of Galilee, the expected king had started toward His coronation. Many of the old friends and neighbors from Capernaum had joined their band, to go on to the Paschal feast. They made slow progress, however, for at every turn in the road they were stopped by outstretched hands and cries for help. Nearly every step was taken to the sound of some rejoicing cry from some one who had been blessed. Joel could not crowd all the scenes into his memory; but some stood with clear-cut distinctness. There were the ten lepers who met them at the very outset; and there was blind Bartimeus begging by the wayside. He could never forget the expression of that man's face, when his eyes were opened, and for the first time he looked out on the glory of the morning sunshine. Joel quivered all over with a thrill of sympathy, remembering his own healing, and realizing more than the others what had been done for the blind beggar. Then there was Zaccheus, climbing up to look down through the sycamore boughs that he might see the Master passing into Jericho, and Zaccheus scrambling down again in haste to provide entertainment for his honored guest. There was the young ruler going away sorrowful because the sacrifice asked of him was more than he was willing to make. But there was one scene that his memory held in unfading colors:-- Roses and wild honeysuckle climbing over a bank by the road-side. Orange-trees dropping a heavy fragrance with the falling petals of their white blossoms. In the midst of the shade and the bloom the mothers from the village near by, gathering with their children, all freshly washed and dressed to find favor in the eyes of the passing Prophet. Babies cooed in their mother's arms. Bright little faces smiled out from behind protecting skirts, to which timid fingers clung. As they waited for the coming procession, and little bare feet chased each other up and down the bank, the happy laughter of the older children filled all the sunny air. As the travellers came on, the women caught up their children and crowded forward. It was a sight that would have made almost any one pause,--those innocent-eyed little ones waiting for the touch that would keep them always pure in heart,--that blessing their mothers coveted for them. But some of the disciples, impatient at the many delays, seeing in the rosy faces and dimpled limbs nothing that seemed to claim help or attention, spoke to the women impatiently. "Why trouble ye the Master?" they said. "Would ye stop the great work He has come to do for matters of such little importance?" Repelled by the rebuke, they fell back. But there was a look of displeasure on His face, such as they had never seen before, as Jesus turned toward them. "Suffer the little children to come unto me," He said, sternly, "and forbid them not; for of such is the kingdom of heaven!" Then holding out His hands He took them up in His arms and blessed them, every one, even the youngest baby, that blinked up at Him unknowingly with its big dark eyes, received its separate blessing. So fearlessly they came to Him, so lovingly they nestled in His arms, and with such perfect confidence they clung to Him, that He turned again to His disciples. "Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein." Met at all points as He had been by loathsome sights, ragged beggars, and diseases of all kinds, this group of happy-faced children must have remained long in His memory, as sweet as the unexpected blossoming of a rose in a dreary desert. At last the slow journey drew towards a close. The Friday afternoon before the Passover found the tired travellers once more in Bethany. News of their coming had been brought several hours before by a man riding down from Jericho. His swift-footed beast had overtaken and passed the slow procession far back on the road. There was a joyful welcome for the Master in the home of Lazarus. The cool, vine-covered arbor was a refreshing change from the dusty road. Here were no curious throngs and constant demands for help. Away from the sights that oppressed Him, away from the clamor and the criticism, here was a place where heart and body might find rest. The peace of the place, and the atmosphere of sympathy surrounding Him, must have fallen like dew on His thirsty soul. Here, for a few short days, He who had been so long a houseless wanderer was to know the blessedness of a home. Several hours before the first trumpet blast from the roof of the synagogue proclaimed the approaching Sabbath, Simon hurried to his home. "Esther," he called in great excitement, "I have seen Him! The Christ! I have knelt at His feet. I have looked in His face. And, oh, only think!--He has promised to sit at our table! To-morrow night, such a feast as has never been known in the place shall be spread before Him. Help me to think of something we may do to show him especial honor." Esther sprang up at the news. "We have very little time to prepare," she said. "Seth must go at once into the city to make purchases. To-morrow night, no hireling hand shall serve him. I myself shall take that lowly place, with Martha and Mary to aid me. Abigail, too, shall help us, for it is a labor of love that she will delight to take part in. I shall go at once to ask them." The long, still Sabbath went by. The worshippers in the synagogue looked in vain for other miracles, listened in vain for the Voice that wrought such wonders. Through the unbroken rest of that day He was gathering up His strength for a coming trial. Something of the approaching shadow may have been seen in His tender eyes; some word of the awaiting doom may have been spoken to the brother and sisters sitting reverently at his feet,--for they seemed to feel that a parting was at hand, and that they must crowd the flying hours with all the loving service they could render Him. That night at the feast, as Esther's little white hands brought the water for the reclining guests to wash, and Martha and Abigail placed sumptuously filled dishes before them, Mary paused in her busy passing to and fro; she longed to do some especial thing to show her love for the honored guest. Never had His face worn such a look of royalty; never had He seemed so much the Christ. The soft light of many candles falling on His worn face seemed to reveal as never before the divine soul soon to leave the worn body where it now tarried. An old Jewish custom suddenly occurred to her. She seemed to see two pictures: one was Aaron, standing up in the rich garments of the priesthood, with his head bowed to receive the sacred anointing; the other was Israel's first king, on whom the hoary Samuel was bestowing the anointing that proclaimed his royalty. Token of both priesthood and kingship,--oh, if she dared but offer it! No one noticed when she stepped out after awhile, and hurried swiftly homeward. Hidden away in a chest in her room, was a little alabaster flask, carefully sealed. It held a rare sweet perfume, worth almost its weight in gold. She took it out with trembling fingers, and hid it in the folds of her long flowing white dress. Her breath came quick, and her heart beat fast, as she slipped in behind the guests again. The color glowed and paled in her cheeks, as she stood there in the shadow of the curtains, hesitating, half afraid to venture. At last, when the banquet was almost over, she stepped noiselessly forward. There was a hush of surprise at this unusual interruption, although every one there was familiar with the custom, and recognized its deep meaning and symbolism. First on His head, then on His feet, she poured the costly perfume. Bending low in the deepest humility, she swept her long soft hair across them to wipe away the crystal drops. The whole house was filled with the sweet, delicate odor. Some of those who saw it, remembered a similar scene in the house of another Simon, in far away Galilee; but only the Anointed One could feel the deep contrast between the two. That Simon, the proud Pharisee, condescending and critical and scant in hospitality; this Simon, the cleansed leper, ready to lay down his life, in his boundless love and gratitude. That woman, a penitent sinner, kneeling with tears before His mercy; this woman, so pure in heart that she could see God though hidden in the human body of the Nazarene. That anointing, to His priesthood at the beginning of His ministry; this anointing, to His kingdom, now almost at hand. No one spoke as the fragrance rose and spread itself like the incense of a benediction. It seemed a fitting close to this hour of communion with the Master. Across this eloquent silence that the softest sound would have jarred upon, a cold, unfeeling voice broke harshly. [Illustration: "A DARK FIGURE WENT SKULKING OUT INTO THE NIGHT"] It was Judas Iscariot who spoke. "Why was all this ointment wasted?" he asked. "It would have been better to have sold it and given it to the poor." Simon frowned indignantly at this low-browed guest, who was so lacking in courtesy, and Mary looked up distressed. "Let her alone!" said the Master, gently. "Ye have the poor with you always, and whensoever ye will, ye may do them good: but me ye have not always. She hath done what she could: she is come aforehand to anoint my body to the burying." A dark look gleamed in the eyes of Judas,--there was that reference again to His burial. There seemed to be no use of making any further pretence to follow Him any longer. His kingdom was a delusion,--a vague, shadowy, spiritual thing that the others might believe in if they chose. But if there was no longer any hope of gaining by His service, he would turn to the other side. That night there was another secret council of some of the Sanhedrin, and Judas Iscariot was in their midst. When the lights were out, and the Temple police were making their final rounds, a dark figure went skulking out into the night, and wound its way through the narrow streets,--the dark figure that still goes skulking through the night of history,--the man who covenanted for thirty pieces of silver to betray his Lord. CHAPTER XVI. "WHO is that talking in the house?" asked Joel of Abigail the morning after the feast. He had been playing in the garden with Jesse, and paused just outside the door as he heard voices. "Only father and Phineas, now," answered Abigail. "Simon the oil-seller has just been here, and I am sure you could not guess his errand. It was about you." "About me?" echoed Joel, in surprise. "Yes, I never knew until this morning that you were the one who persuaded him to go to the Master for healing. He says if it had not been for you, he would still be an outcast from home. During these weeks you have been away, he has been hoping to find some trace of you, for he longs to express his gratitude. Last night at the feast, he learned your name, and now he has just been here to talk to Phineas and father about you. His olive groves yield him a large fortune every year, and he is in a position to do a great deal for you, if you will only let him." "What does he want to do?" asked Joel. "He has offered a great deal: to send you to the best schools in the country; to let you travel in foreign lands, and see life as it is in Rome and Athens and the cities of Egypt. Then when you are grown, he offers to take you in business with himself, and give you the portion of a son. It is a rare chance for you, my boy." "Yes," answered Joel, flushing with pleasure at the thought of all he might be able to see and learn. He seemed lost for a few minutes in the bright anticipation of such a tempting future; then his face clouded. "But I would have to leave everybody I love," he cried, "and the home where I have been so happy! I cannot do it, mother Abigail; it is too much to ask." "Now you talk like a child," she answered, half impatiently; but there was a suspicion of tears in her eyes as she added, "Joel, you have grown very dear to us. It will be hard to give you up, for you seem almost like an own son. But consider, my boy; it would not be right to turn away from such advantages. Jesse and Ruth will be well provided for. All that my father has will be theirs some day. But Phineas is only a poor carpenter, and cannot give you much beyond food and clothing. I heard him say just now that he clearly thought it to be your duty to accept, and he had no doubt but that you would." "But I cannot be with the Master!" cried Joel, as the thought suddenly occurred to him that he could no longer follow Him as he had been doing, if he was to be sent away to study and travel. "No; but think what you may be able to do for His cause, if you have money and education and influence. It seems to me that for His sake alone, you ought to consent to such an arrangement." That was the argument that Phineas used when he came out; and the boy was sadly bewildered between the desire to be constantly with his beloved Master, and his wish to serve Him as they suggested. It was in this perplexed state of mind that he started up to Jerusalem with Jesse and his grandfather. The streets were rapidly filling with people, coming up to the Feast of the Passover, and Joel recognized many old friends from Galilee. "There is Rabbi Amos!" he exclaimed, as he caught sight of an old man in the door of a house across the street. "May I run and speak to him?" "Certainly!" answered Reuben. "You know your way so well about the streets that it makes no difference if we do get separated. Jesse and I will walk on down to the shop. You can meet us there." Rabbi Amos gave Joel a cordial greeting. "I am about to go back to the Damascus gate," he said. "I have just been told that the Nazarene will soon make His entrance into the city, and a procession of pilgrims are going out to meet Him. I have heard much of the man since He left Capernaum, and I have a desire to see Him again. Will you come?" The old man hobbled along so painfully, leaning on his staff, that they were a long time in reaching the gate. The outgoing procession had already met the coming pilgrims, and were starting to return. The way was strewn with palm branches and the clothes they had taken off to lay along the road in front of the man they wished to honor. Every hand carried a palm branch, and every voice cried a Hosannah. At first Joel saw only a confused waving of the green branches, and heard an indistinct murmur of voices; but as they came nearer, he caught the words, "Hosannah to the Son of David!" "Look!" cried Rabbi Amos, laying his wrinkled, shaking hand heavily on Joel's shoulder. "Look ye, boy, the voice of prophecy! No Roman war-horse bears the coming victor! It is as Zechariah foretold! That the king should come riding upon the colt of an ass,--the symbol of peace. So David rode, and so the Judges of Israel came and went!" Joel's eyes followed the gesture of the tremulous, pointing finger. There came the Master, right in the face of His enemies, boldly riding in to take possession of His kingdom. At last! No wandering now in lonely wildernesses! No fear of the jealous scribe or Pharisee! The time had fully come. With garments strewn in the way, with palms of victory waving before Him, with psalm and song and the shouting of the multitude, He rode triumphantly into the city. Joel was roused to the highest pitch of enthusiasm, to see His best beloved friend so honored. People understood Him now; they appreciated Him. The demonstrations of the multitude proved it. He was so happy and excited, he scarcely knew what he was doing. He had no palm branch to wave, but as the head of the procession came abreast with him, and he saw the face of the rider, he was almost beside himself. He waved his empty hands wildly up and down, cheering at the top of his voice; but his shrillest Hosannahs were heard only by himself. They were only a drop in that mighty surf-beat of sound. Scarcely knowing what to expect, yet prepared for almost anything, they followed the procession into the city. When they reached the porch of the Temple, the Master had disappeared. "I wonder where He has gone," said Joel, in a disappointed tone. "I thought they would surely crown Him." "He evidently did not wish it to be," answered Rabbi Amos. "It would be more fitting that the coronation take place at the great feast. Wait until the day of the Passover." As they sat in the Court of the Gentiles, resting, Joel told Rabbi Amos of the offer made him by the wealthy oil-dealer Simon. "Accept it, by all means!" was the old man's advice. "We have seen enough just now to know that a new day is about to dawn for Israel. In Bethany, you will be much nearer the Master than in Capernaum; for surely, after to-day's demonstration, He will take up His residence in the capital. In time you may rise to great influence in the new government soon to be established." The old rabbi's opinion weighed heavily with Joel, and he determined to accept Simon's offer. Then for awhile he was so full of his new plans and ambitions, he could think of nothing else. All that busy week he was separated from the Master and His disciples; for it was the first Passover he had ever taken part in. After it was over, he was to break the ties that bound him to the carpenter's family and the simple life in Galilee, and go to live in Simon's luxurious home in Bethany. So he stayed closely with Phineas and Abigail, taking a great interest in all the great preparations for the feast. * * * * * Reuben chose, from the countless pens, a male lamb a year old, without blemish. About two o'clock the blast of two horns announced that the priests and Levites in the Temple were ready, and the gates of the inner courts were opened, that all might bring the lambs for examination. The priests, in two long rows, caught the blood in great gold and silver vessels, as the animals were killed, and passed it to others behind, till it reached the altar, at the foot of which it was poured out. Then the lamb was taken up and roasted in an earthen oven, and the feast commenced at sunset on Thursday. The skin of the lamb, and the earthen dishes used, were generally given to the host, when different families lodged together. As many as twenty were allowed to gather at one table. Reuben had invited Nathan ben Obed, and those who came with him, to partake of his hospitality. Much to Joel's delight, a familiar shock of sunburned hair was poked in at the door, and he recognized Buz's freckled face, round-eyed and open mouthed at this first glimpse of the great city. During the first hour they were together, Buz kept his squinting eyes continually on Joel. He found it hard to believe that this straight, sinewy boy could be the same pitiful little cripple who had gone with him to the sheepfolds of Nathan ben Obed. "Say," he drawled, after awhile, "I know where that fellow is who made you lame. I was so upset at seeing you this way that I forgot to tell you. He had a dreadful accident, and you have already had your wish, for he is as blind as that stone." "Oh, how? Who told you?" cried Joel, eagerly. "I saw him myself, as we came through Jericho. He had been nearly beaten to death by robbers a few weeks before. It gave him a fever, and both eyes were so inflamed and bruised that he lost his sight." "Poor Rehum!" exclaimed Joel. "Poor Rehum!" echoed Buz, in astonishment. "What do you mean by poor Rehum? Aren't you glad? Isn't that just exactly what you planned; or did you want the pleasure of punching them out yourself?" "No," answered Joel, simply; "I forgave him a year ago, the night before I was healed." "You forgave him!" gasped Buz,--"you forgave him! A dog of a Samaritan! Why, how could you?" Buz looked at him with such a wondering, puzzled gaze that Joel did not attempt to explain. Buz might be ignorant of a great many things, but he knew enough to hate the Samaritans, and look down on them with the utmost contempt. "I don't really believe you could understand it," said Joel, "so it is of no use to try to tell you how or why. But I did forgive him, fully and freely. And if you will tell me just where to find him, I will go after him early in the morning and bring him back with me. The Hand that straightened my back can open his eyes; for I have seen it done many times." All during the feast, Buz kept stealing searching glances at Joel. He could hardly tell which surprised him most, the straightened body or the forgiving spirit. It was so wonderful to him that he sat speechless. At the same time, in an upper chamber in another street, the Master and His disciples were keeping the feast together. It was their last supper with Him, although they knew it not. Afterwards they recalled every word and every incident, with loving memory that lingered over each detail; but at the time they could not understand its full import. The gates were left open on Passover night. While the Master and His followers walked out to the Garden of Gethsemane, where they had often gone together, Joel was questioning Buz as to the exact place where he was to find his old enemy. "I'll go out very early in the morning," said Joel, as his head touched the pillow. "Very early in the morning, for I want Rehum's eyes to be open just as soon as possible, so that he can see the Master's face. Lord help me to find him to-morrow," he whispered, and with a blessing on his lips for the one he had so long ago forgiven, his eyes closed softly. Sleep came quickly to him after the fatigue and excitement of the day. In his dreams he saw again the Master's face as He made His triumphal entrance into the city; he heard again the acclamations of the crowd. Then he saw Rabbi Amos and Simon and little Ruth. There was a confused blending of kindly faces; there was a shadow-like shifting of indistinct but pleasant scenes. In the fair dreamland where he wandered, fortune smiled on him, and all his paths were peace. Sleep on, little disciple, happy in thy dreaming; out in Gethsemane's dark garden steals one to betray thy Lord! By the light of glimmering lanterns and fitful torches they take Him now. Armed with swords and staves, they lead Him out from the leafy darkness into the moon-flooded highroad. Now He stands before the High Priest,--alone, unfriended. Sleep, and wake not at the cock's shrill crowing, for there is none to make answer for Him, and one who loved Him hath thrice denied! Dream on! In the hall of Pilate now, thorn-crowned and purple-clad, Him whom thou lovest; scourged now, and spat upon. This day, indeed, shall He come into His kingdom, but well for thee, that thou seest not the coronation. Sleep on, little disciple, be happy whilst thou can! CHAPTER XVII. IT was so much later than he had intended, when Joel awoke next morning, that without stopping for anything to eat, he hurried out of the city, and took the road by which the Master had made such a triumphal entry a few days before. Faded branches of palms still lay scattered by the wayside, thickly covered with dust. All unconscious of what had happened the night before, and what was even at that very moment taking place, Joel trudged on to Bethany at a rapid pace, light-hearted and happy. For six days he had been among enthusiastic Galileans who firmly believed that before the end of Passover week they should see the overthrow of Rome, and all nations lying at the feet of a Jewish king. How long they had dreamed of this hour! He turned to look back at the city. The white and gold of the Temple dazzled his eyes, as it threw back the rays of the morning sun. He thought of himself as he had stood that day on the roof of the carpenter's house, stretching out longing arms to this holy place, and calling down curses on the head of his enemy, Rehum. Could he be the same boy? It seemed to him now that that poor, crippled body, that bitter hatred, that burning thirst for revenge, must have belonged to some one else, he felt so well, so strong, so full of love to God and all mankind. A little broken-winged sparrow fluttered feebly under a hedgerow. He stopped to gather a handful of ripe berries for it, and even retraced his steps to a tiny spring he had noticed farther back, to bring it water in the hollow of a smooth stone. He did not find Rehum at the place where Buz had told him to inquire. His father had taken him to his home, somewhere in Samaria. Joel turned back, tired and disappointed. He was glad to lie down, when he reached Bethany again, and rest awhile. A peculiar darkness began to settle down over the earth. Joel was perplexed and frightened; he knew it could not be an eclipse, for it was the time of the full moon. Finally he started back to Jerusalem, although it was like travelling in the night, for the darkness had deepened and deepened for nearly three hours, and the mysterious gloom made him long to be with his friends. His first thought was to find the Master, and he naturally turned toward the Temple. Just as he started across the Porch of Solomon, the darkness was lifted, and everything seemed to dance before his eyes. He had never experienced an earthquake shock before, but he felt sure that this was one. He braced himself against one of the pillars. How the massive columns quivered! How the hot air throbbed! The darkness had been awful, but this was doubly terrifying. The earth had scarcely stopped trembling, when an old white-bearded priest ran across the Court of the Gentiles; his wrinkled hands, raised above his head, shook as with palsy. The scream that he uttered seemed to transfix Joel with horror. "_The veil of the Temple is rent in twain!_" he cried,--"_The veil of the Temple is rent in twain!_" Then with a convulsive shudder he fell forward on his face. Joel's knees shook. The darkness, the earthquake, and now this mighty force that had laid bare the Holy of Holies, filled him with an undefined dread. He ran past the prostrate priest into the inner court, and saw for himself. There hung the heavy curtain of Babylonian tapestry, in all its glory of hyacinth and scarlet and purple, torn asunder from top to bottom. No earthquake shock could have made that ragged gash. The wrath of God must have come down and laid mighty fingers upon it. He ran out of the Temple, and towards the house where he had slept the night before. The earthquake seemed to have shaken all Jerusalem into the streets. Strange words were afloat. A question overheard in passing one excited group, an exclamation in another, made him run the faster. At Reuben's shop he found Jesse and Ruth both crying from fright. The attendant who had them in charge told him that his friends had been gone nearly all day. "Where?" demanded Joel. "I do not know exactly. They went out with one of the greatest multitudes that ever passed through the gates of the city. Not only Jews, but Greeks and Romans and Egyptians. You should have seen the camels and the chariots, the chairs and the litters!" exclaimed the man. A sudden fear fell upon the boy that this was the day that the One he loved best had been made king, and he had missed it,--had missed the greatest opportunity of his life. "Was it to follow Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth?" he demanded eagerly. The man nodded. "To crown Him?" was the next breathless question. "No; to crucify Him." The unexpected answer was almost a death-thrust. Joel stood a moment, dumb with horror. The blood seemed to stand still in his veins; there was a roaring in his ears; then everything grew black before him. He clutched blindly at the air, then staggered back against the wall. "No, _no_, _no_, NO!" he cried; each word was louder than the last. "I will not believe it! You do not speak truth!" He ran madly from the shop, down the street, and through the city gate. Out on the highway he met the returning multitude, most of them in as great haste as he. Everything he saw seemed to confirm the truth of what he had just heard, but he could not believe it. "No, no, no!" he gasped, in a breathless whisper, as he ran. "No, no, no! It cannot be! He is the Christ! The Son of God! They could not be able to do it, no matter how much they hated Him!" But even as he ran he saw the hill where three crosses rose. He turned sick and cold, and so weak he could scarcely stand. Still he stumbled resolutely on, but with his face turned away from the sight he dared not look upon, lest seeing should be knowing what he feared. At last he reached the place, and, shrinking back as if from an expected blow, he slowly raised his eyes till they rested on the face of the dead body hanging there. The agonized shriek on his lips died half uttered, as he fell unconscious at the foot of the cross. A long time after, one of the soldiers happening to notice him, turned him over with his foot, and prodded him sharply with his spear. It partially aroused him, and in a few moments he sat up. Then he looked up again into the white face above him; but this time the bowed head awed him into a deep calm. The veil of the Temple was rent indeed, and through this pierced body there shone out from its Holy of Holies the Shekinah of God's love for a dying world. It uplifted Joel, and drew him, and drew him, till he seemed to catch a faint glimpse of the Father's face; to feel himself folded in boundless pardon, in pity so deep, and a love so unfathomed, that the lowest sinner could find a share. But while he gazed and gazed into the white face, so glorified in its marble stillness, Joseph of Arimathea stood between him and the cross, giving directions, in a low tone, for the removal of the body. It seemed to waken Joel out of his trance; and when the bloodstained form was stretched gently on the ground, he forgot his glimpse of heavenly mysteries, he saw no longer the uplifted Christ. He saw instead, the tortured body of the man he loved; the friend for whom he would gladly have given his life. Almost blinded by the rush of tears, he groped his way on his knees toward it. A mantle of fine white linen had been laid over the lifeless body; but one hand lay stretched out beside Him with a great bloody nail-hole through the palm,--it was the hand that had healed him; the hand that had fed the hungry multitudes; the hand that had been laid in blessing on the heads of little children, waiting by the roadside! With the thought of all it had done for him, with the thought of all it had done for all the countless ones its warm, loving touch had comforted, came the remembrance of the torture it had just suffered. Joel lay down beside it with a heart-broken moan. Men came and lifted the body in its spotless covering. Joel did not look up to see who bore it away. The lifeless hand still hung down uncovered at His side. With his eyes fixed on that, Joel followed, longing to press it to his lips with burning kisses; but he dared not so much as touch it with trembling fingers,--a sense of his unworthiness forbade. As the silent procession went onward, Joel found himself walking beside Abigail. She had pushed her veil aside that she might better see the still form borne before them; she had stood near by through all those hours of suffering. Her wan face and swollen eyes showed how the force of her sympathy and grief had worn upon her. Joel glanced around for Phineas. He was one of those who walked before with the motionless burden, his strong brown hands tenderly supporting the Master's pierced feet; his face was as rigid as stone, and seemed to Joel to have grown years older since the night before. Another swift rush of tears blinded Joel, as he looked at the set, despairing face, and then at what he carried. O friend of Phineas! O feet that often ran to meet him on the grassy hillsides of Nazareth, that walked beside him at his daily toil, and led him to a nobler living!--Thou hast climbed the mountain of Beatitudes! Thou hast walked the wind-swept waters of the Galilee! But not of this is he thinking now. It is of Thy life's unselfish pilgrimage; of the dust and travel stains of the feet he bears; of the many steps, taken never for self, always for others; of the cure and the comfort they have daily carried; of the great love that hath made their very passing by to be a benediction. It seemed strange to Joel that, in the midst of such overpowering sorrow, trivial little things could claim his attention. Years afterward he remembered just how the long streaks of yellow sunshine stole under the trees of the garden; he could hear the whirr of grasshoppers, jumping up in the path ahead of them; he could smell the heavy odor of lilies growing beside an old tomb. The sorrowful little group wound its way to a part of the garden where a new tomb had been hewn out of the rock; here Joseph of Arimathea motioned them to stop. They laid the open bier gently on the ground, and Joel watched them with dry eyes but trembling lips, as they noiselessly prepared the body for its hurried burial. From time to time as they wound the bands of white linen, powdered with myrrh and aloes, they glanced up nervously at the sinking sun. The Sabbath eve was almost upon them, and the old slavish fear of the Law made them hasten. A low stifled moaning rose from the lips of the women, as the One they had followed so long was lifted up, and borne forever out of their sight, through the low doorway of the tomb. Strong hands rolled the massive stone in place that barred the narrow opening. Then all was over; there was nothing more that could be done. The desolate mourners sat down on the grass outside the tomb, to watch and weep and wait over a dead hope and a lost cause. A deep stillness settled over the garden as they lingered there in the gathering twilight. They grew calm after awhile, and began to talk in low tones of the awful events of the day just dying. Gradually, Joel learned all that had taken place. As he heard the story of the shame and abuse and torture that had been heaped upon the One he loved better than all the world, his face grew white with horror and indignation. "Oh, wasn't there _one_ to stand up for Him?" he cried, with clasped hands and streaming eyes. "Wasn't there _one_ to speak a word in His defence? O my Beloved!" he moaned. "Out of all the thousands Thou didst heal, out of all the multitudes Thou didst bless, not one to bear witness!" He rocked himself to and fro on his knees, wringing his hands as if the thought brought him unspeakable anguish. "Oh, if I had only been there!" he moaned. "If I could only have stood up beside Him and told what He had done for me! O my God! My God! How can I bear it? To think He went to His death without a friend and without a follower, when I loved Him so! All alone! Not one to speak for Him, not one!" Groping with tear-blinded eyes towards the tomb, the boy stretched his arms lovingly around the great stone that stopped its entrance; then suddenly realizing that he could never go any closer to the One inside, never see Him again, he leaned his head hopelessly against the rock, and gave way to his feeling of utter loneliness and despair. How long he stood there, he did not know. When he looked up again, the women had gone, and it was nearly dark. Phineas and several other men lingered in the black shadows of the trees, and Joel joined them. Roman guards came presently. A stout cord was stretched across the stone, its ends firmly fastened, and sealed with the seal of Cæsar. A watch-fire was kindled near by; then the Roman sentinels began their steady tramp! tramp! as they paced back and forth. High overhead the stars began to set their countless watch-fires in the heavens; then the white full moon of the Passover looked down, and all night long kept its silent vigil over the forsaken tomb of the sleeping Christ. * * * * * Abigail had found shelter for the night with friends, in a tent just outside the city; but Joel and Phineas took their way back to Bethany. Little was said as they trudged along in the moonlight. Joel thought only of one thing,--his great loss, the love of which he had been bereft. But to Phineas this death meant much more than the separation from the best of friends; it meant the death of a cause on which he had staked his all. He must go back to Galilee to be the laughing-stock of his old neighbors. He who they trusted would have saved Israel had been put to death as a felon,--crucified between two thieves! The cause was lost; he was left to face an utter failure. When the moon went down that morning over the hills of Judea, there were many hearts that mourned the Man of Nazareth, but not a soul in all the universe believed on Him as the Son of God. Hope lay dead in the tomb of Joseph, with a great stone forever walling it in. CHAPTER XVIII. "WAKE up, Joel! Wake up! I bring you good tidings, my lad!" It was Abigail's voice ringing cheerily through the court-yard, as she bent over the boy, fast asleep on the hard stones. All the long Sabbath day after the burial, he had sat listlessly in the shady court-yard, his blank gaze fixed on the opposite wall. No one seemed able to arouse him from his apathy. He turned away from the food they brought him, and refused to enter the house when night came. Towards morning he had gone over to the fountain for a long draught of its cool water; then overcome by weakness from his continued fast, and exhausted by grief, he fell asleep on the pavement. Abigail came in and found him there, with the red morning sun beating full in his face. She had to shake him several times before she could make him open his eyes. He sat up dizzily, and tried to collect his thoughts. Then he remembered, and laid his head wearily down again, with a groan. "Wake up! Wake up!" she insisted, with such eager gladness in her voice that Joel opened his eyes again, now fully aroused. "What is it?" he asked indifferently. "_He is risen!_" she exclaimed joyfully, clasping her hands as she always did when much excited. "I went to His tomb very early in the morning, while it was yet dark, with Mary and Salome and some other women. The stone had been rolled aside; and while we wondered and wept, fearing His enemies had stolen Him away, He stood before us, with His old greeting on His lips,--'All hail!'" Joel rubbed his eyes and looked at her. "No, no!" he said wearily, "I am dreaming again!" He would have thrown himself on the ground as before, his head pillowed on his arm, but she would not let him. She shook his hands with a persistence that could not be refused, talking to him all the while in such a glad eager voice that he slowly began to realize that something had made her very happy. "What is it, Mother Abigail?" he asked, much puzzled. "I do not wonder you are bewildered," she cried. "It is such blessed, such wonderful news. Why He is _alive_, Joel, He whom Thou lovest! Try to understand it, my boy! I have just now come from the empty tomb. I saw Him! I spoke with Him! I knelt at His feet and worshipped!" By this time all the family had come out. Reuben looked at his daughter pityingly, as she repeated her news; then he turned to Phineas. "Poor thing!" he said, in a low tone. "She has witnessed such terrible scenes lately, and received such a severe shock, that her mind is affected by it. She does not know what she is saying. Did not you yourself help prepare the body for burial, and put it in the tomb?" "Yes," answered Phineas, "and helped close it with a great stone, which no one man could possibly move by himself. And I saw it sealed with the seal of Cæsar; and when I left it was guarded by Roman sentinels in armor. No man could have opened it." "But Abigail talks of angels who sat in the empty tomb, and who told them He had risen," replied her father. Joel, who had overheard this low-toned conversation, got up and stood close beside them. He had begun to tremble from weakness and excitement. [Illustration: "'THE STONE IS GONE!'"] "Father Phineas," he asked, "do you remember the story we heard from the old shepherd, Heber? The angels told of His birth; maybe she _did_ see them in His tomb." "How can such things be?" queried Reuben, stroking his beard in perplexity. "That's just what you said when Rabbi Lazarus was brought back to life," piped Jesse's shrill voice, quite unexpectedly, at his grandfather's elbow. He had not lost a word of the conversation. "Why don't you go and see for yourself if the tomb is empty?" Abigail had gone into the house with her mother, and now the summons to breakfast greeted them. She saw she could not convince them of the truth of her story, so she said no more about it; but her happy face was more eloquent than words. All day snatches of song kept rising to her lips,--old psalms of thanksgiving, and half whispered hallelujahs. At last Joel and Phineas were both so much affected by her continued cheerfulness, that they began to believe there must be some great cause for it. Finally, in the waning afternoon, they took the road that led from Bethany to the garden where they firmly believed that the Master still lay buried. As they came in sight of the tomb, Joel clutched Phineas by the arm, and pointed, with a shaking finger, to the dark opening ahead of of them. "See!" he said, pointing into its yawning darkness. "She was right! The stone is gone!" It was some time before they could muster up courage to go nearer and look into the sepulchre. When at last they did so, neither spoke a word, but, after one startled look into each other's eyes, turned and left the garden. It was growing dark as they hurried along the highway homeward. Two men came half running towards the city, in great haste to reach the gates before they should be closed for the night. They were two disciples well known to Phineas. He stopped them with the question that was uppermost in his mind. "Yes, He is risen," answered one of the men, breathlessly. "We have seen Him. Hosanna to the Highest! He walked along this road with us as we went to Emmaus." "Ah, how our hearts burned as He talked with us by the way!" interrupted the other man. "Only this hour He sat at meat with us," cried the first speaker. "He broke bread with us, and blessed it as He always used to do. We are running back to the city now to tell the other disciples." Phineas would have laid a detaining hand on them, but they hurried on, and left him standing in the road, looking wistfully after them. "It must be true," said Joel, "or they could not have been so nearly wild with joy." Phineas sadly shook his head. "I wish I could think so," he sighed. "Let us go home," urged Abigail, the next day, "the Master has bidden His brethren meet Him in Galilee. Let us go. There is hope of seeing Him again in our old home!" Joel, now nearly convinced of the truth of her belief, was also anxious to go. But Phineas lingered; his plodding mind was slower to grasp such thoughts than the sensitive woman's or the imaginative boy's. One after another he sought out Peter and James and John, and the other disciples who had seen the risen Master, and questioned them closely. Still he tarried for another week. One morning he met Thomas, whose doubts all along had strengthened his own. He ran against him in the crowded street in Jerusalem. Thomas seized his arm, and, turning, walked beside him a few paces. "_It is true!_" he said, in a low intense tone, with his lips close to his ear. "I saw Him myself last night; I held His hands in mine! I touched the side the spear had pierced! He called me by name; and I know now beyond all doubt that the Master has risen from the dead, and that He is the Son of God!" After that, Phineas no longer objected when it was proposed that they should go back to Galilee. The story of the resurrection was too great for him to grasp entirely, still he could not put aside such a weight of evidence that came to him from friends whose word he had always implicitly trusted. The roads were still full of pilgrims returning from the Passover. As Phineas journeyed on with his little family, he fell in with the sons of Jonah and Zebedee, going back to their nets and their fishing-boats. The order of procession was constantly shifting, and one morning Joel found himself walking beside John, one of the chosen twelve, who seemed to have understood his Master better than any of the others. The man seemed wrapped in deep thought, and took no notice of his companion, till Joel timidly touched his sleeve. "Do _you_ believe it is true?" the boy asked. There was no surprise in the man's face at the abrupt question, he felt, without asking, what Joel meant. A reassuring smile lighted up his face as he laid his hand kindly on Joel's shoulder. "I know it, my lad; I have been with Him." The quiet positiveness with which he spoke seemed to destroy Joel's last doubt. "Many things that He said to us come back to me very clearly; and I see now He was trying to prepare us for this." "Tell me about them," begged Joel, "and about those last hours He was with you. Oh, if I could only have been with Him, too!" John saw the tears gathering in the boy's eyes, heard the tremble in his voice, and felt a thrill of sympathy as he recognized a kindred love in the little fellow's heart. So he told Joel of the last supper they had taken together, of the hymn they had sung, and of the watch they had failed to keep, when He took them with Him into the garden of Gethsemane. All the little incidents connected with those last solemn hours, he repeated carefully to the listening boy. From time to time Joel brushed his hand across his eyes; but a deep calm fell over him as John's voice went on, slowly repeating the words the Master had comforted them with. "Let not your hearts be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house are many mansions.... I go to prepare a place for you. I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.... If ye loved me, ye would rejoice, because I said, I go unto the Father.... These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world." Joel made an exclamation as if about to speak, and then stopped. "What is it?" asked John. "How could He mean that He has overcome the world? Cæsar still rules, and Jerusalem is full of His enemies. I can't forget that they killed Him, even if He has risen." John stooped to tie his sandal before he answered. "I have been fitting together different things He told us; and I begin to see how blind we were. Once He called Himself the Good Shepherd who would give his life for his sheep, and said, 'Therefore doth my Father love me, because I lay down my life that I might take it again. No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again.'" They walked on in silence a few paces, then John asked abruptly, "Do you remember about the children of Israel being so badly bitten by serpents in the wilderness, and how Moses was commanded to set up a brazen serpent in their midst?" "Yes, indeed!" answered Joel. "All who looked up at it were saved; but those who would not died from the poisonous bites." "One night," continued John, "a learned man by the name of Nicodemus, one of the rulers, came to the Master with many questions. And I remember one of the answers He gave him. 'As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.' We did not understand Him then at all. Not till I saw Him lifted up on the cruel cross, did I begin to dimly see what He meant." A light broke over Joel's face as he remembered the vision he had had that day, kneeling at the foot of the cross; then he stopped still in the road, with his hands clasped in dismay. There suddenly seemed to rise before him the scenes of daily sacrifice in the Temple, when the blood of innocent lambs flowed over the altar; then he thought of the great Day of Atonement, when the poor scape-goat was driven away to its death, laden with the sins of the people. "Oh, that must be what Isaiah meant!" he cried in distress. "'He was brought as a lamb to the slaughter!' Oh, can it be possible that 'the Lord hath laid on _Him_ the iniquity of us all'? What an awful sacrifice!" The tears streamed down his face as the thought came over him with overwhelming conviction, that it was for _him_ that the man he loved so had endured all the horrible suffering of death by crucifixion. "Why did such a thing have to be?" he asked, looking up appealingly at his companion. John looked out and up, as if he saw far beyond the narrow, hill-bound horizon, and quoted softly: "_For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life._" Just as the feeling had come to him that morning by the Galilee, and again as he gazed and gazed into the white face on the cross, Joel seemed to feel again the love of the Father, as it took him close into its infinite keeping. "'Greater love hath no man than this,'" quoted John again, "'that a man lay down his life for his friends.' He is the propitiation for our sins; and not ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world." It was hard for the child to understand this at first; but this gentle disciple who walked beside him had walked long beside the Master, and in the Master's own way and words taught Joel life's greatest lesson. CHAPTER XIX. THEY went back to their simple lives again,--those hardy fishermen, the busy carpenter, and the boy. Phineas was silent and grave. For him, hope still lay dead in that garden tomb near Golgotha; but Joel sang as he worked. The appointed time was nearing when the Master was to meet them on the mountain. As often as he could, Joel stole away from the moody man at the work-bench, and went down to the beach for more cheerful companionship. One morning, seeing a fishing-boat that he recognized pulling in quickly to shore, he ran down to see what luck his friends had had during the night. He held up his hands in astonishment at the great haul of fish the boat held. "We have been with the Master," explained one of the men. "We toiled all night, and took nothing till we met Him." Joel listened eagerly while they told him of that meeting in the early dawn, and of the meal they ate together, while the sun came up over the Galilee, and the blue waves whispered their gladness to the beach, as they heard the Master's voice once more. "Oh, to think that He is in Galilee again!" exclaimed Joel. That thought added purpose and meaning to each new day. Every morning he woke with the feeling, "Maybe I shall see Him before the sun goes down." Every night he went to sleep saying, "He is somewhere near! No telling how soon I may be with Him!" When the day came on which they were to go to the mountain, Joel was up very early in the morning. He bathed and dressed himself with the care of a priest about to enter the inner courts on some holy errand. When he started to the mountain, Abigail noticed that he wore his finest headdress of white linen. His tunic was spotless, and, from the corners of his brown and white striped mantle, the blue fringes that the Law prescribed hung smooth as silk. He did not wait for Phineas or any of his friends. Long before the time, he had climbed the rocky path, and was sitting all alone in the deep shadowed stillness. The snapping of a twig startled him; the falling of a leaf made him look up hopefully. Any minute the Master might come. His heart beat so loud it seemed to him that the wood-birds overhead must surely hear it, and be frightened away. Imagine that scene, you who can,--you who have just seen the earth close over your best-beloved; who have awakened in the lonely night, with that sudden sickening remembrance of loss; who have longed, with a longing like a constant ache, for the voice and the smile and the footstep that have slipped hopelessly beyond recall. Think of what it would mean, if you knew now, beyond doubt, that all that you had loved and lost would be given back to you before the passing of another hour! So Joel waited, restless, burning, all in a quiver of expectancy. Steps began to wind around the base of the mountain. One familiar face after another came in sight, then strange ones, until, by and by, five hundred people had gathered there, and were sitting in reverent, unbroken silence. The soft summer wind barely stirred the leaves; even the twitter of nestlings overhead was hushed. After awhile, thrilled by some unseen influence, as a field of grain is swayed by the passing wind, they bowed their heads. The Master stood before them, His hands outspread in blessing. Joel started forward with a wild desire to throw himself at His feet, and put his arms around them; but a majesty he had never seen before in that gentle face restrained him. He listened to the voice as it rose and fell with all its old winning tenderness. As you would listen could the dead lips you love move again; as you would greedily snatch up every word, and hide it in your heart of hearts, so Joel listened. "I go to prepare a place for you. I will come again and receive you unto myself, that where I am there ye may be also.... Peace I leave with you.... Not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid." As the beloved voice went on, promising the Comforter that should come when He was gone, all the dread and pain of the coming separation seemed to be lost. Boy though he was, Joel looked down the years of his life feeling it was only a fleeting shadow, compared with the eternal companionship just promised him. He would make no moan; he would utter no complaint: but he would take up his life's little day, and bear it after the Master,--a cup of loving service,--into that upper kingdom where there was a place prepared for him. It was all over so soon. They were left alone on the mountain-side again, with only the sunshine flickering through the leaves, and the wood-birds just beginning to trill to each other once more. But the warm air seemed to still throb with the last words He had spoken: "Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world." Phineas came down the mountain with his face all ashine; at last his eyes had been opened. "He and the Father are one!" he exclaimed to the man walking beside him. "That voice is the same that spake from the midst of the burning bush, and from the summit of Sinai. All these years I have followed the Master, I believed Him to be a perfect man and a great prophet; I believed Him to be 'the rod out of the stem of Jesse' who through Jehovah's hand was to redeem Israel, even as the rod in Aaron's hand smote the floods and made a pathway for our people. "When I saw Him put to death as a felon, all hope died within me; even to-day I came out here unbelieving. I could not think that I should see Him. How blind we have been all these years! God with us in the flesh, and we did not know Him!" Joel walked on behind the two, sharing their feeling of exaltation. As they came down into the valley and entered Capernaum, the work-a-day sights and noises seemed to jar on their senses, in this uplifted mood. A man standing in an open doorway accosted Phineas, and asked when he could commence work on the house he had talked to him about building. Phineas hesitated, and looked down at the ground, as if studying some difficult problem. In a few minutes he raised his eyes with a look of decision. "I cannot build it for you at all," he answered. "Not build it!" echoed the man. "I thought you were anxious for the job." "So I was," answered the carpenter; "but when I asked for it, I had no belief that the Master could rise from the dead. Just now, on the mountain yonder, I have been with Him. His command is still ringing in my ears: 'Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature!' "Henceforth I give my life to Him, even as He gave His to me. My days are now half spent, but every remaining one shall be used to proclaim, as far and wide as possible, that the risen Christ is the Son of God!" The man was startled as he looked at Phineas; such a fire of love and purpose seemed to illuminate his earnest face that it was completely transformed. "Even now," exclaimed Phineas, "will I commence my mission. You are the first one I have met, and I must tell to you this glad new gospel. He died for you! 'God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life!' O my friend, if you could only believe that as I believe it!" The man shrank back into the doorway, strangely moved by the passionate force of his earnestness. "I must go up to Jerusalem," continued Phineas, "and wait till power is given us from on high; then I can more clearly see my way. I do not know whether I shall be directed to go into other lands, or to come back here to carry the news to my old neighbors. But it matters not which path is pointed out, the mission has been already given,--to tell the message to every creature my voice can reach." "And you?" asked the man, pointing to the companion of Phineas. "I, too, received the command," was the answer, "and I, too, am ready to go to the world's end, if need be!" "Surely there must be truth in what you say," muttered the man. Then his glance fell on Joel. "You, too?" he questioned. "Nay, he is but a lad," answered Phineas, before Joel could find words to answer him. "Come! we must hasten home." Joel talked little during the next few days, and stole away often to think by himself, in the quiet little upper chamber on the roof. Phineas was making his preparations to go back to Jerusalem; and he urged the boy to go back with him, and accept Simon's offer. Abigail, too, added her persuasions to his; and even old Rabbi Amos came down one day, and sat for an hour under the fig-trees, painting in glowing colors the life that might be his for the choosing. It was a very alluring prospect; it had been the dream of his life to travel in far countries. He pictured himself surrounded by wealth and culture; he would be able to do so much for his old friends. He could give back to Jesse and Ruth a hundred fold, what had been bestowed on him; and the poor--how much he could help them, when he received a son's portion from the wealthy Simon! O the hearts he could make glad, all up and down the land! The old day-dreams he used to delight in danced temptingly before him. As he stood idly beside the work-bench one afternoon, thinking of such a future, a soft step behind him made him turn. The hammer fell from his hand to the grass, as he saw the woman who came timidly to meet him. "Why, Aunt Leah!" he cried. "What brought _you_ here?" He had not seen her since the night his Uncle Laban had driven him from home. She drew aside her veil, and looked at him. "I heard you had been healed," she said, "and I have always wanted to come and see you, and tell you how glad I am; but my husband forbade it. Child!" she cried abruptly, "how much you look like your father! The likeness is startling!" The discovery seemed to make her forget what she had come to say, and she stood and stared at him; then she remembered. "Rabbi Amos told me of the offer you have had from a rich merchant in Bethany, and I came down here, secretly, to beg you to accept it. In your father's name I beg you!" Joel looked perplexed. "I hardly know what to do," he said. "Every one advises me just as you do; but I feel that they are all wrong. Surely the Master meant me as well as father Phineas and the others, when He charged us to go and preach the gospel to every creature." A sudden interest came into the woman's face; she took a step forward. "Joel, did _you_ see Him after He was risen?" "Yes," he answered. "Oh, I believe then that He is the Christ!" she cried. "I have thought all the time that it might be so, and the children are so sure of it." "And Uncle Laban?" questioned Joel. She shook her head sadly. "He grows more bitterly opposed every day." "Aunt Leah," he asked, coming back to the first question, "don't you think He must have meant me as well as those men?" "Oh, hardly," she said, hesitatingly, "you are so young, and there are so many others to do it; it would surely be better for you to go to Bethany." After she had gone home, he put away his tools, and, like one in a dream, started slowly towards the mountain. The same summer stillness reigned on its shady slopes as when the five hundred had gathered there. He climbed up near the summit, and sat down on a high stone. To the eastward the Galilee glittered like a sapphire in the sun; Capernaum seemed like a great ant-hill in commotion. No wonder he could not think among all those conflicting voices; he was glad he had come up where it was so still. Phineas was going away in the morning. If Joel went also, maybe he would never look down on that scene again. Then almost as if some living voice broke the stillness, he heard the words: "Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature!" It was the echo of the words that had fallen from the Master's lips. Nothing once uttered by that voice can ever die; it lives on and on in the ever-widening circles of the centuries, as a ripple, once started, rings shoreward through the seas. In that instant all the things he had been considering seemed so small and worthless. He had been planning to give Simon's gold and silver to the poor; but the Master had given them His life, Himself! Could he do less? "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these, ye have done it unto me," something seemed to say to him. Yes; he could do it for the Master's sake, for the One who had healed him, for the One who had died for him. Then and there, high up in the mountain's solitudes, he found the path he was to follow; and then he wondered how he could have thought for an instant of making any other choice. It was the path the Master's own feet had trod, and the boy who had followed, knew well what a weary way it led. For his great love's sake, he gave up the old ambitions, the self-centred hopes, saying, in a low tone, as if he felt the beloved Presence very near, "Oh, I want to serve Thee truly! If I am too young now to go out into all the world, let me be Thy little cup-bearer here at home, to carry the story of Thy life and love to those around me!" The west was all alight with the glory of the sunset; somewhere beyond its burnished portals lay the City of the King. Joel turned from its dazzling depths to look downward into the valley. He had chosen persecution and sacrifice and suffering, he knew, but the light on his face was more than the halo of the summer sunset. As he went down the mountain to his life of lowly service, a deep peace fell warm across his heart; for the promise went with him, a staff to bear him up through all his after life's long pilgrimage: "LO, I AM WITH YOU ALWAY, EVEN UNTO THE END OF THE WORLD!" THE END Selections from The Page Company's Books for Young People THE BLUE BONNET SERIES _Each large 12mo, cloth decorative, illustrated, per volume_ $1.50 A TEXAS BLUE BONNET By CAROLINE E. JACOBS. "The book's heroine, Blue Bonnet, has the very finest kind of wholesome, honest, lively girlishness."--_Chicago Inter-Ocean._ BLUE BONNET'S RANCH PARTY By CAROLINE E. JACOBS AND EDYTH ELLERBECK READ. 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"The accounts are not only authentic, but distinctly readable, making a book of wide appeal to all who love the history of actual adventure."--_Cleveland Leader._ HILDEGARDE-MARGARET SERIES By LAURA E. RICHARDS Eleven Volumes The Hildegarde-Margaret Series, beginning with "Queen Hildegarde" and ending with "The Merryweathers," make one of the best and most popular series of books for girls ever written. _Each large 12mo, cloth decorative, illustrated, per volume_ $1.25 _The eleven volumes boxed as a set_ $13.75 LIST OF TITLES QUEEN HILDEGARDE HILDEGARDE'S HOLIDAY HILDEGARDE'S HOME HILDEGARDE'S NEIGHBORS HILDEGARDE'S HARVEST THREE MARGARETS MARGARET MONTFORT PEGGY RITA FERNLEY HOUSE THE MERRYWEATHERS THE CAPTAIN JANUARY SERIES By LAURA E. RICHARDS _Each 12mo, cloth decorative, illustrated, per volume._ _Net_, 50 cents; carriage paid, 60 cents CAPTAIN JANUARY A charming idyl of New England coast life, whose success has been very remarkable. 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THE THREE WEAVERS: A FAIRY TALE FOR FATHERS AND MOTHERS AS WELL AS FOR THEIR DAUGHTERS. KEEPING TRYST: A TALE OF KING ARTHUR'S TIME. THE LEGEND OF THE BLEEDING HEART THE RESCUE OF PRINCESS WINSOME: A FAIRY PLAY FOR OLD AND YOUNG. THE JESTER'S SWORD * * * * * THE LITTLE COLONEL'S GOOD TIMES BOOK Uniform in size with the Little Colonel Series $1.50 Bound in white kid (morocco) and gold _Net_ 3.00 Cover design and decorations by Peter Verberg. "A mighty attractive volume in which the owner may record the good times she has on decorated pages, and under the directions as it were of Annie Fellows Johnston."--_Buffalo Express._ * * * * * Transcriber's Notes: Obvious punctuation errors repaired. Varied hyphenation as in "head-dress" and "headdress" was retained. Page 11, word "an" removed from text. Original read (never be an any better) Page 32, "a good" changed to "good a" (too good a man to) Page 68, "persistance" changed to "persistence" (persistence with which the) Page 68, "coin" changed to "coins" (small bag of coins) Page 90, "acknowleged" changed to "acknowledged" (he acknowledged proudly) Page 101, "That" changed to "that" (unto you that) Page 114, "Was" changed to "was" (was Joel's constant) Page 116, "kness" changed to "knees" (his knees in readiness) 
12662	----	Distributed Proofreaders Transcriber's note: The original text contained typographical errors and spelling inconsistencies. Where possible these have been corrected; many could not be resolved and remain as they appeared in the source text. FOUR GIRLS AT CHAUTAUQUA BY PANSY Author of "Chautauqua Girls at Home," "Ruth Erskine's Crosses," "Judge Burnham's Daughters," "The Hall in The Grove," "Eighty-Seven," etc. 1876 CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCED. CHAPTER II. THE QUESTION DISCUSSED. CHAPTER III. ENTERING THE CURRENT. CHAPTER IV. FAIRPOINT. CHAPTER V. UNREST. CHAPTER VI. FEASTS. CHAPTER VII. TABLE TALK. CHAPTER VIII. "AT EVENING TIME IT SHALL BE BRIGHT." CHAPTER IX. FLEEING. CHAPTER X. HOW THE "FLITTING" ENDED. CHAPTER XI. HEART TOUCHES. CHAPTER XII. FLOSSY AT SCHOOL. CHAPTER XIII. "CROSS PURPOSES." CHAPTER XIV. THE NEW LESSON. CHAPTER XV. GREAT MEN. CHAPTER XVI. WAR OF WORDS. CHAPTER XVII. GETTING READY TO LIVE. CHAPTER XVIII. THE SILENT WITNESS. CHAPTER XIX. AN OLD STORY. CHAPTER XX. PEOPLE WHO, "HAVING EYES, SEE NOT." CHAPTER XXI. A "SENSE OF DUTY." CHAPTER XXII. ONE MINUTE'S WORK. CHAPTER XXIII. "I'VE BEEN REDEEMED." CHAPTER XXIV. SWORD THRUSTS. CHAPTER XXV. SERMONS IN CHALK. CHAPTER XXVI. "THEIR WORKS DO FOLLOW THEM." CHAPTER XXVII. UNFINISHED MUSIC. CHAPTER XXVIII. MENTAL PROBLEMS. CHAPTER XXIX. WAITING. CHAPTER XXX. SETTLED QUESTIONS. CHAPTER XXXI. THE BEGINNING OF THE END. CHAPTER XXXII. THE END OF THE BEGINNING. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCED. Eurie Mitchell shut the door with a bang and ran up the stairs two steps at a time. She nearly always banged doors, and was always in a hurry. She tapped firmly at the door just at the head of the stairs; then she pushed it open and entered. "Are you going?" she said, and her face was all in a glow of excitement and pleasure. The young lady to whom she spoke measured the velvet to see if it was long enough for the hat she was binding, raised her eyes for just an instant to the eager face before her, and said "Good-morning." "Ruth Erskine! what are you trimming your hat for? Didn't it suit? Say, are you going? Why in the world don't you tell me? I have been half wild all the morning." Ruth Erskine smiled. "Which question shall I answer first? What a perfect interrogation point you are, Eurie. My hats never suit, you know; this one was worse than usual. This velvet is a pretty shade, isn't it? Am I going to Chautauqua, do you mean? I am sure I don't know. I haven't thought much about it. Do you really suppose it will be worth while?" Eurie stamped her foot impatiently. "How provoking you are! Haven't thought of it, and here I have been talking and coaxing all the morning. Father thinks it is a wild scheme, of course, and sees no sense in spending so much money; but I'm going for all that. I don't have a frolic once in an age, and I have set my heart on this. Just think of living in the woods for two whole weeks! camping out, and doing all sorts of wild things. I'm just delighted." Miss Erskine sewed thoughtfully for some seconds, then she said: "Why, there is nothing in the world to hinder my going if I want to. As to the money, I suppose one could hardly spend as much there as at Long Branch or Saratoga, and of course I should go somewhere. But the point is, what do I want to go for?" "Why, just to be together, and be in the woods, and live in a tent, and do nothing civilized for a fortnight. It is the nicest idea that ever was." "And should we go to the meetings?" Miss Erskine asked, still speaking thoughtfully, and as if she were undecided. "Why, yes, of course, now and then. Though for that matter I suppose father is right enough when he says that precious few people go for the sake of the meetings. He says it is a grand jollification, with a bit of religion for the background. But for that matter the less religion they have the better, and so I told him." At this point there was a faint little knock at the door, and Eurie sprang to open it, saying as she went: "That is Flossy, I know; she always gives just such little pussy knocks as that." The little lady who entered fitted her name perfectly. She was small and fair, blue-eyed, flossy yellow curls lying on her shoulders, her voice was small and sweet, almost too sweet or too soft, that sort of voice that could change when slight occasion offered into a whine or positive tearfulness. She was greeted with great glee by Eurie, and in her more quiet way by Miss Erskine. "_I'm_ going," she said, with a soft little laugh, and she sank down among the cushions of the sofa, while her white morning dress floated around her like a cloud. "Charlie thinks it is silly, and Kit thinks it is sillier, and mamma thinks it is the very silliest thing I ever did yet; but for all that I am going--that is, if the rest of you are." Which, by the way, was always this little Flossy's manner of speech. She was going to do or not to do, speak or keep silent, approve or condemn, exactly as the mind which was for the time being nearest to her chose to sway her. "Good!" said Eurie, softly clapping her hands. "I didn't think it of you, Flossy; I thought you were too much of a mouse. Now, Ruth, you will go, won't you? As for Marion, there is no knowing whether she will go or not. I don't see now she can afford it myself any more than I can; but, of course, that is her own concern. We can go anyway, whether she does or not--only I don't want to, I want her along. Suppose we all go down and see her; it is Saturday, she will be at home, and then we can begin to make our preparations. It is really quite time we were sure of what we are going to do." By dint of much coaxing and argument Ruth was prevailed upon to leave her fascinating brown hat with its brown velvet trimmings, and in the course of the next half hour the trio were on their way down Park Street, intent on a call on Miss Marion Wilbur. Park Street was a simple, quiet, unpretending street, narrow and short; the houses were two-storied and severely plain. In one of the plainest of these, wearing an unmistakable boarding-house look, in a back room on the second floor, the object of their search, in a dark calico dress, with her sleeves rolled above her elbows, had her hands immersed in a wash-bowl of suds, and was doing up linen collars. She was one of those miserable creatures in this weary world, a teacher in a graded school, and her one day of rest was filled with all sorts of washing, ironing and mending work, until she had fairly come to groan over the prospect of Saturday because of the burden of work which it brought. She welcomed her callers without taking her hands from the suds; she was as quiet in her way as Ruth Erskine was in hers. This time it was Flossy who asked the important question: "Are you going?" Marion answered as promptly as though the question had been decided for a week. "Yes, certainly I am going. I thought I told you that when we talked it over before. I am washing out my collars to have them ready. Ruth, are you going to take a trunk?" Ruth roused herself from the contemplation of her brown gloves to say with a little start: "How you girls do rush things. Why, I haven't decided yet that I am going." "Oh, you'll go," Marion Wilbur said. "The question is, are we to take trunks--or, rather, are you to? because I know _I_ shall not. I'm going to wear my black suit. Put it on on Tuesday morning, or Monday is it that we start? and wear it until we return. I may take it off, to be sure, while I sleep, but even that is uncertain, as we may not get a place to sleep in; but for once in my life I am not going to be bored with baggage." "I shall take mine," Ruth Erskine said with determination. "I don't intend to be bored by being without baggage. It is horrid, I think, to go away with only one dress, and feel obliged to wear it whether it is suited to the weather or not, or whatever happens to it. Eurie, what are you laughing at?" "I am interested in the phenomena of Marion Wilbur being the first to introduce the dress question. I venture to say not one of us has thought of that phase of the matter up to this present moment." While the talk went on the collars and cuffs were carefully washed and rinsed, and presently Marion, with her hands only a trifle pinker for the operation, was ready to lean against a chair and discuss ways and means. Her long apprenticeship in school-rooms had given her the habit of standing instead of sitting, even when there was no occasion for the former. If these four young ladies had been creatures of the brain, gotten up expressly for the purpose of illustrating extremes of character, instead of being flesh and blood creations, I doubt whether they could have better illustrated the different types of young ladyhood. There was Ruth Erskine, dwelling in solitary grandeur in her royal home, as American royalty goes, the sole daughter, the sole child indeed of the house, a girl who had no idea of life except as a place in which to have a serenely good time, and teach everybody to do as she desired them to. Money was a commonplace matter-of-course article, neither to be particularly prized nor despised; it was convenient, of course, and must be an annoyance when one had to do without it; but of that, by practical experience, she knew nothing. Yet Ruth was by no means a "pink-and-white" girl without character; on the contrary, she had plenty of character, but hitherto it had been frittered away on nothings, until it looked as much like nothing as it could. She was the sort of person whom education and circumstances of the right sort would have developed into splendor, but the development had not taken place. Now you are not to suppose that she was uneducated; that would be a libel on Madame La Fonte and her fashionable seminary. She had graduated with honor; taken the first prizes in everything. She knew all about seminaries; so do I; and if you do, you are ready to admit that the development had not come. There is constantly occurring something to take back. While I write I have in mind an institution where the earnest desire sought after and prayed for is the higher development, not alone of the intellect, but of the heart: where the wonderful woman who is at its head said to me a few years ago: "If a lady has spent three years under my care, and graduated, and gone out from me not a Christian, I feel like going down on my knees in bitterness of soul, and crying, 'Lord, I have failed in the trust thou didst give me." But the very fact that the word "wonderful" fits that woman's name is proof enough that such institutions as hers are rare, and it was not at that seminary that Ruth Erskine graduated. She was spending her life in elegant pursuits that meant nothing, those of them which did not mean worse than nothing, and the only difference between her and a hundred others around her was that she knew perfectly well that they all amounted to nothing, and didn't hesitate to say so, therefore she earned the title of "queer." At the same time she did not hesitate to lead the whirl around this continuous nothing, therefore she occupied that perilous position of being liked and admired and envied, all in one. Very few people loved her, and queerly enough she knew that too, and instead of resenting it realized that she could not see why they should. She was, moreover, remarkably careful as to her leading after all, and those who followed were sure of being led in an eminently respectable and fashionable way. Her most intimate friend was Eurie Mitchell, which was not strange when one considered what remarkable opposites in character they were. Eureka J. Mitchell was the respectable sounding name that the young lady bore, but the full name would have sounded utterly strange to her ears, the wild little word "Eurie" seeming to have been made on purpose for her. She was the eldest daughter of a large, good-natured, hard-working, much-bewildered family. They never knew just where they belonged. They went to the First Church, which for itself should have settled their position, since it was the opinion of most of its members that it was organized especially that the "first families" might have a church-home. But they occupied a very front seat, by reason of their inability to pay for a middle one, which was bad for "position," as First Church gentility went. What was surprising to them was how they ever happened to have the money to pay for that seat; but, let me record it to their honor, they always happened to have it. They were honest. They ought to have been called "the happen family," by reason of their inability to tell how much or how little they might happen to have to live on, whether they could afford three new dresses apiece or none at all. The fact being that it depended on the amount of sickness there was in Dr. Mitchell's beat whether there were to be luxuries or simple bare necessities, with some wonderment as to how even those were to be paid. Eurie was the most light-hearted and indifferent of this free-and-easy family, who always had roast turkey when it was to be had, and who could laugh and chat merrily over warmed-up meat and johnny-cake, or even no meat at all, when such days came. How she ever came to think that she could go to Chautauqua was a matter of surprise to herself; but it happened to have been a sickly summer among the wealthy people, and large bills had come in--the next thing was to spend them. Chautauqua was a silly place to do it in, to be sure; that was Dr. Mitchell's idea, and the family laughed together over Eurie's last wild notion; but for all that they good-naturedly prepared to let her carry it out. Just how full of fun and mischief and actual wildness Eurie was, a two-weeks sojourn at Chautauqua will be likely to develop; for before that conversation at Marion's was concluded they decided that they were really going. Why Marion went, puzzled the girls very much, puzzled herself somewhat. She was her own mistress, had neither father to direct nor sister to consult. She had an uncle and aunt who lived where she called "home," and with whom she spent her vacations, but they were the poorest of hard-working country people, who stood in awe of Marion and her education, and by no means ventured to interfere with her plans. Marion was as independent in her way as Ruth was in hers, but they were very different ways. Ruth, for instance, indulged her independence in the matter of dress, by spending a small fortune in looking elegantly unlike everybody else, and straightway created a frantic desire in her set to look as nearly like her as possible. But no one cared to look like Marion, in her severely plain black or brown suits, with almost and sometimes quite no trimmings at all on them. It was agreed that she looked remarkably well, but so unlike any one else they didn't see how she could bring herself to dressing so. She laughed when this was hinted to her, and got what comfort she could out of the fact that she was considered "odd." In a certain way she ruled them all, Ruth Erskine included, though that young lady never suspected it. The queerest one of this company was little Flossy Shipley--queer to be found in just such company, I mean. She was the petted darling of a wealthy home, a younger daughter, a baby in their eyes, to be loved and cherished, and allowed to have her own sweet and precious way even when it included such a strange proceeding as a two weeks in the woods, all because that strange girl in the ward school that Flossy had taken such an unaccountable fancy for was going. This family were First Church people, too, and capable of buying a seat very near the centre, in fact but a few removes from the Erskine pew, which was, of course, the wealthy one of the church. The Shipley pew was rarely honored by all the members of the family, and indeed the pastor had no special cause for alarm if several Sundays went by without an appearance from one of them. A variety of trifles might happen to cause such a state of things, from which you will infer that they were not a church-going family. Another strange representative for Chautauqua! Now how did those four girls come to be friends? Oh, dreadful! You don't expect me to be able to account for human friendships I hope, especially for school-girl friendships? There is no known rule that will apply to such idiosyncracies. They had been in school together, even Marion Wilbur, with the indomitable energy which characterized her, had managed one term of Madame La Fonte's enormous bills, and with the close of the term found herself strangely enough drawn into this strange medley of character that moved in such different circles, and yet called themselves friends. You are to understand that though the same church received these girls on Sunday, yet the actual circle in which their lives whirled was as unlike as possible. The Erskines were the cream, cultured, traveled, wealthy, aristocratic as to blood and as to manners, literary in the sense that they bought rare books, and knew why they were rare. The Mitchells had a calling acquaintance with their family because Dr. Mitchell was their chosen physician, but that came to pass through an accident, and not many of the doctor's patrons were of just the same stamp. This family never went to the Erskine entertainments, never were invited to go to the other entertainments starting from the same circle, yet they had their friends and many of them. The Shipleys were free-and-easy, cordial, social, friendly people, who bought many books and pictures, and were prominent in fairs and festivals, and were popular everywhere, but were not, after all, of the Erskine stamp. Finally came Marion, alone, no position any where, save as she ruled in the most difficult room in the most difficult ward in the city. A worker, known to be such; a manager, recognized as one who could make incongruous elements meet and marshal into working order. In that capacity she found her place even in the First Church, for they had fairs and festivals, and oyster suppers, and other trials even in the First Church; and there was much work to be done, and Marion Wilbur could work. And these four girls were going to Chautauqua--were to start on Monday morning, August 2, 1875. CHAPTER II. THE QUESTION DISCUSSED. Rev. Dr. Dennis and Rev. Mr. Harrison met just at the corner of Howard and Clinton Streets, and stopped for a chat. Dr. Dennis was pastor of the First Church, and Mr. Harrison was pastor of the Fourth, and some of the sheep belonging to these respective flocks supposed the two churches to be rivals, but the pastors thereof never thought of such a thing. On the contrary, they were always getting up excuses for coming in contact with each other; and woe to the work that was waiting for each when they chanced to meet of a morning on some shady corner. "You are to be represented, I hear, at the coming assembly," said Mr. Harrison, as they shook hands in that hearty way which says, as plainly as words, "How _very_ glad I am to see you!" Dr. Dennis shrugged his shoulders. "Such a representation!" he said. "If the entire congregation had been canvassed, it would have been impossible to have made more curious selections. I do wish we could have some real workers from the different churches." "Miss Erskine isn't a member of the church, is she?" "None of them are members, nor Christians; nor have they an atom of interest in any such matters. They are going for pure fun, and nothing else." "Now perhaps they will happily disappoint you by coming back with a wholesome interest aroused in Sunday-school work, and will really go into the work for themselves." "I don't want them," Dr. Dennis said, stoutly. "I wouldn't give a dime for a hundred such workers; they are an injury to the cause. I want Sunday-school workers who have a personal, vital sense of the worth of souls, and a consuming desire to see them converted. All other Sunday-school teaching is aimless." Mr. Harrison looked thoughtful. "We haven't many such, I am afraid," he said, gravely; but I agree with you in thinking that they should at least be Christians. Still, I suppose that it is not impossible that some one of these ladies may be converted." "Not at Chautauqua," Dr. Dennis said, as one who had looked into the matter and knew all about it. "I am not entirely in sympathy with that meeting, anyway; or, that is, I am and I am not, all at once. I think it would be a grand place for you and me. I haven't the least doubt but that we would be refreshed, bodily and mentally, and, for that matter, spiritually. If the whole world were converted I should vote for Chautauqua with a loud voice; but I am more than fearful as to the influence of such meetings on the masses--the unconverted world. _They_ will go there for recreation. Their whole aim will be to have a glorious frolic away from the restraints of ordinary home-life. They will have no interest in the meetings, no sympathy with the central thought that has drawn the workers together, and the tendency will be to frolic through it all. "The truth is, there will be such a mixing of things that I actually fear the effect will be wholesale demoralization. At the same time I am interested in the idea, and am watching it with anxiety. Since I have heard of the delegation from my own church I have been more convinced still of the evil influences. It makes me gloomy to think of the fruitful field such a place will be for the fertile brain of that little Eurie Mitchell. She is too wild now for civilized life The four walls of the church and the sacred associations connected with the building serve to keep her only half controlled when she is actually attending Sabbath service. There will be nothing to control her in the woods, and she will lose what little reverence she possesses. I tell you, the more I think of it, the more certain I am that for such people these great religious jubilees, holding over the Sabbath, do harm." "You put it more gently than our friend Mr. Archer," Mr. Harrison said, smiling. "He is in a condition of absolute scorn. He gives none of them credit for honesty or genuine interest. He says it is a running away from work, a regular shirking of what they ought to be doing, and going off into the woods to have a good time, and, by way of gulling the public, they pretend to season it with religion." Dr. Dennis laughed. "That sounds precisely like him, and is quite as logical as one could expect, coming from that source," he said, indifferently. "Why doesn't it occur to his dull brain, that thinks itself such a sharp one, that the leaders thereof are men responsible to no one save God and their own consciences for the way in which they spend their time? There is nothing earthly to hinder their going to the woods, and staying three months if they please to do so." "Oh, but I have left out one of the important reasons for the meeting. It is to make money; a grand speculation, whereby the fortunes of these same leaders are to be made at the expense of the poor victims whom they gather about them." Again Dr. Dennis' shoulders went upward in that peculiar but expressive shrug. "Of all the precarious and dangerous ways of making a fortune, I should think that went ahead," he said, still laughing. "What an idea now! Shouldn't you suppose people with common sense would have some faint idea of the immense expenses to be involved in such an undertaking, and the tremendous risks to be run? If they succeed in meeting their expenses this year I think they will have cause for rejoicing." "The point that puzzles me," Mr. Harrison said, "is what particular commandment would they be breaking if they should actually happen to have twenty-five cents to put in their pockets when the meeting closed; though, as you say, I doubt the probability. But they force no one to come; it is a matter for individual decision, and they render a fair equivalent for every cent of money spent; at least, if the spender thinks it is not a fair equivalent he is foolish to go; so why should they not make enough to justify them in giving their time to this work?" "Of course, of course," assented Dr. Dennis, heartily; "they ought to; none but an idiot would think otherwise." It is to be presumed that both these gentlemen had gotten so far away from the name that was quoted as holding these views as to forget all about him, else they certainly would not have been guilty of calling a brother minister an idiot, however much his arguments might suggest the thought. "But," continued Dr. Dennis, "my trouble lies, as I said, in the results. I have no sort of doubt that great good will be done, and I have the same feeling of certainty that harm will be done. Take it in my own church. We are so situated, or we think ourselves so situated, that not a single one of the earnest, hearty workers who would come back to us with a blessing for themselves and us, is able to go; instead, we have four representatives who will turn the whole thing into ridicule, and dish it up for the entertainment of their friends during the coming winter. "That Miss Erskine seems to have a special talent for getting up Thursday evening entertainments, to invite our people who are supposed to be interested in the prayer-meeting, but who rarely fail to make it convenient to go to the party. I imagine a bevy of them being entertained by Eurie Mitchell. She can do it, and she is looking forward to just that sort of thing, for I heard her rejoicing over it. That girl will be injured by Chautauqua; I know it as well as though I already saw it; and the question with me is, whether the amount of evil done will not overbalance the good. At the same time I am inconsistent enough to wish with all my heart that I could be there." "What about Miss Shipley? Perhaps relief will come to you from that quarter." Those shoulders again. "She is nothing in the world but a little pink feather, and she blows precisely in the direction of the strongest current; and Satan looks out for her with untiring patience that the wind shall blow in the exact direction where it can do her the most harm. Going to Chautauqua with the influences that will surround her, with Miss Erskine and Miss Wilbur on the one side, and Eurie Mitchell on the other, will be the very best thing that Satan can do next for her, and he doubtless knows it." "I do not know Miss Wilbur at all. Is she also one of your flock?" Dr. Dennis' face was dark and sad. "She is an infidel," he said, decidedly. "She does not call herself such; she wouldn't like to be known as such, because it would be likely to affect her position in the school. But the name is rightly hers, and she would do less harm in the world if she owned it." "It is an extraordinary representation, I declare," Mr. Harrison said, a little startled. "I have been half inclined to be envious of you because you were to hear so directly from the meeting, but I believe on the whole I shall be quite as well off without any delegates as you will with them." "Better, decidedly. I am distressed at the whole thing. It will result disastrously for them all, you mark my words." And having settled the affairs at Chautauqua, apparently beyond all repeal, the brethren shook hands again and went to their studies. Meantime the express train was giving occasional premonitory snorts, and the four young ladies who had been so thoroughly discussed were in various stages of unrest, waiting for the moment of departure. A looker-on would have been able to come to marked conclusions concerning the different characters of these young ladies, simply from their manner of dress. Flossy Shipley was the one to look at first. That was a very good description of her usual style--something to look at. She had chosen for her traveling dress a pale, lavender cashmere, of that delightful shade that resents a drop of water as promptly as a drop of oil. It was trimmed with a contrasting shade of silk, and trimmed profusely; yards of gathered trimming, headed by yards of flat pleating, and that in turn headed by yards of folds. The dainty sack and hat, and the four-buttoned gloves, were as faultless as to fit and as delicate in color as the dress. In short, Miss Flossy looked as though she might be ready for an evening concert. Moreover, she felt as if she were, or at least she had an uncomfortable consciousness as to clothes. She kept a nervous lookout for the lower flounce whenever the crowd of people surged her way, and brushed vigorously at the arm of the seat she had chosen ere she dared to rest _her_ arm on it. Evidently she had given herself over to the martyrdom of thinking of and caring for clothes during this journey, and I don't know whether there is a greater martyrdom made out of a trifle than that. It was one of Flossy's besetting sins, this arraying herself in glory, and making wrinkles in her face in the vain attempt to keep so. Not that she was particularly anxious to save the wear and tear, only she hated to look spotted and wrinkled, and she could never seem to learn the simple lesson of wearing the things best suited to the occasion. Standing near her, toying carelessly with her traveling fan, and looking as though the thought of dress was something that had passed utterly by her, was Miss Erskine. She looked like one of those ladies whom gentlemen in their wisdom are always selecting, pointing them out as models. "So tasteful and appropriate, and withal so simple in their dress." Let me tell you about her dress. It was plain dark brown, precisely the shade of brown that the fashion of the season required. It was of soft, lusterless silk. It was very simply made, almost severely plain, as Miss Erskine knew became a traveler. In fact, elegant simplicity marked her entire toilet, everything matched, everything was fresh and spotless, and arranged with an eye to remaining so. I am willing to concede that she was faultlessly dressed, and it was a real pleasure to see her thus. But I am also anxious to have the gentlemen understand that that same simple attire represented more money than two wardrobes like Flossy Shipley's. It is often so with those delightfully plain and simple dresses that attract so many people. In fact, it might as well be admitted, since we are on that subject, that elegant simplicity is sometimes a very expensive article. Eurie Mitchell was neither particularly elegant nor noted for simplicity, yet her dress was not without character. We see enough of that sort to become familiar with what it means. Its language is simply a straightened purse, necessitating the putting together of shades that do not quite harmonize, and trimming in a way that will cover the most spots and take the least material. That was Eurie's dress. Skirt of one kind and overdress of another. A very economical fashion, and one not destined to last long, because of its economy, and the fact that very elegant ladies rather curl their lips at it, and call it the "patchwork style." Eurie from necessity rather than choice adopted it, and it was also her misfortune rather than her taste that the colors were too light to be really according to the mode. Her gloves were of an entirely different shade from the rest of the attire, and were mended with a shade of silk that did not quite match Altogether, Eurie's dress did not suit Miss Erskine. But, for that matter, neither did it suit herself, with this difference, that it was, after all, a matter of minor importance to her. Miss Wilbur's dress can be disposed of in a single sentence: It was a black alpaca skirt, not too long, and severely plain, covered to within three inches with a plain brown linen polonaise; her black hat with a band of velvet about it, fastened by a single heavy knot, and her somewhat worn black gloves completed her toilet, and she looked every inch a lady. The very people who would have curled their aristocratic lips at Eurie's attempt at style, turned and gave Miss Wilbur a second thoughtful respectful look. There was a Mr. Wayne who deserves attention. He possessed himself of Miss Erskine's fan, and played with it carelessly, while he said: "You are a queer set. What are you all going off there for, to bury yourselves in the woods? I don't believe one of you has an idea what you are about. And it is the very height of the season, too." "That is the trouble," Miss Erskine said, with a little toss of her handsome head. "We are sick of the season, and want to get away from it. I want something new. That is precisely what I am going for." "I have no doubt you will find it," and the gentleman gave a disdainful shrug to his shoulders. "Out in the backwoods attending a hallelujah meeting! I am sure I envy you." "You don't know what we will find," Eurie Mitchell said, with a defiant air. "Nor what may happen to us before we return. We may meet our destinies. I have no doubt they are lurking for us behind some of the trees. Just you meet the evening train of Wednesday, two weeks hence, and see if you can not discover the finger of fate having been busy with us. Wonderful things can happen in two weeks." Just then the train gave its last warning howl, and Mr. Wayne made rapid good-bys, a trifle more lingering in the case of Miss Erskine than the others, and with that prophetic sentence still ringing in his ears he departed. And the four girls were actually _en route_ for Chautauqua. CHAPTER III. ENTERING THE CURRENT. It is a queer thought, not to say a startling one, what very trifles about us are constantly giving object lessons on our characters. Those four girls, as they arranged themselves in the cars for their all-day journey conveyed four different impressions to the critical looker-on. In the first place they each selected and took possession of an entire seat, though the cars were filling rapidly, and many an anxious woman and heavily laden man looked reproachfully at them. They took these whole seats from entirely different stand-points--Miss Erskine because she was a finished and selfish traveler; and although she did not belong to that absolutely unendurable class, who occupy room that is not theirs until a conductor interferes, she yet regularly appropriated and kept the extra seat engaged with her flounces until she was asked outright to vacate it by one more determined than the rest. She hated company and avoided it when possible. Flossy Shipley was willing, nay, ready, to give up her extra seat the moment a person of the right sort appeared; not simply a cleanly, respectable individual--they might pass by the dozens--but one who attracted her, who was elegantly dressed and stylish looking. Flossy would endure being crowded if only the person who did it was stylish. Miss Wilbur was indifferent to the whole race of human beings; she cared as little as possible whether a well-dressed lady stood or sat; so far as she was concerned they were apt to do the former. She neither frowned nor smiled when the time came that she was obliged to move; she simply _moved_, with as unconcerned and indifferent a face as she had worn all the due. As for Eurie Mitchell, she took an entire seat, as she did most other things, from pure heedlessness; any one was welcome who wanted to sit with her, and whether it was a servant girl or a princess was a matter of no moment. These various shades of feeling were nearly as fully expressed in their faces as though they had spoken; and yet they did not in the least comprehend their own actions. This is only an illustration; it was so in a hundred little nothings during the day. Not a window was raised or closed for their benefit, not a turn of a blind made, that a close student of human nature could not have seen the distinct and ruling differences in their temperaments, no matter from what point of the compass they started. In the course of time they reached East Buffalo. "Now for our dinners!" Eurie said, as the whistle shrieked a warning that the station was being neared. "What are we going to do?" "We are going to eat them, I presume, as usual," Miss Erskine said in her most indifferent tone. I should explain that long before this the girls had grown weary of the separate seats, and by dint of much planning and the good-natured removal of two fellow passengers to other seats had accomplished an arrangement that should naturally have been enjoyed from the beginning: that of a turned seat, and being their own seat-mates. "But I mean," Eurie said, in no wise quenched by what was a common enough manner in Miss Erskine, "are we to get a lunch, or are we to go in to a regular dinner?" "If you mean what I am going to do, I shall most assuredly have a 'regular' dinner, as you call it. I have no fancy for eating things thrown together in a bag." "The bag will be the most economical process for all that," Eurie said, laughing at Miss Erskine's disdainful face. "I presume very likely; but as I did not start on this trip for the purpose of studying social economy, I shall vote for the dinner." "And I shall take to the bag method," Eurie said, decidedly. Opposition always decided her. So it did Flossy, though in a different way; she was sure to side with the stronger party. "It would be pleasanter for us all to keep together," she began in a doubtful tone, looking first at Miss Erskine and then at Eurie. "But since, according to Eurie's and my decided differences, it is impossible for us to do the 'better' thing, which of the two _worse_ things are you going to do?" This Miss Erskine said with utmost good nature, but with utmost determination--as much as it would have taken to carry out a good idea in the face of opposition. "Oh, I think I'll go with you." Flossy said it hastily, as if she feared that she might appear foolish in the eyes of this young lady by having fancied anything else. "Very well--then it remains for Marion to choose her company," Eurie said, composedly. Marion held up a paper bundle. "It is already chosen," she said, promptly. "It is a slice of bread and butter, with a very thin slice of fat ham, which I never eat, and a greasy doughnut, the whole done up in a brown paper. This is decidedly an improvement on the bag dinner (which you think of going after) in an economical point of view; and as I am a student of social and all other sorts of economy, not only on this trip but on every other trip of mine in this mortal life, I recommend it to you; at least I would have done so if you had asked me this morning before you left home." Eurie made a grimace. "I might have brought a splendid lunch from home if I had only thought of such a thing," she said, regretfully. "My thoughts always come afterward." "And it is quite the mode to take lunches with you when they are elegantly put up," Flossy said, regretfully, as she prepared to follow Ruth. "I wonder we never thought of it." This last remark of Flossy's set the two girls left behind into a hearty laugh. "Do you suppose that when Flossy has to die she will be troubled lest it may not be the fashion for young ladies to die that season?" Eurie said, looking after the pretty little doll as she gathered her skirts about her anxiously; for, whatever other qualifications East Buffalo may have, cleanliness is not one of them. "No," Marion answered, gravely, "not the least danger of it, because it happens to be the fashion for ladies to die at all seasons; it is the one thing that never seems to go out. I am heartily glad that we have one thing that remains absolute in this fashionable world." Eurie looked at her thoughtfully. "Marion, one would think you were religious--sometimes," she said, gravely. "You make such strange remarks." Marion laughed immoderately. "You ridiculous little infidel!" she said, as soon as she could speak. "You do not even know enough about religion to detect the difference between goodness and wickedness. Why, that was one of my wickedest remarks, and here you are mistaking it for goodness. My dear child, run and get your paper bag before it is time to go; or will you have my slice of ham and half this doughnut? The bread and butter I want myself." The freshness and novelty of this journey wore away before the long summer afternoon began to wane; the cars were crowded and uncomfortable, and the cinders flew about in as trying a way as cinders can. None of the girls had the least idea where they were going. They knew, in a general way, that there must be such a place as Chautauqua Lake, as the papers that they chanced to come in contact with had been full of the delights of that region for many months; and, indeed, a young man, earnest, enthusiastic and sensible, who stopped over night at Dr. Mitchell's, and had been a delighted guest at the Chautauqua Assembly a year before, had sown the first seeds that resulted in this trip. He of course could tell the exact route and the necessary steps to be taken; but it had been no part of Eurie's wisdom to ask about the journey thither; she knew how many boats were on the lake, and what kind of fish could be caught in it, but the most direct way to reach it was a minor matter. So there they were, simply blundering along, in the belief that the railroad officials knew their business, and would get them somewhere sometime. As the day waned, and the road became more unknown to them, and their weariness grew upon them, they fell to indulging in those stale jokes that young ladies will perpetrate when they don't know what else to do. As they declared, with much laughter, and many smart ways of saying it, that Chautauqua was a myth of Eurie's brain, or that she had been the dupe of the fine young theological student who had chanced her way and that the search for paradise would come to naught, perhaps it was not all joking; for, as the hours passed and they journeyed on, hearing nothing about the place of which for the last few weeks they had thought so much, a queer feeling began to steal over them that there really was no such spot, and that they were all a set of idiots. "I thought we should have been there by this time, and regularly established at housekeeping," Marion said, as they picked up baskets and bundles and prepared to change cars; "and here we are making another change. This is the third this afternoon, or is it the thirteenth? and who knows where Brocton is or what it is? Is anybody sure that it is in this hemisphere? Eurie, you are certain that your theological student did not cross the Atlantic in order to reach his elysium?" "Brocton is _here_," Eurie said, as they climbed the steps of the car. "I see the name on that building yonder; though whether 'here' is America or Asia I am unable to say. I think we have come overland, but it is so long since we started I may have forgotten." But at this point they checked their nonsense and began to get up a new interest in existence. They were among a different class of people--earnest, eager people, who seemed to have no thought of yawns or weariness. Camp-stools abounded, with here and there a bundle looking like quilts and pillows. Every lady had a waterproof and every man an umbrella, and the talk was of "tents," and "division meetings," and "the morning boats," with stray words like "Fairpoint" and "Mayville" coming in every now and then. These two words, the girls knew had to do with _their_ hopes; so they began to feel revived. "I actually begin to think there is some foundation for Eurie's wild fancies after all," Marion whispered, "or else this is another party of lunatics as wild as ourselves; but they are a large and respectable party; I'm rather hopeful." In two minutes more the railroad official who speaks in the unknown tongue yelped something at either door, and thereupon everybody got up and began to prepare for an exit. "Do you think he said Mayville?" questioned Eurie with a shade of anxiety in her voice. She had been the leader of this scheme, and she felt just a trifle of responsibility. "Haven't the least idea," Marion said, composedly gathering her wrappings; "it sounded as much like any other word you happen to think of as it did like that, but everybody is going, and Flossy and I are determined to be in the fashion so we go too." At the door dismay seized upon Flossy. A light drizzly rain was falling. Oh, the lavender suit! and her waterproof tucked away in her trunk, and everybody pushing and trying to pass her. "Never mind," Marion said, with utmost good nature, "here is mine; I haven't any trunk, so it is handy; and it has rained on my old alpaca for ages; can't hurt that, so wrap yourself up and come along, for I believe in my heart that this is Mayville." "This way to the Mayville House," said the gentlemanly official, touching his hat as politely as though they had been princesses. Why can't hotel subordinates more often show a little common politeness? This act decided the location of these four girls in a twinkling; they knew nothing about any of the hotels, and, other things being equal, anybody would rather go to a place to which they had been decently invited than to be elbowed and yelled at and forced. Water and rest and tea did much to restore them to comfort, and as they discussed matters in their rooms afterward they assured each other that the Mayville House was just the place to stop at. A discussion was in progress as to the evening meeting. Miss Erskine had taken down her hair and donned a becoming wrapper, and reposed serenely in the rocking-chair, offering no remark beyond the composed and decided, "I am not going over in the woods to-night by any manner of means; that would be enough if I were actually one of the lunatics instead of a mild looker-on." "I haven't the least idea of going, either," Eurie said, sitting on a stool, balancing her stockinged feet against Ruth's rocker. "Not that I mind the rain, or that it wouldn't be fun enough if I were not so dead tired. But I tell you, girls, I have had to work like a soldier to get ready, and having the care of such a set as you have been all day has been too much for me. A religious meeting would just finish me. I'm going to save myself up for morning. You are a goosie to go, Marion. It is as dark as ink, and is raining. What can you see to-night?" "I tell you I've _got_ to go," Marion said, as she quietly unstrapped her shawl. "I earn my bread, as you are very well aware, by teaching school; but my butter, and a few such delicacies, I get by writing up folks and things. I've promised to give a melting account of this first meeting, and I have no idea of losing the chance. Flossy Shipley, you may wear my waterproof every minute if you will go with me. It is long enough to drag a quarter of a yard, and a rain drop can not get near enough to think of you. "But it is so damp," shivered Flossy, looking drearily out into the night, "and so dark, Marion, I am afraid to go." "Plenty of people going. What is there to be afraid of? We go down from here in a carriage." "I wouldn't go, Flossy," chimed in a voice from the rocker and one from the ottoman. "It will be very damp there," pleaded Flossy, who _did_ like to be accommodating. "You may have ten thicknesses of my shawl to sit on," urged Marion. "Come, now, Flossy Shipley. I didn't have the least idea of coaxing those other girls to go, for every one knows they are selfish and will do as they please; but I did think you would keep me company. It really isn't pleasant to think of going alone." The end of it was that Flossy, done up in a cloak twice too large for her, went off looking like the martyr that she was, and Eurie and Ruth staid in their room and laughed over the ridiculousness of Flossy Shipley going out in the night and the rain, in a lavender cashmere, to attend a religious meeting! CHAPTER IV. FAIRPOINT. It was not so very dark after all, nor so disagreeable as she had imagined. She sat curled up in a heap on the deck of the Col. Phillips, looking with interested eyes on the groups of people, who, despite the rain and darkness, were evidently on their way to Chautauqua. Marion had gone to the other side of the boat and was looking over into the water, rested and interested in spite of herself by the novelty of the scene around her. The fellow-passengers seemed not to be novices like themselves, for as their talk floated to the girls it had sentences like these: "Last year we stopped in the village, but this time we are going to be right on the ground." "Last year it rained, too; but rain makes no difference at Chautauqua." "They are all last year's people," said Marion, coming over to Flossy's side. "That speaks well for the interest, or the fun, doesn't it? Now what do you suppose takes all these people to this place?" "I don't know," Flossy said thoughtfully, "I never thought much about it. Perhaps some of them came just as I did, because the girls were coming and asked me to. I'm sure I haven't the least idea what else I came for." Marion looked down on the little creature done up in water-proof, with a half-pitying laugh. "You are a good little mouse," she said patronizingly. "I never remember doing _anything_ without a motive somewhere. It must be refreshing to forget that important individual now and then." "Oh, I don't," Flossy said, simply. "Of course I came for the good time I would have. But then, you know, I would never have thought of coming if the rest of you hadn't." Another laugh from Marion. "You let others do your thinking for you," she said, with just a touch of contempt, covered by the gayety of the tone. "Well, it is much the easier way. If I could find anyone to undertake the task, I should like to try it for myself." Flossy's answer was a little scream of delight, for they were coming upon fairy-land; the lights of Fairpoint were gleaming in the soft distance, and very fairy-like they looked shining among the trees. The sound of music on the steamer mingled charmingly with the peal of the bells from the shore. Marion looked on the scene with quiet interest. Flossy's face took a pink glow; she liked pretty things. As for those who had been at Chautauqua the year before, they gathered at the vessel's side as those gather who, after a long and tiresome journey, realize that they are nearing home. They were eager and excited. "The dock is better," said one. "Yes, and the passage way is larger," chimed in his nearest neighbor. "Oh, everything is on an improved scale this year," said still a third, speaking confidently. "The _meeting_ can't be any better," spoke a quiet-faced woman, with a decided voice, "that is simply impossible." Marion laughed softly. "Hear the lunatics!" she said, bending to give Flossy the benefit of her words. "They are just infatuated; they think this is the original Garden of Eden, with that wretched Eve left out. If she were here I would choke her with a relish." This last in a muttered undertone, too low for even Flossy, and with a darkening face. Meantime the boat rounded the point, the plank was laid, and the feet of the eager passengers touched the shores of Chautauqua. Some detention about tickets, arising from a misunderstanding of terms, made our girls lose sight and sound of the rest of the boat-load, and when they passed within the railing they found themselves suddenly and strangely alone. A few lights glimmered in the trees, enough to point the way, and from the cottages near at hand streams of light shot out into the darkness; but no sound of footsteps, no sight of human being appeared "Over the river, on the hill, Another village lieth still," quoted Marion, gravely. Then: "I say, Flossy, what does it all mean? Are we among a party of witches, do you suppose? Where could those congenial spirits so suddenly have conveyed themselves away, I wonder? The road isn't broad, but it most decidedly isn't straight. Only behold that long, long, _long_ array of damp and empty seats! Where are the faithful now, do you suppose?" "There isn't any meeting here to-night, and we might have known there wouldn't be," Flossy said, peevishly, beginning to grow not only disenchanted but half frightened. "I was never in such a queer place in my life! Those white seats all look like ghosts. What could have possessed you to come to-night? Of course they wouldn't have meeting in the rain! Marion, do let us go back; I am frightened out of my wits!" "You blessed little simpleton!" said Marion, gaily. "What on earth is there to be frightened over? Not pine seats and lamplight, surely, and there is nothing more formidable than that so far." "I wish with all my heart that I were safely back in the hotel, where I would have been if you had not coaxed me away," sighed, or rather whined, poor Flossy, shivering with chilliness or nervousness, and added: "Come, Marion, do let us go back with that boat. It can't have started yet." Marion grasped her hand firmly, and spoke like a commander: "Flossy Shipley, don't you go to getting nervous and acting like a simpleton, for I won't have it. As for that boat, it is half way to Mayville by this time, and I am glad of it. Do you suppose I am going to make an ignominious retreat now, when we have got so far advanced? Not a bit of it. If there is no meeting, we will go where there ought to be one, since it was advertised, and not a word said about rain. It isn't likely they stay out-doors when it actually pours. Very likely they go in somewhere and have a prayer-meeting. So now compose your nerves and walk fast, for if the spot is within walking distance I am going to find it. I tell you I am to get ten dollars at least for writing up this meeting, and I am going to write it if there is one to write about. If there isn't I shall have to make up one. I dare say I could make it interesting. I'll put you in if I do, and you shall be Mrs. Fearful--in Pilgrim's Progress, you know--if you don't stop shivering and walk faster." During this time they had really been making as rapid progress as the up-hill way and their doubt of the road would allow. Flossy made no reply to this harangue, for the reason that a sudden turn in the path brought them into bright light and the sound of a ringing voice. "There!" whispered Marion as the mammoth tent came in view. "What did I tell you? What do you think of _that_ for a prayer-meeting?" And then she, too, relapsed into silence, for the ringing tones of the speaker's voice were distinct and clear. They made their way rapidly and silently under the tent, down the aisle--half way down--then a gentleman beckoned them, and by dint of some pushing and moving secured them seats. Then both girls looked about them in astonishment. Who would have supposed that it rained! Why, there were rows and rows and rows of heads, men and women, and even children. A tent larger than they had imagined could be built and packed with people. Marion's tongue was uncontrollable. She was barely seated before she began her whispered comments: "That man who is speaking is Dr. Vincent. Hasn't he a ringing voice? It reminds me of a trumpet. He likes to use it, I know he does; he has learned to manage it so nicely, and with an eye to the effect. You will hear his voice often enough, and you just watch and see if you don't learn to know the first echo of it from any other." "Perhaps he won't be here all the time to use his voice," whispered back Flossy, without much idea what she was saying. The novelty of the scene had stolen her senses. Marion laughed softly. "You blessed little idiot!" she said, "don't you know that he manufactured Chautauqua, root and branch? Or if he didn't quite manufacture the trees he looked after their growth, I dare say. Why, this meeting is his darling, his idol, his best beloved. 'Hear him speak?' I guess you will. I should like to see a meeting of this kind that didn't hear from him. It will have to be when he is out of the body." "How do you know about him?" whispered Flossy, struck with sudden curiosity. "I've written him up," Marion said, briefly. "I've had to do it several times. Oh, I'm a veteran at Sunday-school meetings. But he is the hardest man to write about that there is among them, because you can never tell what he may happen to say or do next. It will never do to jump at his conclusions, and slip in a neat little sentence of your own as coming from him if you don't happen to have taken very profuse notes, because as sure as you do he will spring up in some tiresome meeting in less than a week and unsay every single word that you said. He said--" At this point a poor martyr, who had the misery to sit directly in front of these two whisperers, turned and gave them such a look as only a man can under like circumstances, and awed them into five minutes of quiet. It lasted until Dr. Eggleston was announced. Then Marion's tongue broke loose again: "He is the 'Hoosier Schoolmaster.' Don't you know we read his book aloud at the seminary? Looks as though he might have written it, doesn't he? Let's listen to what he says. He always says a word or two that a body can report; very few of them do." This is a fair specimen of the way in which Miss Wilbur buzzed through that meeting--that _wonderful_ meeting, that Flossy Shipley will remember all her life. She made no answer to Marion's comments after a little, and the pink flush glowed deeper on her face. She was wonderfully interested--indeed she was more than interested. There was a strange feeling of pain at her heart, a sort of sick, longing feeling that she had never felt before, to understand what all these people meant, to feel as they seemed to feel. The Christian world is more to blame for the unspoken infidelity that thrives in its circles than is generally supposed. Flossy Shipley had been in many religious meetings, but she had really never in her life before been among a large gathering of cultured people, who were eager and excited and happy, and the cause for that eagerness and that happiness been found in the religion of Jesus Christ. I do not say that there had never been such meetings before, nor that there have not been many of them. I simply say that it was a new revelation to Flossy, and she had been to the church prayer-meeting at home several times. Whether that church may have been peculiar or not I do not say, but Flossy had certainly failed to get the idea that prayer-meetings were blessed places; that the people who went there from week to week found their joy and their rest and their comfort there. She began to have an unutterable sense of want and longing creeping over her; she stole shy glances at Marion to see if she felt this, but Marion was absorbed just then in catching the speaker's last sentence and writing it down. Her face expressed nothing but business earnestness. Speech-making concluded, there came the "covenant service." "I wonder what that is supposed to be?" whispered Marion. "It sounds like something dreadfully solemn. I hope they are not going to have any scenes. Revivals are not fashionable except in the winter." "Marion, _don't_!" Flossy said, in an earnest undertone. The gay, and what for the first time struck her as the sacrilegious words, chilled her. And for almost the first time in her life she uttered an unhesitating remonstrance. Something in the tone surprised Marion, and she looked curiously down at her little companion, but said not another word. The covenant service was the simplest of all services; in fact, only the singing of a familiar hymn and the offering of a prayer. But the hymn was read first, in such solemn, tender, pleading tones as it seemed to Flossy she had never heard before; and the singing rolled around that great tent like the voices of the ten thousand who sing before the throne--at least to Flossy's heart it seemed like that. The prayer that followed was the simplest of all prayers as to words, and the briefest public prayer she ever remembered to have heard, and it made her feel as nothing in life had ever done before. She did not understand the cause for her emotion; she was not acquainted with the Spirit of God; she did not know that he was speaking to her softened heart, and calling her gently to himself, so she felt ashamed of the emotion that she could not help. She wiped the tears away secretly, and was glad that the night was dark and the need for haste great, for the steamer's warning whistle could already be beard. Marion talked on as they went down the hill, not alone now but accompanied by hundreds, talked precisely as she had before the singing of those words and the prayer. "How could she?" Flossy wondered. "How could anything look the same to her?" The Spirit had found no softened heart in which to leave a message, and so had passed by. This, if Flossy had known it, was the reason that Marion was gay and indifferent. If either of them had fully realized the reason for the different effect of the meeting upon them, how startled they would have been! It is not strange after all that a service is not the same to one soul that it is to another, when we remember that God speaks to one and passes another. The night was still heavy with clouds, not a star to lighten the gloom; a fine mist was falling. It was Marion who shivered this time, and said: "It is a horrible night, that is a fact; but I am not sorry we went. That meeting will write up splendidly, though it was too long; I will say that in print about it. You must find some fault, you know, when you are writing for the public; it is the fashion." "Was it long?" said Flossy, in an absent tone. She had not thought of it in that way. Then she went to the side of the boat again and sat down in a tumult. What was the matter with her? Where had her complacent, pretty little content gone? Would she _always_ feel so sad and anxious and unhappy, have such a longing as she did now? If she had been wiser she could have told herself that the trouble of heart was caused by an unhealthy excitement upon this question, and that this was the great fault with religious meetings; but she was not wise, she did not think of such a reason. If it had been suggested to her it is doubtful if, in her ignorance, she would not have said: "Why, she had been more excited at an evening party a hundred times than she had thought of being then!" She actually did not know that eagerness and zeal are proper enough at parties, but utterly out of place in religion. Just in front of her sat a young man who hummed in undertone the closing words of the covenant song. It brought the tears again to Flossy's eyes. He turned suddenly toward her. "It was a pleasant service," he said. "Don't you think so?" It was rather startling to be addressed by a strange young gentleman, or would have been it his voice had not been so quiet and dignified, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to compare notes with one who had just come out from the great meeting. "I don't know whether it was or not," she said, hurriedly. She could not seem to decide whether she enjoyed it or hated it. "It was blessed to me," the young man said, in quiet voice; and added in undertone, as if speaking to himself only: "God was there." "Do you feel that?" said Flossy, suddenly. "Then I wonder that you were not afraid." He turned toward her a pleasant face and said, earnestly: "You would not be afraid of your father, would you? Well, God is my Father, my reconciled Father;" And then, after a moment, he added: "It I were not at peace with him, and had reason to think that he was angry with me, then it would be different. Then I suppose I should be afraid; at least I think it would be reasonable to be." Flossy spoke out of the fullness of a troubled heart: "I don't understand it at all. I never wanted to, either, until just to-night; but now I want to feel as those people did when they sang that hymn." Marion came quickly up from the other side. "Flossy," she said, with sudden sharpness, "come over here and watch the track of the boat through the water." And as Flossy mechanically obeyed, she added: "What a foolish, heedless little mouse you are! I wonder that your mother let you go from her sight. Don't you know that you mustn't get up conversations with strange young men in that fashion?" Flossy had not thought of it at all: but now she said a little drearily, as if the subject did not interest her: "But I have often held conversations with strange young men at the dancing-hall, you know, and danced with them, too, when _everything_ I knew about them was their names, and generally I forgot that." Marion gave a light laugh. "That is different," she said, letting her lip curl in the darkness over the folly of her own words. "What its proper at a dance in very improper coming home from prayer-meeting, don't you see?" "What do you think!" she said the minute they were in their rooms. "There was I, leaning meditatively over the boat, thinking solemnly on the truths I had heard, and that absurd little water-proof morsel was having a flirtation with a nice young man. Here is one of the fruits of the system! What on earth was he saying to you, Flossy?" "Don't!" said Flossy, for the second time that evening. "He wasn't saying any harm." The whole thing jarred on her with an inexpressible and to her bewildering pain. She had always been ready for fun before. "That girl is homesick or something," Marion said, as she and Eurie went to their rooms, leaving Flossy with Ruth, who prefered her as a room-mate to either of the others because she _could_ keep from talking. "I haven't the least idea what is the matter, but she has been as unlike herself as possible. I hope she isn't going to get sick and spoil our fun. How silly we were to bring her, anyway. The baby hasn't life enough to see the frolic of the thing, and the intellectual is miles beyond her. I suspect she was dreadfully bored this evening. But, Eurie, there is going to be some splendid speaking done here. I shouldn't wonder if we attended a good many of the meetings." CHAPTER V. UNREST. Flossy went to the window and stood looking out into the starless night. The pain in her heart deepened with every moment. "If there was only some one to ask, some one to say a word to me," she sighed to herself. "It seems as though I could never go to sleep with this feeling clinging to me. I wonder what can be the matter? Perhaps I am sick and am going to die. It feels almost like that, and I am not fit to die--I am afraid. I wonder if Ruth Erskine is afraid to die? I have almost a mind to ask her. I wonder if she ever prays? People who are not afraid of death are always those who pray. Perhaps she will to-night. I feel as though I wanted to pray: I think if I only knew how it would be just the thing to do. If she kneels down I mean to go and kneel beside her." These were some of the thoughts that whirled through her brain as she stood with her nose pressed to the glass. But Ruth did not pray. She went around with the composed air of one who was at peace with all the world; and when her elaborate preparations for rest were concluded she laid her head on her pillow without one thought of prayer. "Why in the name of sense don't you come to bed?" she presently asked, surveying with curious glance the quiet little creature whose face was hidden from her, and who was acting entirely out of accordance with anything she had ever seen in her before. "What can you possibly find to keep you gazing out of that window? It can't be called star-gazing, for to my certain knowledge there isn't a single star visible; in fact, I should say nothing could be visible but the darkness." For a minute Flossy made no answer. She did not move nor turn her head; but presently she said, in a low and gentle voice: "Ruth, should you be afraid to die?" "To die!" said Ruth; and I have no means of telling you what an astonished face and voice she had. "Flossy Shipley, what do you mean?" "Why, I mean _that_," said Flossy, in the same quiet tone. "Of course we have got to die, and everybody knows it; and what I say is, should you be afraid if it were to-night, you know?" "Humph!" said Ruth, turning her pillow and waiting to beat it into shape before she spoke further. "I haven't the least idea of dying to-night." "But how can you be _sure_ of that? You might _have_ to die to-night, you know people do sometimes." "I know one thing, am perfectly certain of it, and that is, that you will take cold standing there and making yourself dismal. You are shivering like a leaf, I can see you from here. If that is all the good to be gotten from the 'religious impressions' that they harp about being so great here, the less religion they have the better, and there is quite little enough you may be sure." Saying which, Ruth turned her pillow again and her head, so that she could not see the small creature at the window. She was unaccountably rasped, not to say startled, by her question, and she did not like to be startled; she liked to have her current of life run smoothly. As for Flossy, she gave a great sigh of disappointment and unrest, and turned slowly from the window. She had vaguely hoped for help of some sort from Ruth, and as she lay down on her prayerless pillow she said to herself, "If she had only knelt down I should certainly have done so, too; and perhaps I might have been helped out of this dreadful feeling." Yet so ignorant was she of the way that it never once occurred to her to kneel alone and pray. No more words were spoken by those two girls that night, but each lay awake for a long time and tossed about restlessly. Ruth had been most effectually disturbed, and try as best she could it was impossible to banish the memory of those quiet words: "You might _have_ to die to-night; people do, you know." To actually _have_ to do something that she had not planned to do and was not quite ready for, would be a new experience to this girl. Yet when would she be ready to plan for dying? At last she grew thoroughly vexed, and vented her disgust on the "religionists" who got up camp-meeting excitements for the purpose of turning weak brains like Flossy Shipley's. After that she went to sleep. "Flossy Shipley, for pity's sake _don't_ rig your self up in that awful cashmere! It rains yet and you will just be going around with five wrinkles on your forehead all day, besides spoiling your dress." It was morning, and the door of communication between the two sleeping-rooms being thrown open the four girls were in full tide of talk and preparation for Fairpoint. Flossy, though kept her strangely quiet face and manner; the night had not brought her peace; she had tossed restlessly for hours, and when at last she slept it was only to be haunted with troubled dreams. With the first breath of morning she opened her eyes and felt that the weight of yesterday was still pressing on her heart. "What _shall_ I wear?" she asked, in an absent, bewildered way of Eurie, who had objected to the cashmere. "I'm sure I don't know. Didn't you bring anything suited to the rain? Let me go fishing in that ponderous trunk and see if I can't find something." The "fishing" produced nothing more suitable than a heavy black silk, elaborately trimmed, and looking, as Eurie phrased it, "elegantly out of place." Through much confusion and frolicking the four were at last entering the grounds at Chautauqua. By reason of their superior knowledge Marion and Flossy led the way, while the others followed eagerly, looking and exclaiming. "I'll tell you what it is, girls," Eurie said, eagerly. "Let's come over here and board. We'll have a tent or a cottage. A tent will be jollier, and it will be twice as much fun as to stay at the hotel." There being no dissenting voice to this proposal, they started in much glee to look up a home; only Flossy demurred timidly. "Can't we go to the meeting, girls, and look for the tent afterward? The meeting has commenced; I hear them singing." "It's nothing in the world but a Bible service," Eurie said. "That man at the gate handed me a programme. Who wants to go to a Bible service? We have Bibles enough at home. We want to be on hand at eleven o'clock, because Edward Eggleston is to speak on 'The Paradise of Childhood.' My childhood was anything but paradise, but I am anxious to know what he will make of it." Flossy succumbed, of course, as every one expected she would; and the party went in search of tents and accommodations. It was no easy matter to suit them, as the patient and courteous President found. "I don't like the location of any one of them," Ruth Erskine said. Of course she was the hardest to suit. "Why can't we have one of those in that row on the hill?" "Those are the guest tents, ma'am." "The guest tents?" Eurie exclaimed, in surprise. "I wonder if they entertain guests here! Who are they?" "Why, those who have been invited to take part in the exercises, of course. You did not suppose that they paid their own expenses and did the work besides, did you?" This explanation was given by Marion, who, by virtue of her experience as reporter was better versed in the ways of these great gatherings than the others. "What an idea!" Eurie said. "Fancy being a guest and speaking at this great meeting. Being a person of distinction, you know; so that people would be pointing you out, and telling their neighbors who you were. "There goes Miss Mitchell. She is the leading speaker on Sunday-school books. How does that sound? Only, on the whole, I should choose some other department than Sunday-school books; they are all so horridly good--the people in them, I mean--that one can't get through with more than two in a season. I tried to read one last week for Sunday, but I abandoned it in despair." This was an aside, while Ruth was questioning the President. She was looking dismayed. "Can't we have one of the tents on that side near the stand?" "Those were taken months ago. This is a large gathering, you know." "I should think it was! Then, it seems, we must go back to the hotel. I thought you would be glad to let us have accommodations at any price." The gentlemanly President here carefully repressed an amused smile. Here were people who had evidently misunderstood Chautauqua. "Oh, yes," he said, "we can give you accommodations, only not the very best, I am sorry to say. Our best tents were secured many months ago. Still, we will do the best we can for you, and I think we can make you entirely comfortable." "People have different ideas as to the meaning of that word," Miss Eurie said, loftily. Then she moved to another tent, over which she exclaimed in dismay: "Why, the bed isn't made up! Pray, are we to sleep on the slats?" "Oh, no. But you have to hire all those things, you know. Have you seen our bulletin? There are parties on the ground prepared to fit up everything that you need, and to do it very reasonably. Of course we can not know what degree of expense those requiring tents care to incur, so we leave that matter for them to decide for themselves. You can have as many or as few comforts as you choose, and pay accordingly." "And are all four of us expected to occupy this one room?" There was an expression of decided disgust on Miss Erskine's face. "Why, you see," explained the amused President, "this tent is designed for four; two good-sized bedsteads set up in it; and the necessity seems to be upon us to crowd as much as we can conveniently. There will be no danger of impure air, you know, for you have all out-doors to breathe." "And you really don't have toilet stands or toilet accommodations! What a way to live!" Another voice chimed in now, which was the very embodiment of refined horror. "And you don't have pianos nor sofas, and the room isn't lighted with gas! I'm sure I don't see how we can live! It is not what we have been accustomed to." This was Marion, with the most dancing eyes in the world, and the President completed the scene by laughing outright. Suddenly Ruth discovered that she was acting the part of a simpleton, and with flushed face she turned from them, and walked to a vacant seat, in the opposite direction from where they were standing. "We will take this one," she said, haughtily, without vouchsafing it a look. "I presume it is as good as any of them, and, since we are fairly into this absurd scrape we must make the best of it." "Or the worst of it," Marion said, still laughing. "You are bent on doing that, I think, Ruthie." By a violent effort and rare good sense Ruth controlled herself sufficiently to laugh, and the embarrassment vanished. There were splendid points about this girl's character, not the least among them being the ability to laugh at a joke that had been turned toward herself. At least the effect was splendid. The reasons, therefore, might have been better. It was because her sharp brain saw the better effect that her ability to do this thing immediately produced on the people around her. But I shall have to confess that a poise of character strong enough to gracefully avert unpleasant effects arising from causes of her own making ought to have been strong enough to have suppressed the causes. The question of an abiding-place being thus summarily disposed of, the party set themselves to work with great energy to get settled, Marion and Eurie taking the lead. Both were used to both planning and working, and Marion at least had so much of it to do as to have lost all desire to lead unnecessarily, and therefore everything grew harmonious. There was a good deal of genuine disgust in Ruth's part of it, though, her eyes having been opened, she bravely tried to hide the feeling from the rest. But you will remember that she had lived and breathed in an atmosphere of elegant refinement all her life, accepting the luxuries of life as common necessities until they had really become such to her, and the idea of doing without many things that people during camp life necessarily find themselves _obliged_ to do without was not only strange to her but exceedingly disagreeable. The two leaders being less used to the extremes of luxury, and more indifferent to them by nature, could not understand and had little sympathy with her feeling. "We shall have to go back after all to the hotel," Eurie said, as she dived both hands into the straw tick and tried to level the bed. "We have too fine a lady among us; she cannot sleep on a bedstead that doesn't rest its aristocratic legs on a velvet carpet. She doesn't see the fun at all. I thought Flossy would be the silly one, but Flossy is in a fit of the dumps. I never saw her so indifferent to her dress before. See her now, bringing that three-legged stand, without regard to rain! There is one comfort in this perpetual rain, we shall have less dust. After all, though, I don't know as that is any improvement, so long as it goes and makes itself up into mud. Look at the mud on my dress! That tent we were looking at first would have been ever so much the best, but after Ruth's silliness I really hadn't the face to suggest a change--I thought we had given trouble enough. She makes a mistake; she thinks this is a great hotel, where people are bound to get all the money they can and give as little return, instead of its being a place where people are striving to be as accommodating as they can, and give everybody as good a time as possible." In the midst of all this talk and work they left and ran up the hill to the Tabernacle, where the crowds were gathering to hear Dr. Eggleston. It was a novel sight to these four girls; the great army of eager, strong, expectant faces; the ladies, almost without an exception, dressed to match the rain and the woods, looking neither tired nor annoyed about anything--looking only in earnest. To Ruth, especially, it came like a revelation. She looked around her with surprised eyes. There were intellectual faces on every hand. There was the hum of conversation all about her, for the meeting was not yet opened, and the tone of their words was different from any with which her life had been familiar; they seemed lifted up, enthused; they seemed to have found something worthy of enthusiasm. As a rule Ruth had not enjoyed enthusiastic people; they had seemed silly to her; and you will admit that there is a silly side to the consuming of a great deal of that trait on the dress for an evening party, or the arrangement of programmes for a fancy concert. Just now she had a glimmering fancy that there might be something worthy of arresting and holding one's eager attention. "They look alive," she said, turning from right to left among the rows and rows of faces. "They look as though they had a good deal to do, and they thought it was worth doing." Then, curiously enough, there came suddenly to her mind that question which she had banished the night before, and she wondered if these people had all really answered it to their satisfaction. Flossy took a seat immediately in front of the speaker. She was hungry for something, and she did not know what to call it--something that would set her fevered heart at rest. As for Marion and Eurie, they hoped with all their hearts that the "Hoosier Schoolmaster" would give them a rich intellectual treat, at least Marion was after the intellectual. Eurie would be contented if she got the fun, and a man like Dr. Eggleston has enough of both those elements to make sure of satisfying their hopes. But would he bring something to help Flossy? CHAPTER VI. FEASTS. "He doesn't look in the least as I thought he did." It was Eurie who whispered this, and she nudged Marion's arm by way of emphasis as she did it. Marion laughed. "How did you think he looked?" "Oh, I don't know--rough, rather." Whereupon Marion laughed again. "That is the way some people discriminate," she whispered back. "You think because he wrote about rough people he must be rough; and when one writes about people of culture and elegance you think straightway that he is the personification of those ideas. You forget, you see, that the world is full to the brim with hypocrisy; and it is easier to be perfect on paper than it is anywhere else in this world." "Or to be a sinner either, according to that view of it." "It is easy enough to be a sinner anywhere. Hush, I want to listen." For which want the people all about her must have been very thankful. Our young ladies gave Dr. Eggleston their attention at the moment when he was drawling out in his most nasal and ludicrous tones the hymn that used to be a favorite in Sunday-schools ninety years ago: "Broad is the road that leads to death, And thousands walk together there, But wisdom shows a narrow path, With here and there a traveler." The manner in which part of these lines were repeated was irresistibly funny. To Eurie it was explosively so; she laughed until the seat shook with mirth. To be sure, she knew nothing about modern Sunday-schools; for aught that she was certain of, they might have sung that very hymn in the First Church Sunday-school the Sabbath before; and it made not the least atom of difference whether they did or not; the way in which Dr. Eggleston was putting it was funny, and Eurie never spoiled fun for the sake of sentiment. Presently she looked up at Marion for sympathy. That young lady's eyes were in a blaze of indignation. What in the world was the matter with her? Surely she, with her hearty and unquestioning belief in _nothing_, could not have been disturbed by any jar! Let me tell you a word about Marion. Away back in her childhood there was a memory of a little dingy, old-fashioned kitchen, one of the oldest and dreariest of its kind, where the chimney smoked and the winter wind crawled in through endless cracks and crannies; where it was not always possible to get enough to eat during the hardest times; but there was a large, old-fashioned arm-chair, covered with frayed and faded calico, and in this chair sat often of a winter evening a clean-faced old man, with thin and many-patched clothes, with a worn and sickly face, with a few gray hairs straggling sadly about on his smooth crown: and that old man used often and often to drone out in a cracked voice and in a tune pitched too low by half an octave the very words which had just been repeated in Marion's hearing. What of all that? Why, that little gloomy kitchen was Marion's memory of home; that old, tired man was her father, and he used to sing those words while his hand wandered tenderly through the curls of her brown head, and patted softly the white forehead over which they fell; and all of love that there was in life, all that the word "tenderness" meant, all that was dear, or sweet or to be reverenced, was embodied in that one memory to Marion. Now you understand the flashing eyes. She did not believe it at all; she believed, or thought she did, that the "broad" and "narrow" roads were all nonsense; that go where you would, or do what you would, all the roads led to _death_; and that was the end. But the father who had quavered through those lines so many times had staked his hopes forever on that belief, and the assurance of it had clothed his face in a grand smile as he lay dying--a smile that she liked to think of, that she did not like to hear ridiculed, and to her excited imagination Dr. Eggleston seemed to be ridiculing the faith on which the hymn was built. "They are more thorough hypocrites than I supposed," she said, in scorn, and hardly in undertone, in answer to Eurie's inquiring look. "I don't believe the stuff myself, but I always supposed the ministers did. I gave some of them at least credit for sincerity, but it seems it is nothing but a fable to be laughed to scorn." "Why, Marion!" Eurie said, and her look expressed surprise and dismay. "He is not making fun of religion, you know; he is simply referring to the inappropriateness of such hymns for children." "What is so glaringly inappropriate about it if they really believe the Bible? I'm sure it says there that there are two roads, one broad and the other narrow; and that many people are on one and but few on the other. Why shouldn't it be put into a hymn if it is desirable to impress it?" "I'm sure I don't know," Eurie said, unaccustomed to being put through a course of logic. "Only, you know, I suppose he simply means that it is beyond their comprehensions." "They must have remarkably limited comprehensions then if they are incapable of understanding so simple a figure of speech, as that there are two ways to go, and one is harder and safer than the other. I understood it when it was sung to me--and I was a very little child--and believed it, too, until I saw the lives of people contradict it; but if I believed, it still I would not make public sport of it." At this point Ruth leaned forward from the seat behind and whispered: "Girls, do keep still; you are drawing the attention of all the people around you and disturbing everybody." After that they kept still; but the good doctor had effectually sealed one heart to whatever that was tender and earnest he might have to say. She sat erect, with scornful eyes and glowing cheeks, and when the first flush of excitement passed off was simply harder and gayer than before. Who imagined such a result as that? Nobody, of course. But how perfectly foolish and illogical! Couldn't she see that Dr. Eggleston only meant to refer to the fact that literature, both of prose and poetry, had been improved by being brought to the level of childish minds, and to reprove that way of teaching religious truth, that leaves a somber, dismal impression on youthful hearts? Apparently she could not, since she did not. As for being absurd and illogical, I _did_ not say that she wasn't. I am simply giving you facts as they occurred. I think myself that she was dishonoring the memory of her father ten thousand times more than any chance and unmeant word of the speakers could possibly have done. The only trouble was, that she was such an idiot she did not see it; and she prided herself on her powers of reasoning, too! But the world is full of idiots. She sat like a stone during the rest of the brilliant lecture. Many things she heard because she could not help hearing; many she admired, because it was in her to admire a brilliant and charming thing, and she could not help that, either; but she could shut her _heart_ to all tenderness of feeling and all softening influences, and that she did with much satisfaction, deliberately steeling herself against the words of a man because he had quoted a chance line that her father used to sing, while she lived every day of her life in defiance of the principles by which her father shaped his life and his death! Verily, the ways of girls are beyond understanding. Eurie enjoyed it all. When Dr. Eggleston told of the men that, as soon as their children grew a little too restless, had business down town, she clapped her hands softly and whispered: "That is for all the world like father. Neddie and Puss were never in a whining fit in their lives that father didn't at once think of a patient he had neglected to visit that day, and rush off." She laughed over the thought that women were shut in with little steam engines, and said: "That's a capital name for them; we have three at home that are always just at the very point of explosion. I mean to write to mother and tell her I have found a new name for them." When he suggested the blunt-end scissors, and the colored crayons with which they could make wonderful yellow dogs, with green tails and blue eyes, her delight became so great that she looked around to Ruth to help her enjoy it, and said: "You see if I don't invest in a ton of colored crayons the very first thing I do when I get home; it is just capital! So strange I never thought of it before." "You did not think of it now," Ruth said, in her quiet cooling way. "Give the speaker credit for his own ideas, please. Half the world have to do the thinking for the other half always." "That is the reason so much is left undone, then," retorted Eurie, with unfailing good humor, and turned back to the speaker in time to hear his description of the superintendent that was so long in finding the place to sing that the boys before him went around the world while he was giving the number. "Slow people," said she, going down the hill afterward. "I never could endure them, and I shall have less patience with them in future than ever. Wasn't he splendid? Ruth, you liked the part about Dickens, of course." "A valuable help the lecture will be to your after-life if all you have got is an added feeling of impatience toward slow people. Unfortunately for you they are in the world, and will be very likely to stay in it, and a very good sort of people they are, too." It was Marion who said this, and her tone was dry and unsympathetic. Eurie turned to her curiously. "You didn't like him," she said, "did you? I am so surprised; I thought you would think him splendid. On your favorite hobby, too. I said to myself this will be just in Marion's line. She has so much to say about teaching children by rote in a dull and uninteresting way. You couldn't forgive him for reciting that horrid old hymn in such a funny way. Flossy, do you suppose you can ever hear that hymn read again without laughing? What was the matter, Marion? Who imagined you had any sentimental drawings toward Watts' hymns?" "I didn't even know it was Watts' hymn," Marion said, indifferently. "But I hate to hear any one go back on his own belief. If he honestly believes in the sentiments of that verse, and they certainly are Bible sentiments, he shouldn't make fun of it. But I'm sure it is of no consequence to me. He may make fun of the whole Bible if he chooses, verse by verse, and preach a melting sermon from it the very next Sabbath; it will be all the same to me. Let us go in search of some dinner, and not talk any more about him." "But that isn't fair. You are unjust, isn't she, Ruth? I say he didn't make fun of religion, as Marion persists in saying that he did." "Of course not," Ruth said. "A minister would hardly be guilty of doing that. He was simply comparing the advanced methods of the present with the stupidity of the past." And obstinate Marion said then he ought to get a new Bible, for the very same notions were in it that were when she was a child and learned verses. And that was all that this discussion amounted to. Nobody had appealed to Flossy. She had stood looking with an indifferent air around her, until Marion turned suddenly and said: "What did the lecture say to you, Flossy? Eurie seems very anxious to get out of it something for our 'special needs,' as they say in church. What was yours?" Flossy hesitated like a timid child, flushed and then paled, and finally said, simply: "I have been thinking ever since he spoke it of that one sentence, 'Rock-firm, God-trust, has died out of the world.' I was wondering if it were true, and I was wishing that it wasn't." All the girls looked at each other in astonished silence; such a strange thing for Flossy to say. "What of it?" said Marion, presently. "What if it has? or, rather, what if it were never in the world?" "It wasn't that side of it that I thought about. It was what if it were." "And what then?" "Why, then, I should like to see the person who had it, just to see how he would seem." Marion laughed somewhat scornfully. "Curiosity is at the bottom of your wise thought, is it? Well, my little mousie, I am amazingly afraid you are destined never to discover how it will seem. So I wouldn't puzzle my brains about it. It might be too much for them. Shall we go to dinner?" You should have seen our four young ladies taking their first meal at Chautauqua! It was an experience not to be forgotten. They went to the "hotel." This was a long board building, improvised for the occasion, and filled with as many comforts as the _necessities_ of the occasion could furnish. To Miss Erskine the word "hotel" had only one sort of association. She had been a traveler in her own country only, and it had been her fortune to be intimate only with the hotels in large cities, and only with those where people go whose purses are full to overflowing. So she had come to associate with the name all that was elegant or refined or luxurious. When the President of the grounds inquired whether they would have tickets for the hotel or one of the boarding-houses, Miss Erskine had answered without hesitation: "For the hotel, of course. I never have anything to do with boarding-houses. They are almost certain to be second rate." Said President kept his own counsel, thinking, I fancy, that here was a girl who needed some lessons in the practical things of this life, and Chautauqua hotels were good places in which to take lessons. Imagine now, if you can, the look of this lady's face, as they made their way with much difficulty down the long room, and looked about them on either side for seats. "A hotel, indeed!" she said, in utter contempt and disgust, as one of the attendants signaled them and politely drew back the long board seat that did duty in the place of chairs, and answered for five, or, if you were good natured and crowded, for six people. He was just as polite in his attentions as if the unplaned seat had been a carved chair of graceful shape and pattern. One would suppose that Ruth might have taken a hint from his example. But the truth is, she belonged to that class of people who are so accustomed to polite attentions that it is only their absence which calls forth remark. "The idea of naming this horrid, dirty old lumber-room a hotel!" and she carefully and disdainfully spread her waterproof cloak on the seat before she took it. Eurie's merry laugh rang out until others looked and smiled in sympathy with her fun, whatever it was. "What in the world did you expect, Ruthie? I declare, you are too comical! I verily believe you expected Brussels carpets, and mirrors in which you could admire yourself all the while you were eating." "I expected a _hotel_," Ruth said, in no wise diminishing her lofty tone. "That is what is advertised, and people naturally do not look for so much deception in a religious gathering. This is nothing in the world but a shanty." Chautauqua was doing one thing for this young lady which surprised and annoyed her. It was helping her to get acquainted with herself. Up to this time she had looked upon herself as a person of smooth and even temperament, not by any means easily ruffled or turned from her quiet poise. She had prided herself on her composed, gracefully dignified way of receiving things. She never hurried, she never was breathless and flushed, and apologetic over something that she ought or ought not to have done, which was a chronic state with Eurie. She never was in a thorough and undisguised rage, as Marion was quite likely to be. She was, in her own estimation, a model of propriety. All this until she came to Chautauqua. Now, great was her surprise to discover in herself a disposition to be utterly disgusted with things that to Marion were of so little consequences as to be unnoticed, and that to Eurie were positive sources of fun. Doubtless you understand her better than she did herself. The truth is, it is a comparatively easy matter to be gracious and courteous and unruffled when everything about you is moving exactly according to your mind, and when you can think of nothing earthly to be annoyed about. There are some natures that are deceiving their own hearts in just such an atmosphere as this. They are not the lowest type of nature by any means. The small, petty trials that come to every life are beneath them. If it rains when they want to walk they can go in a handsome carriage, and keep their tempers. If their elegant new robes prove to be badly made they can have them remodeled and made more elegant with a superior composure. In just so far are they above the class who can endure nothing in the shape of annoyances or disappointment, however small. The fact is, however, that there are petty annoyance, _not_ coming in their line of life, that would be altogether too much for them. But of this they remain in graceful ignorance until some Chautauqua brings the sleeping shadows to the surface. CHAPTER VII. TABLE TALK. "What is your private explanation of the word 'hotel'?" Marion asked. She was in an argumentative mood, and it made almost no difference to her which side of the question she argued. "Webster says it is a place to entertain strangers, but you seem to attach some special importance to the term." "Is that all that Webster says?" The questioner was not Ruth, but a man who sat just opposite to them at the table, and while he waited for his order to be filled watched with amused eyes the four gills who were evidently in a new element. He was not a young man, and his gray hairs would have arrested the pertness of the reply on Marion's tongue at any other time than this, but you remember that she was not in a good mood. She answered promptly; "Yes, sir, he says ever so many things. In fact, he is the most voluminous author I ever read." The gentleman laughed. The pertness seemed to amuse him. "Didn't I limit my question?" he said, pleasantly. "He is voluminous, and what a sensible book he has written. I wish all authors had given us so much information. But I meant, is that all he says about hotels? Doesn't he justify your friend just a little bit in her expectations?" "I'm sure I don't know," Marion said, amused in turn at the good-natured interest which the elderly gentleman took in the question. "He has said so much that I haven't had time to digest it all. If you have, won't you please enlighten me as to his wisdom on this subject?" "'Especially one of some style or pretensions,'" quoted the old gentleman, "so Webster adds. You see I am interested in the subject," and he laughed pleasantly. "I have been looking it up, which must be my apology for addressing you young ladies, if so old a man as I must apologize for being interested in girls. The fact is, I had occasion to talk with a young man yesterday who took the people to task most roundly for that very name, on the ground that they had no right to it--that it was a misnomer. I have been struck with the thought that nothing is trivial, not even the name that happens to be chosen for a house where one _waits_ for his dinner," with a strong emphasis on the word "wait," which Eurie understood and laughed over. "Except the remarks that people make about such things," Marion said, answering the first part of the sentence and bestowing a wicked glance on Ruth. "They are trivial enough. Did you agree with the young gentleman?" "No. I thought it all over and consulted Webster, as I said, and came to the conclusion that in view of this being a more pretentious house than either of the others they had a right to the word. Webster doesn't say what degree of pretension is necessary, you know." The lifting of Ruth's eyebrows at this point was so expressive that all the party laughed. But the old gentleman grew grave again in a moment, as he said: "But the thought that impressed me most was what a very perfect system of faith the religion of Jesus Christ is; how completely it commends itself to the human heart, since the very slightest departure from what is regarded as strictly true and right, when it is done by a Christian (society or individual), is noticed and commented upon by lookers-on; they seem to know of a certainty that it is not according to the Spirit of Christ." This last sentence struck Marion dumb. How fond she was of caviling at Christian lives! Was she really thus giving all the time an unconscious tribute to the truth and purity of the Christian faith? It was a merry dinner, after all, eaten with steel forks and without napkins, and with plated spoons, if you were so fortunate as to secure one. The rush of people was very great, and, with their inconvenient accommodations, the process of serving was slow. Marion, her eyes being opened, went to studying the people about her. She found that courteous good-humor was the rule, and selfishness and ungraciousness the exception. Inconveniences were put up with and merrily laughed over by people who, from their dress and manners, could be accustomed to only the best. Marion took mental notes. "They do not act in the least like the mass of people who stop at railroad eating-houses for their dinner; they are patient and courteous under difficulties; they did not come here for the purpose of being entertained; if they did the accommodations wouldn't satisfy." There was another little thing that interested Marion. As the tables kept filling, and those who had been served made room for those who had not, she found herself watching curiously what proportion of the guests observed that instant of silent thanks with covered eyes. It was so brief, so slight a thing, I venture that scarcely a person there noticed it, much less imagined that there was a pair of keen gray eyes over in the corner looking and calculating concerning them. "What if they all had to wear badges," she said to herself, "badges that read 'I am a Christian,' I wonder how many of them it would influence to different words than they are speaking, or to different acts? I wonder if they _do_ all wear them? I wonder if the distinction is really marked, so one looking on could detect the difference, though all of them are strangers? I mean to watch during these two weeks. 'The proper study of mankind is man.' Very well, Brother Pope, a convenient place for the study of man is Chautauqua. I'll take it up. Who knows but I may learn a new branch to teach the graded infants in Ward No. 4." Ruth did not recover her equanimity. She was rasped on every side. Those two-tined steel forks were a positive sting to her. She shuddered as the steel touched her lips. She had no spoon at all, and she looked on in utter disgust while Eurie merrily stirred her tea with her fork. When the waiter came at last, with hearty apologies for keeping them waiting for their spoons, and the old gentleman said cordially, "All in good time. We shall not starve even if we get no spoons," she curled her lip disdainfully, and murmured that she had always been accustomed to the conveniences of life, and found it somewhat difficult to do without them. When one is in the mood for grumbling there is no easier thing in the world than to find food for that spirit, and Ruth continued her pastime, waxing louder and more decided after the genial old man had left their neighborhood. "What is the use in fault-finding?" Eurie said at last, half petulantly. She was growing very tired of this exhibition. "What did you expect? They are doing as well as they can, without any doubt. Just imagine what it must be to get conveniences together for this vast crowd. They did not expect anything like such a large attendance at first; I heard them say so and that makes it harder to wait upon them. But of course they are doing just as well as they can, and we fare as well as any of them." "Don't you be so foolish as to believe that," Ruth said, with a curling lip. "If you could see behind the scenes you would soon discover something very different. That is why it is so provoking to me. Let people who cannot afford to pay any better take such as they can get. But what right had they to suppose that we had not the money to pay for what we wish? I'm sure _I'm_ not a pauper! You will find that there is a place where the select few can get what they want, and have it served in a respectable manner, and I say I don't like it; I have been accustomed to the decencies of life." Just behind them the talk was going on unceasingly, and one voice, at this point, rising higher than the others, caught the attention of our girls. Eurie turned suddenly and tried to catch a glimpse of the speaker. Something in the voice sounded natural. A sudden movement on the part of the gentleman between them and she caught a glimpse of the face. She turned back eagerly. "Girls, that is Mrs. Schuyler Germain!" "Where?" Ruth asked, with sudden interest in her voice. "Over at that table, in a water-proof cloak and black straw hat, and eating boiled potatoes with a steel fork. What about being behind the scenes now, Ruthie?" To fully appreciate this you must understand that even among the Erskines to get as high as Mrs. Schulyer Germain was to get as high as the aristocracy of this world reached; not that she lived in any grander style than the Erskines, or showed that she had more money, but every one knew that her bank accounts were very heavy, and, besides, she was the daughter of Gen. Wadsworth Hillyer, of Washington, and the great-granddaughter, by direct descent, of one of England's noblemen. She was traveled and cultivated, and all but titled through her youngest daughter. Could American ambition reach higher? And there she sat, at a table made of pine boards, eating boiled potatoes with a two-tined steel fork! Could English nobility sink lower! Ruth looked over at her in quiet surprise for a moment, and then gave her head its haughty toss as she met Eurie's mischievous eyes, and said: "It is not an aristocracy of position here, then. The leaders keep all their nice things and places for themselves. That is smaller than I supposed them to be." At this particular moment there was an uprising from the table just behind them. Half a dozen gentlemen leaving their empty plates, and in full tide of talk, making their way down the hall. The girls looked and nudged each other as they recognized them. The younger of the two foremost had a face that can not easily be mistaken, and Eurie, having seen it once, did not need Marion's low-toned, "That is Mr. Vincent." And Ruth herself, thrown off her guard, recognized and exclaimed over Dr. Hodge. This climax was too much for Eurie. She threw down her fork to clap her hands in softly glee. "Oh, Ruthie, Ruthie! How has your dismal castle of favoritism faded! Yonder is the Queen of American society eating pie at this very instant with the very fork which did duty on her potato, and here goes the King of the feast, wiping his lips on his own handkerchief instead of a damask napkin." It was at this moment, when Ruth's follies and ill humors were rising to an almost unbearable height, that her higher nature asserted itself, and shone forth in a rich, full laugh. Then, in much glee and good feeling, they followed the crowd down the hill to the auditorium. For the benefit of such poor benighted beings as have never seen Chautauqua, let me explain that the auditorium was the great temple where the congregation assembled for united service. Such a grand temple as it was! The pillars thereof were great solemn trees, with their green leaves arching overhead in festoons of beauty. I don't know how many seats there were, nor how many could be accommodated at the auditorium. Eurie set out to walk up and down the long aisles one day and count the seats, but she found that which so arrested her attention before she was half-way down the central aisle that she forgot all about it, and there was never any time afterward for that work. I mean to tell you about that day when I get to it. The grand stand was down here in front of all these seats, spacious and convenient, the pillars thereof festooned with flags from many nations. The large piano occupied a central point; the speaker's desk at its feet, in the central of the stand; the reporters' tables and chairs just below. "I ought to have one of those chairs," Marion said, as they passed the convenient little space railed off from the rest of the audience. "Just as if I were not a real reporter because I write in plain good English, instead of racing over the paper and making queer little tracks that only one person in five thousand can read. If I were not the most modest and retiring of mortals I would go boldly up and claim a seat." "What is to be next?" Ruth asked. "Are we supposed to be devoted to all these meetings? I thought we were only going to one now and then. We won't be alive in two weeks from now if we pin ourselves down here." "In the way that we have been doing," chimed in Eurie. "Just think here we have been to every single meeting they have had yet, except the one last night and one this morning." "We are going to skip every one that we possibly can," said Marion. "But the one that is to come just now is decidedly the one that we can't. The speaker is Dr. Calkins, of Buffalo. I heard him four years ago, and it is one of the few sermons that I remember to this day. I always said if I ever had another chance I should certainly hear him again. I like his subject this afternoon, too. It is appropriate to my condition." "What is the subject?" Flossy asked, with a sudden glow of interest. "It is what a Christian can learn from a heathen. I'm the heathen, and I presume Dr Calkins is the Christian. So he is to see what he can learn from me, I take it, and naturally I am anxious to know. Flossy isn't interested in that; I can see it from her face. She knows she isn't a heathen--she is a good proper little Christian. But it is your duty, my dear, to find what you can learn from me." "What can he possibly make of such a subject as that?" Ruth asked, curiously. "I don't believe I want to hear him. Is he so very talented, Marion?" "I don't know. Haven't the least idea whether he is what you call talented or not. He says things exactly as though he knew they were so, and for the time being he makes you feel as though you were a perfect simpleton for not knowing it, too." "And you like to be made to feel like a 'perfect simpleton?' Is that the reason you resolved to hear him again?" "I like to meet a man once in a while who knows how to do it, and for the matter of that I wouldn't mind being made to feel the truth of the things that he says, if one could only _stay_ made. It isn't the fault of the preaching that it all feels like a pretty story and nothing else; it is the fault of the wretched practicing that the sheep go home and do. It makes one feel like being an out-and-out goat, and done with it, instead of being such a perfect idiot of a sheep." At this point the talk suddenly ceased, for the leaders began to assemble, and the service commenced. Ruth and Marion exchanged comic glances when they discovered the "heathen" of the afternoon to be Socrates. And Marion presently whispered that she was evidently to play the character of the old fellow's wife, and Eurie whispered to them both: "Now I want to know if that horrid Zantippe was Socrates' wife! Upon my word I never knew it before. She wasn't to blame, after all, for being such a wretch." "What do you mean?" Marion whispered back, with scornful eyes. "Socrates was the grandest old man that ever lived." "Pooh! He wasn't. He didn't know any more than little mites of Sunday-school children do nowdays. I never could understand why his philosophy was so remarkable, only that he lived in a heathen country and got ahead of all the rest, but if he were living now he would be a pigmy." "I wish he were," Marion said, with her eyes still flashing. "I would like to see such a life as he lived." This girl was a hero worshiper. Her cheeks could burn and her eyes glow over the grand stories of old heathen characters, and she could melt to tears over their trials and wrongs. And yet she passed by in haughty silence the sublime life that of all others is the only perfect one on record, and she had no tears to shed over the shameful and pitiful story of the cross. What a strange girl she was! I wonder if it be possible that there are any others like her? CHAPTER VIII. "AT EVENING TIME IT SHALL BE BRIGHT." Meantime Flossy Shipley came to no place where her heart could rest. She went through that first day at Chautauqua in a sort of maze, hearing and yet not hearing, and longing in her very soul for something that she did not hear--that is, she did not hear it distinctly and fairly stated, so that she could grasp it and act upon it; and yet it was shadowed all around her, and hinted at in every word that was uttered, so that it was impossible to forget that there was a great something in which the most of these people were eagerly interested, and which was sealed to her. She felt it dimly all the while that Dr. Eggleston was speaking; she felt it sensibly when they sang; she felt it in the chance words that caught her ear on every side as the meeting closed--bright, fresh words of greeting, of gladness, of satisfaction, but every one of them containing a ring that she could hear but not copy. What did it mean? And, above all, why did she care what it meant, when she had been happy all her life before without knowing or thinking anything about it? As they went down the hill to dinner, she loitered somewhat behind the others, thinking while they talked. As the throng pressed down around them there came one whose face she instantly recognized; it belonged to the young man who had spoken to her on the boat the evening before. The face recalled the earnest words that he had spoken, and the tone of restful satisfaction in which they were spoken. His face wore the same look now--interested, alert, but _at rest_. She coveted rest. It was clear that he also recognized her, and something in her wistful eyes recalled the words _she_ had spoken. "Have you found the Father's presence yet?" he asked, with a reverent tone to his voice when he said "the Father," and yet with such evident trust and love that the tears started to her eyes. She answered quickly: "No, I haven't. I cannot feel that he is my Father." They went down the steps just then, and the crowd rushed in between them, so that neither knew what had become of the other; only that chance meeting; he might never see her again. Chautauqua was peculiarly a place where people met for a moment, then lost each other, perhaps for all the rest of the time. "I may never see her again," Evan Roberts thought, "but I am glad that I said a word to her. I hope in my soul that she will let Him find her." If Flossy could have heard this unspoken sentence she would have marveled. "Let Him find her!" Why, she was dimly conscious that she was seeking for Him, but no such thought had presented itself as that God was really seeking after her. She went on, still falling behind, and trying to hide the rush of feeling that the simple question had called forth. She was very quiet at the dinner table; she was oblivious to steel forks or the want of spoons; these things that had hitherto filled her life and looked of importance to her had strangely dwindled; she was miserably disappointed; she had looked forward to Chautauqua as a place where she could have such a "nice" time. That word "nice" was a favorite with her, and surely no one could be having a more wretched time than this; and it was not the rain, either, over which she had been miserable all day yesterday, nor her cashmere dress; she didn't care in the least now whether it cleared or not; and as to her dress, she had torn her silk twice, and it was sadly drabbled, but she did not even care for that; she wanted--what? Alas for the daughter of nominally Christian parents, living among all the privileges of a cultured Christian society, she _did not know what the wanted_. Dr. Calkins had one eager listener. If he could have picked out her earnest, wistful eyes among that crowd of upturned faces he would have let old Socrates go, and given himself heart and soul to the leading of this groping soul into the light. As it was he hovered around it, touching the subject here and there, thrilling her with the possibilities stretching out before her; but he was thinking of and talking all the while to those who had reached after and secured this "something" that to her was still a shadow. Now and then the speaker brought the quick tears to her eyes as he referred to those who had followed the teaching of his lips with sympathetic faces and answered the appeal to their hearts with tears; but her tears were different from those--they were the tears of a sick soul, longing for light and help. The entire party ignored the evening meeting. Marion declared that her brain whirled now, so great had been the mental strain; Ruth was loftily indifferent to any plan that could be gotten up, and Eurie's wits were ripe for mischief; Flossy's opinion, of course, was not asked, nobody deeming it possible that she could have the slightest desire to go to meeting. In fact, Eurie put their desertion on the ground that Flossy had been exhausted by the mental effort of the day, and needed to be cheered and petted. She on her part was silent and wearily indifferent; she did not know what to do with her heavy heart, and felt that she might as soon walk down by the lake shore as do anything else; so down to the shore they went, and gave themselves up to the full enjoyment of the novel scene--an evening in the woods, great, glowing lights on every side, great companies of people passing to and fro, boats touching at the wharves and sending up group after group to the central attraction, the grand stand; singing, music by thousands of voices ringing down to them as they loitered under the trees on the rustic seats. "I declare, it must be nice in heaven for a little while." It was Eurie who made this somewhat startling discovery and announcement after a lull had fallen upon their mirth. "Have you been there to see?" illogically asked Marion, as she threw a tiny stone into the water and watched the waves quiver and ripple. Eurie laughed. "Not quite, but this must be a little piece of it--this music, I mean. I am almost tempted to make an effort after the real thing. How exquisitely those voices sound! I'm very certain I should enjoy the music, whether I should be able to get along with the rest of the programme or not. What on earth do you suppose they do there all the time, anyway?" "Where?" "Why, in heaven, of course; that is what I was talking about. I believe you are half asleep, Flossy Shipley; you mustn't go to sleep out here; it isn't quite heaven yet, and you will take cold. Honestly, girls, isn't it a sort of wonderment to you how the people up there can employ their time? In spite of me I cannot help feeling that it must be rather stupid; think of never being able to lie down and take a nap!" "Or read a novel," added Marion. "Isn't that your favorite employment when you are awake, Eurie? I'm sure I don't know much about the occupations of the place; I'm not posted; there is nothing about it laid down in our geography; and, in fact, the people who seem to be expecting to spend their lives there are unaccountably mum about it. I don't at this moment remember hearing any one ever express a downright opinion, and I have always thought it rather queer. I asked Nellie Wheden about it one day when she was going on about her expected tour in Europe. She had bored me to death, making me produce all my geographic and historic lore for her benefit; and suddenly I thought of an expedient for giving myself a little peace and a chance to talk about something else. 'Come, Nellie,' I said, 'one good turn deserves another. I have told you everything I can think of that can possibly be of interest to you about Europe; now give me some information about the other place where you are going. You must have laid up a large stock of information in all these years.'" "What on earth did she say?" Ruth asked, curiously, while Eurie was in great glee over the story. "She was as puzzled as if I had spoken to her in Greek. 'What in the world can you be talking about?' she said. 'I'm not going anywhere else that I know of. My head has been full of Europe for the last year, and I haven't talked nor thought about any other journey.' Well, I enlightened her as to her expectations, and what do you think she said? You wouldn't be able to guess, so I'll tell you. She said I was irreverent, and that no one who respected religion would ask such questions as that, and she actually went off in a huff over my wickedness. So, naturally, I have been chary of trying to get information on such 'reverent' subjects ever since." Whereupon all these silly young ladies laughed long and heartily over this silly talk. Flossy laughed with the rest, partly from the force of habit and partly because this recital struck her as very foolish. Every one of them saw its inconsistent side as plainly as though they had been Christians for years; more plainly, perhaps, for it is very strange what blinded eyes we can get under certain systems of living the religious faith. Presently the society of these young ladies palled upon themselves, and they agreed one with another that they had been very silly not to go to meeting, and that another evening they would at least discover what was being said before they lost the opportunity for getting seats. "Stupid set!" said Eurie "who imagined that the crowd would do such a silly thing as to rush to that meeting, as if there were nothing else to do but to go flying off for a seat the moment the bell rings? I thought there would be crowds out here, and we would make some pleasant acquaintances, and perhaps get a chance to take a boat ride." And so, in some disgust, they voted to bring the first day at Chautauqua to a sudden close and try tent life. Silence and darkness reigned in the tent where our girls had disposed of themselves. It was two hours since they had come in. It took more than an hour, and much talking and more laughter, not to mention considerable grumbling on Ruth's part, before everything was arranged to their satisfaction--or, as Ruth expressed it, "to their endurance" for the night. Three of the girls were sleeping quietly, their fun and their discontents alike forgotten, but Flossy tossed wearily on her bed, turned her pillow and turned it back again, and sought in vain for a quiet spot. With the silence and the darkness her unrest had come upon her again with tenfold force. She felt no nearer a solution of her trouble than she had in the morning; in fact, the pain had deepened all day, and the only definite feeling she had about it now was that she could not live so; that something must be done; that she must get back to her home and her old life, where she might hope to forged it all and be at peace again. Into the quiet of the night came a firm, manly step, and the movement of chairs right by her side, so at least it seemed to her. All unused to tent life as she was a good deal startled she raised herself on one elbow and looked about her in a frightened way before she realized that the sounds came from the tent next to theirs. Before her thoughts were fairly composed they were startled anew; this time with the voice of prayer. Very distinct the words were on this still night air; every sentence as clear as though it had really been spoken in the same tent. Now, there was something peculiar in the voice; clearly cut and rounded the words were, like that of a man very decided, very positive in his views, and very earnest in his life. There was also a modulation to the syllables that Flossy could not describe, but that she felt And she knew that she had heard that voice twice before, once on the boat the evening before and once as they jostled together in the crowd on their way to dinner. She felt sorry to be unwittingly a listener to a prayer that the maker evidently thought was being heard only by his Savior. But she could not shut out the low and yet wonderfully distinct sentences, and presently she ceased to wish to, for it became certain that he was praying for her. He made it very plain. He called her "that young girl who said to-day that she could not think of thee as her Father; who seems to want to be led by the hand to thee." Did you ever hear yourself prayed for by an earnest, reverent, pleading voice? Then perhaps you know something of Flossy's feelings as she lay there in the darkness. She had never heard any one pray for her before. So destitute was she of real friends that she doubted much whether there were one person living who had ever before earnestly asked God to make her his child. That was what this prayer was asking. She lifted the white sleeve of her gown, and wiped away tear after tear as the pleading voice went on. Very still she was. It seemed to her that she must not lose a syllable of the prayer, for here at last was the help she had been seeking, blindly, and without knowing that she sought, all this long, heavy day. Help? Yes, plain, clear, simple help. How small a thing it seemed to do! "Show her her need of thee, blessed Jesus," thus the prayer ran. And oh! _hadn't_ he showed her that? It flashed over her troubled brain then and there: "It is Jesus that I need. It is he who can help me. I believe he can. I believe he is the only one who can." This was her confession of faith. "Then lead her to ask the help of thee that she needs. Just to come to thee as the little child would go to her mother, and say, 'Jesus, take me; make me thy child.'" Only that? Was it such a little, _little_ thing to do? How wonderful! The praying ceased, and the young man who had remembered the stranger to whom God had given him a chance to speak during the day, all unconscious that other ear than God's had heard his words of prayer, laid himself down to quiet sleep. Flossy lay very still. The rain had ceased during the afternoon, and now some solemn stars were peeping in through the chinks in the tent and the earth was moon-lighted. She raised herself on one elbow and looked around on her companions. How soundly asleep they were! Another few minutes of stillness and irresolution. Then a white-robed figure slipped softly and quietly to the floor and on her knees, and a low-whispered voice repeated again and again these words: "Jesus, take me; make me thy child." It wasn't very long afterward that she lay quietly down on her pillow, and earth went on exactly as if nothing at all had happened--knew nothing at all about it--even the sleeper by her side was totally ignorant of the wonderful tableau that had been acted all about her that evening. But if Eurie Mitchell could have had one little peep into heaven just then what _would_ her entranced soul have thought of the music and the enjoyment there? For what _must_ it be like when there is "joy in the presence of the angels in heaven"? CHAPTER IX. FLEEING. The next morning every one of them ran away from the meeting. The way of it was this: as they came up from breakfast and stood at the tent-door discussing the question whether they would go to the early meeting, Mrs. Duane Smithe passed, glanced up at them carelessly, then looked back curiously, and at last turned and came back to them. "I beg pardon," she said, "but isn't this Miss Erskine? It surely is! I thought I recognized your face, but couldn't be sure in these strange surroundings. And you have a party with you? How delightful! We were just wishing for more ladies. I really don't think it is going to rain much to-day, and we have a lovely prospect in view. You must certainly join us." Then followed introductions and explanations, Mrs. Duane Smithe was a Saratoga acquaintance of Ruth Erskine, and was _en route_ for Jamestown for the day. "Where is Jamestown?" queried Eurie, who was a very useful member of society, in that she never pretended knowledge that she did not possess, so that you had only to keep still and listen to the answers that were made to her questions in order to know a good deal. "It is at the head of this lovely little lake, or at the foot, I'm sure I don't know which way to call it, and it is nothing of consequence, of course, but the ride thither is said to be charming, and we are going to take a lunch, and picnic in a private way, just for the fun of getting together, you know, in a more social manner than one can accomplish in this wilderness of people. Isn't it a queer place, Miss Erskine? I am dying to know how you happened to come here." Ruth arched her eyebrows. "I confess it is almost as strange as what brought _you_ here," she said, smiling. "I can answer that in an instant. I have a ridiculous nephew here, who thought that a week of meetings from morning to night would be just a trifle short of paradise, so what did he do but smuggle us all off this way. I shall find it a bore, of course, and the only way to get through with it is to have little pleasure excursions like the one we propose to-day." Now you know as much about Mrs. Duane Smithe as though I should write about her for a week. It is strange how little we have to say before we have explained to people not only our intellectual but our moral status. Our girls, you will remember, had as little regard for the meetings as girls could have, and they had by this time begun to feel themselves in a strange atmosphere, without acquaintances or gentlemanly attentions, so it took almost no persuasion at all to induce them to join Mrs. Smithe's party, composed of two young ladies and four young gentlemen. It would be difficult to explain to you what a disappointment the decision to spend the day in frolic, instead of going to the meetings, was to Flossy. All the morning her heart had been in a great flutter of happiness over the beautiful day that stretched out before her. To meet those earnest, eager people again, to hear those hymns, to hear the voice of prayer all about her, to hear the constant allusions that were so strange and so saddening to her yesterday, and that now she understood, how blessed it would be! She had gone about the bewilderments of her toilet in a tent with a serenely happy face, and almost unawares had hummed the refrain of a tune that had already shown itself a favorite at Chautauqua. "Flossy is like herself this morning," Eurie said, as she heard the happy little song. "I think she has recovered from her home-sickness." Tents are not convenient places in which to make private remarks. Flossy overheard this one and smiled to herself. Yes, she had gotten over her home-sickness--she had found home. She gave a little exclamation of dismay as she heard the plannings for the day, and said: "But, Ruth, what about the meetings?" "Well," Ruth had said, with her most provokingly nonchalant air, "I haven't made any inquiry, but I presume they will continue them all day just the same as if we were here. I don't _think_ they will change the programme on our account." And Eurie had added, mischievously: "Flossy is afraid it is not the aristocratic thing to do, not to stay to all the meetings." "Oh, as to that," Mrs. Smithe had said (she was one of those interesting people who always take remarks seriously), "I assure you it is what the first people on the ground are doing. Of course none of them would be so absurd as to think of attending meetings all the time. The brain wouldn't endure such a strain." "Of course not," Marion had answered with gravity, "My brain is already very tired. I think yours must be exhausted." Flossy meditated a daring resolution to stay behind and take her "rest" in the way she coveted; but the impossibility of explaining what would appear to the others as merely an ill-natured freak, and occasion no end of talk, deterred her, and with slow, reluctant steps she followed the merry group down to the wharf. If those people had stopped long enough to think of it, this disposal of themselves would have had its ludicrous side. Certainly it was a strange fancy to run away twenty miles with lunches done up in paper in search of a picnic, when Chautauqua was one great picnic ground, stretching out before them in beauty and convenience. But the entire group belonged to that class of people for whom the fancy of the moment, whatever it may be, has infinite charms. There was plenty of room on the Colonel Phillips. Very few people were traveling in that direction. "It is really queer," the Captain was overheard to say, "to take a party _away_ from the grounds at this hour of the day." "What an enthusiastic set of people they are about here," Eurie said to Mr. Rawson, one of Mrs. Smithe's party, as they paced the deck together. "The people all talk and act as though there was nowhere to go and nothing to do but attend those meetings. For my part it is a real relief to have a change in the programme." "Do you find it so?" he asked. "Well, now, I don't agree with you. I think this proceeding is a real bore. My respected aunt is always getting up absurd freaks, and this is one of them, and the worst one, in my opinion, that she has had for some time. I wanted to go to those meetings to-day--some of them, at least. One isn't obliged to be there every minute. But it looks badly to run away." Eurie eyed him closely. "Are you the 'good nephew' that your aunt said thought these meetings only a step below paradise?" she asked, at last. "I wonder you would consent to come." Mr. Rawson flushed deeply. "I am not the 'good nephew' at all," he said, trying to laugh. "The 'good one' wouldn't come. My aunt tried all her powers of persuasion on him in vain. But the truth is her eloquence, or her persistence, proved too much for me, though I don't like the looks of it, and I don't feel the pleasure of it, and I am afraid I shall make anything but an agreeable addition to the party. Now that is being frank, isn't it, when I am walking the deck with a young lady?" "I don't see why that circumstance should make it a surprising thing that you are frank. But I am very sorry for you; perhaps you might prevail on the Captain to put you off now, and let you swim back; you could get there in time for the sermon. Is there to be a sermon? What _is_ it you are so anxious to hear?" "All of it," he said gloomily. "I beg your pardon for being in so disagreeable a mood; it is defrauding you out of some of your expected pleasure to have a dismal companion. But as I have commenced by being frank I may as well continue. I am dissatisfied with myself. I ought not to have come on this excursion. The truth is, I meant to make Chautauqua a help to me. I need the help badly enough. I am in the rush and whirl of business all the time at home. This is the only two weeks in the year that I am free, and I wanted to make it a great spiritual help to me. I know very well that merely hovering around in such an atmosphere as that at Chautauqua is a help to the Christian, and I came with the full intention of taking in all that I could get of this sort of inspiration, and it chafes me that so early in the meeting I have been led away against my inclinations by a little pressure that I might have resisted, and done no harm to any one. My cousin had the same sort of influence brought to bear on him, and it had no more effect on him than it would on a stone." He stopped, and seemed to give Eurie a chance to answer, but she was not inclined, and he added, as if he had just thought his words an implied reproach: "I can understand how, to you young ladies of comparative leisure, with plenty of time to cultivate the spiritual side of your natures, it should seem an unnecessary and perhaps a wearisome thing to attend all these meetings; but you can not understand what it is to be in the whirl of business life, never having time to think, hardly having time to pray, and to get away from it all and go to heaven, as it were, for a fortnight, is something to be coveted by us as a great help." Once more he waited for Eurie's answer, but it was very different from what he had seemed to expect. "You might just as well talk to me in the Greek language; I should understand quite as well what you have been saying; I don't think _I have_ any spiritual side to my nature; at least it has never been cultivated if I have; and Chautauqua to me is just the place in which to have a good free easy time; go where I like and stay as long as I like; and for once in my life not be bound by conventional forms. If heaven is anything like that I shouldn't object to it; but I'm sure your and my idea of it would differ. There, I've been frank now, and shocked you, I know. I see it in every line of your face. Poor fellow! I don't know what you will do, for there isn't a single one of us who has the least idea what you mean by that sort of talk, unless you have some young ladies of a different type in your party, and from their manner I rather doubt it." She had shocked him. He looked not only pained but puzzled. "I am very sorry," he stammered. "I mean surprised. Yes, and disappointed. Of course I am that. I think I had imagined that it was only Christians who could be attracted to Chautauqua at all; I meant to come to stay through all the services." "Your aunt, for instance?" Eurie said, inquiringly. "My aunt is a Christian," he answered, "and a sincere one, too, though I see for some reason you don't think so. There are degrees in Christianity, Miss Mitchell, just as there are in amiability, or culture, or beauty." "Mr. Rawson!" called a voice from the other end at this moment, and he in obedience to the call found Eurie a seat near some of her party and went away, only stopping to say, in low tones: "I am sorry it is all 'Greek' to you; you would enjoy understanding it, I am sure." It so happened that those two people did not exchange another word together that day, but Eurie had got her thrust when and where she least expected it. She had taken it for granted that not a single fanatic was of their party. In the secret of her wise heart she denominated all the earnest people at Chautauqua fanatics, and all the half-hearted people hypocrites. Only she, who stood outside and felt nothing, was sincere and wise. Meantime Marion had undertaken a strange task. Mr. Charlie Flint was the gentleman who had drawn his chair near her, and said, as he drew a long breath: "It is exceedingly pleasant to breathe air once more that isn't heavy with psalm singing I think they are running that thing a little too steep over there. Who imagined that they were going to have meeting every minute in the day and evening, and give nobody a chance to breathe?" "Have they exhausted you already?" Marion asked. "Let me see, this is the morning of the second day, is it not?" "Oh, as to myself, I was exhausted before I commenced it. I am only speaking a word for the lunatics who think they enjoy it. I am one of the victims to our cousin's whim. He expects to get me converted here, I think, or something of that sort." "I wouldn't be afraid of it," Marion said, in disgust. "I don't believe there is the least danger." Mr. Charlie chose to consider this as a compliment, and bowed and smiled, and said: "Thanks. Now tell me why, please." "You don't look like that class of people who are affected in that way." He was wonderfully interested, and begged at once to know why. Marion had it in her heart to say, "Because they all look as though they had some degree of brain as well as body," but even she had a little regard left for feelings; so she contented herself with saying, savagely: "Oh, they, as a rule, are the sort of people who think there is something in life worth doing and planning for, and you look as though that would be too much trouble." Now, Mr. Charlie by no means liked to be considered devoid of energy, so he said: "Oh, you mistake. I think there are several things worth doing. But this eternal going to meeting, and whining over one's soul, is not to my taste." "You think that it is more worth your while to take ladies out to ride and walk, and carry their parasols and muffs for them, and things of that sort. Since we are made for the purpose of staying here and showing our fine clothes for all eternity, of course it is foolish to have anything to do with one's soul, that can only last for a few years or so!" She hardly realized herself the intense scorn there was in her voice, and as for Charlie Flint he muttered to himself: "Upon my word, she is one of them; of the bitterest sort, too! What in creation is she doing here? Why didn't she stay there and preach?" CHAPTER X. HOW THE "FLITTING" ENDED. As for Ruth Erskine, if she had been asked whether she was enjoying the day, she would hardly have known what answer to make; she could not even tell why the excursion was not in every respect all that it had promised in the morning. She had no realization of how much the atmosphere of the day before lingered around her, and made her notice the contrast between the people of yesterday and the people of to-day. Mrs. Smithe, if she were a Christian, as her nephew insisted, was one of the most unfortunate specimens of that class for Ruth Erskine to meet; because she was a woman who entered into pleasure and fashion, and entertainments of all sorts, with zest and energy and only in matters of religious interest seemed to lose all life and zeal. Now Ruth Erskine, calm as a summer morning herself over all matters pertaining to the souls of people in general, and her own in particular, was yet exceedingly fond of seeing other people act in a manner that she chose to consider consistent with their belief; therefore she despised Mrs. Smithe for what she was pleased to term her "hypocrisy." At the same time, while at Saratoga, she had quite enjoyed her society. They rode together on fine mornings, sipped their "Congress" together before lunch, and attended hops together in the evenings. Now the reason why Mrs. Smithe's society had so suddenly palled upon her, and the words that she was pleased to call "conversation" become such vapid things, Ruth did not know, and did not for one instant attribute to Chautauqua; and yet that meeting had already stamped its impression upon her. From serene, indifferent heights she liked to look down upon and admire earnestness; therefore Chautauqua, despite all her disgust over the common surroundings and awkward accommodations, had pleased her fancy and arrested her attention more than she herself realized. It was her fate to be thrown almost constantly with Mrs. Smithe during the day, and before the afternoon closed she was surfeited. She heartily wished herself back to the grounds, and found herself wondering what they were singing, and whether the service of song was really very interesting. One episode in her day had interested her, and she could not tell whether it had most amused or annoyed her. One of their party was conversing with a gentleman as she came up. She had just time to observe that he was young and fine-looking, when the two turned to her, and she was introduced to the stranger. "You are from Chautauqua?" he said, speaking rapidly and earnestly. "Grand meeting, isn't it? Going to be better than last year, I think. Were you there? No? Then you don't know what a treat you are to have. I'm very sorry to lose to-day. It has been a good day, I know. The programme was rich; but a matter of business made it necessary to be away. It is unfortunate for me that I am so near home. If I were two or three hundred miles away where the business couldn't reach me, I should get more benefit. Miss Erskine, what is your opinion of the direct spiritual results of this gathering? I do not mean upon Christians. No one, of course, can doubt its happy influence upon our hearts and lives. But I mean, are you hopeful as to the reaching of many of the unconverted, or do you consider its work chiefly among us?" Such a volley of words? They fairly poured forth! And the speaker was so intensely in earnest, and so assured in his use of that word "we," as if it were a matter that was entirely beyond question that she was one of the magic "we." She did not know how to set out to work to enlighten him. In fact, she gave little thought to that part of the matter, but, instead, fell to wondering what _was_ her idea--whether she did expect to see results of any sort from the great gathering, and that being the case, what she expected? "Spiritual results," she said to herself, and a smile hovered over her face--what _were_ "spiritual results?" She knew nothing about them. _Were_ there any such things? Eurie Mitchell, had such a question occurred to her, would have asked it aloud at once and enjoyed the sense of shocking her auditor. But Ruth did not like to shock people; she was too much of a lady for that. "What proportion of that class of people are here, do you think?" she said, at last. "Are not the most of them professing Christians?" "Precisely the question that interests me. I should really like to know. I wonder if there is no way of coming at it? We might call for a rising vote of all who loved the Lord; could we not? Wouldn't it be a beautiful sight?--a great army standing up for him! I incline to your opinion that the most of them are Christians, or at least a large proportion. But I should very much like to know just how far this idea had touched the popular heart, so as to call out those who are not on the Lord's side." "They would simply have come for the fun of the thing, or the novelty of it," she said, feeling amused again that almost of necessity she was speaking of herself and using the pronoun "they." What would this gentleman think if he should bring about that vote of which he spoke and happen to see her among the seated ones? "'A wolf in sheep's clothing' he would suppose me to be," she said to herself. "But I am sure I have not told him that I belong to the 'we' at all. If he chooses to assume things in that way, it is not my fault." Apparently he answered both her expressed sentence and her thought: "I do not think so," he said, earnestly. "I doubt if any have come simply for fun or for novelty. There are better places in which to gratify both tastes. I believe there is more actual interest in this subject, even among the unconverted, than many seem to think. They are reasonable beings. They must think, and many of them, no doubt, think to good purpose. It may not be clear even to themselves for what they have come; But I believe in some instances, to say the least, it will prove to have been the call of the Spirit." Again Ruth felt herself forced to smile, not at the earnestness--she liked that, but there was her party, and she rapidly reviewed them--Marion, with her calm, composed, skeptical views, indifferent alike to the Christian or unchristian way of doing things; Eurie, who lived and breathed for the purpose of having what in wild moments she called "a high time;" Flossy with her dainty wardrobe, and her dainty ways, and her indifference to everything that demanded thought or care. Which of them had been "called by the Spirit"? There was herself, and for the time she gave a little start. What had _she_ come to Chautauqua for? After all she was the only one who seemed to be absolutely without a reason for being there. Marion's avowed intention had been to make some money; Eurie's to have a free and easy time; Flossy had come as she did everything else, because "they" did. But now, what about Ruth Erskine? She was not wont to do as others did, unless it happened to please her. What had been her motive? It was strange to feel that she really did not know. What if this strange speaking young man were right, and she had been singled out by the Spirit of God! The thought gave her a thrill, not of pleasure, but of absolute, nervous fear. What did she know of that gracious Spirit? What did she know of Christ? To her there was no beauty in him. She desired simply to be left alone. She was silent so long that her companion gave her a very searching review from under his heavy eyebrows, and then his face suddenly lighted as if he had solved a problem. "May I venture to prophesy that you have some friend here whom you would give much to feel had been drawn here by the very Spirit of God?" He spoke the words eagerly and with earnestness, but with utmost respect, and added, "If I am right I will add the name to my list for special prayer. Do not think me rude, please. I know how pleasant it is to feel there is a union of desire in prayer. I have enjoyed that help often. We do not always need to know who those are for whom we pray. God knows them, and that is the needful thing. Good-evening. I am glad to have met you. It is pleasant to have additions to our list of fellow-heirs." How bright his smile was as he said those words! And how thoroughly manly and yet how strikingly childlike had been his words and his trust! Ruth watched him as he walked rapidly away to overtake a friend who had just passed them. Do you remember a certain gentleman, Harold Wayne by name, who had walked with them, walked especially with Ruth, down to the depot on the morning of departure, who had toyed with her fan and complained that he could not imagine what they were going to bury themselves out there for? Ruth thought of him now, and the contrast between his lazily exquisite air and drawling words and the fresh, earnest life that glowed in this young man's veins brought a positive quiver of disgust over her handsome face. There was no shadow of a smile upon it now. Instead, she felt a nameless dread. How strange the talk had been! To what had she committed herself by her silence and his blunders? _She_ pray for any one! What a queer thing that would be to do. _She_ anxious that any one should be led by the spirit of God! The spirit of God frightened her. For whom would this young man pray? Not certainly for any friend of hers; yet he would put the name of some stranger in his prayers. He was thoroughly in earnest, and he was the sort of a man to do just what he said. God, he had said, would understand whom he meant. For whom would God count those prayers? For her? And that thought also frightened her. "They are all lunatics, I verily believe, from the leaders to the followers," she said in irritation, and then she wished herself at home. During the remainder of the day she was engaged in trying to shake off the impression that the stranger had left upon her. Go where she would, say what she might, and she really exerted herself to be brilliant and entertaining, there followed her around the memory of those great, earnest eyes when he said, "I will add the name to my list for special prayer." What name? He knew hers. He would say, doubtless, "Her friend for whom she was anxious." But the one to whom he prayed would know there was no such person. What would _He_ do with that earnest prayer? For she knew it would be earnest. She was not used to theological mazes, and if ever a girl was heartily glad when a day of pleasuring was over, and the boat had touched again at the Chautauqua wharf, it was Ruth Erskine. As for Flossy, it so happened that Charlie Flint, after Marion had startled and disgusted him, sought refuge with her. She was pretty and dainty, and did not look strong-minded; not in the least as if her forte was to preach, so he made ready to have a running fire of small talk with her. This had been Flossy's power in conversation for several years. He had judged her rightly there. But do you remember with whom her morning had commenced? Do you know that all the day thus far she had seemed to herself to be shadowed by a glorious presence, who walked steadily beside her, before her, on either hand, to shield, and help and bless? It was very sweet to Flossy, and she was very happy; happier than she had ever been in her life. She smiled to herself as the others chatted, she hummed in undertone the refrain of a hymn that she had caught in a near tent that morning: "I am so glad that Jesus loves me." _Wasn't_ she glad! Was there anything better to find in all this world than the assurance of this truth? She felt that the thought was large enough to fill heaven itself. After that, what hope was there for Charlie Flint and his small talk? Still, he tried it, and if ever he did hard work it was during that talk. Flossy was sweet and cheery, but preoccupied. There was a tantalizingly pleasant smile on her face, as if her thoughts might be full of beauty, but none of them seemed to appear in her words. She did not flush over his compliments, nor was she disturbed at his bantering. He got out of all patience. "I beg pardon," he said, in his flippantly gallant way, "but I'm inclined to think you are very selfish; you are having your enjoyment all to yourself. To judge by the face which you have worn all day your heart is bubbling over with it, and yet you think about it instead of giving me a bit." Flossy looked up with a shy, sweet smile that was very pleasant to see, and the first blush he had been able to call forth that day glowed on her cheeks. Was it true? she questioned within herself. Was she being selfish in this, her new joy? Ought she to try to tell him about it? Would he understand? and could she speak about such things, anyway? She didn't know how. She shrank from it, and yet perhaps it would be so pleasant to him to know. No, on the whole, she did not think it would be pleasant. They had not talked of the meetings nor of religious matters at all; but for all that the subtle magnetism that there is about some people had told her that Charlie Flint would not sympathize in her new hopes and joys. Well, if that were so, ought she not all the more to tell him, so that he might know that to one more person Christ had proved himself a reality, and not the spiritual fancy that he used to seem to her? Flossy, you see, was taking long strides that first day of her Christian experience, and was reaching farther than some Christians reach who have been practicing for years. Something told her that here was a chance of witnessing for the one who had just saved her. She thought these thoughts much more quickly than it has taken me to write them, and then she spoke: "Have I been selfish? I do not know but I have. It is all so utterly new that I hardly know how I am acting; but it is true that my heart has been as light as a bird's all day. The truth is, I have found a friend here at Chautauqua who has just satisfied me." "Have you indeed!" said Mr. Charlie, giving, in spite of his well-bred effort to quell it, an amused little laugh. And in his heart he said, "What a ridiculous little mouse she is! I wonder if they have the wedding day set already, and if she will announce it to me?" Then aloud: "How very fortunate you have been! I wish I could find a friend so easily as that! I wonder if I am acquainted with him? Would you mind telling me his name?" And then Flossy answered just one word in a low voice that was tremulous with feeling, and at the same time wonderfully clear, and with a touch of joy in it that would not be suppressed, "Jesus." Then it was that the exquisite young fop at her side was utterly dumbfounded. He could not remember ever before in his life being so completely taken by surprise and dismay that he had not a word to answer. But this time he said not a single word. He did not even attempt an answer, but paced the length of the deck beside her in utter and confused silence, then abruptly seated her, still in silence, and went hurriedly away. Flossy, occupied with the rush of feeling that this first witnessing for the new name called forth, gave little heed to his manner, and was indifferent to his departure. He was right as to one thing. Her love was still selfish: it was so new and sweet to her that it occupied all her heart, and left no room as yet for the outside world who knew not this friend of hers. They were almost at the dock now, and the glimmer of the Chautauqua lights was growing into a steady brightness. As she stood leaning over the boat's side and watching the play of the silver waves, there brushed past her one who seemed to be very quietly busy. One hand was full of little leaflets, and he was dropping one on each chair and stool as he passed. She glanced at the one nearest her and read the title: "The True Friend," and it brought an instant flush of brightness to her face to understand those words and feel that the Friend was hers. Then she glanced at the worker and recognized his face. He had prayed for her. She could not forget _that_ face. It was plain also that his eyes fell on her. He knew her, and something in her face prompted the low-toned sentence as he paused before her: "You have found the Father, I think." And Flossy, with brightening eyes, answered, quickly, "Yes, I have." And then the boat touched at the wharf, and the crowd elbowed their way out. There were two opinions expressed about that excursion by two gentlemen as they made their way up the avenue. One of the gentleman was clerical, and spectacled, and solemn. "There go a boat-load of excursionists," he said to his companion. "They come, as likely as not delegates, from some church or Sabbath-school, and the way they do their work is to go off for a frolic and be gone all day. I saw them when I left this morning. That is a specimen of a good deal of the dissipation that is going on here under the guise of religion. I don't know about it; sometimes I am afraid more harm than good will be done." The other speaker was Mr. Charlie Flint, and as he rushed past these two he said to _his_ companion, "Confound it all! Talk about getting away from these meetings! It's no use; it can't be done. A fellow might just as well stay here and run every time the bell rings. I heard more preaching to-day on this excursion than I did yesterday; and a good deal more astonishing preaching, too." CHAPTER XI. HEART TOUCHES. Marion gave her hair an energetic twist as she made her toilet the next morning, and announced her determination. "This day is to be devoted conscientiously to the legitimate business that brought me to this region. Yesterday's report will have to be copied from the Buffalo papers, or made out of my own brain. But I'm going to work to-day. I have a special interest in the programme for this morning. The subject for the lecture just suits me." "What is it?" Eurie asked, yawning, and wishing there was another picnic in progress. Neither heart nor brain were particularly interested in Chautauqua. "Why, it is 'The Press and the Sunday-school.' Of course the press attracts me, as I intend to belong to the staff when I get through teaching young ideas." "But what about the Sunday-school?" Ruth questioned, with a calm voice. "You can not be expected to have any special interest in that. You never go to such an institution, do you?" "I was born and brought up in one. But that isn't the point. The subject to-day is Sunday-school literature, I take it. The subject is strung together, 'The Press and the Sunday-school,' without any periods between them, and I'm exceedingly interested in that, for just as soon as I get time I'm going to write a Sunday-school book." This announcement called forth bursts of laughter from all the girls. "Why not?" Marion said, answering the laugh. "I hope you don't intimate that I can't do it. I don't know anything easier to do. You just have to gather together the most improbable set of girls and boys, and rack your brains for things that they never _did_ do, or _could_ do, or _ought_ to do, and paste them all together with a little 'good talk,' and you have your book, as orthodox as possible. Do any of you know anything about Dr. Walden? He is the speaker. I presume he is as dry as a stick, and won't give me a single idea that I can weave into my book. I'm going to begin it right away. Girls, I'm going to put you all in, only I can't decide which shall be the good one. Flossy, do you suppose there is enough imagination in me to make you into a book saint? They always have a saint, you know." There was a pretty flush on Flossy's cheek, but she answered, brightly: "You might try, Marion, and I'll engage to practice on the character, if it is really and truly a good one." "I had a glimpse of Dr. Walden," Eurie said, answering the question. "He was pointed out to me yesterday. He looked dignified enough to write a theological review. _I'm_ not going to hear him. What's the use? I came for fun, and I'm going in search of it all this day. I have studied the programme, and there is just one thing that I'm going to attend, and that is Frank Beard's 'chalk talk.' I know that will be capital, and he won't bore one with a sermon poked in every two minutes." So the party divided for the day. Marion and Ruth went to the stand, and Flossy strayed to a side tent, and what happened to her you shall presently hear. Eurie wandered at her fancy, and enjoyed a "stupid time," so she reported. Marion's pencil moved rapidly over the paper almost as soon as Dr. Walden commenced, until presently she whispered in dismay to Ruth: "I do wish he would say something to leave out! This letter will be fearfully long. How sharp he is, isn't he?" Then she scribbled again. Ruth had the benefit of many side remarks. "My!" Marion said, with an accompanying grimace. "What an army of books! All for Sunday-schools. Three millions given out every Sunday! Does that seem possible! Brother Hart, I'm afraid you are mistaken. Didn't he say that was Dr. Hart's estimate, Ruthie? There is certainly a good chance for mine, if so many are needed every week. I shall have to go right to work at it. What if I _should_ write one, Ruth, and what if it should _take_, and all the millions of Sunday-schools want it at once! Just as likely as not. I am a genius. They never know it until afterward. I shall certainly put you in, Ruthie, in some form. So you are destined to immortality, remember." "I wish you wouldn't whisper so much," whispered back Ruth. "People are looking at us in an annoyed way. What is the matter with you, Marion? I never knew you to run on in such an absurd way. That is bad enough for Eurie!" "I'm developing," whispered Marion. "It is the 'reflex influence of Chautauqua' that you hear so much about." Then she wrote this sentence from Dr. Walden's lips: "Every author whose books go into the Sabbath-school is as much a teacher in that school as though he had classes there. A good book is a book that will aid the teacher in his work of bringing souls to Christ. I have known the earnest teaching of months to be defeated by one single volume of the wrong kind being placed in the hands of the scholar." Suddenly Marion sat upright, slipped her pencil and note-book into her pocket, and wrote no more. A sentence in that address had struck home. This determination to enter the lists as a writer was not all talk. She had long ago decided to turn her talents in that direction as the easiest thing in the line of literature, whither her taste ran. She had read many of the standard Sunday-school books; read them with amused eyes and curling lips, and felt entirely conscious that she could match them in intellectual power and interest, and do nothing remarkable then. But there rang before her this sentence: "Every author whose books go into the Sabbath-school is as much a teacher in that school as though he had classes there." A teacher in the Sabbath-school! Actually a _teacher_. She had never intended that. She had no desire to be a hypocrite. She had no desire to lead astray. _Could_ she write a book that young people ought to bring from the Sabbath-school with them, and have it say nothing about Christ and heaven and the Christian life? Surely she could not be a teacher without teaching of these things. _Must_ she teach them incidentally? Was saying nothing about them speaking against them? Dr. Walden more than intimated this. "After all," she said, speaking to Ruth as the address closed, "I don't think I shall commence my book yet." "Why?" "Oh, because I am sacred." Then, impatiently, after a moment's silence, during which they changed their seats, "I'm disgusted with Chautauqua! It is going to spoil me. I feel my ambition oozing out at the ends of my toes, instead of my fingers as I had designed. Everybody is so awfully solemn, and has so much to say about eternity, it seems we can't whisper to each other without starting something that doesn't even end in eternity. But, wasn't he logical and eloquent?" "I don't know," Ruth said, absently. And she wondered if Marion knew how true her words were. Ruth had heard scarcely a word of Dr. Walden's address since that last whisper, "So you are destined to immortality, remember." Words spoken in jest, and yet thrilling her through and through with a solemn meaning. She had always known and always believed this. She was no skeptic, yet her heart had never taken it in, with a great throb of anxiety, as it did at that moment. _Was_ she being led of the Spirit of God? The two merely changed their positions and looked about them a little, and then prepared to give attention to the next entertainment, which was a story from Emily Huntington Miller. Marion was the only one who was in the least familiar with her, she being the only one who had felt that absorbing interest in juvenile literature that had led her to keep pace with the times. "I'm disposed to listen to _her_ with all due respect and attention," she said, as she rearranged herself and got out her note-book. "She is one of the few people who seem not to have bidden a solemn farewell to their common sense when they set out to entertain the children. I have read everything she ever wrote, and liked it, too. I set out to make an idol of her in my more juvenile days. I used to think that the height of my ambition would be attained if I could have a long look at her. I'm going to try it to-day, and see if it satisfies me; though we are such aspiring and unsatisfied creatures that I strongly suspect I shall go on reaching out for something else even after _this_ experience." Very little whispering was done after that for some time. Although Marion made light of her youthful dreams, there was a strong feeling of excitement and interest clustering around this first sight of the woman whose name she had known so long; and something in the fair, sweet face and cultured voice fascinated and held her, much as she had fancied in her earlier days would be the case. She frowned when she heard the request to reporters to "lay aside their pencils." She had meant to earn laurels by reporting this delicious bit of imagery, set in between the graver sermons and lectures; but, after all, it was a rest to give herself up to the uninterrupted enjoyment of taking in every word and tone--taking it in for her own private benefit. "The Parish of Fair Haven." How heartily she enjoyed it. The refined and delicate, and yet keen and intense satire underlying the whole quaint original story, was of just the nature to hold and captivate her. She was just in the mood to enjoy it, too. For was it not aimed at that class of people who awakened her own keenest sense of satire--the so-called "Christian world"? She did not belong to it, you know; in her own estimation was entirely without the pale of its sarcasm; stranded on a high and majestic rock of unbelief in everything, and in a condition to be amused at the follies of people who played at belief; and treated what they _played_ was solemn realities as if they were cradle stories or nicely woven fiction. There was no listener in all that crowd who so enjoyed the keen play of wit and the sharp home thrusts as did Marion Wilbur. Ruth was a little undecided what to think; she did not belong to the class who were hit, to be sure, but her father always gave largely to missions whenever the solicitor called on him: she had heard his name mentioned with respect as one of the most benevolent men of the day; she did not quite like the very low and matter-of-course place which Mrs. Miller's view of the mission question gave him. According to the people of Fair Haven, to give one's thousands to the cause was the most commonplace thing in the world--not to do so was to be an inhuman wretch. Ruth didn't quite like it--in truth she was just enough within the circle of modern Christianity to feel herself slightly grazed by the satire. "It is absurd," she said to Marion as they went up the hill. "What is the sense in a woman talking in that way? As if people, were they ever so good and benevolent, could get themselves up in that ridiculous manner! If we live in the world at all we have to have a little regard for propriety. I wonder if she thinks one's entire time and money should be devoted to the heathen?" Marion answered her with spirit. "Oh, don't try to apologize for the folly that is going on in this world in the name of religion! It can't be done, and sensible people only make fools of themselves if they attempt it. There is nothing plainer or more impossible to deny than that church-members give and work and pray for the heathen as though they were a miserable and abominable set of brutes, who ought to be exterminated from the face of the earth, but for whom some ridiculous fanatics called 'missionaries' had projected a wild scheme to do something; and _they_, forsooth, must be kept from starving somehow, even though they had been unmitigated fools; so the paltry collections are doled out, with sarcastic undertones about the 'waste of money,' and the sin of missionaries wearing clothes, and expecting to have things to eat after throwing themselves away. Don't talk to me! I've been to missionary societies; I know all about it. The whole system is one that is exactly calculated to make infidels. I believe Satan got it up, because he knew in just what an abominable way the dear Christians would go at it, and what a horrid farce they would make of it all." "It is a great pity you are not a Christian, Marion. I never come in contact with any one who understands their duty so thoroughly as you appear to, and I think you ought to be practicing." Ruth said this calmly enough. She was not particularly disturbed; she did not belong to them, you know; but for all that she was remotely connected with those who did, and was just enough jarred to make her give this quiet home thrust. Oddly enough it struck Marion as it never had before, although the same idea had been suggested to her by other nettled mortals. It was true that she had realized how the practicing ought to be done, and a vague wish that she _did_ believe in it all, and could work by their professed standard with _all her soul_, flitted over her. Meantime Flossy was being educated. The morning work had touched her from a different standpoint. She had not heard Dr. Walden; instead she had wandered into a bit of holy ground. She began by losing her way. It is one of the easiest things to do at Chautauqua. The avenues cross and recross in an altogether bewildering manner to one not accustomed to newly laid-out cities; and just when one imagines himself at the goal for which he started, lo! there is woods, and nothing else anywhere. Another attempt patiently followed for an hour has the exasperating effect of bringing him to the very point from which he started. Such an experience had Flossy, when by reason of her loitering propensities she became detached from her party, and tried to find her own way to the stand. A whole hour of wandering, then a turn into perfect chaos. She had no more idea where she was than if she had been in the by-ways of London. Clearly she must inquire the way. She looked about her. It was queer to be lost in the woods, and yet be surrounded by tents and people. She stooped and peeped timidly into a tent, the corner of which was raised to admit air, and from which the sound of voices issued. "Come in," said a pleasant voice, and the bright-faced hostess arose from the foot of her bed and came forward with greeting, exactly as though they had been waiting for Flossy all the morning. "Would you like to rest? Come right in, we have plenty of room and the most lovely accommodations," and a silvery laugh accompanied the words, while the little lady whisked a tin basin from a low stool, and dusting it rapidly with her handkerchief proffered her guest a seat, with as graceful an air as though the stool had been an easy-chair upholstered in velvet. The only other sitting-place, the low bed, was full, there being three ladies tucked about on it in various stages of restful work, for they had books and papers strewn about, and each held a pencil poised as if ready for action at a moment. "I'm afraid I intrude," Flossy said, sweetly; "but the truth is, I have lost my friends and my way, and I really am an object of pity, for I have been wandering up hill and down, till my strength is less than it was." "Poor child!" came sympathetically from the bed, spoken by the eldest of the ladies, while another rapidly improvised a fan out of the _Sunday-School Times_, and passed it to her. Meantime Flossy looked about her in secret delight. Something about the air of the tent and the surroundings, and an indefinite something about every one of the ladies, told her as plainly as words could have done that she was among the workers; that she had unwittingly and gracefully slipped behind the scenes, and had been cordially admitted to one of the work-shops of Chautauqua; and there were _so_ many things she wanted to know! CHAPTER XII. FLOSSY AT SCHOOL. She hadn't the least idea who they were, but, like an earnest little diplomatist, she set to work to find out. "I started for the auditorium," she said. "I wanted to hear Dr. Walden, but he has had time to make a long speech and get through since I first started. I think it must be nearly eleven." "No," they said laughing, "it is only half past ten." Her wanderings had not been so long as they seemed; but it was hardly worth while to try to hear anything from him now, she would not be at all likely to get a seat; and, besides, his time was nearly over. She would better wait and go down with them in time for Mrs. Miller. "We were obliged to miss Dr. Walden," the elder lady explained. "We disliked to very much; probably it was as instructive as anything we shall get; but we had work that had to be done, so we ran away." "Do you have to bring work to Chautauqua with you?" Flossy asked, with insinuating sweetness. "How very busy you must be! I would have tried to run away from my work for two weeks if I had been you." The bright little hostess laughed. "Chautauqua _makes_ work," she said, "and somebody has to get ready for it. This lady beside me expects an overwhelming Sabbath class here, and much time has to be given to the lesson. We lesser mortals are ostensibly going to help her, but in reality we are going to look and see how she does it." "Have you found out?" Flossy asked in a little tremor of delight. This was what she wanted, to know how to do it all. The lady who had been pointed out as teacher answered her quickly, so far as her words could be said to be an answer: "Are you a Sabbath-school teacher?" "No," Flossy said, flushing and feeling like a naughty child whose curiosity had led her into mischief. "No, I am not _anything_, but I want to be; I don't know how to work at all in any way, but I want to learn." "Are you looking for work to do for the Master?" the same lady asked, with a sweet cheery voice and smile, not at all as if this were a subject which she must touch cautiously. "Yes," Flossy said, her cheeks all in a glow. "She did not know how to work, she had but just found out that she wanted to; indeed she had but yesterday known anything of Him." Then this unusual company of ladies came with one consent and eager eyes and voices and took her hand, and said how glad they were to welcome her to the ranks. They knew she would love the work, and the rewards were so sure and so precious. All this was new and strange and delightful to Flossy. Then they began each eagerly to tell about their work; they were all infant or primary class teachers, and all enthusiasts. Who that has to do with the teaching of little children and attains to any measure of success but is largely gifted with this same element? They had been talking over and preparing their lesson together, and they talked it over again before the bewildered Flossy, who had no idea that there was such a wonderful story in all the Bible as they were developing out of a few bare details. "We had just reached the vital point of the entire lesson," explained the leader, "the place where every true teacher needs most help; where, having arranged all her facts and got them in martial order in her brain, she wants to know the best way of making those facts of practical _present_ service to the little children who will be before her, and at this point I think every teacher needs to go to the fountain head for help. We were just going to pray; you would like, perhaps, to join us for just a few moments." "If she wouldn't intrude," Flossy said, timidly, in a tremor of satisfaction; and then for the first time in her life she bowed with a company of her own sex, and heard the simple earnest voice of prayer. The words were startlingly direct and simple, and Flossy, who had been full of mysterious awe on this question, and who much doubted whether her timid whispers alone in her tent could have been called prayer, was reassured and comforted. If _this_ were prayer, it was simply talking in a sweet, natural voice, and in the most simple and natural language, with a dear and wise friend. It was the most quiet and yet the most confident way of asking for just what one wanted, and nothing more. It was what Flossy needed. She took long strides in her religious education there on her knees; and as they went out from that tent and down the hill to the meeting, there was born in her heart an eager determination to enter the lists as a Sabbath-school teacher the very first opportunity, and to pray her lesson into her heart, having done what she could to get it into her head. If her anxious and well-nigh discouraged pastor could have been gifted with supernatural and prophetic vision, and could have seen that resolve, and, looking ahead, the fruit that was to be borne from it, how would his anxious soul have thanked God and taken courage! In this mood came Flossy to listen to the story of "The Parish of Fair Haven," as it flowed down to her in Mrs. Miller's smooth-toned musical voice. One who comes from her knees to listen is sure to find the seed if it has been put in. Flossy found hers. Often in the course of her young life she had been at church and sat in the attitude of listener while a missionary sermon was preached. She had heard, perhaps, ten sentences from those sermons, not ten consecutive sentences, but words scattered here and there through the whole; from these she had gathered that there was to be a collection taken for the cause of Missions. Just where the money was to go, and just what was to be done with it when it arrived, what had been accomplished by missionary effort, what the Christian world was hoping for in that direction--all these things Flossy Shipley knew no more about than her kitten did. Perhaps it was not strange then, that although abundantly supplied with pin-money, she had never in her life given anything to the work of Missions. Not that she would not willingly have deposited some of her money in the box for whatever use the authorities chose to make of it had she happened to have any; but young ladies as a rule have been educated to imagine that there is one day in the week in which their portmonnaies can be off duty. There being no shopping to be done, no worsteds to match, no confectionary to tempt what earthly use for money? So it was locked up at home. This, at least, is the way in which Flossy Shipley had argued, without knowing that she argued at all. Now she was looking at things with new eyes; the same things that she had heard of hundreds of times, but how different they were! What a remarkable scheme it was, this carrying the story of Jesus to those miserable ignorant ones, getting them ready for the heaven that had been made ready for them! The people of "Fair Haven" did not appear to her like lunatics, as they did to Ruth Erskine. She was not, you will remember, of the class who had argued this question in their ignorance, and quieted their consciences with the foolish assertion that the church collections went to pay secretaries and treasurers and erect splendid public buildings. She belonged, rather, to that less hopeless class who had never thought at all. Now, as she listened, her eyes brightened with feeling and her cheeks glowed. The whole sublime _romance_ of Missions was being mapped out to her on the face of that quaint allegory, and her heart responded warmly. Curiously enough, her first throbs of conscience were not for herself but for her father. The portly gentleman who occasionally sat at the head of the Shipley pew, and who certainly never parted company with his pocket-book on Sabbath or on any other day, did _he_ give liberally to Foreign Missions? She could not determine as to the probabilities of the case. He was counted a liberal man--people liked to come to him to start subscriptions; but Flossy felt instinctively that a subscription paper with her father's name leading it was different, someway, from a quiet, baize-lined box, and no noise nor words. She doubted whether the cause had been materially helped by him. She lost some sentences of the story while she planned ways for interesting her father and securing liberal donations from him; and then she was suddenly startled back to personality by hearing some astounding statements from the reader. "It would be _so_ easy to drop into a household box the price of an apple, or a paper, or a glass of peanuts, and yet who does it? Why, there are young ladies who will actually not give two cents a week from the money that they waste!" The rich blood mounted in waves to Flossy's forehead. Apples and papers were not in her line, but _peanuts_! wasn't there a certain stand which she passed almost daily on her way down town, and did she ever pass it without indulging in a glass of peanuts? Neither was that the end. Why, once started on that list, and her wastes were almost numberless. How fond she was of cream dates, and how expensive they were; and oranges, the tempting yellow globes were always shining at her from certain windows as she passed. Oh, they were just endless, her temptations and her falls in that direction--only who had ever supposed that there was any harm in this lavish treatment of herself and of any friends whom she happened to meet? Yet it was true that she had never given any money at all to the work of sending the Bible to those who are without it. "They will not give two cents a week," said Mrs. Miller. It was true: she had not given "two cents a week," or even two cents a year--she had simply ignored the existence of such a need for money. True, she had not been a Christian; but she was surprised to see how little this refuge served her. "I have been a human being," she told herself, with a flush on her face, "and I ought to have had sufficient interest in humanity to have wanted those poor creatures civilized." But there was another thrust preparing for Flossy. The reader presently touched upon one item of expenditure common to ladies, namely, kid gloves; and made the bewildering statement that economy in this matter, to the degree that needless purchases should be avoided, would treble the fund in the missionary treasury! It could not be that from among that sea of faces the speaker had singled out Flossy Shipley, and yet that is the way it seemed to her. If there was any one expense which stood out glaringly above another in her list of luxuries it was kid gloves. They must be absolutely immaculate as to quality, shade and fit, and she remorselessly consigned them to the waste-bag at the first hint of rip or change of color. How strange that Mrs. Miller should have pitched upon just that item, and what an amazing declaration to make concerning it! It was very strange, had any one been looking on to observe it, the manner in which this young girl was being educated. It is doubtful if a whole year of church work in the regular home routine, listening to the stated, statistical sermon of her pastor, that sermon which presupposes so much more knowledge than people possess, would have _begun_ to do for Flossy what the strange, fanciful, pungent story of "Fair Haven" did. * * * * * Before that hour was closed she had settled within her resolute little heart a plan that should henceforth put her in close communion and sympathy with mission work--not exactly the plans of operation, except that kid gloves and peanuts took stern places in the background, but this was simply the foundation for a resolute system of education, carried all through her future life. What a pity it seems sometimes that people cannot read the hearts and watch the springs of action of those around them. If Mrs. Miller, as she closed her paper and moved away from the platform, could have seen the earnest purpose glowing and throbbing in Flossy's heart, and have known that it was born of words of hers, what a glad and thankful heart would she have carried back to her tent! Also, if the much troubled pastor at home could have taken peeps into the future and seen what Flossy Shipley's resolves would do for Missions, how glad he would have been! Perhaps it would be better to lay all the troubles and the tangles down in the Hand that overrules it all, and say, in peace and restfulness, "He knoweth the end from the beginning." CHAPTER XIII. "CROSS PURPOSES." When people start out with the express design of having a good time, irrespective of other people's plans or feelings--in short, with a general forgetfulness of the existence of others--they are very likely to find at the close of the day that a failure has been made. It did not take the entire day to convince Eurie Mitchell that Chautauqua was not the synonym for absolute, unalloyed _pleasure_. You will remember that she detached herself from her party in the early morning, and set out to find pleasure, or, as she phrased it, "fun." She imagined them to be interchangeable terms. She had not meant to be deserted, but had hoped to secure Ruth for her companion, she not having the excuse of wishing to report the meetings to call her to them. Failing in her, in case she should have a fit of obstinacy, and choose to attend the meetings, Eurie counted fully upon Flossy as an ally. Much to her surprise, and no little to her chagrin, Flossy proved decidedly the more determined of the two. No amount of coaxing--and Eurie even descended to the employment of that weapon--had the least effect. To be sure, Flossy presented no more powerful argument than that it did not look well to come to the meeting and then not attend it. But she carried her point and left the young searcher for fun with a clear field. Now fun rarely comes for the searching; it is more likely to spring upon one unawares. So, though Eurie walked up and down, and stared about her, and lost herself in the labyrinths of the intersecting paths, and tore her dress in a thicket, and caught her foot in a bog, to the great detriment of shoe and temper, she still found not what she was searching for. Several times she came in sight of the stand; once or twice in sound of the speaker's voice; but having so determinately carried her point in the morning, she did not choose to abandon her position and appear among the listeners, though sorely tempted to do so. She wandered into several side tents in hope of finding something to distract her attention; but she only found that which provoked her. In one of them a young lady and gentleman were bending eagerly over a book and talking earnestly. They were interesting looking people, and she hovered near, hoping that she had at last found the "children" who would "play" with her--a remembrance of one of her nursery stories coming to her just then, and a ludicrous sense of her resemblance to the truant boy who spent the long, bright day in the woods searching for one not too busy to play. But these two were discussing nothing of more importance than the lesson for the coming Sabbath; and though she hovered in their vicinity for some time, she caught only stray words--names of places in the far away Judean land, that seemed to her like a name in the Arabian Nights; or an eager dissertation on the different views of eminent commentators on this or that knotty point; and so engrossed were they in their work that they bestowed on her only the slightest passing glance, and then bent over their books. She went away in disgust. At the next tent half a dozen ladies were sitting. She halted there. Here at last were some people who, like herself, were bored with this everlasting meeting, and had escaped to have a bit of gossip. Who knew but she might creep into the circle and find pleasant acquaintances? So she drew nearer and listened a moment to catch the subject under discussion. She heard the voice of prayer; and a nearer peep showed her that every head was bowed on the seat in front, and one of the ladies, in a low voice, was asking for enlightenment _on the lesson for the coming Sabbath_! "What wonderful lesson can it be that is so fearfully important?" she muttered, as she plunged recklessly into the mud and made her way in all haste up the hill without attempting any more tents. "Who ever heard such an ado made about a Sunday-school lesson? These people all act as though there was nothing of any consequence anywhere but Sunday-schools. I guess it is the first time that such a _furor_ was ever gotten up over teaching a dozen verses to a parcel of children. I wonder if the people at home ever make such a uproar about the lesson? I know some teachers who own up, on the way to church, that they don't know where the lesson is. This must be a peculiar one. I wonder how I shall contrive to discover where it is? The girls won't know, of course. With all their boasted going to meeting they know no more about lessons than I do myself. I would really like to find out. I mean to ask the next person I meet. It will be in accordance with the fashion of the place. Think of my walking down Broadway of a sunny morning and stopping a stranger with the query, 'Will you tell me where the lesson is, please?'" And at this point Eurie burst into a laugh over the absurdity of the picture she had conjured. "But this is not Broadway," she said a moment afterward, "and I mean to try it. Here comes a man who looks as if he ought to know everything. I wonder who he is? I've seen his face a dozen times since I have been here. He led the singing yesterday. Perhaps he knows nothing but sing. They are not apt to; but his face looks as though he might have a few other ideas. Anyway, I'll try him, and if he knows nothing about it, he will go away with a confused impression that I am a very virtuous young lady, and that he ought to have known all about it; and who knows what good seed may be sown by my own wicked hand?" Whereupon she halted before the gentleman who was going with rapid strides down the hill, and said, in her clearest and most respectful tone: "Will you be so kind as to tell me where the lesson for next Sabbath commences? I have forgotten just where it is." There was no hesitation, no query in his face as to what she was talking about, or uncertainty as to the answer. "It is the fifth chapter, from the fifth to the fifteenth verse," he said, glibly. "All fives, you see. Easy to remember. It is a grand lesson. Hard to teach, though, because it is all there. Are you a teacher for next Sunday? You must come to the teachers' meeting to-morrow morning; you will get good help there. Glorious meeting, isn't it? I'm so glad you are enjoying it." And away he went. Every trace of ill-humor had vanished from Eurie's face. Instead, it was twinkling with laughter. "The fifth chapter and fifteenth verse" of what? Certainly she had no more idea than the birds had who twittered above her head. How entirely certain he had been that of course she knew the general locality of the lesson. _She_ a teacher and coming to the teachers' meeting for enlightenment as to how to teach the lesson! "I wonder who he is?" she said again, as these thoughts flashed through her brain, and, following out the next impulse that came to her, she stopped an old gentleman who was walking leisurely down, and said, as she pointed out her late informant: "What is that man's name, please? I can't recall it." "That," said the old gentleman, "is Prof. Sherwin, of Newark. Have you heard him sing?" "Yes." "Well, that is worth hearing; and have you heard him talk?" "No." "Well, he can talk; you will hear him, and enjoy it, too; see if you don't. But I'll tell you what it is, young lady, to know him thoroughly you ought to hear him pray! There is the real power in a man. Let me know how a man can pray and I'll risk his talking." Eurie had got much more information now than she had asked for. She ventured on no more questions, but made all haste to her tent, where, seated upon a corner of the bed, one foot tucked under her while the unfortunate shoe tried to dry, she sewed industriously on the zig-zag tear in her dress, and tried to imagine what she could do next. Certainly they had long days at Chautauqua. "I shall go to meeting this afternoon," she said, resolutely, "if they have three sermons, each an hour long; and what is more, I shall find out where that Sunday-school lesson is." The next thing she did was to write a letter to her brother Nellis, a dashing boy two years her senior and her favorite companion in her search for pleasure. Here is a copy of the letter: "DEAR NEL: I wish you were here. Chautauqua isn't so funny as it might be. There are some things that are done here continually. In the first place, it rains. Why, you never saw anything like it! It just can't help it. The sun puts on a bland face and looks glowing intentions, and while you are congratulating your next neighbor on the prospect, she is engaged in clutching frantically after her umbrella to save her hat from the first drops of the new shower. Next, they have meetings, and there is literally no postponement on account of the weather. It is really funny to see the way in which the people rush when the bell rings, rain or shine. Nel, only think of Flossy Shipley going in the rain to hear a man preach of the 'Influence of the Press,' or something of that sort! It was good though, worth hearing. I went myself, because, of course, one must do something, and the frantic fashion of the place is to go to meeting. At the same time I don't understand Flossy: she is different from what she ever was at home. I suppose it is the force of the many shining examples all around her. You know she always was a good little sheep about following somebody's lead. "Marion is reporting, and has to be industrious. She is queer, Nel; she professes infidelity, you know; and you have no idea how mad she gets over anything that seems to be casting reproach on Christianity (unless indeed she says it herself, which is often enough, but then she seems to think it is all right). "Ruth keeps on the even tenor of her way. It would take an earthquake to move that girl. "I have had the greatest fun this morning. I have been mistaken for a Sabbath-school teacher who had the misfortune to forget at what verse her lesson commenced! You see I was cultivating new acquaintances, and a Prof. Sherwin gave me good advice. That and some other things aroused my curiosity concerning that same lesson, and I am going to find out where it is. "Did you know that Sunday-school lessons were such remarkable affairs? The one for next Sunday must comprise the most wonderful portion of Scripture that there is, for hundreds of people on these grounds are talking about it, and I stumbled upon a party of ladies this morning who were actually praying over it! "Another thing I overheard this morning, which is news to me, that all the world was at work on the same lesson. That is rather fascinating, isn't it, to think of so many hundreds and thousands of people all pitching into the same verses on Sunday morning? It is quite sentimental, too, or capable of being made so, for instance, by a great stretch of your imagination. Suppose you and me to be very dear friends, separated by miles of ocean we will say, and both devoted Sabbath-school teachers, isn't that a stretch now? Such being the astonishing case, wouldn't it be pleasant to be at work on the same lesson? Don't you see? Lets play do it. You look up the lesson for next Sabbath and so will I. Won't that have all the charm of novelty? Then give me the benefit of your ideas acquired on that important subject, and I'll do the same to you. Really, the more I think of it the more the plan delights me. I wonder how you will carry it out? Shall you go to Sunday-school? What will the dear Doctor say if he sees you walk into his Bible-class? I really wish I were there to enjoy the sensation. Meantime I'm going to look up an altogether wonderful teacher for myself, and then for comparing notes. My spirits begin to rise, they have been rather damp all the morning, but I see fun in the distance. "We are to have a sensation this afternoon in the shape of a troupe of singers called the Tennesseeans--negroes, you know, and they are to give slave-cabin songs and the like. I expect to enjoy it thoroughly, but you ought to see Ruth curl her aristocratic nose at the thought. "'Such a vulgar idea! and altogether inappropriate to the occasion. She likes to see things in keeping. If it is a religious gathering let them keep it such, and not introduce negro minstrels for the sake of calling a low crowd together, and making a little more money.' "Marion, too, shoots arrows from her sharp tongue at it, but she rather enjoys the idea, just as she does every other thing that she chooses to call inconsistent when she happens to be the one to discover it; but woe to the one who comments on it further than she chooses to go. "Flossy and I now look with utmost toleration on the dark element that is to be introduced. I tell Ruth that I am really grateful to the authorities for introducing something that a person of my limited capacities can appreciate, and Flossy, with her sweet little charitable voice, has 'no doubt they will choose proper things to sing.' That little mouse is really more agreeable than she ever was in her life; and I am amazed at it, too. I expected the dear baby would make us all uncomfortable with her finified whims; but don't you think it is our lofty Ruth who is decidedly the most disagreeable of our party, save and except myself!" This interesting epistle was brought to a sudden close by an interruption. A gentleman came with rapid steps, and halted before her tent door, which was tied hospitably back. "I beg pardon," he said, speaking rapidly, "but this is Miss Rider?" "It is not," Eurie answered, with promptness at which information he looked surprised and bewildered. "Isn't this her tent? I am sorry to trouble you, but I have been sent in haste for her. She is wanted for a consultation, and I was told I would find her here. Perhaps I might leave a message with you for her?" "It certainly isn't her tent," Eurie said, trying to keep down the desire to laugh, "and I haven't the least idea where she is. I should be glad to give her your message if I could, but I never saw the lady in my life, and have no reason to expect that pleasure." Whereupon her questioner laughed outright. "That is a dilemma," he said. "I appreciate your feelings, for I am precisely in the same position; but the lady was described minutely to me, and I certainly thought I had found her. I am sorry to have interrupted you," and he bowed himself away. A new curiosity seized upon Eurie--the desire to see Miss Rider. "She must be one of them," she soliloquized, falling into Flossy's way of speaking of the workers at Chautauqua. "He said she was wanted for a consultation. I wonder if she can be one of those who are to take part in the primary exercises? She must be young for such prominent work if she looks like me; but how could he know that since he never saw her? It is very evident that I am to go to Sunday-school next Sabbath anyhow, if I never did before, for now I have two items of interest to look up--a lesson that is in the 'fifth chapter, from the fifth to the fifteenth verse of _something_,' and a being called 'Miss Rider.'" So thinking she hastily concluded and folded her letter, ready for the afternoon mail, without a thought or care as to the seed that she had been sending away in it, or as to the fruit it might bear; without the slightest insight into the way she was being led through seeming mistakes and accidents up to a point that was to influence all her future. CHAPTER XIV. THE NEW LESSON. Eurie turned her pillow, thumped the scant feathers into little heaps, and gave a dismal groan as she laid her head back on it. "It is very queer," she said, "that as soon as ever I make up my mind to be orthodox, and go to meeting every time the bell rings, I should be dumped into a heap on this hard bed with the headache. I haven't had a touch of it before." "'The way of transgressors is hard,'" quoted Marion, going on calmly with her writing. "If you hadn't taken that horrid tramp yesterday instead of going to meeting like a Christian, you would have been all right to-day." "I believe you sit up nights to read your Bible, so as to have verses to fling at people who are overtaken in any possible trial or inconvenience. You always have them ready. Didn't you bring it with you, and don't you prepare a list for each day's use?" This was Eurie's half merry, half petulant reply to the Bible verse that had been "flung" at her. Marion carefully erased a word that seemed to her fastidious taste too inexpressive before she answered: "I don't own such an article as a Bible, my child; so your suspicions are entirely unfounded. My early education was not defective in that respect, however, and I confess that I find many verses that seem to very aptly describe the ways of sinful mortals like yourself." Eurie raised herself on one elbow, regardless of headache and the cloth wet in vinegar that straightway fell off. "You don't own a Bible!" she said, in utter surprise, and with a touch of actual dismay in her voice. "I am depraved to that degree, my dear little saint. I conclude that you are more devoutly inclined, and have one of your own. Pray how many chapters a day do you read in it?" Eurie lay down again, and Flossy came with the vinegar cloth and bound it securely on her forehead. "I don't read in it very often, to be sure," Eurie murmured. "In fact I suppose I may as well say that I never do. But then I own one, and always have. I am not a heathen; and really and truly it seems almost queer not to have a Bible of one's own. It is a sort of mark of civilization, you know." Marion laughed good-naturedly. "I never make a great deal of pretense in that line," she said, gayly. "As for being a heathen, that is only a relative term. According to Dr. Calkins, they were more or less in advance of us. I am one of the 'advanced' sort. Ruth, your toilet ought to be nearly completed; I hear that indefatigable bell." "You are very foolish not to go this morning and let your writing wait. We shall be certain to have something worth listening to; it is a strange time to select for absence." This was Ruth's quiet answer, as she pinned her lace ruffle with a gleaming little diamond. "'Diligent in business.' There is another verse for you, my heathen," Marion said, with a merry glance toward Eurie. "When you get home and get the dust of years swept off from your Bible, you take a look at it, and see if I have not quoted correctly. And a good, sensible verse it is. I have found it the only way in which to keep my head above water. Ruthie, the trouble is not with me, it lies with those selfish and obstinate newspaper men. If they would have the sense to let their papers wait over another day I could go to the lecture this morning. As it is, I am a victim to their indifference. If I miss a blessing the sin will be at _their_ door, not mine." Eurie opened her heavy eyes and looked at Flossy. "Come," she said, "don't stand there mopping me in vinegar any longer. Are you ready? I am really disappointed. I've always wanted to hear that man. I want to tell Nel about him." Flossy washed her hands, shook back the yellow curls with an indifferent and preoccupied air, and went to the door to wait for Ruth. She had taken no part in the war of words that had been passing between Marion and Eurie, but she had heard. And like almost everything else that she heard during these days, it had awakened a new thought and desire. Flossy was growing amazed at herself. It seemed to her that she must have spent her seventeen years of life taking long naps, and this Chautauqua was a stiff breeze from the ocean that was going to shake her awake. The special thought that had dashed itself at her this morning was that she, too, had no Bible. Not that she did not own one, elegantly done in velvet and clasped in gold, so effectually clasped that it had been sealed to her all her life. She positively had no recollection of having ever sat down deliberately to read the Bible. She had "looked over" occasionally in school, but even this service of her eyes had been fitful and indifferent; and as for her head paying any sort of attention to the reading, it might as well have been done in Greek instead of French, which language she but dimly comprehended even when she tried. But now she ought to have a Bible. She ought not to wait for that velvet covered one. A whole week in which to find what some of her orders were, and no way in which to find them. Of course she could buy one, but how queer it would seem to be going to the museum to make a purchase of a Bible! "They will wonder why I did not bring my own," she murmured, with that life-long deference that she had educated herself to pay to the "they" who composed her world. And in another instance the new-born feeling of respect and independence asserted itself. "I can't help that," she said, positively, shaking her curls with a determined air; "and it really makes no difference what anybody thinks. Of course I must have a Bible, and I only wish I had it for this morning, I shall certainly get one the first opportunity." Then she turned and said "good-morning" to the pretty little lady who occupied the tent next door, and between whom and herself a pleasant acquaintance was springing up. "Are you going to the lecture?" Flossy, asked and the small lady shook her head, with a wistful air. "Dear me, no! My young tyrant wouldn't consent to that. I meant to take him down with me and try him, but he has gone to sleep; and it is just as well, for he would have been certain to want to do all the talking. He has no idea that there is any one in the country who knows quite as much as he does." It was said in a half complaining tone, but underneath it was the foundation of tender pride, that showed her to be the vain mother of the handsome tyrant. Still it seemed to be Flossy's duty to condole with her. "You miss most of the meetings, do you not?" "Three-fourths of them. You see it is inconvenient to have a husband who is reporter for the press, and who must be there to hear. It is only when he must write up his notes for publication that I can get a chance; and even then, unless it is baby's sleepy time, it does me no good. I am especially sorry this morning, for Dr. Cuyler used to be my pastor. He married me one summer morning just like this, and I haven't laid eyes on him since. I should like to hear his voice again, but it can't be done." Now who would have imagined that, with all the powers that were bestirring themselves to come to Flossy's education, it would have been a rosy, crowing baby, in the unconsciousness of a morning nap, that should have given her her first lesson in unselfishness? Yet he was the very one. It flashed over Flossy in an instant from some source. Who was so likely to have suggested it as the sweet angel who hovered over the sleeping darling? "Oh, Mrs. Adams, let me stay with baby, and you go to hear Cuyler. It is a real pity that you should miss him, when he is associated with your life in this way. I never saw him, and though, of course, I should like to, yet I presume there will be opportunities enough. I will be as careful of baby as if he were my grandson; and if he wakens I will charm him out of his wits, so that it will never occur to him to cry." Of course there was demurring, and profuse expressions of thanks and declinatures all in a breath. But Flossy was so winning, so eager, so thoroughly in earnest; and the little Mrs. Adams did so love her old pastor, and did feel so anxious to see him again, that in a very short time she was beguiled into going in all haste to her tent to make a "go-to-meeting" toilet; and a blessed thing it was that that sentence does not mean at Chautauqua what it does in Buffalo, or Albany, or a few other places, else Dr. Cuyler might have slipped from them before the necessary articles were all in array. It involved simply the twitching off of a white apron, the settling of a pretty sun hat--for the sun actually shone!--and the seizure of a waterproof, needed, if she found a seat, to protect her from the damp boards--needed in any case, because in five minutes it might rain--and she was ready. Ruth came to the door. "Come, Flossy," she said; "where in the world are you? We shall be late." And said it precisely as though she had been waiting for that young person for half an hour. Flossy emerged from the adjoining tent. "I am not going." she said. "I have turned nurse-girl, and have the sweetest little baby in here that ever grew. Mrs. Adams is going in my place. Mrs. Adams, Miss Erskine." And as those two ladies walked away together Mrs. Adams might have been heard to say: "What a lovely, unselfish disposition your friend has! It was so beautiful in her to take me so by storm this morning! I am afraid I was very selfish; which is apt to be the case, I think, when one comes in contact with actual unselfishness. It is one of the Christian graces that is very hard to cultivate, anyway; don't you think so?" Ruth was silent; not from discourtesy, but from astonishment. It was such a strange experience to hear any one speak of Flossy Shipley as "unselfish." In truth she had grown up under influences that had combined to foster the most complete and tyrannical selfishness--exercised in a pretty, winning sort of way, but rooted and grounded in her very life. So indeed was Ruth's; but _she_, of course, did not know that, though she had clear vision for the mote in Flossy's eyes. Meantime Marion had staid her busy pen and was biting the end of it thoughtfully. The two tents were such near neighbors that the latter conversation and introduction had been distinctly heard. She glanced around to the girl on the bed. "Eurie," she said, "are you asleep, or are you enjoying Flossy's last new departure?" Eurie giggled. "I heard," she said. "The lazy little mouse has slipped out of a tedious hour, and has a chance to lounge and read a pleasant novel. I dare say the mother is provided with them." Then Marion, after another thoughtful pause: "But, my child, how do you account for the necessity of going to the neighbors and taking the supervision of a baby in order to do that? Flossy need not have gone to church if she didn't choose." "Yes she need. Don't you suppose the child can see that it is the fashion of the place? She is afraid that it wouldn't look well to stay in the tent and lounge, without an excuse for doing so. If that girl could only go to a place where it was the fashion for all the people to be good, she would be a saint, just because 'they' were." "She would have to go to heaven," muttered Marion, going on with her writing. "And, according to you, there is no such place; so there is no hope for her, after all. Oh, dear! I wonder if you are right, and nothing is of any consequence, anyhow?" And the weary girl turned on her pillow and tried not to think, an effort that was hard to accomplish after a week's experience at Chautauqua. Flossy sat herself down beside the sleeping darling, and cast about her for something to amuse or interest, her eyes brightening into beauty as she recognized a worn and torn copy of the Bible. Eurie would have been surprised to see the eagerness with which she seized upon the book that was to afford her entertainment. She turned the leaves tenderly, with a new sense of possession about her. This Bible was a copy of letters that had been written to her--words spoken, many of them, by Jesus himself. Strange that she had so little idea what they were! Marion, with her boasted infidel notions, knew much more about "The Book" than Flossy with her nominal Christian education and belief. She had no idea where to turn or what to look for to help her. Yet she turned the leaves slowly, with a delicious sense of having found a prize a--book of instructions, a guide book for her on this journey that she was just beginning to realize that she was taking. Somewhere within it she would find light and help. The book was one that had been much used, and had a fashion of opening of itself at certain places that might have been favorites with the little mother. At one of those places Flossy halted and read: "'After this there was a feast of the Jews.' After what, I wonder?" she said within herself. She knew nothing about it. "Never mind, I will see pretty soon. This is about a feast where Jesus was. And Jesus went up to Jerusalem." "Oh, how nice to have been there, wherever that was." The ignorant little thing had not the least idea where Jerusalem was, except that it was in that far away, misty Holy Land, that had seemed as vague and indefinite to her as the grave or as heaven. But there came suddenly to her heart a certain blessed analogy. "If I were going to write an account of my recent experiences to some dear friend that I wanted to tell it to," she said, talking still to herself, or to the sleeping baby, "I would write it something like this: 'After this'--That would mean; let me see what it _would_ mean. Why, after that party at home, when I danced all night and was sick. 'After this there was a feast of the Christian people at Chautauqua, and Jesus went there.' I could certainly write that, for I have seen him and heard him speak in my very heart." Then she went on, through the second verse to the third. "'In these lay a great multitude of impotent folk, of blind, halt, withered, waiting for the moving of the water,'" and here a great swell of tears literally blinded her eyes. It came to her so suddenly, so forcibly. The great multitude here at Chautauqua--blind. Yes, some of them. Was not she? How many more might there be? Many of whom she knew, others that she did not know, but that Jesus did. Waiting without knowing that they were waiting. With tears and smiles, and with a new great happiness throbbing at her heart, she read through the sweet, simple, wonderful story; how the poor man met Jesus; how he questioned; how the man complained; and how Jesus was greater than his infirmity. Through the whole of it, until suddenly she closed the book, her tears dried, and a solemn, wondering, almost awe-struck look on her face. She had got her lesson, her directions, her example. She could bear no more, even of the Bible, just then. She said it over, that startling verse that came to her with a whole volume of suggestion: "'_And the man departed and told the Jews that it was Jesus which had made him whole._'" CHAPTER XV. GREAT MEN. Ruth Erskine, with her skirts gathered daintily around her, to avoid contact with the unclean earth, made her way skill fully through the crowd, and with the aid of a determined spirit and a camp-chair secured a place and a seat very near the stand. The little lady who timidly followed in her lead was not quite so fortunate, inasmuch as she had no camp-chair, and was less resolved in her determination to get ahead of those who had arrived earlier; so she contented herself with a damp seat on the end of a board, which was vacated for her use by a courteous gentleman. Ruth, you must understand, was not selfish in this matter because she had planned to be, but simply because it had never occurred to her to be otherwise, which is one of the misfortunes that come to people who are educated in a selfish atmosphere. Ruth Erskine had come to this meeting fully prepared to enjoy it. Dr. Cuyler was a star of sufficient magnitude to attract her. During her frequent visits to New York she had heard much of but had never seen him. The people whom she visited were too elegant in their views and practices to have much in common with the church which was so pronounced on the two great questions of religion and temperance. Yet, even with them, Dr. Cuyler and Dr. Cuyler's great church were eccentricities to be tolerated, not ignored. Therefore Ruth had had it in her heart to enjoy listening to him sometime. The sometime had arrived. She had dressed herself with unusual care, a ceremony which seemed to be quite in the background among the people who were at home at Chautauqua. But someway it seemed to Ruth that the great Brooklyn pastor should receive this mark of respect at her hands; so she had spent the morning at her toilet and was now a fashionable lady, fashionably attired for church. If the people who vouchsafed her a glance as she crowded past indulged, some of them, in a smile at her expense, and thought the simple temple made of trees and grasses an inappropriate surrounding to her silken robes and costly lace mantle, she was none the wiser for that, you know, and took her seat, indifferent to them all, except that presently there stole over her the sense of disagreeable incongruity with her outdoor surroundings; so Satan had the pleasure of ruffling her spirits and occupying her thoughts with her rich brown silk dress instead of letting her heart be touched with the solemnity and beauty of the grand hymn which rolled down those long aisles. Satan has that everlasting weapon, "What to wear, and what not to wear," everlastingly at command and wonderfully under his control. But Ruth, in her way, was strong-minded and could control her thoughts when she chose; so she presently shook off the feeling of annoyance and decided to give herself up to the influences of the hour. By this time Dr. Cuyler appeared and was introduced, Ruth gave him the benefit of a very searching gaze, and decided that he was the very last man of all those on the platform whom she would have selected as the speaker. Probably if Dr. Cuyler had known this, and known also that his personal presence entirely disappointed her, he would not have been greatly disconcerted thereby. But his subject was one that found an answering thrill in this young lady's heart--"Some Talks I Have Had With Great Men." Ruth liked greatness. In her calm, composed way she bowed before it. She would have enjoyed being great. Celebrity in a majestic, dignified form would have been her delight. She by no means admitted this, as Eurie Mitchell so often did. She by no means sought after it in the small ways within her reach. Small ways did not suit her; they disgusted her. But if she could have flashed into splendid greatness, if by any amount of laborious study, or work, or suffering, she could have seen the way to world-wide renown she would have grasped for it in an instant. The next best thing to being renowned one's self was to have renowned people for friends. This was another thing that Ruth coveted in silence. She wanted no one to know how earnestly she aspired to, sometime, making the acquaintance of some of the great people not--the vulgarly great, those who were in a sense, and in the eyes of a few, great because of the accidents of fortune and travel. She knew such by the scores. Indeed, she had been in circles many a time where _she_ shone with that sort of greatness herself. Perhaps it was for that reason that it was such a despised height to her. But she meant the _really_ great people of this world--people of power, people who moved the masses by the force of their brains. Not one such had she ever met to look upon as an acquaintance; and here was this man telling off the honored names by the score, and saying, "My friend, Dr. Guthrie"--"My good friend, Thomas Carlyle"--"My dear brother, Newman Hall." How would it seem to stand in intimate relationship with one single gifted mind like these, and was she destined ever to know by actual experience? There was another reason why Ruth had desired to choose Dr. Cuyler to listen to rather than some other names on the programme, because, from the nature of his subject she had judged it most unlikely that he should have about him any arrows that would touch home to her. Not that she put it in that language; she did not admit even to herself that any of the solemn words that had been spoken at Chautauqua had reference to her; and yet in a vague, fitful way she was ill at ease. She had moments of feeling that there was a reach of happiness possessed by these people of which she knew nothing. Little side thrusts had come to her from time to time in places where she least expected them. That question, asked by Flossy during her night of unrest, "Should you be afraid to die?" hovered around this quietly poised young lady in a most unaccountable manner. All the more persistently did it cling because she could not shake it off with the thought that it was silly. Common sense told her that the strange, solemn shadow, which came so steadily after men, and so surely enveloped one after another among the grandest intellects that the world owned, was not a thing to pass over lightly. After all, why should she _not_ be afraid of death? Then that strange gentleman who had persisted in ranking her among the praying people! he had left his shadow. Why did she not pray? She wondered over this in a vague sort of way; wondered how it seemed to kneel down alone, and speak to an invisible presence; wondered if those who so knelt always felt as though they were really speaking to God. There were times when Ruth was exceedingly disgusted with these perplexing thoughts, and wanted nothing so much as to get away from them. She resented this intrusion upon her quiet. This day was one of those in which she was impatient of all these things, and she had made her toilet with great satisfaction, and said within herself complacently: "We are to have one hour at last devoted to this mundane sphere and the mortals who inhabit it; most of the time these Chautauquans talk and act as though earth was only a railroad station, where people changed cars and went on to heaven. Dr. Cuyler is going to refresh us with some actual living specimens of humanity. He can't make a sermon out of that subject if he tries." But Ruth Erskine had not measured the power of the earnest preachers of Jesus Christ. As if Dr. Cuyler could talk for an hour to thousands of immortal souls, and leave Christ and heaven and immortality out. To Ruth these three words constituted a sermon, and she got them that day. Not that he had an idea that he was preaching Christ, except incidentally, as a man refers almost unconsciously to the one whom he loves best in all the world but Ruth knew he was. It came in little sudden touches when she least expected it, when heart and soul were wrought upon with some strong enthusiasm by the splendid picture of a splendid man--as when he told of Spurgeon. It was a glowing description, such as thrilled Ruth, and made her feel that to have just one glimpse of that great man, with his great marvelous power over humanity, would be worth a lifetime. Suddenly the speaker said: "The secret of that man's power lies, first, in his study of the Bible." Ruth started and came down like a bomb-shell from her wondrous height. The Bible! copies of which lay carelessly on every table of her father's elegantly furnished house unstudied and unthought of. How very strange to ascribe the power of the great intellect to the study of one book that was more or less familiar to every Sunday-school boy. "Second, in short, simple, homely language." Ruth smiled now. Dr. Cuyler was growing absurd, as if it were not the most common thing in the world to use simple, homely language! No Spurgeons could be manufactured in that way, she was sure. "Third, mighty earnestness to save souls." Here was a point concerning which Ruth knew nothing. Dr. Cuyler's manner put tremendous force into the forceful words, and carried conviction with them. She wondered how a really _mighty_ earnestness to save souls made a man appear? She wondered whether she had ever seen such a one; she went rapidly over the list of her acquaintances in the church. She smiled to herself a sarcastic, contemptuous smile; she had met them all at parties, concerts, festivals, and the like; she had seen them on occasions when _nothing_ seemed to possess them but to have a good time like the rest of the world. Like the rest of the world, Ruth reasoned and decided from her chance meetings with the outside life of these Christians, forgetting that she had never seen one of them in their closets before God; rather, she knew nothing about these closets, nor the experiences learned there, and could only reason from outside life. This being the case, what a pity that her verdict of those lives should have called forth only that contemptuous smile! Wandering off in this train of thought, she lost the speaker's next point, but was called back by his solemn, ringing close. "Put these together, melt them down with the love of Christ, and you have a Spurgeon. God be thanked for such a piece of hand work as he!" Another start and another retrospect. _Did_ she know any people who put these together; who made a real, earnest, constant study of the Bible as school girls studied their Latin grammars, and who were really eager to save souls because they had the love of Christ in their hearts, and who said so in plain simple language? "Does he, I wonder?" she said to herself. "I wonder if his sermons sound like that? I should like to hear him preach just once. Oh, dear! if he isn't running off to Moody and Sankey. It _is_ a sermon after all!" On the whole, Ruth was disgusted. Her brain was in a whirl; she was being compelled to hear _sermons_ on every hand. She was sick of it. They had been great men of whom she had heard, and she admired them all; she wanted the secret of their power, but she didn't want it to be made out of such commonplace material as was in the hands of every child. She did not know what she wanted--only that she had come out to be entertained and to revel in her love of heroes, and she had been pinned down to the one thought that _real_ men were made of those who found their power in their Bible and on their knees. The solemn, earnest, tender closing to this address did not lessen her sense of discomfort. Then just beside her was carried on a conversation that added to her annoyance. "They are big men," a man said. He was dressed in a common business suit; his linen had not the exquisite freshness about it that her fastidious eyes delighted in; his hands looked as though they might have been used to work that was rough and hard; his straggling hair was sprinkled with gray, and there was not a striking feature about him. "They are big men," he said, "and I've no doubt it is a big thing to know them, and talk with them, and have a friendly feeling for each, as if they belonged to him, but he knows a bigger one than them, and the best of it is, so do we. The Lord Jesus Christ, our Elder Brother, is not to be compared to common men like these." And now Ruth's lips curled utterly. She was an aristocrat without knowing it. She believed in Christianity, and in its power to save the poor and the commonest, but this insufferable assumption of dignity and superiority over the rest of the world, as she called it, was hateful to her in the extreme. It would have startled her exceedingly to have been told that she was angry with the man for presuming to place _his_ Friend higher in the list of great ones than any of those given that day; and yet such was actually her feeling. She swept her skirts angrily away from contact with the man, and spoke so crustily to the little lady who had come in her wake that she moved timidly away. Just at her left were two gentlemen shaking hands. Both had been on the stand together, she knew the faces of both, and _one_ ranked just a trifle higher in her estimation than any one at Chautauqua. She edged a little nearer. She lived in the hope of making the acquaintance of some of these lights, just enough acquaintance to receive a bow and a clasp of the hand, though how one could accomplish it who was determined that her interest in them should neither be seen nor suspected, it would be hard to say; but they were talking in eager, hearty tones, not at all as if their words were confidential--at least she might have the benefit of them. "That was a capital lecture," the elder of the two was saying. "Cuyler has had great advantages in his life in meeting on a familiar footing so many of our great men. When you get thinking of these things, and of the many men whom you would like to know intimately, what is the thought that strikes you most forcibly?" "That I am glad I belong to the 'royal family,' and have the opportunity of knowing intimately and holding close personal relations with Him who 'spake as never man spake.'" The other answered in a rare, rich tone of suppressed jubilance of feeling. "Exactly!" his friend said; "and when you can leave the fullness of that thought long enough to take another, there is the looking forward to actual fellowship and communion not only with him, but with all these glorious men who are living here, and who have gone up yonder." Ruth turned abruptly away. The very thought that possessed the heart of the plain-looking man and that so annoyed her; and these two, whom to know was an honor, were looking forward to that consummation as the height of it all! CHAPTER XVI. A WAR OF WORDS. "Well, why not?" she said, as she went slowly down the aisle. Of course all these people would be in heaven together, and why should they not look forward to a companionship untrameled by earthly forms and conventionalities, and uncumbered by the body in its present dull and ponderous state? What a chance to get into the best society! the highest circle! real best, too, not made up of money, or blood, or dress, or any of the flimsy and silly barriers that fenced people in and out now. Then at once she felt her own inconsistency in growing disgusted with the plainly-dressed, common-looking man. If he did really belong to that "royal family," why not rejoice over it? Wasn't _she_ the foolish one? She by no means liked these reflections, but she could not get away from them. "How do you do?" said a clear, round voice behind her; not speaking to her, but to some one whom he was very glad to see, judging from his tone. And the voice was peculiar; she had been listening to it for an hour, and could not be mistaken; it belonged to Dr. Cuyler himself. She turned herself suddenly. Here was a chance for a nearer view, and to see who was being greeted so heartily. It was the little lady whose society had been thrust upon her that morning by Flossy. And they were shaking hands as though they were old and familiar acquaintances! "It is good to see your face again," that same hearty voice which seemed to have so much good fellowship in it was saying. "I didn't know you were to be here; I'm real glad to see you again, and what about the husband and the dear boy?" At which point it occurred to Miss Ruth Erskine that she was listening to conversation not designed for her ears. She moved away suddenly, in no way comforted or sweetened as to her temper by this episode. Why should that little bit of an insignificant woman have the honor of such a cordial greeting from the great man, while he did not even know of _her_ existence? To be sure, Dr. Cuyler had baptized and received into church fellowship and united in marriage the little woman with whom he was talking; but Ruth, even if she had known these circumstances, was in no mood to attach much importance to them. She wandered away from the crowd down by the lake-side. She stopped at Jerusalem on her way, and poked her parasol listlessly into the sand of which the hills lying about that city were composed, and thought: "What silly child's play all this was! How absurd to suppose that people were going to get new ideas by _playing_ at cities with bits of painted board and piles of sand! Even if they _could_ get a more distinct notion of its surroundings, what difference did it make how Jerusalem looked, or where it stood, or what had become of the buildings?" This last, as it began dimly to dawn upon her, that it was useless to deny the fact that even such listless and disdainful staring as she had vouchsafed to this make-believe city had located it, as it had not been located before, in her brain. When she produced the flimsy question, "What difference does it make?" you can see at once the absurd mood that had gotten possession of her, and you lose all your desire to argue with any one who feels as foolish as that. Neither had Ruth any desire to argue with herself; she was disgusted with her mind for insisting on keeping her up to a strain of thought. "A lovely place to rest!" she said, aloud, and indignantly, giving a more emphatic poke with her parasol, and quite dislodging one of the buildings in Jerusalem. "One's brain is just kept at high pressure all the time." Now, why this young lady's brain should have been in need of rest she did not take the trouble to explain, even to herself. She sat herself down presently under one of the trees by the lake-side and gave herself up to plans. She was tired of Chautauqua; of that she was certain. It stirred her up, and the process was uncomfortable. Her former composed life suited her taste better. She must get away. There was no earthly reason why she should not go at once to Saratoga. A host of friends were already there, and certain other friends would be only too glad to follow as soon as ever they heard of her advent in that region. Before she left that rustic settee under the trees she had the programme all arranged. "We will get through to-morrow as we best can," she said, sighing over the thought that to-morrow being the Sabbath would perforce be spent there, "and then on Monday morning Flossy and I will just run away to Saratoga and leave those two absurd girls to finish their absurd scheme in the best way they can." And having disposed of Flossy as though she were a bit of fashionable merchandise without any volition of her own, Ruth felt more composed and went at once to dinner. There came an astonishing interference to this planning, from no other than Flossy herself. To the utter amazement of each of the girls, she quietly refused to be taken to Saratoga; nor did she offer any other excuse for this astonishing piece of self-assertion than that she was having a good time and meant to finish it. And to this she adhered with a pertinacity that was very bewildering, because it was so very new. Marion laughed over her writing, to which she had returned the moment dinner was concluded. "That is right, Flossy," she said, "I'm glad to see Chautauqua is having an effect of some sort on one of us. You are growing strong-minded; mind isn't a bad thing to have; keep to yours. Ruth, I am astonished at _you_; I shall have to confess that you are disappointing me, my child. Now, I rather expected this dear little bit of lace and velvet to give up, conquered, in less than a week, but I said to myself, 'Ruth Erskine has pluck enough to carry her through a _month_ of camp-life,' and here you are quenched at the end of four days." "It isn't the camp-life," Ruth said, irritably. "I am not so much a baby as to care about those things to such a degree that I can't endure them, though everything is disagreeable enough; but that isn't the point at all." Marion turned and looked at her curiously. "What on earth is the point then? What has happened to so disgust you with Chautauqua?" "The point is, that I am tired of it all. It is unutterably stupid! I suppose I have a right to be tired of a silly scheme that ought never to have been undertaken, if I choose to be, have I not, without being called in question by any one?" And feeling more thoroughly vexed, not only with the girls, but with herself, than ever she remembered feeling before, Ruth arose suddenly and sought refuge under the trees outside the tent. Marion maintained a puzzled silence. This was a new phase in Ruth's character, and one hard to manage. Flossy looked on the point of crying. She was not used to crossing the wills of those who had influence over her, but she was very determined as to one thing: she was not going to leave Chautauqua. "Nothing could tempt me to go to Saratoga just now," she said, earnestly. "Why?" asked Marion, and receiving no answer at all felt that Flossy puzzled her as much as Ruth had done. However, she set herself to work to restore peace. "This letter is done," she said, gayly, folding her manuscript. "It is a perfectly gushing account of yesterday's meeting, for some of which I am indebted to the Buffalo reporters; for I have given the most thrilling parts where I wasn't present. Now I'm going to celebrate. Come in, Ruth, we are of the same mind precisely. I would gladly accompany you on the afternoon train to Saratoga with the greatest pleasure, were it not for certain inconveniences connected with my pocket-book, and a desire to replenish it by writing up this enterprise. But since we can't go to Saratoga, let's you and I go to Mayville. It is a city of several hundred inhabitants, six or eight, certainly, I should think; and we can have an immense amount of fun out of the people and the sights this afternoon, and escape the preaching. I haven't got to write another letter until Monday. Come, shall we take the three o'clock boat?" Neither of these young ladies could have told what possible object there could be in leaving the lovely woods in which they were camped and going off to the singularly quiet, uninteresting little village of Mayville, except that it was, as they said, a getting away from the preaching--though why two young ladies, with first-class modern educations, should find it so important to get themselves away from some of the first speakers in the country they did not stop to explain even to themselves. However, the plan came to Ruth as a relief, and she unhesitatingly agreed to it; so they went their ways--Flossy to the afternoon meeting (since Eurie declared herself so far convalescent as to be entirely able to remain alone) and the two of the party who had prided themselves up to this time on their superiority of intellect down to the wharf to take the boat for Mayville. The ride thither on the lovely lake was almost enough to excuse them for their folly. But the question what to do with themselves afterward was one that burdened them during all that long summer afternoon. They went to the Mayville House and took a walk on the piazza, and the boarders looked at them in curiosity, and wondered if it were really a pleasanter walk than the green fields over at Chautauqua. They ordered dinner and ate it at the general table with great relish, Ruth rejoicing over this return to civilized life. One episode of the table must be noted. Opposite them sat a gentleman who, either from something in their appearance, or more probably from the reasonable conclusion that all the strangers who had gathered at the quiet little village were in some way associated with the great gathering, addressed them as being part of that great whole. "You people are going to reap a fine harvest, pecuniarily, to-morrow; but how about the fourth commandment? You Christians lay great stress on that document whenever a Sunday reading-room or something of that sort is being contemplated, don't you?" The remark was addressed to both of them, but Ruth was too much occupied with the strangeness of the thought that she was again being counted among "Christian people" to make any answer. Not so Marion. Her eyes danced with merriment, but she answered with great gravity: "We believe in keeping holy the Sabbath day, of course. What has that to do with Chautauqua. Haven't you consulted the programme and read: 'No admission at the gates or docks'?" The gentleman smiled incredulously. "I have read it," he said, significantly, "and doubtless many believe it implicitly. I hope their faith won't be shaken by hearing the returns from tickets counted over in the evening." There was a genuine flush of feeling on Marion's face now. "Do you mean to say," she asked, haughtily, "that you have no faith in the published statement that the gates will be closed, or do you mean that the association have changed their minds? Because if you have heard the latter, I can assure you it is a mistake, as I heard the matter discussed by those in authority this very morning; and they determined to adhere rigidly to the rules." "I have no doubt they will, so far as lies in their power," the gentleman said, with an attempt at courtesy in his manner. "But the trouble is, the thing is absurd on the face of it. If I hold a ticket for an entertainment, which the Association have sold to me, it is none of their business on what day I present it, provided the entertainment is in progress. They have no right to keep me out, and they are swindling me out of so much money if they do it." "You have changed your argument," Marion said, with a flash of humor in her eyes. "You were talking about the amount of money that the Association were to earn to-morrow, not the amount which you were to lose by not being allowed to come in. However, I am willing to talk from that standpoint. If you hold the _season_ ticket of the Association, and are stopping outside, you will be admitted, of course. It is held to be as reasonable a way to go to church as though you harnessed your horses at home and drove, on the Sabbath, to your regular place of worship. But you buy no ticket _for_ the Sabbath, and none is received from you; and if you choose not to go, the Association neither makes nor loses by the operation, and, so far as money is concerned, is entirely indifferent which you decide to do. What fault can possibly be found with such an arrangement?" "Well," said the gentleman, with a quiet positiveness of tone, "I haven't a season ticket, and I don't mean to buy one, and I mean to go down there to meeting to-morrow, and I expect to get in." "I dare say," Marion answered, with glowing cheeks. "The grounds are extensive, you know, and they are not walled in. I haven't the least doubt but that hundreds can creep through the brush, and so have the gospel free. There is something about 'he that climbeth up some other way being a thief and a robber;' but, of course, the writer could not have had Chautauqua in mind; and even if it applies, it would be only stealing from an Association, which is not stealing at all, you know." "You are hard on me," the gentleman said, flushing in his turn, and the listeners, of whom there were many, laughed and seemed to enjoy the flashing of words. "I have no intention of creeping or climbing in. I shall present the same sort of ticket which took me in to-day, and if it doesn't pass me I will send you a dispatch to let you know, if you will give me your address." "And if you _do_ get in, and will let me know, I will report at once to the proper authorities that the gate-keepers have been unfaithful to their trust," said Marion, triumphantly. "But, my dear madam, what justice is there in that? I have paid my money, and what business is it to them when I present my ticket? That is keeping me out of my just dues." "Oh, not a bit of it; that is, if you can read, and have, as you admit, read their printed statement that you are not invited to the ground on Sunday. Your fifty-cent ticket will admit you on Monday. And you surely will not argue that the Association has not a right to limit the number of guests that it will entertain over the Sabbath?" "Yes, I argue that it is their business to let me in whenever I present their ticket." Marion laughed outright. "That is marvelous!" she said. "It is wicked for them to receive payment for your coming in on the Sabbath, and it is wicked for them not to let you in on your ticket. Really, I don't see what the Association are to do. They are committing sin either way it is put. I see no way out of it but to have refused to sell you any tickets at all. Would that have made it right?" The laugh that was raised over this innocently put question seemed to irritate her new acquaintance. He spoke hastily. "It is a Sabbath-breaking concern, viewed in any light that you choose to put it. There is no sense in holding camp-meetings over the Sabbath, and every one agrees that they have a demoralizing effect." "Do you mean me to understand you to think that the several thousand people who are now stopping at Chautauqua will be breaking the Sabbath by going out of their tents to-morrow and walking down to the public service?" The bit of sophistry in this meekly put question was overlooked, or at least not answered, and the logical young gentleman asked: "If they think Sabbath services in the woods so helpful, why are they not consistent? Let them throw the meeting open for all who wish to come, making the gospel without money and without price, as they pretend it is. Why isn't that done?" "Well, there are at least half a dozen reasons. I wonder you have not thought of one of them. In the first place, that, of course, would tempt to a great deal of Sabbath traveling, a thing which they carefully guard against now by refusing to admit all travelers. And in the second place, it would give the Chautauqua people a great deal to do in the way of entertaining so large a class of people. As it is, they have quite as much as they care to do to make comfortable the large company who belong to their family. And in the third place--But perhaps you do not care to hear all the reasons?" He ignored this question also, and went back to one of her arguments. "They don't keep travelers away at all, even by your own admission. What is to hinder hundreds of them from coming here to-day and buying season tickets in order to get in to-morrow?" He had the benefit of a most quizzical glance then from Marion's shining eyes before she answered. "Oh, well, if the people are really so hungering and thirsting for the gospel, as it is dispensed at Chautauqua, that they are willing to act a lie, by pretending that they are members _who have been and are to be in regular attendance_, and then are willing to pay two dollars and a half for the Sunday meeting, I don't know but I think they ought to be allowed to _creep_ in. Don't you?" CHAPTER XVII. GETTING READY TO LIVE. Amid the laughter that followed this retort the company rose up from the table and went their various ways, to meet, perhaps, again. "How on earth do you manage to keep so thoroughly posted in regard to Chautauqua affairs? One would think you were the wife of the private secretary. _I_ shouldn't have known whether the gates were to be opened or closed to-morrow." This from Ruth as the two girls paced the long piazza while waiting for the carriage which was to take them to the boat; for, having exhausted the resources of Mayville for entertainment, they were about to return to Chautauqua. Marion laughed. "I'm here in the capacity of a newspaper writer, please remember," she answered promptly, "and what I don't know I can imagine, like the rest of that brilliant fraternity. I am not really positive about a great many of the statements that I made, except on the general principle that these people belong to the class who are very much given to doing according to their printed word. It says on the circulars that the gates will be closed on the Sabbath, and I dare say they will be. At least, we have a right to assume such to be the case until it is proven false." "What class of people do you mean who are given to doing as they have agreed? Christian people, do you refer to?" "Well, yes; the sort of Christians that one meets at such a gathering as this. As a rule, the namby-pamby Christians stay away from such places; or, if they come, they float off to Saratoga or some more kindred climate. I beg your pardon, Ruthie, that doesn't mean you, you know, because you are not one of any sort." "Then do you take it to be their religion which inclines you to trust to their word, without having an individual acquaintance with them?" Marion shrugged her shoulders. "Oh, bother!" she said, gayly, "you are not turning theologian, or police detective in search of suspicious characters, are you? I never pretend to pry into my notions for and against people and things; if I was betrayed into anything that sounded like common sense I beg your pardon. I am out on a frolic, and mean to have it if there is any such thing." "Well, before you go back into absolute nonsense let me ask you one more question. Do you really feel as deeply as you pretended to that man, on all these questions of the Chautauqua conscience? I mean, is it a vital point in your estimation whether people go there to church on Sunday or not?" Marion hesitated, and a fine glow deepened on her face as she said, after a little, speaking with grave dignity: "I do not know that I can explain myself to you, Ruth, and I dare say that I seem to you like a bundle of contradictions; but it is a real pleasure to me to come in contact with people who have earnest faith and eager enthusiasm over _anything_, and principle enough to stand by their views through evil and good report. In this way, and to a great degree, this meeting is a positive delight to me, though I know personally as little about the feeling from which they think their actions take rise as any mortal can. Does that answer satisfy you, my blessed mother confessor? or are you more muddled than ever over what I do, and especially over what I do _not_ believe?" "If I believed as much as you do I should look further." Ruth said this with emphasis; and there was that in it which, despite her attempts to throw it off, set Marion to thinking, and kept her wonderfully quiet during their return trip. On the whole, the flight to Mayville was not viewed entirely in the light of a success. Ruth had been quiet and grave for some time, when she suddenly spoke in her most composed and decided voice: "I shall go to Saratoga on Monday, whether any one else will or not; I shall find plenty of friends to welcome me, and I shall take the morning train from here." But she didn't. Meantime Flossy's afternoon had been an uninterrupted satisfaction to her. She attended the children's meeting, and it was perfectly amazing to her newly awakened brain how many of the stories, used to point truths for the children, touched home to her. Dr. Hurlbut, of Plainfield, seemed to have especially planned his address for the purpose of hitting at some of the markedly weak points in her character, though no doubt the good man would have been utterly amazed had he known her thoughts. She listened and laughed with the rest over the story of the poor tailor who promised a coat to a customer for one, two and three weeks, heaping up his promises one on the other until he had a perfect pyramid of them, only to topple about his ears. She heard with the rest the magnificent voice ring out the solemn conclusion: "Children, he did not mean to lie. He did not even think he was a liar. He only _broke his promises_." They all heard, and I don't know how many shivered over it, but I _do_ know that to Flossy Shipley it seemed as if some one had struck her an actual blow. Was it possible that the easy sentences, the easy promises, to "write," to "come," to "bring this," to "tell that," made so gracefully, sounding so kindly, costing so little because forgotten almost as soon as her head was turned away, actually belonged in that list described by the ugly word "lie." Flossy had been a special sinner in this department of polite wickedness because it just accorded with her nature; such promises were so easy to make, and seemed to please people, and were so easy to forget. Like the tailor, she hadn't meant to be a liar, nor dreamed that she was one. But her wide-open ears took it all in, and her roused brain turned the thought over and over, until, be it known to you, that that girl's happy pastor, when he receives from her a decided, "Yes, sir, I will do it," may rest assured that unless something beyond her control intervenes she will be at her post. So much did Dr. Hurlbut accomplish that afternoon without ever knowing it. There were many things done that afternoon, I suspect, that only the light of the judgement day will reveal. Over the story of the two workmen, who each resolved to stick to a certain effort for six months, and did it, the one earning thereby a patent right worth thousands of dollars, and the other teaching a little dog how to dance to the whistling of a certain tune, Flossy looked unutterably sober, while the laughter swelled to a perfect roar around her. It was hard to feel that not "six months" only, but a dozen years of intelligent life, were gone from her, and she had not even taught a dog to dance a jig! That was the very way she put it in her humility; and I do not say that she placed it too low, because really I don't know that Flossy Shipley had _ever had_ even so settled a purpose in life as that! She had simply fluttered around the edge of this solemn business that we call living. But along with the sober thought glowed the earnest purpose: given another dozen years to my young lady's life and they will bear a different record; and whatever they bear, Dr. Hurlburt will be in a sense responsible for, though he never saw her and probably never will. Verily this living is a complicated bewildering thing Well for us that _all_ the weight of the responsibility is not ours to bear. There was still another story, and over it Flossy's lips parted, and her eyes glowed with feeling. That wonderful machine that the most skillful workmen tried in vain to repair, that was useless and worthless, until the name of the owner was found on it, and he was sent for, then indeed it found the master-hand, the only one who could right it; she did not need Dr. Hurlbut's glowing application. "So He who made us, and engraved his name, his image, on our bodies, can alone take our hearts and make them right." Flossy listened to this and the sentences that followed, thrilling her heart with their power and beauty--thrilling as they would not have done one week ago, for did she not know by actual experience just how blessed a worker the great Maker was? Had she not carried her heart to him, and had he not left his indelible impression there? Oh, this was a wonderful meeting to Flossy--one that she will never forget--one that many others will have reason to remember, because of the way in which she listened. But was it not strange, the way in which her education was being cared for? After tea she stood at the entrance of the tent, looking out for the girls--looking out, also, on the cool, quiet sunset and the glory spread everywhere, for there had been sunshine that day, part of the time, and there was a clear sun setting. Under her arm she held the treasure which she had in the morning determined to possess--a good, plain, large-print Bible, not at all like the velvet-covered one that lay on her toilet-stand at home, but such as the needs of Bible students at Chautauqua had demanded, and therefore much better fitted for actual service than the velvet. Among the many passers-by came Mrs. Smythe. She halted before Flossy. "Good-evening. I thought your party must have left. I haven't seen you since Thursday. Haven't you been fearfully bored? We are going to leave on Monday morning--going to Saratoga. Don't some of you want to join us? "I don't know," Flossy said, thoughtfully mindful of Ruth and her plan that had not worked. "It is possible that Miss Erskine may. Do your entire party go?" "Oh, not my nephew, of course! Nothing could tear him away. He is perfectly charmed with all this singing and praying and preaching, but I confess it is too much of a good thing for me. I am not intellectually inclined, I like the music very well, and some of the addresses are fine; but there is such a thing as carrying meetings to excess." At this point she turned quickly at the sound of a firm step behind her, and greeted a young man. "Speak of angels and you hear their wings, or the squeak of their boots," she said. "We were just talking about you, Evan. My nephew, Mr. Roberts, Miss Shipley. I believe you have never met before." Had they not! There was a heightened flush on the cheek of each as they shook hands. It was clear that each recognized the other. "Are we strangers?" he asked, with a bright smile, speaking so low that Mrs. Smythe, whose attention had already wandered from them to a group who were passing, did not hear the words, "On the contrary, I think we are related, though I do not know that we have happened to hear each other's names before." Flossy understood the relationship--sons and daughters of one Father--for she knew this was the young man who had twice questioned her concerning her allegiance to that Father. Also, she remembered him as the only one whom she had ever heard pray for her. Mrs. Smythe called out a gay good-evening to them, and joined a party of friends, and Mr. Roberts leaned against a tree and prepared to cultivate the acquaintance of his newly-found relative. "You have one of those large, sensible-looking Bibles, I see," he said. "I have been very much tempted, but I could not make myself feel that I really needed one." "I really needed mine," Flossy said, smiling. "I left my Bible at home. I had not such a thought as bringing it along. I feel now as if I had a treasure that I didn't know how to use. It is quite new to me. I don't know where to read first, but I suppose it makes no difference." "Indeed it does make great difference," he said, smiling, "and you will enjoy finding out how to read it. Chautauqua is a good place for such a study, and the Bible reading this evening is an excellent place to commence. Are you going?" "Yes, indeed!" Flossy said, with brightening eyes. "I have been looking forward to it all day. I can't think what a Bible reading is. Do they just read verses in the Bible?" "Yes," he said, smiling. "It is just Bible verses, with a word of explanation now and then and a little singing. But the Bible verses are something remarkable, as you will see. It is nearly time for service. Are you ready? Shall we walk down and secure seats?" So they went down together it the early twilight, and took seats under the trees amid the glowing of brilliant lights and the soft sound of music coming from the piano on the stand. CHAPTER XVIII. THE SILENT WITNESS. That Bible reading! I wish I could make it appear to you as it did to Flossy Shipley. Not that either, because I trust that the sound of the Bible verses is not so utterly new to you as it was to her--rather, that it might sound to you as it did to the earnest-souled young man who sat beside her, taking in ever; word with as much eagerness as if some of the verses had not been his dear and long-cherished friends; nay, with more eagerness on that account. Do you know Dr. Parsons, of Boston? It was he who conducted that reading, and his theme was, "The Coming of the Lord." Let me give you just a few of the groupings as he called them forth from his congregation under the trees, and which he called "the Lord's own testimonies to his coming:" "Watch therefore, for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come." "Therefore, be ye also ready; for in such an hour as ye think not the Son of man cometh." "Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh." "Take ye heed, watch and pray: for ye know not when the time is." Four solemn warnings from the Head of the vineyard. They reached to Flossy's very soul, and she had that old well-known thrill of feeling that almost every Christian has some time experienced. "If _I_ had only been there; if He had spoken such words to _me_, I could never, never have forgotten, or been neglectful. If I could only have heard Him speak!" And as if in answer to this longing cry Dr. Parsons himself read the next solemn sentence, read it in such a way that it almost seemed as if this might be the sacred garden, and _Himself_ standing among the olive-trees speaking even to _her_: "And what I say unto you I say unto all, Watch." Here, then, was her direction from His own lips. Though centuries had passed since He spoke them they echoed down to her. She was not overwhelmed; she was not crushed by the new and solemn sense of her calling that flowed over her. The Lord himself was there in every deed, and whispered in her ear, "It is I, be not afraid." And her heart responded solemnly, "Aye, Lord, I feel thy presence; I have been sleeping, but I am awake, and from henceforth I _will_ watch." That Bible reading was like a whole week of theological study to Flossy. It was not that she learned simply about the blessed assurance, the weight of testimony amounting to an absolute certainty, concerning the coming of the Lord. But there were so many truths growing out from that, so many incentives to be up and doing; for she found before the reading closed that one must not only watch, but in the watching work; and there were so many reasons why she should, and so many hints as to the way and the time. Then there was, also, the most blessed discovery that the Bible was not a book to treat like an arithmetic. That one must read through the Book of Genesis, and then go on to Exodus, a chapter to-day, two chapters to-morrow, and perhaps some days, when one was not in too great a hurry and could read very fast, take half a dozen chapters, and so get through it. But she learned that there were little connecting links of sweetness all the way through the book; that she had a right to look over in Revelation for an explanation of something that was stated in Deuteronomy. She did not learn all this, either, at this one time; but she got a vivid hint of it, strong enough to keep her hunting and pulling at the lovely golden thread of the Bible for long years to come. There were special points about the closing verses that throbbed in her heart, and awakened purposes that never slept again. It was the gentleman who sat beside her who read the solemn words of the verse: "But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up. Seeing then that all these things shall be dissolved, what manner of persons ought ye to be in all holy conversation and godliness?" His voice was very earnest, and his face had an eager look of solemn joy. From it she felt the truth that while the words which he had been reading were full of solemnity, and while he felt the sense of responsibility, there was also that in them which filled his heart with great joy, for when that time should come would not he be with his Lord? Again, when a little later he gave the closing verses of this wonderful lesson, reading them from her Bible, because in the dimness the print was larger and clearer than his own, they made the conclusion of the whole matter: "Ye are the children of light, and the children of the day; we are not of the night, nor of the darkness. Therefore let us not sleep as do others, but let us watch and be sober." He marked it with his pencil as he finished reading, and as he returned the book to her keeping he said with a smile: "We will, shall we not?" And it felt to Flossy like a convenant, witnessed by the Lord himself. But Dr. Parsons, you know, knew nothing of all this. Chautauqua was the place for sowing the seed; they could only hope that the Lord of the vineyard was looking on and watching over the coming harvest; it was not for their eyes to see the fruits. Sunday morning at Chautauqua! None of all the many hundreds who spent the day within the shadow of that sweet and leafy place have surely forgotten how the quaint and quiet beauty of the place and its surroundings fell upon them; they know just how the birds sang among those tall old trees; they know just how still and blue and clear the lake looked as they caught glimpses of it through the quivering green of myriad leaves; they know just how clearly the Chautauqua bells cut the air and called to the worship. It needs not even these few words to recall the place in its beauty to the hearts of those who worshiped there that day; and for you who did not see it nor feel its power there is no use to try to describe Chautauqua. Only this, it is a place to love and look back to with a sort of sweet and tender longing all your lives. Our girls felt somewhat of the sacredness of the place; at least they went around with a more decided feeling that it was Sunday than they had ever realized before. Three of them did. To Flossy this day was like the revelation of a new heaven and a new earth. Her first Sunday in Christ! There was no sunshine, neither was there rain. Just a hush of all things, and sweetness everywhere. After breakfast Ruth and Marion lolled on their cots and studied the programme, while the other two made hasty toilets, and announced their intention of going to Sunday-school. "What in the name of sense takes you?" queried Marion, rising on one elbow, the better to view this strange phenomena. "Why I have a mission," Eurie said. "About three thousand people have been talking all this week about teaching a few Bible verses to some children to-day, and I am going to find out what they are, and what is so wonderful about them. Besides, I was taken for a being named Miss Rider, and on inquiry I find her to be what they call an infant-class teacher, so I am going to hunt her up and see if we look alike and are affinities." Flossy chose to make no answer at all, and presently the two departed together to attend their first Sabbath-school since they were known as children. As they passed a certain tent Eurie's ready ears gained information from other passers-by: "This is where the little children are; Miss Rider is going to teach them." Eurie halted. "_I'm_ going in here," she said, decidedly, to Flossy. "That is the very lady I am in search of." And seeing Flossy hesitate, she added: "Oh, you may go on, it is just as well to divide our forces; we may each have some wonderful adventure. You go your way and I will go mine, and we'll see what will come of it." The tent was full apparently; but that spirit which was rife at Chautauqua, and which prompted everybody to try to look out a little for the comfort of everybody else, made a seat full of ladies crowd a little and make room for her. Rows and rows of little people with smiling faces and shining eyes! It was a pretty sight. Eurie gave eager attention to the lady who was talking to them, and laughed a little to herself over the dissimilarity of their appearance. "Hair and eyes and height, and everything else, totally unlike me!" she said. "She is older than I, too, ever so much. She doesn't look as I thought Miss Rider would." But what she was saying proved to be very interesting, not only to the little people, but to Eurie. She listened eagerly. It was important to discover what had been so stirring the Sunday-school world all the week. She was not left in doubt; the story was plainly, clearly, fascinatingly told; it was that tender one of the sick man so long waiting, waiting to be helped into the pool; disappointed year after year, until one blessed day Jesus came that way and asked one simple question, and received an eager answer, and gave one brief command, and, lo! the work was done! The long, long years of pain and trial were over! Do you think this seemed like a wonderful story to Eurie? Do you think her cheeks glowed with joy over the thought of the great love and the great power of Jesus? Alas, alas! to her there was no beauty in him. This simple tender story did not move her as the commonplace account of a common sickness and common recovery given in a village paper would have done. The very most that she thought of it was this: "That Miss Rider has a good deal of dramatic power. How well she tells the story! But dear me! how stupid it must be. What is the use of taking so much trouble for these little midgets? They don't understand the story, and of what use would it be to them if they did? Something that happened to somebody hundreds of years ago." But now her attention was arrested by the sound of a very loud whisper just behind her, given in a childish voice. "Miss Rider, Miss Rider," the child was saying, and emphasizing her whisper by a pull at a lady's dress. Eurie turned quickly; the dress belonged to a young, fair girl, with fresh glowing face and large bright eyes, that shone now with feeling as she listened eagerly to this story, and to the comments of the children concerning it. Then she in turn whispered to the lady nearest her: "Is it Miss Rider who is teaching?" "No, it is Mrs. Clark, of Newark. That is Miss Rider leaning against a post." Then Eurie looked back to her. "She is no older than I," she murmured; "indeed not so old, I should think. Her hair must be exactly the color of mine, and we are about the same height. I wonder if we _do_ look in the least alike? What do I care!" Yet still she looked; the bright face fascinated her. The little child had won the lady's attention; and the lips and eyes, and indeed the whole face, were vivid with animation as she bent low and answered some troubled question, appealing to the diagram on the board, and making clear her answer by rapid gestures with her fingers. The lady beside Eurie volunteered some more information. "Miss Rider was to have taught this class, I heard. I wonder why she didn't?" "I don't know," Eurie answered, briefly. Then she looked back at her again. "She is jealous," she said to herself. "She was to have taught this class this morning, and by some blundering she was left out, and she is disgusted. She will say that such teaching as this amounts to nothing; she could have done it five times as well; or, if she doesn't _say_ that last, she will think it and act it. I have no doubt these rival teachers cordially hate each other, like politicians." Nevertheless that fresh young face, with its glow of feeling, fascinated her. She kept looking at her; she gave no more attention to the lesson. What was it, after all, but an old story that had nothing to do with her; the fact that it was taken from the Bible was proof enough of that. But she watched Miss Rider. The session closed and that lady pressed forward to assist in giving out papers. The crowd pushed the willing Eurie nearer to her, so near that she could catch the sentence that she was eagerly saying to the lady near her. "Isn't Mrs. Clark delightful? It was such a beautiful lesson this morning. I think it is such a treat and such a privilege to be allowed to listen to her. Yes, darling," this last to another little one claiming a word, "of course Jesus can hear you now, just as well as though He stood here. He often says to people, 'Wilt thou be made whole?' He has said so to you this morning." Eurie turned away quickly. She had had her lesson. It wasn't from the Bible, nor yet did she find it in those hundred little faces so eager to know the story in all its details. It was just in that young face not so old as hers, so bright, so strong, so thoroughly alert, and so thoroughly enlisted in this matter. The vivid contrast between that life and hers struck Eurie with the force of a new revelation. She went to the general service under the trees; she heard a sermon from Dr. Pierce, so full of power and eloquence that to many who heard it there came new resolves, new purposes, new plans. I beg her pardon, she did not listen; she simply occupied a seat and looked as though she was a listener. But the truth was, she had not learned yet to listen to sermons. The very fact that it was a sermon made it clear to her mind that there was to be nothing in it for her; this had been her education. In reality, during that hour of worship she was engaged in watching the changeful play of expression on Miss Rider's face, as her eyes brightened and glowed with enthusiasm or trembled with tears, according as the preacher's words roused or subdued her. Well, Eurie had her lesson. It was not from the Bible, it was not from the preacher's lips except incidentally, but it was from a living epistle. "Ye shall be witnesses of me," was the promise of Christ in the long ago, just before the cloud received him out of sight. Is not that promise verified to us often and often when we know it not? Miss Rider had no means of knowing as she sat a listener that Sabbath morning that she was witnessing for Christ. But she was just as surely speaking for him as though she had stood up amid that throng and said: "I love Jesus." "Ye are my witnesses, saith the Lord." And the poet has said: "They also serve who only stand and wait." Blessed are those in whom the waiting and the service go together. CHAPTER XIX. AN OLD STORY. Meantime Flossy, deserted by her companion, made her way somewhat timidly down to the stand, amazed by the great congregation of people who had formed themselves into a Sunday-school. With all their haste the girls had gotten a very late start. The opening exercises were all over, and the numerous teachers were turning to their work. Strangely enough, the first person whom Flossy's eye took in distinctly enough for recognition was Mr. Roberts. He had recognized her, also, and was coming toward her. "How do you do this morning?" he said, holding out his hand. "Do you know I have a mission for you? There are two boys who seem to belong to nobody, and to have nothing in common with this gathering, except curiosity. The superintendent has twice tried to charm them in, but without success--they will come no further than that tree. I think they have slipped in from the village, probably in a most unorthodox fashion, and what I am coming at is, will you go out under the tree to them and beguile them into attending a Sabbath-school for once in their lives? They look to me as though it was probably a rare occurrence." Now you are not to suppose that this invitation came to Flossy with the same sound that it would have had to you, if Mr. Roberts had come to you that Sabbath morning and asked you to tell those two boys a Bible story. It is something that you have probably been doing a good deal of, all your grown-up life, and two boys at Chautauqua are no more to you than two boys anywhere else, except that there is a delightful sensation connected with having a class-room out in the open air. But imagine yourself suddenly confronted by Dr. Vincent, and asked if you would be so kind as to step on the platform and preach to five thousand people, from a text that he would select for you! Now you have something of an idea as to how this request felt to Flossy. A rare glow spread all over her face, and she looked up at her questioner with eyes that were quivering in tears. "You do not know what you are saying," she said, in low and trembling voice. "I have not been to a Sabbath-school in seven years, and I never taught anybody anything in my life." It was true that he did not know. It seemed to him such a very little thing that he had asked. However, he spoke gently enough as one who was courteous, even when he could not quite comprehend. "Then is not to-day a good time to commence? You will surely never have a better opportunity." But she shook her head, and turned quite away from him, walking down among the trees where no people were. Her joy was all gone, and her pleasant time. She had meant to go to Sabbath-school; to sit down quietly in some body's class and learn, oh! a very great deal during the next hour. Now she was all stirred up, and could not go anywhere. As for Mr. Roberts, he went back to the large class who were waiting for him. And those two boys hovered around the edge of that feast like hungry creatures who yet had never learned to come to the table and take their places. Flossy looked at them; at first indignantly, as at miserable beings who had spoiled her pleasure; then she became fascinated by their bright, dirty faces and roguish ways. She edged a little nearer to them. Boys she was afraid of; she knew nothing about them. Had they been a little older, and been dressed well, and been of the stamp of boys who knew how to bring her handkerchief to her when she dropped it, she would have known what to say to them. But boys who were not more than twelve or fourteen, and who were both ragged and dirty, were new phases of life to her. "Why don't you go to Sunday-school?" she questioned at last, with a timid air. She could at least ask that. They were not the least timid as to answering; the older and the dirtier of the two turned his roguish eyes on her and surveyed her from head to foot before he said: "Why don't you?" Flossy was unprepared for this question, but she answered quickly and truthfully: "Because I am afraid to go." Both boys stared, and then laughed, and the other younger one said: "So be we." "I suppose we are both very silly," Flossy said. "But I have not been to Sunday-school for so long that I have forgotten all about it. Let's have one of our own that we are not afraid to go to." And she sat bravely down on the stump at her feet; her mood had changed very suddenly; only yesterday she had read a verse in that Bible, and it thrilled her then, and came to her now: "The man departed and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had made him whole." Suppose she were the man, and these were the Jews, could she not say to them, "He has made me whole"? She could tell them about that pool, and about the sick man. It wouldn't be teaching in Sunday-school, but it would be doing the best thing that she could. It suddenly occurred to her to wonder where the lesson was that was being taught this morning, and she consulted the lesson leaf that Mr. Roberts had left in her hand. The glow on her face deepened and spread as she recognized the very story which had so filled her heart the day before! What if the great Physician had actually selected her to tell of that miracle of healing to these two neglected ones! Surely they were not so formidable as the Jews! But how in the world to begin was a bewilderment. Clearly she must decide at once if she was to have any class, for her two boys began to look about them, and show signs of flight. "Did you ever hear about a wonderful spring that used to cure people?" "Lots of 'em. I used to live right by one that cured the rheumatiz." "But this one would cure other things, only it wouldn't cure people all the time. There was just one time in the year when it would do it; and then the one that got in first was the only one cured." Her listeners looked skeptical. "What was that for?" queried the bolder of the two. "Why didn't it cure but one?" "I don't know," Flossy said. "There are ever so many things that I know that I can't tell why they are so. For instance, I don't know why that spring you have been telling me about cures the rheumatism, but I know it does, for you told me so." "No more do I," the boy said, promptly, having in his heart a rising respect for the young teacher and her story. Then this new beginner, with the air of a diplomatist, told all the details of this wonderful cure, without once mentioning the name of either person or place. An innate sense of the human heart told her that "Jerusalem" and "Jesus" were both probably connected in the minds of these two with the Bible, and their appearance told her that they were likely to be skeptical as to the interest of Bible stories. But, like all ignorant persons, there was a credulous side to their nature. It is surprising what marvelous stories people are prepared to receive and credit, provided only that they do not come from the Bible, with a "Thus saith the Lord" to vouch for them. Then, indeed, they are apt to become "unreasonable" and "improbable." Presently her boys volunteered some remarks and asked some questions. "Jolly! that fellow must have felt good: I guess he wanted to run all around the country and tell about it. Where was this spring, and what was the man's name that cured him?" The other chimed in: "Yes, and how did he do it? That's what I'm after. And is he dead? 'cause I don't hear of no such cures now-days." Then was Flossy tremulous of heart. She had become eagerly interested in her story and her boys. Would the charm that she had woven be broken the moment they knew the story's origin? But of course she must tell them, for what good else would the story do? "He is dead," she said, slowly, answering the last question first. "That is, he is what _you_ call dead. But, of course, you know as well as I do that that doesn't mean what it seems to; it means simply that he doesn't live in the same place that he once did. He went to heaven to live ever so many years ago." She waited to feel the effect of this announcement. The boys were silent and grave. They had evidently heard of heaven, and had some measure of respect for the name. The new teacher did not know what to say next. The boys helped her. The younger one drew a heavy sigh. "Well, all I've got to say is, I wish he was alive now," he said, in a regretful tone, "'cause my mother has been sick longer than thirty-eight years; she has been sick about all her life, and she is real bad now, so she can't walk at all. I s'pose he could cure her if he was here." "I suppose he could cure her now." Flossy said this slowly, reverently, looking earnestly at the boy, hoping to convey to him a sense of her meaning. He looked utterly puzzled. Light began to dawn on the face of the older boy. "She's been tellin' us one of them Bible stories," he said, speaking not to Flossy, but to his companion, and assuming an injured air, as if a wrong had been done them. Flossy spoke quickly: "Of course I have. I thought you wanted to hear something that really happened, and not a made up story." This seemed to be an appeal to their dignity, and they eyed her reflectively. "How do you know it happened?" ventured the younger one. Flossy gave a rapid and animated answer. "There are about a hundred reasons why I know it; it would take me all day to tell you half of them. But one is, that I read it in a book which good men who know a great deal, and who have been studying all their lives to find out about it, say they know is true; and I believe what they tell me about Washington and Lincoln and other men whom I never saw, so I ought to believe them when they tell me about this man." "But there's _one_ thing you don't know. You don't know that he can cure folks now, and he don't do it." This was spoken with a quiet positiveness, and with the air that said, "_That_ can't be disputed, and you know it can't." Flossy hesitated just a moment; the glow on her face deepened and spread. Then she answered in much the same tone that the boy had used: "I know he _can_, and I have good reason for knowing. I'll tell you a secret; you are the very first persons I have told about it, but he has cured me. I have been sick all my life, when I came here to Chautauqua I was sick. I could not do anything that I was made to do, and I kept doing things all the time that were not meant for me to do, but he has cured me." The boys looked at her in absolute incredulous wonder. "Was you sick in bed when you came?" ventured one of them at last. "No; it is not that kind of sickness that I mean. That is when the body is sick, the body that when the soul goes away looks like nothing but marble, can not move, nor feel, nor speak; that isn't of much consequence, you know, because we are sure that the soul will go away from it after awhile. It is this soul of mine that is going to live forever that was cured." "How do you know it was?" came again from these wondering boys. Flossy smiled a rare, bright smile that charmed them. "If _yours_ had been cured you would not ask me that question," she said; "you would _know_ how I know it. But I can't tell you how it is: don't you know there are some things that you are sure of that you can't explain? You are sure you can think, aren't you? but how would you set to work to explain to me that you are sure? The only way that you can know how is by going to this doctor and getting cured; then you will understand." "I'd like him if he would cure folks' _bodies_," began the boy who had a sick mother, speaking in a doubtful, somewhat dissatisfied tone. "He does," Flossy said, quickly. "Don't people's bodies get well sometimes? and who can cure bodies except the one who made them? If you want your mother cured you ought to try him. If she is to be made well you may be sure that he can do it; but why should he so long as you do not care enough about it to ask him?" There was a rush and a bustle among the crowds in the distance. Sunday-school session was over, and the great company were moving for seats for the morning service. The boys took the alarm and fled, each glancing back to nod and smile at the bright apparition who had told them a story. Flossy picked up her Bible; she had not needed to use it during this talk. The story of Bethesda had burned itself so into her heart with that morning reading that she had no need to look at it again. She gave a thoughtful little sigh. "I don't know about that being teaching," she said within her heart, "but I certainly told them about Jesus, and I told them it was Jesus who had 'made me whole.' I made my own experience 'witness' for me to that degree. If that is what they mean by teaching I like to do it. I mean to go to Sunday-school just as soon as I get home, and if I find out that they just tell about things as they are in the Bible I can do it. I can make the boys listen to me, I know." Bright little fairy that she was! There was a new glow about her face. She was waking to the thought that there was such a thing as power over people's brains. No danger but she will use her knowledge. Let me tell you another thing that Chautauqua did for her. It planted the seed that shall blossom into splendid teaching. There was one teacher who gave many glances that morning to the little group around that old tree stump. Mr. Roberts, from his point of observation, not far away, watched this scene from beginning to end. It fascinated him. He saw the timid beginning and the ever-increasing interest, until, when Flossy closed her Bible and arose, he turned his eyes from her with a quiet smile in them, and to himself he said: "Unless I am very greatly mistaken she has found something that she can do." CHAPTER XX. PEOPLE WHO, "HAVING EYES, SEE NOT." "Girls!" said Eurie, as she munched a doughnut, which she had brought from the lunch-table with her, and lounged on a camp-chair, waiting for the afternoon service, "do you know that Flossy taught a class in Sunday-school this morning?" "Taught a class!" repeated both Marion and Ruth in one voice, and with about equal degrees of amazement. "She did, as true as the world. That is, she must have been teaching. The way of it was this: I went to see the little midgets exhibit themselves, and when I came out of the tent and walked over toward the stand, there sat Flossy on that old stump just back of the stand, and before her were two of the roughest-looking boys that ever emerged from the backwoods. They were ragged and dirty and wild; and as wicked little imps as one could find, I am sure. Flossy was talking to them, and she had a large Bible in her lap and one of those Lesson Leaves that they flutter about here so much; and--well, altogether it was an amazing sight! She was certainly talking to them with all her might, and they were listening; and it is my opinion that she was trying to play Sunday-school teacher, and give them a lesson. You know she is an imitative little sheep, and always was." "Nonsense!" Ruth said, and she seemed to speak more sharply than the occasion warranted. "Just as if Flossy Shipley couldn't have anything to say to two boys but what she found in the Bible! Little she knows what is in it, for that matter. I suppose she wandered out that way because she did not know what else to do with herself, and talked to the boys by way of amusement. She has often amused herself in that way, I am sure." "Ah, yes; but these specimens were rather too youthful and dirty for that sort of amusement, and she had a Bible in her lap." "What of that! Bibles are as common as leaves here. I found two lying on the seat which I took this morning. People seem to think the art of stealing has not found its way here." "Flossy is changed," interrupted Marion. "The mouse is certainly different from what _I_ ever saw her before; she seems so quiet and self-sustained. I thought she was bored. Why, I expected her to hail a trip to her dear Saratoga with absolute delight! She belongs to just the class of people who would find the intellectual element here too strong for her, and would have to flutter off in that direction in self-defense. Ruthie, you have the temper of an angel not to fly out at me for bringing in Saratoga every few minutes. It isn't with 'malice aforethought,' I assure you. I forget your projected scheme whenever I speak of it; but you must allow me to be astonished over Flossy's refusal to go with you. Something has come over the mousie that is not explainable by any of the laws of science with which I am acquainted." "Don't trouble yourself to apologize, I beg. I hope you do not think I am so foolish as to care anything about your hints as to Saratoga. Of course I recognize my right in this world to be governed by my own tastes and inclinations. I have enjoyed that privilege too long to be disturbed by trifles." This from Ruth; but I shall have to admit that it was very stiffly spoken, and if she had but known it, indicated that she _did_ care a great deal. In truth she was very sore over her position and her plans. She who had prided herself on her intellectuality bored to the very point of leaving, and Flossy, who had been remarkable for nothing but flutter and fashion, actually so interested that she could not be coaxed into going away! What _was_ it that interested her? That was the question which interested and puzzled Ruth. She studied over it during all the time that Marion and Eurie were chatting about the morning service. Flossy _was_ different; there was no shutting one's eyes to that fact. The truth was that she had suddenly seemed to have little in common with her own party. She certainly said little to them; she made no complaints as to inconveniences, even when they amounted to positive annoyances with the rest of the party; she had given up afternoon toilets altogether, and in fact the subject of dress seemed to be one that had suddenly sunken into such insignificance as to cease to claim her thoughts at all. Grave changes these to be found in Flossy Shipley. Then, too, she had taken to wandering away alone in the twilight; during the short spaces between services she was nowhere to be found, but the Chautauqua bell brought her back invariably in time to make ready for the next service. "There is certainly more to the little mouse than I ever expected before. If Chautauqua wakes _our_ wits as it has Flossy's we shall have reason to bless the day that Dr. Vincent invented it." This Ruth heard from Marion as she roused herself from her reverie to give attention to what the girls were saying. They had got back to a discussion of Flossy again. It was a subject that someway annoyed Ruth, so she dismissed it, and made ready for the afternoon meeting, whither they all went. To Marion the morning sermon had been an intellectual treat. She had a way of listening to sermons that would have been very disheartening to the preacher if he had known of it. She had learned how to divest herself of all personality. The subject was one that had nothing to do with her; the application of solemn truths were for the people around her who believed in these things, but never for her; so she listened and enjoyed, just as she enjoyed a book or a picture, just as if she had no soul at all, nothing but an intellect. It was very rare indeed that an arrow from any one's quiver touched her. But there was one single sentence in Dr. Pierce's sermon that was destined to haunt her. Said he: "When the blind man was questioned he couldn't argue, he didn't try to; but he could stand up there before them and say, 'Whereas I was blind, now I see; make the most of that.' And wasn't it an unanswerable argument? There is no argument like it. When men are honest and earnest and spiritual in Wall Street, it tells." Now that was just the kind of sentence to delight Marion's heart. The inconsistencies of Christians was one of her very strong points, she saw them bristling out everywhere, and she looked about her with a satisfied smile on her face that so large a company of them were getting so sharp a thrust as this. And suddenly there flashed across her brain an utterly new thought. "Whereas I was _blind_, now I see." "Perhaps," she said to herself--"_perhaps_ I am blind. What if that should be the only reason why these things are not to me as they are to others. How do I know, after all, but there may really be a spiritual blindness, and that it may be holding me? How do I know but that the reason some of these poor ignorant people whom I meet are so firm in their belief of Christ and heaven is because they have had just this experience? "'Whereas I _was_ blind, now I see!' How can I possibly tell but that this may be the case? I wonder what I _do_ think anyway? Do I really think that all these men gathered here are either deceived or deceivers? One or the other they must be--and either position is too silly to sustain--or else I must be blind. If there should be such a thing as seeing, and I discover it too late! If there is a too late to this thing, and I do not find it out simply because I am blind, what then? The sun shines, of course, though I dare say an entirely blind man doesn't believe it. Doesn't have an idea anyway what it is--how can he?" Over and over did she revolve this sentence, and look at it from every attainable standpoint. No use to try to shut it off, back it came. All the clatter with which she had amused herself during the interval between meetings had not banished it. No sooner was she seated under those trees waiting for the afternoon service than the thought presented itself for her to consider. "I wonder if there are different degrees of moral blindness?" she said, suddenly. "People who can see just enough to enable them to keep constantly going the wrong way, so that they are no better off than the blind, except that they admit that there is such a thing as seeing. The thing is possible, I suppose." Ruth turned and looked at her wonderingly. "What _are_ you talking about?" she asked at last. "I'm moralizing," Marion said, laughing. "You yourself suggested that train of thought. I was wondering which of us was right in our notions, you or I; and, for all practical purposes, what difference it made." "You are too high up for me to follow. I haven't the least idea what you mean." "Why, I tell you I was contrasting our conditions. Let me see if I have a right view of them. Don't you honestly think that there is a God, and a heaven, and a hell, and that to escape the one place and secure the other certain efforts upon your part are necessary?" "Why, of course I think so. I have never made any pretense of disbelieving all these things. I think it is foolish to do so." "Exactly. Now for one question more: Have you made the effort that you believe to be necessary?" "Have you been hired as an exhorter?" Ruth said, trying to laugh. "Why, no, I can not say that I have." "Well, then, suppose you and I should both die to-night. _I_ don't believe any of these things; you do, but you don't practice on your belief. Then, according to your own view, you will be lost forever; and, according to that same view, so shall I. Now, practically, what difference is there between us? So if it is really blindness, why may not one be totally blind as well as to have a little sight that keeps one all the time in the wrong way?" "I dare say we are quite as well off," Ruth said, composedly; "only I think there is this point of difference between us. I think your position is silly. I don't see how any one who has studied Paley and Butler, and in fact any of the sciences, can think so foolish a thing as you pretend to. One doesn't like to be foolish, even if one doesn't happen to be a Christian." "Foolish?" Marion repeated, and there was a fine glow on her face. "Don't you go and talk anything so wild as that! If there is any class of people in this world who profess to be simpletons, and act up to their professions, it is you people who believe _everything_ and _do_ nothing. Now just look at the thing for a minute. Suppose you say, 'There is a precipice over there, and every whiff of wind blows us nearer to it; we will surely go over if we sit here; we ought to go up on that hill; I know that is a safe place,' and yet you sit perfectly still. And suppose I say, 'I don't believe there is any such thing as a precipice, and I believe this is just as safe a place as there is anywhere,' and _I_ sit still. Now I should like to know which of us was acting the sillier?" "You would be," Ruth said, stoutly, "if you persisted in disbelieving what could be proved to you so clearly that no person with common sense would think of denying it." "Humph!" said Marion, settling back; "in that case I think there would be very little chance for each to accuse the other of folly; only I confess to you just this, Ruth Erskine, if you could _prove_ to me that there was a precipice over there, and that we were being carried toward it, and that the hill was safe, I know in my very soul that I should get up and go to that hill. I would not be such a fool as to delay, I know I wouldn't." "You are frank," Ruth said, and her face was flushed. "I am sure I don't see why you don't make the attempt and decide for yourself, if you feel this thing so deeply. _I_ think there ought to be a prayer-meeting on your account. If I knew Dr. Vincent I would try to have this thing turned into a regular camp-meeting time, then you would doubtless get all the help you need." Marion laughed good-humoredly. "Don't waste your sarcasm on me," she said, cheerily; "keep your weapons for more impressible subjects. You know I am not in the least afraid of any such arguments. I have been talking downright truth and common sense, and you know it, and are hit; that is what makes you sarcastic. Did you know that was at the bottom of most sarcasm, my dear?" "Do hush, please. These people before us are trying hard to hear what the speaker is saying." This was Ruth's answer; but she had had her sermon; and of all the preachers at Chautauqua, the one who had preached to _her_ was Marion Wilbur, the infidel school-teacher! It was her use of Dr. Pierce's arrow that had thrust Ruth. She gave herself up to the thought of it all during that wonderful afternoon meeting. Very little did she hear of the speeches, save now and then a sentence more vivid than the rest; her brain was busy with new thoughts. _Was_ it all so very queer? Did it look to others than Marion a strange way to live? Did she actually believe these things for which she had been contending? If she did, was she in very deed an idiot? It actually began to look as though she might be. She was not wild like Eurie, nor intense and emotional, like Marion; she was still and cold, and, in her way, slow; given to weighing thoughts, and acting calmly from decisions rather than from impulse. It struck her oddly enough now that, having so stoutly defended the cardinal doctrines of Christian faith, she should have no weapons except sarcasm with which to meet a bold appeal to her inconsistency. "When I get home from Saratoga," she said, at last, turning uneasily in her seat, annoyed at the persistency of her thoughts, "I really mean to look into this thing. I am not sure but a sense of propriety should lead one to make a profession of religion. It is, as Marion says, strange to believe as we do and not indicate it by our professions. I am not sure but the right thing for me to do would be to unite with the church. There is certainly some ground for the thrusts that Marion has been giving. My position must seem inconsistent to her. I certainly believe these things. What harm in my saying so to everybody? Rather, is it not the right thing to do? I will unite with the church from a sense of duty, not because my feelings happen to be wrought upon by some strong excitement. I wonder just what is required of people when they join the church? A sense of their own dependence on Christ for salvation I suppose. I certainly feel that. I am not an unbeliever in any sense of the word. I respect Christian people, and always did. Mother used to be a church-member; I suppose she would be now if she were not an invalid. Most of the married ladies in our set are church-members. I don't see why it isn't quite as proper for young ladies to be. I certainly mean to give some attention to this matter just as soon as the season is over at Saratoga. In the meantime I wonder when there is a train I can get, and if I couldn't telegraph to mother to send my trunks on and have them there when I arrived." CHAPTER XXI A "SENSE OF DUTY." It is not so easy to get away from ones self as you might think, if you never had occasion to try it. Ruth Erskine--who honestly thought herself on the high road to heaven because she had decided to offer herself for church-membership as soon as she returned from Saratoga--did not find the comfort and rest of heart that so heroic a resolution ought to have brought. It was in vain that she endeavored to dismiss the subject and try to decide just what new costume the Saratoga trip would demand. If she could only have gotten away from the crowd of people and out of that meeting back to the quiet of her tent, she might have succeeded in arranging her wardrobe to her satisfaction; but she was completely hedged in from any way of escape, and the inconsiderate speakers constantly made allusions that thrust the arrow further into her brain; I am not sure that it could have been said to have reached her heart. "Who is to blame that you can not all be addressed as _workers_ for Christ? Who is _your_ Master? Why do you not serve him?" These were sentences that struck in upon her just as she was deciding to have a new summer silk, trimmed with shirrings of the same material a shade darker. "_Workers_!" She did not know whether the speaker gave a peculiar emphasis to that word, or whether it only sounded so to her ears. Did this resolution that she had made put her among the _workers_? What was she ready to do? Teach in the Sabbath-school? Involuntarily she shrugged her shoulders; she did not like children; tract distributing, too, was hateful work, and out of style she had heard some one say. What wonderful work was to be done? She was sure _she_ didn't know. Sewing certainly wasn't in her line; she couldn't make clothes for the poor; but, then, she could give money to buy them with. Oh, yes, she was perfectly willing to do that. And then she tried to determine whether it would be well to get a new black grenadine, or whether a black silk would suit her better. She had got it trimmed with four rows of knife pleating, headed with puffs, when she was suddenly returned to the meeting. Somebody was telling a story; she had not been giving sufficient attention to know who the speaker was, but he told his story remarkably well. It must have been about a miserable little street boy who was sick, and another miserable street boy seemed to be visiting him. This was where her ears took it up: "It was up a ricketty pair of stairs, and another, and another, to a filthy garret. There lay the sick boy burning with a fever, mother and father both drunk, and no one to do anything or care anything for the boy who was fighting with death. 'Ben,' said his dirty-faced visitor, bending over him, 'you're pretty bad ain't you? Ben, do you ever pray?' 'No,' says Ben, turning fevered eyes on the questioner: 'I don't know what that is.' 'Did you know there was a man once named Jesus Christ? He come to this world on purpose to save people who are going to die. Did you ever be told about him?' 'No; who is he?' 'Why, he is God; you have to believe on him.' 'I don't know what you mean.' 'Why, ask him to save you. When you die you ask him to take you and save you. I heard about him at school.' 'Will he do it?' 'Yes, he will _sure_. Them says so as have tried him.' Silence in the garret, Ben with his face turned to the wall the fever growing less, the pulse growing fainter; suddenly he turns back. 'I've asked him,' he said; 'I've asked him, and he said he would.'" Ruth looked about her nervously. People were weeping softly all around her. Marion brushed two great tears from her glowing cheeks, and Ruth, with her heart beating with such a quickened motion that it made her faint, wondered what was the matter with every one, and wished this dreadful meeting was over, or that she had gone to Saratoga on Saturday. It was hard to go back to the puffs on that grenadine dress in the midst of all this, but with a resolute struggle she threw herself back into an argument as to whether she would stop on her way to make purchases, or run down to Albany as soon as she was comfortably settled at her hotel. Mr. Bliss was the next one who roused her. You have never heard him sing? Then I am sorry for you. How can I tell you anything about it? You should hear Ruth tell it! How his voice rolled out and up from under those grand old trees; how distinctly every word fell on your ear, as distinctly as though you and he had been together in a little room alone, and he had song it for you. "This loving Savior stands patiently-- Though oft rejected, Calls again for thee. Calling now for thee, prodigal, Calling now for thee; Thou hast wandered far away, But he's calling now for thee." What _was_ the matter with everybody? Was this an army of prodigals who had gathered under the trees this Sabbath afternoon? Turn where she would they were wiping away the tears; she felt herself as if she could hardly keep back her own; and yet why should she weep? What had that song to do with her? _She_ certainly was not a prodigal: she had never wandered, for she had never professed to be a Christian. What strange logic, that because I have never owned my Father's love and care, therefore I am not a wanderer from him! Ruth did not understand it; she felt almost provoked; had she not decided this very afternoon and for the first time in her life that it was fitting and eminently the proper thing to do to unite with the church, and had she not determined upon doing it just as soon as the season was over? What more could she do? Why could she not now have a little peace? If this was the "comfort" and "rest" that the Christians at Chautauqua had been talking about for a week, she was sure the less she had of them the better, for she never felt so uncomfortable in her life. Nevertheless, she adhered to her resolution. So settled was she that it was the next proper thing to do that she staid at home from the meeting that evening to write a letter to Mr. Wayne, the gentleman who you will perhaps remember, accompanied the girls to the depot on the morning of their departure, and expressed his disgust with the whole plan. As this is the first _religious_ letter Miss Ruth Erskine ever wrote, you shall be gratified with a copy of it: "DEAR HAROLD: "I am alone in the tent this evening--the girls have all gone to meeting; but I, finding it exhaustive, not to say tiresome, to be so constantly listening to sermons, have staid at home to write to you. I have something to tell you which I know will please you. I am going to start for Saratoga to-morrow morning. I think I shall take the 10:50 train. Now don't you make up your mind to laugh at me and say that I have grown tired of Chautauqua sooner than any of the rest. It is true enough. "You know my mode of life and my enjoyments are necessarily very different from Eurie's and Marion's. Those two naturally look upon this place as an escape from every-day drudgery; in short, as an economical place in which to enjoy a vacation and see a good deal of first-class society; for there are a great many first-class people here, there is no denying that. Not many from our set, you know, but a great many celebreties in the literary world that it is really very pleasant to see. "I am not sorry that I came; if for nothing else I am glad to have come on the girls' account; they would hardly have ventured without me, and it is a real treat to them. "You will wonder what has become of poor little Flossy, and want to know whether she is going to follow me to Saratoga as usual, but the little sprite refuses to go! I fancy Marion has been teasing her; you know she is very susceptible to ridicule, and it suits Marion's fancy to amuse herself at the expense of those people who weary of Chautauqua. She has attempted something of the kind on me, but, of course I am indifferent to any such shafts, having been in the habit of leading, rather than following, all my life. It seems natural, I suppose, to do so still. I think well of Chautauqua. It is a good place for people to come who have not much money to spend, and who like to be in a pleasant place among pleasant people; and who enjoy fine music, and fine lectures, and all that sort of thing, and are so trammelled by work and small means at home that they cannot cultivate these tastes. But, of course, all these things are no treat to _me_, and I do not hesitate to tell you that I am bored. There is too much preaching to suit my fancy--not real preaching, either, for we haven't had what you could call a sermon until to-day, but _lectures_, which constantly bring the same theme before you. "Now you are not to conclude from this that I do not believe in preaching, and Sunday, and all that sort of thing; on the contrary, I believe more fully in them all than I did before I came. In fact I have this very afternoon come to a determination which may surprise you, and which is partly the occasion of my writing this letter, in order that you may know at once what to expect. Harold, as soon as the season is over, and I get back home, I am going to unite with the church? Have I astonished you! I am going to do this from a conviction of duty. You need not imagine that I have been wrought up to such a pitch of excitement that I don't know what I am about. I assure you there is nothing of the kind. I have simply concluded that it is an eminently proper thing to do. So long as I believe fully in the church and in religion, and wish to sustain both by my money and my influence, why should I not say so? That is a very simple and altogether proper way of saying it, and saves a good deal of troublesome explanation. I wonder that I haven't thought of it before. "I do not mind telling you that it was some remarks of Marion's that first suggested the propriety of this thing to me. You know she is an infidel and I am not; and she intimated what is true enough, that I lived exactly as though I thought just as she did; so in thinking it over I concluded it was true, and that my influence ought to be with the church in this matter. Now you know, Harold, that with me to decide is to do; so this is as good as done. I should like it very well if you choose to come to the same conclusion and unite at the same time that I do. I am sure Dr. Dennis would be gratified. I don't know why we shouldn't be willing to have it known where we stand; and I know you respect the church and trust her as well as I do myself. "I told Marion to-day 'I did not see how a person with brains could be an infidel,' or something to that effect--and I _don't_. I think that is such a silly view to take of life. Just as if everything _could_ come by chance! And if God did not make everything, who did? I have no patience with that sort of thing, and I am glad to remember that you have no such tastes. "By the way, are the Arnotts in Saratoga? I hope not, for they are such fanatics there is no comfort in meeting them, and yet one has to be civil. "Seems to me you do not enjoy the opera as well as usual, nor the hops either. What is the matter? Do you really miss me? If there is any such foolish fancy in your heart as that, prepare to enjoy yourself next week, for I shall be with you at every one of them after Tuesday. It will take me until then to get something decent to wear. "I hear the girls coming up the hill, and I must leave you. "_Au revoir_, "RUTH." Folding and addressing this epistle with a satisfied air, and still full of the spirit which had prompted her to write a _religious_ letter, Ruth, finding that Marion had come in alone, and that Flossy and Eurie were still loitering up the hill, gave herself the satisfaction of communicating her change of views. "I have been thinking a good deal about what you said this afternoon, Marion, and there is truth in it. I do not think as you do, and I ought to take some measures to let people know it. I have the most perfect respect for and confidence in religion, and I mean to prove it by uniting with the church. I have decided to attend to that matter as soon as I get home again after the season is over. I am surprised at myself for not doing so before, for I certainly consider it eminently proper, in fact a duty." Now, it was very provoking to have so religious a sentence as this received in the manner that it was. Marion tilted her stool back against the bed, and gave herself up to the luxury of a ringing laugh. "Really," Ruth said, "you have returned from church in a very hilarious mood; something very funny must have happened; it can not be that anything in my sentence had to do with your amusement." "Yes, but it has," squealed Marion, holding her sides and laughing still. "Oh, Ruthie, Ruthie, you will be the death of me! And so you think that this is religion! You honestly suppose that standing up in church and having your name read off constitutes Christianity! Don't do it, Ruthie; you have never been a hypocrite, and I have always honored you because you were not. If this is all the religion you can find, go without it forever and ever, for I tell you there is not a single bit in it." Her laughter had utterly ceased, and her voice was solemn in its intensity. "I don't know what you mean in the least," Ruth said, testily. "You are talking about something of which you know nothing." "So are you. Oh, Ruthie, so are you! Yes, I know something about it; I know that you haven't reached the A, B, C, of it. Why, Ruthie, do you remember that story this afternoon? Do you remember that little boy in the garret, how he turned his face to the wall and asked God to save him? Have you done that? Do you honestly think that _you_, Ruth Erskine, have anything to be saved from? Don't you know the little fellow said, '_He answered_.' Has He answered you? Why, Ruth, do you never listen to the church covenant? How does it read: 'That it is eminently fit and proper for those who believe that God made them to join the church?' Ruth Erskine, you can never take more solemn vows upon you than you will have to take if you unite with the church, and I beg you not to do it. I tell you it means more than that. I had a father who was a member of the church and he prayed--oh, how he prayed! He was the best man who ever lived on earth! Every one knew he was good; every one thought he was a saint; and it seems to me as though I could never love any God who did not give him a happier lot than he had as a reward for his holy life. But do you think he thought himself good? I tell you he felt that no one could be more weak and sinful and in need of saving than he was. Oh, I know the people who make up churches have more than this in them. _I_ think it is all a deception, but it is a blessed one to have. I know these people at Chautauqua have it, hundreds of them. I see the same look in their faces that my father had in his, and if I could only get the same delusion into my heart I would hug it for my blessed father's sake; but don't you ever go into the church and subscribe to these things that they will ask of you until you have felt the same need of help and the same sense of being helped that they have. If you do, and there is a God, I would rather stand my chance with him than to have yours." And Marion seized her hat and rushed out into the night, leaving Ruth utterly dumbfounded. CHAPTER XXII. ONE MINUTE'S WORK. Marion struck out into the darkness, caring little which way she went; she had rarely been so wrought upon; her veins seemed to glow with fire. What difference did it make? she asked herself. If there was nothing at all in it, why not let Ruth amuse herself by joining the church and playing at religion? It would add to her sense of dignity, and who would be hurt by it? There was a difficulty in the way. Turn where she would, it confronted Marion during these days. There was a solemn haunting "if" that would not be put down. What _if_ all these things were true? She by no means felt so assured as she had once done: indeed, the foundations for her disbelief seemed to have been shaken from under her during the last week. Remember, she had never spent a week with Christians before in her life; not, at least, a week during which she was made to realize all the time that they were Christians; that they stood on a different platform from herself. Now, as she tramped about through the darkening woods, meeting constantly groups of people on their way home from the meeting, hearing from them snatches of what had been said and sung, she suddenly paused, and so vivid was the impression that for long afterward she could not think of it without feeling that a voice must certainly have spoken the words in her ear. Yet she recognized them as a sentence which had struck her from Dr. Pierce's sermon in the morning. "God honors his gospel, even though preached by a bad man; honors it sometimes to the saving of a soul. But think of a meeting between the two! the sinner saved and the sinner lost, who was the means of the other's salvation." It had thrilled Marion at the time, with her old questioning thrill: What if such a thing were possible! Now it came again. She stood perfectly still, all the blood seeming to recede from and leave her faint with the strange solemnity of the thought! What if she had this evening been preaching the gospel to Ruth! What if the words of hers should lead Ruth to think, and to hunt, and to find this light that those who were not blind--if there were any such--succeeded in finding! What if, as a result of this, she should go to heaven! and what if it were true that there was to be a judgment, and they two should meet, and then and there she should realize that it was because of this evening's talk that Ruth stood in glory on the other side of the great gulf of separation! What kind of a feeling would that be? "Oh, if I only knew," she said aloud, sitting suddenly down on a fallen log, "if I _only_ knew that any of these things were so! or if I could only get to imagining that they were, I would take them up and have the comfort out of them that some of these people seem to get, for I have so little comfort in my life. It can not be that it is all a farce, such as Ruth's horrid resolve would lead one to think; that is not the way that Dr. Vincent feels about it; it is not the way that Dr. Pierce preached about it this morning; it is not the way that man Bliss sings about it. There is more to it than that. My father had more than that. If he could only look down to-night and tell me whether it is so, whether he is safe and well and perfectly happy. Oh, it seems to me if I could only be sure, _sure_ beyond a doubt that God did give an eternal heaven to my father, I could love him forever for doing that, even though there is a hell and I go to it." Within the tent they were having talk that would seem to amount to very little. Even Eurie appeared to be subdued, and to have almost nothing to say. Ruth was roused from the half stupor of astonishment into which Marion's unexpected words had thrown her by hearing Flossy say, "Oh, Ruth, I forgot to tell you something; Mrs. Smythe stopped at the door on Saturday evening before you came home; her party leave for Saratoga to-morrow morning, and she wanted to know whether any of us would go with them." "Did you tell her I was going?" Ruth asked, quickly. It was utterly distasteful to her to think of having Mrs. Smythe's company. She did not stop to analyze her feelings; she simply shrank from contact with Mrs. Smythe and from others who were sure to be of her stamp. "No," Flossy said, "I did not know what you had decided upon; I said it was possible that you might want to go, but some one joined us just then and the conversation changed: I did not think of it again." "I am glad you didn't," Ruth said, emphatically. "I don't want her society. I won't go in the morning if I am to be bored with that party; I would rather wait a week." "They are going in the morning train," Eurie said; "I heard that tall man who sometimes leads the singing say so. He said there was quite a little party to go, among them a party from Clyde, who were _en route_ for Saratoga. That is them, you know; nearly all of them are from Clyde. 'Oh, yes,' the other man said; 'we must expect that. Of course there is a froth to all these things that must evaporate toward Saratoga, or some other resort. There is a class of mind that Chautauqua is too much for.' Think of that, Ruthie, to be considered nothing but froth that is to evaporate!" "Nonsense!" Ruth said, sharply. She seemed to consider that an unanswerable argument, and in a sense it is. Nevertheless Eurie's words had their effect; she began to wish that letter unwritten, and to wish that she had not said so much about Saratoga, and to wish that there was some quiet way of changing her plans. In fact, an utter distaste for Saratoga seemed suddenly to have come upon her. Conversation palled after this; Marion came in, and the four made ready for the night in almost absolute silence. The next thing that occurred was sufficiently startling in its nature to arouse them all. It was one of those sudden, careless movements that this life of ours is full of, taking only a moment of time, and involving consequences that reached away beyond time, and death, and resurrection. "Eurie," Ruth had said, "where is your head ache bottle that you boast so much of? I believe I am going to have a sick headache." "In my satchel," Eurie answered, sleepily. She was already in bed. "There is a spoon on that box in the corner; take a tea-spoonful." Another minute of silence, then Eurie suddenly raised her head from the pillow and looked about her wildly. The dim light of the lamp showed Ruth, slowly pulling the pins from her hair. "Did you take it?" she asked, and her voice was full of eager, intense fright. "Ruth, you didn't _take_ it!" "Yes, I did, of course. What is the matter with you?" "It was the wrong bottle. It was the liniment bottle in my satchel. I forgot. Oh, Ruth, Ruth, what will we do? It is a deadly poison." Then to have realized the scene that followed you should have been there to sea. Ruth gave one loud shriek that seemed to re-echo through the trees, and Eurie's moan was hardly less terrible. Marion sprang out of bed, and was alert and alive in a moment. "Ruth, lie down; Eurie, stop groaning and act. What was it? Tell me this instant." "Oh, I don't _know_ what it was, only he said that ten drops would kill a person, and she took a tea-spoonful." "I know where the doctor's cottage is," said Flossy, dressing rapidly. "I can go for him." And almost as soon as the words were spoken she had slipped out into the darkness. Ruth had obeyed the imperative command of Marion and laid herself on the bed. She was deadly pale, and Eurie, who felt eagerly for her pulse, felt in vain. Whether it was gone, or whether her excitement was too great to find it, she did not know. Meantime, Marion fumbled in Flossy's trunk and came toward them with a bottle. "Hold the light, Eurie; this is Flossy's hair-oil. I happen to know that it is harmless, and oil is an antidote for half the poisons in the world. Ruth, swallow this and keep up courage; we will save you." Down went the horrid spoonful, and Marion was eagerly at work chafing her limbs and rubbing her hands, hurrying Eurie meantime who had started for the hotel in search of help and hot water. That dreadful fifteen minutes! Not one of them but that thought it was hours. They never forgot the time when they fought so courageously, and yet so hopelessly, with death. Ruth did not seem to grow worse, but she looked ghastly enough for death to have claimed her for his victim; and Flossy did not return. Eurie came back to report a fire made and water heating, and seizing a pail was about to start again, when her eye caught the open satchel, and a bottle quietly reposing there, closely corked and tied over the top with a bit of kid; she gave a scream as loud as the first had been. "What _is_ the matter now?" Marion said. "Eurie, do have a little common sense." "She didn't take it!" burst forth Eurie. "It is all a mistake. It _was_ the right bottle. Here is the other, corked, just as I put it." Before this sentence was half concluded Ruth was sitting up in bed, and Marion, utterly overcome by this sudden revulsion of feeling, was crying hysterically. There is no use in trying to picture the rest of that excitement. Suffice it to say that the events of the next hour are not likely to be forgotten by those who were connected with them. Eurie came back to her senses first, and met and explained to the people who had heard the alarm, and were eagerly gathering with offers of help. There was much talk, and many exclamations of thankfulness and much laughter, and at last everything was growing quiet again. "I can not find the doctor," Flossy had reported in despair. "He has gone to Mayville, but Mr. Roberts will be here in a minute with a remedy, and he is going right over to Mayville for the doctor." "Don't let him, I beg," said Marion, who was herself again. "There is nothing more formidable than a spoonful of your hair-oil. I don't know but the poor child needs an emetic to get rid of that. Eurie, my dear, can't you impress it on those dear people that we _don't want_ any hot water? I hear the fourth pail coming." It was midnight before this excited group settled down into anything like quiet. But the strain had been so great, and the relief so complete, that a sleep so heavy that it was almost a stupor at last held the tired workers. Now, what of it all? Why did this foolish mistake of bottles, which might have been a tragedy, and was nothing but a causeless excitement, reach so far with its results? Let me tell you of one to whom sleep did not come. That was the one who but half an hour before had believed herself face to face with death! What mattered it to her that it was a mistake, and death no nearer to her, so far as she knew, than to the rest of the sleeping world? Death was not annihilated--he was only held at bay. She knew that he _would_ come, and that there would be no slipping away when his hand actually grasped hers. She believed in death; she had supposed herself being drawn into his remorseless grasp. To her the experience, so far as it had led her, was just as real as though there had been no mistake. And the result? _She had been afraid_! All her proper resolutions, so fresh in her mind, made only that very afternoon, had been of no more help to her than so much foam. She had not so much as remembered in her hour of terror whether there _was_ a church to join. But that there was a God, and a judgment, and a Savior, who was not hers, had been as real and vivid as she thinks it ever can be, even when she stands on the very brink. Oh, that long night of agony! when she tossed and turned and sought in vain for an hour of rest. She was afraid to sleep. How like death this sleeping was! Who could know, when they gave themselves up to the grasp of this power, that he was not the very death angel himself in disguise, and would give them no earthly awakening forever? What should she do? Believe in religion? Yes. She knew it was true. What then? What had Marion said? Was that all true? Aye, verily it was; she knew that, too. Had she not stood side by side with death? The hours went by and the conflict went on. There was a conflict. Her conscience knew much more than her tongue had given it credit for knowing that afternoon. Oh, she had seen Christians who had done more than join the church! She had imagined that that act might have a mysterious and gradual change on her tastes and feelings, so that some time in her life, when she was old, and the seasons for her were over, she might feel differently about a good many things. But that hour of waiting for the messenger of death, who, she thought, had called her, had swept away this film. "It is not teaching in Sunday-school," said her brain. "It is not tract distributing; it is not sewing societies for the poor; it is not giving or going. It is _none_ of these things, or _any_ of them, or _all_ of them, as the case may be, and as they come afterward. But _first_ it is this question: Am I my own mistress? do I belong to myself or to God? will I do as I please or as he pleases? will I submit my soul to him, and ask him to keep it and to show me what to do, or when and where to step?" The night was utterly spent, and the gray dawn of the early sweet summer morning was breaking into the grove, and still Ruth lay with wide-open eyes, and thought. A struggle? Oh dear, yes! Such an one as she had never imagined. That strong will of hers, which had led not only herself but others, yield it, submit to other leadership, always to question: Is this right? can I go here? ought I to say that? What a thing to do! But it involved that; she knew it, felt it. She might have been blind during the week past, but she was not deaf. How they surged over her, the sentences from one and another to whom she had listened! They were not at play, these great men. What did it mean but that there was a life hidden away, belonging to Christ? She felt no love in her heart, no longing for love, such as poor little Flossy had yearned for. She felt instead that she was equal to life; that the world was sufficient for her; that she wanted the world; but that the world was at conflict with God, and that she belonged to God, and that she _should_ give herself utterly into his hands. Moreover, she knew there was coming a time when the world, and Saratoga, and the season, with its pleasures, would not do. There was grim death!--he would come. She could not always get away. He was coming every hour for somebody around her. She must--yes, she _must_ get ready for him. It would not do to be surprised again as she had been surprised last night. It was not becoming in Ruth Erskine to live so that the sound of death could palsy her limbs and blanch her cheek and make her shudder with fear. She must get where she could say calmly: "Oh, are _you_ here? Well, I am ready." It was just as the sun which was rising in glory forced its smiles in between the thick leaves of the Chautauqua birds' nests, and set all the little birds in a twitter of delight, that Ruth raised herself on her elbow and said aloud, and with the force that comes from a determined will that has decided something in which there has been a struggle: "I _will_ do it." CHAPTER XXIII. "I'VE BEEN REDEEMED." "What about Saratoga?" was Eurie's first query as she awoke to life and talk again on that summer morning. "Do you think you will take the 10:50 train, Ruth?" Ruth gave nothing more decided than a wan smile in answer, and in her heart a wonder as to what Eurie would think of her if she could have known the way in which her night was passed. "She is more likely to stay in bed," Marion said, looking at her critically. "You will never think of trying to travel to-day, will you, Ruth? Dear me! how you look! I have always heard that hair oil was weakening, but I did not know its effects were so sudden and disastrous!" And then every one of these silly girls laughed. The disaster of the night before had reached its irresistibly comic side--to them. Only Ruth shivered visibly; it was not funny to her. It was a very eventful day. She by no means relished the character of invalid that the girls seemed determined ought to be forced upon her and at the same time she had not the least idea of going to Saratoga. Strangely enough, that desire seemed to have utterly gone from her. She had not slept at all, but she arose and dressed herself as usual, with only one feeling strong upon her, and that was a determination to carry out the decision to which she had so recently come, and she had not the least idea how to set to work to carry it out. She went with the rest to the large tent to hear Mrs. Clark's address to primary class teachers. "I'm not a primary class teacher, and not likely to be, but I am a woman, and gifted with the natural curiosity of that sex to know what a woman may have to say in so big a place as this. I don't see how she dares to peep." This was Eurie's explanation of her desire to go to the reception. Ruth went because to go to meeting seemed to be the wisest way that she knew of for carrying out her decision, and a good time she had. She had not imagined that teaching primary classes was such an art, and involved so much time and brain as it did. She listened eagerly to all Mrs. Clark had to say; she followed her through the blackboard lessons with surprise and delight, and she awoke at the close of the hour to the memory that, although she had been interested as she had not imagined it possible for her to be on such a theme, she had done nothing toward her determination to make a Christian of herself, and that she knew no more how to go to work than before. "When I _do_ find out how to be one I know I will go to work in the Sabbath-school; I have changed my mind on that point." This she told herself softly as they went back to dinner. It was a strange afternoon to her. She became unable to interest herself heartily in the public services; her own heart claimed her thought. It was noticeable also that for the first time Chautauqua chose this day in which to be metaphysical and scientific, to the exclusion of personal religion. Not that they were irreligious, not that they for a moment forgot their position as a great religious gathering; but there was an absence of that intense personal element in the talk which had so offended Ruth's taste heretofore, and she missed it. She wandered aimlessly up and down the aisles, listening to sentences now and then, and sighing a little. They were eloquent, they were helpful; she could imagine herself as being in a state to enjoy them heartily, but just now she wanted nothing so much as to know what to do in order to give herself a right to membership with that great religious world. Why should Chautauqua suddenly desert her now when she so much needed its help? "If I knew a single one of these Christian people I would certainly ask them what to do." This she said talking still to herself. She had come quite away from the meeting, and was down in one of the rustic seats by the lake side. It struck her as very strange that she had not intimate acquaintance with a single Christian. She even traveled home and tried to imagine herself in conversation on this subject with some of her friends. To whom could she go? Mr. Wayne? Why, he wouldn't understand her in the least. What a strange letter that was which she wrote him! Could it be possible that it was written only yesterday? How strange that she should have suggested to him to unite with the church! How strange that she should have thought of it herself! There came a quick step behind her, and a voice said, "Good-evening, Miss Erskine." She turned and tried to recall the name that belonged to the face of the young man before her. "You do not remember me?" he said, inquiringly. "I was of the party who went to Jamestown on the excursion." "Oh, Mr. Flint," she said, smiling, and holding out her hand. "I beg pardon for forgetting; that seems about a month ago." "So it does to me; we live fast here. Miss Erskine, I have been looking for your party; I couldn't find them. Isn't Miss Shipley in your tent? Yes, I thought so. Well, I want to see her very much. I have something to tell her that I know will give her pleasure. Perhaps you would take a message for me. I want her to know that since last week, when she told me of her Friend who had become so dear to her, I have found the truth of it. He is my Friend now, and I want to thank her for so impressing me with a desire to know him that I could not give it up." Ruth looked utterly puzzled. Something in the young man's reverent tone, when he used the word "Friend," suggested that he could mean only the Friend for whom she herself was in looking; and yet--Flossy Shipley! What had _she_ to do with him? "Do you mean," she said, hesitatingly, and yet eagerly, for if he indeed meant that here was one for whom she had been looking; "do you mean that you have become a Christian?" "It is such a new experience," he said, his face flushing, "that I have hardly dared to call myself by that name; but if to be a Christian means to love the Lord Jesus Christ, and to have given one's self, body and soul, to his service, why then I am assuredly a Christian." This was it. There was no time to be lost. She had spent one night of horror, she could not endure another, and the day was drawing to its end. To be sure she felt no terror now, but the night might bring it back. "How did you do it?" she asked, simply. "How?" The very simplicity of the question puzzled him. "Why, I just gave myself up to his keeping; I resolved to take a new road and follow only where he led. Miss Shipley was the one who first made me think seriously about this matter; and then I went to the service that evening, and everything that was said and sung, was said and sung right at me. I was just forced into the belief that I had been a fool, and I wanted to be something else." "Miss Shipley!" Ruth said, brought back by that name to the wonderment. "You are mistaken. You can not mean Flossy. She isn't a Christian at all. She never so much as thinks of such things." "Oh, _you_ are mistaken." He said it eagerly and positively. "On the contrary, she is the most earnest and straightforward little Christian that I ever met in my life. Why, I never had anything so come to my soul as that little sentence that she said about having found a _Friend_.' I know it is the same one. I have seen her with you since, but not near enough to address. Her name is Flossy; I heard her called so that day on the boat." "Flossy!" Ruth said it again, in a bewildering tone, and rising as she spoke. "I am going to find her; I want to understand this mystery. I will give her your message, Mr. Flint, but I think there is a mistake." Saying which she bade him a hasty good-afternoon, for the flutter of a scarlet shawl had reached her eyes. No one but Flossy wore such a wrap as that. She wanted to see her at once, and she _didn't_ want Mr. Charlie Flint to be along. She went forward with rapid steps to meet her, and slipping an arm within hers, they turned and went slowly back over the mossy path. "Flossy, I want you to tell me something. I have heard something so strange; I think it is not so, but you can tell me. I want to know if you think you are a Christian?" I wonder if Flossy has any idea, even now, how strangely Ruth's heart beat as she asked that simple question. It seemed to involve a great deal to her. She waited for the answer. There was no hesitation and no indecision about Flossy's answer. Her cheeks took a pink tint, but her voice was clear. "I _know_ I am, Ruth. I do not even have to speak with hesitancy. I am so sure that Christ is my Friend, and I grow so much surer of it every day, that I can not doubt it any more than I can doubt that I am walking down this path with you." And then, again, Ruth's astonishment was in part lost in that absorbing question: "How did you get to be one?" "It is a simple little story," Flossy said. And then she began at the beginning and told her little bit of experience, fresh in her heart, dating only a few days back, and full to the brim with peace and gladness to her. "But I don't see," Ruth said, perplexed. "I don't find out what to _do_. I want to be told how to do it, and none of you tell me; you seem to have just resolved about it, and not _done_ anything. I have gone so far myself. Such a night as last night was, Flossy! Oh, you can never imagine it!" And then she told her story, as much of it as _could_ be told; of the horror and the thick darkness that had enveloped her she could only hint. What an eager flash there was in Flossy's bright eyes as she listened. "When you said that!" she began, eagerly, as Ruth paused. "When you said, 'I will do it.' What then? Did you feel just as you did before?" "No," Ruth said, "not at all. The night had gone by that time. As I looked about me I realized that it was daylight, and I fancied that my feelings were the result of a highly excited state of nerves. But the resolve was not to be accounted for in any such way. I meant that. The horror, though, of which I had been telling you was quite gone. It was as if there had been a fearful storm, with the constant roll of thunder, and suddenly a calm. I hadn't the least feeling of fear or dread, and I haven't had all day; but to-night I may have the very same experience." "No, you will not," Flossy said, her voice aglow with feeling and with joy. "Oh, Ruthie, Ruthie! There _is_ no night! You have got beyond it. I tell you, you have come into God's light! And isn't it blessed? You are a Christian now." "But," protested Ruth, utterly bewildered, "I do not understand you, and I don't think you understand yourself. In what way am I different from what I was yesterday? How can I be lost in God's sight one moment and accepted the next?" "Easily; oh, _so_ easily! Don't you see? Why, if I had been coaxing you for a year to give me something, and you had steadily refused, but if suddenly you had said to me, 'Yes. I will; I have changed my mind; I will give it to you,' wouldn't there be a difference? Wouldn't I know that I was to have it? And couldn't I thank you then, and tell you how glad I was, just the same as though I had it in my hand? It is a poor little illustration, Ruthie, but it is true that God has been calling you all your life, and if you have all the time been saying 'No,' up to that moment when you said solemnly, meaning it with all your heart, 'I will,' I tell you it makes a difference." I can not describe to you how strangely all this sounded to Ruthie. Up to this moment she had not realized in the least that the Lord was asking her simply for a decision, and that having solemnly given it, the work, so far as _she_ was concerned, was done, and the new relations instantly commenced. She thought it over--that sudden calming of heart--that sense of resolve--of determination, so strong, and yet so quiet. She remembered what a strange day it had been. How she had tried to keep before her mind the horror of the night, and had not been able. She went on talking with Flossy, telling her about Charlie Flint, noticing the happy tears that glistened in Flossy's eyes as she received her message, taking in the murmured words, "To think that Christ would honor such a feeble little witnessing as that!" and realizing even then that it would be very blessed to have one say to her, "You have been the means of leading me to think about this thing." Why should _she_ care, though, whether people thought about this thing or not? Yesterday she didn't. During all the talk she kept up this little undertone of thought, this running commentary on her sudden change of views and feelings, and wondered, and _wondered_, could it be possible that she was utterly changed? And yet, when she came to think of it, wasn't she? Didn't she love Christ? And then it struck her as the strangest thing in the world _not_ to love him. How could any one be so devoid of heart as that? Why, a mere man, to have done one-half of what Christ had done for her, would have received undying love and service. As they walked they neared the stand, and there came just at that moment a burst of music, one of those strange, thrilling tunes such as none but the African race ever sing. The words were familiar, and yet to Ruth they were new: "There is a fountain filled with blood, Drawn from Immanuel's veins, And sinners, plunged beneath that flood. Lose all their guilty stains." A sinner! Was _she_, Ruth Erskine, a sinner? Yesterday she had not liked it to be called a prodigal. But to-day, oh yes. Was there a greater sinner to be found than she? How long she had known this story! How long she had known and believed of a certainty that Jesus Christ lived and died that she might have salvation, and yet she had never in her life thanked him for it! Nay, she had spurned and scorned his gift! So much worse than though she had not believed it at all! For then at least she could not have been said to have met him with the insult of indifference. Then the chorus swelled out on the still air. Only those who heard it under the trees at Chautauqua have the least idea how it sounded; only those who hear it, as Ruth Erskine did, can have the least idea how it sounded to her. "I've been redeemed, I've been redeemed!" Over and over the strain repeated. Now in clear soprano tones, and anon rolled out from the grand bass voices. And then the swelling unison: "I've been redeemed-- Been washed in the blood of the Lamb." The girls had stopped, and almost held their breaths to listen. They stood in silence while verse after verse with its triumphant swell of chorus rolled out to them. The great tears gathered slowly in Ruth's eyes, until, as the last echo died away, she turned to Flossy, and her voice was clear and triumphant: "I believe I _have_. Flossy, I believe I have. It is a glorious thought, and a wonderful one. It almost frightens me. And yet it thrills me with perfect delight. The fountain is deep enough for us all--for them and for me. I have 'been redeemed,' and if God will help me I will never forget it again." CHAPTER XXIV. SWORD THRUSTS. By the next morning it became clear to our girls that a change of programme was a necessity. Ruth had by no means recovered from her shock and the sleepless night that followed, and some of the comforts of invalidism must be found for her. At the same time she utterly repudiated the idea of Saratoga, which was now urged upon her; it had lost its charms; neither would she go home. "I have decided to stay until the _very_ last meeting," she said, with quiet determination. Flossy laughed softly; she knew what charms Chautauqua had taken on, but the others supposed it to be a whim, resulting from the ridicule she had suffered because of the Saratoga scheme. After many plans were discussed it was finally decided that Flossy and Ruth should seek quarters at the hotel in Mayville, Ruth coming over to the meetings only when her strength and her fancy dictated, and having some of the luxuries of home about her. It seemed to fall naturally to Flossy's lot to accompany her; indeed, a barrier was in the way of either of the others being chosen. The hotel arrangement, when one took into consideration the numerous boat-rides to and from the ground, was by no means an economical proceeding, and as Flossy and Ruth were the only ones who were entirely indifferent to the demands of their purses, it must of necessity be them. Neither of them was disposed to demur; there had never been much congeniality between these two, but they had been friendly, and now there was a subtle bond of sympathy which made them long to be together. So, during the next morning hours, those two were engaged in packing their effects and preparing for a flitting to the Mayville House. Meantime Marion and Eurie, having stood around and looked on until they were tired, departed in search of something to interest them. "It is too early for meeting," Marion said. "There is nothing of interest until 11 o'clock. I'm sorry we missed Mrs. Clark. I like to look at her and listen to her; she is just bubbling over with enthusiasm. One can see that she thinks she means it. If I were a Sunday-school teacher I should be glad I was here, to hear her. I think it has been about the most helpful thing I have heard thus far; helpful to those who indulge in that sort of work, I mean." "I wonder what those normal classes are like?" Eurie said, studying her programme. "We haven't been to one of those, have we? What do you suppose they do?" Marion shrugged her shoulders. "They are like work," she said. "'Working hours,' they are named; and I suppose some hard thinking is done. If I didn't have to teach school six hours out of every day at home I might be tempted to go in and listen to them; but I came here to play, you see, and to make money; they are not good to report about. People who stay at home and read the reported letters don't want to hear anything about the actual _work_; they want to know who the speaker was and how he looked, and whether his gestures were graceful, and--if it is a lady--above all, how she was dressed; if they say anything remarkably sarcastic or irresistibly funny you may venture to report it, but not otherwise, consequently reporting is easy work, if you have not too much conscience, because what you didn't see you can make up." At the end of this harangue she paused suddenly before a tent, whence came the sound of a firm and distinct voice. "What is this?" she said, and then she lifted a bit of the canvas and peeped in. "I'm going in here, after all," she said, withdrawing her head and explaining. "This is a normal class, I guess. That man from Philadelphia--what is his name? Tyler? Yes, that is it--J. Bennet Tyler--is leading. I like him; I like his voice ever so much; he makes you hear, whether you want to or not. Then, someway, you get a kind of a notion that he not only believes what he says but that he _knows_ it is so, and that is all there is about it. I like to meet such people now and then, because they are so rare. Generally people act as though you could coax them out of their notions in about twenty minutes if you tried--when they are talking about religious subjects, I mean. Obstinacy is not so rare a trait where other matters are concerned. Let's go in." "What is the subject this morning?" Eurie asked, following her guide around to the entrance, somewhat reluctantly. She was in no mood for shutting herself inside a tent, and being obliged to listen whether she wanted to or not. But Marion was in one of her positive moods this morning, and must either be followed or deserted altogether. Mr. Tyler was reading from a slip of paper as they entered. This was the sentence he read: "Difficulties in interpretation which arise from certain mental peculiarities of the student. Some minds, and not by any means the strongest or noblest, must always see the _reason_ for everything." Marion gave Eurie a sagacious nod of the head. "Don't you see?" she said. "Now, by the peculiar way in which he read that, he made believe it was _me_ he meant. And, by the way, I'm not sure but he is correct. I must say that I like a reason for things. But what right has he to say that _that_ is an indication of a weak mind?" "He didn't say so," whispered Eurie. "Oh, yes he did; it amounted to that. There is where his peculiar use of words comes in. That man has _studied_ words until he handles them as if they were foot-balls, and were to go exactly where he sent them." "He is looking this way. The next thing you know he will throw some at us for whispering." This was Ernie's attempt to quiet Marion's tongue. That or some other influence had the desired effect. She whispered no more, and it was apparent in a very few minutes that she had become intensely interested in the theme and in the way it was being handled. An eager examination of the programme disclosed what she began to suspect, that the subject was, "Difficulties in the Bible." Her intellectual knowledge of the Bible was considerable; and having read it ever since she could remember, with the express purpose of finding difficulties, it was not surprising that she had found them. Something, either in the leader's manner of drawing out answers, or the peculiar emphasis with which he contrived to invest certain words, had the effect to cause Marion to feel as though she had been very superficial in her reasoning and childish in her objections. She grew eager; her brain, accustomed to work rapidly and follow trains of thought closely, enjoyed the keen play of thought that was being drawn forth. But there was more than that; almost unconsciously to herself this subject was assuming vital proportions to her; she did not even herself realize the intensity of the cry in her heart, "If I only _knew_ whether these were so!" Presently the voice which had once before struck her as being so peculiar in its personality sounded distinctly down the long tent. "Remember the conditions under which the Bible promise clear apprehension of the truth." It chanced--at least that is the way in which we use language--it chanced that Mr. Tyler's eyes as he repeated these words rested on Marion. Speaking of it afterward she said: "So far as the impression made on me was concerned, it was the same as though he had said: 'Do you understand what an idiot you have been not to take that cardinal point into consideration at all? Open your Bible and read, and see how like a weak-minded babe you are.'" Beside her lay a Bible just dropped by some one who had been called out. Following out the impulse of the moment she turned to the reference, and her clear voice gave it distinctly: "If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine whether it be of God or whether I speak of myself." The effect of this simple, straightforward and reasonable proposition, on sounding back to her spoken by her own voice, was tremendous. Very little more of the talk did she hear. A thrust, from God's own sword had reached her. What a fool she had been! What right had she to presume to give an opinion before applying the test? Had not the most common-place statements a right to be tried by their own tests? Yet she had never given this simple direction a thought. So this was the Bible promise? "He _shall_ know." Not that these things are so, but a more logical, more satisfactory statement to the natural heart. He shall judge for himself whether these things be so; follow the directions, and then judge by your experiences after that whether these things be true or false. Could anything be more reasonable? "I shall never dare to say that I don't believe the Bible again, for fear some one will ask me whether I have applied the test, and if I have not what business have I to judge. That man now, if I should come in contact with him, which I shall endeavor not to do, would be sure to ask me. He has almost the same as asked it now, before all these people. He has a mysterious way of making me feel as though he was talking for my confusion and for nobody else." This Marion told to herself as she eyed the leader, half sullenly. He had strangely disturbed her logic and set her refuge in ruins. "Let's go," she said suddenly to Eurie. "I am tired of this; I have had enough, and more than enough." But the hour was over, and she had had all that was to be secured from that source. All the younger portion of the congregation seemed to be rushing back up the hill again, and inquiry developed the fact that Mrs. Clark was to meet the primary workers in the large tent. It was wonderful how many people chose to consider themselves primary workers? At least they rushed to this meeting, a great army of them, as though their one object in life, was to learn how successfully to teach the little ones. Our girls all met together in the tent. Ruth and Flossy had finished their preparations, but had concluded to wait until afternoon service. "I declare if _you_ are not armed with a pencil and paper. Have you been seized with a mania for taking notes?" This Eurie said to Ruth. "Now I'm going to get out _my_ note book too. Here is a card--it will hold all I care to write I dare say. Let me see, who knows but I shall go to teaching in Sabbath-school one of these days! I am going to make a list of the things which according to Mrs. Clark, we shall need." True to her new fancy, she scribbled industriously during the session, and showed her card with glee as they left the tent. "I've a complete list," she said. "If any of you go into the business I can supply you with the names of the necessary tools. Look! "A blackboard. "A picture roll. "A punch! "Cards. "Brains! "Blank book. "Children. "More brains! "That last item," she said, reflectively, "is the hardest to find. I had no idea so much of that material was necessary. Now let me see what is on your papers." This even Marion stoutly resisted. And Flossy quietly hid hers in her pocket, saying with a smile: "Mine is simply a list of things needful for such work." If she had shown her paper it would have astonished Eurie, and it might have done her good. This was what she had written: "What I need in order to be a successful teacher. "Such a forgetfulness of self as shall lead me to think only of the little ones and their needs. "Such a love for Christ as shall lead me to long after every little soul to lead it to him." As for Marion her paper contained simply this sentence, carefully written out in German text as if she had deliberated over each letter; "If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God." They went in a body to hear Dr. Hatfield. "I want that lecture," Marion said, "'Perils of the Hour.' I'm very anxious to know what my peril is. I know just what is hovering over every one of you, but I can't quite make up my mind as to my own state. Perhaps the distinguished gentleman can help me." And he did. He had selected for one of the perils that which was embodied in the following ringing sentence: "The third peril is the prevelancy of skepticism. A class of scientists have discovered that there is no God! What the fool said in his _heart_ they proclaimed on the house-top!" Eurie looked over at her, smiling and mischievous, and said in anything but a softly whisper, "That means you, my dear." But Marion did not hear her; she was absorbed in the intense scathing sentences that followed. Of one thing she presently felt assured, that whoever was right or whoever was wrong in this matter, Dr. Hatfield believed with all the intensity of an intense educated intellect that God ruled. Was it probable that he had met the condition, done his will, and so _knew_ of the doctrine? That was an hour to be remembered. Eurie ceased to whisper or to frolic; there was too much intensity, about the speaker's manner not to claim her attention. She listened as she was not in the habit of listening. She could give you a detailed account even now of that hour of thought; so could I, and I am awfully tempted; but, you see, it is only Tuesday, and the girls have six more days to spend at Chautauqua. Both Ruth and Flossy got their crumb to think over. They discussed it at the hotel that evening. "I tell you, Flossy, if Dr. Hatfield is correct you and I have tremendous changes to make in our way of spending the Sabbath; and I have actually prided myself on the way in which I respected the day!" And Ruth laughed as if that were so strange a thought, now that it was hardly possible to think that she could have entertained it. "I know," Flossy said; "and he can not but be right, for he proved his position. I am glad I heard that address. But for him, I know I should never have thought of my influence in some places where I now see I can use it. Ruth you will be struck with one thing. Now, Chautauqua is like what Madame C's school might have been, so far as study is concerned. Every day I have a new lesson, one that startles me so! I feel that there must be some mistake, or I would have heard of or thought of some of these things before. And yet they sound so reasonable when you come to think them over, that presently I am surprised that I have not felt them before. Ruthie, do you think Eurie and Marion have any interest at all?" "No," said Ruth, positively, "I know Marion hasn't. It was only the other evening that she talked more wildly if anything than before." About this time Marion, alone in her tent, said again, as she had said a dozen times during the last few days: "If I _only knew_!" And this time she added, "If I only knew _how_ to know!" CHAPTER XXV. SERMONS IN CHALK. Now, see here, Marion Wilbur, wake up and give me your attention. I want to make a speech; I've caught the infection. It's queer in a place where there is so much speech-making done that I can't have a chance to express my views." "I'm all attention," Marion answered, turning on her pillow, and giving Eurie a sleepy stare. "What has moved you to be eloquent? Give me the subject." "The subject is the reflex influence of preaching! It may have different effects on different natures. Its effect on mine has been marked enough. I'm thoroughly surfeited. I don't want to hear another sermon while I am here, and I don't _mean_ to. They are all sermons. The subject may be scientific, literary or artistic, and it amounts to the same thing; they contrive to row around to the same spot from whatever point they start. Now, I came here for fun, and I'm being literally cheated out of it. So the application of my remark is, I've learned since I have been here always to have an application to everything, and this time it is that I won't go any more. I've studied the programme carefully, and I have selected just what I am going to do. That Mrs. Knox has a reception this morning. I've heard about her before; she is awfully in earnest, and awfully good. Oh, I haven't the least doubt of it; but, you see, I don't want to be good, nor to have such an uncomfortable amount of goodness about me." "She is said to be one of the most successful Sabbath-school teachers here; and I heard a gentleman say last night that her primary class was a regular training school for young ladies in Christian work. You know she has ever so many teachers under her." "I can't help that. I am not one of them, I am thankful to say. What do I care whether she is successful or not? That won't help me any. I know all about her. They say the young ladies in her classes are invariably converted before they have been under her influence long. So if you want to be converted you have only to go to Elmira and join her class; but as for me, I am not in the mood for that experience yet, and I am not going near her." "What _are_ you going to do then?" "Just what I please! That is what I came for. Just think of the absurdity of we four girls rushing to meeting at the rate we have been doing for the last week. What do you suppose the people at home would think of us? Why, I didn't expect to hear any of their sermons when I came. I as good as promised Flossy that I would frolic about with her all the time, and now the absurd little dunce acts as if she were under a wager to be on the ground every time the bell rings! I've declared off. I can tell you to an item just what I am going to hear. There is a performance to come off this afternoon some time that I shall be ready for. I loitered behind the King tent last night, and heard him say so. That Frank Beard is going to give his chalk talk--caricatures: that I shall hear, and especially _see_. It will be hard work to poke a sermon into that. I guess that is to be this afternoon; it is to be some time soon, anyway, and I shall watch for it. Then there is to be another extra. Mrs. Miller is going to read a story. I can give you the title of it. I didn't sit on that horrid stump in the dark listening to Dr. Vincent for nothing. It is to be 'Three Blind Mice.' Now it stands to reason that a story with such a title will not be very far above my intellectual capacity, and it _can't_ very well develop into a sermon, or close with a prayer-meeting. Then I'm going to the concert by the Tennesseeans;' their jargon won't hurt me; and, of course, I shall attend the President's reception. I must have a stare at him--and that is every solitary meeting I am going to attend. I've heard the last preaching that I mean to for some time." Now this was what Eurie Mitchell _said_. Let me tell you a little bit about what she _thought_. She was by no means so indifferent, nor so bored as she would have Marion understand. She was by no means in the state of mind that Ruth had been, or that Marion was. No doubts as to the general truth of all the vital doctrines of Christianity had ever troubled her. She accepted without question the belief of the so-called Christian World. Neither was she bewildered as to what constituted Christian life. No vague notion that to unite herself with some church would let her into the charmed circle had ever befogged her brain. On the contrary, she knew better than many a Christian does just what the Christian profession involved, and just how narrow a path ought to be walked by those professing to follow Christ. In proportion to the keenness of her sarcasm over blundering, stumbling Christians, had her eyes been open to what they ought to be. There was just this the matter with Eurie. She knew so well what religious professions involved that she wanted to make none. She hated the thought of self-abnegation, of bridling her eager tongue, of going only where her enlightened conscience said a Christian should go, of looking out for and calling after others to go with her. She wished deliberately to ignore it all. Not forever, she would have been shocked at the thought. Some time she meant to give intense heed to these things, and then indeed the church should see what a Christian _could_ be! But not now. There were a hundred things laid down in her programme for the coming winter that she knew perfectly well were not the things to do or say, provided she were a Christian, and she deliberately wished to avoid the fear of becoming one. Just here she was afraid of the influence of Chautauqua. How was it possible to attend these meetings, to listen to these daily, hourly addresses, teeming either directly or indirectly with the same thought, personal consecration, without feeling herself drawn within the circle? She would _not_ be drawn. This was her deliberate conclusion, therefore her determination. It was almost well for her that she could not realize on what fearfully dangerous ground she was treading! I wonder if those over whom the Lord says, "Let them alone," are ever conscious at the time that the order has gone forth, and that they are to feel their consciences pressing home this matter no more? "Well," said Marion, after turning this resolution over in her mind for a few minutes, "I dare say you will lose a good many things worth hearing; but I have nothing to do with that--only I want you to go with me up to hear Mrs. Knox this morning. I've _got_ to go, for I promised especially to report her for the teachers at home, and it is stupid to go alone. _She_ won't preach, and she won't bore you, and I want you to help me remember items." So, much against her will, Eurie was coaxed into this departure from her programme, and came back from the meeting in intense disgust. "Talk about _her_ not preaching," she said, venting her annoyance on Marion while she energetically brushed her hair. "Every fold of her dress preached a sermon! She makes me ache all over, she is so powerfully in earnest; and didn't she hint what angels of goodness those girls of hers were--those teachers! I'd like to know how they could be anything else but good with such an example at hand. Just think, Marion, of having the brains that that woman has, and the energy and tact and the skill of a general, and then forcing it into a Sunday-school class room for the teaching of a hundred little dots that have just tumbled out of their cradles!" "Well, if she teaches them to tumble out on the right side so that they will come up grand men and women, what then? Isn't that an ambition worthy of her?" "Stuff and nonsense! Don't you go to preaching. I shall go and drown myself in the lake if I hear any more of it, and then one worthless person will be out of the way. But don't you dare to ask me to go and hear that woman again! I won't give up my plans in life for hers, and she needn't hint it to me. And, Marion Wilbur, I am not going to listen to another man or woman who has the least chance to fire words right at me--now mark my words." Full of this determination she carried it out during the afternoon, until the hour for Frank Beard's caricatures; then, secure from fear of a sermon, she came gayly down and considered herself fortunate to secure a seat directly in front of the stand and in full view of the blackboard. If you have never seen Frank Beard make pictures you know nothing about what a good time she had. They were such funny pictures! --just a few strokes of the magic crayon and the character described would seem to start into life before you, and you would feel that you could almost know what thoughts were passing in the heart of the creature made of chalk. Eurie looked, and listened, and laughed. The old deacon who thought the Sunday-school was being glorified too much had his exact counterpart among her acquaintances, so far as his looks were concerned. The three troublesome Sunday-school scholars fairly convulsed her by their life-like appearance. There was the little scamp of a boy who was revealed by the dozen to any one who took a walk down town toward the close of the day; the argumentative old man, with his nose pointing out a flaw in your reasoning or on the keen scent for a mistake; and the pert fourteen-year-old girl whose very nose, as it slightly turned upward, showed that she knew more than all the logicians and theologians in the world. This entertainment was exactly in Eurie's line. If there was anything in the world that she was an adept at it was looking up weak points in the characters of other people; and when the silly girl with but two ideas--one of them bows and the other beaux--lived and breathed before her on the blackboard her delight reached its climax. "She is the very picture of Nettie Arnold!" she whispered to Marion. "When I go home I mean to tell her that her photograph was displayed at Chautauqua. She is just vain enough to believe it!" Still the fun went on. Just a few bold, rapid strokes, and some caricature breathed before them, so real that the character was guessed before the explanation was given, and the ground rang with continued and overpowering roars of laughter. Into the midst of this entertainment came Dr. Vincent, his face aglow with the exertion of hearty laughter, every feature of it expressive of his hearty appreciation of this hour of recreation and yet every feature alive and alert with a higher and more enduring feeling. "Frank," he said, laying a friendly hand on the artist's arm, "our time is almost up. Give us the symbol of the teacher's work." There was an instant of rapid motion, a few skillful lines, and it needed no word of explanation to recognize the great family Bible. "Now the symbol of the teacher's hope," and on one page of the open Bible there flashed an anchor. "Now the symbol of his reward," and lo, there rose up before them the solid wall, built brick by brick. Dr. Vincent's voice was almost husky with feeling, so suddenly had the play of his emotions changed, as he said: "Now we want the foundation." How did Frank Beard do it with a dull colored crayon and a half-dozen movements of his skillful arm? How can I tell, except that God has given to the arm wondrous skill; but there appeared before that astonished multitude a foundation as of granite, and there rose from it, as if suddenly hewed out before them, a clean-cut solid shaft of gray, imperishable granite. One more dash of the wondrous crayon and the shaft was done--a solid cross! Prof. Sherwin was sitting, for want of a better position, on the floor of the stand. It was the only available space. He had been looking and enjoying as only men like Prof. Sherwin can; and now, as he watched the outgrowth of this wonderful cross, as the last stroke was given that made it complete, and a sound like a subdued shout of joy and triumph murmured through the crowd, moved as by a sudden mighty impulse that he could not control, his splendid voice burst forth in the glorious words: "Rock of Ages, cleft for me, Let me _hide_ myself in Thee." And that great multitude took it up and rolled the tribute of praise down those resounding aisles until people bowed themselves, and some of them wept softly in the very excess of their joy and thanksgiving. It was all so sudden, so unexpected; yet it was so surely the key-note to the Chautauqua heart, and fitted in so aptly with their professions and intentions. They could play for a few minutes--none could do it with better hearts or more utter enjoyment than these same splendid leaders--but how surely their hearts turned back to the main thought, the main work, the main hope, in life and in death. As for Eurie, she will not be likely to forget that sermon. It almost overpowered her. There came over her such a sudden and eager longing to understand the depths from whence such feeling sprung, to rest her feet on the same foundation, that for the moment her heart gave a great bound and said: "It is worth all the self-denial and all the change of life and plans which it would involve. I almost think I want that rather than anything else." That miserable "almost!" I wonder how many souls it has shipwrecked? The old story. If Eurie had been familiar with her Bible it would surely have reminded her of the foolish listener who said, while he trembled under the truth, "_Almost_ thou persuadest me to be a Christian." Shall I tell you what came in, just then and there, to influence her decision? It was such a miserable little thing--nothing more than the remembrance of certain private parties that were a standing institution among "their set" at home, to meet fortnightly in each other's parlors for a social dance. Not a ball! oh, no, not at all. These young ladies did not attend _balls_, unless occasionally a charity ball, when a very select party was made up. Simply quiet evenings among _special_ friends, where the special amusement was dancing. "Dear me!" you say, "I am a Christian, and I don't see anything wrong in _dancing_. Why, I dance at private parties very often. What was there in that thought that needed to influence her?" Oh, well, we are not arguing, you know. This is simply a record of matters and things as they occurred at Chautauqua. It can hardly be said to be a story, except as records of real lives of course make stories. But Eurie was _not_ a Christian, you see; and however foolish it may have been in her she had picked out dancing as one of the amusements not fitting to a Christian profession. It is a queer fact, for the cause of which I do not pretend to account, but if you are curious, and will investigate this subject, you will find that four fifths of the people in this world who are not Christiana have tacitly agreed among themselves that dancing is not an amusement that seems entirely suited to church-members. If you want to get at the reason for this strange prejudice, question some of them. Meantime the fact exists that Eurie felt herself utterly unwilling to give up the leadership of those fortnightly parties, and that the trivial question actually came in then and there, while she stood looking at that picture of the cross; and in proportion as her sudden conviction of desire lost itself in this whirl of intended amusement did her disgust arise at the thought that she had been actually betrayed into listening to another sermon! CHAPTER XXVI. "THEIR WORKS DO FOLLOW THEM." Marion went alone to the services the next morning. It was in vain that she assured Eurie that Miss Morris was going to conduct one of the normal classes, and that she had heard her spoken of as unusually sparkling. Eurie shook her head. "Go and hear her sparkle, then, by all means I won't. Now that's a very inelegant word to use, but it is expressive, and when _I_ use it you may know that I mean it; I am tired of the whole story, and I have been cheated times enough. Look at yesterday! It was a dozen prayer-meetings combined. No, I don't get caught this morning." "But the subject is one that will not admit of sermonizing and prayer-meetings this morning," Marion pleaded; "I am specially interested in it. It is 'How to win and hold attention.' If there is anything earthly that a ward school-teacher needs to know it is those two items. I expect to get practical help." "You needn't expect anything _earthly_; this crowd have nothing to do with matters this side of eternity. As for the subject not admitting of sermonizing, look at the subject of blackboard caricatures. What came of that?" So she went her way, and Marion, who had seen Miss Morris and had been attracted, looked her up with earnest work in view. She had an ambition to be a power in her school-room. Why should not this subject help _her_? The tent was quite full, but she made her way to a corner and secured a seat. Miss Morris was apparently engaged in introducing herself and apologizing for her subject. "I tried to beg off," she said; "I told them that the subject and I had nothing in common; that I was a primary class teacher, and in that line lay my work. But there is no sort of use in trying to change Dr. Vincent's mind about anything, so I had to submit. But for once in my life I remind myself of Gough. I once overheard him in conversation with a committee on lectures. They were objecting to having him lecture on temperance, and pressing him to name some other subject. 'Choose what subject you please, gentlemen,' he said at last, 'and I'll lecture on it, but remember what I _say_ will be on temperance.' So they have given me this subject and I have engaged to take it, but I want you to remember that what I _say_ will be on primary class-teaching." By this time Miss Morris had the sympathy of her audience, and had awakened an interest to see how she would follow out her programme, and from first to last she held their attention. Certain thoughts glowed vividly. I don't know who else they influenced, but I knew they roused and startled Marion, and will have much to do with her future methods of teaching. "Remember," said the speaker, "that you can not live on skim-milk and teach cream!" The thought embodied in that brief and telling sentence was as old as time, and Marion had heard it as long ago as she remembered anything, but it never flashed before her until that moment. What an illustration! She saw herself teaching her class in botany to analyze the flowers, to classify them, to tell every minute item concerning them, and she taught them nothing to say concerning the Creator. Was this "skim-milk" teaching? She knew so many ways in which, did she but have this belief concerning heaven, and Christ, and the judgment, in her heart, she could impress it upon her scholars. She had aimed to be the very _cream_ of teachers. Was she? She came back from her reverie, or, rather, her self-questioning, to hear Miss Morris say: "Why, one move of your hand moves all creation! and as surely does one thought of your soul grow and spread and roll through the universe. Why, you can't sit in your room alone, and think a mean thought, or a false thought, or an unchristian thought, without its influencing not only all people around you, not only all people in all the universe, but nations yet unborn must live under the shadow or the glory that the thought involves." Bold statements these! But Marion could follow her. Intellectually she was thoroughly posted. Had she not herself used the illustration of the tiny stream that simpered through the home meadow and went on, and on, and on, until it helped to surge the beaches of the ocean? But here was a principle involved that reached beyond the ocean, that ignored time, that sought after eternity. Was she following the stream? Could she honestly tell that it might not lead to a judgment that should call her to account for her non-religious influence over her scholars? Marion was growing heavy-hearted; she wanted at least to do no harm in the world if she could do no good. But if all this mountain weight of evidence at Chautauqua proved anything, it proved that she was living a life of infidelity, for the influence of which she was to be called into judgment. No sort of use to comfort herself with the thought that she talked of her peculiar views to no one; it began to be evident that the things which she did _not_ do were more startling than the things which she did. On the whole, no comfort came to her troubled soul through this morning session. To herself she seemed precisely where she was when she went into that tent, only perhaps a trifle more impressed with the solemnity of all things. But, without knowing it, a great stride had been taken in her education. She was not again to be able to say: "I injure no one with my belief; I keep it to myself." "No Man liveth to himself." The verse came solemnly to her as she went out, as though other than human voice were reminding her of it, and life began to feel like an overwhelming responsibility that she could not assume. When one begins to _feel_ that thought in all its force the next step is to find one who will assume the responsibility for us. She met Ruth on her way up the hill. "Flossy has deserted me," Ruth explained as they met; "Eurie carried her away to take a walk. Are you going to hear about John Knox? I am interested in him chiefly because of the voice that is to tell of him to-day; I like Dr. Hurlburt." Marion's only reply was: "I don't see but you come to meeting quite as regularly, now that you are at the hotel, as you did when on the grounds." Then they went to secure their seats. I am not to attempt to tell you anything about the John Knox lecture; indeed I have given over telling more about the Chautauqua addresses. It is of no sort of use. One only feels like bemoaning a failure after any attempt to repeat such lectures as we heard there. Besides, I am chiefly interested at present in their effect on our girls. They listened--these two, and enjoyed as people with brains must necessarily have done. But there was more than that to it; there were consequences that will surely be met again at the last great day. Ruth, as she walked thoughtfully away, said to herself: "That is the way. _Live_ the truth. It is a different day, and the trials and experiences are different, but _life_ must be the same. It is not the day for half-way Christianity nor for idling; I will be an earnest Christian, or I will not dishonor the name and disgrace the memory of such men as Knox by claiming to be of their faith." While Marion, as she turned her flushed cheeks hastily away from Ruth, not willing to show one who knew nothing about this matter, save that it was expedient to join a church, had gotten one foot set firmly toward the rock. "The power that enabled _that_ man to live _that_ life was certainly of God," she thought. "It _must_ be true. God must be in communication with some of the souls that have lived. Is he now, and can I be one of them? Oh, I wonder if there are a favored few who have shone out as grand lights in the world and have gone up from the world to their reward? And I wonder if there is no such thing now? If the blundering creatures who call themselves by his name are nothing but miserable imitations of what was _once_ real? "Such lives as that one can understand; but how can I ever believe that Deacon Cole's life is molded by the same influence, or, indeed, that mine can be? Must I be a Deacon Cole Christian if I am one at all?" The afternoon clouded over, and a mincing little rain began to fall. Marion stood in the tent door and grumbled over it. "I wanted to hear that Mr. Hazard," she said; "I rather fancy his face, and I fancy the name of his subject. I had a curiosity to see what he would do with it, and here is this rain to hinder." Ruth and Flossy had come over for the day, and were waiting in the tent. "Haven't you been at Chautauqua long enough to catch one of its cardinal rules, never to stay at home for rain?" Flossy said. Marion looked around at her. She was putting on her rubbers. "Are you really going?" She asked the question in great surprise. "Why, Flossy, it is going to rain hard!" "What of it?" said Flossy, lightly. "I have waterproof, and rubbers, and umbrella, and if it gets to be too wet I can run to a tent." "If you were at home you wouldn't think of going to church. Why, Flossy Shipley, I never knew you to go out in the rain! I thought you were always afraid you would spoil your clothes." "That was because I had none already spoiled to wear," Flossy answered, cheerily; "but that difficulty is obviated; I have spoiled two dresses since I have been here. This one now is indifferent to the rain, and will be for the future. I have an improvement on that plan, though; I mean to have a rainy-day dress as soon as I get home. Come, it is time we were off." "I believe I am a dunce," Marion said, slowly. "I think it is going to rain hard; but as I have to go, at home, whether it rains or shines, I suppose I can do it here. But if this were a congregation of respectable city Christians, instead of a set of lunatics, there wouldn't be a dozen out." They found hundreds out, however. Indeed, it proved to be difficult to secure seats. That address was heard under difficulties. In the first place it _would_ rain; not an out-and-out hearty shower, that would at once set at rest the attempt to hold an out-door meeting, but an exasperating little drizzle, enlivened occasionally by a few smart drops that seemed to hint business. There was a constant putting up of umbrellas and putting them down again. There was a constant fidgeting about, and getting up and sitting down again, to let some of the more nervous ones who had resolved upon a decided rain escape to safer quarters. Half of the people had their heads twisted around to get a peep at the sky, to see what the clouds really _did_ mean, anyway. Our girls had one of the uncomfortable posts. Arrived late, they had to take what they could get, and it was some distance from the speaker, and their sight and sound were so marred by the constant changes and the whirl of umbrellas that Marion presently lost all patience and gave up the attempt to listen. She would have deserted altogether but for the look of eager attention on Flossy's face. Despite the annoyances, _she_ was evidently hearing and enjoying. It seemed a pity to disturb her and suggest a return to the tent; besides, Marion felt half ashamed to do so. It was not pleasant to give tacit acknowledgment to the fact that poor little, unintellectual Flossy was much more interested than herself. She gave herself up to an old and favorite employment of hers, that of looking at faces and studying them, when a sudden hush that seemed to be settling over the hither to fidgety audience arrested her attention. The speaker's voice was full of pathos, and so quiet had the place become that every word of his could be distinctly heard. He was evidently in the midst of a story, the first of which she had not heard. This was the sentence, as her ears took it up: "Don't cry, father, don't cry! To-night I shall be with Jesus, and I will tell him that you did all you could to bring me there!" What a tribute for a child to give to a father's love! Flossy, with her cheeks glowing and her eyes shining like stars, quietly wiped away the tears, and in her heart the resolve grew strong to live so that some one, dying, could say of her: "I will tell Jesus that you did all you could to bring me there!" Do you think that was what the sentence said to Marion? Quick as thought her life flashed back to that old dingy, weather-beaten house, to that pale-faced man, with his patched clothing and his gray hairs straggling over on the coarse pillow. _Her_ father, dying--her one friend, who had been her memory of love and care all these long years, dying--and these were the last words his lips had said: "Don't cry, little girl--father's dear little girl. I am going to Jesus. I shall be there in a little while. I shall tell him that I tried to have you come!" Oh, blessed father! How hard he had tried in his feebleness and weakness to teach her the way! How sure he had seemed to feel that she would follow him! And how had she wandered! How far away she was! Oh, blessed Spirit of God, to seek after her all these years, through all the weak and foolish mazes of doubt, and indifference, and declared unbelief--still coming with her down to this afternoon at Chautauqua, and there renewing to her her father's parting word. She had often and often thought of these words of her father's. In a sense, they had been ever present with her. Just why they should come at this time, bringing such a sense of certainty about them to her very soul that all this was truth, God's solemn, _real_, unchangeable truth, and force this conviction upon her in such a way that she was moved to say, "Whereas I _was_ blind, now I see," I can not tell. Why Mr. Hazard was used as the instrument of such a revelation of God to her I can not tell. Perhaps he had prayed that his work at Chautauqua that rainy afternoon might, in some way, be blessed to the help of some struggling soul. Perhaps this was the answer to his prayer--unheard, unseen by him, as many an answer to our pleading is, and yet the answer as surely comes. Who can tell how this may be. I do not know. I know this, that Marion's heart gave a great sobbing cry, as it said: "Oh, father, father! if your God, if your Christ, will help me, I will--I will _try_ to come." It was her way of repeating the old cry, "Lord, I believe, help thou mine unbelief." And I do know that it is written, "Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth: Yea, saith the Spirit, that they may rest from their labors; and their works do follow them." It was fifteen years that the weary father had been resting from his labors, and here were his works following him. I have heard that Mr. Hazard said, as he folded his papers and came down from the stand that afternoon, "It was useless to try to talk in such a rain, with the prospect of more every minute. The people could not listen. It would have been better to have adjourned. Nothing was accomplished." Much _he_ knew about it, or will know until the day when the secrets of all hearts shall be revealed! CHAPTER XXVII. UNFINISHED MUSIC. Meantime, this day, which was to be so fraught with consequences to Marion, was on Eurie's hands to dispose of as best she could. To be at Chautauqua, and to be bent on having nothing whatever to do with any of the Chautauqua life, was in itself a novel position. The more so as she felt herself quite deserted. The necessity for reporting served Marion as an excuse for attending even those meetings which she did not report; and the others having gone to Mayville to live, this foolish sheep, who was within the fold, and who would not be _of_ it, went wandering whither she would in search of amusement. After Marion left her she made her way to the museum, and a pleasant hour she spent; one could certainly not desire a more attractive spot. She went hither and thither, handling and admiring the books, the pictures, the maps, the profusion of curiosities, and, at the end of the hour, when the press of visitors became too great to make a longer stay agreeable, she departed well pleased with herself that she had had the wisdom to choose such a pleasant resort instead of a seat in some crowded tent as a listener. Coming out, she walked down the hill, and on and on, watching the crowds of people who were gathering, and wishing she had a programme that she might see what the special attraction was that seemed to be drawing so many. At last she reached the wharf. The Assembly steamer was lying at her dock, her jaunty flags flying, and the commotion upon her decks betokening that she was making ready for a voyage. The crowd seemed greater there than at any other point. It would appear that the special attraction was here, after all. She understood it, and pushed nearer, as the ringing notes of song suddenly rose on the air, and she recognized the voices of the Tennesseeans. This was a great treat; she delighted in hearing them. She allowed herself to be elbowed and jostled by the throng, reaching every moment by judicious pushing a place where she could not only hear but see, and where escape was impossible. The jubilant chorus ceased and one of those weird minor wails, such as their music abounds in, floated tenderly around her. It was a farewell song, so full of genuine pathos, and so tenderly sung, that it was in vain to try to listen without a swelling of the throat and a sense of sadness. Something in the way that the people pressed nearer to listen suggested to Eurie that it must be designed as a farewell tribute to somebody, and presently Prof. Sherwin mounted a seat that served as a platform and gave them a tender informal farewell address. In every sentence his great, warm heart shone. "I am going away," he said, "before the blessed season at Chautauqua is concluded. I am going with a sad heart, for I feel that opportunities here for work for the Master have been great, and some of them I have lost. And yet there is light in the sadness, for the work that I can not do will yet be done. I once sat before my organ improvising a thought that was in my heart, trying to give expression to it, and I could not. I knew what I wanted, and I knew it was in my heart, but how to give it expression I did not know. A celebrated organist came up the stairs and stood beside me. I looked around to him. 'Can't you take this tune,' I said, 'just where I leave it, and finish it for me as I have it in my heart to do? I can't give it utterance. Don't you see what I want?'" "'Perhaps I do,' he said, and he placed his fingers over my fingers, on the same keys that mine were touching, and I slipped out of the seat and back into the shadow, and he slipped into my place, and then the music rolled forth. My tune, only I could not play it. He was doing it for me. So, though I may have failed in my work that I have tried to do here, the great Master is here, and I pray and I hope and I believe that he will put his grand hand upon my unfinished work and in heaven I shall meet it completed.'" What was there in this to move Eurie to tears? She did not know Prof. Sherwin--that is, she had never been introduced to him--but she had heard him sing, she had heard him pray, she had met him in the walk and asked where the Sunday-school lesson was, and he had in part directed her--directed her in such a way that she had been led to seek further, and in doing so had met Miss Ryder, and in meeting her had been interested ever since in studying a Christian life. Was this one of Prof. Sherwin's unfinished tunes? Would he meet it again in heaven? A very tender spirit took possession of Eurie--an almost irresistible longing to know more of this influence, or presence, or whatever name it should be called, that so moved hearts, and made the friends of a week say farewell with tears, and yet with hopeful smiles as they spoke in joy and assurance of a future meeting. Prof. Sherwin and his friends embarked, and the dainty little steamer turned her graceful head toward Mayville, and slipped away over the silver water. Eurie made no attempt to get away from the throng who pressed to the edge of the dock to get the last bow, the last flutter of his handkerchief. She even drew out her own handkerchief and fluttered it after him, and received from him a special bow, and was almost decided to resolve to be present in joy at that other meeting, and to make sure this very day of her title to an inheritance there. Almost! Going back she met Ruth and Flossy. She seized eagerly upon the latter. "Come," she said, "you have been to meetings enough, and you haven't taken a single walk with me since we have been here, and think of the promises we made to entertain each other." Flossy laughed cheerfully. "We have been entertained, without any effort on our part," she said. Nevertheless she suffered herself to be persuaded to go for a walk, provided Eurie would go to Palestine. "What nonsense!" Eurie said, disdainfully, when Flossy had explained to her that she had a consuming desire to wander along the banks of the Jordan, and view those ancient cities, historic now. "However, I would just as soon walk in that direction as any other." There was one other person who, it transpired, would as soon take a walk as do anything else just then. He joined the girls as they turned toward the Palestine road. That was Mr. Evan Roberts. "Are you going to visit the Holy Land this morning, and may I be of your party?" he asked. "Yes," Flossy answered, whether to the first question, or to both in one, she did not say. Then she introduced Eurie, and the three walked on together, discussing the morning and the meetings with zest. "Here we are, on 'Jordan's stormy banks,'" Mr. Roberts said, at last, halting beside the grassy bank. "I suppose there was never a more perfect geographical representation than this." "Do you really think it has any practical value?" Eurie asked, skeptically. Mr. Roberts looked at her curiously. "Hasn't it to you?" he said. "Now, to me, it is just brimful of interest and value; that is, as much value as geographical knowledge ever is. I take two views of it. If I never have an actual sight of the sacred land, by studying this miniature of it, I have as full a knowledge as it is possible to get without the actual view, and if I at some future day am permitted to travel there, why--well, you know of course how pleasant it is to be thoroughly posted in regard to the places of interest that you are about to visit; every European traveler understands that." "But do you suppose it is really an accurate outline?" Eurie said, again, quoting opinions that she had read until she fancied they were her own. Again Mr. Roberts favored her with that peculiar look from under heavy eyebrows--a look half satirical, half amused. "Some of the most skilled surveyors and traveled scholars have so reported," he said, carelessly. "And when you add to that the fact that they are Christian men, who have no special reason for getting up a wholesale deception for us, and are supposed to be tolerably reliable on all other subjects, I see no reason to doubt the statement." On the whole, Eurie had the satisfaction of realizing that she had appeared like a simpleton. Flossy, meantime, was wandering delightedly along the banks, stopping here and there to read the words on the little white tablets that marked the places of special interest. "Do you see," she said, turning eagerly, "that these are Bible references on each tablet? Wouldn't it be interesting to know what they selected as the scene to especially mark this place?" Mr. Roberts swung a camp-chair from his arm, planted it firmly in the ground, and drew a Bible from his pocket. "Miss Mitchell," he said, "suppose you sit down here in this road, leading from Jerusalem to Bethany, and tell us what is going on just now in Bethany, while Miss Shipley and I supply you with chapter and verse." "I am not very familiar with the text-book," Eurie said. "If you are really in the village yourselves you might possibly inquire of the inhabitants before I could find the account." But she took the chair and the Bible. "Look at Matthew xxi. 17, Eurie," Flossy said, stooping over the tablet, and Eurie read: "'And he left them, and went out of the city into Bethany; and he lodged there.'" "That was Jesus, wasn't it? Then he went this way, this very road, Eurie, where you are sitting!" It was certainly very fascinating. "And stopped at the house on which you have your hand, perhaps," Mr. Roberts said, smiling at her eager face. "That might have been Simon's house, for instance." "Did _he_ live in Bethany? I don't know anything about these things." "Eurie, look if you can find anything about him. The next reference is Matthew xxvi." And again Eurie read: "'Now when Jesus was in Bethany, in the house of Simon the leper.'" "The very place!" Flossy said, again. "Oh, I want so much to know what happened then!" "Won't Miss Mitchell read it to us?" Mr. Roberts said, and he arranged his shawl along the ground for seats. "Since we have really come to Bethany, let us have the full benefit of it. Now, Miss Shipley, take a seat, and we will give ourselves up to the pleasure of being with Jesus in Simon's house, and looking on at the scene." So they disposed of themselves on the grass, and Eurie, hardly able to restrain a laugh over the novelty of the situation, and yet wonderfully fascinated by the whole scene, read to them the tender story of the loving woman with her sweet-smelling ointment, growing more and more interested, until in the closing verse her voice was full of feeling. "'Verily I say unto you, Wheresoever this gospel shall be preached in the whole world, there shall also this, that this woman hath done be told as a memorial of her.'" "Think of that!" said Mr. Roberts. "And here are we, eighteen hundred years afterward, sitting here in Bethany and talking of that same woman still! Miss Mitchell, are you going to do something for Christ that shall be talked over a thousand years from now? There is a chance for undying fame." "Doubtful!" Eurie said, but she did not smile; her face was grave. "Or, better still, are you going to do such work for Christ that, hundreds of years after, your influence will be silently living and working out its fruit in human hearts?" "It is altogether more likely that I shall do nothing at all." "Out of the question," he said, with a grave smile. "Either for or against, every life must be, whether we will it or not. 'He that is not with me is against me,' was the word of the Master himself, and as long as eternity lasts the fruit of the sowing will last." "That is a fearfully solemn thought," Flossy said, earnestly. Mr. Roberts turned toward her a face aglow with smiles now. "And a wondrously precious one," he said, and Flossy answered him in a low tone: "Yes, I can see that it might be." Now, the actual fact is, that those three people wandered around that far-away land until the morning vanished and the loud peal of the Chautauqua bells announced the fact that the feast of intellect was over, and it was time for dinner They went from Bethany to Bethel, and from Bethel to Shechem, and they even climbed Mount Hermon's snowy peak, and looked about on the lovely plain below. In every place there was Bible reading, and Eurie was the reader, and it was such a morning that she will remember for all time. "Pray, who is this Mr. Roberts?" she asked, as they parted company at the foot of the hill. "Where did you make his acquaintance?" "He is Mrs. Smythe's nephew," Flossy said. "She introduced me to him the other evening." "The other evening! You seemed to be as well acquainted as though you had spent the summer together." "Some people have a way of seeming like friends on short acquaintance," Flossy said, with grave face and smiling eyes. "You two missed a good deal by your folly this morning," Ruth said, as they met at dinner. "We had a grand lecture." "So had we," answered Eurie, significantly, and that was every word she vouchsafed concerning the trip to Palestine. CHAPTER XXVIII. MENTAL PROBLEMS. "Dr. Deems," said Ruth, looking up from her programme with a thoughtful air. "I wonder if he is a man whom I have any special desire to hear?" You must constantly remember the entire ignorance of these girls on all names and topics that pertained to the religious world. Ruth knew indeed that the gentleman in question was a New York clergyman; that was as far as her knowledge extended. "His subject is interesting," Flossy said. "I don't think it is," said Eurie. "Not to me, anyhow. Nature and I have nothing in common, except to have a good time together if we can get it. She is a miserably disappointed jade, I know. What has she done for us since we have been here except to arrange rainy weather? I'm going to visit his honor the mummy this morning, and from there I am going to the old pyramid; and I advise you to go with me, all of you. Talk about nature when there is an old fellow to see who was acquainted with it thousands of years ago. Nature is too common an affair to be interested in." "Oh, are you going to the museum?" said Flossy. "Then please get me one of the 'Bliss' singing books, will you? I want to secure one before they are all gone. Girls, don't you each want one of them to take home? The hymns are lovely." "I don't," said Eurie, "unless he is for sale to go along and sing them. I can't imagine anything tamer than to hear some commonplace voice trying to do those songs that he roars out without any effort at all. What has become of the man?" "He has gone," said Marion. "Called home suddenly, some one told me. His singing is splendid, isn't it? I don't know but I feel much as you do about the book. Think of having Deacon Miller try to sing, 'Only an armor-bearer!' I don't mind telling you that I felt very much as if I were being lifted right off my feet and carried up somewhere, I hardly know where, when I heard him sing that. I was coming down the hill, away off, you know, by the post-office--no, away above the post-office, and he suddenly burst forth. I stopped to listen, and I could hear every single word as distinctly as I can hear you in this tent." "Hear!" said Eurie, "I guess you could. I shouldn't be surprised if they heard him over at Mayville, and that is what brings such crowds here every day. Did you ever _see_ anything like the way the people come here, anyhow?" "I don't feel at all as you do," said Flossy, going back to the question of singing-books. "After we get let down a little, 'Only an armor-bearer' will sound very well even from common singers. It has in it what can't be taken out because a certain voice is lost; and the book is full of other and simpler pieces, and lovely choruses, that people can catch after one hearing." "Flossy is going home to introduce it into the First Church," Eurie said, gravely. Flossy's cheeks flushed. "I had not thought of that," she said, simply; "perhaps we can. In any case get me a couple, Eurie." The discussion on the morning service ended in a division of the party. Ruth, who had come over early on purpose to attend, was obliged to succumb to a feeling of utter weariness and lie down. Eurie steadily refused to go to the platform meeting, assuring them that she knew Dr. Deems would be "as dry as a stick; all New York ministers were." So Flossy and Marion went away together, Marion with her note-book in the hope of getting an item for a newspaper letter that must be written that afternoon. They were late, and almost abandoned in despair the hope of getting within hearing, until a happy thought suggested a seat on the platform stair at the speaker's back. There was a "crack" there, Marion said, into which they presently crept. The address was already commenced. Marion listened at first with that indifferent air that a face wears when its owner perforce commences in the middle of a thing, and has to _wait_ his way to a tangible idea of what is being said. There was not long waiting, however. Her eyes began to dilate and her face to glow; she was almost a worshiper of eloquence, and surely no one ever sat for two hours and listened to a more unbroken flow of rich, glowing words, shining like diamonds, than fell lavishly around the listeners that Friday morning at Chautauqua. But a few minutes and Marion's pencil began to move with speed. This was the thought that had thrilled her: "First, light; then liberation from chaos; then grass; and then God stopped his work and gazed with delight on the picture he had drawn. Think what a picture it must have been! There was nothing but rocks ground down when God said, 'Earth, grow!' Then straightway the mother power fell down upon the earth, life pulsed in her veins, and the baby shoot of grass sprang up, and the rocky earth wrapped herself in her garment of emerald, and God, stopping his work said, 'Useful, beautiful!'" When the speaker touched upon the doctrine of the resurrection Marion's pencil paused, and she leaned eagerly forward to get a glimpse of his face. That doctrine had seemed to her doubting heart the strangest, wildest, most hopeless of the Christian theories. If clear light could shine on that, could there not on _anything_? Her face was aglow with interest not only, but with anxiety. This morning, for the first time in her life, she could be called an honest doubter. She had fancied herself able to believe any thing of which her reason had been convinced; but she found, to her surprise and dismay, that so fixed had the habit of unbelief become, it seemed impossible to shake it off, and that she needed to be convinced and reconvinced; that her questionings came in on every hand, seized upon the smallest point, and tormented her without mercy. What about this strange story of the resurrection? As she listened a subdued smile broke over her face--a smile of sarcasm. How very absurdly simple the argument from nature was, how utterly unanswerable! And after the sentence, "Tell me how that wonderful field of waving grain came from the bare kernels of corn, and I will tell you how my blessed baby shall rise an angel," Marion said in tone so distinct that it struck on Flossy's ear like a knell, "What a fool!" Not the speaker, as the dismayed and disappointed Flossy supposed, but _herself_. "The measure of every man is his faith," said Dr. Deems. "The greatest thing a human being can do is not to perceive, nor to _compare_, not to _reason_, but to _believe_." And again Marion smiled. If this were true what a pigmy she must be! She began to more than suspect that she was. "Don't waste time," said the Doctor, "in trying to reconcile science and the Bible. Science wasn't intended to teach religion. The Bible wasn't intended to teach science; but wherever they touch they agree. God sends his servants--scientific men--all abroad through nature to gather facts with which to illustrate the Bible." Marion began to write again, but it was only in snatches here and there; not that there was not that which she longed to catch, but she could not write it--the sentences just poured forth; and how perfectly aglow with light and beauty they were! This one sentence she presently wrote: "In the black ink of his power God wrote the Book of nature; in the red ink of his love he wrote the Bible; and all this _power_ is to bring us all to this _love_. Oh, to rest in arms like these! Are they not strong enough?" Suddenly Marion closed her book and slipped her pencil into her pocket; she could not write. And although she thrilled through every nerve over the majestic sentences that followed and was carried to a pitch of enthusiasm almost beyond her control, when the jubilant thunder of thousands of voices rang together in the matchless closing words, "Blessing, and glory, and thanksgiving, and honor, and power, and might, be unto our God, forever and ever. Amen." She made no further attempt to write; her heart was full; there rang in it this eager cry, "Oh, to rest in arms like these!" Strong enough? Aye, indeed! Doubts were forever set at rest. The Maker of all nature could be none other than God, and the God of nature was the God of the Bible. It was as clear as the sunlight. Reason was forever satisfied, but there lingered yet the hungering cry, "Oh, to rest in arms like these!" And Flossy said not a word to her of the resting place. Not because she had not found it strong and safe; not because she did not long to have her friend rest there, but because of that despairing murmur in her heart. "What is the use in saying anything? Had she not heard with her own ears Marion's sneering sentence in the face of the unanswerable arguments that had been presented?" I wonder how often we turn away from harvest fields that are ready for the reader because we mistake for a sneer that which is the admission of a convicted soul? By afternoon Ruth was rested and ready for meeting; if the truth be known it was her troubled brain which had tired her body and obliged her to rest. She had begun to take up that problem of "Christian work." The platform meeting of the evening before, and, more than anything else, Dr. Niles' address, had fanned her heart into a flame of desire to do something for the Master. But what could she do? She and Flossy had talked it over together after they reached their room at the hotel; in fact they talked away into the night. "I don't know," Flossy said, with a little laugh, "but I shall have to depend on the 'unconscious influence' which I exert to do my work for me. I don't know of anything which I can actually _do_. Dr. Niles made a great deal of that." "Yes," Ruth, said, "but you see, Flossy, the people whose unconscious influence does any good are the ones after all who are moving around _trying_ to do something. I don't feel sure that he lets the unconscious influence of the drones amount to much, unless it is in the wrong scale. Dr. Niles made a good deal of _that_, you remember." "Don't you like him ever so much, Ruth?" "Why, yes," Ruth said again, turning her pillow wearily. "I liked him of course; how could I help it? But, after all, he made me very uncomfortable. I seem to feel as though I _must_ find something to do. I have a great deal of time to make up. I tell you what it is, Flossy, I wish you and I could do something for those two girls. Isn't it strange that they are not interested?" "But they are not." Flossy said it as positively as if she could see right into their hearts. "I think Marion is worse than ever; and as for Eurie, she won't even go to the meetings, you know." "I know. Perhaps we would only do harm to try. But what _can_ we do? I am sure I don't see anything. And don't you know how clearly Dr. Niles made it appear that there was a special work for each one?" So they discussed the question, turning it over and over, and getting almost no light, coming to feel themselves very useless and worthless specks on the sea of life, until late in the night Flossy said: "I'll tell you what it is, Ruth, we must just ask for work--little bits of work, you know--and then keep our eyes open until it comes. I know of things I can do when I get home." "So do I," said Ruth, "but I want to begin now." Silence for a few minutes, and then Flossy asked: "Ruthie, have you written to Mr. Wayne?" "No," said Ruth, her cheeks flushing even in the darkness. "I wrote a long letter just before this came to me, but I burned it, and I am glad of it." Then they went to sleep. But the desire for the work did not fade with the daylight. Flossy had even been tempted to say a humble little word to Marion, but had been deterred by the sound of that sneer of which I told you; and Ruth, lying on her bed, had revolved the subject and sent up many an earnest prayer, and went out to afternoon service resolved upon keeping her eyes very wide open. The special attraction for the afternoon was a conference of primary class teachers. They were out in full force, and were ready for any questions that might fill the hearts and the mouths of eager learners. Our girls had each their special favorites among these leaders. Ruth found herself attracted and deeply interested in every word that Mrs. Clark uttered. Marion was making a study of both Mrs. Knox and Miss Morris, and found it difficult to tell which attracted her most. Even Eurie was ready for this meeting. She had never been able to shake off the thought of Miss Rider, and her eager enthusiasm in this work, while Flossy had been fascinated and carried away captive by the magnetic voice and manner of Mrs. Partridge. "She makes me glow," Flossy said, in trying to explain the feeling to the calmer Ruth. "Her life seems to quiver all through me, and make me long to reach after it; to have the same power which she has over the hearts of wild uncared-for children." And Ruth looked down on the exquisite bit of flesh and blood beside her, and thought of her elegant home and her elegant mother, and of all the softening and enervating influences of her city life, and laughed. How little had she in common with such a work as that to which Mrs. Partridge had given her soul! Keeping her eyes open, as she had planned to do, this same Flossy saw as she was passing down the aisle the hungry face of one of her boys, as she had mentally called the Arabs with whom her life had brushed on the Sunday morning The word just described it still, a hungry face like one hanging wistfully around the outskirts of a feast in which he had no share. Flossy let go her hold of Ruth's arm and darted toward him. "How do you do?" she said, in winning voice, before he had even seen her. "I am real glad to see you again. If you will come with me I will get a seat for you. A lady is going to speak this afternoon who has five hundred boys in her class in Sunday-school." Now the Flossy of two weeks ago, if she could have imagined herself in any such business, would have been utterly disgusted with the result, and gone away with her pretty nose very high. The boy turned his dirty face toward her and said, calmly: "What a whopper!" The experience of a lifetime could not have answered more deftly: "You come and see. I am almost certain she will tell us about some of them." Still he stared, and Flossy waited with her pretty face very near to his, and her pretty hand held coaxingly out. "Come," she said again. And it could not have been more to the boy's surprise than it was to hers that he presently said: "Well, go ahead. I can send if I don't like it. I'll follow." And he did. CHAPTER XXIX. WAITING. It required Flossy's eyes and heart both to keep watch of her boy during the progress of that meeting. The novelty of the scene, the strangeness of seeing ladies occupying the speaker's stand, kept him quiet and alert, until Mrs. Partridge, that woman with wonderful power over the forgotten, neglected portion of the world, arrested all his bewildering thoughts and centered them on the strange stories she had to tell. Did you ever hear her tell that remarkable story of her first attempt at controlling that remarkable class which came under her care, many years ago, in St. Louis? It is full of wonder and pathos and terror and fascination, even to those who are somewhat familiar with such experiences. But Flossy and her boy had never heard, or dreamed of its like. No, I am wrong; the boy had dreamed of scenes just so wild and daring, but even he had not fancied that such people ever found their way to Sunday-schools. Peanuts, cigars, a pack of cards, and a bowie-knife! Imagine yourself, teacher, to be seated before your orderly and courteous class of boys next Sunday morning and find them transformed into beings represented by such surroundings as these! It was Mrs. Partridge's experience. How fascinating that story is! That one incorrigible boy, the one with the bowie-knife, the one who would make no answer to her questions, show no interest in her stories, ignore her very presence and go on with his horrible mischief, until it even came to a stabbing affray right there in the class-room! Imagine her meeting that boy ten years afterward, when he was not only a man, but a gentleman; not only that, but a Christian and not only that, but a working Christian, superintending a mission Sunday-school, giving his best energies and his best time to work like that! Think of being told by him that the determination to amount to something was taken that morning, ten years before, when he seemed not to be listening nor caring! What is ten years of Christian work when we can hope for such results as that! Flossy had forgotten her charge; her face was all aglow; so was her heart. She knew more about Christian work than she did an hour before. She had learned that we must take the step that plainly comes next to be taken, no matter for the darkness of the day and the apparent gloom of the future. _Work_ is ours; _results_ are God's. This life business is divided. Partnership with God. Nothing but _the work_ to do; so that it is done to the utmost limit of our best, the responsibility is the Lord's. That was blessed! She could dare to try. Meantime the boy. He had listened in utmost silence, and with eyes that never for an instant left the speaker's face! When the spell was broken he drew a long sigh, and this was his mighty conclusion. "That chap was enough sight meaner than I'd ever be, and yet he got to be _some_! I'll be blamed if I don't see what can be done in that line!" A small beginning; so small that on Flossy's face it excited only smiles. She was ignorant, you know. To Mrs. Partridge that sentence would have been worth a wedge of gold. But it is possible that Flossy's first simple little reach after work may have fruit to bear. It is difficult to begin to tell about that next day at Chautauqua. There was so much crowded into it that it would almost make a little book of itself. The morning was spent by a large class of people in a state of excited unrest and expectancy. The sensible ones by the hundreds, and indeed I suppose I may say by the thousands, went to the morning service, as usual, and heard the children's sermon, delivered by Dr. Newton; and those who did not, and who afterward had the misfortune to fall in with those who did, bemoaned their folly in not doing likewise. On the whole, the children, and those who had brains enough to become children for the time being, were the only comfortable ones at Chautauqua that Saturday morning. The president was coming! So, apparently, was the rest of the world! Oh, the throngs and throngs that continually arrived! It of itself was a rare and never-to-be-forgotten novelty to those who had never in their lives before seen such a vast army of human beings gathered into a small space, and all perfectly quiet and correct, and even courteous in their deportment. "Where are the drunken men?" said Marion, looking around curiously on the constantly increasing throng. "We always read of them as being in great crowds." "Yes, and the people who swear," added Eurie. "I haven't heard an oath this morning, and I have roamed around everywhere. I must say Chautauqua will bear off the palm for getting together a most respectable-looking, well-behaved 'rabble!' That is what I overheard a sour-looking old gentleman, who doesn't approve of having a president--or of letting him come to a religious meeting, I don't know which--say would rush in to-day. It certainly is a remarkably orderly 'rush.' Girls, look at Dr. Vincent! I declare, Chautauqua has paid, just to watch him! He ought to be the president himself. I mean to vote for him when female suffrage comes in. Or a king! Wouldn't he make a grand king? How he would enjoy ordering the subjects and enforcing his laws!" "All of which he seems able to do now," Marion said. "I don't believe he would thank you for a vote. His realm is large enough, and he seems to have willing subjects." "He has go-ahead-a-tive-ness." Eurie said. "What is the proper word for that, school-ma'am? Executive ability, that's it. Those are splendid words, and they ought to be added to his name. I tell you what, girls, I wish we could cut him up into seven men, and take him home with us. Seven first-class men made out of him and distributed through the towns about us would make a new order of things." All this was being said while they were scrambling with the rest of the world down to the auditorium to secure seats, for the grand afternoon had arrived, and people had been advised to be "in their seats as soon after one o'clock as they could make it convenient." "How soon will that be, I wonder?" Marion said, quoting this sentence from Dr. Vincent's advice given in the morning, and holding up her watch to show that it was five minutes of one. "It looks to me as though those deluded beings who arrive here at one o'clock will have several hours of patient waiting before they will make it convenient to secure seats. Just stand a minute, girls, and look! It is worth seeing. Away back, just as far as I can see, there is nothing but heads! The aisles are full, and space between the seats, and the office is full, and the people are just pouring down from the hill in a continuous stream. To look that way you wouldn't think that any had got down here yet!" Now I really wish I had a photograph of that gathering of people to put right in here, on this page! Many of them would have looked much better at this point than they did after four hours of patient waiting. How that crowd did fidget and fix and change position, as far as it was possible to change, when there was not an inch of unoccupied space. How they talked and laughed and sang and grumbled and yawned, and sang again! It _was_ a tedious waiting. It had its irresistibly comic side. There were those among the Chautauqua girls who could see the comic side of things with very little trouble. The material out of which they made some of their fun might have appeared very meager to orderly, decorous people. But they made it. What infinite sport they got out of the fidgety lady before them, who could not get herself and her three children seated to her mind! Those ladies who labored so industriously in order that the nation's flags, draping the stand, should float gracefully over the nation's chief, were an almost inexhaustible source of amusement to our girls. "Look!" said Eurie, "that arrangement doesn't suit; some of the stars are hidden; see them twitch it; it will be down! Now that one has it looped just to her fancy. No! I declare, there it comes down again! The other one twitched it this time; they are not of the same mind. Girls, do look! It is fun to watch them; they work as though the interests of this meeting all turned on a right arrangement of that flag." By this time the attention of the girls was engaged, and the number of witty remarks that were made at the expense of those flags would no doubt have disconcerted the earnest workers thereat could they have heard them. The hours waned, and the president did not arrive. The waiters essayed to sing, but to lead such an army of people was a difficult task, especially when there was no one to lead. Such singing! "We came out ahead, anyhow!" said Flossy, stopping to laugh. Five or six thousand people had finished their verse, while five or six thousand in the rear were in the third line of it. "We need Mr. Bliss or Mr. Sherwin or _somebody_," said Ruth. "What a pity that they have all gone, and Dr. Tourjée hasn't come! I thought he was to be here." Presently came a singer to their rescue. The girls did not know who he was, but he led well, and the singing became decidedly enjoyable. Suddenly he disappeared, and they went back again into utter confusion. They stopped singing and began to grumble. "Queer arrangements, anyhow," said a surly-looking man in front. "Why didn't they have a speaker ready to address this throng, instead of keeping us waiting here with nothing to entertain us?" "I know it," said Marion, briskly addressing herself to her party. "Dr. Vincent has not used his accustomed foresight. He ought to have known that the presidential party would be three hours late, and filled up the programme with speeches, especially since there has been such a dearth of speech-making during the past two weeks. We are really hungry for an address! I don't know who would have undertaken the task, however, unless they sent for Gabriel or some other celestial. I know _I_ have no desire to listen to a common mortal." Before them sat a lady absorbed in a book. During the singing she joined heartily, and when Dr. Vincent came, on one of his numerous journeys to try to encourage the crowd with the information that the party waited for had not yet arrived, she looked and listened with the rest, but always with her finger between the leaves, as if the place was too interesting to be lost. Eurie's curiosity rose to such a pitch that she leaned forward for a peep at the title-page, and drew back suddenly. It was a copy of the Teacher's Bible! A silence fell upon the company near the front, broken suddenly by an old lady who leaned lovingly toward her chubby-faced grandson, and said: "Frankie, you must look in a few minutes and you will see the President of the United States." "That is good news, anyhow," spoke forth a rough-looking, good-natured man near by, and the listeners, who were in that excited state of weariness and waiting that they were ready to laugh or cry as the slightest occasion offered, burst forth into roars of laughter, which rang back among the crowds behind and enticed them to join, though I suppose not twenty of the laughers knew what the joke was, if indeed there _was_ one. A sudden rush. Some one occupied the stand. A notice. "A telegram!" said a ringing voice. "For Mrs. C.G. Hammond. Marked--'Death!'" A sympathetic murmur ran through the great company, as they moved and wedged and fell back, and did almost impossible things, to make a road out of that dense throng of humanity for the one to whom the president had suddenly become an insignificance. Just then came the "Wyoming Trio." Blessings on them, whoever they are. Nothing ever could have fitted in more splendidly than they did just there and then. And the singing rested and helped them all. Now a sensation came in the shape of a poem that had been written for the occasion, and was to be learned to sing in greeting to the president. How they rang those jubilant words through those old trees! Tender, touching words, with the Chautauqua key-note quivering all through them. "Greet him! Let the air around him Benedictions bear; Let the hearts of all the people Circle him with prayer.' "I wonder if he realizes what a blessed thing it is to be circled with prayer?" said she of the Teacher's Bible, turning a thoughtful face upon the four girls who had attracted her attention. "I wonder who Mary A. Lathbury is?" said Eurie, reading from the poem. "She is a poet, whoever she is. There isn't a line in this that is simply _rhyme_. I doubt if the president ever had such a rhythmical tribute as that." "She is the lady with blue eyes and curls who designs the pictures in that charming child's paper which flutters around here. I have forgotten the name of it, but the pictures are little poems themselves." This was Flossy's bit of information. "Which designs them, the blue eyes or the curls?" Marion asked, gravely. And then these four simpletons burst into a merry laugh. Still the president did not appear. The audience had exhausted their resources and their good humor. Ominous grumblings and cross faces began to predominate. Some darkly hinted that he was not coming at all, and that this was a design to draw the immense crowd together. Nobody believed it, but many were in a mood to pretend that they did. "I never believed in this thing," said a tall, dark-faced, solemn-featured man, speaking in a voice loud enough to interest the crowd in front "This sensation business I don't believe in. What do we want of the president here! Who cares to see him? I don't like it; I believe it is all wrong, turning a religious meeting upside down for a sensation, and I told them so." Our friend Marion, you will remember, was gifted with a clear voice and a saucy tongue. "If he doesn't like it," she said, quickly, "and doesn't want to see the president, why do you suppose he has kept one of the best chairs for four mortal hours? Don't you think that is selfish?" Which sentence caused ripples of laughter all about them, and quenched the solemn-visaged man. But it was growing serious, this waiting. It was a great army of people to be kept at rest, and though they had been quiet and decorous enough thus far, it was not to be presumed that they were all people governed by nice shades of propriety. Would the disappointment break forth into any disagreeable demonstrations? Dr. Vincent had done what he could; he had appeared promptly on the arrival of dispatches, and given the latest news that the telegraph and the telescope would send. But what can any mortal man do who has arranged for people to come who do not come, except wait for them with what patience he can command. At this ominous moment he appeared before them again. Not a notice this time; something which shone in his eyes and quivered in every vein and rang in his trumpet-like voice. This was what he said. CHAPTER XXX. SETTLED QUESTIONS. Dear Friends: I should bear a burden on my conscience, if I did not come to you to-day with the 'old, old story.' "Over the tent which has been prepared for the President of the United States there glows, done in evergreen, this single word, '_rest_.' "As I pass it, I am reminded of another and a different rest: the rest from every burden, every anxiety, every pain, every sin; who has rested in those everlasting arms? There is coming a day when all this throng of human life gathered here shall wait for the coming of the King. Yea, even the 'King of kings.' Should that time be to-day, who is ready? Do you know his power? Do you know his grace? Do you know his love? Through the atonement of the Lord Jesus Christ, every one of you may have that King for your father; I am commissioned, this day, to bring this invitation to each one of you; 'Come unto me all ye that are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.' Will you come?------Pardon this interruption--no, I will not ask your pardon: it is never an interruption to bring good news from the King to his subjects. I will not weary you with a long presentation; I have only this message: you are all invited to come to the Lord Jesus Christ, and be saved from every possible calamity; you are all invited to come now. I am going to ask the Tennesseeans to sing one of my favorites: "'Brother, don't stay away; For my Lord says there's room enough, Room enough in the heaven for you.'" Never were tender words more tenderly sung! Never did they steal out upon the hearts of a more hushed and solemn audience. That matchless word of gospel had touched home. There were those in the crowd who had never realized before that the invitation was for them. Following the hymn came another, suggested also by Dr. Vincent: "Steal away to Jesus." It is one of the sweetest as well as one of the strangest of African melodies; and as the tender message floated up among the trees, a strange hush settled over the listeners; many tears were quietly wiped away from eyes unused to weeping. "Now sing 'Almost persuaded,'" said Dr. Vincent, his own voice tremulous with his highly wrought feeling. Many voices took that up. Even the Chautauqua girls sang, all but Eurie. With the sentence: "Seems now some soul to say, Go, spirit, go thy way; Some more convenient day On thee I'll call." Flossy tamed her anxious, appealing eyes on Eurie, but she was laughing merrily over the attempt of a feeble old man near her to join in the song, and Flossy whispered sadly to Ruth: "Eurie has not even as much interest as that." The spell of the message and the music lingered, even after Dr. Vincent had gone again. There was no more grumbling; there was very little laughing; a subdued spirit seemed to brood over the great company. "We could almost have a revival, right here," said one thoughtful man, looking with searching eyes, up and down the sea of faces. "I tell you, no grander opportunity was ever more grandly improved than by those few words of Dr. Vincent's. They touched bottom. He will meet those words again with joy, or I am mistaken." But the waiting was over; suddenly the Chautauqua bells began to peal; strains of martial music, and the roll of drums, mingled with the booming of cannon; and almost before they were aware, even after all their waiting, twenty thousand people stood face to face with their nation's chief. "When the president's head appears above this platform, I hope it will thunder here," had been Dr. Vincent's suggestion several hours before. Thunder! That was no comparison! I hope even _he_ was satisfied. Then how that song of greeting rung out; tender still, even in its power: "Let the hearts of all the people circle him with prayer." No better gift for him than that. After the cheering and the singing, and the very brief speech from the president himself, came the address of welcome by Dr. Fowler of Chicago. His first sentence sent the multitude into another storm of cheers. Said he: "The work that I thought to do, has been done by twenty thousand people." How could they help doing it again after that? Chautauqua had not dropped her colors in this plan of an afternoon given to the president. The address of welcome from first to last rang with the gospel invitation, "come;" no better word than that even for their chief; "honor to whom honor is due," quoted the speaker, and then followed his graceful tribute, but it closed with a tender, dignified, earnest appeal to the President of the United States to 'rest' in the same refuge, to enlist under the same flag, to be loyal to the same Chief, whom they were met to serve. "Out of my heart," said he: "as a man who recognizes God as the supreme ruler of us all, I bid you come with us, and we will do you good, for the Lord hath spoken good concerning Israel." Poor Eurie! What a place she had chosen if she desired to hear no more preaching. What were all these exercises, but sermons, one after the other, strong warm unanswerable appeals to be loyal to the Great Chief? Certainly Dr. Deems was not the man to forget the Greater in his greeting to the under ruler; nor did he. "Let me speak to you in closing," said he, "to you and to this assembly, out of my heart. We shall never all stand together again, until that great white throne shall stop in mid heavens, and we shall stand to meet the Chiefest of all chiefs. O men and brethren, shall we not all prepare to meet there? Mr. President, every day prayer is made for you; we are hoping to meet with you in heaven. Brave men who stood beside you in the late war, and have gone on ahead, are hoping to greet you there. May you have a good life, a happy life, a blessed life; and may other tongues more eloquent than mine, more eloquent than even my brother's who preceded me, bid you welcome one day to the general assembly of the first born. Amen and amen." What could better close the matchless greetings than to have the Tennesseeans circle round their president and sing again that ringing chorus: "I've been redeemed, Been washed in the blood of the Lamb." "I don't know what will become of the grumblers," Marion said as they rested in various stages of dishabille, and talked the exciting scenes over. "They have been shamefully left in the lurch; they were going to have this affair a demoralizing dissipation from first to last, unworthy of the spirit of Chautauqua. And if more solemn, or more searching, or more effective preaching could be crowded into an afternoon than has been done here, I should like to be shown how. What do you think of your choice of entertainments, Eurie? You thought it would be safe to attend the president's reception, you remember." "I don't tell all I think," Eurie answered, and then she went out among the trees. Truth to tell, Eurie had heard that from which she could not get away. Dr. Vincent's words were still sounding, "you are invited to come to Jesus and be saved; you are invited to come _now_." There had been nothing to dissipate that impression, everything to deepen it, and the thought that clung and repeated itself to her heart was that plaintive wail: "Almost persuaded, now to believe." That was certainly herself; she felt it, knew it; in the face of that knowledge think how solemn the words grew: "Almost will not prevail, Almost is but to fail; Sad, sad that bitter wail, Almost,--but lost!" Was that for her, too? In short, Eurie out there alone, among the silent trees, felt and admitted this fact: that the time had actually come to her when this question must be decided, either for or against, and decided forever. Sunday morning at Chautauqua! A white day. There can be none of all that throng who spent the 15th day of August, 1875, in that sacred place, who remember it without a thrill. A perfect day! Glorious and glowing sunshine everywhere; and beauty, such perfect beauty of lake and grove! The God of nature smiled lovingly on Chautauqua that morning. Our girls seemed to think that the perfect day required perfection of attire, and it was noticeable that the taste of each settled on spotless white, without color or ornament, other than a spray of leaves and grasses, which one and another of them gathered almost without knowing it, and placed in belt or hair. Outward calm, but inward unrest, at least so far as some were concerned; Marion Wilbur among the number. It was a very heavy heart that she carried that day. There was no unbelief; that demon was conquered. Instead there was an overpowering, terrible _certainty_. And now came Satan with the whole of her past life which had turned to sin before her, and hurled it on her poor shrinking shoulders, until she felt almost to faint beneath the load; she lay miserably on her bed, and thought that she would not add to her burden by going to the service, that she knew already too much. But an appeal from Flossy to keep her company, as the others had gone, had the effect of changing her mind. Armed each with a camp-chair, they made their way to the stand, after the great congregation were seated. A fortunate thought those camp-chairs had been; there was not a vacant seat anywhere. Marion placed her chair out of sight both of stand and speaker, but within hearing, and gave herself up to her own troubled thoughts, until the opening exercises were concluded and the preacher announced his text: "The place that is called Calvary." She roused a little and tried to determine whose voice it was, it had a familiar sound, but she could not be sure, and she tried to go back to the useless questionings of her own heart; but she could not. She could never be deaf to eloquence; whoever the speaker was, there was that in his very opening sentences which roused and held her. Whatever he had to say, whether or not it was anything that had to do with her, she _must_ listen. Still the wonderment existed as to which voice it was. But when he reached the sentences: "Jump the ages! Come down here to Chautauqua Lake to-day, O Son of God! O Son of Man! O Son of Mary! When the prophet of old said, 'He shall see of the travail of his soul and shall be satisfied,' did he look along the centuries and see the gathered thousands here, who have just sung, 'Tell me the old, old story'? What story? Why, the story of the place that is called Calvary!"--Marion leaned forward and addressed the person next to her. "Isn't that Dr. Deems?" she said. "Yes indeed!" was the answer, spoken with enthusiasm. And Marion drew back, and listened. That sermon! Marion tried to report it, but it was like trying to report the roll of the waves on the Atlantic; she could only listen with beating heart and flushing cheek. Presently she listened with a new interest, for the divisions of the subject were: "God's thought of sin," and "God's thought of mercy." Though the morning was warm, she shivered and drew her wrap closer about her. "God's thought of sin! She was in a mood to comprehend in a measure what a fearful thought it might be. "Some men," said the speaker, "make light of sin." Yes, she had done it herself. "Where shall we learn what God thinks of it? On Sinai? No. God spoke there in thunder and lightning, till the very _hills_ shook and trembled. "And what were they doing down below? Dancing around a golden calf! I tell you it is only at Calvary that we can learn God's idea of sin. For at Calvary, because of sin, God the Father surrendered his communion with God the Son, and on Calvary God _died_! Will God ever forgive sin? Many a one has carried that question around in his soul until it burned there." Now you can imagine how Marion tried no more to write; thought no more about eloquence; this question, which had become to her the one terrible question of life, was being looked into. "How will we find out? Go by science into nature, and there's no proof of it; God never forgives what seems to be the mistake of even a reptile!" I cannot tell you about the rest of that sermon. I took no notes of it; my notes ended abruptly in the middle of a sentence; one cannot write out words that are piercing to their hearts. I doubt if even Marion Wilbur can give you any satisfactory account of the wording of the sentences. And yet Marion Wilbur rose up at its close, with cheeks aglow not only with tears, but smiles; and the question, "Will God ever forgive sin?" she could answer. There was a place where the burden would roll away. "At the place called Calvary." She knew it, believed it, felt it,--why should she not? She had been there in very deed, that summer morning. He had seen again of the travail of his soul, he was one soul nearer to being satisfied. There were other matters of interest: those two Bibles, symbol of the Chautauqua pulse,--that were presented to the nation's highest officer; the address which accompanied them--simple, earnest gospel; the hymn they sang,--_everything_ was full of interest. But Marion let it pass by her like the sound of music, and the words in her heart that kept time to it all were the closing words of that sermon: "Here I could forever stay, Sit and _sing_ my life away. This is more than life to me, Lovely, mournful Calvary." It was so, all day. She went to the afternoon service; she listened to Dr. Fowler's sermon, not as she had ever listened to one before; the sermon for the first time was for her. When people listen for _themselves_, there is a difference. She felt fed and strengthened; she joined in the singing as her voice had never joined before; they were singing about _her_ Saviour. Then she went back to her tent. "I am not going to-night," she said to the girls. "I am full, I want nothing more to-day." "Preached out, I declare!" said Eurie. "Are you going to write out your report for the paper? I wouldn't, Marion. I would go to the meeting. I am going." "No," said Marion in answer to the question, and smiling at the thought. How strange it would seem to her to spend _this_ Sabbath evening thus. How many had she so spent! "I am glad to-morrow is the last day," she said, sinking into a chair; "I want to go home." And Flossy and Ruth looked at each other, and sighed. How well these girls understood one another! Why can't people be frank and speak so that they can be understood? Suppose Marion had said: "No, I am _not_ going to write my report, I am going to pray." Suppose she had said; "Yes, I want to go home to _practice_." CHAPTER XXXI. THE BEGINNING OF THE END. It is a troublesome fact that, even when people are very much interested, and very eager over important themes, commonplace and comparatively trivial duties, will intrude, and insist upon being done at that moment. For instance, our girls were obliged to spend the whole of Monday morning in packing their trunks and satchels, returning their furniture, settling for their tents, and the like; in short, breaking up housekeeping and getting ready to go back to the civilized world. Flossy and Ruth dispatched their part at the hotel promptly and came over to the grounds to help the others. They discussed the meeting while they worked. "If we hadn't been idiots," Marion said, "we should have attended that normal class and been graduating, this morning, instead of being down here, at work at our trunks and unknown to fame." "Well, you wouldn't go," Ruth answered. "Don't you know you declared that was too much like work, and you hadn't an idea of learning anything?" "Oh, yes," said Marion. "I remember a great many things I have said, that I would quite as soon forget." By dint of eager bustling from one point to another, the work was accomplished by noon, and all the girls were ready for the afternoon service, which all seemed equally eager to attend. When they reached the stand they looked about them in surprise and dismay. "Everybody is gone!" said Flossy, "only look! There are ever so many unoccupied seats!" Marion laughed. "And ever so many that are occupied," she said. "My child, you have been so used to counting audiences by the thousands, that sixteen or seventeen hundred people look rather commonplace to you. However, there are more than that number here, I think." It soon became a matter of small importance, whether there were few or many, so long as they had the good fortune to be there themselves, and to have the company of Dr. Eben Tourjée. Now it so happened that among these four girls there were two to whom God had given special gifts: though neither of them had ever considered that there were such things as gifts from God, which they were bound to use in his service. There was Ruth Erskine, who had capabilities for music in the ends of her fingers, that would have almost entranced the angels. What did she do with her talent? Almost nothing. She hated the sickly sentimentalities which, set to music, find their way into fashionable parlors by the score. She was not in the society that knew of, or craved, the higher, grander kind of music; and because she did, and did not know it, she simply palled of the kind within her reach and let her gift lie waste. Then there was Marion, whose voice was simply grand, both in power and tone. What had she done with her voice? Sung by the hour to the old father whose tender memory lingered with her to-day; less than nothing with it since; no one knew she could sing; she hated singing in school, she never went anywhere else; so only occasionally could the four walls of her upper back room have testified that there was a talent buried there. Did Dr. Tourjée travel from Boston to Chautauqua for the purpose of inspiring and educating these two girls. I don't suppose he knew of their existence, but that makes no difference, they are working out his lecture all the same; in fact it is nearly a year since these Chautauqua girls came home, and if you have any sort of desire to know what Chautauqua theories develop into, when put to the test, please keep a sharp lookout for "_The Chautauqua Girls at Home_." As the familiar talk on music went on, Ruth, with her eyes aglow, began to plan in her own heart, first what she _might_ do, and presently what she _would_ do. And Marion, at the other end of the seat, went through the same process neither imagining that these same 'doings' would bring them together, and lead to endless other doings. But that is just the way in which life is going on every where, who imagined that what you did yesterday, would lead your neighbor to do what he _has_ done to-day? "Luther said: 'Next to theology, I place sacred music.'" This was the sentence that started a train of thought for Ruth. After that, she listened in order that she might work. "Never use an interlude in church, I pray God that I may be forgiven for the fiddle-faddle that I have strummed on organs, in the name of interludes." This, delighted Marion, she hated interludes. She hated quartette choirs. She had steadily refused to be beguiled into one, by the few who knew that she could sing, so, when Dr. Tourjée said: "Think of the grand old hymn, 'From all that dwell below the skies, let the Creator's praise arise,' being warbled by one voice, a grand chorus of four coming in on the third line!" Marion was entirely in sympathy with him, and eager for work in the way in which he pointed out. It was an enjoyable afternoon in every respect. But to "our girls" it was much more than that, it was an education. Every one of them got ideas which they were eager to put in practice; and they saw their ways clear to practise them to some purpose. When the service was over, and the audience moved away, a sense of sadness and lonliness began to creep over many, snatches of remark could be heard on all sides. "Where is Dr. Fowler?" "Gone: went this morning." "Where is the Miller party?" "Oh, they went some time ago." "When did the president leave?" "It's all about 'go,'" Eurie said: "Look! How they are crowding down to the boat; and only a stray one now and then coming up from there. Who would have supposed it could make us feel so forlorn? I am glad we are not to be at the morning meeting. I am not sure but I should cry of homesickness. I say, girls, let's go to Palestine." Which suggestion was greeted with delight, and they immediately went. A great many were of the same mind. Mr. Vanlennep in full Turkish dress, was leading the way, and giving his familiar lecture on the--to him--familiar spots. The girls stood near him by the sea of Galilee, and heard his tender farewell words, and his hope that they would all meet on the other side of Jordon. It was hard to keep back the quiet tears from falling. They climbed Mount Hermon in silence, and looked over at Mount Lebanon, they came back by the way of Cesarea, and turned aside to take a last look at Joppa, down by the sea. In almost total silence this walk back was accomplished. What was the matter with them all? Mr. Roberts had joined them, and he and Flossy walked on ahead. But their voices were subdued and their subject--to judge from their faces, _quieting_, to say the least. Then they all went to take their last supper at Chautauqua. Not one of them grumbled over anything. Indeed, they all agreed that the board had certainly improved very much during the last few days, and that it was really remarkable that such a throng of people could have been served so promptly and courteously, and on the whole, so well, as had been done there. Still, it was strange to have plenty of elbow room, and to see the waiters moving leisurely up and down the long halls; no one in haste, no one kept waiting. As they rose from table, a gentleman passed through; they had passed each other every day for a week; they had no idea what his name was, and I suppose he knew as little about them. But he paused before them: "Good-bye," he said. And held out his hand, "I hope we shall all meet at the assembly up there!" "Good-bye," they answered, and they shook hands. None of them smiled, none of them thought it strange; though they had never been introduced! It was the Chautauqua brotherhood of feeling. But after two weeks of experience and much practice in that line, it was impossible to rid onesself of the feeling that one must hurry down to the stand in order to secure seats; so they hurried, and had a new experience; they were among the first twenty on the ground. "The audience will be utterly lost to-night in this immense array of seats;" Flossy said in dismay. "Doesn't it feel forlorn?" But they took their seats, and presently came Miss Ryder and seated herself at the piano in the twilight, and the tunes she played were soft and tender and weird. "Every note says 'goodbye,'" said Ruth, and she gave a little sigh. Presently, the calcium lights began to glow, as usual, and meantime though everybody was supposed to have left; still, the people came from somewhere; and at last, dismayed voices began to say: "Why! Did you ever see the like! I thought we should surely get good seats to-night? Where _do_ all the people come from." "Look! Marion," said Eurie. "What would Dr. Harris think of such a congregation as this! They could not get into our church, could they?" But just then the hymn claimed attention: "My days are gliding swiftly by." How swiftly these days had glided away. How full they had been! During the prayer that followed, all heads bowed, and the silence that fell upon them made it seem that all hearts joined. Dr. Vincent was the first speaker. His manner and voice had changed. Both were subdued; he looked like a man who had been lifted up for a great mental strain and was gradually letting down again to earth. "We are coming toward the close," he said. "We are more quiet than we have been here before. Familiar faces and forms that have moved in and out among these trees, for two weeks past, have gone. Only a few hours and we are going; only a few hours and utter silence will fall upon Chautauqua." "Oh dear!" murmured Eurie, "why _will_ he be so forlorn! I don't see why I need care so much! Who would have supposed I could!" "Hush!" said Marion, and she surreptitiously wiped away a tear. "A love feast," Dr. Vincent said they were going to have, for that last evening; it was very much like that. The farewell from Canada came next; the speaker said he had been "thawed out," meant to have America annexed to Canada! Indeed they had already been annexed; in heart and soul! "Who's who?" said he, and "what's what? Who knows?" There was just enough of the comical mixed with the pathetic in this address to steady many a tremulous heart. Dr. Presbry followed in much the same strain, closing, though, with such a tender tribute to some who had been at the assembly the year before, and had since gone to join the assembly that never breaks up, that the tears came to the surface again. But those blessed Tennesseeans just at that point made the grounds ring with the chorus, "Oh jubilee! jubilee! the Christian religion is jubilee!" and followed it with: "I've been a long time in the house of God, and I ain't got weary yet." By that time our girls looked at each other with faces on which tears and smiles struggled for the mastery. "Shall we laugh, or cry?" whispered Eurie, and then they giggled outright. But they sobered instantly and sat upright, ready to listen, for the next one who appeared on the platform was Dr. Deems. He, too, commenced as if the spell of the parting was upon him. "He was too tired," he said, "to make a short speech. Some one asked Walter Scott why he didn't put a certain book of his into one volume instead of five. And he said he hadn't time. It took five weeks to prepare a speech three minutes long. And then he warmed, and grew with his subject until the beautiful thoughts fell around them like pearls. Not only beautiful, but searching. "No man," said he, "_dares_ to make a careless speech at Chautauqua, there are too many to treasure it up, to plant it again." Of course he knew nothing about those girls, and how much seed they were gathering which they meant to plant; but they gathered it, all the same. He dropped his seeds with lavish hand. This was one that took root in Marion's brain and heart: "There are so many side influences that are unconscious, that the only safe way for one to do is to let no part of himself ravel, but to keep himself round and thorough, and healthy to the core." After that, Marion's pencil, on which I have to depend for my notes, gave up in despair. "I _couldn't_ keep track of that man!" she said, when I complained. "There was no more use to try than there would be to count these apple blossoms," for it was this spring, and we were standing in an apple orchard, and a perfect shower of the white, sweet-smelling things came fluttering round our heads. But after he 'calmed down a little,' as she called it, she tried to write again; and I copy this: "Brethren: This meeting will convert some of the most thoughtful people of this generation: men who come here not knowing by personal experience the power of this thing, men who walk thoughtfully up and down these aisles, looking on, will say: 'There are scholars here, there are men of genius, of great brain power, there are men and women here of every variety of temperament, and attainment, held together for fourteen days by one common bond,' and the perseverance, the solemnity, the hilarity, the freedom, the naturalness, the earnestness of this meeting will so impress them that they will know that there is a miracle holding us, a supernatural strength. "May I give you to-night one word more of gospel invitation? Come, go with us, you who do not understand this matter for yourselves, go with us, and we _will_ do you good. Will you go to your rooms to-night and make the resolve that shall write your names in God's book of life? The recording angel has a trembling hand this minute, waiting for your answer. Weary one, _so_ young and yet so tired, come, come, come now." Marion, with cheeks burning, and eyes very bright and earnest, looked around her: Eurie sat next to her, she seemed unmoved, there was no sign of tears to her bright eyes, but she was looking steadily at the speaker. "Never mind!" Marion said within herself, and there came to her an eager desire to begin her practice, to do something; what if it were utter failure, would the fault be hers? Following the sudden leading that she had learned no better than to call 'impulse' she said in a quick low whisper: "Eurie, _won't you_?" And she held her breath for the answer, and could distinctly feel the beating of her own heart. Eurie turned great gray astonished eyes on her friend, and said in a firm quiet voice: "I have. I settled that matter on Saturday. Have you?" And then those two girls, each with the wonderful surprise ringing music in her heart, were willing to have that meeting over. CHAPTER XXXII. THE END OF THE BEGINNING. It was almost over. Dr. Deems sat down amid the hush of hearts, and all the people seemed to feel that no more words were needed. Yet, the next moment, they greeted Frank Beard with joy, and prepared themselves with great satisfaction to listen to what he had to say. Frank Beard was one of Chautauqua's favorites. People had not the least idea that they could be beguiled into laughter; hearts were too tender for that; yet you should have heard the bursts of mirth that rang there for the next five minutes! Frank Beard was so quaint, so original, so innocent in his originality, so pure and high-toned, even in his fun, and they liked him so much that every heart there responded to his mirth. The roars of laughter reached as high as the music had done, but a little while before. Yet, when people's hearts are tender, and full, it is strange how near laughter is to tears! Just a sentence from the same lips and the hush fell on them again. Frank Beard had brought his heart with him to Chautauqua, and he was evidently leaving some of it there. The touching little story of his dream about his mother brought out a flutter of handkerchiefs, and made tear-stained faces. And when he, simply as a child, tenderly as a large-souled man, trustfully as only a Christian can, said his farewell, and told of his joyful hope of meeting them all in the eternal morning, absolute stillness settled over them. So many last words--one and another came--just a word, just "good-bye," until we meet again; maybe here, next year, maybe there, where good-byes are never heard. Finally came Dr. Vincent, his strong decided voice breaking the spell, and helping them to realize that they ware men and women with work to do: "Now, my friends," he said, "we really _must_ go home; it is hard to close; I know that, no one knows it better: we _have_ closed a good many times, and it won't _stay_ closed. The last word has been said over and over again. I said it myself, some time ago, and here I am again: we must just _stop_, never mind the closing; we will ring a hymn, and go away, and next year we will begin right here, where we left it." But he didn't "stop," and no one wanted him to. His voice grew tender, and his words were solemn. The last words that he would ever speak to many a soul within sound of his voice; it could not be otherwise. You can imagine better than I could tell you what Dr. Vincent's message would be at such a time as that. Breaking into it, came the shrill sound of the whistle. The Col. Phillips--the last boat for the night--was giving out its warning. The Chautauqua bells began their parting peal. Not even for his own convenience would that marvel of punctuality have the bells tarry a moment behind the hour appointed. Our girls looked at each other and made signs, and nodded, and began to slip quietly out. They had arranged to spend the night at the Mayville House, and take an early train. Many others were softly and reluctantly moving away. They were very quiet during that last walk down to the wharf. Glorious moonlight was abroad, and the water shone like a sheet of silver. As they walked, the evening wind brought to them the notes of the last song which the throng at the stand were singing. A clear, ringing, yet tender farewell. It floated sweetly down to them, growing fainter and fainter as the distance lengthened, until, as they stepped on board the boat, they lost its sound. There were many people going the same way, but there was little talking. There are times when people, though they may be very far from unhappiness, have no desire to talk. Once on deck, Marion turned and clasped both of Eurie's hands. "I have had such a blessed surprise to-night!" she said, with glowing face. "I did not think of such a thing! O Eurie, why didn't you tell me?" "You cannot begin to be as surprised as I am," Eurie said. "I thought you were miles away from such a thing. Why didn't you tell _me_?" Ruth and Flossy were leaning over, watching the play of the water against the boat's side. "What about those two?" Eurie said, nodding her head toward them. Marion sighed. "Ruth is very far from understanding anything about it," she said; "at least the last time I talked with her she knew as little about the Christian life as the veriest heathen so far at least as personal duty was concerned." "When was that?" "Why, a week ago; more than a week." "How long is it since you settled this question for yourself?" "Since yesterday," Marion said, blushing and laughing. "Eurie, you would do for a cross-questioner." "And I have been on this side since Saturday,'" Eurie answered, significantly. "A great many things can happen in a week." At this point, Ruth turned and came towards them. She looked quiet and grave. "It is a year, isn't it? since we stood here together for the first time," she said. "At least I seem to have had a year of life and experience. Do you know, girls, I have something to tell you: I thought to wait until we reached home, but I have decided to-night that I will not. I am sorry that I have not told you before. Marion, don't you know how like a simpleton I talked, a week ago last Saturday night? I want to tell you that I was a fool; and was talking about that of which I knew nothing at all. I want to assure you that there is a safe place, that I know it now by actual experience, I have gone to the mountain and it is sure and safe; and, oh, girls, I want you both to come so much." "I know the mountain;" Marion said, reaching out, and clasping Ruth's hand. "The name of it is Calvary, it _is_ safe, and it is sufficient for us all. Ruthie, we three are together in this thing." What those girls said to each other then and there is sacred to them. But if I could, I would tell you something of the joy they felt. Flossy still leaned over the railing, a small quiet speck in the moonlight. Marion kept turning her head in her direction. "Our poor little Flossy would not understand much about this experience, I suppose," she said at last; "she is such a child, and yet, I don't know--sometimes I have fancied that she thinks more than we give her credit for. That at least she has lately." "Let us tell her, anyway," Eurie, said, "we can't know what good it may do. If we had not been so dreadfully afraid of each other, during the last few days, we might have helped each other a good deal; for my part, I have learned a lesson on which I mean to practice." Ruth looked up quickly, a rare smile in her eyes; she opened her lips to speak to them, then seemed to change her mind and raised her voice: "Flossy!" And Flossy came at her call. "Come here," Ruth said, withdrawing her hand from Marion's, and winding her arm around the small figure beside her. "Flossy, the girls have had our very experience all by themselves, and they want to know how long it is since you began to think about this matter for yourself." Flossy turned her soft blue eyes on Marion. "The very night we came, Marion, and you made me come to the meeting in the rain, you remember? I heard that which I knew would never let me rest again, until I understood it and had it for my own. But I was very ignorant, and foolish, and I blundered along in the dark for three mortal days! After that Jesus found me, and I have known since what it is to live in the light." "A Christian experience of ten whole days!" Eurie said. Of course she was the first one to rise from her surprise and get possession of her tongue. "Flossy, you have had a chance to get a good way ahead instead of being behind, as we thought. You will have to show us the way." "Isn't this just wonderful!" broke forth Marion, suddenly, an overwhelming sense coming over her, of the new relations that they four would henceforth bear to each other. "Why, girls, what would they say up there at the stand, if they could know what has come to each of us! I almost feel like going back and telling them all. Just think what a delight it would be to Dr. Vincent, and Dr. Deems, and, oh, to all of them. Isn't it queer to think how well we know them all, and they are not aware of our existence?" "I don't believe people will have to wait to be introduced to each other when they get to heaven," Eurie said; "that is one of the first things I am going to do when I get there; hunt up some of these Chautauqua people and cultivate their acquaintance." This sentence gave Flossy a new thought: "We are really _all_ going to heaven!" She said it precisely as you might speak of a trip to Europe on which your heart had long been set. "We are just as sure of it as though we were there this minute! Girls, don't you know how nice we thought it would be to be together at Chautauqua for two whole weeks? Now think of being together, there, for a million years!" But the thought which filled Flossy's heart with a sweet song of melody, and wreathed her face in glad smiles, was such an overwhelming one to Marion, so immense with power and possibility, that it seemed to her to take her very breath; she turned abruptly from the rest and walked to the Teasel's side to still the throbbing of her heart. Meantime the boat had been filling with passengers, and now she was getting under way. Still the hush continued; the people stood closely around the railing, on the Chautauqua side, and looked lovingly back at the fair point of land that lay before them in glowing moonlight. Presently a leading voice began to sing: "There's a land that is fairer than day, And by faith we can see it afar; For the Father waits over the way To prepare us a dwelling-place there. We shall meet in the sweet by and by, On that beautiful shore in the sweet by and by, We shall meet on that beautiful shore." Before the chorus was reached, every voice that could sing at all must have taken up the strain. Marion, for the first time in years gave a hint of the full compass of her powers, making Ruth turn suddenly towards her, with a brightening face, for she saw how the singing and the playing could fit into each other, and do good service. On and on stole the vessel through the silver water. The courteous captain came around quietly for his tickets, and to one and another with whose faces he had grown familiar he said: "We shall miss you; the Col. Phillips has been proud of carrying you all safely back and forth." One said to him in return: "I hope, captain, we shall all land at last safe in the harbor." And the captain bowed his answer in silence. It would have been hard to speak words just then. But ever and anon that leading voice took up words of song. Still the song that best seemed to suit all hearts was that tender "By and by," and as the lights along the Chautauqua shore grew dim it rose again in swelling volume: "We shall meet, we shall sing, we shall reign, In the land where the saved never die; We shall rest free from sorrow and pain, Safe at home in the sweet by and by." Then the refrain, repeated and re-repeated, until, as the last lingering note of it died away, the boat touched at the wharf, and looking back, they saw that the Chautauqua lights were out, and silence and darkness had Fairpoint. "Good-bye," Marion said, and she bowed towards the distant shore; she was smiling, but her lips were quivering. "We shall meet in the sweet by and by," Flossy quoted, but her voice trembled. "There is a chance to do grand work first, that the final meeting may be infinitely larger, because of us." This the leading voice in the singing said, as he held out his hand to say good-bye. And as they took it some of the girls noticed for the first time that it was Mr. Roberts; as for Flossy, she had known it all the time. "We are going to try to do some of the work, Mr. Roberts," Eurie said; "I have found the road to Bethany since I saw you, the _real_ road, and we are going to try and keep it well trodden." He was shaking hands with Flossy, as Eurie spoke, and he still held her hand while he answered: "Good news! There is plenty of work to do. It is well that Chautauqua has gathered in new reapers. I am coming to your city, next winter; I shall want to help you. Good-bye." 
45536	----	[Transcriber's Note: Bold text is surrounded by =equal signs= and italic text is surrounded by _underscores_.] THE PANSY BOOKS. =Each volume 12mo, cloth, $1.50= Chautauqua Girls at Home. Christie's Christmas. Divers Women. Echoing and Re-Echoing. Eighty-Seven. Endless Chain (An). Ester Ried. Ester Ried Yet Speaking. Four Girls at Chautauqua. From Different Standpoints. Hall in the Grove (The). Household Puzzles. Interrupted. Judge Burnham's Daughters. Julia Ried. King's Daughter (The). Little Fishers and Their Nets. Links in Rebecca's Life. Mrs. Solomon Smith Looking On. Modern Prophets. Man of the house. New Graft on the Family Tree (A). One Commonplace Day. Pocket Measure (The). Profiles. Ruth Erskine's Crosses. Randolphs (The). Sevenfold Trouble (A). Sidney Martin's Christmas. Spun from Fact. Those Boys. Three People. Tip Lewis and His Lamp. Wise and Otherwise. =Each volume 12mo, cloth. $1.25.= Cunning Workmen. Dr. Deane's Way. Grandpa's Darlings. Miss Priscilla Hunter. Mrs. Deane's Way. What She Said. =Each volume 12mo, cloth, $1.00.= At Home and Abroad. Bobby's Wolf and other Stories. Five Friends. In the Woods and Out. Young Folks Worth Knowing. Mrs. Harry Harper's Awakening. New Years Tangles. Next Things. Pansy Scrap Book. Some Young Heroines. =Each volume 12mo, cloth, 75 cts.= Couldn't be Bought. Getting Ahead. Mary Burton Abroad. Pansies. Six Little Girls. Stories from the life of Jesus. That Boy Bob. Two Boys. =Each volume 16mo, cloth, 75 cts.= Bernie's White Chicken. Docia's Journal. Helen Lester. Jessie Wells. Monteagle. =Each volume 16mo, cloth, 60 cts.= Browning Boys. Dozen of Them (A). Gertrude's Diary. Hedge Fence (A). Side by Side. Six O'Clock in the Evening. Stories of Remarkable Women. Stories of Great Men. Story of Puff. "We Twelve girls." World of Little People (A). [Illustration: NORMAN WAS A HANDSOME BOY WHEN SHE MARRIED MR. DECKER.] Little Fishers: and Their Nets BY PANSY AUTHOR OF "CHRISTIE'S CHRISTMAS," "A HEDGE FENCE," "GERTRUDE'S DIARY," "THE MAN OF THE HOUSE," "INTERRUPTED," "THE HALL IN THE GROVE," "AN ENDLESS CHAIN," "MRS. SOLOMON SMITH LOOKING ON," "FOUR GIRLS AT CHAUTAUQUA," "RUTH ERSKINE'S CROSSES," "SPUN FROM FACT," ETC., ETC. _ILLUSTRATED_ BOSTON D LOTHROP COMPANY FRANKLIN AND HAWLEY STREETS COPYRIGHT 1887 BY D LOTHROP COMPANY CONTENTS. PAGE. CHAPTER I. THE DECKERS' HOME 7 CHAPTER II. BEGINNING HER LIFE 24 CHAPTER III. THE TRUTH IS TOLD 43 CHAPTER IV. NEW FRIENDS 63 CHAPTER V. A GREAT UNDERTAKING 85 CHAPTER VI. HOW IT SUCCEEDED 106 CHAPTER VII. LONG STORIES TO TELL 125 CHAPTER VIII. A SABBATH TO REMEMBER 143 CHAPTER IX. A BARGAIN AND A PROMISE 164 CHAPTER X. PLEASURE AND DISAPPOINTMENT 179 CHAPTER XI. A COMPLETE SUCCESS 204 CHAPTER XII. AN UNEXPECTED HELPER 226 CHAPTER XIII. THE LITTLE PICTURE MAKERS 240 CHAPTER XIV. THE CONCERT 257 CHAPTER XV. A WILL AND A WAY 271 CHAPTER XVI. AN ORDEAL 288 CHAPTER XVII. THE FLOWER PARTY 304 CHAPTER XVIII. A SATISFACTORY EVENING 320 CHAPTER XIX. READY TO TRY 334 CHAPTER XX. THE WAY MADE PLAIN 351 CHAPTER XXI. THE NEW ENTERPRISE 365 CHAPTER XXII. TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE 382 CHAPTER XXIII. THE CROWNING WONDER 400 CHAPTER XXIV. THE PAST AND PRESENT 418 Little Fishers: and Their Nets. CHAPTER I. THE DECKERS' HOME. JOE DECKER gave his chair a noisy shove backward from the table, over the uneven floor, shambled across the space between it and the kitchen door, a look of intense disgust on his face, then stopped for his good-morning speech: "You may as well know, first as last, that I've sent for Nan. I've stood this kind of thing just exactly as long as I'm going to. There ain't many men, I can tell you, who would have stood it so long. Such a meal as that! Ain't fit for a decent dog! "Nan is coming in the afternoon stage. There must be some place fixed up for her to sleep in. Understand, now, that has _got_ to be done, and I won't have no words about it." Then he slammed the door, and went away. Yes, he was talking to his wife! She could remember the time when he used to linger in the door, talking to her, so many last words to say, and when at last he would turn away with a kind "Well, good-by, Mary! Don't work too hard." But that seemed ages ago to the poor woman who was left this morning in the wretched little room with the door slammed between her and her husband. She did not look as though she had life enough left to make words about anything. She sat in a limp heap in one of the broken chairs, her bared arms lying between the folds of a soiled and ragged apron. Not an old woman, yet her hair was gray, and her cheeks were faded, and her eyes looked as though they had not closed in quiet restful sleep for months. She had not combed her hair that morning; and thin and faded as it was, it hung in straggling locks about her face. I don't suppose you ever saw a kitchen just like that one! It was heated, not only by the fierce sun which streamed in at the two uncurtained eastern windows, but by the big old stove, which could smoke, not only, and throw out an almost unendurable heat on a warm morning like this, when heat was not wanted, but had a way at all times of refusing to heat the oven, and indeed had fits of sullenness when it would not "draw" at all. This was one of the mornings when the fire had chosen to burn; it had swallowed the legs and back of a rickety chair which the mistress in desperation had stuffed in, when she was waiting for the teakettle to boil, and now that there was nothing to boil, or fry, and no need for heat, the stump of wood, wet by yesterday's rain, had dried itself and chosen to burn. The west windows opened into a side yard, and the sound of children's voices in angry dispute, and the smell of a pigsty, came in together, and seemed equally discouraging to the wilted woman in the chair. The sun was already pretty high in the sky, yet the breakfast-table still stood in the middle of the room. I don't know as I can describe that table to you. It was a square one, unpainted, and stained with something red, and something green, and spotted with grease, and spotted with black, rubbed from endless hot kettles set on it, or else from one kettle set on it endless times; it must have been that way, for now that I think of it, there was but one kettle in that house. No tablecloth covered the stains; there was a cracked plate which held a few crusts of very stale bread, and a teacup about a third full of molasses, in which several flies were struggling. More flies covered the bread crusts, and swam in a little mess of what had been butter, but was now oil, and these were the only signs of food. It was from this breakfast-table that the man had risen in disgust. You don't wonder? You think it was enough to disgust anybody? That is certainly true, but if the man had only stopped to think that the reason it presented such an appearance was because he had steadily drank up all that ought to have gone on it during the months past, perhaps he would have turned his disgust where it belonged--on himself. The woman had not tried to eat anything. She had given the best she had to the husband and son, and had left it for them. She was very willing to do so. It seemed to her as though she never could eat another mouthful of anything. Can you think of her, sitting in that broken chair midway between the table and the stove, the heat from the stove puffing into her face; the heat from the sun pouring full on her back, her straggling hair silvery in the sunlight, her short, faded calico dress frayed about the ankles, her feet showing plainly from the holes of the slippers into which they were thrust, her hands folded about the soiled apron, and such a look of utter hopeless sorrow on her face as cannot be described? No, I hope you cannot imagine a woman like her, and will never see one to help you paint the picture. And yet I don't know; since there are such women--scores of them, thousands of them--why should you not know about them, and begin now to plan ways of helping them out of these kitchens, and out of these sorrows? Mrs. Decker rose up presently, and staggered toward the table; a dim idea of trying to clear it off, and put things in something like order, struggled with the faintness she felt. She picked up two plates, sticky with molasses, and having a piece of pork rind on one, and set them into each other. She poured a slop of weak tea from one cracked cup into another cracked cup, her face growing paler the while. Suddenly she clutched at the table, and but for its help, would have fallen. There was just strength enough left to help her back to the rickety chair. Once there, she dropped into the same utterly hopeless position, and though there was no one to listen, spoke her sorrowful thoughts. "It's no use; I must just give up. I'm done for, and that's the truth! I've been expecting it all along, and now it's come. I couldn't clear up here and get them any dinner, not if he should kill me, and I don't know but that will be the next thing. I've slaved and slaved; if anybody ever tried to do something with nothing, I'm the one; and now I'm done. I've just got to lie down, and stay there, till I die. I wish I _could_ die. If I could do it quick, and be done with it, I wouldn't care how soon; but it would be awful to lie there and see things go on; oh, dear!" She lifted up her poor bony hands and covered her face with them and shook as though she was crying. But she shed no tears. The truth is, her poor eyes were tired of crying. It was a good while since any tears had come. After a few minutes she went on with her story. "It isn't enough that we are naked, and half-starved, and things growing worse every day, but now that Nan mast come and make one more torment. 'Fix a place for her to sleep!' Where, I wonder, and what with? It is too much! Flesh and blood can't bear any more. If ever a woman did her best I have, and done it with nothing, and got no thanks for it; now I've got to the end of my rope. If I have strength enough to crawl back into bed, it is all there is left of me." But for all that, she tried to do something else. Three times she made an effort to clear away the few dirty things on that dirty table, and each time felt the deadly faintness creeping over her, which sent her back frightened to the chair. The children came in, crying, and she tried to untie a string for one, and find a pin for the other; but her fingers trembled so that the knot grew harder, and not even a pin was left for her to give them, and she finally lost all patience with their cross little ways and gave each a slap and an order not to come in the house again that forenoon. The door was ajar into the most discouraged looking bedroom that you can think of. It was not simply that the bed was unmade; the truth is, the clothes were so ragged that you would have thought they could not be touched without falling to pieces; and they were badly stained and soiled, the print of grimy little hands being all over them. Partly pushed under, out of sight, was a trundle-bed, that, if anything, looked more repulsive than the large one. There was an old barrel in the corner, with a rough board over it, and a chair more rickety than either of those in the kitchen, and this was the only furniture there was in that room. The only bright thing there was in it was the sunshine, for there was an east window in this room, and the curtain was stretched as high as it could be. To the eyes of the poor tired woman who presently dragged herself into this room, the light and the heat from the sun seemed more than she could bear, and she tugged at the brown paper curtain so fiercely that it tore half across, but she got it down, and then she fell forward among the rags of the bed with a groan. Poor Mrs. Decker! I wonder if you have not imagined all her sorrowful story without another word from me! It is such an old story; and it has been told over so many times, that all the children in America know it by heart. Yes; she was the wife of a drunkard. Not that Joe Decker called himself a drunkard; the most that he ever admitted was that he sometimes took a drop too much! I don't think he had the least idea how many times in a month he reeled home, unable to talk straight, unable to help himself to his wretched bed. I don't suppose he knew that his brain was never free from the effects of alcohol; but his wife knew it only too well. She knew that he was always cross and sullen now, when he was not fierce, and she knew that this was not his natural disposition. No one need explain to her how alcohol would effect a man's nature; she had watched her husband change from month to month, and she knew that he was growing worse every day. There was another sorrow in this sad woman's heart. She had one boy who was nearly ten years old, when she married Mr. Decker; and people had said to her often and often, "What a handsome boy you have, Mrs. Lloyd; he ought to have been a girl." And the first time she had felt any particular interest in Joe Decker was when he made her boy a kite, and showed him how to fly it, and gave him one bright evening, such as fathers give their boys. This boy's father had died when he was a baby, and the Widow Lloyd had struggled on alone; caring for him, keeping him neatly dressed, sending him to school as soon as he was old enough, bringing him up in such a way that it was often and often said in the village, "What a nice boy that Norman Lloyd is! A credit to his mother!" And the mother had sat and sewed, in the evenings when Norman was in bed, and thought over the things that fathers could do for boys which mothers could not; and then thought that there were things which mothers could do for girls that fathers could not, and Mr. Joseph Decker, the carpenter, had a little girl, she had been told, only a few years younger than her Norman. And so, when Mr. Decker had made kites, not only, but little sail boats, and once, a little table for Norman to put his school books on, with a drawer in it for his writing-book and pencil, and when he had in many kind and manly ways won her heart, this respectable widow who had for ten years earned her own and her boy's living, married him, and went to keep his home for him, and planned as to the kind and motherly things which she would do for his little girl when she came home. Alas for plans! She knew, this foolish woman, that Mr. Decker sometimes took a drink of beer with his noon meal, and again at night, perhaps; but she said to herself, "No wonder, poor man; always having to eat his dinner out of a pail! No home, and no woman to see that he had things nice and comfortable. She would risk but what he would stay at home, when he had one to stay in, and like a bit of beefsteak better than the beer, any day." She had not calculated as to the place which the beer held in his heart. Neither had he. He was astonished to find that it was not easy to give it up, even when Mary wanted him to. He was astonished at first to discover how often he was thirsty with a thirst that nothing but beer would satisfy. I have not time for all the story. The beer was not given up, the habit grew stronger and stronger, and steadily, though at first slowly, the Deckers went down. From being one of the best workmen in town, Mr. Decker dropped down to the level of "Old Joe Decker," whom people would not employ if they could get anybody else. The little girl had never come home save for a short visit; at first the new mother was sorry, then she was glad. As the days passed, her heart grew heavier and heavier; a horrible fear which was almost a certainty, had now gotten hold of her--that her handsome, manly Norman was going to copy the father she had given him! Poor mother! I would not, if I could, describe to you all the miseries of that long day! How the mother lay and tossed on that miserable bed, and burned with fever and groaned with pain. How the children quarreled and cried, and ran into mother, and cried again because she could give them no attention, and made up, and ran out again to play, and quarreled again. How the father came home at noon, more under the influence of liquor than he had been in the morning; and swore at the table still standing as he had left it at breakfast time, and swore at his wife for "lying in bed and sulking, instead of doing her work like a decent woman," and swore at his children for crying with hunger; and finally divided what remained of the bread between them, and went off himself to a saloon, where he spent twenty-five cents for his dinner, and fifty cents for liquor. How Norman came home, and looked about the deserted kitchen and empty cupboard, and looked in at his mother, and said he was sorry she had a headache, and sighed, and wished that he had a decent home like other fellows, and wished that a doctor could be found, who didn't want more money than he was worth, to pay him for coming to see a sick woman, and then went to a bakery and bought a loaf of bread, and a piece of cheese, and having munched these, washed them down with several glasses of beer, went back to his work. Meantime, the playing and the quarreling, and the crying, went on outside, and Mrs. Decker continued to sleep her heavy, feverish sleep. Several times she wakened in a bewilderment of fever and pain, and groaned, and tried to get up, and fell back and groaned again, and lost her misery in another unnaturally heavy sleep, and the day wore away until it was three o'clock in the afternoon. The stages would be due in a few minutes--the one that brought passengers over from the railroad junction a mile away. The children in the yard did not know that one of them was expected to stop at their house; and the father when he came home at noon had been drinking too much liquor to remember it; and Norman had not heard of it, and for his mother's sake would have been too angry to have met it if he had; so Nan was coming home with nobody to welcome her. If you had seen her sitting at that moment, a trim little maiden in the stage, her face all flushed over the prospect of seeing father, and the rest, in a few minutes, you would not have thought it possible that she could belong to the Decker family. She had not seen her home in seven years. She had been a little thing of six when she went away with the Marshall family. It had all come about naturally. Mrs. Marshall was their neighbor, and had known her mother from childhood; and when she died had carried the motherless little girl home with her to stay until Mr. Decker decided what to do; and he was slow in deciding, and Mrs. Marshall had a family of boys, but no little girl, and held the motherless one tenderly for her mother's sake; and when the Marshalls suddenly had an offer of business which made it necessary for them to move to the city, they clung to the little girl, and proposed to Mr. Decker that she should go with them and stay until he had a place for her again. Apparently he had not found a place for her in all these seven years, for she had never been sent for to come home. The new wife had wanted her at first, to be mother to her, as she fancied Mr. Decker was going to be father to her boy. But it did not take her very many months to get her eyes open to the thought that perhaps the girl would be better off away from her father; and of late years she had looked on the possible home-coming with positive terror. Her own little ones had nothing to eat, sometimes, save what Norman provided; and if "he"--and by this Mrs. Decker meant her husband; he had ceased to be "Mr. Decker" to her, or "Joseph," or even Joe--if "he" should take a notion to turn against the girl, life would be more terrible to them in every way; and on the other hand, if he should fancy her, and because of her, turn more against the wife, or Norman, what would become of them then? So the years had passed, and beyond an occasional threat when Joe Decker was at his worst, to "send for Nan right straight off," nothing had been said of her home-coming. The threat had come oftener of late, for Joe Decker had discovered that there was just now nothing that his wife dreaded more than the presence of this step-daughter; and his present manly mood was to do all he could for the discomfort of his wife! That was one of the elevating thoughts which liquor had given him! Three o'clock. The stages came rattling down the stony road. Few people who lived on this street had much to do with the stage; they could not afford to ride, and they did not belong to the class who had much company. So when the heavy carriages kept straight on, instead of turning the corner below, it brought a swarm of children from the various dooryards to see who was coming, and where. "It's stopped at Decker's, as true as I live!" said Mrs. Job Smith, peeping out of her clean pantry window to get a view. "I heard that Joe had sent for little Nan, but I hoped it wasn't true. Poor Nan! if the Marshalls have treated her with any kind of decency, it'll be a dreadful change, and I'm sorry enough for her. Yes, that must be Nan getting out. She's got the very same bright eyes, but she has grown a sight, to be sure!" Which need not have seemed strange to Mrs. Smith, if she had stopped to remember that seven years had passed since Nan went away. The little woman got down with a brisk step from the stage, and watched her trunk set in the doorway, and got out her red pocket-book, and paid the fare, and then looked about her doubtfully. Could this be home! CHAPTER II. BEGINNING HER LIFE. SHE did not remember anything, but the yard was very dirty, and the fence was tumbling down, and there were lights of glass out of the windows, and a general air of discomfort prevailed. It did not look like a home. Besides, where were father and mother? There must be some mistake. The two little Deckers who had played and quarreled together all day had left their work to come and stare at the new comer out of astonished eyes. Certainly they did not seem to have been expecting her. The new comer turned to the elder of the two children, and spoke in a gentle winning voice: "Little girl, do you live here--in this house?" The child with her forefinger placed meditatively on her lip, and her bright eyes staring intensely, decided to nod that she did. "And can you tell me what your name is?" To this question there was no answer for several seconds, then she thought better of it and gravely said: "I could." This seemed so funny, that poor Nan, though by this time carrying a very sad heart, could not help smiling. "Well, will you?" she asked. But at this the tangled yellow head was shaken violently. No, she wouldn't. "It can't be," said Nan, talking to herself, since there was no one who would talk with her, looking with troubled eyes at the two uncombed, unwashed children, with their dresses half torn from them, and dirtier than any dresses that this trim little maiden had ever seen before, "this really cannot be the place! and yet father said this street and number; and the driver said this was right." Then she stooped to the little one. "Won't you tell me if your name is Satie Decker?" But this one was shy, and hid her dirty face in her dirty hands, and stepped back behind her sister who at once came to the rescue. "Yes, 'tis," she said, "and you let her alone." A shadow fell over Nan's face, but she said quickly, "Then you must be Susie Decker, and this place is really home!" But you cannot think how strangely it sounded to her to call such a looking spot as this home. There was no use in standing on the doorstep. She could feel that curious eyes were peeping at her from neighbors' windows. She stepped quickly inside the half-open door, into the kitchen where that breakfast-table still stood, with the flies so thick around the molasses cup, from which the children had long since drained the molasses, that it was difficult to tell whether there was a cup behind it, or whether this really was a pyramid of flies. The children followed her in. Susie had a dark frown on her face, and a determined air, as one who meant to stand up for her rights and protect the little sister who still tried to hide behind her. I think it was well they were there; had they not been, I feel almost sure that the stranger would have sat down in the first chair and cried. Poor little woman! It was such a sorrowful home-coming to her. So different from what she had been planning all day. I wish I could give you a real true picture of her as she stood in the middle of that dreadful room, trying to choke back the tears while she convinced herself that she was really Nettie Decker. A trim little figure in a brown and white gingham dress, a brown straw hat trimmed with broad bands and ends of satin ribbon, with brown gloves on her hands, and a ruffle in her neck. This was Nettie Decker; neat and orderly, from ruffle to buttoned boots. I wonder if you can think what a strange contrast she was to everything around her? What was to be done? she could not stand there, gazing about her; and there seemed no place to sit down, and nowhere to go. Where could father be? Why had he not stayed at home to welcome his little girl? or if too busy for that, surely the mother could have stayed, and he must have left a message for her. If the little girls would only be good and try to tell her what all this strangeness meant! She made another effort to get into their confidence. She bent toward Susie, smiling as brightly as she could, and said: "Didn't you know, little girlie, that I was your sister Nettie? I have come home to play with you and help you have a nice time." Even while she said it, she felt ten years older than she ever had before, and she wondered if she should ever play anything again; and if it could be possible for people to have nice times who lived in such a house as this. But Susie was in no sense won, and scowled harder than ever, as she said in a suspicious tone: "I ain't got no sister Nettie, only Sate, and Nan." Hot as the room was, the neat little girl shivered. There was something dreadful to her in the sound of that name. She had forgotten that she ever used to hear it; she remembered her father as having called her 'Nannie'; that would do very well, though it was not so pleasant to her as the 'Nettie' to which she had been answering for seven years. But how strange and sad it was that these little sisters should have been taught to call her Nan! could there be a more hateful name than that, she wondered. Did it mean that her step-mother hated her, and had taught the children to do so? She swallowed at the lump in her throat. What if she should cry! what would those children say or do, and what would happen next? she must try to explain. "I am Nannie," she couldn't make her lips say the word Nan. "I have come home to live, and to help you!" She did not feel like saying "play with you," now. "Will you be a good girl, and let me love you?" How Susie scowled at her then! "No," she said, firmly, "I won't." There seemed to be no truthful answer to make to this, for in the bottom of her heart, Nannie did not believe that she could. Still, she must make the best of it, and she began slowly to draw off her gloves. Clearly she must do something towards getting herself settled. "Won't you tell me where father is? or mother?" her voice faltered a little over that word; "maybe you can show me where to put my trunk; do you know which is to be my room?" There were pauses made between each of these questions. The poor little stranger seemed to be trying first one form and then another, to see if it was possible to get any help. Susie decided at last to do something besides scowl. "Mother's sick. She lies in bed and groans all the time. She ain't got us no dinner to-day; Sate and me called her, and called her, and she wouldn't say anything to us. There ain't no room only this and that," nodding her head toward the bedroom door, "and the room over the shed where Norm sleeps. Norm is hateful. He didn't bring home no bread this noon for Sate and me; and he said maybe he would; we're awful hungry." "Perhaps he couldn't," said poor startled Nettie. She hardly knew what she said, only it seemed natural to try to excuse Norm. But what dreadful story was this! If there was really a sick mother, why was not the father bending over her, and the house hushed and darkened, and somebody tiptoeing about, planning comforts for the night? She had seen something of sickness, and this was the way it was managed. Then what was this about there being no room for her? Then what in the world was she to do? Oh, what did it all mean! She felt as though she must run right back to the depot, and get on the cars and go to her own dear home. To be sure she knew that her father was poor; what of that? so were the Marshalls; she had heard Mrs. Marshall say many a time that "poor folks can't have such things," in answer to some of the children's coaxings. But poverty such as this which seemed to surround this home was utterly strange to Nettie. Still, though she felt such a child, she was also a woman; in some things at least. She knew there was no going home for her to-night. If she had the money to go with, and if there had been a train to go on, she would still have been stayed, because it would be wrong to go. Her father had sent for her, had said that they wanted her, needed her, and her father certainly had a right to her; and she had come away with a full heart, and a firm resolve to be as good and as helpful and as happy in her old home as she possibly could. And now that nothing anywhere was as she had expected it, was no reason why she should not still do right. Only, what was there for her to do, and how should she begin? She stood there still in the middle of the room, the children staring. Presently she crossed on tiptoe to the bedroom door which was partly open and peeped in, catching her first glimpse of the woman whom she must call "mother." Also she caught a glimpse of that dreadful bed; and the horrors of that sight almost took away the thought of the woman lying on it. How could she help being sick if she had to sleep in such a place as that? Poor Nettie Decker! She stood and looked, and looked. Then seeing that the woman did not stir, but seemed to be in a heavy sleep, she shut the door softly and came away. I don't suppose that Nettie Decker will ever forget the next three hours of her life, even if she lives to be an old woman. Not that anything wonderful happened; only that, for years and years afterwards, it seemed to her that she grew suddenly, that afternoon, from a happy-hearted little girl of thirteen, into a care-taking, sorrowful woman. While she stood in that bedroom door, a perfect whirl of thoughts rushed through her brain, and when she shut the door, she had come to this conclusion: "I can't help it; I am Nettie Decker; he is my father, and I belong to him, and I ought to be here if he wants me; and she is my mother; and if it is dreadful, I can't help it; there is everything to do; and I must do it." It was then that she shut the door softly and went back and began her life. There was that trunk out on the stoop. It ought to go somewhere. At least she could drag it into the kitchen so that the troops of children gathering about the door need not have it to wonder at any longer. Putting all her strength to it she drew it in and shut the door. By this time, Sate, who was getting used to her as she had gotten used to many a new thing in her little life, began to wail that she was hungry, and wanted some bread and some molasses. "Poor little girlie!" Nettie said, "don't cry; I'll see if I can find you something to eat. Did she really have no dinner, Susie? Oh, darling, don't cry so; you will trouble poor mother." But Susie had gone back to the scowling mood. "She _shall_ cry, if she wants to; you can't stop her; and you needn't try; I'll cry too, just as loud as I can." And Susie Decker who had strong lungs and always did as she said she would, immediately set up such a howl as put Sate's milder crying quite in the shade. Nettie looked over at the bedroom door in dismay; but no sound came from there. Yet this roaring was fearful. How could it be stopped? Suddenly she plunged her hand into the depths of a small travelling bag which still hung on her arm, and brought forth a lovely red-cheeked peach. She held it before the eyes of the naughty couple and spoke in a determined tone: "This is for the one who stops crying this instant." Both children stopped as suddenly as though they had been wound up, and the machinery had run down. Nettie smiled, and went back into the travelling bag. "There must be two of them, it seems," she said, and brought out another peach. "Now you are to sit down on the steps and eat them, while I see what can be found for our supper." Down sat the children. There had been quiet determination in this new-comer's tone, and peaches were not to be trifled with. Their mouths had watered for a taste ever since the dear woolly things began to appear in the grocery windows, and not one had they had! Now began work indeed. Nettie opened her trunk and drew out a work apron which covered her dress from throat to shoes, and made her look if anything, prettier than before. Where was the broom? The children busy with their peaches, neither knew nor cared; however, a vigorous search among the rubbish in the shed brought one to light. And then there was such a cloud of dust as the Decker kitchen had not seen in a long time. Then came a visit to the back yard in search of chips; both children following close at her heels, saying nothing, but watching every movement with wide-open wondering eyes. Back again to the kitchen and the fire was made up. Then an old kettle was dragged out from a hole in the corner, which poor Mrs. Decker called a closet. It was to hold water, while the fire heated it, but first it must be washed; everything must be washed that was touched. Where was the dishcloth? The children being asked, stared and shook their heads. Nettie searched. She found at last a rag so black and ill-smelling that without giving the matter much thought she opened the stove door and thrust it in. This brought a rebuke from the fierce Susie. "You better look out how you burn up my mother's things. My mother will take your head right off." "It wasn't good for anything, dear," Nettie said soothingly, "it was too dirty." And she stooped down and turned over the contents of the trunk. Neat little piles of clothing, carefully marked with her full name; a pretty green box which Susie dived for, and pushing off the cover disclosed little white ruffles, some of lace, and some of fine lawn, lying cosily together; but Nettie was not searching for such as these. Quite at the bottom of the trunk was a pile of towels, all neatly hemmed and marked. Two of these she selected; looked thoughtfully at one of them for a moment, and then with a grave shake of her head, got out her scissors and snipped it in two. Now she had a dishcloth, and a towel for drying. But what a pity to soil the nice white cloth by washing out that iron kettle! Nettie had grave suspicions that after such a proceeding it would not be fit for the dishes. Still, the kettle must be washed, and to have used the black rag which she had burned, was out of the question. There was no help for it, the other neat dishcloth must be sacrificed. So taking the precaution to wipe out the iron kettle with a piece of paper, and then to heat it quite hot, and apply soap freely, the cloth escaped without very serious injury; and in less time than it takes me to tell it, the water was getting itself into bubbles over the stove, and a tin pan was being cleaned, ready for the dishes. Then they were gathered, and placed in the hot and soapy water, and washed and rinsed and polished with the white towel until they shone; and the little girls looked on, growing more amazed each moment. It did not take long to wash every dish there was in that house. I suppose you would have been very much astonished if you could have seen how few there were! Nettie was very much astonished. She wondered how people could get supper with so few dishes, to say nothing of breakfasts and dinner. But you see she did not know how little there was to put on them. The next question was, Where to put them? One glance at the upper part of the closet where she had found some of them, convinced Nettie that her clean dishes could not be happy resting on those shelves. There was no help for it; they must be scrubbed, though she had not intended to begin housecleaning the first afternoon. More water and more soap, and the few shelves were soon cleared of rubbish, and washed. Nettie piled all the rubbish on a lower shelf and left it for a future day. She did not dare to burn any more property. "Don't they look pretty?" she said to the children, when at last the dishes were neatly arranged on the shelf. One held them all, nicely. Susie nodded with a grave face that said she had not yet decided whether to be pleased or indignant. "What did you do it for?" she asked, after a moment's silent survey. "Why, to make them clean and shining. You and I are going to clear up the house and make it look ever so nice for mother when she wakes up." "Did you come home to help mother?" "Yes, indeed. And you two little sisters must show me how to help her; poor sick mother! I am afraid she has too much to do." "She cries," said Susie gravely, as though she were stating not a surprising but simply a settled fact; "she cried every day: not out loud like Sate and me, but softly. Father says she is always sniveling." If you had been watching Nettie Decker just then you would have noticed that the blood flamed into her cheeks, and her eyes had a flash of wonder, and terror, and anger in them. What did it all mean? Where had the children learned such words? Was it possible that her father talked in this way to his wife? "Hush!" she said unguardedly, "you must not talk so." But this made the fierce little Susie stamp her foot. "I _shall_ talk so!" she said angrily; "I shall talk just what I please, and you sha'n't stop me." And then the queer little mimic beside her stamped her foot, and said, "You sha'n't stop me." Said Nettie, "There was a little girl on the cars to-day that I knew. She had a little gray kitty with three white feet, and a white spot on one ear, and it had a blue ribbon around its neck. What if you had such a kitty. Would you be real good to it?" "I will have a _black_ kitty," said Susie, "all black; as black as that stove." Nettie glancing at the stove, could not help thinking that it was more gray than black; but she kept her thoughts to herself, and Susie went on. "And it should have a red ribbon around its neck; as red as Janie Martin's dress; her dress is as red as fire, and has ruffles on, and ribbons. But what would it eat?" She did not mean the dress but the kitten. Nettie laughed, but hastened to explain that the kitten would need a saucer of milk quite often, and bits of various things. This made wise Susie gravely shake her head. "We don't have no milk," she said, "only once in awhile when Norm buys it; Sate, she often cries for milk, but she don't get none. It don't do no good to cry for milk; I ain't cried for any in a long time." Poor little philosopher! Poor, pitiful childhood without any milk! Hardly anything could have told the story of poverty to Nettie's young ears more surely than this. Why, she was a big girl thirteen years old, and had lived in a city where milk was scarce, and yet her glass had been filled every evening. Nettie did not know what to make of it. How came her father to be so poor? She was sure that the house did not look like this when she went away; and her clothes had been neat and good. She had the little red dress now which she wore away. She thought of it when Susie was talking, and wondered if with a little fixing it could not be made to fit the black-eyed child who seemed to admire red so much. Finding the kitty a troublesome subject, at least so far as the finding of milk for it was concerned, she turned the conversation to the little girls who had been on the cars; the one with the kitty, and her little sister, whom she called "Pet." "She was about as old as you, Susie, and Pet was about Satie's age. And she was very kind to Pet; she always spoke to her so gently, and took such care of her everybody seemed to love her for her kindness." "I take care of Sate," said Susie. "I never let anybody hurt her. I would scratch their eyes out if they did; and they know it." "You slap me sometimes," little Sate said, her voice slightly reproachful. "Yes," said Susie loftily, "but that is when you are bad and need it; I don't let anybody else slap you." "The oldest little girl had curly hair," said Nettie, "but it wasn't so long as yours, and did not curl so nicely as I think yours would. And Pet's hair was a pretty brown, like Sate's, and looked very pretty. It was combed so neatly. One wore a blue dress, and one a white dress; but I think they would have looked prettier if they had been dressed both alike." "I don't like white dresses," said Susie; "I like fiery red ones." So Nettie resolved that the red dress should be made to fit her. Meantime, the scrubbing had gone on rapidly; the table was as clean as soap and water could make it. Now if those children would only let her wash their faces and put their hair in order, how different they would look. Should she venture to suggest it? It all depended on how the idea happened to strike Susie. CHAPTER III. THE TRUTH IS TOLD. IN the bottom of that wonderful little trunk lay side by side two little blue and white plaid dresses, made gabrielle fashion, with ruffles around the bottom and around the neck. Never were dresses made with more patient care. All the stitches were small and very neat. And they represented hours and hours of steady work. Every stitch in them had been taken by Nettie Decker. Long before she had thought of such a thing as coming home, they had been commenced. Birthday presents they were to be to the little sisters whom she had never seen. She had earned the money to buy them. She had borrowed two little neighbors of the same age, to fit them to, and with much advice and now and then a little skilful handling from Mrs. Marshall, they were finally finished to Nettie's great satisfaction. It was the day the last stitch was set in them that she learned she was to come herself and bring them. She thought of them this afternoon. If the little girls would only let her comb their hair and wash their faces and hands, she would put on the new dresses. She had not intended to present them in that way, but dresses as soiled and faded and worn as those the little sisters had on, Nettie Decker had never worn. She opened the trunk, with both children beside her, watching, and drew out the dresses. "Aren't these almost as pretty as red ones?" she asked, as she unfolded them, and displayed the dainty ruffles. "No," said Susie, "not near so pretty as red ones. But then they are pretty. They aren't dresses at all; they are aprons. Are they for you to wear?" "No," said Nettie, "they are for two little girls to wear, who have their hair combed beautifully, and their hands and faces very clean." "Do you mean us?" "I do if the description fits. I can think just how nice you would look if your faces were clean and your hair was combed." "We will put on the aprons," said Susie firmly, "but we won't have our hair combed, nor our faces washed, and you need not try it." But Miss Susie found that this new sister had as strong a will as she. The trunk lid went down with a click, and Nettie rose up. "Very well," she said, "then we will not waste time over them. I brought them for you, and meant to put them on you this afternoon to surprise mamma, but if you don't want them, they can lie in the trunk." "I told you we did want them," said Susie, looking horribly cross. "I said we would put them on." "Yes, but you said some more which spoiled it. _I_ say that they cannot go on until your faces and hands are so clean that they shine, and your hair is combed beautifully." "You can't make us have our hair combed." "I shall not try," said Nettie, as though it was a matter of very small importance to her. "I was willing to dress you all up prettily, but if you don't choose to look like the little girls I saw on the cars, why you can go dirty, of course. But you can't have the clean new dresses." "Till when?" "Not ever. Unless you are clean and neat." "It hurts to have hair combed." "I know it. Yours would hurt a good deal, because you don't have it combed every day; if you kept it smooth and nice it would hardly hurt at all. But I didn't suppose you were a cowardly little girl who was afraid of a few pulls. If the dresses are not worth those, we had better let them lie in the trunk." Nettie was already beginning to understand her queer fierce little sister. She had no idea of being thought a coward. "Well," she said, after a thoughtful pause, "comb my hair if you like; I don't care. Sate, you are going to have your hair combed, and you needn't cry; because it won't do any good." It was certainly a trial to all parties; and poor little Sate in spite of this warning, did shed several tears; but Susie, though she frowned, and choked, and once jerked the comb away and threw it across the floor, did not let a single tear appear on her cheeks. And at last the terrible tangles slipped out, and left silky folds of beautiful hair that was willing to do whatever Nettie's skilful fingers told it. When the faces and hands were clean, and the lovely blue dresses had been arranged, Nettie stood back to look at them in genuine delight. What pretty little girls they were! She sighed in two minutes after she thought this. What did it mean that they looked so neglected and dirty? "These must go in the wash," she said, as she gathered up the rags which had been kicked off. "Will we put these on in the morning?" asked Susie, in quite a mild tone. She was looking down at herself and was very much pleased with her changed appearance. "Oh, no," Nettie said, "they are too light to play in. They are dress-up clothes. You must have dark dresses on in the morning." "We ain't got no dresses only them," and Susie pointed contemptuously at the rags in Nettie's hand. This made poor Nettie sigh again. What did it all mean? However, there was no time for sighing. There was still a great deal to be done. "Now we must get tea," she said, bustling about. "Where does mother keep the bread, and other things?" "She don't keep them nowhere. We don't have no things. I go to the bakery sometimes for bread, and for potatoes, and sometimes for milk. I would go now; I just want to show that hateful little girl in there my new dress, and my curls, but it isn't a bit of use to go. He won't let us have another single thing without the money. He said so yesterday, and he looked so cross he scared Sate; but I made faces at him." This called forth several questions as to where the bakery was, and Nettie, finding that it was but a few steps away, and that the little girls really bought most of the things which came from there, counted out the required number of pennies from her poor little purse for a loaf of bread and a pint of milk. In the cupboard was what had once been butter, set on the upper shelf in a teacup. It was almost oil, now. "If I had a lump of ice for this," Nettie murmured, "it might do. Butter costs so much." "They keep ice at the bakery," said that wise young woman, Susie, "but we never buy it." This brought two more pennies from the pocketbook; for to Nettie it seemed quite impossible that butter in such a condition could be eaten. So the ice was ordered, and two very neat, and very vain little bits of girls started on their mission. Tablecloths? Where would the new housekeeper find them? Where indeed! Hunt through the room as she would, no trace of one was to be found. She did not know that the Deckers had not used such an article in months. She thought of the cupboard drawer at home, and of the neat pile which was always waiting there, and at about this hour it had been her duty to set the table and make everything ready for tea. It would not do to think about it. There were sharper contrasts than these. Her proposed present to her mother had been a tablecloth, not very large nor very fine, but beautifully smooth and clean, and hemmed by her own patient fingers. She must get it out to-night, as no other appeared; and of course she could not set the table without one. So it was spread on the clean table, and the few dishes arranged as well as she could. There was a drawing of tea set up in another teacup, and there was a sticky little tin teapot. Nettie, as she washed it, told it that to-morrow she would scour it until it shone; then she made tea. Meantime the little errand girls had returned with their purchases, the butter was resting on a generous lump of ice, the bread which was found to be stale, was toasted, a plate of cookies from the wonderful trunk was added, and at last there was ready such a supper as had not been eaten in that house for weeks. To be sure it looked to Nettie as though there was very little to eat; but then she had not been used to living at the Deckers. She began to be very nervous about the people who were going to sit down at this neat table. Why did not some of them come? The wise housekeeper knew that neither tea nor toast improved greatly by standing, but she drew the teapot to the very edge of the stove, covered the toast, and set it in the oven. Then she went softly to the bedroom door and opened it. This time a pair of heavy eyes turned, as the door creaked, and were fixed on her with a kind of bewildered stare. She went softly in. "How do you feel now?" she asked gently. "I have made a cup of tea and a bit of toast for you. Shall I bring them now? The children said you did not eat any dinner." "Who are you?" asked the astonished woman, still regarding her with that bewildered stare. Nettie swallowed at the lump in her throat. It would be dreadful if she should burst out crying and run away, as she felt exactly like doing. "I am Nettie Decker," she said, and her lips quivered a little. "Father sent for me, you know. Didn't you think I would be here to-day, ma'am?" "You can't be Nan!" I cannot begin to describe to you the astonishment there was in Mrs. Decker's voice. "Yes'm, I am. At least that is what father used to call me once in a while, just for fun. My name is Nanette; but Auntie Marshall where I live, or where I used to live"--she corrected herself, "always called me Nettie. May I bring you the tea, ma'am? I think it will make you feel better." But the two children had stayed in the background as long as they intended. They pushed forward, Susie eager-voiced: "Look at us! See my curls, and see my new apron, only she says it is a dress, but it ain't; it is made just like Jennie Brown's apron, ain't it? But we ain't got no dresses on. She's got a white cloth on the table, and cookies, and a lump of ice, and everything; and we had two peaches. Old Jock gave us the bread. She sent the money, and I told him to take his old money and give me some bread right straight." How fast Susie could talk! There was scarcely room for the slow sweet Satie to get in her gentle, "and me too." Meaning look at my dress and hair. The bewildered mother raised herself on her elbow and stared--from Nan to the little girls, and then back to Nan. She was sufficiently astonished to satisfy even Susie. "Well, I never!" she said at last. "I didn't know, I mean I didn't think"--then she stopped and pressed her hand to her head, and pushed back the straggling hair behind her ears. "I took dizzy this morning," she said at last, addressing Nettie as though she were a grown-up neighbor who had stepped in to see her, "and I staggered to the bed, and didn't know nothing for a long while. I had a dreadful pain in my head, and then I must have dropped to sleep. Here I've been all day, if the day is gone. It must be after three o'clock if you've got here. I meant to try to do something towards making things a little more decent; though the land knows what it would have been; I don't. There's nothing to do with. I didn't know till this morning that he had the least notion of sending for you--though he's threatened it times enough. I've been ailing all the spring, and this morning I just give out. I don't know what is the matter with me. The bed goes round now, and things get into a kind of a blur." "Let me bring you a cup of tea and something to eat," said Nettie; "I think you are faint." Then she vanished, the children following. She was back in a few minutes, under her arm a white towel from her trunk; this she spread on the barrel head which you will remember did duty as a table. She spread it with one hand, little Sate carefully smoothing out the other end. In her left hand she carried a cup of tea smoking hot, and poor Mrs. Decker noticed that the cup shone. Susie followed behind, an air of grave importance on her face, and in her hands a plate, covered by a smaller one, which being taken off disclosed a delicately browned slice of bread with a bit of butter spread carefully over it. "Well, I never!" said Mrs. Decker again, but she drank the tea with feverish haste, stopping long enough to feel of the cup with a curious look on her face. It was so smooth. There was a sound of heavy feet outside, and the children appeared at the door and announced that father and Norm had come. Nettie took the emptied cup, promising to fill it again, urged the eating of the toast while it was hot, and went with trembling heart to meet the father whom she had not seen in so many years that she remembered very little about him. A great rough-faced, unshaven man, with uncombed hair, ragged and dirty shirt sleeves, ragged and dirty pants, a red face and eyes that seemed but half open, and watery. Nothing less like what Nettie had imagined a father, could well be described. However, if she had but known it, this was a great improvement on the man who often came home to supper. He was nearly sober, and greeted her with a rough sort of kindness, giving her a kiss, which made her shrink and tremble. It was perfumed with odors which she did not like. "Well, Nan, my girl, you have grown into a fine young lady, have you? Tall for your years, too. And smart, I'll be bound; you wouldn't be your mother's girl if you wasn't. Is it you that has fixed up things so? It is a good thing you have come to take care of us. We haven't had anything decent here in so long, we've most forgot how to treat it. Come on, Norm. This table looks something like living again." And "Norm" shambled in. Rough, and uncombed, and unwashed, except a dab at his hands which left long streaks of brown at the wrists. A hard-looking boy, harder than Nettie had ever spoken to before. She could not help thinking of Jim Daker who lived in a saloon not far from her old home, and whom she had always passed with a hurried step, and with eyes on the ground, and of whom she thought as of one who lived in a different world from hers, and wondered how it felt to be down there in the slum. Now here was a boy whom it was her duty to think of as a brother; and he reminded her of Jim Daker! Still there was something about Norm that she could not help half liking. He had great brown, wistful-looking eyes, and an honest face. She had not much chance, it is true, to observe the eyes; for he did not look at her, nor speak, until his father said: "Why don't you shake hands with Nan? You ought to be glad to see her. You ain't used to such a looking supper as this." The boy laughed, in an embarrassed way, and said he was sure he did not know whether he was glad to see her or not: depended on what she had come for. He gave her just a gleam then from the brown eyes, and she smiled and held out her hand. He took it awkwardly enough, and dropped it as suddenly as though it had been hot; then sat down in haste at the table, where his step-father was already making havoc with the toast. It was not a very substantial meal for people who had dined on bread and cheese, and were hungering at that moment for beer; but the man had spoken the truth, it was better than they generally found. There was one part of the story, however, that he failed to tell: which was, that he did not furnish money to get anything better. As for Susie and Sate, they had become suddenly silent. They sat close together and devoured their toast, like hungry children indeed, but also like scared children. They gave occasional frightened glances at their father which puzzled and pained Nettie. No suspicion of the truth had yet come to her. Oh, yes, she had smelled the liquor when her father kissed her; but she thought it was something which had to do with the machinery around which he worked. "Where is the old woman?" he asked suddenly, setting down his empty cup which Nettie had filled for the third time. She looked up at him with a startled air. To whom was he speaking and what old woman could he mean? Her look seemed to make him cross. "What are you staring at?" he said sharply. "Can't you answer a question? Where's your mother?" Nettie hurried to answer; she was sick, had been real sick all day, but was better now, and was trying to get up. "She is everlastingly sick," the father said with a sneer; "you will get used to that story if you live here long. I hope you ain't one of the sickly kind, because we have heard enough of that." This sentence and the tone in which it was spoken, brought the blood in great waves to Nettie's face. It was the first time she had ever heard a man speak of his wife in such a way. Norm looked up from his cookie, and flashed angry eyes on his step-father for a moment, and said "he didn't know as that was any wonder. She had enough to make any woman sick." "You shut up," said the father in increasing irritability; and the children slipped out of their seats and moved toward the door, keeping careful eyes on the father until they were fairly outside. Nettie felt her limbs trembling so that her knees knocked together under the table. But at last every crumb of toast was eaten, and every drop of tea swallowed, and Mr. Decker pushed himself back from the table, and spoke in a somewhat gentler tone: "Well, my girl, make yourself as comfortable as you can. I'm glad to see you. We need your help, you'll find, in more ways than one. You've been working for other folks long enough. It is a poor place you've come to, and that's a fact. I ain't what I used to be; I've been unfortunate. No fellow ever had worse luck. Everything has gone wrong with me ever since your mother died. A sick wife, and young ones to look after, and nobody to do a thing. It is a hard life, but you might as well rough it with the rest of us. You'll get along somehow, I s'pose. The rest of us always have. I've got to go out for awhile. You tell the old woman to fix up some place for you to sleep, and we'll do the best we can." And he lounged away; Norm having left the table and the room some minutes before. And this was the father to whom Nettie Decker had come home! She swallowed at the lump which seemed growing larger every minute in her throat. She had choked back a great many tears that afternoon. There was no time to cry. Some place must be fixed for her to sleep. In the home that she had left, there was a little room with matting on the floor, and a little white bed in the corner, and a pretty toilet set that the carpenter's son had made her at odd times, and a wash bowl and pitcher that had been her present on her eleventh birthday, and a green rocking-chair that aunt Kate had sent her: not her own aunt Kate, but Mrs. Marshall's sister who had adopted her as a niece, and these things and many another little knickknack were all her own. The room was empty to-night; but then Nettie must not cry! She began to gather the dishes and get them ready for washing. Just as she plunged her hands into the dishwater, the bedroom door opened, and her mother came out, stepping feebly, like one just recovering from severe illness. "I'm dreadful weak," she said in answer to Nettie's inquiries, "but I guess I'm better than I have been in a good while. I've had a rest to-day; the first one I have had in three years. I don't know what made me give out so, all of a sudden. I tried to keep on my feet, but I couldn't do it no more than I could fly. You oughtn't to have to wash them dishes, child, with your pretty hands and your pretty dress. Oh, dear! I don't know what is to become of any of us." "This is my work apron," said Nettie, trying to speak cheerily, "and I am used to this work: I always helped with the tea dishes at home." Then she plunged into the midst of the subject which was troubling her. "Father said I was to ask you where I was to sleep." "He better ask himself!" said the wilted woman, rousing to sudden energy and indignation. "How does he think I know? There isn't the first rag to make a bed of, nor a spot to put it, if there was. I say it was a sin and a shame for him to send for you, and that's the truth! If he had one decent child who had a place to stay, where she would be took care of, he ought to have let you alone. You have come to an awful home, child. You have got to know the truth, and you might as well know it first as last. It is enough sight worse than you have seen to-night, though I dare say you think this is bad enough. You don't look nor act like what I was afraid of, and you must have had good friends who took care of you; and he ought to have let you alone. This is no place for a decent girl. It is bad enough for an old woman who has given up, and never expects to have anything decent any more. He won't provide any place for you, nor any clothes, and what we are to do with one more mouth to feed is more than I can see. I wouldn't grudge it to you, child, if we had it; but we are starved, half the time, and that's the living truth." "I won't eat much," said poor Nettie, trembling and quivering, "and I will try very hard to help; but if you please, what makes things so? Can't father get work?" "Work! of course he can; as much as he can do. He is as good a machinist to-day as there is in the shops; when they have a particular job they want him to do it. He works hard enough by spells; why, child, it's the drink. You didn't know it, did you? Well, you may as well know it first as last. He was nearer sober to-night than he has been in a week; but he wasn't so very sober or he wouldn't have been cross. He used to be good and kind as the best of them, and we had things decent. I never thought it would come to this, but it has, and it grows worse every day. Yes, you may well turn pale, and cry out. Turning pale won't do any good. And you may cry tears of blood, and them that sells the rum to poor foolish men will go right on selling it as long as they have money to pay, and kick them out when they haven't. That is the way it is done, and it keeps going on here year after year, homes ruined, and children made beggars, and them that have the making of the laws, go right on and let it be done. I've watched it. And I've tried, too. You needn't think I gave up and sat down to it without trying as hard as ever woman could to struggle against the curse; but I've give up now. Nothing is of any use. And the worst of it is my Norm is going the same road." CHAPTER IV. NEW FRIENDS. AND then the poor woman who thought she had no more tears to shed, buried her face in her hands and shed some of the bitterest ones she ever did in her life. Poor Nettie! she tried to turn comforter; tried to think of one cheering word to say; but what was there to cheer the wife of a drunkard? Or the daughter of a drunkard? Could it be possible that she, Nettie Decker, was that! Oh, dear! how often she had stood in the door, and with a kind of terrified fascination watched Jane Daker stealing home in the darkness, afraid to go in at the front door, lest her drunken father should see her and vent his wrath on her. Could she ever creep around in the dark and hide away from her own _father_? Wouldn't it be possible for her to go back home? She had not money enough to get there, but couldn't she work somehow, and earn money? She could write a letter to the folks at home and tell them the dreadful story, and they would surely find a way of sending for her. But then, money was not plenty in that home, and she began to understand that they had done a great deal for her, and that it had cost a good deal to pay her fare to this place. She had wondered, at the time, that her father did not send the money for her to come home, but she said to herself: "I suppose he did not know how much it would cost, and he will give it to me to send in my first letter. Perhaps he will give me a little bit more than it costs, too, for a little present for Jamie." Oh, poor little girl! building hopes on a father like hers. She had not been at home half a day, but she knew now that no money would ever go back to the Marshalls in return for all they had done for her. Worse than that, she might not be able to get back to them herself. Would her father be likely to let her go? He had sent for her, and had told her during this first hour of their meeting, that she had worked for other people long enough. This made her heart swell with indignation. Done enough for others, indeed! What had they not done for her? She never realized it half so plainly as she did to-night. "I will go back!" she muttered, setting the little bowl she was drying on the table with a determined thump. "I can't stay in such a place as this. I will write to Auntie Marshall this very night if I can get a chance, and she will contrive some way." Certainly, Nettie in that mood could have no comfort for a weeping mother, and attempted none, after the first murmured word of pity. But meantime she knew very well that she could not go back home that night, and the present terror was, where was she to sleep? Her mother went back into the bedroom after a few minutes of bitter weeping, and Nettie finished the work, then stood drearily in the doorway, wondering what she could do next, when a good, homely, motherly face looked out of the side window of the small house next their own, and a cheery voice spoke: "Are you Joe Decker's little Nannie?" "Yes'm," said Nettie, sadly, wondering drearily, even then, if it could be possible that this was so. "Well," said the voice, "I calculated that you must be; though I never should have known you in the world, if I hadn't heard you was coming, you was such a mite of a thing when you went away. What a tall nice girl you've got to be. Your ma is sick, the children said. I've been away ironing all day, or I would have been in to see if I could help the poor thing any. I don't know her very much, but she is sickly, and has hard times now and then, and I'm sorry for her. Now what I was wondering is, where are they going to put you to sleep? The upper part of that house ain't finished off, is it? It is one big attic, ain't it, where Norm sleeps? I thought so. I suppose there could be quite a nice room made up there with a little work and a few dollars laid out, but your pa ain't done it, I'll be bound. And I knew there wasn't but one bedroom down-stairs, and I couldn't think how they would manage it." "It isn't managed at all, ma'am," said Nettie, seeing that she seemed to wait for an answer, and there was nothing to say but the simple truth. "There is no place for me to sleep." "You don't say! Now that's a shame. Well, now, what I was thinking was, that maybe you would like to sleep in the woodhouse chamber; it is a nice little room as ever was, and it opens right out of my Sarah Ann's room; so you wouldn't be lonesome. I haven't any manner of use for it, now my boy's gone away, and I just as soon you would sleep there as not until your folks get things fixed. You're a dreadful clean-looking little girl, and I like that. I'm a master hand to have clean things around me; Job says he believes I catch the flies and dust their wings before I let them go into my front room. Job is my husband, and that is his little joke at me, you know." And she laughed such a jolly little roly-poly sort of laugh that poor Nettie could not keep a smile from her troubled face. A refuge in the woodhouse chamber of this neat, good-natured-looking woman seemed like a bit of heaven to the homesick child. "I am very much obliged to you, ma'am," she said respectfully; "I will tell my mother how kind you are, and I think she will be glad to accept the kindness for a few days. I--" and then Nettie suddenly stopped. It might not be well to say to this new friend that she would not need to trouble the woodhouse chamber long, for she meant to start for home as soon as a letter could travel there, and another travel back. Something might come in the way of this resolve, though it made her feel hot all over to think of such a possibility. "Bless my heart!" said Mrs. Job Smith as Nettie vanished to consult her mother. "If that ain't as polite and pretty-spoken a child as ever I see in my life. She makes me think of our Jerry. To think of that child being Joe Decker's girl and coming back to such a home as he keeps! It is too bad! I am sure I hope they will let her sleep in the woodhouse chamber. It is the only spot where she will get any peace." Mrs. Decker was only too glad to avail herself of her neighbor's kind offer. "It is good of her," she said gratefully to Nettie. "I wish to the land you could have such a comfortable room all the time; they are real clean-looking folks. You wouldn't suppose from the looks of this house that I cared for clean things, but I do, and I used to have them about me, too. I was as neat once as the best of them; but it takes clothes and soap and strength to be clean, and I have had none of 'em in so long that I have most forgot how to do anything decent." "Soap?" said Nettie, wonderingly. She was beating up the poor rags which composed the bed in her mother's room, trying to get a little freshness into them. "Yes, soap; I don't suppose you can imagine how it would seem not to have all the soap you wanted; I couldn't, either, once, but I tell you I save the pennies nowadays for bread, so that I need not see my children starve before my eyes. I would rather do without soap than bread; especially when our clothes are so worn out that there is nothing much to change with. Oh, I tell you when you get into a house where the men folks spend all they can get on beer or whiskey, there are not many pennies left. Mrs. Smith has been real kind; she sent the children in a bowl of soup one day when their father had gone off and not left a thing in the house, nor a cent to get anything with. "And she has done two or three things like that lately; I'm grateful to her, but I'm ashamed to say so. I never expected to sink so low that I should be glad of the scraps which a poor neighbor like her could send in. Oh, no; they are not very poor. Why, they are rich as kings, come to compare them with us; but they are not grand folks at all; he is a teamster, and works hard every day; so does she; but he doesn't drink a drop, and they have a good many comfortable things. Their boy is away at school, and their girl, Sarah Ann, is learning a dressmaker's trade. You will have a comfortable bed in there, and I'm glad of it." And now it was eight o'clock. Susie and Sate were asleep in their trundle bed, the tired Nettie having coaxed them to let her give them a splendid bath first, making the idea pleasant to them by producing from her trunk a cunning little cake of perfumed soap. They looked "as pretty as pictures," the sad-eyed mother said, as she bent over them when they were asleep, with their moist hair in loose waves, and their clean faces flushed with health. "They are real pretty little girls," she added earnestly, as she turned away. "He might be proud of them. And he used to be, too. When Sate was a baby, he said she had eyes like you, and he used to kiss her and tell her she was pretty, until I was afraid he would spoil her; but there isn't the least danger of that now. He never notices either of them except to slap them or growl at them." "How came father to begin to drink?" Nettie asked the question timidly, hesitating over the last word; it seemed such a dreadful word to add to a father's name. "Don't ask me, child; I don't know. They say he always drank a little; a glass of beer now and then. I knew he did when I married him, but I thought it was no more than all hard-working men did. I never thought much about it. I know it never entered my head that he could be a drunkard. I'd have been too afraid for Norm if I had dreamed of such a thing as that. "He kept increasing the drinks, little by little--it grows on them, it seems, the habit does; they say that is the way with all the drinks; I didn't know it. I never was taught about these things. If I had been, I think sometimes my life would have been very different. I know I wouldn't have walked right into the fire with my one boy, anyhow. I'm talking to you, child, as though you were a woman grown, and you seem most like a woman to me, you are so handy, and quiet, and nice-looking. I was sorry you were coming, because I thought you would just be an added plague; and now I am sorry for your own sake." Nettie hesitated greatly over the next question. It was a very hard one to ask this sick and discouraged mother, but she must know the whole of the misery by which she was surrounded. "Does Norman drink too?" "Norm," said Mrs. Decker, dropping into the one chair, and putting her hand to her heart as though there was something stabbing her there, "Norm has been led away by your father. He was a bright little fellow, and your father took to him amazingly. I used to tell him his own little girls would have reason to be jealous of his step-son. He took Norm with him everywhere, from the first. And taught him to do odd things, for a little fellow, and was proud of his singing, and his speaking, and all that. And when Susie there, was a baby, and I was kept close at home with her, and Norm would tear around in the evening and wake her up, I slipped into the way of letting him go out with your father to spend the evenings; I didn't know they spent them in bar-rooms, or groceries where they sold beer. I never _dreamed_ of such a thing. Your father talked about meeting the men, and I thought they met at some of the houses where there wasn't a baby to cry, and talked their work over, or the news, you know. And there he was teaching Norm to drink. He was a pretty little fellow, and he would sing comic songs, and then they would treat him to the sugar in their glasses! When I found it out, he had got to liking the stuff, and I don't suppose a day goes by without his taking more or less of it now. He never gets as bad as your father; but he will. He is never cross and ugly to me, nor to the children, but he will be. It grows on him. It grows on them all. And to think that I led him into the trap! If I had stayed in the country where I was brought up, or if I had left him with his grandfather, as he wanted me to, he might have been saved. The grandfather is gone now, and so is the farm. Your father got hold of my share of that, and lost it somehow. He didn't mean to, and that soured him, and he drank the harder and we are going down to the very bottom of everything as fast as we can." It seemed to poor Nettie that they must have reached the bottom now. She could not imagine any lower depths than these. She made up the poor bed as well as she could, and then went back to the kitchen to see what could be done about breakfast. Her new mother was evidently too weak and sick to be troubled with the thought of it, and while she stayed, Nettie resolved that she would help the poor woman all she could. She went out into the yard to examine, and discovered to her satisfaction that there must be a cooper's shop just around the corner, for the chips lay thick. She gathered some for the morning fire, determined in her mind that she would buy a few potatoes at the grocery in the morning! In the cupboard she had found a cup of sour milk; this she had carefully treasured with an eye to breakfast, and she now looked into her purse to see if she could spare pennies for a quart of flour. If she could, then some excellent cakes would be the result. And now everything that she knew how to do towards the next day's needs was attended to, and she went out in the moonlight, and sat down on the lowest step of the back stoop, and did what she had been longing to do all the afternoon--cried as though her poor young heart was breaking. Astride a saw-horse in the yard which belonged to Job Smith, and which was separated from the stoop where she sat only by a low fence, was a curly-headed boy, who had come there apparently to whittle and whistle and watch her. He was not there when she sat down and buried her head in her apron. She did not notice his whistling, though he made it loud and shrill on purpose to attract her attention, He knew quite a little about her by this time. He had come upon the boys of the Grammar School in the midst of their afternoon recess and heard Harry Stuart interrupt little Ted Barrows who was the youngest one in the class and wrote the best compositions. They were gathered under a tree listening to Ted, while he read them "The Story of An Hour," which was especially interesting because it had some of their own experiences skilfully woven in. "Hold on," Harry was saying, just as the whistling boy appeared within hearing. "You didn't make that thing up; you got it from the Deckers; that is what is just going to happen there. Old Joe's Nan is coming home this very day, and she is about as old as the girl you've got in your story, and is freckled, I dare say; most girls are." "I didn't even know old Joe Decker had a girl to come home!" said little Ted, looking injured. "I made every word of it out of my own mind." But the boys did not hear him; their interest had been called in another direction. "Is that so? Is Nan Decker coming home? My! What a house to come to. Mother said only yesterday that she hoped the folks who had her would keep her forever. What is she coming for? Who told you?" "Why, she is coming because Joe thinks that will be another way to plague the old lady. At least that is what my mother thinks. Mrs. Decker told her once that when Joe had been drinking more than usual he always threatened to send for Nan; but she didn't think he would. And now it seems he has. I heard it from the old fellow himself. He was telling Norm about it, while I stood waiting for father's saw. He said she was coming in the stage this afternoon; that she had worked for other folks long enough and it was time he had some good of her himself. I pity her, I tell you." Then the whistler had come out from behind the trees, and said good-afternoon, and asked a few questions. The boys had answered him civilly enough, but in a way which showed that they did not count him as one of them. The fact was, he was a good deal of a stranger. He had been in town only a few weeks, and he did not go to school, and he boarded with or lived with, the Smiths, who lived next door to the Deckers, and were nice enough people, but did not have much to do with the fathers and mothers of these boys, and--well, the fact was, the boys did not know whether to take this new comer in, and make him welcome, or not. They sort of liked him; he was good-natured, and accommodating so far as they knew, but they knew very little about him. He asked a good many questions about the expected Nan Decker. He had never heard of her before. Since he was to live next door to her, it might be pleasant to know what sort of a person she was. But the boys could tell him very little. Seven years, at their time of life, blots out a good many memories. They only knew that she was Nan Decker who went away when her mother died, and who had lived with the Marshalls ever since; and all agreed in being sorry for her that she was obliged at last to come home. The whistling boy walked away, after having cross-questioned first one, and then another, and learned that they knew nothing. He was on his way to the woods for one of his long summer rambles. He felt a trifle lonely, and wished that the boys had asked him to sit down under the trees and have a good time with them. [Illustration: JERRY ON ONE OF HIS SUMMER RAMBLES.] He would have liked to hear Ted's composition, he said to himself; the boy had a sweet face, and a head that looked as though he might be going to make a smart man, one of these days. What was the matter with those fellows, he wondered, that they were not more cordial? He thought about it quite awhile, then plunged into the mosses and ferns and gathered some lovely specimens, which he arranged in the box he carried slung over his shoulder, and forgot all about the boys, and poor little Nan Decker. On the way home, in the glow of the setting sun, he thought of her again, and wondered if she had come, and if she would be a sorrowful and homesick little girl. It seemed queer to think of being homesick when one came home! But then, it was only a home in name; he had not lived next door to it for five weeks without discovering that, and the little girl's mother was dead! Poor Nan Decker! A shadow came over his bright face for a moment as he thought of this. His mother was dead. He resolved to speak a kind word to the little girl the very first time that he had a chance. And here in the moonlight was his chance. He stopped whistling at last and spoke: "If it is anything about which I can help, I shall be very glad to do it." A kind, cheerful voice. Nettie looked up quickly and choked back her tears. She was not one to cry, if there were to be any lookers-on. "I guess you are homesick," said the boy from, his horse's back; "and that isn't any wonder. I'm homesick myself, nearly every night, especially if it is moonlight. I don't know what there is about the moon that chokes a fellow up so, but I've noticed it often; but then I feel all right in the morning." "Are you away from your home?" "I should say I was! Or rather home has gone away from me. I haven't any home in particular, only my father, and he is away out in California. I couldn't go there with him, and since my school closed I am waiting here for him to come back. It is home, you know, wherever he is. He doesn't expect to be back yet for months. So you and I ought to be pretty good friends, we are such near neighbors. I live right next door to you. We ought to be introduced. You are Nannie Decker, I suppose, and I am Jerry Mack at your service. I don't wonder you are homesick; folks always are, the first night." "My name is Nanette," said Nettie, gently, "but people who like me most always say Nettie: and it isn't being homesick that makes me feel so badly--though I am homesick; but it is being scared, and astonished, and, oh! everything. Nothing is as I thought it would be; and there are things about it that I did not understand at all, or maybe I wouldn't have come; and now I am here, I don't know what to do." She was very near crying again, in spite of a watcher. "I know," he said, nodding his head, and speaking in a grave, sympathetic voice. "Job Smith--that is the man I am staying with--has told me how it used to be with your father. He says he was a very nice father indeed. I am as sorry for you as I can be. But after all, I wouldn't give up if I were you; and I should be real glad that I had come home to help him. He needs a great deal of help. Folks reform, you know. Why, people who are a great deal worse than your father has ever been yet, have turned right around and become splendid men. If I were you I would go right to work to have him reform. Then there's Norm--he needs help, too; and he ought to have it before he gets any older, because it would be so much easier for him to get started right now." "I don't know the least thing to do," said Nettie; but she dried her eyes on her neat little handkerchief as she spoke, and sat up straight, and looked with earnest eyes at the boy on the other side the fence. This sort of talk interested and helped her. "No; of course you don't. You haven't studied these things up, I suppose. But there is a great deal to do. My father is a temperance man, and I have heard him talk. I know a hundred things I would like to do, and a few that I can do. I'll tell you what it is, Nettie, say we start a society, you and I, and fight this whole thing? "We can begin with little bits of plans which we can carry out now, and let them grow as fast as we can follow them and see what we can do. Is it a bargain?" "There is nothing I would like so well, if you will only show me how," said Nettie, and her eyes were shining. It was wonderful what a weight these few words seemed to lift from her troubled heart. The boy's face had grown more thoughtful. He seemed in doubt just how to express what he wanted to say next. "I don't know how you feel about it," he said as last, "but I know somebody who would be sure to help in anything of this kind that we tried to do--show us how, you know, and make ways for us to get money, and all that." "Who is it?" Nettie spoke quickly now, for her heart was beating loud and fast. Was there somebody in this town who could be asked to come to the rescue, and who was willing to give such hearty help as that? If such were the case, she could see that a great deal might be accomplished. She waited for her new friend's answer, but he looked down on the stick he was whittling and gravely sharpened the end to a very fine point, before he spoke again. "I don't know what you think about such things, but I mean--God. I _know_ he is on our side in this business, don't you?" "Yes," said Nettie, thoughtfully, and her manner changed. Her voice which had been only eager before, became soft and gentle, and she looked over at the boy in the moonlight and smiled. "I know Him," she said, "and I am His servant. It is strange I forgot for a little while that He knew all about this home, and father, and everything! Maybe He wants me to help father. I mean to begin right away. I will do every single thing I can think of, to keep father, and Norm, and everybody else from drinking liquor any more forever." There was a sudden spring from the saw-horse, a long step taken over the low fence, and the boy stood beside her. "There are two of us," he said gravely. "There is my hand on it. I am a Christian, too. And father gave me a verse once, which always helps me when I think of the rumsellers: 'If God be for us, who _can_ be against us!' I know he is for us, and so, though the rumsellers are against us, and think they are going to beat, one of these days he will show them! What you and I want to do is to keep working at it all we can, so as to show that we believe in him." "Now we are partners--Nettie Decker and Jerry Mack, who knows what we can do? Anyhow, we are friends, and will stand by each other through thick and thin, won't we?" "Yes," said Nettie, "we will." And she rose up from the doorstep, and they shook hands. CHAPTER V. A GREAT UNDERTAKING. JERRY turned away whistling. Did you ever notice how apt boys are to whistle when something has stirred their feelings very much, and they don't intend that anybody but themselves shall know it? Nettie went back into the little brown house to see if her mother was comfortable for the night. Her heart was lighter than she had thought it ever would be again. Everything was quiet within the house. The children with their arms tossed about one another, and their cheeks flushed with sleep, looked sweeter than they often did awake. The heartsick mother had forgotten her sorrow again for a little while, in sleep. Where father and Norm were, Nettie did not know. It seemed strange to go away and leave the light burning, and the door unfastened. At home, they always gathered at about this hour, in the neat sitting-room, and sang a hymn and repeated each a Bible verse, and then Mr. Marshall prayed, and after that she kissed Auntie Marshall and the others, and tripped away to her pretty room. The contrast was very sharp. If it had not been for that new friend whose voice she heard at this moment softly singing a cheery tune, I think the tears would have come again. As it was, she slipped into Mrs. Job Smith's neat kitchen. What a contrast that was to the kitchen next door! The first thing she saw was the tall old clock in the corner. "Tick-tock, tick-tock." She had never seen so large a clock before; she had never heard one speak in such a slow and patronizing tone, as though it were managing all the world. She looked up into its face and smiled. It seemed like a great strong friend. There was nothing very remarkable about that kitchen. At least I suppose you would not have thought so, unless you had just spent an afternoon in the Decker kitchen. Then you might have felt the difference. The floor was painted a bright yellow, and had gay rugs spread here and there. The stove shone brilliantly, and the two chairs under the window were painted green, with dazzling white seats. A high, old-fashioned, wooden-backed rocker occupied a cosey corner near the clock. A table set against the wall had a bright spread on it, and newspapers, and a book or two, and a pair of spectacles lay on it. The lamp was in the centre, and was clear and beautifully trimmed. Simple enough things, all of them, but they spoke to Nettie's heart of home. There was a brisk step on the stair; the door opened, and Mrs. Smith's strong, homely face appeared in sight. "Here you are," she said cheerily, "tired enough to go to sleep, I dare say. Well, the room is all ready for you. I guess you won't be lonesome, for it is right out of Sarah Ann's room, and my boy Jerry is across the hall. You've got acquainted with Jerry, I guess? I saw you and him talking, out in the moonlight. I'm glad of it. Jerry is good at chirking a body up; and there never was a better boy made than he is. "Now you get right to sleep as goon as you can, and dream of all the nice things you can think of. It is good luck to have nice dreams in a new room, you know." "Poor little soul!" she said to herself as the door closed after Nettie. "I hope she will be so sound asleep that she won't hear her father and Norm come stumbling home. Isn't it a mean thing, now, that the father of such a little girl as that should go and disgrace her?" Mrs. Smith was talking to nobody, and so of course nobody answered her; and in a little while that house was still for the night. Nettie, in the clean, sweet-smelling woodhouse chamber, was soon on her knees; not sobbing out a homesick cry, as she thought she would, as soon as ever she had a chance, but actually thanking God for these new friends; and asking Him to be One in this new society, and show them just what and how to do. Then she went into sound sleep; and heard no stumbling, nor grumbling, though both father and brother did much of it when at last they shambled home. The new plans came up for consideration early the next morning. Before Nettie had opened her eyes to the neatly whitewashed walls in the woodhouse chamber, she heard the sound of merry whistling, keeping time to the swift blows of an axe. Jerry was preparing kindlings. In a very short time after that, he looked up to say good-morning, as Nettie was making her way across the yard to the other house. "Don't you want some of these nice chips? They will make your kettle boil in a jiffy." This was his good-morning; he held out both hands to her, full of broad smooth chips. "Aunt Jerusha likes them better than any other kind; I keep her supplied. Wait, I'll carry them in." "Oh, you needn't," Nettie said in haste, and blushing. What would he think of the Decker kitchen after being used to Mrs. Smith's! But he took long springs across the walk, vaulted the fence and stood at the kitchen door waiting for her. It looked even more desolate, in contrast with the sunny morning, than it had the night before. Nettie resolved to blacken the stove that very day. "Do you know how to make a fire?" Jerry asked. "I do. I made aunt Jerusha's for her, two mornings, but it is hard work to get ahead of her." Yes, Nettie knew how. She had made the fire for the supper, in Mrs. Marshall's boarding house, many a time. She proceeded to show her skill at once; Jerry, looking on admiringly, admitted that she knew more about it than he did. "You see, father and I board," he said apologetically, "and there isn't much chance to learn things. I'll tell you what I can do--get you a fresh pail of water." Before she could speak, he darted away. There was a sound of feet coming down the unfinished stairs, and Norm lounged into the room, rubbing sleepy eyes, and looking as though he had not combed his hair in a week. He stared at Nettie as though he had never seen her before, and answered her good-morning, with: "I'll be bound if I didn't forget you! Where have you been all night?" "Asleep," said Nettie, brightly. "Now I want to have breakfast ready by the time mother comes out, to surprise her. Will you tell me whether you have tea or coffee?" Norm laughed slightly. "We have what we can get, as a rule. I heard mother say there wasn't any tea in the house. And I don't believe we have had any coffee for a month. I'd like some, though; I know that. I've got a quarter; I'll go and get some, if you will make us a first-rate cup of coffee." "Well," said Nettie, "I'll do my best." She spoke a little doubtfully, having a shrewd suspicion that the quarter ought to be saved for more important things than coffee; but she did not like to object to Norm's first expressed idea of partnership; so he went away, and when the fresh water came, the teakettle was filled, the table set, the potatoes washed and put in the oven; by the time Mrs. Decker appeared, Nettie, with a very flushed face, was bending over her hot griddle, testing the cake she had baked. "Well, I do say!" said Mrs. Decker, and the tone expressed not only surprise, but gratitude. There was a pleasant odor of coffee in the room, and the potatoes were already beginning to hint that they would soon be done. The cake that Nettie had baked was as puffy and sweet as her heart could desire. "I believe you're a witch," said Mrs. Decker. "I couldn't think of a thing for breakfast. Where did you get them cakes?" "Made them," said Nettie; "I found a cup of sour milk; Auntie Marshall used to let me make them often for breakfast. Norm went after the coffee; and I guess it is good. I saved my egg shell from the cakes to settle it." "You're a regular little housekeeper," said Mrs. Decker. "And so Norm went after coffee! Did you ask him to? Went of his own accord! That's something wonderful for Norm. He used to think of things for me but he don't any more." Altogether, it was really almost a comfortable breakfast, though it seemed to Nettie that she would never get it ready. She was not used to managing with so few dishes. Her father drank three cups of coffee, said it was something like living, and gave Nettie twenty-five cents, with the direction that he hoped there would be something decent to eat when they came home at noon. Nettie's cheeks were red with more than the baking of cakes, then. She was ashamed of her father. How could he speak in a way to insult his wife! They went off hurriedly at last, Norm and the father; and the children who had been silent, began to chatter the moment the door closed after them. Mrs. Decker, too, began to talk. "He thinks twenty-five cents will buy a dinner for us all, and keep us in clothes, and get new furniture, and dishes! He will have it that it is because things are wasted that we have such poor meals. As if I had anything to waste! I don't know what to do, nor which way to turn. We need everything." "Don't you think we had better clean house to-day?" Nettie asked a little timidly, as they rose from the table and she began to gather the dishes. "Clean house!" repeated the dazed mother. "Why, yes, child, I suppose so. It needs it badly enough. Oh, we can wash up the floor, and the shelf. It doesn't take long; there are not many things in the way. No furniture to move. But it doesn't stay clean long, I can tell you. Just one room in which to do everything! I might have kept it looking better, though, if I had not been sick. I have just had to let everything go, child. Lying awake nights, and worrying, have used me up." She took the broom as she spoke and began to sweep vigorously, scurrying the children out of her way. It was a long day, and a busy one. And at night, the room certainly looked better. The floor had been scrubbed with hot lye to get off the grease, and the stove had been blackened until the children shouted that it would do for a looking-glass. Several other improvements had been made. But after all, to Nettie's eyes it was dreadfully bare and comfortless. Not a cushioned chair, nor a rocker, nor anything that to her seemed like home. All day she had been casting glances at a closed door which opened from the kitchen, and thinking her thoughts about the room in there. A large square room, perfectly empty. Why wasn't it used? If for nothing else, why didn't Norm sleep in it, instead of in that dreadful unfinished attic where the rats must certainly have full sweep? Or why did not her mother move in there with the trundle bed, instead of being cooped up in that small bedroom? Or why had they not prepared it for her to sleep in, if they really did not want it for anything else? She gathered courage at last, to ask questions. "Oh, that room," her mother said with bitterness, "when I first came here to live, we pleased ourselves nights, after the children were in bed, telling what we would have in it. We meant to furnish it for a parlor. We were going to have it carpeted; he wanted a red carpet, and I wanted a brown one with a little bit of pink in, but land! I would have taken one that was all yellow, just to please him. And we were going to have a lounge, and two rocking chairs, and I don't know what not. And there it is, shut up. I might have had it for a bedroom at first, but I wouldn't. I wanted to save it. And then, when I gave that all up, there was nothing to fix it with. Norm couldn't sleep there without curtains to the windows; no more could we; it is right on the street, almost. "And things keep getting worse and worse, so I just shut the door and locked it and let it go. If I had had a spare chair to put in, I might have gone in there and cried, now and then, but I hadn't even that. I tried to rent it; but the woman who was hunting rooms heard that your father drank, and was afraid to come. Oh, we have a splendid name in the place, you'll find. We are just going to ruin as fast as a family can; that's the whole story." In the middle of the afternoon, when Nettie had done everything she could think of, unless some money could be raised, and some clothes made, so that the children could have the ones washed which they were wearing, she stood in the back door, wondering how that could be brought about, when Jerry appeared in his favorite seat on the sawhorse. "Everything done up for the day?" he asked. Nettie laughed. "Everything has stopped for the want of things to do with," she said. "I don't see but that will be the trouble with what we want to do. Why, you can't do a single thing without money; and where is it to come from?" "That is one of the things we must think up," Jerry said gravely. "I have thought about it some. This temperance business needs money. One of the troubles with boys like Norm is that they have no nice places to go to. Boys like to meet together and talk things over, you know, and have a good time, and how are some of them going to do it? The church isn't the place, nor the schoolhouse, and those fellows haven't pleasant homes; the only spot for them is the saloons. I don't much wonder that they get in the habit of going there. I have heard my father say that saloons were the only places that were fixed up, and lighted, where folks without any pleasant homes were made welcome. Why, just look at it in this town. There's your Norm. There are two fellows who go with him a great deal. If you meet one, you may be sure that the other two are not far away. Their names are Alf Barnes and Rick Walker. Neither of them have as decent a home as Norm's, oh! not by a good deal. And he doesn't feel like inviting them into your kitchen to spend the evening. Should you think he would?" Warm as the day was, Nettie shivered. "I should think they would rather stay out in the street than to come there," she said. "Well, now you see how it is. They don't stay in the streets, such fellows don't. Not all the time. They get tired, and sometimes it rains, and in winter it is cold, and they look about them for somewhere to go. There's a saloon, bright and clean; comfortable chairs, and good-natured people. It is the only place that says Come in! to such fellows. Why shouldn't they go in? "I've heard my father talk about this by the hour. In big cities they have rooms warmed and lighted, and nicely furnished, on purpose for such young men; only father is always saying that they don't begin to have enough of them; but in such a town as this, I would like to know what the boys who haven't nice homes to stay in, are expected to do with themselves evenings? One of these days, when I am a man, that is the way I am going to use all my extra money. I'll hunt out towns where the fellows have just been left to stay in the streets, or else go to the rum-holes, and I'll fit up the nicest kind of a room for them. Bright as gas can make it, and elegant, you know, like a parlor; and I'll have cakes, and coffee, and lemonades, and all those things, cheaper than beer, and serve them in fine style. Wouldn't that be a fine thing to do?" "Then the first thing," said Nettie, "is a room." Jerry turned round on his horse and looked full at her and laughed. "You talk as though it was to be done now," he said. "I was telling what I would do in that dim future, when I become a man." "We might begin pieces of it now. Norm will be too old when you are a man; and so will those others. There is our front room. If we only had some furniture to put in it. My Auntie Marshall made some real pretty seats once, out of old boxes; she padded them with cotton, and covered them with pretty calico, and you can't think how nice they were. I could make some, if I had the boxes and the calico." "I could get the boxes," said Jerry. "I know a man in the blacksmith shop who has a brother in the grocery down at the corner, and he could get boxes for us of him, I'm pretty sure. He is a nice man, that blacksmith. I like him better than any man in town, I believe. I could fix covers on the boxes myself, and do several other things. I have a box of tools, and I often make little things. I say, Nettie, let's fix up the front room. I've often wondered what there was in there. Would your mother let us have it?" "She would let us have most everything, I guess," Nettie said thoughtfully, "if she thought it would do any good." "All right. We'll make it do some good. Let's set to work right away. The first thing as you say, is a room. No, we have the room; the first thing is furniture. I'll go and see Mr. Collins this very evening. He is the blacksmith." In less than half an hour from that time Jerry stood beside Mr. Collins. That gentleman had on his big leather apron, and was busy about his work as usual. "Boxes?" he said to Jerry. "Why, yes, there are piles of them in his cellar, and out by his back door. I should think he would be glad to get rid of some. But what do you want of them? Furniture? How are you going to make furniture out of boxes? What put such a notion as that into your head, and what do you want of furniture, anyhow?" So Jerry sat down on a box and told the whole story. Mr. Collins listened, and nodded, and shook his head, and smiled grimly, occasionally, and sighed, and in every possible way showed his interest and appreciation. "And so you two are going to take hold and reform the town?" he said at last. "Humph! Well, it needs it bad enough! if old boxes will help, it stands to reason that you ought to have as many as you want. I'll engage to see that you get them." When Mr. Collins told his brother-in-law, the grocer, the two laughed a good deal, but the blacksmith finished his story with, "Well, now I tell you what it is--something is better than nothing, any day; there's been nothing done here for so long that I think it is kind of wonderful that those two young things should start up and try to do something." "So do I, so do I," assented the grocer, heartily, "and if old boxes will help 'em, why, land, they're welcome to as many as they can use. Tell the chap to step around here and select his lumber, and I'll have it delivered." This message Jerry was not slow to obey; so it happened that the very next afternoon Mrs. Job Smith stood in her back door and watched with curious eyes the unloading of the grocer's wagon. Six, seven, eight empty boxes! "For the land's sake, what be you going to do with them?" she asked Jerry. Mrs. Job Smith had a great warm heart, but no education to speak of; and no mother had, in her childhood, begged her a dozen times a day not to use such expressions as "for the land's sake!" she knew no better than to suppose they added emphasis to her words; Jerry laughed. "It is for the room's sake, auntie," he said. "We are going to have a cabinet shop in the barn loft. Mr. Smith said I might. I shall make some nice things, auntie, see if I don't. Come up in the loft, will you, and see my tool chest?" This last sentence was addressed to Nettie who had appeared in her back door to admire the boxes. So the two climbed the ladder stairs, Nettie a little timidly as one unused to ladders, and Jerry with quick springs, holding out his hand to her at the top, to help her in making the final leap. Then he took from his pocket a curious little key which he explained to Nettie would open that tool chest provided you knew how to use it; but he supposed that a man who had stolen it might try for a week, and yet not get into the chest. A skilful touch, and the handsome chest was open before her, displaying its wonders to her pleased eyes. It was a well-stocked chest. Chisels, and saws, and hammers, and augers, and sharp, wicked-looking little things for which Nettie had no name, gleamed before her. "How nice!" she said at last. "How splendid! It looks as though somebody who knew how, could make splendid things with them." "And I know how," said Jerry. "At least, I know some things. I spent a summer down in a little country town where father had some business; and the man we boarded with kept a small shop, where all sorts of things were made. Not a great factory, you know, where they make a thousand chairs of one kind, and a thousand of another, and never make anything but chairs. This was just a little country shop, where they made a table one day, and a chair the next, and a bedstead the next; and you could watch the men at work, and ask questions and learn ever so much. I got so I could use tools, as well as the next one, Mr. Braisted said, whatever he meant by that. Father liked to have me learn. He said tools were the cleanest sharp things that he knew anything about. I can make ever so many things. I like to do it. I wonder I have not been about it since I came here. Now what shall we go at first? What does your mother say about the room?" "She is willing," said Nettie, "only she doesn't see how much of anything can be done. She is most discouraged, you see, and nothing looks possible to her, I suppose." "That's all right. She can't be expected to know we can do things until we show her. If she will let us try, that is all we need ask." "She says the room ought to have some kind of a carpet; they always have carpets in home-like rooms, she says; and I guess that is so. Except in kitchens, of course." Nettie hastened to say this, apologetically, thinking of Mrs. Job Smith's bright yellow floor. Jerry whistled. "That is so, I suppose," he said thoughtfully; "and they don't make carpets out of boxes, nor with saws and hammers, do they? I don't know how we would manage that. There must be a way to do it, though. Let's put that one side among the things that have got to be thought about." "And prayed about," said Nettie. "Yes," he said, flashing a very bright look at her, "I thought that, but somehow I did not like to say it out, in so many words." "I wonder why?" said Nettie thoughtfully; "I mean, I wonder why it is so much harder to say things of that kind than it is to speak about anything else?" "Father used to say it was because people didn't get in the habit of talking about religion in a common sense way. They don't, you know; hardly anybody. At least hardly anybody that I know; around here, anyway. Now my father speaks of those things just as easy as he does of anything." "So does Auntie Marshall; but I used to notice that not many people did. Your father must be a good man." "There never was a better one!" Notwithstanding Jerry said all this with tremendous energy, his voice trembled a little, and there came one of those dashes of feeling over him which made him think that he must drop everything and go to that dear father right away. "When he comes after you and takes you away, what will I do?" Nettie's mournful tone restored the boy's courage. He laughed a little. "No use in borrowing trouble about that. He is afraid he cannot come back before winter, if he does then. I'm going to get him to let me stay here until he does come, though. And now we must attend to business. What will you have first in my line? Chairs, tables, sofas--why, anything you say, ma'am." And both faces were sunny again. CHAPTER VI. HOW IT SUCCEEDED. MRS. JOB SMITH leaned against the table in her bright kitchen, caught up the edge of her apron in one hand, then leaned both hands on her sides, and thought. Jerry had been consulting her. Was there any way of planning so that the front room in the Decker house could have a carpet? He repeated all Mrs. Decker said about a room not being home-like without one, and Mrs. Smith, at first inclined to combat the idea, finally admitted that in winter a room where you sat down to visit, did look kind of desolate without a carpet, unless it was a kitchen, and had a good-sized cook stove to brighten it up. There was no denying that that square front room would be the better for a carpet. At the same time there was no denying that the Deckers needed a hundred other things worse than they did a carpet. But the hearts of the boy and girl were bent on having one; and what the boy was bent on, Mrs. Job Smith liked to have accomplished, and believed sooner or later that it would be. The question was, How could she help to bring it about? "There's that roll of rag carpeting, bran-new," she said aloud; Mrs. Smith had spent a good deal of her time alone and had learned to hold long conversations with herself, arguing out questions as well, sometimes she thought better, than a second party could have done. At this point she put her hands on her sides. "There's enough of it, and more than enough. I had it made for the front room the year poor Hannah died, and sent me that boughten carpet which just exactly fitted, and is good for ten years' wear. That rag carpeting has been rolled up and done up in tobacco and things ever since--most two years. Sarah Jane doesn't need it, and I don't know as I shall ever put it on the kitchen. I don't like a great heavy carpet in a kitchen, much, anyway; rugs, and square pieces that a body can take up and shake, are enough sight neater, to my way of thinking. But I can't afford to give away bran-new carpeting. To be sure it only cost me the warp and the weaving; and I got the warp at a bargain, and old Mother Turner never did ask me as much for weaving as she did other folks. The rags was every one of them saved up. Poor Hannah used to send me a lot of rags, and Sarah Jane and I sewed them at odd spells when we wouldn't have been doing anything. It is a good deal of bother to take care of it, and I'm always afraid the moths will get ahead of me, and eat it up. I might sell it to her for what the warp and the weaving cost me. But land! what would she pay with? I might give her a chance to do ironing. I have to turn away fine ironing every week of my life because I can't do more than accommodate my old customers. Who knows but she is a pretty good ironer? I might give her the coarse parts to iron, and watch her, and find out. Job is always at me to have somebody help with the big ironings, and I have always said I wouldn't have a girl bothering around, I would rather take less to do. But then, she is a decent quiet body, and that Nettie is just a little woman. She will have to do something to help along if they ever get started in being decent; perhaps ironing is the thing for her, and I can start her if she knows how to do it. For the matter of that, I might teach her how, if she wanted to learn. To be sure they need other things more than carpets, but it wouldn't take her long to pay for this, if I just charge for the weaving. I might throw in the warp, maybe, seeing I got it at a bargain. The two are so bent on having a carpet for that room; and Jerry, he said he had prayed about it, and while he was on his knees, it kind of seemed to him as though I was the one to get to think it out. That's queer now! Jerry don't know anything about the carpet rolled up in tobacco in the box in the garret; why should he think that I could help? I feel almost bound to, somehow, after that. I don't like to have Jerry disappointed, nor the little girl either, now that's a fact. I take to that little Nettie amazingly. Well, I know what I'll do. I'll talk with Job about it, and if he is agreed, maybe we will see what she says to it." This last was a kind of "make believe," and the good woman knew it; Job Smith thought that his wife was the wisest, most prudent, most capable woman in the world, and besides being sure to agree to whatever she had to propose, he was himself of such a nature that he would have given away unhesitatingly the very clothes he wore, if he thought somebody else needed them more than he. There was little need to fear that Job Smith would ever put a stumbling-block in the way of any benevolence. But who shall undertake to tell you how astonished Mrs. Decker was when Mrs. Smith, having duly considered, and talked with Sarah Jane, and talked with Job, and unrolled the tobacco-smelling carpet, and examined it carefully, did finally come over to the Decker home with her startling proposition. It is true that a carpet had taken perhaps undue proportions in this poor woman's eyes. Her best room during all the years of her past life had never been without a neat bright carpet; it had been the pleasant dream of her second married-life, so long as any pleasantness had been left to allow of dreaming; and she could not get away from the feeling that people who had not a scrap of carpeting for their best room, were very low down. She opened her eyes very wide while listening to Mrs. Smith's rapidly told story. What kind of a carpet could it be that was offered to her for simply the price of the weaving? for Job and his wife after some figuring with pencil and paper, had agreed together heartily to throw in the warp. She went over to the neat kitchen and examined the carpet. It was bright and pretty. There was a good deal of red in it, and there was a good deal of brown; a blending of the two colors which had been the subject of much discussion between herself and husband in the days when Mr. Decker talked anything about the comforts of his home. How well it would look in the square room which had two windows, and was really the only pleasant room in the house. Surely she could iron enough to pay for that. "I am not very strong," she said with a sigh. "I used to be, but of late I've been failing. But Nannie is so handy, and so willing, that she saves me a great deal, and she has a notion that she would like to fix up the front room and try to get hold of my Norm. It would be worth trying, maybe, but I don't know. We are very low down, Mrs. Smith." And then Mrs. Decker sank into one of the green painted chairs and cried. "Of course it is worth trying," Mrs. Smith said, bustling about, as though she must find some more windows to raise; tears always made her feel as though she was choking. "If I were you I would have a carpet, and curtains to the windows, and lots of nice things, and make a home fit for that boy of yours to have a good time in. There is nothing like a nice pleasant home to keep a boy from going wrong." Before Mrs. Decker went home, she had promised to try the ironing the very next week, and if she could do it well enough to suit Mrs. Smith, the carpet should be bought. "Poor thing!" said Mrs. Smith, looking after her, and rubbing her eyes with the corner of her apron. "The ironing shall suit; if she irons wrinkles into the collars and creases in the cuffs, I won't say a word; only I guess maybe I won't give her collars and cuffs to iron; not till she learns how. I ought to have done something to kind of help her along before; only I don't know what it would have been. It takes that boy of mine to set folks to work." Meantime, "that boy" sat in the kitchen door, studying. Not from a book, but from his own puzzled thoughts. He did not see his way clear. Under Nettie's direction he had planned a very satisfactory sofa with a back to it, and two chairs, but how to get the material needed to finish them, and also for curtains for the new room, had sent Nettie home in bewilderment, and stranded him on the doorstep in the middle of the afternoon to think it out. "How much stuff does it take for curtains, anyhow?" "For curtains?" said Mrs. Smith, coming back with a start from her ironing table and the plan she had for teaching Mrs. Decker to iron shirts. "Why, that depends on what kind of stuff it is, and how many curtains you want, and how big the windows are." "Well, what do they use for curtains?" Mrs. Smith still looked bewildered. "A great many things, Jerry. They have lace curtains, and linen ones, and muslin ones, and in some of the rooms up at Mrs. Barlow's, on the hill, you know, when I helped her do up curtains that time, they had great heavy silk things, or maybe velvet, though the stuff didn't look much like either. I don't rightly know what it was, but it was heavy, and soft, and satiny, and shone like gold, in some places." Jerry turned around on the doorstep and looked full at Mrs. Smith, and laughed. "I know," he said, "I have seen such curtains. They are damask. I am not thinking about lace, and damask, and all that sort of thing. I mean for Mrs. Decker's front room. What could be used that would do, and how much would they cost?" "Surely!" said Mrs. Smith, coming down to everyday life. "What a goose I was. I might have known what you were thinking about. Why, let me see. Cheese cloth makes real pretty curtains; if you have a bit of bright calico to put over the top, and a nice hem in, or maybe some bright calico at the bottom to help them hang straight, I don't know as there is anything much prettier. Though to be sure they aren't good for much to keep people from looking in; and they aren't quite suitable for winter. I suppose you want to plan for winter, too? I'll tell you what it is, I believe that unbleached muslin makes about as pretty a curtain as a body could have; put bright red at the top and bottom, and they look real nice." "What is unbleached muslin? I mean, how much does it cost?" "Why," said Mrs. Smith, dropping into her rocking-chair, and folding her hands on her lap to give her mind fully to the important question, "as to that, I should have to think; I'm not very good at figures. Unbleached muslin costs about eight cents a yard, or maybe ten; we'll say ten, because I've always noticed that was easier to calculate. Ten cents a yard, and two windows, say two yards to each, and no, two yards to each half, four yards to each, and twice four is eight, eight yards at ten cents a yard. How much would that be, Jerry? You can tell in a minute, I dare say." "Eighty cents," said Jerry with a sigh. "I am afraid she will think that is a great deal. And then there's the red to put on them. What does that cost?" "Why, that ought to be oil calico, because the other kind ain't fast colors. I don't much believe you could get those curtains up short of fifty cents apiece; and that is a good deal for curtains, that's a fact. Paper ones don't cost so much, but then there's the rollers and the fastenings, I don't know but they do cost just as much. And then they tear." "I don't want her to have paper ones," said Jerry decisively. "A dollar for the curtains, and I don't know how much more for the furniture. She can't imagine where the money is to come from." "I could tell where it ought to come from," said Mrs. Smith, nodding her head and looking severe. "It ought to come out of Joe Decker's pocket. He makes his dollar a day, even now, when he doesn't half work; Job said so only last night. But furniture is dreadful dear stuff, Jerry, worse than curtains. And they need about everything. I never did see such a desolate house! And those little girls need clothes." "Nettie is going to make them some clothes," said Jerry; "she has some that she has outgrown; a great roll in her trunk; she is going to make them over to fit the little girls. She is at work at some of them to-day. And you know, auntie, I am making the furniture." "Making it!" "Well, making its skeleton. If we had some clothes to put on it, I guess it would be furniture. I've made a sofa, and two chairs, and I'm at work at a table. Only I would like to see how the things were going to look, before I went any farther." "Making furniture!" repeated dazed Mrs. Smith; and she shook her head. "I don't see how you can! You can do a great many things that no other boy ever thought of; but I'm afraid that's beyond you." "Why, you see, auntie, she has seen some made, and she showed me what to do with hammer and nails. You make a frame, just the size you want for a sofa, and put a back to it, then it is padded with cotton, and covered with something bright, cretonne, I think she said they called it, only it wasn't real cretonne, but a cheap imitation, and they tack a skirt to the thing in puckers, so," and he caught up a bit of Mrs. Smith's apron to illustrate. "I see," she said, nodding her head and speaking in an admiring tone. "What a contriving little thing she is! And what about the chairs?" "The chairs are served in very much the same way. The table is just two flat boards and a post between them, nailed firmly, then they tack red calico, or blue, or whatever they want, around it, and cover it with thin white cheese cloth or some lacey stuff, she had the name of it, but I've forgotten; it doesn't cost much, she said, and tie a sash around it, and it looks like an hour glass. The question is, where are the cotton and calico to come from?" "Well," said Mrs. Smith, "you two do beat all! It can't take much stuff for a little table; and I can see that they might be real pretty. I want a table myself, to stand under the glass in my front room. What if you was to make two, and I'd get cloth enough for two, and she would do mine and hers, to pay for the cloth?" Jerry sprang up from his doorstep, and came over and put both arms around Mrs. Smith's trim waist. "Hurrah!" he said; "you are the contriver. That will do splendidly. I'll go this minute and set up the skeleton of another table. I have two boards there which will just do it. Then we'll think out a way to get the rest of the stuff." Now Nettie, busy with her fingers in the house next door, had not left the others to do all the thinking. She knew the price of "oil calico," and imitation cretonne, and unbleached muslin; she knew to a fraction how many yards of each would be needed, and the sum total appalled her. Yet she too knew that her father earned at least a dollar a day, and did not give them two a week to live on. This her mother had told her. Also she knew that on this Saturday evening at about six o'clock, he would probably be paid for his week's work. Couldn't she contrive to coax some of the money from his keeping into hers? She had hinted the possibility of her mother's getting hold of it, and Mrs. Decker had said that the bare thought of trying made her feel faint and sick; that if she had ever seen her father in a passion such as he could get into when things did not go just to suit him, she would know what it was to ask him for anything. Nettie, who had not yet been at home a week, had some faint idea of what her father might do and say if he were very angry. Nevertheless, she was trying to plan a way to meet him before he left the shop, and secure some of that money if she could. With this thought in view, she presently laid aside the neat little petticoat on which she had been sewing, brushed her hair, put on her brown ribboned hat, and her brown gloves, watched her chance while the children were quarreling over an apple that Jerry had given them, and stole out in the direction of the shop where her father worked. She would not ask Jerry to go with her, though he looked after her from the barn window and wished she had; if her father was to grow angry and swear, and possibly strike, no one should know it but herself, if she could help it. I must not forget to tell you of one thing that she did before starting. She went into her mother's little tucked-up bedroom, put a nail over the door, which she had herself arranged for a fastening, and knelt there so long by the barrel which did duty as a table, that her mother, had she seen her, would have been frightened. But Nettie felt that she needed courage for this undertaking; and she knew where to get it. Then she had to walk pretty fast; it was later than she thought, for just as she turned the corner by the shop where her father worked, the six o'clock bell began to ring. "Halloo!" said one of the men, standing in the door while he untied his leather apron. "What party is this coming down the street? The neatest little woman I've seen for many a day. A stranger in this part of the world, I reckon. Doesn't fit in, somehow. Do you know who it is, Decker?" And Mr. Decker, thus appealed to, came to the door in time to receive Nettie's bow and smile. "That's my girl," he said, and a look of pride stole into his face. She was a trim little creature; it was rather pleasant to own her as his daughter. "Your girl!" and the astonishment which the man felt was expressed by a slight whistle. "I want to know now if that is the little one who went away six, seven years ago, was it? She's as pretty a girl as I've seen in a year. Looks smart, too. I say, Decker, you better take good care of her. She is a girl to be proud of." At just that moment Nettie sprang up the steps. "May I come in, father?" she said; "I wanted to see where you worked." Her voice was clear and sweet. All the men in the shop turned to look. The foreman who was paying Mr. Decker, and who had begun severely with the sentence: "Two half-days off again, Decker; that sort of thing won't"--stopped short at the sound of Nettie's voice, and gave him the two two dollar bills, and two ones, without further words. Six dollars! If only she could get part of it! How should the delicate matter be managed? Suddenly Nettie acted on the thought which came to her. What more natural than for a child to ask for money just then and there? She needed it, and why not say it? Perhaps he would not like to refuse her entirely before all the men. And poor Nettie had a very disagreeable fear that he would certainly refuse her if she waited until the men were gone; even if she found a chance to ask him before he reached the saloon just next door, where he spent so much of his money. Or at least where his wife thought he spent it. "May I have some of that, father? I want some money. That was one of the things I came after." This was certainly the truth. Why not treat it as a matter of course? "Why should I take it for granted that he is going to waste all his money?" said poor Nettie to herself. All the same she knew she had good reason for supposing that he would. "Money!" he said, as he seized the bills. "What do you know about money, or want with it?" "Oh, I want things. The little girls must have some shoes. I promised to see about it as soon as I could. And then I want to buy your Sunday dinner; a real nice one." The tone was a winning, coaxing one. Nettie did not know how to coax; was not very well acquainted with her father; did not know how he would endure coaxing of any sort, but some way must be tried, and this was the best one she knew of. "Divide with her, Decker," said the man who had first called his attention to Nettie. "She looks as though she could buy a dinner, and cook it too. If I had a trim little girl like that to look out for my comfort, hang me if I wouldn't take pleasure in keeping her well supplied." He sighed as he spoke, and nobody laughed; for most of them remembered that the man's home was desolate. Wife and daughter both buried only a few months before. This man sometimes spent his earnings on beer, but he was accustomed to say that there was nobody left to care; and that while he had them, he took care of them; which was true. Nettie looked up at the man with a curious pitiful interest. His tone was very sad. She was grateful to him for his words. Was there possibly something sometime that she could do for him? She would remember his face. All the men were looking now, and there was Nettie's outstretched hand. Her face a good deal flushed; but it wore an expectant look. She was going to believe in her father as long as she could. "Go ahead, Joe, divide with the girl. Such a handsome one as that. You ought to be proud of the chance." "You have something worth taking care of, it seems, Decker." It was the foreman who said this, as he passed on his way to the other side of the room where the men were waiting. Whether it was a father's pride, or a father's shame, or both these motives which moved Mr. Decker, I cannot say, but he actually took a two and a one and placed them in her hands as he said hastily, "There, my girl, I've given you half; you can't complain of that." CHAPTER VII. LONG STORIES TO TELL. IF only I had a good picture of Nettie, so that you might see the radiant look in her eyes just then! She had hoped for the money, she had tried to trust her father, but she was, nevertheless, wonderfully surprised when her hand closed over three dollars. "O father!" she said, "how nice." And then her courage rose. "Will you go with me, father, to buy the shoes? The little girls are so eager for them. I promised to take them with me to Sunday-school to-morrow, if I could get shoes, but I don't know how to buy them very well. Could you go?" The shoe shop was farther down the street, in an opposite direction from the one where Mr. Decker generally got his liquor, and wily Nettie remembered that there was a street leading from it which would take them home without passing the saloon. Of course it was true that she needed his help to select the shoes, but it was also true that she was very glad she did. Mr. Decker was untying his apron, and rolling down his sleeves; he felt very thirsty--the sight of the money seemed to make him thirsty. He had meant to go directly to the saloon, give them one dollar on the old bill, and spend what he needed, only a very little, on beer. With the rest of the money he honestly meant to pay his rent. Yet no one ought to have understood better than he that he would not be likely to get away from that saloon with a cent of money in his pocket. For all that, he wanted to go. He wished Nettie would go away and let him alone. But the men were watching. "You can't fit the children to shoes without having them along," he said gruffly. But Nettie was ready for him: "Oh!" she said, swiftly unrolling a newspaper, "I brought their feet along." And with a bright little laugh she plumped down two badly worn shoes on the work table. "That left-footed one is Satie's. The other was so dreadfully worn out, I was afraid the shoemaker couldn't measure it. This is the best one of Susie's." It was plain to any reasonable eyes that two pairs of shoes were badly needed. "I guess they need other things besides shoes." It was the father who said this, and they were out on the street, and he was actually being drawn by Nettie's eager hand in the opposite direction from the saloon. "O no," she said; "I had some clothes which I had outgrown; I have been at work at them all day, and they make nice little suits. Auntie Marshall sent them each a cunning little white sunbonnet. When we get the shoes, they will look just as nice as can be. You don't know how pleased they are about going to Sunday-school. I am so glad they will not be disappointed to-morrow." The shoes were bought, good, strong-looking little ones, and wonderfully cheap, perhaps because Nettie did the bargaining, and the man who knew how scarce her money must be, was sorry for the little woman. It did seem a great deal to pay out--two whole dollars--for shoes when everything was needed. It was warm weather, perhaps she ought to have let the little girls go barefoot for awhile, but then she could not take them to Sunday-school very well; at least, it seemed to her that she couldn't; and father was willing to have them bought now. Who could tell when he would be willing again? He stood in the door and waited for her, wondering why he did so, why he could not leave her and go back to that saloon and get his drink. One reason was, that she gave him no chance. She appealed to him every minute for advice. "Father, can we go to market now? I want to get just a splendid piece of meat for your Sunday dinner. I know just how to cook it in a way that you will like." "I guess you can do that without me; I have an errand in another direction." They were on the street again. She caught his hand eagerly. "O, father, do please come with me to the market, there are so many men there I don't like to go alone; and it is so nice to take a walk with you. I haven't had one since I came. Won't you please come, father?" Joe Decker hardly knew what to think of himself. There was something in her soft coaxing voice which seemed to take him back a dozen years into the past, and which led him along in spite of himself. The meat was bought, Nettie looking wise over the different pieces, and insisting on a neck piece, which the boy told her was not fit to eat. "I know how to make it fit," she said, with a little nod of her head. "I want three pounds of it. And then, father, I want two carrots and two onions; I'm going to make something nice." Only sixty-eight cents of her precious money left! "I did need some butter," she said mournfully, "and that in the tub looks nice, but I guess I can't afford it this time." "How much is butter?" asked Mr. Decker, suddenly rising to the needs of the moment. "Twenty-five," said the grocer, shortly. He did not know the trim little woman who had paid for her carrots and onions, and held them in a paper bag at this moment, but he did know Joe Decker and had an account against him. He had no desire to sell him any butter. "Then give me two pounds, and be quick about it." And Mr. Decker put down a dollar bill on the counter. The man seized it promptly and began to arrange the butter in a neat wooden dish, while he said, "By the way, Mr. Decker, when will it be convenient to settle that little account?" "I'll do it as soon as I can," said Mr. Decker, speaking low, for Nettie turned toward him startled; this was worse than she thought. She had not known of any accounts. Mr. Decker himself had forgotten it until he stood in the very door. It was months since he had bought groceries. "Is it much, father?" Nettie asked, and he replied pettishly: "Much? no. It is only a miserable little three dollars. I mean to pay it; he needn't be scared." Yet why he shouldn't be "scared," when he had asked for those three dollars perhaps fifty times, Mr. Decker did not say. "Father," said Nettie, in a very low voice, "couldn't you let the man keep the fifty cents, on the account, and that would be a beginning?" But this was too much. "No," said Mr. Decker; "I will pay my bills when I get ready and not before; and it is none of your business when I do it. You must not meddle with what does not belong to you." "No, sir;" said Nettie, though it was hard work to speak just then; there was a queer little lump in her throat. She was not in the habit of being spoken to in this way. The butter was ready, and the man handed back the change. Mr. Decker pocketed it, saying as he did so, "I'll have some money for you next week, I guess." And then they went away. "If it hadn't been for the girl I'd have kept the fifty cents and got so much out of the old drunkard; but someway I couldn't bring myself to doing it with her looking on." This was what the grocer muttered as they walked away. But they did not hear him. Nettie was bent now on tolling her father down the cross street to go home. "Father," she said, "we are going to have milk toast for supper. Mother said she would have it ready, and toast spoils, you know, if it stands long. Couldn't we go home this way and make it shorter?" He was a good deal astonished that he did it. He was still very thirsty, but there really came to him no decent excuse for deserting his little girl and going back to the saloon. And they walked into the house together, so astonishing Mrs. Decker that she almost dropped the teapot which she was filling with hot water. Whatever other night, Mr. Decker contrived to get home to supper, he was always late on Saturday, and in a worse condition than at any other time. That was really a nice little suppertime. Mrs. Decker had done her part well, not for the husband whom she did not expect, but in gratitude to the little girl who had worked so hard all the week for herself and her neglected babies. The toast was well made, and the tea was good. Besides, there was a treat; not ten minutes before, Mrs. Job Smith had sent in a plate of ginger cookies; "for the children," she said, and the children each had one. So did the father and mother. Mr. Decker washed his hands before he sat down to the table, for the tablecloth had been freshly washed and ironed that day, and his wife had on a clean calico apron and a strip of white cloth about her neck, and her hair was smooth. "There!" said Nettie, displaying her meat, "now, mother, we can have that stew for to-morrow, just as we planned. Father got the meat, and the carrots, and everything. And what do you think, little girlies, father bought you each a pair of shoes!" Mrs. Decker set down the teapot again. She was just in the act of giving her husband a cup of tea, and the color came and went on her face so queerly that Nettie for a moment was frightened. As for the father, he felt very queer. Scared and silent as his little girls generally were in his presence, they could not keep back a little squeal of delight over this wonderful piece of news. Altogether, Mr. Decker could not help feeling that it really was a nice thing to be able to buy shoes and meat for his family. "Come," he said, "give us your tea if you're going to; I'm as dry as a fish." And the tea was poured. The toast was good, and there was plenty of it, and someway it took longer to eat it than this family usually spent at the supper-table; and then, after supper, the shoes had to be tried on, and Nettie called the little girls to their father to see if the shoes fitted, and he took Sate up on his lap to examine them, which was a thing that had not happened to Sate in so long that Susie scowled and expected that she would be frightened, but Sate seemed to like it, and actually stole an arm around her father's neck and patted his cheek, while he was feeling of the shoe. Then Mrs. Decker had a happy thought. She winked and motioned Nettie into the bedroom and whispered: "Don't you believe he might like to see the children in their nice clothes? I ain't seen him notice them so much in a year; and he hasn't been drinking a mite, has he?" "Not a drop," said Nettie; "I'll dress Susie." And she flew out to the kitchen. "Father, just you wait until Susie is ready to show you something. Come here, Susie, quick." And almost in less time than it takes me to tell it, Susie was whisked into the pretty petticoats and dress which had been shortened and tightened for her that day. The dress was a plain, not over-fine white one; but it was beautifully ironed, and the white sunbonnet perched on the trim head completed the picture and made a pretty creature of Susie. I am sure I don't wonder that the child felt a trifle vain as she squeaked out in her new shoes to show herself to her father. She had not been neatly dressed long enough to consider it as a matter of course. "Upon my word!" said Mr. Decker, and there he stopped. This was certainly a wonderful change. He looked at his little daughter from head to foot, and could hardly believe his eyes. What a pretty child she was. And to think that she was his! Certainly she ought to have new shoes, and new clothes. Sate's arm was still about his neck, and Sate's sweet full lips were suddenly touched to his rough cheek. "I've got new clothes too," she said sweetly, "only I doesn't want to get down from here to put them on." The father turned at that and kissed her. Then he sat her down hastily and got up. Something made his eyes dim. He really did not know what was the matter with him, only it all seemed to come to him suddenly that he had some very nice children, and that they ought to have clothes and food and chances like others, and that it was his own fault they hadn't. Nettie hated tobacco, but she went herself in haste and lighted her father's pipe and brought it to him; if he must smoke, it would be so much better to have him sit in the door and do it rather than to go off down to that saloon. She hated the saloon worse than the tobacco. As she brought the pipe, she said within her hopeful little heart: "Maybe sometime he won't want either to drink or smoke. I most know we can coax him to give them both up; and then won't that be nice?" One thing was troubling her; as soon as she could, she followed her mother into the yard and questioned, "Do you know where Norm is?" Yes, Mrs. Decker knew. He came home just after Nettie had gone out, and said he had an hour's holiday; their room had closed early for Saturday, and he was going to wash up and go down street before supper. "My heart was in my mouth," said the poor mother; "because when there is a holiday he gets into worse scrapes than he does any other time; he goes with a set that don't do anything but have holidays, and they always have some mischief hatched up to get Norm into. I never see the like of the boys in this town for getting others into scrapes; but I didn't dare to say a word, because Norm thinks he is getting too big for me to give him any words, and just as he was going out, that boy next door--Jerry, you said his name was, didn't you?--he came out and called Norm, real friendly, and they stood talking together; he appeared to be arguing something, and Norm holding off, and at last Norm came in and wanted the tin pail and said he had changed his mind and was going fishing; and they went off together, them two." And Mrs. Decker finished the sentence with a rare smile. She was grateful to Jerry for carrying off her boy, and grateful to Nettie for thinking about him and being anxious. "Good!" said Nettie with a happy little laugh, "then we will have some fried fish to-morrow for breakfast. What a nice day to-morrow is going to be." Mr. Decker was a good deal surprised at himself, but he did not go down town again that night. After he had smoked, he felt thirsty, it is true, and at that very minute Nettie came in with the one glass which they had in the house, and it was full of lemonade. "Did he want a nice cool drink?" she had two lemons which she bought with her own money, and she knew how to make good lemonade, Auntie Marshall used to say. The father drank the cool liquid off almost at a swallow, said it was good, and that he guessed she knew how to do most things. By this time the little girls had been tucked away to bed, and just as Mr. Decker rose up to say he guessed he would go down street awhile, Norm appeared with a string of fish. They were beauties; he declared that he never had such luck in his life; that fellow just bewitched the fish, he believed, so they would rather be caught than not. Then came a talk about dressing them. Norm said he was sure he did not know how; and Mr. Decker said, a great fellow like him ought to know how. When he was a boy of fourteen he used to catch fish for his mother almost every day of his life, and dress them too; his mother never had to touch them until they were ready to cook. Then Nettie, flushed and eager, said: "O father, then you can show me how to do it, can't you? I would like to learn just the right way." And the father laughed, and looked at his wife with something like the old look on his face, and said he seemed to be fairly caught. And together they went to the box outside, and in the soft summer night, with the moon looking down on them, Nettie took her lesson in fish dressing. When the work was all done, Norm having hovered around through it all, and watched, and helped a little, Mr. Decker went back to the kitchen and yawned, and wondered how late it was. No clock in this house to give any idea of time. There used to be, but one day it got out of order and Mr. Decker carried it down street to be fixed, and never brought it back. Mrs. Decker asked about it a good many times, then went herself in search of it, and found it in the saloon at the corner. "He took it for debt," the owner told her, and a poor bargain it was; it never came to time, any better than her husband did. However, just as Mr. Decker made his wonderment, the old clock over at Mrs. Smith's rose up to its duty, and dignifiedly struck nine. "Well, I declare," said Mr. Decker, "I did not think it was as late as that. There ain't any evenings now days. Well, I guess, after all, I'll go to bed. I'm most uncommon tired to-night somehow." Norm had already gone up to his room; and Mrs. Decker when she heard her husband's words, hurried into the bedroom to hide two happy tears. "I declare for it, I believe you have bewitched him," she said to Nettie, who followed her to ask about the breakfast; "I ain't known him to do such a thing not in two years, as to go to bed at nine o'clock without ever going down street again. He don't act like himself; not a mite. I was most scared when I saw him take Sate in his arms; that child don't remember his doing it before, I don't believe. Did he really buy the things, child, and pay for them? Well, now, it does beat all! And Saturday night, too; that has always been his worst night. Child, if you get hold of your father, and of my Norm, there ain't anything in this world too good for you. I'd work my fingers to the bone any time to help along, and be glad to." It was all very sweet. Nettie ran away before the sentence was fairly finished, waiting only to say, "Good-night, mother!" She had done this every night since she came, but to-night she reached up and touched her lips to the tall woman's thin cheek. Poor Nettie had been used to kissing somebody every night when she went to bed. It had made her homesick not to do it. But she had not wanted to kiss anybody in this house, except the little girls. To-night, she wanted to kiss this mother. She reached the back door, then stopped and looked back; her father sat in his shirt sleeves, in the act of pulling off one boot. Should she tell him good-night? He had not been there for her to do it a single evening since she came home. Should she kiss him? Why not? Wasn't he her father? Yet he might not like it. She could not be sure. He was not like the fathers she had known. However, she came back on tiptoe and stooped over him, her voice low and sweet: "Good-night, father! I am going now." And then she put a kiss on the rough cheek, just where little Sate had left her velvet touch. Mr. Decker started almost as though somebody had struck him. But it was not anger which filled his face. "Good-night, my girl," he said, but his voice was husky; and Nettie ran as fast as she could across the yard to the next house. "I did not get the things," she said to Jerry, who stood in the doorway waiting for her; "I couldn't; but, Jerry, I had such a wonderful time! Father gave me money, and we went to market, and bought shoes and he bought butter; and since we came home almost everything has happened. I can't begin to tell you. I can get some of the things on Monday. Father gave me money." "All right," said Jerry; "I didn't get the skeletons ready, either; I meant to work after tea, but instead of that I went fishing." And he gave her a bright smile. "Oh! I know it," said Nettie, breathless almost with eagerness. "That is part of my nice time. Jerry, I am so glad you went fishing to-night, and I am so glad you caught your fish; not the ones which we are to eat for our Sunday breakfast, you know, but the other one. Do you understand?" And Jerry laughed. "I understand," he said, "I had a nice time, too. We shall have some long stories to tell each other, I guess. We must go in now." CHAPTER VIII. A SABBATH TO REMEMBER. SUNDAY was a successful day at the Deckers. The sun shone brilliantly; a trifle too warm, you might have thought it, for comfort; but the little Deckers did not notice it. The fish was beautifully browned and the coffee was delicious. Mr. Decker had a clean shirt which his wife had contrived to wash and mend, the day before, and all things were harmonious. Some time before nine o'clock. Sate and Susie were arrayed in their new white suits, and with their trim new shoes, and hair beautifully neat, they were as pretty little girls as one need want to see. Nettie surveyed them with unqualified satisfaction, and then seated them, each with a picture primer, while she made her own toilet. She put on the dress which had been her best for Sunday, all summer. It was a gingham, a trifle finer and a good deal lighter than the brown one in which she had travelled. It was neatly made, and fitted her well; and the brown hat and ribbons looked well with it. On the whole, when they set off for Sabbath-school, Jerry accompanying them, arrayed in a fresh brown linen suit, Mrs. Decker watching them from the side window, admitted that she never saw a nicer-looking set in her life! She even had the courage to call Mr. Decker to see how nice the two little girls looked, and he came and watched them out of sight. And when he said that his Nan was about as nice a looking girl as he wanted to see, she answered heartily that Nannie was the very best girl she ever saw in her life. Fairly in the Sabbath-school, a fit of extreme shyness came over the two little Deckers. With Susie, as usual, it took the form of fierceness; she planted her two stout feet in the doorway and resolutely shook her head to all coaxings to go any farther; keeping firm hold of Sate's hand, and giving her arm a jerk now and then, to indicate to her that she was not to stir from her protector's side. The situation was becoming embarrassing. Nettie could not leave them, and Jerry would not; though some of the boys were giggling, those of his class were motioning him to leave the group and join them. The superintendent came forward and cordially invited the children in, but Susie scowled at him and shook her head. Then Jerry went around to Sate's side and held out his hand. "Sate," he said in a winning tone, "come with me over where all those pretty little girls sit, and I will get you a picture paper with a bird on it." To Susie's utter dismay, Sate who had meekly obeyed her slightest whim during all her little life, suddenly dropped the hand that held hers, and gave the other to Jerry, with a firm: "I'm going in, Susie; we came to go in, and Nettie wants us to." Poor, astonished, deserted Susie! She had been so sure of Sate that she had neglected to keep firm hold, and now she had slid away. There was nothing left for Susie but to follow her with what grace she could. They were seated at last. Seven little girls of nearly Nettie's size and age. As she took a seat among them, I wish I could give you an idea of how she felt. Up to this hour, it had not occurred to her that she was not as well dressed as others of her age. Not quite that, either; being a wise little woman of business, she was well aware that her clothes were plain, and cheap, and that some girls wore clothes which cost a great deal of money. But I mean that this was the first time she had taken in the thought of the difference, so that it gave her a sting. The Sabbath-school which she had been attending, was a mission, in the lower part of the city; the scholars, nearly all of them, coming from homes where there was not much to spare on dress; and the girls of her class had all of them dressed like herself, neatly and plainly. It was very different with these seven girls. She felt at once, as she seated herself, as though she had come into the midst of a flower garden where choice blossoms were glowing on every side, and she might be a poor little weed. Summer silk dresses, broad-brimmed hats aglow with flowers, kid gloves, dainty lace-trimmed parasols--what a beautiful world it was into which this poor little weed had moved? Nettie knew that her hat was coarse, and the ribbon narrow and cheap, and her gloves cotton, but these things had never troubled her before. Why should they now? The truth is, it was not the pretty things, but the curious glances that their owners gave at the small brown thrush which had come in among them. They seemed to poor Nettie to be making a memoranda of everything she had on, from the narrow blue ribbon on her hair to the strong neat boots in which her plump feet were encased. The look in their eyes said, "How queerly she is dressed!" It was impossible to get away from the thought of their thoughts, and from the fact that the girl next to her drew her blue silk dress closer about her, and placed her pink-lined parasol on the other side, even though the pretty lady who sat before them in the teacher's seat, welcomed her kindly, and hoped she would be happy among them. Nettie hoped so, too; but she could hardly believe that it could be possible. She looked over at Jerry. He seemed to be having a good time; there was not so much difference in boys' clothes as in girls. She did not see but he looked as well as any of them. She looked forward at the little girls. Susie had allowed herself to be led in search of Sate, and the two were at this moment side by side in a seat full of bobbing heads; they had taken off their sunbonnets, and their pretty heads bobbed about with the rest, and the white dresses of the two looked as well at a distance as the others, though Nettie could see that there were ruffles, and tucks, and embroidery and lace. But some were plain; and none of the wee ones seemed to notice or to care. It was only Nettie who had gotten among those who made her care, by the glance of their eyes, and the rustle of their finery. She tried to get away from it all; tried hard. She listened to the words read, and joined as well as she could, in the hymn sung, and answered quietly and correctly, the questions put to her; but all the while there was a queer lump in her throat, which kept her swallowing, and swallowing, and a wish in her heart that she could go back to Auntie Marshall's. [Illustration: LORENA BARSTOW.] When the service was over, she stood waiting, feeling shy and alone. Jerry was talking with the boys in his class, and the little girls were being kissed by their pretty teacher. Her classmates stood and looked at her. At last the teacher who had been talking with one of the secretaries turned to her with a pleasant voice: "Well, Nettie, we are glad to have you with us. Can you come every Sabbath, do you think? Are you acquainted with these girls? No? Then you must be introduced. This is Irene Lewis, and this is Cecelia Lester," and in this way she named the seven girls, each one making in turn what seemed to poor Nettie the stiffest little bow she had ever seen. At last, Irene Lewis, who stood next to her, and wore an elegant fawn-colored silk dress trimmed with lace, tried to think of something to say. "You haven't begun school yet, have you? I haven't seen anything of you. What grade are you in?" Nettie explained that she had not been in a regular school; that she went afternoons to a private school which had no grades, and that now she did not expect to go at all; because mother could not spare her. "A private school!" said Miss Irene, "and held only in the afternoon! What a queer idea! I should think morning was the time to study. What was it for?" Then it became necessary to further explain that the girls who attended this afternoon school, had all of them work to do in the mornings, and could not be spared. "I have heard of them," said Lorena Barstow. "They are sort of charity schools, are they not?" Lorena was dressed in white, and looked almost weighed down with rich embroidery; but she had a disagreeable smile on her face, and a look in her eyes that made Nettie's face crimson. "I don't know," she said, quietly, "I never heard it called by that name. My auntie thought very well of it, and was glad to have me go." Then she turned away, and hoped that none of the girls would ask her any more questions, or try to be friendly with her. Just now, she could be glad of only one thing, and that was, that she need not go to school with these disagreeable people. She stepped quite out of sight behind the screen which shielded the next class, and waited impatiently for the little girls. They seemed to be having a very nice time, and were in no haste to come to her. Standing there, waiting, she had the pleasure of hearing herself talked about. "Isn't she a queer little object?" said Lorena Barstow. And when one of the others was kind enough to say that she did not see anything very queer about her, Lorena proceeded to explain. "You don't! Well, I should think you might. Did you ever see a girl in our class before, with a gingham dress on? Of course she wore her very best for the first Sunday; and her hat is of very coarse straw, just the commonest kind, and last year's shape at that; then look at her cotton gloves! I'm sure I think she is as funny a little object as ever came into this room." "What of it? I am sure she looks neat and clean, and she spoke very prettily, and knew her lesson better than any of us." "I didn't say she didn't. I was only talking about her clothes." "Clothes are not of much consequence." "O Miss Ermina! When you dress better than any of us. Why don't you wear gingham dresses, and cheap ribbons, and cotton gloves, if you think they look as well as nice ones?" "I did not say that; I wear the clothes my mother gets for me; but I truly don't think they are the most important things in the world." "Neither do I. You needn't take a person up in that way, as though you were better than anybody else. I am sure I am willing she should wear what she likes." Then Cecelia Lester took up the conversation: "She could not be expected to dress very well, of course. Don't you know she is old Joe Decker's daughter?" "Who is Joe Decker? I never heard of him." "Well, he is just a drunkard; they live over on Hamlin street. Mrs. Decker washes for my auntie once in awhile, when they have extra company, and I have seen her there, with both the little girls. I heard that Joe's daughter who has been living out, for years, was coming home." "Living out! that little thing! No wonder she hasn't better clothes. She has a pretty face, I think. But it seems sort of queer to have her come into our class, doesn't it? We sha'n't know what to do with her! She can't go in our set, of course." "O, I don't know. Perhaps Ermina Farley will invite her to her party." At this point, all the others laughed, as though a funny thing had been said, but Ermina spoke quietly: "So far as her gingham dress is concerned, I am sure I would just as soon. I don't choose my friends on account of the clothes they wear; and I suppose the poor thing cannot help her father being a drunkard; but then, I shouldn't like to invite her, for fear you girls would not treat her well." Nettie could see the toss of Lorena Barstow's yellow curls as she answered: "Well, I must say I like to be careful with whom I associate; and mother likes to have me careful. I am sorry for the girl; but I don't know that I need make her my most intimate friend on that account. Say, girls, did you ever notice what fine eyes that boy has who came in with her? Some think he is a real handsome fellow." "He seems to be a particular friend of this girl; I saw them on the street together yesterday, and they were talking and laughing, as though they enjoyed each other ever so much. Who is that boy?" Lorena seemed to be prepared to answer all questions. "He isn't much," she said, with another toss of her yellow curls. "His name is Jerry Mack; a regular Irish name, and he is Irish in face; I think he is coarse-looking; dreadful red cheeks! The girls over on the West Side say he is smart, and handsome, and all that. I don't see where they find it." "O, he is smart," said Cecelia Lester. "My brother knows him, and he says there isn't a more intelligent boy in town. I used to think he was splendid; I have talked with him some, and he is real pleasant; but I must say I don't understand why he goes with that Decker girl all the time." "I don't see why he shouldn't," declared Lorena. "For my part, I think they are well matched; he works for his board at Job Smith's the carman's, and she is a drunkard's daughter; they ought to be able to have nice times together." "Does he work for his board?" chimed in two or three voices at once. "Why, I suppose so, or gets it without working for it. He lives there, anyway. They say his father has deserted him, run away to California, or somewhere; Jerry will have to learn the carman's trade, and support himself, and Nettie, too, maybe." Whereupon there was a chorus of giggles. Something about this seemed to be thought funny. Ermina seemed to have left the group, so they took her up next. "Ermina Farley meant to invite him to her party, but I hardly think she will, when she finds out how all we girls feel about it. She tries to do things different from everybody else, though; so perhaps that will be the very reason why she will ask them both. I'll tell you what it is, girls, we must stand up for our rights, and not let her have everything her own way. Let's say squarely that we will not go to her party if she invites out of our set. I could endure the boy if I had to, because he is very polite, and merry; and so few of the boys around here know how to behave themselves; but if he has chosen that Decker girl for his friend, we must just let them both alone. This class isn't the place for that girl; I wonder who invited her in? I think it was real mean in Miss Wheeler to ask her to come again, without knowing how we felt about it." All this time was poor Nettie behind that screen. Not daring to stir, because there was no place for her to go. The little girls were still engaged with their teacher, who had Sate on her lap, and Susie by her side, and was showing them some picture cards, and apparently telling them a story about the pictures. Jerry had sat down beside a boy who was copying something which Jerry seemed to be reading to him, and various groups stood about, chatting. They were waiting for the bell to toll before they went into church. Nettie could not go without the little girls, and she could not stir without being brought into full view. And just then she felt as though it would not be possible for her to meet the eyes of anybody. If only she could run away and hide, where she need never see any of those dreadful girls again! or, for that matter, see anybody. It was true, she was a drunkard's daughter, and would go down lower and lower, until her neat dress would be in rags, and her hat, coarse as it was, would grow frayed, and be many years behind the fashion. What a cruel, wicked world it was! Who could have imagined that those pretty, beautifully dressed girls could have such cruel tongues, and say such hateful words! Didn't they know she was within hearing? Couldn't they have waited until she got out of the way, so that she need not have known how dreadful they were? So far as that was concerned, they did not know it. To do them justice, I think none of them would have wounded her so, quite to her face. They might have been cold, but they would not have been cruel in her presence. They thought she went out of the room, instead of behind the screen. The bell tolled, at last, and Jerry finished his reading, and came over to her, his face bright. The girls in their beautiful plumage fluttered away like gay birds, the teacher of the little girls came toward her holding a hand of each, and saying brightly: "Are these your little sisters? What dear little treasures they are! We have had such a pleasant time together. I hope you have enjoyed your first day at Sabbath-school?" "Thank you, ma'am," said Nettie. She was in great doubt as to whether this was a correct answer, for the sentence had the tone of a question in it, but truthful Nettie could not say that she enjoyed it very much, and did not want to say that she had never had a more miserable time in her life. Jerry was harder to answer. "Was it nice?" he asked her, as soon as they were fairly outside. "Did you have a good time? Those girls looked a trifle like peacocks, didn't they? I thought you were the best dressed one among them." O, ignorant boy! If there hadn't been such a lump in Nettie's throat, she would have laughed at this bit of folly. As it was, she contrived to give him a very little shadow of a smile, and was glad that the church door was near at hand, and that there was no more time for closer questions. All through the morning service she was trying to forget. It was not easy to do, for there sat three of the girls in a seat on which she could look down all the time; and try as she would, it seemed impossible to keep eyes or thoughts from turning that way. The girls did not behave very well. They whispered a good deal, during the Bible reading, and giggled over a book that fell while the hymn was being sung; and though Nettie covered her eyes during prayer, she could not help hearing a soft little buzz of whispering voices, even then. Jerry looked straight before him, with bright, untroubled face, and seemed to be having a good time. Susie and Sate, who had never been in church before in their lives, behaved remarkably well. In the course of the morning Sate leaned her little brown head trustingly against Nettie and dropped asleep, and Nettie put her arm around her, arranged her pretty head comfortably, and looked lovingly down upon her, and was glad that she had a little sister to love. Two of them, indeed, for Susie sat bolt upright and looked straight before her, and took in everything with wide-open eyes, and looked so handsome with her glowing cheeks and her lovely curls, that it was almost impossible not to feel proud of the womanly little face. Nettie contrived to keep herself occupied with the prattle of the children during the walk home. She was not yet ready for Jerry's questions. She did not know what to say. Of one thing she felt sure; that was, that she never meant to go to that Sabbath-school again. Dinner was nearly ready when they reached home; such an appetizing smell of soup as had never filled the Decker kitchen before. Mrs. Decker had followed the directions of her young daughter with great care; and presently a very comfortable family sat down to the table. There were no soup plates, but there were two bowls for the father and mother, and a deep saucer for Norm; and the little girls were made happy with tin cups, two of which Nettie had found and scoured, the day before. It was certainly a very pleasant time. After dinner, as Nettie was preparing to wash the dishes, her mother came out with a troubled face, and whispered: "Norm says he guesses he will go out for a walk; and I know what that means; he gets with a mean set every Sunday, and they carouse dreadful; it is the worst day in the week for boys. I was thinking, what if you could get that boy next door to go a-fishing again; Norm enjoyed it last night first-rate; and he said that boy was as jolly company as he should ever want. If he could keep him away from that set, he would be doing a good deed." "But, mother," she said, "it is Sunday." "Yes," said Mrs. Decker, "that's just what I've been saying; Sunday is the day when he gets into the worst kind of scrapes. Do you think Jerry would help us?" "I know he would if he could; but he could not go fishing on Sunday, you know." "Why not? I should think it was enough sight better than for Norm to go off with a set of loafers, who do all sorts of wicked things." Poor Nettie was not skilled in argument; she did not know how to explain to her mother that Jerry must not do one wrong thing, to keep Norm from doing another wrong thing, even though the thing he chose might be the worse of the two. There was only a simple statement which she could make. "This is God's day, mother, and he says we must not do our own work, or our own pleasure on his day; and I know Jerry will try to obey him, because he is his soldier." Mrs. Decker looked at the red-cheeked young girl a moment, then drew a long sigh. "Well," she said, "I know that is the way good folks talk; I used to hear plenty of it when I was young; and I was brought up to keep the Sabbath as strict as anybody; I would do it now if I could; but I'm free to confess that I would rather have Norm go a-fishing, ten times over, than to go with those fellows and get drunk." "Yes'm," said Nettie, respectfully. "But then, God says we must obey him; and he has told us just how to keep the Sabbath day. He couldn't help us to do things for other people, if we begin by disobeying Him." Mrs. Decker went away, the trouble still on her face, and Nettie began to wash the dishes. Suddenly, she dropped her dish towel and rushed after Norman as he lounged out of the door. "Norman," she called, just as he was moving down the street, "won't you take the little girls and me over to that green place, that I see, the other side of the pond? There is such a pretty tree there, and it looks so pleasant on the bank. I have some story papers that I promised to read to the little girls, and that would be such a nice place for reading. Won't you?" Norm stopped and looked down at her in astonishment, and some embarrassment. "You can go over there without me," he said, at last; "it isn't such a dreadful ways off; there's a plank across the stream down there a ways, where it is narrow. Lots of girls go there." Nettie looked over at it timidly. She was honestly afraid of the water, and nothing short of keeping Norm out of harm's way would have tempted her to cross a plank, with the little girls for companions. She spoke in genuine timidity. "I wouldn't like to go over there alone, with just the children. I am not used to going about alone. Couldn't you go with us, for just a little while? It will seem so nice to have a big brother to take care of me." Something about it all seemed suddenly rather nice to Norm. He had never been asked to take care of anybody before. He stood irresolutely for a moment, then said lazily, "Well, I don't know as I care; bring on your babies, then, and we'll go." Nettie sped back to the kitchen, dashed after the little girls and their sunbonnets, saying to Mrs. Decker as she went: "Mother, would you mind finishing the dishes? Norman is going to take the little girls and me over to the big tree, and we are going to stay there awhile, and read." "I'll finish,'em," said Mrs. Decker, comfort in her tone, and she murmured, as she watched them away, Sate with her hand slipped inside of Norm's, "I declare, I never see the beat of that girl in all my life." CHAPTER IX. A BARGAIN AND A PROMISE. DURING the next few days work went on rapidly in the Decker home: or, more properly speaking, in the room over Job Smith's barn. Jerry developed such taste in the manufacture of furniture, or of "skeletons," that Nettie grew alarmed lest there should never be found clothing enough to cover them. However, matters in that respect began to look brighter. Mrs. Job Smith, as she grew into an understanding of the plan, dragged out certain old trunks from her woodhouse chamber and looked them over. There were treasures in those trunks, which even Mrs. Job herself had forgotten. A gay chintz dress of Job's mother's, which had been saved by her daughter-in-law "she couldn't rightly tell for what, only Job set store by it because it was his old mother's." Nettie fairly clapped her hands in delight over it, and then blushed crimson when she remembered it was not hers. "Well, now," said Mrs. Job, "I'll just tell you what it is. If you see anything in life to do with these rolls of things, here is a bundle of old muslin curtains, embroidered, you know, and dreadful pretty once, I suppose, but they are all to pieces now. Mrs. Percival, a lady I used to clear starch and iron for, gave them to me; paid me in that kind of trash, you know, though what in the world she thought I could ever do with them is more than I could imagine. But I was younger then than I am now, and was kind of meek, and I lugged home the great roll and said nothing; only I remember when I got home I just sat down on a corner of the table and cried, I was so disappointed. I had expected to be paid in money, and I had planned two or three things to surprise Job, and they had to be given up. Well, as I was saying," she added, in a brisker tone, having roused from her little dream of the past to watch Nettie's fingers linger lovingly and wistfully among the rolls of soft muslin, "they have never been the least mite of good to me. I have just kept them because it didn't seem quite the thing to throw such pretty soft stuff into the rag-bag, and they were dreadful poor trash to give away; and Sarah Jane, she is tired of having them in the attic taking up room, and if there is anything in life can be done with these things in this trunk, I wish you would just go shares, and make some things for me too. Sarah Jane would like it, first-rate." This sentence fairly made Nettie catch her breath. The treasures in that trunk were so wonderful to her. "I could make such lovely things!" she said, almost gasping out the words; "but, O Mrs. Smith, you can't mean it! I'm afraid I oughtn't to." "Why, bless your heart, child, I tell you I don't know of a single useful thing in that trunk; not one; it is just a pack of rubbish, now, that's the truth; and if Sarah Jane has begged me once to let her sell it to the rag pedlers, I believe she has twenty times." The bare thought of such a sacrifice as this almost made Nettie pale. Also it settled her resolution and her conscience. She reached forward and plunged into the delights of the despised trunk with a satisfied air. "I will make you some of the prettiest things you ever saw in your life," she said, with the air of one who knew she could do it. And Mrs. Smith laughed, and watched her with admiring eyes, and told Sarah Jane that she believed the child could do some things that other folks couldn't. It was after the day's work was done, and the little girls were asleep, and Nettie sat in the back door waiting for father and Norm, and wishing that they had not gone down town again, that she had a chance to say the few little words which she had made up her mind to say to Jerry. While her hands had been busy over long seams of rag carpeting, and over the wonderful trunk full of treasures, her thoughts had, much of the time, been busy with other matters. Yesterday at noon she had been sure that she should never go to that Sabbath-school again. By night, after the quiet talk under the trees with Norm and the little girls, she had not been so sure of it. The little girls could not go without her, and they had learned sweet lessons that very day, which had filled their young heads full of wondering thoughts, and they had asked questions which had at least amused Norm, and which might set him to thinking. In any case, ought she, because she had not been happy in her class, to deprive the little girls of the help which the Sabbath-school might be to them? Then how badly it would look to Norm, and to her mother, if she went no more. And what would Jerry think? On the whole, the longer she thought about it, the more she felt inclined to believe that her decision might have been a hasty one, and it was her duty to continue in that Sabbath-school, and even in that class, at least until the superintendent placed her in some other. It was a good deal of a trial to her to decide the question in this way, but she could not make any other seem right. There had also been another question to decide, which had been harder, and cost her more tears than the other. She was a very lonely little girl, and it seemed hard to give up a friend. But this, too, seemed to be the only right thing to do, so she made it known to Jerry in the moonlight. "Do you know, Jerry, I have been thinking all day of something that I ought to say to you?" "All right," said Jerry, whittling away at the stick which he was fashioning into a proper shape to do duty as a towel rack for Mrs. Job Smith's kitchen towel. "Go ahead, this is a good time to say it." And he held the stick up and took a scientific squint at it in the moonlight. "This thing would work better if the wood were a little softer. I am going to make one for your mother if it is a success, and it will be. Now what is your news?" "It isn't news," said Nettie, "it is only something that I have made up my mind I ought to say. Jerry, I think, that is, I don't think, I mean"-- And there she stopped. "Just so," said Jerry, nodding his head gravely, "that is plain, I am sure, and interesting; I agree with you entirely." After that, both of them had to laugh a little, and the story did not get on. "But I truly mean it," Nettie said at last, her face growing grave again, "and I ought to say it. What I want to tell you is, that I have made up my mind that you and I must not be friends any more." Jerry did not laugh now, he did not even whistle. His knife suddenly stopped, and he squared around to get a full view of her face. "What!" he said at last, as though he did not think it possible that he could have understood her. "Yes," she said firmly, "I mean it, Jerry, and it is real hard to say; you and I ought not to be friends, or, I mean we must not let folks know that we are friends. We mustn't take walks together, nor work together. I don't mean that I shall not like you all the same; but we mustn't have anything to do with each other." "Why not, pray? Have I done anything to make you ashamed of me? I'll try to behave myself, I'm sure." This was so ridiculous that Nettie could not help smiling a little. "O, Jerry!" she said, "you know better than to talk in that way. It sounds strange, I know, and it is real hard to do, but I am sure it is right, and we must do it." "But what in the world is the trouble? Can't you give a fellow a reason for things? Is it your brother who doesn't like it?" "O no! Norm likes you; and mother is as much obliged to you as she can be, for getting him to go a-fishing. But, you see, it is bad for you to be my friend." "Oh-ho! I don't believe your influence is very hard on me; I don't feel as though you had led me very far astray!" "It isn't fun, Jerry, it is sober earnest. I have heard things said that set me to thinking. I overheard the girls talk! those girls in the class, you know, yesterday. I guess they did not know I was there. They talked about me a good deal. They said I had a last year's hat on, and that is true, and my dress was only gingham, and washed at that." "Washed!" interrupted Jerry in bewilderment; "well, what of that? Would they have had you wear it dirty?" But Nettie hastened on; she did not feel equal to explaining to him the subtle distinction between a brand-new dress and one that had been "done up." "They said a good deal more than that, Jerry, and it was all true. They said I was nothing but a drunkard's daughter," and here Nettie found it hard work to control the sob in her throat. "That is not true," said Jerry, indignantly. "Your father has not drank a drop in three days." "Oh! but, Jerry, you know he does drink; and he has gone down town to-night, and mother is sure that he will not come home sober. It is all true, Jerry. I don't mean that I am going to give up. I shall try for father all the time; and I think maybe he will reform, after a while. And I won't forget our promise, and I know you won't; but it is best for us not to act like friends. They talked about you, too; they said you were handsome, and they used to like you; they thought you were smart. But now you had begun to go with me, so you couldn't be much. One of them said you were an Irish boy, that you had a real Irish name. Are you Irish, Jerry?" "Not much! Or, hold on, I don't know but I am. Why, yes, my great-grandmother came from the North of Ireland. Father is proud of it, I remember." "Well, I don't care where you came from, you know. Nor whether you are Irish, or Dutch, or what; I am only telling you what they said. They told how you worked at Job Smith's for your board; and one of them said your father had run away and left you." "Well, he has; run three thousand miles away, and left me, as sure as time. But he means to run back again, when he gets ready." "I knew that wasn't true, Jerry; and I only tell you because I thought you might want to speak about your father in a way that would show them it wasn't so. But what I want to say is, that I know they will get all over those feelings when they come to know you; and they will like you, and invite you to places, if you don't go with me; but they won't any of them have anything to do with me, on account of my father. And, Jerry, I want you not to go with me, or talk with me any more." "Just so," said Jerry, in an unconcerned voice. "Do you think I am making this stick too long for the frame? Our kitchen towels are pretty wide. Well, now, see here, Miss Nettie Decker, you would not make a very honest business woman if you went back on a square bargain in that fashion. You and I settled it to be partners in a very important business; and partners can't get along very well without speaking to each other. There is no use in talking. You are several days too late. The mischief is done. I'm your friend and fellow-laborer and partner in the cabinet business, and the upholstery line, and all the other lines. You will find me the hardest fellow to get rid of that ever was. I don't shake off worth a cent. I shall take walks with you every chance I can get; and shout to you from the woodshed window when you are over home, and wait for you to come out when I think it is about time you should appear, and be on hand in all imaginable places. Now I hope you understand what sort of a fellow I am." If the boy had looked in Nettie's face just then, he would have seen a sudden light flash over it which carried away a good deal of the look of patient endurance which it had worn for the last few hours. Still her voice was full of earnestness. "But, Jerry, they will not have anything to do with you if you act so. By and by they will not even speak to you. And they won't invite you to their parties, nor anywhere. There is going to be a party next week, and I think you would have been invited if you hadn't gone with me Sunday; now I am afraid you won't be." And now Jerry whistled a few rollicking notes. "All right," he said in a cheery tone. "If there is any one thing more than another that I don't like to go to, it is a girls' party where they make believe act like silly, grown-up men and women. I know just about what kind of a party those girls in that class would get up. If you have been the means of saving me from an invitation, it is just another thing to thank you for. Look here, Nettie, let us make another bargain, sober earnest, not to be broken. I don't care a red cent for the girls, nor their invitations, nor their bows; I would just as soon they did not know me when they met me as not. If that is their game, I shall like nothing better than to meet them half-way; girls who would know no better than to talk the way they did about you, are not to my liking. If because you wear clothes that are neat and nice and the best you can afford, and because I am an Irish boy and work for my board, are good reasons for not having anything to do with us, why, we will return the favor and not have anything to do with them, for better reasons than they have shown. Let's drop them. I thought some of them would be good friends to you, maybe, and help you to have a nice time; but they are not of the right sort, it seems. You and I will have just as good times as we can get up. And we will bow to them if they bow to us; if they don't we will let them pass. What is settled is, that we are bound to work out this thing together. Understand?" "Yes," said Nettie, with a little soft laugh, "I understand, and I don't believe I ought to let you do it. But you don't know how nice it is; and I can't tell you how lonesome I felt when I thought I ought not to talk with you any more." "I should like to see you help yourself," said Jerry, in a complacent tone. "You would find it the hardest work you ever did in your life not to talk to me, when I should keep up a regular fire of questions of all sorts and sizes." Then Nettie laughed outright, but added, after a moment of silence, "But, Jerry, I think the worst of it is about father; and that is true, you know. They might not think so much about the clothes, if it were not for him." "That has nothing to do with it," said Jerry sturdily. "You are not to blame for your father's drinking liquor. Wouldn't you stop it quick enough if you could? It is only another reason why they ought to be friends to you. Besides, there wouldn't be so much of the stuff for folks to drink, if Lorena Barstow's father did not make it." "O Jerry! does he?" "Yes, he does. Owns one of the largest distilleries in the country." "Jerry, I think I would rather have my father drink liquor than make it for other folks. At least he doesn't make money out of other people's troubles." "So would I, enough sight," said Jerry with emphasis. Then he lifted up his voice in answer to Mrs. Job Smith who appeared in the adjoining door. "All right, auntie, we are coming." And he carefully gathered the chips he had whittled, into his handkerchief, and rose up. "Going over now, Nettie? I guess auntie thinks it is time to lock up." Nettie darted within for a few minutes, then appeared, and they crossed the yard together. As they stepped on the lower step of Mrs. Smith's porch, Jerry said: "Remember this is a bargain forever and aye, Nettie; there is to be no backing out, and no caring for what folks say, or for what happens, either now or afterwards. Do you promise?" "I promise," said Nettie with a smile. And they went into the clean kitchen. Before Jerry went to bed that night he took out of the fly leaf of his Bible the picture of a tall man, and kissed it, as he said aloud: "So you have run away and left your poor little Irish boy, have you? But when you run back again, won't they all be glad to see you, though!" CHAPTER X. PLEASURE AND DISAPPOINTMENT. THE day came at last when the front room at the Deckers was put in order. I don't suppose you have any idea how pretty that room looked when the last tack was driven, and the last fold in the curtain twitched into place! The rag carpet was very bright. "I put a good many red and yellows in it," said Mrs. Smith, "and now I know why I did it. It is just bright enough for this room. I don't see how you two could have got it down as firm as you have." "Nettie managed it," said Mrs. Decker, "she is a master hand at putting down carpets." The furniture was done and in place, and certainly did justice to the manufacturers. There were two "sofas" with backs which were so nicely padded that they were very comfortable things to lean against, and the gay-flowered goods that had looked "so horrid" in a dress that Mrs. Smith could never bring herself to wear it, proved to be just the thing for a sofa-cover. Between the windows was a very marvel of a table. Nobody certainly to look at it, draped in the whitest of muslin, with a pink cambric band around its waist, covered with the muslin, and looking as much like pink ribbon as possible, would have imagined that a square post, about six inches in diameter, and two feet long, with a barrel head securely nailed to each end, was the "skeleton" out of which all this prettiness was evolved. "And mine is as like it as two peas," said Mrs. Smith, "only mine is tied with blue ribbon. Who would have thought such things could be made out of what they had to work with! I declare them two young things beat all!" This time she meant Nettie and Jerry, not the two tables. The curtains for which, after much consideration, cheap unbleached muslin had been chosen, when their pinkish lambrequins of the same gay-flowered goods as the sofas, had been cut and scalloped, and put in place, were almost pretty enough to justify the extravagant admiration which they called forth. But the crowning glory was, after all, a chair which occupied the broad space between the window and the door. It was cushioned, back, and sides, and arms; it was dressed in a robe which had belonged to Job Smith's grandmother. It was delightful to look at, and delightful to sit in. Mrs. Decker declared that the first time she sat down in it, she felt more rested than she had in three years. Those two barrel chairs were triumphs of art. Jerry had been a week over the first one, planning, trying, failing, trying again; Nettie had seen one once, in the room of a house where she used to go sometimes to carry flowers to a sick woman. She had admired it very much, and the lady herself had told her how it was made, and that her nephew, a boy of sixteen, made it for her. Now, although Jerry was not a boy of sixteen, he had no idea there lived one of that age who could accomplish anything which he could not; so he persevered, and I must say his success was complete. Mrs. Smith believed there never was such a wonderful chair made, before. Jerry who had been missing for the last half-hour, now appeared, and with long strides reached the nice little mantel and set thereon a lamp, not very large, but new and bright. "That belongs to the firm," he said, in answer to Nettie's look. "I saw a lamp the other day that I knew would just fit nicely on that mantel, and I couldn't rest until I had tried it." Nettie's cheeks were red. She glanced over at her mother to see how she would like this. Nettie did not know whether a poor boy's money ought to be taken to provide a lamp for the new room; she much doubted the propriety of it. "The first money I earn, or father gives me, I can pay him back," she thought, then gave herself up to the enjoyment of her new treasure. None of them had planned to give a reception that evening, yet I do not know but such an unusual state of things as was found at the Deckers about eight o'clock, is worthy of so dignified a name. Mr. Decker and Norm came in to supper together, and both a little late. Nettie had trembled over what kept them, and her heart gave a great bound of relief and thanksgiving, when they appeared at last, none the worse for liquor. Indeed, she did not think either of them had taken even a glass of beer. They were in good humor; a bit of what Mr. Decker called "extra good luck" had fallen to him in the shape of a piece of work which it was found he could manage better than any other hand in the shop, and for which extra wages were to be paid. And Norm had been told that he was quite a success in a certain line of work. "He kept me after hours to give the new boy a lift," said Norm, good-naturedly; "he said I knew how to do the work, and how to tell others better than the other fellows." It was a good time for Mrs. Decker to tell what had been going on in the square room, or rather to hint at it, and tell them when supper was over, they should go in and see. "Nannie and I haven't been folding our hands while you have been working," she said with a complacent air, and a smile for Nettie as warmed that little girl's heart, making her feel it would not be a hard thing to love this new mother a great deal. So after supper they went in. I suppose you can hardly understand or imagine their surprise; because, you see, you have been used all your life to nicely arranged rooms. For Mr. Decker it stirred old memories. There had been a time when his best room if not so fine as this, was neat and clean, with many comforts in it. "Well, I never," he began, and then his voice choked, and he stopped. However, Norm could talk, and expressed his surprise and pleasure in eager words. "Where did you get the table, and the gimcracks around that chair? _Is_ that a chair, or a sofa, or what? Halloo! here's a new lamp. Let's have it lighted and see how it works. I tell you what it is, Nannie Decker, I guess you're a brick and no mistake." Then father was coaxed to sit down in the barrel chair, and try its strength and its softness, and guess what it was made of. And the little girls stood at his knee and put in eager words as to the effect that they helped, and altogether, there was such a time as that family had not known before. Just as Nettie was explaining that it was dark enough to try the lamp, and Norm went for a match, Mrs. Smith made her way across the yard, and who should march solemnly behind her but Job Smith himself! "Come right along," said Mrs. Decker heartily, as the new lamp threw a silvery light across the room. "Come and try the new sofa. Here, Mr. Smith, is a chair for you, if that is too low. Decker, he's got the seat of honor; Nettie said her pa must have the first chance in it." The name "Nettie" seemed to slip naturally from Mrs. Decker's tongue; she had heard Jerry use it so often during the past few days, that it was beginning to seem like the proper name of that young woman. Mr. Smith sat down, slowly, solemnly, in much doubt what to do or say next. "Well, Neighbor Decker, these young folks of ours are busy people, ain't they, and seem to be getting the upper hand of us?" Then he laughed, a slow, pleasant laugh. Mrs. Smith laughed a round, admiring satisfied laugh; she was _very_ proud of Job for saying that. Then they fell into conversation, the two men, about the signs of the times as regarded business, and prices, and various interests. Mr. Decker was a good talker, and here lay some of his temptations; there was always somebody in the saloons to talk with; there was never anybody in his home. Jerry came, presently, to admire the room and the lamp, and to have a little aside talk with Nettie. Norm was trying one of the lounges near them. "How did you make this thing?" he asked Jerry, and Jerry explained, and Norm listened and asked a question now and then, until presently he said, "I know a thing that would improve it; the next time you make one, try it and see." "What is that?" asked Jerry. "Why, look here, in this corner where you put the crossbar, if you should take a narrower piece, so, and fit it in here so," and the sofa was unceremoniously turned upside down and inside out, and planned over, Jerry in his turn becoming listener until at last he said: "I understand; I mean to fix this one, some day." Nettie nodded, her eyes bright; it was not about the sofa that they shone; it gave her such intense pleasure as perhaps you cannot understand, to see her father sitting beside Mr. Smith, talking eagerly, and her mother and Mrs. Smith having a good time together, and Jerry and Norm interested in each other. "It is exactly like other folks!" she said to Jerry, later, "and I don't believe either father or Norm will go down street to-night." And they didn't. It was a very happy girl who went over to Mrs. Smith's woodhouse chamber to sleep that night. She sang softly, while she was getting ready for rest; and as often as she looked out of the window towards the square room in the next house, she smiled. It looked so much better than she had ever hoped to make it; and father and Norm had seemed so pleased, and they had all spent such a pleasant evening. Alas for Nettie! All the next day her happiness lasted. She sang over her work; she charmed the little girls with stories. She made an apple pudding for dinner, she baked some choice potatoes for supper; but they were not eaten, at least only by the little girls. They waited until seven o'clock, and half-past seven, and eight o'clock for the father and brother who did not come. Jerry, who stopped at the door and learned of the anxiety, slipped away to try to find out what kept them; but he came back in a little while with a grave face and shook his head. Both had left their shops at the usual time; nobody knew what had become of them. Jerry could guess, so also could Mrs. Decker. The poor woman was too used to it to be very much astonished; but Nettie was overwhelmed. She ate no supper; she did not sing at all over the dishwashing. She watched every step on the street, and turned pale at the sound of passing voices. She put the little girls to bed, and cried over their gay chatter. She coaxed her sad-faced mother to go to bed at last, and drew a long sigh of relief when she went into her bedroom and shut the door. It had been so dreadful to hear her say: "I told you so; I knew just how it would be. They will both come staggering home. It's of no use." Nettie did not believe it. She believed that work somewhere was holding them; people often had extra work to do, or were sent on errands, but she went at last over to the woodhouse chamber; it would not do to keep the Smiths up longer. Instead of making ready for bed, she kneeled down before the little window which gave her a view of the next house, and watched and waited. They came at last; father and son; not together. Norm came first, and stumbled, and shuffled, and growled; his voice was thick, and the few words she could catch had no connection or sense. He had too surely been drinking. But he was not so far gone as the father. _He_ had to be helped along the street by some of his companions; he could not hold himself upright while they opened the door. And when the gentle wind blew it shut again, he swore a succession of oaths which made Nettie shudder and bury her face in her hands. But she did not cry. It was the first time in her young life that her heart was too heavy for tears. She drew great deep sighs as she went about, at last, preparing for bed; she wished that the tears would come, for the choking feeling might be relieved by them; but the tears seemed dried. She tossed about on her neat little bed, in a sorrow very unlike childhood. Poor, disappointed Nettie! The sun shone brightly the next morning, but there was no brightness in the little girl's heart. She was early down stairs, and stole away to the next house without seeing anybody. Mrs. Decker was up, with a face as wan as Nettie's. "Well," she said, in a hopeless tone, "it's all over. Did you hear them come in last night? Both of 'em. If it had been one at a time, we could have stood it better; but both of 'em! I _did_ have a little hope, as sure as you live. Your pa seemed so different by spells, and Norm, he seemed to like you, and to stay at home more, and I kind of chirked up and thought may be, after all, good times was coming to me; but it's all of no use; I've give up; and it seems to me it would have been easier to have stayed down, than to have crept up, to tumble back. "Not that I'm blaming you, child," she said, "you did your best, and you did wonders; and I think sometimes, maybe if I had made such a brave shift as that in the beginning, things wouldn't have got where they have. But I didn't, and it's too late now." Not a word had Nettie to say. It was a sad breakfast-time. Mr. Decker shambled down late, and had barely time to swallow his coffee very hot, and take a piece of bread in his hand, for the seven o'clock bells were ringing, and punctuality was something that was insisted on by his foreman. Norm came later, and ate very little breakfast, and looked miserable enough to be sent back to bed again. Nettie only saw him through a crack in the door; she stayed out in the little back yard, pretending to put it in order. He made his stay very short, and went away without a word to mother or sister; and the heavy burden of life went on. Mrs. Decker prepared to do the big ironing which yesterday she had been glad over, because it would give them a chance to have an extra comfort added to the table; but which to-day seemed of very little importance. Nettie washed the dishes, and wished she was at Auntie Marshall's, and tried to plan a way for getting there. What was the use of staying here? Hadn't she tried her very best and failed? didn't the mother say it was harder for her than though they hadn't tried at all? In the course of the morning, Mrs. Smith sent in a basket of corn. Sarah Jane brought it. "Some folks on a farm that mother ironed for, when they lived in town, sent her a great basket full; heaps more than we can use, and mother said it would be just the thing for your men folks; they always like corn, you know." Mrs. Decker took the basket without a smile on her face. "Your mother is a very kind woman," she said, "the kindest one I ever knew; in fact, I haven't known many kind people, and that's the truth. She has done all she could to help us, but I don't know as we can be helped; it seems as though some people couldn't." Sarah Jane went back and told her mother that Mrs. Decker seemed dreadful downhearted and discouraged; and Mrs. Smith replied with a sigh that she didn't know as she wondered at it; poor thing! Nettie made the dinner as nice as she could. Mr. Decker ate with a relish, and said the corn was good, and he had sometimes thought that the bit of ground back of the house might be made to raise corn; and Nettie brightened a little, and looked over at Norm and was just going to say, "Let's have a garden next summer," when he spoiled it by declaring that he wouldn't slave in a garden for anybody. It was hard enough to work ten hours a day. Then his father told him that he guessed he did not hurt himself with work; and he retorted that he guessed they neither of them would die with over-work; and his father told him to hold his tongue. In short, nothing was plainer than that these two were ashamed of themselves, and of each other, and were much move irritable than they had been for several days. The afternoon work was all done, and Nettie had just hung up her apron, and wondered whether she should offer to iron for awhile, or run away to the woodhouse chamber, and write to Auntie Marshall, when Jerry appeared in the door. She had not seen him since the sorrow of the night before had come upon them; Nettie thought he avoided coming in, because he too was discouraged. Her face flushed when she heard his step, and she wished something would happen so that she need not turn around to him. She felt so ashamed of her own people, and of his efforts to help them. His voice, however, sounded just as usual. "Through, Nettie? Then come out on the back step; I want to talk with you." "There is no use in talking," she said, sadly. But she followed him out, and sat down listlessly on the broad low step, which the jog in Mr. Smith's house shaded from the afternoon sun. Jerry took no notice of the words if indeed he heard them. "I heard some news this morning," he began. "Two of the older boys at the corner, that one in Peck's store, you know, and the one next door told me that a lot of fellows were going off to-night on what he called a lark. They have hired a boat, and are going to row across to Duck Island, and catch some fish and have a supper in that mean little hole which is kept on the island; they mean to make an all-night of it. I don't know what is to be done next; play cards, I suppose; they do, whenever they get together, and lots of drinking. It is a dreadful place. Well, I heard, by a kind of accident, that they thought of asking Norm to join 'em. At first they said they wouldn't, because he wouldn't be likely to have any money to help pay the bills; but then they remembered that he was a good rower, and thought they would get his share out of him in that way; and I say, Nettie, let's spoil their plans for them." "How?" asked Nettie, drearily. Jerry talked on eagerly. "I have a plan; I rented a boat for this afternoon, and was going to ask Mrs. Decker to let me take you and the chicks for a ride, and I meant to catch some fish for our supper; but this will be better. I propose to invite Norm and two fellows that he goes with some, to go out with me, fishing. I have a splendid fishing rig, you know, and I'll lend it to them, and help them to have a good time, and then if you will plan a kind of treat when we get back--coffee, you know, and fish, and bread and butter, we could have a picnic of our own and as much fun as they would get with that set on the island. I believe Norm would go; he is just after a good time, you see, and if he gets it in this way, he will like it as well, maybe better, than though he spent the night at it and got the worst of his bargain. Anyhow, it is worth trying; if we can save him from this night's work it will be worth a good deal. Don't you think so?" Instead of the hearty, "yes, indeed," which he expected, Nettie said not a word; and when he turned and looked at her, to learn what was the matter, her face was red and the tears were gathering in her eyes. "Don't you know what has happened?" she asked at last. "I thought I heard you in your room last night when he came home." "Yes," said Jerry, speaking gravely, "I was up. What of it?" "What of it? O Jerry!" and here the tears which had been choking poor Nettie all day had it their own way for a few minutes. She had not meant to cry; but she felt at once how quickly the tears relieved the lump in her throat. "I don't mean that, exactly," Jerry said, after waiting a minute for the sobs to grow less deep, "of course it was a great trouble, and I have been so sorry for Mrs. Decker all day that I wanted to stay away, because I could not think of the right thing to say; but it's only another reason why we should work and plan in all ways to get ahead of them and save Norm." "O Jerry! don't you think it is too late?" "Too late! What in the world can you mean? Has anything happened to-day that I haven't heard of? Where is Norm? Has he gone away anywhere?" "O, no," said Nettie, "he has gone to work; but I mean--I meant--doesn't it all seem to you of no use at all? After we worked so hard and got everything nice, and he seemed so pleased, and stayed at home all the evening and talked with us, and then the very next night to come home like that!" Jerry stared in blank astonishment. "I don't believe I understand," he said at last. "You did not think that Norm was going to reform the very minute you did anything pleasant for him, did you?" "N-no," said Nettie slowly, "I don't suppose I did; but it all seemed so dreadful! I expected something, I hardly know what, and I could not help feeling disappointed and miserable." Nettie's face was growing red; she began to suspect she might be a very foolish girl. "Why, that is queer," said Jerry. "Now I am not disappointed a bit. I am sorry, of course, but I expected just that thing. Why, Nettie, they go after men sometimes for months and years before they get real hold and are sure of them. There is a lawyer in New York that father says kept three men busy for five years trying to save him. They didn't succeed, either, but they got him to go to the One who could save him. He is a grand man now. Suppose they had given up during those five years!" "Do you think it may take five years to get hold of Norm?" There were tears in Nettie's eyes, but there was a little suggestion of a smile on her face, and she waited eagerly for Jerry's answer. "I'm sure I hope not," he said, "but if it does, we are not to give him up at the end of five years; nor _before_ five years, that is certain." Nettie wiped the tears away, and smiled outright; then sat still in deep thought for several minutes. Then she arose, decision and energy on her face. "Thank you, Jerry; I wish you had come in this morning. I have been a goose, I guess, and I almost spoiled what we tried to do. We'll get up a nice supper if you can get Norm and the others to come. I don't believe they will, but we can try. We have coffee enough to make a nice pot of it, and Mrs. Smith sent us some milk out of that pail from the country that is almost cream. I will make some baked potato balls, they are beautiful with fish; all brown, you know; and I was going to make a johnny-cake if I could get up interest enough in it. I'm interested now, and I shouldn't wonder if I staid so," and she blushed and laughed. "You see," said Jerry, "you must not expect things to be done in a minute. Why, even God doesn't do things quickly, when he could, as well as not. And he doesn't get tired of people, either; and that I think is queer. Have you ever thought that if you were God, you would wipe most all the people out of this world in a second, and make some new ones who could behave better?" "Why, no," said Nettie, wonderment and bewilderment struggling together in her face, this strange thought sounded almost wicked to her. "Well, I do," said Jerry sturdily; "I have often thought of it; I believe almost any _man_ would get out of patience with this old world, full of rum saloons, and gambling saloons and tobacco. I think it is such a good thing that men don't have the management of it. "I'll tell you what it is, Nettie, we shall have a pretty busy afternoon if we carry out our plans, won't we? Suppose you go and talk the thing up with your mother, and I will go and see what Norm says. Or, hold on, suppose we go together and call on him; I'll ask him to go fishing, and you ask him to bring his friends home to eat the fish. How would that do?" It was finally agreed that that would do beautifully, and Jerry went to see whether his long flat stick fitted, while Nettie ran to her mother. Mrs. Decker was ironing, her worn face looking older and more worn, Nettie thought, than she had ever seen it before. Poor mother! Why had not she helped her to bear her heavy burden, instead of almost sulking over failure? "O, mother," she began, "Jerry has a plan, and we want to know what you think of it; he has heard of things that are to be done this evening." And she hurried through the story of the intended frolic on the island, and the fishing party that was, if possible, to be pushed in ahead. Mrs. Decker listened in silence, and at first with an uninterested face; presently, when she took in the largeness of the plan, she stayed her iron long enough to look up and say: "What's the use, child? I thought you and Jerry had given up." "O, mother," and the cheeks were rosy red now, "I'm ashamed that I felt so discouraged; Jerry isn't at all; and he thinks it is the strangest thing that I should have been! He says they have to work for years, sometimes, to get hold of people. He knew a man that they kept working after for five years, and now he is a grand man. He says we must hold on to Norm if it is five years, though I don't believe it will be. I'm going to begin over again, mother, and not get discouraged at anything. It is true, as Jerry says, that we can't expect Norm to reform all in a minute. He says the boys that Norm goes with the most are not bad fellows, only they haven't any homes, and they keep getting into mischief, because they have nowhere to go to have any pleasant times. Don't you think Norm would like it to have them asked home with him to supper, and show them how to have a real good time? Jerry says the two boys that he means board at a horrid place, where they have old bread and weak tea for supper, and where people are smoking and drinking in the back end of the room while they are eating. I am sure I don't know as it is any wonder that they go to the saloons sometimes." Mrs. Decker still held her iron poised in air, on her face a look that was worth studying. "Norm hasn't ever had a decent place to ask anybody to, nor a decent time of any kind since he was old enough to care much about it," she said slowly. "I thought I had done about my best, but it may be I'll find myself mistaken. Well, child, let's try it, for mercy's sake, or anything else that that boy thinks of. You and him together are the only ones that's done any thinking for Norm in years; and if I don't go half-way and more too for anybody that wants to do anything, it will be a wonder." In a very few minutes Nettie was in her neat street dress, and the two were walking down the shady side of the main street, toward Norm's shop. They passed Lorena Barstow, and though Jerry, without thinking, took off his cap to her, she tossed her head and looked the other way. Jerry laughed. "I did not know she was so nearsighted as all that, did you?" he asked, and then continued the sentence which the sight of her had interrupted. Nettie could not laugh; she was sore over the thought that she had so spoiled Jerry's life for him that his old acquaintances would not bow to him on the street. Norm was at work, and worked with energy; they stood and looked at him through the window for a few minutes. "He works fast," said Jerry, "and he works as though he would rather do it than not; Mr. Smith says there isn't a lazy streak in him. He ought to make a smart man, Nettie; and I shouldn't wonder if he would." Then they went in. To say that Norm was astonished at sight of them, would be to tell only half the story. He stood in doubt what to say, but Jerry was equal to the occasion; nothing could have been more matter-of-course than the way in which he told about his plans for going fishing, declaring that the afternoon was prime for such work, and that he was tired of going alone. "Wouldn't Norm and his two friends go too?" Now a ride in a boat was something that Norm rarely had. In the first place, boats cost money, and in the second place they took time. To be sure, after working hours, there was time enough for rowing, but boats were sure to be scarce then, even if money had been plenty. Norm wiped his face with a corner of his work-apron, and admitted that he would like to go, first-rate, but did not know as he could get away. They were not over busy it was true, neither was the foreman troubled with good nature; he would be next to certain to say no, if Norm asked to be let off at five o'clock. "Let's try him," said Jerry, and he walked boldly to the other side of the room where the foreman stood. CHAPTER XI. A COMPLETE SUCCESS. THIS man was a friend of Jerry's; it was only two weeks ago that he had done him a good turn, in finding and bringing home his stray cow. He was perfectly good-natured, and found no fault at all with Norm's leaving the shop at five; in fact he said he was glad to have the boy leave in such good company. "Would the others go?" Nettie questioned eagerly, and Norm, laughing, said he reckoned they would go quick enough if they got a chance; invitations to take boat rides were not so plenty that they could afford to lose them. Then was time for Nettie's great surprise. "And, Norm, will you bring them all home to supper with you? I'll have everything ready to cook the fish in a hurry as soon as you get into the house, and you can visit in the new room until they are ready." Now indeed, I wish you could have seen Norm! It never happened to him before to have a chance to invite anybody home to supper with him. He looked at Nettie in silent bewilderment for a minute; he even rubbed his eyes as though possibly he might be dreaming; but she looked so real and so trim, and so sure of herself standing there quietly waiting his answer, that at last he stammered out: "What do you mean, Nannie? You aren't in dead earnest?" "Why, of course," said Nettie, deciding in a flash upon her plan of action; she would do as Jerry had, and take all this as a matter of course. "I'm going to make a lovely johnny-cake for supper, and some new-fashioned potatoes, and we have cream for the coffee. You shall have an elegant supper; only be sure you catch lots of fish." It was all arranged at last to their satisfaction, and the two conspirators turned away to get ready for their part of the business. "Norm liked it," said Jerry. "Couldn't you see by his face that he did? I believe we can get hold of him after awhile, by doing things of this kind; things that make him remember he has a home, and pleasant times, like other boys." If Jerry had waited fifteen minutes he might have been surer of that even than he was. Norm's second invitation followed hard on the first; and Norm, who felt a little sore over certain meannesses of the night before, and who knew his foreman was within hearing and would be sure to object to this young fellow who had come to ask him to go to the island, answered loftily: "Can't do it; I've promised to go out fishing with a party; and besides, our folks are going to have company to tea." Company to tea! He almost laughed when he said it. How very strange the sentence sounded. "O, indeed," said Jim Noxen from the saloon. "Seems to me you are getting big." "It sounds like it," said Norman. "I wonder if I am?" But this he said to himself; for answer to the remark, he only laughed. "If I had a chance to keep company with a young fellow like Jerry, and a trim little woman like that sister of yours, I guess I wouldn't often be found with the other set." This the foreman said, with a significant nod of his head toward the young fellow who represented the other set. And this, too, had its influence. Jerry and Nettie had a glimpse of one of Norm's friends as they passed his shop on their homeward way. "He has a good face," said Nettie. "Poor fellow! Hasn't he any home at all? Don't you wish we could get hold of him so close that he would help us? He looks as though he might." Then she stepped into the boat and floated idly around, while Jerry ran for the oars; and while she floated, she thought and planned. There was a great deal to be done, both then and afterwards. "I wish you could go with us and catch a fish," said Jerry, as he saw how she enjoyed the water, "but maybe it wouldn't be just the thing." "I know it wouldn't," said Nettie; "besides, who would make the johnny-cake, and the potato balls? There is a great deal to be done to make things match, when you are catching fish." The fishing party was a complete success. Jerry said afterwards that the very fish acted as though they were in the secret and were bound to help. He had never seen them bite so readily. By seven o'clock, the boat was headed homeward, with more fish than even four hungry boys could possibly eat. "Now for supper," said Norm, who with secret delight had thought constantly of the surprise in store for Alf and Rick. "Boys, I'm going to take you home with me and show you what a prime cook my little sister is. We'll have these fish sizzling in a pan quicker than you have any notion of; and she knows how to sizzle them just right; doesn't she, Jerry?" But Jerry was spared the trouble of a reply, for Alf with incredulous stare said, "You're gassing now." "No, I'm not gassing. You can come home with me, honor bright, and you shall have such a supper as would make old Ma'am Turner wild." Old Ma'am Turner, poor soul, was the woman who kept the wretched boarding house where these homeless boys boarded, and she really did know how to make things taste a little worse, probably, than any one you know of. "What'll your mother say to your bringing folks home to supper?" questioned Rick, looking as incredulous as his friend. "She'll give us a hint of broomstick, I reckon, if we try it." "Well," said Norm, unconcernedly, dipping the oar into the water, "try it and see, if you are a mind to, that's all I've got to say. I ain't going to force you to eat fish; but I promise you a first-class meal of them if you choose to come." "Oh! we'll go," said Alf, with a giggle; "if we are broomed out the next second, we'll try it, just to see what will come of it. Things is queerer in this world than folks think, often; now I didn't believe a word of it, when you said we was going out in a boat to-night; I thought it was some of your nonsense; and here the little fellow has treated us prime." The "little fellow" was Jerry, who smiled and nodded in honor of his compliment, but said nothing; he resolved to let Norm do the honors alone. They went with long strides to the Decker home, Jerry waiting to fasten the boat and pay his bill. Each boy carried a fine string of fish of his own catching; and appeared at the back door just as Nettie came out to look. "O, what beauties!" she said, gleefully; "and such a nice lot of them! I'm all ready and waiting. You go in, Norm, with your friends, and we'll have them cooking as soon as we can." "Not much," said Norm, coming around to the board which she had evidently gotten ready for cleaning the fish, and diving his hand in his pocket in search of his jack-knife. "Let's fall to, boys, and clean these fellows. I know how, and I think likely you do, and they'll taste the better, like enough." "Just so," said Rick Walker, who owned the face that Nettie had decided was a good one. "I'm agreeable; I know how to clean fish as well as the next one; used to do it for mother, when I was a little shaver." Did the sentence end in a sigh, or did Nettie imagine it? All three went to work with strong skilful hands, and Nettie hopped back and forth bringing fresh water, and fresh plates, and feeling in her secret heart very grateful to the boys for doing this, which she had dreaded. They were all done in a very short time, and each boy in turn had washed his hands in the basin which shone, and then, the shining, or the smoothness and beautiful cleanness of the great brown towel, or something, prompted Rick to take fresh water and dip his brown face into it, and toss the water about like a great Newfoundland dog. "I declare, that feels good!" he said. "Try it, Alf." And Alf tried it. Then Norm led the way to the new room. It would have done Nettie's heart good if she had known how many times he had thought of that room during the last hour. He knew it would be a surprise to the boys. They had never seen anything but the Decker kitchen, and not much of that, standing at the door to wait a minute for Norm, but the few glimpses they had had of it, had not led them to suppose that there was any such place in the house as this in which he was now going to usher them. Their surprise was equal to the occasion. They stopped in the doorway, and looked around upon the prettiness, the bright carpet, the delicate curtains, the gay chairs! nothing like this was to be found at Ma'am Turner's, nor in any other room with which they were familiar. "Whew!" said Rick, closing the word with a shrill whistle; "I think as much!" said Alf. "Who'd have dreamed it. I say, Norm, you're a sly one; why didn't you ever let on that you had this kind of thing?" How they entertained one another during that next hour, Nettie did not know. Eyes and brain were occupied in the kitchen. Jerry came, presently, but reported that they were getting on all right in the front room, and he believed he could do better service in the kitchen; so he set the table with a delicate regard for nicety which Nettie had been taught at Auntie Marshall's, and which she knew he had not learned at Mrs. Job Smith's. Sarah Jane was rigidly clean, but never what Nettie called "nice." "We'll take the table in the front room," decreed Nettie as she surveyed it thoughtfully for a few minutes. "It is very warm out here, and they will like it better to be quite alone; we can put all the dishes on, with the leaves down, and set them in their places in a twinkling, after we have lifted it in there. Won't that be the way, mother?" "Land!" said Mrs. Decker, withdrawing her head from the oven, whither it had gone to see after the new-fashioned potato balls, "I should think they could eat out here; you may depend they never saw so clean a kitchen at old Ma'am Turner's. But it is hot here, and no mistake; and I should not know what to do with myself while they was eating. Please yourself, child, and then I'll be pleased. I'm going to save one of these potatoes for your pa; I never see anything in my life look prettier than they do." Mrs. Decker's tones told much plainer than her words, that she liked Nettie's idea of putting the table in the front room for Norm's company. She would not have owned it, but her mother-heart was glad over a "fuss" being made for her Norm. So the table went in; Jerry at one end, and Nettie at the other. They hushed a loud laugh by their entrance, but Jerry went immediately over to Rick Walker to show a new-fashioned knife, and Nettie's fingers flew over the table, so by the time the knife had been exhausted, she was ready to vanish. Confess now that you would like to have had a seat at that table when it was ready. A platter of smoking fish, done to the nicest brown, without drying or burning; a bowl of lovely little brown balls, each of them about the size of an egg, a plate of very light and puffy-looking Johnny-cake, and to crown all, coffee that filled the room with such an aroma as Ma'am Turner perhaps dreamed of, but never certainly in these days smelled. Mrs. Job Smith at the last minute had sent in a pat of genuine country butter, and Sate had flown to the grocery for a piece of ice with which to keep it in countenance. Jerry set the chairs, and Nettie poured the coffee, and creamed and sugared it, and then slipped away. She knew by the looks on the faces of the guests, that they were astonished beyond words, and she knew that Norm was both astonished and pleased. There was another supper being made ready in the kitchen. Mrs. Decker had herself tugged in the box which had been lately set up as a washbench, and spread the largest towel over it, and was serving three lovely fish, and a bowl of potato balls for "Decker" and herself. "I guess I'm going to have company too," she said to Nettie, her face beaming. "Your pa has gone to wash up, and I thought seeing there was only two chairs, and two plates left, you wouldn't mind having him and me sit down together, for a meal, first." "Yes, I do mind," said Nettie; "I think it is a lovely plan; I'm so glad you thought of it, and Jerry and I will keep watch that they have everything in the other room, while you eat." If you are wondering in your hearts where those important beings, Sate and Susie, were at this moment, I should have told you before, that Sarah Jane had a brilliant thought, but an hour before, and carried them out to tea. So all the Decker family were visiting that evening, save Nettie, and I think perhaps she was the happiest among them all. Every time she heard a burst of fresh fun from the front room, she laughed, too; it was so nice to think that Norm was having a good time in his own home, and nothing to worry over. It is almost a pity that, for her encouragement, she could not have heard some of the conversation in that room. "I say, Norm," said his friend Alf, his tones muffled by reason of a large piece of johnny-cake, "what an awful sly fellow you are! You never let on that you had these kind of doings in your house. Who'd have thought that you had a stunning room like this for folks, and potatoes done up in brown satin, to eat, and coffee such as they get up at the hotels! It beats all creation!" "That's so," said Rick, taking in a quarter of a fish at one mouthful, "I never dreamed of such a thing; what beats me, is, why a fellow who has such nice doings at home, wants to loaf around, and spend evenings at Beck's, or at Steen's. Hang me if I don't think the contrast a little too great. 'Pears to me if I had this kind of thing, I should like to enjoy it oftener than Norm seems to." Norman smiled loftily on them. Do you think he was going to own that "this kind of thing" had never been enjoyed in his home before, during all the years of his recollection? Not he; he only said that folks liked a change once in awhile, of course, and he only laughed when Rick and Alf both declared that if they knew themselves, and they thought they did, they would be content never to change back from this kind of thing to Ma'am Turner's supper table so long as they lived. How those boys did eat! Nettie owned to herself that she was astonished; and privately rejoiced that she had made four johnny-cakes instead of three, though it had seemed almost extravagant until she remembered that it would warm up nicely for breakfast. Not a crumb would there be for breakfast. She had one regret and she told it to Jerry as she went out to him on the back stoop, having poured the third cup of coffee around, for the three in the front room. "Jerry, I am just afraid there won't be a speck of johnny-cake left for you to taste. Those boys do eat so!" "Never mind," laughed Jerry. "We will eat the tail of a fish, if any of them have a tail left, and rejoice over our success; this thing is going to work, I believe, if we can keep it going." "That's the trouble," said Nettie, an anxious look in her eyes. "How can we? Fish won't do every time; and there are no other things that you can catch. Besides, even this has cost a great deal. I paid eight cents for lard to fry the fish, and the butter and milk and things would have cost as much as fifteen cents certainly. Mrs. Smith furnished them this time, but of course such things won't happen again." "A great many things happen," said Jerry, wisely. "More than you can calculate on. 'Never cross a bridge until you come to it, my boy.' Didn't I tell you that was what my father was always saying to me? I have found it a good plan, too, to follow his advice. Many a time I've worried over troubles that never came. Look here, don't you believe that if we are to do this thing and good is to come from it, we shall be able to manage it somehow?" "Why, y-e-s," said Nettie, slowly, as though she were waiting to see whether her faith could climb so high; "I suppose that is so." "Well, if good isn't going to come of it, do we want to do it?" "Of course not." "All right, then," with a little laugh. "What are we talking about?" And Nettie laughed, and ran in to give her father his last cup of coffee, and to hear him say that he hadn't had so good a meal in six years. It was a curious fact that Susie and Sate were the chief movers in the next thing that these young Fishers did to interest the particular fish whom they were after. It began the next Sabbath morning in Sabbath-school. There, the little girls heard with deep interest that on the following Sabbath there was to be a service especially for the children. A special feature of the day was to be the decoration of the church with flowers, which the children were to bring on the previous Saturday. Susie and Sate promised with the rest, that they would bring flowers. Promised in the confident expectation of childhood that some way they could join the others and do as they did; though both little girls knew that not a flower grew in or about them. During the early part of the week they forgot it, but on Saturday morning they stood in the little front yard and saw a sight which recalled all the delights of the coming Sunday in which they seemed to be having no share. The little girls from the Orphanage on the hill were bringing their treasures. Even fat little Karl who was only five, had a potted plant in full bloom, which he was proudly carrying. Little Dutch Maggie, in her queer long apron, carried a plant with lovely satiny leaves which were prettier than any bloom, and behind her was Robert the Scotch gardener with his arms full; then young Rob Severn, Miss Wheeler's nephew, had a lovely fuchsia just aglow with blossoms, and Miss Wheeler herself, who was the matron at the Orphanage, was carrying a choice plant. All these the hungry eyes of Sate and Susie took in, as the procession passed the house, then they ran wailing to Nettie who had already become the long suffering person to whom they must pour out their woes. "We promised, we did," explained Sate, her earnest eyes fixed on Nettie, while her arms clasped that young lady just as she was in the act of throwing out her dishwater. "We did promise, and they will 'spect them, and they won't be there." "Well, but, darling, what made you promise, when you knew we had no flowers? Mrs. Smith would give you some in a minute if hers were in bloom. Why didn't they wait a little later, I wonder? Then Mrs. Smith could have given us such lovely china-asters." "We must have some to-morrow," said the emphatic Susie, and she fastened her black eyes on Nettie in a way that said: "Now you understand what must be, I hope you will at once set about bringing it to pass." Nettie could not help laughing. "If you were a fairy queen," she said, "and could wave your wand and say, 'Flowers, bloom,' and they would obey you, we should certainly have some; as it is, I don't quite see how they are to be had. We have no friends to ask." "I can't help it," said Susie, positively, "we _promised_ to bring some, and of course we must. You said, Nettie Decker, that we must always keep our promises." "Now, Miss Nettie Decker, you are condemned!" said Jerry, with grave face but laughing eyes; "something must evidently be done about this business. Dandelions are gone, except the whiteheads, and they would blow away before they got themselves settled in church, I am afraid. Hold on, I have a thought, just a splendid one if can manage it; wait a bit, Susie, and we will see what we can do." Susie, who was beginning to have full faith in this wise friend of theirs, told Sate in confidence that they were going to have some flowers to take to church, as well as the rest of them; she did not know what Jerry was going to make them out of, but she knew he would _make_ some. After that, Jerry was not seen again for several hours. In fact it was just as the dinner dishes were washed, that he appeared with a triumphant face. "Have you made some?" asked Sate, springing up from her dolly and going toward him expectantly. "Made some what, Curly?" "Flowers," said Sate, gravely. "Susie said she knew you would." Jerry laughed. "Susie has boundless faith in impossibilities," he said. "No, I haven't made the flowers, but I have the boat. That old thing that leaked so, you know, Nettie; well, I've put it in prime order, and got permission to use it, and if you and the chicks will come, we will sail away to where they make flowers, and pick all we want; unless some wicked fairy has whispered my bright thought to somebody else, and I don't believe it, for I have seen no one out on the pond to-day." Then Sate, her eyes very large, went in search of Susie to tell her that this wonderful boy had come to take them where flowers were made, and to let them gather for themselves. "I suppose it is heaven," said Sate, gravely, "because the real truly flowers, you know, God makes, and he has his things all up in heaven to work with, I guess." "What a little goosie you are!" said Susie, curling her wise lip; "as if Jerry Mack could take us to heaven!" However, she went at once to see about it, and was almost as much astonished to think that they were really going out in a boat, as she would have been if they were going to heaven. "I s'pose it's safe?" said Mrs. Decker doubtfully, watching the light in the little girls' eyes, and remembering how few pleasures had been offered them. "O, yes'm," said Jerry, "as safe as the road. I could row a boat, ma'am, very well indeed, father said, when I was six years old; and you couldn't coax that clumsy old thing to tip over, if you wanted it to; and if it should, the water isn't up to my waist anywhere in the pond." Mrs. Decker laughed, and said it sounded safe enough; and went back to her ironing, and the four happy people sailed away. If not to where the pond lilies were made, at least to where they grew in all their wild sweet beauty. "How very strange," said Nettie, as they leaned over the great rude, flat-bottomed boat and pulled the beauties in; "how very strange that no one has gathered these for to-morrow. Why, nothing could be more lovely!" "Well," said Jerry, "only a few people row this way, because it isn't the pleasantest part of the pond, you know, for rowing; and I guess no one has remembered that the lilies were out; there don't many people, only fishermen, go out on this pond, you know, because the boats are so ugly; and fishermen don't care for flowers, I guess. Anyhow, they haven't been here, for the buds are all on hand, just as I thought they would be by this time, when I was here on Tuesday. But I never thought of the church; so you see how little thinking is done." Well, they gathered great loads of the beauties, and rowed home in triumph, and put the lilies in a tub of water, and sat down to consider how best to arrange them. It was curious that Mrs. Job Smith should have been the next one with an idea. "I should think," she said, standing in the doorway of her kitchen, her hands on her sides, "I should think a great big salver of them laid around in their own leaves, would be the prettiest thing in the world." "So it would," said Nettie, "the very thing, if we only had the salver." "Well, I've got that. Mrs. Sims, she gave me an old battered and bruised one, when they were moving. It is big enough to put all the cups and saucers on in town, almost; when I lugged it home, Job, he wanted to know what on _earth_ I wanted of that, and says I, I don't know, but she give it to me, and most everything in this world comes good, if you keep it long enough. Sarah Ann, you run up to the corner in the back garret and get that thing, and see what they'll make of it." So Sarah Ann ran. CHAPTER XII. AN UNEXPECTED HELPER. PERHAPS you do not see how the pond lilies, lovely as they were, arranged on that salver, helped Jerry and Nettie in their plans for Norm and his friends. But there is another part to that story. After the salver had been filled with sand, and covered with moss, and soaked until it would absorb no more water, and the lilies had been laid in so thickly that they looked like a great white bank of bloom, the whole was lovely, as I said, but heavy. The walk to the church was long, and Nettie, thinking of it, surveyed her finished work with a grave face. How was it ever to be gotten to the church? She tried to lift one end of it, and shook her head. There was no hope that she could even _help_ carry it for so long a distance. Mrs. Smith saw the trouble in her eyes, and guessed at its cause. "It is an awful heavy thing, that's a fact," she said, "hefting" it in her strong arms; "I don't know how you are going to manage it; Sarah Jane would help in a minute, but there's her back; she ain't got no back to speak of, Sarah Jane hasn't. And there's Job, he ain't at home; he went this morning before it was light, away over the other side of the clip hill with a load, and the last words he says to me was: 'Don't you be scairt if I don't get round very early; them roads over there is dreadful heavy, and I shall have to rest the team in the heat of the day,' and like enough he won't get back till nigh ten o'clock." Certainly no help could be expected from the Smith family. "We shall have to take some of the sand out," said Nettie, surveying the mound regretfully; "I'm real sorry; it does look so pretty heaped up! but Jerry can never carry it away down there alone." Then came Jerry's bright idea. "I'll get Norman to help me." "Norm!" said Nettie, stopping astonished in the very act of picking out some of the lilies. It had not once occurred to her that Norm could be asked to go to the church on an errand. She couldn't have told why, but Norm and the church seemed too far apart to have anything in common. "Yes," said Jerry, positively. "Why not? I know he'll help; and he and I can carry it like a daisy. Don't take out one of them, Nettie. I know you will spoil it if you touch it again; it is just perfect. Halloo, Norm, come this way." Sure enough at that moment Norm appeared from the attic where he slept; he had washed his face and combed his hair, and made himself as decent looking as he could, and was starting for somewhere; and Nettie remembered with a sinking heart that it was Saturday night; Norm's worst night except Sunday. He stopped at Jerry's call, and stood waiting. "You are just the individual I wanted to see at this moment," said Jerry with a confident air. "This meadow here has got to be dug up and carried bodily down to the church; and it is as heavy as though its roots were struck deep in the soil. Will you shoulder an end with me?" "To the church!" repeated Norm with an incredulous stare. "What do they want of that thing at the church?" "They are our flowers," said Sate with a positive little nod of her head. "We promised to bring them, and they are so big and heavy we can't. Will you help?" Now Norm had really a very warm feeling in his heart for this small sister; Susie he considered a nuisance, and a vixen, but Sate with her slow sweet voice, and shy ways, had several times slipped behind his chair to escape a slap from her angry father, thus appealing to his protection, and once when he lifted her over the fence, she kissed him; he was rather willing to please Sate. Then there was Jerry who was a good fellow as ever lived, and Nettie who was a prime girl; why shouldn't he help tote the thing down to the church if that was what they wanted? To be sure he wanted to go in the other direction, and the fellows would be waiting, he supposed; but he could go there, afterwards, let them wait until he came. "Well," he said at last, "come on, I'll help; though what they want of all this rubbish at the church is more than I can imagine." And Nettie and the little girls stood with satisfied faces watching the two move off under their heavy burden. It was something to have Norm go to church if it was only to carry flowers. Arrived at the door, Norm was seized with a fit of shyness; the doors were thrown wide open, and ladies and children were flitting about, and many tongues were going, and flowers and vines were being festooned around the gas lights, and the pillars, and wherever there was a spot for them. "Hold on," said Norm, jerking back, thus putting the great salver in eminent peril, "I ain't going in there; all the village is there; you better pitch this rubbish out, they've got flowers enough." "There isn't a lily among them," said Jerry. "And besides they have to go in, anyhow, we can't afford to disappoint Sate. Come on, Norm, I can't carry the thing alone, any more than I could the stove; it is unaccountably heavy." This was true, but Jerry was very glad that it was. He had his reasons for wanting to get Norm down the aisle to the front of the pulpit. With very reluctant feet Norm followed, bearing his share of the burden, his face flushing over the exclamations with which they were at last greeted. "Oh, oh! pond lilies! I did not know there were any this year. Where did you get them? Girls, look! Did you ever see anything more lovely?" And a group of faces were gathered about the tray, and one brown head went down among the lilies and caressed them. "Where did you get them?" she repeated; "I asked my cousin if there were any about here, and she said she thought not; and last night when I was out on the pond I looked and could not find any." "They hide," said Jerry. "The only place on the pond where they can be found is down behind the old mill; and most people don't go there at all, because the channel is so narrow, and the water so shallow." "Well, we are so glad you brought them! Girls, aren't they too lovely for anything? Who arranged them?" "My sister," said Norm, to whom Jerry promptly turned with an air which said as plainly as words could have done: "You are the one to answer; she belongs to you." "And who is that?" asked the owner of the pretty brown head, as she made way for them to pass to the table with their burden. "I am sure I would like to know her; for she certainly knows how to put flowers into lovely shapes." Then came from behind the desk a man whom Jerry knew and whom he had seen while he stood at the door. "Good evening, Jerry," he said, holding out his hand in a cordial way. "What a wonderful bank of beauty you have brought! Introduce me to your helper, please." "Mr. Sherrill, Mr. Norman Decker," said Jerry, exactly as though he had been used to introducing people all his life; and Norm, his face very red, knew that he was shaking hands with the new minister. A very cordial hand-shake, certainly, and then the minister turning to her of the brown head, said, "Eva, come here; let me introduce you to Mr. Norman Decker. My sister, Mr. Decker." Norm, hardly knowing what he was about, contrived another bow, and then Miss Eva said, "Decker, why, that is the name of my two little darlings about whom I have been telling you for two Sabbaths. Are they your little sisters, Mr. Decker? Little Sate and Susie?" And as Norm managed to nod an answer, she continued: "They have stolen my heart utterly; that little Sate is the dearest little thing. By the way, I wonder if these are her flowers? She promised me she would certainly get some; she said they had none in their garden, but God would make some grow for her somewhere she guessed." "Yes'm," said Jerry, seeing that Norm would not speak, "they are her flowers, hers and Susie's, they coaxed us to go for them." "Decker," said the minister, suddenly, "you are pretty tall, I wonder if you are not just the one to help me get this wreath fastened back of the pulpit? I have been working at it for some time, and failed for the want of an arm long enough and strong enough to help me." And the two disappeared behind the desk up the pulpit stairs to the immense satisfaction of Jerry. The ladies went on with their work; Miss Eva calling to him to help her move the table, and then to help arrange the salver on it, and then to bring more vines from the lecture room to cover the base of the floral cross; and indeed, before they knew it, both Jerry and Norm were in the thick of the engagement; Jerry flitting hither and thither at the call of the girls, and Norm following the minister from point to point, and using his long limbs to good advantage. "Well," he said, wiping his face with his coat sleeve, as, more than an hour after their entrance, he and Jerry made their way down the churchyard walk, "that is the greatest snarl I ever got into. How that fellow can work! But he would never have got them things up in the world, if I had not been there to help him." "No," said Jerry "I don't believe he would. How glad they were to get the lilies! They do look prettier than anything there. I did not know who that lady was who taught the little folks. She has only been there a few weeks. She is pretty, isn't she?" "I s'pose so," said Norm, "her voice is, anyhow. They say she's a singer. I heard the fellows down at the corner talking about her one night; Dick Welsh says she can mimic a bird so you couldn't tell which was which. I wouldn't mind hearing her sing. I like good singing." "I suppose they will have her sing in the church," said Jerry in a significant tone. But to this, Norm made no reply. "What was it Mr. Sherrill wanted of you just as we were coming out?" asked Jerry, after reflecting whether he had better ask the question or not. "Wanted me to come and see how the things looked in the daytime," said Norm with an awkward laugh that ended in a half sneer; "I'll be likely to I think!" "Going up home, I s'pose?" said Jerry, trying to speak indifferently, and slipping his hand through Norm's arm as they reached the corner, and Norm half halted. "Well, I suppose I might as well," Norm said, allowing himself to be drawn on by never so slight a pressure from Jerry's arm. "I was going down street, and the boys were to wait for me; but they have never waited all this while; it must be considerable after nine o'clock." "Yes," said Jerry, "it is." And they went home. Nettie, sitting on the doorstep, waiting, will never forget that night, nor the sinking of heart with which she waited. Her father had been kept at home, first by his employer who came to give directions about work to be attended to the first thing on Monday morning, and then by Job Smith getting home before he was expected and asking a little friendly help with the load he brought; and he had at last decided that it was too late to go out again, and had gone to bed. Mrs. Decker in her kitchen, hovered between the door and the window, peering out into the lovely night, saying nothing, but her heart throbbing so with anxiety about her boy that she could not lay her tired body away. Mrs. Job Smith in her kitchen, looked from her door and then her window, many misgivings in her heart; if that bad boy Norm should lead her good boy Jerry into mischief what should she say to his father? How could she ever forgive herself for having encouraged the intimacy between him and the Deckers? Presently, far down the quiet street came the sound of cheery whistling; Nettie knew the voice: nothing so very bad could have happened when Jerry was whistling like that; or was he perhaps doing it to keep his courage up? The whistle turned the corner, and in the dim starlight she could distinguish two figures; they came on briskly, Jerry and Norm. "A nice job you set us at," began Jerry, gayly, "we have just this minute got through; and here it is toward morning somewhere, isn't it?" Then all that happy company went to their beds. After dinner the next day, Nettie studied if there were not ways in which she might coax Norm to go to church that evening. Jerry had told her of the minister's invitation. Norm had slept later than usual that morning, and lounged at home until after dinner; now he was preparing to go out. How could she keep him? How could she coax him to go with her? Before she could decide what to do to try to hold him, Susie took matters into her own hands by pitching head foremost out of the kitchen window, hitting her head on the stones. Then there was hurry and confusion in the Decker kitchen! Then did Mrs. Smith, and Job Smith, and Sarah Jane fly to the rescue. Though after all, Norm was the one who stooped over poor silent Susie and brought her limp and apparently lifeless into the kitchen. Jerry ran with all speed for the doctor. It was hours before they settled down again, having discovered that Susie was not dead, but had fainted; was not even badly hurt, save for a bump or two. But it took the little lady only a short time, after recovering from her fright, to discover that she was a person of importance, and to like the situation. It happened that Norm had, by the doctor's directions, carried her from her mother's bed to the cooler atmosphere of the front room. Susie had enjoyed the ride, and now announced with the air of a conqueror, "I want Norm to carry me." So Norm, frightened into love and tenderness, lifted the little girl in his strong arms, laid the pretty head on his shoulder, and willingly tramped up and down the room. Was Susie a witch, or a selfish little girl? Certain it was that during that walk she took an unaccountable and ever increasing fancy for Norm. He must wet the brown paper on her head as often is the vinegar with which it was saturated dried away; he must hold the cup while she took a drink of water; he must push the marvel of a barrel chair in which she for a time sat in state, closer to the window; he must carry her from the chair to the table when supper was finally ready, and carry her back again when it was eaten. Nettie looked on amused and puzzled. Certainly Susie had kept Norm at home all the afternoon; but was she also likely to accomplish it for the evening? For Norm, to her great surprise, seemed to like the new order of things. He blushed awkwardly when Susie gently pushed her mother aside and demanded Norm, but he came at once, with a good-natured laugh, and held her in his arms with as much gentleness and more strength than the mother could have given; and seemed to like the touch of the curly head on his shoulder. But while Nettie was putting away the dishes and puzzling over all the strange events of the afternoon, Susie was undressed, partly by Norm, according to her decree, and fell asleep in his arms and was laid on her mother's bed, and Norm slipped away! Poor Nettie! She ran to the door to try to call him, but he was out of sight. "I tried to think of something to keep him till you came in," explained the disappointed mother, "but I couldn't do it; he laid Susie down as quick as he could, and shot away as though he was afraid you would get hold of him." So Nettie, her face sad, prepared to go with Jerry and the Smiths down to evening meeting, and told Jerry on the way, that it did seem strange to her, so long as Susie had kept Norm busy all the afternoon, that they must let him slip away from them at last. CHAPTER XIII. THE LITTLE PICTURE MAKERS. AFTER Susie Decker pitched out of the window that Sabbath afternoon she became such an object of importance that you would hardly have supposed anything else could have happened worth mentioning; but after the excitement was quite over, and Susie had been cuddled and petted and cared for more than it seemed to her she had ever been in her life before, Mr. Decker, finding nothing better to do, went out and sat down on the doorstep. Little Sate dried her eyes and slipped away very soon after she discovered that Susie could move, and speak, and was therefore not dead. She had wandered in search of entertainment to the yard just around the corner, where had come but a few days before, a small boy on a visit. This boy, Bobby by name, finding Sunday a hard day, had finally, after getting into all sorts of mischief within doors, been established by an indulgent auntie in the back yard, with her apron tied around his chubby neck, to protect his new suit, with a few pieces of charcoal, and permission to draw some nice Sunday pictures on the white boards of the house. This business interested Sate, and in spite of her shyness, drew her the other side of the high board fence which separated the neighbor's back yard from Mr. Decker's side one. Just as that gentleman took his seat on the doorstep, he heard the voices of the two children; first, Bobby's confident one, the words he used conveying all assurance of unlimited power at his command-- "Now, what shall I make?" "Make," said Sate, her sweet face thrown upward in earnest thought, "make the angel who would have come for Susie if she had died just now." "How do you know any angel would have come for her?" asked sturdy Bobby. "Why, 'cause I _know_ there would. Miss Sherrill said so to-day; she told us about that little baby that died last night; she said an angel came after it and took it right straight up to heaven." "Maybe she don't know," said skeptical Bobby. Then did Sate's eyes flash. "I guess she does know, Bobby Burns, and you will be real mean, and bad if you say so any more. She knows all about heaven, and angels, and everything." "Does angels come after all folks that dies?" "I dunno; I guess so; no, I guess not. Only good folks." "Is Susie good?" "Sometimes she is," said truthful Sate, in slow, thoughtful tones, a touch of mournfulness in them that might have gone to Susie's heart had she heard and understood; "she gave me the biggest half of a cookie the other night. It was a _good deal_ the biggest; and she takes care of me most always; one day she took off her shoes and put them on me, because the stones and the rough ground hurt my feet. They hurt her feet too; they bleeded, oh! just awful, but she wouldn't let _me_ be hurt." "Why didn't you wear your own shoes?" "I didn't have any; mine all went to holes; just great big holes that wouldn't stay on; it was before my papa got good, and he didn't buy me any shoes at all." "Has your papa got good?" "Yes," said Sate confidently, "I guess he has. My sister Nettie thinks so; and Susie does too. He don't drink bad stuff any more. It was some kind of stuff he drank that made him cross; mamma said so; and the stuff made him feel so bad that he couldn't buy shoes, nor nothing; why, sometimes, before Nettie came home, we didn't have any bread! He isn't cross to-day, and he wasn't last night; and he bought me some new shoes--real pretty ones, and he kissed me. I love my papa when he is good. Do you love your papa when he is good?" "My papa is always good," said Bobby, with that air of immense superiority. "Is he?" asked Sate, wonder and admiration in her tone. Happy Bobby, to possess a father who was always good! "Doesn't he ever drink any of that bad stuff?" "I guess he doesn't!" said indignant Bobby. "You wouldn't catch him taking a drop of it for anything. If he was sick and was going to die if he didn't, he says he wouldn't take it. I know all about that; the name of it is whiskey, and things; it has lots of names, but that is one of them. My father is a temperance." "What is that?" "It is a man who promises that he won't ever taste it nor touch it, nor nothing, forever and ever. And he won't." "Oh my!" said Sate. "Then of course you love him all the time. I mean to love my papa, all the time too. I'm most sure I can. What makes you make such a big angel? Susie isn't big; a little angel could carry her." "This angel isn't the one who was coming for Susie; it is the one who is going to come for my papa when he dies." "Oh! then will you make the one who will come for my papa? Make him very big and strong, for my papa is a strong man, and I don't want the angel to drop him." Mr. Decker arose suddenly and went round to the back part of the house, and cleared his throat, and coughed, two or three times, and rubbed the back of his hand across his eyes. Had he peeped through the fence and caught a glimpse of the angel whom Bobby made, he might not have been so strangely touched; but the words of his little girl seemed to choke him, and his eyes, just then, were too dim to see angels. He was very still all the rest of the afternoon. At the tea table he scarcely spoke, and afterwards, while Mrs. Decker and Nettie were mourning over Norm's escape, he too put on his coat, and went away down the street. Mrs. Decker came to the door when she discovered it, and looked after him. He was still in sight, but she did not dare to call. As she looked, she gathered up a corner of her apron and wiped her eyes. Presently she sat down on the step where he had been sitting so short a time before, leaned her elbows on her knees, and her cheeks on her hands, and thought sad thoughts. She felt very much discouraged. On this first Sunday, after the new room had been made, and new hopes excited, they had slipped away, both Norm and her husband, to lounge in the saloon as usual, and to come home, late at night, the worse for liquor. She knew all about it! Hadn't she been through it many times? The little gleam of hope which had started again, under Nettie and Jerry's encouraging words and ways, died quite out. Sitting there, Mrs. Decker made up her mind once more, that there was no kind of use in working, and struggling, and trying to be somebody. She was the wife of a drunkard; and the mother of a drunkard; Norm would be that, before long. And her little girls would grow up beggars. It was almost a pity that Susie had not been killed when she fell. Why should she want to live to be a drunkard's daughter, and a drunkard's sister? If the Heaven she used to hear about when she was a little girl, was all so, why should she not long for Susie and Sate to go there? Then if she could go away herself and leave all this misery! She had hurried with her dishes, she had hoped that when she was ready to sit down in the neat room with the new lamp burning brightly, he would sit with her as he used to do on Sunday evenings long ago. But here she was alone, as usual. More than once that big apron which she had not cared to take off after she found herself deserted, was made to do duty as a handkerchief and wipe away bitter tears. Meantime, Nettie sat in the pretty church and looked at the lovely flowers, and listened to the wonderful singing. Miss Sherrill sang the solo of something more beautiful than Nettie had ever even imagined. "Consider the lilies how they grow." What wonderful words were these to be sung while looking down at a great bank of lilies! It is possible that the singing may have been more beautiful to Nettie because her own fingers had arranged the lilies, but it was in itself enough for any reasonable mortal's ear, and as it rolled through the church, there was more than one listener who thought of the angels, and wondered if their voices could be sweeter. Nettie's small handkerchief went to her eyes several times during the anthem; she could not have told why she cried, but the music moved her strangely. Before the anthem was fairly concluded there was something else to take her attention. Mrs. Job Smith in whose seat she sat, gave her arm a vigorous poke with a sharp elbow, and whispered in a voice which seemed to Nettie must have been heard all over the church, "For the land's sake, if there ain't your pa sitting down there under the gallery!" As soon as she dared do so, Nettie turned her head for one swift look. Mrs. Smith _must_ be mistaken, but she would take one glance to assure herself. Certainly that was her father, sitting in almost the last seat, leaning his head against one of the pillars, the shabbiness of his coat showing plainly in the bright gaslight. But Nettie did not think of his coat. Her cheeks grew red, and her eyes filled again with tears. It was not the music, now; it was a strange thrill of satisfaction, and of hope. How pleasant she had thought it would be to go to church with her father. It was one of the things she had planned at Auntie Marshall's; how she would perhaps take her father's arm, being tall for her years, and Auntie Marshall said he was not a tall man, and walk to church by his side, and find the hymns for him, and receive his fatherly smile, and when she handed him his hat after service, perhaps he would say, "Thank you, my daughter," as she had heard Doctor Porter say to his little girl in the seat just ahead of theirs. Nettie's hungry little heart had wanted to hear that word applied to herself. Now all these sweet dreams of hers seemed to have been ages ago; actually it felt like years since she had hoped for such a thing, or dreamed of seeing her father in church, so swiftly had the reality crowded out her pretty dreams. Yet there he sat, listening to the reading. What Nettie would have done or thought had she known that Norm and two friends were at that moment seated in the gallery just over her father's head, I cannot say. On the whole, I am glad she did not know it until church was out. Especially I am glad she did not know that Norm giggled a good deal, and whispered more or less, and in various ways so annoyed the minister that he found it difficult to keep from speaking to the young men in the gallery. The fact is, he would have done so, had he not recognized in one of them his helper of the evening before, and resolved to bear his troubles patiently, in the hope that something good would grow out of this unusual appearance at church. It would perhaps be hard work to explain what had brought Norm to church. A fancy perhaps for seeing how the flowers looked by this time. A queer feeling that he was slightly connected with the church service for once in his life; a lingering desire to know whether in the hanging of that tallest wreath, he or the minister had been right; they had differed as to the distance from one arch to the other; from the gallery he was sure he could tell which had possessed the truer eye. All these motives pressed him a little. Then they were singing when he reached the door, and Rick had said, "Hallo! that voice sounds as though it lived up in the sky. Who is that, do you s'pose?" Then Norm proud of his knowledge in the matter, explained that she was the minister's sister, and they said she could mimic a bird so you couldn't tell which was which. "Poh!" Alf had said; he didn't believe a word of that; he should like to see a woman who could fool him into thinking that she was a bird! but he had added, "Let's go in and hear her." And as this was what Norm had been half intending to do ever since he started from the house, he agreed to do it at once. In they slipped and half-hid themselves behind the posts in the gallery, and behaved disreputably all the evening, more because they felt shamefaced about being there at all, and wanted to keep each other in countenance, than because they really desired to disturb the service. However, they heard a great deal. What do you think was the minister's text on that evening? "No drunkard shall inherit the kingdom of heaven." I shall have to tell you that when he caught sight of Mr. Decker half-hidden behind his post and recognized him as the man who was so fast growing into a drunkard, and as the man who had never been inside the church since he had been the pastor, he was sorry that his text and subject were what they were that evening. He told himself that it was very unfortunate. That if he had dreamed of such a thing as having that man for a listener, he would have told him the story of Jesus as simply and as earnestly as he could; and not have preached a sermon that would seem to the man as a fling at himself. However, there was no help for it now; he did not recognize Mr. Decker until he had announced his text, and fairly commenced his sermon. It was a sermon for young people; it was intended to warn them against the first beginnings of this great sin which shut heaven away from the sinner. He need not have been troubled about not telling the story of Jesus; there was a great deal about Jesus in the sermon, as well as a great deal about the heaven prepared for those who were willing to go. I do not know that anywhere in the church you could have found a more attentive listener than Mr. Decker. At least one who seemed to listen more earnestly; from the moment that the text was repeated until the great Bible was closed, he did not take his eyes from the minister's face. Yet some of his words he did not hear. Some of the time Mr. Decker was hearing a little voice, very sweet, saying: "Make a very big strong angel to come for my papa when he dies; my papa is a strong man and I don't want the angel to drop him." Poor papa! as he thought of it, he had to look straight before him and wink hard and fast to keep the tears from dropping; he had no handkerchief to wipe them away. Think of an angel coming for him! "I love my papa when he is good!" the sweet voice had said. Was he ever good? Then he listened awhile to the sermon; heard the vivid description of some of the possible glories and joys of Heaven. Would he be likely ever to go there? Little Sate thought so; she had planned for it that very afternoon. Dear little Sate who did not want the angel to drop him. Now it is possible that if the sermon had been about drunkards, Mr. Decker would have been vexed and would not have listened. He did not call himself a drunkard; it is a sad and at the same time a curious fact that he did not realize how nearly he had reached the point where the name would apply to him. That he drank beer, much, and often, and that he was growing more and more fond of it, and that it kept him miserably poor, was certainly true, and there were times when he realized it; but that he was ever going to be a common drunkard and roll in the gutter, and kick his wife, and seize his children by the hair, he did not for a moment believe. But the sermon was by no means addressed to people who were even so far on this road as he. It was addressed to boys, who were just beginning to like the taste of hard cider, and spruce beer, and hop bitters, and all those harmless (?) drinks which so many boys were using. It was a plain story of the rapid, certain, downward journey of those who began in these simple ways. It was illustrated by certain facts which Mr. Sherrill had personally known. And Mr. Decker, as he listened, owned to himself that he knew facts which would have proved the same truth. Then he gave a little start and shrank farther into the shadow of the pillar. The moment he admitted that, he also admitted that he was himself in danger. What nonsense that was! Couldn't he stop drinking the stuff whenever he liked? "There is a time," said the minister, "when this matter is in your own hands. You have no very great taste for the dangerous liquors, you are only using them because those with whom you associate do so. You could give them up without much effort; but I tell you, my friends, the time comes, and to many it comes very early in life, when they are like slaves bound hand and foot in a habit that they cannot break, and cannot control." Mr. Decker heard this, and something, what was it? pressed the thought home to him just then, that, if he did not belong to this last-mentioned class, neither did he to the former. He knew it would take a good deal of effort for him to give up his beer; of course it would; else he should not be such a fool as to keep himself and his family in poverty for the sake of indulging it. What if he were already a slave, bound hand and foot! What if the "stuff" which Sate said made him "cross" had already made him a drunkard! Perhaps the boys on the street called him so; though they rarely saw him stagger; his staggering was nearly always done under cover of the night. Still, now that he was dealing honestly with himself, he must own that it was less easy to go without his beer than it used to be. Since Nettie had come home he had drank less of it than usual, and by that very means he had discovered how much it meant to him. "No drunkard shall inherit the kingdom of heaven!" The minister's earnest voice repeated his text just then. Was he a drunkard? Then what about the strong angel? Little Sate was to be disappointed, after all! Oh! I am not going to try to tell you all the thoughts which passed through Joe Decker's mind that evening. I don't think he could tell you himself, though he remembers the evening vividly. He stood up, during the closing hymn, and waited until the benediction was pronounced, and then he slipped away, swiftly; Nettie tried to get to him, but she did not succeed, and she sorrowed over it. He stumbled along in the darkness, moving almost as unsteadily as though he had been drinking. The sky was thick with clouds, and he jostled against a lady and gentleman as he crossed the street; the lady shrank away. "Who is that?" he heard her ask; and the answer came to him distinctly: "Oh! it is old Joe Decker; he is drunk, I suppose. He generally is at this time of night." Yes, there it was! he was already counted on the streets as a drunkard. "No drunkard shall inherit the kingdom of heaven." It was not the minister's voice this time; yet it seemed to the poor man's excited brain that some one repeated those words in his ears. Then he heard again the sweet soft voice: "Make him very big and strong, for I don't want the angel to drop him." CHAPTER XIV. THE CONCERT. WITHIN the church wonderful things were going on. Jerry had caught sight of Norm as he slipped up the gallery stairs, and laid his plans accordingly. He whispered to Nettie during the singing of the closing hymn, thereby shocking her a little. Jerry did not often whisper in church. This was what he said: "Don't you need those lilies to help trim the room to-morrow night? Let's take them home." The moment the "amen" was spoken, he dashed out, and was at the stair door as Norm came down. "Norm," he said, "won't you help me carry home that tray? We want the flowers for something special to-morrow." Said Norm, "O bother! I can't help tote that heavy thing through the streets." "What's that?" asked Rick; and when the explanation was briefly made, he added the little word of advice which so often turns the scales. "Ho! that isn't much to do when you are going that very road. I'd do as much as that, any day, for the little chap who gave us such a tall row." This last was in undertone. "Well," said Norm, "I don't care; I'll help; but how are we going to get the things out here?" "Come inside," answered Jerry; "we can wait in the back seat. They will all be gone in a few minutes, then we can step up and get the salver." Once inside the church, the rest followed easily. Mr. Sherrill who had eyes for all that was going on, came forward swiftly and held a cordial hand to Norm. "Good-evening," he said; "I am glad to see you accepted my invitation. How did our work look by gaslight?" "It looked," said Norm, a roguish twinkle in his eye, "it looked just as I expected it would; crooked. That there arch at the left of the pulpit wants to be hung as much as two inches lower to match the other." "You don't say so!" said the minister, in good-humored surprise. "Does it appear so from the gallery? Are my eyes as crooked as that? Let us go up gallery and see if I can discover it." So to the gallery they went, Norm clearing the space with a few bounds, and taking a triumphant station where he could point out the defect to the minister. "That is true," Mr. Sherrill said, with hearty frankness. "You are right and I was wrong. If I had taken your word last night the wreaths would have looked better, wouldn't they? Well, perhaps wreaths are not the only things which show crooked when we get higher up and look down on them. Eh, my friend?" Norm laughed a good-humored, rather embarrassed laugh. It was remarkable that he should be up here holding a chatty, almost gay, conversation with the minister. There came over him the wish that he had behaved himself better during the service. That he had not whispered so much, nor nudged Rick's elbow to make him laugh, just at the moment that the minister's eye was fixed on them. He had a half-fancy that if the evening were to be lived over again, he would go down below and sit up straight and show this man that he could behave as well as anybody if he were a mind to. Not a word about the laughing and whispering said the minister. But he said a thing which startled Norm. "My sister has a fancy for having the church adorned with wreaths or strings of asters in contrasting colors for next Sabbath; will you make an appointment with me to help hang them on Saturday evening? I'll promise to follow your eye to the half-inch." Norm started, flushed, looked into the frank face and laughed a little, then seeing that the answer was waited for said: "Why, I don't care if I do, if you honestly want it." "I honestly want it," said the minister in great satisfaction. Then they went downstairs. Job Smith and his wife were gone. "I will wait for my brother," said Nettie, and her heart swelled with pride as she said it. How nice to have a brother to wait for, just as Miss Sherrill was doing. At that moment the "beautiful lady" as Sate and Susie called her, came to Nettie's side. "Good-evening," she said pleasantly. "I hope the little girls are well; I met your brother last night; he helped my brother to hang the flowers. I see they are upstairs together now, admiring their work. My brother said he was a very intelligent helper. You do not know how much I thank you for those flowers. They helped me to sing to-night." "I thought," said Nettie, raising her great truthful eyes to the lady's face and speaking with an earnestness that showed she felt what she said, "I thought you sang as though the angels were helping you. I don't think they can sing any sweeter." "Thank you," said Miss Sherrill; she smiled as she spoke, yet there were tears in her eyes; the honest, earnest tribute seemed very unlike a little girl, and very unlike the usual way of complimenting her wonderful voice. "I saw that you liked music," she said, "I noticed you while I was singing. Will you let me give you a couple of tickets for the concert to-morrow evening; and will you and your brother come to hear me sing? I am going to sing something that I think you will like." Nettie went home behind the lilies and the boys, her heart all in a flutter of delight. What a wonderful thing had come to her! The concert for which the best singers in town had been so long practising, and for which the tickets were fifty cents apiece, and which she had no more expected to attend than she had expected to hear the real angels sing that week, was to take place to-morrow evening, and she had two tickets in her pocket! Mrs. Decker was waiting for them, her nose pressed against the glass; she started forward to open the door for the boys, before Nettie could reach it. There was such a look of relief on her face when she saw Norm as ought to have gone to his very heart; but he did not see it; he was busy settling the salver in a safe place. "Has father come in?" Nettie asked, as she followed her mother to the back step, where she went for the dipper at Norm's call. "Yes, child, he has, and went straight to bed. He didn't say two words; but he wasn't cross; and he hadn't drank a drop, I believe." "Mother," said Nettie, standing on tiptoe to reach the tall woman's ear, and speaking in an awe-stricken whisper, "father was in church!" "For the land of pity!" said Mrs. Decker, speaking low and solemnly. And all through the next morning's meal, which was an unusually quiet one, she waited on her husband with a kind of respectful reverence, which if he had noticed, might have bewildered him. It seemed to her that the event of the evening before had lifted him into a higher world than hers, and that she could not tell now, what might happen. The event of the day was the concert; all other plans were set aside for that. At first Norm scoffed and declared that his ticket might be used to light the fire with, for all he cared; he didn't want to go to one of their "swell" concerts. But this talk Nettie laughed over good-naturedly, as though it were intended for a joke, and continued her planning as to when to have supper, and just when she and Norm must start. In the course of the day, that young man discovered it to be a fine thing to own tickets for this special concert. Before noon tickets were at a premium, and several of Norm's fellow-workmen gayly advised him to make an honest penny by selling his. During the early morning it had been delicately hinted by one young fellow that Norm Decker's tickets were made of tissue paper, which was his way of saying, that he did not believe that Norm had any; but, thanks to Nettie's thoughtful tact, the tickets were at that very moment reposing in her brother's pocket, and he drew them forth in triumph, wanting to know if anybody saw any tissue paper about those. Good stiff green pasteboard with the magic words on them which would admit two people to what was considered on all sides the finest entertainment of the sort the town had ever enjoyed. "Where did you get 'em, Norm? Come, tell us, that's a good fellow. You was never so green as to go and pay a dollar for two pieces of pasteboard." "They are complimentaries," said Norm, tossing off a shaving with a careless air, as though complimentary tickets to first-class concerts were every-day affairs with him. "Complimentary? My eyes, aren't we big!" (I am very sorry that the boys in Norm's shop used these slang phrases; but I want to say this for them: it was because they had never been taught better. Not one of them had mother or father who were grieved by such words; some of them were so truly good-hearted that I believe if such had been the case, they would never have used them again; and I wish the same might be said of all boys with cultured and careful mothers.) "How did you get 'em? Been selling tickets for the show, or piling chairs, or what?" "I haven't done a living thing for one of them," said Norm composedly; and Ben Halleck came to his rescue. "That's so, boys; or, at least if he had, it wouldn't done him no good. They don't pay for this show in any such way. The fellows that carried around bills were paid in money because they said they expected seats would be scarce; and they didn't sell no tickets around the streets. Them that wanted them had to go to the book-store and buy them. Oh, I tell you, it's a big thing. I wouldn't mind going myself if I could be complimented through. You see that Sherrill girl who lives at the new minister's is a most amazing singer, and they say everybody wants to hear her." By this time Norm's mind was fully made up that he would go to the concert. It is a pity Nettie could not have known it. For despite the cheerful courage with which she received Norm's disagreeable statements in the morning, she was secretly very much afraid that he would not go. This would have been a great trial to her, for her little soul was as full of music as possible; and the thought of hearing that wonderful voice so soon again filled her with delight; but she was a timid little girl so far as appearing among strangers was concerned, and the idea of going alone to a concert was not to be thought of. Her mother proposed Jerry for company, but he had gone with Job Smith into the country and was not likely to return until too late. So Nettie made her little preparations with a troubled heart. There was something more to it than simply hearing fine music; it would be so like other girls whom she knew, so like the dreams of home she had indulged in while at Auntie Marshall's--this going out in the evening attended and cared for by her brother. Norm ate his dinner in haste, and was silent and almost gruff; nobody knows why. I have often wondered why even well brought up boys, seem sometimes to like to appear more disagreeable than at heart they are. But by six o'clock the much-thought-about brother appeared, his face pleasant enough. "Well, Nannie," he said, "got your fusses and fixings all ready?" And Nettie with beating heart and laughing eyes assured him that she would be all ready in good time, and that she had laid his clean shirt on his bed, and a clean handkerchief, and brushed his coat. "Yes; and she ironed your shirt with her own hands," explained his mother, "and the bosom shines like a glass bottle." "O bother!" said Norm. "I don't want a clean shirt." But he went to his attic directly after supper and put on the shirt, and combed his hair, and rubbed his boots with Jerry's brush which he went around the back way and borrowed of Mrs. Job Smith before he came in to supper. He had noticed how very neat and pretty Nettie looked as she walked down the church isle beside him the night before; and he had also noticed Jerry's shining boots. His mother noticed his the moment he came down stairs. "How nice you two do look!" she said admiringly; and then the two walked away well pleased. It was a wonderful concert. Norm had not known that he was particularly fond of music, but he owned to Rick the next day, that there was something in that Sherrill girl's voice which almost lifted a fellow out of his boots. They had excellent seats! Nettie learned to her intense surprise that their tickets called for reserved seats. She had studied over certain mysterious numbers on the tickets, but had not understood them. It appeared also that the usher was surprised. "Can't give you any seats," was his greeting as they presented their tickets. "Everything is full now except the reserves; you'll have to stand in the aisle; there's a good place under the gallery. Halloo! What's this? Reserved! Why, bless us, I didn't see these numbers. Come down this way; you have as nice seats as there are in the hall." It was all delightful. Lorena Barstow and two others of the Sabbath-school class were a few seats behind them; Nettie could hear them whispering and giggling, and for a few minutes she had an uncomfortable feeling that they were laughing at her; as I am sorry to say they were. But neither this nor anything else troubled her long, for Norm's unusual toilet having taken much longer than was planned for, they were really among the late comers; and in a very little while the music began. Oh! how wonderful it was. Neither Nettie nor Norm had ever heard really fine concert music before, and even Norm who did not know that he cared for music, felt his nerves thrill to his fingers' ends. Then, when after the first two or three pieces Miss Sherrill appeared, she was so beautiful and her voice was so wonderful that Nettie, try as hard as she did, could not keep the tears from her foolish happy eyes. I will not venture to say how much the beautiful silk dress with its long train, and the mass of soft white lace at her throat had to do with Miss Sherrill's loveliness, though I daresay if she had appeared in a twelve-cent gingham like Nettie's, she might have sang just as sweetly. Norm, however, did not believe that. "Half of it is the fuss and feathers," he declared to Rick, next day, looking wise. And Rick made a wise answer. "Well, when you add the handsome voice to the fuss and feathers, I s'pose they help, but I don't believe folks would go and rave so much just over a blue silk dress, and some gloves, and things. They all had to match, you see." So Rick, without knowing it, became a philosopher. As for Nettie, she told her mother that the dress was just lovely, and her voice was as sweet as any angel's could possibly be; but there was a look in her eyes which was better than all the rest; and that when she sang, "Oh that I had wings, had wings like a dove!" she, Nettie, could not help feeling that they were hidden about her somewhere, and that before the song was over, she might unfold them and soar away. CHAPTER XV. A WILL AND A WAY. "THE next thing we want to do is to earn some money." This, Jerry said, as he sat on the side step with Nettie, after sunset. They had been having a long talk, planning the campaign against the enemy, which they had made up their minds should be carried on with vigor. At least, they had been trying to plan; but that obstacle which seems to delight to step into the midst of so many plans and overturn them, viz. money, met them at every point. So when Jerry made that emphatic announcement, Nettie was prepared to agree with him fully; but none the less did she turn anxious eyes on him as she said: "How can we?" "I don't know yet," Jerry said, whistling a few bars of Oh, do not be discouraged, and stopping in the middle of the line to answer, "But of course there is a way. There was an old man who worked for my father, who used to say so often: 'Where there's a will there's a way,' that after awhile we boys got to calling him 'Will and Way' for short, you know; his name was John," and here Jerry stopped to laugh a little over that method of shortening a name; "but it was wonderful to see how true it proved; he would make out to do the most surprising things that even my father thought sometimes could not be done. We must _make_ a way to earn some money." Nettie laughed a little. "Well, I am sure," she said, "there is a will in this case; in fact, there are two wills; for you seem to have a large one, and I know if ever I was determined to do a thing I am now; but for all that I can't think of a possible way to earn a cent." Now Sarah Ann Smith was at this moment standing by the kitchen window, looking out on the two schemers. Her sleeves were rolled above her elbow, for she was about to set the sponge for bread; she had her large neat work apron tied over her neat dress-up calico; and on her head was perched the frame out of which, with Nettie's skilful help, and some pieces of lace from her mother's old treasure bag, she meant to make herself a bonnet every bit as pretty as the one worn by Miss Sherrill the Sabbath before. "Talk of keeping things seven years and they'll come good," said Mrs. Smith, watching with satisfaction while Nettie tumbled over the contents of the bag in eager haste and exclaimed over this and that piece which would be "just lovely." "I've kept the rubbish in that bag going on to twenty years, just because the pretty girls where I used to do clear-starching, gave them to me. I had no kind of notion what I should ever do with them; but they looked bright and pretty, and I always was a master hand for bright colors, and so whenever they would hand out a bit of ribbon or lace, and say, 'Cerinthy, do you want that?' I was sure to say I did; and chuck it into this bag; and now to think after keeping of them for more than twenty years, my girl should be planning to make a bonnet out of them! Things is queer! I don't ever mean to throw away _anything_. I never was much at throwing away; now that's a fact." Now the truth was that Sarah Ann, left to herself, would as soon have thought of making a _house_ out of the contents of that bag, as a bonnet; but Nettie Decker's deft fingers had a natural tact for all cunning contrivances in lace and silk, and her skill in copying what she saw, was something before which Sarah Ann stood in silent admiration; when, therefore, she offered to construct for Sarah Ann, out of the treasures of that bag, a bonnet which should be both becoming and economical, Sarah Ann's gratitude knew no bounds. She went that very afternoon to the milliner's to select her frame, and had it perched at that moment as I said, on her head, while she listened to the clear young voices under the window. She had a great desire to be helpful; but money was far from plenty at Job Smith's. What was it which made her at that moment think of a bit of news which she had heard while at the milliner's? Why, nothing more remarkable than that the color of Nettie Decker's hair in the fading light was just the same as Mantie Horton's. But what made her suddenly speak her bit of news, interrupting the young planners? Ah, that Sarah Ann does not know; she only knows she felt just like saying it, so she said it. "Mantie Horton's folks are all going to move to the city; they are selling off lots of things; I saw her this afternoon when I was at the milliner's, and she says about the only thing now that they don't know what to do with is her old hen and chickens; a nice lot of chicks as ever she saw, but of course they can't take them to the city. My! I should think they would feel dreadful lonesome without chickens, nor pigs, nor nothing! _We_ might have some chickens as well as not, if we only had a place to keep 'em; enough scrapings come from the table every day, to feed 'em, most." Before this sentence was concluded, Jerry had turned and given Nettie a sudden look as if to ask if she saw what he did; then he whistled a low strain which had in it a note of triumph; and the moment Sarah Ann paused for breath he asked: "Where do the Hortons live?" "Why, out on the pike about a mile; that nice white house set back from the road a piece; don't you know? It is just a pleasant walk out there." Then Sarah Ann turned away to attend to her bread, and as she did so her somewhat homely face was lighted by a smile; for an idea had just dawned upon her, and she chuckled over it: "I shouldn't wonder if those young things would go into business; he's got contrivance enough to make a coop, any day, and mother would let them have the scrapings, and welcome." Sarah Ann was right; though Nettie, unused to country ways and plans, did not think of such a thing, Jerry did. The next morning he was up, even before the sun; in fact that luminary peeped at him just as he was turning into the long carriage drive which led finally to the Horton barnyard. There a beautiful sight met his eyes; a white and yellow topknot mother, and eight or ten fluffy chickens scampering about her. "They are nice and plump," said Jerry to himself; "I'm afraid I haven't money enough to buy them; but then, there is a great deal of risk in raising a brood of chickens like these; perhaps he will sell them cheap." Farmer Horton was an early riser, and was busy about his stables when Jerry reached there. He was anxious to get rid of all his live stock, and be away as soon as possible, and here was a customer anxious to buy; so in much less time than Jerry had supposed it would take, the hen and chickens changed owners and much whistling was done by the new owner as he walked rapidly back to town to build a house for his family. Mrs. Smith had been taken into confidence; so indeed had Job, before the purchase was made; but the whole thing was to be a profound surprise to Nettie. Therefore, she saw little of him that day, and I will not deny was a trifle hurt because he kept himself so busy about something which he did not share with her. But I want you to imagine, if you can, her surprise the next morning when just as she was ready to set the potatoes to frying, she heard Jerry's eager voice calling her to come and see his house. "See what?" asked Nettie, appearing in the doorway, coffee pot in hand. "A new house. I built it yesterday, and rented it; the family moved in last night. That is the reason I was so busy. I had to go out and help move them; and I must say they were as ill-behaved a set as I ever had anything to do with. The mother is the crossest party I ever saw; and she has no government whatever; her children scurry around just where they please." "What are you talking about?" said astonished Nettie, her face growing more and more bewildered as he continued his merry description. "Come out and see. It is a new house, I tell you; I built it yesterday; that is the reason I did not come to help you about the bonnet. Didn't you miss me? Sarah Ann thinks it is actually nicer than the one Miss Sherrill wore." And he broke into a merry laugh, checking himself to urge Nettie once more to come out and see his treasures. "Well," said Nettie, "wait until I cover the potatoes, and set the teakettle off." This done she went in haste and eagerness to discover what was taking place behind Job Smith's barn. A hen and chickens! Beautiful little yellow darlings, racing about as though they were crazy; and a speckled mother clucking after them in a dignified way, pretending to have authority over them, when one could see at a glance that they did exactly as they pleased. Then came a storm of questions. "Where? and When? and Why?" "It is a stock company concern," exclaimed Jerry, his merry eyes dancing with pleasure. Nettie was fully as astonished and pleased as he had hoped. "Don't you know I told you yesterday we must plan a way to earn money? This is one way, planned for us. _We_ own Mrs. Biddy; every feather on her knot, of which she is so proud, belongs to us, and she must not only earn her own living and that of her children, but bring us in a nice profit besides. Those are plump little fellows; I can imagine them making lovely pot pies for some one who is willing to pay a good price for them. Cannot you?" "Poor little chickens," said Nettie in such a mournful tone that Jerry went off into shouts of laughter. He was a humane boy, but he could not help thinking it very funny that anybody should sigh over the thought of a chicken pot pie. "Oh, I know they are to eat," Nettie said, smiling in answer to his laughter, "and I know how to make nice crust for pot pie; but for all that, I cannot help feeling sort of sorry for the pretty fluffy chickens. Are you going to fat them all, to eat; or raise some of them to lay eggs?" "I don't know what _we_ are going to do, yet," Jerry said with pointed emphasis on the we. "You see, we have not had time to consult; this is a company concern, I told you. What do you think about it?" Nettie's cheeks began to grow a deep pink; she looked down at the hurrying chickens with a grave face for a moment, then said gently: "You know, Jerry, I haven't any money to help buy the chickens, and I cannot help own what I do not help buy; they are your chickens, but I shall like to watch them and help you plan about them." Jerry sat down on an old nail keg, crossed one foot over the other, and clasped his hands over his knees, as Job Smith was fond of doing, and prepared for argument: "Now, see here, Nettie Decker, let us understand each other once for all; I thought we had gone into partnership in this whole business; that we were to fight that old fiend Rum, in every possible way we could; and were to help each other plan, and work all the time, and in all ways we possibly could. Now if you are tired of me and want to work alone, why, I mustn't force myself upon you." "O, Jerry!" came in a reproachful murmur from Nettie, whose cheeks were now flaming. "Well, what is a fellow to do? You see you hurt my feelings worse than old Mother Topknot did this morning when she pecked me; I want to belong, and I mean to; but all that kind of talk about helping to buy these half-dozen little puff-balls is all nonsense, and a girl of your sense ought to be ashamed of it." Said Nettie, "O, Jerry, I smell the potatoes; they are scorching!" and she ran away. Jerry looked after her a moment, as though astonished at the sudden change of subject, then laughed, and rising slowly from the nail-keg addressed himself to the hen. "Now, Mother Topknot, I want you to understand that you belong to the firm; that little woman who was just here is your mistress, and if you peck her and scratch her as you did me, this morning, it will be the worse for you. You are just like some people I have seen; haven't sense enough to know who is your best friend; why, there is no end to the nice little bits she will contrive for you and your children, if you behave yourself; for that matter, I suspect she would do it whether you behaved yourself or not; but that part it is quite as well you should not understand. I want you to bring these children up to take care of themselves, just as soon as you can; and then you are to give your attention to laying a nice fresh egg every morning; and the sooner you begin, the better we shall like it." Then he went in to breakfast. There was no need to say anything more about the partnership. Nettie seemed to come to the conclusion that she must be ashamed of herself or her pride in the matter; and after a very short time grew accustomed to hearing Jerry talk about "Our chicks," and dropped into the fashion of caring for and planning about them. None the less was she resolved to find some way of earning a little money for her share of the stock company. Curiously enough it was Susie and little Sate who helped again. They came in one morning, with their hands full of the lovely field daisies. The moment Nettie looked at the two little faces, she knew that a dispute of some sort was in progress. Susie's lips were curved with that air of superior wisdom, not to say scorn, which she knew how to assume; and little Sate's eyes were full of the half-grieved but wholly positive look which they could wear on occasion. "What is it?" Nettie asked, stopping on her way to the cellar with a nice little pat of batter which she was saving for her father's supper. Butter was a luxury which she had decided the children at least, herself included, must not expect every day. "Why," said Susie, her eyes flashing her contempt of the whole thing, "she says these are folks; old women with caps, and eyes, and noses, and everything; she says they look at her, and some of them are pleasant, and some are cross. She is too silly for anything. They don't look the least bit in the word like old women. I told her so, fifty-eleven times, and she keeps saying it!" Nettie held out her hand for the bunch of daisies, looked at them carefully, and laughed. "Can't you see them?" was little Sate's eager question. "They are just as plain! Don't you see them a little bit of a speck, Nannie?" "Of course she doesn't!" said scornful Susie. "Nobody but a silly baby like you would think of such a thing." "I don't know," said Nettie, still smiling, "I don't think I see them as plain as Sate does, but maybe we can, after awhile; wait till I get my butter put away, and I'll put on my spectacles and see what I can find." So the two waited, Susie incredulous and disgusted, Sate with a hopeful light in her eyes, which made Nettie very anxious to find the old ladies. On her way up stairs she felt in her pocket for the pencil Jerry had sharpened with such care the evening before; yes, it was there, and the point was safe. Jerry had made a neat little tube of soft wood for it to slip into, and so protect itself. "Now, let us look for the old lady," she said, taking a daisy in hand and retiring to the closet window for inspection; it was the work of a moment for her fingers which often ached for such work, to fashion a pair of eyes, a nose, and a mouth; and then to turn down the white petals for a cap border, leaving two under the chin for strings! "Does your old lady look anything like that?" she questioned, as she came out from her hiding place. Little Sate looked, and clasped her hands in an ecstacy of delight: "Look, Susie, look, quick! there she is, just as plain! O Nannie! I'm _so_ glad you found her." "Humph!" said Susie, "she made her with a pencil; she wasn't there at all; and there couldn't nobody have found her. So!" And to this day, I suppose it would not be possible to make Susie Decker believe that the spirits of beautiful old ladies hid in the daisies! Some people cannot see things, you know, show them as much as you may. But Nettie was charmed with the little old woman. She left the potatoes waiting to be washed, and sat down on the steps with eager little Sate, and made old lady after old lady. Some with spectacles, and some without. Some with smooth hair drawn quietly back from quiet foreheads, some with the old-fashioned puffs and curls which she had seen in old, old pictures of "truly" grandmothers. What fun they had! The potatoes came near being forgotten entirely. It was the faithful old clock in Mrs. Smith's kitchen which finally clanged out the hour and made Nettie rise in haste, scattering old ladies right and left. But little Sate gathered them, every one, holding them with as careful hand as though she feared a rough touch would really hurt their feelings, and went out to hunt Susie and soothe her ruffled dignity. She did not find Susie; that young woman was helping Jerry nail laths on the chicken coop; but she found her sweet-faced Sabbath-school teacher, who was sure to stop and kiss the child, whenever she passed. To her, Sate at once showed the sweet old women. "Nannie found them," she explained; "Susie could not see them at all, and she kept saying they were not there; but Nannie said she would make them look plainer so Susie could see, and now Susie thinks she made them out of a pencil; but they were there, before, I saw them." "Oh, you quaint little darling!" said Miss Sherrill, kissing her again. "And so your sister Nettie made them plainer for you. I must say she has done it with a skilful hand. Sate dear, would you give one little old woman to me? Just one; this dear old face with puffs, I want her very much." So Sate gazed at her with wistful, tender eyes, kissed her tenderly, and let Miss Sherrill carry her away. She carried her straight to the minister's study, and laid her on the open page of a great black commentary which he was studying. "Did you ever see anything so cunning? That little darling of a Sate says Nannie 'found' her; she doesn't seem to think it was made, but simply developed, you know, so that commoner eyes than hers could see it; that child was born for a poet, or an artist, I don't know which. Tremayne, I'm going to take this down to the flower committee, and get them to invite Nettie to make some bouquets of dear old grandmothers, and let little Sate come to the flower party and sell them. Won't that be lovely? Every gentleman there will want a bouquet of the nice old ladies in caps, and spectacles; we will make it the fashion; then they will sell beautifully, and the little merchant shall go shares on the proceeds, for the sake of her artist sister." "It is a good idea," said the minister. "I infer from what that handsome boy Jerry has told me, that they have some scheme on hand which requires money. I am very much interested in those young people, my dear. I wish you would keep a watch on them, and lend a helping hand when you can." CHAPTER XVI. AN ORDEAL. THAT was the way it came about that little Sate not only, but Susie and Nettie, went to the flower party. They had not expected to do any such thing. The little girls, who were not used to going any where, had paid no attention to the announcements on Sunday, and Nettie had heard as one with whom such things had nothing in common. Her treatment in the Sabbath-school was not such as to make her long for the companionship of the girls of her age, and by this time she knew that her dress at the flower party would be sure to command more attention than was pleasant; so she had planned as a matter of course to stay away. But the little old ladies in their caps and spectacles springing into active life, put a new face on the matter. Certainly no more astonished young person can be imagined than Nettie Decker was, the morning Miss Sherrill called on her, the one daisy she had begged still carefully preserved, and proposed her plan of partnership in the flower party. "It will add ever so much to the fun," she explained, "besides bringing you a nice little sum for your spending money." Did Miss Sherrill have any idea how far that argument would reach just now, Nettie wondered. "We can dress the little girls in daisies," continued their teacher. "Little Sate will look like a flower herself, with daisies wreathed about her dress and hair." "Little Sate will be afraid, I think," Nettie objected. "She is very timid, and not used to seeing many people." "But with Susie she will not mind, will she? Susie has assurance enough to take her through anything. Oh, I wonder if little Sate would not recite a verse about the daisy grandmothers? I have such a cunning one for her. May I teach her, Mrs. Decker, and see if I can get her to learn it?" Mrs. Decker's consent was very easy to gain; indeed it had been freely given in Mrs. Decker's heart before it was asked. For Miss Sherrill had not been in the room five minutes before she had said: "Your son, Norman, I believe his name is, has promised to help my brother with the church flowers this evening. My brother says he is an excellent helper; his eye is so true; they had quite a laugh together, last week. It seems one of the wreaths was not hung plumb; your son and my brother had an argument about it, and it was finally left as my brother had placed it, but was out of line several inches. He was obliged to admit that if he had followed Norman's direction it would have looked much better." After that, it would have been hard for Miss Sherrill to have asked a favor which Mrs. Decker would not grant if she could. _She_ saw through it all; these people were in league with Nettie, to try to save her boy. What wasn't she ready to do at their bidding! There was but one thing about which she was positive. The little girls could not go without Nettie; they talked it over in the evening, after Miss Sherrill was gone. Nettie looked distressed. She liked to please Miss Sherrill; she was willing to make many grandmothers; she would help to put the little girls in as dainty attire as possible, but she did _not_ want to go to the flower festival. She planned various ways; Jerry would take them down, or Norm; perhaps even _he_ would go with them; surely mother would be willing to have them go with Norm. Miss Sherrill would look after them carefully, and they would come home at eight o'clock; before they began to grow very sleepy. But no, Mrs. Decker was resolved; she could not let them go unless Nettie would go with them and bring them home. "I let one child run the streets," she said with a heavy sigh, "and I have lived to most wish he had died when he was a baby, before I did it; and I said then I would never let another one go out of my sight as long as I had control; I can't go; but I would just as soon they would be with you as with me; and unless you go, they can't stir a step, and that's the whole of it." Mrs. Decker was a very determined woman when she set out to be; and Nettie looked the picture of dismay. It did not seem possible to her to go to a flower party; and on the other hand it seemed really dreadful to thwart Miss Sherrill. Jerry sat listening, saying little, but the word he put in now and then, was on Mrs. Decker's side; he owned to himself that he never so entirely approved of her as at that moment. He wanted Nettie to go to the flower party. "But I have nothing to wear?" said Nettie, blushing, and almost weeping. "Nothing to wear!" repeated Mrs. Decker in honest astonishment. "Why, what do you wear on Sundays, I should like to know? I'm sure you look as neat and nice as any girl I ever saw, in your gingham. I was watching you last Sunday and thinking how pretty it was." "Yes; but, mother, they all wear white at such places; and I cut up my white dress, you know, for the little girls; it was rather short for me anyway; but I should feel queer in any other color." "O, well," said Mrs. Decker in some irritation, "if they go to such places to show their clothes, why, I suppose you must stay at home, if you have none that you want to show. I thought, being it was a church, it didn't matter, so you were neat and clean; but churches are like everything else, it seems, places for show." Jerry looked grave disapproval at Nettie, but she felt injured and could have cried. Was it fair to accuse her of going to church to show her clothes, or of being over-particular, when she went every Sunday in a blue and white gingham such as no other girl in her class would wear even to school? This was not church, it was a party. It was hard that she must be blamed for pride, when she was only too glad to stay at home from it. "I can't go in my blue dress, and that is the whole of it," she said at last, a good deal of decision in her voice. "Very well," said Mrs Decker. "Then we'll say no more about it; as for the little girls going without you, they sha'n't do it. When I set my foot down, it's _down_." Jerry instinctively looked down at her foot as she spoke. It was a good-sized one, and looked as though it could set firmly on any question on which it was put. His heart began to fail him; the flower party and certain things which he hoped to accomplish thereby, were fading. He took refuge with Mrs. Smith to hide his disappointment, and also to learn wisdom about this matter of dress. "Do clothes make such a very great difference to girls?" was his first question. "Difference?" said Mrs. Smith rubbing a little more flour on her hands, and plunging them again into the sticky mass she was kneading. "Yes'm. They seem to think of clothes the first thing, when there is any place to go to; boys aren't that way. I don't believe a boy knows whether his coat ought to be brown or green. What makes the difference?" Mrs. Smith laughed a little. "Well," she said reflectively, "there is a difference, now that's a fact. I noticed it time and again when I was living with Mrs. Jennison. Dick would go off with whatever he happened to have on; and Florence was always in a flutter as to whether she looked as well as the rest. I've heard folks say that it is the fault of the mothers, because they make such a fuss over the girls' clothes, and keep rigging them up in something bright, just to make 'em look pretty, till they succeed in making them think there isn't anything quite so important in life as what they wear on their backs. It's all wrong, I believe. But then, Nettie ain't one of that kind. She hasn't had any mother to perk her up and make her vain. I shouldn't think she would be one to care about clothes much." "She doesn't," said Jerry firmly. "I don't think she would care if other folks didn't. The girls in her class act hatefully to her; they don't speak, if they can help it. I suppose it's clothes; I don't know what else; they are always rigged out like hollyhocks or tulips; they make fun of her, I guess; and that isn't very pleasant." "Is that the reason she won't go to the flower show next week?" "Yes'm, that's the reason. All the girls are going to dress in white; I suppose she thinks she will look queerly, and be talked about. But I don't understand it. Seems to me if all the boys were going to wear blue coats, and I knew it, I'd just as soon wear my gray one if gray was respectable." "She ought to have a white dress, now that's a fact," said Mrs. Smith with energy, patting her brown loaf, and tucking it down into the tin in a skilful way. "It isn't much for a girl like her to want; if her father was the kind of man he ought to be, she might have a white dress for best, as well as not; I've no patience with him." "Her father hasn't drank a drop this week," said Jerry. "Hasn't; well, I'm glad of it; but I'm thinking of what he has done, and what he will go and do, as likely as not, next week; they might be as forehanded as any folks I know of, if he was what he ought to be; there isn't a better workman in the town. Well, you don't care much about the flower party, I suppose?" "I don't now," said Jerry, wearily. "When I thought the little girls were going, I had a plan. Sate is such a little thing, she would be sure to be half-asleep by eight o'clock; and I was going to coax Norm to come for her, and we carry her home between us. Norm won't go to a flower party, out and out; but he is good-natured, and was beginning to think a great deal of Sate; then I thought Mr. Sherrill would speak to him. The more we can get Norm to feeling he belongs in such places, the less he will feel like belonging to the corner groceries, and the streets." "I see," said Mrs. Smith admiringly. "Well, I do say I didn't think Nettie was the kind of girl to put a white dress between her chances of helping folks. Sarah Ann thinks she's a real true Christian; but Satan does seem to be into the clothes business from beginning to end." "I don't suppose it is any easier for a Christian to be laughed at and slighted, than it is for other people," said Jerry, inclined to resent the idea that Nettie was not showing the right spirit; although in his heart he was disappointed in her for caring so much about the color of her dress. "Well, I don't know about that," said Mrs. Smith, stopping in the act of tucking her bread under the blankets, to look full at Jerry, "why, they even made fun of the Lord Jesus Christ; dressed him up in purple, like a king, and mocked at him! When it comes to remembering that, it would seem as if any common Christian might be almost glad of a chance to be made fun of, just to stand in the same lot with him." This was a new thought to Jerry. He studied it for awhile in silence. Now it so happened that neither Mrs. Smith nor Jerry remembered certain facts; one was that Mrs. Smith's kitchen window was in a line with Mrs. Decker's bedroom window, where Nettie had gone to sit while she mended Norm's shirt; the other was that a gentle breeze was blowing, which brought their words distinctly to Nettie's ears. At first she had not noticed the talk, busy with her own thoughts, then she heard her name, and paused needle in hand, to wonder what was being said about her. Then, coming to her senses, she determined to leave the room; but her mother, for convenience, had pushed her ironing table against the bedroom door, and then had gone to the yard in search of chips; Nettie was a prisoner; she tried to push the table by pushing against the door, but the floor was uneven, and the table would not move; meantime the conversation going on across the alleyway, came distinctly to her. No use to cough, they were too much interested to hear her. By and by she grew so interested as to forget that the words were not intended for her to hear. There were more questions involved in this matter of dress than she had thought about. Her cheeks began to burn a little with the thought that her neighbor had been planning help for Norm, which she was blocking because she had no white dress! This was an astonishment! She had not known she was proud. In fact, she had thought herself very humble, and worthy of commendation because she went Sabbath after Sabbath to the school in the same blue and white dress, not so fresh now by a great deal as when she first came home. When Mrs. Smith reached the sentence which told of the Lord Jesus being robed in purple, and crowned with thorns, and mocked, two great tears fell on Norm's shirt sleeve. It was a very gentle little girl who moved about the kitchen getting early tea; Mrs. Decker glanced at her from time to time in a bewildered way. The sort of girl with whom she was best acquainted would have slammed things about a little; both because she had not clothes to wear like other children, and because she had been blamed for not wanting to do what was expected of her. But Nettie's face had no trace of anger, her movements were gentleness itself; her voice when she spoke was low and sweet: "Mother, I will take the little girls, if you will let them go." Mrs. Decker drew a relieved sigh. "I'd like them to go because _she_ asked to have them; and I can see plain enough she is trying to get hold of Norm; so is _he_; that's what helping with the flowers means; and there ain't anything I ain't willing to do to help, only I couldn't let the little girls go without you; they'd be scared to death, and it wouldn't look right. I'm sorry enough you ain't got suitable clothes; if I could help it, you should have as good as the best of them." "Never mind," said Nettie, "I don't think I care anything about the dress now." She was thinking of that crown of thorns. So when Miss Sherrill called the way was plain and little Sate ready to be taught anything she would teach her. They went away down to the pond under the clump of trees which formed such a pretty shade; and there Sate's slow sweet voice said over the lines as they were told to her, putting in many questions which the words suggested. "He makes the flowers blow," she repeated with thoughtful face, then: "What did He make them for?" "I think it was because He loved them; and He likes to give you and me sweet and pleasant things to look at." "Does He love flowers?" "I think so, darling." "And birds? See the birds!" For at that moment two beauties standing on the edge of their nest, looked down into the clear water, and seeing themselves reflected in its smoothness began to talk in low sweet chirps to their shadows. "Oh, yes, He loves the birds, I am sure; think how many different kinds He has made, and how beautiful they are. Then He has given them sweet voices, and they are thanking Him as well as they know how, for all his goodness. Listen." Sure enough, one of the little birds hopped back a trifle, balanced himself well on the nest, and, putting up his little throat, trilled a lovely song. "What does he say?" asked Sate, watching him intently. "Oh, I don't know," said Miss Sherrill, with a little laugh. Sate was taxing her powers rather too much. "But God understands, you know; and I am sure the words are very sweet to him." Sate reflected over this for a minute, then went back to the flowers. "What made Him put the colors on them? Does He like to see pretty colors, do you sink? Which color does He like just the very bestest of all?" "O you darling! I don't know that, either. Perhaps, crimson; or, no, I think He must like pure white ones a little the best. But He likes little human flowers the best of all. Little white flowers with souls. Do you know what I mean, darling? White hearts are given to the little children who try all the time to do right, because they love Jesus, and want to please him." "Sate wants to," said the little girl earnestly. "Sate loves Jesus; and she would like to kiss him." "I do not know but you shall, some day. Now shall we take another line of the hymn?" continued her teacher. "I tried to teach her," explained Miss Sherrill to her brother. "But I think, after all, she taught me the most. She is the dearest little thing, and asks the strangest questions! When I look at her grave, sweet face, and hear her slow, sweet voice making wise answers, and asking wise questions, a sort of baby wisdom, you know, I can only repeat over and over the words: "'Of such is the kingdom of heaven.' "To-day I told her the story of Jesus taking the little children up in his arms and blessing them. She listened with that thoughtful look in her eyes which is so wonderful, then suddenly she held up her pretty arms and said in the most coaxing tones: "'Take little Sate to Him, and let Him bless her, yight away.' "Tremaine, I could hardly keep back the tears. Do you think He can be going to call her soon?" "Not necessarily at all. There is no reason why a little child should not live very close to Him on earth. I hope that little girl has a great work to do for Christ in this world. She has a very sweet face." CHAPTER XVII. THE FLOWER PARTY. I DARE say some of you think Nettie Decker was a very silly girl to care so much because her dress was a blue and white gingham instead of being all white. You have told your friend Katie about the story and asked her if she didn't think it was real silly to make such an ado over _clothes_; you have said you were sure you would just as soon wear a blue gingham as not if it was clean and neat. But now let me venture a hint. I shouldn't be surprised if that was because you never do have to go to places differently dressed from all the others. Because if you did, you would know that it was something of a trial. Oh! I don't say it is the hardest thing in the world; or that one is all ready to die as a martyr who does it; but what I _do_ say is, that it takes a little moral courage; and, for one, I am not surprised that Nettie looked very sober about it when the afternoon came. It took her a good while to dress; not that there was so much to be done, but she stopped to think. With her hair in her neck, still unbraided, she pinned a lovely pink rose at her breast just to see how pretty it would look for a minute. Miss Sherrill had left it for her to wear; but she did not intend to wear it, because she thought it would not match well with her gingham dress. Just here, I don't mind owning that I think her silly; because I believe that sweet flowers go with sweet pure young faces, whether the dress is of gingham or silk. But Nettie looked grave, as I said, and wished it was over; and tried to plan for the hundredth time, how it would all be. The girls, Cecelia Lester and Lorena Barstow and the rest of them, would be out in their elegant toilets, and would look at her so! That Ermina Farley would be there; she had seen her but once, on the first Sunday, and liked her face and her ways a little better than the others; but she had been away since then. Jerry said she was back, however, and Mrs. Smith said they were the richest folks in town; and of course Ermina would be elegantly dressed at the flower party. Well, she did not care. She was willing to have them all dressed beautifully; she was not mean enough to want them to wear gingham dresses, if only they would not make fun of hers. Oh! if she could _only_ stay at home, and help iron, and get supper, and fry some potatoes nicely for father, how happy she would be. Then she sighed again, and set about braiding her hair. She meant to go, but she could not help being sorry for herself to think it must be done; and she spent a great deal of trouble in trying to plan just how hateful it would all be; how the girls would look, and whisper, and giggle; and how her cheeks would burn. Oh dear! Then she found it was late, and had to make her fingers fly, and to rush about the little woodhouse chamber which was still her room, in a way which made Sarah Ann say to her mother with a significant nod, "I guess she's woke up and gone at it, poor thing!" Yes, she had; and was down in fifteen minutes more. Oh! but didn't the little girls look pretty! Nettie forgot her trouble for a few minutes, in admiring them when she had put the last touches to their toilet. Susie was to be in a tableau where she would need a dolly, and Miss Sherrill had furnished one for the occasion. A lovely dolly with real hair, and blue eyes, and a bright blue sash to match them; and when Susie got it in her arms, there came such a sweet, softened look over her face that Nettie hardly knew her. The sturdy voice, too, which was so apt to be fierce, softened and took a motherly tone; the dolly was certainly educating Susie. Little Sate looked on, interested, pleased, but without the slightest shade of envy. She wanted no dolly; or, if she did, there was a little black-faced, worn, rag one reposing at this moment in the trundle bed where little Sate's own head would rest at night; kissed, and caressed, and petted, and told to be good until mamma came back; this dolly had all of Sate's warm heart. For the rest, the grave little old women in caps and spectacles, which wound about her dress, crept up in bunches on her shoulders, lay in nestling heaps at her breast, filled all Sate's thoughts. She seemed to have become a little old woman herself, so serious and womanly was her face. Nettie took a hand of each, and they went to the flower festival. There was to be a five o'clock tea for all the elderly people of the church, and the tables, some of them, were set in Mr. Eastman's grounds, which adjoined the church. When Nettie entered these grounds she found a company of girls several years younger than herself, helping to decorate the tables with flowers; at least that was their work, but as Nettie appeared at the south gate, a queer little object pushed in at the west side. A child not more than six years old, with a clean face, and carefully combed hair, but dressed in a plain dark calico; and her pretty pink toes were without shoes or stockings. [Illustration: AT THE FLOWER PARTY.] I am not sure that if a little wolf had suddenly appeared before them, it could have caused more exclamations of astonishment and dismay. "Only look at that child!" "The idea!" "Just to think of such a thing!" were a few of the exclamations with which the air was thick. At last, one bolder than the rest, stepped towards her: "Little girl, where did you come from? What in the world do you want here?" Startled by the many eyes and the sharp tones, the small new-comer hid her face behind an immense bunch of glowing hollyhocks, which she held in her hand, and said not a word. Then the chorus of voices became more eager: "Do look at her hollyhocks! Did ever anybody see such a queer little fright! Girls, I do believe she has come to the party." Then the one who had spoken before, tried again: "See here, child, whoever you are, you must go right straight home; this is no place for you. I wonder what your mother was about--if you have one--to let you run away barefooted, and looking like a fright." Now the barefooted maiden was thoroughly frightened, and sobbed outright. It was precisely what Nettie Decker needed to give her courage. When she came in at the gate, she had felt like shrinking away from all eyes; now she darted an indignant glance at the speaker, and moved quickly toward the crying child, Susie and Sate following close behind. "Don't cry, little girl," she said in the gentlest tones, stooping and putting an arm tenderly around the trembling form; "you haven't done anything wrong; Miss Sherrill will be here soon, and she will make it all right." Thus comforted, the tears ceased, and the small new-comer allowed her hand to be taken; while Susie came around to her other side, and scowled fiercely, as though to say: "I'll protect this girl myself; let's see you touch her now!" A burst of laughter greeted Nettie as soon as she had time to give heed to it. Others had joined the groups, among them Lorena Barstow and Irene Lewis. "What's all this?" asked Irene. "O, nothing," said one; "only that Decker girl's sister, or cousin, or something has just arrived from Cork, and come in search of her. Lorena Barstow, did you ever see such a queer-looking fright?" "I don't see but they look a good deal alike," said Lorena, tossing her curls; "I'm sure their dresses correspond; is she a sister?" "Why, no," answered one of the smaller girls; "those two cunning little things in white are Nettie Decker's sisters; I think they are real sweet." "Oh!" said Lorena, giving them a disagreeable stare, "in white, are they? The unselfish older sister has evidently cut up her nightgowns to make them white dresses for this occasion." "Lorena," said the younger girl, "if I were you I would be ashamed; mother would not like you to talk in that way." "Well, you see Miss Nanie, you are not me, therefore you cannot tell what you would be, or do; and I want to inform you it is not your business to tell me what mother would like." Imagine Nettie Decker standing quietly, with the barefooted child's small hand closely clasped in hers, listening to all this! There was a pretense of lowered voices, yet every word was distinct to her ears. Her heart beat fast and she began to feel as though she really was paying quite a high price for the possibility of getting Norm into the church parlor for a few minutes that evening. At that moment, through the main gateway, came Ermina Parley, a colored man with her, bearing a basket full of such wonderful roses, that for a minute the group could only exclaim over them. Ermina was in white, but her dress was simply made, and looked as though she might not be afraid to tumble about on the grass in it; her shoes were thick, and the blue sash she wore, though broad and handsome, had some way a quiet air of fitness for the occasion, which did not seem to belong to most of the others. She watched the disposal of her roses, then gave an inquiring glance about the grounds as she said, "What are you all doing here?" "We are having a tableau," said Lorena Barstow. "Look behind you, and you will see the Misses Bridget and Margaret Mulrooney, who have just arrived from ould Ireland shure." Most of the thoughtless girls laughed, mistaking this rudeness for wit, but Ermina turned quickly and caught her first glimpse of Nettie's burning face; then she hastened toward her. "Why, here is little Prudy, after all," she said eagerly; "I coaxed her mother to let her come, but I didn't think she would. Has Miss Sherrill seen her? I think she will make such a cunning Roman flower-girl, in that tableau, you know. Her face is precisely the shape and style of the little girls we saw in Rome last winter. Poor little girlie, was she frightened? How kind you were to take care of her. She is a real bright little thing. I want to coax her into Sunday-school if I can. Let us go and ask Miss Sherrill what she thinks about the flower-girl." How fast Ermina Farley could talk! She did not wait for replies. The truth was, Nettie's glowing cheeks, and Susie's fierce looks, told her the story of trial for somebody else besides the Roman flower-girl; she could guess at things which might have been said before she came. She wound her arm familiarly about Nettie's waist as she spoke, and drew her, almost against her will, across the lawn. "My!" said Irene Lewis. "How good we are!" "Birds of a feather flock together," quoted Lorena Barstow. "I think that barefooted child and her protector look alike." "Still," said Irene, "you must remember that Ermina Farley has joined that flock; and her feathers are very different." "Oh! that is only for effect," was the naughty reply, with another toss of the rich curls. Now what was the matter with all these disagreeable young people? Did they really attach so much importance to the clothes they wore as to think no one was respectable who was not dressed like them? Had they really no hearts, so that it made no difference to them how deeply they wounded poor Nettie Decker? I do not think it was quite either of these things. They had been, so far in their lives, unfortunate, in that they had heard a great deal about dress, and style, until they had done what young people and a few older ones are apt to do, attached too much importance to these things. They were neither old enough, nor wise enough, to know that it is a mark of a shallow nature to judge of people by the clothes they wear; then, in regard to the ill-natured things said, I tell you truly, that even Lorena Barstow was ashamed of herself. When her younger sister reproved her, the flush which came on her cheek was not all anger, much of it was shame. But she had taught her tongue to say so many disagreeable words, and to pride itself on its independence in saying what she pleased, that the habit asserted itself, and she could not seem to control it. The contrast between her own conduct and Ermina Farley's struck her so sharply and disagreeably it served only to make her worse than before; precisely the effect which follows when people of uncontrolled tempers find themselves rebuked. Half-way down the lawn the party in search of Miss Sherrill met her face to face. Her greeting was warm. "Oh! here is my dear little grandmother. Thank you, Nettie, for coming; I look to you for a great deal of help. Why, Ermina, what wee mousie have you here?" "She is a little Roman flower-girl, Miss Sherrill; they live on Parker street. Her mother is a nice woman; my mother has her to run the machine. I coaxed her to let Trudie wear her red dress and come barefoot, until you would see if she would do for the Roman flower-girl. Papa says her face is very Roman in style, and she always makes us think of the flower-girls we saw there. I brought my Roman sash to dress her in, if you thought well of it; she is real bright, and will do just as she is told." "It is the very thing," said Miss Sherrill with a pleased face; "I am so glad you thought of it. And the hollyhocks are just red enough to go in the basket. Did you think of them too?" "No, ma'am; mamma did. She said the more red flowers we could mass about her, the better for a Roman peasant." "It will be a lovely thing," said Miss Sherrill. Then she stooped and kissed the small brown face, which was now smiling through its tears. "You have found good friends, little one. She is very small to be here alone. Ermina, will you and Nettie take care of her this afternoon, and see that she is happy?" "Yes'm," said Ermina promptly. "Nettie was taking care of her when I came. She was afraid at first, I think." "They were ugly to her," volunteered Susie, "they were just as ugly to her as they could be; they made her cry. If they'd done it to Sate I would have scratched them and bit them." "Oh," said Miss Sherrill sorrowfully. "How sorry I am to hear it; then Susie would have been naughty too, and it wouldn't have made the others any better; in fact, it would have made them worse." "I don't care," said Susie, but she did care. She said that, just as you do sometimes, when you mean you care a great deal, and don't want to let anybody know it. For the first time, Susie reflected whether it was a good plan to scratch and bite people who did not, in her judgment, behave well. It had not been a perfect success in her experience, she was willing to admit that; and if it made Miss Sherrill sorry, it was worth thinking about. Well, that afternoon which began so dismally, blossomed out into a better time than Nettie had imagined it possible for her to have. To be sure those particular girls who had been the cause of her sorrow, would have nothing to do with her; and whispered, and sent disdainful glances her way when they had an opportunity; but Nettie went in their direction as little as possible, and when she did was in such a hurry that she sometimes forgot all about them. Miss Sherrill, who was chairman of the committee of entertainment, kept her as busy as a bee the entire afternoon; running hither and thither, carrying messages to this one, and pins to that one, setting this vase of flowers at one end, and that lovely basket at another, and, a great deal of the time, standing right beside Miss Sherrill herself, handing her, at call, just what she needed when she dressed the girls with their special flowers. She could hear the bright pleasant talk which passed between Miss Sherrill and the other young ladies. She was often appealed too with a pleasant word. Her own teacher smiled on her more than once, and said she was the handiest little body who had ever helped them; and all the time that lovely Ermina Farley with her beautiful hair, and her pretty ways, and her sweet low voice, was near at hand, joining in everything which she had to do. To be sure she heard, in one of her rapid scampers across the lawn, this question asked in a loud tone by Lorena Barstow: "I wonder how much they pay that girl for running errands? Maybe she will earn enough to get herself a new white nightgown to wear to parties;" but at that particular minute, Ermina Farley running from another direction on an errand precisely like her own, bumped up against her with such force that their noses ached; then both stopped to laugh merrily, and some way, what with the bump, and the laughter, Nettie forgot to cry, when she had a chance, over the unkind words. Then, later in the afternoon, came Jerry; and in less than five minutes he joined their group, and made himself so useful that when Mr. Sherrill came presently for boys to go with him to the chapel to arrange the tables, Miss Sherrill said in low tones, "Don't take Jerry please, we need him here." Nettie heard it, and beamed her satisfaction. Also she heard Irene Lewis say, "Now they've taken that Irish boy into their crowd--shouldn't you think Ermina Farley would be ashamed!" Then Nettie's face fairly paled. It is one thing to be insulted yourself; it is another to stand quietly by and see your friends insulted. She was almost ready to appeal to Miss Sherrill for protection from tongues. But Jerry heard the same remark, and laughed; not in a forced way, but actually as though it was very amusing to him. And almost immediately he called out something to Ermina, using an unmistakable Irish brogue. What was the use in trying to protect a boy who was so indifferent as that? CHAPTER XVIII. A SATISFACTORY EVENING. THE little old grandmothers with their queer caps were perhaps the feature of the evening. Everybody wanted a bouquet of them. In fact, long before eight o'clock, Jerry had been hurried away for a fresh supply, and Nettie had been established behind a curtain to "make more grandmothers." In her excitement she made them even prettier than before; and sweet, grave little Sate had no trouble in selling every one. The pretty Roman flower girl was so much admired, that her father, a fine-looking young mechanic who came after her bringing red stockings and neat shoes, carried her off at last in triumph on his shoulder, saying he was afraid her head would be turned with so much praise, but thanking everybody with bright smiling eyes for giving his little girl such a pleasant afternoon. "She isn't Irish, after all," said Irene Lewis, watching them. "And Mr. Sherrill shook hands with him as familiarly as though he was an old friend; I wish we hadn't made such simpletons of ourselves. Lorena Barstow, what did you want to go and say she was an Irish girl for?" "I didn't say any such thing," said Lorena in a shrill voice; and then these two who had been friends in ill humor all the afternoon quarreled, and went home more unhappy than before. And still I tell you they were not the worst girls in the world; and were very much ashamed of themselves. Before eight o'clock, Norm came. To be sure he stoutly refused, at first, to step beyond the doorway, and ordered Nettie in a somewhat surly tone to "bring that young one out," if she wanted her carried home. That, of course, was the little grandmother; but her eyes looked as though they had not thought of being sleepy, and the ladies were not ready to let her go. Then the minister, who seemed to understand things without having them explained, said, "Where is Decker? we'll make it all right; come, little grandmother, let us go and see about it." So he took Sate on his shoulder and made his way through the crowd; and Nettie who watched anxiously, presently saw Norm coming back with them, not looking surly at all; his clothes had been brushed, and he had on a clean collar, and his hair was combed, quite as though he had meant to come in, after all. Soon after Norm's coming, something happened which gave Nettie a glimpse of her brother in a new light. Young Ernest Belmont was there with his violin. During the afternoon, Nettie had heard whispers of what a lovely player he was, and at last saw with delight that a space was being cleared for him to play. Crowds of people gathered about the platform to listen, but among them all Norm's face was marked; at least it was to Nettie. She had never seen him look like that. He seemed to forget the crowds, and the lights, and everything but the sounds which came from that violin. He stood perfectly still, his eyes never once turning from their earnest gaze of the fingers which were producing such wonderful tones. Nettie, looking, and wondering, almost forgot the music in her astonishment that her brother should be so absorbed. Jerry with some difficulty elbowed his way towards her, his face beaming, and said, "Isn't it splendid?" For answer she said, "Look at Norm." And Jerry looked. "That's so," he said at last, heartily, speaking as though he was answering a remark from somebody; "Norm is a musician. Did you know he liked it so much?" "I didn't know anything about it," Nettie said, hardly able to keep back the tears, though she did not understand why her eyes should fill; but there was such a look of intense enjoyment in Norm's face, mingled with such a wistful longing for something, as made the tears start in spite of her. "I didn't know he liked _anything_ so much as that." "He likes _that_," said Jerry heartily, "and I am glad." "I don't know. What makes you glad? I am almost sorry; because he may never have a chance to hear it again." "He must make his chances; he is going to be a man. I'm glad, because it gives us a hint as to what his tastes are; don't you see?" "Why, yes," said Nettie, "I see he likes it; but what is the use in knowing people's tastes if you cannot possibly do anything for them?" "There's no such thing as it not being possible to do most anything," Jerry said good humoredly. "Maybe we will some of us own a violin some day, and Norm will play it for us. Who knows? Stranger things than that have happened." But this thing looked to Nettie so improbable that she merely laughed. The music suddenly ceased, and Norm came back from dreamland and looked about him, and blushed, and felt awkward. He saw the people now, and the lights, and the flowers; he remembered his hands and did not know what to do with them; and his feet felt too large for the space they must occupy. Jerry plunged through the crowd and stood beside him. "How did you like it?" he asked, and Norm cleared his voice before replying; he could not understand why his throat should feel so husky. "I like a fiddle," he said. "There is a fellow comes into the corner grocery down there by Crossman's and plays, sometimes; I always go down there, when I hear of it." If Jerry could have caught Nettie's eye just then he would have made a significant gesture; the store by Crossman's made tobacco and liquor its chief trade. So a fiddle was one of the things used to draw the boys into it! "Is a fiddle the only kind of music you like?" Jerry had been accustomed to calling it a violin, but the instinct of true politeness which was marked in him, made him say fiddle just now as Norm had done. "Oh! I like anything that whistles a tune!" said Norm. "I've gone a rod out of my way to hear a jew's-harp many a time; even an old hand-organ sounds nice to me. I don't know why, but I never hear one without stopping and listening as long as I can." He laughed a little, as though ashamed of the taste, and looked at Jerry suspiciously. But there was not the slightest hint of a smile on the boy's face, only hearty interest and approval. "I like music, too, almost any sort; but I don't believe I like it as well as you. Your face looked while you were listening as though you could make some yourself if you tried." The smile went out quickly from Norm's face, and Jerry thought he heard a little sigh with the reply: "I never had a chance to try; and never expect to have." "Well, now, I should like to know why not? I never could understand why a boy with brains, and hands, and feet, shouldn't have a try at almost anything which was worth trying, sometime in his life." It was not Jerry who said this, but the minister who had come up in time to hear the last words from both sides. He stopped before Norm, smiling as he spoke. "Try the music, my friend, by all means, if you like it. It is a noble taste, worth cultivating." Norm looked sullen. "It's easy to talk," he said severely, "but when a fellow has to work like a dog to get enough to eat and wear, to keep him from starving or freezing, I'd like to see him get a chance to try at music, or anything else of that kind!" "So should I. He is the very fellow who ought to have the chance; and more than that, in nine cases out of ten he is the fellow who gets it. A boy who is willing and able to work, is pretty sure, in this country, to have opportunity to gratify his tastes in the end. He may have to wait awhile, but that only sharpens the appetite of a genuine taste; if it is a worthy taste, as music certainly is, it will grow with his growth, and will help him to plan, and save, and contrive, until one of these days he will show you! By the way, you would like organ music, I fancy; the sort which is sometimes played on parlor organs. If you will come to the parsonage to-morrow night at eight o'clock, I think I can promise you something which you will enjoy. My sister is going to try some new music for a few friends, at that time; suppose you come and pick out your favorite?" All Jerry's satisfaction and interest shone in his face; to-morrow night at eight o'clock! All day he had been trying to arrange something which would keep Norm at that hour away from the aforesaid corner grocery, where he happened to know some doubtful plans were to be arranged for future mischief, by the set who gathered there. If only Norm would go to the parsonage it would be the very thing. But Norm flushed and hesitated. "Bring a friend with you," said the minister. "Bring Jerry, here; you like music, don't you, Jerry?" "Yes, sir," said Jerry promptly; "I like music very much, and I would like to go if Norm is willing." "Bring Jerry with you." That sentence had a pleasant sound. Up to this moment it was the younger boy who had patronized the elder. Norm called him the "little chap," but for all that looked up to him with a curious sort of respect such as he felt for none of the "fellows" who were his daily companions; the idea of bringing him to a place of entertainment had its charms. "May I expect you?" asked the minister, reading his thoughts almost as plainly as though they had been printed on his face, and judging that this was the time to press an acceptance. "Why, yes," said Norm, "I suppose so." One of these days Norman Decker will not think of accepting an invitation with such words, but his intentions are good, now, and the minister thanks him as though he had received a favor, and departs well pleased. And now it is really growing late and little Sate must be carried home. It was an evening to remember. They talked it over by inches the next morning. Nettie finishing the breakfast dishes, and Jerry sitting on the doorstep fashioning a bracket for the kitchen lamp. Nettie talked much about Ermina Farley. "She is just as lovely and sweet as she can be. It was beautiful in her to come over to me as she did when she came into that yard; part of it was for little Trudie's sake, and a great deal of it was for my sake. I saw that at the time; and I saw it plainer all the afternoon. She didn't give me a chance to feel alone once; and she didn't stay near me as though she felt she ought to, but didn't want to, either; she just took hold and helped do everything Miss Sherrill gave me to do, and was as bright and sweet as she could be. I shall never forget it of her. But for all that," she added as she wrung out her dishcloth with an energy which the small white rag hardly needed, "I know it was pretty hard for her to do it, and I shall not give her a chance to do it again." "I want to know what there was hard about it?" said Jerry, looking up in astonishment. "I thought Ermina Farley seemed to be having as good a time as anybody there." "Oh, well now, I know, you are not a girl; boys are different from girls. They are not so kind-of-mean! At least, some of them are not," she added quickly, having at that moment a vivid recollection of some mean things which she had endured from boys. "Really I don't think they are," she said, after a moment's thoughtful pause, and replying to the quizzical look on his face. "They don't think about dresses, and hats, and gloves, and all those sorts of things as girls do, and they don't say such hateful things. Oh! I _know_ there is a great difference; and I know just how Ermina Farley will be talked about because she went with me, and stood up for me so; and I think it will be very hard for her. I used to think so about you, but you--are real different from girls!" "It amounts to about this," said Jerry, whittling gravely. "Good boys are different from bad girls, and bad boys are different from good girls." Nettie laughed merrily. "No," she said, "I do know what I am talking about, though you don't think so; I know real splendid girls who couldn't have done as Ermina Farley did yesterday, and as you do all the time; and what I say is, I don't mean to put myself where she will _have_ to do it, much. I don't want to go to their parties; I don't expect a chance to go, but if I had it, I wouldn't go; and just for her sake, I don't mean to be always around for her to have to take care of me as she did yesterday. I have something else to do." Said Jerry, "Where do you think Norm is to take me this evening?" "Norm going to take you!" great wonderment in the tone. "Why, where could he take you? I don't know, I am sure." "He is to take me to the parsonage at eight o'clock to hear some wonderful music on the organ. He has been invited, and has had permission to bring me with him if he wants to. Don't you talk about not putting yourself where other people will have to take care of you! I advise you to cultivate the acquaintance of your brother. It isn't everybody who gets invited to the parsonage to hear such music as Miss Sherrill can make." The dishcloth was hung away now, and every bit of work was done. Nettie stood looking at the whittling boy in the doorway for a minute in blank astonishment, then she clasped her hands and said: "O Jerry! Did they do it? Aren't they the very splendidest people you ever knew in your life?" "They are pretty good," said Jerry, "that's a fact; they are most as good as my father. I'll tell you what it is, if you knew my father you would know a man who would be worth remembering. I had a letter from him last night, and he sent a message to my friend Nettie." "What?" asked Nettie, her eyes very bright. "It was that you were to take good care of his boy; for in his opinion the boy was worth taking care of. On the strength of that I want you to come out and look at Mother Speckle; she is in a very important frame of mind, and has been scolding her children all the morning. I don't know what is the trouble; there are two of her daughters who seem to have gone astray in some way; at least she is very much displeased with them. Twice she has boxed Fluffie's ears, and once she pulled a feather out of poor Buff. See how forlorn she seems!" By this time they were making their way to the little house where the hen lived, Nettie agreeing to go for a very few minutes, declaring that if Norm was going out every evening there was work to do. He would need a clean collar and she must do it up; for mother had gone out to iron for the day. "Mother is so grateful to Mrs. Smith for getting her a chance to work," she said, as they paused before the two disgraced chickens; "she says she would never have thought of it if it had not been for her; you know she always used to sew. Why, how funny those chickens look! Only see, Jerry, they are studying that eggshell as though they thought they could make one. Now don't they look exactly as though they were planning something?" "They are," said Jerry. "They are planning going to housekeeping, I believe; you see they have quarreled with their mother. They consider that they have been unjustly punished, and I am in sympathy with them; and they believe they could make a house to live in out of that eggshell if they could only think of a way to stick it together again. I wish _we_ could build a house out of eggshells; or even one room, and we'd have one before the month was over." "Why?" said Nettie, stooping down to see why Buff kept her foot under her. "Do you want a room, Jerry?" "Somewhat," said Jerry. "At least I see a number of things we could do if we had a room, that I don't know how to do without one. Come over here, Nettie, and sit down; leave those chickens to sulk it out, and let us talk a little. I have a plan so large that there is no place to put it." CHAPTER XIX. READY TO TRY. "YOU see," said Jerry, as Nettie came, protesting as she walked that she could stay but a few minutes, because there was Norm's collar, and she had four nice apples out of which she was going to make some splendid apple dumplings for dinner, "you see we must contrive something to keep a young fellow like Norm busy, if we are going to hold him after he is caught. It doesn't do to catch a fish and leave him on the edge of the bank near enough to flounce back into the water. Norm ought to be set to work to help along the plans, and kept so busy he wouldn't have time to get tired of them." "But how could that be done?" Nettie said in wondering tones, which nevertheless had a note of admiration in them. Jerry went so deeply into things, it almost took her breath away to follow him. "Just so; that's the problem which ought to be thought out. I can think of things enough; but the room, and the tools to begin with, are the trouble." "What have you thought of? What would you do if you could?" "O my!" said Jerry, with a little laugh; "don't ask me that question, or your folks will have no apple dumplings to-day. I don't believe there is any end to the things which I would do if I could. But the first beginnings of them are like this: suppose we had a few dollars capital, and a room." "You might as well suppose we had a palace, and a million dollars," said Nettie, with a long-drawn sigh. "No, because I don't expect either of those things; but I do mean to have a room and a few dollars in capital for this thing some day; only, you see, I don't want to wait for them." "Well, go on; what then?" "Why, then we would start an eating-house, you and I, on a little bit of a scale, you know. We would have bread with some kind of meat between, and coffee, in cold weather, and lemonade in hot, and a few apples, and now and then some nuts, and a good deal of gingerbread--soft, like what auntie Smith makes--and some ginger-snaps like those Mrs. Dix sent us from the country, and, well, you know the names of things better than I do. Real good things, I mean, but which don't cost much. Such as you, and Sarah Ann, and a good many bright girls learn how to make, without using a great deal of money. Those things are all rather cheap, which I have mentioned, because we have them at our house quite often, and the Smiths are poor, you know. But they are made so nice that they are just capital. Well, I would have them for sale, just as cheap as could possibly be afforded; a great deal cheaper than beer, or cigars, and I would have the room bright and cheery; warm in winter, and as cool as I could make it in summer; then I would have slips of paper scattered about the town, inviting young folks to come in and get a lunch; then when they came, I would have picture papers if I could, for them to look at, and games to play, real nice jolly games, and some kind of music going on now and then. I'd run opposition to that old grocery around the corner from Crossman's, with its fiddle and its whiskey. That's the beginning of what I would do. Just what I told you about, that first night we talked it over. The fellows, lots of them, have nowhere to go; it keeps growing in my mind, the need for doing something of the sort. I never pass that mean grocery without thinking of it." You should have seen Nettie's eyes! The little touch of discouragement was gone out of them, and they were full of intense thought. "I can see," she said at last, "just how splendid it might grow to be. But what did you mean about Norm? there isn't any work for him in such a plan. At least, I mean, not until he was interested to help for the sake of others." "Yes, there is, plenty of business for him. Don't you see? I would have this room, open evenings, after the work was done, and I would have Norm head manager. He should wait on customers, and keep accounts. When the thing got going he would be as busy as a bee; and he is just the sort of fellow to do that kind of thing well, and like it too," he added. "O Jerry," said Nettie, and her hands were clasped so closely that the blood flowed back into her wrists, "was there ever a nicer thought than that in the world! I know it would succeed; and Norm would like it so much. Norm likes to do things for others, if he only had the chance." "I know it; and he likes to do things in a business way, and keep everything straight. Oh! he would be just the one. If we only had a room, there is nothing to hinder our beginning in a very small way. Those chickens are growing as fast as they can, and by Thanksgiving there will be a couple of them ready to broil; then the little old grandmothers did so well." "I know it; who would have supposed that almost four dollars could be made out of some daisy grandmothers! Miss Sherrill gave me one dollar and ninety-five cents which she said was just half of what they had earned. I do think it was so nice in her to give us that chance! She couldn't have known how much we wanted the money. Jerry, why couldn't we begin, just with that? It would start us, and then if the things sold, why, the money from them would keep us started until we found a way to earn more. Why can't we?" "Room," said Jerry, with commendable brevity. "Why, we have a room; there's the front one that we just put in such nice order. Why not? It is large enough for now, and maybe when our business grew we could get another one somehow." Jerry stopped fitting the toe of his boot to a hole which he had made in the ground, and looked at the eager young woman of business before him. "Do you mean your mother would let us have the room, and the chance in the kitchen, to go into such business?" "Mother would do _anything_," said Nettie emphatically, "anything in the world which might possibly keep Norm in the house evenings; you don't know how dreadfully she feels about Norm. She thinks father," and there Nettie stopped. How could a daughter put it into words that her mother was afraid her father would lead his son astray? "I know," said Jerry. "See here, Nettie, what is the matter with your father? I never saw him look so still, and--well, queer, in some way. Mr. Smith says he doesn't think he is drinking a drop; but he looks unlike himself, somehow, and I can't decide how." "I don't know," said Nettie, in a low voice. "We don't know what to think of him. He hasn't been so long without drinking, mother says, in four years. But he doesn't act right; or, I mean, natural. He isn't cross, as drinking beer makes him, but he isn't pleasant, as he was for a day or two. He is real sober; hardly speaks at all, nor notices the things I make; and I try just as hard to please him! He eats everything, but he does it as though he didn't know he was eating. Mother thinks he is in some trouble, but she can't tell what. He can't be afraid of losing his place--because mother says he was threatened that two or three times when he was drinking so hard, and he didn't seem to mind it at all; and why should he be discharged now, when he works hard every day? Last Saturday night he brought home more money than he has in years. Mother cried when she saw what there was, but she had debts to pay, so we didn't get much start out of it after all. Then we spend a good deal in coffee; we have it three times a day, hot and strong; I can see father seems to need it; and I have heard that it helped men who were trying not to drink. When I told mother that, she said he should have it if she had to beg for it on her knees. But I don't know what is the matter with father now. Sometimes mother is afraid there is a disease coming on him such as men have who drink; she says he doesn't sleep very well nights, and he groans some, when he is asleep. Mother tries hard," said Nettie, in a closing burst of confidence, "and she _does_ have such a hard time! If we could only save Norm for her." "I'll tell you who your mother looks like, or would look like if she were dressed up, you know. Did you ever see Mrs. Burt?" "The woman who lives in the cottage where the vines climb all around the front, and who has birds, and a baby? I saw her yesterday. You don't think mother looks like her!" "She would," said Jerry, positively, "if she had on a pink and white dress and a white fold about her neck. I passed there last night, while Mrs. Burt was sitting out by that window garden of hers, with her baby in her arms; Mr. Burt sat on one of the steps, and they were talking and laughing together. I could not help noticing how much like your mother she looked when she turned her side face. Oh! she is younger, of course; she looks almost as though she might be your mother's daughter. I was thinking what fun it would be if she were, and we could go and visit her, and get her to help us about all sorts of things. Mr. Burt knows how to do every kind of work about building a house, or fixing up a room." "He is a nice man, isn't he?" "Why, yes, nice enough; he is steady and works hard. Mr. Smith thinks he is quite a pattern; he has bought that little house where he lives, and fixed it all up with vines and things; but I should like him better if he didn't puff tobacco smoke into his wife's face when he talked with her. He doesn't begin to be so good a workman as your father, nor to know so much in a hundred ways. I think your father is a very nice-looking man when he is dressed up. He looks smart, and he is smart. Mr. Smith says there isn't a man in town who can do the sort of work that he can at the shop, and that he could get very high wages and be promoted and all that, if"-- Jerry stopped suddenly, and Nettie finished the sentence with a sigh. She too had passed the Burt cottage and admired its beauty and neatness. To think that Mr. Burt owned it, and was a younger man by fifteen years at least than her father--and was not so good a workman! then see how well he dressed his wife; and little Bobby Burt looked as neat and pretty in Sunday-school as the best of them. It was very hard that there must be such a difference in homes. If she could only live in a house like the Burt cottage, and have things nice about her as they did, and have her father and mother sit together and talk, as Mr. and Mrs. Burt did, she should be perfectly happy, Nettie told herself. Then she sprang up from the log and declared that she must not waste another minute of time; but that Jerry's plan was the best one she had ever heard, and she believed they could begin it. With this thought still in mind, after the dinner dishes were carefully cleared away, and her mother, returned from the day's ironing, had been treated to a piece of the apple dumpling warmed over for her, and had said it was as nice a bit as she ever tasted, Nettie began on the subject which had been in her thoughts all day: "What would you think of us young folks going into business?" "Going into business!" "Yes'm. Jerry and Norm and me. Jerry has a plan; he has been telling me about it this morning. It is nice if we can only carry it out; and I shouldn't wonder if we could. That is, if you think well of it." "I begin to think there isn't much that you and Jerry can't do, with Norm, or with anybody else, if you try; and you both appear to be ready to try to do all you can for everybody." Mrs. Decker's tone was so hearty and pleased, that you would not have known her for the same woman who looked forward dismally but a few weeks ago to Nettie's home-coming. Her heart had so warmed to the girl in her efforts for father and brother, that she was almost ready to agree to anything which she could have to propose. So Nettie, well pleased with this beginning, unfolded with great clearness and detail, Jerry's wonderful plan for not only catching Norm, but setting him up in business. Mrs. Decker listened, and questioned and cross-questioned, sewing swiftly the while on Norm's jacket which had been torn, and which was being skilfully darned in view of the evening to be spent at the parsonage. "Well," she said at last, "it looks wild to me, I own; I should as soon try to fly as of making anything like that work in this town; but then, you've made things work, you two, that I'd no notion could be done, and between you, you seem to kind of bewitch Norm. He's done things for you that I would no sooner have thought of asking of him than I would have asked him to fly up to the moon; and this may be another of them. Anyhow, if you've a mind to try it, I won't be the one to stop you. I've been that scared for Norm, that I'm ready for anything. Oh! the _room_, of course you may use it. If you wanted to have a circus in there, I think I'd agree, wild animals and all; I've had worse than wild animals in my day. No, your father won't object; he thinks what you do is about right, I guess. And for the matter of that, he doesn't object to anything nowadays; I don't know what to make of him." The sentence ended with a long-drawn, troubled sigh. Just what this strange change in her husband meant, Mrs. Decker could not decide; and each theory which she started in her mind about it, looked worse than the last. Norm's collar was ready for him, so was his jacket. He was somewhat surly; the truth was, he had received what he called a "bid" to the merry-making which was to take place in the back room of the grocery, around the corner from Crossman's, and he was a good deal tried to think he had cut himself off by what he called a "spooney" promise, from enjoying the evening there. At the same time there was a certain sense of largeness in saying he could not come because he had received an invitation elsewhere, which gave him a momentary pleasure. To be sure the boys coaxed until they had discovered the place of his engagement, and joked him the rest of the time, until he was half-inclined to wish he had never heard of the parsonage; but for all that, a certain something in Norman which marked him as different from some boys, held him to his word when it was passed; and he had no thought of breaking from his engagement. It was an evening such as Norman had reason to remember. For the first time in his life he sat in a pleasantly furnished home, among ladies and gentlemen, and heard himself spoken to as one who "belonged." Three ladies were there from the city, and two gentlemen whom Norman had never seen before; all friends of the Sherrills come out to spend a day with them. They were not only unlike any people whom he had ever seen before, but, if he had known it, unlike a great many ladies and gentlemen, in that their chief aim in life was to be found in their Master's service; and a boy about whom they knew nothing, save that he was poor, and surrounded by temptations, and Satan desired to have him, was in their eyes so much stray material which they were bound to bring back to the rightful owner if they could. To this end they talked to Norman. Not in the form of a lecture, but with bright, winning words, on topics which he could understand, not only, but actually on certain topics about which he knew more than they. For instance, there was a cave about two miles from the town, of which they had heard, but had never seen and Norm had explored every crevice in it many a time. He knew on which side of the river it was located, whether the entrance was from the east or the south; just how far one could walk through it, just how far one could creep in it, after walking had become impossible, and a dozen other things which it had not occurred to him were of interest to anybody else. In fact, Norm discovered in the course of the hour that there was such a thing as conversation. Not that he made use of that word, in thinking it over; his thoughts, if they could have been seen, would have been something like this: "These are swell folks, but I can understand what they say, and they seem to understand what I say, and don't stare as though I was a wild animal escaped from the woods. I wonder what makes the difference between them and other folks?" But when the music began! I have no words to describe to you what it was to Norm to sit close to an organ and hear its softest notes, and feel the thrill of its heavy bass tones, and be appealed to occasionally as to whether he liked this or that the best, and to have a piece sung because the player thought it would please him; she selected it that morning, she told him, with this thought in view. "Decker, you ought to learn to play," said one of the guests who had watched him through the last piece. "You _look_ music, right out of your eyes. Miss Sherrill, here is a pupil for you who might do you credit. Have you ever had any instrument, Decker?" Then Norm came back to every-day life, and flushed and stammered. "No, he hadn't, and was not likely to;" and wondered what they would think if they were to see the corner grocery where he spent most of his leisure time. The questioner laughed pleasantly. "Oh, I'm not so sure of that. I have a friend who plays the violin in a way to bring tears to people's eyes, and he never touched one until he was thirty years old; hadn't time until then. He was an apprentice, and had his trade to master, and himself to get well started in it before he had time for music; but when he came to leisure, he made music a delight to himself and to others." "A great deal can be done with leisure time," said another of the guests. "Mr. Sherrill, you remember Myers, your college classmate? He did not learn to read, you know, until he was seventeen." "What?" said Norm, astonished out of his diffidence; "didn't know how to read!" "No," repeated the gentleman, "not until he was seventeen. He had a hard childhood--was kicked about in the world, with no leisure and no help, had to work evenings as well as days, but when he was seventeen he fell into kinder hands, and had a couple of hours each evening all to himself, and he mastered reading, not only, but all the common studies, and graduated from college with honor when he was twenty-six." Now Norm had all his evenings to lounge about in, and had not known what to do with them; and he could read quite well. CHAPTER XX. THE WAY MADE PLAIN. IT was a beautiful Sabbath afternoon; just warm enough to make people feel still and pleasant. The soft summer sunshine lay smiling on all the world, and the soft summer breeze rustled the leaves of the trees, and stole gently in at open windows. In the front room of the Deckers, the family was gathered, all save Mr. Decker. He could be heard in his bedroom stepping about occasionally, and great was his wife's fear lest he was preparing to go down town and put himself in the place of temptation at his old lounging place. Sunday could not be said to be a day of rest to Mrs. Decker. It had been the day of her greatest trials, so far. Norm was in his clean shirt and collar, which had been done up again by Nettie's careful hands and which shone beautifully. He was also in his shirt sleeves; that the mother was glad to see; _he_ was not going out just yet, anyway. Mrs. Decker had honored the day with a clean calico dress, and had shyly and with an almost shamefaced air, pinned into it a little cambric ruffle which Nettie had presented her, with the remark that it was just like the one Mrs. Burt wore, and that Jerry said she looked like Mrs. Burt a little, only he thought she was the best-looking of the two. Mrs. Decker had laughed, and then sighed; and said it made dreadful little difference to her how she looked. But the sigh meant that the days were not so very far distant when Mr. Decker used to tell her she was a handsome woman; and she used to smile over it, and call him a foolish man without any taste; but nevertheless used to like it very much, and make herself look as well as she could for his sake. She hadn't done it lately, but whose fault was that, she should like to know? However, she pinned the ruffle in, and whether Mr. Decker noticed it or not, she certainly looked wonderfully better. Norm noticed it, but of course he would not have said so for the world. Nettie in her blue and white gingham which had been washed and ironed since the flower party, and which had faded a little and shrunken a little, still looked neat and trim, and had the little girls one on either side of her, telling them a story in low tones; not so low but that the words floated over to the window where Norm was pretending not to listen: "And so," said the voice, "Daniel let himself be put into a den of dreadful fierce lions, rather than give up praying." "Did they frow him in?" this question from little Sate, horror in every letter of the words. "Yes, they did; and shut the door tight." "I wouldn't have been," said fierce Susie; "I would have bitten, and scratched and kicked just awful!" "Why didn't Daniel shut up the window just as _tight_, and not let anybody know it when he said his prayers?" Oh little Sate! how many older and wiser ones than you have tried to slip around conscience corners in some such way. "I don't know all the reasons," said Nettie, after a thoughtful pause, "but I suppose one was, because he wouldn't act in a way to make people believe he had given up praying. He wanted to show them that he meant to pray, whether they forbade it or not." "Go on," said Susie, sharply, "I want to know how he felt when the lions bit him." "They didn't bite him; God wouldn't let them touch him. They crouched down and kept as _still_, all night; and in the morning when the king came to look, there was Daniel, safe!" "Oh my!" said Sate, drawing a long, quivering sigh of relief; "wasn't that just splendid!" "How do you know it is true?" said skeptical Susie, looking as though she was prepared not to believe anything. "I know it because God said it, Susie; he put it in the Bible." "I didn't ever hear him say it," said Susie with a frown. A laugh from Norm at that moment gave Nettie her first knowledge of him as a listener. Her cheeks grew red, and she would have liked to slip away into a more quiet corner but Sate was in haste to hear just what the king said, and what Daniel said, and all about it, and the story went on steadily, Daniel's character for true bravery shining out all the more strongly, perhaps, because Nettie suspected herself of being a coward, and not liking Norm to laugh at her Bible stories. As for Norm, he knew he was a coward; he knew he had done in his life dozens of things to make his mother cry; not because he was so anxious to do them, nor because he feared a den of lions if he refused, but simply because some of the fellows would laugh at him if he did. That Sabbath day had been a memorable one to the Decker family in some respects; at least to part of it. Nettie had taken the little girls with her to Sabbath-school, and then to church. Mrs. Smith had given her a cordial invitation to sit in their seat, but it was not a very large seat, and when Job and his wife, and Sarah Ann and Jerry were all there, as they were apt to be, there was just room for Nettie without the little girls; so she went with them to the seat directly under the choir gallery where very few sat. It was comfortable enough; she could see the minister distinctly, and though she had to stretch out her neck to see the choir, she could hear their sweet voices; and surely that was enough. All went smoothly until the sermon was concluded. Sate sat quite still, and if she did not listen to the sermon, listened to her own thoughts and troubled no one. But when the anthem began, Sate roused herself. That wonderful voice which seemed to fill every corner of the church! She knew the voice; it belonged to her dear teacher. She stretched out her little neck, and could catch a glimpse of her, standing alone, the rest of the choir sitting back, out of sight. And what was that she was saying, over and over? "Come unto Me, unto Me, unto Me"--the words were repeated in the softest of cadences--"all ye who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest." Sate did not understand those words, certainly her little feet were not weary, but there was a sweetness about the word "rest" as it floated out on the still air, which made her seem to want to go, she knew not whither. Then came the refrain: "Come unto Me, unto Me," swelling and rolling until it filled all the aisles, and dying away at last in the tenderest of pleading sounds. Sate's heart beat fast, and the color came and went on her baby face in a way which would have startled Nettie had she not been too intent on her own exquisite delight in the music, to remember the motionless little girl at her left. "Take my yoke upon you, and learn of Me, learn of Me," called the sweet voice, and Sate, understanding the last of it felt that she wanted to learn, and of that One above all others. "For I am meek and lowly of heart"--she did not know what the words meant, but she was drawn, drawn. Then, listening, breathless, half resolved, came again that wondrous pleading, "Come unto Me, unto Me, unto Me." Softly the little feet slid down to the carpeted floor, softly they stepped on the green and gray mosses which gave back no sound; softly they moved down the aisle as though they carried a spirit with them, and when Nettie, hearing no sound, yet turned suddenly as people will, to look after her charge, little Sate was gone! Where? Nettie did not know, could not conjecture. No sight of her in the aisle, not under the seat, not in the great church anywhere. The door was open into the hall, and poor little tired Sate must have slipped away into the sunshine outside. Well, no harm could come to her there; she would surely wait for them, or, failing in that, the road home was direct enough, and nothing to trouble her; but how strange in little Sate to do it! If it had been Susie, resolute, independent Susie always sufficient to herself and a little more ready to do as she pleased than any other way! But Susie sat up prim and dignified on Nettie's right; not very conscious of the music, and willing enough to have the service over, but conscious that she had on her new shoes, and a white dress, and a white bonnet, and looked very well indeed. Meantime, little Sate was not out in the sunshine. She had not thought of sunshine; she had been called; it was not possible for her sweet little heart to get away from the feeling that some one was calling her, and that she wanted to go. What better was there to do than follow the voice? So she followed it, out into the hall, up the gallery stairs, still softly--the new shoes made no sound on the carpet--through the door which stood ajar, quite to the singer's side, there slipped this quiet little woman who had left her white bonnet by Nettie, and stood with her golden head rippling with the sunlight which fell upon it. There was a rustle in the choir gallery, a soft stir over the church, the sort of sound which people make when they are moved by some deep feeling which they hardly understand; there was a smile on some faces, but it was the kind of smile which might be given to a baby angel if it had strayed away from heaven to look at something bright down here. The tenor singer would have drawn away the small form from the soloist, but she put forth a protecting hand and circled the child, and sang on, her voice taking sweeter tone, if possible, and dying away in such tenderness as made the smiles on some faces turn to tears, and made the echo linger with them of that last tremulous "Come unto Me." [Illustration: LITTLE SATE IN THE CHOIR GALLERY.] But little Sate, when she reached the choir gallery, saw something which startled her out of her sweet resolute calm. Away on the side, up there, where few people were, sat her own father; and rolling down his cheeks were tears. Sate had never seen her father cry before. What was the matter? Had she been naughty, and was it making him feel bad? She stole a startled glance at the face of her teacher, whose arm was still around her and had drawn her toward the seat into which she dropped, when the song was over. No, _her_ face was quiet and sweet; not grieved, as Sate was sure it would be, if she had been naughty. Neither did the people look cross at her; many of them had bowed their heads in prayer, but some were sitting erect, looking at her and smiling; surely she had made no noise. Why should her father cry? She looked at him; he had shaded his face with his hand. Was he crying still? Little Sate thought it over, all in a moment of time, then suddenly she slipped away from the encircling arm, moved softly across the intervening space, into the side gallery, and was at her father's side, with her small hand on his sleeve. He stooped and took her in his arms, and the tears were still in his eyes; but he kissed her, and _kissed_ her, as little Sate had never been kissed before; she nestled in his arms and felt safe and comforted. The prayer was over, the benediction given, and the worshipers moved down the aisles. Sate rode comfortably in her father's arms, down stairs, out into the hall, outside, in the sunshine, waiting for Nettie and for her white sunbonnet. Presently Nettie came, hurried, flushed, despite her judgment, anxious as to where the bonnetless little girl could have vanished. "Why, Sate," she began, but the rest of the sentence died in astonished silence on her lips, for Sate held her father's hand and looked content. They walked home together, the father and his youngest baby, saying nothing, for Sate was one of those wise-eyed little children who have spells of sweet silence come over them, and Nettie, with Susie, walked behind, the elder sister speculating: "Where did little Sate find father? Did he pick her up on the street somewhere, and would he be angry, and not let Nettie take her to church any more? Or did he, passing, spy her in the churchyard and come in for her?" Nettie did not know, and Sate did not tell; principally because she did not understand that there was anything to tell. So while the people in their homes talked and laughed about the small white waif who had slipped into the choir, the people in this home were entirely silent about it, and the mother did not know that anything strange had happened. It is true, Susie began to inquire reprovingly, but was hushed by Nettie's warning whisper; certainly Nettie was gaining a wonderful control over the self-sufficient Susie. The child respected her almost enough to follow her lead unquestioningly, which was a great deal for Susie to do. So they sat together that sweet Sabbath afternoon, Nettie telling her Bible stories, and wondering how she should plan. What did Norm intend to do a little later in the day? What was there she could do to keep him from lounging down street? Why was her father staying so long in the choked-up bedroom? What was the matter with her father these days, and how long was anything going to last? Why did she feel, someway, as though she stood on the very edge of something which startled and almost frightened her? Was it because she was afraid her father would not let her take Sate and Susie to church any more? With all these thoughts floating through her mind, it was rather hard to keep herself closely confined to Daniel and his experiences. Suddenly the bedroom door opened and her father came out. Everybody glanced up, though perhaps nobody could have told why. There was a peculiar look on his face. Mrs. Decker noticed it and did not understand it, and felt her heart beat in great thuds against the back of her chair. Little Sate noticed it, and went over to him and slipped her hand inside his. He sat down in the state chair which Nettie and her mother had both contrived to have left vacant, and took Sate in his arms. This of itself was unusual, but after that, there was silence, Sate nestling safely in the protective arms and seeming satisfied with all the world. Nettie felt her face flush, and her bosom heave as if the tears were coming, but she could not have told why she wanted to cry Norm seemed oppressed with the stillness, and broke it by whistling softly; also he had a small stick and was whittling; it was the only thing he could think of to do just now. It was too early to go out; the boys would not be through with their boarding-house dinners yet. Suddenly Mr. Decker broke in on the almost silence. "Hannah," he said, then he cleared his voice, and was still again, "and you children," he added, after a moment, "I've got something to tell you if I knew how. Something that I guess you will be glad to hear. I've turned over a new leaf at last. I've turned it, off and on, in my mind a good many times lately, though I don't know as any of you knew it. I've been thinking about this thing, well, as soon as Nannie there came home, at least; but I haven't understood it very well, and I s'pose I don't now; but I understand it enough to have made up my mind; and that's more than half the battle. The long and short of it is, I have given myself to the Lord, or he has got hold of me, somehow; it isn't much of a gift, that's a fact, but the queer thing about it is, he seems to think it worth taking. I told him last night that if he would show a poor stick like me how to do it, why, I'd do my part without fail; and this morning he not only showed the way plain enough, but he sent my little girl to help me along." The father's voice broke then, and a tear trembled in his eye. Sate had held her little head erect and looked steadily at him as soon as he began to talk, wonder and interest, and some sort of still excitement in her face as she listened. At his first pause she broke forth: "Did He mean you, papa, when He said 'Come unto Me'? Was He calling you, all the time? and did you tell Him you would?" "Yes," he said, bending and kissing the earnest face, "He meant me, and He's been calling me loud, this good while; but I never got started till to-day. Now I'm going along with Him the rest of the way." "I'm so glad," said little Sate, nestling contentedly back, "I'm so glad, papa; I'm going too." CHAPTER XXI. THE NEW ENTERPRISE. ONE bright and never-to-be-forgotten day, Nettie and Jerry stood together in the "new" room and surveyed with intense satisfaction all its appointments. They were ready to begin business. On that very evening the room was to be "open to the public!" They looked at each other as they repeated that large-sounding phrase, and laughed gleefully. There had been a great deal to do to get ready. Hours and even days had been spent in planning. It astonished both these young people to discover how many things there were to think of, and get ready for, and guard against, before one could go into business. There was a time when with each new day, new perplexities arose. During those days Jerry had spent a good deal of his leisure in fishing; both because at the Smiths, and also at the Deckers, fish were highly prized, and also because, as he confided to Nettie, "a fellow could somehow think a great deal better when his fingers were at work, and when it was still everywhere about him." There were times, however, when his solitude was disturbed. There had been one day in particular when something happened about which he did not tell Nettie. He was in his fishing suit, which though clean and whole was not exactly the style of dress which a boy would wear to a party, and he stood leaning against a rail fence, rod in hand, trying to decide whether he should try his luck on that side, or jump across the logs to a shadier spot; trying also to decide just how they could manage to get another lamp to stand on the reading table, when he heard voices under the trees just back of him. They were whispering in that sort of penetrating whisper that floats so far in the open air, and which some, girls, particularly, do not seem to know can be heard a few feet away. Jerry could hear distinctly; in fact unless he stopped his ears with his hands he could not help hearing. And the old rule, that listeners never hear any good of themselves, applied here. "There's that Jerry who lives at the Smiths'," said whisperer number one, "do look what a fright; I guess he has borrowed a pair of Job Smith's overalls! Isn't it a shame that such a nice-looking boy is deserted in that way, and left to run with all sorts of people?" "I heard that he wasn't deserted; that his father was only staying out West, or down South, or somewhere for awhile." "Oh! that's a likely story," said whisperer number one, her voice unconsciously growing louder. "Just as if any father who was anybody, would leave a boy at Job Smith's for months, and never come near him. I think it is real mean; they say the Smiths keep him at work all the while, fishing; he about supports them, and the Deckers too, with fish and things." At this point the amused listener nearly forgot himself and whistled. "Oh well, that's as good a way as any to spend his time; he knows enough to catch fish and do such things, and when he is old enough, I suppose he will learn a trade; but I must say I think he is a nice-looking fellow." "He would be, if he dressed decently. The boys like him real well; they say he is smart; and I shouldn't wonder if he was; big eyes twinkle as though he might be. If he wouldn't keep running with that Decker girl all the time, he might be noticed now and then." At this point came up a third young miss who spoke louder. Jerry recognized her voice at once as belonging to Lorena Barstow. "Girls, what are you doing here? Why, there is that Irish boy; I wonder if he wouldn't sell us some fish? They say he is very anxious to earn money; I should think he would be, to get himself some decent clothes. Or maybe he wants to make his dear Nan a present." Then followed a laugh which was quickly hushed, lest the victim might hear. But the victim had heard, and looked more than amused; his eyes flashed with a new idea. "Much obliged, Miss Lorena," he said softly, nodding his head. "If I don't act on your hint, it will be because I am not so bright as you give me credit for being." Then the first whisperer took up the story: "Say, girls, I heard that Ermina did really mean to invite him to her candy pull, and the Decker girl too; she says they both belong to the Sunday-school, and she is going to invite all the boys and girls of that age in the school, and her mother thinks it would not be nice to leave them out. You know the Farleys are real queer about some things." Lorena Barstow flamed into a voice which was almost loud. "Then I say let's just not speak a word to either of them the whole evening. Ermina Farley need not think that because she lives in a grand house, and her father has so much money, she can rule us all. I for one, don't mean to associate with a drunkard's daughter, and I won't be made to, by the Farleys or anybody else." "Her father isn't a drunkard now. Why, don't you know he has joined the church? And last Wednesday night they say he was in prayer meeting." "Oh, yes, and what does that amount to? My father says it won't last six weeks; he says drunkards are not to be trusted; they never reform. And what if he does? That doesn't make Nan Decker anything but a dowdy, not fit for us girls to go with; and as for that Irish boy! Why doesn't Ermina go down on Paddy Lane and invite the whole tribe of Irish if she is so fond of them?" "Hush, Lora, Ermina will hear you." Sure enough at that moment came Ermina, springing briskly over logs and underbrush. "Have I kept you waiting?" she asked gayly. "The moss was so lovely back there; I wanted to carry the whole of it home to mother. Why, girls, there is that boy who sits across from us in Sabbath-school. "How do you do?" she said pleasantly, for at that moment Jerry turned and came toward them, lifting his hat as politely as though it was in the latest shape and style. "Have you had good luck in fishing?" "Very good for this side; the fish are not so plenty here generally as they are further up. I heard you speaking of fish, Miss Barstow, and wondering whether I would not supply your people? I should be very glad to do so, occasionally; I am a pretty successful fellow so far as fishing goes." You should have seen the cheeks of the whisperers then! Ermina looked at them, perplexed for a moment, then seeing they answered only with blushes and silence _she_ spoke: "Mamma would be very glad to get some; she was saying yesterday she wished she knew some one of whom she could get fish as soon as they were caught. Have you some to-day for sale?" "Three beauties which I would like nothing better than to sell, for I am in special need of the money just now." "Very well," said Ermina promptly, "I am sure mamma will like them; could you carry them down now? I am on my way home and could show you where to go." "Ermina Farley!" remonstrated Lorena Barstow in a low shocked tone, but Ermina only said: "Good-by, girls, I shall expect you early on Thursday evening," and walked briskly down the path toward the road, with Jerry beside her, swinging his fish. If the girls could have seen his eyes just then, they would have been sure that they twinkled. They had a pleasant walk, and Ermina did actually invite him to her candy-pull on Thursday evening; not only that, but she asked if he would take an invitation from her to Nettie Decker. "She lives next door to you, I think," said Ermina, "I would like very much to have her come; I think she is so pleasant and unselfish. It is just a few boys and girls of our age, in the Sunday-school." How glad Jerry was that she had invited them! He had been so afraid that her courage would not be equal to it. Glad was he also to be able to say, frankly, that both he and Nettie had an engagement for Thursday evening; he would be sure to give Nettie the invitation, but he knew she could not come. Of course she could not, he said to himself; "Isn't that our opening evening?" But all the same it was very nice in Ermina Farley to have invited them. "Here is another lamp for the table," said Jerry gayly, as he rushed into the new room an hour later and tossed down a shining silver dollar. He had exchanged the fish for it. Then he sat down and told part of their story to Nettie. About the whisperers, however, he kept silent. What was the use in telling that? But from them he had gotten another idea. "Look here, Nettie, some evening we'll have a candy-pull, early, with just a few to help, and sell it cheap to customers." So now they stood together in the room to see if there was another thing to be done before the opening. A row of shelves planed and fitted by Norm were ranged two thirds of the way up the room and on them were displayed tempting pans of ginger cookies, doughnuts, molasses cookies, and soft gingerbread. Sandwiches made of good bread, and nice slices of ham, were shut into the corner cupboard to keep from drying; there was also a plate of cheese which was a present from Mrs. Smith. She had sent it in with the explanation that it would be a blessing to her if that cheese could get eaten by somebody; she bought it once, a purpose, as a treat for Job, and it seemed it wasn't the kind he liked, and none of the rest of them liked any kind, so there it had stood on the shelf eying her for days. There was to be coffee; Nettie had planned for that. "Because," she explained, "they _all_ drink beer; and things to eat, can never take the place of things to drink." It had been a difficult matter to get the materials together for this beginning. All the money which came in from the "little old grandmothers," as well as that which Jerry contributed, had been spent in flour, and sugar, and eggs and milk. Nettie was amazed and dismayed to find how much even soft gingerbread cost, when every pan of it had to be counted in money. A good deal of arithmetic had been spent on the question: How low can we possibly sell this, and not actually lose money by it? Of course some allowance had to be made for waste. "We'll have to name it waste," explained Nettie with an anxious face, "because it won't bring in any money; but of course not a scrap of it will be wasted; but what is left over and gets too dry to sell, we shall have to eat." Jerry shook his head. "We must sell it," he said with the air of a financier. Then he went away thoughtfully to consult Mrs. Job, and came back triumphant. She would take for a week at half price, all the stale cake they might have left. "That means gingercake," he explained, "she says the cookies and things will keep for weeks, without getting too old." "Sure enough!" said radiant Nettie, "I did not think of that." There were other things to think of; some of them greatly perplexed Jerry; he had to catch many fish before they were thought out. Then he came with his views to Nettie. "See here, do you understand about this firm business; it must be you and me, you know?" Nettie's bright face clouded. "Why, I thought," she said, speaking slowly, "I thought you said, or you meant--I mean I thought it was to help Norm; and that he would be a partner." Jerry shook his head. "Can't do it," he said decidedly. "Look here, Nettie, we'll get into trouble right away if we take in a partner. He believes in drinking beer, and smoking cigarettes, and doing things of that sort; now if he as a partner introduces anything of the kind, what are we to do?" "Sure enough!" the tone expressed conviction, but not relief. "Then what are we to do, Jerry? I don't see how we are going to help Norm any." "I do; quite as well as though he was a partner. Norm is a good-natured fellow; he likes to help people. I think he likes to do things for others better than for himself. If we explain to him that we want to go into this business, and that you can't wait on customers, because you are a girl, and it wouldn't be the thing, and I can't, because it is in your house, and I promised my father I would spend my evenings at home, and write a piece of a letter to him every evening; and ask him to come to the rescue and keep the room open, and sell the things for us, don't you believe he will be twice as likely to do it as though we made him as young as ourselves, and tried to be his equals?" Then Nettie's face was bright. "What a contriver you are!" she said admiringly. "I think that will do just splendidly." She was right, it did. Norm might have curled his lip and said "pooh" to the scheme, had he been placed on an equality; for he was getting to the age when to be considered young, or childish, is a crime in a boy's eyes. But to be appealed to as one who could help the "young fry" out of their dilemma, and at the same time provide himself with a very pleasant place to stay, and very congenial employment while he stayed, was quite to Norm's mind. And as it was an affair of the children's, he made no suggestions about beer or cigars; it is true he thought of them, but he thought at once that neither Nettie or Jerry would probably have anything to do with them, and as he had no dignity to sustain, he decided to not even mention the matter. These two planned really better than they knew in appealing to Norm for help. His curious pride would never have allowed him to say to a boy, "We keep cakes and coffee for sale at our house; come in and try them." But it was entirely within the line of his ideas of respectability to say: "What do you think those two young ones over at our house have thought up next? They have opened an eating-house, cakes and things such as my sister can make, and coffee, dirt cheap. I've promised to run the thing for them in the evening awhile; I suppose you'll patronize them?" And the boys, who would have sneered at _his_ setting himself up in business, answered: "What, the little chap who lives at Smith's? And your little sister! Ho! what a notion! I don't know but it is a bright one, though, as sure as you live. There isn't a spot in this town where a fellow can get a decent bite unless he pays his week's wages for it; boys, let's go around and see what the little chaps are about." The very first evening was a success. Nettie had assured herself that she must not be disappointed if no one came, at first. "You see, it is a new thing," she explained to her mother, "of course it will take them a little while to get acquainted with it; if nobody at all comes to-night, I shall not be disappointed. Shall you, Jerry?" "Why, yes," said Jerry, "I should; because I know of one boy who is coming, and is going to have a ginger-snap and a glass of milk. And that is little Ted Locker who lives down the lane; they about starve that boy. I shall like to see him get something good. He has three cents and I assured him he could get a brimming glass of milk and a ginger-snap for that. He was as delighted as possible." "Poor fellow!" said Nettie, "I mean to tell Norm to let him have two snaps, wouldn't you?" And Jerry agreed, not stopping to explain that he had furnished the three cents with which Ted was to treat his poor little stomach. So the work began in benevolence. Still Nettie was anxious, not to say nervous. "You will have to eat soft gingerbread at your house, for breakfast, dinner and supper, I am afraid," she said to Jerry with a half laugh, as they stood looking at it. "I don't know why I made four tins of it; I seemed to get in a gale when I was making it." "Never you fear," said Jerry, cheerily. "I'll be willing to eat such gingerbread as that three times a day for a week. Between you and me," lowering his voice, "Sarah Ann can't make very good gingerbread; when we get such a run of custom that we have none left over to sell, I wish you'd teach her how." I do not know that any member of the two households could be said to be more interested in the new enterprise than Mr. Decker. He helped set up the shelves, and he made a little corner shelf on purpose for the lamp, and he watched the entire preparations with an interest which warmed Nettie's heart. I haven't said anything about Mr. Decker during these days, because I found it hard to say. You are acquainted with him as a sour-faced, unreasonable, beer-drinking man; when suddenly he became a man who said "Good morning" when he came into the room, and who sat down smooth shaven, and with quiet eyes and smile to his breakfast, and spoke gently to Susie when she tipped her cup of water over, and kissed little Sate when he lifted her to her seat, and waited for Mrs. Decker to bring the coffee pot, then bowed his head and in clear tones asked a blessing on the food, how am I to describe him to you? The change was something which even Mrs. Decker who watched him every minute he was in the house and thought of him all day long, could not get accustomed to. It astonished her so to think that she, Mrs. Decker, lived in a house where there was a prayer made every night and morning, and where each evening after supper Nettie read a few verses in the Bible, and her father prayed; that every time she passed her own mother's Bible which had been brought out of its hiding-place in an old trunk, she said, under her breath, "Thank the Lord." No, she did not understand it, the marvelous change which had come over her husband. She had known him as a kind man; he had been that when she married him, and for a few months afterwards. She had heard him speak pleasantly to Norm, and show him much attention; he had done it before they were married, and for awhile afterwards; but there was a look in his face, and a sound in his voice now, such as she had never seen nor heard before. "It isn't Decker," she said in a burst of confidence to Nettie. "He is just as good as he can be; and I don't know anything in the world he ain't willing to do for me, or for any of us; and it is beautiful, the whole of it; but it is all new. I used to think if the man I married could only come back to me I should be perfectly happy; but I don't know this man at all; he seems to me sometimes most like an angel." Probably you would have laughed at this. Joe Decker did not look in the least like the picture you have in your mind of an angel; but perhaps if you had known him only a few weeks before, as Mrs. Decker did, and could have seen the wonderful change in him which she saw, the contrast might even have suggested angels. Nettie understood it. She struggled with her timidity and her ignorance of just what ought to be said; then she made her earnest reply: "Mother, I'll tell you the difference. Father prays, and when people pray, you know, and mean it, as he does, they get to looking very different." But Mrs. Decker did not pray. CHAPTER XXII. TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE. AS a matter of fact there wasn't a cake left. Neither doughnut nor gingersnap; hardly a crumb to tell the successful tale. Nettie surveyed the empty shelves the next morning in astonishment. She had been too busy the night before to realize how fast things were going. Naturally the number and variety of dishes in the Decker household was limited and the evening to Nettie was a confused murmur of, "Hand us some more cups." "Can't you raise a few more teaspoons somewhere?" "Give us another plate," or, "More doughnuts needed;" and Nettie flew hither and thither, washed cups, rinsed spoons, said, "What did I do with that towel?" or, "Where in the world is the bread knife?" or, "Oh! I smell the coffee! maybe it is boiling over," and was conscious of nothing but weariness and relief when the last cup of coffee was drank, and the last teaspoon washed. But with the next morning's sunshine she knew the opening was a success. She counted the gains with eager joy, assuring Jerry that they could have twice as much gingerbread next time. "And you'll need it," said Norm. "I had to tell half a dozen boys that there wasn't a crumb left. I felt sorry for 'em, too; they were boarding-house fellows who never get anything decent to eat." Already Norm had apparently forgotten that he was one who used frequently to make a similar complaint. There was a rarely sweet smile on Nettie's face, not born of the chink in the factory bag which she had made for the money; it grew from the thought that she need not hide the bag now, and tremble lest it should be taken to the saloon to pay for whiskey. What a little time ago it was that she had feared that! What a changed world it was! "But there won't be such a crowd again," she said as they were putting the room in order, "that was the first night." "Humph!" said that wise woman Susie with a significant toss of her head; "last night you said we mustn't expect anybody because it was the first night." Then "the firm" had a hearty laugh at Nettie's expense and set to work preparing for evening. I am not going to tell you the story of that summer and fall. It was beautiful; as any of the Deckers will tell you with eager eyes and voluble voice if you call on them, and start the subject. The business grew and grew, and exceeded their most sanguine expectations. Mr. Decker interested himself in it most heartily, and brought often an old acquaintance to get a cup of coffee. "Make it good and strong," he would say to Nettie in an earnest whisper. "He's thirsty, and I brought him here instead of going for beer. I wish the room was larger, and I'd get others to come." In time, and indeed in a very short space of time, this grew to be the crying need of the firm: "If we only had more room, and more dishes!" There was a certain long, low building which had once been used as a boarding-house for the factory hands, before that institution grew large and moved into new quarters, and which was not now in use. At this building Jerry and Nettie, and for that matter, Norm, looked with longing eyes. They named it "Our Rooms," and hardly ever passed that they did not suggest some improvement in it which could be easily made, and which would make it just the thing for their business. They knew just what sort of curtains they would have at the windows, just what furnishings in front and back rooms, just how many lamps would be needed. "We will have a hanging lamp over the centre table," said Jerry. "One of those new-fashioned things which shine and give a bright light, almost like gas; and lots of books and papers for the boys to read." "But where would we get the books and papers?" would Nettie say, with an anxious business face, as though the room, and the table, and the hanging lamp, were arranged for, and the last-mentioned articles all that were needed to complete the list. "Oh! they would gather, little by little. I know some people who would donate great piles of them if we had a place to put them. For that matter, as it is, father is going to send us some picture-papers, a great bundle of them; send them by express, and we must have a table to put them on." So the plans grew, but constantly they looked at the long, low building and said what a nice place it would be. One morning Jerry came across the yard with a grave face. "What do you think?" he said, the moment he caught sight of Nettie. "They have gone and rented our rooms for a horrid old saloon; whiskey in front, and gambling in the back part! Isn't it a shame that they have got ahead of us in that kind of way?" "Oh dear me!" said Nettie, drawing out each word to twice its usual length, and sitting down on a corner of the woodbox with hands clasped over the dish towel, and for the moment a look on her face as though all was lost. But it was the very same day that Jerry appeared again, his face beaming. This time it was hard to make Nettie hear, for Mrs. Decker was washing, and mingling with the rapid rub-a-dub of the clothes was the sizzle of ham in the spider, and the bubble of a kettle which was bent on boiling over, and making the half-distracted housekeeper all the trouble it could. Yet his news was too good to keep; and he shouted above the din: "I say, Nettie, the man has backed out! Our rooms are not rented, after all." "Goody!" said Nettie, and she smiled on the kettle in a way to make it think she did not care if everything in it boiled over on the floor; whereupon it calmed down, of course, and behaved itself. So the weeks passed, and the enterprise grew and flourished. I hope you remember Mrs. Speckle? Very early in the autumn she sent every one of her chicks out into the world to toil for themselves and began business. Each morning a good-sized, yellow-tinted, warm, beautiful egg lay in the nest waiting for Jerry; and when he came, Mrs. Speckle cackled the news to him in the most interested way. "She couldn't do better if she were a regularly constituted member of the firm with a share in the profits," said Jerry. The egg was daily carried to Mrs. Farley's, where there was an invalid daughter, who had a fancy for that warm, plump egg which came to her each morning, done up daintily in pink cotton, and laid in a box just large enough for it. But there came a morning which was a proud one to Nettie. Jerry had returned from Mrs. Farley's with news. "The sick daughter is going South; she has an auntie who is to spend the winter in Florida, so they have decided to send her. They start to-morrow morning. Mrs. Farley said they would take our eggs all the same, and she wished Miss Helen could have them; but somebody else would have to eat them for her." Then Nettie, beaming with pleasure, "Jerry, I wish you would tell Mrs. Farley that we can't spare them any more at present; I would have told you before, but I didn't want to take the egg from Miss Helen; I want to buy them now, every other morning, for mother and father; mother thinks there is nothing nicer than a fresh egg, and I know father will be pleased." What satisfaction was in Nettie's voice, what joy in her heart! Oh! they were poor, very poor, "miserably poor" Lorena Barstow called them, but they had already reached the point where Nettie felt justified in planning for a fresh egg apiece for father and mother, and knew that it could be paid for. So Mrs. Speckle began from that day to keep the results of her industry in the home circle, and grew more important because of that. Almost every day now brought surprises. One of the largest of them was connected with Susie Decker. That young woman from the very first had shown a commendable interest in everything pertaining to the business. She patiently did errands for it, in all sorts of weather, and was always ready to dust shelves, arrange cookies without eating so much as a bite, and even wipe teaspoons, a task which she used to think beneath her. "If you can't trust me with things that would smash," she used to say with scornful gravity, to Nettie, "then you can't expect me to be willing to wipe those tough spoons." But in these days, spoons were taken uncomplainingly. Susie had a business head, and was already learning to count pennies and add them to the five and ten cent pieces; and when Jerry said approvingly: "One of these days, she will be our treasurer," the faintest shadow of a blush would appear on Susie's face, but she always went on counting gravely, with an air of one who had not heard a word. On a certain stormy, windy day, one of November's worst, it was discovered late in the afternoon that the molasses jug was empty, and the boys had been promised some molasses candy that very evening. "What shall we do?" asked Nettie, looking perplexed, and standing jug in hand in the middle of the room. "Jerry won't be home in time to get it, and I can't leave those cakes to bake themselves; mother, you don't think you could see to them a little while till I run to the grocery, do you?" Mrs. Decker shook her head, but spoke sympathetically: "I'd do it in a minute, child, or I'd go for the molasses, but these shirts are very particular; I never had such fine ones to iron before, and the irons are just right, and if I should have to leave the bosoms at the wrong minute to look at the cakes, why, it would spoil the bosoms; and on the other hand, if I left the cakes and saved the bosoms, why, they would be spoiled." This seemed logical reasoning. Susie, perched on a high chair in front of the table, was counting a large pile of pennies, putting them in heaps of twenty-five cents each. She waited until her fourth heap was complete, then looked up. "Why don't you ask me to go?" "Sure enough!" said Nettie, laughing, "I'd 'ask' you in a minute if it didn't rain so hard; but it seems a pretty stormy day to send out a little chicken like you." "I'm not a chicken, and I'm not the leastest bit afraid of rain; I can go as well as not if you only think so." "I don't believe it will hurt her!" said Mrs. Decker, glancing doubtfully out at the sullen sky. "It doesn't rain so hard as it did, and she has such a nice thick sack now." It was nice, made of heavy waterproof cloth, with a lovely woolly trimming going all around it. Susie liked that sack almost better than anything else in the world. Her mother had bought it second-hand of a woman whose little girl had outgrown it; the mother had washed all day and ironed another day to pay for it, and felt the liveliest delight in seeing Susie in the pretty garment. The rain seemed to be quieting a little, so presently the young woman was robed in sack and waterproof bonnet with a cape, and started on her way. Half-way to the grocery she met Jerry hastening home from school with a bag of books slung across his shoulder. "Is it so late as that?" asked Susie in dismay. "Nettie thought you wouldn't be at home in a good while; the candy won't get done." "No, it is as early as this," he answered laughing; "we were dismissed an hour earlier than usual this afternoon. Where are you going? after molasses? See here, suppose you give me the jug and you take my books and scud home. There is a big storm coming on; I think the wind is going to blow, and I'm afraid it will twist you all up and pour the molasses over you. Then you'd be ever so sticky!" Susie laughed and exchanged not unwillingly the heavy jug for the books. There had been quite wind enough since she started, and if there was to be more, she had no mind to brave it. "If you hurry," called Jerry, "I think you'll get home before the next squall comes." So she hurried; but Jerry was mistaken. The squall came with all its force, and poor small Susie was twisted and whirled and lost her breath almost, and panted and struggled on, and was only too thankful that she hadn't the molasses jug. Nearly opposite the Farley home, their side door suddenly opened and a pleasant voice called: "Little girl, come in here, and wait until the shower is over; you will be wet to the skin." It is true Susie did not believe that her waterproof sack _could_ be wet through, but that dreadful wind so frightened her, twisting the trees as it did, that she was glad to obey the kind voice and rush into shelter. "Why, it is Nettie's sister, I do believe!" said Ermina Farley, helping her off with the dripping hood. "You dear little mouse, what sent you out in such a storm?" Miss Susie not liking the idea of being a mouse much more than she did being a chicken, answered with dignity, and becoming brevity. "Molasses candy!" said Mrs. Farley, laughing, yet with an undertone of disapproval in her voice which keen-minded Susie heard and felt, "I shouldn't think that was a necessity of life on such a day as this." "It is if you have promised it to some boys who don't ever have anything nice only what they get at our house; and who save their pennies that they spend on beer, and cider, and cigars to get it." Wise Susie, indignation in every word, yet well controlled, and aware before she finished her sentence that she was deeply interesting her audience! How they questioned her! What was this? Who did it? Who thought of it? When did they begin it? Who came? How did they get the money to buy their things? Susie, thoroughly posted, thoroughly in sympathy with the entire movement, calm, collected, keen far beyond her years, answered clearly and well. Plainly she saw that this lady in a silken gown was interested. "Well, if this isn't a revelation!" said Mrs. Farley at last. "A young men's Christian association not only, but an eating-house flourishing right in our midst and we knowing nothing about it. Did you know anything of it, daughter?" "No, ma'am," said Ermina. "But I knew that splendid Nettie was trying to do something for her brother; and that nice boy who used to bring eggs was helping her; it is just like them both. I don't believe there is a nicer girl in town than Nettie Decker." Mrs. Farley seemed unable to give up the subject. She asked many questions as to how long the boys stayed, and what they did all the time. Susie explained: "Well, they eat, you know; and Norm doesn't hurry them; he says they have to pitch the things down fast where they board, to keep them from freezing; and our room is warm, because we keep the kitchen door open, and the heat goes in; but we don't know what we shall do when the weather gets real cold; and after they have eaten all the things they can pay for, they look at the pictures. Jerry's father sends him picture papers, and Mr. Sherrill brings some, most every day. Miss Sherrill is coming Thanksgiving night to sing for them; and Nettie says if we only had an organ she would play beautiful music. We want to give them a treat for Thanksgiving; we mean to do it without any pay at all if we can; and father thinks we can, because he is working nights this week, and getting extra pay; and Jerry thinks there will be two chickens ready; and Nettie wishes we could have an organ for a little while, just for Norm, because he loves music so, but of course we can't." Long before this sentence was finished, Ermina and her mother had exchanged glances which Susie, being intent on her story, did not see. She was a wise little woman of business; what if Mrs. Farley should say: "Well, I will give you a chicken myself for the Thanksgiving time, and a whole peck of apples!" then indeed, Susie believed that their joy would be complete; for Nettie had said, if they could only afford three chickens she believed that with a lot of crust she could make chicken pie enough for them each to have a large piece, hot; not all the boys, of course, but the seven or eight who worked in Norm's shop and boarded at the dreary boarding-house; they would so like to give Norm a surprise for his birthday, and have a treat say at six o'clock for all of these; for this year Thanksgiving fell on Norm's birthday. The storm held up after a little, and Susie, trudging home, a trifle disgusted with Mrs. Farley because she said not a word about the peck of apples or the other chicken, was met by Jerry coming in search of her. The molasses was boiling over, he told her, and so was her mother, with anxiety lest the wind had taken her, Susie, up in a tree, and had forgotten to bring her down again. He hurried her home between the squalls, and Susie quietly resolved to say not a word about all the things she had told at the Farley home. What if Nettie should think she hadn't been womanly to talk so much about what they were doing! If there was one thing that this young woman had a horror of during these days, it was that Nettie would think she was not womanly. The desire, nay, the determination to be so, at all costs had well nigh cured her of her fits of rage and screaming, because in one of her calm moments Nettie had pointed out to her the fact that she never in her life heard a _woman_ scream like that. Susie being a logical person, argued the rest of the matter out for herself, and resolved to scream and stamp her foot no more. Great was the astonishment of the Decker family, next morning. Mrs. Farley herself came to call on them. She wanted some plain ironing done that afternoon. Yes, Mrs. Decker would do it and be glad to; it was a leisure afternoon with her. Mrs. Farley wanted something more! she wanted to know about the business in which Nettie and her young friend next door were engaged; and Susie listened breathlessly, for fear it would appear that she had told more than she ought. But Mrs. Farley kept her own counsel, only questioning Nettie closely, and at last she made a proposition that had well nigh been the ruin of the tin of cookies which Nettie was taking from the oven. She dropped the tin! "Did you burn you, child?" asked Mrs. Decker, rushing forward. "No, ma'am," said Nettie, laughing, and trying not to laugh, and wanting to cry, and being too amazed to do so. "But I was so surprised and so almost scared, that they dropped. "O Mrs. Farley, we have wanted that more than anything else in the world; ever since Mr. Sherrill saw how my brother Norman loved music, and said it might be the saving of him; Jerry and I have planned and planned, but we never thought of being able to do it for a long, long time." Yet all this joy was over an old, somewhat wheezy little house organ which stood in the second-story unused room of Mrs. Farley's house, and which she had threatened to send to the city auction rooms to get out of the way. She offered to lend it to Nettie for her "Rooms," and Nettie's gratitude was so great that the blood seemed inclined to leave her face entirely for a minute, then thought better of it and rolled over it in waves. CHAPTER XXIII. THE CROWNING WONDER. AND they did have the Thanksgiving supper! It seemed wonderful to Nettie, even then, and long afterwards the wonder grew, that so many things occurred about that time to help the scheme along. At first it was to be a very simple little affair; two of the boys, Rick for instance, and Alf, invited to come in an hour or so before the room was open for the evening, and have a little supper by themselves--a chicken, and possibly some cranberry sauce if she could compass it, though cranberries were very expensive at that season, and besides, they ate sugar in a way which was perfectly alarming! A pie of some sort she had quite set her heart on, but whether it would be pumpkin or not, depended on how they succeeded in saving up for extra milk. The circumstances of the Deckers were changing steadily, but when a man has tumbled to the foot of a hill, and lain there quite awhile, it is generally a slow process to get up and climb back to where he was before. Mr. Decker's wages were good, and in time he expected to be able to support his family in at least ordinary comfort; but when he came fully to his senses, he stood for awhile appalled before the number of things which had been sold to pay his bill at the saloon, and the number of things which in the meantime had worn out, and not been replaced by new ones; then the rent was two months back, and Job Smith had been all that stood between him and a home. There was a great deal to do if the Deckers were to get back to the place from which they began to roll down hill; so extra expenses for cranberries, or even milk, were not to be thought of, if they must be drawn from the family funds. The business of the firm was flourishing; but you must remember that the central feature of the enterprise was to keep prices very low, lower than beer and bad cigars, and the enterprise of the dealers in these things is so great, that if you are willing to put up with the meanest sorts you can always get them very low indeed. To compete with them, Jerry and Nettie had to study the most rigid economy to keep their shelves supplied, and even to sometimes "shut their eyes and make a reckless dash at apples or peanuts, regardless of expense." This was the way in which Jerry occasionally apologized for an extra quantity of these luxuries. Still, in the most interesting ways the Thanksgiving supper grew. Mrs. Decker secured within a week of the time, an unexpected ironing which she could do in two evenings, and she it was who proposed the wild scheme of having two chickens and having them hot, and stuffing them with bread crumbs as she used to do years ago, and having gravy and some baked potatoes. She agreed to furnish the extra potatoes, and a few turnips, just to make it feel like Thanksgiving. Nettie was astonished, but pleased. It would be more work, but what of that? Think of being able to make a real supper for Norm's birthday! Then Mrs. Smith at just the right moment had a present of two pumpkins from her country friends; as they could never make away with two pumpkins before they would spoil, of course the Deckers must take part of one, at least. About that time the minister bought a cow, and what did he do but come himself one night to know if Mrs. Decker had any use for skimmed milk; they were very fond of cream at their house, and skimmed milk gathered faster than they knew what to do with it. "Any use for skim milk!" Mrs. Decker could only repeat the words in a kind of ecstasy at her good luck, and she almost wondered that the yellow pumpkin standing behind the door in the closet did not laugh outright. But the crowning wonder came, after all, on the morning before the eventful day. Jake, the Farleys' man of all work, brought it in a basket which was large and closely covered, and very heavy looking. It was left at the door with Susie, who went to answer the knock, "For Miss Nettie." Susie repeated the name with a lingering tone as though she liked the sound of the unusual prefix. Then they gathered about the basket. A great solemn-looking turkey with a note in his mouth, which said: "A Thanksgiving token for Nettie, from her friend ERMINA FARLEY." A turkey in the Decker oven! Mr. Decker surveyed the great fellow in silence for a few minutes, then said impressively, "If we don't have a new cook stove before another Thanksgiving day comes around, my name is not Decker." Mrs. Job Smith left her pies half-made, and ran in, in a friendly way, to see the wonder; and at once remarked that he would exactly fit into their oven, and she wasn't going to cook their turkey till the day afterwards, because they had got to go to Job's uncle's for Thanksgiving; so that matter was settled. It was then that the Deckers decided to make a reckless plunge into society and invite every boy in Norm's shop to a three o'clock dinner, with turkey and cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie and turnip, and all the rest. What a day it was! They grew nearly wild in their efforts to keep all the secrets from Norm, and act as though nothing unusual was happening. Especially was this the case after the morning express brought a package for Nettie from her dear old home, with two mince pies, and a box of Auntie Marshall's doughnuts, and a bag of nuts, and as much as two pounds of the loveliest candy she ever saw; sent by the young man of the home who was clerk in a wholesale confectioner's. It took Mrs. Decker and Nettie not five minutes to resolve, looking curiously into each other's faces the while to see if they really had become insane, that they would have a regular dessert following the dinner! "It is only once a year," said Nettie apologetically. "It is only once in five years!" said Mrs. Decker solemnly. "I haven't had a Thanksgiving in five years, child; and I never expected to have another." Everybody was busy all day long. Mrs. Smith was in and out, helping as faithfully as though Norm was her boy, and Sarah Ann just gave herself up to the importance of the occasion, and did not go to her uncle's at all. "I can go there any time," she said good naturedly, "or no time; they always forget that we are alive till Thanksgiving Day, and then they ask us because they kind of think they've got to. Uncle Jed is a clerk, and his wife makes dresses for the folks on Belmont street, and they feel stuck up four feet above us; I'd rather eat cold pork and potatoes at home than to go there any day. I'm dreadful glad of an excuse that father thinks is worth giving." Susie was a young woman of importance that day. Nettie, who had discovered exactly how to manage her, gave her work to do which suited her ideas of what a grown person like herself ought to be about; and when she wanted the table cleared from the picture papers of the night before, instead of telling Miss Susie to fold them away, said, "What do you think, Susie, would it be best for us to fold these papers away in the closet for to-day, and have this table left clear for the nuts and the candies?" "Yes," said Susie, with her grown-up air, "I think it would; I'll attend to it." And she did it beautifully. "It is well we have no little bits of folks around," said Nettie, when the nuts were being cracked, "they would be tempted to eat some, and then I'm afraid we would not have enough to go around." And Susie, gravely assenting to this theory, arranged the nuts in Mrs. Smith's blue saucers, an equal number in each, and ate not one! Little Sate went with Jerry to give the invitations to the boys, and to charge them to keep the whole thing a profound secret from Norm; they came home by way of the Farley woods, and little Sate appeared at the door with her arms laden with such lovely branches of autumn leaves, that Nettie exclaimed in wild delight, and left her turnips half-peeled to help adorn the walls of the front room. This suggested the idea, and by three o'clock that room was a bower of beauty. Red and golden and lovely brown leaves mixed in with the evergreen tassels of the pines, with here and there pine cones, and red berries peeping out from everywhere. "You little darling," said Nettie, kissing Sate, "you have made a picture of it, like what they paint on canvas, only a thousand times lovelier." And Sate, looking on, with her wide sweet eyes aglow with feeling, fitted the picture well. So the feast was spread, and the astonished and hungry boys came, and feasted. And Norm, too astonished at first to take it in, began presently to understand that all this preparation and delight were in honor of his birthday! And though he said not a word, aloud, he kept up in his soul a steady line of thought; the centre of which was this: "I don't deserve it, that's a fact; there's mother doing everything for me, and Nettie working like a slave, and the children going without things to give me a treat. I'll be in a better fix to keep a birthday before it gets around again, see if I'm not!" His was not the only thinking which was done that day. Rick, merry enough all the afternoon, and enjoying his dinner as well as it was possible for a hungry fellow to do, nevertheless had a sober look on his face more than once, and said as he shook hands with Norm at night: "I'll tell you what it is, my boy, if I had your kind of a home, and folks, I'd be worth something in the world; I would, so. I ain't sure, between you and me, but I shall, anyhow; just for the sake of getting into such Thanksgiving houses once in awhile. By and by a fellow will have to carry himself pretty straight, or that sister of yours won't have nothing to do with him; I can see that in her eyes." Then he went home. And cold though his room was he sat down, even after he had pulled off his coat, as a memory of some thoughtful word of Nettie's came over him, and went all over it again; then he brought his hard hand down with a thud on the rickety table, on which he leaned and said: "As sure as you live, and breathe the breath of life, old fellow, you've got to turn over a new leaf; and you've got to begin to-night." It was less than a week after the Thanksgiving excitements that the town got itself roused over something which reached even to the children. Jerry came home from school with it, and came directly to Nettie, his cheeks aglow with the news. "There's to be the biggest kind of a time here next Thursday, Nettie; don't you think General McClintock is coming, to give a lecture, and they are going to give him a reception at Judge Bentley's and I don't know what all, and the schools are all going to dismiss and go down to the train in procession to meet him, and they are going to sing, _Hail to the Chief_, and the band is to play, _See, the conquering Hero comes_, and I don't know what isn't going to be done." "Who is General McClintock?" said ignorant Nettie, composedly drying her plate as though all the generals in the world were nothing to her. Then did Jerry come the nearest impatience that Nettie had ever seen in him; and he launched forth in such a wild praise of General McClintock and such an excited account of the things which he had done and said, and prevented, and pushed, that Nettie was half bewildered and delightfully excited when he paused for breath. Henceforth the talk of the town was General McClintock. "It is a wonder they asked him to speak on temperance," said Nettie, disdain in her voice; she had not a high opinion of the temperance enthusiasm of the town in which she lived. "They didn't," said Jerry. "He asked himself; they wanted him to talk about the war, or the tariff, or the great West, or some other stupid thing, but he said, 'No, sir! the great question of the day is temperance, and I shall speak on that, or nothing!'" "How do you happen to know so much about him?" Nettie questioned one day when Jerry was at his highest pitch of excitement. "Ho!" he said, almost in scorn, "I have known about him ever since I was born; everybody knows General McClintock." Then Nettie felt meek and ignorant. Nothing had ever so excited Jerry as the coming of the hero; and indeed the town generally seemed to have caught fire. General McClintock seemed to be the theme of every tongue. Connected with these days, Nettie had her perplexities and her sorrows. In the first place, Jerry was obstinately determined that she should join the procession with him to meet General McClintock. In vain she protested that she did not belong to the public schools. He did, he said, and that was enough. Then when Nettie urged and almost cried, he had another plan: "Well, then, we won't go as scholars. We'll go ahead, as private individuals; I'm only a kind of a scholar, anyhow, just holding on for a few weeks till my father comes; we'll go up there early and get a good place before the procession forms and see the whole of it. I know the marshal real well; he's a good friend of mine, and I know he will give us a place." It was of no use for Nettie to protest; to remind him that the girls would think she was putting herself forward, to say that she had nothing to wear to such a gathering. She might as well have talked to a stone for all the impression she made. She had never seen him so resolute to have his own way. He did not care what she wore, it made not the slightest difference to him what the girls said, and he _did_ ask it of her as a kindness to him, and he should be hurt so that he could never get over it if she refused to go; he had never wanted anything so much in his life, and he _could_ not give it up. So Nettie, reluctant, sorrowful, promised, and cried over it in her room that night. She wanted to please Jerry, for his father was coming now in a few weeks perhaps, and Jerry would go away with him, and she should never see him again; and what in the world would she do without him? And here she cried harder than ever. Then came up that dreadful question of clothes; her one winter dress was too short and too narrow and a good deal worn. Auntie Marshall had thought last winter that it would hardly do for a church dress, and here it was still her best. There was no such thing as a new one for the present; for mother had not had anything in so long, she must be clothed, and Nettie was willing to wait; but she was not willing to take a conspicuous place on a public day and be stared at and talked about. However, Jerry continued merciless to the very last; nothing else would satisfy him. He hurried her in a breathless state down the hill to the platform, smiled and nodded to his friend the marshal, who nodded back in the most confidential manner, and perched them on the corner of the temporary platform, right behind the reception committee! It was every whit as disagreeable as Nettie had planned that it should be. Of course Lorena Barstow was among the leaders in the young people's procession, and of course she contrived to get enough to be heard, and to say in a most unnecessarily loud voice: "Do look at that Decker girl perched up there on the platform. If she doesn't contrive to make herself a laughing stock everywhere! Girls, look at her hat; she must have worn it ever since they came out of the ark. What business is she here, anyway? She doesn't belong to the schools?" There was much more in the same vein; much pushing and crowding, and laughing and hateful speeches about folks who crowded in where they didn't belong, and poor Nettie, the tears only kept back by force of will, looked in vain for sympathy into Jerry's fairly dancing eyes. What ailed the boy? She had never seen him so almost wild with eager excitement before. Judge Barstow and Dr. Lewis were both on the reception committee, of course, and under cover of this, their daughters wedged their way to the front, and whispered to the fathers. Loud whispers: "Papa, that ridiculous Decker girl and the little Irish boy with her ought not to be perched up there in that conspicuous place. She doesn't belong here, anyway; she isn't a scholar." Then Judge Barstow in good-humored tones to Jerry: "My boy, don't you think you would find it quite as pleasant down there among the others? This little girl doesn't want to be up here, I am sure; suppose you both go down and fall behind the procession? You can see the General when the carriage passes; it is to be thrown open so every one can see." Then the marshal: "If you please, Judge Barstow, it won't do for them to try to get through now. The crowd is so great they might be hurt; there is plenty of room where they stand. They will do no harm." _Now_ the tears must come from the indignant eyes. No, they shall not. Jerry doesn't even wink. He only laughs, in the highest good humor. Has Jerry gone wild with excitement? "It will all be over in two minutes," explains Judge Barstow. "He wished to drive directly to his hotel, and have perfect quiet for two hours. He declined to be entertained at a private house, or to say a word at the depot. I suppose he is fatigued, and doesn't like to trust his voice to speak in the open air; so the committee are to shake hands with him as rapidly as possible, and show him to his carriage, and not wait on him for two hours. He has ordered a private dinner at the Keppler House." Suddenly there is the whistle of the train, the band plays _See, the conquering Hero comes!_ With the second strain the train comes to a halt, and a tall, broad-shouldered man with iron gray hair and a military air all about him steps from the platform amid the cheers of thousands. Now indeed there was some excuse for Lorena Barstow's loud exclamations of disapproval! There was Jerry, pushing his way among the throng, holding so firmly all the while to Nettie's hand that escape was impossible--pushing even past the reception committee, notwithstanding the detaining hand of Judge Barstow, who says, "See here, my boy, you are impudent, did you know it?" "I beg pardon," says Jerry respectfully, but he slips past him, just as General McClintock with courteous words is thanking the committee of reception, declining their pressing personal invitations, his eyes meantime roving over the crowd in search of something or somebody. Suddenly they melt with a tenderness which does not belong to the soldier, and the firm lips quiver as his voice says: "O my boy!" and Jerry the Irish boy flings himself into General McClintock's arms, and the world stands agape! Just a second, and his hand holds firmly to the sack which covers Nettie's startled frightened form, then he releases himself and turns to her: "Father, this is Nettie!" "Sure enough!" said the General, and his tall head bends and the mustached lips of the old soldier touch Nettie's cheek, and the cheering, hushed for a second, breaks forth afresh! It is a moment of the wildest excitement. Even then Nettie tries to break away and is held fast. And an officer of the day advances with the military salute and assures the General that his carriage is in waiting. And the General himself hands the bewildered Nettie in, with a friendly smile and an assuring: "Of course you must go. My boy planned this whole thing three months ago; and you and I must carry out his programme to the letter." Then Jerry springs like a cat into the carriage, and the scholars sing, _Hail to the Chief_, and the carriage, drawn by four horses, rolls down the road made wide for it by the homeguard in full uniform, and the General lifts his hat and bows right and left, and smiles on Nettie Decker sitting by his side, and almost devours with his hungry, fatherly eyes, her friend the Irish boy on the opposite seat. And the scholars almost forget to sing, in their great and ever-increasing amazement. CHAPTER XXIV. THE PAST AND PRESENT. NETTIE DECKER sat by the window of her father's house, looking out into the beautiful world; taking one last look at the flowers, and the trees, and the lawn, and all the beautiful and familiar things. Saying good-by to them, for in a brief two hours she was to leave them, and the old home. [Illustration: NETTIE DECKER HAS A SUITABLE DRESS AT LAST.] She is Nettie Decker still, but you will not be able to say that of her in another hour. She has changed somewhat since you last saw her in her blue gingham dress a trifle faded, or in her brown merino much the worse for time. To-day she is twenty years old. A lovely summer day, and her birthday is to be celebrated by making it her wedding day. The blue gingham has been long gone; so has the brown merino. The dress she wears to-day looks unlike either of them. It is white, all white; she has a suitable dress at last for a gala day. Soft, rich, quiet white silk. Long and full and pure; not a touch of trimming about it anywhere. Not even a flower yet, though she holds one in her hand in doubt whether she will add it to the whiteness. I think it will probably be pushed among the folds of soft lace which lie across her bosom; for that would please little Sate's artist eye, and Nettie likes to please Sate. While she sits there, watching the birds, and the flowers, and thinking of the strange sweet past, and the strange sweet present, there pass by almost underneath the window two young ladies; moving slowly, glancing up curiously at the open casement, from which Nettie draws a little back, that she may not be seen. "That is Nettie's room where the window is open," says one of the ladies. "It is a lovely room; I was in it once when the circle met there; it is furnished in blue, with creamy tints on the walls and furniture. I don't think I ever saw a prettier room. Nettie has excellent taste." "Do you say her brother is to be at the wedding?" "O, yes indeed! He came day before yesterday; he is a splendid-looking fellow, and smart; they say he is the finest student Yale has had for years. He graduated with the very highest honors, and now he is studying medicine. I heard Dr. Hobart say that he would be an honor to the profession. You ought to hear him play; I thought he would be a musician, he is so fond of music, and really he plays exquisitely on the organ. Last spring when he was home he played in church all day, and I heard ever so many people say they had never heard anything finer in any church." "I don't remember him. Was he in our set?" "O no! he wasn't in any set when you were here. Why, Irene Lewis, you must remember the Deckers! They weren't in any set." "Oh! I remember them, of course; don't you know what fun we used to make of Nettie? Didn't we call her Nan? I remember she always wore an old blue and white gingham to Sunday-school." "That was years ago; she dresses beautifully now, and in exquisite taste. She must make a lovely bride. I should like to get a glimpse of her." "The McClintocks are very rich, I have been told." "Oh! immensely so; and they say General McClintock just idolizes Nettie. I don't wonder at that; she is a perfectly lovely girl." "Seems to me, Lorena, my dear, about the time I left this part of the world you did not think so much of her as you do now. I remember you used to make all sorts of fun of her, and real hateful speeches, as schoolgirls will, you know. I have a distinct recollection of a flower party where she was, and my conscience, I remember, troubled me at the time for saying so many disagreeable things about her that afternoon; but I recollect I comforted myself with the thought that you were much worse than I. You used to lead off, in those days, you know." "Oh! I remember; I was a perfect little idiot in those days. Yes, I was disagreeable enough to Nettie Decker; if she hadn't been a real sweet girl she would never have forgotten it; but I don't believe she ever thinks of it, and really she is so utterly changed, and all the family are, that I hardly ever remember her as the same girl." "What became of that little Irish boy she used to be so fond of--Jerry, his name was?" "Now, Irene Lewis! you don't mean to tell me you have never heard about him! Well, you have been out of the world, sure enough." "I have never heard a word of him from the time I went with Uncle Lawrence out West. Father moved in the spring, you know, so instead of my coming back early in the spring as I expected, I never came until now? What about Jerry? Did he distinguish himself in any way? I always thought him a fine-looking boy." "That is too funny that you shouldn't know! Why, the Irish boy, Jerry, as you call him, is the Gerald McClintock whom Nettie Decker is to marry at twelve o'clock to-day." "Gerald McClintock! How can that be? That boy's name was Jerry Mack." "Indeed it wasn't. We were all deceived in that boy. It does seem so strange that you have never heard the story! Why, you see, he was General McClintock's son all the time." "Why did he pretend he was somebody else?" "He didn't pretend; or at least I heard he said he didn't begin it. It seems that Mrs. Smith, the car-man's wife, you know, used to live in General McClintock's family before his wife died; and Job Smith lived there as coachman. When they married, General McClintock broke up housekeeping, and went South with his family. Then Mrs. McClintock died, and the General and this one boy boarded in New York, and Gerald attended school. In the spring the General was called to California on some important law business--you know he is a celebrated lawyer, and they say his son is going to be even more brilliant than his father--well, the father had to go, and the boy made him promise that he might spend the summer vacation with Mrs. Smith out here. The McClintocks had been very fond of her and her husband and trusted them both; so the General agreed to it, thinking he would be back long before the vacation closed. "But he was delayed by one thing and another, and the boy coaxed to stay on, and study in the public school here; he was a pupil in Whately Institute at home. Imagine him taking up with our common schools! so he stayed until the first of December, and then his father came. "Such a time as that was! You see we all knew of General McClintock, of course, and when it was found we could get him to lecture, the people nearly went wild over it. We couldn't understand why we should have such good fortune, when we knew ever so many places--large cities--had been refused; but it was all explained after he came. "It was a beautiful day when he came; all the schools were closed, and we formed a procession and marched to the depot, and the band was there, and great crowds. I remember as though it were yesterday how astonished we were to see Nettie Decker and that boy in a conspicuous place on the corner of the platform. Nettie had on her old brown merino, and looked so queer and seemed so out of place, that I went and spoke to father about it, and he advised them to go down and join the procession; but it seems the marshal knew what he was about, and objected to their moving. Then the train came, and there was a great excitement, and in the midst of it, the General almost took that boy Jerry in his arms, and kissed and kissed him! Then he kissed Nettie Decker, and while we stood wondering what on earth it all meant, they all three entered an elegant carriage drawn by four horses, and were carried to the Keppler House. "They had an elegant private dinner, they three; and in fact all the time the General was here, he kept Nettie Decker with them; he treated her more like a daughter than a stranger. I don't think there was ever such an excitement in this town about anything as we had at that time; the circumstances were so peculiar, you know." "But I don't understand it, yet. Why did he call himself Jerry Mack? What was his object in deceiving us all?" "He hadn't the slightest intention of doing so. I heard he said such a thought never entered his mind until we began it. It seems when he was a little bit of a fellow he tried to speak his name, Gerald McClintock, and the nearest he could approach to it, was, Jerry Mack. Of course they thought that was cunning, and it grew to be his pet name; so before they knew it, the servants and all his boy friends called him so, all the time. When he came here Mrs. Smith and her husband naturally used the old name; then somebody, I'm sure I don't know who, started the story that he was an Irish boy working at the Smiths for his board; and it seems he heard of it, and it amused him so much he decided to let people think so if they wanted to; he coaxed the Smiths not to tell who he was, or why he was here; and they so nearly worshipped him, that if he had asked them to say he was a North American Indian I believe they would have done it. It seems he liked Nettie Decker from the first, and was annoyed because she wasn't invited in our set. But I am sure I don't know how we were to blame; she had nothing to wear, and how were we to know that she was a very smart girl, and real sweet and good? The Deckers were very poor, and Mr. Decker drank, you know, and Norm was sort of a loafer, and we thought they were real low people." "I remember Ermina Farley was friendly with Nettie, and with the boy, too." "O yes, Ermina was always peculiar; she is yet. I have always thought that perhaps Ermina knew something about the McClintocks, but she says she didn't. I heard her say the other day that somebody told her he was an Irish boy, whose father had run away and left him; and the Smiths gave him a home out of pity; and she supposed of course it was so, and was sorry for him. Then she always thought he was handsome, and smart; well, so did I, I must say." "I wonder who started that absurd story about his father deserting him?" "I don't know, I'm sure; somebody imagined it was so, I suppose, and spoke of it; such things spread, you know, nobody seems to understand quite how." "Well, as I remember things, Jerry--I shall always call him that name, I don't believe I could remember to say Mr. McClintock if I should meet him now--as I remember him, he seemed to be as poor as Nettie; he dressed very well, but not as a gentleman's son, and he seemed to be contriving ways to earn little bits of money. Don't you remember that old hen and chickens he bought? And he used to go to the Farleys every morning with a fresh egg for Helen; sold it, you know, for I was there one morning when Mrs. Farley paid him." "I know it; he was always contriving ways to earn money; why, Irene, don't you remember his selling fish to Ermina Farley that day when we were talking down by the pond? I have always thought he heard more than we imagined he did, that day; I don't clearly remember what we said, but I know we were running on about Nettie Decker and about Jerry; I used to sort of dislike them both, because Ermina Farley was always trying to push them forward. "I would give something to know exactly what we did say that day. For awhile I did not like to meet any of the McClintocks; it always seemed to me as though they were thinking about that time. But they have been perfectly polite and cordial to me, always; and Nettie Decker is a perfect lady. But I know all about the poverty. It seems the boy Jerry had been very fond of giving away money, and books, and all sorts of things to people whom he thought needed them; and his father began to be afraid he would have no knowledge of the value of money, and would give carelessly, you know, just because he felt like it. So the General had a long talk with him, and made an arrangement that while he was gone West, Jerry should have nothing to give away but what he earned. He might earn as much as he liked, or could, and give it all away if he chose; but not a penny besides, and he was not to appeal to his father to help anybody in any way whatever. Of course the father was to pay all his bills for necessary things--they say he paid a splendid price to the Smiths for taking care of him. Poor Mrs. Smith cried when he went away, as though he had been her own child. Well, of course that crippled him, in his pocket money, but they say his father was very much pleased to find how many schemes he had started for earning money. That plan about the business was his from beginning to end, and just see what it has grown to!" "What? I don't know; remember, I only came night before last, and haven't heard anything about the town since the day I left it." "Why, the Norman House, the most elegant hotel in town, is the outgrowth of that enterprise begun in the Decker's front room! Mr. Decker owns the whole thing, now, and manages it splendidly. His wife is a perfect genius, they say, about managing. She oversees the housekeeping herself, and the cooking is perfect they say. General McClintock was so pleased with the beginning, that he bought that long low building on Smith street that first time he was here, and fitted it up for Norman and Nettie to run. He carried his son away with him, of course, but they stayed long enough to see that matter fairly under way. The Norman House is managed on the same general principles; strictly temperance, of course. The General is as great a fanatic about that as the Deckers are, and the prices are very low--lower than other first-class houses, while the table is better, and the rooms are beautifully furnished. They say it is because Mrs. Decker is such an excellent manager that they can afford things at such low prices. Then, besides, there is a lunch room for young men, where they can get excellent things for just what they cost; that is a sort of benevolence. General McClintock devotes a certain amount to it each year; and there is a splendid young man in charge of the room; you saw him once, Rick Walker, his name is. He used to be considered a sort of hard boy, but there isn't a more respected young man in town than he. He is book-keeper at the Norman House, and has the oversight of this Home Dining Room. You ought to go in there; it is very nicely furnished, and they have flowers, plants, you know, and birds, and a fountain, and pictures on the walls, and for fifteen cents you can get an excellent dinner. Everybody likes Rick Walker; they say he has a great influence over the boys in town, almost as great as Norman Decker; _he_ used to be in charge of it all, before he went to college." "Still, I shouldn't think the McClintocks would have liked Nettie Decker to be in quite so public a place," interrupted her listener. "Oh! she wasn't public; why, she went to New York to a private school the very next winter after the General came home. She boarded with them; the General's sister came East with him, and was the lady of the house; then he sent her to Wellesley, you know. Didn't you know that? She graduated at Wellesley a year ago. Yes, the McClintocks educated her, or began it; her father has done so well that I suppose he hasn't needed their help lately. He is a master builder, you know, and keeps at his business, and owns and manages this hotel, besides. Oh! they are well off; you ought to see Mrs. Decker. She is a very pretty woman, and a real lady; they say Nettie and Norman are so proud of her! What was I telling you? Oh! about the room; they have a library connected with it, and a reading room, and everything complete; it is such a nice thing for our young men. A great many wealthy gentlemen contribute to the library. There is a little alcove at the further end of the reading room, where they keep cake and lemonade, and nuts and little things of all sorts. They are very cheap, but the boys can't get any cigars there; I'm so glad of that. The Norman House is in very great favor--quite the fashion, and it makes such a difference with the boys who are just beginning to imagine themselves young men, and who want to be manly, to have an elegant place like that frown on all such things. My brother Dick, you remember him? He was a little fellow when you lived here--he went into the Norman House one day and called for a cigar; he was just beginning to smoke, and I suppose he did it because he thought it would sound manly. It was in the spring when Norman was at home on vacation, and it seems he expressed so much astonishment that Dick was quite ashamed; I don't think he has smoked a cigar since." "The Deckers seem to be quite a centre of interest in town." "Well, they are. They are a sort of exceptional family someway; their experience has been so romantic. Mr. Decker has become such a nice man; Deacon Decker, he is, a prominent man in the church, and everywhere. Oh! do you remember those two cunning little girls? I always thought they were sweet. Susie is a perfect lady; she is going with Nettie and her husband to Washington; but little Sate is a beauty. They say she is going to be a poet and an artist, and she looks almost like an angel. General McClintock admires her very much; he says she shall have the finest art teachers in Europe. I never saw a family come up as they did, from nothing, you may say. But then it was all owing to that fortunate accident of being friends with Gerald McClintock, and having the Farleys interested in them. Did I tell you Norman was engaged to Ermina Farley? O yes! they will marry as soon as he graduates from the medical college, and then he will take her abroad and take a post graduate course in medicine there. I suppose they will take Sate with them then. They say that is the plan. No, I certainly never saw anything like their success in life. Mrs. Smith doesn't believe in luck, you know, nor much in money, though since her Job has a position in the Norman House that pays better than carting, they have built an addition to their house, and, Sarah Ann says, "live like folks." She is housekeeper at the Norman House--Mrs. Decker's right-hand woman. Mrs. Smith says the Lord had a great deal to do with the Decker family; that Nettie came home resolved to be faithful to Him, and to trust Him to save her father and brother, and so He did it, of course. It seems she and Jerry promised each other to work for Norman and the father in every possible way until they were converted; and they did. I must say I think they are real wonderful Christians, all of them. I like to hear Mr. Decker pray better than almost any other man in our meeting; and as for Norman, he leads a meeting beautifully. They say Mr. Sherrill thought at first that he ought to preach; but now he says he is reconciled; there is greater need for Christian physicians than for ministers. Mr. Sherrill has always been great friends with all the Deckers; you remember he was, from the first. Norman studied with him all the time he was managing that first little bit of a restaurant in the square room of the old Decker house. They tore down that house last month, to make room for a carriage drive around the back of their new house, and they say Nettie cried when the square room was torn up. "She has some of the quaintest furniture! Sofas, she calls them, made out of boxes; and a queer old-fashioned hour-glass stand, and a barrel chair, which have been sent on with all her elegant things, to New York; she is going to furnish a room for Gerald and her with them; he made them, it seems, when they began that queer scheme. Who would have supposed it could grow as it did? It really seems as though the Lord must have had a good deal to do with it, doesn't it? I tell you, Irene, it is wonderful how many young men they have helped save, those two. It seems a pity sometimes that they could not have told us girls what they were about and let us help; but then, I don't know as we would have helped if we had understood; I used to be such a perfect little idiot then! Well, it was Nettie Decker got hold of me at last. Norman signed the pledge that night when General McClintock lectured here, and during the winter he was converted; but it was two years after that before I made up my mind. I was miserable all that time, too; because I knew I was doing wrong. And I didn't treat Nettie wonderfully well any of the time; but when she came to me with her eyes shining with tears, and said she had been praying for me ever since that day of the flower party, I just broke down. "O Irene, there's the carriage with the bride and groom and Norman and Ermina. Doesn't the bride look lovely! I wish they had had a public wedding and let us all see her! But they say General McClintock thinks weddings ought to be very private. Never mind, we will see her at the reception next week; but then, she won't be Nettie Decker; we shall have to say good-by to her." And Miss Lorena Barstow stood still in the street, and shaded her eyes from the sunlight to watch the bridal party as the carriage wound around the square, looking her last with tender, loving eyes, upon Nettie Decker. CHOICE BOOKS FOR READERS OF ALL AGES Pansy Books. =The Pansy= for 1888. With colored frontispiece. Edited by Pansy. More than 400 pages of reading and pictures for children of eight to fifteen years in various lines of interest. Quarto, boards, 1.25. =Pansy Sunday Book= for 1889. With colored frontispiece. Edited by Pansy. Quarto, boards, 1.25. Just the thing for children on Sunday afternoon, when the whole family are gathered in the home to exchange helpful thought and gain new courage for future work and study which the tone and excellence of these tales impart. =Pansy's Story Book.= By Pansy. Quarto, boards, 1.25. Made up largely of Pansy's charming stories with an occasional sketch or poem by some other well-known children's author to give variety. =Mother's Boys and Girls.= By Pansy. Quarto, boards, 1.25. A book full of stories for boys and girls, most of them short, so all the more of them. Easy words and plenty of pictures. =Pansy Token= (A); or An Hour with Miss Streator. For Sunday School teachers. 24mo, paper, 15 cts. =Young Folks Stories of American History and Home Life.= Edited by Pansy. Quarto, cover in colors, 75 cts. Sketches, tales and pictures on New-World subjects. =Young Folks Stories of Foreign Lands.= Edited by Pansy. First Series, quarto, cover in colors, 75 cts. Sketches, tales and pictures on Old-World subjects. =Stories and Pictures from the Life of Jesus.= By Pansy. 12mo, boards, 50 cts. The life of Jesus as recorded in the four gospels simplified and unified for children. =A Christmas Time.= By Pansy, 12mo, boards, 15 cts. A Christmas story full of Christmas trees and sleigh-rides. Its lesson is the joy to be got in helping others. Travel and History for Young Folks. =Story of the American Indian (The).= By Elbridge S. Brooks. 8vo, cloth, 2.50. "A thorough compendium of the archæology, history, present standing and outlook of our nation's wards.... We commend it as the best and most comprehensive book on the Indian for general reading known to us."--_Literary World._ =Story of the American Sailor (The).= By Elbridge S. Brooks. Octavo, cloth, 2.50. The first consecutive narrative yet attempted, sketching the rise and development of the American seaman on board merchant vessel and man-of-war. =Ned Harwood's Visit to Jerusalem.= By Mrs. S. G. Knight. Quarto, 1.25. Travel in the Holy Land. The manuscript was approved by Rev. Selah Merrill, for many years U. S. Consul at Jerusalem. The strictest accuracy has thus been secured without impairing the interest of the story. =Out and About.= By Kate Tannatt Woods. Quarto, boards, 1.25. Cape Cod to the Golden Gate with a lot of young folks along, and plenty of yarns by the way. =Sights Worth Seeing.= By those who saw them. Quarto, cloth, 1.50. Eleven descriptive articles by such writers as Margaret Sidney, Amanda B. Harris, Annie Sawyer Downs, Frank T. Merrill and Rose Kingsley. Copiously and beautifully illustrated. =Adventures of the Early Discoverers.= By Frances A. Humphrey. 4to, cloth, 1.00. Real history written and pictured for readers both sides of ten years old. It begins with the mythology of discovery and comes down to the sixteenth and seventeenth century. =The Golden West=: as Seen by the Ridgway Club. By Margaret Sidney. Quarto, boards, 1.75. Description of a trip through Southern California taken by Mr. and Mrs. Ridgway and their children. The careful observations and the fine illustrations make it a treasure for boys and girls. =Days and Nights in the Tropics.= By Felix L. Oswald. Quarto, boards, 1.25. The collector of curiosities for the Brazilian museum goes on his quest with his eyes open. A book of adventures and hunters' yarns. Illustrated Stories for Young Folks. =Young Folks' Cyclopedia of Stories.= Quarto, cloth, 3.00. Contains in one large book the following stories with many illustrations: Five Little Peppers, Two Young Homesteaders, Royal Lowrie's Last Year at St. Olaves, The Dogberry Bunch, Young Rick, Nan the New-Fashioned Girl, Good-for-Nothing Polly and The Cooking Club of Tu-Whit Hollow. =What the Seven Did=; or, the Doings of the Wordsworth Club. By Margaret Sidney. Quarto, boards, 1.75. The Seven are little girl neighbors who meet once a week at their several homes. They helped others and improved themselves. =Me and My Dolls.= By L. T. Meade. Quarto, 50 cts. A family history. Some of the dolls have had queer adventures. Twelve full-page illustrations by Margaret Johnson. =Little Wanderers in Bo-Peep's World.= Quarto, boards, double lithograph covers, 50 cts. =Polly and the Children.= By Margaret Sidney. Boards, quarto, 50 cts. The story of a funny parrot and two charming children. The parrot has surprising adventures at the children's party and wears a medal after the fire. =Five Little Peppers.= By Margaret Sidney. 12mo, 1.50. Story of five little children of a fond, faithful and capable "mamsie." Full of young life and family talk. =Seal Series.= 10 vols., boards, double lithographed covers, quarto. Rocky Fork, Old Caravan Days, The Dogberry Bunch, by Mary H. Catherwood; The Story of Honor Bright and Royal Lowrie's Last Year at St. Olaves, by Charles R. Talbot; Their Club and Ours, by John Preston True; From the Hudson to the Neva, by David Ker; The Silver City, by Fred A. Ober; Two Young Homesteaders, by Theodora Jenness; The Cooking Club of Tu-Whit Hollow, by Ella Farman. =Cats' Arabian Nights.= By Abby Morton Diaz. Quarto, cloth, 1.75; boards, 1.25. The wonderful cat story of cat stories told by Pussyanita that saved the lives of all the cats. Natural History. =Stories and Pictures of Wild Animals.= By Anna F. Burnham. Quarto, boards, 75 cts. Big letters, big pictures and easy stories of elephants, lions, tigers, lynxes, jaguars, bears and many others. =Life and Habits of Wild Animals.= Quarto, cloth, 1.50. The very best book young folks can have if they are at all interested in Natural History. If they are not yet interested it will make them so. Illustrated from designs by Joseph Wolf. =Children's Out-Door Neighbors.= By Mrs. A. E. Andersen-Maskell. 3 volumes, 12mo, cloth, each 1.00. Three instructive and interesting books: Children with Animals, Children with Birds, Children with Fishes. The author has the happy faculty of interesting boys and girls in the wonderful neighbors around them and that without introducing anything which is not borne out by the knowledge of learned men. =Some Animal Pets.= By Mrs. Oliver Howard. Quarto, boards, 35 cts. The experiences of a Colorado family with young, wild and tame animals. It is one of the pleasantest animal books we have met in many a day. Well thought, well written, well pictured, the book itself, apart from its contents, is attractive. Full page pictures. =Tiny Folk In Red and Black.= Quarto, boards, 35 cts. The tiny folk are ants and they make as interesting a study as human folk--perhaps more interesting in the opinion of some. The book gives a full and graphic description of their many wise and curious ways--how they work, how they harvest their grain, how they milk their cows, etc. It will teach the children to keep eyes and ears open. =My Land and Water Friends.= By Mary E. Bamford. Seventy illustrations by Bridgman. Quarto, cloth, 1.50. The frog opens the book with a "talk" about himself, in the course of which he tells us all about the changes through which he passes before he arrives at perfect froghood. Then the grasshopper talks and is followed by others, each giving his view of life from his own individual standpoint. Young Folks' Illustrated Quartos. =Wide Awake Volume Z.= Quarto, boards, 1.75. Good literature and art have been put into this volume. Henry Bacon's paper about Rosa Bonheur, the great painter of horses and lions, and Steffeck's painting of Queen Louise with Kaiser William would do credit to any Art publication. =Chit Chat for Boys and Girls.= Quarto, boards, 75 cts. A volume of selected pieces upon every conceivable subject. As a distinctive feature it devotes considerable space to Home Life and Sports and Pastimes. =Good Cheer for Boys and Girls.= Short stories, sketches, poems, bits of history, biography and natural history. =Our Little Men and Women for 1888.= Quarto, boards, 1.50. No boys and girls who have this book can be ignorant beyond their years of history, natural history, foreign sights or the good times of other boys and girls. =Babyland for 1888.= Quarto, boards, 75 cts. Finger-plays, cricket stories, Tales told by a Cat and scores of jingles and pictures. Large print and easy words. Colored frontispiece. =Kings and Queens at Home.= By Frances A. Humphrey. Quarto, boards, 50 cts. Short-story accounts of living royal personages. =Queen Victoria at Home.= By Frances A. Humphrey. Quarto, boards, 50 cts. Pen picture of a noble woman. It will aid in educating the heart by presenting the domestic side of the queen's character. =Stories about Favorite Authors.= By Frances A. Humphrey. Quarto boards, 50 cts. Little literature lessons for little boys and girls. =Child Lore.= Edited by Clara Doty Bates. Quarto, cloth, tinted edges, 2.25; boards, 1.50. More than 50,000 copies sold. The most successful quarto for children. Helpful Books for Young Folks. =Danger Signals.= By Rev. F. E. Clark, President of the United Society of Christian Endeavor. 12mo, cloth, 75 cts. The enemies of youth from the business man's standpoint. The substance of a series of addresses delivered two or three years ago in one of the Boston churches. =Marion Harland's Cookery for Beginners.= 12mo, vellum cloth, 75 cts. The untrained housekeeper needs such directions as will not confuse and discourage her. Marion Harland makes her book simple and practical enough to meet this demand. =Bible Stories.= By Laurie Loring. 4to, boards, 35 cts. Very short stories with pictures. The Creation, Noah and the Dove, Samuel, Joseph, Elijah, the Christ Child, the Good Shepherd, Peter, etc. =The Magic Pear.= Oblong, 8vo, boards, 75 cts. Twelve outline drawing lessons with directions for the amusement of little folks. They are genuine pencil puzzles for untaught fingers. A pear gives shape to a dozen animal pictures. =What O'Clock Jingles.= By Margaret Johnson. Oblong, 8vo, boards, 75 cts. Twelve little counting lessons. Pretty rhymes for small children. Twenty-seven artistic illustrations by the author. =Ways for Boys to Make and Do Things.= 60 cts. Eight papers by as many different authors, on subjects that interest boys. A book to delight active boys and to inspire lazy ones. =Our Young Folks at Home.= 4to, boards, 1.00. A collection of illustrated prose stories by American authors and artists. It is sure to make friends among children of all ages. Colored frontispiece. =Peep of Day Series.= 3 vols., 1.20 each. Peep of Day, Line upon Line, Precept upon Precept. Sermonettes for the children, so cleverly preached that the children will not grow sleepy. =Home Primer.= Boards, square, 8vo, 50 cts. A book for the little ones to learn to read in before they are old enough to be sent off to school. 100 illustrations. MONTEAGLE. By Pansy. Boston: D. Lothrop Company. Price 75 cents. Both girls and boys will find this story of Pansy's pleasant and profitable reading. Dilly West is a character whom the first will find it an excellent thing to intimate, and boys will find in Hart Hammond a noble, manly, fellow who walks for a time dangerously near temptation, but escapes through providential influences, not the least of which is the steady devotion to duty of the young girl, who becomes an unconscious power of good. A DOZEN OF THEM. By Pansy. Boston: D. Lothrop Company. Price 60 cents. A Sunday-school story, written in Pansy's best vein, and having for its hero a twelve-year-old boy who has been thrown upon the world by the death of his parents, and who has no one left to look after him but a sister a little older, whose time is fully occupied in the milliner's shop where she is employed. Joe, for that is the boy's name, finds a place to work at a farmhouse where there is a small private school. His sister makes him promise to learn by heart a verse of Scripture every month. It is a task at first, but he is a boy of his word, and he fulfills his promise, with what results the reader of the story will find out. It is an excellent book for the Sunday-school. AT HOME AND ABROAD. Stories from _The Pansy_ Boston: D. Lothrop Company. Price, $1.00. A score of short stories which originally appeared in the delightful magazine, _The Pansy_, have been here brought together in collected form with the illustrations which originally accompanied them. They are from the pens of various authors, and are bright, instructive and entertaining. ABOUT GIANTS. By Isabel Smithson. Boston: D. Lothrop Company. Price 60 cents. In this little volume Miss Smithson has gathered together many curious and interesting facts relating to real giants, or people who have grown to an extraordinary size. She does not believe that there was ever a race of giants, but that those who are so-called are exceptional cases, due to some freak of nature. Among those described are Cutter, the Irish giant, who was eight feet tall, Tony Payne, whose height exceeded seven feet, and Chang, the Chinese giant, who was on exhibition in this country a few years ago. The volume contains not only accounts of giants, but also of dwarfs, and is illustrated. AMERICAN AUTHORS. By Amanda B. Harris. Boston: D. Lothrop Company. Price $1.00. This is one of the books we can heartily commend to young readers, not only for its interest, but for the information it contains. All lovers of books have a natural curiosity to know something about their writers, and the better the books, the keener the curiosity. Miss Harris has written the various chapters of the volume with a full appreciation of this fact. She tells us about the earlier group of American writers, Irving, Cooper, Prescott, Emerson, and Hawthorne, all of whom are gone, and also of some of those who came later, among them the Cary sisters, Thoreau, Lowell, Helen Hunt, Donald G. Mitchell and others. Miss Harris has a happy way of imparting information, and the boys and girls into whose hands this little book may fall will find it pleasant reading. TILTING AT WINDMILLS: A Story of the Blue Grass Country. By Emma M. Connelly. Boston: D. Lothrop Company. 12mo, $1.50. Not since the days of "A Fool's Errand" has so strong and so characteristic a "border novel" been brought to the attention of the public as is now presented by Miss Connelly in this book which she so aptly terms "Tilting at Windmills." Indeed, it is questionable whether Judge Tourgee's famous book touched so deftly and yet so practically the real phases of the reconstruction period and the interminable antagonisms of race and section. The self-sufficient Boston man, a capital fellow at heart, but tinged with the traditions and environments of his Puritan ancestry and conditions, coming into his strange heritage in Kentucky at the close of the civil war, seeks to change by instant manipulation all the equally strong and deep-rooted traditions and environments of Blue Grass society. His ruthless conscience will allow of no compromise, and the people whom he seeks to proselyte alike misunderstand his motives and spurn his proffered assistance. Presumed errors are materialized and partial evils are magnified. Allerton tilts at windmills and with the customary Quixotic results. He is, seemingly, unhorsed in every encounter. Miss Connelly's work in this, her first novel, will make readers anxious to hear from her again and it will certainly create, both in her own and other States, a strong desire to see her next forthcoming work announced by the same publishers in one of their new series--her "Story of the State of Kentucky." THE ART OF LIVING. From the Writings of Samuel Smiles. With Introduction by the venerable Dr. Peabody of Harvard University, and Biographical Sketch by the editor, Carrie Adelaide Cooke. Boston: D. Lothrop Company. Price $1.00. Samuel Smiles is the Benjamin Franklin of England. His sayings have a similar terseness, aptness and force; they are directed to practical ends, like Franklin's; they have the advantage of being nearer our time and therefore more directly related to subjects upon which practical wisdom is of practical use. Success in life is his subject all through, The Art of Living; and he confesses on the very first page that "happiness consists in the enjoyment of little pleasures scattered along the common path of life, which in the eager search for some great and exciting joy we are apt to overlook. It finds delight in the performance of common duties faithfully and honorably fulfilled." Let the reader go back to that quotation again and consider how contrary it is to the spirit that underlies the businesses that are nowadays tempting men to sudden fortune, torturing with disappointments nearly all who yield, and burdening the successful beyond their endurance, shortening lives and making them weary and most of them empty. Is it worth while to join the mad rush for the lottery; or to take the old road to slow success? This book of the chosen thoughts of a rare philosopher leads to contentment as well as wisdom; for, when we choose the less brilliant course because we are sure it is the best one, we have the most complete and lasting repose from anxiety. * * * * * Transcriber's Notes: Punctuation errors repaired. First book list page, "Eaoh" changed to "Each" (Each volume 16mo) Page 4, "208" changed to "226" to reflect actual first page of Chapter XII. Page 4, "230" changed to "304" to reflect actual first page of Chapter XVII. Page 4 and 5, each page number reference increased by two to match actual location of remaining chapters. (_i.e._ 318 is now 320 to reflect location of Chapter XVIII) Page 29, "botton" changed to "bottom" (for in the bottom of) Page 69, "nowdays" changed to "nowadays" (the pennies nowadays) Page 88, "keees" changed to "knees" (soon on her knees) Page 200, "think" changed to "thing" (thing that I should) Page 202, "interruped" changed to "interrupted" (of her had interrupted) Page 212, "sat" changed to "set" (he set the table) Page 269, "unsual" changed to "unusual" (unusual toilet having) Page 385, extra word "the" removed from text. Original read (have at the the windows) Page 407, "pealed" changed to "peeled" (turnips half-peeled) Page 437, "esson" changed to "lesson" (lesson is the joy) 
621	----	The Varieties of Religious Experience A Study in Human Nature Being the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion Delivered at Edinburgh in 1901-1902 By William James Longmans, Green, And Co, New York, London, Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras 1917 CONTENTS Preface. Lecture I. Religion And Neurology. Lecture II. Circumscription of the Topic. Lecture III. The Reality Of The Unseen. Lectures IV and V. The Religion Of Healthy-Mindedness. Lectures VI And VII. The Sick Soul. Lecture VIII. The Divided Self, And The Process Of Its Unification. Lecture IX. Conversion. Lecture X. Conversion--Concluded. Lectures XI, XII, And XIII. Saintliness. Lectures XIV And XV. The Value Of Saintliness. Lectures XVI And XVII. Mysticism. Lecture XVIII. Philosophy. Lecture XIX. Other Characteristics. Lecture XX. Conclusions. Postscript. Index. Footnotes [Title Page] To C. P. G. IN FILIAL GRATITUDE AND LOVE PREFACE. This book would never have been written had I not been honored with an appointment as Gifford Lecturer on Natural Religion at the University of Edinburgh. In casting about me for subjects of the two courses of ten lectures each for which I thus became responsible, it seemed to me that the first course might well be a descriptive one on "Man's Religious Appetites," and the second a metaphysical one on "Their Satisfaction through Philosophy." But the unexpected growth of the psychological matter as I came to write it out has resulted in the second subject being postponed entirely, and the description of man's religious constitution now fills the twenty lectures. In Lecture XX I have suggested rather than stated my own philosophic conclusions, and the reader who desires immediately to know them should turn to pages 511-519, and to the "Postscript" of the book. I hope to be able at some later day to express them in more explicit form. In my belief that a large acquaintance with particulars often makes us wiser than the possession of abstract formulas, however deep, I have loaded the lectures with concrete examples, and I have chosen these among the extremer expressions of the religious temperament. To some readers I may consequently seem, before they get beyond the middle of the book, to offer a caricature of the subject. Such convulsions of piety, they will say, are not sane. If, however, they will have the patience to read to the end, I believe that this unfavorable impression will disappear; for I there combine the religious impulses with other principles of common sense which serve as correctives of exaggeration, and allow the individual reader to draw as moderate conclusions as he will. My thanks for help in writing these lectures are due to Edwin D. Starbuck, of Stanford University, who made over to me his large collection of manuscript material; to Henry W. Rankin, of East Northfield, a friend unseen but proved, to whom I owe precious information; to Theodore Flournoy, of Geneva, to Canning Schiller, of Oxford, and to my colleague Benjamin Rand, for documents; to my colleague Dickinson S. Miller, and to my friends, Thomas Wren Ward, of New York, and Wincenty Lutoslawski, late of Cracow, for important suggestions and advice. Finally, to conversations with the lamented Thomas Davidson and to the use of his books, at Glenmore, above Keene Valley, I owe more obligations than I can well express. HARVARD UNIVERSITY, March, 1902. LECTURE I. RELIGION AND NEUROLOGY. It is with no small amount of trepidation that I take my place behind this desk, and face this learned audience. To us Americans, the experience of receiving instruction from the living voice, as well as from the books, of European scholars, is very familiar. At my own University of Harvard, not a winter passes without its harvest, large or small, of lectures from Scottish, English, French, or German representatives of the science or literature of their respective countries whom we have either induced to cross the ocean to address us, or captured on the wing as they were visiting our land. It seems the natural thing for us to listen whilst the Europeans talk. The contrary habit, of talking whilst the Europeans listen, we have not yet acquired; and in him who first makes the adventure it begets a certain sense of apology being due for so presumptuous an act. Particularly must this be the case on a soil as sacred to the American imagination as that of Edinburgh. The glories of the philosophic chair of this university were deeply impressed on my imagination in boyhood. Professor Fraser's Essays in Philosophy, then just published, was the first philosophic book I ever looked into, and I well remember the awe- struck feeling I received from the account of Sir William Hamilton's class-room therein contained. Hamilton's own lectures were the first philosophic writings I ever forced myself to study, and after that I was immersed in Dugald Stewart and Thomas Brown. Such juvenile emotions of reverence never get outgrown; and I confess that to find my humble self promoted from my native wilderness to be actually for the time an official here, and transmuted into a colleague of these illustrious names, carries with it a sense of dreamland quite as much as of reality. But since I have received the honor of this appointment I have felt that it would never do to decline. The academic career also has its heroic obligations, so I stand here without further deprecatory words. Let me say only this, that now that the current, here and at Aberdeen, has begun to run from west to east, I hope it may continue to do so. As the years go by, I hope that many of my countrymen may be asked to lecture in the Scottish universities, changing places with Scotsmen lecturing in the United States; I hope that our people may become in all these higher matters even as one people; and that the peculiar philosophic temperament, as well as the peculiar political temperament, that goes with our English speech may more and more pervade and influence the world. ------------------------------------- As regards the manner in which I shall have to administer this lectureship, I am neither a theologian, nor a scholar learned in the history of religions, nor an anthropologist. Psychology is the only branch of learning in which I am particularly versed. To the psychologist the religious propensities of man must be at least as interesting as any other of the facts pertaining to his mental constitution. It would seem, therefore, that, as a psychologist, the natural thing for me would be to invite you to a descriptive survey of those religious propensities. If the inquiry be psychological, not religious institutions, but rather religious feelings and religious impulses must be its subject, and I must confine myself to those more developed subjective phenomena recorded in literature produced by articulate and fully self-conscious men, in works of piety and autobiography. Interesting as the origins and early stages of a subject always are, yet when one seeks earnestly for its full significance, one must always look to its more completely evolved and perfect forms. It follows from this that the documents that will most concern us will be those of the men who were most accomplished in the religious life and best able to give an intelligible account of their ideas and motives. These men, of course, are either comparatively modern writers, or else such earlier ones as have become religious classics. The _documents humains_ which we shall find most instructive need not then be sought for in the haunts of special erudition--they lie along the beaten highway; and this circumstance, which flows so naturally from the character of our problem, suits admirably also your lecturer's lack of special theological learning. I may take my citations, my sentences and paragraphs of personal confession, from books that most of you at some time will have had already in your hands, and yet this will be no detriment to the value of my conclusions. It is true that some more adventurous reader and investigator, lecturing here in future, may unearth from the shelves of libraries documents that will make a more delectable and curious entertainment to listen to than mine. Yet I doubt whether he will necessarily, by his control of so much more out-of-the-way material, get much closer to the essence of the matter in hand. The question, What are the religious propensities? and the question, What is their philosophic significance? are two entirely different orders of question from the logical point of view; and, as a failure to recognize this fact distinctly may breed confusion, I wish to insist upon the point a little before we enter into the documents and materials to which I have referred. In recent books on logic, distinction is made between two orders of inquiry concerning anything. First, what is the nature of it? how did it come about? what is its constitution, origin, and history? And second, What is its importance, meaning, or significance, now that it is once here? The answer to the one question is given in an _existential judgment_ or proposition. The answer to the other is a _proposition of value_, what the Germans call a _Werthurtheil_, or what we may, if we like, denominate a _spiritual judgment_. Neither judgment can be deduced immediately from the other. They proceed from diverse intellectual preoccupations, and the mind combines them only by making them first separately, and then adding them together. In the matter of religions it is particularly easy to distinguish the two orders of question. Every religious phenomenon has its history and its derivation from natural antecedents. What is nowadays called the higher criticism of the Bible is only a study of the Bible from this existential point of view, neglected too much by the earlier church. Under just what biographic conditions did the sacred writers bring forth their various contributions to the holy volume? And what had they exactly in their several individual minds, when they delivered their utterances? These are manifestly questions of historical fact, and one does not see how the answer to them can decide offhand the still further question: of what use should such a volume, with its manner of coming into existence so defined, be to us as a guide to life and a revelation? To answer this other question we must have already in our mind some sort of a general theory as to what the peculiarities in a thing should be which give it value for purposes of revelation; and this theory itself would be what I just called a spiritual judgment. Combining it with our existential judgment, we might indeed deduce another spiritual judgment as to the Bible's worth. Thus if our theory of revelation-value were to affirm that any book, to possess it, must have been composed automatically or not by the free caprice of the writer, or that it must exhibit no scientific and historic errors and express no local or personal passions, the Bible would probably fare ill at our hands. But if, on the other hand, our theory should allow that a book may well be a revelation in spite of errors and passions and deliberate human composition, if only it be a true record of the inner experiences of great-souled persons wrestling with the crises of their fate, then the verdict would be much more favorable. You see that the existential facts by themselves are insufficient for determining the value; and the best adepts of the higher criticism accordingly never confound the existential with the spiritual problem. With the same conclusions of fact before them, some take one view, and some another, of the Bible's value as a revelation, according as their spiritual judgment as to the foundation of values differs. ------------------------------------- I make these general remarks about the two sorts of judgment, because there are many religious persons--some of you now present, possibly, are among them--who do not yet make a working use of the distinction, and who may therefore feel at first a little startled at the purely existential point of view from which in the following lectures the phenomena of religious experience must be considered. When I handle them biologically and psychologically as if they were mere curious facts of individual history, some of you may think it a degradation of so sublime a subject, and may even suspect me, until my purpose gets more fully expressed, of deliberately seeking to discredit the religious side of life. Such a result is of course absolutely alien to my intention; and since such a prejudice on your part would seriously obstruct the due effect of much of what I have to relate, I will devote a few more words to the point. There can be no doubt that as a matter of fact a religious life, exclusively pursued, does tend to make the person exceptional and eccentric. I speak not now of your ordinary religious believer, who follows the conventional observances of his country, whether it be Buddhist, Christian, or Mohammedan. His religion has been made for him by others, communicated to him by tradition, determined to fixed forms by imitation, and retained by habit. It would profit us little to study this second-hand religious life. We must make search rather for the original experiences which were the pattern-setters to all this mass of suggested feeling and imitated conduct. These experiences we can only find in individuals for whom religion exists not as a dull habit, but as an acute fever rather. But such individuals are "geniuses" in the religious line; and like many other geniuses who have brought forth fruits effective enough for commemoration in the pages of biography, such religious geniuses have often shown symptoms of nervous instability. Even more perhaps than other kinds of genius, religious leaders have been subject to abnormal psychical visitations. Invariably they have been creatures of exalted emotional sensibility. Often they have led a discordant inner life, and had melancholy during a part of their career. They have known no measure, been liable to obsessions and fixed ideas; and frequently they have fallen into trances, heard voices, seen visions, and presented all sorts of peculiarities which are ordinarily classed as pathological. Often, moreover, these pathological features in their career have helped to give them their religious authority and influence. If you ask for a concrete example, there can be no better one than is furnished by the person of George Fox. The Quaker religion which he founded is something which it is impossible to overpraise. In a day of shams, it was a religion of veracity rooted in spiritual inwardness, and a return to something more like the original gospel truth than men had ever known in England. So far as our Christian sects to-day are evolving into liberality, they are simply reverting in essence to the position which Fox and the early Quakers so long ago assumed. No one can pretend for a moment that in point of spiritual sagacity and capacity, Fox's mind was unsound. Every one who confronted him personally, from Oliver Cromwell down to county magistrates and jailers, seems to have acknowledged his superior power. Yet from the point of view of his nervous constitution, Fox was a psychopath or _détraqué_ of the deepest dye. His Journal abounds in entries of this sort:-- "As I was walking with several friends, I lifted up my head, and saw three steeple-house spires, and they struck at my life. I asked them what place that was? They said, Lichfield. Immediately the word of the Lord came to me, that I must go thither. Being come to the house we were going to, I wished the friends to walk into the house, saying nothing to them of whither I was to go. As soon as they were gone I stept away, and went by my eye over hedge and ditch till I came within a mile of Lichfield; where, in a great field, shepherds were keeping their sheep. Then was I commanded by the Lord to pull off my shoes. I stood still, for it was winter: but the word of the Lord was like a fire in me. So I put off my shoes, and left them with the shepherds; and the poor shepherds trembled, and were astonished. Then I walked on about a mile, and as soon as I was got within the city, the word of the Lord came to me again, saying: Cry, 'Wo to the bloody city of Lichfield!' So I went up and down the streets, crying with a loud voice, Wo to the bloody city of Lichfield! It being market day, I went into the market-place, and to and fro in the several parts of it, and made stands, crying as before, Wo to the bloody city of Lichfield! And no one laid hands on me. As I went thus crying through the streets, there seemed to me to be a channel of blood running down the streets, and the market-place appeared like a pool of blood. When I had declared what was upon me, and felt myself clear, I went out of the town in peace; and returning to the shepherds gave them some money, and took my shoes of them again. But the fire of the Lord was so on my feet, and all over me, that I did not matter to put on my shoes again, and was at a stand whether I should or no, till I felt freedom from the Lord so to do: then, after I had washed my feet, I put on my shoes again. After this a deep consideration came upon me, for what reason I should be sent to cry against that city, and call it The bloody city! For though the parliament had the minister one while, and the king another, and much blood had been shed in the town during the wars between them, yet there was no more than had befallen many other places. But afterwards I came to understand, that in the Emperor Diocletian's time a thousand Christians were martyr'd in Lichfield. So I was to go, without my shoes, through the channel of their blood, and into the pool of their blood in the market-place, that I might raise up the memorial of the blood of those martyrs, which had been shed above a thousand years before, and lay cold in their streets. So the sense of this blood was upon me, and I obeyed the word of the Lord." Bent as we are on studying religion's existential conditions, we cannot possibly ignore these pathological aspects of the subject. We must describe and name them just as if they occurred in non-religious men. It is true that we instinctively recoil from seeing an object to which our emotions and affections are committed handled by the intellect as any other object is handled. The first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along with something else. But any object that is infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also as if it must be _sui generis_ and unique. Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. "I am no such thing," it would say; "I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone." ------------------------------------- The next thing the intellect does is to lay bare the causes in which the thing originates. Spinoza says: "I will analyze the actions and appetites of men as if it were a question of lines, of planes, and of solids." And elsewhere he remarks that he will consider our passions and their properties with the same eye with which he looks on all other natural things, since the consequences of our affections flow from their nature with the same necessity as it results from the nature of a triangle that its three angles should be equal to two right angles. Similarly M. Taine, in the introduction to his history of English literature, has written: "Whether facts be moral or physical, it makes no matter. They always have their causes. There are causes for ambition, courage, veracity, just as there are for digestion, muscular movement, animal heat. Vice and virtue are products like vitriol and sugar." When we read such proclamations of the intellect bent on showing the existential conditions of absolutely everything, we feel--quite apart from our legitimate impatience at the somewhat ridiculous swagger of the program, in view of what the authors are actually able to perform--menaced and negated in the springs of our innermost life. Such cold-blooded assimilations threaten, we think, to undo our soul's vital secrets, as if the same breath which should succeed in explaining their origin would simultaneously explain away their significance, and make them appear of no more preciousness, either, than the useful groceries of which M. Taine speaks. Perhaps the commonest expression of this assumption that spiritual value is undone if lowly origin be asserted is seen in those comments which unsentimental people so often pass on their more sentimental acquaintances. Alfred believes in immortality so strongly because his temperament is so emotional. Fanny's extraordinary conscientiousness is merely a matter of over-instigated nerves. William's melancholy about the universe is due to bad digestion--probably his liver is torpid. Eliza's delight in her church is a symptom of her hysterical constitution. Peter would be less troubled about his soul if he would take more exercise in the open air, etc. A more fully developed example of the same kind of reasoning is the fashion, quite common nowadays among certain writers, of criticising the religious emotions by showing a connection between them and the sexual life. Conversion is a crisis of puberty and adolescence. The macerations of saints, and the devotion of missionaries, are only instances of the parental instinct of self-sacrifice gone astray. For the hysterical nun, starving for natural life, Christ is but an imaginary substitute for a more earthly object of affection. And the like.(1) We are surely all familiar in a general way with this method of discrediting states of mind for which we have an antipathy. We all use it to some degree in criticising persons whose states of mind we regard as overstrained. But when other people criticise our own more exalted soul- flights by calling them "nothing but" expressions of our organic disposition, we feel outraged and hurt, for we know that, whatever be our organism's peculiarities, our mental states have their substantive value as revelations of the living truth; and we wish that all this medical materialism could be made to hold its tongue. Medical materialism seems indeed a good appellation for the too simple- minded system of thought which we are considering. Medical materialism finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic. It snuffs out Saint Teresa as an hysteric, Saint Francis of Assisi as an hereditary degenerate. George Fox's discontent with the shams of his age, and his pining for spiritual veracity, it treats as a symptom of a disordered colon. Carlyle's organ-tones of misery it accounts for by a gastro-duodenal catarrh. All such mental over-tensions, it says, are, when you come to the bottom of the matter, mere affairs of diathesis (auto- intoxications most probably), due to the perverted action of various glands which physiology will yet discover. And medical materialism then thinks that the spiritual authority of all such personages is successfully undermined.(2) Let us ourselves look at the matter in the largest possible way. Modern psychology, finding definite psycho-physical connections to hold good, assumes as a convenient hypothesis that the dependence of mental states upon bodily conditions must be thorough-going and complete. If we adopt the assumption, then of course what medical materialism insists on must be true in a general way, if not in every detail: Saint Paul certainly had once an epileptoid, if not an epileptic seizure; George Fox was an hereditary degenerate; Carlyle was undoubtedly auto-intoxicated by some organ or other, no matter which,--and the rest. But now, I ask you, how can such an existential account of facts of mental history decide in one way or another upon their spiritual significance? According to the general postulate of psychology just referred to, there is not a single one of our states of mind, high or low, healthy or morbid, that has not some organic process as its condition. Scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are; and if we only knew the facts intimately enough, we should doubtless see "the liver" determining the dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does those of the Methodist under conviction anxious about his soul. When it alters in one way the blood that percolates it, we get the methodist, when in another way, we get the atheist form of mind. So of all our raptures and our drynesses, our longings and pantings, our questions and beliefs. They are equally organically founded, be they of religious or of non-religious content. To plead the organic causation of a religious state of mind, then, in refutation of its claim to possess superior spiritual value, is quite illogical and arbitrary, unless one have already worked out in advance some psycho-physical theory connecting spiritual values in general with determinate sorts of physiological change. Otherwise none of our thoughts and feelings, not even our scientific doctrines, not even our _dis_-beliefs, could retain any value as revelations of the truth, for every one of them without exception flows from the state of their possessor's body at the time. It is needless to say that medical materialism draws in point of fact no such sweeping skeptical conclusion. It is sure, just as every simple man is sure, that some states of mind are inwardly superior to others, and reveal to us more truth, and in this it simply makes use of an ordinary spiritual judgment. It has no physiological theory of the production of these its favorite states, by which it may accredit them; and its attempt to discredit the states which it dislikes, by vaguely associating them with nerves and liver, and connecting them with names connoting bodily affliction, is altogether illogical and inconsistent. Let us play fair in this whole matter, and be quite candid with ourselves and with the facts. When we think certain states of mind superior to others, is it ever because of what we know concerning their organic antecedents? No! it is always for two entirely different reasons. It is either because we take an immediate delight in them; or else it is because we believe them to bring us good consequential fruits for life. When we speak disparagingly of "feverish fancies," surely the fever-process as such is not the ground of our disesteem--for aught we know to the contrary, 103° or 104° Fahrenheit might be a much more favorable temperature for truths to germinate and sprout in, than the more ordinary blood-heat of 97 or 98 degrees. It is either the disagreeableness itself of the fancies, or their inability to bear the criticisms of the convalescent hour. When we praise the thoughts which health brings, health's peculiar chemical metabolisms have nothing to do with determining our judgment. We know in fact almost nothing about these metabolisms. It is the character of inner happiness in the thoughts which stamps them as good, or else their consistency with our other opinions and their serviceability for our needs, which make them pass for true in our esteem. Now the more intrinsic and the more remote of these criteria do not always hang together. Inner happiness and serviceability do not always agree. What immediately feels most "good" is not always most "true," when measured by the verdict of the rest of experience. The difference between Philip drunk and Philip sober is the classic instance in corroboration. If merely "feeling good" could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience. But its revelations, however acutely satisfying at the moment, are inserted into an environment which refuses to bear them out for any length of time. The consequence of this discrepancy of the two criteria is the uncertainty which still prevails over so many of our spiritual judgments. There are moments of sentimental and mystical experience--we shall hereafter hear much of them--that carry an enormous sense of inner authority and illumination with them when they come. But they come seldom, and they do not come to every one; and the rest of life makes either no connection with them, or tends to contradict them more than it confirms them. Some persons follow more the voice of the moment in these cases, some prefer to be guided by the average results. Hence the sad discordancy of so many of the spiritual judgments of human beings; a discordancy which will be brought home to us acutely enough before these lectures end. ------------------------------------- It is, however, a discordancy that can never be resolved by any merely medical test. A good example of the impossibility of holding strictly to the medical tests is seen in the theory of the pathological causation of genius promulgated by recent authors. "Genius," said Dr. Moreau, "is but one of the many branches of the neuropathic tree." "Genius," says Dr. Lombroso, "is a symptom of hereditary degeneration of the epileptoid variety, and is allied to moral insanity." "Whenever a man's life," writes Mr. Nisbet, "is at once sufficiently illustrious and recorded with sufficient fullness to be a subject of profitable study, he inevitably falls into the morbid category.... And it is worthy of remark that, as a rule, the greater the genius, the greater the unsoundness."(3) Now do these authors, after having succeeded in establishing to their own satisfaction that the works of genius are fruits of disease, consistently proceed thereupon to impugn the _value_ of the fruits? Do they deduce a new spiritual judgment from their new doctrine of existential conditions? Do they frankly forbid us to admire the productions of genius from now onwards? and say outright that no neuropath can ever be a revealer of new truth? No! their immediate spiritual instincts are too strong for them here, and hold their own against inferences which, in mere love of logical consistency, medical materialism ought to be only too glad to draw. One disciple of the school, indeed, has striven to impugn the value of works of genius in a wholesale way (such works of contemporary art, namely, as he himself is unable to enjoy, and they are many) by using medical arguments.(4) But for the most part the masterpieces are left unchallenged; and the medical line of attack either confines itself to such secular productions as every one admits to be intrinsically eccentric, or else addresses itself exclusively to religious manifestations. And then it is because the religious manifestations have been already condemned because the critic dislikes them on internal or spiritual grounds. In the natural sciences and industrial arts it never occurs to any one to try to refute opinions by showing up their author's neurotic constitution. Opinions here are invariably tested by logic and by experiment, no matter what may be their author's neurological type. It should be no otherwise with religious opinions. Their value can only be ascertained by spiritual judgments directly passed upon them, judgments based on our own immediate feeling primarily; and secondarily on what we can ascertain of their experiential relations to our moral needs and to the rest of what we hold as true. _Immediate luminousness_, in short, _philosophical reasonableness_, and _moral helpfulness_ are the only available criteria. Saint Teresa might have had the nervous system of the placidest cow, and it would not now save her theology, if the trial of the theology by these other tests should show it to be contemptible. And conversely if her theology can stand these other tests, it will make no difference how hysterical or nervously off her balance Saint Teresa may have been when she was with us here below. ------------------------------------- You see that at bottom we are thrown back upon the general principles by which the empirical philosophy has always contended that we must be guided in our search for truth. Dogmatic philosophies have sought for tests for truth which might dispense us from appealing to the future. Some direct mark, by noting which we can be protected immediately and absolutely, now and forever, against all mistake--such has been the darling dream of philosophic dogmatists. It is clear that the _origin_ of the truth would be an admirable criterion of this sort, if only the various origins could be discriminated from one another from this point of view, and the history of dogmatic opinion shows that origin has always been a favorite test. Origin in immediate intuition; origin in pontifical authority; origin in supernatural revelation, as by vision, hearing, or unaccountable impression; origin in direct possession by a higher spirit, expressing itself in prophecy and warning; origin in automatic utterance generally,--these origins have been stock warrants for the truth of one opinion after another which we find represented in religious history. The medical materialists are therefore only so many belated dogmatists, neatly turning the tables on their predecessors by using the criterion of origin in a destructive instead of an accreditive way. They are effective with their talk of pathological origin only so long as supernatural origin is pleaded by the other side, and nothing but the argument from origin is under discussion. But the argument from origin has seldom been used alone, for it is too obviously insufficient. Dr. Maudsley is perhaps the cleverest of the rebutters of supernatural religion on grounds of origin. Yet he finds himself forced to write:-- "What right have we to believe Nature under any obligation to do her work by means of complete minds only? She may find an incomplete mind a more suitable instrument for a particular purpose. It is the work that is done, and the quality in the worker by which it was done, that is alone of moment; and it may be no great matter from a cosmical standpoint, if in other qualities of character he was singularly defective--if indeed he were hypocrite, adulterer, eccentric, or lunatic.... Home we come again, then, to the old and last resort of certitude,--namely the common assent of mankind, or of the competent by instruction and training among mankind."(5) In other words, not its origin, but _the way in which it works on the whole_, is Dr. Maudsley's final test of a belief. This is our own empiricist criterion; and this criterion the stoutest insisters on supernatural origin have also been forced to use in the end. Among the visions and messages some have always been too patently silly, among the trances and convulsive seizures some have been too fruitless for conduct and character, to pass themselves off as significant, still less as divine. In the history of Christian mysticism the problem how to discriminate between such messages and experiences as were really divine miracles, and such others as the demon in his malice was able to counterfeit, thus making the religious person twofold more the child of hell he was before, has always been a difficult one to solve, needing all the sagacity and experience of the best directors of conscience. In the end it had to come to our empiricist criterion: By their fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots, Jonathan Edwards's Treatise on Religious Affections is an elaborate working out of this thesis. The _roots_ of a man's virtue are inaccessible to us. No appearances whatever are infallible proofs of grace. Our practice is the only sure evidence, even to ourselves, that we are genuinely Christians. "In forming a judgment of ourselves now," Edwards writes, "we should certainly adopt that evidence which our supreme Judge will chiefly make use of when we come to stand before him at the last day.... There is not one grace of the Spirit of God, of the existence of which, in any professor of religion, Christian practice is not the most decisive evidence.... The degree in which our experience is productive of practice shows the degree in which our experience is spiritual and divine." Catholic writers are equally emphatic. The good dispositions which a vision, or voice, or other apparent heavenly favor leave behind them are the only marks by which we may be sure they are not possible deceptions of the tempter. Says Saint Teresa:-- "Like imperfect sleep which, instead of giving more strength to the head, doth but leave it the more exhausted, the result of mere operations of the imagination is but to weaken the soul. Instead of nourishment and energy she reaps only lassitude and disgust: whereas a genuine heavenly vision yields to her a harvest of ineffable spiritual riches, and an admirable renewal of bodily strength. I alleged these reasons to those who so often accused my visions of being the work of the enemy of mankind and the sport of my imagination.... I showed them the jewels which the divine hand had left with me:--they were my actual dispositions. All those who knew me saw that I was changed; my confessor bore witness to the fact; this improvement, palpable in all respects, far from being hidden, was brilliantly evident to all men. As for myself, it was impossible to believe that if the demon were its author, he could have used, in order to lose me and lead me to hell, an expedient so contrary to his own interests as that of uprooting my vices, and filling me with masculine courage and other virtues instead, for I saw clearly that a single one of these visions was enough to enrich me with all that wealth."(6) I fear I may have made a longer excursus than was necessary, and that fewer words would have dispelled the uneasiness which may have arisen among some of you as I announced my pathological programme. At any rate you must all be ready now to judge the religious life by its results exclusively, and I shall assume that the bugaboo of morbid origin will scandalize your piety no more. Still, you may ask me, if its results are to be the ground of our final spiritual estimate of a religious phenomenon, why threaten us at all with so much existential study of its conditions? Why not simply leave pathological questions out? To this I reply in two ways: First, I say, irrepressible curiosity imperiously leads one on; and I say, secondly, that it always leads to a better understanding of a thing's significance to consider its exaggerations and perversions, its equivalents and substitutes and nearest relatives elsewhere. Not that we may thereby swamp the thing in the wholesale condemnation which we pass on its inferior congeners, but rather that we may by contrast ascertain the more precisely in what its merits consist, by learning at the same time to what particular dangers of corruption it may also be exposed. Insane conditions have this advantage, that they isolate special factors of the mental life, and enable us to inspect them unmasked by their more usual surroundings. They play the part in mental anatomy which the scalpel and the microscope play in the anatomy of the body. To understand a thing rightly we need to see it both out of its environment and in it, and to have acquaintance with the whole range of its variations. The study of hallucinations has in this way been for psychologists the key to their comprehension of normal sensation, that of illusions has been the key to the right comprehension of perception. Morbid impulses and imperative conceptions, "fixed ideas," so called, have thrown a flood of light on the psychology of the normal will; and obsessions and delusions have performed the same service for that of the normal faculty of belief. Similarly, the nature of genius has been illuminated by the attempts, of which I already made mention, to class it with psychopathical phenomena. Borderland insanity, crankiness, insane temperament, loss of mental balance, psychopathic degeneration (to use a few of the many synonyms by which it has been called), has certain peculiarities and liabilities which, when combined with a superior quality of intellect in an individual, make it more probable that he will make his mark and affect his age, than if his temperament were less neurotic. There is of course no special affinity between crankiness as such and superior intellect,(7) for most psychopaths have feeble intellects, and superior intellects more commonly have normal nervous systems. But the psychopathic temperament, whatever be the intellect with which it finds itself paired, often brings with it ardor and excitability of character. The cranky person has extraordinary emotional susceptibility. He is liable to fixed ideas and obsessions. His conceptions tend to pass immediately into belief and action; and when he gets a new idea, he has no rest till he proclaims it, or in some way "works it off." "What shall I think of it?" a common person says to himself about a vexed question; but in a "cranky" mind "What must I do about it?" is the form the question tends to take. In the autobiography of that high-souled woman, Mrs. Annie Besant, I read the following passage: "Plenty of people wish well to any good cause, but very few care to exert themselves to help it, and still fewer will risk anything in its support. 'Some one ought to do it, but why should I?' is the ever reëchoed phrase of weak-kneed amiability. 'Some one ought to do it, so why not I?' is the cry of some earnest servant of man, eagerly forward springing to face some perilous duty. Between these two sentences lie whole centuries of moral evolution." True enough! and between these two sentences lie also the different destinies of the ordinary sluggard and the psychopathic man. Thus, when a superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce--as in the endless permutations and combinations of human faculty, they are bound to coalesce often enough--in the same individual, we have the best possible condition for the kind of effective genius that gets into the biographical dictionaries. Such men do not remain mere critics and understanders with their intellect. Their ideas possess them, they inflict them, for better or worse, upon their companions or their age. It is they who get counted when Messrs Lombroso, Nisbet, and others invoke statistics to defend their paradox. To pass now to religious phenomena, take the melancholy which, as we shall see, constitutes an essential moment in every complete religious evolution. Take the happiness which achieved religious belief confers. Take the trance-like states of insight into truth which all religious mystics report.(8) These are each and all of them special cases of kinds of human experience of much wider scope. Religious melancholy, whatever peculiarities it may have _quâ_ religious, is at any rate melancholy. Religious happiness is happiness. Religious trance is trance. And the moment we renounce the absurd notion that a thing is exploded away as soon as it is classed with others, or its origin is shown; the moment we agree to stand by experimental results and inner quality, in judging of values,--who does not see that we are likely to ascertain the distinctive significance of religious melancholy and happiness, or of religious trances, far better by comparing them as conscientiously as we can with other varieties of melancholy, happiness, and trance, than by refusing to consider their place in any more general series, and treating them as if they were outside of nature's order altogether? I hope that the course of these lectures will confirm us in this supposition. As regards the psychopathic origin of so many religious phenomena, that would not be in the least surprising or disconcerting, even were such phenomena certified from on high to be the most precious of human experiences. No one organism can possibly yield to its owner the whole body of truth. Few of us are not in some way infirm, or even diseased; and our very infirmities help us unexpectedly. In the psychopathic temperament we have the emotionality which is the _sine quâ non_ of moral perception; we have the intensity and tendency to emphasis which are the essence of practical moral vigor; and we have the love of metaphysics and mysticism which carry one's interests beyond the surface of the sensible world. What, then, is more natural than that this temperament should introduce one to regions of religious truth, to corners of the universe, which your robust Philistine type of nervous system, forever offering its biceps to be felt, thumping its breast, and thanking Heaven that it hasn't a single morbid fibre in its composition, would be sure to hide forever from its self-satisfied possessors? If there were such a thing as inspiration from a higher realm, it might well be that the neurotic temperament would furnish the chief condition of the requisite receptivity. And having said thus much, I think that I may let the matter of religion and neuroticism drop. ------------------------------------- The mass of collateral phenomena, morbid or healthy, with which the various religious phenomena must be compared in order to understand them better, forms what in the slang of pedagogics is termed "the apperceiving mass" by which we comprehend them. The only novelty that I can imagine this course of lectures to possess lies in the breadth of the apperceiving mass. I may succeed in discussing religious experiences in a wider context than has been usual in university courses. LECTURE II. CIRCUMSCRIPTION OF THE TOPIC. Most books on the philosophy of religion try to begin with a precise definition of what its essence consists of. Some of these would-be definitions may possibly come before us in later portions of this course, and I shall not be pedantic enough to enumerate any of them to you now. Meanwhile the very fact that they are so many and so different from one another is enough to prove that the word "religion" cannot stand for any single principle or essence, but is rather a collective name. The theorizing mind tends always to the over-simplification of its materials. This is the root of all that absolutism and one-sided dogmatism by which both philosophy and religion have been infested. Let us not fall immediately into a one-sided view of our subject, but let us rather admit freely at the outset that we may very likely find no one essence, but many characters which may alternately be equally important in religion. If we should inquire for the essence of "government," for example, one man might tell us it was authority, another submission, another police, another an army, another an assembly, another a system of laws; yet all the while it would be true that no concrete government can exist without all these things, one of which is more important at one moment and others at another. The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening. And why may not religion be a conception equally complex?(9) ------------------------------------- Consider also the "religious sentiment" which we see referred to in so many books, as if it were a single sort of mental entity. In the psychologies and in the philosophies of religion, we find the authors attempting to specify just what entity it is. One man allies it to the feeling of dependence; one makes it a derivative from fear; others connect it with the sexual life; others still identify it with the feeling of the infinite; and so on. Such different ways of conceiving it ought of themselves to arouse doubt as to whether it possibly can be one specific thing; and the moment we are willing to treat the term "religious sentiment" as a collective name for the many sentiments which religious objects may arouse in alternation, we see that it probably contains nothing whatever of a psychologically specific nature. There is religious fear, religious love, religious awe, religious joy, and so forth. But religious love is only man's natural emotion of love directed to a religious object; religious fear is only the ordinary fear of commerce, so to speak, the common quaking of the human breast, in so far as the notion of divine retribution may arouse it; religious awe is the same organic thrill which we feel in a forest at twilight, or in a mountain gorge; only this time it comes over us at the thought of our supernatural relations; and similarly of all the various sentiments which may be called into play in the lives of religious persons. As concrete states of mind, made up of a feeling _plus_ a specific sort of object, religious emotions of course are psychic entities distinguishable from other concrete emotions; but there is no ground for assuming a simple abstract "religious emotion" to exist as a distinct elementary mental affection by itself, present in every religious experience without exception. As there thus seems to be no one elementary religious emotion, but only a common storehouse of emotions upon which religious objects may draw, so there might conceivably also prove to be no one specific and essential kind of religious object, and no one specific and essential kind of religious act. ------------------------------------- The field of religion being as wide as this, it is manifestly impossible that I should pretend to cover it. My lectures must be limited to a fraction of the subject. And, although it would indeed be foolish to set up an abstract definition of religion's essence, and then proceed to defend that definition against all comers, yet this need not prevent me from taking my own narrow view of what religion shall consist in _for the purpose of these lectures_, or, out of the many meanings of the word, from choosing the one meaning in which I wish to interest you particularly, and proclaiming arbitrarily that when I say "religion" I mean _that_. This, in fact, is what I must do, and I will now preliminarily seek to mark out the field I choose. One way to mark it out easily is to say what aspects of the subject we leave out. At the outset we are struck by one great partition which divides the religious field. On the one side of it lies institutional, on the other personal religion. As M. P. Sabatier says, one branch of religion keeps the divinity, another keeps man most in view. Worship and sacrifice, procedures for working on the dispositions of the deity, theology and ceremony and ecclesiastical organization, are the essentials of religion in the institutional branch. Were we to limit our view to it, we should have to define religion as an external art, the art of winning the favor of the gods. In the more personal branch of religion it is on the contrary the inner dispositions of man himself which form the centre of interest, his conscience, his deserts, his helplessness, his incompleteness. And although the favor of the God, as forfeited or gained, is still an essential feature of the story, and theology plays a vital part therein, yet the acts to which this sort of religion prompts are personal not ritual acts, the individual transacts the business by himself alone, and the ecclesiastical organization, with its priests and sacraments and other go-betweens, sinks to an altogether secondary place. The relation goes direct from heart to heart, from soul to soul, between man and his maker. Now in these lectures I propose to ignore the institutional branch entirely, to say nothing of the ecclesiastical organization, to consider as little as possible the systematic theology and the ideas about the gods themselves, and to confine myself as far as I can to personal religion pure and simple. To some of you personal religion, thus nakedly considered, will no doubt seem too incomplete a thing to wear the general name. "It is a part of religion," you will say, "but only its unorganized rudiment; if we are to name it by itself, we had better call it man's conscience or morality than his religion. The name 'religion' should be reserved for the fully organized system of feeling, thought, and institution, for the Church, in short, of which this personal religion, so called, is but a fractional element." But if you say this, it will only show the more plainly how much the question of definition tends to become a dispute about names. Rather than prolong such a dispute, I am willing to accept almost any name for the personal religion of which I propose to treat. Call it conscience or morality, if you yourselves prefer, and not religion--under either name it will be equally worthy of our study. As for myself, I think it will prove to contain some elements which morality pure and simple does not contain, and these elements I shall soon seek to point out; so I will myself continue to apply the word "religion" to it; and in the last lecture of all, I will bring in the theologies and the ecclesiasticisms, and say something of its relation to them. In one sense at least the personal religion will prove itself more fundamental than either theology or ecclesiasticism. Churches, when once established, live at second-hand upon tradition; but the _founders_ of every church owed their power originally to the fact of their direct personal communion with the divine. Not only the superhuman founders, the Christ, the Buddha, Mahomet, but all the originators of Christian sects have been in this case;--so personal religion should still seem the primordial thing, even to those who continue to esteem it incomplete. There are, it is true, other things in religion chronologically more primordial than personal devoutness in the moral sense. Fetishism and magic seem to have preceded inward piety historically--at least our records of inward piety do not reach back so far. And if fetishism and magic be regarded as stages of religion, one may say that personal religion in the inward sense and the genuinely spiritual ecclesiasticisms which it founds are phenomena of secondary or even tertiary order. But, quite apart from the fact that many anthropologists--for instance, Jevons and Frazer--expressly oppose "religion" and "magic" to each other, it is certain that the whole system of thought which leads to magic, fetishism, and the lower superstitions may just as well be called primitive science as called primitive religion. The question thus becomes a verbal one again; and our knowledge of all these early stages of thought and feeling is in any case so conjectural and imperfect that farther discussion would not be worth while. Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us _the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine_. Since the relation may be either moral, physical, or ritual, it is evident that out of religion in the sense in which we take it, theologies, philosophies, and ecclesiastical organizations may secondarily grow. In these lectures, however, as I have already said, the immediate personal experiences will amply fill our time, and we shall hardly consider theology or ecclesiasticism at all. We escape much controversial matter by this arbitrary definition of our field. But, still, a chance of controversy comes up over the word "divine" if we take it in the definition in too narrow a sense. There are systems of thought which the world usually calls religious, and yet which do not positively assume a God. Buddhism is in this case. Popularly, of course, the Buddha himself stands in place of a God; but in strictness the Buddhistic system is atheistic. Modern transcendental idealism, Emersonianism, for instance, also seems to let God evaporate into abstract Ideality. Not a deity _in concreto_, not a superhuman person, but the immanent divinity in things, the essentially spiritual structure of the universe, is the object of the transcendentalist cult. In that address to the graduating class at Divinity College in 1838 which made Emerson famous, the frank expression of this worship of mere abstract laws was what made the scandal of the performance. "These laws," said the speaker, "execute themselves. They are out of time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance: Thus, in the soul of man there is a justice whose retributions are instant and entire. He who does a good deed is instantly ennobled. He who does a mean deed is by the action itself contracted. He who puts off impurity thereby puts on purity. If a man is at heart just, then in so far is he God; the safety of God, the immortality of God, the majesty of God, do enter into that man with justice. If a man dissemble, deceive, he deceives himself, and goes out of acquaintance with his own being. Character is always known. Thefts never enrich; alms never impoverish; murder will speak out of stone walls. The least admixture of a lie--for example, the taint of vanity, any attempt to make a good impression, a favorable appearance--will instantly vitiate the effect. But speak the truth, and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots of the grass underground there do seem to stir and move to bear your witness. For all things proceed out of the same spirit, which is differently named love, justice, temperance, in its different applications, just as the ocean receives different names on the several shores which it washes. In so far as he roves from these ends, a man bereaves himself of power, of auxiliaries. His being shrinks ... he becomes less and less, a mote, a point, until absolute badness is absolute death. The perception of this law awakens in the mind a sentiment which we call the religious sentiment, and which makes our highest happiness. Wonderful is its power to charm and to command. It is a mountain air. It is the embalmer of the world. It makes the sky and the hills sublime, and the silent song of the stars is it. It is the beatitude of man. It makes him illimitable. When he says 'I ought'; when love warns him; when he chooses, warned from on high, the good and great deed; then, deep melodies wander through his soul from supreme wisdom. Then he can worship, and be enlarged by his worship; for he can never go behind this sentiment. All the expressions of this sentiment are sacred and permanent in proportion to their purity. [They] affect us more than all other compositions. The sentences of the olden time, which ejaculate this piety, are still fresh and fragrant. And the unique impression of Jesus upon mankind, whose name is not so much written as ploughed into the history of this world, is proof of the subtle virtue of this infusion."(10) Such is the Emersonian religion. The universe has a divine soul of order, which soul is moral, being also the soul within the soul of man. But whether this soul of the universe be a mere quality like the eye's brilliancy or the skin's softness, or whether it be a self-conscious life like the eye's seeing or the skin's feeling, is a decision that never unmistakably appears in Emerson's pages. It quivers on the boundary of these things, sometimes leaning one way, sometimes the other, to suit the literary rather than the philosophic need. Whatever it is, though, it is active. As much as if it were a God, we can trust it to protect all ideal interests and keep the world's balance straight. The sentences in which Emerson, to the very end, gave utterance to this faith are as fine as anything in literature: "If you love and serve men, you cannot by any hiding or stratagem escape the remuneration. Secret retributions are always restoring the level, when disturbed, of the divine justice. It is impossible to tilt the beam. All the tyrants and proprietors and monopolists of the world in vain set their shoulders to heave the bar. Settles forevermore the ponderous equator to its line, and man and mote, and star and sun, must range to it, or be pulverized by the recoil."(11) Now it would be too absurd to say that the inner experiences that underlie such expressions of faith as this and impel the writer to their utterance are quite unworthy to be called religious experiences. The sort of appeal that Emersonian optimism, on the one hand, and Buddhistic pessimism, on the other, make to the individual and the sort of response which he makes to them in his life are in fact indistinguishable from, and in many respects identical with, the best Christian appeal and response. We must therefore, from the experiential point of view, call these godless or quasi-godless creeds "religions"; and accordingly when in our definition of religion we speak of the individual's relation to "what he considers the divine," we must interpret the term "divine" very broadly, as denoting any object that is god_like_, whether it be a concrete deity or not. ------------------------------------- But the term "godlike," if thus treated as a floating general quality, becomes exceedingly vague, for many gods have flourished in religious history, and their attributes have been discrepant enough. What then is that essentially godlike quality--be it embodied in a concrete deity or not--our relation to which determines our character as religious men? It will repay us to seek some answer to this question before we proceed farther. For one thing, gods are conceived to be first things in the way of being and power. They overarch and envelop, and from them there is no escape. What relates to them is the first and last word in the way of truth. Whatever then were most primal and enveloping and deeply true might at this rate be treated as godlike, and a man's religion might thus be identified with his attitude, whatever it might be, towards what he felt to be the primal truth. Such a definition as this would in a way be defensible. Religion, whatever it is, is a man's total reaction upon life, so why not say that any total reaction upon life is a religion? Total reactions are different from casual reactions, and total attitudes are different from usual or professional attitudes. To get at them you must go behind the foreground of existence and reach down to that curious sense of the whole residual cosmos as an everlasting presence, intimate or alien, terrible or amusing, lovable or odious, which in some degree every one possesses. This sense of the world's presence, appealing as it does to our peculiar individual temperament, makes us either strenuous or careless, devout or blasphemous, gloomy or exultant, about life at large; and our reaction, involuntary and inarticulate and often half unconscious as it is, is the completest of all our answers to the question, "What is the character of this universe in which we dwell?" It expresses our individual sense of it in the most definite way. Why then not call these reactions our religion, no matter what specific character they may have? Non-religious as some of these reactions may be, in one sense of the word "religious," they yet belong to _the general sphere of the religious life_, and so should generically be classed as religious reactions. "He believes in No-God, and he worships him," said a colleague of mine of a student who was manifesting a fine atheistic ardor; and the more fervent opponents of Christian doctrine have often enough shown a temper which, psychologically considered, is indistinguishable from religious zeal. But so very broad a use of the word "religion" would be inconvenient, however defensible it might remain on logical grounds. There are trifling, sneering attitudes even towards the whole of life; and in some men these attitudes are final and systematic. It would strain the ordinary use of language too much to call such attitudes religious, even though, from the point of view of an unbiased critical philosophy, they might conceivably be perfectly reasonable ways of looking upon life. Voltaire, for example, writes thus to a friend, at the age of seventy-three: "As for myself," he says, "weak as I am, I carry on the war to the last moment, I get a hundred pike-thrusts, I return two hundred, and I laugh. I see near my door Geneva on fire with quarrels over nothing, and I laugh again; and, thank God, I can look upon the world as a farce even when it becomes as tragic as it sometimes does. All comes out even at the end of the day, and all comes out still more even when all the days are over." Much as we may admire such a robust old gamecock spirit in a valetudinarian, to call it a religious spirit would be odd. Yet it is for the moment Voltaire's reaction on the whole of life. _Je m'en fiche_ is the vulgar French equivalent for our English ejaculation "Who cares?" And the happy term _je m'en fichisme_ recently has been invented to designate the systematic determination not to take anything in life too solemnly. "All is vanity" is the relieving word in all difficult crises for this mode of thought, which that exquisite literary genius Renan took pleasure, in his later days of sweet decay, in putting into coquettishly sacrilegious forms which remain to us as excellent expressions of the "all is vanity" state of mind. Take the following passage, for example,--we must hold to duty, even against the evidence, Renan says,--but he then goes on:-- "There are many chances that the world may be nothing but a fairy pantomime of which no God has care. We must therefore arrange ourselves so that on neither hypothesis we shall be completely wrong. We must listen to the superior voices, but in such a way that if the second hypothesis were true we should not have been too completely duped. If in effect the world be not a serious thing, it is the dogmatic people who will be the shallow ones, and the worldly minded whom the theologians now call frivolous will be those who are really wise. "_In utrumque paratus_, then. Be ready for anything--that perhaps is wisdom. Give ourselves up, according to the hour, to confidence, to skepticism, to optimism, to irony, and we may be sure that at certain moments at least we shall be with the truth.... Good-humor is a philosophic state of mind; it seems to say to Nature that we take her no more seriously than she takes us. I maintain that one should always talk of philosophy with a smile. We owe it to the Eternal to be virtuous; but we have the right to add to this tribute our irony as a sort of personal reprisal. In this way we return to the right quarter jest for jest; we play the trick that has been played on us. Saint Augustine's phrase: _Lord, if we are deceived, it is by thee!_ remains a fine one, well suited to our modern feeling. Only we wish the Eternal to know that if we accept the fraud, we accept it knowingly and willingly. We are resigned in advance to losing the interest on our investments of virtue, but we wish not to appear ridiculous by having counted on them too securely."(12) Surely all the usual associations of the word "religion" would have to be stripped away if such a systematic _parti pris_ of irony were also to be denoted by the name. For common men "religion," whatever more special meanings it may have, signifies always a _serious_ state of mind. If any one phrase could gather its universal message, that phrase would be, "All is _not_ vanity in this Universe, whatever the appearances may suggest." If it can stop anything, religion as commonly apprehended can stop just such chaffing talk as Renan's. It favors gravity, not pertness; it says "hush" to all vain chatter and smart wit. But if hostile to light irony, religion is equally hostile to heavy grumbling and complaint. The world appears tragic enough in some religions, but the tragedy is realized as purging, and a way of deliverance is held to exist. We shall see enough of the religious melancholy in a future lecture; but melancholy, according to our ordinary use of language, forfeits all title to be called religious when, in Marcus Aurelius's racy words, the sufferer simply lies kicking and screaming after the fashion of a sacrificed pig. The mood of a Schopenhauer or a Nietzsche,--and in a less degree one may sometimes say the same of our own sad Carlyle,--though often an ennobling sadness, is almost as often only peevishness running away with the bit between its teeth. The sallies of the two German authors remind one, half the time, of the sick shriekings of two dying rats. They lack the purgatorial note which religious sadness gives forth. There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious. If glad, it must not grin or snicker; if sad, it must not scream or curse. It is precisely as being _solemn_ experiences that I wish to interest you in religious experiences. So I propose--arbitrarily again, if you please--to narrow our definition once more by saying that the word "divine," as employed therein, shall mean for us not merely the primal and enveloping and real, for that meaning if taken without restriction might well prove too broad. The divine shall mean for us only such a primal reality as the individual feels impelled to respond to solemnly and gravely, and neither by a curse nor a jest. But solemnity, and gravity, and all such emotional attributes, admit of various shades; and, do what we will with our defining, the truth must at last be confronted that we are dealing with a field of experience where there is not a single conception that can be sharply drawn. The pretension, under such conditions, to be rigorously "scientific" or "exact" in our terms would only stamp us as lacking in understanding of our task. Things are more or less divine, states of mind are more or less religious, reactions are more or less total, but the boundaries are always misty, and it is everywhere a question of amount and degree. Nevertheless, at their extreme of development, there can never be any question as to what experiences are religious. The divinity of the object and the solemnity of the reaction are too well marked for doubt. Hesitation as to whether a state of mind is "religious," or "irreligious," or "moral," or "philosophical," is only likely to arise when the state of mind is weakly characterized, but in that case it will be hardly worthy of our study at all. With states that can only by courtesy be called religious we need have nothing to do, our only profitable business being with what nobody can possibly feel tempted to call anything else. I said in my former lecture that we learn most about a thing when we view it under a microscope, as it were, or in its most exaggerated form. This is as true of religious phenomena as of any other kind of fact. The only cases likely to be profitable enough to repay our attention will therefore be cases where the religious spirit is unmistakable and extreme. Its fainter manifestations we may tranquilly pass by. Here, for example, is the total reaction upon life of Frederick Locker Lampson, whose autobiography, entitled "Confidences," proves him to have been a most amiable man. "I am so far resigned to my lot that I feel small pain at the thought of having to part from what has been called the pleasant habit of existence, the sweet fable of life. I would not care to live my wasted life over again, and so to prolong my span. Strange to say, I have but little wish to be younger. I submit with a chill at my heart. I humbly submit because it is the Divine Will, and my appointed destiny. I dread the increase of infirmities that will make me a burden to those around me, those dear to me. No! let me slip away as quietly and comfortably as I can. Let the end come, if peace come with it. "I do not know that there is a great deal to be said for this world, or our sojourn here upon it; but it has pleased God so to place us, and it must please me also. I ask you, what is human life? Is not it a maimed happiness--care and weariness, weariness and care, with the baseless expectation, the strange cozenage of a brighter to-morrow? At best it is but a froward child, that must be played with and humored, to keep it quiet till it falls asleep, and then the care is over."(13) This is a complex, a tender, a submissive, and a graceful state of mind. For myself, I should have no objection to calling it on the whole a religious state of mind, although I dare say that to many of you it may seem too listless and half-hearted to merit so good a name. But what matters it in the end whether we call such a state of mind religious or not? It is too insignificant for our instruction in any case; and its very possessor wrote it down in terms which he would not have used unless he had been thinking of more energetically religious moods in others, with which he found himself unable to compete. It is with these more energetic states that our sole business lies, and we can perfectly well afford to let the minor notes and the uncertain border go. It was the extremer cases that I had in mind a little while ago when I said that personal religion, even without theology or ritual, would prove to embody some elements that morality pure and simple does not contain. You may remember that I promised shortly to point out what those elements were. In a general way I can now say what I had in mind. ------------------------------------- "I accept the universe" is reported to have been a favorite utterance of our New England transcendentalist, Margaret Fuller; and when some one repeated this phrase to Thomas Carlyle, his sardonic comment is said to have been: "Gad! she'd better!" At bottom the whole concern of both morality and religion is with the manner of our acceptance of the universe. Do we accept it only in part and grudgingly, or heartily and altogether? Shall our protests against certain things in it be radical and unforgiving, or shall we think that, even with evil, there are ways of living that must lead to good? If we accept the whole, shall we do so as if stunned into submission,--as Carlyle would have us--"Gad! we'd better!"--or shall we do so with enthusiastic assent? Morality pure and simple accepts the law of the whole which it finds reigning, so far as to acknowledge and obey it, but it may obey it with the heaviest and coldest heart, and never cease to feel it as a yoke. But for religion, in its strong and fully developed manifestations, the service of the highest never is felt as a yoke. Dull submission is left far behind, and a mood of welcome, which may fill any place on the scale between cheerful serenity and enthusiastic gladness, has taken its place. It makes a tremendous emotional and practical difference to one whether one accept the universe in the drab discolored way of stoic resignation to necessity, or with the passionate happiness of Christian saints. The difference is as great as that between passivity and activity, as that between the defensive and the aggressive mood. Gradual as are the steps by which an individual may grow from one state into the other, many as are the intermediate stages which different individuals represent, yet when you place the typical extremes beside each other for comparison, you feel that two discontinuous psychological universes confront you, and that in passing from one to the other a "critical point" has been overcome. If we compare stoic with Christian ejaculations we see much more than a difference of doctrine; rather is it a difference of emotional mood that parts them. When Marcus Aurelius reflects on the eternal reason that has ordered things, there is a frosty chill about his words which you rarely find in a Jewish, and never in a Christian piece of religious writing. The universe is "accepted" by all these writers; but how devoid of passion or exultation the spirit of the Roman Emperor is! Compare his fine sentence: "If gods care not for me or my children, here is a reason for it," with Job's cry: "Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him!" and you immediately see the difference I mean. The _anima mundi_, to whose disposal of his own personal destiny the Stoic consents, is there to be respected and submitted to, but the Christian God is there to be loved; and the difference of emotional atmosphere is like that between an arctic climate and the tropics, though the outcome in the way of accepting actual conditions uncomplainingly may seem in abstract terms to be much the same. "It is a man's duty," says Marcus Aurelius, "to comfort himself and wait for the natural dissolution, and not to be vexed, but to find refreshment solely in these thoughts--first that nothing will happen to me which is not conformable to the nature of the universe; and secondly that I need do nothing contrary to the God and deity within me; for there is no man who can compel me to transgress.(14) He is an abscess on the universe who withdraws and separates himself from the reason of our common nature, through being displeased with the things which happen. For the same nature produces these, and has produced thee too. And so accept everything which happens, even if it seem disagreeable, because it leads to this, the health of the universe and to the prosperity and felicity of Zeus. For he would not have brought on any man what he has brought, if it were not useful for the whole. The integrity of the whole is mutilated if thou cuttest off anything. And thou dost cut off, as far as it is in thy power, when thou art dissatisfied, and in a manner triest to put anything out of the way."(15) Compare now this mood with that of the old Christian author of the Theologia Germanica:-- "Where men are enlightened with the true light, they renounce all desire and choice, and commit and commend themselves and all things to the eternal Goodness, so that every enlightened man could say: 'I would fain be to the Eternal Goodness what his own hand is to a man.' Such men are in a state of freedom, because they have lost the fear of pain or hell, and the hope of reward or heaven, and are living in pure submission to the eternal Goodness, in the perfect freedom of fervent love. When a man truly perceiveth and considereth himself, who and what he is, and findeth himself utterly vile and wicked and unworthy, he falleth into such a deep abasement that it seemeth to him reasonable that all creatures in heaven and earth should rise up against him. And therefore he will not and dare not desire any consolation and release; but he is willing to be unconsoled and unreleased; and he doth not grieve over his sufferings, for they are right in his eyes, and he hath nothing to say against them. This is what is meant by true repentance for sin; and he who in this present time entereth into this hell, none may console him. Now God hath not forsaken a man in this hell, but He is laying his hand upon him, that the man may not desire nor regard anything but the eternal Good only. And then, when the man neither careth for nor desireth anything but the eternal Good alone, and seeketh not himself nor his own things, but the honour of God only, he is made a partaker of all manner of joy, bliss, peace, rest, and consolation, and so the man is henceforth in the kingdom of heaven. This hell and this heaven are two good safe ways for a man, and happy is he who truly findeth them."(16) How much more active and positive the impulse of the Christian writer to accept his place in the universe is! Marcus Aurelius agrees _to_ the scheme--the German theologian agrees _with_ it. He literally _abounds_ in agreement, he runs out to embrace the divine decrees. Occasionally, it is true, the Stoic rises to something like a Christian warmth of sentiment, as in the often quoted passage of Marcus Aurelius:-- "Everything harmonizes with me which is harmonious to thee, O Universe. Nothing for me is too early nor too late, which is in due time for thee. Everything is fruit to me which thy seasons bring, O Nature: from thee are all things, in thee are all things, to thee all things return. The poet says, Dear City of Cecrops; and wilt thou not say, Dear City of Zeus?"(17) But compare even as devout a passage as this with a genuine Christian outpouring, and it seems a little cold. Turn, for instance, to the Imitation of Christ:-- "Lord, thou knowest what is best; let this or that be according as thou wilt. Give what thou wilt, so much as thou wilt, when thou wilt. Do with me as thou knowest best, and as shall be most to thine honour. Place me where thou wilt, and freely work thy will with me in all things.... When could it be evil when thou wert near? I had rather be poor for thy sake than rich without thee. I choose rather to be a pilgrim upon the earth with thee, than without thee to possess heaven. Where thou art, there is heaven; and where thou art not, behold there death and hell."(18) It is a good rule in physiology, when we are studying the meaning of an organ, to ask after its most peculiar and characteristic sort of performance, and to seek its office in that one of its functions which no other organ can possibly exert. Surely the same maxim holds good in our present quest. The essence of religious experiences, the thing by which we finally must judge them, must be that element or quality in them which we can meet nowhere else. And such a quality will be of course most prominent and easy to notice in those religious experiences which are most one- sided, exaggerated, and intense. Now when we compare these intenser experiences with the experiences of tamer minds, so cool and reasonable that we are tempted to call them philosophical rather than religious, we find a character that is perfectly distinct. That character, it seems to me, should be regarded as the practically important _differentia_ of religion for our purpose; and just what it is can easily be brought out by comparing the mind of an abstractly conceived Christian with that of a moralist similarly conceived. A life is manly, stoical, moral, or philosophical, we say, in proportion as it is less swayed by paltry personal considerations and more by objective ends that call for energy, even though that energy bring personal loss and pain. This is the good side of war, in so far as it calls for "volunteers." And for morality life is a war, and the service of the highest is a sort of cosmic patriotism which also calls for volunteers. Even a sick man, unable to be militant outwardly, can carry on the moral warfare. He can willfully turn his attention away from his own future, whether in this world or the next. He can train himself to indifference to his present drawbacks and immerse himself in whatever objective interests still remain accessible. He can follow public news, and sympathize with other people's affairs. He can cultivate cheerful manners, and be silent about his miseries. He can contemplate whatever ideal aspects of existence his philosophy is able to present to him, and practice whatever duties, such as patience, resignation, trust, his ethical system requires. Such a man lives on his loftiest, largest plane. He is a high-hearted freeman and no pining slave. And yet he lacks something which the Christian _par excellence_, the mystic and ascetic saint, for example, has in abundant measure, and which makes of him a human being of an altogether different denomination. The Christian also spurns the pinched and mumping sick-room attitude, and the lives of saints are full of a kind of callousness to diseased conditions of body which probably no other human records show. But whereas the merely moralistic spurning takes an effort of volition, the Christian spurning is the result of the excitement of a higher kind of emotion, in the presence of which no exertion of volition is required. The moralist must hold his breath and keep his muscles tense; and so long as this athletic attitude is possible all goes well--morality suffices. But the athletic attitude tends ever to break down, and it inevitably does break down even in the most stalwart when the organism begins to decay, or when morbid fears invade the mind. To suggest personal will and effort to one all sicklied o'er with the sense of irremediable impotence is to suggest the most impossible of things. What he craves is to be consoled in his very powerlessness, to feel that the spirit of the universe recognizes and secures him, all decaying and failing as he is. Well, we are all such helpless failures in the last resort. The sanest and best of us are of one clay with lunatics and prison inmates, and death finally runs the robustest of us down. And whenever we feel this, such a sense of the vanity and provisionality of our voluntary career comes over us that all our morality appears but as a plaster hiding a sore it can never cure, and all our well-doing as the hollowest substitute for that well-_being_ that our lives ought to be grounded in, but, alas! are not. And here religion comes to our rescue and takes our fate into her hands. There is a state of mind, known to religious men, but to no others, in which the will to assert ourselves and hold our own has been displaced by a willingness to close our mouths and be as nothing in the floods and waterspouts of God. In this state of mind, what we most dreaded has become the habitation of our safety, and the hour of our moral death has turned into our spiritual birthday. The time for tension in our soul is over, and that of happy relaxation, of calm deep breathing, of an eternal present, with no discordant future to be anxious about, has arrived. Fear is not held in abeyance as it is by mere morality, it is positively expunged and washed away. We shall see abundant examples of this happy state of mind in later lectures of this course. We shall see how infinitely passionate a thing religion at its highest flights can be. Like love, like wrath, like hope, ambition, jealousy, like every other instinctive eagerness and impulse, it adds to life an enchantment which is not rationally or logically deducible from anything else. This enchantment, coming as a gift when it does come,--a gift of our organism, the physiologists will tell us, a gift of God's grace, the theologians say,--is either there or not there for us, and there are persons who can no more become possessed by it than they can fall in love with a given woman by mere word of command. Religious feeling is thus an absolute addition to the Subject's range of life. It gives him a new sphere of power. When the outward battle is lost, and the outer world disowns him, it redeems and vivifies an interior world which otherwise would be an empty waste. If religion is to mean anything definite for us, it seems to me that we ought to take it as meaning this added dimension of emotion, this enthusiastic temper of espousal, in regions where morality strictly so called can at best but bow its head and acquiesce. It ought to mean nothing short of this new reach of freedom for us, with the struggle over, the keynote of the universe sounding in our ears, and everlasting possession spread before our eyes.(19) This sort of happiness in the absolute and everlasting is what we find nowhere but in religion. It is parted off from all mere animal happiness, all mere enjoyment of the present, by that element of solemnity of which I have already made so much account. Solemnity is a hard thing to define abstractly, but certain of its marks are patent enough. A solemn state of mind is never crude or simple--it seems to contain a certain measure of its own opposite in solution. A solemn joy preserves a sort of bitter in its sweetness; a solemn sorrow is one to which we intimately consent. But there are writers who, realizing that happiness of a supreme sort is the prerogative of religion, forget this complication, and call all happiness, as such, religious. Mr. Havelock Ellis, for example, identifies religion with the entire field of the soul's liberation from oppressive moods. "The simplest functions of physiological life," he writes, "may be its ministers. Every one who is at all acquainted with the Persian mystics knows how wine may be regarded as an instrument of religion. Indeed, in all countries and in all ages, some form of physical enlargement--singing, dancing, drinking, sexual excitement--has been intimately associated with worship. Even the momentary expansion of the soul in laughter is, to however slight an extent, a religious exercise.... Whenever an impulse from the world strikes against the organism, and the resultant is not discomfort or pain, not even the muscular contraction of strenuous manhood, but a joyous expansion or aspiration of the whole soul--there is religion. It is the infinite for which we hunger, and we ride gladly on every little wave that promises to bear us towards it."(20) But such a straight identification of religion with any and every form of happiness leaves the essential peculiarity of religious happiness out. The more commonplace happinesses which we get are "reliefs," occasioned by our momentary escapes from evils either experienced or threatened. But in its most characteristic embodiments, religious happiness is no mere feeling of escape. It cares no longer to escape. It consents to the evil outwardly as a form of sacrifice--inwardly it knows it to be permanently overcome. If you ask _how_ religion thus falls on the thorns and faces death, and in the very act annuls annihilation, I cannot explain the matter, for it is religion's secret, and to understand it you must yourself have been a religious man of the extremer type. In our future examples, even of the simplest and healthiest-minded type of religious consciousness, we shall find this complex sacrificial constitution, in which a higher happiness holds a lower unhappiness in check. In the Louvre there is a picture, by Guido Reni, of St. Michael with his foot on Satan's neck. The richness of the picture is in large part due to the fiend's figure being there. The richness of its allegorical meaning also is due to his being there--that is, the world is all the richer for having a devil in it, _so long as we keep our foot upon his neck_. In the religious consciousness, that is just the position in which the fiend, the negative or tragic principle, is found; and for that very reason the religious consciousness is so rich from the emotional point of view.(21) We shall see how in certain men and women it takes on a monstrously ascetic form. There are saints who have literally fed on the negative principle, on humiliation and privation, and the thought of suffering and death,--their souls growing in happiness just in proportion as their outward state grew more intolerable. No other emotion than religious emotion can bring a man to this peculiar pass. And it is for that reason that when we ask our question about the value of religion for human life, I think we ought to look for the answer among these violenter examples rather than among those of a more moderate hue. Having the phenomenon of our study in its acutest possible form to start with, we can shade down as much as we please later. And if in these cases, repulsive as they are to our ordinary worldly way of judging, we find ourselves compelled to acknowledge religion's value and treat it with respect, it will have proved in some way its value for life at large. By subtracting and toning down extravagances we may thereupon proceed to trace the boundaries of its legitimate sway. To be sure, it makes our task difficult to have to deal so much with eccentricities and extremes. "How _can_ religion on the whole be the most important of all human functions," you may ask, "if every several manifestation of it in turn have to be corrected and sobered down and pruned away?" Such a thesis seems a paradox impossible to sustain reasonably,--yet I believe that something like it will have to be our final contention. That personal attitude which the individual finds himself impelled to take up towards what he apprehends to be the divine--and you will remember that this was our definition--will prove to be both a helpless and a sacrificial attitude. That is, we shall have to confess to at least some amount of dependence on sheer mercy, and to practice some amount of renunciation, great or small, to save our souls alive. The constitution of the world we live in requires it:-- "Entbehren sollst du! sollst entbehren! Das ist der ewige Gesang Der jedem an die Ohren klingt, Den, unser ganzes Leben lang Uns heiser jede Stunde singt." For when all is said and done, we are in the end absolutely dependent on the universe; and into sacrifices and surrenders of some sort, deliberately looked at and accepted, we are drawn and pressed as into our only permanent positions of repose. Now in those states of mind which fall short of religion, the surrender is submitted to as an imposition of necessity, and the sacrifice is undergone at the very best without complaint. In the religious life, on the contrary, surrender and sacrifice are positively espoused: even unnecessary givings-up are added in order that the happiness may increase. _Religion thus makes easy and felicitous what in any case is necessary_; and if it be the only agency that can accomplish this result, its vital importance as a human faculty stands vindicated beyond dispute. It becomes an essential organ of our life, performing a function which no other portion of our nature can so successfully fulfill. From the merely biological point of view, so to call it, this is a conclusion to which, so far as I can now see, we shall inevitably be led, and led moreover by following the purely empirical method of demonstration which I sketched to you in the first lecture. Of the farther office of religion as a metaphysical revelation I will say nothing now. But to foreshadow the terminus of one's investigations is one thing, and to arrive there safely is another. In the next lecture, abandoning the extreme generalities which have engrossed us hitherto, I propose that we begin our actual journey by addressing ourselves directly to the concrete facts. LECTURE III. THE REALITY OF THE UNSEEN. Were one asked to characterize the life of religion in the broadest and most general terms possible, one might say that it consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto. This belief and this adjustment are the religious attitude in the soul. I wish during this hour to call your attention to some of the psychological peculiarities of such an attitude as this, of belief in an object which we cannot see. All our attitudes, moral, practical, or emotional, as well as religious, are due to the "objects" of our consciousness, the things which we believe to exist, whether really or ideally, along with ourselves. Such objects may be present to our senses, or they may be present only to our thought. In either case they elicit from us a _reaction_; and the reaction due to things of thought is notoriously in many cases as strong as that due to sensible presences. It may be even stronger. The memory of an insult may make us angrier than the insult did when we received it. We are frequently more ashamed of our blunders afterwards than we were at the moment of making them; and in general our whole higher prudential and moral life is based on the fact that material sensations actually present may have a weaker influence on our action than ideas of remoter facts. The more concrete objects of most men's religion, the deities whom they worship, are known to them only in idea. It has been vouchsafed, for example, to very few Christian believers to have had a sensible vision of their Saviour; though enough appearances of this sort are on record, by way of miraculous exception, to merit our attention later. The whole force of the Christian religion, therefore, so far as belief in the divine personages determines the prevalent attitude of the believer, is in general exerted by the instrumentality of pure ideas, of which nothing in the individual's past experience directly serves as a model. But in addition to these ideas of the more concrete religious objects, religion is full of abstract objects which prove to have an equal power. God's attributes as such, his holiness, his justice, his mercy, his absoluteness, his infinity, his omniscience, his tri-unity, the various mysteries of the redemptive process, the operation of the sacraments, etc., have proved fertile wells of inspiring meditation for Christian believers.(22) We shall see later that the absence of definite sensible images is positively insisted on by the mystical authorities in all religions as the _sine qua non_ of a successful orison, or contemplation of the higher divine truths. Such contemplations are expected (and abundantly verify the expectation, as we shall also see) to influence the believer's subsequent attitude very powerfully for good. Immanuel Kant held a curious doctrine about such objects of belief as God, the design of creation, the soul, its freedom, and the life hereafter. These things, he said, are properly not objects of knowledge at all. Our conceptions always require a sense-content to work with, and as the words "soul," "God," "immortality," cover no distinctive sense-content whatever, it follows that theoretically speaking they are words devoid of any significance. Yet strangely enough they have a definite meaning _for our practice_. We can act _as if_ there were a God; feel _as if_ we were free; consider Nature _as if_ she were full of special designs; lay plans _as if_ we were to be immortal; and we find then that these words do make a genuine difference in our moral life. Our faith _that_ these unintelligible objects actually exist proves thus to be a full equivalent in _praktischer Hinsicht_, as Kant calls it, or from the point of view of our action, for a knowledge of _what_ they might be, in case we were permitted positively to conceive them. So we have the strange phenomenon, as Kant assures us, of a mind believing with all its strength in the real presence of a set of things of no one of which it can form any notion whatsoever. My object in thus recalling Kant's doctrine to your mind is not to express any opinion as to the accuracy of this particularly uncouth part of his philosophy, but only to illustrate the characteristic of human nature which we are considering, by an example so classical in its exaggeration. The sentiment of reality can indeed attach itself so strongly to our object of belief that our whole life is polarized through and through, so to speak, by its sense of the existence of the thing believed in, and yet that thing, for purpose of definite description, can hardly be said to be present to our mind at all. It is as if a bar of iron, without touch or sight, with no representative faculty whatever, might nevertheless be strongly endowed with an inner capacity for magnetic feeling; and as if, through the various arousals of its magnetism by magnets coming and going in its neighborhood, it might be consciously determined to different attitudes and tendencies. Such a bar of iron could never give you an outward description of the agencies that had the power of stirring it so strongly; yet of their presence, and of their significance for its life, it would be intensely aware through every fibre of its being. It is not only the Ideas of pure Reason, as Kant styled them, that have this power of making us vitally feel presences that we are impotent articulately to describe. All sorts of higher abstractions bring with them the same kind of impalpable appeal. Remember those passages from Emerson which I read at my last lecture. The whole universe of concrete objects, as we know them, swims, not only for such a transcendentalist writer, but for all of us, in a wider and higher universe of abstract ideas, that lend it its significance. As time, space, and the ether soak through all things, so (we feel) do abstract and essential goodness, beauty, strength, significance, justice, soak through all things good, strong, significant, and just. Such ideas, and others equally abstract, form the background for all our facts, the fountain-head of all the possibilities we conceive of. They give its "nature," as we call it, to every special thing. Everything we know is "what" it is by sharing in the nature of one of these abstractions. We can never look directly at them, for they are bodiless and featureless and footless, but we grasp all other things by their means, and in handling the real world we should be stricken with helplessness in just so far forth as we might lose these mental objects, these adjectives and adverbs and predicates and heads of classification and conception. This absolute determinability of our mind by abstractions is one of the cardinal facts in our human constitution. Polarizing and magnetizing us as they do, we turn towards them and from them, we seek them, hold them, hate them, bless them, just as if they were so many concrete beings. And beings they are, beings as real in the realm which they inhabit as the changing things of sense are in the realm of space. Plato gave so brilliant and impressive a defense of this common human feeling, that the doctrine of the reality of abstract objects has been known as the platonic theory of ideas ever since. Abstract Beauty, for example, is for Plato a perfectly definite individual being, of which the intellect is aware as of something additional to all the perishing beauties of the earth. "The true order of going," he says, in the often quoted passage in his "Banquet," "is to use the beauties of earth as steps along which one mounts upwards for the sake of that other Beauty, going from one to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair actions, and from fair actions to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute Beauty, and at last knows what the essence of Beauty is."(23) In our last lecture we had a glimpse of the way in which a platonizing writer like Emerson may treat the abstract divineness of things, the moral structure of the universe, as a fact worthy of worship. In those various churches without a God which to- day are spreading through the world under the name of ethical societies, we have a similar worship of the abstract divine, the moral law believed in as an ultimate object. "Science" in many minds is genuinely taking the place of a religion. Where this is so, the scientist treats the "Laws of Nature" as objective facts to be revered. A brilliant school of interpretation of Greek mythology would have it that in their origin the Greek gods were only half-metaphoric personifications of those great spheres of abstract law and order into which the natural world falls apart--the sky-sphere, the ocean-sphere, the earth-sphere, and the like; just as even now we may speak of the smile of the morning, the kiss of the breeze, or the bite of the cold, without really meaning that these phenomena of nature actually wear a human face.(24) As regards the origin of the Greek gods, we need not at present seek an opinion. But the whole array of our instances leads to a conclusion something like this: It is as if there were in the human consciousness a _sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception_ of what we may call "_something there_," more deep and more general than any of the special and particular "senses" by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed. If this were so, we might suppose the senses to waken our attitudes and conduct as they so habitually do, by first exciting this sense of reality; but anything else, any idea, for example, that might similarly excite it, would have that same prerogative of appearing real which objects of sense normally possess. So far as religious conceptions were able to touch this reality- feeling, they would be believed in in spite of criticism, even though they might be so vague and remote as to be almost unimaginable, even though they might be such non-entities in point of _whatness_, as Kant makes the objects of his moral theology to be. The most curious proofs of the existence of such an undifferentiated sense of reality as this are found in experiences of hallucination. It often happens that an hallucination is imperfectly developed: the person affected will feel a "presence" in the room, definitely localized, facing in one particular way, real in the most emphatic sense of the word, often coming suddenly, and as suddenly gone; and yet neither seen, heard, touched, nor cognized in any of the usual "sensible" ways. Let me give you an example of this, before I pass to the objects with whose presence religion is more peculiarly concerned. An intimate friend of mine, one of the keenest intellects I know, has had several experiences of this sort. He writes as follows in response to my inquiries:-- "I have several times within the past few years felt the so-called 'consciousness of a presence.' The experiences which I have in mind are clearly distinguishable from another kind of experience which I have had very frequently, and which I fancy many persons would also call the 'consciousness of a presence.' But the difference for me between the two sets of experience is as great as the difference between feeling a slight warmth originating I know not where, and standing in the midst of a conflagration with all the ordinary senses alert. "It was about September, 1884, when I had the first experience. On the previous night I had had, after getting into bed at my rooms in College, a vivid tactile hallucination of being grasped by the arm, which made me get up and search the room for an intruder; but the sense of presence properly so called came on the next night. After I had got into bed and blown out the candle, I lay awake awhile thinking on the previous night's experience, when suddenly I _felt_ something come into the room and stay close to my bed. It remained only a minute or two. I did not recognize it by any ordinary sense, and yet there was a horribly unpleasant 'sensation' connected with it. It stirred something more at the roots of my being than any ordinary perception. The feeling had something of the quality of a very large tearing vital pain spreading chiefly over the chest, but within the organism--and yet the feeling was not _pain_ so much as _abhorrence_. At all events, something was present with me, and I knew its presence far more surely than I have ever known the presence of any fleshly living creature. I was conscious of its departure as of its coming: an almost instantaneously swift going through the door, and the 'horrible sensation' disappeared. "On the third night when I retired my mind was absorbed in some lectures which I was preparing, and I was still absorbed in these when I became aware of the actual presence (though not of the _coming_) of the thing that was there the night before, and of the 'horrible sensation.' I then mentally concentrated all my effort to charge this 'thing,' if it was evil, to depart, if it was _not_ evil, to tell me who or what it was, and if it could not explain itself, to go, and that I would compel it to go. It went as on the previous night, and my body quickly recovered its normal state. "On two other occasions in my life I have had precisely the same 'horrible sensation.' Once it lasted a full quarter of an hour. In all three instances the certainty that there in outward space there stood _something_ was indescribably _stronger_ than the ordinary certainty of companionship when we are in the close presence of ordinary living people. The something seemed close to me, and intensely more real than any ordinary perception. Although I felt it to be like unto myself, so to speak, or finite, small, and distressful, as it were, I didn't recognize it as any individual being or person." Of course such an experience as this does not connect itself with the religious sphere. Yet it may upon occasion do so; and the same correspondent informs me that at more than one other conjuncture he had the sense of presence developed with equal intensity and abruptness, only then it was filled with a quality of joy. "There was not a mere consciousness of something there, but fused in the central happiness of it, a startling awareness of some ineffable good. Not vague either, not like the emotional effect of some poem, or scene, or blossom, of music, but the sure knowledge of the close presence of a sort of mighty person, and after it went, the memory persisted as the one perception of reality. Everything else might be a dream, but not that." My friend, as it oddly happens, does not interpret these latter experiences theistically, as signifying the presence of God. But it would clearly not have been unnatural to interpret them as a revelation of the deity's existence. When we reach the subject of mysticism, we shall have much more to say upon this head. Lest the oddity of these phenomena should disconcert you, I will venture to read you a couple of similar narratives, much shorter, merely to show that we are dealing with a well-marked natural kind of fact. In the first case, which I take from the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, the sense of presence developed in a few moments into a distinctly visualized hallucination,--but I leave that part of the story out. "I had read," the narrator says, "some twenty minutes or so, was thoroughly absorbed in the book, my mind was perfectly quiet, and for the time being my friends were quite forgotten, when suddenly without a moment's warning my whole being seemed roused to the highest state of tension or aliveness, and I was aware, with an intenseness not easily imagined by those who had never experienced it, that another being or presence was not only in the room, but quite close to me. I put my book down, and although my excitement was great, I felt quite collected, and not conscious of any sense of fear. Without changing my position, and looking straight at the fire, I knew somehow that my friend A. H. was standing at my left elbow, but so far behind me as to be hidden by the armchair in which I was leaning back. Moving my eyes round slightly without otherwise changing my position, the lower portion of one leg became visible, and I instantly recognized the gray-blue material of trousers he often wore, but the stuff appeared semi- transparent, reminding me of tobacco smoke in consistency,"(25)--and hereupon the visual hallucination came. Another informant writes:-- "Quite early in the night I was awakened.... I felt as if I had been aroused intentionally, and at first thought some one was breaking into the house.... I then turned on my side to go to sleep again, and immediately felt a consciousness of a presence in the room, and singular to state, it was not the consciousness of a live person, but of a spiritual presence. This may provoke a smile, but I can only tell you the facts as they occurred to me. I do not know how to better describe my sensations than by simply stating that I felt a consciousness of a spiritual presence.... I felt also at the same time a strong feeling of superstitious dread, as if something strange and fearful were about to happen."(26) Professor Flournoy of Geneva gives me the following testimony of a friend of his, a lady, who has the gift of automatic or involuntary writing:-- "Whenever I practice automatic writing, what makes me feel that it is not due to a subconscious self is the feeling I always have of a foreign presence, external to my body. It is sometimes so definitely characterized that I could point to its exact position. This impression of presence is impossible to describe. It varies in intensity and clearness according to the personality from whom the writing professes to come. If it is some one whom I love, I feel it immediately, before any writing has come. My heart seems to recognize it." In an earlier book of mine I have cited at full length a curious case of presence felt by a blind man. The presence was that of the figure of a gray-bearded man dressed in a pepper and salt suit, squeezing himself under the crack of the door and moving across the floor of the room towards a sofa. The blind subject of this quasi-hallucination is an exceptionally intelligent reporter. He is entirely without internal visual imagery and cannot represent light or colors to himself, and is positive that his other senses, hearing, etc., were not involved in this false perception. It seems to have been an abstract conception rather, with the feelings of reality and spatial outwardness directly attached to it--in other words, a fully objectified and exteriorized _idea_. Such cases, taken along with others which would be too tedious for quotation, seem sufficiently to prove the existence in our mental machinery of a sense of present reality more diffused and general than that which our special senses yield. For the psychologists the tracing of the organic seat of such a feeling would form a pretty problem--nothing could be more natural than to connect it with the muscular sense, with the feeling that our muscles were innervating themselves for action. Whatsoever thus innervated our activity, or "made our flesh creep,"--our senses are what do so oftenest,--might then appear real and present, even though it were but an abstract idea. But with such vague conjectures we have no concern at present, for our interest lies with the faculty rather than with its organic seat. Like all positive affections of consciousness, the sense of reality has its negative counterpart in the shape of a feeling of unreality by which persons may be haunted, and of which one sometimes hears complaint:-- "When I reflect on the fact that I have made my appearance by accident upon a globe itself whirled through space as the sport of the catastrophes of the heavens," says Madame Ackermann; "when I see myself surrounded by beings as ephemeral and incomprehensible as I am myself, and all excitedly pursuing pure chimeras, I experience a strange feeling of being in a dream. It seems to me as if I have loved and suffered and that erelong I shall die, in a dream. My last word will be, 'I have been dreaming.' "(27) In another lecture we shall see how in morbid melancholy this sense of the unreality of things may become a carking pain, and even lead to suicide. We may now lay it down as certain that in the distinctively religious sphere of experience, many persons (how many we cannot tell) possess the objects of their belief, not in the form of mere conceptions which their intellect accepts as true, but rather in the form of quasi-sensible realities directly apprehended. As his sense of the real presence of these objects fluctuates, so the believer alternates between warmth and coldness in his faith. Other examples will bring this home to one better than abstract description, so I proceed immediately to cite some. The first example is a negative one, deploring the loss of the sense in question. I have extracted it from an account given me by a scientific man of my acquaintance, of his religious life. It seems to me to show clearly that the feeling of reality may be something more like a sensation than an intellectual operation properly so-called. "Between twenty and thirty I gradually became more and more agnostic and irreligious, yet I cannot say that I ever lost that 'indefinite consciousness' which Herbert Spencer describes so well, of an Absolute Reality behind phenomena. For me this Reality was not the pure Unknowable of Spencer's philosophy, for although I had ceased my childish prayers to God, and never prayed to _It_ in a formal manner, yet my more recent experience shows me to have been in a relation to _It_ which practically was the same thing as prayer. Whenever I had any trouble, especially when I had conflict with other people, either domestically or in the way of business, or when I was depressed in spirits or anxious about affairs, I now recognize that I used to fall back for support upon this curious relation I felt myself to be in to this fundamental cosmical _It_. It was on my side, or I was on Its side, however you please to term it, in the particular trouble, and it always strengthened me and seemed to give me endless vitality to feel its underlying and supporting presence. In fact, it was an unfailing fountain of living justice, truth, and strength, to which I instinctively turned at times of weakness, and it always brought me out. I know now that it was a personal relation I was in to it, because of late years the power of communicating with it has left me, and I am conscious of a perfectly definite loss. I used never to fail to find it when I turned to it. Then came a set of years when sometimes I found it, and then again I would be wholly unable to make connection with it. I remember many occasions on which at night in bed, I would be unable to get to sleep on account of worry. I turned this way and that in the darkness, and groped mentally for the familiar sense of that higher mind of my mind which had always seemed to be close at hand as it were, closing the passage, and yielding support, but there was no electric current. A blank was there instead of _It_: I couldn't find anything. Now, at the age of nearly fifty, my power of getting into connection with it has entirely left me; and I have to confess that a great help has gone out of my life. Life has become curiously dead and indifferent; and I can now see that my old experience was probably exactly the same thing as the prayers of the orthodox, only I did not call them by that name. What I have spoken of as 'It' was practically not Spencer's Unknowable, but just my own instinctive and individual God, whom I relied upon for higher sympathy, but whom somehow I have lost." Nothing is more common in the pages of religious biography than the way in which seasons of lively and of difficult faith are described as alternating. Probably every religious person has the recollection of particular crises in which a directer vision of the truth, a direct perception, perhaps, of a living God's existence, swept in and overwhelmed the languor of the more ordinary belief. In James Russell Lowell's correspondence there is a brief memorandum of an experience of this kind:-- "I had a revelation last Friday evening. I was at Mary's, and happening to say something of the presence of spirits (of whom, I said, I was often dimly aware), Mr. Putnam entered into an argument with me on spiritual matters. As I was speaking, the whole system rose up before me like a vague destiny looming from the Abyss. I never before so clearly felt the Spirit of God in me and around me. The whole room seemed to me full of God. The air seemed to waver to and fro with the presence of Something I knew not what. I spoke with the calmness and clearness of a prophet. I cannot tell you what this revelation was. I have not yet studied it enough. But I shall perfect it one day, and then you shall hear it and acknowledge its grandeur."(28) Here is a longer and more developed experience from a manuscript communication by a clergyman,--I take it from Starbuck's manuscript collection:-- "I remember the night, and almost the very spot on the hilltop, where my soul opened out, as it were, into the Infinite, and there was a rushing together of the two worlds, the inner and the outer. It was deep calling unto deep,--the deep that my own struggle had opened up within being answered by the unfathomable deep without, reaching beyond the stars. I stood alone with Him who had made me, and all the beauty of the world, and love, and sorrow, and even temptation. I did not seek Him, but felt the perfect unison of my spirit with His. The ordinary sense of things around me faded. For the moment nothing but an ineffable joy and exaltation remained. It is impossible fully to describe the experience. It was like the effect of some great orchestra when all the separate notes have melted into one swelling harmony that leaves the listener conscious of nothing save that his soul is being wafted upwards, and almost bursting with its own emotion. The perfect stillness of the night was thrilled by a more solemn silence. The darkness held a presence that was all the more felt because it was not seen. I could not any more have doubted that _He_ was there than that I was. Indeed, I felt myself to be, if possible, the less real of the two. "My highest faith in God and truest idea of him were then born in me. I have stood upon the Mount of Vision since, and felt the Eternal round about me. But never since has there come quite the same stirring of the heart. Then, if ever, I believe, I stood face to face with God, and was born anew of his spirit. There was, as I recall it, no sudden change of thought or of belief, except that my early crude conception had, as it were, burst into flower. There was no destruction of the old, but a rapid, wonderful unfolding. Since that time no discussion that I have heard of the proofs of God's existence has been able to shake my faith. Having once felt the presence of God's spirit, I have never lost it again for long. My most assuring evidence of his existence is deeply rooted in that hour of vision, in the memory of that supreme experience, and in the conviction, gained from reading and reflection, that something the same has come to all who have found God. I am aware that it may justly be called mystical. I am not enough acquainted with philosophy to defend it from that or any other charge. I feel that in writing of it I have overlaid it with words rather than put it clearly to your thought. But, such as it is, I have described it as carefully as I now am able to do." Here is another document, even more definite in character, which, the writer being a Swiss, I translate from the French original.(29) "I was in perfect health: we were on our sixth day of tramping, and in good training. We had come the day before from Sixt to Trient by Buet. I felt neither fatigue, hunger, nor thirst, and my state of mind was equally healthy. I had had at Forlaz good news from home; I was subject to no anxiety, either near or remote, for we had a good guide, and there was not a shadow of uncertainty about the road we should follow. I can best describe the condition in which I was by calling it a state of equilibrium. When all at once I experienced a feeling of being raised above myself, I felt the presence of God--I tell of the thing just as I was conscious of it--as if his goodness and his power were penetrating me altogether. The throb of emotion was so violent that I could barely tell the boys to pass on and not wait for me. I then sat down on a stone, unable to stand any longer, and my eyes overflowed with tears. I thanked God that in the course of my life he had taught me to know him, that he sustained my life and took pity both on the insignificant creature and on the sinner that I was. I begged him ardently that my life might be consecrated to the doing of his will. I felt his reply, which was that I should do his will from day to day, in humility and poverty, leaving him, the Almighty God, to be judge of whether I should some time be called to bear witness more conspicuously. Then, slowly, the ecstasy left my heart; that is, I felt that God had withdrawn the communion which he had granted, and I was able to walk on, but very slowly, so strongly was I still possessed by the interior emotion. Besides, I had wept uninterruptedly for several minutes, my eyes were swollen, and I did not wish my companions to see me. The state of ecstasy may have lasted four or five minutes, although it seemed at the time to last much longer. My comrades waited for me ten minutes at the cross of Barine, but I took about twenty-five or thirty minutes to join them, for as well as I can remember, they said that I had kept them back for about half an hour. The impression had been so profound that in climbing slowly the slope I asked myself if it were possible that Moses on Sinai could have had a more intimate communication with God. I think it well to add that in this ecstasy of mine God had neither form, color, odor, nor taste; moreover, that the feeling of his presence was accompanied with no determinate localization. It was rather as if my personality had been transformed by the presence of a _spiritual spirit_. But the more I seek words to express this intimate intercourse, the more I feel the impossibility of describing the thing by any of our usual images. At bottom the expression most apt to render what I felt is this: God was present, though invisible; he fell under no one of my senses, yet my consciousness perceived him." The adjective "mystical" is technically applied, most often, to states that are of brief duration. Of course such hours of rapture as the last two persons describe are mystical experiences, of which in a later lecture I shall have much to say. Meanwhile here is the abridged record of another mystical or semi-mystical experience, in a mind evidently framed by nature for ardent piety. I owe it to Starbuck's collection. The lady who gives the account is the daughter of a man well known in his time as a writer against Christianity. The suddenness of her conversion shows well how native the sense of God's presence must be to certain minds. She relates that she was brought up in entire ignorance of Christian doctrine, but, when in Germany, after being talked to by Christian friends, she read the Bible and prayed, and finally the plan of salvation flashed upon her like a stream of light. "To this day," she writes, "I cannot understand dallying with religion and the commands of God. The very instant I heard my Father's cry calling unto me, my heart bounded in recognition. I ran, I stretched forth my arms, I cried aloud, 'Here, here I am, my Father.' Oh, happy child, what should I do? 'Love me,' answered my God. 'I do, I do,' I cried passionately. 'Come unto me,' called my Father. 'I will,' my heart panted. Did I stop to ask a single question? Not one. It never occurred to me to ask whether I was good enough, or to hesitate over my unfitness, or to find out what I thought of his church, or ... to wait until I should be satisfied. Satisfied! I was satisfied. Had I not found my God and my Father? Did he not love me? Had he not called me? Was there not a Church into which I might enter?... Since then I have had direct answers to prayer--so significant as to be almost like talking with God and hearing his answer. The idea of God's reality has never left me for one moment." Here is still another case, the writer being a man aged twenty-seven, in which the experience, probably almost as characteristic, is less vividly described:-- "I have on a number of occasions felt that I had enjoyed a period of intimate communion with the divine. These meetings came unasked and unexpected, and seemed to consist merely in the temporary obliteration of the conventionalities which usually surround and cover my life.... Once it was when from the summit of a high mountain I looked over a gashed and corrugated landscape extending to a long convex of ocean that ascended to the horizon, and again from the same point when I could see nothing beneath me but a boundless expanse of white cloud, on the blown surface of which a few high peaks, including the one I was on, seemed plunging about as if they were dragging their anchors. What I felt on these occasions was a temporary loss of my own identity, accompanied by an illumination which revealed to me a deeper significance than I had been wont to attach to life. It is in this that I find my justification for saying that I have enjoyed communication with God. Of course the absence of such a being as this would be chaos. I cannot conceive of life without its presence." Of the more habitual and so to speak chronic sense of God's presence the following sample from Professor Starbuck's manuscript collection may serve to give an idea. It is from a man aged forty-nine,--probably thousands of unpretending Christians would write an almost identical account. "God is more real to me than any thought or thing or person. I feel his presence positively, and the more as I live in closer harmony with his laws as written in my body and mind. I feel him in the sunshine or rain; and awe mingled with a delicious restfulness most nearly describes my feelings. I talk to him as to a companion in prayer and praise, and our communion is delightful. He answers me again and again, often in words so clearly spoken that it seems my outer ear must have carried the tone, but generally in strong mental impressions. Usually a text of Scripture, unfolding some new view of him and his love for me, and care for my safety. I could give hundreds of instances, in school matters, social problems, financial difficulties, etc. That he is mine and I am his never leaves me, it is an abiding joy. Without it life would be a blank, a desert, a shoreless, trackless waste." I subjoin some more examples from writers of different ages and sexes. They are also from Professor Starbuck's collection, and their number might be greatly multiplied. The first is from a man twenty-seven years old:-- "God is quite real to me. I talk to him and often get answers. Thoughts sudden and distinct from any I have been entertaining come to my mind after asking God for his direction. Something over a year ago I was for some weeks in the direst perplexity. When the trouble first appeared before me I was dazed, but before long (two or three hours) I could hear distinctly a passage of Scripture: 'My grace is sufficient for thee.' Every time my thoughts turned to the trouble I could hear this quotation. I don't think I ever doubted the existence of God, or had him drop out of my consciousness. God has frequently stepped into my affairs very perceptibly, and I feel that he directs many little details all the time. But on two or three occasions he has ordered ways for me very contrary to my ambitions and plans." Another statement (none the less valuable psychologically for being so decidedly childish) is that of a boy of seventeen:-- "Sometimes as I go to church, I sit down, join in the service, and before I go out I feel as if God was with me, right side of me, singing and reading the Psalms with me.... And then again I feel as if I could sit beside him, and put my arms around him, kiss him, etc. When I am taking Holy Communion at the altar, I try to get with him and generally feel his presence." I let a few other cases follow at random:-- "God surrounds me like the physical atmosphere. He is closer to me than my own breath. In him literally I live and move and have my being."-- "There are times when I seem to stand, in his very presence, to talk with him. Answers to prayer have come, sometimes direct and overwhelming in their revelation of his presence and powers. There are times when God seems far off, but this is always my own fault."-- "I have the sense of a presence, strong, and at the same time soothing, which hovers over me. Sometimes it seems to enwrap me with sustaining arms." Such is the human ontological imagination, and such is the convincingness of what it brings to birth. Unpicturable beings are realized, and realized with an intensity almost like that of an hallucination. They determine our vital attitude as decisively as the vital attitude of lovers is determined by the habitual sense, by which each is haunted, of the other being in the world. A lover has notoriously this sense of the continuous being of his idol, even when his attention is addressed to other matters and he no longer represents her features. He cannot forget her; she uninterruptedly affects him through and through. I spoke of the convincingness of these feelings of reality, and I must dwell a moment longer on that point. They are as convincing to those who have them as any direct sensible experiences can be, and they are, as a rule, much more convincing than results established by mere logic ever are. One may indeed be entirely without them; probably more than one of you here present is without them in any marked degree; but if you do have them, and have them at all strongly, the probability is that you cannot help regarding them as genuine perceptions of truth, as revelations of a kind of reality which no adverse argument, however unanswerable by you in words, can expel from your belief. The opinion opposed to mysticism in philosophy is sometimes spoken of as _rationalism_. Rationalism insists that all our beliefs ought ultimately to find for themselves articulate grounds. Such grounds, for rationalism, must consist of four things: (1) definitely statable abstract principles; (2) definite facts of sensation; (3) definite hypotheses based on such facts; and (4) definite inferences logically drawn. Vague impressions of something indefinable have no place in the rationalistic system, which on its positive side is surely a splendid intellectual tendency, for not only are all our philosophies fruits of it, but physical science (amongst other good things) is its result. Nevertheless, if we look on man's whole mental life as it exists, on the life of men that lies in them apart from their learning and science, and that they inwardly and privately follow, we have to confess that the part of it of which rationalism can give an account is relatively superficial. It is the part that has the _prestige_ undoubtedly, for it has the loquacity, it can challenge you for proofs, and chop logic, and put you down with words. But it will fail to convince or convert you all the same, if your dumb intuitions are opposed to its conclusions. If you have intuitions at all, they come from a deeper level of your nature than the loquacious level which rationalism inhabits. Your whole subconscious life, your impulses, your faiths, your needs, your divinations, have prepared the premises, of which your consciousness now feels the weight of the result; and something in you absolutely _knows_ that that result must be truer than any logic-chopping rationalistic talk, however clever, that may contradict it. This inferiority of the rationalistic level in founding belief is just as manifest when rationalism argues for religion as when it argues against it. That vast literature of proofs of God's existence drawn from the order of nature, which a century ago seemed so overwhelmingly convincing, to-day does little more than gather dust in libraries, for the simple reason that our generation has ceased to believe in the kind of God it argued for. Whatever sort of a being God may be, we _know_ to-day that he is nevermore that mere external inventor of "contrivances" intended to make manifest his "glory" in which our great-grandfathers took such satisfaction, though just how we know this we cannot possibly make clear by words either to others or to ourselves. I defy any of you here fully to account for your persuasion that if a God exist he must be a more cosmic and tragic personage than that Being. The truth is that in the metaphysical and religious sphere, articulate reasons are cogent for us only when our inarticulate feelings of reality have already been impressed in favor of the same conclusion. Then, indeed, our intuitions and our reason work together, and great world-ruling systems, like that of the Buddhist or of the Catholic philosophy, may grow up. Our impulsive belief is here always what sets up the original body of truth, and our articulately verbalized philosophy is but its showy translation into formulas. The unreasoned and immediate assurance is the deep thing in us, the reasoned argument is but a surface exhibition. Instinct leads, intelligence does but follow. If a person feels the presence of a living God after the fashion shown by my quotations, your critical arguments, be they never so superior, will vainly set themselves to change his faith. Please observe, however, that I do not yet say that it is _better_ that the subconscious and non-rational should thus hold primacy in the religious realm. I confine myself to simply pointing out that they do so hold it as a matter of fact. So much for our sense of the reality of the religious objects. Let me now say a brief word more about the attitudes they characteristically awaken. We have already agreed that they are _solemn_; and we have seen reason to think that the most distinctive of them is the sort of joy which may result in extreme cases from absolute self-surrender. The sense of the kind of object to which the surrender is made has much to do with determining the precise complexion of the joy; and the whole phenomenon is more complex than any simple formula allows. In the literature of the subject, sadness and gladness have each been emphasized in turn. The ancient saying that the first maker of the Gods was fear receives voluminous corroboration from every age of religious history; but none the less does religious history show the part which joy has evermore tended to play. Sometimes the joy has been primary; sometimes secondary, being the gladness of deliverance from the fear. This latter state of things, being the more complex, is also the more complete; and as we proceed, I think we shall have abundant reason for refusing to leave out either the sadness or the gladness, if we look at religion with the breadth of view which it demands. Stated in the completest possible terms, a man's religion involves both moods of contraction and moods of expansion of his being. But the quantitative mixture and order of these moods vary so much from one age of the world, from one system of thought, and from one individual to another, that you may insist either on the dread and the submission, or on the peace and the freedom as the essence of the matter, and still remain materially within the limits of the truth. The constitutionally sombre and the constitutionally sanguine onlooker are bound to emphasize opposite aspects of what lies before their eyes. The constitutionally sombre religious person makes even of his religious peace a very sober thing. Danger still hovers in the air about it. Flexion and contraction are not wholly checked. It were sparrowlike and childish after our deliverance to explode into twittering laughter and caper- cutting, and utterly to forget the imminent hawk on bough. Lie low, rather, lie low; for you are in the hands of a living God. In the Book of Job, for example, the impotence of man and the omnipotence of God is the exclusive burden of its author's mind. "It is as high as heaven; what canst thou do?--deeper than hell; what canst thou know?" There is an astringent relish about the truth of this conviction which some men can feel, and which for them is as near an approach as can be made to the feeling of religious joy. "In Job," says that coldly truthful writer, the author of Mark Rutherford, "God reminds us that man is not the measure of his creation. The world is immense, constructed on no plan or theory which the intellect of man can grasp. It is _transcendent_ everywhere. This is the burden of every verse, and is the secret, if there be one, of the poem. Sufficient or insufficient, there is nothing more.... God is great, we know not his ways. He takes from us all we have, but yet if we possess our souls in patience, we _may_ pass the valley of the shadow, and come out in sunlight again. We may or we may not!... What more have we to say now than God said from the whirlwind over two thousand five hundred years ago?"(30) If we turn to the sanguine onlooker, on the other hand, we find that deliverance is felt as incomplete unless the burden be altogether overcome and the danger forgotten. Such onlookers give us definitions that seem to the sombre minds of whom we have just been speaking to leave out all the solemnity that makes religious peace so different from merely animal joys. In the opinion of some writers an attitude might be called religious, though no touch were left in it of sacrifice or submission, no tendency to flexion, no bowing of the head. Any "habitual and regulated admiration," says Professor J. R. Seeley,(31) "is worthy to be called a religion"; and accordingly he thinks that our Music, our Science, and our so-called "Civilization," as these things are now organized and admiringly believed in, form the more genuine religions of our time. Certainly the unhesitating and unreasoning way in which we feel that we must inflict our civilization upon "lower" races, by means of Hotchkiss guns, etc., reminds one of nothing so much as of the early spirit of Islam spreading its religion by the sword. In my last lecture I quoted to you the ultra-radical opinion of Mr. Havelock Ellis, that laughter of any sort may be considered a religious exercise, for it bears witness to the soul's emancipation. I quoted this opinion in order to deny its adequacy. But we must now settle our scores more carefully with this whole optimistic way of thinking. It is far too complex to be decided off-hand. I propose accordingly that we make of religious optimism the theme of the next two lectures. LECTURES IV AND V. THE RELIGION OF HEALTHY-MINDEDNESS. If we were to ask the question: "What is human life's chief concern?" one of the answers we should receive would be: "It is happiness." How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness, is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure. The hedonistic school in ethics deduces the moral life wholly from the experiences of happiness and unhappiness which different kinds of conduct bring; and, even more in the religious life than in the moral life, happiness and unhappiness seem to be the poles round which the interest revolves. We need not go so far as to say with the author whom I lately quoted that any persistent enthusiasm is, as such, religion, nor need we call mere laughter a religious exercise; but we must admit that any persistent enjoyment may _produce_ the sort of religion which consists in a grateful admiration of the gift of so happy an existence; and we must also acknowledge that the more complex ways of experiencing religion are new manners of producing happiness, wonderful inner paths to a supernatural kind of happiness, when the first gift of natural existence is unhappy, as it so often proves itself to be. With such relations between religion and happiness, it is perhaps not surprising that men come to regard the happiness which a religious belief affords as a proof of its truth. If a creed makes a man feel happy, he almost inevitably adopts it. Such a belief ought to be true; therefore it is true--such, rightly or wrongly, is one of the "immediate inferences" of the religious logic used by ordinary men. "The near presence of God's spirit," says a German writer,(32) "may be experienced in its reality--indeed _only_ experienced. And the mark by which the spirit's existence and nearness are made irrefutably clear to those who have ever had the experience is the utterly incomparable _feeling of happiness_ which is connected with the nearness, and which is therefore not only a possible and altogether proper feeling for us to have here below, but is the best and most indispensable proof of God's reality. No other proof is equally convincing, and therefore happiness is the point from which every efficacious new theology should start." In the hour immediately before us, I shall invite you to consider the simpler kinds of religious happiness, leaving the more complex sorts to be treated on a later day. In many persons, happiness is congenital and irreclaimable. "Cosmic emotion" inevitably takes in them the form of enthusiasm and freedom. I speak not only of those who are animally happy. I mean those who, when unhappiness is offered or proposed to them, positively refuse to feel it, as if it were something mean and wrong. We find such persons in every age, passionately flinging themselves upon their sense of the goodness of life, in spite of the hardships of their own condition, and in spite of the sinister theologies into which they may be born. From the outset their religion is one of union with the divine. The heretics who went before the reformation are lavishly accused by the church writers of antinomian practices, just as the first Christians were accused of indulgence in orgies by the Romans. It is probable that there never has been a century in which the deliberate refusal to think ill of life has not been idealized by a sufficient number of persons to form sects, open or secret, who claimed all natural things to be permitted. Saint Augustine's maxim, _Dilige et quod vis fac_,--if you but love [God], you may do as you incline,--is morally one of the profoundest of observations, yet it is pregnant, for such persons, with passports beyond the bounds of conventional morality. According to their characters they have been refined or gross; but their belief has been at all times systematic enough to constitute a definite religious attitude. God was for them a giver of freedom, and the sting of evil was overcome. Saint Francis and his immediate disciples were, on the whole, of this company of spirits, of which there are of course infinite varieties. Rousseau in the earlier years of his writing, Diderot, B. de Saint Pierre, and many of the leaders of the eighteenth century anti-christian movement were of this optimistic type. They owed their influence to a certain authoritativeness in their feeling that Nature, if you will only trust her sufficiently, is absolutely good. It is to be hoped that we all have some friend, perhaps more often feminine than masculine, and young than old, whose soul is of this sky- blue tint, whose affinities are rather with flowers and birds and all enchanting innocencies than with dark human passions, who can think no ill of man or God, and in whom religious gladness, being in possession from the outset, needs no deliverance from any antecedent burden. "God has two families of children on this earth," says Francis W. Newman,(33) "_the once-born_ and _the twice-born_," and the once- born he describes as follows: "They see God, not as a strict Judge, not as a Glorious Potentate; but as the animating Spirit of a beautiful harmonious world, Beneficent and Kind, Merciful as well as Pure. The same characters generally have no metaphysical tendencies: they do not look back into themselves. Hence they are not distressed by their own imperfections: yet it would be absurd to call them self-righteous; for they hardly think of themselves _at all_. This childlike quality of their nature makes the opening of religion very happy to them: for they no more shrink from God, than a child from an emperor, before whom the parent trembles: in fact, they have no vivid conception of _any_ of the qualities in which the severer Majesty of God consists.(34) He is to them the impersonation of Kindness and Beauty. They read his character, not in the disordered world of man, but in romantic and harmonious nature. Of human sin they know perhaps little in their own hearts and not very much in the world; and human suffering does but melt them to tenderness. Thus, when they approach God, no inward disturbance ensues; and without being as yet spiritual, they have a certain complacency and perhaps romantic sense of excitement in their simple worship." In the Romish Church such characters find a more congenial soil to grow in than in Protestantism, whose fashions of feeling have been set by minds of a decidedly pessimistic order. But even in Protestantism they have been abundant enough; and in its recent "liberal" developments of Unitarianism and latitudinarianism generally, minds of this order have played and still are playing leading and constructive parts. Emerson himself is an admirable example. Theodore Parker is another,--here are a couple of characteristic passages from Parker's correspondence.(35) "Orthodox scholars say: 'In the heathen classics you find no consciousness of sin.' It is very true--God be thanked for it. They were conscious of wrath, of cruelty, avarice, drunkenness, lust, sloth, cowardice, and other actual vices, and struggled and got rid of the deformities, but they were not conscious of 'enmity against God,' and didn't sit down and whine and groan against non- existent evil. I have done wrong things enough in my life, and do them now; I miss the mark, draw bow, and try again. But I am not conscious of hating God, or man, or right, or love, and I know there is much 'health in me'; and in my body, even now, there dwelleth many a good thing, spite of consumption and Saint Paul." In another letter Parker writes: "I have swum in clear sweet waters all my days; and if sometimes they were a little cold, and the stream ran adverse and something rough, it was never too strong to be breasted and swum through. From the days of earliest boyhood, when I went stumbling through the grass,... up to the gray-bearded manhood of this time, there is none but has left me honey in the hive of memory that I now feed on for present delight. When I recall the years ... I am filled with a sense of sweetness and wonder that such little things can make a mortal so exceedingly rich. But I must confess that the chiefest of all my delights is still the religious." Another good expression of the "once-born" type of consciousness, developing straight and natural, with no element of morbid compunction or crisis, is contained in the answer of Dr. Edward Everett Hale, the eminent Unitarian preacher and writer, to one of Dr. Starbuck's circulars. I quote a part of it:-- "I observe, with profound regret, the religious struggles which come into many biographies, as if almost essential to the formation of the hero. I ought to speak of these, to say that any man has an advantage, not to be estimated, who is born, as I was, into a family where the religion is simple and rational; who is trained in the theory of such a religion, so that he never knows, for an hour, what these religious or irreligious struggles are. I always knew God loved me, and I was always grateful to him for the world he placed me in. I always liked to tell him so, and was always glad to receive his suggestions to me.... I can remember perfectly that when I was coming to manhood, the half- philosophical novels of the time had a deal to say about the young men and maidens who were facing the 'problem of life.' I had no idea whatever what the problem of life was. To live with all my might seemed to me easy; to learn where there was so much to learn seemed pleasant and almost of course; to lend a hand, if one had a chance, natural; and if one did this, why, he enjoyed life because he could not help it, and without proving to himself that he ought to enjoy it.... A child who is early taught that he is God's child, that he may live and move and have his being in God, and that he has, therefore, infinite strength at hand for the conquering of any difficulty, will take life more easily, and probably will make more of it, than one who is told that he is born the child of wrath and wholly incapable of good."(36) One can but recognize in such writers as these the presence of a temperament organically weighted on the side of cheer and fatally forbidden to linger, as those of opposite temperament linger, over the darker aspects of the universe. In some individuals optimism may become quasi-pathological. The capacity for even a transient sadness or a momentary humility seems cut off from them as by a kind of congenital anæsthesia.(37) The supreme contemporary example of such an inability to feel evil is of course Walt Whitman. "His favorite occupation," writes his disciple, Dr. Bucke, "seemed to be strolling or sauntering about outdoors by himself, looking at the grass, the trees, the flowers, the vistas of light, the varying aspects of the sky, and listening to the birds, the crickets, the tree frogs, and all the hundreds of natural sounds. It was evident that these things gave him a pleasure far beyond what they give to ordinary people. Until I knew the man," continues Dr. Bucke, "it had not occurred to me that any one could derive so much absolute happiness from these things as he did. He was very fond of flowers, either wild or cultivated; liked all sorts. I think he admired lilacs and sunflowers just as much as roses. Perhaps, indeed, no man who ever lived liked so many things and disliked so few as Walt Whitman. All natural objects seemed to have a charm for him. All sights and sounds seemed to please him. He appeared to like (and I believe he did like) all the men, women, and children he saw (though I never knew him to say that he liked any one), but each who knew him felt that he liked him or her, and that he liked others also. I never knew him to argue or dispute, and he never spoke about money. He always justified, sometimes playfully, sometimes quite seriously, those who spoke harshly of himself or his writings, and I often thought he even took pleasure in the opposition of enemies. When I first knew [him], I used to think that he watched himself, and would not allow his tongue to give expression to fretfulness, antipathy, complaint, and remonstrance. It did not occur to me as possible that these mental states could be absent in him. After long observation, however, I satisfied myself that such absence or unconsciousness was entirely real. He never spoke deprecatingly of any nationality or class of men, or time in the world's history, or against any trades or occupations--not even against any animals, insects, or inanimate things, nor any of the laws of nature, nor any of the results of those laws, such as illness, deformity, and death. He never complained or grumbled either at the weather, pain, illness, or anything else. He never swore. He could not very well, since he never spoke in anger and apparently never was angry. He never exhibited fear, and I do not believe he ever felt it."(38) Walt Whitman owes his importance in literature to the systematic expulsion from his writings of all contractile elements. The only sentiments he allowed himself to express were of the expansive order; and he expressed these in the first person, not as your mere monstrously conceited individual might so express them, but vicariously for all men, so that a passionate and mystic ontological emotion suffuses his words, and ends by persuading the reader that men and women, life and death, and all things are divinely good. Thus it has come about that many persons to-day regard Walt Whitman as the restorer of the eternal natural religion. He has infected them with his own love of comrades, with his own gladness that he and they exist. Societies are actually formed for his cult; a periodical organ exists for its propagation, in which the lines of orthodoxy and heterodoxy are already beginning to be drawn;(39) hymns are written by others in his peculiar prosody; and he is even explicitly compared with the founder of the Christian religion, not altogether to the advantage of the latter. Whitman is often spoken of as a "pagan." The word nowadays means sometimes the mere natural animal man without a sense of sin; sometimes it means a Greek or Roman with his own peculiar religious consciousness. In neither of these senses does it fitly define this poet. He is more than your mere animal man who has not tasted of the tree of good and evil. He is aware enough of sin for a swagger to be present in his indifference towards it, a conscious pride in his freedom from flexions and contractions, which your genuine pagan in the first sense of the word would never show. "I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self- contained, I stand and look at them long and long; They do not sweat and whine about their condition. They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins. Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago, Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth."(40) No natural pagan could have written these well-known lines. But on the other hand Whitman is less than a Greek or Roman; for their consciousness, even in Homeric times, was full to the brim of the sad mortality of this sunlit world, and such a consciousness Walt Whitman resolutely refuses to adopt. When, for example, Achilles, about to slay Lycaon, Priam's young son, hears him sue for mercy, he stops to say:-- "Ah, friend, thou too must die: why thus lamentest thou? Patroclos too is dead, who was better far than thou.... Over me too hang death and forceful fate. There cometh morn or eve or some noonday when my life too some man shall take in battle, whether with spear he smite, or arrow from the string."(41) Then Achilles savagely severs the poor boy's neck with his sword, heaves him by the foot into the Scamander, and calls to the fishes of the river to eat the white fat of Lycaon. Just as here the cruelty and the sympathy each ring true, and do not mix or interfere with one another, so did the Greeks and Romans keep all their sadnesses and gladnesses unmingled and entire. Instinctive good they did not reckon sin; nor had they any such desire to save the credit of the universe as to make them insist, as so many of _us_ insist, that what immediately appears as evil must be "good in the making," or something equally ingenious. Good was good, and bad just bad, for the earlier Greeks. They neither denied the ills of nature,--Walt Whitman's verse, "What is called good is perfect and what is called bad is just as perfect," would have been mere silliness to them,--nor did they, in order to escape from those ills, invent "another and a better world" of the imagination, in which, along with the ills, the innocent goods of sense would also find no place. This integrity of the instinctive reactions, this freedom from all moral sophistry and strain, gives a pathetic dignity to ancient pagan feeling. And this quality Whitman's outpourings have not got. His optimism is too voluntary and defiant; his gospel has a touch of bravado and an affected twist,(42) and this diminishes its effect on many readers who yet are well disposed towards optimism, and on the whole quite willing to admit that in important respects Whitman is of the genuine lineage of the prophets. ------------------------------------- If, then, we give the name of healthy-mindedness to the tendency which looks on all things and sees that they are good, we find that we must distinguish between a more involuntary and a more voluntary or systematic way of being healthy-minded. In its involuntary variety, healthy- mindedness is a way of feeling happy about things immediately. In its systematical variety, it is an abstract way of conceiving things as good. Every abstract way of conceiving things selects some one aspect of them as their essence for the time being, and disregards the other aspects. Systematic healthy-mindedness, conceiving good as the essential and universal aspect of being, deliberately excludes evil from its field of vision; and although, when thus nakedly stated, this might seem a difficult feat to perform for one who is intellectually sincere with himself and honest about facts, a little reflection shows that the situation is too complex to lie open to so simple a criticism. In the first place, happiness, like every other emotional state, has blindness and insensibility to opposing facts given it as its instinctive weapon for self-protection against disturbance. When happiness is actually in possession, the thought of evil can no more acquire the feeling of reality than the thought of good can gain reality when melancholy rules. To the man actively happy, from whatever cause, evil simply cannot then and there be believed in. He must ignore it; and to the bystander he may then seem perversely to shut his eyes to it and hush it up. But more than this: the hushing of it up may, in a perfectly candid and honest mind, grow into a deliberate religious policy, or _parti pris_. Much of what we call evil is due entirely to the way men take the phenomenon. It can so often be converted into a bracing and tonic good by a simple change of the sufferer's inner attitude from one of fear to one of fight; its sting so often departs and turns into a relish when, after vainly seeking to shun it, we agree to face about and bear it cheerfully, that a man is simply bound in honor, with reference to many of the facts that seem at first to disconcert his peace, to adopt this way of escape. Refuse to admit their badness; despise their power; ignore their presence; turn your attention the other way; and so far as you yourself are concerned at any rate, though the facts may still exist, their evil character exists no longer. Since you make them evil or good by your own thoughts about them, it is the ruling of your thoughts which proves to be your principal concern. The deliberate adoption of an optimistic turn of mind thus makes its entrance into philosophy. And once in, it is hard to trace its lawful bounds. Not only does the human instinct for happiness, bent on self- protection by ignoring, keep working in its favor, but higher inner ideals have weighty words to say. The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly. What can be more base and unworthy than the pining, puling, mumping mood, no matter by what outward ills it may have been engendered? What is more injurious to others? What less helpful as a way out of the difficulty? It but fastens and perpetuates the trouble which occasioned it, and increases the total evil of the situation. At all costs, then, we ought to reduce the sway of that mood; we ought to scout it in ourselves and others, and never show it tolerance. But it is impossible to carry on this discipline in the subjective sphere without zealously emphasizing the brighter and minimizing the darker aspects of the objective sphere of things at the same time. And thus our resolution not to indulge in misery, beginning at a comparatively small point within ourselves, may not stop until it has brought the entire frame of reality under a systematic conception optimistic enough to be congenial with its needs. In all this I say nothing of any mystical insight or persuasion that the total frame of things absolutely must be good. Such mystical persuasion plays an enormous part in the history of the religious consciousness, and we must look at it later with some care. But we need not go so far at present. More ordinary non-mystical conditions of rapture suffice for my immediate contention. All invasive moral states and passionate enthusiasms make one feelingless to evil in some direction. The common penalties cease to deter the patriot, the usual prudences are flung by the lover to the winds. When the passion is extreme, suffering may actually be gloried in, provided it be for the ideal cause, death may lose its sting, the grave its victory. In these states, the ordinary contrast of good and ill seems to be swallowed up in a higher denomination, an omnipotent excitement which engulfs the evil, and which the human being welcomes as the crowning experience of his life. This, he says, is truly to live, and I exult in the heroic opportunity and adventure. The systematic cultivation of healthy-mindedness as a religious attitude is therefore consonant with important currents in human nature, and is anything but absurd. In fact, we all do cultivate it more or less, even when our professed theology should in consistency forbid it. We divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can; and the slaughter- houses and indecencies without end on which our life is founded are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer and cleaner and better than the world that really is.(43) The advance of liberalism, so-called, in Christianity, during the past fifty years, may fairly be called a victory of healthy-mindedness within the church over the morbidness with which the old hell-fire theology was more harmoniously related. We have now whole congregations whose preachers, far from magnifying our consciousness of sin, seem devoted rather to making little of it. They ignore, or even deny, eternal punishment, and insist on the dignity rather than on the depravity of man. They look at the continual preoccupation of the old-fashioned Christian with the salvation of his soul as something sickly and reprehensible rather than admirable; and a sanguine and "muscular" attitude, which to our forefathers would have seemed purely heathen, has become in their eyes an ideal element of Christian character. I am not asking whether or not they are right, I am only pointing out the change. The persons to whom I refer have still retained for the most part their nominal connection with Christianity, in spite of their discarding of its more pessimistic theological elements. But in that "theory of evolution" which, gathering momentum for a century, has within the past twenty-five years swept so rapidly over Europe and America, we see the ground laid for a new sort of religion of Nature, which has entirely displaced Christianity from the thought of a large part of our generation. The idea of a universal evolution lends itself to a doctrine of general meliorism and progress which fits the religious needs of the healthy-minded so well that it seems almost as if it might have been created for their use. Accordingly we find "evolutionism" interpreted thus optimistically and embraced as a substitute for the religion they were born in, by a multitude of our contemporaries who have either been trained scientifically, or been fond of reading popular science, and who had already begun to be inwardly dissatisfied with what seemed to them the harshness and irrationality of the orthodox Christian scheme. As examples are better than descriptions, I will quote a document received in answer to Professor Starbuck's circular of questions. The writer's state of mind may by courtesy be called a religion, for it is his reaction on the whole nature of things, it is systematic and reflective, and it loyally binds him to certain inner ideals. I think you will recognize in him, coarse- meated and incapable of wounded spirit as he is, a sufficiently familiar contemporary type. Q. _What does Religion mean to you?_ A. It means nothing; and it seems, so far as I can observe, useless to others. I am sixty-seven years of age and have resided in X. fifty years, and have been in business forty-five, consequently I have some little experience of life and men, and some women too, and I find that the most religious and pious people are as a rule those most lacking in uprightness and morality. The men who do not go to church or have any religious convictions are the best. Praying, singing of hymns, and sermonizing are pernicious--they teach us to rely on some supernatural power, when we ought to rely on ourselves. I _tee_totally disbelieve in a God. The God-idea was begotten in ignorance, fear, and a general lack of any knowledge of Nature. If I were to die now, being in a healthy condition for my age, both mentally and physically, I would just as lief, yes, rather, die with a hearty enjoyment of music, sport, or any other rational pastime. As a timepiece stops, we die--there being no immortality in either case. Q. _What comes before your mind corresponding to the words God, Heaven, Angels, etc.?_ A. Nothing whatever. I am a man without a religion. These words mean so much mythic bosh. Q. _Have you had any experiences which appeared providential?_ A. None whatever. There is no agency of the superintending kind. A little judicious observation as well as knowledge of scientific law will convince any one of this fact. Q. _What things work most strongly on your emotions?_ A. Lively songs and music; Pinafore instead of an Oratorio. I like Scott, Burns, Byron, Longfellow, especially Shakespeare, etc., etc. Of songs, the Star-spangled Banner, America, Marseillaise, and all moral and soul-stirring songs, but wishy-washy hymns are my detestation. I greatly enjoy nature, especially fine weather, and until within a few years used to walk Sundays into the country, twelve miles often, with no fatigue, and bicycle forty or fifty. I have dropped the bicycle. I never go to church, but attend lectures when there are any good ones. All of my thoughts and cogitations have been of a healthy and cheerful kind, for instead of doubts and fears I see things as they are, for I endeavor to adjust myself to my environment. This I regard as the deepest law. Mankind is a progressive animal. I am satisfied he will have made a great advance over his present status a thousand years hence. Q. _What is your notion of sin?_ A. It seems to me that sin is a condition, a disease, incidental to man's development not being yet advanced enough. Morbidness over it increases the disease. We should think that a million of years hence equity, justice, and mental and physical good order will be so fixed and organized that no one will have any idea of evil or sin. Q. _What is your temperament?_ A. Nervous, active, wide-awake, mentally and physically. Sorry that Nature compels us to sleep at all. If we are in search of a broken and a contrite heart, clearly we need not look to this brother. His contentment with the finite incases him like a lobster-shell and shields him from all morbid repining at his distance from the Infinite. We have in him an excellent example of the optimism which may be encouraged by popular science. To my mind a current far more important and interesting religiously than that which sets in from natural science towards healthy-mindedness is that which has recently poured over America and seems to be gathering force every day,--I am ignorant what foothold it may yet have acquired in Great Britain,--and to which, for the sake of having a brief designation, I will give the title of the "Mind-cure movement." There are various sects of this "New Thought," to use another of the names by which it calls itself; but their agreements are so profound that their differences may be neglected for my present purpose, and I will treat the movement, without apology, as if it were a simple thing. It is a deliberately optimistic scheme of life, with both a speculative and a practical side. In its gradual development during the last quarter of a century, it has taken up into itself a number of contributory elements, and it must now be reckoned with as a genuine religious power. It has reached the stage, for example, when the demand for its literature is great enough for insincere stuff, mechanically produced for the market, to be to a certain extent supplied by publishers,--a phenomenon never observed, I imagine, until a religion has got well past its earliest insecure beginnings. One of the doctrinal sources of Mind-cure is the four Gospels; another is Emersonianism or New England transcendentalism; another is Berkeleyan idealism; another is spiritism, with its messages of "law" and "progress" and "development"; another the optimistic popular science evolutionism of which I have recently spoken; and, finally, Hinduism has contributed a strain. But the most characteristic feature of the mind-cure movement is an inspiration much more direct. The leaders in this faith have had an intuitive belief in the all-saving power of healthy-minded attitudes as such, in the conquering efficacy of courage, hope, and trust, and a correlative contempt for doubt, fear, worry, and all nervously precautionary states of mind.(44) Their belief has in a general way been corroborated by the practical experience of their disciples; and this experience forms to-day a mass imposing in amount. The blind have been made to see, the halt to walk; lifelong invalids have had their health restored. The moral fruits have been no less remarkable. The deliberate adoption of a healthy-minded attitude has proved possible to many who never supposed they had it in them; regeneration of character has gone on on an extensive scale; and cheerfulness has been restored to countless homes. The indirect influence of this has been great. The mind- cure principles are beginning so to pervade the air that one catches their spirit at second-hand. One hears of the "Gospel of Relaxation," of the "Don't Worry Movement," of people who repeat to themselves, "Youth, health, vigor!" when dressing in the morning, as their motto for the day. Complaints of the weather are getting to be forbidden in many households; and more and more people are recognizing it to be bad form to speak of disagreeable sensations, or to make much of the ordinary inconveniences and ailments of life. These general tonic effects on public opinion would be good even if the more striking results were non-existent. But the latter abound so that we can afford to overlook the innumerable failures and self-deceptions that are mixed in with them (for in everything human failure is a matter of course), and we can also overlook the verbiage of a good deal of the mind-cure literature, some of which is so moonstruck with optimism and so vaguely expressed that an academically trained intellect finds it almost impossible to read it at all. The plain fact remains that the spread of the movement has been due to practical fruits, and the extremely practical turn of character of the American people has never been better shown than by the fact that this, their only decidedly original contribution to the systematic philosophy of life, should be so intimately knit up with concrete therapeutics. To the importance of mind-cure the medical and clerical professions in the United States are beginning, though with much recalcitrancy and protesting, to open their eyes. It is evidently bound to develop still farther, both speculatively and practically, and its latest writers are far and away the ablest of the group.(45) It matters nothing that, just as there are hosts of persons who cannot pray, so there are greater hosts who cannot by any possibility be influenced by the mind-curers' ideas. For our immediate purpose, the important point is that so large a number should exist who _can_ be so influenced. They form a psychic type to be studied with respect.(46) To come now to a little closer quarters with their creed. The fundamental pillar on which it rests is nothing more than the general basis of all religious experience, the fact that man has a dual nature, and is connected with two spheres of thought, a shallower and a profounder sphere, in either of which he may learn to live more habitually. The shallower and lower sphere is that of the fleshly sensations, instincts, and desires, of egotism, doubt, and the lower personal interests. But whereas Christian theology has always considered _frowardness_ to be the essential vice of this part of human nature, the mind-curers say that the mark of the beast in it is _fear_; and this is what gives such an entirely new religious turn to their persuasion. "Fear," to quote a writer of the school, "has had its uses in the evolutionary process, and seems to constitute the whole of forethought in most animals; but that it should remain any part of the mental equipment of human civilized life is an absurdity. I find that the fear element of forethought is not stimulating to those more civilized persons to whom duty and attraction are the natural motives, but is weakening and deterrent. As soon as it becomes unnecessary, fear becomes a positive deterrent, and should be entirely removed, as dead flesh is removed from living tissue. To assist in the analysis of fear, and in the denunciation of its expressions, I have coined the word _fearthought_ to stand for the unprofitable element of forethought, and have defined the word 'worry' as _fearthought in contradistinction to forethought_. I have also defined fearthought as _the self-imposed or self- permitted suggestion of inferiority_, in order to place it where it really belongs, in the category of harmful, unnecessary, and therefore not respectable things."(47) The "misery-habit," the "martyr-habit," engendered by the prevalent "fearthought," get pungent criticism from the mind-cure writers:-- "Consider for a moment the habits of life into which we are born. There are certain social conventions or customs and alleged requirements, there is a theological bias, a general view of the world. There are conservative ideas in regard to our early training, our education, marriage, and occupation in life. Following close upon this, there is a long series of anticipations, namely, that we shall suffer certain children's diseases, diseases of middle life, and of old age; the thought that we shall grow old, lose our faculties, and again become childlike; while crowning all is the fear of death. Then there is a long line of particular fears and trouble-bearing expectations, such, for example, as ideas associated with certain articles of food, the dread of the east wind, the terrors of hot weather, the aches and pains associated with cold weather, the fear of catching cold if one sits in a draught, the coming of hay-fever upon the 14th of August in the middle of the day, and so on through a long list of fears, dreads, worriments, anxieties, anticipations, expectations, pessimisms, morbidities, and the whole ghostly train of fateful shapes which our fellow-men, and especially physicians, are ready to help us conjure up, an array worthy to rank with Bradley's 'unearthly ballet of bloodless categories.' "Yet this is not all. This vast array is swelled by innumerable volunteers from daily life,--the fear of accident, the possibility of calamity, the loss of property, the chance of robbery, of fire, or the outbreak of war. And it is not deemed sufficient to fear for ourselves. When a friend is taken ill, we must forthwith fear the worst and apprehend death. If one meets with sorrow ... sympathy means to enter into and increase the suffering."(48) "Man," to quote another writer, "often has fear stamped upon him before his entrance into the outer world; he is reared in fear; all his life is passed in bondage to fear of disease and death, and thus his whole mentality becomes cramped, limited, and depressed, and his body follows its shrunken pattern and specification.... Think of the millions of sensitive and responsive souls among our ancestors who have been under the dominion of such a perpetual nightmare! Is it not surprising that health exists at all? Nothing but the boundless divine love, exuberance, and vitality, constantly poured in, even though unconsciously to us, could in some degree neutralize such an ocean of morbidity."(49) Although the disciples of the mind-cure often use Christian terminology, one sees from such quotations how widely their notion of the fall of man diverges from that of ordinary Christians.(50) Their notion of man's higher nature is hardly less divergent, being decidedly pantheistic. The spiritual in man appears in the mind-cure philosophy as partly conscious, but chiefly subconscious; and through the subconscious part of it we are already one with the Divine without any miracle of grace, or abrupt creation of a new inner man. As this view is variously expressed by different writers, we find in it traces of Christian mysticism, of transcendental idealism, of vedantism, and of the modern psychology of the subliminal self. A quotation or two will put us at the central point of view:-- "The great central fact of the universe is that spirit of infinite life and power that is back of all, that manifests itself in and through all. This spirit of infinite life and power that is back of all is what I call God. I care not what term you may use, be it Kindly Light, Providence, the Over-Soul, Omnipotence, or whatever term may be most convenient, so long as we are agreed in regard to the great central fact itself. God then fills the universe alone, so that all is from Him and in Him, and there is nothing that is outside. He is the life of our life, our very life itself. We are partakers of the life of God; and though we differ from Him in that we are individualized spirits, while He is the Infinite Spirit, including us, as well as all else beside, yet in essence the life of God and the life of man are identically the same, and so are one. They differ not in essence or quality; they differ in degree. "The great central fact in human life is the coming into a conscious vital realization of our oneness with this Infinite Life, and the opening of ourselves fully to this divine inflow. In just the degree that we come into a conscious realization of our oneness with the Infinite Life, and open ourselves to this divine inflow, do we actualize in ourselves the qualities and powers of the Infinite Life, do we make ourselves channels through which the Infinite Intelligence and Power can work. In just the degree in which you realize your oneness with the Infinite Spirit, you will exchange dis-ease for ease, inharmony for harmony, suffering and pain for abounding health and strength. To recognize our own divinity, and our intimate relation to the Universal, is to attach the belts of our machinery to the powerhouse of the Universe. One need remain in hell no longer than one chooses to; we can rise to any heaven we ourselves choose; and when we choose so to rise, all the higher powers of the Universe combine to help us heavenward."(51) Let me now pass from these abstracter statements to some more concrete accounts of experience with the mind-cure religion. I have many answers from correspondents--the only difficulty is to choose. The first two whom I shall quote are my personal friends. One of them, a woman, writing as follows, expresses well the feeling of continuity with the Infinite Power, by which all mind-cure disciples are inspired. "The first underlying cause of all sickness, weakness, or depression is the _human sense of separateness_ from that Divine Energy which we call God. The soul which can feel and affirm in serene but jubilant confidence, as did the Nazarene: 'I and my Father are one,' has no further need of healer, or of healing. This is the whole truth in a nutshell, and other foundation for wholeness can no man lay than this fact of impregnable divine union. Disease can no longer attack one whose feet are planted on this rock, who feels hourly, momently, the influx of the Deific Breath. If one with Omnipotence, how can weariness enter the consciousness, how illness assail that indomitable spark? "This possibility of annulling forever the law of fatigue has been abundantly proven in my own case; for my earlier life bears a record of many, many years of bedridden invalidism, with spine and lower limbs paralyzed. My thoughts were no more impure than they are to-day, although my belief in the necessity of illness was dense and unenlightened; but since my resurrection in the flesh, I have worked as a healer unceasingly for fourteen years without a vacation, and can truthfully assert that I have never known a moment of fatigue or pain, although coming in touch constantly with excessive weakness, illness, and disease of all kinds. For how can a conscious part of Deity be sick?--since 'Greater is he that is _with_ us than all that can strive against us.' " My second correspondent, also a woman, sends me the following statement:-- "Life seemed difficult to me at one time. I was always breaking down, and had several attacks of what is called nervous prostration, with terrible insomnia, being on the verge of insanity; besides having many other troubles, especially of the digestive organs. I had been sent away from home in charge of doctors, had taken all the narcotics, stopped all work, been fed up, and in fact knew all the doctors within reach. But I never recovered permanently till this New Thought took possession of me. "I think that the one thing which impressed me most was learning the fact that we must be in absolutely constant relation or mental touch (this word is to me very expressive) with that essence of life which permeates all and which we call God. This is almost unrecognizable unless we live it into ourselves _actually_, that is, by a constant turning to the very innermost, deepest consciousness of our real selves or of God in us, for illumination from within, just as we turn to the sun for light, warmth, and invigoration without. When you do this consciously, realizing that to turn inward to the light within you is to live in the presence of God or your divine self, you soon discover the unreality of the objects to which you have hitherto been turning and which have engrossed you without. "I have come to disregard the meaning of this attitude for bodily health _as such_, because that comes of itself, as an incidental result, and cannot be found by any special mental act or desire to have it, beyond that general attitude of mind I have referred to above. That which we usually make the object of life, those outer things we are all so wildly seeking, which we so often live and die for, but which then do not give us peace and happiness, they should all come of themselves as accessory, and as the mere outcome or natural result of a far higher life sunk deep in the bosom of the spirit. This life is the real seeking of the kingdom of God, the desire for his supremacy in our hearts, so that all else comes as that which shall be 'added unto you'--as quite incidental and as a surprise to us, perhaps; and yet it is the proof of the reality of the perfect poise in the very centre of our being. "When I say that we commonly make the object of our life that which we should not work for primarily, I mean many things which the world considers praiseworthy and excellent, such as success in business, fame as author or artist, physician or lawyer, or renown in philanthropic undertakings. Such things should be results, not objects. I would also include pleasures of many kinds which seem harmless and good at the time, and are pursued because many accept them--I mean conventionalities, sociabilities, and fashions in their various development, these being mostly approved by the masses, although they may be unreal, and even unhealthy superfluities." Here is another case, more concrete, also that of a woman. I read you these cases without comment,--they express so many varieties of the state of mind we are studying. "I had been a sufferer from my childhood till my fortieth year. [Details of ill-health are given which I omit.] I had been in Vermont several months hoping for good from the change of air, but steadily growing weaker, when one day during the latter part of October, while resting in the afternoon, I suddenly heard as it were these words: 'You will be healed and do a work you never dreamed of.' These words were impressed upon my mind with such power I said at once that only God could have put them there. I believed them in spite of myself and of my suffering and weakness, which continued until Christmas, when I returned to Boston. Within two days a young friend offered to take me to a mental healer (this was January 7, 1881). The healer said: 'There is nothing but Mind; we are expressions of the One Mind; body is only a mortal belief; as a man thinketh so is he.' I could not accept all she said, but I translated all that was there for _me_ in this way: 'There is nothing but God; I am created by Him, and am absolutely dependent upon Him; mind is given me to use; and by just so much of it as I will put upon the thought of right action in body I shall be lifted out of bondage to my ignorance and fear and past experience.' That day I commenced accordingly to take a little of every food provided for the family, constantly saying to myself: 'The Power that created the stomach must take care of what I have eaten.' By holding these suggestions through the evening I went to bed and fell asleep, saying: 'I am soul, spirit, just one with God's Thought of me,' and slept all night without waking, for the first time in several years [the distress-turns had usually recurred about two o'clock in the night]. I felt the next day like an escaped prisoner, and believed I had found the secret that would in time give me perfect health. Within ten days I was able to eat anything provided for others, and after two weeks I began to have my own positive mental suggestions of Truth, which were to me like stepping-stones. I will note a few of them; they came about two weeks apart. "1st. I am Soul, therefore it is well with me. "2d. I am Soul, therefore I _am_ well. "3d. A sort of inner vision of myself as a four-footed beast with a protuberance on every part of my body where I had suffering, with my own face, begging me to acknowledge it as myself. I resolutely fixed my attention on being well, and refused to even look at my old self in this form. "4th. Again the vision of the beast far in the background, with faint voice. Again refusal to acknowledge. "5th. Once more the vision, but only of my eyes with the longing look; and again the refusal. Then came the conviction, the inner consciousness, that I was perfectly well and always had been, for I was Soul, an expression of God's Perfect Thought. That was to me the perfect and completed separation between what I was and what I appeared to be. I succeeded in never losing sight after this of my real being, by constantly affirming this truth, and by degrees (though it took me two years of hard work to get there) _I expressed health continuously throughout my whole body_. "In my subsequent nineteen years' experience I have never known this Truth to fail when I applied it, though in my ignorance I have often failed to apply it, but through my failures I have learned the simplicity and trustfulness of the little child." But I fear that I risk tiring you by so many examples, and I must lead you back to philosophic generalities again. You see already by such records of experience how impossible it is not to class mind-cure as primarily a religious movement. Its doctrine of the oneness of our life with God's life is in fact quite indistinguishable from an interpretation of Christ's message which in these very Gifford lectures has been defended by some of your very ablest Scottish religious philosophers.(52) But philosophers usually profess to give a quasi-logical explanation of the existence of evil, whereas of the general fact of evil in the world, the existence of the selfish, suffering, timorous finite consciousness, the mind-curers, so far as I am acquainted with them, profess to give no speculative explanation. Evil is empirically there for them as it is for everybody, but the practical point of view predominates, and it would ill agree with the spirit of their system to spend time in worrying over it as a "mystery" or "problem," or in "laying to heart" the lesson of its experience, after the manner of the Evangelicals. Don't reason about it, as Dante says, but give a glance and pass beyond! It is Avidhya, ignorance! something merely to be outgrown and left behind, transcended and forgotten. Christian Science so-called, the sect of Mrs. Eddy, is the most radical branch of mind-cure in its dealings with evil. For it evil is simply a _lie_, and any one who mentions it is a liar. The optimistic ideal of duty forbids us to pay it the compliment even of explicit attention. Of course, as our next lectures will show us, this is a bad speculative omission, but it is intimately linked with the practical merits of the system we are examining. Why regret a philosophy of evil, a mind-curer would ask us, if I can put you in possession of a life of good? After all, it is the life that tells; and mind-cure has developed a living system of mental hygiene which may well claim to have thrown all previous literature of the _Diätetik der Seele_ into the shade. This system is wholly and exclusively compacted of optimism: "Pessimism leads to weakness. Optimism leads to power." "Thoughts are things," as one of the most vigorous mind-cure writers prints in bold type at the bottom of each of his pages; and if your thoughts are of health, youth, vigor, and success, before you know it these things will also be your outward portion. No one can fail of the regenerative influence of optimistic thinking, pertinaciously pursued. Every man owns indefeasibly this inlet to the divine. Fear, on the contrary, and all the contracted and egoistic modes of thought, are inlets to destruction. Most mind-curers here bring in a doctrine that thoughts are "forces," and that, by virtue of a law that like attracts like, one man's thoughts draw to themselves as allies all the thoughts of the same character that exist the world over. Thus one gets, by one's thinking, reinforcements from elsewhere for the realization of one's desires; and the great point in the conduct of life is to get the heavenly forces on one's side by opening one's own mind to their influx. On the whole, one is struck by a psychological similarity between the mind-cure movement and the Lutheran and Wesleyan movements. To the believer in moralism and works, with his anxious query, "What shall I do to be saved?" Luther and Wesley replied: "You are saved now, if you would but believe it." And the mind-curers come with precisely similar words of emancipation. They speak, it is true, to persons for whom the conception of salvation has lost its ancient theological meaning, but who labor nevertheless with the same eternal human difficulty. _Things are wrong with them_; and "What shall I do to be clear, right, sound, whole, well?" is the form of their question. And the answer is: "You _are_ well, sound, and clear already, if you did but know it." "The whole matter may be summed up in one sentence," says one of the authors whom I have already quoted, "_God is well, and so are you_. You must awaken to the knowledge of your real being." The adequacy of their message to the mental needs of a large fraction of mankind is what gave force to those earlier gospels. Exactly the same adequacy holds in the case of the mind-cure message, foolish as it may sound upon its surface; and seeing its rapid growth in influence, and its therapeutic triumphs, one is tempted to ask whether it may not be destined (probably by very reason of the crudity and extravagance of many of its manifestations(53)) to play a part almost as great in the evolution of the popular religion of the future as did those earlier movements in their day. ------------------------------------- But I here fear that I may begin to "jar upon the nerves" of some of the members of this academic audience. Such contemporary vagaries, you may think, should hardly take so large a place in dignified Gifford lectures. I can only beseech you to have patience. The whole outcome of these lectures will, I imagine, be the emphasizing to your mind of the enormous diversities which the spiritual lives of different men exhibit. Their wants, their susceptibilities, and their capacities all vary and must be classed under different heads. The result is that we have really different types of religious experience; and, seeking in these lectures closer acquaintance with the healthy-minded type, we must take it where we find it in most radical form. The psychology of individual types of character has hardly begun even to be sketched as yet--our lectures may possibly serve as a crumb-like contribution to the structure. The first thing to bear in mind (especially if we ourselves belong to the clerico-academic- scientific type, the officially and conventionally "correct" type, "the deadly respectable" type, for which to ignore others is a besetting temptation) is that nothing can be more stupid than to bar out phenomena from our notice, merely because we are incapable of taking part in anything like them ourselves. Now the history of Lutheran salvation by faith, of methodistic conversions, and of what I call the mind-cure movement seems to prove the existence of numerous persons in whom--at any rate at a certain stage in their development--a change of character for the better, so far from being facilitated by the rules laid down by official moralists, will take place all the more successfully if those rules be exactly reversed. Official moralists advise us never to relax our strenuousness. "Be vigilant, day and night," they adjure us; "hold your passive tendencies in check; shrink from no effort; keep your will like a bow always bent." But the persons I speak of find that all this conscious effort leads to nothing but failure and vexation in their hands, and only makes them two-fold more the children of hell they were before. The tense and voluntary attitude becomes in them an impossible fever and torment. Their machinery refuses to run at all when the bearings are made so hot and the belts so tight. Under these circumstances the way to success, as vouched for by innumerable authentic personal narrations, is by an anti-moralistic method, by the "surrender" of which I spoke in my second lecture. Passivity, not activity; relaxation, not intentness, should be now the rule. Give up the feeling of responsibility, let go your hold, resign the care of your destiny to higher powers, be genuinely indifferent as to what becomes of it all, and you will find not only that you gain a perfect inward relief, but often also, in addition, the particular goods you sincerely thought you were renouncing. This is the salvation through self- despair, the dying to be truly born, of Lutheran theology, the passage into _nothing_ of which Jacob Behmen writes. To get to it, a critical point must usually be passed, a corner turned within one. Something must give way, a native hardness must break down and liquefy; and this event (as we shall abundantly see hereafter) is frequently sudden and automatic, and leaves on the Subject an impression that he has been wrought on by an external power. Whatever its ultimate significance may prove to be, this is certainly one fundamental form of human experience. Some say that the capacity or incapacity for it is what divides the religious from the merely moralistic character. With those who undergo it in its fullness, no criticism avails to cast doubt on its reality. They _know_; for they have actually _felt_ the higher powers, in giving up the tension of their personal will. A story which revivalist preachers often tell is that of a man who found himself at night slipping down the side of a precipice. At last he caught a branch which stopped his fall, and remained clinging to it in misery for hours. But finally his fingers had to loose their hold, and with a despairing farewell to life, he let himself drop. He fell just six inches. If he had given up the struggle earlier, his agony would have been spared. As the mother earth received him, so, the preachers tell us, will the everlasting arms receive _us_ if we confide absolutely in them, and give up the hereditary habit of relying on our personal strength, with its precautions that cannot shelter and safeguards that never save. The mind-curers have given the widest scope to this sort of experience. They have demonstrated that a form of regeneration by relaxing, by letting go, psychologically indistinguishable from the Lutheran justification by faith and the Wesleyan acceptance of free grace, is within the reach of persons who have no conviction of sin and care nothing for the Lutheran theology. It is but giving your little private convulsive self a rest, and finding that a greater Self is there. The results, slow or sudden, or great or small, of the combined optimism and expectancy, the regenerative phenomena which ensue on the abandonment of effort, remain firm facts of human nature, no matter whether we adopt a theistic, a pantheistic- idealistic, or a medical-materialistic view of their ultimate causal explanation.(54) When we take up the phenomena of revivalistic conversion, we shall learn something more about all this. Meanwhile I will say a brief word about the mind-curer's _methods_. They are of course largely suggestive. The suggestive influence of environment plays an enormous part in all spiritual education. But the word "suggestion," having acquired official status, is unfortunately already beginning to play in many quarters the part of a wet blanket upon investigation, being used to fend off all inquiry into the varying susceptibilities of individual cases. "Suggestion" is only another name for the power of ideas, _so far as they prove efficacious over belief and conduct_. Ideas efficacious over some people prove inefficacious over others. Ideas efficacious at some times and in some human surroundings are not so at other times and elsewhere. The ideas of Christian churches are not efficacious in the therapeutic direction to-day, whatever they may have been in earlier centuries; and when the whole question is as to why the salt has lost its savor here or gained it there, the mere blank waving of the word "suggestion" as if it were a banner gives no light. Dr. Goddard, whose candid psychological essay on Faith Cures ascribes them to nothing but ordinary suggestion, concludes by saying that "Religion [and by this he seems to mean our popular Christianity] has in it all there is in mental therapeutics, and has it in its best form. Living up to [our religious] ideas will do anything for us that can be done." And this in spite of the actual fact that the popular Christianity does absolutely _nothing_, or did nothing until mind-cure came to the rescue.(55) An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of a revelation. The mind-cure with its gospel of healthy-mindedness has come as a revelation to many whose hearts the church Christianity had left hardened. It has let loose their springs of higher life. In what can the originality of any religious movement consist, save in finding a channel, until then sealed up, through which those springs may be set free in some group of human beings? The force of personal faith, enthusiasm, and example, and above all the force of novelty, are always the prime suggestive agency in this kind of success. If mind-cure should ever become official, respectable, and intrenched, these elements of suggestive efficacy will be lost. In its acuter stages every religion must be a homeless Arab of the desert. The church knows this well enough, with its everlasting inner struggle of the acute religion of the few against the chronic religion of the many, indurated into an obstructiveness worse than that which irreligion opposes to the movings of the Spirit. "We may pray," says Jonathan Edwards, "concerning all those saints that are not lively Christians, that they may either be enlivened, or taken away; if that be true that is often said by some at this day, that these cold dead saints do more hurt than natural men, and lead more souls to hell, and that it would be well for mankind if they were all dead."(56) The next condition of success is the apparent existence, in large numbers, of minds who unite healthy-mindedness with readiness for regeneration by letting go. Protestantism has been too pessimistic as regards the natural man, Catholicism has been too legalistic and moralistic, for either the one or the other to appeal in any generous way to the type of character formed of this peculiar mingling of elements. However few of us here present may belong to such a type, it is now evident that it forms a specific moral combination, well represented in the world. Finally, mind-cure has made what in our protestant countries is an unprecedentedly great use of the subconscious life. To their reasoned advice and dogmatic assertion, its founders have added systematic exercise in passive relaxation, concentration, and meditation, and have even invoked something like hypnotic practice. I quote some passages at random:-- "The value, the potency of ideals is the great practical truth on which the New Thought most strongly insists,--the development namely from within outward, from small to great.(57) Consequently one's thought should be centred on the ideal outcome, even though this trust be literally like a step in the dark.(58) To attain the ability thus effectively to direct the mind, the New Thought advises the practice of concentration, or in other words, the attainment of self-control. One is to learn to marshal the tendencies of the mind, so that they may be held together as a unit by the chosen ideal. To this end, one should set apart times for silent meditation, by one's self, preferably in a room where the surroundings are favorable to spiritual thought. In New Thought terms, this is called 'entering the silence.' "(59) "The time will come when in the busy office or on the noisy street you can enter into the silence by simply drawing the mantle of your own thoughts about you and realizing that there and everywhere the Spirit of Infinite Life, Love, Wisdom, Peace, Power, and Plenty is guiding, keeping, protecting, leading you. This is the spirit of continual prayer.(60) One of the most intuitive men we ever met had a desk at a city office where several other gentlemen were doing business constantly, and often talking loudly. Entirely undisturbed by the many various sounds about him, this self-centred faithful man would, in any moment of perplexity, draw the curtains of privacy so completely about him that he would be as fully inclosed in his own psychic aura, and thereby as effectually removed from all distractions, as though he were alone in some primeval wood. Taking his difficulty with him into the mystic silence in the form of a direct question, to which he expected a certain answer, he would remain utterly passive until the reply came, and never once through many years' experience did he find himself disappointed or misled."(61) Wherein, I should like to know, does this _intrinsically_ differ from the practice of "recollection" which plays so great a part in Catholic discipline? Otherwise called the practice of the presence of God (and so known among ourselves, as for instance in Jeremy Taylor), it is thus defined by the eminent teacher Alvarez de Paz in his work on Contemplation. "It is the recollection of God, the thought of God, which in all places and circumstances makes us see him present, lets us commune respectfully and lovingly with him, and fills us with desire and affection for him.... Would you escape from every ill? Never lose this recollection of God, neither in prosperity nor in adversity, nor on any occasion whichsoever it be. Invoke not, to excuse yourself from this duty, either the difficulty or the importance of your business, for you can always remember that God sees you, that you are under his eye. If a thousand times an hour you forget him, reanimate a thousand times the recollection. If you cannot practice this exercise continuously, at least make yourself as familiar with it as possible; and, like unto those who in a rigorous winter draw near the fire as often as they can, go as often as you can to that ardent fire which will warm your soul."(62) All the external associations of the Catholic discipline are of course unlike anything in mind-cure thought, but the purely spiritual part of the exercise is identical in both communions, and in both communions those who urge it write with authority, for they have evidently experienced in their own persons that whereof they tell. Compare again some mind-cure utterances:-- "High, healthful, pure thinking can be encouraged, promoted, and strengthened. Its current can be turned upon grand ideals until it forms a habit and wears a channel. By means of such discipline the mental horizon can be flooded with the sunshine of beauty, wholeness, and harmony. To inaugurate pure and lofty thinking may at first seem difficult, even almost mechanical, but perseverance will at length render it easy, then pleasant, and finally delightful. "The soul's real world is that which it has built of its thoughts, mental states, and imaginations. If we _will_, we can turn our backs upon the lower and sensuous plane, and lift ourselves into the realm of the spiritual and Real, and there gain a residence. The assumption of states of expectancy and receptivity will attract spiritual sunshine, and it will flow in as naturally as air inclines to a vacuum.... Whenever the thought is not occupied with one's daily duty or profession, it should be sent aloft into the spiritual atmosphere. There are quiet leisure moments by day, and wakeful hours at night, when this wholesome and delightful exercise may be engaged in to great advantage. If one who has never made any systematic effort to lift and control the thought- forces will, for a single month, earnestly pursue the course here suggested, he will be surprised and delighted at the result, and nothing will induce him to go back to careless, aimless, and superficial thinking. At such favorable seasons the outside world, with all its current of daily events, is barred out, and one goes into the silent sanctuary of the inner temple of soul to commune and aspire. The spiritual hearing becomes delicately sensitive, so that the 'still, small voice' is audible, the tumultuous waves of external sense are hushed, and there is a great calm. The ego gradually becomes conscious that it is face to face with the Divine Presence; that mighty, healing, loving, Fatherly life which is nearer to us than we are to ourselves. There is soul-contact with the Parent-Soul, and an influx of life, love, virtue, health, and happiness from the Inexhaustible Fountain."(63) When we reach the subject of mysticism, you will undergo so deep an immersion into these exalted states of consciousness as to be wet all over, if I may so express myself; and the cold shiver of doubt with which this little sprinkling may affect you will have long since passed away--doubt, I mean, as to whether all such writing be not mere abstract talk and rhetoric set down _pour encourager les autres_. You will then be convinced, I trust, that these states of consciousness of "union" form a perfectly definite class of experiences, of which the soul may occasionally partake, and which certain persons may live by in a deeper sense than they live by anything else with which they have acquaintance. This brings me to a general philosophical reflection with which I should like to pass from the subject of healthy-mindedness, and close a topic which I fear is already only too long drawn out. It concerns the relation of all this systematized healthy-mindedness and mind-cure religion to scientific method and the scientific life. ------------------------------------- In a later lecture I shall have to treat explicitly of the relation of religion to science on the one hand, and to primeval savage thought on the other. There are plenty of persons to-day--"scientists" or "positivists," they are fond of calling themselves--who will tell you that religious thought is a mere survival, an atavistic reversion to a type of consciousness which humanity in its more enlightened examples has long since left behind and outgrown. If you ask them to explain themselves more fully, they will probably say that for primitive thought everything is conceived of under the form of personality. The savage thinks that things operate by personal forces, and for the sake of individual ends. For him, even external nature obeys individual needs and claims, just as if these were so many elementary powers. Now science, on the other hand, these positivists say, has proved that personality, so far from being an elementary force in nature, is but a passive resultant of the really elementary forces, physical, chemical, physiological, and psycho-physical, which are all impersonal and general in character. Nothing individual accomplishes anything in the universe save in so far as it obeys and exemplifies some universal law. Should you then inquire of them by what means science has thus supplanted primitive thought, and discredited its personal way of looking at things, they would undoubtedly say it has been by the strict use of the method of experimental verification. Follow out science's conceptions practically, they will say, the conceptions that ignore personality altogether, and you will always be corroborated. The world is so made that all your expectations will be experientially verified so long, and only so long, as you keep the terms from which you infer them impersonal and universal. But here we have mind-cure, with her diametrically opposite philosophy, setting up an exactly identical claim. Live as if I were true, she says, and every day will practically prove you right. That the controlling energies of nature are personal, that your own personal thoughts are forces, that the powers of the universe will directly respond to your individual appeals and needs, are propositions which your whole bodily and mental experience will verify. And that experience does largely verify these primeval religious ideas is proved by the fact that the mind-cure movement spreads as it does, not by proclamation and assertion simply, but by palpable experiential results. Here, in the very heyday of science's authority, it carries on an aggressive warfare against the scientific philosophy, and succeeds by using science's own peculiar methods and weapons. Believing that a higher power will take care of us in certain ways better than we can take care of ourselves, if we only genuinely throw ourselves upon it and consent to use it, it finds the belief, not only not impugned, but corroborated by its observation. How conversions are thus made, and converts confirmed, is evident enough from the narratives which I have quoted. I will quote yet another couple of shorter ones to give the matter a perfectly concrete turn. Here is one:-- "One of my first experiences in applying my teaching was two months after I first saw the healer. I fell, spraining my right ankle, which I had done once four years before, having then had to use a crutch and elastic anklet for some months, and carefully guarding it ever since. As soon as I was on my feet I made the positive suggestion (and felt it through all my being): 'There is nothing but God, all life comes from him perfectly. I cannot be sprained or hurt, I will let him take care of it.' Well, I never had a sensation in it, and I walked two miles that day." The next case not only illustrates experiment and verification, but also the element of passivity and surrender of which awhile ago I made such account. "I went into town to do some shopping one morning, and I had not been gone long before I began to feel ill. The ill feeling increased rapidly, until I had pains in all my bones, nausea and faintness, headache, all the symptoms in short that precede an attack of influenza. I thought that I was going to have the grippe, epidemic then in Boston, or something worse. The mind-cure teachings that I had been listening to all the winter thereupon came into my mind, and I thought that here was an opportunity to test myself. On my way home I met a friend, and I refrained with some effort from telling her how I felt. That was the first step gained. I went to bed immediately, and my husband wished to send for the doctor. But I told him that I would rather wait until morning and see how I felt. Then followed one of the most beautiful experiences of my life. "I cannot express it in any other way than to say that I did 'lie down in the stream of life and let it flow over me.' I gave up all fear of any impending disease; I was perfectly willing and obedient. There was no intellectual effort, or train of thought. My dominant idea was: 'Behold the handmaid of the Lord: be it unto me even as thou wilt,' and a perfect confidence that all would be well, that all _was_ well. The creative life was flowing into me every instant, and I felt myself allied with the Infinite, in harmony, and full of the peace that passeth understanding. There was no place in my mind for a jarring body. I had no consciousness of time or space or persons; but only of love and happiness and faith. "I do not know how long this state lasted, nor when I fell asleep; but when I woke up in the morning, _I was well_." These are exceedingly trivial instances,(64) but in them, if we have anything at all, we have the method of experiment and verification. For the point I am driving at now, it makes no difference whether you consider the patients to be deluded victims of their imagination or not. That they seemed to _themselves_ to have been cured by the experiments tried was enough to make them converts to the system. And although it is evident that one must be of a certain mental mould to get such results (for not every one can get thus cured to his own satisfaction any more than every one can be cured by the first regular practitioner whom he calls in), yet it would surely be pedantic and over-scrupulous for those who _can_ get their savage and primitive philosophy of mental healing verified in such experimental ways as this, to give them up at word of command for more scientific therapeutics. What are we to think of all this? Has science made too wide a claim? I believe that the claims of the sectarian scientist are, to say the least, premature. The experiences which we have been studying during this hour (and a great many other kinds of religious experiences are like them) plainly show the universe to be a more many-sided affair than any sect, even the scientific sect, allows for. What, in the end, are all our verifications but experiences that agree with more or less isolated systems of ideas (conceptual systems) that our minds have framed? But why in the name of common sense need we assume that only one such system of ideas can be true? The obvious outcome of our total experience is that the world can be handled according to many systems of ideas, and is so handled by different men, and will each time give some characteristic kind of profit, for which he cares, to the handler, while at the same time some other kind of profit has to be omitted or postponed. Science gives to all of us telegraphy, electric lighting, and diagnosis, and succeeds in preventing and curing a certain amount of disease. Religion in the shape of mind-cure gives to some of us serenity, moral poise, and happiness, and prevents certain forms of disease as well as science does, or even better in a certain class of persons. Evidently, then, the science and the religion are both of them genuine keys for unlocking the world's treasure- house to him who can use either of them practically. Just as evidently neither is exhaustive or exclusive of the other's simultaneous use. And why, after all, may not the world be so complex as to consist of many interpenetrating spheres of reality, which we can thus approach in alternation by using different conceptions and assuming different attitudes, just as mathematicians handle the same numerical and spatial facts by geometry, by analytical geometry, by algebra, by the calculus, or by quaternions, and each time come out right? On this view religion and science, each verified in its own way from hour to hour and from life to life, would be co-eternal. Primitive thought, with its belief in individualized personal forces, seems at any rate as far as ever from being driven by science from the field to-day. Numbers of educated people still find it the directest experimental channel by which to carry on their intercourse with reality.(65) The case of mind-cure lay so ready to my hand that I could not resist the temptation of using it to bring these last truths home to your attention, but I must content myself to-day with this very brief indication. In a later lecture the relations of religion both to science and to primitive thought will have to receive much more explicit attention. Appendix (See note to p. 121.) CASE I. "My own experience is this: I had long been ill, and one of the first results of my illness, a dozen years before, had been a diplopia which deprived me of the use of my eyes for reading and writing almost entirely, while a later one had been to shut me out from exercise of any kind under penalty of immediate and great exhaustion. I had been under the care of doctors of the highest standing both in Europe and America, men in whose power to help me I had had great faith, with no or ill result. Then, at a time when I seemed to be rather rapidly losing ground, I heard some things that gave me interest enough in mental healing to make me try it; I had no great hope of getting any good from it--it was a _chance_ I tried, partly because my thought was interested by the new possibility it seemed to open, partly because it was the only chance I then could see. I went to X. in Boston, from whom some friends of mine had got, or thought that they had got, great help; the treatment was a silent one; little was said, and that little carried no conviction to my mind; whatever influence was exerted was that of another person's thought or feeling silently projected on to my unconscious mind, into my nervous system as it were, as we sat still together. I believed from the start in the _possibility_ of such action, for I knew the power of the mind to shape, helping or hindering, the body's nerve-activities, and I thought telepathy probable, although unproved, but I had no belief in it as more than a possibility, and no strong conviction nor any mystic or religious faith connected with my thought of it that might have brought imagination strongly into play. "I sat quietly with the healer for half an hour each day, at first with no result; then, after ten days or so, I became quite suddenly and swiftly conscious of a tide of new energy rising within me, a sense of power to pass beyond old halting-places, of power to break the bounds that, though often tried before, had long been veritable walls about my life, too high to climb. I began to read and walk as I had not done for years, and the change was sudden, marked, and unmistakable. This tide seemed to mount for some weeks, three or four perhaps, when, summer having come, I came away, taking the treatment up again a few months later. The lift I got proved permanent, and left me slowly gaining ground instead of losing it, but with this lift the influence seemed in a way to have spent itself, and, though my confidence in the reality of the power had gained immensely from this first experience, and should have helped me to make further gain in health and strength if my belief in it had been the potent factor there, I never after this got any result at all as striking or as clearly marked as this which came when I made trial of it first, with little faith and doubtful expectation. It is difficult to put all the evidence in such a matter into words, to gather up into a distinct statement all that one bases one's conclusions on, but I have always felt that I had abundant evidence to justify (to myself, at least) the conclusion that I came to then, and since have held to, that the physical change which came at that time was, first, the result of a change wrought within me by a change of mental state; and, secondly, that that change of mental state was not, save in a very secondary way, brought about through the influence of an excited imagination, or a _consciously_ received suggestion of an hypnotic sort. Lastly, I believe that this change was the result of my receiving telepathically, and upon a mental stratum quite below the level of immediate consciousness, a healthier and more energetic attitude, receiving it from another person whose thought was directed upon me with the intention of impressing the idea of this attitude upon me. In my case the disease was distinctly what would be classed as nervous, not organic; but from such opportunities as I have had of observing, I have come to the conclusion that the dividing line that has been drawn is an arbitrary one, the nerves controlling the internal activities and the nutrition of the body throughout; and I believe that the central nervous system, by starting and inhibiting local centres, can exercise a vast influence upon disease of any kind, if it can be brought to bear. In my judgment the question is simply how to bring it to bear, and I think that the uncertainty and remarkable differences in the results obtained through mental healing do but show how ignorant we are as yet of the forces at work and of the means we should take to make them effective. That these results are not due to chance coincidences my observation of myself and others makes me sure; that the conscious mind, the imagination, enters into them as a factor in many cases is doubtless true, but in many others, and sometimes very extraordinary ones, it hardly seems to enter in at all. On the whole I am inclined to think that as the healing action, like the morbid one, springs from the plane of the normally _un_conscious mind, so the strongest and most effective impressions are those which _it_ receives, in some as yet unknown, subtle way, _directly_ from a healthier mind whose state, through a hidden law of sympathy, it reproduces." CASE II. "At the urgent request of friends, and with no faith and hardly any hope (possibly owing to a previous unsuccessful experience with a Christian Scientist), our little daughter was placed under the care of a healer, and cured of a trouble about which the physician had been very discouraging in his diagnosis. This interested me, and I began studying earnestly the method and philosophy of this method of healing. Gradually an inner peace and tranquillity came to me in so positive a way that my manner changed greatly. My children and friends noticed the change and commented upon it. All feelings of irritability disappeared. Even the expression of my face changed noticeably. "I had been bigoted, aggressive, and intolerant in discussion, both in public and private. I grew broadly tolerant and receptive toward the views of others. I had been nervous and irritable, coming home two or three times a week with a sick headache induced, as I then supposed, by dyspepsia and catarrh. I grew serene and gentle, and the physical troubles entirely disappeared. I had been in the habit of approaching every business interview with an almost morbid dread. I now meet every one with confidence and inner calm. "I may say that the growth has all been toward the elimination of selfishness. I do not mean simply the grosser, more sensual forms, but those subtler and generally unrecognized kinds, such as express themselves in sorrow, grief, regret, envy, etc. It has been in the direction of a practical, working realization of the immanence of God and the Divinity of man's true, inner self." LECTURES VI AND VII. THE SICK SOUL. At our last meeting, we considered the healthy-minded temperament, the temperament which has a constitutional incapacity for prolonged suffering, and in which the tendency to see things optimistically is like a water of crystallization in which the individual's character is set. We saw how this temperament may become the basis for a peculiar type of religion, a religion in which good, even the good of this world's life, is regarded as the essential thing for a rational being to attend to. This religion directs him to settle his scores with the more evil aspects of the universe by systematically declining to lay them to heart or make much of them, by ignoring them in his reflective calculations, or even, on occasion, by denying outright that they exist. Evil is a disease; and worry over disease is itself an additional form of disease, which only adds to the original complaint. Even repentance and remorse, affections which come in the character of ministers of good, may be but sickly and relaxing impulses. The best repentance is to up and act for righteousness, and forget that you ever had relations with sin. Spinoza's philosophy has this sort of healthy-mindedness woven into the heart of it, and this has been one secret of its fascination. He whom Reason leads, according to Spinoza, is led altogether by the influence over his mind of good. Knowledge of evil is an "inadequate" knowledge, fit only for slavish minds. So Spinoza categorically condemns repentance. When men make mistakes, he says,-- "One might perhaps expect gnawings of conscience and repentance to help to bring them on the right path, and might thereupon conclude (as every one does conclude) that these affections are good things. Yet when we look at the matter closely, we shall find that not only are they not good, but on the contrary deleterious and evil passions. For it is manifest that we can always get along better by reason and love of truth than by worry of conscience and remorse. Harmful are these and evil, inasmuch as they form a particular kind of sadness; and the disadvantages of sadness," he continues, "I have already proved, and shown that we should strive to keep it from our life. Just so we should endeavor, since uneasiness of conscience and remorse are of this kind of complexion, to flee and shun these states of mind."(66) Within the Christian body, for which repentance of sins has from the beginning been the critical religious act, healthy-mindedness has always come forward with its milder interpretation. Repentance according to such healthy-minded Christians means _getting away from_ the sin, not groaning and writhing over its commission. The Catholic practice of confession and absolution is in one of its aspects little more than a systematic method of keeping healthy-mindedness on top. By it a man's accounts with evil are periodically squared and audited, so that he may start the clean page with no old debts inscribed. Any Catholic will tell us how clean and fresh and free he feels after the purging operation. Martin Luther by no means belonged to the healthy-minded type in the radical sense in which we have discussed it, and he repudiated priestly absolution for sin. Yet in this matter of repentance he had some very healthy-minded ideas, due in the main to the largeness of his conception of God. "When I was a monk," he says, "I thought that I was utterly cast away, if at any time I felt the lust of the flesh: that is to say, if I felt any evil motion, fleshly lust, wrath, hatred, or envy against any brother. I assayed many ways to help to quiet my conscience, but it would not be; for the concupiscence and lust of my flesh did always return, so that I could not rest, but was continually vexed with these thoughts: This or that sin thou hast committed: thou art infected with envy, with impatiency, and such other sins: therefore thou art entered into this holy order in vain, and all thy good works are unprofitable. But if then I had rightly understood these sentences of Paul: 'The flesh lusteth contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit contrary to the flesh; and these two are one against another, so that ye cannot do the things that ye would do,' I should not have so miserably tormented myself, but should have thought and said to myself, as now commonly I do, 'Martin, thou shalt not utterly be without sin, for thou hast flesh; thou shalt therefore feel the battle thereof.' I remember that Staupitz was wont to say, 'I have vowed unto God above a thousand times that I would become a better man: but I never performed that which I vowed. Hereafter I will make no such vow: for I have now learned by experience that I am not able to perform it. Unless, therefore, God be favorable and merciful unto me for Christ's sake, I shall not be able, with all my vows and all my good deeds, to stand before him.' This (of Staupitz's) was not only a true, but also a godly and a holy desperation; and this must they all confess, both with mouth and heart, who will be saved. For the godly trust not to their own righteousness. They look unto Christ their reconciler, who gave his life for their sins. Moreover, they know that the remnant of sin which is in their flesh is not laid to their charge, but freely pardoned. Notwithstanding, in the mean while they fight in spirit against the flesh, lest they should _fulfill_ the lusts thereof; and although they feel the flesh to rage and rebel, and themselves also do fall sometimes into sin through infirmity, yet are they not discouraged, nor think therefore that their state and kind of life, and the works which are done according to their calling, displease God; but they raise up themselves by faith."(67) One of the heresies for which the Jesuits got that spiritual genius, Molinos, the founder of Quietism, so abominably condemned was his healthy- minded opinion of repentance:-- "When thou fallest into a fault, in what matter soever it be, do not trouble nor afflict thyself for it. For they are effects of our frail Nature, stained by Original Sin. The common enemy will make thee believe, as soon as thou fallest into any fault, that thou walkest in error, and therefore art out of God and his favor, and herewith would he make thee distrust of the divine Grace, telling thee of thy misery, and making a giant of it; and putting it into thy head that every day thy soul grows worse instead of better, whilst it so often repeats these failings. O blessed Soul, open thine eyes; and shut the gate against these diabolical suggestions, knowing thy misery, and trusting in the mercy divine. Would not he be a mere fool who, running at tournament with others, and falling in the best of the career, should lie weeping on the ground and afflicting himself with discourses upon his fall? Man (they would tell him), lose no time, get up and take the course again, for he that rises again quickly and continues his race is as if he had never fallen. If thou seest thyself fallen once and a thousand times, thou oughtest to make use of the remedy which I have given thee, that is, a loving confidence in the divine mercy. These are the weapons with which thou must fight and conquer cowardice and vain thoughts. This is the means thou oughtest to use--not to lose time, not to disturb thyself, and reap no good."(68) Now in contrast with such healthy-minded views as these, if we treat them as a way of deliberately minimizing evil, stands a radically opposite view, a way of maximizing evil, if you please so to call it, based on the persuasion that the evil aspects of our life are of its very essence, and that the world's meaning most comes home to us when we lay them most to heart. We have now to address ourselves to this more morbid way of looking at the situation. But as I closed our last hour with a general philosophical reflection on the healthy-minded way of taking life, I should like at this point to make another philosophical reflection upon it before turning to that heavier task. You will excuse the brief delay. If we admit that evil is an essential part of our being and the key to the interpretation of our life, we load ourselves down with a difficulty that has always proved burdensome in philosophies of religion. Theism, whenever it has erected itself into a systematic philosophy of the universe, has shown a reluctance to let God be anything less than All-in-All. In other words, philosophic theism has always shown a tendency to become pantheistic and monistic, and to consider the world as one unit of absolute fact; and this has been at variance with popular or practical theism, which latter has ever been more or less frankly pluralistic, not to say polytheistic, and shown itself perfectly well satisfied with a universe composed of many original principles, provided we be only allowed to believe that the divine principle remains supreme, and that the others are subordinate. In this latter case God is not necessarily responsible for the existence of evil; he would only be responsible if it were not finally overcome. But on the monistic or pantheistic view, evil, like everything else, must have its foundation in God; and the difficulty is to see how this can possibly be the case if God be absolutely good. This difficulty faces us in every form of philosophy in which the world appears as one flawless unit of fact. Such a unit is an _Individual_, and in it the worst parts must be as essential as the best, must be as necessary to make the individual what he is; since if any part whatever in an individual were to vanish or alter, it would no longer be _that_ individual at all. The philosophy of absolute idealism, so vigorously represented both in Scotland and America to-day, has to struggle with this difficulty quite as much as scholastic theism struggled in its time; and although it would be premature to say that there is no speculative issue whatever from the puzzle, it is perfectly fair to say that there is no clear or easy issue, and that the only _obvious_ escape from paradox here is to cut loose from the monistic assumption altogether, and to allow the world to have existed from its origin in pluralistic form, as an aggregate or collection of higher and lower things and principles, rather than an absolutely unitary fact. For then evil would not need to be essential; it might be, and may always have been, an independent portion that had no rational or absolute right to live with the rest, and which we might conceivably hope to see got rid of at last. Now the gospel of healthy-mindedness, as we have described it, casts its vote distinctly for this pluralistic view. Whereas the monistic philosopher finds himself more or less bound to say, as Hegel said, that everything actual is rational, and that evil, as an element dialectically required, must be pinned in and kept and consecrated and have a function awarded to it in the final system of truth, healthy-mindedness refuses to say anything of the sort.(69) Evil, it says, is emphatically irrational, and _not_ to be pinned in, or preserved, or consecrated in any final system of truth. It is a pure abomination to the Lord, an alien unreality, a waste element, to be sloughed off and negated, and the very memory of it, if possible, wiped out and forgotten. The ideal, so far from being co- extensive with the whole actual, is a mere _extract_ from the actual, marked by its deliverance from all contact with this diseased, inferior, and excrementitious stuff. Here we have the interesting notion fairly and squarely presented to us, of there being elements of the universe which may make no rational whole in conjunction with the other elements, and which, from the point of view of any system which those other elements make up, can only be considered so much irrelevance and accident--so much "dirt," as it were, and matter out of place. I ask you now not to forget this notion; for although most philosophers seem either to forget it or to disdain it too much ever to mention it, I believe that we shall have to admit it ourselves in the end as containing an element of truth. The mind-cure gospel thus once more appears to us as having dignity and importance. We have seen it to be a genuine religion, and no mere silly appeal to imagination to cure disease; we have seen its method of experimental verification to be not unlike the method of all science; and now here we find mind-cure as the champion of a perfectly definite conception of the metaphysical structure of the world. I hope that, in view of all this, you will not regret my having pressed it upon your attention at such length. ------------------------------------- Let us now say good-by for a while to all this way of thinking, and turn towards those persons who cannot so swiftly throw off the burden of the consciousness of evil, but are congenitally fated to suffer from its presence. Just as we saw that in healthy-mindedness there are shallower and profounder levels, happiness like that of the mere animal, and more regenerate sorts of happiness, so also are there different levels of the morbid mind, and the one is much more formidable than the other. There are people for whom evil means only a mal-adjustment with _things_, a wrong correspondence of one's life with the environment. Such evil as this is curable, in principle at least, upon the natural plane, for merely by modifying either the self or the things, or both at once, the two terms may be made to fit, and all go merry as a marriage bell again. But there are others for whom evil is no mere relation of the subject to particular outer things, but something more radical and general, a wrongness or vice in his essential nature, which no alteration of the environment, or any superficial rearrangement of the inner self, can cure, and which requires a supernatural remedy. On the whole, the Latin races have leaned more towards the former way of looking upon evil, as made up of ills and sins in the plural, removable in detail; while the Germanic races have tended rather to think of Sin in the singular, and with a capital S, as of something ineradicably ingrained in our natural subjectivity, and never to be removed by any superficial piecemeal operations.(70) These comparisons of races are always open to exception, but undoubtedly the northern tone in religion has inclined to the more intimately pessimistic persuasion, and this way of feeling, being the more extreme, we shall find by far the more instructive for our study. Recent psychology has found great use for the word "threshold" as a symbolic designation for the point at which one state of mind passes into another. Thus we speak of the threshold of a man's consciousness in general, to indicate the amount of noise, pressure, or other outer stimulus which it takes to arouse his attention at all. One with a high threshold will doze through an amount of racket by which one with a low threshold would be immediately waked. Similarly, when one is sensitive to small differences in any order of sensation, we say he has a low "difference-threshold"--his mind easily steps over it into the consciousness of the differences in question. And just so we might speak of a "pain-threshold," a "fear-threshold," a "misery-threshold," and find it quickly overpassed by the consciousness of some individuals, but lying too high in others to be often reached by their consciousness. The sanguine and healthy-minded live habitually on the sunny side of their misery-line, the depressed and melancholy live beyond it, in darkness and apprehension. There are men who seem to have started in life with a bottle or two of champagne inscribed to their credit; whilst others seem to have been born close to the pain-threshold, which the slightest irritants fatally send them over. Does it not appear as if one who lived more habitually on one side of the pain-threshold might need a different sort of religion from one who habitually lived on the other? This question, of the relativity of different types of religion to different types of need, arises naturally at this point, and will become a serious problem ere we have done. But before we confront it in general terms, we must address ourselves to the unpleasant task of hearing what the sick souls, as we may call them in contrast to the healthy-minded, have to say of the secrets of their prison-house, their own peculiar form of consciousness. Let us then resolutely turn our backs on the once-born and their sky-blue optimistic gospel; let us not simply cry out, in spite of all appearances, "Hurrah for the Universe!--God's in his Heaven, all's right with the world." Let us see rather whether pity, pain, and fear, and the sentiment of human helplessness may not open a profounder view and put into our hands a more complicated key to the meaning of the situation. ------------------------------------- To begin with, how _can_ things so insecure as the successful experiences of this world afford a stable anchorage? A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain. In the healthiest and most prosperous existence, how many links of illness, danger, and disaster are always interposed? Unsuspectedly from the bottom of every fountain of pleasure, as the old poet said, something bitter rises up: a touch of nausea, a falling dead of the delight, a whiff of melancholy, things that sound a knell, for fugitive as they may be, they bring a feeling of coming from a deeper region and often have an appalling convincingness. The buzz of life ceases at their touch as a piano-string stops sounding when the damper falls upon it. Of course the music can commence again;--and again and again,--at intervals. But with this the healthy-minded consciousness is left with an irremediable sense of precariousness. It is a bell with a crack; it draws its breath on sufferance and by an accident. Even if we suppose a man so packed with healthy-mindedness as never to have experienced in his own person any of these sobering intervals, still, if he is a reflecting being, he must generalize and class his own lot with that of others; and, doing so, he must see that his escape is just a lucky chance and no essential difference. He might just as well have been born to an entirely different fortune. And then indeed the hollow security! What kind of a frame of things is it of which the best you can say is, "Thank God, it has let me off clear this time!" Is not its blessedness a fragile fiction? Is not your joy in it a very vulgar glee, not much unlike the snicker of any rogue at his success? If indeed it were all success, even on such terms as that! But take the happiest man, the one most envied by the world, and in nine cases out of ten his inmost consciousness is one of failure. Either his ideals in the line of his achievements are pitched far higher than the achievements themselves, or else he has secret ideals of which the world knows nothing, and in regard to which he inwardly knows himself to be found wanting. When such a conquering optimist as Goethe can express himself in this wise, how must it be with less successful men? "I will say nothing," writes Goethe in 1824, "against the course of my existence. But at bottom it has been nothing but pain and burden, and I can affirm that during the whole of my 75 years, I have not had four weeks of genuine well-being. It is but the perpetual rolling of a rock that must be raised up again forever." What single-handed man was ever on the whole as successful as Luther? yet when he had grown old, he looked back on his life as if it were an absolute failure. "I am utterly weary of life. I pray the Lord will come forthwith and carry me hence. Let him come, above all, with his last Judgment: I will stretch out my neck, the thunder will burst forth, and I shall be at rest."--And having a necklace of white agates in his hand at the time he added: "O God, grant that it may come without delay. I would readily eat up this necklace to-day, for the Judgment to come to-morrow."--The Electress Dowager, one day when Luther was dining with her, said to him: "Doctor, I wish you may live forty years to come." "Madam," replied he, "rather than live forty years more, I would give up my chance of Paradise." Failure, then, failure! so the world stamps us at every turn. We strew it with our blunders, our misdeeds, our lost opportunities, with all the memorials of our inadequacy to our vocation. And with what a damning emphasis does it then blot us out! No easy fine, no mere apology or formal expiation, will satisfy the world's demands, but every pound of flesh exacted is soaked with all its blood. The subtlest forms of suffering known to man are connected with the poisonous humiliations incidental to these results. And they are pivotal human experiences. A process so ubiquitous and everlasting is evidently an integral part of life. "There is indeed one element in human destiny," Robert Louis Stevenson writes, "that not blindness itself can controvert. Whatever else we are intended to do, we are not intended to succeed; failure is the fate allotted."(71) And our nature being thus rooted in failure, is it any wonder that theologians should have held it to be essential, and thought that only through the personal experience of humiliation which it engenders the deeper sense of life's significance is reached?(72) But this is only the first stage of the world-sickness. Make the human being's sensitiveness a little greater, carry him a little farther over the misery-threshold, and the good quality of the successful moments themselves when they occur is spoiled and vitiated. All natural goods perish. Riches take wings; fame is a breath; love is a cheat; youth and health and pleasure vanish. Can things whose end is always dust and disappointment be the real goods which our souls require? Back of everything is the great spectre of universal death, the all-encompassing blackness:-- "What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the Sun? I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit. For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; as the one dieth, so dieth the other; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.... The dead know not anything, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten. Also their love and their hatred and their envy is now perished; neither have they any more a portion for ever in anything that is done under the Sun.... Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the Sun: but if a man live many years and rejoice in them all, yet let him remember the days of darkness; for they shall be many." In short, life and its negation are beaten up inextricably together. But if the life be good, the negation of it must be bad. Yet the two are equally essential facts of existence; and all natural happiness thus seems infected with a contradiction. The breath of the sepulchre surrounds it. To a mind attentive to this state of things and rightly subject to the joy-destroying chill which such a contemplation engenders, the only relief that healthy-mindedness can give is by saying: "Stuff and nonsense, get out into the open air!" or "Cheer up, old fellow, you'll be all right erelong, if you will only drop your morbidness!" But in all seriousness, can such bald animal talk as that be treated as a rational answer? To ascribe religious value to mere happy-go-lucky contentment with one's brief chance at natural good is but the very consecration of forgetfulness and superficiality. Our troubles lie indeed too deep for _that_ cure. The fact that we _can_ die, that we _can_ be ill at all, is what perplexes us; the fact that we now for a moment live and are well is irrelevant to that perplexity. We need a life not correlated with death, a health not liable to illness, a kind of good that will not perish, a good in fact that flies beyond the Goods of nature. It all depends on how sensitive the soul may become to discords. "The trouble with me is that I believe too much in common happiness and goodness," said a friend of mine whose consciousness was of this sort, "and nothing can console me for their transiency. I am appalled and disconcerted at its being possible." And so with most of us: a little cooling down of animal excitability and instinct, a little loss of animal toughness, a little irritable weakness and descent of the pain-threshold, will bring the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight into full view, and turn us into melancholy metaphysicians. The pride of life and glory of the world will shrivel. It is after all but the standing quarrel of hot youth and hoary eld. Old age has the last word: the purely naturalistic look at life, however enthusiastically it may begin, is sure to end in sadness. This sadness lies at the heart of every merely positivistic, agnostic, or naturalistic scheme of philosophy. Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet. In the practical life of the individual, we know how his whole gloom or glee about any present fact depends on the remoter schemes and hopes with which it stands related. Its significance and framing give it the chief part of its value. Let it be known to lead nowhere, and however agreeable it may be in its immediacy, its glow and gilding vanish. The old man, sick with an insidious internal disease, may laugh and quaff his wine at first as well as ever, but he knows his fate now, for the doctors have revealed it; and the knowledge knocks the satisfaction out of all these functions. They are partners of death and the worm is their brother, and they turn to a mere flatness. The lustre of the present hour is always borrowed from the background of possibilities it goes with. Let our common experiences be enveloped in an eternal moral order; let our suffering have an immortal significance; let Heaven smile upon the earth, and deities pay their visits; let faith and hope be the atmosphere which man breathes in;--and his days pass by with zest; they stir with prospects, they thrill with remoter values. Place round them on the contrary the curdling cold and gloom and absence of all permanent meaning which for pure naturalism and the popular science evolutionism of our time are all that is visible ultimately, and the thrill stops short, or turns rather to an anxious trembling. For naturalism, fed on recent cosmological speculations, mankind is in a position similar to that of a set of people living on a frozen lake, surrounded by cliffs over which there is no escape, yet knowing that little by little the ice is melting, and the inevitable day drawing near when the last film of it will disappear, and to be drowned ignominiously will be the human creature's portion. The merrier the skating, the warmer and more sparkling the sun by day, and the ruddier the bonfires at night, the more poignant the sadness with which one must take in the meaning of the total situation. The early Greeks are continually held up to us in literary works as models of the healthy-minded joyousness which the religion of nature may engender. There was indeed much joyousness among the Greeks--Homer's flow of enthusiasm for most things that the sun shines upon is steady. But even in Homer the reflective passages are cheerless,(73) and the moment the Greeks grew systematically pensive and thought of ultimates, they became unmitigated pessimists.(74) The jealousy of the gods, the nemesis that follows too much happiness, the all-encompassing death, fate's dark opacity, the ultimate and unintelligible cruelty, were the fixed background of their imagination. The beautiful joyousness of their polytheism is only a poetic modern fiction. They knew no joys comparable in quality of preciousness to those which we shall erelong see that Brahmans, Buddhists, Christians, Mohammedans, twice-born people whose religion is non-naturalistic, get from their several creeds of mysticism and renunciation. Stoic insensibility and Epicurean resignation were the farthest advance which the Greek mind made in that direction. The Epicurean said: "Seek not to be happy, but rather to escape unhappiness; strong happiness is always linked with pain; therefore hug the safe shore, and do not tempt the deeper raptures. Avoid disappointment by expecting little, and by aiming low; and above all do not fret." The Stoic said: "The only genuine good that life can yield a man is the free possession of his own soul; all other goods are lies." Each of these philosophies is in its degree a philosophy of despair in nature's boons. Trustful self-abandonment to the joys that freely offer has entirely departed from both Epicurean and Stoic; and what each proposes is a way of rescue from the resultant dust- and-ashes state of mind. The Epicurean still awaits results from economy of indulgence and damping of desire. The Stoic hopes for no results, and gives up natural good altogether. There is dignity in both these forms of resignation. They represent distinct stages in the sobering process which man's primitive intoxication with sense-happiness is sure to undergo. In the one the hot blood has grown cool, in the other it has become quite cold; and although I have spoken of them in the past tense, as if they were merely historic, yet Stoicism and Epicureanism will probably be to all time typical attitudes, marking a certain definite stage accomplished in the evolution of the world-sick soul.(75) They mark the conclusion of what we call the once-born period, and represent the highest flights of what twice-born religion would call the purely natural man--Epicureanism, which can only by great courtesy be called a religion, showing his refinement, and Stoicism exhibiting his moral will. They leave the world in the shape of an unreconciled contradiction, and seek no higher unity. Compared with the complex ecstasies which the supernaturally regenerated Christian may enjoy, or the oriental pantheist indulge in, their receipts for equanimity are expedients which seem almost crude in their simplicity. Please observe, however, that I am not yet pretending finally to _judge_ any of these attitudes. I am only describing their variety. The securest way to the rapturous sorts of happiness of which the twice- born make report has as an historic matter of fact been through a more radical pessimism than anything that we have yet considered. We have seen how the lustre and enchantment may be rubbed off from the goods of nature. But there is a pitch of unhappiness so great that the goods of nature may be entirely forgotten, and all sentiment of their existence vanish from the mental field. For this extremity of pessimism to be reached, something more is needed than observation of life and reflection upon death. The individual must in his own person become the prey of a pathological melancholy. As the healthy-minded enthusiast succeeds in ignoring evil's very existence, so the subject of melancholy is forced in spite of himself to ignore that of all good whatever: for him it may no longer have the least reality. Such sensitiveness and susceptibility to mental pain is a rare occurrence where the nervous constitution is entirely normal; one seldom finds it in a healthy subject even where he is the victim of the most atrocious cruelties of outward fortune. So we note here the neurotic constitution, of which I said so much in my first lecture, making its active entrance on our scene, and destined to play a part in much that follows. Since these experiences of melancholy are in the first instance absolutely private and individual, I can now help myself out with personal documents. Painful indeed they will be to listen to, and there is almost an indecency in handling them in public. Yet they lie right in the middle of our path; and if we are to touch the psychology of religion at all seriously, we must be willing to forget conventionalities, and dive below the smooth and lying official conversational surface. One can distinguish many kinds of pathological depression. Sometimes it is mere passive joylessness and dreariness, discouragement, dejection, lack of taste and zest and spring. Professor Ribot has proposed the name _anhedonia_ to designate this condition. "The state of _anhedonia_, if I may coin a new word to pair off with _analgesia_," he writes, "has been very little studied, but it exists. A young girl was smitten with a liver disease which for some time altered her constitution. She felt no longer any affection for her father and mother. She would have played with her doll, but it was impossible to find the least pleasure in the act. The same things which formerly convulsed her with laughter entirely failed to interest her now. Esquirol observed the case of a very intelligent magistrate who was also a prey to hepatic disease. Every emotion appeared dead within him. He manifested neither perversion nor violence, but complete absence of emotional reaction. If he went to the theatre, which he did out of habit, he could find no pleasure there. The thought of his house, of his home, of his wife, and of his absent children moved him as little, he said, as a theorem of Euclid."(76) Prolonged seasickness will in most persons produce a temporary condition of anhedonia. Every good, terrestrial or celestial, is imagined only to be turned from with disgust. A temporary condition of this sort, connected with the religious evolution of a singularly lofty character, both intellectual and moral, is well described by the Catholic philosopher, Father Gratry, in his autobiographical recollections. In consequence of mental isolation and excessive study at the Polytechnic school, young Gratry fell into a state of nervous exhaustion with symptoms which he thus describes:-- "I had such a universal terror that I woke at night with a start, thinking that the Pantheon was tumbling on the Polytechnic school, or that the school was in flames, or that the Seine was pouring into the Catacombs, and that Paris was being swallowed up. And when these impressions were past, all day long without respite I suffered an incurable and intolerable desolation, verging on despair. I thought myself, in fact, rejected by God, lost, damned! I felt something like the suffering of hell. Before that I had never even thought of hell. My mind had never turned in that direction. Neither discourses nor reflections had impressed me in that way. I took no account of hell. Now, and all at once, I suffered in a measure what is suffered there. "But what was perhaps still more dreadful is that every idea of heaven was taken away from me: I could no longer conceive of anything of the sort. Heaven did not seem to me worth going to. It was like a vacuum; a mythological elysium, an abode of shadows less real than the earth. I could conceive no joy, no pleasure in inhabiting it. Happiness, joy, light, affection, love--all these words were now devoid of sense. Without doubt I could still have talked of all these things, but I had become incapable of feeling anything in them, of understanding anything about them, of hoping anything from them, or of believing them to exist. There was my great and inconsolable grief! I neither perceived nor conceived any longer the existence of happiness or perfection. An abstract heaven over a naked rock. Such was my present abode for eternity."(77) So much for melancholy in the sense of incapacity for joyous feeling. A much worse form of it is positive and active anguish, a sort of psychical neuralgia wholly unknown to healthy life. Such anguish may partake of various characters, having sometimes more the quality of loathing; sometimes that of irritation and exasperation; or again of self-mistrust and self-despair; or of suspicion, anxiety, trepidation, fear. The patient may rebel or submit; may accuse himself, or accuse outside powers; and he may or he may not be tormented by the theoretical mystery of why he should so have to suffer. Most cases are mixed cases, and we should not treat our classifications with too much respect. Moreover, it is only a relatively small proportion of cases that connect themselves with the religious sphere of experience at all. Exasperated cases, for instance, as a rule do not. I quote now literally from the first case of melancholy on which I lay my hand. It is a letter from a patient in a French asylum. "I suffer too much in this hospital, both physically and morally. Besides the burnings and the sleeplessness (for I no longer sleep since I am shut up here, and the little rest I get is broken by bad dreams, and I am waked with a jump by nightmares, dreadful visions, lightning, thunder, and the rest), fear, atrocious fear, presses me down, holds me without respite, never lets me go. Where is the justice in it all! What have I done to deserve this excess of severity? Under what form will this fear crush me? What would I not owe to any one who would rid me of my life! Eat, drink, lie awake all night, suffer without interruption--such is the fine legacy I have received from my mother! What I fail to understand is this abuse of power. There are limits to everything, there is a middle way. But God knows neither middle way nor limits. I say God, but why? All I have known so far has been the devil. After all, I am afraid of God as much as of the devil, so I drift along, thinking of nothing but suicide, but with neither courage nor means here to execute the act. As you read this, it will easily prove to you my insanity. The style and the ideas are incoherent enough--I can see that myself. But I cannot keep myself from being either crazy or an idiot; and, as things are, from whom should I ask pity? I am defenseless against the invisible enemy who is tightening his coils around me. I should be no better armed against him even if I saw him, or had seen him. Oh, if he would but kill me, devil take him! Death, death, once for all! But I stop. I have raved to you long enough. I say raved, for I can write no otherwise, having neither brain nor thoughts left. O God! what a misfortune to be born! Born like a mushroom, doubtless between an evening and a morning; and how true and right I was when in our philosophy-year in college I chewed the cud of bitterness with the pessimists. Yes, indeed, there is more pain in life than gladness--it is one long agony until the grave. Think how gay it makes me to remember that this horrible misery of mine, coupled with this unspeakable fear, may last fifty, one hundred, who knows how many more years!"(78) This letter shows two things. First, you see how the entire consciousness of the poor man is so choked with the feeling of evil that the sense of there being any good in the world is lost for him altogether. His attention excludes it, cannot admit it: the sun has left his heaven. And secondly you see how the querulous temper of his misery keeps his mind from taking a religious direction. Querulousness of mind tends in fact rather towards irreligion; and it has played, so far as I know, no part whatever in the construction of religious systems. ------------------------------------- Religious melancholy must be cast in a more melting mood. Tolstoy has left us, in his book called My Confession, a wonderful account of the attack of melancholy which led him to his own religious conclusions. The latter in some respects are peculiar; but the melancholy presents two characters which make it a typical document for our present purpose. First it is a well-marked case of anhedonia, of passive loss of appetite for all life's values; and second, it shows how the altered and estranged aspect which the world assumed in consequence of this stimulated Tolstoy's intellect to a gnawing, carking questioning and effort for philosophic relief. I mean to quote Tolstoy at some length; but before doing so, I will make a general remark on each of these two points. First on our spiritual judgments and the sense of value in general. It is notorious that facts are compatible with opposite emotional comments, since the same fact will inspire entirely different feelings in different persons, and at different times in the same person; and there is no rationally deducible connection between any outer fact and the sentiments it may happen to provoke. These have their source in another sphere of existence altogether, in the animal and spiritual region of the subject's being. Conceive yourself, if possible, suddenly stripped of all the emotion with which your world now inspires you, and try to imagine it _as it exists_, purely by itself, without your favorable or unfavorable, hopeful or apprehensive comment. It will be almost impossible for you to realize such a condition of negativity and deadness. No one portion of the universe would then have importance beyond another; and the whole collection of its things and series of its events would be without significance, character, expression, or perspective. Whatever of value, interest, or meaning our respective worlds may appear endued with are thus pure gifts of the spectator's mind. The passion of love is the most familiar and extreme example of this fact. If it comes, it comes; if it does not come, no process of reasoning can force it. Yet it transforms the value of the creature loved as utterly as the sunrise transforms Mont Blanc from a corpse-like gray to a rosy enchantment; and it sets the whole world to a new tune for the lover and gives a new issue to his life. So with fear, with indignation, jealousy, ambition, worship. If they are there, life changes. And whether they shall be there or not depends almost always upon non-logical, often on organic conditions. And as the excited interest which these passions put into the world is our gift to the world, just so are the passions themselves _gifts_,--gifts to us, from sources sometimes low and sometimes high; but almost always non-logical and beyond our control. How can the moribund old man reason back to himself the romance, the mystery, the imminence of great things with which our old earth tingled for him in the days when he was young and well? Gifts, either of the flesh or of the spirit; and the spirit bloweth where it listeth; and the world's materials lend their surface passively to all the gifts alike, as the stage-setting receives indifferently whatever alternating colored lights may be shed upon it from the optical apparatus in the gallery. Meanwhile the practically real world for each one of us, the effective world of the individual, is the compound world, the physical facts and emotional values in indistinguishable combination. Withdraw or pervert either factor of this complex resultant, and the kind of experience we call pathological ensues. In Tolstoy's case the sense that life had any meaning whatever was for a time wholly withdrawn. The result was a transformation in the whole expression of reality. When we come to study the phenomenon of conversion or religious regeneration, we shall see that a not infrequent consequence of the change operated in the subject is a transfiguration of the face of nature in his eyes. A new heaven seems to shine upon a new earth. In melancholiacs there is usually a similar change, only it is in the reverse direction. The world now looks remote, strange, sinister, uncanny. Its color is gone, its breath is cold, there is no speculation in the eyes it glares with. "It is as if I lived in another century," says one asylum patient.--"I see everything through a cloud," says another, "things are not as they were, and I am changed."--"I see," says a third, "I touch, but the things do not come near me, a thick veil alters the hue and look of everything."--"Persons move like shadows, and sounds seem to come from a distant world."--"There is no longer any past for me; people appear so strange; it is as if I could not see any reality, as if I were in a theatre; as if people were actors, and everything were scenery; I can no longer find myself; I walk, but why? Everything floats before my eyes, but leaves no impression."--"I weep false tears, I have unreal hands: the things I see are not real things."--Such are expressions that naturally rise to the lips of melancholy subjects describing their changed state.(79) Now there are some subjects whom all this leaves a prey to the profoundest astonishment. The strangeness is wrong. The unreality cannot be. A mystery is concealed, and a metaphysical solution must exist. If the natural world is so double-faced and unhomelike, what world, what thing is real? An urgent wondering and questioning is set up, a poring theoretic activity, and in the desperate effort to get into right relations with the matter, the sufferer is often led to what becomes for him a satisfying religious solution. At about the age of fifty, Tolstoy relates that he began to have moments of perplexity, of what he calls arrest, as if he knew not "how to live," or what to do. It is obvious that these were moments in which the excitement and interest which our functions naturally bring had ceased. Life had been enchanting, it was now flat sober, more than sober, dead. Things were meaningless whose meaning had always been self-evident. The questions "Why?" and "What next?" began to beset him more and more frequently. At first it seemed as if such questions must be answerable, and as if he could easily find the answers if he would take the time; but as they ever became more urgent, he perceived that it was like those first discomforts of a sick man, to which he pays but little attention till they run into one continuous suffering, and then he realizes that what he took for a passing disorder means the most momentous thing in the world for him, means his death. These questions "Why?" "Wherefore?" "What for?" found no response. "I felt," says Tolstoy, "that something had broken within me on which my life had always rested, that I had nothing left to hold on to, and that morally my life had stopped. An invincible force impelled me to get rid of my existence, in one way or another. It cannot be said exactly that I _wished_ to kill myself, for the force which drew me away from life was fuller, more powerful, more general than any mere desire. It was a force like my old aspiration to live, only it impelled me in the opposite direction. It was an aspiration of my whole being to get out of life. "Behold me then, a man happy and in good health, hiding the rope in order not to hang myself to the rafters of the room where every night I went to sleep alone; behold me no longer going shooting, lest I should yield to the too easy temptation of putting an end to myself with my gun. "I did not know what I wanted. I was afraid of life; I was driven to leave it; and in spite of that I still hoped something from it. "All this took place at a time when so far as all my outer circumstances went, I ought to have been completely happy. I had a good wife who loved me and whom I loved; good children and a large property which was increasing with no pains taken on my part. I was more respected by my kinsfolk and acquaintance than I had ever been; I was loaded with praise by strangers; and without exaggeration I could believe my name already famous. Moreover I was neither insane nor ill. On the contrary, I possessed a physical and mental strength which I have rarely met in persons of my age. I could mow as well as the peasants, I could work with my brain eight hours uninterruptedly and feel no bad effects. "And yet I could give no reasonable meaning to any actions of my life. And I was surprised that I had not understood this from the very beginning. My state of mind was as if some wicked and stupid jest was being played upon me by some one. One can live only so long as one is intoxicated, drunk with life; but when one grows sober one cannot fail to see that it is all a stupid cheat. What is truest about it is that there is nothing even funny or silly in it; it is cruel and stupid, purely and simply. "The oriental fable of the traveler surprised in the desert by a wild beast is very old. "Seeking to save himself from the fierce animal, the traveler jumps into a well with no water in it; but at the bottom of this well he sees a dragon waiting with open mouth to devour him. And the unhappy man, not daring to go out lest he should be the prey of the beast, not daring to jump to the bottom lest he should be devoured by the dragon, clings to the branches of a wild bush which grows out of one of the cracks of the well. His hands weaken, and he feels that he must soon give way to certain fate; but still he clings, and sees two mice, one white, the other black, evenly moving round the bush to which he hangs, and gnawing off its roots. "The traveler sees this and knows that he must inevitably perish; but while thus hanging he looks about him and finds on the leaves of the bush some drops of honey. These he reaches with his tongue and licks them off with rapture. "Thus I hang upon the boughs of life, knowing that the inevitable dragon of death is waiting ready to tear me, and I cannot comprehend why I am thus made a martyr. I try to suck the honey which formerly consoled me; but the honey pleases me no longer, and day and night the white mouse and the black mouse gnaw the branch to which I cling. I can see but one thing: the inevitable dragon and the mice--I cannot turn my gaze away from them. "This is no fable, but the literal incontestable truth which every one may understand. What will be the outcome of what I do to-day? Of what I shall do to-morrow? What will be the outcome of all my life? Why should I live? Why should I do anything? Is there in life any purpose which the inevitable death which awaits me does not undo and destroy? "These questions are the simplest in the world. From the stupid child to the wisest old man, they are in the soul of every human being. Without an answer to them, it is impossible, as I experienced, for life to go on. " 'But perhaps,' I often said to myself, 'there may be something I have failed to notice or to comprehend. It is not possible that this condition of despair should be natural to mankind.' And I sought for an explanation in all the branches of knowledge acquired by men. I questioned painfully and protractedly and with no idle curiosity. I sought, not with indolence, but laboriously and obstinately for days and nights together. I sought like a man who is lost and seeks to save himself,--and I found nothing. I became convinced, moreover, that all those who before me had sought for an answer in the sciences have also found nothing. And not only this, but that they have recognized that the very thing which was leading me to despair--the meaningless absurdity of life--is the only incontestable knowledge accessible to man." To prove this point, Tolstoy quotes the Buddha, Solomon, and Schopenhauer. And he finds only four ways in which men of his own class and society are accustomed to meet the situation. Either mere animal blindness, sucking the honey without seeing the dragon or the mice,--"and from such a way," he says, "I can learn nothing, after what I now know;" or reflective epicureanism, snatching what it can while the day lasts,--which is only a more deliberate sort of stupefaction than the first; or manly suicide; or seeing the mice and dragon and yet weakly and plaintively clinging to the bush of life. Suicide was naturally the consistent course dictated by the logical intellect. "Yet," says Tolstoy, "whilst my intellect was working, something else in me was working too, and kept me from the deed--a consciousness of life, as I may call it, which was like a force that obliged my mind to fix itself in another direction and draw me out of my situation of despair.... During the whole course of this year, when I almost unceasingly kept asking myself how to end the business, whether by the rope or by the bullet, during all that time, alongside of all those movements of my ideas and observations, my heart kept languishing with another pining emotion. I can call this by no other name than that of a thirst for God. This craving for God had nothing to do with the movement of my ideas,--in fact, it was the direct contrary of that movement,--but it came from my heart. It was like a feeling of dread that made me seem like an orphan and isolated in the midst of all these things that were so foreign. And this feeling of dread was mitigated by the hope of finding the assistance of some one."(80) Of the process, intellectual as well as emotional, which, starting from this idea of God, led to Tolstoy's recovery, I will say nothing in this lecture, reserving it for a later hour. The only thing that need interest us now is the phenomenon of his absolute disenchantment with ordinary life, and the fact that the whole range of habitual values may, to a man as powerful and full of faculty as he was, come to appear so ghastly a mockery. When disillusionment has gone as far as this, there is seldom a _restitutio ad integrum_. One has tasted of the fruit of the tree, and the happiness of Eden never comes again. The happiness that comes, when any does come,--and often enough it fails to return in an acute form, though its form is sometimes very acute,--is not the simple ignorance of ill, but something vastly more complex, including natural evil as one of its elements, but finding natural evil no such stumbling-block and terror because it now sees it swallowed up in supernatural good. The process is one of redemption, not of mere reversion to natural health, and the sufferer, when saved, is saved by what seems to him a second birth, a deeper kind of conscious being than he could enjoy before. ------------------------------------- We find a somewhat different type of religious melancholy enshrined in literature in John Bunyan's autobiography. Tolstoy's preoccupations were largely objective, for the purpose and meaning of life in general was what so troubled him; but poor Bunyan's troubles were over the condition of his own personal self. He was a typical case of the psychopathic temperament, sensitive of conscience to a diseased degree, beset by doubts, fears, and insistent ideas, and a victim of verbal automatisms, both motor and sensory. These were usually texts of Scripture which, sometimes damnatory and sometimes favorable, would come in a half-hallucinatory form as if they were voices, and fasten on his mind and buffet it between them like a shuttlecock. Added to this were a fearful melancholy self-contempt and despair. "Nay, thought I, now I grow worse and worse; now I am farther from conversion than ever I was before. If now I should have burned at the stake, I could not believe that Christ had love for me; alas, I could neither hear him, nor see him, nor feel him, nor savor any of his things. Sometimes I would tell my condition to the people of God, which, when they heard, they would pity me, and would tell of the Promises. But they had as good have told me that I must reach the Sun with my finger as have bidden me receive or rely upon the Promise. [Yet] all this while as to the act of sinning, I never was more tender than now; I durst not take a pin or stick, though but so big as a straw, for my conscience now was sore, and would smart at every touch; I could not tell how to speak my words, for fear I should misplace them. Oh, how gingerly did I then go, in all I did or said! I found myself as on a miry bog that shook if I did but stir; and was as there left both by God and Christ, and the spirit, and all good things. "But my original and inward pollution, that was my plague and my affliction. By reason of that, I was more loathsome in my own eyes than was a toad; and I thought I was so in God's eyes too. Sin and corruption, I said, would as naturally bubble out of my heart as water would bubble out of a fountain. I could have changed heart with anybody. I thought none but the Devil himself could equal me for inward wickedness and pollution of mind. Sure, thought I, I am forsaken of God; and thus I continued a long while, even for some years together. "And now I was sorry that God had made me a man. The beasts, birds, fishes, etc., I blessed their condition, for they had not a sinful nature; they were not obnoxious to the wrath of God; they were not to go to hell-fire after death. I could therefore have rejoiced, had my condition been as any of theirs. Now I blessed the condition of the dog and toad, yea, gladly would I have been in the condition of the dog or horse, for I knew they had no soul to perish under the everlasting weight of Hell or Sin, as mine was like to do. Nay, and though I saw this, felt this, and was broken to pieces with it, yet that which added to my sorrow was, that I could not find with all my soul that I did desire deliverance. My heart was at times exceedingly hard. If I would have given a thousand pounds for a tear, I could not shed one; no, nor sometimes scarce desire to shed one. "I was both a burthen and a terror to myself; nor did I ever so know, as now, what it was to be weary of my life, and yet afraid to die. How gladly would I have been anything but myself! Anything but a man! and in any condition but my own."(81) Poor patient Bunyan, like Tolstoy, saw the light again, but we must also postpone that part of his story to another hour. In a later lecture I will also give the end of the experience of Henry Alline, a devoted evangelist who worked in Nova Scotia a hundred years ago, and who thus vividly describes the high-water mark of the religious melancholy which formed its beginning. The type was not unlike Bunyan's. "Everything I saw seemed to be a burden to me; the earth seemed accursed for my sake: all trees, plants, rocks, hills, and vales seemed to be dressed in mourning and groaning, under the weight of the curse, and everything around me seemed to be conspiring my ruin. My sins seemed to be laid open; so that I thought that every one I saw knew them, and sometimes I was almost ready to acknowledge many things, which I thought they knew: yea sometimes it seemed to me as if every one was pointing me out as the most guilty wretch upon earth. I had now so great a sense of the vanity and emptiness of all things here below, that I knew the whole world could not possibly make me happy, no, nor the whole system of creation. When I waked in the morning, the first thought would be, Oh, my wretched soul, what shall I do, where shall I go? And when I laid down, would say, I shall be perhaps in hell before morning. I would many times look on the beasts with envy, wishing with all my heart I was in their place, that I might have no soul to lose; and when I have seen birds flying over my head, have often thought within myself, Oh, that I could fly away from my danger and distress! Oh, how happy should I be, if I were in their place!"(82) Envy of the placid beasts seems to be a very widespread affection in this type of sadness. ------------------------------------- The worst kind of melancholy is that which takes the form of panic fear. Here is an excellent example, for permission to print which I have to thank the sufferer. The original is in French, and though the subject was evidently in a bad nervous condition at the time of which he writes, his case has otherwise the merit of extreme simplicity. I translate freely. "Whilst in this state of philosophic pessimism and general depression of spirits about my prospects, I went one evening into a dressing-room in the twilight to procure some article that was there; when suddenly there fell upon me without any warning, just as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence. Simultaneously there arose in my mind the image of an epileptic patient whom I had seen in the asylum, a black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic, who used to sit all day on one of the benches, or rather shelves against the wall, with his knees drawn up against his chin, and the coarse gray undershirt, which was his only garment, drawn over them inclosing his entire figure. He sat there like a sort of sculptured Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes and looking absolutely non-human. This image and my fear entered into a species of combination with each other. _That shape am I_, I felt, potentially. Nothing that I possess can defend me against that fate, if the hour for it should strike for me as it struck for him. There was such a horror of him, and such a perception of my own merely momentary discrepancy from him, that it was as if something hitherto solid within my breast gave way entirely, and I became a mass of quivering fear. After this the universe was changed for me altogether. I awoke morning after morning with a horrible dread at the pit of my stomach, and with a sense of the insecurity of life that I never knew before, and that I have never felt since.(83) It was like a revelation; and although the immediate feelings passed away, the experience has made me sympathetic with the morbid feelings of others ever since. It gradually faded, but for months I was unable to go out into the dark alone. "In general I dreaded to be left alone. I remember wondering how other people could live, how I myself had ever lived, so unconscious of that pit of insecurity beneath the surface of life. My mother in particular, a very cheerful person, seemed to me a perfect paradox in her unconsciousness of danger, which you may well believe I was very careful not to disturb by revelations of my own state of mind. I have always thought that this experience of melancholia of mine had a religious bearing." On asking this correspondent to explain more fully what he meant by these last words, the answer he wrote was this:-- "I mean that the fear was so invasive and powerful that if I had not clung to scripture-texts like 'The eternal God is my refuge,' etc., 'Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy-laden,' etc., 'I am the resurrection and the life,' etc., I think I should have grown really insane."(84) There is no need of more examples. The cases we have looked at are enough. One of them gives us the vanity of mortal things; another the sense of sin; and the remaining one describes the fear of the universe;--and in one or other of these three ways it always is that man's original optimism and self-satisfaction get leveled with the dust. In none of these cases was there any intellectual insanity or delusion about matters of fact; but were we disposed to open the chapter of really insane melancholia, with its hallucinations and delusions, it would be a worse story still--desperation absolute and complete, the whole universe coagulating about the sufferer into a material of overwhelming horror, surrounding him without opening or end. Not the conception or intellectual perception of evil, but the grisly blood-freezing heart-palsying sensation of it close upon one, and no other conception or sensation able to live for a moment in its presence. How irrelevantly remote seem all our usual refined optimisms and intellectual and moral consolations in presence of a need of help like this! Here is the real core of the religious problem: Help! help! No prophet can claim to bring a final message unless he says things that will have a sound of reality in the ears of victims such as these. But the deliverance must come in as strong a form as the complaint, if it is to take effect; and that seems a reason why the coarser religions, revivalistic, orgiastic, with blood and miracles and supernatural operations, may possibly never be displaced. Some constitutions need them too much. ------------------------------------- Arrived at this point, we can see how great an antagonism may naturally arise between the healthy-minded way of viewing life and the way that takes all this experience of evil as something essential. To this latter way, the morbid-minded way, as we might call it, healthy-mindedness pure and simple seems unspeakably blind and shallow. To the healthy-minded way, on the other hand, the way of the sick soul seems unmanly and diseased. With their grubbing in rat-holes instead of living in the light; with their manufacture of fears, and preoccupation with every unwholesome kind of misery, there is something almost obscene about these children of wrath and cravers of a second birth. If religious intolerance and hanging and burning could again become the order of the day, there is little doubt that, however it may have been in the past, the healthy-minded would at present show themselves the less indulgent party of the two. In our own attitude, not yet abandoned, of impartial onlookers, what are we to say of this quarrel? It seems to me that we are bound to say that morbid-mindedness ranges over the wider scale of experience, and that its survey is the one that overlaps. The method of averting one's attention from evil, and living simply in the light of good is splendid as long as it will work. It will work with many persons; it will work far more generally than most of us are ready to suppose; and within the sphere of its successful operation there is nothing to be said against it as a religious solution. But it breaks down impotently as soon as melancholy comes; and even though one be quite free from melancholy one's self, there is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth. The normal process of life contains moments as bad as any of those which insane melancholy is filled with, moments in which radical evil gets its innings and takes its solid turn. The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony. If you protest, my friend, wait till you arrive there yourself! To believe in the carnivorous reptiles of geologic times is hard for our imagination--they seem too much like mere museum specimens. Yet there is no tooth in any one of those museum-skulls that did not daily through long years of the foretime hold fast to the body struggling in despair of some fated living victim. Forms of horror just as dreadful to their victims, if on a smaller spatial scale, fill the world about us to- day. Here on our very hearths and in our gardens the infernal cat plays with the panting mouse, or holds the hot bird fluttering in her jaws. Crocodiles and rattlesnakes and pythons are at this moment vessels of life as real as we are; their loathsome existence fills every minute of every day that drags its length along; and whenever they or other wild beasts clutch their living prey, the deadly horror which an agitated melancholiac feels is the literally right reaction on the situation.(85) It may indeed be that no religious reconciliation with the absolute totality of things is possible. Some evils, indeed, are ministerial to higher forms of good; but it may be that there are forms of evil so extreme as to enter into no good system whatsoever, and that, in respect of such evil, dumb submission or neglect to notice is the only practical resource. This question must confront us on a later day. But provisionally, and as a mere matter of program and method, since the evil facts are as genuine parts of nature as the good ones, the philosophic presumption should be that they have some rational significance, and that systematic healthy-mindedness, failing as it does to accord to sorrow, pain, and death any positive and active attention whatever, is formally less complete than systems that try at least to include these elements in their scope. The completest religions would therefore seem to be those in which the pessimistic elements are best developed. Buddhism, of course, and Christianity are the best known to us of these. They are essentially religions of deliverance: the man must die to an unreal life before he can be born into the real life. In my next lecture, I will try to discuss some of the psychological conditions of this second birth. Fortunately from now onward we shall have to deal with more cheerful subjects than those which we have recently been dwelling on. LECTURE VIII. THE DIVIDED SELF, AND THE PROCESS OF ITS UNIFICATION. The last lecture was a painful one, dealing as it did with evil as a pervasive element of the world we live in. At the close of it we were brought into full view of the contrast between the two ways of looking at life which are characteristic respectively of what we called the healthy- minded, who need to be born only once, and of the sick souls, who must be twice-born in order to be happy. The result is two different conceptions of the universe of our experience. In the religion of the once-born the world is a sort of rectilinear or one-storied affair, whose accounts are kept in one denomination, whose parts have just the values which naturally they appear to have, and of which a simple algebraic sum of pluses and minuses will give the total worth. Happiness and religious peace consist in living on the plus side of the account. In the religion of the twice- born, on the other hand, the world is a double-storied mystery. Peace cannot be reached by the simple addition of pluses and elimination of minuses from life. Natural good is not simply insufficient in amount and transient, there lurks a falsity in its very being. Cancelled as it all is by death if not by earlier enemies, it gives no final balance, and can never be the thing intended for our lasting worship. It keeps us from our real good, rather; and renunciation and despair of it are our first step in the direction of the truth. There are two lives, the natural and the spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other. In their extreme forms, of pure naturalism and pure salvationism, the two types are violently contrasted; though here as in most other current classifications, the radical extremes are somewhat ideal abstractions, and the concrete human beings whom we oftenest meet are intermediate varieties and mixtures. Practically, however, you all recognize the difference: you understand, for example, the disdain of the methodist convert for the mere sky-blue healthy-minded moralist; and you likewise enter into the aversion of the latter to what seems to him the diseased subjectivism of the Methodist, dying to live, as he calls it, and making of paradox and the inversion of natural appearances the essence of God's truth.(86) ------------------------------------- The psychological basis of the twice-born character seems to be a certain discordancy or heterogeneity in the native temperament of the subject, an incompletely unified moral and intellectual constitution. "Homo duplex, homo duplex!" writes Alphonse Daudet. "The first time that I perceived that I was two was at the death of my brother Henri, when my father cried out so dramatically, 'He is dead, he is dead!' While my first self wept, my second self thought, 'How truly given was that cry, how fine it would be at the theatre.' I was then fourteen years old. "This horrible duality has often given me matter for reflection. Oh, this terrible second me, always seated whilst the other is on foot, acting, living, suffering, bestirring itself. This second me that I have never been able to intoxicate, to make shed tears, or put to sleep. And how it sees into things, and how it mocks!"(87) Recent works on the psychology of character have had much to say upon this point.(88) Some persons are born with an inner constitution which is harmonious and well balanced from the outset. Their impulses are consistent with one another, their will follows without trouble the guidance of their intellect, their passions are not excessive, and their lives are little haunted by regrets. Others are oppositely constituted; and are so in degrees which may vary from something so slight as to result in a merely odd or whimsical inconsistency, to a discordancy of which the consequences may be inconvenient in the extreme. Of the more innocent kinds of heterogeneity I find a good example in Mrs. Annie Besant's autobiography. "I have ever been the queerest mixture of weakness and strength, and have paid heavily for the weakness. As a child I used to suffer tortures of shyness, and if my shoe-lace was untied would feel shamefacedly that every eye was fixed on the unlucky string; as a girl I would shrink away from strangers and think myself unwanted and unliked, so that I was full of eager gratitude to any one who noticed me kindly; as the young mistress of a house I was afraid of my servants, and would let careless work pass rather than bear the pain of reproving the ill-doer; when I have been lecturing and debating with no lack of spirit on the platform, I have preferred to go without what I wanted at the hotel rather than to ring and make the waiter fetch it. Combative on the platform in defense of any cause I cared for, I shrink from quarrel or disapproval in the house, and am a coward at heart in private while a good fighter in public. How often have I passed unhappy quarters of an hour screwing up my courage to find fault with some subordinate whom my duty compelled me to reprove, and how often have I jeered at myself for a fraud as the doughty platform combatant, when shrinking from blaming some lad or lass for doing their work badly. An unkind look or word has availed to make me shrink into myself as a snail into its shell, while, on the platform, opposition makes me speak my best."(89) This amount of inconsistency will only count as amiable weakness; but a stronger degree of heterogeneity may make havoc of the subject's life. There are persons whose existence is little more than a series of zigzags, as now one tendency and now another gets the upper hand. Their spirit wars with their flesh, they wish for incompatibles, wayward impulses interrupt their most deliberate plans, and their lives are one long drama of repentance and of effort to repair misdemeanors and mistakes. Heterogeneous personality has been explained as the result of inheritance--the traits of character of incompatible and antagonistic ancestors are supposed to be preserved alongside of each other.(90) This explanation may pass for what it is worth--it certainly needs corroboration. But whatever the cause of heterogeneous personality may be, we find the extreme examples of it in the psychopathic temperament, of which I spoke in my first lecture. All writers about that temperament make the inner heterogeneity prominent in their descriptions. Frequently, indeed, it is only this trait that leads us to ascribe that temperament to a man at all. A "dégénéré supérieur" is simply a man of sensibility in many directions, who finds more difficulty than is common in keeping his spiritual house in order and running his furrow straight, because his feelings and impulses are too keen and too discrepant mutually. In the haunting and insistent ideas, in the irrational impulses, the morbid scruples, dreads, and inhibitions which beset the psychopathic temperament when it is thoroughly pronounced, we have exquisite examples of heterogeneous personality. Bunyan had an obsession of the words, "Sell Christ for this, sell him for that, sell him, sell him!" which would run through his mind a hundred times together, until one day out of breath with retorting, "I will not, I will not," he impulsively said, "Let him go if he will," and this loss of the battle kept him in despair for over a year. The lives of the saints are full of such blasphemous obsessions, ascribed invariably to the direct agency of Satan. The phenomenon connects itself with the life of the subconscious self, so-called, of which we must ere-long speak more directly. Now in all of us, however constituted, but to a degree the greater in proportion as we are intense and sensitive and subject to diversified temptations, and to the greatest possible degree if we are decidedly psychopathic, does the normal evolution of character chiefly consist in the straightening out and unifying of the inner self. The higher and the lower feelings, the useful and the erring impulses, begin by being a comparative chaos within us--they must end by forming a stable system of functions in right subordination. Unhappiness is apt to characterize the period of order-making and struggle. If the individual be of tender conscience and religiously quickened, the unhappiness will take the form of moral remorse and compunction, of feeling inwardly vile and wrong, and of standing in false relations to the author of one's being and appointer of one's spiritual fate. This is the religious melancholy and "conviction of sin" that have played so large a part in the history of Protestant Christianity. The man's interior is a battle-ground for what he feels to be two deadly hostile selves, one actual, the other ideal. As Victor Hugo makes his Mahomet say:-- "Je suis le champ vil des sublimes combats: Tantôt l'homme d'en haut, et tantôt l'homme d'en bas; Et le mal dans ma bouche avec le bien alterne, Comme dans le désert le sable et la citerne." Wrong living, impotent aspirations; "What I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I," as Saint Paul says; self-loathing, self-despair; an unintelligible and intolerable burden to which one is mysteriously the heir. Let me quote from some typical cases of discordant personality, with melancholy in the form of self-condemnation and sense of sin. Saint Augustine's case is a classic example. You all remember his half-pagan, half-Christian bringing up at Carthage, his emigration to Rome and Milan, his adoption of Manicheism and subsequent skepticism, and his restless search for truth and purity of life; and finally how, distracted by the struggle between the two souls in his breast, and ashamed of his own weakness of will, when so many others whom he knew and knew of had thrown off the shackles of sensuality and dedicated themselves to chastity and the higher life, he heard a voice in the garden say, "_Sume, lege_" (take and read), and opening the Bible at random, saw the text, "not in chambering and wantonness," etc., which seemed directly sent to his address, and laid the inner storm to rest forever.(91) Augustine's psychological genius has given an account of the trouble of having a divided self which has never been surpassed. "The new will which I began to have was not yet strong enough to overcome that other will, strengthened by long indulgence. So these two wills, one old, one new, one carnal, the other spiritual, contended with each other and disturbed my soul. I understood by my own experience what I had read, 'flesh lusteth against spirit, and spirit against flesh.' It was myself indeed in both the wills, yet more myself in that which I approved in myself than in that which I disapproved in myself. Yet it was through myself that habit had attained so fierce a mastery over me, because I had willingly come whither I willed not. Still bound to earth, I refused, O God, to fight on thy side, as much afraid to be freed from all bonds, as I ought to have feared being trammeled by them. "Thus the thoughts by which I meditated upon thee were like the efforts of one who would awake, but being overpowered with sleepiness is soon asleep again. Often does a man when heavy sleepiness is on his limbs defer to shake it off, and though not approving it, encourage it; even so I was sure it was better to surrender to thy love than to yield to my own lusts, yet, though the former course convinced me, the latter pleased and held me bound. There was naught in me to answer thy call, 'Awake, thou sleeper,' but only drawling, drowsy words, 'Presently; yes, presently; wait a little while.' But the 'presently' had no 'present,' and the 'little while' grew long.... For I was afraid thou wouldst hear me too soon, and heal me at once of my disease of lust, which I wished to satiate rather than to see extinguished. With what lashes of words did I not scourge my own soul. Yet it shrank back; it refused, though it had no excuse to offer.... I said within myself: 'Come, let it be done now,' and as I said it, I was on the point of the resolve. I all but did it, yet I did not do it. And I made another effort, and almost succeeded, yet I did not reach it, and did not grasp it, hesitating to die to death, and live to life; and the evil to which I was so wonted held me more than the better life I had not tried."(92) There could be no more perfect description of the divided will, when the higher wishes lack just that last acuteness, that touch of explosive intensity, of dynamogenic quality (to use the slang of the psychologists), that enables them to burst their shell, and make irruption efficaciously into life and quell the lower tendencies forever. In a later lecture we shall have much to say about this higher excitability. ------------------------------------- I find another good description of the divided will in the autobiography of Henry Alline, the Nova Scotian evangelist, of whose melancholy I read a brief account in my last lecture. The poor youth's sins were, as you will see, of the most harmless order, yet they interfered with what proved to be his truest vocation, so they gave him great distress. "I was now very moral in my life, but found no rest of conscience. I now began to be esteemed in young company, who knew nothing of my mind all this while, and their esteem began to be a snare to my soul, for I soon began to be fond of carnal mirth, though I still flattered myself that if I did not get drunk, nor curse, nor swear, there would be no sin in frolicking and carnal mirth, and I thought God would indulge young people with some (what I called simple or civil) recreation. I still kept a round of duties, and would not suffer myself to run into any open vices, and so got along very well in time of health and prosperity, but when I was distressed or threatened by sickness, death, or heavy storms of thunder, my religion would not do, and I found there was something wanting, and would begin to repent my going so much to frolics, but when the distress was over, the devil and my own wicked heart, with the solicitations of my associates, and my fondness for young company, were such strong allurements, I would again give way, and thus I got to be very wild and rude, at the same time kept up my rounds of secret prayer and reading; but God, not willing I should destroy myself, still followed me with his calls, and moved with such power upon my conscience, that I could not satisfy myself with my diversions, and in the midst of my mirth sometimes would have such a sense of my lost and undone condition, that I would wish myself from the company, and after it was over, when I went home, would make many promises that I would attend no more on these frolics, and would beg forgiveness for hours and hours; but when I came to have the temptation again, I would give way: no sooner would I hear the music and drink a glass of wine, but I would find my mind elevated and soon proceed to any sort of merriment or diversion, that I thought was not debauched or openly vicious; but when I returned from my carnal mirth I felt as guilty as ever, and could sometimes not close my eyes for some hours after I had gone to my bed. I was one of the most unhappy creatures on earth. "Sometimes I would leave the company (often speaking to the fiddler to cease from playing, as if I was tired), and go out and walk about crying and praying, as if my very heart would break, and beseeching God that he would not cut me off, nor give me up to hardness of heart. Oh, what unhappy hours and nights I thus wore away! When I met sometimes with merry companions, and my heart was ready to sink, I would labor to put on as cheerful a countenance as possible, that they might not distrust anything, and sometimes would begin some discourse with young men or young women on purpose, or propose a merry song, lest the distress of my soul would be discovered, or mistrusted, when at the same time I would then rather have been in a wilderness in exile, than with them or any of their pleasures or enjoyments. Thus for many months when I was in company, I would act the hypocrite and feign a merry heart, but at the same time would endeavor as much as I could to shun their company, oh wretched and unhappy mortal that I was! Everything I did, and wherever I went, I was still in a storm, and yet I continued to be the chief contriver and ringleader of the frolics for many months after; though it was a toil and torment to attend them; but the devil and my own wicked heart drove me about like a slave, telling me that I must do this and do that, and bear this and bear that, and turn here and turn there, to keep my credit up, and retain the esteem of my associates: and all this while I continued as strict as possible in my duties, and left no stone unturned to pacify my conscience, watching even against my thoughts, and praying continually wherever I went: for I did not think there was any sin in my conduct, when I was among carnal company, because I did not take any satisfaction there, but only followed it, I thought, for sufficient reasons. "But still, all that I did or could do, conscience would roar night and day." Saint Augustine and Alline both emerged into the smooth waters of inner unity and peace, and I shall next ask you to consider more closely some of the peculiarities of the process of unification, when it occurs. It may come gradually, or it may occur abruptly; it may come through altered feelings, or through altered powers of action; or it may come through new intellectual insights, or through experiences which we shall later have to designate as "mystical." However it come, it brings a characteristic sort of relief; and never such extreme relief as when it is cast into the religious mould. Happiness! happiness! religion is only one of the ways in which men gain that gift. Easily, permanently, and successfully, it often transforms the most intolerable misery into the profoundest and most enduring happiness. But to find religion is only one out of many ways of reaching unity; and the process of remedying inner incompleteness and reducing inner discord is a general psychological process, which may take place with any sort of mental material, and need not necessarily assume the religious form. In judging of the religious types of regeneration which we are about to study, it is important to recognize that they are only one species of a genus that contains other types as well. For example, the new birth may be away from religion into incredulity; or it may be from moral scrupulosity into freedom and license; or it may be produced by the irruption into the individual's life of some new stimulus or passion, such as love, ambition, cupidity, revenge, or patriotic devotion. In all these instances we have precisely the same psychological form of event,--a firmness, stability, and equilibrium succeeding a period of storm and stress and inconsistency. In these non-religious cases the new man may also be born either gradually or suddenly. The French philosopher Jouffroy has left an eloquent memorial of his own "counter-conversion," as the transition from orthodoxy to infidelity has been well styled by Mr. Starbuck. Jouffroy's doubts had long harassed him; but he dates his final crisis from a certain night when his disbelief grew fixed and stable, and where the immediate result was sadness at the illusions he had lost. "I shall never forget that night of December," writes Jouffroy, "in which the veil that concealed from me my own incredulity was torn. I hear again my steps in that narrow naked chamber where long after the hour of sleep had come I had the habit of walking up and down. I see again that moon, half-veiled by clouds, which now and again illuminated the frigid window-panes. The hours of the night flowed on and I did not note their passage. Anxiously I followed my thoughts, as from layer to layer they descended towards the foundation of my consciousness, and, scattering one by one all the illusions which until then had screened its windings from my view, made them every moment more clearly visible. "Vainly I clung to these last beliefs as a shipwrecked sailor clings to the fragments of his vessel; vainly, frightened at the unknown void in which I was about to float, I turned with them towards my childhood, my family, my country, all that was dear and sacred to me: the inflexible current of my thought was too strong,--parents, family, memory, beliefs, it forced me to let go of everything. The investigation went on more obstinate and more severe as it drew near its term, and did not stop until the end was reached. I knew then that in the depth of my mind nothing was left that stood erect. "This moment was a frightful one; and when towards morning I threw myself exhausted on my bed, I seemed to feel my earlier life, so smiling and so full, go out like a fire, and before me another life opened, sombre and unpeopled, where in future I must live alone, alone with my fatal thought which had exiled me thither, and which I was tempted to curse. The days which followed this discovery were the saddest of my life."(93) In John Foster's Essay on Decision of Character, there is an account of a case of sudden conversion to avarice, which is illustrative enough to quote:-- A young man, it appears, "wasted, in two or three years, a large patrimony in profligate revels with a number of worthless associates who called themselves his friends, and who, when his last means were exhausted, treated him of course with neglect or contempt. Reduced to absolute want, he one day went out of the house with an intention to put an end to his life; but wandering awhile almost unconsciously, he came to the brow of an eminence which overlooked what were lately his estates. Here he sat down, and remained fixed in thought a number of hours, at the end of which he sprang from the ground with a vehement, exulting emotion. He had formed his resolution, which was, that all these estates should be his again; he had formed his plan, too, which he instantly began to execute. He walked hastily forward, determined to seize the first opportunity, of however humble a kind, to gain any money, though it were ever so despicable a trifle, and resolved absolutely not to spend, if he could help it, a farthing of whatever he might obtain. The first thing that drew his attention was a heap of coals shot out of carts on the pavement before a house. He offered himself to shovel or wheel them into the place where they were to be laid, and was employed. He received a few pence for the labor; and then, in pursuance of the saving part of his plan, requested some small gratuity of meat and drink, which was given him. He then looked out for the next thing that might chance; and went, with indefatigable industry, through a succession of servile employments in different places, of longer and shorter duration, still scrupulous in avoiding, as far as possible, the expense of a penny. He promptly seized every opportunity which could advance his design, without regarding the meanness of occupation or appearance. By this method he had gained, after a considerable time, money enough to purchase in order to sell again a few cattle, of which he had taken pains to understand the value. He speedily but cautiously turned his first gains into second advantages; retained without a single deviation his extreme parsimony; and thus advanced by degrees into larger transactions and incipient wealth. I did not hear, or have forgotten, the continued course of his life, but the final result was, that he more than recovered his lost possessions, and died an inveterate miser, worth £60,000."(94) Let me turn now to the kind of case, the religious case, namely, that immediately concerns us. Here is one of the simplest possible type, an account of the conversion to the systematic religion of healthy-mindedness of a man who must already have been naturally of the healthy-minded type. It shows how, when the fruit is ripe, a touch will make it fall. Mr. Horace Fletcher, in his little book called Menticulture, relates that a friend with whom he was talking of the self-control attained by the Japanese through their practice of the Buddhist discipline said:-- " 'You must first get rid of anger and worry.' 'But,' said I, 'is that possible?' 'Yes,' replied he; 'it is possible to the Japanese, and ought to be possible to us.' "On my way back I could think of nothing else but the words 'get rid, get rid'; and the idea must have continued to possess me during my sleeping hours, for the first consciousness in the morning brought back the same thought, with the revelation of a discovery, which framed itself into the reasoning, 'If it is possible to get rid of anger and worry, why is it necessary to have them at all?' I felt the strength of the argument, and at once accepted the reasoning. The baby had discovered that it could walk. It would scorn to creep any longer. "From the instant I realized that these cancer spots of worry and anger were removable, they left me. With the discovery of their weakness they were exorcised. From that time life has had an entirely different aspect. "Although from that moment the possibility and desirability of freedom from the depressing passions has been a reality to me, it took me some months to feel absolute security in my new position; but, as the usual occasions for worry and anger have presented themselves over and over again, and I have been unable to feel them in the slightest degree, I no longer dread or guard against them, and I am amazed at my increased energy and vigor of mind; at my strength to meet situations of all kinds, and at my disposition to love and appreciate everything. "I have had occasion to travel more than ten thousand miles by rail since that morning. The same Pullman porter, conductor, hotel-waiter, peddler, book-agent, cabman, and others who were formerly a source of annoyance and irritation have been met, but I am not conscious of a single incivility. All at once the whole world has turned good to me. I have become, as it were, sensitive only to the rays of good. "I could recount many experiences which prove a brand-new condition of mind, but one will be sufficient. Without the slightest feeling of annoyance or impatience, I have seen a train that I had planned to take with a good deal of interested and pleasurable anticipation move out of the station without me, because my baggage did not arrive. The porter from the hotel came running and panting into the station just as the train pulled out of sight. When he saw me, he looked as if he feared a scolding, and began to tell of being blocked in a crowded street and unable to get out. When he had finished, I said to him: 'It doesn't matter at all, you couldn't help it, so we will try again to- morrow. Here is your fee, I am sorry you had all this trouble in earning it.' The look of surprise that came over his face was so filled with pleasure that I was repaid on the spot for the delay in my departure. Next day he would not accept a cent for the service, and he and I are friends for life. "During the first weeks of my experience I was on guard only against worry and anger; but, in the mean time, having noticed the absence of the other depressing and dwarfing passions, I began to trace a relationship, until I was convinced that they are all growths from the two roots I have specified. I have felt the freedom now for so long a time that I am sure of my relation toward it; and I could no more harbor any of the thieving and depressing influences that once I nursed as a heritage of humanity than a fop would voluntarily wallow in a filthy gutter. "There is no doubt in my mind that pure Christianity and pure Buddhism, and the Mental Sciences and all Religions, fundamentally teach what has been a discovery to me; but none of them have presented it in the light of a simple and easy process of elimination. At one time I wondered if the elimination would not yield to indifference and sloth. In my experience, the contrary is the result. I feel such an increased desire to do something useful that it seems as if I were a boy again and the energy for play had returned. I could fight as readily as (and better than) ever, if there were occasion for it. It does not make one a coward. It can't, since fear is one of the things eliminated. I notice the absence of timidity in the presence of any audience. When a boy, I was standing under a tree which was struck by lightning, and received a shock from the effects of which I never knew exemption until I had dissolved partnership with worry. Since then, lightning and thunder have been encountered under conditions which would formerly have caused great depression and discomfort, without [my] experiencing a trace of either. Surprise is also greatly modified, and one is less liable to become startled by unexpected sights or noises. "As far as I am individually concerned, I am not bothering myself at present as to what the results of this emancipated condition may be. I have no doubt that the perfect health aimed at by Christian Science may be one of the possibilities, for I note a marked improvement in the way my stomach does its duty in assimilating the food I give it to handle, and I am sure it works better to the sound of a song than under the friction of a frown. Neither am I wasting any of this precious time formulating an idea of a future existence or a future Heaven. The Heaven that I have within myself is as attractive as any that has been promised or that I can imagine; and I am willing to let the growth lead where it will, as long as the anger and their brood have no part in misguiding it."(95) The older medicine used to speak of two ways, _lysis_ and _crisis_, one gradual, the other abrupt, in which one might recover from a bodily disease. In the spiritual realm there are also two ways, one gradual, the other sudden, in which inner unification may occur. Tolstoy and Bunyan may again serve us as examples, examples, as it happens, of the gradual way, though it must be confessed at the outset that it is hard to follow these windings of the hearts of others, and one feels that their words do not reveal their total secret. Howe'er this be, Tolstoy, pursuing his unending questioning, seemed to come to one insight after another. First he perceived that his conviction that life was meaningless took only this finite life into account. He was looking for the value of one finite term in that of another, and the whole result could only be one of those indeterminate equations in mathematics which end with 0=0. Yet this is as far as the reasoning intellect by itself can go, unless irrational sentiment or faith brings in the infinite. Believe in the infinite as common people do, and life grows possible again. "Since mankind has existed, wherever life has been, there also has been the faith that gave the possibility of living. Faith is the sense of life, that sense by virtue of which man does not destroy himself, but continues to live on. It is the force whereby we live. If Man did not believe that he must live for something, he would not live at all. The idea of an infinite God, of the divinity of the soul, of the union of men's actions with God--these are ideas elaborated in the infinite secret depths of human thought. They are ideas without which there would be no life, without which I myself," said Tolstoy, "would not exist. I began to see that I had no right to rely on my individual reasoning and neglect these answers given by faith, for they are the only answers to the question." Yet how believe as the common people believe, steeped as they are in grossest superstition? It is impossible,--but yet their life! their life! It is normal. It is happy! It is an answer to the question! Little by little, Tolstoy came to the settled conviction--he says it took him two years to arrive there--that his trouble had not been with life in general, not with the common life of common men, but with the life of the upper, intellectual, artistic classes, the life which he had personally always led, the cerebral life, the life of conventionality, artificiality, and personal ambition. He had been living wrongly and must change. To work for animal needs, to abjure lies and vanities, to relieve common wants, to be simple, to believe in God, therein lay happiness again. "I remember," he says, "one day in early spring, I was alone in the forest, lending my ear to its mysterious noises. I listened, and my thought went back to what for these three years it always was busy with--the quest of God. But the idea of him, I said, how did I ever come by the idea? "And again there arose in me, with this thought, glad aspirations towards life. Everything in me awoke and received a meaning.... Why do I look farther? a voice within me asked. He is there: he, without whom one cannot live. To acknowledge God and to live are one and the same thing. God is what life is. Well, then! live, seek God, and there will be no life without him.... "After this, things cleared up within me and about me better than ever, and the light has never wholly died away. I was saved from suicide. Just how or when the change took place I cannot tell. But as insensibly and gradually as the force of life had been annulled within me, and I had reached my moral death-bed, just as gradually and imperceptibly did the energy of life come back. And what was strange was that this energy that came back was nothing new. It was my ancient juvenile force of faith, the belief that the sole purpose of my life was to be _better_. I gave up the life of the conventional world, recognizing it to be no life, but a parody on life, which its superfluities simply keep us from comprehending,"--and Tolstoy thereupon embraced the life of the peasants, and has felt right and happy, or at least relatively so, ever since.(96) As I interpret his melancholy, then, it was not merely an accidental vitiation of his humors, though it was doubtless also that. It was logically called for by the clash between his inner character and his outer activities and aims. Although a literary artist, Tolstoy was one of those primitive oaks of men to whom the superfluities and insincerities, the cupidities, complications, and cruelties of our polite civilization are profoundly unsatisfying, and for whom the eternal veracities lie with more natural and animal things. His crisis was the getting of his soul in order, the discovery of its genuine habitat and vocation, the escape from falsehoods into what for him were ways of truth. It was a case of heterogeneous personality tardily and slowly finding its unity and level. And though not many of us can imitate Tolstoy, not having enough, perhaps, of the aboriginal human marrow in our bones, most of us may at least feel as if it might be better for us if we could. Bunyan's recovery seems to have been even slower. For years together he was alternately haunted with texts of Scripture, now up and now down, but at last with an ever growing relief in his salvation through the blood of Christ. "My peace would be in and out twenty times a day; comfort now and trouble presently; peace now and before I could go a furlong as full of guilt and fear as ever heart could hold." When a good text comes home to him, "This," he writes, "gave me good encouragement for the space of two or three hours"; or "This was a good day to me, I hope I shall not forget it"; or "The glory of these words was then so weighty on me that I was ready to swoon as I sat; yet not with grief and trouble, but with solid joy and peace"; or "This made a strange seizure on my spirit; it brought light with it, and commanded a silence in my heart of all those tumultuous thoughts that before did use, like masterless hell-hounds, to roar and bellow and make a hideous noise within me. It showed me that Jesus Christ had not quite forsaken and cast off my Soul." Such periods accumulate until he can write: "And now remained only the hinder part of the tempest, for the thunder was gone beyond me, only some drops would still remain, that now and then would fall upon me";--and at last: "Now did my chains fall off my legs indeed; I was loosed from my afflictions and irons; my temptations also fled away; so that from that time, those dreadful Scriptures of God left off to trouble me; now went I also home rejoicing, for the grace and love of God.... Now could I see myself in Heaven and Earth at once; in Heaven by my Christ, by my Head, by my Righteousness and Life, though on Earth by my body or person.... Christ was a precious Christ to my soul that night; I could scarce lie in my bed for joy and peace and triumph through Christ." Bunyan became a minister of the gospel, and in spite of his neurotic constitution, and of the twelve years he lay in prison for his non- conformity, his life was turned to active use. He was a peacemaker and doer of good, and the immortal Allegory which he wrote has brought the very spirit of religious patience home to English hearts. But neither Bunyan nor Tolstoy could become what we have called healthy- minded. They had drunk too deeply of the cup of bitterness ever to forget its taste, and their redemption is into a universe two stories deep. Each of them realized a good which broke the effective edge of his sadness; yet the sadness was preserved as a minor ingredient in the heart of the faith by which it was overcome. The fact of interest for us is that as a matter of fact they could and did find _something_ welling up in the inner reaches of their consciousness, by which such extreme sadness could be overcome. Tolstoy does well to talk of it as _that by which men live_; for that is exactly what it is, a stimulus, an excitement, a faith, a force that re-infuses the positive willingness to live, even in full presence of the evil perceptions that erewhile made life seem unbearable. For Tolstoy's perceptions of evil appear within their sphere to have remained unmodified. His later works show him implacable to the whole system of official values: the ignobility of fashionable life; the infamies of empire; the spuriousness of the church, the vain conceit of the professions; the meannesses and cruelties that go with great success; and every other pompous crime and lying institution of this world. To all patience with such things his experience has been for him a permanent ministry of death. Bunyan also leaves this world to the enemy. "I must first pass a sentence of death," he says, "upon everything that can properly be called a thing of this life, even to reckon myself, my wife, my children, my health, my enjoyments, and all, as dead to me, and myself as dead to them; to trust in God through Christ, as touching the world to come; and as touching this world, to count the grave my house, to make my bed in darkness, and to say to corruption, Thou art my father, and to the worm, Thou art my mother and sister.... The parting with my wife and my poor children hath often been to me as the pulling of my flesh from my bones, especially my poor blind child who lay nearer my heart than all I had besides. Poor child, thought I, what sorrow art thou like to have for thy portion in this world! Thou must be beaten, must beg, suffer hunger, cold, nakedness, and a thousand calamities, though I cannot now endure that the wind should blow upon thee. But yet I must venture you all with God, though it goeth to the quick to leave you."(97) The "hue of resolution" is there, but the full flood of ecstatic liberation seems never to have poured over poor John Bunyan's soul. These examples may suffice to acquaint us in a general way with the phenomenon technically called "Conversion." In the next lecture I shall invite you to study its peculiarities and concomitants in some detail. LECTURE IX. CONVERSION. To be converted, to be regenerated, to receive grace, to experience religion, to gain an assurance, are so many phrases which denote the process, gradual or sudden, by which a self hitherto divided, and consciously wrong inferior and unhappy, becomes unified and consciously right superior and happy, in consequence of its firmer hold upon religious realities. This at least is what conversion signifies in general terms, whether or not we believe that a direct divine operation is needed to bring such a moral change about. Before entering upon a minuter study of the process, let me enliven our understanding of the definition by a concrete example. I choose the quaint case of an unlettered man, Stephen H. Bradley, whose experience is related in a scarce American pamphlet.(98) I select this case because it shows how in these inner alterations one may find one unsuspected depth below another, as if the possibilities of character lay disposed in a series of layers or shells, of whose existence we have no premonitory knowledge. Bradley thought that he had been already fully converted at the age of fourteen. "I thought I saw the Saviour, by faith, in human shape, for about one second in the room, with arms extended, appearing to say to me, Come. The next day I rejoiced with trembling; soon after, my happiness was so great that I said that I wanted to die; this world had no place in my affections, as I knew of, and every day appeared as solemn to me as the Sabbath. I had an ardent desire that all mankind might feel as I did; I wanted to have them all love God supremely. Previous to this time I was very selfish and self-righteous; but now I desired the welfare of all mankind, and could with a feeling heart forgive my worst enemies, and I felt as if I should be willing to bear the scoffs and sneers of any person, and suffer anything for His sake, if I could be the means in the hands of God, of the conversion of one soul." Nine years later, in 1829, Mr. Bradley heard of a revival of religion that had begun in his neighborhood. "Many of the young converts," he says, "would come to me when in meeting and ask me if I had religion, and my reply generally was, I hope I have. This did not appear to satisfy them; they said they _knew they_ had it. I requested them to pray for me, thinking with myself, that if I had not got religion now, after so long a time professing to be a Christian, that it was time I had, and hoped their prayers would be answered in my behalf. "One Sabbath, I went to hear the Methodist at the Academy. He spoke of the ushering in of the day of general judgment; and he set it forth in such a solemn and terrible manner as I never heard before. The scene of that day appeared to be taking place, and so awakened were all the powers of my mind that, like Felix, I trembled involuntarily on the bench where I was sitting, though I felt nothing at heart. The next day evening I went to hear him again. He took his text from Revelation: 'And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God.' And he represented the terrors of that day in such a manner that it appeared as if it would melt the heart of stone. When he finished his discourse, an old gentleman turned to me and said, 'This is what I call preaching.' I thought the same; but my feelings were still unmoved by what he said, and I did not enjoy religion, but I believe he did. "I will now relate my experience of the power of the Holy Spirit which took place on the same night. Had any person told me previous to this that I could have experienced the power of the Holy Spirit in the manner which I did, I could not have believed it, and should have thought the person deluded that told me so. I went directly home after the meeting, and when I got home I wondered what made me feel so stupid. I retired to rest soon after I got home, and felt indifferent to the things of religion until I began to be exercised by the Holy Spirit, which began in about five minutes after, in the following manner:-- "At first, I began to feel my heart beat very quick all on a sudden, which made me at first think that perhaps something is going to ail me, though I was not alarmed, for I felt no pain. My heart increased in its beating, which soon convinced me that it was the Holy Spirit from the effect it had on me. I began to feel exceedingly happy and humble, and such a sense of unworthiness as I never felt before. I could not very well help speaking out, which I did, and said, Lord, I do not deserve this happiness, or words to that effect, while there was a stream (resembling air in feeling) came into my mouth and heart in a more sensible manner than that of drinking anything, which continued, as near as I could judge, five minutes or more, which appeared to be the cause of such a palpitation of my heart. It took complete possession of my soul, and I am certain that I desired the Lord, while in the midst of it, not to give me any more happiness, for it seemed as if I could not contain what I had got. My heart seemed as if it would burst, but it did not stop until I felt as if I was unutterably full of the love and grace of God. In the mean time while thus exercised, a thought arose in my mind, what can it mean? and all at once, as if to answer it, my memory became exceedingly clear, and it appeared to me just as if the New Testament was placed open before me, eighth chapter of Romans, and as light as if some candle lighted was held for me to read the 26th and 27th verses of that chapter, and I read these words: 'The Spirit helpeth our infirmities with groanings which cannot be uttered.' And all the time that my heart was a-beating, it made me groan like a person in distress, which was not very easy to stop, though I was in no pain at all, and my brother being in bed in another room came and opened the door, and asked me if I had got the toothache. I told him no, and that he might get to sleep. I tried to stop. I felt unwilling to go to sleep myself, I was so happy, fearing I should lose it--thinking within myself 'My willing soul would stay In such a frame as this.' And while I lay reflecting, after my heart stopped beating, feeling as if my soul was full of the Holy Spirit, I thought that perhaps there might be angels hovering round my bed. I felt just as if I wanted to converse with them, and finally I spoke, saying, 'O ye affectionate angels! how is it that ye can take so much interest in our welfare, and we take so little interest in our own.' After this, with difficulty I got to sleep; and when I awoke in the morning my first thoughts were: What has become of my happiness? and, feeling a degree of it in my heart, I asked for more, which was given to me as quick as thought. I then got up to dress myself, and found to my surprise that I could but just stand. It appeared to me as if it was a little heaven upon earth. My soul felt as completely raised above the fears of death as of going to sleep; and like a bird in a cage, I had a desire, if it was the will of God, to get released from my body and to dwell with Christ, though willing to live to do good to others, and to warn sinners to repent. I went downstairs feeling as solemn as if I had lost all my friends, and thinking with myself, that I would not let my parents know it until I had first looked into the Testament. I went directly to the shelf and looked into it, at the eighth chapter of Romans, and every verse seemed to almost speak and to confirm it to be truly the Word of God, and as if my feelings corresponded with the meaning of the word. I then told my parents of it, and told them that I thought that they must see that when I spoke, that it was not my own voice, for it appeared so to me. My speech seemed entirely under the control of the Spirit within me; I do not mean that the words which I spoke were not my own, for they were. I thought that I was influenced similar to the Apostles on the day of Pentecost (with the exception of having power to give it to others, and doing what they did). After breakfast I went round to converse with my neighbors on religion, which I could not have been hired to have done before this, and at their request I prayed with them, though I had never prayed in public before. "I now feel as if I had discharged my duty by telling the truth, and hope by the blessing of God, it may do some good to all who shall read it. He has fulfilled his promise in sending the Holy Spirit down into our hearts, or mine at least, and I now defy all the Deists and Atheists in the world to shake my faith in Christ." So much for Mr. Bradley and his conversion, of the effect of which upon his later life we gain no information. Now for a minuter survey of the constituent elements of the conversion process. ------------------------------------- If you open the chapter on Association, of any treatise on Psychology, you will read that a man's ideas, aims, and objects form diverse internal groups and systems, relatively independent of one another. Each "aim" which he follows awakens a certain specific kind of interested excitement, and gathers a certain group of ideas together in subordination to it as its associates; and if the aims and excitements are distinct in kind, their groups of ideas may have little in common. When one group is present and engrosses the interest, all the ideas connected with other groups may be excluded from the mental field. The President of the United States when, with paddle, gun, and fishing-rod, he goes camping in the wilderness for a vacation, changes his system of ideas from top to bottom. The presidential anxieties have lapsed into the background entirely; the official habits are replaced by the habits of a son of nature, and those who knew the man only as the strenuous magistrate would not "know him for the same person" if they saw him as the camper. If now he should never go back, and never again suffer political interests to gain dominion over him, he would be for practical intents and purposes a permanently transformed being. Our ordinary alterations of character, as we pass from one of our aims to another, are not commonly called transformations, because each of them is so rapidly succeeded by another in the reverse direction; but whenever one aim grows so stable as to expel definitively its previous rivals from the individual's life, we tend to speak of the phenomenon, and perhaps to wonder at it, as a "transformation." These alternations are the completest of the ways in which a self may be divided. A less complete way is the simultaneous coexistence of two or more different groups of aims, of which one practically holds the right of way and instigates activity, whilst the others are only pious wishes, and never practically come to anything. Saint Augustine's aspirations to a purer life, in our last lecture, were for a while an example. Another would be the President in his full pride of office, wondering whether it were not all vanity, and whether the life of a wood-chopper were not the wholesomer destiny. Such fleeting aspirations are mere _velleitates_, whimsies. They exist on the remoter outskirts of the mind, and the real self of the man, the centre of his energies, is occupied with an entirely different system. As life goes on, there is a constant change of our interests, and a consequent change of place in our systems of ideas, from more central to more peripheral, and from more peripheral to more central parts of consciousness. I remember, for instance, that one evening when I was a youth, my father read aloud from a Boston newspaper that part of Lord Gifford's will which founded these four lectureships. At that time I did not think of being a teacher of philosophy: and what I listened to was as remote from my own life as if it related to the planet Mars. Yet here I am, with the Gifford system part and parcel of my very self, and all my energies, for the time being, devoted to successfully identifying myself with it. My soul stands now planted in what once was for it a practically unreal object, and speaks from it as from its proper habitat and centre. When I say "Soul," you need not take me in the ontological sense unless you prefer to; for although ontological language is instinctive in such matters, yet Buddhists or Humians can perfectly well describe the facts in the phenomenal terms which are their favorites. For them the soul is only a succession of fields of consciousness: yet there is found in each field a part, or sub-field, which figures as focal and contains the excitement, and from which, as from a centre, the aim seems to be taken. Talking of this part, we involuntarily apply words of perspective to distinguish it from the rest, words like "here," "this," "now," "mine," or "me"; and we ascribe to the other parts the positions "there," "then," "that," "his" or "thine," "it," "not me." But a "here" can change to a "there," and a "there" become a "here," and what was "mine" and what was "not mine" change their places. What brings such changes about is the way in which emotional excitement alters. Things hot and vital to us to-day are cold to-morrow. It is as if seen from the hot parts of the field that the other parts appear to us, and from these hot parts personal desire and volition make their sallies. They are in short the centres of our dynamic energy, whereas the cold parts leave us indifferent and passive in proportion to their coldness. Whether such language be rigorously exact is for the present of no importance. It is exact enough, if you recognize from your own experience the facts which I seek to designate by it. Now there may be great oscillation in the emotional interest, and the hot places may shift before one almost as rapidly as the sparks that run through burnt-up paper. Then we have the wavering and divided self we heard so much of in the previous lecture. Or the focus of excitement and heat, the point of view from which the aim is taken, may come to lie permanently within a certain system; and then, if the change be a religious one, we call it a _conversion_, especially if it be by crisis, or sudden. Let us hereafter, in speaking of the hot place in a man's consciousness, the group of ideas to which he devotes himself, and from which he works, call it _the habitual centre of his personal energy_. It makes a great difference to a man whether one set of his ideas, or another, be the centre of his energy; and it makes a great difference, as regards any set of ideas which he may possess, whether they become central or remain peripheral in him. To say that a man is "converted" means, in these terms, that religious ideas, previously peripheral in his consciousness, now take a central place, and that religious aims form the habitual centre of his energy. Now if you ask of psychology just _how_ the excitement shifts in a man's mental system, and _why_ aims that were peripheral become at a certain moment central, psychology has to reply that although she can give a general description of what happens, she is unable in a given case to account accurately for all the single forces at work. Neither an outside observer nor the Subject who undergoes the process can explain fully how particular experiences are able to change one's centre of energy so decisively, or why they so often have to bide their hour to do so. We have a thought, or we perform an act, repeatedly, but on a certain day the real meaning of the thought peals through us for the first time, or the act has suddenly turned into a moral impossibility. All we know is that there are dead feelings, dead ideas, and cold beliefs, and there are hot and live ones; and when one grows hot and alive within us, everything has to re- crystallize about it. We may say that the heat and liveliness mean only the "motor efficacy," long deferred but now operative, of the idea; but such talk itself is only circumlocution, for whence the sudden motor efficacy? And our explanations then get so vague and general that one realizes all the more the intense individuality of the whole phenomenon. In the end we fall back on the hackneyed symbolism of a mechanical equilibrium. A mind is a system of ideas, each with the excitement it arouses, and with tendencies impulsive and inhibitive, which mutually check or reinforce one another. The collection of ideas alters by subtraction or by addition in the course of experience, and the tendencies alter as the organism gets more aged. A mental system may be undermined or weakened by this interstitial alteration just as a building is, and yet for a time keep upright by dead habit. But a new perception, a sudden emotional shock, or an occasion which lays bare the organic alteration, will make the whole fabric fall together; and then the centre of gravity sinks into an attitude more stable, for the new ideas that reach the centre in the rearrangement seem now to be locked there, and the new structure remains permanent. Formed associations of ideas and habits are usually factors of retardation in such changes of equilibrium. New information, however acquired, plays an accelerating part in the changes; and the slow mutation of our instincts and propensities, under the "unimaginable touch of time" has an enormous influence. Moreover, all these influences may work subconsciously or half unconsciously.(99) And when you get a Subject in whom the subconscious life--of which I must speak more fully soon--is largely developed, and in whom motives habitually ripen in silence, you get a case of which you can never give a full account, and in which, both to the Subject and the onlookers, there may appear an element of marvel. Emotional occasions, especially violent ones, are extremely potent in precipitating mental rearrangements. The sudden and explosive ways in which love, jealousy, guilt, fear, remorse, or anger can seize upon one are known to everybody.(100) Hope, happiness, security, resolve, emotions characteristic of conversion, can be equally explosive. And emotions that come in this explosive way seldom leave things as they found them. In his recent work on the Psychology of Religion, Professor Starbuck of California has shown by a statistical inquiry how closely parallel in its manifestations the ordinary "conversion" which occurs in young people brought up in evangelical circles is to that growth into a larger spiritual life which is a normal phase of adolescence in every class of human beings. The age is the same, falling usually between fourteen and seventeen. The symptoms are the same,--sense of incompleteness and imperfection; brooding, depression, morbid introspection, and sense of sin; anxiety about the hereafter; distress over doubts, and the like. And the result is the same,--a happy relief and objectivity, as the confidence in self gets greater through the adjustment of the faculties to the wider outlook. In spontaneous religious awakening, apart from revivalistic examples, and in the ordinary storm and stress and moulting-time of adolescence, we also may meet with mystical experiences, astonishing the subjects by their suddenness, just as in revivalistic conversion. The analogy, in fact, is complete; and Starbuck's conclusion as to these ordinary youthful conversions would seem to be the only sound one: Conversion is in its essence a normal adolescent phenomenon, incidental to the passage from the child's small universe to the wider intellectual and spiritual life of maturity. "Theology," says Dr. Starbuck, "takes the adolescent tendencies and builds upon them; it sees that the essential thing in adolescent growth is bringing the person out of childhood into the new life of maturity and personal insight. It accordingly brings those means to bear which will intensify the normal tendencies. It shortens up the period of duration of storm and stress." The conversion phenomena of "conviction of sin" last, by this investigator's statistics, about one fifth as long as the periods of adolescent storm and stress phenomena of which he also got statistics, but they are very much more intense. Bodily accompaniments, loss of sleep and appetite, for example, are much more frequent in them. "The essential distinction appears to be that conversion intensifies but shortens the period by bringing the person to a definite crisis."(101) The conversions which Dr. Starbuck here has in mind are of course mainly those of very commonplace persons, kept true to a pre-appointed type by instruction, appeal, and example. The particular form which they affect is the result of suggestion and imitation.(102) If they went through their growth-crisis in other faiths and other countries, although the essence of the change would be the same (since it is one in the main so inevitable), its accidents would be different. In Catholic lands, for example, and in our own Episcopalian sects, no such anxiety and conviction of sin is usual as in sects that encourage revivals. The sacraments being more relied on in these more strictly ecclesiastical bodies, the individual's personal acceptance of salvation needs less to be accentuated and led up to. But every imitative phenomenon must once have had its original, and I propose that for the future we keep as close as may be to the more first- hand and original forms of experience. These are more likely to be found in sporadic adult cases. Professor Leuba, in a valuable article on the psychology of conversion,(103) subordinates the theological aspect of the religious life almost entirely to its moral aspect. The religious sense he defines as "the feeling of un-wholeness, of moral imperfection, of sin, to use the technical word, accompanied by the yearning after the peace of unity." "The word 'religion,' " he says, "is getting more and more to signify the conglomerate of desires and emotions springing from the sense of sin and its release"; and he gives a large number of examples, in which the sin ranges from drunkenness to spiritual pride, to show that the sense of it may beset one and crave relief as urgently as does the anguish of the sickened flesh or any form of physical misery. Undoubtedly this conception covers an immense number of cases. A good one to use as an example is that of Mr. S. H. Hadley, who after his conversion became an active and useful rescuer of drunkards in New York. His experience runs as follows:-- "One Tuesday evening I sat in a saloon in Harlem, a homeless, friendless, dying drunkard. I had pawned or sold everything that would bring a drink. I could not sleep unless I was dead drunk. I had not eaten for days, and for four nights preceding I had suffered with delirium tremens, or the horrors, from midnight till morning. I had often said, 'I will never be a tramp. I will never be cornered, for when that time comes, if ever it comes, I will find a home in the bottom of the river.' But the Lord so ordered it that when that time did come I was not able to walk one quarter of the way to the river. As I sat there thinking, I seemed to feel some great and mighty presence. I did not know then what it was. I did learn afterwards that it was Jesus, the sinner's friend. I walked up to the bar and pounded it with my fist till I made the glasses rattle. Those who stood by drinking looked on with scornful curiosity. I said I would never take another drink, if I died on the street, and really I felt as though that would happen before morning. Something said, 'If you want to keep this promise, go and have yourself locked up.' I went to the nearest station- house and had myself locked up. "I was placed in a narrow cell, and it seemed as though all the demons that could find room came in that place with me. This was not all the company I had, either. No, praise the Lord; that dear Spirit that came to me in the saloon was present, and said, Pray. I did pray, and though I did not feel any great help, I kept on praying. As soon as I was able to leave my cell I was taken to the police court and remanded back to the cell. I was finally released, and found my way to my brother's house, where every care was given me. While lying in bed the admonishing Spirit never left me, and when I arose the following Sabbath morning I felt that day would decide my fate, and toward evening it came into my head to go to Jerry M'Auley's Mission. I went. The house was packed, and with great difficulty I made my way to the space near the platform. There I saw the apostle to the drunkard and the outcast--that man of God, Jerry M'Auley. He rose, and amid deep silence told his experience. There was a sincerity about this man that carried conviction with it, and I found myself saying, 'I wonder if God can save _me_?' I listened to the testimony of twenty-five or thirty persons, every one of whom had been saved from rum, and I made up my mind that I would be saved or die right there. When the invitation was given, I knelt down with a crowd of drunkards. Jerry made the first prayer. Then Mrs. M'Auley prayed fervently for us. Oh, what a conflict was going on for my poor soul! A blessed whisper said, 'Come'; the devil said, 'Be careful.' I halted but a moment, and then, with a breaking heart, I said, 'Dear Jesus, can you help me?' Never with mortal tongue can I describe that moment. Although up to that moment my soul had been filled with indescribable gloom, I felt the glorious brightness of the noonday sun shine into my heart. I felt I was a free man. Oh, the precious feeling of safety, of freedom, of resting on Jesus! I felt that Christ with all his brightness and power had come into my life; that, indeed, old things had passed away and all things had become new. "From that moment till now I have never wanted a drink of whiskey, and I have never seen money enough to make me take one. I promised God that night that if he would take away the appetite for strong drink, I would work for him all my life. He has done his part, and I have been trying to do mine."(104) Dr. Leuba rightly remarks that there is little doctrinal theology in such an experience, which starts with the absolute need of a higher helper, and ends with the sense that he has helped us. He gives other cases of drunkards' conversions which are purely ethical, containing, as recorded, no theological beliefs whatever. John B. Gough's case, for instance, is practically, says Dr. Leuba, the conversion of an atheist--neither God nor Jesus being mentioned.(105) But in spite of the importance of this type of regeneration, with little or no intellectual readjustment, this writer surely makes it too exclusive. It corresponds to the subjectively centred form of morbid melancholy, of which Bunyan and Alline were examples. But we saw in our seventh lecture that there are objective forms of melancholy also, in which the lack of rational meaning of the universe, and of life anyhow, is the burden that weighs upon one--you remember Tolstoy's case.(106) So there are distinct elements in conversion, and their relations to individual lives deserve to be discriminated.(107) Some persons, for instance, never are, and possibly never under any circumstances could be, converted. Religious ideas cannot become the centre of their spiritual energy. They may be excellent persons, servants of God in practical ways, but they are not children of his kingdom. They are either incapable of imagining the invisible; or else, in the language of devotion, they are life-long subjects of "barrenness" and "dryness." Such inaptitude for religious faith may in some cases be intellectual in its origin. Their religious faculties may be checked in their natural tendency to expand, by beliefs about the world that are inhibitive, the pessimistic and materialistic beliefs, for example, within which so many good souls, who in former times would have freely indulged their religious propensities, find themselves nowadays, as it were, frozen; or the agnostic vetoes upon faith as something weak and shameful, under which so many of us to-day lie cowering, afraid to use our instincts. In many persons such inhibitions are never overcome. To the end of their days they refuse to believe, their personal energy never gets to its religious centre, and the latter remains inactive in perpetuity. In other persons the trouble is profounder. There are men anæsthetic on the religious side, deficient in that category of sensibility. Just as a bloodless organism can never, in spite of all its goodwill, attain to the reckless "animal spirits" enjoyed by those of sanguine temperament; so the nature which is spiritually barren may admire and envy faith in others, but can never compass the enthusiasm and peace which those who are temperamentally qualified for faith enjoy. All this may, however, turn out eventually to have been a matter of temporary inhibition. Even late in life some thaw, some release may take place, some bolt be shot back in the barrenest breast, and the man's hard heart may soften and break into religious feeling. Such cases more than any others suggest the idea that sudden conversion is by miracle. So long as they exist, we must not imagine ourselves to deal with irretrievably fixed classes. ------------------------------------- Now there are two forms of mental occurrence in human beings, which lead to a striking difference in the conversion process, a difference to which Professor Starbuck has called attention. You know how it is when you try to recollect a forgotten name. Usually you help the recall by working for it, by mentally running over the places, persons, and things with which the word was connected. But sometimes this effort fails: you feel then as if the harder you tried the less hope there would be, as though the name were _jammed_, and pressure in its direction only kept it all the more from rising. And then the opposite expedient often succeeds. Give up the effort entirely; think of something altogether different, and in half an hour the lost name comes sauntering into your mind, as Emerson says, as carelessly as if it had never been invited. Some hidden process was started in you by the effort, which went on after the effort ceased, and made the result come as if it came spontaneously. A certain music teacher, says Dr. Starbuck, says to her pupils after the thing to be done has been clearly pointed out, and unsuccessfully attempted: "Stop trying and it will do itself!"(108) There is thus a conscious and voluntary way and an involuntary and unconscious way in which mental results may get accomplished; and we find both ways exemplified in the history of conversion, giving us two types, which Starbuck calls the _volitional type_ and the _type by self- surrender_ respectively. In the volitional type the regenerative change is usually gradual, and consists in the building up, piece by piece, of a new set of moral and spiritual habits. But there are always critical points here at which the movement forward seems much more rapid. This psychological fact is abundantly illustrated by Dr. Starbuck. Our education in any practical accomplishment proceeds apparently by jerks and starts, just as the growth of our physical bodies does. "An athlete ... sometimes awakens suddenly to an understanding of the fine points of the game and to a real enjoyment of it, just as the convert awakens to an appreciation of religion. If he keeps on engaging in the sport, there may come a day when all at once the game plays itself through him--when he loses himself in some great contest. In the same way, a musician may suddenly reach a point at which pleasure in the technique of the art entirely falls away, and in some moment of inspiration he becomes the instrument through which music flows. The writer has chanced to hear two different married persons, both of whose wedded lives had been beautiful from the beginning, relate that not until a year or more after marriage did they awake to the full blessedness of married life. So it is with the religious experience of these persons we are studying."(109) We shall erelong hear still more remarkable illustrations of subconsciously maturing processes eventuating in results of which we suddenly grow conscious. Sir William Hamilton and Professor Laycock of Edinburgh were among the first to call attention to this class of effects; but Dr. Carpenter first, unless I am mistaken, introduced the term "unconscious cerebration," which has since then been a popular phrase of explanation. The facts are now known to us far more extensively than he could know them, and the adjective "unconscious," being for many of them almost certainly a misnomer, is better replaced by the vaguer term "subconscious" or "subliminal." Of the volitional type of conversion it would be easy to give examples,(110) but they are as a rule less interesting than those of the self-surrender type, in which the subconscious effects are more abundant and often startling. I will therefore hurry to the latter, the more so because the difference between the two types is after all not radical. Even in the most voluntarily built-up sort of regeneration there are passages of partial self-surrender interposed; and in the great majority of all cases, when the will has done its uttermost towards bringing one close to the complete unification aspired after, it seems that the very last step must be left to other forces and performed without the help of its activity. In other words, self-surrender becomes then indispensable. "The personal will," says Dr. Starbuck, "must be given up. In many cases relief persistently refuses to come until the person ceases to resist, or to make an effort in the direction he desires to go." "I had said I would not give up; but when my will was broken, it was all over," writes one of Starbuck's correspondents.--Another says: "I simply said: 'Lord, I have done all I can; I leave the whole matter with Thee;' and immediately there came to me a great peace."--Another: "All at once it occurred to me that I might be saved, too, if I would stop trying to do it all myself, and follow Jesus: somehow I lost my load."--Another: "I finally ceased to resist, and gave myself up, though it was a hard struggle. Gradually the feeling came over me that I had done my part, and God was willing to do his."(111)--"Lord, Thy will be done; damn or save!" cries John Nelson,(112) exhausted with the anxious struggle to escape damnation; and at that moment his soul was filled with peace. Dr. Starbuck gives an interesting, and it seems to me a true, account--so far as conceptions so schematic can claim truth at all--of the reasons why self-surrender at the last moment should be so indispensable. To begin with, there are two things in the mind of the candidate for conversion: first, the present incompleteness or wrongness, the "sin" which he is eager to escape from; and, second, the positive ideal which he longs to compass. Now with most of us the sense of our present wrongness is a far more distinct piece of our consciousness than is the imagination of any positive ideal we can aim at. In a majority of cases, indeed, the "sin" almost exclusively engrosses the attention, so that conversion is "_a process of struggling away from sin rather than of striving towards righteousness_."(113) A man's conscious wit and will, so far as they strain towards the ideal, are aiming at something only dimly and inaccurately imagined. Yet all the while the forces of mere organic ripening within him are going on towards their own prefigured result, and his conscious strainings are letting loose subconscious allies behind the scenes, which in their way work towards rearrangement; and the rearrangement towards which all these deeper forces tend is pretty surely definite, and definitely different from what he consciously conceives and determines. It may consequently be actually interfered with (_jammed_, as it were, like the lost word when we seek too energetically to recall it), by his voluntary efforts slanting from the true direction. Starbuck seems to put his finger on the root of the matter when he says that to exercise the personal will is still to live in the region where the imperfect self is the thing most emphasized. Where, on the contrary, the subconscious forces take the lead, it is more probably the better self _in posse_ which directs the operation. Instead of being clumsily and vaguely aimed at from without, it is then itself the organizing centre. What then must the person do? "He must relax," says Dr. Starbuck,--"that is, he must fall back on the larger Power that makes for righteousness, which has been welling up in his own being, and let it finish in its own way the work it has begun.... The act of yielding, in this point of view, is giving one's self over to the new life, making it the centre of a new personality, and living, from within, the truth of it which had before been viewed objectively."(114) "Man's extremity is God's opportunity" is the theological way of putting this fact of the need of self-surrender; whilst the physiological way of stating it would be, "Let one do all in one's power, and one's nervous system will do the rest." Both statements acknowledge the same fact.(115) To state it in terms of our own symbolism: When the new centre of personal energy has been subconsciously incubated so long as to be just ready to open into flower, "hands off" is the only word for us, it must burst forth unaided! We have used the vague and abstract language of psychology. But since, in any terms, the crisis described is the throwing of our conscious selves upon the mercy of powers which, whatever they may be, are more ideal than we are actually, and make for our redemption, you see why self-surrender has been and always must be regarded as the vital turning-point of the religious life, so far as the religious life is spiritual and no affair of outer works and ritual and sacraments. One may say that the whole development of Christianity in inwardness has consisted in little more than the greater and greater emphasis attached to this crisis of self- surrender. From Catholicism to Lutheranism, and then to Calvinism; from that to Wesleyanism; and from this, outside of technical Christianity altogether, to pure "liberalism" or transcendental idealism, whether or not of the mind-cure type, taking in the mediæval mystics, the quietists, the pietists, and quakers by the way, we can trace the stages of progress towards the idea of an immediate spiritual help, experienced by the individual in his forlornness and standing in no essential need of doctrinal apparatus or propitiatory machinery. Psychology and religion are thus in perfect harmony up to this point, since both admit that there are forces seemingly outside of the conscious individual that bring redemption to his life. Nevertheless psychology, defining these forces as "subconscious," and speaking of their effects as due to "incubation," or "cerebration," implies that they do not transcend the individual's personality; and herein she diverges from Christian theology, which insists that they are direct supernatural operations of the Deity. I propose to you that we do not yet consider this divergence final, but leave the question for a while in abeyance--continued inquiry may enable us to get rid of some of the apparent discord. ------------------------------------- Revert, then, for a moment more to the psychology of self-surrender. When you find a man living on the ragged edge of his consciousness, pent in to his sin and want and incompleteness, and consequently inconsolable, and then simply tell him that all is well with him, that he must stop his worry, break with his discontent, and give up his anxiety, you seem to him to come with pure absurdities. The only positive consciousness he has tells him that all is _not_ well, and the better way you offer sounds simply as if you proposed to him to assert cold-blooded falsehoods. "The will to believe" cannot be stretched as far as that. We can make ourselves more faithful to a belief of which we have the rudiments, but we cannot create a belief out of whole cloth when our perception actively assures us of its opposite. The better mind proposed to us comes in that case in the form of a pure negation of the only mind we have, and we cannot actively will a pure negation. There are only two ways in which it is possible to get rid of anger, worry, fear, despair, or other undesirable affections. One is that an opposite affection should overpoweringly break over us, and the other is by getting so exhausted with the struggle that we have to stop,--so we drop down, give up, and _don't care_ any longer. Our emotional brain-centres strike work, and we lapse into a temporary apathy. Now there is documentary proof that this state of temporary exhaustion not infrequently forms part of the conversion crisis. So long as the egoistic worry of the sick soul guards the door, the expansive confidence of the soul of faith gains no presence. But let the former faint away, even but for a moment, and the latter can profit by the opportunity, and, having once acquired possession, may retain it. Carlyle's Teufelsdröckh passes from the everlasting No to the everlasting Yes through a "Centre of Indifference." Let me give you a good illustration of this feature in the conversion process. That genuine saint, David Brainerd, describes his own crisis in the following words:-- "One morning, while I was walking in a solitary place as usual, I at once saw that all my contrivances and projects to effect or procure deliverance and salvation for myself were utterly in vain; I was brought quite to a stand, as finding myself totally lost. I saw that it was forever impossible for me to do anything towards helping or delivering myself, that I had made all the pleas I ever could have made to all eternity; and that all my pleas were vain, for I saw that self-interest had led me to pray, and that I had never once prayed from any respect to the glory of God. I saw that there was no necessary connection between my prayers and the bestowment of divine mercy; that they laid not the least obligation upon God to bestow his grace upon me; and that there was no more virtue or goodness in them than there would be in my paddling with my hand in the water. I saw that I had been heaping up my devotions before God, fasting, praying, etc., pretending, and indeed really thinking sometimes that I was aiming at the glory of God; whereas I never once truly intended it, but only my own happiness. I saw that as I had never done anything for God, I had no claim on anything from him but perdition, on account of my hypocrisy and mockery. When I saw evidently that I had regard to nothing but self-interest, then my duties appeared a vile mockery and a continual course of lies, for the whole was nothing but self-worship, and an horrid abuse of God. "I continued, as I remember, in this state of mind, from Friday morning till the Sabbath evening following (July 12, 1739), when I was walking again in the same solitary place. Here, in a mournful melancholy state _I was attempting to pray; but found no heart to engage in that or any other duty; my former concern, exercise, and religious affections were now gone. I thought that the Spirit of God had quite left me; but still was not distressed; yet disconsolate, as if there was nothing in heaven or earth could make me happy. Having been thus endeavoring to pray--though, as I thought, very stupid and senseless_--for near half an hour; then, as I was walking in a thick grove, unspeakable glory seemed to open to the apprehension of my soul. I do not mean any external brightness, nor any imagination of a body of light, but it was a new inward apprehension or view that I had of God, such as I never had before, nor anything which had the least resemblance to it. I had no particular apprehension of any one person in the Trinity, either the Father, the Son, or the Holy Ghost; but it appeared to be Divine glory. My soul rejoiced with joy unspeakable, to see such a God, such a glorious Divine Being; and I was inwardly pleased and satisfied that he should be God over all for ever and ever. My soul was so captivated and delighted with the excellency of God that I was even swallowed up in him; at least to that degree that I had no thought about my own salvation, and scarce reflected that there was such a creature as myself. I continued in this state of inward joy, peace, and astonishing, till near dark without any sensible abatement; and then began to think and examine what I had seen; and felt sweetly composed in my mind all the evening following. I felt myself in a new world, and everything about me appeared with a different aspect from what it was wont to do. At this time, the way of salvation opened to me with such infinite wisdom, suitableness, and excellency, that I wondered I should ever think of any other way of salvation; was amazed that I had not dropped my own contrivances, and complied with this lovely, blessed, and excellent way before. If I could have been saved by my own duties or any other way that I had formerly contrived, my whole soul would now have refused it. I wondered that all the world did not see and comply with this way of salvation, entirely by the righteousness of Christ."(116) I have italicized the passage which records the exhaustion of the anxious emotion hitherto habitual. In a large proportion, perhaps the majority, of reports, the writers speak as if the exhaustion of the lower and the entrance of the higher emotion were simultaneous,(117) yet often again they speak as if the higher actively drove the lower out. This is undoubtedly true in a great many instances, as we shall presently see. But often there seems little doubt that both conditions--subconscious ripening of the one affection and exhaustion of the other--must simultaneously have conspired, in order to produce the result. T. W. B., a convert of Nettleton's, being brought to an acute paroxysm of conviction of sin, ate nothing all day, locked himself in his room in the evening in complete despair, crying aloud, "How long, O Lord, how long?" "After repeating this and similar language," he says, "several times, _I seemed to sink away into a state of insensibility_. When I came to myself again I was on my knees, praying not for myself but for others. I felt submission to the will of God, willing that he should do with me as should seem good in his sight. My concern seemed all lost in concern for others."(118) Our great American revivalist Finney writes: "I said to myself: 'What is this? I must have grieved the Holy Ghost entirely away. I have lost all my conviction. I have not a particle of concern about my soul; and it must be that the Spirit has left me.' 'Why!' thought I, 'I never was so far from being concerned about my own salvation in my life.'... I tried to recall my convictions, to get back again the load of sin under which I had been laboring. I tried in vain to make myself anxious. I was so quiet and peaceful that I tried to feel concerned about that, lest it should be the result of my having grieved the Spirit away."(119) But beyond all question there are persons in whom, quite independently of any exhaustion in the Subject's capacity for feeling, or even in the absence of any acute previous feeling, the higher condition, having reached the due degree of energy, bursts through all barriers and sweeps in like a sudden flood. These are the most striking and memorable cases, the cases of instantaneous conversion to which the conception of divine grace has been most peculiarly attached. I have given one of them at length--the case of Mr. Bradley. But I had better reserve the other cases and my comments on the rest of the subject for the following lecture. LECTURE X. CONVERSION--CONCLUDED. In this lecture we have to finish the subject of Conversion, considering at first those striking instantaneous instances of which Saint Paul's is the most eminent, and in which, often amid tremendous emotional excitement or perturbation of the senses, a complete division is established in the twinkling of an eye between the old life and the new. Conversion of this type is an important phase of religious experience, owing to the part which it has played in Protestant theology, and it behooves us to study it conscientiously on that account. I think I had better cite two or three of these cases before proceeding to a more generalized account. One must know concrete instances first; for, as Professor Agassiz used to say, one can see no farther into a generalization than just so far as one's previous acquaintance with particulars enables one to take it in. I will go back, then, to the case of our friend Henry Alline, and quote his report of the 26th of March, 1775, on which his poor divided mind became unified for good. "As I was about sunset wandering in the fields lamenting my miserable lost and undone condition, and almost ready to sink under my burden, I thought I was in such a miserable case as never any man was before. I returned to the house, and when I got to the door, just as I was stepping off the threshold, the following impressions came into my mind like a powerful but small still voice. You have been seeking, praying, reforming, laboring, reading, hearing, and meditating, and what have you done by it towards your salvation? Are you any nearer to conversion now than when you first began? Are you any more prepared for heaven, or fitter to appear before the impartial bar of God, than when you first began to seek? "It brought such conviction on me that I was obliged to say that I did not think I was one step nearer than at first, but as much condemned, as much exposed, and as miserable as before. I cried out within myself, O Lord God, I am lost, and if thou, O Lord, dost not find out some new way, I know nothing of, I shall never be saved, for the ways and methods I have prescribed to myself have all failed me, and I am willing they should fail. O Lord, have mercy! O Lord, have mercy! "These discoveries continued until I went into the house and sat down. After I sat down, being all in confusion, like a drowning man that was just giving up to sink, and almost in an agony, I turned very suddenly round in my chair, and seeing part of an old Bible lying in one of the chairs, I caught hold of it in great haste; and opening it without any premeditation, cast my eyes on the 38th Psalm, which was the first time I ever saw the word of God: it took hold of me with such power that it seemed to go through my whole soul, so that it seemed as if God was praying in, with, and for me. About this time my father called the family to attend prayers; I attended, but paid no regard to what he said in his prayer, but continued praying in those words of the Psalm. Oh, help me, help me! cried I, thou Redeemer of souls, and save me, or I am gone forever; thou canst this night, if thou pleasest, with one drop of thy blood atone for my sins, and appease the wrath of an angry God. At that instant of time when I gave all up to him to do with me as he pleased, and was willing that God should rule over me at his pleasure, redeeming love broke into my soul with repeated scriptures, with such power that my whole soul seemed to be melted down with love; the burden of guilt and condemnation was gone, darkness was expelled, my heart humbled and filled with gratitude, and my whole soul, that was a few minutes ago groaning under mountains of death, and crying to an unknown God for help, was now filled with immortal love, soaring on the wings of faith, freed from the chains of death and darkness, and crying out, My Lord and my God; thou art my rock and my fortress, my shield and my high tower, my life, my joy, my present and my everlasting portion. Looking up, I thought I saw that same light [he had on more than one previous occasion seen subjectively a bright blaze of light], though it appeared different; and as soon as I saw it, the design was opened to me, according to his promise, and I was obliged to cry out: Enough, enough, O blessed God! The work of conversion, the change, and the manifestations of it are no more disputable than that light which I see, or anything that ever I saw. "In the midst of all my joys, in less than half an hour after my soul was set at liberty, the Lord discovered to me my labor in the ministry and call to preach the gospel. I cried out, Amen, Lord, I'll go; send me, send me. I spent the greatest part of the night in ecstasies of joy, praising and adoring the Ancient of Days for his free and unbounded grace. After I had been so long in this transport and heavenly frame that my nature seemed to require sleep, I thought to close my eyes for a few moments; then the devil stepped in, and told me that if I went to sleep, I should lose it all, and when I should awake in the morning I would find it to be nothing but a fancy and delusion. I immediately cried out, O Lord God, if I am deceived, undeceive me. "I then closed my eyes for a few minutes, and seemed to be refreshed with sleep; and when I awoke, the first inquiry was, Where is my God? And in an instant of time, my soul seemed awake in and with God, and surrounded by the arms of everlasting love. About sunrise I arose with joy to relate to my parents what God had done for my soul, and declared to them the miracle of God's unbounded grace. I took a Bible to show them the words that were impressed by God on my soul the evening before; but when I came to open the Bible, it appeared all new to me. "I so longed to be useful in the cause of Christ, in preaching the gospel, that it seemed as if I could not rest any longer, but go I must and tell the wonders of redeeming love. I lost all taste for carnal pleasures, and carnal company, and was enabled to forsake them."(120) Young Mr. Alline, after the briefest of delays, and with no book-learning but his Bible, and no teaching save that of his own experience, became a Christian minister, and thenceforward his life was fit to rank, for its austerity and single-mindedness, with that of the most devoted saints. But happy as he became in his strenuous way, he never got his taste for even the most innocent carnal pleasures back. We must class him, like Bunyan and Tolstoy, amongst those upon whose soul the iron of melancholy left a permanent imprint. His redemption was into another universe than this mere natural world, and life remained for him a sad and patient trial. Years later we can find him making such an entry as this in his diary: "On Wednesday the 12th I preached at a wedding, and had the happiness thereby to be the means of excluding carnal mirth." The next case I will give is that of a correspondent of Professor Leuba, printed in the latter's article, already cited, in vol. vi. of the American Journal of Psychology. This subject was an Oxford graduate, the son of a clergyman, and the story resembles in many points the classic case of Colonel Gardiner, which everybody may be supposed to know. Here it is, somewhat abridged:-- "Between the period of leaving Oxford and my conversion I never darkened the door of my father's church, although I lived with him for eight years, making what money I wanted by journalism, and spending it in high carousal with any one who would sit with me and drink it away. So I lived, sometimes drunk for a week together, and then a terrible repentance, and would not touch a drop for a whole month. "In all this period, that is, up to thirty-three years of age, I never had a desire to reform on religious grounds. But all my pangs were due to some terrible remorse I used to feel after a heavy carousal, the remorse taking the shape of regret after my folly in wasting my life in such a way--a man of superior talents and education. This terrible remorse turned me gray in one night, and whenever it came upon me I was perceptibly grayer the next morning. What I suffered in this way is beyond the expression of words. It was hell-fire in all its most dreadful tortures. Often did I vow that if I got over 'this time' I would reform. Alas, in about three days I fully recovered, and was as happy as ever. So it went on for years, but, with a physique like a rhinoceros, I always recovered, and as long as I let drink alone, no man was as capable of enjoying life as I was. "I was converted in my own bedroom in my father's rectory house at precisely three o'clock in the afternoon of a hot July day (July 13, 1886). I was in perfect health, having been off from the drink for nearly a month. I was in no way troubled about my soul. In fact, God was not in my thoughts that day. A young lady friend sent me a copy of Professor Drummond's Natural Law in the Spiritual World, asking me my opinion of it as a literary work only. Being proud of my critical talents and wishing to enhance myself in my new friend's esteem, I took the book to my bedroom for quiet, intending to give it a thorough study, and then write her what I thought of it. It was here that God met me face to face, and I shall never forget the meeting. 'He that hath the Son hath life eternal, he that hath not the Son hath not life.' I had read this scores of times before, but this made all the difference. I was now in God's presence and my attention was absolutely 'soldered' on to this verse, and I was not allowed to proceed with the book till I had fairly considered what these words really involved. Only then was I allowed to proceed, feeling all the while that there was another being in my bedroom, though not seen by me. The stillness was very marvelous, and I felt supremely happy. It was most unquestionably shown me, in one second of time, that I had never touched the Eternal: and that if I died then, I must inevitably be lost. I was undone. I knew it as well as I now know I am saved. The Spirit of God showed it me in ineffable love; there was no terror in it; I felt God's love so powerfully upon me that only a mighty sorrow crept over me that I had lost all through my own folly; and what was I to do? What could I do? I did not repent even; God never asked me to repent. All I felt was 'I am undone,' and God cannot help it, although he loves me. No fault on the part of the Almighty. All the time I was supremely happy: I felt like a little child before his father. I had done wrong, but my Father did not scold me, but loved me most wondrously. Still my doom was sealed. I was lost to a certainty, and being naturally of a brave disposition I did not quail under it, but deep sorrow for the past, mixed with regret for what I had lost, took hold upon me, and my soul thrilled within me to think it was all over. Then there crept in upon me so gently, so lovingly, so unmistakably, a way of escape, and what was it after all? The old, old story over again, told in the simplest way: 'There is no name under heaven whereby ye can be saved except that of the Lord Jesus Christ.' No words were spoken to me; my soul seemed to see my Saviour in the spirit, and from that hour to this, nearly nine years now, there has never been in my life one doubt that the Lord Jesus Christ and God the Father both worked upon me that afternoon in July, both differently, and both in the most perfect love conceivable, and I rejoiced there and then in a conversion so astounding that the whole village heard of it in less than twenty-four hours. "But a time of trouble was yet to come. The day after my conversion I went into the hay-field to lend a hand with the harvest, and not having made any promise to God to abstain or drink in moderation only, I took too much and came home drunk. My poor sister was heart-broken; and I felt ashamed of myself and got to my bedroom at once, where she followed me, weeping copiously. She said I had been converted and fallen away instantly. But although I was quite full of drink (not muddled, however), I knew that God's work begun in me was not going to be wasted. About midday I made on my knees the first prayer before God for twenty years. I did not ask to be forgiven; I felt that was no good, for I would be sure to fall again. Well, what did I do? I committed myself to him in the profoundest belief that my individuality was going to be destroyed, that he would take all from me, and I was willing. In such a surrender lies the secret of a holy life. From that hour drink has had no terrors for me: I never touch it, never want it. The same thing occurred with my pipe: after being a regular smoker from my twelfth year the desire for it went at once, and has never returned. So with every known sin, the deliverance in each case being permanent and complete. I have had no temptation since conversion, God seemingly having shut out Satan from that course with me. He gets a free hand in other ways, but never on sins of the flesh. Since I gave up to God all ownership in my own life, he has guided me in a thousand ways, and has opened my path in a way almost incredible to those who do not enjoy the blessing of a truly surrendered life." So much for our graduate of Oxford, in whom you notice the complete abolition of an ancient appetite as one of the conversion's fruits. The most curious record of sudden conversion with which I am acquainted is that of M. Alphonse Ratisbonne, a freethinking French Jew, to Catholicism, at Rome in 1842. In a letter to a clerical friend, written a few months later, the convert gives a palpitating account of the circumstances.(121) The predisposing conditions appear to have been slight. He had an elder brother who had been converted and was a Catholic priest. He was himself irreligious, and nourished an antipathy to the apostate brother and generally to his "cloth." Finding himself at Rome in his twenty-ninth year, he fell in with a French gentleman who tried to make a proselyte of him, but who succeeded no farther after two or three conversations than to get him to hang (half jocosely) a religious medal round his neck, and to accept and read a copy of a short prayer to the Virgin. M. Ratisbonne represents his own part in the conversations as having been of a light and chaffing order; but he notes the fact that for some days he was unable to banish the words of the prayer from his mind, and that the night before the crisis he had a sort of nightmare, in the imagery of which a black cross with no Christ upon it figured. Nevertheless, until noon of the next day he was free in mind and spent the time in trivial conversations. I now give his own words. "If at this time any one had accosted me, saying: 'Alphonse, in a quarter of an hour you shall be adoring Jesus Christ as your God and Saviour; you shall lie prostrate with your face upon the ground in a humble church; you shall be smiting your breast at the foot of a priest; you shall pass the carnival in a college of Jesuits to prepare yourself to receive baptism, ready to give your life for the Catholic faith; you shall renounce the world and its pomps and pleasures; renounce your fortune, your hopes, and if need be, your betrothed; the affections of your family, the esteem of your friends, and your attachment to the Jewish people; you shall have no other aspiration than to follow Christ and bear his cross till death;'--if, I say, a prophet had come to me with such a prediction, I should have judged that only one person could be more mad than he,--whosoever, namely, might believe in the possibility of such senseless folly becoming true. And yet that folly is at present my only wisdom, my sole happiness. "Coming out of the café I met the carriage of Monsieur B. [the proselyting friend]. He stopped and invited me in for a drive, but first asked me to wait for a few minutes whilst he attended to some duty at the church of San Andrea delle Fratte. Instead of waiting in the carriage, I entered the church myself to look at it. The church of San Andrea was poor, small, and empty; I believe that I found myself there almost alone. No work of art attracted my attention; and I passed my eyes mechanically over its interior without being arrested by any particular thought. I can only remember an entirely black dog which went trotting and turning before me as I mused. In an instant the dog had disappeared, the whole church had vanished, I no longer saw anything, ... or more truly I saw, O my God, one thing alone. "Heavens, how can I speak of it? Oh no! human words cannot attain to expressing the inexpressible. Any description, however sublime it might be, could be but a profanation of the unspeakable truth. "I was there prostrate on the ground, bathed in my tears, with my heart beside itself, when M. B. called me back to life. I could not reply to the questions which followed from him one upon the other. But finally I took the medal which I had on my breast, and with all the effusion of my soul I kissed the image of the Virgin, radiant with grace, which it bore. Oh, indeed, it was She! It was indeed She! [What he had seen had been a vision of the Virgin.] "I did not know where I was: I did not know whether I was Alphonse or another. I only felt myself changed and believed myself another me; I looked for myself in myself and did not find myself. In the bottom of my soul I felt an explosion of the most ardent joy; I could not speak; I had no wish to reveal what had happened. But I felt something solemn and sacred within me which made me ask for a priest. I was led to one; and there, alone, after he had given me the positive order, I spoke as best I could, kneeling, and with my heart still trembling. I could give no account to myself of the truth of which I had acquired a knowledge and a faith. All that I can say is that in an instant the bandage had fallen from my eyes; and not one bandage only, but the whole manifold of bandages in which I had been brought up. One after another they rapidly disappeared, even as the mud and ice disappear under the rays of the burning sun. "I came out as from a sepulchre, from an abyss of darkness; and I was living, perfectly living. But I wept, for at the bottom of that gulf I saw the extreme of misery from which I had been saved by an infinite mercy; and I shuddered at the sight of my iniquities, stupefied, melted, overwhelmed with wonder and with gratitude. You may ask me how I came to this new insight, for truly I had never opened a book of religion nor even read a single page of the Bible, and the dogma of original sin is either entirely denied or forgotten by the Hebrews of to-day, so that I had thought so little about it that I doubt whether I ever knew its name. But how came I, then, to this perception of it? I can answer nothing save this, that on entering that church I was in darkness altogether, and on coming out of it I saw the fullness of the light. I can explain the change no better than by the simile of a profound sleep or the analogy of one born blind who should suddenly open his eyes to the day. He sees, but cannot define the light which bathes him and by means of which he sees the objects which excite his wonder. If we cannot explain physical light, how can we explain the light which is the truth itself? And I think I remain within the limits of veracity when I say that without having any knowledge of the letter of religious doctrine, I now intuitively perceived its sense and spirit. Better than if I saw them, I _felt_ those hidden things; I felt them by the inexplicable effects they produced in me. It all happened in my interior mind; and those impressions, more rapid than thought, shook my soul, revolved and turned it, as it were, in another direction, towards other aims, by other paths. I express myself badly. But do you wish, Lord, that I should inclose in poor and barren words sentiments which the heart alone can understand?" I might multiply cases almost indefinitely, but these will suffice to show you how real, definite, and memorable an event a sudden conversion may be to him who has the experience. Throughout the height of it he undoubtedly seems to himself a passive spectator or undergoer of an astounding process performed upon him from above. There is too much evidence of this for any doubt of it to be possible. Theology, combining this fact with the doctrines of election and grace, has concluded that the spirit of God is with us at these dramatic moments in a peculiarly miraculous way, unlike what happens at any other juncture of our lives. At that moment, it believes, an absolutely new nature is breathed into us, and we become partakers of the very substance of the Deity. That the conversion should be instantaneous seems called for on this view, and the Moravian Protestants appear to have been the first to see this logical consequence. The Methodists soon followed suit, practically if not dogmatically, and a short time ere his death, John Wesley wrote:-- "In London alone I found 652 members of our Society who were exceeding clear in their experience, and whose testimony I could see no reason to doubt. And every one of these (without a single exception) has declared that his deliverance from sin was instantaneous; that the change was wrought in a moment. Had half of these, or one third, or one in twenty, declared it was _gradually_ wrought in _them_, I should have believed this, with regard to _them_, and thought that _some_ were gradually sanctified and some instantaneously. But as I have not found, in so long a space of time, a single person speaking thus, I cannot but believe that sanctification is commonly, if not always, an instantaneous work." Tyerman's Life of Wesley, i. 463. All this while the more usual sects of Protestantism have set no such store by instantaneous conversion. For them as for the Catholic Church, Christ's blood, the sacraments, and the individual's ordinary religious duties are practically supposed to suffice to his salvation, even though no acute crisis of self-despair and surrender followed by relief should be experienced. For Methodism, on the contrary, unless there have been a crisis of this sort, salvation is only offered, not effectively received, and Christ's sacrifice in so far forth is incomplete. Methodism surely here follows, if not the healthier-minded, yet on the whole the profounder spiritual instinct. The individual models which it has set up as typical and worthy of imitation are not only the more interesting dramatically, but psychologically they have been the more complete. In the fully evolved Revivalism of Great Britain and America we have, so to speak, the codified and stereotyped procedure to which this way of thinking has led. In spite of the unquestionable fact that saints of the once-born type exist, that there may be a gradual growth in holiness without a cataclysm; in spite of the obvious leakage (as one may say) of much mere natural goodness into the scheme of salvation; revivalism has always assumed that only its own type of religious experience can be perfect; you must first be nailed on the cross of natural despair and agony, and then in the twinkling of an eye be miraculously released. It is natural that those who personally have traversed such an experience should carry away a feeling of its being a miracle rather than a natural process. Voices are often heard, lights seen, or visions witnessed; automatic motor phenomena occur; and it always seems, after the surrender of the personal will, as if an extraneous higher power had flooded in and taken possession. Moreover the sense of renovation, safety, cleanness, rightness, can be so marvelous and jubilant as well to warrant one's belief in a radically new substantial nature. "Conversion," writes the New England Puritan, Joseph Alleine, "is not the putting in a patch of holiness; but with the true convert holiness is woven into all his powers, principles, and practice. The sincere Christian is quite a new fabric, from the foundation to the top-stone. He is a new man, a new creature." And Jonathan Edwards says in the same strain: "Those gracious influences which are the effects of the Spirit of God are altogether supernatural--are quite different from anything that unregenerate men experience. They are what no improvement, or composition of natural qualifications or principles will ever produce; because they not only differ from what is natural, and from everything that natural men experience in degree and circumstances, but also in kind, and are of a nature far more excellent. From hence it follows that in gracious affections there are [also] new perceptions and sensations entirely different in their nature and kind from anything experienced by the [same] saints before they were sanctified.... The conceptions which the saints have of the loveliness of God, and that kind of delight which they experience in it, are quite peculiar, and entirely different from anything which a natural man can possess, or of which he can form any proper notion." And that such a glorious transformation as this ought of necessity to be preceded by despair is shown by Edwards in another passage. "Surely it cannot be unreasonable," he says, "that before God delivers us from a state of sin and liability to everlasting woe, he should give us some considerable sense of the evil from which he delivers us, in order that we may know and feel the importance of salvation, and be enabled to appreciate the value of what God is pleased to do for us. As those who are saved are successively in two extremely different states--first in a state of condemnation and then in a state of justification and blessedness--and as God, in the salvation of men, deals with them as rational and intelligent creatures, it appears agreeable to this wisdom, that those who are saved should be made sensible of their Being, in those two different states. In the first place, that they should be made sensible of their state of condemnation; and afterwards, of their state of deliverance and happiness." Such quotations express sufficiently well for our purpose the doctrinal interpretation of these changes. Whatever part suggestion and imitation may have played in producing them in men and women in excited assemblies, they have at any rate been in countless individual instances an original and unborrowed experience. Were we writing the story of the mind from the purely natural-history point of view, with no religious interest whatever, we should still have to write down man's liability to sudden and complete conversion as one of his most curious peculiarities. ------------------------------------- What, now, must we ourselves think of this question? Is an instantaneous conversion a miracle in which God is present as he is present in no change of heart less strikingly abrupt? Are there two classes of human beings, even among the apparently regenerate, of which the one class really partakes of Christ's nature while the other merely seems to do so? Or, on the contrary, may the whole phenomenon of regeneration, even in these startling instantaneous examples, possibly be a strictly natural process, divine in its fruits, of course, but in one case more and in another less so, and neither more nor less divine in its mere causation and mechanism than any other process, high or low, of man's interior life? Before proceeding to answer this question, I must ask you to listen to some more psychological remarks. At our last lecture, I explained the shifting of men's centres of personal energy within them and the lighting up of new crises of emotion. I explained the phenomena as partly due to explicitly conscious processes of thought and will, but as due largely also to the subconscious incubation and maturing of motives deposited by the experiences of life. When ripe, the results hatch out, or burst into flower. I have now to speak of the subconscious region, in which such processes of flowering may occur, in a somewhat less vague way. I only regret that my limits of time here force me to be so short. The expression "field of consciousness" has but recently come into vogue in the psychology books. Until quite lately the unit of mental life which figured most was the single "idea" supposed to be a definitely outlined thing. But at present psychologists are tending, first, to admit that the actual unit is more probably the total mental state, the entire wave of consciousness or field of objects present to the thought at any time; and, second, to see that it is impossible to outline this wave, this field, with any definiteness. As our mental fields succeed one another, each has its centre of interest, around which the objects of which we are less and less attentively conscious fade to a margin so faint that its limits are unassignable. Some fields are narrow fields and some are wide fields. Usually when we have a wide field we rejoice, for we then see masses of truth together, and often get glimpses of relations which we divine rather than see, for they shoot beyond the field into still remoter regions of objectivity, regions which we seem rather to be about to perceive than to perceive actually. At other times, of drowsiness, illness, or fatigue, our fields may narrow almost to a point, and we find ourselves correspondingly oppressed and contracted. Different individuals present constitutional differences in this matter of width of field. Your great organizing geniuses are men with habitually vast fields of mental vision, in which a whole programme of future operations will appear dotted out at once, the rays shooting far ahead into definite directions of advance. In common people there is never this magnificent inclusive view of a topic. They stumble along, feeling their way, as it were, from point to point, and often stop entirely. In certain diseased conditions consciousness is a mere spark, without memory of the past or thought of the future, and with the present narrowed down to some one simple emotion or sensation of the body. The important fact which this "field" formula commemorates is the indetermination of the margin. Inattentively realized as is the matter which the margin contains, it is nevertheless there, and helps both to guide our behavior and to determine the next movement of our attention. It lies around us like a "magnetic field," inside of which our centre of energy turns like a compass-needle, as the present phase of consciousness alters into its successor. Our whole past store of memories floats beyond this margin, ready at a touch to come in; and the entire mass of residual powers, impulses, and knowledges that constitute our empirical self stretches continuously beyond it. So vaguely drawn are the outlines between what is actual and what is only potential at any moment of our conscious life, that it is always hard to say of certain mental elements whether we are conscious of them or not. The ordinary psychology, admitting fully the difficulty of tracing the marginal outline, has nevertheless taken for granted, first, that all the consciousness the person now has, be the same focal or marginal, inattentive or attentive, is there in the "field" of the moment, all dim and impossible to assign as the latter's outline may be; and, second, that what is absolutely extra-marginal is absolutely non-existent, and cannot be a fact of consciousness at all. And having reached this point, I must now ask you to recall what I said in my last lecture about the subconscious life. I said, as you may recollect, that those who first laid stress upon these phenomena could not know the facts as we now know them. My first duty now is to tell you what I meant by such a statement. I cannot but think that the most important step forward that has occurred in psychology since I have been a student of that science is the discovery, first made in 1886, that, in certain subjects at least, there is not only the consciousness of the ordinary field, with its usual centre and margin, but an addition thereto in the shape of a set of memories, thoughts, and feelings which are extra-marginal and outside of the primary consciousness altogether, but yet must be classed as conscious facts of some sort, able to reveal their presence by unmistakable signs. I call this the most important step forward because, unlike the other advances which psychology has made, this discovery has revealed to us an entirely unsuspected peculiarity in the constitution of human nature. No other step forward which psychology has made can proffer any such claim as this. In particular this discovery of a consciousness existing beyond the field, or subliminally as Mr. Myers terms it, casts light on many phenomena of religious biography. That is why I have to advert to it now, although it is naturally impossible for me in this place to give you any account of the evidence on which the admission of such a consciousness is based. You will find it set forth in many recent books, Binet's Alterations of Personality(122) being perhaps as good a one as any to recommend. The human material on which the demonstration has been made has so far been rather limited and, in part at least, eccentric, consisting of unusually suggestible hypnotic subjects, and of hysteric patients. Yet the elementary mechanisms of our life are presumably so uniform that what is shown to be true in a marked degree of some persons is probably true in some degree of all, and may in a few be true in an extraordinarily high degree. The most important consequence of having a strongly developed ultra- marginal life of this sort is that one's ordinary fields of consciousness are liable to incursions from it of which the subject does not guess the source, and which, therefore, take for him the form of unaccountable impulses to act, or inhibitions of action, of obsessive ideas, or even of hallucinations of sight or hearing. The impulses may take the direction of automatic speech or writing, the meaning of which the subject himself may not understand even while he utters it; and generalizing this phenomenon, Mr. Myers has given the name of _automatism_, sensory or motor, emotional or intellectual, to this whole sphere of effects, due to "uprushes" into the ordinary consciousness of energies originating in the subliminal parts of the mind. The simplest instance of an automatism is the phenomenon of post-hypnotic suggestion, so-called. You give to a hypnotized subject, adequately susceptible, an order to perform some designated act--usual or eccentric, it makes no difference--after he wakes from his hypnotic sleep. Punctually, when the signal comes or the time elapses upon which you have told him that the act must ensue, he performs it;--but in so doing he has no recollection of your suggestion, and he always trumps up an improvised pretext for his behavior if the act be of an eccentric kind. It may even be suggested to a subject to have a vision or to hear a voice at a certain interval after waking, and when the time comes the vision is seen or the voice heard, with no inkling on the subject's part of its source. In the wonderful explorations by Binet, Janet, Breuer, Freud, Mason, Prince, and others, of the subliminal consciousness of patients with hysteria, we have revealed to us whole systems of underground life, in the shape of memories of a painful sort which lead a parasitic existence, buried outside of the primary fields of consciousness, and making irruptions thereinto with hallucinations, pains, convulsions, paralyses of feeling and of motion, and the whole procession of symptoms of hysteric disease of body and of mind. Alter or abolish by suggestion these subconscious memories, and the patient immediately gets well. His symptoms were automatisms, in Mr. Myers's sense of the word. These clinical records sound like fairy-tales when one first reads them, yet it is impossible to doubt their accuracy; and, the path having been once opened by these first observers, similar observations have been made elsewhere. They throw, as I said, a wholly new light upon our natural constitution. And it seems to me that they make a farther step inevitable. Interpreting the unknown after the analogy of the known, it seems to me that hereafter, wherever we meet with a phenomenon of automatism, be it motor impulses, or obsessive idea, or unaccountable caprice, or delusion, or hallucination, we are bound first of all to make search whether it be not an explosion, into the fields of ordinary consciousness, of ideas elaborated outside of those fields in subliminal regions of the mind. We should look, therefore, for its source in the Subject's subconscious life. In the hypnotic cases, we ourselves create the source by our suggestion, so we know it directly. In the hysteric cases, the lost memories which are the source have to be extracted from the patient's Subliminal by a number of ingenious methods, for an account of which you must consult the books. In other pathological cases, insane delusions, for example, or psychopathic obsessions, the source is yet to seek, but by analogy it also should be in subliminal regions which improvements in our methods may yet conceivably put on tap. There lies the mechanism logically to be assumed,--but the assumption involves a vast program of work to be done in the way of verification, in which the religious experiences of man must play their part.(123) ------------------------------------- And thus I return to our own specific subject of instantaneous conversions. You remember the cases of Alline, Bradley, Brainerd, and the graduate of Oxford converted at three in the afternoon. Similar occurrences abound, some with and some without luminous visions, all with a sense of astonished happiness, and of being wrought on by a higher control. If, abstracting altogether from the question of their value for the future spiritual life of the individual, we take them on their psychological side exclusively, so many peculiarities in them remind us of what we find outside of conversion that we are tempted to class them along with other automatisms, and to suspect that what makes the difference between a sudden and a gradual convert is not necessarily the presence of divine miracle in the case of one and of something less divine in that of the other, but rather a simple psychological peculiarity, the fact, namely, that in the recipient of the more instantaneous grace we have one of those Subjects who are in possession of a large region in which mental work can go on subliminally, and from which invasive experiences, abruptly upsetting the equilibrium of the primary consciousness, may come. I do not see why Methodists need object to such a view. Pray go back and recollect one of the conclusions to which I sought to lead you in my very first lecture. You may remember how I there argued against the notion that the worth of a thing can be decided by its origin. Our spiritual judgment, I said, our opinion of the significance and value of a human event or condition, must be decided on empirical grounds exclusively. If the _fruits for life_ of the state of conversion are good, we ought to idealize and venerate it, even though it be a piece of natural psychology; if not, we ought to make short work with it, no matter what supernatural being may have infused it. Well, how is it with these fruits? If we except the class of preëminent saints of whom the names illumine history, and consider only the usual run of "saints," the shopkeeping church-members and ordinary youthful or middle-aged recipients of instantaneous conversion, whether at revivals or in the spontaneous course of methodistic growth, you will probably agree that no splendor worthy of a wholly supernatural creature fulgurates from them, or sets them apart from the mortals who have never experienced that favor. Were it true that a suddenly converted man as such is, as Edwards says,(124) of an entirely different kind from a natural man, partaking as he does directly of Christ's substance, there surely ought to be some exquisite class-mark, some distinctive radiance attaching even to the lowliest specimen of this genus, to which no one of us could remain insensible, and which, so far as it went, would prove him more excellent than ever the most highly gifted among mere natural men. But notoriously there is no such radiance. Converted men as a class are indistinguishable from natural men; some natural men even excel some converted men in their fruits; and no one ignorant of doctrinal theology could guess by mere every-day inspection of the "accidents" of the two groups of persons before him, that their substance differed as much as divine differs from human substance. The believers in the non-natural character of sudden conversion have had practically to admit that there is no unmistakable class-mark distinctive of all true converts. The super-normal incidents, such as voices and visions and overpowering impressions of the meaning of suddenly presented scripture texts, the melting emotions and tumultuous affections connected with the crisis of change, may all come by way of nature, or worse still, be counterfeited by Satan. The real witness of the spirit to the second birth is to be found only in the disposition of the genuine child of God, the permanently patient heart, the love of self eradicated. And this, it has to be admitted, is also found in those who pass no crisis, and may even be found outside of Christianity altogether. Throughout Jonathan Edwards's admirably rich and delicate description of the supernaturally infused condition, in his Treatise on Religious Affections, there is not one decisive trait, not one mark, that unmistakably parts it off from what may possibly be only an exceptionally high degree of natural goodness. In fact, one could hardly read a clearer argument than this book unwittingly offers in favor of the thesis that no chasm exists between the orders of human excellence, but that here as elsewhere, nature shows continuous differences, and generation and regeneration are matters of degree. All which denial of two objective classes of human beings separated by a chasm must not leave us blind to the extraordinary momentousness of the fact of his conversion to the individual himself who gets converted. There are higher and lower limits of possibility set to each personal life. If a flood but goes above one's head, its absolute elevation becomes a matter of small importance; and when we touch our own upper limit and live in our own highest centre of energy, we may call ourselves saved, no matter how much higher some one else's centre may be. A small man's salvation will always be a great salvation and the greatest of all facts _for him_, and we should remember this when the fruits of our ordinary evangelicism look discouraging. Who knows how much less ideal still the lives of these spiritual grubs and earthworms, these Crumps and Stigginses, might have been, if such poor grace as they have received had never touched them at all?(125) If we roughly arrange human beings in classes, each class standing for a grade of spiritual excellence, I believe we shall find natural men and converts both sudden and gradual in all the classes. The forms which regenerative change effects have, then, no general spiritual significance, but only a psychological significance. We have seen how Starbuck's laborious statistical studies tend to assimilate conversion to ordinary spiritual growth. Another American psychologist, Prof. George A. Coe,(126) has analyzed the cases of seventy-seven converts or ex-candidates for conversion, known to him, and the results strikingly confirm the view that sudden conversion is connected with the possession of an active subliminal self. Examining his subjects with reference to their hypnotic sensibility and to such automatisms as hypnagogic hallucinations, odd impulses, religious dreams about the time of their conversion, etc., he found these relatively much more frequent in the group of converts whose transformation had been "striking," "striking" transformation being defined as a change which, though not necessarily instantaneous, seems to the subject of it to be distinctly different from a process of growth, however rapid.(127) Candidates for conversion at revivals are, as you know, often disappointed: they experience nothing striking. Professor Coe had a number of persons of this class among his seventy-seven subjects, and they almost all, when tested by hypnotism, proved to belong to a subclass which he calls "spontaneous," that is, fertile in self- suggestions, as distinguished from a "passive" subclass, to which most of the subjects of striking transformation belonged. His inference is that self-suggestion of impossibility had prevented the influence upon these persons of an environment which, on the more "passive" subjects, had easily brought forth the effects they looked for. Sharp distinctions are difficult in these regions, and Professor Coe's numbers are small. But his methods were careful, and the results tally with what one might expect; and they seem, on the whole, to justify his practical conclusion, which is that if you should expose to a converting influence a subject in whom three factors unite: first, pronounced emotional sensibility; second, tendency to automatisms; and third, suggestibility of the passive type; you might then safely predict the result: there would be a sudden conversion, a transformation of the striking kind. Does this temperamental origin diminish the significance of the sudden conversion when it has occurred? Not in the least, as Professor Coe well says; for "the ultimate test of religious values is nothing psychological, nothing definable in terms of _how it happens_, but something ethical, definable only in terms of _what is attained_."(128) As we proceed farther in our inquiry we shall see that what is attained is often an altogether new level of spiritual vitality, a relatively heroic level, in which impossible things have become possible, and new energies and endurances are shown. The personality is changed, the man _is_ born anew, whether or not his psychological idiosyncrasies are what give the particular shape to his metamorphosis. "Sanctification" is the technical name of this result; and erelong examples of it shall be brought before you. In this lecture I have still only to add a few remarks on the assurance and peace which fill the hour of change itself. ------------------------------------- One word more, though, before proceeding to that point, lest the final purpose of my explanation of suddenness by subliminal activity be misunderstood. I do indeed believe that if the Subject have no liability to such subconscious activity, or if his conscious fields have a hard rind of a margin that resists incursions from beyond it, his conversion must be gradual if it occur, and must resemble any simple growth into new habits. His possession of a developed subliminal self, and of a leaky or pervious margin, is thus a _conditio sine qua non_ of the Subject's becoming converted in the instantaneous way. But if you, being orthodox Christians, ask me as a psychologist whether the reference of a phenomenon to a subliminal self does not exclude the notion of the direct presence of the Deity altogether, I have to say frankly that as a psychologist I do not see why it necessarily should. The lower manifestations of the Subliminal, indeed, fall within the resources of the personal subject: his ordinary sense-material, inattentively taken in and subconsciously remembered and combined, will account for all his usual automatisms. But just as our primary wide-awake consciousness throws open our senses to the touch of things material, so it is logically conceivable that _if there be_ higher spiritual agencies that can directly touch us, the psychological condition of their doing so _might be_ our possession of a subconscious region which alone should yield access to them. The hubbub of the waking life might close a door which in the dreamy Subliminal might remain ajar or open. Thus that perception of external control which is so essential a feature in conversion might, in some cases at any rate, be interpreted as the orthodox interpret it: forces transcending the finite individual might impress him, on condition of his being what we may call a subliminal human specimen. But in any case the _value_ of these forces would have to be determined by their effects, and the mere fact of their transcendency would of itself establish no presumption that they were more divine than diabolical. I confess that this is the way in which I should rather see the topic left lying in your minds until I come to a much later lecture, when I hope once more to gather these dropped threads together into more definitive conclusions. The notion of a subconscious self certainly ought not at this point of our inquiry to be held to _exclude_ all notion of a higher penetration. If there be higher powers able to impress us, they may get access to us only through the subliminal door. (See below, p. 515 ff.) ------------------------------------- Let us turn now to the feelings which immediately fill the hour of the conversion experience. The first one to be noted is just this sense of higher control. It is not always, but it is very often present. We saw examples of it in Alline, Bradley, Brainerd, and elsewhere. The need of such a higher controlling agency is well expressed in the short reference which the eminent French Protestant Adolphe Monod makes to the crisis of his own conversion. It was at Naples in his early manhood, in the summer of 1827. "My sadness," he says, "was without limit, and having got entire possession of me, it filled my life from the most indifferent external acts to the most secret thoughts, and corrupted at their source my feelings, my judgment, and my happiness. It was then that I saw that to expect to put a stop to this disorder by my reason and my will, which were themselves diseased, would be to act like a blind man who should pretend to correct one of his eyes by the aid of the other equally blind one. I had then no resource save in _some influence from without_. I remembered the promise of the Holy Ghost; and what the positive declarations of the Gospel had never succeeded in bringing home to me, I learned at last from necessity, and believed, for the first time in my life, in this promise, in the only sense in which it answered the needs of my soul, in that, namely, of a real external supernatural action, capable of giving me thoughts, and taking them away from me, and exerted on me by a God as truly master of my heart as he is of the rest of nature. Renouncing then all merit, all strength, abandoning all my personal resources, and acknowledging no other title to his mercy than my own utter misery, I went home and threw myself on my knees, and prayed as I never yet prayed in my life. From this day onwards a new interior life began for me: not that my melancholy had disappeared, but it had lost its sting. Hope had entered into my heart, and once entered on the path, the God of Jesus Christ, to whom I then had learned to give myself up, little by little did the rest."(129) It is needless to remind you once more of the admirable congruity of Protestant theology with the structure of the mind as shown in such experiences. In the extreme of melancholy the self that consciously _is_ can do absolutely nothing. It is completely bankrupt and without resource, and no works it can accomplish will avail. Redemption from such subjective conditions must be a free gift or nothing, and grace through Christ's accomplished sacrifice is such a gift. "God," says Luther, "is the God of the humble, the miserable, the oppressed, and the desperate, and of those that are brought even to nothing; and his nature is to give sight to the blind, to comfort the broken-hearted, to justify sinners, to save the very desperate and damned. Now that pernicious and pestilent opinion of man's own righteousness, which will not be a sinner, unclean, miserable, and damnable, but righteous and holy, suffereth not God to come to his own natural and proper work. Therefore God must take this maul in hand (the law, I mean) to beat in pieces and bring to nothing this beast with her vain confidence, that she may so learn at length by her own misery that she is utterly forlorn and damned. But here lieth the difficulty, that when a man is terrified and cast down, he is so little able to raise himself up again and say, 'Now I am bruised and afflicted enough; now is the time of grace; now is the time to hear Christ.' The foolishness of man's heart is so great that then he rather seeketh to himself more laws to satisfy his conscience. 'If I live,' saith he, 'I will amend my life: I will do this, I will do that.' But here, except thou do the quite contrary, except thou send Moses away with his law, and in these terrors and this anguish lay hold upon Christ who died for thy sins, look for no salvation. Thy cowl, thy shaven crown, thy chastity, thy obedience, thy poverty, thy works, thy merits? what shall all these do? what shall the law of Moses avail? If I, wretched and damnable sinner, through works or merits could have loved the Son of God, and so come to him, what needed he to deliver himself for me? If I, being a wretch and damned sinner, could be redeemed by any other price, what needed the Son of God to be given? But because there was no other price, therefore he delivered neither sheep, ox, gold, nor silver, but even God himself, entirely and wholly 'for me,' even 'for me,' I say, a miserable, wretched sinner. Now, therefore, I take comfort and apply this to _myself_. And this manner of applying is the very true force and power of faith. For he died _not_ to justify the righteous, but the _un_-righteous, and to make _them_ the children of God."(130) That is, the more literally lost you are, the more literally you are the very being whom Christ's sacrifice has already saved. Nothing in Catholic theology, I imagine, has ever spoken to sick souls as straight as this message from Luther's personal experience. As Protestants are not all sick souls, of course reliance on what Luther exults in calling the dung of one's merits, the filthy puddle of one's own righteousness, has come to the front again in their religion; but the adequacy of his view of Christianity to the deeper parts of our human mental structure is shown by its wildfire contagiousness when it was a new and quickening thing. Faith that Christ has genuinely done his work was part of what Luther meant by faith, which so far is faith in a fact intellectually conceived of. But this is only one part of Luther's faith, the other part being far more vital. This other part is something not intellectual but immediate and intuitive, the assurance, namely, that I, this individual I, just as I stand, without one plea, etc., am saved now and forever.(131) Professor Leuba is undoubtedly right in contending that the conceptual belief about Christ's work, although so often efficacious and antecedent, is really accessory and non-essential, and that the "joyous conviction" can also come by far other channels than this conception. It is to the joyous conviction itself, the assurance that all is well with one, that he would give the name of faith _par excellence_. "When the sense of estrangement," he writes, "fencing man about in a narrowly limited ego, breaks down, the individual finds himself 'at one with all creation.' He lives in the universal life; he and man, he and nature, he and God, are one. That state of confidence, trust, union with all things, following upon the achievement of moral unity, is the _Faith-state_. Various dogmatic beliefs suddenly, on the advent of the faith-state, acquire a character of certainty, assume a new reality, become an object of faith. As the ground of assurance here is not rational, argumentation is irrelevant. But such conviction being a mere casual offshoot of the faith-state, it is a gross error to imagine that the chief practical value of the faith-state is its power to stamp with the seal of reality certain particular theological conceptions.(132) On the contrary, its value lies solely in the fact that it is the psychic correlate of a biological growth reducing contending desires to one direction; a growth which expresses itself in new affective states and new reactions; in larger, nobler, more Christ-like activities. The ground of the specific assurance in religious dogmas is then an affective experience. The objects of faith may even be preposterous; the affective stream will float them along, and invest them with unshakable certitude. The more startling the affective experience, the less explicable it seems, the easier it is to make it the carrier of unsubstantiated notions."(133) The characteristics of the affective experience which, to avoid ambiguity, should, I think, be called the state of assurance rather than the faith- state, can be easily enumerated, though it is probably difficult to realize their intensity, unless one have been through the experience one's self. The central one is the loss of all the worry, the sense that all is ultimately well with one, the peace, the harmony, the _willingness to be_, even though the outer conditions should remain the same. The certainty of God's "grace," of "justification," "salvation," is an objective belief that usually accompanies the change in Christians; but this may be entirely lacking and yet the affective peace remain the same--you will recollect the case of the Oxford graduate: and many might be given where the assurance of personal salvation was only a later result. A passion of willingness, of acquiescence, of admiration, is the glowing centre of this state of mind. The second feature is the sense of perceiving truths not known before. The mysteries of life become lucid, as Professor Leuba says; and often, nay usually, the solution is more or less unutterable in words. But these more intellectual phenomena may be postponed until we treat of mysticism. A third peculiarity of the assurance state is the objective change which the world often appears to undergo. "An appearance of newness beautifies every object," the precise opposite of that other sort of newness, that dreadful unreality and strangeness in the appearance of the world, which is experienced by melancholy patients, and of which you may recall my relating some examples.(134) This sense of clean and beautiful newness within and without is one of the commonest entries in conversion records. Jonathan Edwards thus describes it in himself:-- "After this my sense of divine things gradually increased, and became more and more lively, and had more of that inward sweetness. The appearance of everything was altered; there seemed to be, as it were, a calm, sweet cast, or appearance of divine glory, in almost everything. God's excellency, his wisdom, his purity and love, seemed to appear in everything; in the sun, moon, and stars; in the clouds and blue sky; in the grass, flowers, and trees; in the water and all nature; which used greatly to fix my mind. And scarce anything, among all the works of nature, was so sweet to me as thunder and lightning; formerly nothing had been so terrible to me. Before, I used to be uncommonly terrified with thunder, and to be struck with terror when I saw a thunderstorm rising; but now, on the contrary, it rejoices me."(135) Billy Bray, an excellent little illiterate English evangelist, records his sense of newness thus:-- "I said to the Lord: 'Thou hast said, they that ask shall receive, they that seek shall find, and to them that knock the door shall be opened, and I have faith to believe it.' In an instant the Lord made me so happy that I cannot express what I felt. I shouted for joy. I praised God with my whole heart.... I think this was in November, 1823, but what day of the month I do not know. I remember this, that everything looked new to me, the people, the fields, the cattle, the trees. I was like a new man in a new world. I spent the greater part of my time in praising the Lord."(136) Starbuck and Leuba both illustrate this sense of newness by quotations. I take the two following from Starbuck's manuscript collection. One, a woman, says:-- "I was taken to a camp-meeting, mother and religious friends seeking and praying for my conversion. My emotional nature was stirred to its depths; confessions of depravity and pleading with God for salvation from sin made me oblivious of all surroundings. I plead for mercy, and had a vivid realization of forgiveness and renewal of my nature. When rising from my knees I exclaimed, 'Old things have passed away, all things have become new.' It was like entering another world, a new state of existence. Natural objects were glorified, my spiritual vision was so clarified that I saw beauty in every material object in the universe, the woods were vocal with heavenly music; my soul exulted in the love of God, and I wanted everybody to share in my joy." The next case is that of a man:-- "I know not how I got back into the encampment, but found myself staggering up to Rev. ----'s Holiness tent--and as it was full of seekers and a terrible noise inside, some groaning, some laughing, and some shouting, and by a large oak, ten feet from the tent, I fell on my face by a bench, and tried to pray, and every time I would call on God, something like a man's hand would strangle me by choking. I don't know whether there were any one around or near me or not. I thought I should surely die if I did not get help, but just as often as I would pray, that unseen hand was felt on my throat and my breath squeezed off. Finally something said: 'Venture on the atonement, for you will die anyway if you don't.' So I made one final struggle to call on God for mercy, with the same choking and strangling, determined to finish the sentence of prayer for Mercy, if I did strangle and die, and the last I remember that time was falling back on the ground with the same unseen hand on my throat. I don't know how long I lay there or what was going on. None of my folks were present. When I came to myself, there were a crowd around me praising God. The very heavens seemed to open and pour down rays of light and glory. Not for a moment only, but all day and night, floods of light and glory seemed to pour through my soul, and oh, how I was changed, and everything became new. My horses and hogs and even everybody seemed changed." This man's case introduces the feature of automatisms, which in suggestible subjects have been so startling a feature at revivals since, in Edwards's, Wesley's, and Whitfield's time, these became a regular means of gospel propagation. They were at first supposed to be semi-miraculous proofs of "power" on the part of the Holy Ghost; but great divergence of opinion quickly arose concerning them. Edwards, in his Thoughts on the Revival of Religion in New England, has to defend them against their critics; and their value has long been matter of debate even within the revivalistic denominations.(137) They undoubtedly have no essential spiritual significance, and although their presence makes his conversion more memorable to the convert, it has never been proved that converts who show them are more persevering or fertile in good fruits than those whose change of heart has had less violent accompaniments. On the whole, unconsciousness, convulsions, visions, involuntary vocal utterances, and suffocation, must be simply ascribed to the subject's having a large subliminal region, involving nervous instability. This is often the subject's own view of the matter afterwards. One of Starbuck's correspondents writes, for instance:-- "I have been through the experience which is known as conversion. My explanation of it is this: the subject works his emotions up to the breaking point, at the same time resisting their physical manifestations, such as quickened pulse, etc., and then suddenly lets them have their full sway over his body. The relief is something wonderful, and the pleasurable effects of the emotions are experienced to the highest degree." There is one form of sensory automatism which possibly deserves special notice on account of its frequency. I refer to hallucinatory or pseudo- hallucinatory luminous phenomena, _photisms_, to use the term of the psychologists. Saint Paul's blinding heavenly vision seems to have been a phenomenon of this sort; so does Constantine's cross in the sky. The last case but one which I quoted mentions floods of light and glory. Henry Alline mentions a light, about whose externality he seems uncertain. Colonel Gardiner sees a blazing light. President Finney writes:-- "All at once the glory of God shone upon and round about me in a manner almost marvelous.... A light perfectly ineffable shone in my soul, that almost prostrated me on the ground.... This light seemed like the brightness of the sun in every direction. It was too intense for the eyes.... I think I knew something then, by actual experience, of that light that prostrated Paul on the way to Damascus. It was surely a light such as I could not have endured long."(138) Such reports of photisms are indeed far from uncommon. Here is another from Starbuck's collection, where the light appeared evidently external:-- "I had attended a series of revival services for about two weeks off and on. Had been invited to the altar several times, all the time becoming more deeply impressed, when finally I decided I must do this, or I should be lost. Realization of conversion was very vivid, like a ton's weight being lifted from my heart; a strange light which seemed to light up the whole room (for it was dark); a conscious supreme bliss which caused me to repeat 'Glory to God' for a long time. Decided to be God's child for life, and to give up my pet ambition, wealth and social position. My former habits of life hindered my growth somewhat, but I set about overcoming these systematically, and in one year my whole nature was changed, i.e., my ambitions were of a different order." Here is another one of Starbuck's cases, involving a luminous element:-- "I had been clearly converted twenty-three years before, or rather reclaimed. My experience in regeneration was then clear and spiritual, and I had not backslidden. But I experienced entire sanctification on the 15th day of March, 1893, about eleven o'clock in the morning. The particular accompaniments of the experience were entirely unexpected. I was quietly sitting at home singing selections out of Pentecostal Hymns. Suddenly there seemed to be a something sweeping into me and inflating my entire being--such a sensation as I had never experienced before. When this experience came, I seemed to be conducted around a large, capacious, well-lighted room. As I walked with my invisible conductor and looked around, a clear thought was coined in my mind, 'They are not here, they are gone.' As soon as the thought was definitely formed in my mind, though no word was spoken, the Holy Spirit impressed me that I was surveying my own soul. Then, for the first time in all my life, did I know that I was cleansed from all sin, and filled with the fullness of God." Leuba quotes the case of a Mr. Peek, where the luminous affection reminds one of the chromatic hallucinations produced by the intoxicant cactus buds called mescal by the Mexicans:-- "When I went in the morning into the fields to work, the glory of God appeared in all his visible creation. I well remember we reaped oats, and how every straw and head of the oats seemed, as it were, arrayed in a kind of rainbow glory, or to glow, if I may so express it, in the glory of God."(139) The most characteristic of all the elements of the conversion crisis, and the last one of which I shall speak, is the ecstasy of happiness produced. We have already heard several accounts of it, but I will add a couple more. President Finney's is so vivid that I give it at length:-- "All my feelings seemed to rise and flow out; and the utterance of my heart was, 'I want to pour my whole soul out to God.' The rising of my soul was so great that I rushed into the back room of the front office, to pray. There was no fire and no light in the room; nevertheless it appeared to me as if it were perfectly light. As I went in and shut the door after me, it seemed as if I met the Lord Jesus Christ face to face. It did not occur to me then, nor did it for some time afterwards, that it was wholly a mental state. On the contrary, it seemed to me that I saw him as I would see any other man. He said nothing, but looked at me in such a manner as to break me right down at his feet. I have always since regarded this as a most remarkable state of mind; for it seemed to me a reality that he stood before me, and I fell down at his feet and poured out my soul to him. I wept aloud like a child, and made such confessions as I could with my choked utterance. It seemed to me that I bathed his feet with my tears; and yet I had no distinct impression that I touched him, that I recollect. I must have continued in this state for a good while; but my mind was too much absorbed with the interview to recollect anything that I said. But I know, as soon as my mind became calm enough to break off from the interview, I returned to the front office, and found that the fire that I had made of large wood was nearly burned out. But as I turned and was about to take a seat by the fire, I received a mighty baptism of the Holy Ghost. Without any expectation of it, without ever having the thought in my mind that there was any such thing for me, without any recollection that I had ever heard the thing mentioned by any person in the world, the Holy Spirit descended upon me in a manner that seemed to go through me, body and soul. I could feel the impression, like a wave of electricity, going through and through me. Indeed, it seemed to come in waves and waves of liquid love; for I could not express it in any other way. It seemed like the very breath of God. I can recollect distinctly that it seemed to fan me, like immense wings. "No words can express the wonderful love that was shed abroad in my heart. I wept aloud with joy and love; and I do not know but I should say I literally bellowed out the unutterable gushings of my heart. These waves came over me, and over me, and over me, one after the other, until I recollect I cried out, 'I shall die if these waves continue to pass over me.' I said, 'Lord, I cannot bear any more;' yet I had no fear of death. "How long I continued in this state, with this baptism continuing to roll over me and go through me, I do not know. But I know it was late in the evening when a member of my choir--for I was the leader of the choir--came into the office to see me. He was a member of the church. He found me in this state of loud weeping, and said to me, 'Mr. Finney, what ails you?' I could make him no answer for some time. He then said, 'Are you in pain?' I gathered myself up as best I could, and replied, 'No, but so happy that I cannot live.' " I just now quoted Billy Bray; I cannot do better than give his own brief account of his post-conversion feelings:-- "I can't help praising the Lord. As I go along the street, I lift up one foot, and it seems to say 'Glory'; and I lift up the other, and it seems to say 'Amen'; and so they keep up like that all the time I am walking."(140) One word, before I close this lecture, on the question of the transiency or permanence of these abrupt conversions. Some of you, I feel sure, knowing that numerous backslidings and relapses take place, make of these their apperceiving mass for interpreting the whole subject, and dismiss it with a pitying smile at so much "hysterics." Psychologically, as well as religiously, however, this is shallow. It misses the point of serious interest, which is not so much the duration as the nature and quality of these shiftings of character to higher levels. Men lapse from every level--we need no statistics to tell us that. Love is, for instance, well known not to be irrevocable, yet, constant or inconstant, it reveals new flights and reaches of ideality while it lasts. These revelations form its significance to men and women, whatever be its duration. So with the conversion experience: that it should for even a short time show a human being what the high-water mark of his spiritual capacity is, this is what constitutes its importance,--an importance which backsliding cannot diminish, although persistence might increase it. As a matter of fact, all the more striking instances of conversion, all those, for instance, which I have quoted, _have_ been permanent. The case of which there might be most doubt, on account of its suggesting so strongly an epileptoid seizure, was the case of M. Ratisbonne. Yet I am informed that Ratisbonne's whole future was shaped by those few minutes. He gave up his project of marriage, became a priest, founded at Jerusalem, where he went to dwell, a mission of nuns for the conversion of the Jews, showed no tendency to use for egotistic purposes the notoriety given him by the peculiar circumstances of his conversion,--which, for the rest, he could seldom refer to without tears,--and in short remained an exemplary son of the Church until he died, late in the 80's, if I remember rightly. The only statistics I know of, on the subject of the duration of conversions, are those collected for Professor Starbuck by Miss Johnston. They embrace only a hundred persons, evangelical church-members, more than half being Methodists. According to the statement of the subjects themselves, there had been backsliding of some sort in nearly all the cases, 93 per cent. of the women, 77 per cent. of the men. Discussing the returns more minutely, Starbuck finds that only 6 per cent. are relapses from the religious faith which the conversion confirmed, and that the backsliding complained of is in most only a fluctuation in the ardor of sentiment. Only six of the hundred cases report a change of faith. Starbuck's conclusion is that the effect of conversion is to bring with it "a changed attitude towards life, which is fairly constant and permanent, although the feelings fluctuate.... In other words, the persons who have passed through conversion, having once taken a stand for the religious life, tend to feel themselves identified with it, no matter how much their religious enthusiasm declines."(141) LECTURES XI, XII, AND XIII. SAINTLINESS. The last lecture left us in a state of expectancy. What may the practical fruits for life have been, of such movingly happy conversions as those we heard of? With this question the really important part of our task opens, for you remember that we began all this empirical inquiry not merely to open a curious chapter in the natural history of human consciousness, but rather to attain a spiritual judgment as to the total value and positive meaning of all the religious trouble and happiness which we have seen. We must, therefore, first describe the fruits of the religious life, and then we must judge them. This divides our inquiry into two distinct parts. Let us without further preamble proceed to the descriptive task. It ought to be the pleasantest portion of our business in these lectures. Some small pieces of it, it is true, may be painful, or may show human nature in a pathetic light, but it will be mainly pleasant, because the best fruits of religious experience are the best things that history has to show. They have always been esteemed so; here if anywhere is the genuinely strenuous life; and to call to mind a succession of such examples as I have lately had to wander through, though it has been only in the reading of them, is to feel encouraged and uplifted and washed in better moral air. The highest flights of charity, devotion, trust, patience, bravery to which the wings of human nature have spread themselves have been flown for religious ideals. I can do no better than quote, as to this, some remarks which Sainte-Beuve in his History of Port-Royal makes on the results of conversion or the state of grace. "Even from the purely human point of view," Sainte-Beuve says, "the phenomenon of grace must still appear sufficiently extraordinary, eminent, and rare, both in its nature and in its effects, to deserve a closer study. For the soul arrives thereby at a certain fixed and invincible state, a state which is genuinely heroic, and from out of which the greatest deeds which it ever performs are executed. Through all the different forms of communion, and all the diversity of the means which help to produce this state, whether it be reached by a jubilee, by a general confession, by a solitary prayer and effusion, whatever in short be the place and the occasion, it is easy to recognize that it is fundamentally one state in spirit and in fruits. Penetrate a little beneath the diversity of circumstances, and it becomes evident that in Christians of different epochs it is always one and the same modification by which they are affected: there is veritably a single fundamental and identical spirit of piety and charity, common to those who have received grace; an inner state which before all things is one of love and humility, of infinite confidence in God, and of severity for one's self, accompanied with tenderness for others. The fruits peculiar to this condition of the soul have the same savor in all, under distant suns and in different surroundings, in Saint Teresa of Avila just as in any Moravian brother of Herrnhut."(142) Sainte-Beuve has here only the more eminent instances of regeneration in mind, and these are of course the instructive ones for us also to consider. These devotees have often laid their course so differently from other men that, judging them by worldly law, we might be tempted to call them monstrous aberrations from the path of nature. I begin, therefore, by asking a general psychological question as to what the inner conditions are which may make one human character differ so extremely from another. I reply at once that where the character, as something distinguished from the intellect, is concerned, the causes of human diversity lie chiefly in our _differing susceptibilities of emotional excitement_, and in the _different impulses and inhibitions_ which these bring in their train. Let me make this more clear. Speaking generally, our moral and practical attitude, at any given time, is always a resultant of two sets of forces within us, impulses pushing us one way and obstructions and inhibitions holding us back. "Yes! yes!" say the impulses; "No! no!" say the inhibitions. Few people who have not expressly reflected on the matter realize how constantly this factor of inhibition is upon us, how it contains and moulds us by its restrictive pressure almost as if we were fluids pent within the cavity of a jar. The influence is so incessant that it becomes subconscious. All of you, for example, sit here with a certain constraint at this moment, and entirely without express consciousness of the fact, because of the influence of the occasion. If left alone in the room, each of you would probably involuntarily rearrange himself, and make his attitude more "free and easy." But proprieties and their inhibitions snap like cobwebs if any great emotional excitement supervenes. I have seen a dandy appear in the street with his face covered with shaving-lather because a house across the way was on fire; and a woman will run among strangers in her nightgown if it be a question of saving her baby's life or her own. Take a self- indulgent woman's life in general. She will yield to every inhibition set by her disagreeable sensations, lie late in bed, live upon tea or bromides, keep indoors from the cold. Every difficulty finds her obedient to its "no." But make a mother of her, and what have you? Possessed by maternal excitement, she now confronts wakefulness, weariness, and toil without an instant of hesitation or a word of complaint. The inhibitive power of pain over her is extinguished wherever the baby's interests are at stake. The inconveniences which this creature occasions have become, as James Hinton says, the glowing heart of a great joy, and indeed are now the very conditions whereby the joy becomes most deep. This is an example of what you have already heard of as the "expulsive power of a higher affection." But be the affection high or low, it makes no difference, so long as the excitement it brings be strong enough. In one of Henry Drummond's discourses he tells of an inundation in India where an eminence with a bungalow upon it remained unsubmerged, and became the refuge of a number of wild animals and reptiles in addition to the human beings who were there. At a certain moment a royal Bengal tiger appeared swimming towards it, reached it, and lay panting like a dog upon the ground in the midst of the people, still possessed by such an agony of terror that one of the Englishmen could calmly step up with a rifle and blow out its brains. The tiger's habitual ferocity was temporarily quelled by the emotion of fear, which became sovereign, and formed a new centre for his character. Sometimes no emotional state is sovereign, but many contrary ones are mixed together. In that case one hears both "yeses" and "noes," and the "will" is called on then to solve the conflict. Take a soldier, for example, with his dread of cowardice impelling him to advance, his fears impelling him to run, and his propensities to imitation pushing him towards various courses if his comrades offer various examples. His person becomes the seat of a mass of interferences; and he may for a time simply waver, because no one emotion prevails. There is a pitch of intensity, though, which, if any emotion reach it, enthrones that one as alone effective and sweeps its antagonists and all their inhibitions away. The fury of his comrades' charge, once entered on, will give this pitch of courage to the soldier; the panic of their rout will give this pitch of fear. In these sovereign excitements, things ordinarily impossible grow natural because the inhibitions are annulled. Their "no! no!" not only is not heard, it does not exist. Obstacles are then like tissue-paper hoops to the circus rider--no impediment; the flood is higher than the dam they make. "Lass sie betteln gehn wenn sie hungrig sind!" cries the grenadier, frantic over his Emperor's capture, when his wife and babes are suggested; and men pent into a burning theatre have been known to cut their way through the crowd with knives.(143) One mode of emotional excitability is exceedingly important in the composition of the energetic character, from its peculiarly destructive power over inhibitions. I mean what in its lower form is mere irascibility, susceptibility to wrath, the fighting temper; and what in subtler ways manifests itself as impatience, grimness, earnestness, severity of character. Earnestness means willingness to live with energy, though energy bring pain. The pain may be pain to other people or pain to one's self--it makes little difference; for when the strenuous mood is on one, the aim is to break something, no matter whose or what. Nothing annihilates an inhibition as irresistibly as anger does it; for, as Moltke says of war, destruction pure and simple is its essence. This is what makes it so invaluable an ally of every other passion. The sweetest delights are trampled on with a ferocious pleasure the moment they offer themselves as checks to a cause by which our higher indignations are elicited. It costs then nothing to drop friendships, to renounce long- rooted privileges and possessions, to break with social ties. Rather do we take a stern joy in the astringency and desolation; and what is called weakness of character seems in most cases to consist in the inaptitude for these sacrificial moods, of which one's own inferior self and its pet softnesses must often be the targets and the victims.(144) So far I have spoken of temporary alterations produced by shifting excitements in the same person. But the relatively fixed differences of character of different persons are explained in a precisely similar way. In a man with a liability to a special sort of emotion, whole ranges of inhibition habitually vanish, which in other men remain effective, and other sorts of inhibition take their place. When a person has an inborn genius for certain emotions, his life differs strangely from that of ordinary people, for none of their usual deterrents check him. Your mere aspirant to a type of character, on the contrary, only shows, when your natural lover, fighter, or reformer, with whom the passion is a gift of nature, comes along, the hopeless inferiority of voluntary to instinctive action. He has deliberately to overcome his inhibitions; the genius with the inborn passion seems not to feel them at all; he is free of all that inner friction and nervous waste. To a Fox, a Garibaldi, a General Booth, a John Brown, a Louise Michel, a Bradlaugh, the obstacles omnipotent over those around them are as if non-existent. Could the rest of us so disregard them, there might be many such heroes, for many have the wish to live for similar ideals, and only the adequate degree of inhibition- quenching fury is lacking.(145) The difference between willing and merely wishing, between having ideals that are creative and ideals that are but pinings and regrets, thus depends solely either on the amount of steam-pressure chronically driving the character in the ideal direction, or on the amount of ideal excitement transiently acquired. Given a certain amount of love, indignation, generosity, magnanimity, admiration, loyalty, or enthusiasm of self- surrender, the result is always the same. That whole raft of cowardly obstructions, which in tame persons and dull moods are sovereign impediments to action, sinks away at once. Our conventionality,(146) our shyness, laziness, and stinginess, our demands for precedent and permission, for guarantee and surety, our small suspicions, timidities, despairs, where are they now? Severed like cobwebs, broken like bubbles in the sun-- "Wo sind die Sorge nun und Noth Die mich noch gestern wollt' erschlaffen? Ich schäm' mich dess' im Morgenroth." The flood we are borne on rolls them so lightly under that their very contact is unfelt. Set free of them, we float and soar and sing. This auroral openness and uplift gives to all creative ideal levels a bright and caroling quality, which is nowhere more marked than where the controlling emotion is religious. "The true monk," writes an Italian mystic, "takes nothing with him but his lyre." ------------------------------------- We may now turn from these psychological generalities to those fruits of the religious state which form the special subject of our present lecture. The man who lives in his religious centre of personal energy, and is actuated by spiritual enthusiasms, differs from his previous carnal self in perfectly definite ways. The new ardor which burns in his breast consumes in its glow the lower "noes" which formerly beset him, and keeps him immune against infection from the entire groveling portion of his nature. Magnanimities once impossible are now easy; paltry conventionalities and mean incentives once tyrannical hold no sway. The stone wall inside of him has fallen, the hardness in his heart has broken down. The rest of us can, I think, imagine this by recalling our state of feeling in those temporary "melting moods" into which either the trials of real life, or the theatre, or a novel sometimes throw us. Especially if we weep! For it is then as if our tears broke through an inveterate inner dam, and let all sorts of ancient peccancies and moral stagnancies drain away, leaving us now washed and soft of heart and open to every nobler leading. With most of us the customary hardness quickly returns, but not so with saintly persons. Many saints, even as energetic ones as Teresa and Loyola, have possessed what the church traditionally reveres as a special grace, the so-called gift of tears. In these persons the melting mood seems to have held almost uninterrupted control. And as it is with tears and melting moods, so it is with other exalted affections. Their reign may come by gradual growth or by a crisis; but in either case it may have "come to stay." At the end of the last lecture we saw this permanence to be true of the general paramountcy of the higher insight, even though in the ebbs of emotional excitement meaner motives might temporarily prevail and backsliding might occur. But that lower temptations may remain completely annulled, apart from transient emotion and as if by alteration of the man's habitual nature, is also proved by documentary evidence in certain cases. Before embarking on the general natural history of the regenerate character, let me convince you of this curious fact by one or two examples. The most numerous are those of reformed drunkards. You recollect the case of Mr. Hadley in the last lecture; the Jerry McAuley Water Street Mission abounds in similar instances.(147) You also remember the graduate of Oxford, converted at three in the afternoon, and getting drunk in the hay-field the next day, but after that permanently cured of his appetite. "From that hour drink has had no terrors for me: I never touch it, never want it. The same thing occurred with my pipe, ... the desire for it went at once and has never returned. So with every known sin, the deliverance in each case being permanent and complete. I have had no temptations since conversion." Here is an analogous case from Starbuck's manuscript collection:-- "I went into the old Adelphi Theatre, where there was a Holiness meeting, ... and I began saying, 'Lord, Lord, I must have this blessing.' Then what was to me an audible voice said: 'Are you willing to give up everything to the Lord?' and question after question kept coming up, to all of which I said: 'Yes, Lord; yes, Lord!' until this came: 'Why do you not accept it _now_?' and I said: 'I do, Lord.'--I felt no particular joy, only a trust. Just then the meeting closed, and, as I went out on the street, I met a gentleman smoking a fine cigar, and a cloud of smoke came into my face, and I took a long, deep breath of it, and praise the Lord, all my appetite for it was gone. Then as I walked along the street, passing saloons where the fumes of liquor came out, I found that all my taste and longing for that accursed stuff was gone. Glory to God! ... [But] for ten or eleven long years [after that] I was in the wilderness with its ups and downs. My appetite for liquor never came back." The classic case of Colonel Gardiner is that of a man cured of sexual temptation in a single hour. To Mr. Spears the colonel said, "I was effectually cured of all inclination to that sin I was so strongly addicted to that I thought nothing but shooting me through the head could have cured me of it; and all desire and inclination to it was removed, as entirely as if I had been a sucking child; nor did the temptation return to this day." Mr. Webster's words on the same subject are these: "One thing I have heard the colonel frequently say, that he was much addicted to impurity before his acquaintance with religion; but that, so soon as he was enlightened from above, he felt the power of the Holy Ghost changing his nature so wonderfully that his sanctification in this respect seemed more remarkable than in any other."(148) Such rapid abolition of ancient impulses and propensities reminds us so strongly of what has been observed as the result of hypnotic suggestion that it is difficult not to believe that subliminal influences play the decisive part in these abrupt changes of heart, just as they do in hypnotism.(149) Suggestive therapeutics abound in records of cure, after a few sittings, of inveterate bad habits with which the patient, left to ordinary moral and physical influences, had struggled in vain. Both drunkenness and sexual vice have been cured in this way, action through the subliminal seeming thus in many individuals to have the prerogative of inducing relatively stable change. If the grace of God miraculously operates, it probably operates through the subliminal door, then. But just _how_ anything operates in this region is still unexplained, and we shall do well now to say good-by to the _process_ of transformation altogether,--leaving it, if you like, a good deal of a psychological or theological mystery,--and to turn our attention to the fruits of the religious condition, no matter in what way they may have been produced.(150) The collective name for the ripe fruits of religion in a character is Saintliness.(151) The saintly character is the character for which spiritual emotions are the habitual centre of the personal energy; and there is a certain composite photograph of universal saintliness, the same in all religions, of which the features can easily be traced.(152) They are these:-- 1. A feeling of being in a wider life than that of this world's selfish little interests; and a conviction, not merely intellectual, but as it were sensible, of the existence of an Ideal Power. In Christian saintliness this power is always personified as God; but abstract moral ideals, civic or patriotic utopias, or inner visions of holiness or right may also be felt as the true lords and enlargers of our life, in ways which I described in the lecture on the Reality of the Unseen.(153) 2. A sense of the friendly continuity of the ideal power with our own life, and a willing self-surrender to its control. 3. An immense elation and freedom, as the outlines of the confining selfhood melt down. 4. A shifting of the emotional centre towards loving and harmonious affections, towards "yes, yes" and away from "no," where the claims of the non-ego are concerned. These fundamental inner conditions have characteristic practical consequences, as follows:-- _a._ _Asceticism._--The self-surrender may become so passionate as to turn into self-immolation. It may then so overrule the ordinary inhibitions of the flesh that the saint finds positive pleasure in sacrifice and asceticism, measuring and expressing as they do the degree of his loyalty to the higher power. _b._ _Strength of Soul._--The sense of enlargement of life may be so uplifting that personal motives and inhibitions, commonly omnipotent, become too insignificant for notice, and new reaches of patience and fortitude open out. Fears and anxieties go, and blissful equanimity takes their place. Come heaven, come hell, it makes no difference now! "We forbid ourselves all seeking after popularity, all ambition to appear important. We pledge ourselves to abstain from falsehood, in all its degrees. We promise not to create or encourage illusions as to what is possible, by what we say or write. We promise to one another active sincerity, which strives to see truth clearly, and which never fears to declare what it sees. "We promise deliberate resistance to the tidal waves of fashion, to the 'booms' and panics of the public mind, to all the forms of weakness and of fear. "We forbid ourselves the use of sarcasm. Of serious things we will speak seriously and unsmilingly, without banter and without the appearance of banter;--and even so of all things, for there are serious ways of being light of heart. "We will put ourselves forward always for what we are, simply and without false humility, as well as without pedantry, affectation, or pride." _c._ _Purity._--The shifting of the emotional centre brings with it, first, increase of purity. The sensitiveness to spiritual discords is enhanced, and the cleansing of existence from brutal and sensual elements becomes imperative. Occasions of contact with such elements are avoided: the saintly life must deepen its spiritual consistency and keep unspotted from the world. In some temperaments this need of purity of spirit takes an ascetic turn, and weaknesses of the flesh are treated with relentless severity. _d._ _Charity._--The shifting of the emotional centre brings, secondly, increase of charity, tenderness for fellow-creatures. The ordinary motives to antipathy, which usually set such close bounds to tenderness among human beings, are inhibited. The saint loves his enemies, and treats loathsome beggars as his brothers. ------------------------------------- I now have to give some concrete illustrations of these fruits of the spiritual tree. The only difficulty is to choose, for they are so abundant. Since the sense of Presence of a higher and friendly Power seems to be the fundamental feature in the spiritual life, I will begin with that. In our narratives of conversion we saw how the world might look shining and transfigured to the convert,(154) and, apart from anything acutely religious, we all have moments when the universal life seems to wrap us round with friendliness. In youth and health, in summer, in the woods or on the mountains, there come days when the weather seems all whispering with peace, hours when the goodness and beauty of existence enfold us like a dry warm climate, or chime through us as if our inner ears were subtly ringing with the world's security. Thoreau writes:-- "Once, a few weeks after I came to the woods, for an hour I doubted whether the near neighborhood of man was not essential to a serene and healthy life. To be alone was somewhat unpleasant. But, in the midst of a gentle rain, while these thoughts prevailed, I was suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in Nature, in the very pattering of the drops, and in every sight and sound around my house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once, like an atmosphere, sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages of human neighborhood insignificant, and I have never thought of them since. Every little pine-needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me. I was so distinctly made aware of the presence of something kindred to me, that I thought no place could ever be strange to me again."(155) In the Christian consciousness this sense of the enveloping friendliness becomes most personal and definite. "The compensation," writes a German author, "for the loss of that sense of personal independence which man so unwillingly gives up, is the disappearance of all _fear_ from one's life, the quite indescribable and inexplicable feeling of an inner _security_, which one can only experience, but which, once it has been experienced, one can never forget."(156) I find an excellent description of this state of mind in a sermon by Mr. Voysey:-- "It is the experience of myriads of trustful souls, that this sense of God's unfailing presence with them in their going out and in their coming in, and by night and day, is a source of absolute repose and confident calmness. It drives away all fear of what may befall them. That nearness of God is a constant security against terror and anxiety. It is not that they are at all assured of physical safety, or deem themselves protected by a love which is denied to others, but that they are in a state of mind equally ready to be safe or to meet with injury. If injury befall them, they will be content to bear it because the Lord is their keeper, and nothing can befall them without his will. If it be his will, then injury is for them a blessing and no calamity at all. Thus and thus only is the trustful man protected and shielded from harm. And I for one--by no means a thick-skinned or hard-nerved man--am absolutely satisfied with this arrangement, and do not wish for any other kind of immunity from danger and catastrophe. Quite as sensitive to pain as the most highly strung organism, I yet feel that the worst of it is conquered, and the sting taken out of it altogether, by the thought that God is our loving and sleepless keeper, and that nothing can hurt us without his will."(157) More excited expressions of this condition are abundant in religious literature. I could easily weary you with their monotony. Here is an account from Mrs. Jonathan Edwards:-- "Last night," Mrs. Edwards writes, "was the sweetest night I ever had in my life. I never before, for so long a time together, enjoyed so much of the light and rest and sweetness of heaven in my soul, but without the least agitation of body during the whole time. Part of the night I lay awake, sometimes asleep, and sometimes between sleeping and waking. But all night I continued in a constant, clear, and lively sense of the heavenly sweetness of Christ's excellent love, of his nearness to me, and of my dearness to him; with an inexpressibly sweet calmness of soul in an entire rest in him. I seemed to myself to perceive a glow of divine love come down from the heart of Christ in heaven into my heart in a constant stream, like a stream or pencil of sweet light. At the same time my heart and soul all flowed out in love to Christ, so that there seemed to be a constant flowing and reflowing of heavenly love, and I appeared to myself to float or swim, in these bright, sweet beams, like the motes swimming in the beams of the sun, or the streams of his light which come in at the window. I think that what I felt each minute was worth more than all the outward comfort and pleasure which I had enjoyed in my whole life put together. It was pleasure, without the least sting, or any interruption. It was a sweetness, which my soul was lost in; it seemed to be all that my feeble frame could sustain. There was but little difference, whether I was asleep or awake, but if there was any difference, the sweetness was greatest while I was asleep.(158) As I awoke early the next morning, it seemed to me that I had entirely done with myself. I felt that the opinions of the world concerning me were nothing, and that I had no more to do with any outward interest of my own than with that of a person whom I never saw. The glory of God seemed to swallow up every wish and desire of my heart.... After retiring to rest and sleeping a little while, I awoke, and was led to reflect on God's mercy to me, in giving me, for many years, a willingness to die; and after that, in making me willing to live, that I might do and suffer whatever he called me to here. I also thought how God had graciously given me an entire resignation to his will, with respect to the kind and manner of death that I should die; having been made willing to die on the rack, or at the stake, and if it were God's will, to die in darkness. But now it occurred to me, I used to think of living no longer than to the ordinary age of man. Upon this I was led to ask myself, whether I was not willing to be kept out of heaven even longer; and my whole heart seemed immediately to reply: Yes, a thousand years, and a thousand in horror, if it be most for the honor of God, the torment of my body being so great, awful, and overwhelming that none could bear to live in the country where the spectacle was seen, and the torment of my mind being vastly greater. And it seemed to me that I found a perfect willingness, quietness, and alacrity of soul in consenting that it should be so, if it were most for the glory of God, so that there was no hesitation, doubt, or darkness in my mind. The glory of God seemed to overcome me and swallow me up, and every conceivable suffering, and everything that was terrible to my nature, seemed to shrink to nothing before it. This resignation continued in its clearness and brightness the rest of the night, and all the next day, and the night following, and on Monday in the forenoon, without interruption or abatement."(159) The annals of Catholic saintship abound in records as ecstatic or more ecstatic than this. "Often the assaults of the divine love," it is said of the Sister Séraphique de la Martinière, "reduced her almost to the point of death. She used tenderly to complain of this to God. 'I cannot support it,' she used to say. 'Bear gently with my weakness, or I shall expire under the violence of your love.' "(160) ------------------------------------- Let me pass next to the Charity and Brotherly Love which are a usual fruit of saintliness, and have always been reckoned essential theological virtues, however limited may have been the kinds of service which the particular theology enjoined. Brotherly love would follow logically from the assurance of God's friendly presence, the notion of our brotherhood as men being an immediate inference from that of God's fatherhood of us all. When Christ utters the precepts: "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you," he gives for a reason: "That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust." One might therefore be tempted to explain both the humility as to one's self and the charity towards others which characterize spiritual excitement, as results of the all-leveling character of theistic belief. But these affections are certainly not mere derivatives of theism. We find them in Stoicism, in Hinduism, and in Buddhism in the highest possible degree. They harmonize with paternal theism beautifully; but they _harmonize_ with all reflection whatever upon the dependence of mankind on general causes; and we must, I think, consider them not subordinate but coördinate parts of that great complex excitement in the study of which we are engaged. Religious rapture, moral enthusiasm, ontological wonder, cosmic emotion, are all unifying states of mind, in which the sand and grit of the selfhood incline to disappear, and tenderness to rule. The best thing is to describe the condition integrally as a characteristic affection to which our nature is liable, a region in which we find ourselves at home, a sea in which we swim; but not to pretend to explain its parts by deriving them too cleverly from one another. Like love or fear, the faith-state is a natural psychic complex, and carries charity with it by organic consequence. Jubilation is an expansive affection, and all expansive affections are self-forgetful and kindly so long as they endure. We find this the case even when they are pathological in origin. In his instructive work, la Tristesse et la Joie,(161) M. Georges Dumas compares together the melancholy and the joyous phase of circular insanity, and shows that, while selfishness characterizes the one, the other is marked by altruistic impulses. No human being so stingy and useless as was Marie in her melancholy period! But the moment the happy period begins, "sympathy and kindness become her characteristic sentiments. She displays a universal goodwill, not only of intention, but in act.... She becomes solicitous of the health of other patients, interested in getting them out, desirous to procure wool to knit socks for some of them. Never since she has been under my observation have I heard her in her joyous period utter any but charitable opinions."(162) And later, Dr. Dumas says of all such joyous conditions that "unselfish sentiments and tender emotions are the only affective states to be found in them. The subject's mind is closed against envy, hatred, and vindictiveness, and wholly transformed into benevolence, indulgence, and mercy."(163) There is thus an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness, and their companionship in the saintly life need in no way occasion surprise. Along with the happiness, this increase of tenderness is often noted in narratives of conversion. "I began to work for others";--"I had more tender feeling for my family and friends";--"I spoke at once to a person with whom I had been angry";--"I felt for every one, and loved my friends better";--"I felt every one to be my friend";--these are so many expressions from the records collected by Professor Starbuck.(164) "When," says Mrs. Edwards, continuing the narrative from which I made quotation a moment ago, "I arose on the morning of the Sabbath, I felt a love to all mankind, wholly peculiar in its strength and sweetness, far beyond all that I had ever felt before. The power of that love seemed inexpressible. I thought, if I were surrounded by enemies, who were venting their malice and cruelty upon me, in tormenting me, it would still be impossible that I should cherish any feelings towards them but those of love, and pity, and ardent desires for their happiness. I never before felt so far from a disposition to judge and censure others, as I did that morning. I realized also, in an unusual and very lively manner, how great a part of Christianity lies in the performance of our social and relative duties to one another. The same joyful sense continued throughout the day--a sweet love to God and all mankind." Whatever be the explanation of the charity, it may efface all usual human barriers.(165) Here, for instance, is an example of Christian non-resistance from Richard Weaver's autobiography. Weaver was a collier, a semi-professional pugilist in his younger days, who became a much beloved evangelist. Fighting, after drinking, seems to have been the sin to which he originally felt his flesh most perversely inclined. After his first conversion he had a backsliding, which consisted in pounding a man who had insulted a girl. Feeling that, having once fallen, he might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb, he got drunk and went and broke the jaw of another man who had lately challenged him to fight and taunted him with cowardice for refusing as a Christian man;--I mention these incidents to show how genuine a change of heart is implied in the later conduct which he describes as follows:-- "I went down the drift and found the boy crying because a fellow- workman was trying to take the wagon from him by force. I said to him:-- " 'Tom, you mustn't take that wagon.' "He swore at me, and called me a Methodist devil. I told him that God did not tell me to let him rob me. He cursed again, and said he would push the wagon over me. " 'Well,' I said, 'let us see whether the devil and thee are stronger than the Lord and me.' "And the Lord and I proving stronger than the devil and he, he had to get out of the way, or the wagon would have gone over him. So I gave the wagon to the boy. Then said Tom:-- " 'I've a good mind to smack thee on the face.' " 'Well,' I said, 'if that will do thee any good, thou canst do it.' So he struck me on the face. "I turned the other cheek to him, and said, 'Strike again.' "He struck again and again, till he had struck me five times. I turned my cheek for the sixth stroke; but he turned away cursing. I shouted after him: 'The Lord forgive thee, for I do, and the Lord save thee.' "This was on a Saturday; and when I went home from the coal-pit my wife saw my face was swollen, and asked what was the matter with it. I said: 'I've been fighting, and I've given a man a good thrashing.' "She burst out weeping, and said, 'O Richard, what made you fight?' Then I told her all about it; and she thanked the Lord I had not struck back. "But the Lord had struck, and his blows have more effect than man's. Monday came. The devil began to tempt me, saying: 'The other men will laugh at thee for allowing Tom to treat thee as he did on Saturday.' I cried, 'Get thee behind me, Satan;'--and went on my way to the coal-pit. "Tom was the first man I saw. I said 'Good-morning,' but got no reply. "He went down first. When I got down, I was surprised to see him sitting on the wagon-road waiting for me. When I came to him he burst into tears and said: 'Richard, will you forgive me for striking you?' " 'I have forgiven thee,' said I; 'ask God to forgive thee. The Lord bless thee.' I gave him my hand, and we went each to his work."(166) "Love your enemies!" Mark you, not simply those who happen not to be your friends, but your _enemies_, your positive and active enemies. Either this is a mere Oriental hyperbole, a bit of verbal extravagance, meaning only that we should, as far as we can, abate our animosities, or else it is sincere and literal. Outside of certain cases of intimate individual relation, it seldom has been taken literally. Yet it makes one ask the question: Can there in general be a level of emotion so unifying, so obliterative of differences between man and man, that even enmity may come to be an irrelevant circumstance and fail to inhibit the friendlier interests aroused? If positive well-wishing could attain so supreme a degree of excitement, those who were swayed by it might well seem superhuman beings. Their life would be morally discrete from the life of other men, and there is no saying, in the absence of positive experience of an authentic kind,--for there are few active examples in our scriptures, and the Buddhistic examples are legendary,(167)--what the effects might be: they might conceivably transform the world. Psychologically and in principle, the precept "Love your enemies" is not self-contradictory. It is merely the extreme limit of a kind of magnanimity with which, in the shape of pitying tolerance of our oppressors, we are fairly familiar. Yet if radically followed, it would involve such a breach with our instinctive springs of action as a whole, and with the present world's arrangements, that a critical point would practically be passed, and we should be born into another kingdom of being. Religious emotion makes us feel that other kingdom to be close at hand, within our reach. The inhibition of instinctive repugnance is proved not only by the showing of love to enemies, but by the showing of it to any one who is personally loathsome. In the annals of saintliness we find a curious mixture of motives impelling in this direction. Asceticism plays its part; and along with charity pure and simple, we find humility or the desire to disclaim distinction and to grovel on the common level before God. Certainly all three principles were at work when Francis of Assisi and Ignatius Loyola exchanged their garments with those of filthy beggars. All three are at work when religious persons consecrate their lives to the care of leprosy or other peculiarly unpleasant diseases. The nursing of the sick is a function to which the religious seem strongly drawn, even apart from the fact that church traditions set that way. But in the annals of this sort of charity we find fantastic excesses of devotion recorded which are only explicable by the frenzy of self-immolation simultaneously aroused. Francis of Assisi kisses his lepers; Margaret Mary Alacoque, Francis Xavier, St. John of God, and others are said to have cleansed the sores and ulcers of their patients with their respective tongues; and the lives of such saints as Elizabeth of Hungary and Madame de Chantal are full of a sort of reveling in hospital purulence, disagreeable to read of, and which makes us admire and shudder at the same time. ------------------------------------- So much for the human love aroused by the faith-state. Let me next speak of the Equanimity, Resignation, Fortitude, and Patience which it brings. "A paradise of inward tranquillity" seems to be faith's usual result; and it is easy, even without being religious one's self, to understand this. A moment back, in treating of the sense of God's presence, I spoke of the unaccountable feeling of safety which one may then have. And, indeed, how can it possibly fail to steady the nerves, to cool the fever, and appease the fret, if one be sensibly conscious that, no matter what one's difficulties for the moment may appear to be, one's life as a whole is in the keeping of a power whom one can absolutely trust? In deeply religious men the abandonment of self to this power is passionate. Whoever not only says, but _feels_, "God's will be done," is mailed against every weakness; and the whole historic array of martyrs, missionaries, and religious reformers is there to prove the tranquil-mindedness, under naturally agitating or distressing circumstances, which self-surrender brings. The temper of the tranquil-mindedness differs, of course, according as the person is of a constitutionally sombre or of a constitutionally cheerful cast of mind. In the sombre it partakes more of resignation and submission; in the cheerful it is a joyous consent. As an example of the former temper, I quote part of a letter from Professor Lagneau, a venerated teacher of philosophy who lately died, a great invalid, at Paris:-- "My life, for the success of which you send good wishes, will be what it is able to be. I ask nothing from it, I expect nothing from it. For long years now I exist, think, and act, and am worth what I am worth, only through the despair which is my sole strength and my sole foundation. May it preserve for me, even in these last trials to which I am coming, the courage to do without the desire of deliverance. I ask nothing more from the Source whence all strength cometh, and if that is granted, your wishes will have been accomplished."(168) There is something pathetic and fatalistic about this, but the power of such a tone as a protection against outward shocks is manifest. Pascal is another Frenchman of pessimistic natural temperament. He expresses still more amply the temper of self-surrendering submissiveness:-- "Deliver me, Lord," he writes in his prayers, "from the sadness at my proper suffering which self-love might give, but put into me a sadness like your own. Let my sufferings appease your choler. Make them an occasion for my conversion and salvation. I ask you neither for health nor for sickness, for life nor for death; but that you may dispose of my health and my sickness, my life and my death, for your glory, for my salvation, and for the use of the Church and of your saints, of whom I would by your grace be one. You alone know what is expedient for me; you are the sovereign master; do with me according to your will. Give to me, or take away from me, only conform my will to yours. I know but one thing, Lord, that it is good to follow you, and bad to offend you. Apart from that, I know not what is good or bad in anything. I know not which is most profitable to me, health or sickness, wealth or poverty, nor anything else in the world. That discernment is beyond the power of men or angels, and is hidden among the secrets of your Providence, which I adore, but do not seek to fathom."(169) When we reach more optimistic temperaments, the resignation grows less passive. Examples are sown so broadcast throughout history that I might well pass on without citation. As it is, I snatch at the first that occurs to my mind. Madame Guyon, a frail creature physically, was yet of a happy native disposition. She went through many perils with admirable serenity of soul. After being sent to prison for heresy,-- "Some of my friends," she writes, "wept bitterly at the hearing of it, but such was my state of acquiescence and resignation that it failed to draw any tears from me.... There appeared to be in me then, as I find it to be in me now, such an entire loss of what regards myself, that any of my own interests gave me little pain or pleasure; ever wanting to will or wish for myself only the very thing which God does." In another place she writes: "We all of us came near perishing in a river which we found it necessary to pass. The carriage sank in the quicksand. Others who were with us threw themselves out in excessive fright. But I found my thoughts so much taken up with God that I had no distinct sense of danger. It is true that the thought of being drowned passed across my mind, but it cost no other sensation or reflection in me than this--that I felt quite contented and willing it were so, if it were my heavenly Father's choice." Sailing from Nice to Genoa, a storm keeps her eleven days at sea. "As the irritated waves dashed round us," she writes, "I could not help experiencing a certain degree of satisfaction in my mind. I pleased myself with thinking that those mutinous billows, under the command of Him who does all things rightly, might probably furnish me with a watery grave. Perhaps I carried the point too far, in the pleasure which I took in thus seeing myself beaten and bandied by the swelling waters. Those who were with me took notice of my intrepidity."(170) The contempt of danger which religious enthusiasm produces may be even more buoyant still. I take an example from that charming recent autobiography, "With Christ at Sea," by Frank Bullen. A couple of days after he went through the conversion on shipboard of which he there gives an account,-- "It was blowing stiffly," he writes, "and we were carrying a press of canvas to get north out of the bad weather. Shortly after four bells we hauled down the flying-jib, and I sprang out astride the boom to furl it. I was sitting astride the boom when suddenly it gave way with me. The sail slipped through my fingers, and I fell backwards, hanging head downwards over the seething tumult of shining foam under the ship's bows, suspended by one foot. But I felt only high exultation in my certainty of eternal life. Although death was divided from me by a hair's breadth, and I was acutely conscious of the fact, it gave me no sensation but joy. I suppose I could have hung there no longer than five seconds, but in that time I lived a whole age of delight. But my body asserted itself, and with a desperate gymnastic effort I regained the boom. How I furled the sail I don't know, but I sang at the utmost pitch of my voice praises to God that went pealing out over the dark waste of waters."(171) The annals of martyrdom are of course the signal field of triumph for religious imperturbability. Let me cite as an example the statement of a humble sufferer, persecuted as a Huguenot under Louis XIV.:-- "They shut all the doors," Blanche Gamond writes, "and I saw six women, each with a bunch of willow rods as thick as the hand could hold, and a yard long. He gave me the order, 'Undress yourself,' which I did. He said, 'You are leaving on your shift; you must take it off.' They had so little patience that they took it off themselves, and I was naked from the waist up. They brought a cord with which they tied me to a beam in the kitchen. They drew the cord tight with all their strength and asked me, 'Does it hurt you?' and then they discharged their fury upon me, exclaiming as they struck me, 'Pray now to your God.' It was the Roulette woman who held this language. But at this moment I received the greatest consolation that I can ever receive in my life, since I had the honor of being whipped for the name of Christ, and in addition of being crowned with his mercy and his consolations. Why can I not write down the inconceivable influences, consolations, and peace which I felt interiorly? To understand them one must have passed by the same trial; they were so great that I was ravished, for there where afflictions abound grace is given superabundantly. In vain the women cried, 'We must double our blows; she does not feel them, for she neither speaks nor cries.' And how should I have cried, since I was swooning with happiness within?"(172) The transition from tenseness, self-responsibility, and worry, to equanimity, receptivity, and peace, is the most wonderful of all those shiftings of inner equilibrium, those changes of the personal centre of energy, which I have analyzed so often; and the chief wonder of it is that it so often comes about, not by doing, but by simply relaxing and throwing the burden down. This abandonment of self-responsibility seems to be the fundamental act in specifically religious, as distinguished from moral practice. It antedates theologies and is independent of philosophies. Mind-cure, theosophy, stoicism, ordinary neurological hygiene, insist on it as emphatically as Christianity does, and it is capable of entering into closest marriage with every speculative creed.(173) Christians who have it strongly live in what is called "recollection," and are never anxious about the future, nor worry over the outcome of the day. Of Saint Catharine of Genoa it is said that "she took cognizance of things, only as they were presented to her in succession, _moment by moment_." To her holy soul, "the divine moment was the present moment,... and when the present moment was estimated in itself and in its relations, and when the duty that was involved in it was accomplished, it was permitted to pass away as if it had never been, and to give way to the facts and duties of the moment which came after."(174) Hinduism, mind-cure, and theosophy all lay great emphasis upon this concentration of the consciousness upon the moment at hand. ------------------------------------- The next religious symptom which I will note is what I have called Purity of Life. The saintly person becomes exceedingly sensitive to inner inconsistency or discord, and mixture and confusion grow intolerable. All the mind's objects and occupations must be ordered with reference to the special spiritual excitement which is now its keynote. Whatever is unspiritual taints the pure water of the soul and is repugnant. Mixed with this exaltation of the moral sensibilities there is also an ardor of sacrifice, for the beloved deity's sake, of everything unworthy of him. Sometimes the spiritual ardor is so sovereign that purity is achieved at a stroke--we have seen examples. Usually it is a more gradual conquest. Billy Bray's account of his abandonment of tobacco is a good example of the latter form of achievement. "I had been a smoker as well as a drunkard, and I used to love my tobacco as much as I loved my meat, and I would rather go down into the mine without my dinner than without my pipe. In the days of old, the Lord spoke by the mouths of his servants, the prophets; now he speaks to us by the spirit of his Son. I had not only the feeling part of religion, but I could hear the small, still voice within speaking to me. When I took the pipe to smoke, it would be applied within, 'It is an idol, a lust; worship the Lord with clean lips.' So, I felt it was not right to smoke. The Lord also sent a woman to convince me. I was one day in a house, and I took out my pipe to light it at the fire, and Mary Hawke--for that was the woman's name--said, 'Do you not feel it is wrong to smoke?' I said that I felt something inside telling me that it was an idol, a lust, and she said that was the Lord. Then I said, 'Now, I must give it up, for the Lord is telling me of it inside, and the woman outside, so the tobacco must go, love it as I may.' There and then I took the tobacco out of my pocket, and threw it into the fire, and put the pipe under my foot, 'ashes to ashes, dust to dust.' And I have not smoked since. I found it hard to break off old habits, but I cried to the Lord for help, and he gave me strength, for he has said, 'Call upon me in the day of trouble, and I will deliver thee.' The day after I gave up smoking I had the toothache so bad that I did not know what to do. I thought this was owing to giving up the pipe, but I said I would never smoke again, if I lost every tooth in my head. I said, 'Lord, thou hast told us My yoke is easy and my burden is light,' and when I said that, all the pain left me. Sometimes the thought of the pipe would come back to me very strong; but the Lord strengthened me against the habit, and, bless his name, I have not smoked since." Bray's biographer writes that after he had given up smoking, he thought that he would chew a little, but he conquered this dirty habit, too. "On one occasion," Bray said, "when at a prayer- meeting at Hicks Mill, I heard the Lord say to me, 'Worship me with clean lips.' So, when we got up from our knees, I took the quid out of my mouth and 'whipped 'en' [threw it] under the form. But, when we got on our knees again, I put another quid into my mouth. Then the Lord said to me again, 'Worship me with clean lips.' So I took the quid out of my mouth, and whipped 'en under the form again, and said, 'Yes, Lord, I will.' From that time I gave up chewing as well as smoking, and have been a free man." The ascetic forms which the impulse for veracity and purity of life may take are often pathetic enough. The early Quakers, for example, had hard battles to wage against the worldliness and insincerity of the ecclesiastical Christianity of their time. Yet the battle that cost them most wounds was probably that which they fought in defense of their own right to social veracity and sincerity in their thee-ing and thou-ing, in not doffing the hat or giving titles of respect. It was laid on George Fox that these conventional customs were a lie and a sham, and the whole body of his followers thereupon renounced them, as a sacrifice to truth, and so that their acts and the spirit they professed might be more in accord. "When the Lord sent me into the world," says Fox in his Journal, "he forbade me to put off my hat to any, high or low: and I was required to 'thee' and 'thou' all men and women, without any respect to rich or poor, great or small. And as I traveled up and down, I was not to bid people Good-morning, or Good-evening, neither might I bow or scrape with my leg to any one. This made the sects and professions rage. Oh! the rage that was in the priests, magistrates, professors, and people of all sorts: and especially in priests and professors: for though 'thou' to a single person was according to their accidence and grammar rules, and according to the Bible, yet they could not bear to hear it: and because I could not put off my hat to them, it set them all into a rage.... Oh! the scorn, heat, and fury that arose! Oh! the blows, punchings, beatings, and imprisonments that we underwent for not putting off our hats to men! Some had their hats violently plucked off and thrown away, so that they quite lost them. The bad language and evil usage we received on this account is hard to be expressed, besides the danger we were sometimes in of losing our lives for this matter, and that by the great professors of Christianity, who thereby discovered they were not true believers. And though it was but a small thing in the eye of man, yet a wonderful confusion it brought among all professors and priests: but, blessed be the Lord, many came to see the vanity of that custom of putting off hats to men, and felt the weight of Truth's testimony against it." In the autobiography of Thomas Elwood, an early Quaker, who at one time was secretary to John Milton, we find an exquisitely quaint and candid account of the trials he underwent both at home and abroad, in following Fox's canons of sincerity. The anecdotes are too lengthy for citation; but Elwood sets down his manner of feeling about these things in a shorter passage, which I will quote as a characteristic utterance of spiritual sensibility:-- "By this divine light, then," says Elwood, "I saw that though I had not the evil of the common uncleanliness, debauchery, profaneness, and pollutions of the world to put away, because I had, through the great goodness of God and a civil education, been preserved out of those grosser evils, yet I had many other evils to put away and to cease from; some of which were not by the world, which lies in wickedness (1 John v. 19), accounted evils, but by the light of Christ were made manifest to me to be evils, and as such condemned in me. "As particularly those fruits and effects of pride that discover themselves in the vanity and superfluity of apparel; which I took too much delight in. This evil of my doings I was required to put away and cease from; and judgment lay upon me till I did so. "I took off from my apparel those unnecessary trimmings of lace, ribbons, and useless buttons, which had no real service, but were set on only for that which was by mistake called ornament; and I ceased to wear rings. "Again, the giving of flattering titles to men between whom and me there was not any relation to which such titles could be pretended to belong. This was an evil I had been much addicted to, and was accounted a ready artist in; therefore this evil also was I required to put away and cease from. So that thenceforward I durst not say, Sir, Master, My Lord, Madam (or My Dame); or say Your Servant to any one to whom I did not stand in the real relation of a servant, which I had never done to any. "Again, respect of persons, in uncovering the head and bowing the knee or body in salutation, was a practice I had been much in the use of; and this, being one of the vain customs of the world, introduced by the spirit of the world, instead of the true honor which this is a false representation of, and used in deceit as a token of respect by persons one to another, who bear no real respect one to another; and besides this, being a type and a proper emblem of that divine honor which all ought to pay to Almighty God, and which all of all sorts, who take upon them the Christian name, appear in when they offer their prayers to him, and therefore should not be given to men;--I found this to be one of those evils which I had been too long doing; therefore I was now required to put it away and cease from it. "Again, the corrupt and unsound form of speaking in the plural number to a single person, _you_ to one, instead of _thou_, contrary to the pure, plain, and single language of truth, _thou_ to one, and _you_ to more than one, which had always been used by God to men, and men to God, as well as one to another, from the oldest record of time till corrupt men, for corrupt ends, in later and corrupt times, to flatter, fawn, and work upon the corrupt nature in men, brought in that false and senseless way of speaking _you_ to one, which has since corrupted the modern languages, and hath greatly debased the spirits and depraved the manners of men;--this evil custom I had been as forward in as others, and this I was now called out of and required to cease from. "These and many more evil customs which had sprung up in the night of darkness and general apostasy from the truth and true religion were now, by the inshining of this pure ray of divine light in my conscience, gradually discovered to me to be what I ought to cease from, shun, and stand a witness against."(175) These early Quakers were Puritans indeed. The slightest inconsistency between profession and deed jarred some of them to active protest. John Woolman writes in his diary:-- "In these journeys I have been where much cloth hath been dyed; and have at sundry times walked over ground where much of their dyestuffs has drained away. This hath produced a longing in my mind that people might come into cleanness of spirit, cleanness of person, and cleanness about their houses and garments. Dyes being invented partly to please the eye, and partly to hide dirt, I have felt in this weak state, when traveling in dirtiness, and affected with unwholesome scents, a strong desire that the nature of dyeing cloth to hide dirt may be more fully considered. "Washing our garments to keep them sweet is cleanly, but it is the opposite to real cleanliness to hide dirt in them. Through giving way to hiding dirt in our garments a spirit which would conceal that which is disagreeable is strengthened. Real cleanliness becometh a holy people; but hiding that which is not clean by coloring our garments seems contrary to the sweetness of sincerity. Through some sorts of dyes cloth is rendered less useful. And if the value of dyestuffs, and expense of dyeing, and the damage done to cloth, were all added together, and that cost applied to keeping all sweet and clean, how much more would real cleanliness prevail. "Thinking often on these things, the use of hats and garments dyed with a dye hurtful to them, and wearing more clothes in summer than are useful, grew more uneasy to me; believing them to be customs which have not their foundation in pure wisdom. The apprehension of being singular from my beloved friends was a strait upon me; and thus I continued in the use of some things, contrary to my judgment, about nine months. Then I thought of getting a hat the natural color of the fur, but the apprehension of being looked upon as one affecting singularity felt uneasy to me. On this account I was under close exercise of mind in the time of our general spring meeting in 1762, greatly desiring to be rightly directed; when, being deeply bowed in spirit before the Lord, I was made willing to submit to what I apprehended was required of me; and when I returned home, got a hat of the natural color of the fur. "In attending meetings, this singularity was a trial to me, and more especially at this time, as white hats were used by some who were fond of following the changeable modes of dress, and as some friends, who knew not from what motives I wore it, grew shy of me, I felt my way for a time shut up in the exercise of the ministry. Some friends were apprehensive that my wearing such a hat savored of an affected singularity: those who spoke with me in a friendly way, I generally informed in a few words, that I believed my wearing it was not in my own will." When the craving for moral consistency and purity is developed to this degree, the subject may well find the outer world too full of shocks to dwell in, and can unify his life and keep his soul unspotted only by withdrawing from it. That law which impels the artist to achieve harmony in his composition by simply dropping out whatever jars, or suggests a discord, rules also in the spiritual life. To omit, says Stevenson, is the one art in literature: "If I knew how to omit, I should ask no other knowledge." And life, when full of disorder and slackness and vague superfluity, can no more have what we call character than literature can have it under similar conditions. So monasteries and communities of sympathetic devotees open their doors, and in their changeless order, characterized by omissions quite as much as constituted of actions, the holy-minded person finds that inner smoothness and cleanness which it is torture to him to feel violated at every turn by the discordancy and brutality of secular existence. ------------------------------------- That the scrupulosity of purity may be carried to a fantastic extreme must be admitted. In this it resembles Asceticism, to which further symptom of saintliness we had better turn next. The adjective "ascetic" is applied to conduct originating on diverse psychological levels, which I might as well begin by distinguishing from one another. 1. Asceticism may be a mere expression of organic hardihood, disgusted with too much ease. 2. Temperance in meat and drink, simplicity of apparel, chastity, and non-pampering of the body generally, may be fruits of the love of purity, shocked by whatever savors of the sensual. 3. They may also be fruits of love, that is, they may appeal to the subject in the light of sacrifices which he is happy in making to the Deity whom he acknowledges. 4. Again, ascetic mortifications and torments may be due to pessimistic feelings about the self, combined with theological beliefs concerning expiation. The devotee may feel that he is buying himself free, or escaping worse sufferings hereafter, by doing penance now. 5. In psychopathic persons, mortifications may be entered on irrationally, by a sort of obsession or fixed idea which comes as a challenge and must be worked off, because only thus does the subject get his interior consciousness feeling right again. 6. Finally, ascetic exercises may in rarer instances be prompted by genuine perversions of the bodily sensibility, in consequence of which normally pain-giving stimuli are actually felt as pleasures. I will try to give an instance under each of these heads in turn; but it is not easy to get them pure, for in cases pronounced enough to be immediately classed as ascetic, several of the assigned motives usually work together. Moreover, before citing any examples at all, I must invite you to some general psychological considerations which apply to all of them alike. A strange moral transformation has within the past century swept over our Western world. We no longer think that we are called on to face physical pain with equanimity. It is not expected of a man that he should either endure it or inflict much of it, and to listen to the recital of cases of it makes our flesh creep morally as well as physically. The way in which our ancestors looked upon pain as an eternal ingredient of the world's order, and both caused and suffered it as a matter-of-course portion of their day's work, fills us with amazement. We wonder that any human beings could have been so callous. The result of this historic alteration is that even in the Mother Church herself, where ascetic discipline has such a fixed traditional prestige as a factor of merit, it has largely come into desuetude, if not discredit. A believer who flagellates or "macerates" himself to-day arouses more wonder and fear than emulation. Many Catholic writers who admit that the times have changed in this respect do so resignedly; and even add that perhaps it is as well not to waste feelings in regretting the matter, for to return to the heroic corporeal discipline of ancient days might be an extravagance. Where to seek the easy and the pleasant seems instinctive--and instinctive it appears to be in man; any deliberate tendency to pursue the hard and painful as such and for their own sakes might well strike one as purely abnormal. Nevertheless, in moderate degrees it is natural and even usual to human nature to court the arduous. It is only the extreme manifestations of the tendency that can be regarded as a paradox. The psychological reasons for this lie near the surface. When we drop abstractions and take what we call our will in the act, we see that it is a very complex function. It involves both stimulations and inhibitions; it follows generalized habits; it is escorted by reflective criticisms; and it leaves a good or a bad taste of itself behind, according to the manner of the performance. The result is that, quite apart from the immediate pleasure which any sensible experience may give us, our own general moral attitude in procuring or undergoing the experience brings with it a secondary satisfaction or distaste. Some men and women, indeed, there are who can live on smiles and the word "yes" forever. But for others (indeed for most), this is too tepid and relaxed a moral climate. Passive happiness is slack and insipid, and soon grows mawkish and intolerable. Some austerity and wintry negativity, some roughness, danger, stringency, and effort, some "no! no!" must be mixed in, to produce the sense of an existence with character and texture and power. The range of individual differences in this respect is enormous; but whatever the mixture of yeses and noes may be, the person is infallibly aware when he has struck it in the right proportion _for him_. This, he feels, is my proper vocation, this is the _optimum_, the law, the life for me to live. Here I find the degree of equilibrium, safety, calm, and leisure which I need, or here I find the challenge, passion, fight, and hardship without which my soul's energy expires. Every individual soul, in short, like every individual machine or organism, has its own best conditions of efficiency. A given machine will run best under a certain steam-pressure, a certain amperage; an organism under a certain diet, weight, or exercise. You seem to do best, I heard a doctor say to a patient, at about 140 millimeters of arterial tension. And it is just so with our sundry souls: some are happiest in calm weather; some need the sense of tension, of strong volition, to make them feel alive and well. For these latter souls, whatever is gained from day to day must be paid for by sacrifice and inhibition, or else it comes too cheap and has no zest. Now when characters of this latter sort become religious, they are apt to turn the edge of their need of effort and negativity against their natural self; and the ascetic life gets evolved as a consequence. When Professor Tyndall in one of his lectures tells us that Thomas Carlyle put him into his bath-tub every morning of a freezing Berlin winter, he proclaimed one of the lowest grades of asceticism. Even without Carlyle, most of us find it necessary to our soul's health to start the day with a rather cool immersion. A little farther along the scale we get such statements as this, from one of my correspondents, an agnostic:-- "Often at night in my warm bed I would feel ashamed to depend so on the warmth, and whenever the thought would come over me I would have to get up, no matter what time of night it was, and stand for a minute in the cold, just so as to prove my manhood." Such cases as these belong simply to our head 1. In the next case we probably have a mixture of heads 2 and 3--the asceticism becomes far more systematic and pronounced. The writer is a Protestant, whose sense of moral energy could doubtless be gratified on no lower terms, and I take his case from Starbuck's manuscript collection. "I practiced fasting and mortification of the flesh. I secretly made burlap shirts, and put the burrs next the skin, and wore pebbles in my shoes. I would spend nights flat on my back on the floor without any covering." The Roman Church has organized and codified all this sort of thing, and given it a market-value in the shape of "merit." But we see the cultivation of hardship cropping out under every sky and in every faith, as a spontaneous need of character. Thus we read of Channing, when first settled as a Unitarian minister, that-- "He was now more simple than ever, and seemed to have become incapable of any form of self-indulgence. He took the smallest room in the house for his study, though he might easily have commanded one more light, airy, and in every way more suitable; and chose for his sleeping chamber an attic which he shared with a younger brother. The furniture of the latter might have answered for the cell of an anchorite, and consisted of a hard mattress on a cot-bedstead, plain wooden chairs and table, with matting on the floor. It was without fire, and to cold he was throughout life extremely sensitive; but he never complained or appeared in any way to be conscious of inconvenience. 'I recollect,' says his brother, 'after one most severe night, that in the morning he sportively thus alluded to his suffering: "If my bed were my country, I should be somewhat like Bonaparte: I have no control except over the part which I occupy; the instant I move, frost takes possession." ' In sickness only would he change for the time his apartment and accept a few comforts. The dress too that he habitually adopted was of most inferior quality; and garments were constantly worn which the world would call mean, though an almost feminine neatness preserved him from the least appearance of neglect."(176) Channing's asceticism, such as it was, was evidently a compound of hardihood and love of purity. The democracy which is an offshoot of the enthusiasm of humanity, and of which I will speak later under the head of the cult of poverty, doubtless bore also a share. Certainly there was no pessimistic element in his case. In the next case we have a strongly pessimistic element, so that it belongs under head 4. John Cennick was Methodism's first lay preacher. In 1735 he was convicted of sin, while walking in Cheapside,-- "And at once left off song-singing, card-playing, and attending theatres. Sometimes he wished to go to a popish monastery, to spend his life in devout retirement. At other times he longed to live in a cave, sleeping on fallen leaves, and feeding on forest fruits. He fasted long and often, and prayed nine times a day.... Fancying dry bread too great an indulgence for so great a sinner as himself, he began to feed on potatoes, acorns, crabs, and grass; and often wished that he could live on roots and herbs. At length, in 1737, he found peace with God, and went on his way rejoicing."(177) In this poor man we have morbid melancholy and fear, and the sacrifices made are to purge out sin, and to buy safety. The hopelessness of Christian theology in respect of the flesh and the natural man generally has, in systematizing fear, made of it one tremendous incentive to self- mortification. It would be quite unfair, however, in spite of the fact that this incentive has often been worked in a mercenary way for hortatory purposes, to call it a mercenary incentive. The impulse to expiate and do penance is, in its first intention, far too immediate and spontaneous an expression of self-despair and anxiety to be obnoxious to any such reproach. In the form of loving sacrifice, of spending all we have to show our devotion, ascetic discipline of the severest sort may be the fruit of highly optimistic religious feeling. M. Vianney, the curé of Ars, was a French country priest, whose holiness was exemplary. We read in his life the following account of his inner need of sacrifice:-- " 'On this path,' M. Vianney said, 'it is only the first step that costs. There is in mortification a balm and a savor without which one cannot live when once one has made their acquaintance. There is but one way in which to give one's self to God,--that is, to give one's self entirely, and to keep nothing for one's self. The little that one keeps is only good to double one and make one suffer.' Accordingly he imposed it on himself that he should never smell a flower, never drink when parched with thirst, never drive away a fly, never show disgust before a repugnant object, never complain of anything that had to do with his personal comfort, never sit down, never lean upon his elbows when he was kneeling. The Curé of Ars was very sensitive to cold, but he would never take means to protect himself against it. During a very severe winter, one of his missionaries contrived a false floor to his confessional and placed a metal case of hot water beneath. The trick succeeded, and the Saint was deceived: 'God is very good,' he said with emotion. 'This year, through all the cold, my feet have always been warm.' "(178) In this case the spontaneous impulse to make sacrifices for the pure love of God was probably the uppermost conscious motive. We may class it, then, under our head 3. Some authors think that the impulse to sacrifice is the main religious phenomenon. It is a prominent, a universal phenomenon certainly, and lies deeper than any special creed. Here, for instance, is what seems to be a spontaneous example of it, simply expressing what seemed right at the time between the individual and his Maker. Cotton Mather, the New England Puritan divine, is generally reputed a rather grotesque pedant; yet what is more touchingly simple than his relation of what happened when his wife came to die? "When I saw to what a point of resignation I was now called of the Lord," he says, "I resolved, with his help, therein to glorify him. So, two hours before my lovely consort expired, I kneeled by her bedside, and I took into my two hands a dear hand, the dearest in the world. With her thus in my hands, I solemnly and sincerely gave her up unto the Lord: and in token of my real _Resignation_, I gently put her out of my hands, and laid away a most lovely hand, resolving that I would never touch it more. This was the hardest, and perhaps the bravest action that ever I did. She ... told me that she signed and sealed my act of resignation. And though before that she called for me continually, she after this never asked for me any more."(179) Father Vianney's asceticism taken in its totality was simply the result of a permanent flood of high spiritual enthusiasm, longing to make proof of itself. The Roman Church has, in its incomparable fashion, collected all the motives towards asceticism together, and so codified them that any one wishing to pursue Christian perfection may find a practical system mapped out for him in any one of a number of ready-made manuals.(180) The dominant Church notion of perfection is of course the negative one of avoidance of sin. Sin proceeds from concupiscence, and concupiscence from our carnal passions and temptations, chief of which are pride, sensuality in all its forms, and the loves of worldly excitement and possession. All these sources of sin must be resisted; and discipline and austerities are a most efficacious mode of meeting them. Hence there are always in these books chapters on self-mortification. But whenever a procedure is codified, the more delicate spirit of it evaporates, and if we wish the undiluted ascetic spirit,--the passion of self-contempt wreaking itself on the poor flesh, the divine irrationality of devotion making a sacrificial gift of all it has (its sensibilities, namely) to the object of its adoration,--we must go to autobiographies, or other individual documents. Saint John of the Cross, a Spanish mystic who flourished--or rather who existed, for there was little that suggested flourishing about him--in the sixteenth century, will supply a passage suitable for our purpose. "First of all, carefully excite in yourself an habitual affectionate will in all things to imitate Jesus Christ. If anything agreeable offers itself to your senses, yet does not at the same time tend purely to the honor and glory of God, renounce it and separate yourself from it for the love of Christ, who all his life long had no other taste or wish than to do the will of his Father whom he called his meat and nourishment. For example, you take satisfaction in _hearing_ of things in which the glory of God bears no part. Deny yourself this satisfaction, mortify your wish to listen. You take pleasure in _seeing_ objects which do not raise your mind to God: refuse yourself this pleasure, and turn away your eyes. The same with conversations and all other things. Act similarly, so far as you are able, with all the operations of the senses, striving to make yourself free from their yokes. "The radical remedy lies in the mortification of the four great natural passions, joy, hope, fear, and grief. You must seek to deprive these of every satisfaction and leave them as it were in darkness and the void. Let your soul therefore turn always: "Not to what is most easy, but to what is hardest; "Not to what tastes best, but to what is most distasteful; "Not to what most pleases, but to what disgusts; "Not to matter of consolation, but to matter for desolation rather; "Not to rest, but to labor; "Not to desire the more, but the less; "Not to aspire to what is highest and most precious, but to what is lowest and most contemptible; "Not to will anything, but to will nothing; "Not to seek the best in everything, but to seek the worst, so that you may enter for the love of Christ into a complete destitution, a perfect poverty of spirit, and an absolute renunciation of everything in this world. "Embrace these practices with all the energy of your soul and you will find in a short time great delights and unspeakable consolations. "Despise yourself, and wish that others should despise you. "Speak to your own disadvantage, and desire others to do the same; "Conceive a low opinion of yourself, and find it good when others hold the same; "To enjoy the taste of all things, have no taste for anything. "To know all things, learn to know nothing. "To possess all things, resolve to possess nothing. "To be all things, be willing to be nothing. "To get to where you have no taste for anything, go through whatever experiences you have no taste for. "To learn to know nothing, go whither you are ignorant. "To reach what you possess not, go whithersoever you own nothing. "To be what you are not, experience what you are not." These later verses play with that vertigo of self-contradiction which is so dear to mysticism. Those that come next are completely mystical, for in them Saint John passes from God to the more metaphysical notion of the All. "When you stop at one thing, you cease to open yourself to the All. "For to come to the All you must give up the All. "And if you should attain to owning the All, you must own it, desiring Nothing. "In this spoliation, the soul finds its tranquillity and rest. Profoundly established in the centre of its own nothingness, it can be assailed by naught that comes from below; and since it no longer desires anything, what comes from above cannot depress it; for its desires alone are the causes of its woes."(181) And now, as a more concrete example of heads 4 and 5, in fact of all our heads together, and of the irrational extreme to which a psychopathic individual may go in the line of bodily austerity, I will quote the sincere Suso's account of his own self-tortures. Suso, you will remember, was one of the fourteenth century German mystics; his autobiography, written in the third person, is a classic religious document. "He was in his youth of a temperament full of fire and life; and when this began to make itself felt, it was very grievous to him; and he sought by many devices how he might bring his body into subjection. He wore for a long time a hair shirt and an iron chain, until the blood ran from him, so that he was obliged to leave them off. He secretly caused an undergarment to be made for him; and in the undergarment he had strips of leather fixed, into which a hundred and fifty brass nails, pointed and filed sharp, were driven, and the points of the nails were always turned towards the flesh. He had this garment made very tight, and so arranged as to go round him and fasten in front, in order that it might fit the closer to his body, and the pointed nails might be driven into his flesh; and it was high enough to reach upwards to his navel. In this he used to sleep at night. Now in summer, when it was hot, and he was very tired and ill from his journeyings, or when he held the office of lecturer, he would sometimes, as he lay thus in bonds, and oppressed with toil, and tormented also by noxious insects, cry aloud and give way to fretfulness, and twist round and round in agony, as a worm does when run through with a pointed needle. It often seemed to him as if he were lying upon an ant-hill, from the torture caused by the insects; for if he wished to sleep, or when he had fallen asleep, they vied with one another.(182) Sometimes he cried to Almighty God in the fullness of his heart: Alas! Gentle God, what a dying is this! When a man is killed by murderers or strong beasts of prey it is soon over; but I lie dying here under the cruel insects, and yet cannot die. The nights in winter were never so long, nor was the summer so hot, as to make him leave off this exercise. On the contrary, he devised something farther--two leathern loops into which he put his hands, and fastened one on each side his throat, and made the fastenings so secure that even if his cell had been on fire about him, he could not have helped himself. This he continued until his hands and arms had become almost tremulous with the strain, and then he devised something else: two leather gloves; and he caused a brazier to fit them all over with sharp-pointed brass tacks, and he used to put them on at night, in order that if he should try while asleep to throw off the hair undergarment, or relieve himself from the gnawings of the vile insects, the tacks might then stick into his body. And so it came to pass. If ever he sought to help himself with his hands in his sleep, he drove the sharp tacks into his breast, and tore himself, so that his flesh festered. When after many weeks the wounds had healed, he tore himself again and made fresh wounds. "He continued this tormenting exercise for about sixteen years. At the end of this time, when his blood was now chilled, and the fire of his temperament destroyed, there appeared to him in a vision on Whitsunday, a messenger from heaven, who told him that God required this of him no longer. Whereupon he discontinued it, and threw all these things away into a running stream." Suso then tells how, to emulate the sorrows of his crucified Lord, he made himself a cross with thirty protruding iron needles and nails. This he bore on his bare back between his shoulders day and night. "The first time that he stretched out this cross upon his back his tender frame was struck with terror at it, and blunted the sharp nails slightly against a stone. But soon, repenting of this womanly cowardice, he pointed them all again with a file, and placed once more the cross upon him. It made his back, where the bones are, bloody and seared. Whenever he sat down or stood up, it was as if a hedgehog-skin were on him. If any one touched him unawares, or pushed against his clothes, it tore him." Suso next tells of his penitences by means of striking this cross and forcing the nails deeper into the flesh, and likewise of his self-scourgings,--a dreadful story,--and then goes on as follows: "At this same period the Servitor procured an old castaway door, and he used to lie upon it at night without any bedclothes to make him comfortable, except that he took off his shoes and wrapped a thick cloak round him. He thus secured for himself a most miserable bed; for hard pea-stalks lay in humps under his head, the cross with the sharp nails stuck into his back, his arms were locked fast in bonds, the horsehair undergarment was round his loins, and the cloak too was heavy and the door hard. Thus he lay in wretchedness, afraid to stir, just like a log, and he would send up many a sigh to God. "In winter he suffered very much from the frost. If he stretched out his feet they lay bare on the floor and froze, if he gathered them up the blood became all on fire in his legs, and this was great pain. His feet were full of sores, his legs dropsical, his knees bloody and seared, his loins covered with scars from the horsehair, his body wasted, his mouth parched with intense thirst, and his hands tremulous from weakness. Amid these torments he spent his nights and days; and he endured them all out of the greatness of the love which he bore in his heart to the Divine and Eternal Wisdom, our Lord Jesus Christ, whose agonizing sufferings he sought to imitate. After a time he gave up this penitential exercise of the door, and instead of it he took up his abode in a very small cell, and used the bench, which was so narrow and short that he could not stretch himself upon it, as his bed. In this hole, or upon the door, he lay at night in his usual bonds, for about eight years. It was also his custom, during the space of twenty-five years, provided he was staying in the convent, never to go after compline in winter into any warm room, or to the convent stove to warm himself, no matter how cold it might be, unless he was obliged to do so for other reasons. Throughout all these years he never took a bath, either a water or a sweating bath; and this he did in order to mortify his comfort-seeking body. He practiced during a long time such rigid poverty that he would neither receive nor touch a penny, either with leave or without it. For a considerable time he strove to attain such a high degree of purity that he would neither scratch nor touch any part of his body, save only his hands and feet."(183) I spare you the recital of poor Suso's self-inflicted tortures from thirst. It is pleasant to know that after his fortieth year, God showed him by a series of visions that he had sufficiently broken down the natural man, and that he might leave these exercises off. His case is distinctly pathological, but he does not seem to have had the alleviation, which some ascetics have enjoyed, of an alteration of sensibility capable of actually turning torment into a perverse kind of pleasure. Of the founder of the Sacred Heart order, for example, we read that "Her love of pain and suffering was insatiable.... She said that she could cheerfully live till the day of judgment, provided she might always have matter for suffering for God; but that to live a single day without suffering would be intolerable. She said again that she was devoured with two unassuageable fevers, one for the holy communion, the other for suffering, humiliation, and annihilation. 'Nothing but pain,' she continually said in her letters, 'makes my life supportable.' "(184) So much for the phenomena to which the ascetic impulse will in certain persons give rise. In the ecclesiastically consecrated character three minor branches of self-mortification have been recognized as indispensable pathways to perfection. I refer to the chastity, obedience, and poverty which the monk vows to observe; and upon the heads of obedience and poverty I will make a few remarks. ------------------------------------- First, of Obedience. The secular life of our twentieth century opens with this virtue held in no high esteem. The duty of the individual to determine his own conduct and profit or suffer by the consequences seems, on the contrary, to be one of our best rooted contemporary Protestant social ideals. So much so that it is difficult even imaginatively to comprehend how men possessed of an inner life of their own could ever have come to think the subjection of its will to that of other finite creatures recommendable. I confess that to myself it seems something of a mystery. Yet it evidently corresponds to a profound interior need of many persons, and we must do our best to understand it. On the lowest possible plane, one sees how the expediency of obedience in a firm ecclesiastical organization must have led to its being viewed as meritorious. Next, experience shows that there are times in every one's life when one can be better counseled by others than by one's self. Inability to decide is one of the commonest symptoms of fatigued nerves; friends who see our troubles more broadly, often see them more wisely than we do; so it is frequently an act of excellent virtue to consult and obey a doctor, a partner, or a wife. But, leaving these lower prudential regions, we find, in the nature of some of the spiritual excitements which we have been studying, good reasons for idealizing obedience. Obedience may spring from the general religious phenomenon of inner softening and self-surrender and throwing one's self on higher powers. So saving are these attitudes felt to be that in themselves, apart from utility, they become ideally consecrated; and in obeying a man whose fallibility we see through thoroughly, we, nevertheless, may feel much as we do when we resign our will to that of infinite wisdom. Add self-despair and the passion of self-crucifixion to this, and obedience becomes an ascetic sacrifice, agreeable quite irrespective of whatever prudential uses it might have. It is as a sacrifice, a mode of "mortification," that obedience is primarily conceived by Catholic writers, a "sacrifice which man offers to God, and of which he is himself both the priest and the victim. By poverty he immolates his exterior possessions; by chastity he immolates his body; by obedience he completes the sacrifice, and gives to God all that he yet holds as his own, his two most precious goods, his intellect and his will. The sacrifice is then complete and unreserved, a genuine holocaust, for the entire victim is now consumed for the honor of God."(185) Accordingly, in Catholic discipline, we obey our superior not as mere man, but as the representative of Christ. Obeying God in him by our intention, obedience is easy. But when the text-book theologians marshal collectively all their reasons for recommending it, the mixture sounds to our ears rather odd. "One of the great consolations of the monastic life," says a Jesuit authority, "is the assurance we have that in obeying we can commit no fault. The Superior may commit a fault in commanding you to do this thing or that, but you are certain that you commit no fault so long as you obey, because God will only ask you if you have duly performed what orders you received, and if you can furnish a clear account in that respect, you are absolved entirely. Whether the things you did were opportune, or whether there were not something better that might have been done, these are questions not asked of you, but rather of your Superior. The moment what you did was done obediently, God wipes it out of your account, and charges it to the Superior. So that Saint Jerome well exclaimed, in celebrating the advantages of obedience, 'Oh, sovereign liberty! Oh, holy and blessed security by which one becomes almost impeccable!' "Saint John Climachus is of the same sentiment when he calls obedience an excuse before God. In fact, when God asks why you have done this or that, and you reply, it is because I was so ordered by my Superiors, God will ask for no other excuse. As a passenger in a good vessel with a good pilot need give himself no farther concern, but may go to sleep in peace, because the pilot has charge over all, and 'watches for him'; so a religious person who lives under the yoke of obedience goes to heaven as if while sleeping, that is, while leaning entirely on the conduct of his Superiors, who are the pilots of his vessel, and keep watch for him continually. It is no small thing, of a truth, to be able to cross the stormy sea of life on the shoulders and in the arms of another, yet that is just the grace which God accords to those who live under the yoke of obedience. Their Superior bears all their burdens.... A certain grave doctor said that he would rather spend his life in picking up straws by obedience, than by his own responsible choice busy himself with the loftiest works of charity, because one is certain of following the will of God in whatever one may do from obedience, but never certain in the same degree of anything which we may do of our own proper movement."(186) One should read the letters in which Ignatius Loyola recommends obedience as the backbone of his order, if one would gain insight into the full spirit of its cult.(187) They are too long to quote; but Ignatius's belief is so vividly expressed in a couple of sayings reported by companions that, though they have been so often cited, I will ask your permission to copy them once more:-- "I ought," an early biographer reports him as saying, "on entering religion, and thereafter, to place myself entirely in the hands of God, and of him who takes His place by His authority. I ought to desire that my Superior should oblige me to give up my own judgment, and conquer my own mind. I ought to set up no difference between one Superior and another, ... but recognize them all as equal before God, whose place they fill. For if I distinguish persons, I weaken the spirit of obedience. In the hands of my Superior, I must be a soft wax, a thing, from which he is to require whatever pleases him, be it to write or receive letters, to speak or not to speak to such a person, or the like; and I must put all my fervor in executing zealously and exactly what I am ordered. I must consider myself as a corpse which has neither intelligence nor will; be like a mass of matter which without resistance lets itself be placed wherever it may please any one; like a stick in the hand of an old man, who uses it according to his needs and places it where it suits him. So must I be under the hands of the Order, to serve it in the way it judges most useful. "I must never ask of the Superior to be sent to a particular place, to be employed in a particular duty.... I must consider nothing as belonging to me personally, and as regards the things I use, be like a statue which lets itself be stripped and never opposes resistance."(188) The other saying is reported by Rodriguez in the chapter from which I a moment ago made quotations. When speaking of the Pope's authority, Rodriguez writes:-- "Saint Ignatius said, when general of his company, that if the Holy Father were to order him to set sail in the first bark which he might find in the port of Ostia, near Rome, and to abandon himself to the sea, without a mast, without sails, without oars or rudder or any of the things that are needful for navigation or subsistence, he would obey not only with alacrity, but without anxiety or repugnance, and even with a great internal satisfaction."(189) With a solitary concrete example of the extravagance to which the virtue we are considering has been carried, I will pass to the topic next in order. "Sister Marie Claire [of Port Royal] had been greatly imbued with the holiness and excellence of M. de Langres. This prelate, soon after he came to Port Royal, said to her one day, seeing her so tenderly attached to Mother Angélique, that it would perhaps be better not to speak to her again. Marie Claire, greedy of obedience, took this inconsiderate word for an oracle of God, and from that day forward remained for several years without once speaking to her sister."(190) Our next topic shall be Poverty, felt at all times and under all creeds as one adornment of a saintly life. Since the instinct of ownership is fundamental in man's nature, this is one more example of the ascetic paradox. Yet it appears no paradox at all, but perfectly reasonable, the moment one recollects how easily higher excitements hold lower cupidities in check. Having just quoted the Jesuit Rodriguez on the subject of obedience, I will, to give immediately a concrete turn to our discussion of poverty, also read you a page from his chapter on this latter virtue. You must remember that he is writing instructions for monks of his own order, and bases them all on the text, "Blessed are the poor in spirit." "If any one of you," he says, "will know whether or not he is really poor in spirit, let him consider whether he loves the ordinary consequences and effects of poverty, which are hunger, thirst, cold, fatigue, and the denudation of all conveniences. See if you are glad to wear a worn-out habit full of patches. See if you are glad when something is lacking to your meal, when you are passed by in serving it, when what you receive is distasteful to you, when your cell is out of repair. If you are not glad of these things, if instead of loving them you avoid them, then there is proof that you have not attained the perfection of poverty of spirit." Rodriguez then goes on to describe the practice of poverty in more detail. "The first point is that which Saint Ignatius proposes in his constitutions, when he says, 'Let no one use anything as if it were his private possession.' 'A religious person,' he says, 'ought in respect to all the things that he uses, to be like a statue which one may drape with clothing, but which feels no grief and makes no resistance when one strips it again. It is in this way that you should feel towards your clothes, your books, your cell, and everything else that you make use of; if ordered to quit them, or to exchange them for others, have no more sorrow than if you were a statue being uncovered. In this way you will avoid using them as if they were your private possession. But if, when you give up your cell, or yield possession of this or that object or exchange it for another, you feel repugnance and are not like a statue, that shows that you view these things as if they were your private property.' "And this is why our holy founder wished the superiors to test their monks somewhat as God tested Abraham, and to put their poverty and their obedience to trial, that by this means they may become acquainted with the degree of their virtue, and gain a chance to make ever farther progress in perfection, ... making the one move out of his room when he finds it comfortable and is attached to it; taking away from another a book of which he is fond; or obliging a third to exchange his garment for a worse one. Otherwise we should end by acquiring a species of property in all these several objects, and little by little the wall of poverty that surrounds us and constitutes our principal defense would be thrown down. The ancient fathers of the desert used often thus to treat their companions.... Saint Dositheus, being sick-nurse, desired a certain knife, and asked Saint Dorotheus for it, not for his private use, but for employment in the infirmary of which he had charge. Whereupon Saint Dorotheus answered him: 'Ha! Dositheus, so that knife pleases you so much! Will you be the slave of a knife or the slave of Jesus Christ? Do you not blush with shame at wishing that a knife should be your master? I will not let you touch it.' Which reproach and refusal had such an effect upon the holy disciple that since that time he never touched the knife again." ... "Therefore, in our rooms," Father Rodriguez continues, "there must be no other furniture than a bed, a table, a bench, and a candlestick, things purely necessary, and nothing more. It is not allowed among us that our cells should be ornamented with pictures or aught else, neither armchairs, carpets, curtains, nor any sort of cabinet or bureau of any elegance. Neither is it allowed us to keep anything to eat, either for ourselves or for those who may come to visit us. We must ask permission to go to the refectory even for a glass of water; and finally we may not keep a book in which we can write a line, or which we may take away with us. One cannot deny that thus we are in great poverty. But this poverty is at the same time a great repose and a great perfection. For it would be inevitable, in case a religious person were allowed to own superfluous possessions, that these things would greatly occupy his mind, be it to acquire them, to preserve them, or to increase them; so that in not permitting us at all to own them, all these inconveniences are remedied. Among the various good reasons why the company forbids secular persons to enter our cells, the principal one is that thus we may the easier be kept in poverty. After all, we are all men, and if we were to receive people of the world into our rooms, we should not have the strength to remain within the bounds prescribed, but should at least wish to adorn them with some books to give the visitors a better opinion of our scholarship."(191) Since Hindu fakirs, Buddhist monks, and Mohammedan dervishes unite with Jesuits and Franciscans in idealizing poverty as the loftiest individual state, it is worth while to examine into the spiritual grounds for such a seemingly unnatural opinion. And first, of those which lie closest to common human nature. The opposition between the men who _have_ and the men who _are_ is immemorial. Though the gentleman, in the old-fashioned sense of the man who is well born, has usually in point of fact been predaceous and reveled in lands and goods, yet he has never identified his essence with these possessions, but rather with the personal superiorities, the courage, generosity, and pride supposed to be his birthright. To certain huckstering kinds of consideration he thanked God he was forever inaccessible, and if in life's vicissitudes he should become destitute through their lack, he was glad to think that with his sheer valor he was all the freer to work out his salvation. "Wer nur selbst was hätte," says Lessing's Tempelherr, in Nathan the Wise, "mein Gott, mein Gott, ich habe nichts!" This ideal of the well-born man without possessions was embodied in knight-errantry and templardom; and, hideously corrupted as it has always been, it still dominates sentimentally, if not practically, the military and aristocratic view of life. We glorify the soldier as the man absolutely unencumbered. Owning nothing but his bare life, and willing to toss that up at any moment when the cause commands him, he is the representative of unhampered freedom in ideal directions. The laborer who pays with his person day by day, and has no rights invested in the future, offers also much of this ideal detachment. Like the savage, he may make his bed wherever his right arm can support him, and from his simple and athletic attitude of observation, the property-owner seems buried and smothered in ignoble externalities and trammels, "wading in straw and rubbish to his knees." The claims which _things_ make are corrupters of manhood, mortgages on the soul, and a drag anchor on our progress towards the empyrean. "Everything I meet with," writes Whitefield, "seems to carry this voice with it,--'Go thou and preach the Gospel; be a pilgrim on earth; have no party or certain dwelling place.' My heart echoes back, 'Lord Jesus, help me to do or suffer thy will. When thou seest me in danger of _nestling_,--in pity--in tender pity,--put a _thorn_ in my nest to prevent me from it.' "(192) The loathing of "capital" with which our laboring classes to-day are growing more and more infected seems largely composed of this sound sentiment of antipathy for lives based on mere having. As an anarchist poet writes:-- "Not by accumulating riches, but by giving away that which you have, "Shall you become beautiful; "You must undo the wrappings, not case yourself in fresh ones; "Not by multiplying clothes shall you make your body sound and healthy, but rather by discarding them ... "For a soldier who is going on a campaign does not seek what fresh furniture he can carry on his back, but rather what he can leave behind; "Knowing well that every additional thing which he cannot freely use and handle is an impediment."(193) In short, lives based on having are less free than lives based either on doing or on being, and in the interest of action people subject to spiritual excitement throw away possessions as so many clogs. Only those who have no private interests can follow an ideal straight away. Sloth and cowardice creep in with every dollar or guinea we have to guard. When a brother novice came to Saint Francis, saying: "Father, it would be a great consolation to me to own a psalter, but even supposing that our general should concede to me this indulgence, still I should like also to have your consent," Francis put him off with the examples of Charlemagne, Roland, and Oliver, pursuing the infidels in sweat and labor, and finally dying on the field of battle. "So care not," he said, "for owning books and knowledge, but care rather for works of goodness." And when some weeks later the novice came again to talk of his craving for the psalter, Francis said: "After you have got your psalter you will crave a breviary; and after you have got your breviary you will sit in your stall like a grand prelate, and will say to your brother: 'Hand me my breviary.' ... And thenceforward he denied all such requests, saying: 'A man possesses of learning only so much as comes out of him in action, and a monk is a good preacher only so far as his deeds proclaim him such, for every tree is known by its fruits.' "(194) But beyond this more worthily athletic attitude involved in doing and being, there is, in the desire of not having, something profounder still, something related to that fundamental mystery of religious experience, the satisfaction found in absolute surrender to the larger power. So long as any secular safeguard is retained, so long as any residual prudential guarantee is clung to, so long the surrender is incomplete, the vital crisis is not passed, fear still stands sentinel, and mistrust of the divine obtains: we hold by two anchors, looking to God, it is true, after a fashion, but also holding by our proper machinations. In certain medical experiences we have the same critical point to overcome. A drunkard, or a morphine or cocaine maniac, offers himself to be cured. He appeals to the doctor to wean him from his enemy, but he dares not face blank abstinence. The tyrannical drug is still an anchor to windward: he hides supplies of it among his clothing; arranges secretly to have it smuggled in in case of need. Even so an incompletely regenerate man still trusts in his own expedients. His money is like the sleeping potion which the chronically wakeful patient keeps beside his bed; he throws himself on God, but _if_ he should need the other help, there it will be also. Every one knows cases of this incomplete and ineffective desire for reform,--drunkards whom, with all their self-reproaches and resolves, one perceives to be quite unwilling seriously to contemplate _never_ being drunk again! Really to give up anything on which we have relied, to give it up definitively, "for good and all" and forever, signifies one of those radical alterations of character which came under our notice in the lectures on conversion. In it the inner man rolls over into an entirely different position of equilibrium, lives in a new centre of energy from this time on, and the turning-point and hinge of all such operations seems usually to involve the sincere acceptance of certain nakednesses and destitutions. Accordingly, throughout the annals of the saintly life, we find this ever- recurring note: Fling yourself upon God's providence without making any reserve whatever,--take no thought for the morrow,--sell all you have and give it to the poor,--only when the sacrifice is ruthless and reckless will the higher safety really arrive. As a concrete example let me read a page from the biography of Antoinette Bourignon, a good woman, much persecuted in her day by both Protestants and Catholics, because she would not take her religion at second hand. When a young girl, in her father's house,-- "She spent whole nights in prayer, oft repeating: _Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?_ And being one night in a most profound penitence, she said from the bottom of her heart: 'O my Lord! What must I do to please thee? For I have nobody to teach me. Speak to my soul and it will hear thee.' At that instant she heard, as if another had spoke within her: _Forsake all earthly things. Separate thyself from the love of the creatures. Deny thyself._ She was quite astonished, not understanding this language, and mused long on these three points, thinking how she could fulfill them. She thought she could not live without earthly things, nor without loving the creatures, nor without loving herself. Yet she said, 'By thy Grace I will do it, Lord!' But when she would perform her promise, she knew not where to begin. Having thought on the religious in monasteries, that they forsook all earthly things by being shut up in a cloister, and the love of themselves by subjecting of their wills, she asked leave of her father to enter into a cloister of the barefoot Carmelites, but he would not permit it, saying he would rather see her laid in her grave. This seemed to her a great cruelty, for she thought to find in the cloister the true Christians she had been seeking, but she found afterwards that he knew the cloisters better than she; for after he had forbidden her, and told her he would never permit her to be a religious, nor give her any money to enter there, yet she went to Father Laurens, the Director, and offered to serve in the monastery and work hard for her bread, and be content with little, if he would receive her. At which he smiled and said: _That cannot be. We must have money to build; we take no maids without money; you must find the way to get it, else there is no entry here._ "This astonished her greatly, and she was thereby undeceived as to the cloisters, resolving to forsake all company and live alone till it should please God to show her what she ought to do and whither to go. She asked always earnestly, 'When shall I be perfectly thine, O my God?' And she thought he still answered her, _When thou shalt no longer possess anything, and shalt die to thyself_. 'And where shall I do that, Lord?' He answered her, _In the desert_. This made so strong an impression on her soul that she aspired after this; but being a maid of eighteen years only, she was afraid of unlucky chances, and was never used to travel, and knew no way. She laid aside all these doubts and said, 'Lord, thou wilt guide me how and where it shall please thee. It is for thee that I do it. I will lay aside my habit of a maid, and will take that of a hermit that I may pass unknown.' Having then secretly made ready this habit, while her parents thought to have married her, her father having promised her to a rich French merchant, she prevented the time, and on Easter evening, having cut her hair, put on the habit, and slept a little, she went out of her chamber about four in the morning, taking nothing but one penny to buy bread for that day. And it being said to her in the going out, _Where is thy faith? in a penny?_ she threw it away, begging pardon of God for her fault, and saying, 'No, Lord, my faith is not in a penny, but in thee alone.' Thus she went away wholly delivered from the heavy burthen of the cares and good things of this world, and found her soul so satisfied that she no longer wished for anything upon earth, resting entirely upon God, with this only fear lest she should be discovered and be obliged to return home; for she felt already more content in this poverty than she had done for all her life in all the delights of the world."(195) The penny was a small financial safeguard, but an effective spiritual obstacle. Not till it was thrown away could the character settle into the new equilibrium completely. ------------------------------------- Over and above the mystery of self-surrender, there are in the cult of poverty other religious mysteries. There is the mystery of veracity: "Naked came I into the world," etc.,--whoever first said that, possessed this mystery. My own bare entity must fight the battle--shams cannot save me. There is also the mystery of democracy, or sentiment of the equality before God of all his creatures. This sentiment (which seems in general to have been more widespread in Mohammedan than in Christian lands) tends to nullify man's usual acquisitiveness. Those who have it spurn dignities and honors, privileges and advantages, preferring, as I said in a former lecture, to grovel on the common level before the face of God. It is not exactly the sentiment of humility, though it comes so close to it in practice. It is _humanity_, rather, refusing to enjoy anything that others do not share. A profound moralist, writing of Christ's saying, "Sell all thou hast and follow me," proceeds as follows:-- "Christ may have meant: If you love mankind absolutely you will as a result not care for any possessions whatever, and this seems a very likely proposition. But it is one thing to believe that a proposition is probably true; it is another thing to see it as a fact. If you loved mankind as Christ loved them, you would see his conclusion as a fact. It would be obvious. You would sell your goods, and they would be no loss to you. These truths, while literal to Christ, and to any mind that has Christ's love for mankind, become parables to lesser natures. There are in every generation people who, beginning innocently, with no predetermined intention of becoming saints, find themselves drawn into the vortex by their interest in helping mankind, and by the understanding that comes from actually doing it. The abandonment of their old mode of life is like dust in the balance. It is done gradually, incidentally, imperceptibly. Thus the whole question of the abandonment of luxury is no question at all, but a mere incident to another question, namely, the degree to which we abandon ourselves to the remorseless logic of our love for others."(196) But in all these matters of sentiment one must have "been there" one's self in order to understand them. No American can ever attain to understanding the loyalty of a Briton towards his king, of a German towards his emperor; nor can a Briton or German ever understand the peace of heart of an American in having no king, no Kaiser, no spurious nonsense, between him and the common God of all. If sentiments as simple as these are mysteries which one must receive as gifts of birth, how much more is this the case with those subtler religious sentiments which we have been considering! One can never fathom an emotion or divine its dictates by standing outside of it. In the glowing hour of excitement, however, all incomprehensibilities are solved, and what was so enigmatical from without becomes transparently obvious. Each emotion obeys a logic of its own, and makes deductions which no other logic can draw. Piety and charity live in a different universe from worldly lusts and fears, and form another centre of energy altogether. As in a supreme sorrow lesser vexations may become a consolation; as a supreme love may turn minor sacrifices into gain; so a supreme trust may render common safeguards odious, and in certain glows of generous excitement it may appear unspeakably mean to retain one's hold of personal possessions. The only sound plan, if we are ourselves outside the pale of such emotions, is to observe as well as we are able those who feel them, and to record faithfully what we observe; and this, I need hardly say, is what I have striven to do in these last two descriptive lectures, which I now hope will have covered the ground sufficiently for our present needs. LECTURES XIV AND XV. THE VALUE OF SAINTLINESS. We have now passed in review the more important of the phenomena which are regarded as fruits of genuine religion and characteristics of men who are devout. To-day we have to change our attitude from that of description to that of appreciation; we have to ask whether the fruits in question can help us to judge the absolute value of what religion adds to human life. Were I to parody Kant, I should say that a "Critique of pure Saintliness" must be our theme. If, in turning to this theme, we could descend upon our subject from above like Catholic theologians, with our fixed definitions of man and man's perfection and our positive dogmas about God, we should have an easy time of it. Man's perfection would be the fulfillment of his end; and his end would be union with his Maker. That union could be pursued by him along three paths, active, purgative, and contemplative, respectively; and progress along either path would be a simple matter to measure by the application of a limited number of theological and moral conceptions and definitions. The absolute significance and value of any bit of religious experience we might hear of would thus be given almost mathematically into our hands. If convenience were everything, we ought now to grieve at finding ourselves cut off from so admirably convenient a method as this. But we did cut ourselves off from it deliberately in those remarks which you remember we made, in our first lecture, about the empirical method; and it must be confessed that after that act of renunciation we can never hope for clean-cut and scholastic results. _We_ cannot divide man sharply into an animal and a rational part. _We_ cannot distinguish natural from supernatural effects; nor among the latter know which are favors of God, and which are counterfeit operations of the demon. We have merely to collect things together without any special _a priori_ theological system, and out of an aggregate of piecemeal judgments as to the value of this and that experience--judgments in which our general philosophic prejudices, our instincts, and our common sense are our only guides--decide that _on the whole_ one type of religion is approved by its fruits, and another type condemned. "On the whole,"--I fear we shall never escape complicity with that qualification, so dear to your practical man, so repugnant to your systematizer! I also fear that as I make this frank confession, I may seem to some of you to throw our compass overboard, and to adopt caprice as our pilot. Skepticism or wayward choice, you may think, can be the only results of such a formless method as I have taken up. A few remarks in deprecation of such an opinion, and in farther explanation of the empiricist principles which I profess, may therefore appear at this point to be in place. ------------------------------------- Abstractly, it would seem illogical to try to measure the worth of a religion's fruits in merely human terms of value. How _can_ you measure their worth without considering whether the God really exists who is supposed to inspire them? If he really exists, then all the conduct instituted by men to meet his wants must necessarily be a reasonable fruit of his religion,--it would be unreasonable only in case he did not exist. If, for instance, you were to condemn a religion of human or animal sacrifices by virtue of your subjective sentiments, and if all the while a deity were really there demanding such sacrifices, you would be making a theoretical mistake by tacitly assuming that the deity must be non- existent; you would be setting up a theology of your own as much as if you were a scholastic philosopher. To this extent, to the extent of disbelieving peremptorily in certain types of deity, I frankly confess that we must be theologians. If disbeliefs can be said to constitute a theology, then the prejudices, instincts, and common sense which I chose as our guides make theological partisans of us whenever they make certain beliefs abhorrent. But such common-sense prejudices and instincts are themselves the fruit of an empirical evolution. Nothing is more striking than the secular alteration that goes on in the moral and religious tone of men, as their insight into nature and their social arrangements progressively develop. After an interval of a few generations the mental climate proves unfavorable to notions of the deity which at an earlier date were perfectly satisfactory: the older gods have fallen below the common secular level, and can no longer be believed in. To-day a deity who should require bleeding sacrifices to placate him would be too sanguinary to be taken seriously. Even if powerful historical credentials were put forward in his favor, we would not look at them. Once, on the contrary, his cruel appetites were of themselves credentials. They positively recommended him to men's imaginations in ages when such coarse signs of power were respected and no others could be understood. Such deities then were worshiped because such fruits were relished. Doubtless historic accidents always played some later part, but the original factor in fixing the figure of the gods must always have been psychological. The deity to whom the prophets, seers, and devotees who founded the particular cult bore witness was worth something to them personally. They could use him. He guided their imagination, warranted their hopes, and controlled their will,--or else they required him as a safeguard against the demon and a curber of other people's crimes. In any case, they chose him for the value of the fruits he seemed to them to yield. So soon as the fruits began to seem quite worthless; so soon as they conflicted with indispensable human ideals, or thwarted too extensively other values; so soon as they appeared childish, contemptible, or immoral when reflected on, the deity grew discredited, and was erelong neglected and forgotten. It was in this way that the Greek and Roman gods ceased to be believed in by educated pagans; it is thus that we ourselves judge of the Hindu, Buddhist, and Mohammedan theologies; Protestants have so dealt with the Catholic notions of deity, and liberal Protestants with older Protestant notions; it is thus that Chinamen judge of us, and that all of us now living will be judged by our descendants. When we cease to admire or approve what the definition of a deity implies, we end by deeming that deity incredible. Few historic changes are more curious than these mutations of theological opinion. The monarchical type of sovereignty was, for example, so ineradicably planted in the mind of our own forefathers that a dose of cruelty and arbitrariness in their deity seems positively to have been required by their imagination. They called the cruelty "retributive justice," and a God without it would certainly have struck them as not "sovereign" enough. But to-day we abhor the very notion of eternal suffering inflicted; and that arbitrary dealing-out of salvation and damnation to selected individuals, of which Jonathan Edwards could persuade himself that he had not only a conviction, but a "delightful conviction," as of a doctrine "exceeding pleasant, bright, and sweet," appears to us, if sovereignly anything, sovereignly irrational and mean. Not only the cruelty, but the paltriness of character of the gods believed in by earlier centuries also strikes later centuries with surprise. We shall see examples of it from the annals of Catholic saintship which make us rub our Protestant eyes. Ritual worship in general appears to the modern transcendentalist, as well as to the ultra-puritanic type of mind, as if addressed to a deity of an almost absurdly childish character, taking delight in toy-shop furniture, tapers and tinsel, costume and mumbling and mummery, and finding his "glory" incomprehensibly enhanced thereby;--just as on the other hand the formless spaciousness of pantheism appears quite empty to ritualistic natures, and the gaunt theism of evangelical sects seems intolerably bald and chalky and bleak. Luther, says Emerson, would have cut off his right hand rather than nail his theses to the door at Wittenberg, if he had supposed that they were destined to lead to the pale negations of Boston Unitarianism. So far, then, although we are compelled, whatever may be our pretensions to empiricism, to employ some sort of a standard of theological probability of our own whenever we assume to estimate the fruits of other men's religion, yet this very standard has been begotten out of the drift of common life. It is the voice of human experience within us, judging and condemning all gods that stand athwart the pathway along which it feels itself to be advancing. Experience, if we take it in the largest sense, is thus the parent of those disbeliefs which, it was charged, were inconsistent with the experiential method. The inconsistency, you see, is immaterial, and the charge may be neglected. If we pass from disbeliefs to positive beliefs, it seems to me that there is not even a formal inconsistency to be laid against our method. The gods we stand by are the gods we need and can use, the gods whose demands on us are reinforcements of our demands on ourselves and on one another. What I then propose to do is, briefly stated, to test saintliness by common sense, to use human standards to help us decide how far the religious life commends itself as an ideal kind of human activity. If it commends itself, then any theological beliefs that may inspire it, in so far forth will stand accredited. If not, then they will be discredited, and all without reference to anything but human working principles. It is but the elimination of the humanly unfit, and the survival of the humanly fittest, applied to religious beliefs; and if we look at history candidly and without prejudice, we have to admit that no religion has ever in the long run established or proved itself in any other way. Religions have _approved_ themselves; they have ministered to sundry vital needs which they found reigning. When they violated other needs too strongly, or when other faiths came which served the same needs better, the first religions were supplanted. The needs were always many, and the tests were never sharp. So the reproach of vagueness and subjectivity and "on the whole"-ness, which can with perfect legitimacy be addressed to the empirical method as we are forced to use it, is after all a reproach to which the entire life of man in dealing with these matters is obnoxious. No religion has ever yet owed its prevalence to "apodictic certainty." In a later lecture I will ask whether objective certainty can ever be added by theological reasoning to a religion that already empirically prevails. ------------------------------------- One word, also, about the reproach that in following this sort of an empirical method we are handing ourselves over to systematic skepticism. Since it is impossible to deny secular alterations in our sentiments and needs, it would be absurd to affirm that one's own age of the world can be beyond correction by the next age. Skepticism cannot, therefore, be ruled out by any set of thinkers as a possibility against which their conclusions are secure; and no empiricist ought to claim exemption from this universal liability. But to admit one's liability to correction is one thing, and to embark upon a sea of wanton doubt is another. Of willfully playing into the hands of skepticism we cannot be accused. He who acknowledges the imperfectness of his instrument, and makes allowance for it in discussing his observations, is in a much better position for gaining truth than if he claimed his instrument to be infallible. Or is dogmatic or scholastic theology less doubted in point of fact for claiming, as it does, to be in point of right undoubtable? And if not, what command over truth would this kind of theology really lose if, instead of absolute certainty, she only claimed reasonable probability for her conclusions? If _we_ claim only reasonable probability, it will be as much as men who love the truth can ever at any given moment hope to have within their grasp. Pretty surely it will be more than we could have had, if we were unconscious of our liability to err. Nevertheless, dogmatism will doubtless continue to condemn us for this confession. The mere outward form of inalterable certainty is so precious to some minds that to renounce it explicitly is for them out of the question. They will claim it even where the facts most patently pronounce its folly. But the safe thing is surely to recognize that all the insights of creatures of a day like ourselves must be provisional. The wisest of critics is an altering being, subject to the better insight of the morrow, and right at any moment, only "up to date" and "on the whole." When larger ranges of truth open, it is surely best to be able to open ourselves to their reception, unfettered by our previous pretensions. "Heartily know, when half-gods go, the gods arrive." The fact of diverse judgments about religious phenomena is therefore entirely unescapable, whatever may be one's own desire to attain the irreversible. But apart from that fact, a more fundamental question awaits us, the question whether men's opinions ought to be expected to be absolutely uniform in this field. Ought all men to have the same religion? Ought they to approve the same fruits and follow the same leadings? Are they so like in their inner needs that, for hard and soft, for proud and humble, for strenuous and lazy, for healthy-minded and despairing, exactly the same religious incentives are required? Or are different functions in the organism of humanity allotted to different types of man, so that some may really be the better for a religion of consolation and reassurance, whilst others are better for one of terror and reproof? It might conceivably be so; and we shall, I think, more and more suspect it to be so as we go on. And if it be so, how can any possible judge or critic help being biased in favor of the religion by which his own needs are best met? He aspires to impartiality; but he is too close to the struggle not to be to some degree a participant, and he is sure to approve most warmly those fruits of piety in others which taste most good and prove most nourishing to _him_. I am well aware of how anarchic much of what I say may sound. Expressing myself thus abstractly and briefly, I may seem to despair of the very notion of truth. But I beseech you to reserve your judgment until we see it applied to the details which lie before us. I do indeed disbelieve that we or any other mortal men can attain on a given day to absolutely incorrigible and unimprovable truth about such matters of fact as those with which religions deal. But I reject this dogmatic ideal not out of a perverse delight in intellectual instability. I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather do I fear to lose truth by this pretension to possess it already wholly. That we can gain more and more of it by moving always in the right direction, I believe as much as any one, and I hope to bring you all to my way of thinking before the termination of these lectures. Till then, do not, I pray you, harden your minds irrevocably against the empiricism which I profess. I will waste no more words, then, in abstract justification of my method, but seek immediately to use it upon the facts. ------------------------------------- In critically judging of the value of religious phenomena, it is very important to insist on the distinction between religion as an individual personal function, and religion as an institutional, corporate, or tribal product. I drew this distinction, you may remember, in my second lecture. The word "religion," as ordinarily used, is equivocal. A survey of history shows us that, as a rule, religious geniuses attract disciples, and produce groups of sympathizers. When these groups get strong enough to "organize" themselves, they become ecclesiastical institutions with corporate ambitions of their own. The spirit of politics and the lust of dogmatic rule are then apt to enter and to contaminate the originally innocent thing; so that when we hear the word "religion" nowadays, we think inevitably of some "church" or other; and to some persons the word "church" suggests so much hypocrisy and tyranny and meanness and tenacity of superstition that in a wholesale undiscerning way they glory in saying that they are "down" on religion altogether. Even we who belong to churches do not exempt other churches than our own from the general condemnation. But in this course of lectures ecclesiastical institutions hardly concern us at all. The religious experience which we are studying is that which lives itself out within the private breast. First-hand individual experience of this kind has always appeared as a heretical sort of innovation to those who witnessed its birth. Naked comes it into the world and lonely; and it has always, for a time at least, driven him who had it into the wilderness, often into the literal wilderness out of doors, where the Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, St. Francis, George Fox, and so many others had to go. George Fox expresses well this isolation; and I can do no better at this point than read to you a page from his Journal, referring to the period of his youth when religion began to ferment within him seriously. "I fasted much," Fox says, "walked abroad in solitary places many days, and often took my Bible, and sat in hollow trees and lonesome places until night came on; and frequently in the night walked mournfully about by myself; for I was a man of sorrows in the time of the first workings of the Lord in me. "During all this time I was never joined in profession of religion with any, but gave up myself to the Lord, having forsaken all evil company, taking leave of father and mother, and all other relations, and traveled up and down as a stranger on the earth, which way the Lord inclined my heart; taking a chamber to myself in the town where I came, and tarrying sometimes more, sometimes less in a place: for I durst not stay long in a place, being afraid both of professor and profane, lest, being a tender young man, I should be hurt by conversing much with either. For which reason I kept much as a stranger, seeking heavenly wisdom and getting knowledge from the Lord; and was brought off from outward things, to rely on the Lord alone. As I had forsaken the priests, so I left the separate preachers also, and those called the most experienced people; for I saw there was none among them all that could speak to my condition. And when all my hopes in them and in all men were gone so that I had nothing outwardly to help me, nor could tell what to do; then, oh then, I heard a voice which said, 'There is one, even Jesus Christ, that can speak to thy condition.' When I heard it, my heart did leap for joy. Then the Lord let me see why there was none upon the earth that could speak to my condition. I had not fellowship with any people, priests, nor professors, nor any sort of separated people. I was afraid of all carnal talk and talkers, for I could see nothing but corruptions. When I was in the deep, under all shut up, I could not believe that I should ever overcome; my troubles, my sorrows, and my temptations were so great that I often thought I should have despaired, I was so tempted. But when Christ opened to me how he was tempted by the same devil, and had overcome him, and had bruised his head; and that through him and his power, life, grace, and spirit, I should overcome also, I had confidence in him. If I had had a king's diet, palace, and attendance, all would have been as nothing; for nothing gave me comfort but the Lord by his power. I saw professors, priests, and people were whole and at ease in that condition which was my misery, and they loved that which I would have been rid of. But the Lord did stay my desires upon himself, and my care was cast upon him alone."(197) A genuine first-hand religious experience like this is bound to be a heterodoxy to its witnesses, the prophet appearing as a mere lonely madman. If his doctrine prove contagious enough to spread to any others, it becomes a definite and labeled heresy. But if it then still prove contagious enough to triumph over persecution, it becomes itself an orthodoxy; and when a religion has become an orthodoxy, its day of inwardness is over: the spring is dry; the faithful live at second hand exclusively and stone the prophets in their turn. The new church, in spite of whatever human goodness it may foster, can be henceforth counted on as a staunch ally in every attempt to stifle the spontaneous religious spirit, and to stop all later bubblings of the fountain from which in purer days it drew its own supply of inspiration. Unless, indeed, by adopting new movements of the spirit it can make capital out of them and use them for its selfish corporate designs! Of protective action of this politic sort, promptly or tardily decided on, the dealings of the Roman ecclesiasticism with many individual saints and prophets yield examples enough for our instruction. The plain fact is that men's minds are built, as has been often said, in water-tight compartments. Religious after a fashion, they yet have many other things in them beside their religion, and unholy entanglements and associations inevitably obtain. The basenesses so commonly charged to religion's account are thus, almost all of them, not chargeable at all to religion proper, but rather to religion's wicked practical partner, the spirit of corporate dominion. And the bigotries are most of them in their turn chargeable to religion's wicked intellectual partner, the spirit of dogmatic dominion, the passion for laying down the law in the form of an absolutely closed-in theoretic system. The ecclesiastical spirit in general is the sum of these two spirits of dominion; and I beseech you never to confound the phenomena of mere tribal or corporate psychology which it presents with those manifestations of the purely interior life which are the exclusive object of our study. The baiting of Jews, the hunting of Albigenses and Waldenses, the stoning of Quakers and ducking of Methodists, the murdering of Mormons and the massacring of Armenians, express much rather that aboriginal human neophobia, that pugnacity of which we all share the vestiges, and that inborn hatred of the alien and of eccentric and non-conforming men as aliens, than they express the positive piety of the various perpetrators. Piety is the mask, the inner force is tribal instinct. You believe as little as I do, in spite of the Christian unction with which the German emperor addressed his troops upon their way to China, that the conduct which he suggested, and in which other Christian armies went beyond them, had anything whatever to do with the interior religious life of those concerned in the performance. Well, no more for past atrocities than for this atrocity should we make piety responsible. At most we may blame piety for not availing to check our natural passions, and sometimes for supplying them with hypocritical pretexts. But hypocrisy also imposes obligations, and with the pretext usually couples some restriction; and when the passion gust is over, the piety may bring a reaction of repentance which the irreligious natural man would not have shown. For many of the historic aberrations which have been laid to her charge, religion as such, then, is not to blame. Yet of the charge that over- zealousness or fanaticism is one of her liabilities we cannot wholly acquit her, so I will next make a remark upon that point. But I will preface it by a preliminary remark which connects itself with much that follows. ------------------------------------- Our survey of the phenomena of saintliness has unquestionably produced in your minds an impression of extravagance. Is it necessary, some of you have asked, as one example after another came before us, to be quite so fantastically good as that? We who have no vocation for the extremer ranges of sanctity will surely be let off at the last day if our humility, asceticism, and devoutness prove of a less convulsive sort. This practically amounts to saying that much that it is legitimate to admire in this field need nevertheless not be imitated, and that religious phenomena, like all other human phenomena, are subject to the law of the golden mean. Political reformers accomplish their successive tasks in the history of nations by being blind for the time to other causes. Great schools of art work out the effects which it is their mission to reveal, at the cost of a one-sidedness for which other schools must make amends. We accept a John Howard, a Mazzini, a Botticelli, a Michael Angelo, with a kind of indulgence. We are glad they existed to show us that way, but we are glad there are also other ways of seeing and taking life. So of many of the saints whom we have looked at. We are proud of a human nature that could be so passionately extreme, but we shrink from advising others to follow the example. The conduct we blame ourselves for not following lies nearer to the middle line of human effort. It is less dependent on particular beliefs and doctrines. It is such as wears well in different ages, such as under different skies all judges are able to commend. The fruits of religion, in other words, are, like all human products, liable to corruption by excess. Common sense must judge them. It need not blame the votary; but it may be able to praise him only conditionally, as one who acts faithfully according to his lights. He shows us heroism in one way, but the unconditionally good way is that for which no indulgence need be asked. We find that error by excess is exemplified by every saintly virtue. Excess, in human faculties, means usually one-sidedness or want of balance; for it is hard to imagine an essential faculty too strong, if only other faculties equally strong be there to coöperate with it in action. Strong affections need a strong will; strong active powers need a strong intellect; strong intellect needs strong sympathies, to keep life steady. If the balance exist, no one faculty can possibly be too strong--we only get the stronger all-round character. In the life of saints, technically so called, the spiritual faculties are strong, but what gives the impression of extravagance proves usually on examination to be a relative deficiency of intellect. Spiritual excitement takes pathological forms whenever other interests are too few and the intellect too narrow. We find this exemplified by all the saintly attributes in turn--devout love of God, purity, charity, asceticism, all may lead astray. I will run over these virtues in succession. ------------------------------------- First of all let us take Devoutness. When unbalanced, one of its vices is called Fanaticism. Fanaticism (when not a mere expression of ecclesiastical ambition) is only loyalty carried to a convulsive extreme. When an intensely loyal and narrow mind is once grasped by the feeling that a certain superhuman person is worthy of its exclusive devotion, one of the first things that happens is that it idealizes the devotion itself. To adequately realize the merits of the idol gets to be considered the one great merit of the worshiper; and the sacrifices and servilities by which savage tribesmen have from time immemorial exhibited their faithfulness to chieftains are now outbid in favor of the deity. Vocabularies are exhausted and languages altered in the attempt to praise him enough; death is looked on as gain if it attract his grateful notice; and the personal attitude of being his devotee becomes what one might almost call a new and exalted kind of professional specialty within the tribe.(198) The legends that gather round the lives of holy persons are fruits of this impulse to celebrate and glorify. The Buddha(199) and Mohammed(200) and their companions and many Christian saints are incrusted with a heavy jewelry of anecdotes which are meant to be honorific, but are simply _abgeschmackt_ and silly, and form a touching expression of man's misguided propensity to praise. An immediate consequence of this condition of mind is jealousy for the deity's honor. How can the devotee show his loyalty better than by sensitiveness in this regard? The slightest affront or neglect must be resented, the deity's enemies must be put to shame. In exceedingly narrow minds and active wills, such a care may become an engrossing preoccupation; and crusades have been preached and massacres instigated for no other reason than to remove a fancied slight upon the God. Theologies representing the gods as mindful of their glory, and churches with imperialistic policies, have conspired to fan this temper to a glow, so that intolerance and persecution have come to be vices associated by some of us inseparably with the saintly mind. They are unquestionably its besetting sins. The saintly temper is a moral temper, and a moral temper has often to be cruel. It is a partisan temper, and that is cruel. Between his own and Jehovah's enemies a David knows no difference; a Catherine of Siena, panting to stop the warfare among Christians which was the scandal of her epoch, can think of no better method of union among them than a crusade to massacre the Turks; Luther finds no word of protest or regret over the atrocious tortures with which the Anabaptist leaders were put to death; and a Cromwell praises the Lord for delivering his enemies into his hands for "execution." Politics come in in all such cases; but piety finds the partnership not quite unnatural. So, when "freethinkers" tell us that religion and fanaticism are twins, we cannot make an unqualified denial of the charge. Fanaticism must then be inscribed on the wrong side of religion's account, so long as the religious person's intellect is on the stage which the despotic kind of God satisfies. But as soon as the God is represented as less intent on his own honor and glory, it ceases to be a danger. Fanaticism is found only where the character is masterful and aggressive. In gentle characters, where devoutness is intense and the intellect feeble, we have an imaginative absorption in the love of God to the exclusion of all practical human interests, which, though innocent enough, is too one-sided to be admirable. A mind too narrow has room but for one kind of affection. When the love of God takes possession of such a mind, it expels all human loves and human uses. There is no English name for such a sweet excess of devotion, so I will refer to it as a _theopathic_ condition. The blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque may serve as an example. "To be loved here upon the earth," her recent biographer exclaims: "to be loved by a noble, elevated, distinguished being; to be loved with fidelity, with devotion,--what enchantment! But to be loved by God! and loved by him to distraction [aimé jusqù'à la folie]!--Margaret melted away with love at the thought of such a thing. Like Saint Philip of Neri in former times, or like Saint Francis Xavier, she said to God: 'Hold back, O my God, these torrents which overwhelm me, or else enlarge my capacity for their reception.' "(201) The most signal proofs of God's love which Margaret Mary received were her hallucinations of sight, touch, and hearing, and the most signal in turn of these were the revelations of Christ's sacred heart, "surrounded with rays more brilliant than the Sun, and transparent like a crystal. The wound which he received on the cross visibly appeared upon it. There was a crown of thorns round about this divine Heart, and a cross above it." At the same time Christ's voice told her that, unable longer to contain the flames of his love for mankind, he had chosen her by a miracle to spread the knowledge of them. He thereupon took out her mortal heart, placed it inside of his own and inflamed it, and then replaced it in her breast, adding: "Hitherto thou hast taken the name of my slave, hereafter thou shalt be called the well-beloved disciple of my Sacred Heart." In a later vision the Saviour revealed to her in detail the "great design" which he wished to establish through her instrumentality. "I ask of thee to bring it about that every first Friday after the week of holy Sacrament shall be made into a special holy day for honoring my Heart by a general communion and by services intended to make honorable amends for the indignities which it has received. And I promise thee that my Heart will dilate to shed with abundance the influences of its love upon all those who pay to it these honors, or who bring it about that others do the same." "This revelation," says Mgr. Bougaud, "is unquestionably the most important of all the revelations which have illumined the Church since that of the Incarnation and of the Lord's Supper.... After the Eucharist, the supreme effort of the Sacred Heart."(202) Well, what were its good fruits for Margaret Mary's life? Apparently little else but sufferings and prayers and absences of mind and swoons and ecstasies. She became increasingly useless about the convent, her absorption in Christ's love,-- "which grew upon her daily, rendering her more and more incapable of attending to external duties. They tried her in the infirmary, but without much success, although her kindness, zeal, and devotion were without bounds, and her charity rose to acts of such a heroism that our readers would not bear the recital of them. They tried her in the kitchen, but were forced to give it up as hopeless--everything dropped out of her hands. The admirable humility with which she made amends for her clumsiness could not prevent this from being prejudicial to the order and regularity which must always reign in a community. They put her in the school, where the little girls cherished her, and cut pieces out of her clothes [for relics] as if she were already a saint, but where she was too absorbed inwardly to pay the necessary attention. Poor dear sister, even less after her visions than before them was she a denizen of earth, and they had to leave her in her heaven."(203) Poor dear sister, indeed! Amiable and good, but so feeble of intellectual outlook that it would be too much to ask of us, with our Protestant and modern education, to feel anything but indulgent pity for the kind of saintship which she embodies. A lower example still of theopathic saintliness is that of Saint Gertrude, a Benedictine nun of the thirteenth century, whose "Revelations," a well-known mystical authority, consist mainly of proofs of Christ's partiality for her undeserving person. Assurances of his love, intimacies and caresses and compliments of the most absurd and puerile sort, addressed by Christ to Gertrude as an individual, form the tissue of this paltry-minded recital.(204) In reading such a narrative, we realize the gap between the thirteenth and the twentieth century, and we feel that saintliness of character may yield almost absolutely worthless fruits if it be associated with such inferior intellectual sympathies. What with science, idealism, and democracy, our own imagination has grown to need a God of an entirely different temperament from that Being interested exclusively in dealing out personal favors, with whom our ancestors were so contented. Smitten as we are with the vision of social righteousness, a God indifferent to everything but adulation, and full of partiality for his individual favorites, lacks an essential element of largeness; and even the best professional sainthood of former centuries, pent in as it is to such a conception, seems to us curiously shallow and unedifying. Take Saint Teresa, for example, one of the ablest women, in many respects, of whose life we have the record. She had a powerful intellect of the practical order. She wrote admirable descriptive psychology, possessed a will equal to any emergency, great talent for politics and business, a buoyant disposition, and a first-rate literary style. She was tenaciously aspiring, and put her whole life at the service of her religious ideals. Yet so paltry were these, according to our present way of thinking, that (although I know that others have been moved differently) I confess that my only feeling in reading her has been pity that so much vitality of soul should have found such poor employment. In spite of the sufferings which she endured, there is a curious flavor of superficiality about her genius. A Birmingham anthropologist, Dr. Jordan, has divided the human race into two types, whom he calls "shrews" and "non-shrews" respectively.(205) The shrew-type is defined as possessing an "active unimpassioned temperament." In other words, shrews are the "motors," rather than the "sensories,"(206) and their expressions are as a rule more energetic than the feelings which appear to prompt them. Saint Teresa, paradoxical as such a judgment may sound, was a typical shrew, in this sense of the term. The bustle of her style, as well as of her life, proves it. Not only must she receive unheard-of personal favors and spiritual graces from her Saviour, but she must immediately write about them and _exploiter_ them professionally, and use her expertness to give instruction to those less privileged. Her voluble egotism; her sense, not of radical bad being, as the really contrite have it, but of her "faults" and "imperfections" in the plural; her stereotyped humility and return upon herself, as covered with "confusion" at each new manifestation of God's singular partiality for a person so unworthy, are typical of shrewdom: a paramountly feeling nature would be objectively lost in gratitude, and silent. She had some public instincts, it is true; she hated the Lutherans, and longed for the church's triumph over them; but in the main her idea of religion seems to have been that of an endless amatory flirtation--if one may say so without irreverence--between the devotee and the deity; and apart from helping younger nuns to go in this direction by the inspiration of her example and instruction, there is absolutely no human use in her, or sign of any general human interest. Yet the spirit of her age, far from rebuking her, exalted her as superhuman. We have to pass a similar judgment on the whole notion of saintship based on merits. Any God who, on the one hand, can care to keep a pedantically minute account of individual shortcomings, and on the other can feel such partialities, and load particular creatures with such insipid marks of favor, is too small-minded a God for our credence. When Luther, in his immense manly way, swept off by a stroke of his hand the very notion of a debit and credit account kept with individuals by the Almighty, he stretched the soul's imagination and saved theology from puerility. So much for mere devotion, divorced from the intellectual conceptions which might guide it towards bearing useful human fruit. ------------------------------------- The next saintly virtue in which we find excess is Purity. In theopathic characters, like those whom we have just considered, the love of God must not be mixed with any other love. Father and mother, sisters, brothers, and friends are felt as interfering distractions; for sensitiveness and narrowness, when they occur together, as they often do, require above all things a simplified world to dwell in. Variety and confusion are too much for their powers of comfortable adaptation. But whereas your aggressive pietist reaches his unity objectively, by forcibly stamping disorder and divergence out, your retiring pietist reaches his subjectively, leaving disorder in the world at large, but making a smaller world in which he dwells himself and from which he eliminates it altogether. Thus, alongside of the church militant with its prisons, dragonnades, and inquisition methods, we have the church _fugient_, as one might call it, with its hermitages, monasteries, and sectarian organizations, both churches pursuing the same object--to unify the life,(207) and simplify the spectacle presented to the soul. A mind extremely sensitive to inner discords will drop one external relation after another, as interfering with the absorption of consciousness in spiritual things. Amusements must go first, then conventional "society," then business, then family duties, until at last seclusion, with a subdivision of the day into hours for stated religious acts, is the only thing that can be borne. The lives of saints are a history of successive renunciations of complication, one form of contact with the outer life being dropped after another, to save the purity of inner tone.(208) "Is it not better," a young sister asks her Superior, "that I should not speak at all during the hour of recreation, so as not to run the risk, by speaking, of falling into some sin of which I might not be conscious?"(209) If the life remains a social one at all, those who take part in it must follow one identical rule. Embosomed in this monotony, the zealot for purity feels clean and free once more. The minuteness of uniformity maintained in certain sectarian communities, whether monastic or not, is something almost inconceivable to a man of the world. Costume, phraseology, hours, and habits are absolutely stereotyped, and there is no doubt that some persons are so made as to find in this stability an incomparable kind of mental rest. We have no time to multiply examples, so I will let the case of Saint Louis of Gonzaga serve as a type of excess in purification. I think you will agree that this youth carried the elimination of the external and discordant to a point which we cannot unreservedly admire. At the age of ten, his biographer says:-- "The inspiration came to him to consecrate to the Mother of God his own virginity--that being to her the most agreeable of possible presents. Without delay, then, and with all the fervor there was in him, joyous of heart, and burning with love, he made his vow of perpetual chastity. Mary accepted the offering of his innocent heart, and obtained for him from God, as a recompense, the extraordinary grace of never feeling during his entire life the slightest touch of temptation against the virtue of purity. This was an altogether exceptional favor, rarely accorded even to Saints themselves, and all the more marvelous in that Louis dwelt always in courts and among great folks, where danger and opportunity are so unusually frequent. It is true that Louis from his earliest childhood had shown a natural repugnance for whatever might be impure or unvirginal, and even for relations of any sort whatever between persons of opposite sex. But this made it all the more surprising that he should, especially since this vow, feel it necessary to have recourse to such a number of expedients for protecting against even the shadow of danger the virginity which he had thus consecrated. One might suppose that if any one could have contented himself with the ordinary precautions, prescribed for all Christians, it would assuredly have been he. But no! In the use of preservatives and means of defense, in flight from the most insignificant occasions, from every possibility of peril, just as in the mortification of his flesh, he went farther than the majority of saints. He, who by an extraordinary protection of God's grace was never tempted, measured all his steps as if he were threatened on every side by particular dangers. Thenceforward he never raised his eyes, either when walking in the streets, or when in society. Not only did he avoid all business with females even more scrupulously than before, but he renounced all conversation and every kind of social recreation with them, although his father tried to make him take part; and he commenced only too early to deliver his innocent body to austerities of every kind."(210) At the age of twelve, we read of this young man that "if by chance his mother sent one of her maids of honor to him with a message, he never allowed her to come in, but listened to her through the barely opened door, and dismissed her immediately. He did not like to be alone with his own mother, whether at table or in conversation; and when the rest of the company withdrew, he sought also a pretext for retiring.... Several great ladies, relatives of his, he avoided learning to know even by sight; and he made a sort of treaty with his father, engaging promptly and readily to accede to all his wishes, if he might only be excused from all visits to ladies." (Ibid., p. 71.) When he was seventeen years old Louis joined the Jesuit order(211) against his father's passionate entreaties, for he was heir of a princely house; and when a year later the father died, he took the loss as a "particular attention" to himself on God's part, and wrote letters of stilted good advice, as from a spiritual superior, to his grieving mother. He soon became so good a monk that if any one asked him the number of his brothers and sisters, he had to reflect and count them over before replying. A Father asked him one day if he were never troubled by the thought of his family, to which, "I never think of them except when praying for them," was his only answer. Never was he seen to hold in his hand a flower or anything perfumed, that he might take pleasure in it. On the contrary, in the hospital, he used to seek for whatever was most disgusting, and eagerly snatch the bandages of ulcers, etc., from the hands of his companions. He avoided worldly talk, and immediately tried to turn every conversation on to pious subjects, or else he remained silent. He systematically refused to notice his surroundings. Being ordered one day to bring a book from the rector's seat in the refectory, he had to ask where the rector sat, for in the three months he had eaten bread there, so carefully did he guard his eyes that he had not noticed the place. One day, during recess, having looked by chance on one of his companions, he reproached himself as for a grave sin against modesty. He cultivated silence, as preserving from sins of the tongue; and his greatest penance was the limit which his superiors set to his bodily penances. He sought after false accusations and unjust reprimands as opportunities of humility; and such was his obedience that, when a room-mate, having no more paper, asked him for a sheet, he did not feel free to give it to him without first obtaining the permission of the superior, who, as such, stood in the place of God, and transmitted his orders. I can find no other sorts of fruit than these of Louis's saintship. He died in 1591, in his twenty-ninth year, and is known in the Church as the patron of all young people. On his festival, the altar in the chapel devoted to him in a certain church in Rome "is embosomed in flowers, arranged with exquisite taste; and a pile of letters may be seen at its foot, written to the Saint by young men and women, and directed to 'Paradiso.' They are supposed to be burnt unread except by San Luigi, who must find singular petitions in these pretty little missives, tied up now with a green ribbon, expressive of hope, now with a red one, emblematic of love," etc.(212) Our final judgment of the worth of such a life as this will depend largely on our conception of God, and of the sort of conduct he is best pleased with in his creatures. The Catholicism of the sixteenth century paid little heed to social righteousness; and to leave the world to the devil whilst saving one's own soul was then accounted no discreditable scheme. To-day, rightly or wrongly, helpfulness in general human affairs is, in consequence of one of those secular mutations in moral sentiment of which I spoke, deemed an essential element of worth in character; and to be of some public or private use is also reckoned as a species of divine service. Other early Jesuits, especially the missionaries among them, the Xaviers, Brébeufs, Jogues, were objective minds, and fought in their way for the world's welfare; so their lives to-day inspire us. But when the intellect, as in this Louis, is originally no larger than a pin's head, and cherishes ideas of God of corresponding smallness, the result, notwithstanding the heroism put forth, is on the whole repulsive. Purity, we see in the object-lesson, is _not_ the one thing needful; and it is better that a life should contract many a dirt-mark, than forfeit usefulness in its efforts to remain unspotted. Proceeding onwards in our search of religious extravagance, we next come upon excesses of Tenderness and Charity. Here saintliness has to face the charge of preserving the unfit, and breeding parasites and beggars. "Resist not evil," "Love your enemies," these are saintly maxims of which men of this world find it hard to speak without impatience. Are the men of this world right, or are the saints in possession of the deeper range of truth? No simple answer is possible. Here, if anywhere, one feels the complexity of the moral life, and the mysteriousness of the way in which facts and ideals are interwoven. Perfect conduct is a relation between three terms: the actor, the objects for which he acts, and the recipients of the action. In order that conduct should be abstractly perfect, all three terms, intention, execution, and reception, should be suited to one another. The best intention will fail if it either work by false means or address itself to the wrong recipient. Thus no critic or estimator of the value of conduct can confine himself to the actor's animus alone, apart from the other elements of the performance. As there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it, so reasonable arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and appeals to sympathy or justice, are folly when we are dealing with human crocodiles and boa-constrictors. The saint may simply give the universe into the hands of the enemy by his trustfulness. He may by non-resistance cut off his own survival. Herbert Spencer tells us that the perfect man's conduct will appear perfect only when the environment is perfect: to no inferior environment is it suitably adapted. We may paraphrase this by cordially admitting that saintly conduct would be the most perfect conduct conceivable in an environment where all were saints already; but by adding that in an environment where few are saints, and many the exact reverse of saints, it must be ill adapted. We must frankly confess, then, using our empirical common sense and ordinary practical prejudices, that in the world that actually is, the virtues of sympathy, charity, and non-resistance may be, and often have been, manifested in excess. The powers of darkness have systematically taken advantage of them. The whole modern scientific organization of charity is a consequence of the failure of simply giving alms. The whole history of constitutional government is a commentary on the excellence of resisting evil, and when one cheek is smitten, of smiting back and not turning the other cheek also. You will agree to this in general, for in spite of the Gospel, in spite of Quakerism, in spite of Tolstoi, you believe in fighting fire with fire, in shooting down usurpers, locking up thieves, and freezing out vagabonds and swindlers. And yet you are sure, as I am sure, that were the world confined to these hard-headed, hard-hearted, and hard-fisted methods exclusively, were there no one prompt to help a brother first, and find out afterwards whether he were worthy; no one willing to drown his private wrongs in pity for the wronger's person; no one ready to be duped many a time rather than live always on suspicion; no one glad to treat individuals passionately and impulsively rather than by general rules of prudence; the world would be an infinitely worse place than it is now to live in. The tender grace, not of a day that is dead, but of a day yet to be born somehow, with the golden rule grown natural, would be cut out from the perspective of our imaginations. The saints, existing in this way, may, with their extravagances of human tenderness, be prophetic. Nay, innumerable times they have proved themselves prophetic. Treating those whom they met, in spite of the past, in spite of all appearances, as worthy, they have stimulated them to _be_ worthy, miraculously transformed them by their radiant example and by the challenge of their expectation. From this point of view we may admit the human charity which we find in all saints, and the great excess of it which we find in some saints, to be a genuinely creative social force, tending to make real a degree of virtue which it alone is ready to assume as possible. The saints are authors, _auctores_, increasers, of goodness. The potentialities of development in human souls are unfathomable. So many who seemed irretrievably hardened have in point of fact been softened, converted, regenerated, in ways that amazed the subjects even more than they surprised the spectators, that we never can be sure in advance of any man that his salvation by the way of love is hopeless. We have no right to speak of human crocodiles and boa- constrictors as of fixedly incurable beings. We know not the complexities of personality, the smouldering emotional fires, the other facets of the character-polyhedron, the resources of the subliminal region. St. Paul long ago made our ancestors familiar with the idea that every soul is virtually sacred. Since Christ died for us all without exception, St. Paul said, we must despair of no one. This belief in the essential sacredness of every one expresses itself to-day in all sorts of humane customs and reformatory institutions, and in a growing aversion to the death penalty and to brutality in punishment. The saints, with their extravagance of human tenderness, are the great torch-bearers of this belief, the tip of the wedge, the clearers of the darkness. Like the single drops which sparkle in the sun as they are flung far ahead of the advancing edge of a wave-crest or of a flood, they show the way and are forerunners. The world is not yet with them, so they often seem in the midst of the world's affairs to be preposterous. Yet they are impregnators of the world, vivifiers and animaters of potentialities of goodness which but for them would lie forever dormant. It is not possible to be quite as mean as we naturally are, when they have passed before us. One fire kindles another; and without that over-trust in human worth which they show, the rest of us would lie in spiritual stagnancy. Momentarily considered, then, the saint may waste his tenderness and be the dupe and victim of his charitable fever, but the general function of his charity in social evolution is vital and essential. If things are ever to move upward, some one must be ready to take the first step, and assume the risk of it. No one who is not willing to try charity, to try non- resistance as the saint is always willing, can tell whether these methods will or will not succeed. When they do succeed, they are far more powerfully successful than force or worldly prudence. Force destroys enemies; and the best that can be said of prudence is that it keeps what we already have in safety. But non-resistance, when successful, turns enemies into friends; and charity regenerates its objects. These saintly methods are, as I said, creative energies; and genuine saints find in the elevated excitement with which their faith endows them an authority and impressiveness which makes them irresistible in situations where men of shallower nature cannot get on at all without the use of worldly prudence. This practical proof that worldly wisdom may be safely transcended is the saint's magic gift to mankind.(213) Not only does his vision of a better world console us for the generally prevailing prose and barrenness; but even when on the whole we have to confess him ill adapted, he makes some converts, and the environment gets better for his ministry. He is an effective ferment of goodness, a slow transmuter of the earthly into a more heavenly order. In this respect the Utopian dreams of social justice in which many contemporary socialists and anarchists indulge are, in spite of their impracticability and non-adaptation to present environmental conditions, analogous to the saint's belief in an existent kingdom of heaven. They help to break the edge of the general reign of hardness, and are slow leavens of a better order. ------------------------------------- The next topic in order is Asceticism, which I fancy you are all ready to consider without argument a virtue liable to extravagance and excess. The optimism and refinement of the modern imagination has, as I have already said elsewhere, changed the attitude of the church towards corporeal mortification, and a Suso or a Saint Peter of Alcantara(214) appear to us to-day rather in the light of tragic mountebanks than of sane men inspiring us with respect. If the inner dispositions are right, we ask, what need of all this torment, this violation of the outer nature? It keeps the outer nature too important. Any one who is genuinely emancipated from the flesh will look on pleasures and pains, abundance and privation, as alike irrelevant and indifferent. He can engage in actions and experience enjoyments without fear of corruption or enslavement. As the Bhagavad-Gita says, only those need renounce worldly actions who are still inwardly attached thereto. If one be really unattached to the fruits of action, one may mix in the world with equanimity. I quoted in a former lecture Saint Augustine's antinomian saying: If you only love God enough, you may safely follow all your inclinations. "He needs no devotional practices," is one of Ramakrishna's maxims, "whose heart is moved to tears at the mere mention of the name of Hari."(215) And the Buddha, in pointing out what he called "the middle way" to his disciples, told them to abstain from both extremes, excessive mortification being as unreal and unworthy as mere desire and pleasure. The only perfect life, he said, is that of inner wisdom, which makes one thing as indifferent to us as another, and thus leads to rest, to peace, and to Nirvâna.(216) We find accordingly that as ascetic saints have grown older, and directors of conscience more experienced, they usually have shown a tendency to lay less stress on special bodily mortifications. Catholic teachers have always professed the rule that, since health is needed for efficiency in God's service, health must not be sacrificed to mortification. The general optimism and healthy-mindedness of liberal Protestant circles to-day makes mortification for mortification's sake repugnant to us. We can no longer sympathize with cruel deities, and the notion that God can take delight in the spectacle of sufferings self-inflicted in his honor is abhorrent. In consequence of all these motives you probably are disposed, unless some special utility can be shown in some individual's discipline, to treat the general tendency to asceticism as pathological. Yet I believe that a more careful consideration of the whole matter, distinguishing between the general good intention of asceticism and the uselessness of some of the particular acts of which it may be guilty, ought to rehabilitate it in our esteem. For in its spiritual meaning asceticism stands for nothing less than for the essence of the twice-born philosophy. It symbolizes, lamely enough no doubt, but sincerely, the belief that there is an element of real wrongness in this world, which is neither to be ignored nor evaded, but which must be squarely met and overcome by an appeal to the soul's heroic resources, and neutralized and cleansed away by suffering. As against this view, the ultra-optimistic form of the once-born philosophy thinks we may treat evil by the method of ignoring. Let a man who, by fortunate health and circumstances, escapes the suffering of any great amount of evil in his own person, also close his eyes to it as it exists in the wider universe outside his private experience, and he will be quit of it altogether, and can sail through life happily on a healthy-minded basis. But we saw in our lectures on melancholy how precarious this attempt necessarily is. Moreover it is but for the individual; and leaves the evil outside of him, unredeemed and unprovided for in his philosophy. No such attempt can be a _general_ solution of the problem; and to minds of sombre tinge, who naturally feel life as a tragic mystery, such optimism is a shallow dodge or mean evasion. It accepts, in lieu of a real deliverance, what is a lucky personal accident merely, a cranny to escape by. It leaves the general world unhelped and still in the clutch of Satan. The real deliverance, the twice-born folk insist, must be of universal application. Pain and wrong and death must be fairly met and overcome in higher excitement, or else their sting remains essentially unbroken. If one has ever taken the fact of the prevalence of tragic death in this world's history fairly into his mind,--freezing, drowning, entombment alive, wild beasts, worse men, and hideous diseases,--he can with difficulty, it seems to me, continue his own career of worldly prosperity without suspecting that he may all the while not be really inside the game, that he may lack the great initiation. Well, this is exactly what asceticism thinks; and it voluntarily takes the initiation. Life is neither farce nor genteel comedy, it says, but something we must sit at in mourning garments, hoping its bitter taste will purge us of our folly. The wild and the heroic are indeed such rooted parts of it that healthy-mindedness pure and simple, with its sentimental optimism, can hardly be regarded by any thinking man as a serious solution. Phrases of neatness, cosiness, and comfort can never be an answer to the sphinx's riddle. In these remarks I am leaning only upon mankind's common instinct for reality, which in point of fact has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism. In heroism, we feel, life's supreme mystery is hidden. We tolerate no one who has no capacity whatever for it in any direction. On the other hand, no matter what a man's frailties otherwise may be, if he be willing to risk death, and still more if he suffer it heroically, in the service he has chosen, the fact consecrates him forever. Inferior to ourselves in this or that way, if yet we cling to life, and he is able "to fling it away like a flower" as caring nothing for it, we account him in the deepest way our born superior. Each of us in his own person feels that a high-hearted indifference to life would expiate all his shortcomings. The metaphysical mystery, thus recognized by common sense, that he who feeds on death that feeds on men possesses life supereminently and excellently, and meets best the secret demands of the universe, is the truth of which asceticism has been the faithful champion. The folly of the cross, so inexplicable by the intellect, has yet its indestructible vital meaning. Representatively, then, and symbolically, and apart from the vagaries into which the unenlightened intellect of former times may have let it wander, asceticism must, I believe, be acknowledged to go with the profounder way of handling the gift of existence. Naturalistic optimism is mere syllabub and flattery and sponge-cake in comparison. The practical course of action for us, as religious men, would therefore, it seems to me, not be simply to turn our backs upon the ascetic impulse, as most of us to-day turn them, but rather to discover some outlet for it of which the fruits in the way of privation and hardship might be objectively useful. The older monastic asceticism occupied itself with pathetic futilities, or terminated in the mere egotism of the individual, increasing his own perfection.(217) But is it not possible for us to discard most of these older forms of mortification, and yet find saner channels for the heroism which inspired them? Does not, for example, the worship of material luxury and wealth, which constitutes so large a portion of the "spirit" of our age, make somewhat for effeminacy and unmanliness? Is not the exclusively sympathetic and facetious way in which most children are brought up to-day--so different from the education of a hundred years ago, especially in evangelical circles--in danger, in spite of its many advantages, of developing a certain trashiness of fibre? Are there not hereabouts some points of application for a renovated and revised ascetic discipline? Many of you would recognize such dangers, but would point to athletics, militarism, and individual and national enterprise and adventure as the remedies. These contemporary ideals are quite as remarkable for the energy with which they make for heroic standards of life, as contemporary religion is remarkable for the way in which it neglects them.(218) War and adventure assuredly keep all who engage in them from treating themselves too tenderly. They demand such incredible efforts, depth beyond depth of exertion, both in degree and in duration, that the whole scale of motivation alters. Discomfort and annoyance, hunger and wet, pain and cold, squalor and filth, cease to have any deterrent operation whatever. Death turns into a commonplace matter, and its usual power to check our action vanishes. With the annulling of these customary inhibitions, ranges of new energy are set free, and life seems cast upon a higher plane of power. The beauty of war in this respect is that it is so congruous with ordinary human nature. Ancestral evolution has made us all potential warriors; so the most insignificant individual, when thrown into an army in the field, is weaned from whatever excess of tenderness towards his precious person he may bring with him, and may easily develop into a monster of insensibility. But when we compare the military type of self-severity with that of the ascetic saint, we find a world-wide difference in all their spiritual concomitants. " 'Live and let live,' " writes a clear-headed Austrian officer, "is no device for an army. Contempt for one's own comrades, for the troops of the enemy, and, above all, fierce contempt for one's own person, are what war demands of every one. Far better is it for an army to be too savage, too cruel, too barbarous, than to possess too much sentimentality and human reasonableness. If the soldier is to be good for anything as a soldier, he must be exactly the opposite of a reasoning and thinking man. The measure of goodness in him is his possible use in war. War, and even peace, require of the soldier absolutely peculiar standards of morality. The recruit brings with him common moral notions, of which he must seek immediately to get rid. For him victory, success, must be _everything_. The most barbaric tendencies in men come to life again in war, and for war's uses they are incommensurably good."(219) These words are of course literally true. The immediate aim of the soldier's life is, as Moltke said, destruction, and nothing but destruction; and whatever constructions wars result in are remote and non- military. Consequently the soldier cannot train himself to be too feelingless to all those usual sympathies and respects, whether for persons or for things, that make for conservation. Yet the fact remains that war is a school of strenuous life and heroism; and, being in the line of aboriginal instinct, is the only school that as yet is universally available. But when we gravely ask ourselves whether this wholesale organization of irrationality and crime be our only bulwark against effeminacy, we stand aghast at the thought, and think more kindly of ascetic religion. One hears of the mechanical equivalent of heat. What we now need to discover in the social realm is the moral equivalent of war: something heroic that will speak to men as universally as war does, and yet will be as compatible with their spiritual selves as war has proved itself to be incompatible. I have often thought that in the old monkish poverty-worship, in spite of the pedantry which infested it, there might be something like that moral equivalent of war which we are seeking. May not voluntarily accepted poverty be "the strenuous life," without the need of crushing weaker peoples? Poverty indeed _is_ the strenuous life,--without brass bands or uniforms or hysteric popular applause or lies or circumlocutions; and when one sees the way in which wealth-getting enters as an ideal into the very bone and marrow of our generation, one wonders whether a revival of the belief that poverty is a worthy religious vocation may not be "the transformation of military courage," and the spiritual reform which our time stands most in need of. Among us English-speaking peoples especially do the praises of poverty need once more to be boldly sung. We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise any one who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition. We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient idealization of poverty could have meant: the liberation from material attachments, the unbribed soul, the manlier indifference, the paying our way by what we are or do and not by what we have, the right to fling away our life at any moment irresponsibly,--the more athletic trim, in short, the moral fighting shape. When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion. It is true that so far as wealth gives time for ideal ends and exercise to ideal energies, wealth is better than poverty and ought to be chosen. But wealth does this in only a portion of the actual cases. Elsewhere the desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of cowardice and propagators of corruption. There are thousands of conjunctures in which a wealth-bound man must be a slave, whilst a man for whom poverty has no terrors becomes a freeman. Think of the strength which personal indifference to poverty would give us if we were devoted to unpopular causes. We need no longer hold our tongues or fear to vote the revolutionary or reformatory ticket. Our stocks might fall, our hopes of promotion vanish, our salaries stop, our club doors close in our faces; yet, while we lived, we would imperturbably bear witness to the spirit, and our example would help to set free our generation. The cause would need its funds, but we its servants would be potent in proportion as we personally were contented with our poverty. I recommend this matter to your serious pondering, for it is certain that the prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers. ------------------------------------- I have now said all that I can usefully say about the several fruits of religion as they are manifested in saintly lives, so I will make a brief review and pass to my more general conclusions. Our question, you will remember, is as to whether religion stands approved by its fruits, as these are exhibited in the saintly type of character. Single attributes of saintliness may, it is true, be temperamental endowments, found in non-religious individuals. But the whole group of them forms a combination which, as such, is religious, for it seems to flow from the sense of the divine as from its psychological centre. Whoever possesses strongly this sense comes naturally to think that the smallest details of this world derive infinite significance from their relation to an unseen divine order. The thought of this order yields him a superior denomination of happiness, and a steadfastness of soul with which no other can compare. In social relations his serviceability is exemplary; he abounds in impulses to help. His help is inward as well as outward, for his sympathy reaches souls as well as bodies, and kindles unsuspected faculties therein. Instead of placing happiness where common men place it, in comfort, he places it in a higher kind of inner excitement, which converts discomforts into sources of cheer and annuls unhappiness. So he turns his back upon no duty, however thankless; and when we are in need of assistance, we can count upon the saint lending his hand with more certainty than we can count upon any other person. Finally, his humble- mindedness and his ascetic tendencies save him from the petty personal pretensions which so obstruct our ordinary social intercourse, and his purity gives us in him a clean man for a companion. Felicity, purity, charity, patience, self-severity,--these are splendid excellencies, and the saint of all men shows them in the completest possible measure. But, as we saw, all these things together do not make saints infallible. When their intellectual outlook is narrow, they fall into all sorts of holy excesses, fanaticism or theopathic absorption, self-torment, prudery, scrupulosity, gullibility, and morbid inability to meet the world. By the very intensity of his fidelity to the paltry ideals with which an inferior intellect may inspire him, a saint can be even more objectionable and damnable than a superficial carnal man would be in the same situation. We must judge him not sentimentally only, and not in isolation, but using our own intellectual standards, placing him in his environment, and estimating his total function. Now in the matter of intellectual standards, we must bear in mind that it is unfair, where we find narrowness of mind, always to impute it as a vice to the individual, for in religious and theological matters he probably absorbs his narrowness from his generation. Moreover, we must not confound the essentials of saintliness, which are those general passions of which I have spoken, with its accidents, which are the special determinations of these passions at any historical moment. In these determinations the saints will usually be loyal to the temporary idols of their tribe. Taking refuge in monasteries was as much an idol of the tribe in the middle ages, as bearing a hand in the world's work is to-day. Saint Francis or Saint Bernard, were they living to-day, would undoubtedly be leading consecrated lives of some sort, but quite as undoubtedly they would not lead them in retirement. Our animosity to special historic manifestations must not lead us to give away the saintly impulses in their essential nature to the tender mercies of inimical critics. The most inimical critic of the saintly impulses whom I know is Nietzsche. He contrasts them with the worldly passions as we find these embodied in the predaceous military character, altogether to the advantage of the latter. Your born saint, it must be confessed, has something about him which often makes the gorge of a carnal man rise, so it will be worth while to consider the contrast in question more fully. Dislike of the saintly nature seems to be a negative result of the biologically useful instinct of welcoming leadership, and glorifying the chief of the tribe. The chief is the potential, if not the actual tyrant, the masterful, overpowering man of prey. We confess our inferiority and grovel before him. We quail under his glance, and are at the same time proud of owning so dangerous a lord. Such instinctive and submissive hero- worship must have been indispensable in primeval tribal life. In the endless wars of those times, leaders were absolutely needed for the tribe's survival. If there were any tribes who owned no leaders, they can have left no issue to narrate their doom. The leaders always had good consciences, for conscience in them coalesced with will, and those who looked on their face were as much smitten with wonder at their freedom from inner restraint as with awe at the energy of their outward performances. Compared with these beaked and taloned graspers of the world, saints are herbivorous animals, tame and harmless barn-yard poultry. There are saints whose beard you may, if you ever care to, pull with impunity. Such a man excites no thrills of wonder veiled in terror; his conscience is full of scruples and returns; he stuns us neither by his inward freedom nor his outward power; and unless he found within us an altogether different faculty of admiration to appeal to, we should pass him by with contempt. In point of fact, he does appeal to a different faculty. Reënacted in human nature is the fable of the wind, the sun, and the traveler. The sexes embody the discrepancy. The woman loves the man the more admiringly the stormier he shows himself, and the world deifies its rulers the more for being willful and unaccountable. But the woman in turn subjugates the man by the mystery of gentleness in beauty, and the saint has always charmed the world by something similar. Mankind is susceptible and suggestible in opposite directions, and the rivalry of influences is unsleeping. The saintly and the worldly ideal pursue their feud in literature as much as in real life. For Nietzsche the saint represents little but sneakingness and slavishness. He is the sophisticated invalid, the degenerate _par excellence_, the man of insufficient vitality. His prevalence would put the human type in danger. "The sick are the greatest danger for the well. The weaker, not the stronger, are the strong's undoing. It is not _fear_ of our fellow-man, which we should wish to see diminished; for fear rouses those who are strong to become terrible in turn themselves, and preserves the hard-earned and successful type of humanity. What is to be dreaded by us more than any other doom is not fear, but rather the great disgust, not fear, but rather the great pity--disgust and pity for our human fellows.... The _morbid_ are our greatest peril--not the 'bad' men, not the predatory beings. Those born wrong, the miscarried, the broken--they it is, the _weakest_, who are undermining the vitality of the race, poisoning our trust in life, and putting humanity in question. Every look of them is a sigh,--'Would I were something other! I am sick and tired of what I am.' In this swamp-soil of self-contempt, every poisonous weed flourishes, and all so small, so secret, so dishonest, and so sweetly rotten. Here swarm the worms of sensitiveness and resentment; here the air smells odious with secrecy, with what is not to be acknowledged; here is woven endlessly the net of the meanest of conspiracies, the conspiracy of those who suffer against those who succeed and are victorious; here the very aspect of the victorious is hated--as if health, success, strength, pride, and the sense of power were in themselves things vicious, for which one ought eventually to make bitter expiation. Oh, how these people would themselves like to inflict the expiation, how they thirst to be the hangmen! And all the while their duplicity never confesses their hatred to be hatred."(220) Poor Nietzsche's antipathy is itself sickly enough, but we all know what he means, and he expresses well the clash between the two ideals. The carnivorous-minded "strong man," the adult male and cannibal, can see nothing but mouldiness and morbidness in the saint's gentleness and self- severity, and regards him with pure loathing. The whole feud revolves essentially upon two pivots: Shall the seen world or the unseen world be our chief sphere of adaptation? and must our means of adaptation in this seen world be aggressiveness or non-resistance? The debate is serious. In some sense and to some degree both worlds must be acknowledged and taken account of; and in the seen world both aggressiveness and non-resistance are needful. It is a question of emphasis, of more or less. Is the saint's type or the strong-man's type the more ideal? It has often been supposed, and even now, I think, it is supposed by most persons, that there can be one intrinsically ideal type of human character. A certain kind of man, it is imagined, must be the best man absolutely and apart from the utility of his function, apart from economical considerations. The saint's type, and the knight's or gentleman's type, have always been rival claimants of this absolute ideality; and in the ideal of military religious orders both types were in a manner blended. According to the empirical philosophy, however, all ideals are matters of relation. It would be absurd, for example, to ask for a definition of "the ideal horse," so long as dragging drays and running races, bearing children, and jogging about with tradesmen's packages all remain as indispensable differentiations of equine function. You may take what you call a general all-round animal as a compromise, but he will be inferior to any horse of a more specialized type, in some one particular direction. We must not forget this now when, in discussing saintliness, we ask if it be an ideal type of manhood. We must test it by its economical relations. I think that the method which Mr. Spencer uses in his Data of Ethics will help to fix our opinion. Ideality in conduct is altogether a matter of adaptation. A society where all were invariably aggressive would destroy itself by inner friction, and in a society where some are aggressive, others must be non-resistant, if there is to be any kind of order. This is the present constitution of society, and to the mixture we owe many of our blessings. But the aggressive members of society are always tending to become bullies, robbers, and swindlers; and no one believes that such a state of things as we now live in is the millennium. It is meanwhile quite possible to conceive an imaginary society in which there should be no aggressiveness, but only sympathy and fairness,--any small community of true friends now realizes such a society. Abstractly considered, such a society on a large scale would be the millennium, for every good thing might be realized there with no expense of friction. To such a millennial society the saint would be entirely adapted. His peaceful modes of appeal would be efficacious over his companions, and there would be no one extant to take advantage of his non-resistance. The saint is therefore abstractly a higher type of man than the "strong man," because he is adapted to the highest society conceivable, whether that society ever be concretely possible or not. The strong man would immediately tend by his presence to make that society deteriorate. It would become inferior in everything save in a certain kind of bellicose excitement, dear to men as they now are. But if we turn from the abstract question to the actual situation, we find that the individual saint may be well or ill adapted, according to particular circumstances. There is, in short, no absoluteness in the excellence of sainthood. It must be confessed that as far as this world goes, any one who makes an out-and-out saint of himself does so at his peril. If he is not a large enough man, he may appear more insignificant and contemptible, for all his saintship, than if he had remained a worldling.(221) Accordingly religion has seldom been so radically taken in our Western world that the devotee could not mix it with some worldly temper. It has always found good men who could follow most of its impulses, but who stopped short when it came to non-resistance. Christ himself was fierce upon occasion. Cromwells, Stonewall Jacksons, Gordons, show that Christians can be strong men also. How is success to be absolutely measured when there are so many environments and so many ways of looking at the adaptation? It cannot be measured absolutely; the verdict will vary according to the point of view adopted. From the biological point of view Saint Paul was a failure, because he was beheaded. Yet he was magnificently adapted to the larger environment of history; and so far as any saint's example is a leaven of righteousness in the world, and draws it in the direction of more prevalent habits of saintliness, he is a success, no matter what his immediate bad fortune may be. The greatest saints, the spiritual heroes whom every one acknowledges, the Francises, Bernards, Luthers, Loyolas, Wesleys, Channings, Moodys, Gratrys, the Phillips Brookses, the Agnes Joneses, Margaret Hallahans, and Dora Pattisons, are successes from the outset. They show themselves, and there is no question; every one perceives their strength and stature. Their sense of mystery in things, their passion, their goodness, irradiate about them and enlarge their outlines while they soften them. They are like pictures with an atmosphere and background; and, placed alongside of them, the strong men of this world and no other seem as dry as sticks, as hard and crude as blocks of stone or brickbats. In a general way, then, and "on the whole,"(222) our abandonment of theological criteria, and our testing of religion by practical common sense and the empirical method, leave it in possession of its towering place in history. Economically, the saintly group of qualities is indispensable to the world's welfare. The great saints are immediate successes; the smaller ones are at least heralds and harbingers, and they may be leavens also, of a better mundane order. Let us be saints, then, if we can, whether or not we succeed visibly and temporally. But in our Father's house are many mansions, and each of us must discover for himself the kind of religion and the amount of saintship which best comports with what he believes to be his powers and feels to be his truest mission and vocation. There are no successes to be guaranteed and no set orders to be given to individuals, so long as we follow the methods of empirical philosophy. ------------------------------------- This is my conclusion so far. I know that on some of your minds it leaves a feeling of wonder that such a method should have been applied to such a subject, and this in spite of all those remarks about empiricism which I made at the beginning of Lecture XIII.(223) How, you say, can religion, which believes in two worlds and an invisible order, be estimated by the adaptation of its fruits to this world's order alone? It is its _truth_, not its utility, you insist, upon which our verdict ought to depend. If religion is true, its fruits are good fruits, even though in this world they should prove uniformly ill adapted and full of naught but pathos. It goes back, then, after all, to the question of the truth of theology. The plot inevitably thickens upon us; we cannot escape theoretical considerations. I propose, then, that to some degree we face the responsibility. Religious persons have often, though not uniformly, professed to see truth in a special manner. That manner is known as mysticism. I will consequently now proceed to treat at some length of mystical phenomena, and after that, though more briefly, I will consider religious philosophy. LECTURES XVI AND XVII. MYSTICISM. Over and over again in these lectures I have raised points and left them open and unfinished until we should have come to the subject of Mysticism. Some of you, I fear, may have smiled as you noted my reiterated postponements. But now the hour has come when mysticism must be faced in good earnest, and those broken threads wound up together. One may say truly, I think, that personal religious experience has its root and centre in mystical states of consciousness; so for us, who in these lectures are treating personal experience as the exclusive subject of our study, such states of consciousness ought to form the vital chapter from which the other chapters get their light. Whether my treatment of mystical states will shed more light or darkness, I do not know, for my own constitution shuts me out from their enjoyment almost entirely, and I can speak of them only at second hand. But though forced to look upon the subject so externally, I will be as objective and receptive as I can; and I think I shall at least succeed in convincing you of the reality of the states in question, and of the paramount importance of their function. First of all, then, I ask, What does the expression "mystical states of consciousness" mean? How do we part off mystical states from other states? The words "mysticism" and "mystical" are often used as terms of mere reproach, to throw at any opinion which we regard as vague and vast and sentimental, and without a base in either facts or logic. For some writers a "mystic" is any person who believes in thought-transference, or spirit- return. Employed in this way the word has little value: there are too many less ambiguous synonyms. So, to keep it useful by restricting it, I will do what I did in the case of the word "religion," and simply propose to you four marks which, when an experience has them, may justify us in calling it mystical for the purpose of the present lectures. In this way we shall save verbal disputation, and the recriminations that generally go therewith. 1. _Ineffability._--The handiest of the marks by which I classify a state of mind as mystical is negative. The subject of it immediately says that it defies expression, that no adequate report of its contents can be given in words. It follows from this that its quality must be directly experienced; it cannot be imparted or transferred to others. In this peculiarity mystical states are more like states of feeling than like states of intellect. No one can make clear to another who has never had a certain feeling, in what the quality or worth of it consists. One must have musical ears to know the value of a symphony; one must have been in love one's self to understand a lover's state of mind. Lacking the heart or ear, we cannot interpret the musician or the lover justly, and are even likely to consider him weak-minded or absurd. The mystic finds that most of us accord to his experiences an equally incompetent treatment. 2. _Noetic quality._--Although so similar to states of feeling, mystical states seem to those who experience them to be also states of knowledge. They are states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect. They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance, all inarticulate though they remain; and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority for after-time. These two characters will entitle any state to be called mystical, in the sense in which I use the word. Two other qualities are less sharply marked, but are usually found. These are:-- 3. _Transiency._--Mystical states cannot be sustained for long. Except in rare instances, half an hour, or at most an hour or two, seems to be the limit beyond which they fade into the light of common day. Often, when faded, their quality can but imperfectly be reproduced in memory; but when they recur it is recognized; and from one recurrence to another it is susceptible of continuous development in what is felt as inner richness and importance. 4. _Passivity._--Although the oncoming of mystical states may be facilitated by preliminary voluntary operations, as by fixing the attention, or going through certain bodily performances, or in other ways which manuals of mysticism prescribe; yet when the characteristic sort of consciousness once has set in, the mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if he were grasped and held by a superior power. This latter peculiarity connects mystical states with certain definite phenomena of secondary or alternative personality, such as prophetic speech, automatic writing, or the mediumistic trance. When these latter conditions are well pronounced, however, there may be no recollection whatever of the phenomenon, and it may have no significance for the subject's usual inner life, to which, as it were, it makes a mere interruption. Mystical states, strictly so called, are never merely interruptive. Some memory of their content always remains, and a profound sense of their importance. They modify the inner life of the subject between the times of their recurrence. Sharp divisions in this region are, however, difficult to make, and we find all sorts of gradations and mixtures. These four characteristics are sufficient to mark out a group of states of consciousness peculiar enough to deserve a special name and to call for careful study. Let it then be called the mystical group. ------------------------------------- Our next step should be to gain acquaintance with some typical examples. Professional mystics at the height of their development have often elaborately organized experiences and a philosophy based thereupon. But you remember what I said in my first lecture: phenomena are best understood when placed within their series, studied in their germ and in their over-ripe decay, and compared with their exaggerated and degenerated kindred. The range of mystical experience is very wide, much too wide for us to cover in the time at our disposal. Yet the method of serial study is so essential for interpretation that if we really wish to reach conclusions we must use it. I will begin, therefore, with phenomena which claim no special religious significance, and end with those of which the religious pretensions are extreme. The simplest rudiment of mystical experience would seem to be that deepened sense of the significance of a maxim or formula which occasionally sweeps over one. "I've heard that said all my life," we exclaim, "but I never realized its full meaning until now." "When a fellow-monk," said Luther, "one day repeated the words of the Creed: 'I believe in the forgiveness of sins,' I saw the Scripture in an entirely new light; and straightway I felt as if I were born anew. It was as if I had found the door of paradise thrown wide open."(224) This sense of deeper significance is not confined to rational propositions. Single words,(225) and conjunctions of words, effects of light on land and sea, odors and musical sounds, all bring it when the mind is tuned aright. Most of us can remember the strangely moving power of passages in certain poems read when we were young, irrational doorways as they were through which the mystery of fact, the wildness and the pang of life, stole into our hearts and thrilled them. The words have now perhaps become mere polished surfaces for us; but lyric poetry and music are alive and significant only in proportion as they fetch these vague vistas of a life continuous with our own, beckoning and inviting, yet ever eluding our pursuit. We are alive or dead to the eternal inner message of the arts according as we have kept or lost this mystical susceptibility. A more pronounced step forward on the mystical ladder is found in an extremely frequent phenomenon, that sudden feeling, namely, which sometimes sweeps over us, of having "been here before," as if at some indefinite past time, in just this place, with just these people, we were already saying just these things. As Tennyson writes: "Moreover, something is or seems, That touches me with mystic gleams, Like glimpses of forgotten dreams-- "Of something felt, like something here; Of something done, I know not where; Such as no language may declare."(226) Sir James Crichton-Browne has given the technical name of "dreamy states" to these sudden invasions of vaguely reminiscent consciousness.(227) They bring a sense of mystery and of the metaphysical duality of things, and the feeling of an enlargement of perception which seems imminent but which never completes itself. In Dr. Crichton-Browne's opinion they connect themselves with the perplexed and scared disturbances of self- consciousness which occasionally precede epileptic attacks. I think that this learned alienist takes a rather absurdly alarmist view of an intrinsically insignificant phenomenon. He follows it along the downward ladder, to insanity; our path pursues the upward ladder chiefly. The divergence shows how important it is to neglect no part of a phenomenon's connections, for we make it appear admirable or dreadful according to the context by which we set it off. Somewhat deeper plunges into mystical consciousness are met with in yet other dreamy states. Such feelings as these which Charles Kingsley describes are surely far from being uncommon, especially in youth:-- "When I walk the fields, I am oppressed now and then with an innate feeling that everything I see has a meaning, if I could but understand it. And this feeling of being surrounded with truths which I cannot grasp amounts to indescribable awe sometimes.... Have you not felt that your real soul was imperceptible to your mental vision, except in a few hallowed moments?"(228) A much more extreme state of mystical consciousness is described by J. A. Symonds; and probably more persons than we suspect could give parallels to it from their own experience. "Suddenly," writes Symonds, "at church, or in company, or when I was reading, and always, I think, when my muscles were at rest, I felt the approach of the mood. Irresistibly it took possession of my mind and will, lasted what seemed an eternity, and disappeared in a series of rapid sensations which resembled the awakening from anæsthetic influence. One reason why I disliked this kind of trance was that I could not describe it to myself. I cannot even now find words to render it intelligible. It consisted in a gradual but swiftly progressive obliteration of space, time, sensation, and the multitudinous factors of experience which seem to qualify what we are pleased to call our Self. In proportion as these conditions of ordinary consciousness were subtracted, the sense of an underlying or essential consciousness acquired intensity. At last nothing remained but a pure, absolute, abstract Self. The universe became without form and void of content. But Self persisted, formidable in its vivid keenness, feeling the most poignant doubt about reality, ready, as it seemed, to find existence break as breaks a bubble round about it. And what then? The apprehension of a coming dissolution, the grim conviction that this state was the last state of the conscious Self, the sense that I had followed the last thread of being to the verge of the abyss, and had arrived at demonstration of eternal Maya or illusion, stirred or seemed to stir me up again. The return to ordinary conditions of sentient existence began by my first recovering the power of touch, and then by the gradual though rapid influx of familiar impressions and diurnal interests. At last I felt myself once more a human being; and though the riddle of what is meant by life remained unsolved, I was thankful for this return from the abyss--this deliverance from so awful an initiation into the mysteries of skepticism. "This trance recurred with diminishing frequency until I reached the age of twenty-eight. It served to impress upon my growing nature the phantasmal unreality of all the circumstances which contribute to a merely phenomenal consciousness. Often have I asked myself with anguish, on waking from that formless state of denuded, keenly sentient being, Which is the unreality?--the trance of fiery, vacant, apprehensive, skeptical Self from which I issue, or these surrounding phenomena and habits which veil that inner Self and build a self of flesh-and-blood conventionality? Again, are men the factors of some dream, the dream-like unsubstantiality of which they comprehend at such eventful moments? What would happen if the final stage of the trance were reached?"(229) In a recital like this there is certainly something suggestive of pathology.(230) The next step into mystical states carries us into a realm that public opinion and ethical philosophy have long since branded as pathological, though private practice and certain lyric strains of poetry seem still to bear witness to its ideality. I refer to the consciousness produced by intoxicants and anæsthetics, especially by alcohol. The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. It is in fact the great exciter of the _Yes_ function in man. It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core. It makes him for the moment one with truth. Not through mere perversity do men run after it. To the poor and the unlettered it stands in the place of symphony concerts and of literature; and it is part of the deeper mystery and tragedy of life that whiffs and gleams of something that we immediately recognize as excellent should be vouchsafed to so many of us only in the fleeting earlier phases of what in its totality is so degrading a poisoning. The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness, and our total opinion of it must find its place in our opinion of that larger whole. Nitrous oxide and ether, especially nitrous oxide, when sufficiently diluted with air, stimulate the mystical consciousness in an extraordinary degree. Depth beyond depth of truth seems revealed to the inhaler. This truth fades out, however, or escapes, at the moment of coming to; and if any words remain over in which it seemed to clothe itself, they prove to be the veriest nonsense. Nevertheless, the sense of a profound meaning having been there persists; and I know more than one person who is persuaded that in the nitrous oxide trance we have a genuine metaphysical revelation. Some years ago I myself made some observations on this aspect of nitrous oxide intoxication, and reported them in print. One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question,--for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map. At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality. Looking back on my own experiences, they all converge towards a kind of insight to which I cannot help ascribing some metaphysical significance. The keynote of it is invariably a reconciliation. It is as if the opposites of the world, whose contradictoriness and conflict make all our difficulties and troubles, were melted into unity. Not only do they, as contrasted species, belong to one and the same genus, but _one of the species_, the nobler and better one, _is itself the genus, and so soaks up and absorbs its opposite into itself_. This is a dark saying, I know, when thus expressed in terms of common logic, but I cannot wholly escape from its authority. I feel as if it must mean something, something like what the Hegelian philosophy means, if one could only lay hold of it more clearly. Those who have ears to hear, let them hear; to me the living sense of its reality only comes in the artificial mystic state of mind.(231) I just now spoke of friends who believe in the anæsthetic revelation. For them too it is a monistic insight, in which the _other_ in its various forms appears absorbed into the One. "Into this pervading genius," writes one of them, "we pass, forgetting and forgotten, and thenceforth each is all, in God. There is no higher, no deeper, no other, than the life in which we are founded. 'The One remains, the many change and pass;' and each and every one of us _is_ the One that remains.... This is the ultimatum.... As sure as being--whence is all our care--so sure is content, beyond duplexity, antithesis, or trouble, where I have triumphed in a solitude that God is not above."(232) This has the genuine religious mystic ring! I just now quoted J. A. Symonds. He also records a mystical experience with chloroform, as follows:-- "After the choking and stifling had passed away, I seemed at first in a state of utter blankness; then came flashes of intense light, alternating with blackness, and with a keen vision of what was going on in the room around me, but no sensation of touch. I thought that I was near death; when, suddenly, my soul became aware of God, who was manifestly dealing with me, handling me, so to speak, in an intense personal present reality. I felt him streaming in like light upon me.... I cannot describe the ecstasy I felt. Then, as I gradually awoke from the influence of the anæsthetics, the old sense of my relation to the world began to return, the new sense of my relation to God began to fade. I suddenly leapt to my feet on the chair where I was sitting, and shrieked out, 'It is too horrible, it is too horrible, it is too horrible,' meaning that I could not bear this disillusionment. Then I flung myself on the ground, and at last awoke covered with blood, calling to the two surgeons (who were frightened), 'Why did you not kill me? Why would you not let me die?' Only think of it. To have felt for that long dateless ecstasy of vision the very God, in all purity and tenderness and truth and absolute love, and then to find that I had after all had no revelation, but that I had been tricked by the abnormal excitement of my brain. "Yet, this question remains, Is it possible that the inner sense of reality which succeeded, when my flesh was dead to impressions from without, to the ordinary sense of physical relations, was not a delusion but an actual experience? Is it possible that I, in that moment, felt what some of the saints have said they always felt, the undemonstrable but irrefragable certainty of God?"(233) With this we make connection with religious mysticism pure and simple. Symonds's question takes us back to those examples which you will remember my quoting in the lecture on the Reality of the Unseen, of sudden realization of the immediate presence of God. The phenomenon in one shape or another is not uncommon. "I know," writes Mr. Trine, "an officer on our police force who has told me that many times when off duty, and on his way home in the evening, there comes to him such a vivid and vital realization of his oneness with this Infinite Power, and this Spirit of Infinite Peace so takes hold of and so fills him, that it seems as if his feet could hardly keep to the pavement, so buoyant and so exhilarated does he become by reason of this inflowing tide."(234) Certain aspects of nature seem to have a peculiar power of awakening such mystical moods.(235) Most of the striking cases which I have collected have occurred out of doors. Literature has commemorated this fact in many passages of great beauty--this extract, for example, from Amiel's Journal Intime:-- "Shall I ever again have any of those prodigious reveries which sometimes came to me in former days? One day, in youth, at sunrise, sitting in the ruins of the castle of Faucigny; and again in the mountains, under the noonday sun, above Lavey, lying at the foot of a tree and visited by three butterflies; once more at night upon the shingly shore of the Northern Ocean, my back upon the sand and my vision ranging through the milky way;--such grand and spacious, immortal, cosmogonic reveries, when one reaches to the stars, when one owns the infinite! Moments divine, ecstatic hours; in which our thought flies from world to world, pierces the great enigma, breathes with a respiration broad, tranquil, and deep as the respiration of the ocean, serene and limitless as the blue firmament; ... instants of irresistible intuition in which one feels one's self great as the universe, and calm as a god.... What hours, what memories! The vestiges they leave behind are enough to fill us with belief and enthusiasm, as if they were visits of the Holy Ghost."(236) Here is a similar record from the memoirs of that interesting German idealist, Malwida von Meysenbug:-- "I was alone upon the seashore as all these thoughts flowed over me, liberating and reconciling; and now again, as once before in distant days in the Alps of Dauphiné, I was impelled to kneel down, this time before the illimitable ocean, symbol of the Infinite. I felt that I prayed as I had never prayed before, and knew now what prayer really is: to return from the solitude of individuation into the consciousness of unity with all that is, to kneel down as one that passes away, and to rise up as one imperishable. Earth, heaven, and sea resounded as in one vast world-encircling harmony. It was as if the chorus of all the great who had ever lived were about me. I felt myself one with them, and it appeared as if I heard their greeting: 'Thou too belongest to the company of those who overcome.' "(237) The well-known passage from Walt Whitman is a classical expression of this sporadic type of mystical experience. "I believe in you, my Soul ... Loaf with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat;... Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice. I mind how once we lay, such a transparent summer morning. Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth, And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own, And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own, And that all the men ever born are also my brothers and the women my sisters and lovers, And that a kelson of the creation is love."(238) I could easily give more instances, but one will suffice. I take it from the Autobiography of J. Trevor.(239) "One brilliant Sunday morning, my wife and boys went to the Unitarian Chapel in Macclesfield. I felt it impossible to accompany them--as though to leave the sunshine on the hills, and go down there to the chapel, would be for the time an act of spiritual suicide. And I felt such need for new inspiration and expansion in my life. So, very reluctantly and sadly, I left my wife and boys to go down into the town, while I went further up into the hills with my stick and my dog. In the loveliness of the morning, and the beauty of the hills and valleys, I soon lost my sense of sadness and regret. For nearly an hour I walked along the road to the 'Cat and Fiddle,' and then returned. On the way back, suddenly, without warning, I felt that I was in Heaven--an inward state of peace and joy and assurance indescribably intense, accompanied with a sense of being bathed in a warm glow of light, as though the external condition had brought about the internal effect--a feeling of having passed beyond the body, though the scene around me stood out more clearly and as if nearer to me than before, by reason of the illumination in the midst of which I seemed to be placed. This deep emotion lasted, though with decreasing strength, until I reached home, and for some time after, only gradually passing away." The writer adds that having had further experiences of a similar sort, he now knows them well. "The spiritual life," he writes, "justifies itself to those who live it; but what can we say to those who do not understand? This, at least, we can say, that it is a life whose experiences are proved real to their possessor, because they remain with him when brought closest into contact with the objective realities of life. Dreams cannot stand this test. We wake from them to find that they are but dreams. Wanderings of an overwrought brain do not stand this test. These highest experiences that I have had of God's presence have been rare and brief--flashes of consciousness which have compelled me to exclaim with surprise--God is _here_!--or conditions of exaltation and insight, less intense, and only gradually passing away. I have severely questioned the worth of these moments. To no soul have I named them, lest I should be building my life and work on mere phantasies of the brain. But I find that, after every questioning and test, they stand out to-day as the most real experiences of my life, and experiences which have explained and justified and unified all past experiences and all past growth. Indeed, their reality and their far-reaching significance are ever becoming more clear and evident. When they came, I was living the fullest, strongest, sanest, deepest life. I was not seeking them. What I was seeking, with resolute determination, was to live more intensely my own life, as against what I knew would be the adverse judgment of the world. It was in the most real seasons that the Real Presence came, and I was aware that I was immersed in the infinite ocean of God."(240) Even the least mystical of you must by this time be convinced of the existence of mystical moments as states of consciousness of an entirely specific quality, and of the deep impression which they make on those who have them. A Canadian psychiatrist, Dr. R. M. Bucke, gives to the more distinctly characterized of these phenomena the name of cosmic consciousness. "Cosmic consciousness in its more striking instances is not," Dr. Bucke says, "simply an expansion or extension of the self- conscious mind with which we are all familiar, but the superaddition of a function as distinct from any possessed by the average man as _self_-consciousness is distinct from any function possessed by one of the higher animals." "The prime characteristic of cosmic consciousness is a consciousness of the cosmos, that is, of the life and order of the universe. Along with the consciousness of the cosmos there occurs an intellectual enlightenment which alone would place the individual on a new plane of existence--would make him almost a member of a new species. To this is added a state of moral exaltation, an indescribable feeling of elevation, elation, and joyousness, and a quickening of the moral sense, which is fully as striking, and more important than is the enhanced intellectual power. With these come what may be called a sense of immortality, a consciousness of eternal life, not a conviction that he shall have this, but the consciousness that he has it already."(241) It was Dr. Bucke's own experience of a typical onset of cosmic consciousness in his own person which led him to investigate it in others. He has printed his conclusions in a highly interesting volume, from which I take the following account of what occurred to him:-- "I had spent the evening in a great city, with two friends, reading and discussing poetry and philosophy. We parted at midnight. I had a long drive in a hansom to my lodging. My mind, deeply under the influence of the ideas, images, and emotions called up by the reading and talk, was calm and peaceful. I was in a state of quiet, almost passive enjoyment, not actually thinking, but letting ideas, images, and emotions flow of themselves, as it were, through my mind. All at once, without warning of any kind, I found myself wrapped in a flame-colored cloud. For an instant I thought of fire, an immense conflagration somewhere close by in that great city; the next, I knew that the fire was within myself. Directly afterward there came upon me a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination impossible to describe. Among other things, I did not merely come to believe, but I saw that the universe is not composed of dead matter, but is, on the contrary, a living Presence; I became conscious in myself of eternal life. It was not a conviction that I would have eternal life, but a consciousness that I possessed eternal life then; I saw that all men are immortal; that the cosmic order is such that without any peradventure all things work together for the good of each and all; that the foundation principle of the world, of all the worlds, is what we call love, and that the happiness of each and all is in the long run absolutely certain. The vision lasted a few seconds and was gone; but the memory of it and the sense of the reality of what it taught has remained during the quarter of a century which has since elapsed. I knew that what the vision showed was true. I had attained to a point of view from which I saw that it must be true. That view, that conviction, I may say that consciousness, has never, even during periods of the deepest depression, been lost."(242) We have now seen enough of this cosmic or mystic consciousness, as it comes sporadically. We must next pass to its methodical cultivation as an element of the religious life. Hindus, Buddhists, Mohammedans, and Christians all have cultivated it methodically. In India, training in mystical insight has been known from time immemorial under the name of yoga. Yoga means the experimental union of the individual with the divine. It is based on persevering exercise; and the diet, posture, breathing, intellectual concentration, and moral discipline vary slightly in the different systems which teach it. The yogi, or disciple, who has by these means overcome the obscurations of his lower nature sufficiently, enters into the condition termed _samâdhi_, "and comes face to face with facts which no instinct or reason can ever know." He learns-- "That the mind itself has a higher state of existence, beyond reason, a superconscious state, and that when the mind gets to that higher state, then this knowledge beyond reasoning comes.... All the different steps in yoga are intended to bring us scientifically to the superconscious state or samâdhi.... Just as unconscious work is beneath consciousness, so there is another work which is above consciousness, and which, also, is not accompanied with the feeling of egoism.... There is no feeling of _I_, and yet the mind works, desireless, free from restlessness, objectless, bodiless. Then the Truth shines in its full effulgence, and we know ourselves--for Samâdhi lies potential in us all--for what we truly are, free, immortal, omnipotent, loosed from the finite, and its contrasts of good and evil altogether, and identical with the Atman or Universal Soul."(243) The Vedantists say that one may stumble into superconsciousness sporadically, without the previous discipline, but it is then impure. Their test of its purity, like our test of religion's value, is empirical: its fruits must be good for life. When a man comes out of Samâdhi, they assure us that he remains "enlightened, a sage, a prophet, a saint, his whole character changed, his life changed, illumined."(244) The Buddhists use the word "samâdhi" as well as the Hindus; but "dhyâna" is their special word for higher states of contemplation. There seem to be four stages recognized in dhyâna. The first stage comes through concentration of the mind upon one point. It excludes desire, but not discernment or judgment: it is still intellectual. In the second stage the intellectual functions drop off, and the satisfied sense of unity remains. In the third stage the satisfaction departs, and indifference begins, along with memory and self-consciousness. In the fourth stage the indifference, memory, and self-consciousness are perfected. [Just what "memory" and "self-consciousness" mean in this connection is doubtful. They cannot be the faculties familiar to us in the lower life.] Higher stages still of contemplation are mentioned--a region where there exists nothing, and where the meditator says: "There exists absolutely nothing," and stops. Then he reaches another region where he says: "There are neither ideas nor absence of ideas," and stops again. Then another region where, "having reached the end of both idea and perception, he stops finally." This would seem to be, not yet Nirvâna, but as close an approach to it as this life affords.(245) In the Mohammedan world the Sufi sect and various dervish bodies are the possessors of the mystical tradition. The Sufis have existed in Persia from the earliest times, and as their pantheism is so at variance with the hot and rigid monotheism of the Arab mind, it has been suggested that Sufism must have been inoculated into Islam by Hindu influences. We Christians know little of Sufism, for its secrets are disclosed only to those initiated. To give its existence a certain liveliness in your minds, I will quote a Moslem document, and pass away from the subject. Al-Ghazzali, a Persian philosopher and theologian, who flourished in the eleventh century, and ranks as one of the greatest doctors of the Moslem church, has left us one of the few autobiographies to be found outside of Christian literature. Strange that a species of book so abundant among ourselves should be so little represented elsewhere--the absence of strictly personal confessions is the chief difficulty to the purely literary student who would like to become acquainted with the inwardness of religions other than the Christian. M. Schmölders has translated a part of Al-Ghazzali's autobiography into French:(246)-- "The Science of the Sufis," says the Moslem author, "aims at detaching the heart from all that is not God, and at giving to it for sole occupation the meditation of the divine being. Theory being more easy for me than practice, I read [certain books] until I understood all that can be learned by study and hearsay. Then I recognized that what pertains most exclusively to their method is just what no study can grasp, but only transport, ecstasy, and the transformation of the soul. How great, for example, is the difference between knowing the definitions of health, of satiety, with their causes and conditions, and being really healthy or filled. How different to know in what drunkenness consists,--as being a state occasioned by a vapor that rises from the stomach,--and _being_ drunk effectively. Without doubt, the drunken man knows neither the definition of drunkenness nor what makes it interesting for science. Being drunk, he knows nothing; whilst the physician, although not drunk, knows well in what drunkenness consists, and what are its predisposing conditions. Similarly there is a difference between knowing the nature of abstinence, and _being_ abstinent or having one's soul detached from the world.--Thus I had learned what words could teach of Sufism, but what was left could be learned neither by study nor through the ears, but solely by giving one's self up to ecstasy and leading a pious life. "Reflecting on my situation, I found myself tied down by a multitude of bonds--temptations on every side. Considering my teaching, I found it was impure before God. I saw myself struggling with all my might to achieve glory and to spread my name. [Here follows an account of his six months' hesitation to break away from the conditions of his life at Bagdad, at the end of which he fell ill with a paralysis of the tongue.] Then, feeling my own weakness, and having entirely given up my own will, I repaired to God like a man in distress who has no more resources. He answered, as he answers the wretch who invokes him. My heart no longer felt any difficulty in renouncing glory, wealth, and my children. So I quitted Bagdad, and reserving from my fortune only what was indispensable for my subsistence, I distributed the rest. I went to Syria, where I remained about two years, with no other occupation than living in retreat and solitude, conquering my desires, combating my passions, training myself to purify my soul, to make my character perfect, to prepare my heart for meditating on God--all according to the methods of the Sufis, as I had read of them. "This retreat only increased my desire to live in solitude, and to complete the purification of my heart and fit it for meditation. But the vicissitudes of the times, the affairs of the family, the need of subsistence, changed in some respects my primitive resolve, and interfered with my plans for a purely solitary life. I had never yet found myself completely in ecstasy, save in a few single hours; nevertheless, I kept the hope of attaining this state. Every time that the accidents led me astray, I sought to return; and in this situation I spent ten years. During this solitary state things were revealed to me which it is impossible either to describe or to point out. I recognized for certain that the Sufis are assuredly walking in the path of God. Both in their acts and in their inaction, whether internal or external, they are illumined by the light which proceeds from the prophetic source. The first condition for a Sufi is to purge his heart entirely of all that is not God. The next key of the contemplative life consists in the humble prayers which escape from the fervent soul, and in the meditations on God in which the heart is swallowed up entirely. But in reality this is only the beginning of the Sufi life, the end of Sufism being total absorption in God. The intuitions and all that precede are, so to speak, only the threshold for those who enter. From the beginning, revelations take place in so flagrant a shape that the Sufis see before them, whilst wide awake, the angels and the souls of the prophets. They hear their voices and obtain their favors. Then the transport rises from the perception of forms and figures to a degree which escapes all expression, and which no man may seek to give an account of without his words involving sin. "Whoever has had no experience of the transport knows of the true nature of prophetism nothing but the name. He may meanwhile be sure of its existence, both by experience and by what he hears the Sufis say. As there are men endowed only with the sensitive faculty who reject what is offered them in the way of objects of the pure understanding, so there are intellectual men who reject and avoid the things perceived by the prophetic faculty. A blind man can understand nothing of colors save what he has learned by narration and hearsay. Yet God has brought prophetism near to men in giving them all a state analogous to it in its principal characters. This state is sleep. If you were to tell a man who was himself without experience of such a phenomenon that there are people who at times swoon away so as to resemble dead men, and who [in dreams] yet perceive things that are hidden, he would deny it [and give his reasons]. Nevertheless, his arguments would be refuted by actual experience. Wherefore, just as the understanding is a stage of human life in which an eye opens to discern various intellectual objects uncomprehended by sensation; just so in the prophetic the sight is illumined by a light which uncovers hidden things and objects which the intellect fails to reach. The chief properties of prophetism are perceptible only during the transport, by those who embrace the Sufi life. The prophet is endowed with qualities to which you possess nothing analogous, and which consequently you cannot possibly understand. How should you know their true nature, since one knows only what one can comprehend? But the transport which one attains by the method of the Sufis is like an immediate perception, as if one touched the objects with one's hand."(247) This incommunicableness of the transport is the keynote of all mysticism. Mystical truth exists for the individual who has the transport, but for no one else. In this, as I have said, it resembles the knowledge given to us in sensations more than that given by conceptual thought. Thought, with its remoteness and abstractness, has often enough in the history of philosophy been contrasted unfavorably with sensation. It is a commonplace of metaphysics that God's knowledge cannot be discursive but must be intuitive, that is, must be constructed more after the pattern of what in ourselves is called immediate feeling, than after that of proposition and judgment. But _our_ immediate feelings have no content but what the five senses supply; and we have seen and shall see again that mystics may emphatically deny that the senses play any part in the very highest type of knowledge which their transports yield. ------------------------------------- In the Christian church there have always been mystics. Although many of them have been viewed with suspicion, some have gained favor in the eyes of the authorities. The experiences of these have been treated as precedents, and a codified system of mystical theology has been based upon them, in which everything legitimate finds its place.(248) The basis of the system is "orison" or meditation, the methodical elevation of the soul towards God. Through the practice of orison the higher levels of mystical experience may be attained. It is odd that Protestantism, especially evangelical Protestantism, should seemingly have abandoned everything methodical in this line. Apart from what prayer may lead to, Protestant mystical experience appears to have been almost exclusively sporadic. It has been left to our mind-curers to reintroduce methodical meditation into our religious life. The first thing to be aimed at in orison is the mind's detachment from outer sensations, for these interfere with its concentration upon ideal things. Such manuals as Saint Ignatius's Spiritual Exercises recommend the disciple to expel sensation by a graduated series of efforts to imagine holy scenes. The acme of this kind of discipline would be a semi- hallucinatory mono-ideism--an imaginary figure of Christ, for example, coming fully to occupy the mind. Sensorial images of this sort, whether literal or symbolic, play an enormous part in mysticism.(249) But in certain cases imagery may fall away entirely, and in the very highest raptures it tends to do so. The state of consciousness becomes then insusceptible of any verbal description. Mystical teachers are unanimous as to this. Saint John of the Cross, for instance, one of the best of them, thus describes the condition called the "union of love," which, he says, is reached by "dark contemplation." In this the Deity compenetrates the soul, but in such a hidden way that the soul-- "finds no terms, no means, no comparison whereby to render the sublimity of the wisdom and the delicacy of the spiritual feeling with which she is filled.... We receive this mystical knowledge of God clothed in none of the kinds of images, in none of the sensible representations, which our mind makes use of in other circumstances. Accordingly in this knowledge, since the senses and the imagination are not employed, we get neither form nor impression, nor can we give any account or furnish any likeness, although the mysterious and sweet-tasting wisdom comes home so clearly to the inmost parts of our soul. Fancy a man seeing a certain kind of thing for the first time in his life. He can understand it, use and enjoy it, but he cannot apply a name to it, nor communicate any idea of it, even though all the while it be a mere thing of sense. How much greater will be his powerlessness when it goes beyond the senses! This is the peculiarity of the divine language. The more infused, intimate, spiritual, and supersensible it is, the more does it exceed the senses, both inner and outer, and impose silence upon them.... The soul then feels as if placed in a vast and profound solitude, to which no created thing has access, in an immense and boundless desert, desert the more delicious the more solitary it is. There, in this abyss of wisdom, the soul grows by what it drinks in from the well-springs of the comprehension of love, ... and recognizes, however sublime and learned may be the terms we employ, how utterly vile, insignificant, and improper they are, when we seek to discourse of divine things by their means."(250) I cannot pretend to detail to you the sundry stages of the Christian mystical life.(251) Our time would not suffice, for one thing; and moreover, I confess that the subdivisions and names which we find in the Catholic books seem to me to represent nothing objectively distinct. So many men, so many minds: I imagine that these experiences can be as infinitely varied as are the idiosyncrasies of individuals. The cognitive aspects of them, their value in the way of revelation, is what we are directly concerned with, and it is easy to show by citation how strong an impression they leave of being revelations of new depths of truth. Saint Teresa is the expert of experts in describing such conditions, so I will turn immediately to what she says of one of the highest of them, the "orison of union." "In the orison of union," says Saint Teresa, "the soul is fully awake as regards God, but wholly asleep as regards things of this world and in respect of herself. During the short time the union lasts, she is as it were deprived of every feeling, and even if she would, she could not think of any single thing. Thus she needs to employ no artifice in order to arrest the use of her understanding: it remains so stricken with inactivity that she neither knows what she loves, nor in what manner she loves, nor what she wills. In short, she is utterly dead to the things of the world and lives solely in God.... I do not even know whether in this state she has enough life left to breathe. It seems to me she has not; or at least that if she does breathe, she is unaware of it. Her intellect would fain understand something of what is going on within her, but it has so little force now that it can act in no way whatsoever. So a person who falls into a deep faint appears as if dead.... "Thus does God, when he raises a soul to union with himself, suspend the natural action of all her faculties. She neither sees, hears, nor understands, so long as she is united with God. But this time is always short, and it seems even shorter than it is. God establishes himself in the interior of this soul in such a way, that when she returns to herself, it is wholly impossible for her to doubt that she has been in God, and God in her. This truth remains so strongly impressed on her that, even though many years should pass without the condition returning, she can neither forget the favor she received, nor doubt of its reality. If you, nevertheless, ask how it is possible that the soul can see and understand that she has been in God, since during the union she has neither sight nor understanding, I reply that she does not see it then, but that she sees it clearly later, after she has returned to herself, not by any vision, but by a certitude which abides with her and which God alone can give her. I knew a person who was ignorant of the truth that God's mode of being in everything must be either by presence, by power, or by essence, but who, after having received the grace of which I am speaking, believed this truth in the most unshakable manner. So much so that, having consulted a half-learned man who was as ignorant on this point as she had been before she was enlightened, when he replied that God is in us only by 'grace,' she disbelieved his reply, so sure she was of the true answer; and when she came to ask wiser doctors, they confirmed her in her belief, which much consoled her.... "But how, you will repeat, _can_ one have such certainty in respect to what one does not see? This question, I am powerless to answer. These are secrets of God's omnipotence which it does not appertain to me to penetrate. All that I know is that I tell the truth; and I shall never believe that any soul who does not possess this certainty has ever been really united to God."(252) The kinds of truth communicable in mystical ways, whether these be sensible or supersensible, are various. Some of them relate to this world,--visions of the future, the reading of hearts, the sudden understanding of texts, the knowledge of distant events, for example; but the most important revelations are theological or metaphysical. "Saint Ignatius confessed one day to Father Laynez that a single hour of meditation at Manresa had taught him more truths about heavenly things than all the teachings of all the doctors put together could have taught him.... One day in orison, on the steps of the choir of the Dominican church, he saw in a distinct manner the plan of divine wisdom in the creation of the world. On another occasion, during a procession, his spirit was ravished in God, and it was given him to contemplate, in a form and images fitted to the weak understanding of a dweller on the earth, the deep mystery of the holy Trinity. This last vision flooded his heart with such sweetness, that the mere memory of it in after times made him shed abundant tears."(253) Similarly with Saint Teresa. "One day, being in orison," she writes, "it was granted me to perceive in one instant how all things are seen and contained in God. I did not perceive them in their proper form, and nevertheless the view I had of them was of a sovereign clearness, and has remained vividly impressed upon my soul. It is one of the most signal of all the graces which the Lord has granted me.... The view was so subtile and delicate that the understanding cannot grasp it."(254) She goes on to tell how it was as if the Deity were an enormous and sovereignly limpid diamond, in which all our actions were contained in such a way that their full sinfulness appeared evident as never before. On another day, she relates, while she was reciting the Athanasian Creed,-- "Our Lord made me comprehend in what way it is that one God can be in three Persons. He made me see it so clearly that I remained as extremely surprised as I was comforted, ... and now, when I think of the holy Trinity, or hear It spoken of, I understand how the three adorable Persons form only one God and I experience an unspeakable happiness." On still another occasion, it was given to Saint Teresa to see and understand in what wise the Mother of God had been assumed into her place in Heaven.(255) The deliciousness of some of these states seems to be beyond anything known in ordinary consciousness. It evidently involves organic sensibilities, for it is spoken of as something too extreme to be borne, and as verging on bodily pain.(256) But it is too subtle and piercing a delight for ordinary words to denote. God's touches, the wounds of his spear, references to ebriety and to nuptial union have to figure in the phraseology by which it is shadowed forth. Intellect and senses both swoon away in these highest states of ecstasy. "If our understanding comprehends," says Saint Teresa, "it is in a mode which remains unknown to it, and it can understand nothing of what it comprehends. For my own part, I do not believe that it does comprehend, because, as I said, it does not understand itself to do so. I confess that it is all a mystery in which I am lost."(257) In the condition called _raptus_ or ravishment by theologians, breathing and circulation are so depressed that it is a question among the doctors whether the soul be or be not temporarily dissevered from the body. One must read Saint Teresa's descriptions and the very exact distinctions which she makes, to persuade one's self that one is dealing, not with imaginary experiences, but with phenomena which, however rare, follow perfectly definite psychological types. ------------------------------------- To the medical mind these ecstasies signify nothing but suggested and imitated hypnoid states, on an intellectual basis of superstition, and a corporeal one of degeneration and hysteria. Undoubtedly these pathological conditions have existed in many and possibly in all the cases, but that fact tells us nothing about the value for knowledge of the consciousness which they induce. To pass a spiritual judgment upon these states, we must not content ourselves with superficial medical talk, but inquire into their fruits for life. Their fruits appear to have been various. Stupefaction, for one thing, seems not to have been altogether absent as a result. You may remember the helplessness in the kitchen and schoolroom of poor Margaret Mary Alacoque. Many other ecstatics would have perished but for the care taken of them by admiring followers. The "other-worldliness" encouraged by the mystical consciousness makes this over-abstraction from practical life peculiarly liable to befall mystics in whom the character is naturally passive and the intellect feeble; but in natively strong minds and characters we find quite opposite results. The great Spanish mystics, who carried the habit of ecstasy as far as it has often been carried, appear for the most part to have shown indomitable spirit and energy, and all the more so for the trances in which they indulged. Saint Ignatius was a mystic, but his mysticism made him assuredly one of the most powerfully practical human engines that ever lived. Saint John of the Cross, writing of the intuitions and "touches" by which God reaches the substance of the soul, tells us that-- "They enrich it marvelously. A single one of them may be sufficient to abolish at a stroke certain imperfections of which the soul during its whole life had vainly tried to rid itself, and to leave it adorned with virtues and loaded with supernatural gifts. A single one of these intoxicating consolations may reward it for all the labors undergone in its life--even were they numberless. Invested with an invincible courage, filled with an impassioned desire to suffer for its God, the soul then is seized with a strange torment--that of not being allowed to suffer enough."(258) Saint Teresa is as emphatic, and much more detailed. You may perhaps remember a passage I quoted from her in my first lecture.(259) There are many similar pages in her autobiography. Where in literature is a more evidently veracious account of the formation of a new centre of spiritual energy, than is given in her description of the effects of certain ecstasies which in departing leave the soul upon a higher level of emotional excitement? "Often, infirm and wrought upon with dreadful pains before the ecstasy, the soul emerges from it full of health and admirably disposed for action ... as if God had willed that the body itself, already obedient to the soul's desires, should share in the soul's happiness.... The soul after such a favor is animated with a degree of courage so great that if at that moment its body should be torn to pieces for the cause of God, it would feel nothing but the liveliest comfort. Then it is that promises and heroic resolutions spring up in profusion in us, soaring desires, horror of the world, and the clear perception of our proper nothingness.... What empire is comparable to that of a soul who, from this sublime summit to which God has raised her, sees all the things of earth beneath her feet, and is captivated by no one of them? How ashamed she is of her former attachments! How amazed at her blindness! What lively pity she feels for those whom she recognizes still shrouded in the darkness!... She groans at having ever been sensitive to points of honor, at the illusion that made her ever see as honor what the world calls by that name. Now she sees in this name nothing more than an immense lie of which the world remains a victim. She discovers, in the new light from above, that in genuine honor there is nothing spurious, that to be faithful to this honor is to give our respect to what deserves to be respected really, and to consider as nothing, or as less than nothing, whatsoever perishes and is not agreeable to God.... She laughs when she sees grave persons, persons of orison, caring for points of honor for which she now feels profoundest contempt. It is suitable to the dignity of their rank to act thus, they pretend, and it makes them more useful to others. But she knows that in despising the dignity of their rank for the pure love of God they would do more good in a single day than they would effect in ten years by preserving it.... She laughs at herself that there should ever have been a time in her life when she made any case of money, when she ever desired it.... Oh! if human beings might only agree together to regard it as so much useless mud, what harmony would then reign in the world! With what friendship we would all treat each other if our interest in honor and in money could but disappear from earth! For my own part, I feel as if it would be a remedy for all our ills."(260) Mystical conditions may, therefore, render the soul more energetic in the lines which their inspiration favors. But this could be reckoned an advantage only in case the inspiration were a true one. If the inspiration were erroneous, the energy would be all the more mistaken and misbegotten. So we stand once more before that problem of truth which confronted us at the end of the lectures on saintliness. You will remember that we turned to mysticism precisely to get some light on truth. Do mystical states establish the truth of those theological affections in which the saintly life has its root? In spite of their repudiation of articulate self-description, mystical states in general assert a pretty distinct theoretic drift. It is possible to give the outcome of the majority of them in terms that point in definite philosophical directions. One of these directions is optimism, and the other is monism. We pass into mystical states from out of ordinary consciousness as from a less into a more, as from a smallness into a vastness, and at the same time as from an unrest to a rest. We feel them as reconciling, unifying states. They appeal to the yes-function more than to the no-function in us. In them the unlimited absorbs the limits and peacefully closes the account. Their very denial of every adjective you may propose as applicable to the ultimate truth,--He, the Self, the Atman, is to be described by "No! no!" only, say the Upanishads,(261)--though it seems on the surface to be a no-function, is a denial made on behalf of a deeper yes. Whoso calls the Absolute anything in particular, or says that it is _this_, seems implicitly to shut it off from being _that_--it is as if he lessened it. So we deny the "this," negating the negation which it seems to us to imply, in the interests of the higher affirmative attitude by which we are possessed. The fountain-head of Christian mysticism is Dionysius the Areopagite. He describes the absolute truth by negatives exclusively. "The cause of all things is neither soul nor intellect; nor has it imagination, opinion, or reason, or intelligence; nor is it reason or intelligence; nor is it spoken or thought. It is neither number, nor order, nor magnitude, nor littleness, nor equality, nor inequality, nor similarity, nor dissimilarity. It neither stands, nor moves, nor rests.... It is neither essence, nor eternity, nor time. Even intellectual contact does not belong to it. It is neither science nor truth. It is not even royalty or wisdom; not one; not unity; not divinity or goodness; nor even spirit as we know it," etc., _ad libitum_.(262) But these qualifications are denied by Dionysius, not because the truth falls short of them, but because it so infinitely excels them. It is above them. It is _super_-lucent, _super_-splendent, _super_-essential, _super_-sublime, _super_ everything that can be named. Like Hegel in his logic, mystics journey towards the positive pole of truth only by the "Methode der Absoluten Negativität."(263) Thus come the paradoxical expressions that so abound in mystical writings. As when Eckhart tells of the still desert of the Godhead, "where never was seen difference, neither Father, Son, nor Holy Ghost, where there is no one at home, yet where the spark of the soul is more at peace than in itself."(264) As when Boehme writes of the Primal Love, that "it may fitly be compared to Nothing, for it is deeper than any Thing, and is as nothing with respect to all things, forasmuch as it is not comprehensible by any of them. And because it is nothing respectively, it is therefore free from all things, and is that only good, which a man cannot express or utter what it is, there being nothing to which it may be compared, to express it by."(265) Or as when Angelus Silesius sings:-- "Gott ist ein lauter Nichts, ihn rührt kein Nun noch Hier; Je mehr du nach ihm greiffst, je mehr entwind er dir."(266) To this dialectical use, by the intellect, of negation as a mode of passage towards a higher kind of affirmation, there is correlated the subtlest of moral counterparts in the sphere of the personal will. Since denial of the finite self and its wants, since asceticism of some sort, is found in religious experience to be the only doorway to the larger and more blessed life, this moral mystery intertwines and combines with the intellectual mystery in all mystical writings. "Love," continues Behmen, is Nothing, for "when thou art gone forth wholly from the Creature and from that which is visible, and art become Nothing to all that is Nature and Creature, then thou art in that eternal One, which is God himself, and then thou shalt feel within thee the highest virtue of Love.... The treasure of treasures for the soul is where she goeth out of the Somewhat into that Nothing out of which all things may be made. The soul here saith, _I have nothing_, for I am utterly stripped and naked; _I can do nothing_, for I have no manner of power, but am as water poured out; _I am nothing_, for all that I am is no more than an image of Being, and only God is to me I AM; and so, sitting down in my own Nothingness, I give glory to the eternal Being, and _will nothing_ of myself, that so God may will all in me, being unto me my God and all things."(267) In Paul's language, I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me. Only when I become as nothing can God enter in and no difference between his life and mine remain outstanding.(268) This overcoming of all the usual barriers between the individual and the Absolute is the great mystic achievement. In mystic states we both become one with the Absolute and we become aware of our oneness. This is the everlasting and triumphant mystical tradition, hardly altered by differences of clime or creed. In Hinduism, in Neoplatonism, in Sufism, in Christian mysticism, in Whitmanism, we find the same recurring note, so that there is about mystical utterances an eternal unanimity which ought to make a critic stop and think, and which brings it about that the mystical classics have, as has been said, neither birthday nor native land. Perpetually telling of the unity of man with God, their speech antedates languages, and they do not grow old.(269) "That art Thou!" say the Upanishads, and the Vedantists add: "Not a part, not a mode of That, but identically That, that absolute Spirit of the World." "As pure water poured into pure water remains the same, thus, O Gautama, is the Self of a thinker who knows. Water in water, fire in fire, ether in ether, no one can distinguish them; likewise a man whose mind has entered into the Self."(270) " 'Every man,' says the Sufi Gulshan-Râz, 'whose heart is no longer shaken by any doubt, knows with certainty that there is no being save only One.... In his divine majesty the _me_, the _we_, the _thou_, are not found, for in the One there can be no distinction. Every being who is annulled and entirely separated from himself, hears resound outside of him this voice and this echo: _I am God_: he has an eternal way of existing, and is no longer subject to death.' "(271) In the vision of God, says Plotinus, "what sees is not our reason, but something prior and superior to our reason.... He who thus sees does not properly see, does not distinguish or imagine two things. He changes, he ceases to be himself, preserves nothing of himself. Absorbed in God, he makes but one with him, like a centre of a circle coinciding with another centre."(272) "Here," writes Suso, "the spirit dies, and yet is all alive in the marvels of the Godhead ... and is lost in the stillness of the glorious dazzling obscurity and of the naked simple unity. It is in this modeless _where_ that the highest bliss is to be found."(273) "Ich bin so gross als Gott," sings Angelus Silesius again, "Er ist als ich so klein; Er kann nicht über mich, ich unter ihm nicht sein."(274) In mystical literature such self-contradictory phrases as "dazzling obscurity," "whispering silence," "teeming desert," are continually met with. They prove that not conceptual speech, but music rather, is the element through which we are best spoken to by mystical truth. Many mystical scriptures are indeed little more than musical compositions. "He who would hear the voice of Nada, 'the Soundless Sound,' and comprehend it, he has to learn the nature of Dhâranâ.... When to himself his form appears unreal, as do on waking all the forms he sees in dreams; when he has ceased to hear the many, he may discern the ONE--the inner sound which kills the outer.... For then the soul will hear, and will remember. And then to the inner ear will speak THE VOICE OF THE SILENCE.... And now thy _Self_ is lost in SELF, _thyself_ unto THYSELF, merged in that SELF from which thou first didst radiate.... Behold! thou hast become the Light, thou hast become the Sound, thou art thy Master and thy God. Thou art THYSELF the object of thy search: the VOICE unbroken, that resounds throughout eternities, exempt from change, from sin exempt, the seven sounds in one, the VOICE OF THE SILENCE. _Om tat Sat._"(275) These words, if they do not awaken laughter as you receive them, probably stir chords within you which music and language touch in common. Music gives us ontological messages which non-musical criticism is unable to contradict, though it may laugh at our foolishness in minding them. There is a verge of the mind which these things haunt; and whispers therefrom mingle with the operations of our understanding, even as the waters of the infinite ocean send their waves to break among the pebbles that lie upon our shores. "Here begins the sea that ends not till the world's end. Where we stand, Could we know the next high sea-mark set beyond these waves that gleam, We should know what never man hath known, nor eye of man hath scanned.... Ah, but here man's heart leaps, yearning towards the gloom with venturous glee, From the shore that hath no shore beyond it, set in all the sea."(276) That doctrine, for example, that eternity is timeless, that our "immortality," if we live in the eternal, is not so much future as already now and here, which we find so often expressed to-day in certain philosophic circles, finds its support in a "hear, hear!" or an "amen," which floats up from that mysteriously deeper level.(277) We recognize the passwords to the mystical region as we hear them, but we cannot use them ourselves; it alone has the keeping of "the password primeval."(278) I have now sketched with extreme brevity and insufficiency, but as fairly as I am able in the time allowed, the general traits of the mystic range of consciousness. _It is on the whole pantheistic and optimistic, or at least the opposite of pessimistic. It is anti-naturalistic, and harmonizes best with twice-bornness and so-called other-worldly states of mind._ ------------------------------------- My next task is to inquire whether we can invoke it as authoritative. Does it furnish any _warrant for the truth_ of the twice-bornness and supernaturality and pantheism which it favors? I must give my answer to this question as concisely as I can. In brief my answer is this,--and I will divide it into three parts:-- (1) Mystical states, when well developed, usually are, and have the right to be, absolutely authoritative over the individuals to whom they come. (2) No authority emanates from them which should make it a duty for those who stand outside of them to accept their revelations uncritically. (3) They break down the authority of the non-mystical or rationalistic consciousness, based upon the understanding and the senses alone. They show it to be only one kind of consciousness. They open out the possibility of other orders of truth, in which, so far as anything in us vitally responds to them, we may freely continue to have faith. I will take up these points one by one. 1. As a matter of psychological fact, mystical states of a well-pronounced and emphatic sort _are_ usually authoritative over those who have them.(279) They have been "there," and know. It is vain for rationalism to grumble about this. If the mystical truth that comes to a man proves to be a force that he can live by, what mandate have we of the majority to order him to live in another way? We can throw him into a prison or a madhouse, but we cannot change his mind--we commonly attach it only the more stubbornly to its beliefs.(280) It mocks our utmost efforts, as a matter of fact, and in point of logic it absolutely escapes our jurisdiction. Our own more "rational" beliefs are based on evidence exactly similar in nature to that which mystics quote for theirs. Our senses, namely, have assured us of certain states of fact; but mystical experiences are as direct perceptions of fact for those who have them as any sensations ever were for us. The records show that even though the five senses be in abeyance in them, they are absolutely sensational in their epistemological quality, if I may be pardoned the barbarous expression,--that is, they are face to face presentations of what seems immediately to exist. The mystic is, in short, _invulnerable_, and must be left, whether we relish it or not, in undisturbed enjoyment of his creed. Faith, says Tolstoy, is that by which men live. And faith-state and mystic state are practically convertible terms. 2. But I now proceed to add that mystics have no right to claim that we ought to accept the deliverance of their peculiar experiences, if we are ourselves outsiders and feel no private call thereto. The utmost they can ever ask of us in this life is to admit that they establish a presumption. They form a consensus and have an unequivocal outcome; and it would be odd, mystics might say, if such a unanimous type of experience should prove to be altogether wrong. At bottom, however, this would only be an appeal to numbers, like the appeal of rationalism the other way; and the appeal to numbers has no logical force. If we acknowledge it, it is for "suggestive," not for logical reasons: we follow the majority because to do so suits our life. But even this presumption from the unanimity of mystics is far from being strong. In characterizing mystic states as pantheistic, optimistic, etc., I am afraid I over-simplified the truth. I did so for expository reasons, and to keep the closer to the classic mystical tradition. The classic religious mysticism, it now must be confessed, is only a "privileged case." It is an _extract_, kept true to type by the selection of the fittest specimens and their preservation in "schools." It is carved out from a much larger mass; and if we take the larger mass as seriously as religious mysticism has historically taken itself, we find that the supposed unanimity largely disappears. To begin with, even religious mysticism itself, the kind that accumulates traditions and makes schools, is much less unanimous than I have allowed. It has been both ascetic and antinomianly self-indulgent within the Christian church.(281) It is dualistic in Sankhya, and monistic in Vedanta philosophy. I called it pantheistic; but the great Spanish mystics are anything but pantheists. They are with few exceptions non-metaphysical minds, for whom "the category of personality" is absolute. The "union" of man with God is for them much more like an occasional miracle than like an original identity.(282) How different again, apart from the happiness common to all, is the mysticism of Walt Whitman, Edward Carpenter, Richard Jefferies, and other naturalistic pantheists, from the more distinctively Christian sort.(283) The fact is that the mystical feeling of enlargement, union, and emancipation has no specific intellectual content whatever of its own. It is capable of forming matrimonial alliances with material furnished by the most diverse philosophies and theologies, provided only they can find a place in their framework for its peculiar emotional mood. We have no right, therefore, to invoke its prestige as distinctively in favor of any special belief, such as that in absolute idealism, or in the absolute monistic identity, or in the absolute goodness, of the world. It is only relatively in favor of all these things--it passes out of common human consciousness in the direction in which they lie. So much for religious mysticism proper. But more remains to be told, for religious mysticism is only one half of mysticism. The other half has no accumulated traditions except those which the text-books on insanity supply. Open any one of these, and you will find abundant cases in which "mystical ideas" are cited as characteristic symptoms of enfeebled or deluded states of mind. In delusional insanity, paranoia, as they sometimes call it, we may have a _diabolical_ mysticism, a sort of religious mysticism turned upside down. The same sense of ineffable importance in the smallest events, the same texts and words coming with new meanings, the same voices and visions and leadings and missions, the same controlling by extraneous powers; only this time the emotion is pessimistic: instead of consolations we have desolations; the meanings are dreadful; and the powers are enemies to life. It is evident that from the point of view of their psychological mechanism, the classic mysticism and these lower mysticisms spring from the same mental level, from that great subliminal or transmarginal region of which science is beginning to admit the existence, but of which so little is really known. That region contains every kind of matter: "seraph and snake" abide there side by side. To come from thence is no infallible credential. What comes must be sifted and tested, and run the gauntlet of confrontation with the total context of experience, just like what comes from the outer world of sense. Its value must be ascertained by empirical methods, so long as we are not mystics ourselves. Once more, then, I repeat that non-mystics are under no obligation to acknowledge in mystical states a superior authority conferred on them by their intrinsic nature.(284) 3. Yet, I repeat once more, the existence of mystical states absolutely overthrows the pretension of non-mystical states to be the sole and ultimate dictators of what we may believe. As a rule, mystical states merely add a supersensuous meaning to the ordinary outward data of consciousness. They are excitements like the emotions of love or ambition, gifts to our spirit by means of which facts already objectively before us fall into a new expressiveness and make a new connection with our active life. They do not contradict these facts as such, or deny anything that our senses have immediately seized.(285) It is the rationalistic critic rather who plays the part of denier in the controversy, and his denials have no strength, for there never can be a state of facts to which new meaning may not truthfully be added, provided the mind ascend to a more enveloping point of view. It must always remain an open question whether mystical states may not possibly be such superior points of view, windows through which the mind looks out upon a more extensive and inclusive world. The difference of the views seen from the different mystical windows need not prevent us from entertaining this supposition. The wider world would in that case prove to have a mixed constitution like that of this world, that is all. It would have its celestial and its infernal regions, its tempting and its saving moments, its valid experiences and its counterfeit ones, just as our world has them; but it would be a wider world all the same. We should have to use its experiences by selecting and subordinating and substituting just as is our custom in this ordinary naturalistic world; we should be liable to error just as we are now; yet the counting in of that wider world of meanings, and the serious dealing with it, might, in spite of all the perplexity, be indispensable stages in our approach to the final fullness of the truth. ------------------------------------- In this shape, I think, we have to leave the subject. Mystical states indeed wield no authority due simply to their being mystical states. But the higher ones among them point in directions to which the religious sentiments even of non-mystical men incline. They tell of the supremacy of the ideal, of vastness, of union, of safety, and of rest. They offer us _hypotheses_, hypotheses which we may voluntarily ignore, but which as thinkers we cannot possibly upset. The supernaturalism and optimism to which they would persuade us may, interpreted in one way or another, be after all the truest of insights into the meaning of this life. "Oh, the little more, and how much it is; and the little less, and what worlds away!" It may be that possibility and permission of this sort are all that the religious consciousness requires to live on. In my last lecture I shall have to try to persuade you that this is the case. Meanwhile, however, I am sure that for many of my readers this diet is too slender. If supernaturalism and inner union with the divine are true, you think, then not so much permission, as compulsion to believe, ought to be found. Philosophy has always professed to prove religious truth by coercive argument; and the construction of philosophies of this kind has always been one favorite function of the religious life, if we use this term in the large historic sense. But religious philosophy is an enormous subject, and in my next lecture I can only give that brief glance at it which my limits will allow. LECTURE XVIII. PHILOSOPHY. The subject of Saintliness left us face to face with the question, Is the sense of divine presence a sense of anything objectively true? We turned first to mysticism for an answer, and found that although mysticism is entirely willing to corroborate religion, it is too private (and also too various) in its utterances to be able to claim a universal authority. But philosophy publishes results which claim to be universally valid if they are valid at all, so we now turn with our question to philosophy. Can philosophy stamp a warrant of veracity upon the religious man's sense of the divine? I imagine that many of you at this point begin to indulge in guesses at the goal to which I am tending. I have undermined the authority of mysticism, you say, and the next thing I shall probably do is to seek to discredit that of philosophy. Religion, you expect to hear me conclude, is nothing but an affair of faith, based either on vague sentiment, or on that vivid sense of the reality of things unseen of which in my second lecture and in the lecture on Mysticism I gave so many examples. It is essentially private and individualistic; it always exceeds our powers of formulation; and although attempts to pour its contents into a philosophic mould will probably always go on, men being what they are, yet these attempts are always secondary processes which in no way add to the authority, or warrant the veracity, of the sentiments from which they derive their own stimulus and borrow whatever glow of conviction they may themselves possess. In short, you suspect that I am planning to defend feeling at the expense of reason, to rehabilitate the primitive and unreflective, and to dissuade you from the hope of any Theology worthy of the name. To a certain extent I have to admit that you guess rightly. I do believe that feeling is the deeper source of religion, and that philosophic and theological formulas are secondary products, like translations of a text into another tongue. But all such statements are misleading from their brevity, and it will take the whole hour for me to explain to you exactly what I mean. When I call theological formulas secondary products, I mean that in a world in which no religious feeling had ever existed, I doubt whether any philosophic theology could ever have been framed. I doubt if dispassionate intellectual contemplation of the universe, apart from inner unhappiness and need of deliverance on the one hand and mystical emotion on the other, would ever have resulted in religious philosophies such as we now possess. Men would have begun with animistic explanations of natural fact, and criticised these away into scientific ones, as they actually have done. In the science they would have left a certain amount of "psychical research," even as they now will probably have to re-admit a certain amount. But high-flying speculations like those of either dogmatic or idealistic theology, these they would have had no motive to venture on, feeling no need of commerce with such deities. These speculations must, it seems to me, be classed as over-beliefs, buildings-out performed by the intellect into directions of which feeling originally supplied the hint. But even if religious philosophy had to have its first hint supplied by feeling, may it not have dealt in a superior way with the matter which feeling suggested? Feeling is private and dumb, and unable to give an account of itself. It allows that its results are mysteries and enigmas, declines to justify them rationally, and on occasion is willing that they should even pass for paradoxical and absurd. Philosophy takes just the opposite attitude. Her aspiration is to reclaim from mystery and paradox whatever territory she touches. To find an escape from obscure and wayward personal persuasion to truth objectively valid for all thinking men has ever been the intellect's most cherished ideal. To redeem religion from unwholesome privacy, and to give public status and universal right of way to its deliverances, has been reason's task. I believe that philosophy will always have opportunity to labor at this task.(286) We are thinking beings, and we cannot exclude the intellect from participating in any of our functions. Even in soliloquizing with ourselves, we construe our feelings intellectually. Both our personal ideals and our religious and mystical experiences must be interpreted congruously with the kind of scenery which our thinking mind inhabits. The philosophic climate of our time inevitably forces its own clothing on us. Moreover, we must exchange our feelings with one another, and in doing so we have to speak, and to use general and abstract verbal formulas. Conceptions and constructions are thus a necessary part of our religion; and as moderator amid the clash of hypotheses, and mediator among the criticisms of one man's constructions by another, philosophy will always have much to do. It would be strange if I disputed this, when these very lectures which I am giving are (as you will see more clearly from now onwards) a laborious attempt to extract from the privacies of religious experience some general facts which can be defined in formulas upon which everybody may agree. Religious experience, in other words, spontaneously and inevitably engenders myths, superstitions, dogmas, creeds, and metaphysical theologies, and criticisms of one set of these by the adherents of another. Of late, impartial classifications and comparisons have become possible, alongside of the denunciations and anathemas by which the commerce between creeds used exclusively to be carried on. We have the beginnings of a "Science of Religions," so-called; and if these lectures could ever be accounted a crumb-like contribution to such a science, I should be made very happy. But all these intellectual operations, whether they be constructive or comparative and critical, presuppose immediate experiences as their subject-matter. They are interpretative and inductive operations, operations after the fact, consequent upon religious feeling, not coördinate with it, not independent of what it ascertains. ------------------------------------- The intellectualism in religion which I wish to discredit pretends to be something altogether different from this. It assumes to construct religious objects out of the resources of logical reason alone, or of logical reason drawing rigorous inference from non-subjective facts. It calls its conclusions dogmatic theology, or philosophy of the absolute, as the case may be; it does not call them science of religions. It reaches them in an a priori way, and warrants their veracity. Warranted systems have ever been the idols of aspiring souls. All- inclusive, yet simple; noble, clean, luminous, stable, rigorous, true;--what more ideal refuge could there be than such a system would offer to spirits vexed by the muddiness and accidentality of the world of sensible things? Accordingly, we find inculcated in the theological schools of to-day, almost as much as in those of the fore-time, a disdain for merely possible or probable truth, and of results that only private assurance can grasp. Scholastics and idealists both express this disdain. Principal John Caird, for example, writes as follows in his Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion:-- "Religion must indeed be a thing of the heart; but in order to elevate it from the region of subjective caprice and waywardness, and to distinguish between that which is true and false in religion, we must appeal to an objective standard. That which enters the heart must first be discerned by the intelligence to be _true_. It must be seen as having in its own nature a _right_ to dominate feeling, and as constituting the principle by which feeling must be judged.(287) In estimating the religious character of individuals, nations, or races, the first question is, not how they feel, but what they think and believe--not whether their religion is one which manifests itself in emotions, more or less vehement and enthusiastic, but what are the _conceptions_ of God and divine things by which these emotions are called forth. Feeling is necessary in religion, but it is by the _content_ or intelligent basis of a religion, and not by feeling, that its character and worth are to be determined."(288) Cardinal Newman, in his work, The Idea of a University, gives more emphatic expression still to this disdain for sentiment.(289) Theology, he says, is a science in the strictest sense of the word. I will tell you, he says, what it is not--not "physical evidences" for God, not "natural religion," for these are but vague subjective interpretations:-- "If," he continues, "the Supreme Being is powerful or skillful, just so far as the telescope shows power, or the microscope shows skill, if his moral law is to be ascertained simply by the physical processes of the animal frame, or his will gathered from the immediate issues of human affairs, if his Essence is just as high and deep and broad as the universe and no more; if this be the fact, then will I confess that there is no specific science about God, that theology is but a name, and a protest in its behalf an hypocrisy. Then, pious as it is to think of Him, while the pageant of experiment or abstract reasoning passes by, still such piety is nothing more than a poetry of thought, or an ornament of language, a certain view taken of Nature which one man has and another has not, which gifted minds strike out, which others see to be admirable and ingenious, and which all would be the better for adopting. It is but the theology of Nature, just as we talk of the _philosophy_ or the _romance_ of history, or the _poetry_ of childhood, or the picturesque or the sentimental or the humorous, or any other abstract quality which the genius or the caprice of the individual, or the fashion of the day, or the consent of the world, recognizes in any set of objects which are subjected to its contemplation. I do not see much difference between avowing that there is no God, and implying that nothing definite can be known for certain about Him." What I mean by Theology, continues Newman, is none of these things: "I simply mean the _Science of God_, or the truths we know about God, put into a system, just as we have a science of the stars and call it astronomy, or of the crust of the earth and call it geology." In both these extracts we have the issue clearly set before us: Feeling valid only for the individual is pitted against reason valid universally. The test is a perfectly plain one of fact. Theology based on pure reason must in point of fact convince men universally. If it did not, wherein would its superiority consist? If it only formed sects and schools, even as sentiment and mysticism form them, how would it fulfill its programme of freeing us from personal caprice and waywardness? This perfectly definite practical test of the pretensions of philosophy to found religion on universal reason simplifies my procedure to-day. I need not discredit philosophy by laborious criticism of its arguments. It will suffice if I show that as a matter of history it fails to prove its pretension to be "objectively" convincing. In fact, philosophy does so fail. It does not banish differences; it founds schools and sects just as feeling does. I believe, in fact, that the logical reason of man operates in this field of divinity exactly as it has always operated in love, or in patriotism, or in politics, or in any other of the wider affairs of life, in which our passions or our mystical intuitions fix our beliefs beforehand. It finds arguments for our conviction, for indeed it _has_ to find them. It amplifies and defines our faith, and dignifies it and lends it words and plausibility. It hardly ever engenders it; it cannot now secure it.(290) ------------------------------------- Lend me your attention while I run through some of the points of the older systematic theology. You find them in both Protestant and Catholic manuals, best of all in the innumerable text-books published since Pope Leo's Encyclical recommending the study of Saint Thomas. I glance first at the arguments by which dogmatic theology establishes God's existence, after that at those by which it establishes his nature.(291) The arguments for God's existence have stood for hundreds of years with the waves of unbelieving criticism breaking against them, never totally discrediting them in the ears of the faithful, but on the whole slowly and surely washing out the mortar from between their joints. If you have a God already whom you believe in, these arguments confirm you. If you are atheistic, they fail to set you right. The proofs are various. The "cosmological" one, so-called, reasons from the contingence of the world to a First Cause which must contain whatever perfections the world itself contains. The "argument from design" reasons, from the fact that Nature's laws are mathematical, and her parts benevolently adapted to each other, that this cause is both intellectual and benevolent. The "moral argument" is that the moral law presupposes a lawgiver. The "argument _ex consensu gentium_" is that the belief in God is so widespread as to be grounded in the rational nature of man, and should therefore carry authority with it. As I just said, I will not discuss these arguments technically. The bare fact that all idealists since Kant have felt entitled either to scout or to neglect them shows that they are not solid enough to serve as religion's all-sufficient foundation. Absolutely impersonal reasons would be in duty bound to show more general convincingness. Causation is indeed too obscure a principle to bear the weight of the whole structure of theology. As for the argument from design, see how Darwinian ideas have revolutionized it. Conceived as we now conceive them, as so many fortunate escapes from almost limitless processes of destruction, the benevolent adaptations which we find in Nature suggest a deity very different from the one who figured in the earlier versions of the argument.(292) The fact is that these arguments do but follow the combined suggestions of the facts and of our feeling. They prove nothing rigorously. They only corroborate our pre-existent partialities. ------------------------------------- If philosophy can do so little to establish God's existence, how stands it with her efforts to define his attributes? It is worth while to look at the attempts of systematic theology in this direction. Since God is First Cause, this science of sciences says, he differs from all his creatures in possessing existence _a se_. From this "a-se-ity" on God's part, theology deduces by mere logic most of his other perfections. For instance, he must be both _necessary_ and _absolute_, cannot not be, and cannot in any way be determined by anything else. This makes Him absolutely unlimited from without, and unlimited also from within; for limitation is non-being; and God is being itself. This unlimitedness makes God infinitely perfect. Moreover, God is _One_, and _Only_, for the infinitely perfect can admit no peer. He is _Spiritual_, for were He composed of physical parts, some other power would have to combine them into the total, and his aseity would thus be contradicted. He is therefore both simple and non-physical in nature. He is _simple metaphysically_ also, that is to say, his nature and his existence cannot be distinct, as they are in finite substances which share their formal natures with one another, and are individual only in their material aspect. Since God is one and only, his _essentia_ and his _esse_ must be given at one stroke. This excludes from his being all those distinctions, so familiar in the world of finite things, between potentiality and actuality, substance and accidents, being and activity, existence and attributes. We can talk, it is true, of God's powers, acts, and attributes, but these discriminations are only "virtual," and made from the human point of view. In God all these points of view fall into an absolute identity of being. This absence of all potentiality in God obliges Him to be _immutable_. He is actuality, through and through. Were there anything potential about Him, He would either lose or gain by its actualization, and either loss or gain would contradict his perfection. He cannot, therefore, change. Furthermore, He is _immense_, _boundless_; for could He be outlined in space, He would be composite, and this would contradict his indivisibility. He is therefore _omnipresent_, indivisibly there, at every point of space. He is similarly wholly present at every point of time,--in other words _eternal_. For if He began in time, He would need a prior cause, and that would contradict his aseity. If He ended, it would contradict his necessity. If He went through any succession, it would contradict his immutability. He has _intelligence_ and _will_ and every other creature- perfection, for _we_ have them, and _effectus nequit superare causam_. In Him, however, they are absolutely and eternally in act, and their _object_, since God can be bounded by naught that is external, can primarily be nothing else than God himself. He knows himself, then, in one eternal indivisible act, and wills himself with an infinite self-pleasure.(293) Since He must of logical necessity thus love and will himself, He cannot be called "free" _ad intra_, with the freedom of contrarieties that characterizes finite creatures. _Ad extra_, however, or with respect to his creation, God is free. He cannot _need_ to create, being perfect in being and in happiness already. He _wills_ to create, then, by an absolute freedom. Being thus a substance endowed with intellect and will and freedom, God is a _person_; and a _living_ person also, for He is both object and subject of his own activity, and to be this distinguishes the living from the lifeless. He is thus absolutely _self-sufficient_: his _self-knowledge_ and _self-love_ are both of them infinite and adequate, and need no extraneous conditions to perfect them. He is _omniscient_, for in knowing himself as Cause He knows all creature things and events by implication. His knowledge is _previsive_, for He is present to all time. Even our free acts are known beforehand to Him, for otherwise his wisdom would admit of successive moments of enrichment, and this would contradict his immutability. He is _omnipotent_ for everything that does not involve logical contradiction. He can make _being_--in other words his power includes _creation_. If what He creates were made of his own substance, it would have to be infinite in essence, as that substance is; but it is finite; so it must be non-divine in substance. If it were made of a substance, an eternally existing matter, for example, which God found there to his hand, and to which He simply gave its form, that would contradict God's definition as First Cause, and make Him a mere mover of something caused already. The things he creates, then, He creates _ex nihilo_, and gives them absolute being as so many finite substances additional to himself. The forms which he imprints upon them have their prototypes in his ideas. But as in God there is no such thing as multiplicity, and as these ideas for us are manifold, we must distinguish the ideas as they are in God and the way in which our minds externally imitate them. We must attribute them to Him only in a _terminative_ sense, as differing aspects, from the finite point of view, of his unique essence. God of course is holy, good, and just. He can do no evil, for He is positive being's fullness, and evil is negation. It is true that He has created physical evil in places, but only as a means of wider good, for _bonum totius præeminet bonum partis_. Moral evil He cannot will, either as end or means, for that would contradict his holiness. By creating free beings He _permits_ it only, neither his justice nor his goodness obliging Him to prevent the recipients of freedom from misusing the gift. As regards God's purpose in creating, primarily it can only have been to exercise his absolute freedom by the manifestation to others of his glory. From this it follows that the others must be rational beings, capable in the first place of knowledge, love, and honor, and in the second place of happiness, for the knowledge and love of God is the mainspring of felicity. In so far forth one may say that God's secondary purpose in creating is _love_. I will not weary you by pursuing these metaphysical determinations farther, into the mysteries of God's Trinity, for example. What I have given will serve as a specimen of the orthodox philosophical theology of both Catholics and Protestants. Newman, filled with enthusiasm at God's list of perfections, continues the passage which I began to quote to you by a couple of pages of a rhetoric so magnificent that I can hardly refrain from adding them, in spite of the inroad they would make upon our time.(294) He first enumerates God's attributes sonorously, then celebrates his ownership of everything in earth and Heaven, and the dependence of all that happens upon his permissive will. He gives us scholastic philosophy "touched with emotion," and every philosophy should be touched with emotion to be rightly understood. Emotionally, then, dogmatic theology is worth something to minds of the type of Newman's. It will aid us to estimate what it is worth intellectually, if at this point I make a short digression. ------------------------------------- What God hath joined together, let no man put asunder. The Continental schools of philosophy have too often overlooked the fact that man's thinking is organically connected with his conduct. It seems to me to be the chief glory of English and Scottish thinkers to have kept the organic connection in view. The guiding principle of British philosophy has in fact been that every difference must _make_ a difference, every theoretical difference somewhere issue in a practical difference, and that the best method of discussing points of theory is to begin by ascertaining what practical difference would result from one alternative or the other being true. What is the particular truth in question _known as_? In what facts does it result? What is its cash-value in terms of particular experience? This is the characteristic English way of taking up a question. In this way, you remember, Locke takes up the question of personal identity. What you mean by it is just your chain of particular memories, says he. That is the only concretely verifiable part of its significance. All further ideas about it, such as the oneness or manyness of the spiritual substance on which it is based, are therefore void of intelligible meaning; and propositions touching such ideas may be indifferently affirmed or denied. So Berkeley with his "matter." The cash- value of matter is our physical sensations. That is what it is known as, all that we concretely verify of its conception. That, therefore, is the whole meaning of the term "matter"--any other pretended meaning is mere wind of words. Hume does the same thing with causation. It is known as habitual antecedence, and as tendency on our part to look for something definite to come. Apart from this practical meaning it has no significance whatever, and books about it may be committed to the flames, says Hume. Dugald Stewart and Thomas Brown, James Mill, John Mill, and Professor Bain, have followed more or less consistently the same method; and Shadworth Hodgson has used the principle with full explicitness. When all is said and done, it was English and Scotch writers, and not Kant, who introduced "the critical method" into philosophy, the one method fitted to make philosophy a study worthy of serious men. For what seriousness can possibly remain in debating philosophic propositions that will never make an appreciable difference to us in action? And what could it matter, if all propositions were practically indifferent, which of them we should agree to call true or which false? An American philosopher of eminent originality, Mr. Charles Sanders Peirce, has rendered thought a service by disentangling from the particulars of its application the principle by which these men were instinctively guided, and by singling it out as fundamental and giving to it a Greek name. He calls it the principle of _pragmatism_, and he defends it somewhat as follows:(295)-- Thought in movement has for its only conceivable motive the attainment of belief, or thought at rest. Only when our thought about a subject has found its rest in belief can our action on the subject firmly and safely begin. Beliefs, in short, are rules for action; and the whole function of thinking is but one step in the production of active habits. If there were any part of a thought that made no difference in the thought's practical consequences, then that part would be no proper element of the thought's significance. To develop a thought's meaning we need therefore only determine what conduct it is fitted to produce; that conduct is for us its sole significance; and the tangible fact at the root of all our thought- distinctions is that there is no one of them so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practice. To attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object, we need then only consider what sensations, immediate or remote, we are conceivably to expect from it, and what conduct we must prepare in case the object should be true. Our conception of these practical consequences is for us the whole of our conception of the object, so far as that conception has positive significance at all. This is the principle of Peirce, the principle of pragmatism. Such a principle will help us on this occasion to decide, among the various attributes set down in the scholastic inventory of God's perfections, whether some be not far less significant than others. If, namely, we apply the principle of pragmatism to God's metaphysical attributes, strictly so called, as distinguished from his moral attributes, I think that, even were we forced by a coercive logic to believe them, we still should have to confess them to be destitute of all intelligible significance. Take God's aseity, for example; or his necessariness; his immateriality; his "simplicity" or superiority to the kind of inner variety and succession which we find in finite beings, his indivisibility, and lack of the inner distinctions of being and activity, substance and accident, potentiality and actuality, and the rest; his repudiation of inclusion in a genus; his actualized infinity; his "personality," apart from the moral qualities which it may comport; his relations to evil being permissive and not positive; his self-sufficiency, self-love, and absolute felicity in himself:--candidly speaking, how do such qualities as these make any definite connection with our life? And if they severally call for no distinctive adaptations of our conduct, what vital difference can it possibly make to a man's religion whether they be true or false? For my own part, although I dislike to say aught that may grate upon tender associations, I must frankly confess that even though these attributes were faultlessly deduced, I cannot conceive of its being of the smallest consequence to us religiously that any one of them should be true. Pray, what specific act can I perform in order to adapt myself the better to God's simplicity? Or how does it assist me to plan my behavior, to know that his happiness is anyhow absolutely complete? In the middle of the century just past, Mayne Reid was the great writer of books of out-of- door adventure. He was forever extolling the hunters and field-observers of living animals' habits, and keeping up a fire of invective against the "closet-naturalists," as he called them, the collectors and classifiers, and handlers of skeletons and skins. When I was a boy, I used to think that a closet-naturalist must be the vilest type of wretch under the sun. But surely the systematic theologians are the closet-naturalists of the deity, even in Captain Mayne Reid's sense. What is their deduction of metaphysical attributes but a shuffling and matching of pedantic dictionary-adjectives, aloof from morals, aloof from human needs, something that might be worked out from the mere word "God" by one of those logical machines of wood and brass which recent ingenuity has contrived as well as by a man of flesh and blood. They have the trail of the serpent over them. One feels that in the theologians' hands, they are only a set of titles obtained by a mechanical manipulation of synonyms; verbality has stepped into the place of vision, professionalism into that of life. Instead of bread we have a stone; instead of a fish, a serpent. Did such a conglomeration of abstract terms give really the gist of our knowledge of the deity, schools of theology might indeed continue to flourish, but religion, vital religion, would have taken its flight from this world. What keeps religion going is something else than abstract definitions and systems of concatenated adjectives, and something different from faculties of theology and their professors. All these things are after-effects, secondary accretions upon those phenomena of vital conversation with the unseen divine, of which I have shown you so many instances, renewing themselves _in sæcula sæculorum_ in the lives of humble private men. So much for the metaphysical attributes of God! From the point of view of practical religion, the metaphysical monster which they offer to our worship is an absolutely worthless invention of the scholarly mind. ------------------------------------- What shall we now say of the attributes called moral? Pragmatically, they stand on an entirely different footing. They positively determine fear and hope and expectation, and are foundations for the saintly life. It needs but a glance at them to show how great is their significance. God's holiness, for example: being holy, God can will nothing but the good. Being omnipotent, he can secure its triumph. Being omniscient, he can see us in the dark. Being just, he can punish us for what he sees. Being loving, he can pardon too. Being unalterable, we can count on him securely. These qualities enter into connection with our life, it is highly important that we should be informed concerning them. That God's purpose in creation should be the manifestation of his glory is also an attribute which has definite relations to our practical life. Among other things it has given a definite character to worship in all Christian countries. If dogmatic theology really does prove beyond dispute that a God with characters like these exists, she may well claim to give a solid basis to religious sentiment. But verily, how stands it with her arguments? It stands with them as ill as with the arguments for his existence. Not only do post-Kantian idealists reject them root and branch, but it is a plain historic fact that they never have converted any one who has found in the moral complexion of the world, as he experienced it, reasons for doubting that a good God can have framed it. To prove God's goodness by the scholastic argument that there is no non-being in his essence would sound to such a witness simply silly. No! the book of Job went over this whole matter once for all and definitively. Ratiocination is a relatively superficial and unreal path to the deity: "I will lay mine hand upon my mouth; I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth Thee." An intellect perplexed and baffled, yet a trustful sense of presence--such is the situation of the man who is sincere with himself and with the facts, but who remains religious still.(296) We must therefore, I think, bid a definitive good-by to dogmatic theology. In all sincerity our faith must do without that warrant. Modern idealism, I repeat, has said good-by to this theology forever. Can modern idealism give faith a better warrant, or must she still rely on her poor self for witness? ------------------------------------- The basis of modern idealism is Kant's doctrine of the Transcendental Ego of Apperception. By this formidable term Kant merely meant the fact that the consciousness "I think them" must (potentially or actually) accompany all our objects. Former skeptics had said as much, but the "I" in question had remained for them identified with the personal individual. Kant abstracted and depersonalized it, and made it the most universal of all his categories, although for Kant himself the Transcendental Ego had no theological implications. It was reserved for his successors to convert Kant's notion of _Bewusstsein überhaupt_, or abstract consciousness, into an infinite concrete self-consciousness which is the soul of the world, and in which our sundry personal self-consciousnesses have their being. It would lead me into technicalities to show you even briefly how this transformation was in point of fact effected. Suffice it to say that in the Hegelian school, which to-day so deeply influences both British and American thinking, two principles have borne the brunt of the operation. The first of these principles is that the old logic of identity never gives us more than a post-mortem dissection of _disjecta membra_, and that the fullness of life can be construed to thought only by recognizing that every object which our thought may propose to itself involves the notion of some other object which seems at first to negate the first one. The second principle is that to be conscious of a negation is already virtually to be beyond it. The mere asking of a question or expression of a dissatisfaction proves that the answer or the satisfaction is already imminent; the finite, realized as such, is already the infinite _in posse_. Applying these principles, we seem to get a propulsive force into our logic which the ordinary logic of a bare, stark self-identity in each thing never attains to. The objects of our thought now _act_ within our thought, act as objects act when given in experience. They change and develop. They introduce something other than themselves along with them; and this other, at first only ideal or potential, presently proves itself also to be actual. It supersedes the thing at first supposed, and both verifies and corrects it, in developing the fullness of its meaning. The program is excellent; the universe _is_ a place where things are followed by other things that both correct and fulfill them; and a logic which gave us something like this movement of fact would express truth far better than the traditional school-logic, which never gets of its own accord from anything to anything else, and registers only predictions and subsumptions, or static resemblances and differences. Nothing could be more unlike the methods of dogmatic theology than those of this new logic. Let me quote in illustration some passages from the Scottish transcendentalist whom I have already named. "How are we to conceive," Principal Caird writes, "of the reality in which all intelligence rests?" He replies: "Two things may without difficulty be proved, viz., that this reality is an absolute Spirit, and conversely that it is only in communion with this absolute Spirit or Intelligence that the finite Spirit can realize itself. It is absolute; for the faintest movement of human intelligence would be arrested, if it did not presuppose the absolute reality of intelligence, of thought itself. Doubt or denial themselves presuppose and indirectly affirm it. When I pronounce anything to be true, I pronounce it, indeed, to be relative to thought, but not to be relative to my thought, or to the thought of any other individual mind. From the existence of all individual minds as such I can abstract; I can think them away. But that which I cannot think away is thought or self- consciousness itself, in its independence and absoluteness, or, in other words, an Absolute Thought or Self-Consciousness." Here, you see, Principal Caird makes the transition which Kant did not make: he converts the omnipresence of consciousness in general as a condition of "truth" being anywhere possible, into an omnipresent universal consciousness, which he identifies with God in his concreteness. He next proceeds to use the principle that to acknowledge your limits is in essence to be beyond them; and makes the transition to the religious experience of individuals in the following words:-- "If [Man] were only a creature of transient sensations and impulses, of an ever coming and going succession of intuitions, fancies, feelings, then nothing could ever have for him the character of objective truth or reality. But it is the prerogative of man's spiritual nature that he can yield himself up to a thought and will that are infinitely larger than his own. As a thinking, self-conscious being, indeed, he may be said, by his very nature, to live in the atmosphere of the Universal Life. As a thinking being, it is possible for me to suppress and quell in my consciousness every movement of self-assertion, every notion and opinion that is merely mine, every desire that belongs to me as this particular Self, and to become the pure medium of a thought that is universal--in one word, to live no more my own life, but let my consciousness be possessed and suffused by the Infinite and Eternal life of spirit. And yet it is just in this renunciation of self that I truly gain myself, or realize the highest possibilities of my own nature. For whilst in one sense we give up self to live the universal and absolute life of reason, yet that to which we thus surrender ourselves is in reality our truer self. The life of absolute reason is not a life that is foreign to us." Nevertheless, Principal Caird goes on to say, so far as we are able outwardly to realize this doctrine, the balm it offers remains incomplete. Whatever we may be _in posse_, the very best of us _in actu_ falls very short of being absolutely divine. Social morality, love, and self- sacrifice even, merge our Self only in some other finite self or selves. They do not quite identify it with the Infinite. Man's ideal destiny, infinite in abstract logic, might thus seem in practice forever unrealizable. "Is there, then," our author continues, "no solution of the contradiction between the ideal and the actual? We answer, There is such a solution, but in order to reach it we are carried beyond the sphere of morality into that of religion. It may be said to be the essential characteristic of religion as contrasted with morality, that it changes aspiration into fruition, anticipation into realization; that instead of leaving man in the interminable pursuit of a vanishing ideal, it makes him the actual partaker of a divine or infinite life. Whether we view religion from the human side or the divine--as the surrender of the soul to God, or as the life of God in the soul--in either aspect it is of its very essence that the Infinite has ceased to be a far-off vision, and has become a present reality. The very first pulsation of the spiritual life, when we rightly apprehend its significance, is the indication that the division between the Spirit and its object has vanished, that the ideal has become real, that the finite has reached its goal and become suffused with the presence and life of the Infinite. "Oneness of mind and will with the divine mind and will is not the future hope and aim of religion, but its very beginning and birth in the soul. To enter on the religious life is to terminate the struggle. In that act which constitutes the beginning of the religious life--call it faith, or trust, or self-surrender, or by whatever name you will--there is involved the identification of the finite with a life which is eternally realized. It is true indeed that the religious life is progressive; but understood in the light of the foregoing idea, religious progress is not progress _towards_, but _within_ the sphere of the Infinite. It is not the vain attempt by endless finite additions or increments to become possessed of infinite wealth, but it is the endeavor, by the constant exercise of spiritual activity, to appropriate that infinite inheritance of which we are already in possession. The whole future of the religious life is given in its beginning, but it is given implicitly. The position of the man who has entered on the religious life is that evil, error, imperfection, do not really belong to him: they are excrescences which have no organic relation to his true nature: they are already virtually, as they will be actually, suppressed and annulled, and in the very process of being annulled they become the means of spiritual progress. Though he is not exempt from temptation and conflict, [yet] in that inner sphere in which his true life lies, the struggle is over, the victory already achieved. It is not a finite but an infinite life which the spirit lives. Every pulse-beat of its [existence] is the expression and realization of the life of God."(297) You will readily admit that no description of the phenomena of the religious consciousness could be better than these words of your lamented preacher and philosopher. They reproduce the very rapture of those crises of conversion of which we have been hearing; they utter what the mystic felt but was unable to communicate; and the saint, in hearing them, recognizes his own experience. It is indeed gratifying to find the content of religion reported so unanimously. But when all is said and done, has Principal Caird--and I only use him as an example of that whole mode of thinking--transcended the sphere of feeling and of the direct experience of the individual, and laid the foundations of religion in impartial reason? Has he made religion universal by coercive reasoning, transformed it from a private faith into a public certainty? Has he rescued its affirmations from obscurity and mystery? I believe that he has done nothing of the kind, but that he has simply reaffirmed the individual's experiences in a more generalized vocabulary. And again, I can be excused from proving technically that the transcendentalist reasonings fail to make religion universal, for I can point to the plain fact that a majority of scholars, even religiously disposed ones, stubbornly refuse to treat them as convincing. The whole of Germany, one may say, has positively rejected the Hegelian argumentation. As for Scotland, I need only mention Professor Fraser's and Professor Pringle-Pattison's memorable criticisms, with which so many of you are familiar.(298) Once more, I ask, if transcendental idealism were as objectively and absolutely rational as it pretends to be, could it possibly fail so egregiously to be persuasive? What religion reports, you must remember, always purports to be a fact of experience: the divine is actually present, religion says, and between it and ourselves relations of give and take are actual. If definite perceptions of fact like this cannot stand upon their own feet, surely abstract reasoning cannot give them the support they are in need of. Conceptual processes can class facts, define them, interpret them; but they do not produce them, nor can they reproduce their individuality. There is always a _plus_, a _thisness_, which feeling alone can answer for. Philosophy in this sphere is thus a secondary function, unable to warrant faith's veracity, and so I revert to the thesis which I announced at the beginning of this lecture. In all sad sincerity I think we must conclude that the attempt to demonstrate by purely intellectual processes the truth of the deliverances of direct religious experience is absolutely hopeless. ------------------------------------- It would be unfair to philosophy, however, to leave her under this negative sentence. Let me close, then, by briefly enumerating what she _can_ do for religion. If she will abandon metaphysics and deduction for criticism and induction, and frankly transform herself from theology into science of religions, she can make herself enormously useful. The spontaneous intellect of man always defines the divine which it feels in ways that harmonize with its temporary intellectual prepossessions. Philosophy can by comparison eliminate the local and the accidental from these definitions. Both from dogma and from worship she can remove historic incrustations. By confronting the spontaneous religious constructions with the results of natural science, philosophy can also eliminate doctrines that are now known to be scientifically absurd or incongruous. Sifting out in this way unworthy formulations, she can leave a residuum of conceptions that at least are possible. With these she can deal as _hypotheses_, testing them in all the manners, whether negative or positive, by which hypotheses are ever tested. She can reduce their number, as some are found more open to objection. She can perhaps become the champion of one which she picks out as being the most closely verified or verifiable. She can refine upon the definition of this hypothesis, distinguishing between what is innocent over-belief and symbolism in the expression of it, and what is to be literally taken. As a result, she can offer mediation between different believers, and help to bring about consensus of opinion. She can do this the more successfully, the better she discriminates the common and essential from the individual and local elements of the religious beliefs which she compares. I do not see why a critical Science of Religions of this sort might not eventually command as general a public adhesion as is commanded by a physical science. Even the personally non-religious might accept its conclusions on trust, much as blind persons now accept the facts of optics--it might appear as foolish to refuse them. Yet as the science of optics has to be fed in the first instance, and continually verified later, by facts experienced by seeing persons; so the science of religions would depend for its original material on facts of personal experience, and would have to square itself with personal experience through all its critical reconstructions. It could never get away from concrete life, or work in a conceptual vacuum. It would forever have to confess, as every science confesses, that the subtlety of nature flies beyond it, and that its formulas are but approximations. Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation. There is in the living act of perception always something that glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes too late. No one knows this as well as the philosopher. He must fire his volley of new vocables out of his conceptual shotgun, for his profession condemns him to this industry, but he secretly knows the hollowness and irrelevancy. His formulas are like stereoscopic or kinetoscopic photographs seen outside the instrument; they lack the depth, the motion, the vitality. In the religious sphere, in particular, belief that formulas are true can never wholly take the place of personal experience. In my next lecture I will try to complete my rough description of religious experience; and in the lecture after that, which is the last one, I will try my own hand at formulating conceptually the truth to which it is a witness. LECTURE XIX. OTHER CHARACTERISTICS. We have wound our way back, after our excursion through mysticism and philosophy, to where we were before: the uses of religion, its uses to the individual who has it, and the uses of the individual himself to the world, are the best arguments that truth is in it. We return to the empirical philosophy: the true is what works well, even though the qualification "on the whole" may always have to be added. In this lecture we must revert to description again, and finish our picture of the religious consciousness by a word about some of its other characteristic elements. Then, in a final lecture, we shall be free to make a general review and draw our independent conclusions. The first point I will speak of is the part which the æsthetic life plays in determining one's choice of a religion. Men, I said awhile ago, involuntarily intellectualize their religious experience. They need formulas, just as they need fellowship in worship. I spoke, therefore, too contemptuously of the pragmatic uselessness of the famous scholastic list of attributes of the deity, for they have one use which I neglected to consider. The eloquent passage in which Newman enumerates them(299) puts us on the track of it. Intoning them as he would intone a cathedral service, he shows how high is their æsthetic value. It enriches our bare piety to carry these exalted and mysterious verbal additions just as it enriches a church to have an organ and old brasses, marbles and frescoes and stained windows. Epithets lend an atmosphere and overtones to our devotion. They are like a hymn of praise and service of glory, and may sound the more sublime for being incomprehensible. Minds like Newman's(300) grow as jealous of their credit as heathen priests are of that of the jewelry and ornaments that blaze upon their idols. Among the buildings-out of religion which the mind spontaneously indulges in, the æsthetic motive must never be forgotten. I promised to say nothing of ecclesiastical systems in these lectures. I may be allowed, however, to put in a word at this point on the way in which their satisfaction of certain æsthetic needs contributes to their hold on human nature. Although some persons aim most at intellectual purity and simplification, for others _richness_ is the supreme imaginative requirement.(301) When one's mind is strongly of this type, an individual religion will hardly serve the purpose. The inner need is rather of something institutional and complex, majestic in the hierarchic interrelatedness of its parts, with authority descending from stage to stage, and at every stage objects for adjectives of mystery and splendor, derived in the last resort from the Godhead who is the fountain and culmination of the system. One feels then as if in presence of some vast incrusted work of jewelry or architecture; one hears the multitudinous liturgical appeal; one gets the honorific vibration coming from every quarter. Compared with such a noble complexity, in which ascending and descending movements seem in no way to jar upon stability, in which no single item, however humble, is insignificant, because so many august institutions hold it in its place, how flat does evangelical Protestantism appear, how bare the atmosphere of those isolated religious lives whose boast it is that "man in the bush with God may meet."(302) What a pulverization and leveling of what a gloriously piled-up structure! To an imagination used to the perspectives of dignity and glory, the naked gospel scheme seems to offer an almshouse for a palace. It is much like the patriotic sentiment of those brought up in ancient empires. How many emotions must be frustrated of their object, when one gives up the titles of dignity, the crimson lights and blare of brass, the gold embroidery, the plumed troops, the fear and trembling, and puts up with a president in a black coat who shakes hands with you, and comes, it may be, from a "home" upon a veldt or prairie with one sitting-room and a Bible on its centre-table. It pauperizes the monarchical imagination! The strength of these æsthetic sentiments makes it rigorously impossible, it seems to me, that Protestantism, however superior in spiritual profundity it may be to Catholicism, should at the present day succeed in making many converts from the more venerable ecclesiasticism. The latter offers a so much richer pasturage and shade to the fancy, has so many cells with so many different kinds of honey, is so indulgent in its multiform appeals to human nature, that Protestantism will always show to Catholic eyes the almshouse physiognomy. The bitter negativity of it is to the Catholic mind incomprehensible. To intellectual Catholics many of the antiquated beliefs and practices to which the Church gives countenance are, if taken literally, as childish as they are to Protestants. But they are childish in the pleasing sense of "childlike"--innocent and amiable, and worthy to be smiled on in consideration of the undeveloped condition of the dear people's intellects. To the Protestant, on the contrary, they are childish in the sense of being idiotic falsehoods. He must stamp out their delicate and lovable redundancy, leaving the Catholic to shudder at his literalness. He appears to the latter as morose as if he were some hard-eyed, numb, monotonous kind of reptile. The two will never understand each other--their centres of emotional energy are too different. Rigorous truth and human nature's intricacies are always in need of a mutual interpreter.(303) So much for the æsthetic diversities in the religious consciousness. In most books on religion, three things are represented as its most essential elements. These are Sacrifice, Confession, and Prayer. I must say a word in turn of each of these elements, though briefly. First of Sacrifice. Sacrifices to gods are omnipresent in primeval worship; but, as cults have grown refined, burnt offerings and the blood of he-goats have been superseded by sacrifices more spiritual in their nature. Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism get along without ritual sacrifice; so does Christianity, save in so far as the notion is preserved in transfigured form in the mystery of Christ's atonement. These religions substitute offerings of the heart, renunciations of the inner self, for all those vain oblations. In the ascetic practices which Islam, Buddhism, and the older Christianity encourage we see how indestructible is the idea that sacrifice of some sort is a religious exercise. In lecturing on asceticism I spoke of its significance as symbolic of the sacrifices which life, whenever it is taken strenuously, calls for.(304) But, as I said my say about those, and as these lectures expressly avoid earlier religious usages and questions of derivation, I will pass from the subject of Sacrifice altogether and turn to that of Confession. ------------------------------------- In regard to Confession I will also be most brief, saying my word about it psychologically, not historically. Not nearly as widespread as sacrifice, it corresponds to a more inward and moral stage of sentiment. It is part of the general system of purgation and cleansing which one feels one's self in need of, in order to be in right relations to one's deity. For him who confesses, shams are over and realities have begun; he has exteriorized his rottenness. If he has not actually got rid of it, he at least no longer smears it over with a hypocritical show of virtue--he lives at least upon a basis of veracity. The complete decay of the practice of confession in Anglo-Saxon communities is a little hard to account for. Reaction against popery is of course the historic explanation, for in popery confession went with penances and absolution, and other inadmissible practices. But on the side of the sinner himself it seems as if the need ought to have been too great to accept so summary a refusal of its satisfaction. One would think that in more men the shell of secrecy would have had to open, the pent-in abscess to burst and gain relief, even though the ear that heard the confession were unworthy. The Catholic church, for obvious utilitarian reasons, has substituted auricular confession to one priest for the more radical act of public confession. We English-speaking Protestants, in the general self-reliance and unsociability of our nature, seem to find it enough if we take God alone into our confidence.(305) ------------------------------------- The next topic on which I must comment is Prayer,--and this time it must be less briefly. We have heard much talk of late against prayer, especially against prayers for better weather and for the recovery of sick people. As regards prayers for the sick, if any medical fact can be considered to stand firm, it is that in certain environments prayer may contribute to recovery, and should be encouraged as a therapeutic measure. Being a normal factor of moral health in the person, its omission would be deleterious. The case of the weather is different. Notwithstanding the recency of the opposite belief,(306) every one now knows that droughts and storms follow from physical antecedents, and that moral appeals cannot avert them. But petitional prayer is only one department of prayer; and if we take the word in the wider sense as meaning every kind of inward communion or conversation with the power recognized as divine, we can easily see that scientific criticism leaves it untouched. Prayer in this wide sense is the very soul and essence of religion. "Religion," says a liberal French theologian, "is an intercourse, a conscious and voluntary relation, entered into by a soul in distress with the mysterious power upon which it feels itself to depend, and upon which its fate is contingent. This intercourse with God is realized by prayer. Prayer is religion in act; that is, prayer is real religion. It is prayer that distinguishes the religious phenomenon from such similar or neighboring phenomena as purely moral or æsthetic sentiment. Religion is nothing if it be not the vital act by which the entire mind seeks to save itself by clinging to the principle from which it draws its life. This act is prayer, by which term I understand no vain exercise of words, no mere repetition of certain sacred formulæ, but the very movement itself of the soul, putting itself in a personal relation of contact with the mysterious power of which it feels the presence,--it may be even before it has a name by which to call it. Wherever this interior prayer is lacking, there is no religion; wherever, on the other hand, this prayer rises and stirs the soul, even in the absence of forms or of doctrines, we have living religion. One sees from this why 'natural religion,' so-called, is not properly a religion. It cuts man off from prayer. It leaves him and God in mutual remoteness, with no intimate commerce, no interior dialogue, no interchange, no action of God in man, no return of man to God. At bottom this pretended religion is only a philosophy. Born at epochs of rationalism, of critical investigations, it never was anything but an abstraction. An artificial and dead creation, it reveals to its examiner hardly one of the characters proper to religion."(307) It seems to me that the entire series of our lectures proves the truth of M. Sabatier's contention. The religious phenomenon, studied as an inner fact, and apart from ecclesiastical or theological complications, has shown itself to consist everywhere, and at all its stages, in the consciousness which individuals have of an intercourse between themselves and higher powers with which they feel themselves to be related. This intercourse is realized at the time as being both active and mutual. If it be not effective; if it be not a give and take relation; if nothing be really transacted while it lasts; if the world is in no whit different for its having taken place; then prayer, taken in this wide meaning of a sense that _something is transacting_, is of course a feeling of what is illusory, and religion must on the whole be classed, not simply as containing elements of delusion,--these undoubtedly everywhere exist,--but as being rooted in delusion altogether, just as materialists and atheists have always said it was. At most there might remain, when the direct experiences of prayer were ruled out as false witnesses, some inferential belief that the whole order of existence must have a divine cause. But this way of contemplating nature, pleasing as it would doubtless be to persons of a pious taste, would leave to them but the spectators' part at a play, whereas in experimental religion and the prayerful life, we seem ourselves to be actors, and not in a play, but in a very serious reality. The genuineness of religion is thus indissolubly bound up with the question whether the prayerful consciousness be or be not deceitful. The conviction that something is genuinely transacted in this consciousness is the very core of living religion. As to what is transacted, great differences of opinion have prevailed. The unseen powers have been supposed, and are yet supposed, to do things which no enlightened man can nowadays believe in. It may well prove that the sphere of influence in prayer is subjective exclusively, and that what is immediately changed is only the mind of the praying person. But however our opinion of prayer's effects may come to be limited by criticism, religion, in the vital sense in which these lectures study it, must stand or fall by the persuasion that effects of some sort genuinely do occur. Through prayer, religion insists, things which cannot be realized in any other manner come about: energy which but for prayer would be bound is by prayer set free and operates in some part, be it objective or subjective, of the world of facts. This postulate is strikingly expressed in a letter written by the late Frederic W. H. Myers to a friend, who allows me to quote from it. It shows how independent the prayer-instinct is of usual doctrinal complications. Mr. Myers writes:-- "I am glad that you have asked me about prayer, because I have rather strong ideas on the subject. First consider what are the facts. There exists around us a spiritual universe, and that universe is in actual relation with the material. From the spiritual universe comes the energy which maintains the material; the energy which makes the life of each individual spirit. Our spirits are supported by a perpetual indrawal of this energy, and the vigor of that indrawal is perpetually changing, much as the vigor of our absorption of material nutriment changes from hour to hour. "I call these 'facts' because I think that some scheme of this kind is the only one consistent with our actual evidence; too complex to summarize here. How, then, should we _act_ on these facts? Plainly we must endeavor to draw in as much spiritual life as possible, and we must place our minds in any attitude which experience shows to be favorable to such indrawal. _Prayer_ is the general name for that attitude of open and earnest expectancy. If we then ask to _whom_ to pray, the answer (strangely enough) must be that _that_ does not much matter. The prayer is not indeed a purely subjective thing;--it means a real increase in intensity of absorption of spiritual power or grace;--but we do not know enough of what takes place in the spiritual world to know how the prayer operates;--_who_ is cognizant of it, or through what channel the grace is given. Better let children pray to Christ, who is at any rate the highest individual spirit of whom we have any knowledge. But it would be rash to say that Christ himself _hears us_; while to say that _God_ hears us is merely to restate the first principle,--that grace flows in from the infinite spiritual world." Let us reserve the question of the truth or falsehood of the belief that power is absorbed until the next lecture, when our dogmatic conclusions, if we have any, must be reached. Let this lecture still confine itself to the description of phenomena; and as a concrete example of an extreme sort, of the way in which the prayerful life may still be led, let me take a case with which most of you must be acquainted, that of George Müller of Bristol, who died in 1898. Müller's prayers were of the crassest petitional order. Early in life he resolved on taking certain Bible promises in literal sincerity, and on letting himself be fed, not by his own worldly foresight, but by the Lord's hand. He had an extraordinarily active and successful career, among the fruits of which were the distribution of over two million copies of the Scripture text, in different languages; the equipment of several hundred missionaries; the circulation of more than a hundred and eleven million of scriptural books, pamphlets, and tracts; the building of five large orphanages, and the keeping and educating of thousands of orphans; finally, the establishment of schools in which over a hundred and twenty-one thousand youthful and adult pupils were taught. In the course of this work Mr. Müller received and administered nearly a million and a half of pounds sterling, and traveled over two hundred thousand miles of sea and land.(308) During the sixty-eight years of his ministry, he never owned any property except his clothes and furniture, and cash in hand; and he left, at the age of eighty-six, an estate worth only a hundred and sixty pounds. His method was to let his general wants be publicly known, but not to acquaint other people with the details of his temporary necessities. For the relief of the latter, he prayed directly to the Lord, believing that sooner or later prayers are always answered if one have trust enough. "When I lose such a thing as a key," he writes, "I ask the Lord to direct me to it, and I look for an answer to my prayer; when a person with whom I have made an appointment does not come, according to the fixed time, and I begin to be inconvenienced by it, I ask the Lord to be pleased to hasten him to me, and I look for an answer; when I do not understand a passage of the word of God, I lift up my heart to the Lord that he would be pleased by his Holy Spirit to instruct me, and I expect to be taught, though I do not fix the time when, and the manner how it should be; when I am going to minister in the Word, I seek help from the Lord, and ... am not cast down, but of good cheer because I look for his assistance." Müller's custom was to never run up bills, not even for a week. "As the Lord deals out to us by the day, ... the week's payment might become due and we have no money to meet it; and thus those with whom we deal might be inconvenienced by us, and we be found acting against the commandment of the Lord: 'Owe no man anything.' From this day and henceforward whilst the Lord gives to us our supplies by the day, we purpose to pay at once for every article as it is purchased, and never to buy anything except we can pay for it at once, however much it may seem to be needed, and however much those with whom we deal may wish to be paid only by the week." The articles needed of which Müller speaks were the food, fuel, etc., of his orphanages. Somehow, near as they often come to going without a meal, they hardly ever seem actually to have done so. "Greater and more manifest nearness of the Lord's presence I have never had than when after breakfast there were no means for dinner for more than a hundred persons; or when after dinner there were no means for the tea, and yet the Lord provided the tea; and all this without one single human being having been informed about our need.... Through Grace my mind is so fully assured of the faithfulness of the Lord, that in the midst of the greatest need, I am enabled in peace to go about my other work. Indeed, did not the Lord give me this, which is the result of trusting in him, I should scarcely be able to work at all; for it is now comparatively a rare thing that a day comes when I am not in need for one or another part of the work."(309) In building his orphanages simply by prayer and faith, Müller affirms that his prime motive was "to have something to point to as a visible proof that our God and Father is the same faithful God that he ever was,--as willing as ever to prove himself the living God, in our day as formerly, to all that put their trust in him."(310) For this reason he refused to borrow money for any of his enterprises. "How does it work when we thus anticipate God by going our own way? We certainly weaken faith instead of increasing it; and each time we work thus a deliverance of our own we find it more and more difficult to trust in God, till at last we give way entirely to our natural fallen reason and unbelief prevails. How different if one is enabled to wait God's own time, and to look alone to him for help and deliverance! When at last help comes, after many seasons of prayer it may be, how sweet it is, and what a present recompense! Dear Christian reader, if you have never walked in this path of obedience before, do so now, and you will then know experimentally the sweetness of the joy which results from it."(311) When the supplies came in but slowly, Müller always considered that this was for the trial of his faith and patience. When his faith and patience had been sufficiently tried, the Lord would send more means. "And thus it has proved,"--I quote from his diary,--"for to-day was given me the sum of 2050 pounds, of which 2000 are for the building fund [of a certain house], and 50 for present necessities. It is impossible to describe my joy in God when I received this donation. I was neither excited nor surprised; for I _look out_ for answers to my prayers. _I believe that God hears me._ Yet my heart was so full of joy that I could only _sit_ before God, and admire him, like David in 2 Samuel vii. At last I cast myself flat down upon my face and burst forth in thanksgiving to God and in surrendering my heart afresh to him for his blessed service."(312) George Müller's is a case extreme in every respect, and in no respect more so than in the extraordinary narrowness of the man's intellectual horizon. His God was, as he often said, his business partner. He seems to have been for Müller little more than a sort of supernatural clergyman interested in the congregation of tradesmen and others in Bristol who were his saints, and in the orphanages and other enterprises, but unpossessed of any of those vaster and wilder and more ideal attributes with which the human imagination elsewhere has invested him. Müller, in short, was absolutely unphilosophical. His intensely private and practical conception of his relations with the Deity continued the traditions of the most primitive human thought.(313) When we compare a mind like his with such a mind as, for example, Emerson's or Phillips Brooks's, we see the range which the religions consciousness covers. There is an immense literature relating to answers to petitional prayer. The evangelical journals are filled with such answers, and books are devoted to the subject,(314) but for us Müller's case will suffice. ------------------------------------- A less sturdy beggar-like fashion of leading the prayerful life is followed by innumerable other Christians. Persistence in leaning on the Almighty for support and guidance will, such persons say, bring with it proofs, palpable but much more subtle, of his presence and active influence. The following description of a "led" life, by a German writer whom I have already quoted, would no doubt appear to countless Christians in every country as if transcribed from their own personal experience. One finds in this guided sort of life, says Dr. Hilty,-- "That books and words (and sometimes people) come to one's cognizance just at the very moment in which one needs them; that one glides over great dangers as if with shut eyes, remaining ignorant of what would have terrified one or led one astray, until the peril is past--this being especially the case with temptations to vanity and sensuality; that paths on which one ought not to wander are, as it were, hedged off with thorns; but that on the other side great obstacles are suddenly removed; that when the time has come for something, one suddenly receives a courage that formerly failed, or perceives the root of a matter that until then was concealed, or discovers thoughts, talents, yea, even pieces of knowledge and insight, in one's self, of which it is impossible to say whence they come; finally, that persons help us or decline to help us, favor us or refuse us, as if they had to do so against their will, so that often those indifferent or even unfriendly to us yield us the greatest service and furtherance. (God takes often their worldly goods, from those whom he leads, at just the right moment, when they threaten to impede the effort after higher interests.) "Besides all this, other noteworthy things come to pass, of which it is not easy to give account. There is no doubt whatever that now one walks continually through 'open doors' and on the easiest roads, with as little care and trouble as it is possible to imagine. "Furthermore one finds one's self settling one's affairs neither too early nor too late, whereas they were wont to be spoiled by untimeliness, even when the preparations had been well laid. In addition to this, one does them with perfect tranquillity of mind, almost as if they were matters of no consequence, like errands done by us for another person, in which case we usually act more calmly than when we act in our own concerns. Again, one finds that one can _wait_ for everything patiently, and that is one of life's great arts. One finds also that each thing comes duly, one thing after the other, so that one gains time to make one's footing sure before advancing farther. And then everything occurs to us at the right moment, just what we ought to do, etc., and often in a very striking way, just as if a third person were keeping watch over those things which we are in easy danger of forgetting. "Often, too, persons are sent to us at the right time, to offer or ask for what is needed, and what we should never have had the courage or resolution to undertake of our own accord. "Through all these experiences one finds that one is kindly and tolerant of other people, even of such as are repulsive, negligent, or ill-willed, for they also are instruments of good in God's hand, and often most efficient ones. Without these thoughts it would be hard for even the best of us always to keep our equanimity. But with the consciousness of divine guidance, one sees many a thing in life quite differently from what would otherwise be possible. "All these are things that every human being _knows_, who has had experience of them; and of which the most speaking examples could be brought forward. The highest resources of worldly wisdom are unable to attain that which, under divine leading, comes to us of its own accord."(315) Such accounts as this shade away into others where the belief is, not that particular events are tempered more towardly to us by a superintending providence, as a reward for our reliance, but that by cultivating the continuous sense of our connection with the power that made things as they are, we are tempered more towardly for their reception. The outward face of nature need not alter, but the expressions of meaning in it alter. It was dead and is alive again. It is like the difference between looking on a person without love, or upon the same person with love. In the latter case intercourse springs into new vitality. So when one's affections keep in touch with the divinity of the world's authorship, fear and egotism fall away; and in the equanimity that follows, one finds in the hours, as they succeed each other, a series of purely benignant opportunities. It is as if all doors were opened, and all paths freshly smoothed. We meet a new world when we meet the old world in the spirit which this kind of prayer infuses. Such a spirit was that of Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus.(316) It is that of mind-curers, of the transcendentalists, and of the so-called "liberal" Christians. As an expression of it, I will quote a page from one of Martineau's sermons:-- "The universe, open to the eye to-day, looks as it did a thousand years ago: and the morning hymn of Milton does but tell the beauty with which our own familiar sun dressed the earliest fields and gardens of the world. We see what all our fathers saw. And if we cannot find God in your house or in mine, upon the roadside or the margin of the sea; in the bursting seed or opening flower; in the day duty or the night musing; in the general laugh and the secret grief; in the procession of life, ever entering afresh, and solemnly passing by and dropping off; I do not think we should discern him any more on the grass of Eden, or beneath the moonlight of Gethsemane. Depend upon it, it is not the want of greater miracles, but of the soul to perceive such as are allowed us still, that makes us push all the sanctities into the far spaces we cannot reach. The devout feel that wherever God's hand is, _there_ is miracle: and it is simply an indevoutness which imagines that only where miracle is, can there be the real hand of God. The customs of Heaven ought surely to be more sacred in our eyes than its anomalies; the dear old ways, of which the Most High is never tired, than the strange things which he does not love well enough ever to repeat. And he who will but discern beneath the sun, as he rises any morning, the supporting finger of the Almighty, may recover the sweet and reverent surprise with which Adam gazed on the first dawn in Paradise. It is no outward change, no shifting in time or place; but only the loving meditation of the pure in heart, that can reawaken the Eternal from the sleep within our souls: that can render him a reality again, and reassert for him once more his ancient name of 'the Living God.' "(317) When we see all things in God, and refer all things to him, we read in common matters superior expressions of meaning. The deadness with which custom invests the familiar vanishes, and existence as a whole appears transfigured. The state of a mind thus awakened from torpor is well expressed in these words, which I take from a friend's letter:-- "If we occupy ourselves in summing up all the mercies and bounties we are privileged to have, we are overwhelmed by their number (so great that we can imagine ourselves unable to give ourselves time even to begin to review the things we may imagine _we have not_). We sum them and realize that _we are actually killed with God's kindness_; that we are surrounded by bounties upon bounties, without which all would fall. Should we not love it; should we not feel buoyed up by the Eternal Arms?" Sometimes this realization that facts are of divine sending, instead of being habitual, is casual, like a mystical experience. Father Gratry gives this instance from his youthful melancholy period:-- "One day I had a moment of consolation, because I met with something which seemed to me ideally perfect. It was a poor drummer beating the tattoo in the streets of Paris. I walked behind him in returning to the school on the evening of a holiday. His drum gave out the tattoo in such a way that, at that moment at least, however peevish I were, I could find no pretext for fault- finding. It was impossible to conceive more nerve or spirit, better time or measure, more clearness or richness, than were in this drumming. Ideal desire could go no farther in that direction. I was enchanted and consoled; the perfection of this wretched act did me good. Good is at least possible, I said, since the ideal can thus sometimes get embodied."(318) In Sénancour's novel of Obermann a similar transient lifting of the veil is recorded. In Paris streets, on a March day, he comes across a flower in bloom, a jonquil: "It was the strongest expression of desire: it was the first perfume of the year. I felt all the happiness destined for man. This unutterable harmony of souls, the phantom of the ideal world, arose in me complete. I never felt anything so great or so instantaneous. I know not what shape, what analogy, what secret of relation it was that made me see in this flower a limitless beauty.... I shall never inclose in a conception this power, this immensity that nothing will express; this form that nothing will contain; this ideal of a better world which one feels, but which, it seems, nature has not made actual."(319) We heard in previous lectures of the vivified face of the world as it may appear to converts after their awakening.(320) As a rule, religious persons generally assume that whatever natural facts connect themselves in any way with their destiny are significant of the divine purposes with them. Through prayer the purpose, often far from obvious, comes home to them, and if it be "trial," strength to endure the trial is given. Thus at all stages of the prayerful life we find the persuasion that in the process of communion energy from on high flows in to meet demand, and becomes operative within the phenomenal world. So long as this operativeness is admitted to be real, it makes no essential difference whether its immediate effects be subjective or objective. The fundamental religious point is that in prayer, spiritual energy, which otherwise would slumber, does become active, and spiritual work of some kind is effected really. So much for Prayer, taken in the wide sense of any kind of communion. As the core of religion, we must return to it in the next lecture. ------------------------------------- The last aspect of the religious life which remains for me to touch upon is the fact that its manifestations so frequently connect themselves with the subconscious part of our existence. You may remember what I said in my opening lecture(321) about the prevalence of the psychopathic temperament in religious biography. You will in point of fact hardly find a religious leader of any kind in whose life there is no record of automatisms. I speak not merely of savage priests and prophets, whose followers regard automatic utterance and action as by itself tantamount to inspiration, I speak of leaders of thought and subjects of intellectualized experience. Saint Paul had his visions, his ecstasies, his gift of tongues, small as was the importance he attached to the latter. The whole array of Christian saints and heresiarchs, including the greatest, the Bernards, the Loyolas, the Luthers, the Foxes, the Wesleys, had their visions, voices, rapt conditions, guiding impressions, and "openings." They had these things, because they had exalted sensibility, and to such things persons of exalted sensibility are liable. In such liability there lie, however, consequences for theology. Beliefs are strengthened wherever automatisms corroborate them. Incursions from beyond the transmarginal region have a peculiar power to increase conviction. The inchoate sense of presence is infinitely stronger than conception, but strong as it may be, it is seldom equal to the evidence of hallucination. Saints who actually see or hear their Saviour reach the acme of assurance. Motor automatisms, though rarer, are, if possible, even more convincing than sensations. The subjects here actually feel themselves played upon by powers beyond their will. The evidence is dynamic; the God or spirit moves the very organs of their body.(322) The great field for this sense of being the instrument of a higher power is of course "inspiration." It is easy to discriminate between the religious leaders who have been habitually subject to inspiration and those who have not. In the teachings of the Buddha, of Jesus, of Saint Paul (apart from his gift of tongues), of Saint Augustine, of Huss, of Luther, of Wesley, automatic or semi-automatic composition appears to have been only occasional. In the Hebrew prophets, on the contrary, in Mohammed, in some of the Alexandrians, in many minor Catholic saints, in Fox, in Joseph Smith, something like it appears to have been frequent, sometimes habitual. We have distinct professions of being under the direction of a foreign power, and serving as its mouthpiece. As regards the Hebrew prophets, it is extraordinary, writes an author who has made a careful study of them, to see-- "How, one after another, the same features are reproduced in the prophetic books. The process is always extremely different from what it would be if the prophet arrived at his insight into spiritual things by the tentative efforts of his own genius. There is something sharp and sudden about it. He can lay his finger, so to speak, on the moment when it came. And it always comes in the form of an overpowering force from without, against which he struggles, but in vain. Listen, for instance, [to] the opening of the book of Jeremiah. Read through in like manner the first two chapters of the prophecy of Ezekiel. "It is not, however, only at the beginning of his career that the prophet passes through a crisis which is clearly not self-caused. Scattered all through the prophetic writings are expressions which speak of some strong and irresistible impulse coming down upon the prophet, determining his attitude to the events of his time, constraining his utterance, making his words the vehicle of a higher meaning than their own. For instance, this of Isaiah's: 'The Lord spake thus to me with a strong hand,'--an emphatic phrase which denotes the overmastering nature of the impulse,--'and instructed me that I should not walk in the way of this people.' ... Or passages like this from Ezekiel: 'The hand of the Lord God fell upon me,' 'The hand of the Lord was strong upon me.' The one standing characteristic of the prophet is that he speaks with the authority of Jehovah himself. Hence it is that the prophets one and all preface their addresses so confidently, 'The Word of the Lord,' or 'Thus saith the Lord.' They have even the audacity to speak in the first person, as if Jehovah himself were speaking. As in Isaiah: 'Hearken unto me, O Jacob, and Israel my called; I am He, I am the First, I also am the last,'--and so on. The personality of the prophet sinks entirely into the background; he feels himself for the time being the mouthpiece of the Almighty."(323) "We need to remember that prophecy was a profession, and that the prophets formed a professional class. There were schools of the prophets, in which the gift was regularly cultivated. A group of young men would gather round some commanding figure--a Samuel or an Elisha--and would not only record or spread the knowledge of his sayings and doings, but seek to catch themselves something of his inspiration. It seems that music played its part in their exercises.... It is perfectly clear that by no means all of these Sons of the prophets ever succeeded in acquiring more than a very small share in the gift which they sought. It was clearly possible to 'counterfeit' prophecy. Sometimes this was done deliberately.... But it by no means follows that in all cases where a false message was given, the giver of it was altogether conscious of what he was doing."(324) Here, to take another Jewish case, is the way in which Philo of Alexandria describes his inspiration:-- "Sometimes, when I have come to my work empty, I have suddenly become full; ideas being in an invisible manner showered upon me, and implanted in me from on high; so that through the influence of divine inspiration, I have become greatly excited, and have known neither the place in which I was, nor those who were present, nor myself, nor what I was saying, nor what I was writing; for then I have been conscious of a richness of interpretation, an enjoyment of light, a most penetrating insight, a most manifest energy in all that was to be done; having such effect on my mind as the clearest ocular demonstration would have on the eyes."(325) If we turn to Islam, we find that Mohammed's revelations all came from the subconscious sphere. To the question in what way he got them,-- "Mohammed is said to have answered that sometimes he heard a knell as from a bell, and that this had the strongest effect on him; and when the angel went away, he had received the revelation. Sometimes again he held converse with the angel as with a man, so as easily to understand his words. The later authorities, however, ... distinguish still other kinds. In the Itgân (103) the following are enumerated: 1, revelations with sound of bell, 2, by inspiration of the holy spirit in M.'s heart, 3, by Gabriel in human form, 4, by God immediately, either when awake (as in his journey to heaven) or in dream.... In Almawâhib alladunîya the kinds are thus given: 1, Dream, 2, Inspiration of Gabriel in the Prophet's heart, 3, Gabriel taking Dahya's form, 4, with the bell- sound, etc., 5, Gabriel in propriâ personâ (only twice), 6, revelation in heaven, 7, God appearing in person, but veiled, 8, God revealing himself immediately without veil. Others add two other stages, namely: 1, Gabriel in the form of still another man, 2, God showing himself personally in dream."(326) In none of these cases is the revelation distinctly motor. In the case of Joseph Smith (who had prophetic revelations innumerable in addition to the revealed translation of the gold plates which resulted in the Book of Mormon), although there may have been a motor element, the inspiration seems to have been predominantly sensorial. He began his translation by the aid of the "peep-stones" which he found, or thought or said that he found, with the gold plates,--apparently a case of "crystal gazing." For some of the other revelations he used the peep-stones, but seems generally to have asked the Lord for more direct instruction.(327) Other revelations are described as "openings"--Fox's, for example, were evidently of the kind known in spiritistic circles of to-day as "impressions." As all effective initiators of change must needs live to some degree upon this psychopathic level of sudden perception or conviction of new truth, or of impulse to action so obsessive that it must be worked off, I will say nothing more about so very common a phenomenon. When, in addition to these phenomena of inspiration, we take religious mysticism into the account, when we recall the striking and sudden unifications of a discordant self which we saw in conversion, and when we review the extravagant obsessions of tenderness, purity, and self-severity met with in saintliness, we cannot, I think, avoid the conclusion that in religion we have a department of human nature with unusually close relations to the trans-marginal or subliminal region. If the word "subliminal" is offensive to any of you, as smelling too much of psychical research or other aberrations, call it by any other name you please, to distinguish it from the level of full sunlit consciousness. Call this latter the A-region of personality, if you care to, and call the other the B-region. The B-region, then, is obviously the larger part of each of us, for it is the abode of everything that is latent and the reservoir of everything that passes unrecorded or unobserved. It contains, for example, such things as all our momentarily inactive memories, and it harbors the springs of all our obscurely motived passions, impulses, likes, dislikes, and prejudices. Our intuitions, hypotheses, fancies, superstitions, persuasions, convictions, and in general all our non-rational operations, come from it. It is the source of our dreams, and apparently they may return to it. In it arise whatever mystical experiences we may have, and our automatisms, sensory or motor; our life in hypnotic and "hypnoid" conditions, if we are subjects to such conditions; our delusions, fixed ideas, and hysterical accidents, if we are hysteric subjects; our supra- normal cognitions, if such there be, and if we are telepathic subjects. It is also the fountain-head of much that feeds our religion. In persons deep in the religious life, as we have now abundantly seen,--and this is my conclusion,--the door into this region seems unusually wide open; at any rate, experiences making their entrance through that door have had emphatic influence in shaping religious history. With this conclusion I turn back and close the circle which I opened in my first lecture, terminating thus the review which I then announced of inner religious phenomena as we find them in developed and articulate human individuals. I might easily, if the time allowed, multiply both my documents and my discriminations, but a broad treatment is, I believe, in itself better, and the most important characteristics of the subject lie, I think, before us already. In the next lecture, which is also the last one, we must try to draw the critical conclusions which so much material may suggest. LECTURE XX. CONCLUSIONS. The material of our study of human nature is now spread before us; and in this parting hour, set free from the duty of description, we can draw our theoretical and practical conclusions. In my first lecture, defending the empirical method, I foretold that whatever conclusions we might come to could be reached by spiritual judgments only, appreciations of the significance for life of religion, taken "on the whole." Our conclusions cannot be as sharp as dogmatic conclusions would be, but I will formulate them, when the time comes, as sharply as I can. Summing up in the broadest possible way the characteristics of the religious life, as we have found them, it includes the following beliefs:-- 1. That the visible world is part of a more spiritual universe from which it draws its chief significance; 2. That union or harmonious relation with that higher universe is our true end; 3. That prayer or inner communion with the spirit thereof--be that spirit "God" or "law"--is a process wherein work is really done, and spiritual energy flows in and produces effects, psychological or material, within the phenomenal world. Religion includes also the following psychological characteristics:-- 4. A new zest which adds itself like a gift to life, and takes the form either of lyrical enchantment or of appeal to earnestness and heroism. 5. An assurance of safety and a temper of peace, and, in relation to others, a preponderance of loving affections. In illustrating these characteristics by documents, we have been literally bathed in sentiment. In re-reading my manuscript, I am almost appalled at the amount of emotionality which I find in it. After so much of this, we can afford to be dryer and less sympathetic in the rest of the work that lies before us. The sentimentality of many of my documents is a consequence of the fact that I sought them among the extravagances of the subject. If any of you are enemies of what our ancestors used to brand as enthusiasm, and are, nevertheless, still listening to me now, you have probably felt my selection to have been sometimes almost perverse, and have wished I might have stuck to soberer examples. I reply that I took these extremer examples as yielding the profounder information. To learn the secrets of any science, we go to expert specialists, even though they may be eccentric persons, and not to commonplace pupils. We combine what they tell us with the rest of our wisdom, and form our final judgment independently. Even so with religion. We who have pursued such radical expressions of it may now be sure that we know its secrets as authentically as any one can know them who learns them from another; and we have next to answer, each of us for himself, the practical question: what are the dangers in this element of life? and in what proportion may it need to be restrained by other elements, to give the proper balance? ------------------------------------- But this question suggests another one which I will answer immediately and get it out of the way, for it has more than once already vexed us.(328) Ought it to be assumed that in all men the mixture of religion with other elements should be identical? Ought it, indeed, to be assumed that the lives of all men should show identical religious elements? In other words, is the existence of so many religious types and sects and creeds regrettable? To these questions I answer "No" emphatically. And my reason is that I do not see how it is possible that creatures in such different positions and with such different powers as human individuals are, should have exactly the same functions and the same duties. No two of us have identical difficulties, nor should we be expected to work out identical solutions. Each, from his peculiar angle of observation, takes in a certain sphere of fact and trouble, which each must deal with in a unique manner. One of us must soften himself, another must harden himself; one must yield a point, another must stand firm,--in order the better to defend the position assigned him. If an Emerson were forced to be a Wesley, or a Moody forced to be a Whitman, the total human consciousness of the divine would suffer. The divine can mean no single quality, it must mean a group of qualities, by being champions of which in alternation, different men may all find worthy missions. Each attitude being a syllable in human nature's total message, it takes the whole of us to spell the meaning out completely. So a "god of battles" must be allowed to be the god for one kind of person, a god of peace and heaven and home, the god for another. We must frankly recognize the fact that we live in partial systems, and that parts are not interchangeable in the spiritual life. If we are peevish and jealous, destruction of the self must be an element of our religion; why need it be one if we are good and sympathetic from the outset? If we are sick souls, we require a religion of deliverance; but why think so much of deliverance, if we are healthy-minded?(329) Unquestionably, some men have the completer experience and the higher vocation, here just as in the social world; but for each man to stay in his own experience, whate'er it be, and for others to tolerate him there, is surely best. ------------------------------------- But, you may now ask, would not this one-sidedness be cured if we should all espouse the science of religions as our own religion? In answering this question I must open again the general relations of the theoretic to the active life. Knowledge about a thing is not the thing itself. You remember what Al- Ghazzali told us in the Lecture on Mysticism,--that to understand the causes of drunkenness, as a physician understands them, is not to be drunk. A science might come to understand everything about the causes and elements of religion, and might even decide which elements were qualified, by their general harmony with other branches of knowledge, to be considered true; and yet the best man at this science might be the man who found it hardest to be personally devout. _Tout savoir c'est tout pardonner._ The name of Renan would doubtless occur to many persons as an example of the way in which breadth of knowledge may make one only a dilettante in possibilities, and blunt the acuteness of one's living faith.(330) If religion be a function by which either God's cause or man's cause is to be really advanced, then he who lives the life of it, however narrowly, is a better servant than he who merely knows about it, however much. Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another. For this reason, the science of religions may not be an equivalent for living religion; and if we turn to the inner difficulties of such a science, we see that a point comes when she must drop the purely theoretic attitude, and either let her knots remain uncut, or have them cut by active faith. To see this, suppose that we have our science of religions constituted as a matter of fact. Suppose that she has assimilated all the necessary historical material and distilled out of it as its essence the same conclusions which I myself a few moments ago pronounced. Suppose that she agrees that religion, wherever it is an active thing, involves a belief in ideal presences, and a belief that in our prayerful communion with them,(331) work is done, and something real comes to pass. She has now to exert her critical activity, and to decide how far, in the light of other sciences and in that of general philosophy, such beliefs can be considered _true_. Dogmatically to decide this is an impossible task. Not only are the other sciences and the philosophy still far from being completed, but in their present state we find them full of conflicts. The sciences of nature know nothing of spiritual presences, and on the whole hold no practical commerce whatever with the idealistic conceptions towards which general philosophy inclines. The scientist, so-called, is, during his scientific hours at least, so materialistic that one may well say that on the whole the influence of science goes against the notion that religion should be recognized at all. And this antipathy to religion finds an echo within the very science of religions itself. The cultivator of this science has to become acquainted with so many groveling and horrible superstitions that a presumption easily arises in his mind that any belief that is religious probably is false. In the "prayerful communion" of savages with such mumbo-jumbos of deities as they acknowledge, it is hard for us to see what genuine spiritual work--even though it were work relative only to their dark savage obligations--can possibly be done. The consequence is that the conclusions of the science of religions are as likely to be adverse as they are to be favorable to the claim that the essence of religion is true. There is a notion in the air about us that religion is probably only an anachronism, a case of "survival," an atavistic relapse into a mode of thought which humanity in its more enlightened examples has outgrown; and this notion our religious anthropologists at present do little to counteract. This view is so widespread at the present day that I must consider it with some explicitness before I pass to my own conclusions. Let me call it the "Survival theory," for brevity's sake. The pivot round which the religious life, as we have traced it, revolves, is the interest of the individual in his private personal destiny. Religion, in short, is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism. The gods believed in--whether by crude savages or by men disciplined intellectually--agree with each other in recognizing personal calls. Religious thought is carried on in terms of personality, this being, in the world of religion, the one fundamental fact. To-day, quite as much as at any previous age, the religious individual tells you that the divine meets him on the basis of his personal concerns. Science, on the other hand, has ended by utterly repudiating the personal point of view. She catalogues her elements and records her laws indifferent as to what purpose may be shown forth by them, and constructs her theories quite careless of their bearing on human anxieties and fates. Though the scientist may individually nourish a religion, and be a theist in his irresponsible hours, the days are over when it could be said that for Science herself the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth his handiwork. Our solar system, with its harmonies, is seen now as but one passing case of a certain sort of moving equilibrium in the heavens, realized by a local accident in an appalling wilderness of worlds where no life can exist. In a span of time which as a cosmic interval will count but as an hour, it will have ceased to be. The Darwinian notion of chance production, and subsequent destruction, speedy or deferred, applies to the largest as well as to the smallest facts. It is impossible, in the present temper of the scientific imagination, to find in the driftings of the cosmic atoms, whether they work on the universal or on the particular scale, anything but a kind of aimless weather, doing and undoing, achieving no proper history, and leaving no result. Nature has no one distinguishable ultimate tendency with which it is possible to feel a sympathy. In the vast rhythm of her processes, as the scientific mind now follows them, she appears to cancel herself. The books of natural theology which satisfied the intellects of our grandfathers seem to us quite grotesque,(332) representing, as they did, a God who conformed the largest things of nature to the paltriest of our private wants. The God whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals. The bubbles on the foam which coats a stormy sea are floating episodes, made and unmade by the forces of the wind and water. Our private selves are like those bubbles,--epiphenomena, as Clifford, I believe, ingeniously called them; their destinies weigh nothing and determine nothing in the world's irremediable currents of events. You see how natural it is, from this point of view, to treat religion as a mere survival, for religion does in fact perpetuate the traditions of the most primeval thought. To coerce the spiritual powers, or to square them and get them on our side, was, during enormous tracts of time, the one great object in our dealings with the natural world. For our ancestors, dreams, hallucinations, revelations, and cock-and-bull stories were inextricably mixed with facts. Up to a comparatively recent date such distinctions as those between what has been verified and what is only conjectured, between the impersonal and the personal aspects of existence, were hardly suspected or conceived. Whatever you imagined in a lively manner, whatever you thought fit to be true, you affirmed confidently; and whatever you affirmed, your comrades believed. Truth was what had not yet been contradicted, most things were taken into the mind from the point of view of their human suggestiveness, and the attention confined itself exclusively to the æsthetic and dramatic aspects of events.(333) How indeed could it be otherwise? The extraordinary value, for explanation and prevision, of those mathematical and mechanical modes of conception which science uses, was a result that could not possibly have been expected in advance. Weight, movement, velocity, direction, position, what thin, pallid, uninteresting ideas! How could the richer animistic aspects of Nature, the peculiarities and oddities that make phenomena picturesquely striking or expressive, fail to have been first singled out and followed by philosophy as the more promising avenue to the knowledge of Nature's life? Well, it is still in these richer animistic and dramatic aspects that religion delights to dwell. It is the terror and beauty of phenomena, the "promise" of the dawn and of the rainbow, the "voice" of the thunder, the "gentleness" of the summer rain, the "sublimity" of the stars, and not the physical laws which these things follow, by which the religious mind still continues to be most impressed; and just as of yore, the devout man tells you that in the solitude of his room or of the fields he still feels the divine presence, that inflowings of help come in reply to his prayers, and that sacrifices to this unseen reality fill him with security and peace. Pure anachronism! says the survival-theory;--anachronism for which deanthropomorphization of the imagination is the remedy required. The less we mix the private with the cosmic, the more we dwell in universal and impersonal terms, the truer heirs of Science we become. In spite of the appeal which this impersonality of the scientific attitude makes to a certain magnanimity of temper, I believe it to be shallow, and I can now state my reason in comparatively few words. That reason is that, so long as we deal with the cosmic and the general, we deal only with the symbols of reality, but _as soon as we deal with private and personal phenomena as such, we deal with realities in the completest sense of the term_. I think I can easily make clear what I mean by these words. ------------------------------------- The world of our experience consists at all times of two parts, an objective and a subjective part, of which the former may be incalculably more extensive than the latter, and yet the latter can never be omitted or suppressed. The objective part is the sum total of whatsoever at any given time we may be thinking of, the subjective part is the inner "state" in which the thinking comes to pass. What we think of may be enormous,--the cosmic times and spaces, for example,--whereas the inner state may be the most fugitive and paltry activity of mind. Yet the cosmic objects, so far as the experience yields them, are but ideal pictures of something whose existence we do not inwardly possess but only point at outwardly, while the inner state is our very experience itself; its reality and that of our experience are one. A conscious field _plus_ its object as felt or thought of _plus_ an attitude towards the object _plus_ the sense of a self to whom the attitude belongs--such a concrete bit of personal experience may be a small bit, but it is a solid bit as long as it lasts; not hollow, not a mere abstract element of experience, such as the "object" is when taken all alone. It is a _full_ fact, even though it be an insignificant fact; it is of the _kind_ to which all realities whatsoever must belong; the motor currents of the world run through the like of it; it is on the line connecting real events with real events. That unsharable feeling which each one of us has of the pinch of his individual destiny as he privately feels it rolling out on fortune's wheel may be disparaged for its egotism, may be sneered at as unscientific, but it is the one thing that fills up the measure of our concrete actuality, and any would-be existent that should lack such a feeling, or its analogue, would be a piece of reality only half made up.(334) If this be true, it is absurd for science to say that the egotistic elements of experience should be suppressed. The axis of reality runs solely through the egotistic places,--they are strung upon it like so many beads. To describe the world with all the various feelings of the individual pinch of destiny, all the various spiritual attitudes, left out from the description--they being as describable as anything else--would be something like offering a printed bill of fare as the equivalent for a solid meal. Religion makes no such blunder. The individual's religion may be egotistic, and those private realities which it keeps in touch with may be narrow enough; but at any rate it always remains infinitely less hollow and abstract, as far as it goes, than a science which prides itself on taking no account of anything private at all. A bill of fare with one real raisin on it instead of the word "raisin," with one real egg instead of the word "egg," might be an inadequate meal, but it would at least be a commencement of reality. The contention of the survival-theory that we ought to stick to non-personal elements exclusively seems like saying that we ought to be satisfied forever with reading the naked bill of fare. I think, therefore, that however particular questions connected with our individual destinies may be answered, it is only by acknowledging them as genuine questions, and living in the sphere of thought which they open up, that we become profound. But to live thus is to be religious; so I unhesitatingly repudiate the survival-theory of religion, as being founded on an egregious mistake. It does not follow, because our ancestors made so many errors of fact and mixed them with their religion, that we should therefore leave off being religious at all.(335) By being religious we establish ourselves in possession of ultimate reality at the only points at which reality is given us to guard. Our responsible concern is with our private destiny, after all. You see now why I have been so individualistic throughout these lectures, and why I have seemed so bent on rehabilitating the element of feeling in religion and subordinating its intellectual part. Individuality is founded in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done.(336) Compared with this world of living individualized feelings, the world of generalized objects which the intellect contemplates is without solidity or life. As in stereoscopic or kinetoscopic pictures seen outside the instrument, the third dimension, the movement, the vital element, are not there. We get a beautiful picture of an express train supposed to be moving, but where in the picture, as I have heard a friend say, is the energy or the fifty miles an hour?(337) Let us agree, then, that Religion, occupying herself with personal destinies and keeping thus in contact with the only absolute realities which we know, must necessarily play an eternal part in human history. The next thing to decide is what she reveals about those destinies, or whether indeed she reveals anything distinct enough to be considered a general message to mankind. We have done as you see, with our preliminaries, and our final summing up can now begin. I am well aware that after all the palpitating documents which I have quoted, and all the perspectives of emotion-inspiring institution and belief that my previous lectures have opened, the dry analysis to which I now advance may appear to many of you like an anti-climax, a tapering-off and flattening out of the subject, instead of a crescendo of interest and result. I said awhile ago that the religious attitude of Protestants appears poverty-stricken to the Catholic imagination. Still more poverty- stricken, I fear, may my final summing up of the subject appear at first to some of you. On which account I pray you now to bear this point in mind, that in the present part of it I am expressly trying to reduce religion to its lowest admissible terms, to that minimum, free from individualistic excrescences, which all religions contain as their nucleus, and on which it may be hoped that all religious persons may agree. That established, we should have a result which might be small, but would at least be solid; and on it and round it the ruddier additional beliefs on which the different individuals make their venture might be grafted, and flourish as richly as you please. I shall add my own over- belief (which will be, I confess, of a somewhat pallid kind, as befits a critical philosopher), and you will, I hope, also add your over-beliefs, and we shall soon be in the varied world of concrete religious constructions once more. For the moment, let me dryly pursue the analytic part of the task. Both thought and feeling are determinants of conduct, and the same conduct may be determined either by feeling or by thought. When we survey the whole field of religion, we find a great variety in the thoughts that have prevailed there; but the feelings on the one hand and the conduct on the other are almost always the same, for Stoic, Christian, and Buddhist saints are practically indistinguishable in their lives. The theories which Religion generates, being thus variable, are secondary; and if you wish to grasp her essence, you must look to the feelings and the conduct as being the more constant elements. It is between these two elements that the short circuit exists on which she carries on her principal business, while the ideas and symbols and other institutions form loop-lines which may be perfections and improvements, and may even some day all be united into one harmonious system, but which are not to be regarded as organs with an indispensable function, necessary at all times for religious life to go on. This seems to me the first conclusion which we are entitled to draw from the phenomena we have passed in review. The next step is to characterize the feelings. To what psychological order do they belong? The resultant outcome of them is in any case what Kant calls a "sthenic" affection, an excitement of the cheerful, expansive, "dynamogenic" order which, like any tonic, freshens our vital powers. In almost every lecture, but especially in the lectures on Conversion and on Saintliness, we have seen how this emotion overcomes temperamental melancholy and imparts endurance to the Subject, or a zest, or a meaning, or an enchantment and glory to the common objects of life.(338) The name of "faith-state," by which Professor Leuba designates it, is a good one.(339) It is a biological as well as a psychological condition, and Tolstoy is absolutely accurate in classing faith among the forces _by which men live_.(340) The total absence of it, anhedonia,(341) means collapse. The faith-state may hold a very minimum of intellectual content. We saw examples of this in those sudden raptures of the divine presence, or in such mystical seizures as Dr. Bucke described.(342) It may be a mere vague enthusiasm, half spiritual, half vital, a courage, and a feeling that great and wondrous things are in the air.(343) When, however, a positive intellectual content is associated with a faith- state, it gets invincibly stamped in upon belief,(344) and this explains the passionate loyalty of religious persons everywhere to the minutest details of their so widely differing creeds. Taking creeds and faith-state together, as forming "religions," and treating these as purely subjective phenomena, without regard to the question of their "truth," we are obliged, on account of their extraordinary influence upon action and endurance, to class them amongst the most important biological functions of mankind. Their stimulant and anæsthetic effect is so great that Professor Leuba, in a recent article,(345) goes so far as to say that so long as men can _use_ their God, they care very little who he is, or even whether he is at all. "The truth of the matter can be put," says Leuba, "in this way: _God is not known, he is not understood; he is used_--sometimes as meat-purveyor, sometimes as moral support, sometimes as friend, sometimes as an object of love. If he proves himself useful, the religious consciousness asks for no more than that. Does God really exist? How does he exist? What is he? are so many irrelevant questions. Not God, but life, more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life, is, in the last analysis, the end of religion. The love of life, at any and every level of development, is the religious impulse."(346) At this purely subjective rating, therefore, Religion must be considered vindicated in a certain way from the attacks of her critics. It would seem that she cannot be a mere anachronism and survival, but must exert a permanent function, whether she be with or without intellectual content, and whether, if she have any, it be true or false. ------------------------------------- We must next pass beyond the point of view of merely subjective utility, and make inquiry into the intellectual content itself. First, is there, under all the discrepancies of the creeds, a common nucleus to which they bear their testimony unanimously? And second, ought we to consider the testimony true? I will take up the first question first, and answer it immediately in the affirmative. The warring gods and formulas of the various religions do indeed cancel each other, but there is a certain uniform deliverance in which religions all appear to meet. It consists of two parts:-- 1. An uneasiness; and 2. Its solution. 1. The uneasiness, reduced to its simplest terms, is a sense that there is _something wrong about us_ as we naturally stand. 2. The solution is a sense that _we are saved from the wrongness_ by making proper connection with the higher powers. In those more developed minds which alone we are studying, the wrongness takes a moral character, and the salvation takes a mystical tinge. I think we shall keep well within the limits of what is common to all such minds if we formulate the essence of their religious experience in terms like these:-- The individual, so far as he suffers from his wrongness and criticises it, is to that extent consciously beyond it, and in at least possible touch with something higher, if anything higher exist. Along with the wrong part there is thus a better part of him, even though it may be but a most helpless germ. With which part he should identify his real being is by no means obvious at this stage; but when stage 2 (the stage of solution or salvation) arrives,(347) the man identifies his real being with the germinal higher part of himself; and does so in the following way. _He becomes conscious that this higher part is conterminous and continuous with a _MORE_ of the same quality, which is operative in the universe outside of him, and which he can keep in working touch with, and in a fashion get on board of and save himself when all his lower being has gone to pieces in the wreck._ It seems to me that all the phenomena are accurately describable in these very simple general terms.(348) They allow for the divided self and the struggle; they involve the change of personal centre and the surrender of the lower self; they express the appearance of exteriority of the helping power and yet account for our sense of union with it;(349) and they fully justify our feelings of security and joy. There is probably no autobiographic document, among all those which I have quoted, to which the description will not well apply. One need only add such specific details as will adapt it to various theologies and various personal temperaments, and one will then have the various experiences reconstructed in their individual forms. So far, however, as this analysis goes, the experiences are only psychological phenomena. They possess, it is true, enormous biological worth. Spiritual strength really increases in the subject when he has them, a new life opens for him, and they seem to him a place of conflux where the forces of two universes meet; and yet this may be nothing but his subjective way of feeling things, a mood of his own fancy, in spite of the effects produced. I now turn to my second question: What is the objective "truth" of their content?(350) The part of the content concerning which the question of truth most pertinently arises is that "MORE of the same quality" with which our own higher self appears in the experience to come into harmonious working relation. Is such a "more" merely our own notion, or does it really exist? If so, in what shape does it exist? Does it act, as well as exist? And in what form should we conceive of that "union" with it of which religious geniuses are so convinced? It is in answering these questions that the various theologies perform their theoretic work, and that their divergencies most come to light. They all agree that the "more" really exists; though some of them hold it to exist in the shape of a personal god or gods, while others are satisfied to conceive it as a stream of ideal tendency embedded in the eternal structure of the world. They all agree, moreover, that it acts as well as exists, and that something really is effected for the better when you throw your life into its hands. It is when they treat of the experience of "union" with it that their speculative differences appear most clearly. Over this point pantheism and theism, nature and second birth, works and grace and karma, immortality and reincarnation, rationalism and mysticism, carry on inveterate disputes. At the end of my lecture on Philosophy(351) I held out the notion that an impartial science of religions might sift out from the midst of their discrepancies a common body of doctrine which she might also formulate in terms to which physical science need not object. This, I said, she might adopt as her own reconciling hypothesis, and recommend it for general belief. I also said that in my last lecture I should have to try my own hand at framing such an hypothesis. The time has now come for this attempt. Who says "hypothesis" renounces the ambition to be coercive in his arguments. The most I can do is, accordingly, to offer something that may fit the facts so easily that your scientific logic will find no plausible pretext for vetoing your impulse to welcome it as true. ------------------------------------- The "more," as we called it, and the meaning of our "union" with it, form the nucleus of our inquiry. Into what definite description can these words be translated, and for what definite facts do they stand? It would never do for us to place ourselves offhand at the position of a particular theology, the Christian theology, for example, and proceed immediately to define the "more" as Jehovah, and the "union" as his imputation to us of the righteousness of Christ. That would be unfair to other religions, and, from our present standpoint at least, would be an over-belief. We must begin by using less particularized terms; and, since one of the duties of the science of religions is to keep religion in connection with the rest of science, we shall do well to seek first of all a way of describing the "more," which psychologists may also recognize as real. The _subconscious self_ is nowadays a well-accredited psychological entity; and I believe that in it we have exactly the mediating term required. Apart from all religious considerations, there is actually and literally more life in our total soul than we are at any time aware of. The exploration of the transmarginal field has hardly yet been seriously undertaken, but what Mr. Myers said in 1892 in his essay on the Subliminal Consciousness(352) is as true as when it was first written: "Each of us is in reality an abiding psychical entity far more extensive than he knows--an individuality which can never express itself completely through any corporeal manifestation. The Self manifests through the organism; but there is always some part of the Self unmanifested; and always, as it seems, some power of organic expression in abeyance or reserve."(353) Much of the content of this larger background against which our conscious being stands out in relief is insignificant. Imperfect memories, silly jingles, inhibitive timidities, "dissolutive" phenomena of various sorts, as Myers calls them, enter into it for a large part. But in it many of the performances of genius seem also to have their origin; and in our study of conversion, of mystical experiences, and of prayer, we have seen how striking a part invasions from this region play in the religious life. Let me then propose, as an hypothesis, that whatever it may be on its _farther_ side, the "more" with which in religious experience we feel ourselves connected is on its _hither_ side the subconscious continuation of our conscious life. Starting thus with a recognized psychological fact as our basis, we seem to preserve a contact with "science" which the ordinary theologian lacks. At the same time the theologian's contention that the religious man is moved by an external power is vindicated, for it is one of the peculiarities of invasions from the subconscious region to take on objective appearances, and to suggest to the Subject an external control. In the religious life the control is felt as "higher"; but since on our hypothesis it is primarily the higher faculties of our own hidden mind which are controlling, the sense of union with the power beyond us is a sense of something, not merely apparently, but literally true. This doorway into the subject seems to me the best one for a science of religions, for it mediates between a number of different points of view. Yet it is only a doorway, and difficulties present themselves as soon as we step through it, and ask how far our transmarginal consciousness carries us if we follow it on its remoter side. Here the over-beliefs begin: here mysticism and the conversion-rapture and Vedantism and transcendental idealism bring in their monistic interpretations(354) and tell us that the finite self rejoins the absolute self, for it was always one with God and identical with the soul of the world.(355) Here the prophets of all the different religions come with their visions, voices, raptures, and other openings, supposed by each to authenticate his own peculiar faith. Those of us who are not personally favored with such specific revelations must stand outside of them altogether and, for the present at least, decide that, since they corroborate incompatible theological doctrines, they neutralize one another and leave no fixed result. If we follow any one of them, or if we follow philosophical theory and embrace monistic pantheism on non-mystical grounds, we do so in the exercise of our individual freedom, and build out our religion in the way most congruous with our personal susceptibilities. Among these susceptibilities intellectual ones play a decisive part. Although the religious question is primarily a question of life, of living or not living in the higher union which opens itself to us as a gift, yet the spiritual excitement in which the gift appears a real one will often fail to be aroused in an individual until certain particular intellectual beliefs or ideas which, as we say, come home to him, are touched.(356) These ideas will thus be essential to that individual's religion;--which is as much as to say that over-beliefs in various directions are absolutely indispensable, and that we should treat them with tenderness and tolerance so long as they are not intolerant themselves. As I have elsewhere written, the most interesting and valuable things about a man are usually his over-beliefs. Disregarding the over-beliefs, and confining ourselves to what is common and generic, we have in _the fact that the conscious person is continuous with a wider self through which saving experiences come_,(357) a positive content of religious experience which, it seems to me, _is literally and objectively true as far as it goes_. If I now proceed to state my own hypothesis about the farther limits of this extension of our personality, I shall be offering my own over-belief--though I know it will appear a sorry under-belief to some of you--for which I can only bespeak the same indulgence which in a converse case I should accord to yours. ------------------------------------- The further limits of our being plunge, it seems to me, into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely "understandable" world. Name it the mystical region, or the supernatural region, whichever you choose. So far as our ideal impulses originate in this region (and most of them do originate in it, for we find them possessing us in a way for which we cannot articulately account), we belong to it in a more intimate sense than that in which we belong to the visible world, for we belong in the most intimate sense wherever our ideals belong. Yet the unseen region in question is not merely ideal, for it produces effects in this world. When we commune with it, work is actually done upon our finite personality, for we are turned into new men, and consequences in the way of conduct follow in the natural world upon our regenerative change.(358) But that which produces effects within another reality must be termed a reality itself, so I feel as if we had no philosophic excuse for calling the unseen or mystical world unreal. God is the natural appellation, for us Christians at least, for the supreme reality, so I will call this higher part of the universe by the name of God.(359) We and God have business with each other; and in opening ourselves to his influence our deepest destiny is fulfilled. The universe, at those parts of it which our personal being constitutes, takes a turn genuinely for the worse or for the better in proportion as each one of us fulfills or evades God's demands. As far as this goes I probably have you with me, for I only translate into schematic language what I may call the instinctive belief of mankind: God is real since he produces real effects. The real effects in question, so far as I have as yet admitted them, are exerted on the personal centres of energy of the various subjects, but the spontaneous faith of most of the subjects is that they embrace a wider sphere than this. Most religious men believe (or "know," if they be mystical) that not only they themselves, but the whole universe of beings to whom the God is present, are secure in his parental hands. There is a sense, a dimension, they are sure, in which we are _all_ saved, in spite of the gates of hell and all adverse terrestrial appearances. God's existence is the guarantee of an ideal order that shall be permanently preserved. This world may indeed, as science assures us, some day burn up or freeze; but if it is part of his order, the old ideals are sure to be brought elsewhere to fruition, so that where God is, tragedy is only provisional and partial, and shipwreck and dissolution are not the absolutely final things. Only when this farther step of faith concerning God is taken, and remote objective consequences are predicted, does religion, as it seems to me, get wholly free from the first immediate subjective experience, and bring a _real hypothesis_ into play. A good hypothesis in science must have other properties than those of the phenomenon it is immediately invoked to explain, otherwise it is not prolific enough. God, meaning only what enters into the religious man's experience of union, falls short of being an hypothesis of this more useful order. He needs to enter into wider cosmic relations in order to justify the subject's absolute confidence and peace. That the God with whom, starting from the hither side of our own extra- marginal self, we come at its remoter margin into commerce should be the absolute world-ruler, is of course a very considerable over-belief. Over- belief as it is, though, it is an article of almost every one's religion. Most of us pretend in some way to prop it upon our philosophy, but the philosophy itself is really propped upon this faith. What is this but to say that Religion, in her fullest exercise of function, is not a mere illumination of facts already elsewhere given, not a mere passion, like love, which views things in a rosier light. It is indeed that, as we have seen abundantly. But it is something more, namely, a postulator of new _facts_ as well. The world interpreted religiously is not the materialistic world over again, with an altered expression; it must have, over and above the altered expression, _a natural constitution_ different at some point from that which a materialistic world would have. It must be such that different events can be expected in it, different conduct must be required. This thoroughly "pragmatic" view of religion has usually been taken as a matter of course by common men. They have interpolated divine miracles into the field of nature, they have built a heaven out beyond the grave. It is only transcendentalist metaphysicians who think that, without adding any concrete details to Nature, or subtracting any, but by simply calling it the expression of absolute spirit, you make it more divine just as it stands. I believe the pragmatic way of taking religion to be the deeper way. It gives it body as well as soul, it makes it claim, as everything real must claim, some characteristic realm of fact as its very own. What the more characteristically divine facts are, apart from the actual inflow of energy in the faith-state and the prayer-state, I know not. But the over- belief on which I am ready to make my personal venture is that they exist. The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist, and that those other worlds must contain experiences which have a meaning for our life also; and that although in the main their experiences and those of this world keep discrete, yet the two become continuous at certain points, and higher energies filter in. By being faithful in my poor measure to this over-belief, I seem to myself to keep more sane and true. I _can_, of course, put myself into the sectarian scientist's attitude, and imagine vividly that the world of sensations and of scientific laws and objects may be all. But whenever I do this, I hear that inward monitor of which W. K. Clifford once wrote, whispering the word "bosh!" Humbug is humbug, even though it bear the scientific name, and the total expression of human experience, as I view it objectively, invincibly urges me beyond the narrow "scientific" bounds. Assuredly, the real world is of a different temperament,--more intricately built than physical science allows. So my objective and my subjective conscience both hold me to the over-belief which I express. Who knows whether the faithfulness of individuals here below to their own poor over-beliefs may not actually help God in turn to be more effectively faithful to his own greater tasks? POSTSCRIPT. In writing my concluding lecture I had to aim so much at simplification that I fear that my general philosophic position received so scant a statement as hardly to be intelligible to some of my readers. I therefore add this epilogue, which must also be so brief as possibly to remedy but little the defect. In a later work I may be enabled to state my position more amply and consequently more clearly. Originality cannot be expected in a field like this, where all the attitudes and tempers that are possible have been exhibited in literature long ago, and where any new writer can immediately be classed under a familiar head. If one should make a division of all thinkers into naturalists and supernaturalists, I should undoubtedly have to go, along with most philosophers, into the supernaturalist branch. But there is a crasser and a more refined supernaturalism, and it is to the refined division that most philosophers at the present day belong. If not regular transcendental idealists, they at least obey the Kantian direction enough to bar out ideal entities from interfering causally in the course of phenomenal events. Refined supernaturalism is universalistic supernaturalism; for the "crasser" variety "piecemeal" supernaturalism would perhaps be the better name. It went with that older theology which to-day is supposed to reign only among uneducated people, or to be found among the few belated professors of the dualisms which Kant is thought to have displaced. It admits miracles and providential leadings, and finds no intellectual difficulty in mixing the ideal and the real worlds together by interpolating influences from the ideal region among the forces that causally determine the real world's details. In this the refined supernaturalists think that it muddles disparate dimensions of existence. For them the world of the ideal has no efficient causality, and never bursts into the world of phenomena at particular points. The ideal world, for them, is not a world of facts, but only of the meaning of facts; it is a point of view for judging facts. It appertains to a different "-ology," and inhabits a different dimension of being altogether from that in which existential propositions obtain. It cannot get down upon the flat level of experience and interpolate itself piecemeal between distinct portions of nature, as those who believe, for example, in divine aid coming in response to prayer, are bound to think it must. Notwithstanding my own inability to accept either popular Christianity or scholastic theism, I suppose that my belief that in communion with the Ideal new force comes into the world, and new departures are made here below, subjects me to being classed among the supernaturalists of the piecemeal or crasser type. Universalistic supernaturalism surrenders, it seems to me, too easily to naturalism. It takes the facts of physical science at their face-value, and leaves the laws of life just as naturalism finds them, with no hope of remedy, in case their fruits are bad. It confines itself to sentiments about life as a whole, sentiments which may be admiring and adoring, but which need not be so, as the existence of systematic pessimism proves. In this universalistic way of taking the ideal world, the essence of practical religion seems to me to evaporate. Both instinctively and for logical reasons, I find it hard to believe that principles can exist which make no difference in facts.(360) But all facts are particular facts, and the whole interest of the question of God's existence seems to me to lie in the consequences for particulars which that existence may be expected to entail. That no concrete particular of experience should alter its complexion in consequence of a God being there seems to me an incredible proposition, and yet it is the thesis to which (implicitly at any rate) refined supernaturalism seems to cling. It is only with experience _en bloc_, it says, that the Absolute maintains relations. It condescends to no transactions of detail. I am ignorant of Buddhism and speak under correction, and merely in order the better to describe my general point of view; but as I apprehend the Buddhistic doctrine of Karma, I agree in principle with that. All supernaturalists admit that facts are under the judgment of higher law; but for Buddhism as I interpret it, and for religion generally so far as it remains unweakened by transcendentalistic metaphysics, the word "judgment" here means no such bare academic verdict or platonic appreciation as it means in Vedantic or modern absolutist systems; it carries, on the contrary, _execution_ with it, is _in __ rebus_ as well as _post rem_, and operates "causally" as partial factor in the total fact. The universe becomes a gnosticism(361) pure and simple on any other terms. But this view that judgment and execution go together is that of the crasser supernaturalist way of thinking, so the present volume must on the whole be classed with the other expressions of that creed. I state the matter thus bluntly, because the current of thought in academic circles runs against me, and I feel like a man who must set his back against an open door quickly if he does not wish to see it closed and locked. In spite of its being so shocking to the reigning intellectual tastes, I believe that a candid consideration of piecemeal supernaturalism and a complete discussion of all its metaphysical bearings will show it to be the hypothesis by which the largest number of legitimate requirements are met. That of course would be a program for other books than this; what I now say sufficiently indicates to the philosophic reader the place where I belong. If asked just where the differences in fact which are due to God's existence come in, I should have to say that in general I have no hypothesis to offer beyond what the phenomenon of "prayerful communion," especially when certain kinds of incursion from the subconscious region take part in it, immediately suggests. The appearance is that in this phenomenon something ideal, which in one sense is part of ourselves and in another sense is not ourselves, actually exerts an influence, raises our centre of personal energy, and produces regenerative effects unattainable in other ways. If, then, there be a wider world of being than that of our every-day consciousness, if in it there be forces whose effects on us are intermittent, if one facilitating condition of the effects be the openness of the "subliminal" door, we have the elements of a theory to which the phenomena of religious life lend plausibility. I am so impressed by the importance of these phenomena that I adopt the hypothesis which they so naturally suggest. At these places at least, I say, it would seem as though transmundane energies, God, if you will, produced immediate effects within the natural world to which the rest of our experience belongs. The difference in natural "fact" which most of us would assign as the first difference which the existence of a God ought to make would, I imagine, be personal immortality. Religion, in fact, for the great majority of our own race _means_ immortality, and nothing else. God is the producer of immortality; and whoever has doubts of immortality is written down as an atheist without farther trial. I have said nothing in my lectures about immortality or the belief therein, for to me it seems a secondary point. If our ideals are only cared for in "eternity," I do not see why we might not be willing to resign their care to other hands than ours. Yet I sympathize with the urgent impulse to be present ourselves, and in the conflict of impulses, both of them so vague yet both of them noble, I know not how to decide. It seems to me that it is eminently a case for facts to testify. Facts, I think, are yet lacking to prove "spirit-return," though I have the highest respect for the patient labors of Messrs. Myers, Hodgson, and Hyslop, and am somewhat impressed by their favorable conclusions. I consequently leave the matter open, with this brief word to save the reader from a possible perplexity as to why immortality got no mention in the body of this book. The ideal power with which we feel ourselves in connection, the "God" of ordinary men, is, both by ordinary men and by philosophers, endowed with certain of those metaphysical attributes which in the lecture on philosophy I treated with such disrespect. He is assumed as a matter of course to be "one and only" and to be "infinite"; and the notion of many finite gods is one which hardly any one thinks it worth while to consider, and still less to uphold. Nevertheless, in the interests of intellectual clearness, I feel bound to say that religious experience, as we have studied it, cannot be cited as unequivocally supporting the infinitist belief. The only thing that it unequivocally testifies to is that we can experience union with _something_ larger than ourselves and in that union find our greatest peace. Philosophy, with its passion for unity, and mysticism with its monoideistic bent, both "pass to the limit" and identify the something with a unique God who is the all-inclusive soul of the world. Popular opinion, respectful to their authority, follows the example which they set. Meanwhile the practical needs and experiences of religion seem to me sufficiently met by the belief that beyond each man and in a fashion continuous with him there exists a larger power which is friendly to him and to his ideals. All that the facts require is that the power should be both other and larger than our conscious selves. Anything larger will do, if only it be large enough to trust for the next step. It need not be infinite, it need not be solitary. It might conceivably even be only a larger and more godlike self, of which the present self would then be but the mutilated expression, and the universe might conceivably be a collection of such selves, of different degrees of inclusiveness, with no absolute unity realized in it at all.(362) Thus would a sort of polytheism return upon us--a polytheism which I do not on this occasion defend, for my only aim at present is to keep the testimony of religious experience clearly within its proper bounds. [Compare p. 132 above.] Upholders of the monistic view will say to such a polytheism (which, by the way, has always been the real religion of common people, and is so still to-day) that unless there be one all-inclusive God, our guarantee of security is left imperfect. In the Absolute, and in the Absolute only, _all_ is saved. If there be different gods, each caring for his part, some portion of some of us might not be covered with divine protection, and our religious consolation would thus fail to be complete. It goes back to what was said on pages 131-133, about the possibility of there being portions of the universe that may irretrievably be lost. Common sense is less sweeping in its demands than philosophy or mysticism have been wont to be, and can suffer the notion of this world being partly saved and partly lost. The ordinary moralistic state of mind makes the salvation of the world conditional upon the success with which each unit does its part. Partial and conditional salvation is in fact a most familiar notion when taken in the abstract, the only difficulty being to determine the details. Some men are even disinterested enough to be willing to be in the unsaved remnant as far as their persons go, if only they can be persuaded that their cause will prevail--all of us are willing, whenever our activity- excitement rises sufficiently high. I think, in fact, that a final philosophy of religion will have to consider the pluralistic hypothesis more seriously than it has hitherto been willing to consider it. For practical life at any rate, the _chance_ of salvation is enough. No fact in human nature is more characteristic than its willingness to live on a chance. The existence of the chance makes the difference, as Edmund Gurney says, between a life of which the keynote is resignation and a life of which the keynote is hope.(363) But all these statements are unsatisfactory from their brevity, and I can only say that I hope to return to the same questions in another book. INDEX. Absolute, oneness with the, 419. Abstractness of religious objects, 53. ACHILLES, 86. ACKERMANN, MADAME, 63. Adaptation to environment, of things, 438; of saints, 374-377. Æsthetic elements in religions, 460. Alacoque, 310, 344, 413. Alcohol, 387. AL-GHAZZALI, 402. ALI, 341. ALLEINE, 228. ALLINE, 159, 217. Alternations of personality, 193. ALVAREZ DE PAZ, 116. AMIEL, 394. Anæsthesia, 288. Anæsthetic revelation, 387-393. ANGELUS SILESIUS, 417. Anger, 181, 264. "Anhedonia," 145. Aristocratic type, 371. ARISTOTLE, 495. Ars, le Curé d', 302. Asceticism, 273, 296-310, 360-365. Aseity, God's, 439, 445. Atman, 400. Attributes of God, 440; their æsthetic use, 458. AUGUSTINE, SAINT, 171, 361, 496. AURELIUS, see MARCUS. Automatic writing, 62, 478. Automatisms, 234, 250, 478-483. BALDWIN, 347, 503. BASHKIRTSEFF, 83. BEECHER, 256. BEHMEN, see BOEHME. Belief, due to non-rationalistic impulses, 73. BESANT, MRS., 23, 168. Bhagavad-Gita, 361. BLAVATSKY, MADAM, 421. BLOOD, 389. BLUMHARDT, 113. BOEHME, 410, 417, 418. BOOTH, 203. BOUGAUD, 344. BOURGET, 263. BOURIGNON, 321. BOWNE, 502. BRAINERD, 212, 253. BRAY, 249, 256, 290. BROOKS, 512. BROWNELL, 515. BUCKE, 398. Buddhism, 31, 34, 522. Buddhist mysticism, 401. BULLEN, 287. BUNYAN, 157, 160. BUTTERWORTH, 411. CAIRD, EDWARD, 106. CAIRD, J., on feeling in religion, 434; on absolute self, 450; he does not prove, but reaffirms, religion's dicta, 453. CALL, 289. CARLYLE, 41, 300. CARPENTER, 319. Catharine, Saint, of Genoa, 289. Catholicism and Protestantism compared, 114, 227, 336, 461. Causality of God, 517, 522. Cause, 502. CENNICK, 301. Centres of personal energy, 196, 267, 523. Cerebration, unconscious, 207. Chance, 526. CHANNING, 300, 488. CHAPMAN, 324. Character, cause of its alterations, 193; scheme of its differences of type, 197, 214. Causes of its diversity, 261; balance of, 340. Charity, 274, 278, 310, 355. Chastity, 310. Chiefs of tribes, 371. Christian Science, 106. Christ's atonement, 129, 245. Churches, 335, 460. CLARK, 389. CLISSOLD, 481. COE, 240. Conduct, perfect, 355. Confession, 462. Consciousness, fields of, 231; subliminal, 233. Consistency, 296. Conversion, to avarice, 178. Conversion, Fletcher's, 181; Tolstoy's, 184; Bunyan's, 186; in general, Lectures IX and X, passim; Bradley's, 189; compared with natural moral growth, 199; Hadley's, 201; two types of, 205 ff.; Brainerd's, 212; Alline's, 217; Oxford graduate's, 221; Ratisbonne's, 223; instantaneous, 227; is it a natural phenomenon? 230; subliminal action involved, in sudden cases, 236, 240; fruits of, 237; its momentousness, 239; may be supernatural, 242; its concomitants: sense of higher control, 244, happiness, 248, automatisms, 250, luminous phenomena, 251; its degree of permanence, 256. Cosmic consciousness, 398. Counter-conversion, 176. Courage, 265, 287. Crankiness, see Psychopathy. CRICHTON-BROWNE, 384, 386. Criminal character, 263. Criteria of value of spiritual affections, 18. CRUMP, 239. Cure of bad habits, 270. DAUDET, 167. Death, 139, 364. DERHAM, 493. Design, argument from, 438, 492 ff. Devoutness, 340. DIONYSIUS AREOPAGITICUS, 416. Disease, 99, 113. Disorder in contents of world, 438. Divided Self, Lecture VIII, passim; Cases of: Saint Augustine, 172, H. Alline, 173. Divine, the, 31. Dog, 281. Dogmatism, 326, 333. DOWIE, 113. DRESSER, H. W., 96, 99, 289, 516. Drink, 268. Drummer, 476. DRUMMOND, 262. Drunkenness, 387, 403, 488. "Dryness," 204. DUMAS, 279. Dyes, on clothing, 294. Earnestness, 264. Ecclesiastical spirit, the, 335, 338. ECKHART, 417. EDDY, 106. EDWARDS, JONATHAN, 20, 114, 200, 229, 238, 239, 248, 330. EDWARDS, MRS. J., 276, 280. Effects of religious states, 21. Effeminacy, 365. Ego of Apperception, 449. ELLIS, HAVELOCK, 418. ELWOOD, 292. EMERSON, 32, 56, 167, 205, 239, 330. Emotion, as alterer of life's value, 150; of the character, 195, 261 ff., 279. Empirical method, 18, 327 ff., 443. Enemies, love your, 278, 283. Energy, personal, 196; mystical states increase it, 414. Environment, 356, 374. Epictetus, 474. Epicureans, 143. Equanimity, 284. Ether, mystical effects of, 392. Evil, ignored by healthy-mindedness, 88, 106, 131; due to _things_ or to the _Self_, 134; its reality, 163. Evolutionist optimism, 91. Excesses of piety, 340. Excitement, its effects, 195, 266, 279, 325. Experience, religious, the essence of, 508. Extravagances of piety, 339, 486. Extreme cases, why we take them, 486. Failure, 139. Faith, 246, 506. Faith-state, 505. Fanaticism, 338 ff. Fear, 98, 159, 161, 263, 275. Feeling deeper than intellect in religion, 431. FIELDING, 436. FINNEY, 207, 215. FLETCHER, 98, 181. FLOURNOY, 67, 514. Flower, 476. FOSTER, 178, 383. FOX, GEORGE, 7, 291, 335, 411. FRANCIS, SAINT, D'ASSISI, 319. FRANCIS, SAINT, DE SALES, 11. FRASER, 454. Fruits, of conversion, 237; of religion, 327; of Saintliness, 357. FULLER, 41. GAMOND, 288. GARDINER, 269. Genius and insanity, 16. Geniuses, see Religious leaders. Gentleman, character of the, 317, 371. GERTRUDE, SAINT, 345. "Gifts," 151. Glory of God, 342. GOD, 31; sense of his presence, 66-72, 272, 275 ff.; historic changes in idea of him, 74, 328 ff., 493; mind-curer's idea of him, 101; his honor, 342; described by negatives, 417; his attributes, scholastic proof of, 439; the metaphysical ones are for us meaningless, 445; the moral ones are ill-deduced, 447; he is not a mere inference, 502; is _used_, not known, 506; his existence must make a difference among phenomena, 517, 522; his relation to the subconscious region, 242, 515; his tasks, 519; may be finite and plural, 525. GODDARD, 96. GOERRES, 407. GOETHE, 137. GOUGH, 203. GOURDON, 171. "Grace," the operation of, 226; the state of, 260. GRATRY, 146, 476, 506. Greeks, their pessimism, 86, 142. Guidance, 472. GURNEY, 527. GUYON, 276, 286. HADLEY, 201, 268. HALE, 82. HAMON, 367. Happiness, 47-49, 79, 248, 279. HARNACK, 100. Healthy-mindedness, Lectures IV and V, passim; its philosophy of evil, 131; compared with morbid-mindedness, 162, 488. Heart, softening of, 267. HEGEL, 389, 449, 454. HELMONT, VAN, 497. Heroism, 364, 488, note. Heterogeneous personality, 169, 193. Higher criticism, 4. HILTY, 79, 275, 472. HODGSON, R., 524. HOMER, 86. HUGO, 171. Hypocrisy, 338. Hypothesis, what make a useful one, 517. HYSLOP, 524. IGNATIUS LOYOLA, 313, 406, 410. Illness, 113. "Imitation of Christ," the, 44. Immortality, 524. Impulses, 261. Individuality, 501. Inhibitions, 261 ff. Insane melancholy and religion, 144. Insanity and genius, 16; and happiness, 279. Institutional religion, 335. Intellect a secondary force in religion, 431, 514. Intellectual weakness of some saints, 370. Intolerance, 342. Irascibility, 264. JESUS, HARNACK on, 100. JOB, 76, 448. JOHN, SAINT, OF THE CROSS, 304, 407, 413. JOHNSTON, 258. JONQUIL, 476. JORDAN, 347. JOUFFROY, 176, 198. Judgments, existential and spiritual, 4. KANT, 54, 448. Karma, 522. KELLNER, 401. Kindliness, see Charity. KINGSLEY, 385. LAGNEAU, 285. Leaders, see Religious leaders. Leaders, of tribes, 371. LEJEUNE, 113, 312. LESSING, 318. LEUBA, 201, 203, 220, 246, 506. Life, its significance, 151. Life, the subconscious, 207, 209. LOCKER-LAMPSON, 39. Logic, Hegelian, 449. Louis, Saint, of Gonzaga, 350. Love, see Charity. Love, cases of falling out of, 179. Love of God, 276. Love your enemies, 278, 283. LOWELL, 65. Loyalty, to God, 342. LUTFULLAH, 164. LUTHER, 128, 137, 244, 330, 348, 382. Lutheran self-despair, 108, 211. Luxury, 365. LYCAON, 86. Lyre, 267. Mahomet, 171. See MOHAMMED. MARCUS AURELIUS, 42, 44, 474. MARGARET MARY, see ALACOQUE. Margin of consciousness, 232. MARSHALL, 503. MARTINEAU, 475. MATHER, 303. MAUDSLEY, 19. Meaning of life, 151. Medical criticism of religion, 413. Medical materialism, 10 ff. Melancholy, 145, 279; Lectures V and VI, passim; cases of, 148, 149, 157, 159, 198. Melting moods, 267. Method of judging value of religion, 18, 327. Methodism, 227, 237. MEYSENBUG, 395. Militarism, 365-367. Military type of character, 371. MILL, 204. Mind-cure, its sources and history, 94-97; its opinion of fear, 98; cases of, 102-105, 120, 123; its message, 108; its methods, 112-123; it uses verification, 120-124; its philosophy of evil, 131. Miraculous character of conversion, 227. MOHAMMED, 341, 481. MOLINOS, 130. MOLTKE, VON, 264, 367. Monasteries, 296. Monism, 416. Morbidness compared with healthy-mindedness, 488. See, also, Melancholy. Mormon revelations, 482. Mortification, see Asceticism. MUIR, 482. MULFORD, 497. MÜLLER, 468. MURISIER, 349. MYERS, 233, 234, 466, 511, 524. Mystic states, their effects, 21, 414. Mystical experiences, 66. Mysticism, Lectures XVI and XVII, passim; its marks, 380; its theoretic results, 416, 422, 428; it cannot warrant truth, 422; its results, 425; its relation to the sense of union, 509. Mystical region of experience, 515. Natural theology, 492. Naturalism, 141, 167. Nature, scientific view of, 491. Negative accounts of deity, 417. NELSON, 208, 423. NETTLETON, 215. NEWMAN, F. W., 80. NEWMAN, J. H., on dogmatic theology, 434, 442; his type of imagination, 459. NIETZSCHE, 371, 372. Nitrous oxide, its mystical effects, 387. No-function, 261-263, 299, 387, 416. Non-resistance, 281, 358, 376. Obedience, 310. OBERMANN, 476. O'CONNELL, 257. Omit, 296. "Once-born" type, 80, 166, 363, 488. Oneness with God, see Union. Optimism, systematic, 88; and evolutionism, 91; it may be shallow, 364. Orderliness of world, 438. Organism determines all mental states whatsoever, 14. Origin of mental states no criterion of their value, 14 ff. Orison, 406. Over-beliefs, 513; the author's, 515. Over-soul, 516. Oxford, graduate of, 220, 268. Pagan feeling, 86. Pantheism, 131, 416. PARKER, 83. PASCAL, 286. PATON, 359. PAUL, SAINT, 171, 357. PEEK, 253. PEIRCE, 444. Penny, 323. PERREYVE, 505. Persecutions, 338, 342. Personality, explained away by science, 119, 491; heterogeneous, 169; alterations of, 193, 210 ff.; is reality, 499. See Character. PETER, SAINT, OF ALCANTARA, 360. PHILO, 481. Philosophy, Lecture XVIII, passim; must coerce assent, 433; scholastic, 439; idealistic, 448; unable to give a theoretic warrant to faith, 455; its true office in religion, 455. Photisms, 251. Piety, 339 ff. Pluralism, 131. Polytheism, 131, 526. Poverty, 315, 367. "Pragmatism," 444, 519, 522-524. Prayer, 463; its definition, 464; its essence, 465; petitional, 467; its effects, 474-477, 523. "Presence," sense of, 58-63. Presence of God, 66-72, 272, 275 ff., 396, 418. Presence of God, the practice of, 116. Primitive human thought, 495. PRINGLE-PATTISON, 454. Prophets, the Hebrew, 479. Protestant theology, 244. Protestantism and Catholicism, 114, 227, 330, 461. Providential leading, 472. Psychopathy and religion, 22 ff. PUFFER, 394. Purity, 274, 290, 348. Quakers, 7, 291. RAMAKRISHNA, 361, 365. Rationalism, 73, 74; its authority overthrown by mysticism, 428. RATISBONNE, 223, 257. Reality of unseen objects, Lecture III, passim. RÉCÉJAC, 407, 509. "Recollection," 116, 289. Redemption, 157. Reformation of character, 320. Regeneration, see Conversion; by relaxation, 111. REID, 446. Relaxation, salvation by, 110. See Surrender. Religion, to be tested by fruits, not by origin, 10 ff., 331; its definition, 26, 31; is solemn, 37; compared with Stoicism, 41; its unique function, 51; abstractness of its objects, 54; differs according to temperament, 75, 135, 333, and ought to differ, 487; considered to be a "survival," 118, 490, 498; its relations to melancholy, 145; worldly passions may combine with it, 337; its essential characters, 369, 485; its relation to prayer, 463-466; asserts a fact, not a theory, 489; its truth, 377; more than science, it holds by concrete reality, 500; attempts to evaporate it into philosophy, 502; it is concerned with personal destinies, 491, 503; with feeling and conduct, 504; is a sthenic affection, 505; is for life, not for knowledge, 506; its essential contents, 508; it postulates issues of fact, 518. Religious emotion, 279. Religious leaders, often nervously unstable, 6 ff., 30; their loneliness, 335. "Religious sentiment," 27. RENAN, 37. Renunciations, 349. Repentance, 127. Resignation, 286. Revelation, the anæsthetic, 387-393. Revelations, see Automatisms. Revelations, in Mormon Church, 482. Revivalism, 228. RIBET, 407. RIBOT, 145, 502. RODRIGUEZ, 313, 314, 317. ROYCE, 454. RUTHERFORD, MARK, 76. SABATIER, A., 464. Sacrifice, 303, 462. SAINT-PIERRE, 83. SAINTE-BEUVE, 260, 315. Saintliness, Sainte-Beuve on, 260; its characteristics, 272, 370; criticism of, 326 ff. Saintly conduct, 356-377. Saints, dislike of natural man for, 371. Salvation, 526. SANDAYS, 480. SATAN, in picture, 50. SCHEFFLER, 417. Scholastic arguments for God, 437. Science, ignores personality and teleology, 491; her "facts," 500, 501. "Science of Religions," 433, 455, 456, 488-490. Scientific conceptions, their late adoption, 496. Second-birth, 157, 165, 166. SEELEY, 77. Self of the world, 449. Self-despair, 110, 129, 208. Self-surrender, 110, 208. SÉNANCOUR, 476. SETH, 454. Sexual temptation, 269. Sexuality as cause of religion, 10, 11. "Shrew," 347. Sickness, 113. Sick souls, Lectures V and VI, passim. SIGHELE, 263. Sin, 209. Sinners, Christ died for, 129. Skepticism, 332 ff. SKOBELEFF, 265. SMITH, JOSEPH, 482. Softening of the heart, 267. Solemnity, 37, 48. Soul, 195. Soul, strength of, 273. SPENCER, 355, 374. SPINOZA, 9, 127. Spiritism, 514. Spirit-return, 524. Spiritual judgments, 4. Spiritual states, tests of their value, 18. STARBUCK, 198, 199, 204, 206, 208-210, 249, 253, 258, 268, 276, 323, 353, 394. STEVENSON, 138, 296. Stoicism, 42-45, 143. Strange appearance of world, 151. Strength of soul, 273. Subconscious action in conversion, 236, 242. Subconscious life, 115, 207, 209, 233, 236, 270, 483. Subconscious Self, as intermediary between the Self and God, 511. Subliminal, see Subconscious. Sufis, 402, 420. Suggestion, 112, 234. Suicide, 147. Supernaturalism its two kinds, 520; criticism of universalistic, 521. Supernatural world, 518. Surrender, salvation by, 110, 208, 211. Survival-theory of religion, 490, 498, 500. SUSO, 306, 349. SWINBURNE, 421. SYMONDS, 385, 390. Sympathetic magic, 496. Sympathy, see Charity. Systems, philosophic, 433. Taine, 9. TAYLOR, 246. Tenderness, see Charity. TENNYSON, 383, 384. TERESA, SAINT, 20, 346, 360, 408, 411, 412, 414. Theologia Germanica, 43. Theologians, systematic, 446. "Theopathy," 343. THOREAU, 275. Threshold, 135. Tiger, 164, 262. Tobacco, 270, 290. TOLSTOY, 149, 178, 184. TOWIANSKI, 281. Tragedy of life, 363. Tranquillity, 285. Transcendentalism criticised, 522. Transcendentalists, 516. TREVOR, 396. TRINE, 101, 394. Truth of religion, how to be tested, 377; what it is, 509; mystical perception of, 380, 410. "Twice-born," type, 166, 363, 488. TYNDALL, 299. "Unconscious cerebration," 207. Unification of Self, 183, 349. "UNION MORALE," 272. Union with God, 408, 418, 425, 451, 509 ff. See lectures on Conversion, passim. Unity of universe, 131. Unreality, sense of, 63. Unseen realities, Lecture III, passim. Upanishads, 419. UPHAM, 289. Utopias, 360. VACHEROT, 502. Value of spiritual affections, how tested, 18. VAMBÉRY, 341. Vedantism, 400, 419, 513, 522. Veracity, 7, 291 ff. VIVEKANANDA, 513. VOLTAIRE, 38. VOYSEY, 275. War, 365-367. Wealth-worship, 365. WEAVER, 281. WESLEY, 227. Wesleyan self-despair, 108, 211. WHITEFIELD, 318. WHITMAN, 84, 395, 396, 506. WOLFF, 492, 493. WOOD, HENRY, 96, 99, 117. World, soul of the, 449. Worry, 98, 181. Yes-function, 261-263, 299, 387. Yoga, 400. YOUNG, 256. FOOTNOTES 1 As with many ideas that float in the air of one's time, this notion shrinks from dogmatic general statement and expresses itself only partially and by innuendo. It seems to me that few conceptions are less instructive than this re-interpretation of religion as perverted sexuality. It reminds one, so crudely is it often employed, of the famous Catholic taunt, that the Reformation may be best understood by remembering that its _fons et origo_ was Luther's wish to marry a nun:--the effects are infinitely wider than the alleged causes, and for the most part opposite in nature. It is true that in the vast collection of religious phenomena, some are undisguisedly amatory--e.g., sex-deities and obscene rites in polytheism, and ecstatic feelings of union with the Saviour in a few Christian mystics. But then why not equally call religion an aberration of the digestive function, and prove one's point by the worship of Bacchus and Ceres, or by the ecstatic feelings of some other saints about the Eucharist? Religious language clothes itself in such poor symbols as our life affords, and the whole organism gives overtones of comment whenever the mind is strongly stirred to expression. Language drawn from eating and drinking is probably as common in religious literature as is language drawn from the sexual life. We "hunger and thirst" after righteousness; we "find the Lord a sweet savor;" we "taste and see that he is good." "Spiritual milk for American babes, drawn from the breasts of both testaments," is a sub-title of the once famous New England Primer, and Christian devotional literature indeed quite floats in milk, thought of from the point of view, not of the mother, but of the greedy babe. Saint François de Sales, for instance, thus describes the "orison of quietude": "In this state the soul is like a little child still at the breast, whose mother, to caress him whilst he is still in her arms, makes her milk distill into his mouth without his even moving his lips. So it is here.... Our Lord desires that our will should be satisfied with sucking the milk which His Majesty pours into our mouth, and that we should relish the sweetness without even knowing that it cometh from the Lord." And again: "Consider the little infants, united and joined to the breasts of their nursing mothers, you will see that from time to time they press themselves closer by little starts to which the pleasure of sucking prompts them. Even so, during its orison, the heart united to its God oftentimes makes attempts at closer union by movements during which it presses closer upon the divine sweetness." Chemin de la Perfection, ch. xxxi.; Amour de Dieu, vii. ch. i. In fact, one might almost as well interpret religion as a perversion of the respiratory function. The Bible is full of the language of respiratory oppression: "Hide not thine ear at my breathing; my groaning is not hid from thee; my heart panteth, my strength faileth me; my bones are hot with my roaring all the night long; as the hart panteth after the water-brooks, so my soul panteth after thee, O my God." _God's Breath in Man_ is the title of the chief work of our best known American mystic (Thomas Lake Harris); and in certain non- Christian countries the foundation of all religious discipline consists in regulation of the inspiration and expiration. These arguments are as good as much of the reasoning one hears in favor of the sexual theory. But the champions of the latter will then say that their chief argument has no analogue elsewhere. The two main phenomena of religion, namely, melancholy and conversion, they will say, are essentially phenomena of adolescence, and therefore synchronous with the development of sexual life. To which the retort again is easy. Even were the asserted synchrony unrestrictedly true as a fact (which it is not), it is not only the sexual life, but the entire higher mental life which awakens during adolescence. One might then as well set up the thesis that the interest in mechanics, physics, chemistry, logic, philosophy, and sociology, which springs up during adolescent years along with that in poetry and religion, is also a perversion of the sexual instinct:--but that would be too absurd. Moreover, if the argument from synchrony is to decide, what is to be done with the fact that the religious age _par excellence_ would seem to be old age, when the uproar of the sexual life is past? The plain truth is that to interpret religion one must in the end look at the immediate content of the religious consciousness. The moment one does this, one sees how wholly disconnected it is in the main from the content of the sexual consciousness. Everything about the two things differs, objects, moods, faculties concerned, and acts impelled to. Any _general_ assimilation is simply impossible: what we find most often is complete hostility and contrast. If now the defenders of the sex-theory say that this makes no difference to their thesis; that without the chemical contributions which the sex- organs make to the blood, the brain would not be nourished so as to carry on religious activities, this final proposition may be true or not true; but at any rate it has become profoundly uninstructive: we can deduce no consequences from it which help us to interpret religion's meaning or value. In this sense the religious life depends just as much upon the spleen, the pancreas, and the kidneys as on the sexual apparatus, and the whole theory has lost its point in evaporating into a vague general assertion of the dependence, _somehow_, of the mind upon the body. 2 For a first-rate example of medical-materialist reasoning, see an article on "les Variétés du Type dévot," by Dr. Binet-Sanglé, in the Revue de l'Hypnotisme, xiv. 161. 3 J. F. NISBET: The Insanity of Genius, 3d ed., London, 1893, pp. xvi, xxiv. 4 MAX NORDAU, in his bulky book entitled _Degeneration_. 5 H. MAUDSLEY: Natural Causes and Supernatural Seemings, 1886, pp. 257, 256. 6 Autobiography, ch. xxviii. 7 Superior intellect, as Professor Bain has admirably shown, seems to consist in nothing so much as in a large development of the faculty of association by similarity. 8 I may refer to a criticism of the insanity theory of genius in the Psychological Review, ii. 287 (1895). 9 I can do no better here than refer my readers to the extended and admirable remarks on the futility of all these definitions of religion, in an article by Professor Leuba, published in the Monist for January, 1901, after my own text was written. 10 Miscellanies, 1868, p. 120 (abridged). 11 Lectures and Biographical Sketches, 1868, p. 186. 12 Feuilles détachées, pp. 394-398 (abridged). 13 Op. cit., pp. 314, 313. 14 Book V., ch. x. (abridged). 15 Book V., ch. ix. (abridged). 16 Chaps. x., xi. (abridged): Winkworth's translation. 17 Book IV., § 23. 18 Benham's translation: Book III., chaps. xv., lix. Compare Mary Moody Emerson: "Let me be a blot on this fair world, the obscurest, the loneliest sufferer, with one proviso,--that I know it is His agency. I will love Him though He shed frost and darkness on every way of mine." R. W. EMERSON: Lectures and Biographical Sketches, p. 188. 19 Once more, there are plenty of men, constitutionally sombre men, in whose religious life this rapturousness is lacking. They are religious in the wider sense; yet in this acutest of all senses they are not so, and it is religion in the acutest sense that I wish, without disputing about words, to study first, so as to get at its typical _differentia_. 20 The New Spirit, p. 232. 21 I owe this allegorical illustration to my lamented colleague and friend, Charles Carroll Everett. 22 Example: "I have had much comfort lately in meditating on the passages which show the personality of the Holy Ghost, and his distinctness from the Father and the Son. It is a subject that requires searching into to find out, but, when realized, gives one so much more true and lively a sense of the fullness of the Godhead, and its work in us and to us, than when only thinking of the Spirit in its effect on us." AUGUSTUS HARE: Memorials, i. 244, Maria Hare to Lucy H. Hare. 23 Symposium, Jowett, 1871, i. 527. 24 Example: "Nature is always so interesting, under whatever aspect she shows herself, that when it rains, I seem to see a beautiful woman weeping. She appears the more beautiful, the more afflicted she is." B. de St. Pierre. 25 Journal of the S. P. R., February, 1895, p. 26. 26 E. GURNEY: Phantasms of the Living, i. 384. 27 Pensées d'un Solitaire, p. 66. 28 Letters of Lowell, i. 75. 29 I borrow it, with Professor Flournoy's permission, from his rich collection of psychological documents. 30 Mark Rutherford's Deliverance, London, 1885, pp. 196, 198. 31 In his book (too little read, I fear), Natural Religion, 3d edition, Boston, 1886, pp. 91, 122. 32 C. HILTY: Glück, dritter Theil, 1900, p. 18. 33 The Soul; its Sorrows and its Aspirations, 3d edition, 1852, pp. 89, 91. 34 I once heard a lady describe the pleasure it gave her to think that she "could always cuddle up to God." 35 JOHN WEISS: Life of Theodore Parker, i. 152, 32. 36 STARBUCK: Psychology of Religion, pp. 305, 306. 37 "I know not to what physical laws philosophers will some day refer the feelings of melancholy. For myself, I find that they are the most voluptuous of all sensations," writes Saint Pierre, and accordingly he devotes a series of sections of his work on Nature to the Plaisirs de la Ruine, Plaisirs des Tombeaux, Ruines de la Nature, Plaisirs de la Solitude--each of them more optimistic than the last. This finding of a luxury in woe is very common during adolescence. The truth-telling Marie Bashkirtseff expresses it well:-- "In this depression and dreadful uninterrupted suffering, I don't condemn life. On the contrary, I like it and find it good. Can you believe it? I find everything good and pleasant, even my tears, my grief. I enjoy weeping, I enjoy my despair. I enjoy being exasperated and sad. I feel as if these were so many diversions, and I love life in spite of them all. I want to live on. It would be cruel to have me die when I am so accommodating. I cry, I grieve, and at the same time I am pleased--no, not exactly that--I know not how to express it. But everything in life pleases me. I find everything agreeable, and in the very midst of my prayers for happiness, I find myself happy at being miserable. It is not I who undergo all this--my body weeps and cries; but something inside of me which is above me is glad of it all." Journal de Marie Bashkirtseff, i. 67. 38 R. M. BUCKE: Cosmic Consciousness, pp. 182-186, abridged. 39 I refer to The Conservator, edited by Horace Traubel, and published monthly at Philadelphia. 40 Song of Myself, 32. 41 Iliad, XXI., E. Myers's translation. 42 "God is afraid of me!" remarked such a titanic-optimistic friend in my presence one morning when he was feeling particularly hearty and cannibalistic. The defiance of the phrase showed that a Christian education in humility still rankled in his breast. 43 "As I go on in this life, day by day, I become more of a bewildered child; I cannot get used to this world, to procreation, to heredity, to sight, to hearing; the commonest things are a burthen. The prim, obliterated, polite surface of life, and the broad, bawdy, and orgiastic--or mænadic--foundations, form a spectacle to which no habit reconciles me." R. L. STEVENSON: Letters, ii. 355. 44 "Cautionary Verses for Children": this title of a much used work, published early in the nineteenth century, shows how far the muse of evangelical protestantism in England, with her mind fixed on the idea of danger, had at last drifted away from the original gospel freedom. Mind-cure might be briefly called a reaction against all that religion of chronic anxiety which marked the earlier part of our century in the evangelical circles of England and America. 45 I refer to Mr. Horatio W. Dresser and Mr. Henry Wood, especially the former. Mr. Dresser's works are published by G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York and London; Mr. Wood's by Lee & Shepard, Boston. 46 Lest my own testimony be suspected, I will quote another reporter, Dr. H. H. Goddard, of Clark University, whose thesis on "the Effects of Mind on Body as evidenced by Faith Cures" is published in the American Journal of Psychology for 1899 (vol. x.). This critic, after a wide study of the facts, concludes that the cures by mind- cure exist, but are in no respect different from those now officially recognized in medicine as cures by suggestion; and the end of his essay contains an interesting physiological speculation as to the way in which the suggestive ideas may work (p. 67 of the reprint). As regards the general phenomenon of mental cure itself, Dr. Goddard writes: "In spite of the severe criticism we have made of reports of cure, there still remains a vast amount of material, showing a powerful influence of the mind in disease. Many cases are of diseases that have been diagnosed and treated by the best physicians of the country, or which prominent hospitals have tried their hand at curing, but without success. People of culture and education have been treated by this method with satisfactory results. Diseases of long standing have been ameliorated, and even cured.... We have traced the mental element through primitive medicine and folk-medicine of to-day, patent medicine, and witchcraft. We are convinced that it is impossible to account for the existence of these practices, if they did not cure disease, and that if they cured disease, it must have been the mental element that was effective. The same argument applies to those modern schools of mental therapeutics--Divine Healing and Christian Science. It is hardly conceivable that the large body of intelligent people who comprise the body known distinctively as Mental Scientists should continue to exist if the whole thing were a delusion. It is not a thing of a day; it is not confined to a few; it is not local. It is true that many failures are recorded, but that only adds to the argument. There must be many and striking successes to counterbalance the failures, otherwise the failures would have ended the delusion.... Christian Science, Divine Healing, or Mental Science do not, and never can in the very nature of things, cure all diseases; nevertheless, the practical applications of the general principles of the broadest mental science will tend to prevent disease.... We do find sufficient evidence to convince us that the proper reform in mental attitude would relieve many a sufferer of ills that the ordinary physician cannot touch; would even delay the approach of death to many a victim beyond the power of absolute cure, and the faithful adherence to a truer philosophy of life will keep many a man well, and give the doctor time to devote to alleviating ills that are unpreventable" (pp. 33, 34 of reprint). 47 HORACE FLETCHER: Happiness as found in Forethought _minus_ Fearthought, Menticulture Series, ii. Chicago and New York, Stone, 1897, pp. 21-25, abridged. 48 H. W. DRESSER: Voices of Freedom, New York, 1899, p. 38. 49 HENRY WOOD: Ideal Suggestion through Mental Photography, Boston, 1899, p. 54. 50 Whether it differs so much from Christ's own notion is for the exegetists to decide. According to Harnack, Jesus felt about evil and disease much as our mind-curers do. "What is the answer which Jesus sends to John the Baptist?" asks Harnack, and says it is this: " 'The blind see, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead rise up, and the gospel is preached to the poor.' That is the 'coming of the kingdom,' or rather in these saving works the kingdom is already there. By the overcoming and removal of misery, of need, of sickness, by these actual effects John is to see that the new time has arrived. The casting out of devils is only a part of this work of redemption, _but Jesus points to that as the sense and seal of his mission_. Thus to the wretched, sick, and poor did he address himself, but not as a moralist, and without a trace of sentimentalism. He never makes groups and departments of the ills; he never spends time in asking whether the sick one 'deserves' to be cured; and it never occurs to him to sympathize with the pain or the death. He nowhere says that sickness is a beneficent infliction, and that evil has a healthy use. No, he calls sickness sickness and health health. All evil, all wretchedness, is for him something dreadful; it is of the great kingdom of Satan; but he feels the power of the Saviour within him. He knows that advance is possible only when weakness is overcome, when sickness is made well." Das Wesen des Christenthums, 1900, p. 39. 51 R. W. TRINE: In Tune with the Infinite, 26th thousand, N. Y., 1899. I have strung scattered passages together. 52 The Cairds, for example. In EDWARD CAIRD'S Glasgow Lectures of 1890-92 passages like this abound:-- "The declaration made in the beginning of the ministry of Jesus that 'the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of heaven is at hand,' passes with scarce a break into the announcement that 'the kingdom of God is among you'; and the importance of this announcement is asserted to be such that it makes, so to speak, a difference _in kind_ between the greatest saints and prophets who lived under the previous reign of division, and 'the least in the kingdom of heaven.' The highest ideal is brought close to men and declared to be within their reach, they are called on to be 'perfect as their Father in heaven is perfect.' The sense of alienation and distance from God which had grown upon the pious in Israel just in proportion as they had learned to look upon Him as no mere national divinity, but as a God of justice who would punish Israel for its sin as certainly as Edom or Moab, is declared to be no longer in place; and the typical form of Christian prayer points to the abolition of the contrast between this world and the next which through all the history of the Jews had continually been growing wider: 'As in heaven, so on earth.' The sense of the division of man from God, as a finite being from the Infinite, as weak and sinful from the Omnipotent Goodness, is not indeed lost; but it can no longer overpower the consciousness of oneness. The terms 'Son' and 'Father' at once state the opposition and mark its limit. They show that it is not an absolute opposition, but one which presupposes an indestructible principle of unity, that can and must become a principle of reconciliation." The Evolution of Religion, ii. pp. 146, 147. 53 It remains to be seen whether the school of Mr. Dresser, which assumes more and more the form of mind-cure experience and academic philosophy mutually impregnating each other, will score the practical triumphs of the less critical and rational sects. 54 The theistic explanation is by divine grace, which creates a new nature within one the moment the old nature is sincerely given up. The pantheistic explanation (which is that of most mind-curers) is by the merging of the narrower private self into the wider or greater self, the spirit of the universe (which is your own "subconscious" self), the moment the isolating barriers of mistrust and anxiety are removed. The medico-materialistic explanation is that simpler cerebral processes act more freely where they are left to act automatically by the shunting-out of physiologically (though in this instance not spiritually) "higher" ones which, seeking to regulate, only succeed in inhibiting results.--Whether this third explanation might, in a psycho-physical account of the universe, be combined with either of the others may be left an open question here. 55 Within the churches a disposition has always prevailed to regard sickness as a visitation; something sent by God for our good, either as chastisement, as warning, or as opportunity for exercising virtue, and, in the Catholic Church, of earning "merit." "Illness," says a good Catholic writer (P. LEJEUNE: Introd. à la Vie Mystique, 1899, p. 218), "is the most excellent of corporeal mortifications, the mortification which one has not one's self chosen, which is imposed directly by God, and is the direct expression of his will. 'If other mortifications are of silver,' Mgr. Gay says, 'this one is of gold; since although it comes of ourselves, coming as it does of original sin, still on its greater side, as coming (like all that happens) from the providence of God, it is of divine manufacture. And how just are its blows! And how efficacious it is!... I do not hesitate to say that patience in a long illness is mortification's very masterpiece, and consequently the triumph of mortified souls.' " According to this view, disease should in any case be submissively accepted, and it might under certain circumstances even be blasphemous to wish it away. Of course there have been exceptions to this, and cures by special miracle have at all times been recognized within the church's pale, almost all the great saints having more or less performed them. It was one of the heresies of Edward Irving, to maintain them still to be possible. An extremely pure faculty of healing after confession and conversion on the patient's part, and prayer on the priest's, was quite spontaneously developed in the German pastor, Joh. Christoph Blumhardt, in the early forties and exerted during nearly thirty years. Blumhardt's Life by Zündel (5th edition, Zurich, 1887) gives in chapters ix., x., xi., and xvii. a pretty full account of his healing activity, which he invariably ascribed to direct divine interposition. Blumhardt was a singularly pure, simple, and non- fanatical character, and in this part of his work followed no previous model. In Chicago to-day we have the case of Dr. J. A. Dowie, a Scottish Baptist preacher, whose weekly "Leaves of Healing" were in the year of grace 1900 in their sixth volume, and who, although he denounces the cures wrought in other sects as "diabolical counterfeits" of his own exclusively "Divine Healing," must on the whole be counted into the mind-cure movement. In mind- cure circles the fundamental article of faith is that disease should never be accepted. It is wholly of the pit. God wants us to be absolutely healthy, and we should not tolerate ourselves on any lower terms. 56 Edwards, from whose book on the Revival in New England I quote these words, dissuades from such a use of prayer, but it is easy to see that he enjoys making his thrust at the cold dead church members. 57 H. W. DRESSER: Voices of Freedom, 46. 58 DRESSER: Living by the Spirit, 58. 59 DRESSER: Voices of Freedom, 33. 60 TRINE: In Tune with the Infinite, p. 214. 61 TRINE: p. 117. 62 Quoted by LEJEUNE: Introd. à la Vie Mystique, 1899, p. 66. 63 HENRY WOOD: Ideal Suggestion through Mental Photography, pp. 51, 70 (abridged). 64 See Appendix to this lecture for two other cases furnished me by friends. 65 Whether the various spheres or systems are ever to fuse integrally into one absolute conception, as most philosophers assume that they must, and how, if so, that conception may best be reached, are questions that only the future can answer. What is certain now is the fact of lines of disparate conception, each corresponding to some part of the world's truth, each verified in some degree, each leaving out some part of real experience. 66 Tract on God, Man, and Happiness, Book ii. ch. x. 67 Commentary on Galatians, Philadelphia, 1891, pp. 510-514 (abridged). 68 MOLINOS: Spiritual Guide, Book II., chaps. xvii., xviii. (abridged). 69 I say this in spite of the monistic utterances of many mind-cure writers; for these utterances are really inconsistent with their attitude towards disease, and can easily be shown not to be logically involved in the experiences of union with a higher Presence with which they connect themselves. The higher Presence, namely, need not be the absolute whole of things, it is quite sufficient for the life of religious experience to regard it as a part, if only it be the most ideal part. 70 Cf. J. MILSAND: Luther et le Serf-Arbitre, 1884, _passim_. 71 He adds with characteristic healthy-mindedness: "Our business is to continue to fail in good spirits." 72 The God of many men is little more than their court of appeal against the damnatory judgment passed on their failures by the opinion of this world. To our own consciousness there is usually a residuum of worth left over after our sins and errors have been told off--our capacity of acknowledging and regretting them is the germ of a better self _in posse_ at least. But the world deals with us _in actu_ and not _in posse_: and of this hidden germ, not to be guessed at from without, it never takes account. Then we turn to the All- knower, who knows our bad, but knows this good in us also, and who is just. We cast ourselves with our repentance on his mercy: only by an All-knower can we finally be judged. So the need of a God very definitely emerges from this sort of experience of life. 73 E.g., Iliad, XVII. 446: "Nothing then is more wretched anywhere than man of all that breathes and creeps upon this earth." 74 E.g., Theognis, 425-428: "Best of all for all things upon earth is it not to be born nor to behold the splendors of the Sun; next best to traverse as soon as possible the gates of Hades." See also the almost identical passage in OEdipus in Colonus, 1225.--The Anthology is full of pessimistic utterances: "Naked came I upon the earth, naked I go below the ground--why then do I vainly toil when I see the end naked before me?"--"How did I come to be? Whence am I? Wherefore did I come? To pass away. How can I learn aught when naught I know? Being naught I came to life: once more shall I be what I was. Nothing and nothingness is the whole race of mortals."--"For death we are all cherished and fattened like a herd of hogs that is wantonly butchered." The difference between Greek pessimism and the oriental and modern variety is that the Greeks had not made the discovery that the pathetic mood may be idealized, and figure as a higher form of sensibility. Their spirit was still too essentially masculine for pessimism to be elaborated or lengthily dwelt on in their classic literature. They would have despised a life set wholly in a minor key, and summoned it to keep within the proper bounds of lachrymosity. The discovery that the enduring emphasis, so far as this world goes, may be laid on its pain and failure, was reserved for races more complex, and (so to speak) more feminine than the Hellenes had attained to being in the classic period. But all the same was the outlook of those Hellenes blackly pessimistic. 75 For instance, on the very day on which I write this page, the post brings me some aphorisms from a worldly-wise old friend in Heidelberg which may serve as a good contemporaneous expression of Epicureanism: "By the word 'happiness' every human being understands something different. It is a phantom pursued only by weaker minds. The wise man is satisfied with the more modest but much more definite term _contentment_. What education should chiefly aim at is to save us from a discontented life. Health is one favoring condition, but by no means an indispensable one, of contentment. Woman's heart and love are a shrewd device of Nature, a trap which she sets for the average man, to force him into working. But the wise man will always prefer work chosen by himself." 76 RIBOT: Psychologie des sentiments, p. 54. 77 A. GRATRY: Souvenirs de ma jeunesse, 1880, pp. 119-121, abridged. Some persons are affected with anhedonia permanently, or at any rate with a loss of the usual appetite for life. The annals of suicide supply such examples as the following:-- An uneducated domestic servant, aged nineteen, poisons herself, and leaves two letters expressing her motive for the act. To her parents she writes:-- "Life is sweet perhaps to some, but I prefer what is sweeter than life, and that is death. So good-by forever, my dear parents. It is nobody's fault, but a strong desire of my own which I have longed to fulfill for three or four years. I have always had a hope that some day I might have an opportunity of fulfilling it, and now it has come.... It is a wonder I have put this off so long, but I thought perhaps I should cheer up a bit and put all thought out of my head." To her brother she writes: "Good-by forever, my own dearest brother. By the time you get this I shall be gone forever. I know, dear love, there is no forgiveness for what I am going to do.... I am tired of living, so am willing to die.... Life may be sweet to some, but death to me is sweeter." S. A. K. STRAHAN: Suicide and Insanity, 2d edition, London, 1894, p. 131. 78 ROUBINOVITCH ET TOULOUSE: La Mélancolie, 1897, p. 170, abridged. 79 I cull these examples from the work of G. DUMAS: La Tristesse et la Joie, 1900. 80 My extracts are from the French translation by "ZONIA." In abridging I have taken the liberty of transposing one passage. 81 Grace abounding to the Chief of Sinners: I have printed a number of detached passages continuously. 82 The Life and Journal of the Rev. Mr. Henry Alline, Boston, 1806, pp. 25, 26. I owe my acquaintance with this book to my colleague, Dr. Benjamin Rand. 83 Compare Bunyan: "There was I struck into a very great trembling, insomuch that at some times I could, for days together, feel my very body, as well as my mind, to shake and totter under the sense of the dreadful judgment of God, that should fall on those that have sinned that most fearful and unpardonable sin. I felt also such clogging and heat at my stomach, by reason of this my terror, that I was, especially at some times, as if my breast-bone would have split asunder.... Thus did I wind, and twine, and shrink, under the burden that was upon me; which burden also did so oppress me that I could neither stand, nor go, nor lie, either at rest or quiet." 84 For another case of fear equally sudden, see HENRY JAMES: Society the Redeemed Form of Man, Boston, 1879, pp. 43 ff. 85 Example: "It was about eleven o'clock at night ... but I strolled on still with the people.... Suddenly upon the left side of our road, a crackling was heard among the bushes; all of us were alarmed, and in an instant a tiger, rushing out of the jungle, pounced upon the one of the party that was foremost, and carried him off in the twinkling of an eye. The rush of the animal, and the crush of the poor victim's bones in his mouth, and his last cry of distress, 'Ho hai!' involuntarily reëchoed by all of us, was over in three seconds; and then I know not what happened till I returned to my senses, when I found myself and companions lying down on the ground as if prepared to be devoured by our enemy, the sovereign of the forest. I find my pen incapable of describing the terror of that dreadful moment. Our limbs stiffened, our power of speech ceased, and our hearts beat violently, and only a whisper of the same 'Ho hai!' was heard from us. In this state we crept on all fours for some distance back, and then ran for life with the speed of an Arab horse for about half an hour, and fortunately happened to come to a small village.... After this every one of us was attacked with fever, attended with shivering, in which deplorable state we remained till morning."--Autobiography of Lutfullah, a Mohammedan Gentleman, Leipzig, 1857, p. 112. 86 E.g., "Our young people are diseased with the theological problems of original sin, origin of evil, predestination, and the like. These never presented a practical difficulty to any man--never darkened across any man's road, who did not go out of his way to seek them. These are the soul's mumps, and measles, and whooping-coughs," etc. EMERSON: "Spiritual Laws." 87 Notes sur la Vie, p. 1. 88 See, for example, F. Paulhan, in his book Les Caractères, 1894, who contrasts les Equilibrés, les Unifiés, with les Inquiets, les Contrariants, les Incohérents, les Emiettés, as so many diverse psychic types. 89 ANNIE BESANT: an Autobiography, p. 82. 90 SMITH BAKER, in Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, September, 1893. 91 LOUIS GOURDON (Essai sur la Conversion de Saint Augustine, Paris, Fischbacher, 1900) has shown by an analysis of Augustine's writings immediately after the date of his conversion (A. D. 386) that the account he gives in the Confessions is premature. The crisis in the garden marked a definitive conversion from his former life, but it was to the neo-platonic spiritualism and only a halfway stage toward Christianity. The latter he appears not fully and radically to have embraced until four years more had passed. 92 Confessions, Book VIII., chaps. v., vii., xi., abridged. 93 TH. JOUFFROY: Nouveaux Mélanges philosophiques, 2me édition, p. 83. I add two other cases of counter-conversion dating from a certain moment. The first is from Professor Starbuck's manuscript collection, and the narrator is a woman. "Away down in the bottom of my heart, I believe I was always more or less skeptical about 'God;' skepticism grew as an undercurrent, all through my early youth, but it was controlled and covered by the emotional elements in my religious growth. When I was sixteen I joined the church and was asked if I loved God. I replied 'Yes,' as was customary and expected. But instantly with a flash something spoke within me, 'No, you do not.' I was haunted for a long time with shame and remorse for my falsehood and for my wickedness in not loving God, mingled with fear that there might be an avenging God who would punish me in some terrible way.... At nineteen, I had an attack of tonsilitis. Before I had quite recovered, I heard told a story of a brute who had kicked his wife downstairs, and then continued the operation until she became insensible. I felt the horror of the thing keenly. Instantly this thought flashed through my mind: 'I have no use for a God who permits such things.' This experience was followed by months of stoical indifference to the God of my previous life, mingled with feelings of positive dislike and a somewhat proud defiance of him. I still thought there might be a God. If so he would probably damn me, but I should have to stand it. I felt very little fear and no desire to propitiate him. I have never had any personal relations with him since this painful experience." The second case exemplifies how small an additional stimulus will overthrow the mind into a new state of equilibrium when the process of preparation and incubation has proceeded far enough. It is like the proverbial last straw added to the camel's burden, or that touch of a needle which makes the salt in a supersaturated fluid suddenly begin to crystallize out. Tolstoy writes: "S., a frank and intelligent man, told me as follows how he ceased to believe:-- "He was twenty-six years old when one day on a hunting expedition, the time for sleep having come, he set himself to pray according to the custom he had held from childhood. "His brother, who was hunting with him, lay upon the hay and looked at him. When S. had finished his prayer and was turning to sleep, the brother said, 'Do you still keep up that thing?' Nothing more was said. But since that day, now more than thirty years ago, S. has never prayed again; he never takes communion, and does not go to church. All this, not because he became acquainted with convictions of his brother which he then and there adopted; not because he made any new resolution in his soul, but merely because the words spoken by his brother were like the light push of a finger against a leaning wall already about to tumble by its own weight. These words but showed him that the place wherein he supposed religion dwelt in him had long been empty, and that the sentences he uttered, the crosses and bows which he made during his prayer, were actions with no inner sense. Having once seized their absurdity, he could no longer keep them up." My Confession, p. 8. 94 Op. cit., Letter III., abridged. I subjoin an additional document which has come into my possession, and which represents in a vivid way what is probably a very frequent sort of conversion, if the opposite of "falling in love," falling out of love, may be so termed. Falling in love also conforms frequently to this type, a latent process of unconscious preparation often preceding a sudden awakening to the fact that the mischief is irretrievably done. The free and easy tone in this narrative gives it a sincerity that speaks for itself. "For two years of this time I went through a very bad experience, which almost drove me mad. I had fallen violently in love with a girl who, young as she was, had a spirit of coquetry like a cat. As I look back on her now, I hate her, and wonder how I could ever have fallen so low as to be worked upon to such an extent by her attractions. Nevertheless, I fell into a regular fever, could think of nothing else; whenever I was alone, I pictured her attractions, and spent most of the time when I should have been working, in recalling our previous interviews, and imagining future conversations. She was very pretty, good humored, and jolly to the last degree, and intensely pleased with my admiration. Would give me no decided answer yes or no, and the queer thing about it was that whilst pursuing her for her hand, I secretly knew all along that she was unfit to be a wife for me, and that she never would say yes. Although for a year we took our meals at the same boarding-house, so that I saw her continually and familiarly, our closer relations had to be largely on the sly, and this fact, together with my jealousy of another one of her male admirers, and my own conscience despising me for my uncontrollable weakness, made me so nervous and sleepless that I really thought I should become insane. I understand well those young men murdering their sweethearts, which appear so often in the papers. Nevertheless I did love her passionately, and in some ways she did deserve it. "The queer thing was the sudden and unexpected way in which it all stopped. I was going to my work after breakfast one morning, thinking as usual of her and of my misery, when, just as if some outside power laid hold of me, I found myself turning round and almost running to my room, where I immediately got out all the relics of her which I possessed, including some hair, all her notes and letters, and ambrotypes on glass. The former I made a fire of, the latter I actually crushed beneath my heel, in a sort of fierce joy of revenge and punishment. I now loathed and despised her altogether, and as for myself I felt as if a load of disease had suddenly been removed from me. That was the end. I never spoke to her or wrote to her again in all the subsequent years, and I have never had a single moment of loving thought towards one who for so many months entirely filled my heart. In fact, I have always rather hated her memory, though now I can see that I had gone unnecessarily far in that direction. At any rate, from that happy morning onward I regained possession of my own proper soul, and have never since fallen into any similar trap." This seems to me an unusually clear example of two different levels of personality, inconsistent in their dictates, yet so well balanced against each other as for a long time to fill the life with discord and dissatisfaction. At last, not gradually, but in a sudden crisis, the unstable equilibrium is resolved, and this happens so unexpectedly that it is as if, to use the writer's words, "some outside power laid hold." Professor Starbuck gives an analogous case, and a converse case of hatred suddenly turning into love, in his Psychology of Religion, p. 141. Compare the other highly curious instances which he gives on pp. 137-144, of sudden non-religious alterations of habit or character. He seems right in conceiving all such sudden changes as results of special cerebral functions unconsciously developing until they are ready to play a controlling part, when they make irruption into the conscious life. When we treat of sudden "conversion," I shall make as much use as I can of this hypothesis of subconscious incubation. 95 H. FLETCHER: Menticulture, or the A-B-C of True Living, New York and Chicago, 1899, pp. 26-36, abridged. 96 I have considerably abridged Tolstoy's words in my translation. 97 In my quotations from Bunyan I have omitted certain intervening portions of the text. 98 A sketch of the life of Stephen H. Bradley, from the age of five to twenty-four years, including his remarkable experience of the power of the Holy Spirit on the second evening of November, 1829. Madison, Connecticut, 1830. 99 Jouffroy is an example: "Down this slope it was that my intelligence had glided, and little by little it had got far from its first faith. But this melancholy revolution had not taken place in the broad daylight of my consciousness; too many scruples, too many guides and sacred affections had made it dreadful to me, so that I was far from avowing to myself the progress it had made. It had gone on in silence, by an involuntary elaboration of which I was not the accomplice; and although I had in reality long ceased to be a Christian, yet, in the innocence of my intention, I should have shuddered to suspect it, and thought it calumny had I been accused of such a falling away." Then follows Jouffroy's account of his counter-conversion, quoted above on p. 176. 100 One hardly needs examples; but for love, see p. 179, note; for fear, p. 162; for remorse, see Othello after the murder; for anger, see Lear after Cordelia's first speech to him; for resolve, see p. 178 (J. Foster case). Here is a pathological case in which _guilt_ was the feeling that suddenly exploded: "One night I was seized on entering bed with a rigor, such as Swedenborg describes as coming over him with a sense of holiness, but over me with a sense of _guilt_. During that whole night I lay under the influence of the rigor, and from its inception I felt that I was under the curse of God. I have never done one act of duty in my life--sins against God and man, beginning as far as my memory goes back--a wildcat in human shape." 101 E. D. STARBUCK: The Psychology of Religion, pp. 224, 262. 102 No one understands this better than Jonathan Edwards understood it already. Conversion narratives of the more commonplace sort must always be taken with the allowances which he suggests: "A rule received and established by common consent has a very great, though to many persons an insensible influence in forming their notions of the process of their own experience. I know very well how they proceed as to this matter, for I have had frequent opportunities of observing their conduct. Very often their experience at first appears like a confused chaos, but then those parts are selected which bear the nearest resemblance to such particular steps as are insisted on; and these are dwelt upon in their thoughts, and spoken of from time to time, till they grow more and more conspicuous in their view, and other parts which are neglected grow more and more obscure. Thus what they have experienced is insensibly strained, so as to bring it to an exact conformity to the scheme already established in their minds. And it becomes natural also for ministers, who have to deal with those who insist upon distinctness and clearness of method, to do so too." Treatise on Religious Affections. 103 Studies in the Psychology of Religious Phenomena, American Journal of Psychology, vii. 309 (1896). 104 I have abridged Mr. Hadley's account. For other conversions of drunkards, see his pamphlet, Rescue Mission Work, published at the Old Jerry M'Auley Water Street Mission, New York city. A striking collection of cases also appears in the appendix to Professor Leuba's article. 105 A restaurant waiter served provisionally as Gough's "Saviour." General Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, considers that the first vital step in saving outcasts consists in making them feel that some decent human being cares enough for them to take an interest in the question whether they are to rise or sink. 106 The crisis of apathetic melancholy--no use in life--into which J. S. Mill records that he fell, and from which he emerged by the reading of Marmontel's Memoirs (Heaven save the mark!) and Wordsworth's poetry, is another intellectual and general metaphysical case. See Mill's Autobiography, New York, 1873, pp. 141, 148. 107 Starbuck, in addition to "escape from sin," discriminates "spiritual illumination" as a distinct type of conversion experience. Psychology of Religion, p. 85. 108 Psychology of Religion, p. 117. 109 Psychology of Religion, p. 385. Compare, also, pp. 137-144 and 262. 110 For instance, C. G. Finney italicizes the volitional element: "Just at this point the whole question of Gospel salvation opened to my mind in a manner most marvelous to me at the time. I think I then saw, as clearly as I ever have in my life, the reality and fullness of the atonement of Christ. Gospel salvation seemed to me to be an offer of something to be accepted, and all that was necessary on my part was to get my own consent to give up my sins and accept Christ. After this distinct revelation had stood for some little time before my mind, the question seemed to be put, 'Will you accept it now, to- day?' I replied, 'Yes; _I will accept it to-day, or I will die in the attempt!_' " He then went into the woods, where he describes his struggles. He could not pray, his heart was hardened in its pride. "I then reproached myself for having promised to give my heart to God before I left the woods. When I came to try, I found I could not.... My inward soul hung back, and there was no going out of my heart to God. The thought was pressing me, of the rashness of my promise that I would give my heart to God that day, or die in the attempt. It seemed to me as if that was binding on my soul; and yet I was going to break my vow. A great sinking and discouragement came over me, and I felt almost too weak to stand upon my knees. Just at this moment I again thought I heard some one approach me, and I opened my eyes to see whether it were so. But right there the revelation of my pride of heart, as the great difficulty that stood in the way, was distinctly shown to me. An overwhelming sense of my wickedness in being ashamed to have a human being see me on my knees before God took such powerful possession of me, that I _cried at the top of my voice, and exclaimed that I would not leave that place if all the men on earth and all the devils in hell surrounded me_. 'What!' I said, 'such a degraded sinner as I am, on my knees confessing my sins to the great and holy God; and ashamed to have any human being, and a sinner like myself, find me on my knees endeavoring to make my peace with my offended God!' The sin appeared awful, infinite. It broke me down before the Lord." Memoirs, pp. 14-16, abridged. 111 STARBUCK: Op. cit., pp. 91, 114. 112 Extracts from the Journal of Mr. John Nelson, London, no date, p. 24. 113 STARBUCK, p. 64. 114 STARBUCK, p. 115. 115 STARBUCK, p. 113. 116 EDWARD'S and DWIGHT'S Life of Brainerd, New Haven, 1822, pp. 45-47, abridged. 117 Describing the whole phenomenon as a change of equilibrium, we might say that the movement of new psychic energies towards the personal centre and the recession of old ones towards the margin (or the rising of some objects above, and the sinking of others below the conscious threshold) were only two ways of describing an indivisible event. Doubtless this is often absolutely true, and Starbuck is right when he says that "self-surrender" and "new determination," though seeming at first sight to be such different experiences, are "really the same thing. Self-surrender sees the change in terms of the old self; determination sees it in terms of the new." Op. cit., p. 160. 118 A. A. BONAR: Nettleton and his Labors, Edinburgh, 1854, p. 261. 119 CHARLES G. FINNEY: Memoirs written by Himself, 1876, pp. 17, 18. 120 Life and Journals, Boston, 1806, pp. 31-40, abridged. 121 My quotations are made from an Italian translation of this letter in the Biografia del Sig. M. A. Ratisbonne, Ferrara, 1843, which I have to thank Monsignore D. O'Connell of Rome for bringing to my notice. I abridge the original. 122 Published in the International Scientific Series. 123 The reader will here please notice that in my exclusive reliance in the last lecture on the subconscious "incubation" of motives deposited by a growing experience, I followed the method of employing accepted principles of explanation as far as one can. The subliminal region, whatever else it may be, is at any rate a place now admitted by psychologists to exist for the accumulation of vestiges of sensible experience (whether inattentively or attentively registered), and for their elaboration according to ordinary psychological or logical laws into results that end by attaining such a "tension" that they may at times enter consciousness with something like a burst. It thus is "scientific" to interpret all otherwise unaccountable invasive alterations of consciousness as results of the tension of subliminal memories reaching the bursting-point. But candor obliges me to confess that there are occasional bursts into consciousness of results of which it is not easy to demonstrate any prolonged subconscious incubation. Some of the cases I used to illustrate the sense of presence of the unseen in Lecture III were of this order (compare pages 59, 61, 62, 67); and we shall see other experiences of the kind when we come to the subject of mysticism. The case of Mr. Bradley, that of M. Ratisbonne, possibly that of Colonel Gardiner, possibly that of Saint Paul, might not be so easily explained in this simple way. The result, then, would have to be ascribed either to a merely physiological nerve storm, a "discharging lesion" like that of epilepsy; or, in case it were useful and rational, as in the two latter cases named, to some more mystical or theological hypothesis. I make this remark in order that the reader may realize that the subject is really complex. But I shall keep myself as far as possible at present to the more "scientific" view; and only as the plot thickens in subsequent lectures shall I consider the question of its absolute sufficiency as an explanation of all the facts. That subconscious incubation explains a great number of them, there can be no doubt. 124 Edwards says elsewhere: "I am bold to say that the work of God in the conversion of one soul, considered together with the source, foundation, and purchase of it, and also the benefit, end, and eternal issue of it, is a more glorious work of God than the creation of the whole material universe." 125 Emerson writes: "When we see a soul whose acts are regal, graceful, and pleasant as roses, we must thank God that such things can be and are, and not turn sourly on the angel and say: Crump is a better man, with his grunting resistance to all his native devils." True enough. Yet Crump may really be the better _Crump_, for his inner discords and second birth; and your once-born "regal" character, though indeed always better than poor Crump, may fall far short of what he individually might be had he only some Crump-like capacity for compunction over his own peculiar diabolisms, graceful and pleasant and invariably gentlemanly as these may be. 126 In his book, The Spiritual Life, New York, 1900. 127 Op. cit., p. 112. 128 Op. cit., p. 144. 129 I piece together a quotation made by W. Monod, in his book La Vie, and a letter printed in the work: Adolphe Monod: I., Souvenirs de sa Vie, 1885, p. 433. 130 Commentary on Galatians, ch. iii. verse 19, and ch. ii. verse 20, abridged. 131 In some conversions, both steps are distinct; in this one, for example:-- "Whilst I was reading the evangelical treatise, I was soon struck by an expression: 'the finished work of Christ.' 'Why,' I asked of myself, 'does the author use these terms? Why does he not say "the atoning work"?' Then these words, 'It is finished,' presented themselves to my mind. 'What is it that is finished?' I asked, and in an instant my mind replied: 'A perfect expiation for sin; entire satisfaction has been given; the debt has been paid by the Substitute. Christ has died for our sins; not for ours only, but for those of all men. If, then, the entire work is finished, all the debt paid, what remains for me to do?' In another instant the light was shed through my mind by the Holy Ghost, and the joyous conviction was given me that nothing more was to be done, save to fall on my knees, to accept this Saviour and his love, to praise God forever." Autobiography of Hudson Taylor. I translate back into English from the French translation of Challand (Geneva, no date), the original not being accessible. 132 Tolstoy's case was a good comment on those words. There was almost no theology in his conversion. His faith-state was the sense come back that life was infinite in its moral significance. 133 American Journal of Psychology, vii. 345-347, abridged. 134 Above, p. 152. 135 DWIGHT: Life of Edwards, New York, 1830, p. 61, abridged. 136 W. F. BOURNE: The King's Son, a Memoir of Billy Bray, London, Hamilton, Adams & Co., 1887, p. 9. 137 Consult WILLIAM B. SPRAGUE: Lectures on Revivals of Religion, New York, 1832, in the long Appendix to which the opinions of a large number of ministers are given. 138 Memoirs, p. 34. 139 These reports of sensorial photism shade off into what are evidently only metaphorical accounts of the sense of new spiritual illumination, as, for instance, in Brainerd's statement: "As I was walking in a thick grove, unspeakable glory seemed to open to the apprehension of my soul. I do not mean any external brightness, for I saw no such thing, nor any imagination of a body of light in the third heavens, or anything of that nature, but it was a new inward apprehension or view that I had of God." In a case like this next one from Starbuck's manuscript collection, the lighting up of the darkness is probably also metaphorical:-- "One Sunday night, I resolved that when I got home to the ranch where I was working, I would offer myself with my faculties and all to God to be used only by and for him.... It was raining and the roads were muddy; but this desire grew so strong that I kneeled down by the side of the road and told God all about it, intending then to get up and go on. Such a thing as any special answer to my prayer never entered my mind, having been converted by faith, but still being most undoubtedly saved. Well, while I was praying, I remember holding out my hands to God and telling him they should work for him, my feet walk for him, my tongue speak for him, etc., etc., if he would only use me as his instrument and give me a satisfying experience--when suddenly the darkness of the night seemed lit up--I felt, realized, knew, that God heard and answered my prayer. Deep happiness came over me; I felt I was accepted into the inner circle of God's loved ones." In the following case also the flash of light is metaphorical:-- "A prayer meeting had been called for at close of evening service. The minister supposed me impressed by his discourse (a mistake--he was dull). He came and, placing his hand upon my shoulder, said: 'Do you not want to give your heart to God?' I replied in the affirmative. Then said he, 'Come to the front seat.' They sang and prayed and talked with me. I experienced nothing but unaccountable wretchedness. They declared that the reason why I did not 'obtain peace' was because I was not willing to give up all to God. After about two hours the minister said we would go home. As usual, on retiring, I prayed. In great distress, I at this time simply said, 'Lord, I have done all I can, I leave the whole matter with thee.' Immediately, like a flash of light, there came to me a great peace, and I arose and went into my parents' bedroom and said, 'I do feel so wonderfully happy.' This I regard as the hour of conversion. It was the hour in which I became assured of divine acceptance and favor. So far as my life was concerned, it made little immediate change." 140 I add in a note a few more records:-- "One morning, being in deep distress, fearing every moment I should drop into hell, I was constrained to cry in earnest for mercy, and the Lord came to my relief, and delivered my soul from the burden and guilt of sin. My whole frame was in a tremor from head to foot, and my soul enjoyed sweet peace. The pleasure I then felt was indescribable. The happiness lasted about three days, during which time I never spoke to any person about my feelings." Autobiography of DAN YOUNG, edited by W. P. STRICKLAND, New York, 1860. "In an instant there rose up in me such a sense of God's taking care of those who put their trust in him that for an hour all the world was crystalline, the heavens were lucid, and I sprang to my feet and began to cry and laugh." H. W. BEECHER, quoted by LEUBA. "My tears of sorrow changed to joy, and I lay there praising God in such ecstasy of joy as only the soul who experiences it can realize."--"I cannot express how I felt. It was as if I had been in a dark dungeon and lifted into the light of the sun. I shouted and I sang praise unto him who loved me and washed me from my sins. I was forced to retire into a secret place, for the tears did flow, and I did not wish my shopmates to see me, and yet I could not keep it a secret."--"I experienced joy almost to weeping."--"I felt my face must have shone like that of Moses. I had a general feeling of buoyancy. It was the greatest joy it was ever my lot to experience."--"I wept and laughed alternately. I was as light as if walking on air. I felt as if I had gained greater peace and happiness than I had ever expected to experience." STARBUCK'S correspondents. 141 Psychology of Religion, pp. 360, 357. 142 SAINTE-BEUVE: Port-Royal, vol. i. pp. 95 and 106, abridged. 143 " 'Love would not be love,' says Bourget, 'unless it could carry one to crime.' And so one may say that no passion would be a veritable passion unless it could carry one to crime." (SIGHELE: Psychologie des Sectes, p. 136.) In other words, great passions annul the ordinary inhibitions set by "conscience." And conversely, of all the criminal human beings, the false, cowardly, sensual, or cruel persons who actually live, there is perhaps not one whose criminal impulse may not be at some moment overpowered by the presence of some other emotion to which his character is also potentially liable, provided that other emotion be only made intense enough. Fear is usually the most available emotion for this result in this particular class of persons. It stands for conscience, and may here be classed appropriately as a "higher affection." If we are soon to die, or if we believe a day of judgment to be near at hand, how quickly do we put our moral house in order--we do not see how sin can evermore exert temptation over us! Old-fashioned hell-fire Christianity well knew how to extract from fear its full equivalent in the way of fruits for repentance, and its full conversion value. 144 Example: Benjamin Constant was often marveled at as an extraordinary instance of superior intelligence with inferior character. He writes (Journal, Paris, 1895, p. 56), "I am tossed and dragged about by my miserable weakness. Never was anything so ridiculous as my indecision. Now marriage, now solitude; now Germany, now France, hesitation upon hesitation, and all because at bottom I am _unable to give up anything_." He can't "get mad" at any of his alternatives; and the career of a man beset by such an all-round amiability is hopeless. 145 The great thing which the higher excitabilities give is _courage_; and the addition or subtraction of a certain amount of this quality makes a different man, a different life. Various excitements let the courage loose. Trustful hope will do it; inspiring example will do it; love will do it; wrath will do it. In some people it is natively so high that the mere touch of danger does it, though danger is for most men the great inhibitor of action. "Love of adventure" becomes in such persons a ruling passion. "I believe," says General Skobeleff, "that my bravery is simply the passion and at the same time the contempt of danger. The risk of life fills me with an exaggerated rapture. The fewer there are to share it, the more I like it. The participation of my body in the event is required to furnish me an adequate excitement. Everything intellectual appears to me to be reflex; but a meeting of man to man, a duel, a danger into which I can throw myself headforemost, attracts me, moves me, intoxicates me. I am crazy for it, I love it, I adore it. I run after danger as one runs after women; I wish it never to stop. Were it always the same, it would always bring me a new pleasure. When I throw myself into an adventure in which I hope to find it, my heart palpitates with the uncertainty; I could wish at once to have it appear and yet to delay. A sort of painful and delicious shiver shakes me; my entire nature runs to meet the peril with an impetus that my will would in vain try to resist." (JULIETTE ADAM: Le Général Skobeleff, Nouvelle Revue, 1886, abridged.) Skobeleff seems to have been a cruel egoist; but the disinterested Garibaldi, if one may judge by his "Memorie," lived in an unflagging emotion of similar danger-seeking excitement. 146 See the case on p. 70, above, where the writer describes his experiences of communion with the Divine as consisting "merely in the _temporary obliteration of the conventionalities_ which usually cover my life." 147 Above, p. 201. "The only radical remedy I know for dipsomania is religiomania," is a saying I have heard quoted from some medical man. 148 Doddridge's Life of Colonel James Gardiner, London Religious Tract Society, pp. 23-32. 149 Here, for example, is a case, from Starbuck's book, in which a "sensory automatism" brought about quickly what prayers and resolves had been unable to effect. The subject is a woman. She writes:-- "When I was about forty I tried to quit smoking, but the desire was on me, and had me in its power. I cried and prayed and promised God to quit, but could not. I had smoked for fifteen years. When I was fifty-three, as I sat by the fire one day smoking, a voice came to me. I did not hear it with my ears, but more as a dream or sort of double think. It said, 'Louisa, lay down smoking.' At once I replied, 'Will you take the desire away?' But it only kept saying: 'Louisa, lay down smoking.' Then I got up, laid my pipe on the mantel-shelf, and never smoked again or had any desire to. The desire was gone as though I had never known it or touched tobacco. The sight of others smoking and the smell of smoke never gave me the least wish to touch it again." The Psychology of Religion, p. 142. 150 Professor Starbuck expresses the radical destruction of old influences physiologically, as a cutting off of the connection between higher and lower cerebral centres. "This condition," he says, "in which the association-centres connected with the spiritual life are cut off from the lower, is often reflected in the way correspondents describe their experiences.... For example: 'Temptations from without still assail me, but there is nothing _within_ to respond to them.' The ego [here] is wholly identified with the higher centres, whose quality of feeling is that of withinness. Another of the respondents says: 'Since then, although Satan tempts me, there is as it were a wall of brass around me, so that his darts cannot touch me.' "--Unquestionably, functional exclusions of this sort must occur in the cerebral organ. But on the side accessible to introspection, their causal condition is nothing but the degree of spiritual excitement, getting at last so high and strong as to be sovereign; and it must be frankly confessed that we do not know just why or how such sovereignty comes about in one person and not in another. We can only give our imagination a certain delusive help by mechanical analogies. If we should conceive, for example, that the human mind, with its different possibilities of equilibrium, might be like a many-sided solid with different surfaces on which it could lie flat, we might liken mental revolutions to the spatial revolutions of such a body. As it is pried up, say by a lever, from a position in which it lies on surface A, for instance, it will linger for a time unstably halfway up, and if the lever cease to urge it, it will tumble back or "relapse" under the continued pull of gravity. But if at last it rotate far enough for its centre of gravity to pass beyond surface A altogether, the body will fall over, on surface B, say, and abide there permanently. The pulls of gravity towards A have vanished, and may now be disregarded. The polyhedron has become immune against farther attraction from their direction. In this figure of speech the lever may correspond to the emotional influences making for a new life, and the initial pull of gravity to the ancient drawbacks and inhibitions. So long as the emotional influence fails to reach a certain pitch of efficacy, the changes it produces are unstable, and the man relapses into his original attitude. But when a certain intensity is attained by the new emotion, a critical point is passed, and there then ensues an irreversible revolution, equivalent to the production of a new nature. 151 I use this word in spite of a certain flavor of "sanctimoniousness" which sometimes clings to it, because no other word suggests as well the exact combination of affections which the text goes on to describe. 152 "It will be found," says Dr. W. R. INGE (in his lectures on Christian Mysticism, London, 1899, p. 326), "that men of preëminent saintliness agree very closely in what they tell us. They tell us that they have arrived at an unshakable conviction, not based on inference but on immediate experience, that God is a spirit with whom the human spirit can hold intercourse; that in him meet all that they can imagine of goodness, truth, and beauty; that they can see his footprints everywhere in nature, and feel his presence within them as the very life of their life, so that in proportion as they come to themselves they come to him. They tell us what separates us from him and from happiness is, first, self-seeking in all its forms; and, secondly, sensuality in all its forms; that these are the ways of darkness and death, which hide from us the face of God; while the path of the just is like a shining light, which shineth more and more unto the perfect day." 153 The "enthusiasm of humanity" may lead to a life which coalesces in many respects with that of Christian saintliness. Take the following rules proposed to members of the Union pour l'Action morale, in the Bulletin de l'Union, April 1-15, 1894. See, also, Revue Bleue, August 13, 1892. "We would make known in our own persons the usefulness of rule, of discipline, of resignation and renunciation; we would teach the necessary perpetuity of suffering, and explain the creative part which it plays. We would wage war upon false optimism; on the base hope of happiness coming to us ready made; on the notion of a salvation by knowledge alone, or by material civilization alone, vain symbol as this is of civilization, precarious external arrangement, ill-fitted to replace the intimate union and consent of souls. We would wage war also on bad morals, whether in public or in private life; on luxury, fastidiousness, and over-refinement; on all that tends to increase the painful, immoral, and anti-social multiplication of our wants; on all that excites envy and dislike in the soul of the common people, and confirms the notion that the chief end of life is freedom to enjoy. We would preach by our example the respect of superiors and equals, the respect of all men; affectionate simplicity in our relations with inferiors and insignificant persons; indulgence where our own claims only are concerned, but firmness in our demands where they relate to duties towards others or towards the public. "For the common people are what we help them to become; their vices are our vices, gazed upon, envied, and imitated; and if they come back with all their weight upon us, it is but just." 154 Above, pp. 248 ff. 155 H. THOREAU: Walden, Riverside edition, p. 206, abridged. 156 C. H. HILTY: Glück, vol. i. p. 85. 157 The Mystery of Pain and Death, London, 1892, p. 258. 158 Compare Madame Guyon: "It was my practice to arise at midnight for purposes of devotion.... It seemed to me that God came at the precise time and woke me from sleep in order that I might enjoy him. When I was out of health or greatly fatigued, he did not awake me, but at such times I felt, even in my sleep, a singular possession of God. He loved me so much that he seemed to pervade my being, at a time when I could be only imperfectly conscious of his presence. My sleep is sometimes broken,--a sort of half sleep; but my soul seems to be awake enough to know God, when it is hardly capable of knowing anything else." T. C. UPHAM: The Life and Religious Experiences of Madame de la Mothe Guyon, New York, 1877, vol. i. p. 260. 159 I have considerably abridged the words of the original, which is given in EDWARDS'S Narrative of the Revival in New England. 160 BOUGAUD: Hist. de la Bienheureuse Marguerite Marie, 1894, p. 125. 161 Paris, 1900. 162 Page 130. 163 Page 167. 164 Op. cit., p. 127. 165 The barrier between men and animals also. We read of Towianski, an eminent Polish patriot and mystic, that "one day one of his friends met him in the rain, caressing a big dog which was jumping upon him and covering him horribly with mud. On being asked why he permitted the animal thus to dirty his clothes, Towianski replied: 'This dog, whom I am now meeting for the first time, has shown a great fellow- feeling for me, and a great joy in my recognition and acceptance of his greetings. Were I to drive him off, I should wound his feelings and do him a moral injury. It would be an offense not only to him, but to all the spirits of the other world who are on the same level with him. The damage which he does to my coat is as nothing in comparison with the wrong which I should inflict upon him, in case I were to remain indifferent to the manifestations of his friendship. We ought,' he added, 'both to lighten the condition of animals, whenever we can, and at the same time to facilitate in ourselves that union of the world of all spirits, which the sacrifice of Christ has made possible.' " André Towianski, Traduction de l'Italien, Turin, 1897 (privately printed). I owe my knowledge of this book and of Towianski to my friend Professor W. Lutoslawski, author of "Plato's Logic." 166 J. PATTERSON'S Life of Richard Weaver, pp. 66-68, abridged. 167 As where the future Buddha, incarnated as a hare, jumps into the fire to cook himself for a meal for a beggar--having previously shaken himself three times, so that none of the insects in his fur should perish with him. 168 Bulletin de l'Union pour l'Action Morale, September, 1894. 169 B. PASCAL: Prières pour les Maladies, §§ xiii., xiv., abridged. 170 From THOMAS C. UPHAM'S Life and Religious Opinions and Experiences of Madame de la Mothe Guyon, New York, 1877, ii. 48, i. 141, 413, abridged. 171 Op. cit., London, 1901, p. 130. 172 CLAPARÈDE et GOTY: Deux Héroines de la Foi, Paris, 1880, p. 112. 173 Compare these three different statements of it: A. P. CALL: As a Matter of Course, Boston, 1894; H. W. DRESSER: Living by the Spirit, New York and London, 1900; H. W. SMITH: The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life, published by the Willard Tract Repository, and now in thousands of hands. 174 T. C. UPHAM: Life of Madame Catharine Adorna, 3d ed., New York, 1864, pp. 158, 172-174. 175 The History of THOMAS ELWOOD, written by Himself, London, 1885, pp. 32-34. 176 Memoirs of W.E. Channing, Boston, 1840, i. 196. 177 L. TYERMAN: The Life and Times of the Rev. John Wesley, i. 274. 178 A. MOUNIN: Le Curé d'Ars, Vie de M. J. B. M. Vianney, 1864, p. 545, abridged. 179 B. WENDELL: Cotton Mather, New York, no date, p. 198. 180 That of the earlier Jesuit, RODRIGUEZ, which has been translated into all languages, is one of the best known. A convenient modern manual, very well put together, is L'Ascétique Chrétienne, by M. J. RIBET, Paris, Poussielgue, nouvelle édition, 1898. 181 SAINT JEAN DE LA CROIX, Vie et OEuvres, Paris, 1893, ii. 94, 99, abridged. 182 "Insects," i.e. lice, were an unfailing token of mediæval sainthood. We read of Francis of Assisi's sheepskin that "often a companion of the saint would take it to the fire to clean and _dispediculate_ it, doing so, as he said, because the seraphic father himself was no enemy of _pedocchi_, but on the contrary kept them on him (le portava adosso), and held it for an honor and a glory to wear these celestial pearls in his habit." Quoted by P. SABATIER: Speculum Perfectionis, etc., Paris, 1898, p. 231, note. 183 The Life of the Blessed HENRY SUSO, by Himself, translated by T. F. KNOX, London, 1865, pp. 56-80, abridged. 184 BOUGAUD: Hist. de la bienheureuse Marguerite Marie, Paris, 1894, pp. 265, 171. Compare, also, pp. 386, 387. 185 LEJEUNE: Introduction à la Vie Mystique, 1899, p. 277. The holocaust simile goes back at least as far as Ignatius Loyola. 186 ALFONSO RODRIGUEZ, S. J.: Pratique de la Perfection Chrétienne, Part iii., Treatise v., ch. x. 187 Letters li. and cxx. of the collection translated into French by BOUIX, Paris, 1870. 188 BARTOLI-MICHEL, ii. 13. 189 RODRIGUEZ: Op. cit., Part iii., Treatise v., ch. vi. 190 SAINTE-BEUVE: Histoire de Port Royal, i. 346. 191 RODRIGUEZ: Op. cit., Part iii., Treatise iii., chaps. vi., vii. 192 R. PHILIP: The Life and Times of George Whitefield, London, 1842, p. 366. 193 EDWARD CARPENTER: Towards Democracy, p. 362, abridged. 194 Speculum Perfectionis, ed. P. SABATIER, Paris, 1898, pp. 10, 13. 195 An Apology for M. Antonia Bourignon, London, 1699, pp. 269, 270, abridged. Another example from Starbuck's MS. collection:-- "At a meeting held at six the next morning, I heard a man relate his experience. He said: The Lord asked him if he would confess Christ among the quarrymen with whom he worked, and he said he would. Then he asked him if he would give up to be used of the Lord the four hundred dollars he had laid up, and he said he would, and thus the Lord saved him. The thought came to me at once that I had never made a real consecration either of myself or of my property to the Lord, but had always tried to serve the Lord in _my_ way. Now the Lord asked me if I would serve him in _his_ way, and go out alone and penniless if he so ordered. The question was pressed home, and I must decide: To forsake all and have him, or have all and lose him! I soon decided to take him; and the blessed assurance came, that he had taken me for his own, and my joy was full. I returned home from the meeting with feelings as simple as a child. I thought all would be glad to hear of the joy of the Lord that possessed me, and so I began to tell the simple story. But to my great surprise, the pastors (for I attended meetings in three churches) opposed the experience and said it was fanaticism, and one told the members of his church to shun those that professed it, and I soon found that my foes were those of my own household." 196 J. J. CHAPMAN, in the Political Nursery, vol. iv. p. 4, April, 1900, abridged. 197 GEORGE FOX: Journal, Philadelphia, 1800, pp. 59-61, abridged. 198 Christian saints have had their specialties of devotion, Saint Francis to Christ's wounds; Saint Anthony of Padua to Christ's childhood; Saint Bernard to his humanity; Saint Teresa to Saint Joseph, etc. The Shi-ite Mohammedans venerate Ali, the Prophet's son-in-law, instead of Abu-bekr, his brother-in-law. Vambéry describes a dervish whom he met in Persia, "who had solemnly vowed, thirty years before, that he would never employ his organs of speech otherwise but in uttering, everlastingly, the name of his favorite, _Ali, Ali_. He thus wished to signify to the world that he was the most devoted partisan of that Ali who had been dead a thousand years. In his own home, speaking with his wife, children, and friends, no other word but 'Ali!' ever passed his lips. If he wanted food or drink or anything else, he expressed his wants still by repeating 'Ali!' Begging or buying at the bazaar, it was always 'Ali!' Treated ill or generously, he would still harp on his monotonous 'Ali!' Latterly his zeal assumed such tremendous proportions that, like a madman, he would race, the whole day, up and down the streets of the town, throwing his stick high up into the air, and shriek out, all the while, at the top of his voice, 'Ali!' This dervish was venerated by everybody as a saint, and received everywhere with the greatest distinction." ARMINIUS VAMBÉRY, his Life and Adventures, written by Himself, London, 1889, p. 69. On the anniversary of the death of Hussein, Ali's son, the Shi-ite Moslems still make the air resound with cries of his name and Ali's. 199 Compare H. C. WARREN: Buddhism in Translation, Cambridge, U. S., 1898, passim. 200 Compare J. L. MERRICK: The Life and Religion of Mohammed, as contained in the Sheeah traditions of the Hyat-ul-Kuloob, Boston, 1850, passim. 201 BOUGAUD: Hist. de la bienheureuse Marguerite Marie, Paris, 1894, p. 145. 202 BOUGAUD: Hist. de la bienheureuse Marguerite Marie, Paris, 1894, pp. 365, 241. 203 BOUGAUD: Op. cit., p. 267. 204 Examples: "Suffering from a headache, she sought, for the glory of God, to relieve herself by holding certain odoriferous substances in her mouth, when the Lord appeared to her to lean over towards her lovingly, and to find comfort Himself in these odors. After having gently breathed them in, He arose, and said with a gratified air to the Saints, as if contented with what He had done: 'See the new present which my betrothed has given Me!' "One day, at chapel, she heard supernaturally sung the words, '_Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus_.' The Son of God leaning towards her like a sweet lover, and giving to her soul the softest kiss, said to her at the second Sanctus: 'In this _Sanctus_ addressed to my person, receive with this kiss all the sanctity of my divinity and of my humanity, and let it be to thee a sufficient preparation for approaching the communion table.' And the next following Sunday, while she was thanking God for this favor, behold the Son of God, more beauteous than thousands of angels, takes her in His arms as if He were proud of her, and presents her to God the Father, in that perfection of sanctity with which He had dowered her. And the Father took such delight in this soul thus presented by His only Son, that, as if unable longer to restrain Himself, He gave her, and the Holy Ghost gave her also, the Sanctity attributed to each by His own _Sanctus_--and thus she remained endowed with the plenary fullness of the blessing of _Sanctity_, bestowed on her by Omnipotence, by Wisdom, and by Love." Révélations de Sainte Gertrude, Paris, 1898, i. 44, 186. 205 FURNEAUX JORDAN: Character in Birth and Parentage, first edition. Later editions change the nomenclature. 206 As to this distinction, see the admirably practical account in J. M. BALDWIN'S little book, The Story of the Mind, 1898. 207 On this subject I refer to the work of M. MURISIER (Les Maladies du Sentiment Religieux, Paris, 1901), who makes inner unification the mainspring of the whole religious life. But _all_ strongly ideal interests, religious or irreligious, unify the mind and tend to subordinate everything to themselves. One would infer from M. Murisier's pages that this formal condition was peculiarly characteristic of religion, and that one might in comparison almost neglect material content, in studying the latter. I trust that the present work will convince the reader that religion has plenty of material content which is characteristic, and which is more important by far than any general psychological form. In spite of this criticism, I find M. Murisier's book highly instructive. 208 Example: "At the first beginning of the Servitor's [Suso's] interior life, after he had purified his soul properly by confession, he marked out for himself, in thought, three circles, within which he shut himself up, as in a spiritual intrenchment. The first circle was his cell, his chapel, and the choir. When he was within this circle, he seemed to himself in complete security. The second circle was the whole monastery as far as the outer gate. The third and outermost circle was the gate itself, and here it was necessary for him to stand well upon his guard. When he went outside these circles, it seemed to him that he was in the plight of some wild animal which is outside its hole, and surrounded by the hunt, and therefore in need of all its cunning and watchfulness." The Life of the Blessed Henry Suso, by Himself, translated by KNOX, London, 1865, p. 168. 209 Vie des premières Religieuses Dominicaines de la Congrégation de St. Dominique, à Nancy; Nancy, 1896, p. 129. 210 MESCHLER'S Life of Saint Louis of Gonzaga, French translation by LEBRÉQUIER, 1891; p. 40. 211 In his boyish note-book he praises the monastic life for its freedom from sin, and for the imperishable treasures, which it enables us to store up, "of merit in God's eyes which makes of Him our debtor for all Eternity." Loc. cit., p. 62. 212 Mademoiselle Mori, a novel quoted in HARE'S Walks in Rome, 1900, i. 55. I cannot resist the temptation to quote from Starbuck's book, p. 388, another case of purification by elimination. It runs as follows:-- "The signs of abnormality which sanctified persons show are of frequent occurrence. They get out of tune with other people; often they will have nothing to do with churches, which they regard as worldly; they become hypercritical towards others; they grow careless of their social, political, and financial obligations. As an instance of this type may be mentioned a woman of sixty-eight of whom the writer made a special study. She had been a member of one of the most active and progressive churches in a busy part of a large city. Her pastor described her as having reached the censorious stage. She had grown more and more out of sympathy with the church; her connection with it finally consisted simply in attendance at prayer-meeting, at which her only message was that of reproof and condemnation of the others for living on a low plane. At last she withdrew from fellowship with any church. The writer found her living alone in a little room on the top story of a cheap boarding-house, quite out of touch with all human relations, but apparently happy in the enjoyment of her own spiritual blessings. Her time was occupied in writing booklets on sanctification--page after page of dreamy rhapsody. She proved to be one of a small group of persons who claim that entire salvation involves three steps instead of two; not only must there be conversion and sanctification, but a third, which they call 'crucifixion' or 'perfect redemption,' and which seems to bear the same relation to sanctification that this bears to conversion. She related how the Spirit had said to her, 'Stop going to church. Stop going to holiness meetings. Go to your own room and I will teach you.' She professes to care nothing for colleges, or preachers, or churches, but only cares to listen to what God says to her. Her description of her experience seemed entirely consistent; she is happy and contented, and her life is entirely satisfactory to herself. While listening to her own story, one was tempted to forget that it was from the life of a person who could not live by it in conjunction with her fellows." 213 The best missionary lives abound in the victorious combination of non-resistance with personal authority. John G. Paton, for example, in the New Hebrides, among brutish Melanesian cannibals, preserves a charmed life by dint of it. When it comes to the point, no one ever dares actually to strike him. Native converts, inspired by him, showed analogous virtue. "One of our chiefs, full of the Christ- kindled desire to seek and to save, sent a message to an inland chief, that he and four attendants would come on Sabbath and tell them the gospel of Jehovah God. The reply came back sternly forbidding their visit, and threatening with death any Christian that approached their village. Our chief sent in response a loving message, telling them that Jehovah had taught the Christians to return good for evil, and that they would come unarmed to tell them the story of how the Son of God came into the world and died in order to bless and save his enemies. The heathen chief sent back a stern and prompt reply once more: 'If you come, you will be killed.' On Sabbath morn the Christian chief and his four companions were met outside the village by the heathen chief, who implored and threatened them once more. But the former said:-- " 'We come to you without weapons of war! We come only to tell you about Jesus. We believe that He will protect us to-day.' "As they pressed steadily forward towards the village, spears began to be thrown at them. Some they evaded, being all except one dexterous warriors; and others they literally received with their bare hands, and turned them aside in an incredible manner. The heathen, apparently thunderstruck at these men thus approaching them without weapons of war, and not even flinging back their own spears which they had caught, after having thrown what the old chief called 'a shower of spears,' desisted from mere surprise. Our Christian chief called out, as he and his companions drew up in the midst of them on the village public ground:-- " 'Jehovah thus protects us. He has given us all your spears! Once we would have thrown them back at you and killed you. But now we come, not to fight but to tell you about Jesus. He has changed our dark hearts. He asks you now to lay down all these your other weapons of war, and to hear what we can tell you about the love of God, our great Father, the only living God.' "The heathen were perfectly overawed. They manifestly looked on these Christians as protected by some Invisible One. They listened for the first time to the story of the Gospel and of the Cross. We lived to see that chief and all his tribe sitting in the school of Christ. And there is perhaps not an island in these southern seas, amongst all those won for Christ, where similar acts of heroism on the part of converts cannot be recited." JOHN G. PATON, Missionary to the New Hebrides, An Autobiography, second part, London, 1890, p. 243. 214 Saint Peter, Saint Teresa tells us in her autobiography (French translation, p. 333), "had passed forty years without ever sleeping more than an hour and a half a day. Of all his mortifications, this was the one that had cost him the most. To compass it, he kept always on his knees or on his feet. The little sleep he allowed nature to take was snatched in a sitting posture, his head leaning against a piece of wood fixed in the wall. Even had he wished to lie down, it would have been impossible, because his cell was only four feet and a half long. In the course of all these years he never raised his hood, no matter what the ardor of the sun or the rain's strength. He never put on a shoe. He wore a garment of coarse sackcloth, with nothing else upon his skin. This garment was as scant as possible, and over it a little cloak of the same stuff. When the cold was great he took off the cloak and opened for a while the door and little window of his cell. Then he closed them and resumed the mantle,--his way, as he told us, of warming himself, and making his body feel a better temperature. It was a frequent thing with him to eat once only in three days; and when I expressed my surprise, he said that it was very easy if one once had acquired the habit. One of his companions has assured me that he has gone sometimes eight days without food.... His poverty was extreme; and his mortification, even in his youth, was such that he told me he had passed three years in a house of his order without knowing any of the monks otherwise than by the sound of their voice, for he never raised his eyes, and only found his way about by following the others. He showed this same modesty on public highways. He spent many years without ever laying eyes upon a woman; but he confessed to me that at the age he had reached it was indifferent to him whether he laid eyes on them or not. He was very old when I first came to know him, and his body so attenuated that it seemed formed of nothing so much as of so many roots of trees. With all this sanctity he was very affable. He never spoke unless he was questioned, but his intellectual right-mindedness and grace gave to all his words an irresistible charm." 215 F. MAX MÜLLER: Ramakrishna, his Life and Sayings, 1899, p. 180. 216 OLDENBERG: Buddha; translated by W. HOEY, London, 1882, p. 127. 217 "The vanities of all others may die out, but the vanity of a saint as regards his sainthood is hard indeed to wear away." Ramakrishna, his Life and Sayings, 1899, p. 172. 218 "When a church has to be run by oysters, ice-cream, and fun," I read in an American religious paper, "you may be sure that it is running away from Christ." Such, if one may judge by appearances, is the present plight of many of our churches. 219 C. V. B. K.: Friedens- und Kriegs-moral der Heere. Quoted by HAMON: Psychologie du Militaire professional, 1895, p. xli. 220 Zur Genealogie der Moral, Dritte Abhandlung, § 14. I have abridged, and in one place transposed, a sentence. 221 We all know _daft_ saints, and they inspire a queer kind of aversion. But in comparing saints with strong men we must choose individuals on the same intellectual level. The under-witted strong man, homologous in his sphere with the under-witted saint, is the bully of the slums, the hooligan or rowdy. Surely on this level also the saint preserves a certain superiority. 222 See above, p. 327. 223 Above, pp. 327-334. 224 Newman's _Securus judicat orbis terrarum_ is another instance. 225 "Mesopotamia" is the stock comic instance.--An excellent old German lady, who had done some traveling in her day, used to describe to me her _Sehnsucht_ that she might yet visit "Philadelphia," whose wondrous name had always haunted her imagination. Of John Foster it is said that "single words (as _chalcedony_), or the names of ancient heroes, had a mighty fascination over him. 'At any time the word _hermit_ was enough to transport him.' The words _woods_ and _forests_ would produce the most powerful emotion." Foster's Life, by RYLAND, New York, 1846, p. 3. 226 The Two Voices. In a letter to Mr. B. P. Blood, Tennyson reports of himself as follows:-- "I have never had any revelations through anæsthetics, but a kind of waking trance--this for lack of a better word--I have frequently had, quite up from boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has come upon me through repeating my own name to myself silently, till all at once, as it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused state but the clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly beyond words--where death was an almost laughable impossibility--the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction, but the only true life. I am ashamed of my feeble description. Have I not said the state is utterly beyond words?" Professor Tyndall, in a letter, recalls Tennyson saying of this condition: "By God Almighty! there is no delusion in the matter! It is no nebulous ecstasy, but a state of transcendent wonder, associated with absolute clearness of mind." Memoirs of Alfred Tennyson, ii. 473. 227 The Lancet, July 6 and 13, 1895, reprinted as the Cavendish Lecture, on Dreamy Mental States, London, Baillière, 1895. They have been a good deal discussed of late by psychologists. See, for example, BERNARD-LEROY: L'Illusion de Fausse Reconnaissance, Paris, 1898. 228 Charles Kingsley's Life, i. 55, quoted by INGE: Christian Mysticism, London, 1899, p. 341. 229 H. F. BROWN: J. A. Symonds, a Biography, London, 1895, pp. 29-31, abridged. 230 Crichton-Browne expressly says that Symonds's "highest nerve centres were in some degree enfeebled or damaged by these dreamy mental states which afflicted him so grievously." Symonds was, however, a perfect monster of many-sided cerebral efficiency, and his critic gives no objective grounds whatever for his strange opinion, save that Symonds complained occasionally, as all susceptible and ambitious men complain, of lassitude and uncertainty as to his life's mission. 231 What reader of Hegel can doubt that that sense of a perfected Being with all its otherness soaked up into itself, which dominates his whole philosophy, must have come from the prominence in his consciousness of mystical moods like this, in most persons kept subliminal? The notion is thoroughly characteristic of the mystical level, and the _Aufgabe_ of making it articulate was surely set to Hegel's intellect by mystical feeling. 232 BENJAMIN PAUL BLOOD: The Anæsthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy, Amsterdam, N. Y., 1874, pp. 35, 36. Mr. Blood has made several attempts to adumbrate the anæsthetic revelation, in pamphlets of rare literary distinction, privately printed and distributed by himself at Amsterdam. Xenos Clark, a philosopher, who died young at Amherst in the '80's, much lamented by those who knew him, was also impressed by the revelation. "In the first place," he once wrote to me, "Mr. Blood and I agree that the revelation is, if anything, non-emotional. It is utterly flat. It is, as Mr. Blood says, 'the one sole and sufficient insight why, or not why, but how, the present is pushed on by the past, and sucked forward by the vacuity of the future. Its inevitableness defeats all attempts at stopping or accounting for it. It is all precedence and presupposition, and questioning is in regard to it forever too late. It is an _initiation of the past_.' The real secret would be the formula by which the 'now' keeps exfoliating out of itself, yet never escapes. What is it, indeed, that keeps existence exfoliating? The formal being of anything, the logical definition of it, is static. For mere logic every question contains its own answer--we simply fill the hole with the dirt we dug out. Why are twice two four? Because, in fact, four is twice two. Thus logic finds in life no propulsion, only a momentum. It goes because it is a-going. But the revelation adds: it goes because it is and _was_ a-going. You walk, as it were, round yourself in the revelation. Ordinary philosophy is like a hound hunting his own trail. The more he hunts the farther he has to go, and his nose never catches up with his heels, because it is forever ahead of them. So the present is already a foregone conclusion, and I am ever too late to understand it. But at the moment of recovery from anæsthesis, just then, _before starting on life_, I catch, so to speak, a glimpse of my heels, a glimpse of the eternal process just in the act of starting. The truth is that we travel on a journey that was accomplished before we set out; and the real end of philosophy is accomplished, not when we arrive at, but when we remain in, our destination (being already there),--which may occur vicariously in this life when we cease our intellectual questioning. That is why there is a smile upon the face of the revelation, as we view it. It tells us that we are forever half a second too late--that's all. 'You could kiss your own lips, and have all the fun to yourself,' it says, if you only knew the trick. It would be perfectly easy if they would just stay there till you got round to them. Why don't you manage it somehow?" Dialectically minded readers of this farrago will at least recognize the region of thought of which Mr. Clark writes, as familiar. In his latest pamphlet, "Tennyson's Trances and the Anæsthetic Revelation," Mr. Blood describes its value for life as follows:-- "The Anæsthetic Revelation is the Initiation of Man into the Immemorial Mystery of the Open Secret of Being, revealed as the Inevitable Vortex of Continuity. Inevitable is the word. Its motive is inherent--it is what has to be. It is not for any love or hate, nor for joy nor sorrow, nor good nor ill. End, beginning, or purpose, it knows not of. "It affords no particular of the multiplicity and variety of things; but it fills appreciation of the historical and the sacred with a secular and intimately personal illumination of the nature and motive of existence, which then seems reminiscent--as if it should have appeared, or shall yet appear, to every participant thereof. "Although it is at first startling in its solemnity, it becomes directly such a matter of course--so old-fashioned, and so akin to proverbs, that it inspires exultation rather than fear, and a sense of safety, as identified with the aboriginal and the universal. But no words may express the imposing certainty of the patient that he is realizing the primordial, Adamic surprise of Life. "Repetition of the experience finds it ever the same, and as if it could not possibly be otherwise. The subject resumes his normal consciousness only to partially and fitfully remember its occurrence, and to try to formulate its baffling import,--with only this consolatory afterthought: that he has known the oldest truth, and that he has done with human theories as to the origin, meaning, or destiny of the race. He is beyond instruction in 'spiritual things.' "The lesson is one of central safety: the Kingdom is within. All days are judgment days: but there can be no climacteric purpose of eternity, nor any scheme of the whole. The astronomer abridges the row of bewildering figures by increasing his unit of measurement: so may we reduce the distracting multiplicity of things to the unity for which each of us stands. "This has been my moral sustenance since I have known of it. In my first printed mention of it I declared: 'The world is no more the alien terror that was taught me. Spurning the cloud-grimed and still sultry battlements whence so lately Jehovan thunders boomed, my gray gull lifts her wing against the nightfall, and takes the dim leagues with a fearless eye.' And now, after twenty-seven years of this experience, the wing is grayer, but the eye is fearless still, while I renew and doubly emphasize that declaration. I know--as having known--the meaning of Existence: the sane centre of the universe--at once the wonder and the assurance of the soul--for which the speech of reason has as yet no name but the Anæsthetic Revelation."--I have considerably abridged the quotation. 233 Op. cit., pp. 78-80, abridged. I subjoin, also abridging it, another interesting anæsthetic revelation communicated to me in manuscript by a friend in England. The subject, a gifted woman, was taking ether for a surgical operation. "I wondered if I was in a prison being tortured, and why I remembered having heard it said that people 'learn through suffering,' and in view of what I was seeing, the inadequacy of this saying struck me so much that I said, aloud, 'to suffer _is_ to learn.' "With that I became unconscious again, and my last dream immediately preceded my real coming to. It only lasted a few seconds, and was most vivid and real to me, though it may not be clear in words. "A great Being or Power was traveling through the sky, his foot was on a kind of lightning as a wheel is on a rail, it was his pathway. The lightning was made entirely of the spirits of innumerable people close to one another, and I was one of them. He moved in a straight line, and each part of the streak or flash came into its short conscious existence only that he might travel. I seemed to be directly under the foot of God, and I thought he was grinding his own life up out of my pain. Then I saw that what he had been trying with all his might to do was to _change his course_, to _bend_ the line of lightning to which he was tied, in the direction in which he wanted to go. I felt my flexibility and helplessness, and knew that he would succeed. He bended me, turning his corner by means of my hurt, hurting me more than I had ever been hurt in my life, and at the acutest point of this, as he passed, I _saw_. I understood for a moment things that I have now forgotten, things that no one could remember while retaining sanity. The angle was an obtuse angle, and I remember thinking as I woke that had he made it a right or acute angle, I should have both suffered and 'seen' still more, and should probably have died. "He went on and I came to. In that moment the whole of my life passed before me, including each little meaningless piece of distress, and I _understood_ them. _This_ was what it had all meant, _this_ was the piece of work it had all been contributing to do. I did not see God's purpose, I only saw his intentness and his entire relentlessness towards his means. He thought no more of me than a man thinks of hurting a cork when he is opening wine, or hurting a cartridge when he is firing. And yet, on waking, my first feeling was, and it came with tears, 'Domine non sum digna,' for I had been lifted into a position for which I was too small. I realized that in that half hour under ether I had served God more distinctly and purely than I had ever done in my life before, or that I am capable of desiring to do. I was the means of his achieving and revealing something, I know not what or to whom, and that, to the exact extent of my capacity for suffering. "While regaining consciousness, I wondered why, since I had gone so deep, I had seen nothing of what the saints call the _love_ of God, nothing but his relentlessness. And then I heard an answer, which I could only just catch, saying, 'Knowledge and Love are One, and the _measure_ is suffering'--I give the words as they came to me. With that I came finally to (into what seemed a dream world compared with the reality of what I was leaving), and I saw that what would be called the 'cause' of my experience was a slight operation under insufficient ether, in a bed pushed up against a window, a common city window in a common city street. If I had to formulate a few of the things I then caught a glimpse of, they would run somewhat as follows:-- "The eternal necessity of suffering and its eternal vicariousness. The veiled and incommunicable nature of the worst sufferings;--the passivity of genius, how it is essentially instrumental and defenseless, moved, not moving, it must do what it does;--the impossibility of discovery without its price;--finally, the excess of what the suffering 'seer' or genius pays over what his generation gains. (He seems like one who sweats his life out to earn enough to save a district from famine, and just as he staggers back, dying and satisfied, bringing a lac of rupees to buy grain with, God lifts the lac away, dropping _one_ rupee, and says, 'That you may give them. That you have earned for them. The rest is for ME.') I perceived also in a way never to be forgotten, the excess of what we see over what we can demonstrate. "And so on!--these things may seem to you delusions, or truisms; but for me they are dark truths, and the power to put them into even such words as these has been given me by an ether dream." 234 In Tune with the Infinite, p. 137. 235 The larger God may then swallow up the smaller one. I take this from Starbuck's manuscript collection:-- "I never lost the consciousness of the presence of God until I stood at the foot of the Horseshoe Falls, Niagara. Then I lost him in the immensity of what I saw. I also lost myself, feeling that I was an atom too small for the notice of Almighty God." I subjoin another similar case from Starbuck's collection:-- "In that time the consciousness of God's nearness came to me sometimes. I say God, to describe what is indescribable. A presence, I might say, yet that is too suggestive of personality, and the moments of which I speak did not hold the consciousness of a personality, but something in myself made me feel myself a part of something bigger than I, that was controlling. I felt myself one with the grass, the trees, birds, insects, everything in Nature. I exulted in the mere fact of existence, of being a part of it all--the drizzling rain, the shadows of the clouds, the tree-trunks, and so on. In the years following, such moments continued to come, but I wanted them constantly. I knew so well the satisfaction of losing self in a perception of supreme power and love, that I was unhappy because that perception was not constant." The cases quoted in my third lecture, pp. 66, 67, 70, are still better ones of this type. In her essay, The Loss of Personality, in The Atlantic Monthly (vol. lxxxv. p. 195), Miss Ethel D. Puffer explains that the vanishing of the sense of self, and the feeling of immediate unity with the object, is due to the disappearance, in these rapturous experiences, of the motor adjustments which habitually intermediate between the constant background of consciousness (which is the Self) and the object in the foreground, whatever it may be. I must refer the reader to the highly instructive article, which seems to me to throw light upon the psychological conditions, though it fails to account for the rapture or the revelation-value of the experience in the Subject's eyes. 236 Op. cit., i. 43-44. 237 Memoiren einer Idealistin, 5te Auflage, 1900, iii. 166. For years she had been unable to pray, owing to materialistic belief. 238 Whitman in another place expresses in a quieter way what was probably with him a chronic mystical perception: "There is," he writes, "apart from mere intellect, in the make-up of every superior human identity, a wondrous something that realizes without argument, frequently without what is called education (though I think it the goal and apex of all education deserving the name), an intuition of the absolute balance, in time and space, of the whole of this multifariousness, this revel of fools, and incredible make-believe and general unsettledness, we call _the world_; a soul-sight of that divine clue and unseen thread which holds the whole congeries of things, all history and time, and all events, however trivial, however momentous, like a leashed dog in the hand of the hunter. [Of] such soul-sight and root-centre for the mind mere optimism explains only the surface." Whitman charges it against Carlyle that he lacked this perception. Specimen Days and Collect, Philadelphia, 1882, p. 174. 239 My Quest for God, London, 1897, pp. 268, 269, abridged. 240 Op. cit., pp. 256, 257, abridged. 241 Cosmic Consciousness: a study in the evolution of the human Mind, Philadelphia, 1901, p. 2. 242 Loc. cit., pp. 7, 8. My quotation follows the privately printed pamphlet which preceded Dr. Bucke's larger work, and differs verbally a little from the text of the latter. 243 My quotations are from VIVEKANANDA, Raja Yoga, London, 1896. The completest source of information on Yoga is the work translated by VIHARI LALA MITRA: Yoga Vasishta Maha Ramayana, 4 vols., Calcutta, 1891-99. 244 A European witness, after carefully comparing the results of Yoga with those of the hypnotic or dreamy states artificially producible by us, says: "It makes of its true disciples good, healthy, and happy men.... Through the mastery which the yogi attains over his thoughts and his body, he grows into a 'character.' By the subjection of his impulses and propensities to his will, and the fixing of the latter upon the ideal of goodness, he becomes a 'personality' hard to influence by others, and thus almost the opposite of what we usually imagine a 'medium' so-called, or 'psychic subject' to be." KARL KELLNER: Yoga: Eine Skizze, München, 1896, p. 21. 245 I follow the account in C. F. KOEPPEN: Die Religion des Buddha, Berlin, 1857, i. 585 ff. 246 For a full account of him, see D. B. MACDONALD: The Life of Al- Ghazzali, in the Journal of the American Oriental Society, 1899, vol. xx. p. 71. 247 A. SCHMÖLDERS: Essai sur les écoles philosophiques chez les Arabes, Paris, 1842, pp. 54-68, abridged. 248 GÖRRES'S Christliche Mystik gives a full account of the facts. So does RIBET'S Mystique Divine, 2 vols., Paris, 1890. A still more methodical modern work is the Mystica Theologia of VALLGORNERA, 2 vols., Turin, 1890. 249 M. RÉCÉJAC, in a recent volume, makes them essential. Mysticism he defines as "the tendency to draw near to the Absolute morally, _and by the aid of Symbols_." See his Fondements de la Connaissance mystique, Paris, 1897, p. 66. But there are unquestionably mystical conditions in which sensible symbols play no part. 250 Saint John of the Cross: The Dark Night of the Soul, book ii. ch. xvii., in Vie et OEuvres, 3me édition, Paris, 1893, iii. 428-432. Chapter xi. of book ii. of Saint John's Ascent of Carmel is devoted to showing the harmfulness for the mystical life of the use of sensible imagery. 251 In particular I omit mention of visual and auditory hallucinations, verbal and graphic automatisms, and such marvels as "levitation," stigmatization, and the healing of disease. These phenomena, which mystics have often presented (or are believed to have presented), have no essential mystical significance, for they occur with no consciousness of illumination whatever, when they occur, as they often do, in persons of non-mystical mind. Consciousness of illumination is for us the essential mark of "mystical" states. 252 The Interior Castle, Fifth Abode, ch. i., in OEuvres, translated by Bouix, iii. 421-424. 253 BARTOLI-MICHEL: Vie de Saint Ignace de Loyola, i. 34-36. Others have had illuminations about the created world, Jacob Boehme, for instance. At the age of twenty-five he was "surrounded by the divine light, and replenished with the heavenly knowledge; insomuch as going abroad into the fields to a green, at Görlitz, he there sat down, and viewing the herbs and grass of the field, in his inward light he saw into their essences, use, and properties, which was discovered to him by their lineaments, figures, and signatures." Of a later period of experience he writes: "In one quarter of an hour I saw and knew more than if I had been many years together at an university. For I saw and knew the being of all things, the Byss and the Abyss, and the eternal generation of the holy Trinity, the descent and original of the world and of all creatures through the divine wisdom. I knew and saw in myself all the three worlds, the external and visible world being of a procreation or extern birth from both the internal and spiritual worlds; and I saw and knew the whole working essence, in the evil and in the good, and the mutual original and existence; and likewise how the fruitful bearing womb of eternity brought forth. So that I did not only greatly wonder at it, but did also exceedingly rejoice, albeit I could very hardly apprehend the same in my external man and set it down with the pen. For I had a thorough view of the universe as in a chaos, wherein all things are couched and wrapt up, but it was impossible for me to explicate the same." Jacob Behmen's Theosophic Philosophy, etc., by EDWARD TAYLOR, London, 1691, pp. 425, 427, abridged. So George Fox: "I was come up to the state of Adam in which he was before he fell. The creation was opened to me; and it was showed me, how all things had their names given to them, according to their nature and virtue. I was at a stand in my mind, whether I should practice physic for the good of mankind, seeing the nature and virtues of the creatures were so opened to me by the Lord." Journal, Philadelphia, no date, p. 69. Contemporary "Clairvoyance" abounds in similar revelations. Andrew Jackson Davis's cosmogonies, for example, or certain experiences related in the delectable "Reminiscences and Memories of Henry Thomas Butterworth," Lebanon, Ohio, 1886. 254 Vie, pp. 581, 582. 255 Loc. cit., p. 574. 256 Saint Teresa discriminates between pain in which the body has a part and pure spiritual pain (Interior Castle, 6th Abode, ch. xi.). As for the bodily part in these celestial joys, she speaks of it as "penetrating to the marrow of the bones, whilst earthly pleasures affect only the surface of the senses. I think," she adds, "that this is a just description, and I cannot make it better." Ibid., 5th Abode, ch. i. 257 Vie, p. 198. 258 OEuvres, ii. 320. 259 Above, p. 21. 260 Vie, pp. 229, 200, 231-233, 243. 261 MÜLLER'S translation, part ii. p. 180. 262 T. DAVIDSON'S translation, in Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 1893, vol. xxii. p. 399. 263 "Deus propter excellentiam non immerito Nihil vocatur." Scotus Erigena, quoted by ANDREW SETH: Two Lectures on Theism, New York, 1897, p. 55. 264 J. ROYCE: Studies in Good and Evil, p. 282. 265 Jacob Behmen's Dialogues on the Supersensual Life, translated by BERNARD HOLLAND, London, 1901, p. 48. 266 Cherubinischer Wandersmann, Strophe 25. 267 Op. cit., pp. 42, 74, abridged. 268 From a French book I take this mystical expression of happiness in God's indwelling presence:-- "Jesus has come to take up his abode in my heart. It is not so much a habitation, an association, as a sort of fusion. Oh, new and blessed life! life which becomes each day more luminous.... The wall before me, dark a few moments since, is splendid at this hour because the sun shines on it. Wherever its rays fall they light up a conflagration of glory; the smallest speck of glass sparkles, each grain of sand emits fire; even so there is a royal song of triumph in my heart because the Lord is there. My days succeed each other; yesterday a blue sky; to-day a clouded sun; a night filled with strange dreams; but as soon as the eyes open, and I regain consciousness and seem to begin life again, it is always the same figure before me, always the same presence filling my heart.... Formerly the day was dulled by the absence of the Lord. I used to wake invaded by all sorts of sad impressions, and I did not find him on my path. To-day he is with me; and the light cloudiness which covers things is not an obstacle to my communion with him. I feel the pressure of his hand, I feel something else which fills me with a serene joy; shall I dare to speak it out? Yes, for it is the true expression of what I experience. The Holy Spirit is not merely making me a visit; it is no mere dazzling apparition which may from one moment to another spread its wings and leave me in my night, it is a permanent habitation. He can depart only if he takes me with him. More than that; he is not other than myself: he is one with me. It is not a juxtaposition, it is a penetration, a profound modification of my nature, a new manner of my being." Quoted from the MS. "of an old man" by WILFRED MONOD: Il Vit: six méditations sur le mystère chrétien, pp. 280-283. 269 Compare M. MAETERLINCK: L'Ornement des Noces spirituelles de Ruysbroeck, Bruxelles, 1891, Introduction, p. xix. 270 Upanishads, M. MÜLLER'S translation, ii. 17, 334. 271 SCHMÖLDERS: Op. cit., p. 210. 272 Enneads, BOUILLIER'S translation, Paris, 1861, iii. 561. Compare pp. 473-477, and vol. i. p. 27. 273 Autobiography, pp. 309, 310. 274 Op. cit., Strophe 10. 275 H. P. BLAVATSKY: The Voice of the Silence. 276 SWINBURNE: On the Verge, in "A Midsummer Vacation." 277 Compare the extracts from Dr. Bucke, quoted on pp. 398, 399. 278 As serious an attempt as I know to mediate between the mystical region and the discursive life is contained in an article on Aristotle's Unmoved Mover, by F. C. S. SCHILLER, in Mind, vol. ix., 1900. 279 I abstract from weaker states, and from those cases of which the books are full, where the director (but usually not the subject) remains in doubt whether the experience may not have proceeded from the demon. 280 Example: Mr. John Nelson writes of his imprisonment for preaching Methodism: "My soul was as a watered garden, and I could sing praises to God all day long; for he turned my captivity into joy, and gave me to rest as well on the boards, as if I had been on a bed of down. Now could I say, 'God's service is perfect freedom,' and I was carried out much in prayer that my enemies might drink of the same river of peace which my God gave so largely to me." Journal, London, no date, p. 172. 281 RUYSBROECK, in the work which Maeterlinck has translated, has a chapter against the antinomianism of disciples. H. DELACROIX'S book (Essai sur le mysticisme spéculatif en Allemagne au XIVme Siècle, Paris, 1900) is full of antinomian material. Compare also A. JUNDT: Les Amis de Dieu au XIVme Siècle, Thèse de Strasbourg, 1879. 282 Compare PAUL ROUSSELOT: Les Mystiques Espagnols, Paris, 1869, ch. xii. 283 See CARPENTER'S Towards Democracy, especially the latter parts, and JEFFERIES'S wonderful and splendid mystic rhapsody, The Story of my Heart. 284 In chapter i. of book ii. of his work Degeneration, "MAX NORDAU" seeks to undermine all mysticism by exposing the weakness of the lower kinds. Mysticism for him means any sudden perception of hidden significance in things. He explains such perception by the abundant uncompleted associations which experiences may arouse in a degenerate brain. These give to him who has the experience a vague and vast sense of its leading further, yet they awaken no definite or useful consequent in his thought. The explanation is a plausible one for certain sorts of feeling of significance; and other alienists (WERNICKE, for example, in his Grundriss der Psychiatrie, Theil ii., Leipzig, 1896) have explained "paranoiac" conditions by a laming of the association-organ. But the higher mystical flights, with their positiveness and abruptness, are surely products of no such merely negative condition. It seems far more reasonable to ascribe them to inroads from the subconscious life, of the cerebral activity correlative to which we as yet know nothing. 285 They sometimes add subjective _audita et visa_ to the facts, but as these are usually interpreted as transmundane, they oblige no alteration in the facts of sense. 286 Compare Professor W. WALLACE'S Gifford Lectures, in Lectures and Essays, Oxford, 1898, pp. 17 ff. 287 Op. cit., p. 174, abridged. 288 Ibid., p. 186, abridged and italicized. 289 Discourse II. § 7. 290 As regards the secondary character of intellectual constructions, and the primacy of feeling and instinct in founding religious beliefs, see the striking work of H. FIELDING, The Hearts of Men, London, 1902, which came into my hands after my text was written. "Creeds," says the author, "are the grammar of religion, they are to religion what grammar is to speech. Words are the expression of our wants; grammar is the theory formed afterwards. Speech never proceeded from grammar, but the reverse. As speech progresses and changes from unknown causes, grammar must follow" (p. 313). The whole book, which keeps unusually close to concrete facts, is little more than an amplification of this text. 291 For convenience' sake, I follow the order of A. STÖCKL'S Lehrbuch der Philosophie, 5te Auflage, Mainz, 1881, Band ii. B. BOEDDER'S Natural Theology, London, 1891, is a handy English Catholic Manual; but an almost identical doctrine is given by such Protestant theologians as C. HODGE: Systematic Theology, New York, 1873, or A. H. STRONG: Systematic Theology, 5th edition, New York, 1896. 292 It must not be forgotten that any form of _dis_order in the world might, by the design argument, suggest a God for just that kind of disorder. The truth is that any state of things whatever that can be named is logically susceptible of teleological interpretation. The ruins of the earthquake at Lisbon, for example: the whole of past history had to be planned exactly as it was to bring about in the fullness of time just that particular arrangement of débris of masonry, furniture, and once living bodies. No other train of causes would have been sufficient. And so of any other arrangement, bad or good, which might as a matter of fact be found resulting anywhere from previous conditions. To avoid such pessimistic consequences and save its beneficent designer, the design argument accordingly invokes two other principles, restrictive in their operation. The first is physical: Nature's forces tend of their own accord only to disorder and destruction, to heaps of ruins, not to architecture. This principle, though plausible at first sight, seems, in the light of recent biology, to be more and more improbable. The second principle is one of anthropomorphic interpretation. No arrangement that for _us_ is "disorderly" can possibly have been an object of design at all. This principle is of course a mere assumption in the interests of anthropomorphic Theism. When one views the world with no definite theological bias one way or the other, one sees that order and disorder, as we now recognize them, are purely human inventions. We are interested in certain types of arrangement, useful, æsthetic, or moral,--so interested that whenever we find them realized, the fact emphatically rivets our attention. The result is that we work over the contents of the world selectively. It is overflowing with disorderly arrangements from our point of view, but order is the only thing we care for and look at, and by choosing, one can always find some sort of orderly arrangement in the midst of any chaos. If I should throw down a thousand beans at random upon a table, I could doubtless, by eliminating a sufficient number of them, leave the rest in almost any geometrical pattern you might propose to me, and you might then say that that pattern was the thing prefigured beforehand, and that the other beans were mere irrelevance and packing material. Our dealings with Nature are just like this. She is a vast _plenum_ in which our attention draws capricious lines in innumerable directions. We count and name whatever lies upon the special lines we trace, whilst the other things and the untraced lines are neither named nor counted. There are in reality infinitely more things 'unadapted' to each other in this world than there are things 'adapted'; infinitely more things with irregular relations than with regular relations between them. But we look for the regular kind of thing exclusively, and ingeniously discover and preserve it in our memory. It accumulates with other regular kinds, until the collection of them fills our encyclopædias. Yet all the while between and around them lies an infinite anonymous chaos of objects that no one ever thought of together, of relations that never yet attracted our attention. The facts of order from which the physico-theological argument starts are thus easily susceptible of interpretation as arbitrary human products. So long as this is the case, although of course no argument against God follows, it follows that the argument for him will fail to constitute a knock-down proof of his existence. It will be convincing only to those who on other grounds believe in him already. 293 For the scholastics the _facultas appetendi_ embraces feeling, desire, and will. 294 Op. cit., Discourse III. § 7. 295 In an article, How to make our Ideas Clear, in the Popular Science Monthly for January, 1878, vol. xii. p. 286. 296 Pragmatically, the most important attribute of God is his punitive justice. But who, in the present state of theological opinion on that point, will dare maintain that hell fire or its equivalent in some shape is rendered certain by pure logic? Theology herself has largely based this doctrine upon revelation; and, in discussing it, has tended more and more to substitute conventional ideas of criminal law for a priori principles of reason. But the very notion that this glorious universe, with planets and winds, and laughing sky and ocean, should have been conceived and had its beams and rafters laid in technicalities of criminality, is incredible to our modern imagination. It weakens a religion to hear it argued upon such a basis. 297 John Caird: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, London and New York, 1880, pp. 243-250, and 291-299, much abridged. 298 A. C. FRASER: Philosophy of Theism, second edition, Edinburgh and London, 1899, especially part ii. chaps. vii. and viii.; A. SETH [PRINGLE-PATTISON]: Hegelianism and Personality, Ibid., 1890, passim. The most persuasive arguments in favor of a concrete individual Soul of the world, with which I am acquainted, are those of my colleague, Josiah Royce, in his Religious Aspect of Philosophy, Boston, 1885; in his Conception of God, New York and London, 1897; and lately in his Aberdeen Gifford Lectures, The World and the Individual, 2 vols., New York and London, 1901-02. I doubtless seem to some of my readers to evade the philosophic duty which my thesis in this lecture imposes on me, by not even attempting to meet Professor Royce's arguments articulately. I admit the momentary evasion. In the present lectures, which are cast throughout in a popular mould, there seemed no room for subtle metaphysical discussion, and for tactical purposes it was sufficient, the contention of philosophy being what it is (namely, that religion can be transformed into a universally convincing science), to point to the fact that no religious philosophy has actually convinced the mass of thinkers. Meanwhile let me say that I hope that the present volume may be followed by another, if I am spared to write it, in which not only Professor Royce's arguments, but others for monistic absolutism shall be considered with all the technical fullness which their great importance calls for. At present I resign myself to lying passive under the reproach of superficiality. 299 Idea of a University, Discourse III. § 7. 300 Newman's imagination so innately craved an ecclesiastical system that he can write: "From the age of fifteen, dogma has been the fundamental principle of my religion: I know no other religion; I cannot enter into the idea of any other sort of religion." And again, speaking of himself about the age of thirty, he writes: "I loved to act as feeling myself in my Bishop's sight, as if it were the sight of God." Apologia, 1897, pp. 48, 50. 301 The intellectual difference is quite on a par in practical importance with the analogous difference in character. We saw, under the head of Saintliness, how some characters resent confusion and must live in purity, consistency, simplicity (above, p. 280 ff.). For others, on the contrary, superabundance, over-pressure, stimulation, lots of superficial relations, are indispensable. There are men who would suffer a very syncope if you should pay all their debts, bring it about that their engagements had been kept, their letters answered, their perplexities relieved, and their duties fulfilled, down to one which lay on a clean table under their eyes with nothing to interfere with its immediate performance. A day stripped so staringly bare would be for them appalling. So with ease, elegance, tributes of affection, social recognitions--some of us require amounts of these things which to others would appear a mass of lying and sophistication. 302 In Newman's Lectures on Justification, Lecture VIII. § 6, there is a splendid passage expressive of this æsthetic way of feeling the Christian scheme. It is unfortunately too long to quote. 303 Compare the informality of Protestantism, where the "meek lover of the good," alone with his God, visits the sick, etc., for their own sakes, with the elaborate "business" that goes on in Catholic devotion, and carries with it the social excitement of all more complex businesses. An essentially worldly-minded Catholic woman can become a visitor of the sick on purely coquettish principles, with her confessor and director, her "merit" storing up, her patron saints, her privileged relation to the Almighty, drawing his attention as a professional _dévote_, her definite "exercises," and her definitely recognized social _pose_ in the organization. 304 Above, p. 362 ff. 305 A fuller discussion of confession is contained in the excellent work by FRANK GRANGER: The Soul of a Christian, London, 1900, ch. xii. 306 Example: "The minister at Sudbury, being at the Thursday lecture in Boston, heard the officiating clergyman praying for rain. As soon as the service was over, he went to the petitioner and said, 'You Boston ministers, as soon as a tulip wilts under your windows, go to church and pray for rain, until all Concord and Sudbury are under water.' " R. W. EMERSON: Lectures and Biographical Sketches, p. 363. 307 AUGUSTE SABATIER: Esquisse d'une Philosophie de la Religion, 2me éd., 1897, pp. 24-26, abridged. 308 My authority for these statistics is the little work on Müller, by FREDERIC G. WARNE, New York, 1898. 309 The Life of Trust; Being a Narrative of the Lord's Dealings with George Müller, New American edition, N. Y., Crowell, pp. 228, 194, 219. 310 Ibid., p. 126. 311 Op. cit., p. 383, abridged. 312 Ibid., p. 323. 313 I cannot resist the temptation of quoting an expression of an even more primitive style of religious thought, which I find in Arber's English Garland, vol. vii. p. 440. Robert Lyde, an English sailor, along with an English boy, being prisoners on a French ship in 1689, set upon the crew, of seven Frenchmen, killed two, made the other five prisoners, and brought home the ship. Lyde thus describes how in this feat he found his God a very present help in time of trouble:-- "With the assistance of God I kept my feet when they three and one more did strive to throw me down. Feeling the Frenchman which hung about my middle hang very heavy, I said to the boy, 'Go round the binnacle, and knock down that man that hangeth on my back.' So the boy did strike him one blow on the head which made him fall.... Then I looked about for a marlin spike or anything else to strike them withal. But seeing nothing, I said, 'LORD! what shall I do?' Then casting up my eye upon my left side, and seeing a marlin spike hanging, I jerked my right arm and took hold, and struck the point four times about a quarter of an inch deep into the skull of that man that had hold of my left arm. [One of the Frenchmen then hauled the marlin spike away from him.] But through GOD'S wonderful providence! it either fell out of his hand, or else he threw it down, and at this time the Almighty GOD gave me strength enough to take one man in one hand, and throw at the other's head: and looking about again to see anything to strike them withal, but seeing nothing, I said, 'LORD! what shall I do now?' And then it pleased GOD to put me in mind of my knife in my pocket. And although two of the men had hold of my right arm, yet GOD Almighty strengthened me so that I put my right hand into my right pocket, drew out the knife and sheath, ... put it between my legs and drew it out, and then cut the man's throat with it that had his back to my breast: and he immediately dropt down, and scarce ever stirred after."--I have slightly abridged Lyde's narrative. 314 As, for instance, In Answer to Prayer, by the BISHOP OF RIPON and others, London, 1898; Touching Incidents and Remarkable Answers to Prayer, Harrisburg, Pa., 1898 (?); H. L. HASTINGS: The Guiding Hand, or Providential Direction, illustrated by Authentic Instances, Boston, 1898 (?). 315 C. HILTY: Glück, Dritter Theil, 1900, pp. 92 ff. 316 "Good Heaven!" says Epictetus, "any one thing in the creation is sufficient to demonstrate a Providence, to a humble and grateful mind. The mere possibility of producing milk from grass, cheese from milk, and wool from skins; who formed and planned it? Ought we not, whether we dig or plough or eat, to sing this hymn to God? Great is God, who has supplied us with these instruments to till the ground; great is God, who has given us hands and instruments of digestion; who has given us to grow insensibly and to breathe in sleep. These things we ought forever to celebrate.... But because the most of you are blind and insensible, there must be some one to fill this station, and lead, in behalf of all men, the hymn to God; for what else can I do, a lame old man, but sing hymns to God? Were I a nightingale, I would act the part of a nightingale; were I a swan, the part of a swan. But since I am a reasonable creature, it is my duty to praise God ... and I call on you to join the same song." Works, book i. ch. xvi., CARTER-HIGGINSON translation, abridged. 317 JAMES MARTINEAU: end of the sermon "Help Thou Mine Unbelief," in Endeavours after a Christian Life, 2d series. Compare with this page the extract from Voysey on p. 275, above, and those from Pascal and Madame Guyon on p. 286. 318 Souvenirs de ma Jeunesse, 1897, p. 122. 319 Op. cit., Letter XXX. 320 Above, p. 248 ff. Compare the withdrawal of expression from the world, in Melancholiacs, p. 151. 321 Above, pp. 24, 25. 322 A friend of mine, a first-rate psychologist, who is a subject of graphic automatism, tells me that the appearance of independent actuation in the movements of his arm, when he writes automatically, is so distinct that it obliges him to abandon a psychophysical theory which he had previously believed in, the theory, namely, that we have no feeling of the discharge downwards of our voluntary motor-centres. We must normally have such a feeling, he thinks, or the _sense of an absence_ would not be so striking as it is in these experiences. Graphic automatism of a fully developed kind is rare in religious history, so far as my knowledge goes. Such statements as Antonia Bourignon's, that "I do nothing but lend my hand and spirit to another power than mine," is shown by the context to indicate inspiration rather than directly automatic writing. In some eccentric sects this latter occurs. The most striking instance of it is probably the bulky volume called, 'Oahspe, a new Bible in the Words of Jehovah and his angel ambassadors,' Boston and London, 1891, written and illustrated automatically by DR. NEWBROUGH of New York, whom I understand to be now, or to have been lately, at the head of the spiritistic community of Shalam in New Mexico. The latest automatically written book which has come under my notice is "Zertoulem's Wisdom of the Ages," by GEORGE A. FULLER, Boston, 1901. 323 W. SANDAY: The Oracles of God, London, 1892, pp. 49-56, abridged. 324 Op. cit., p. 91. This author also cites Moses's and Isaiah's commissions, as given in Exodus, chaps. iii. and iv., and Isaiah, chap. vi. 325 Quoted by AUGUSTUS CLISSOLD: The Prophetic Spirit in Genius and Madness, 1870, p. 67. Mr. Clissold is a Swedenborgian. Swedenborg's case is of course the palmary one of _audita et visa_, serving as a basis of religious revelation. 326 NÖLDEKE, Geschichte des Qorâns, 1860, p. 16. Compare the fuller account in Sir WILLIAM MUIR'S Life of Mahomet, 3d ed., 1894, ch. iii. 327 The Mormon theocracy has always been governed by direct revelations accorded to the President of the Church and its Apostles. From an obliging letter written to me in 1899 by an eminent Mormon, I quote the following extract:-- "It may be very interesting for you to know that the President [Mr. Snow] of the Mormon Church claims to have had a number of revelations very recently from heaven. To explain fully what these revelations are, it is necessary to know that we, as a people, believe that the Church of Jesus Christ has again been established through messengers sent from heaven. This Church has at its head a prophet, seer, and revelator, who gives to man God's holy will. Revelation is the means through which the will of God is declared directly and in fullness to man. These revelations are got through dreams of sleep or in waking visions of the mind, by voices without visional appearance, or by actual manifestations of the Holy Presence before the eye. We believe that God has come in person and spoken to our prophet and revelator." 328 For example, on pages 135, 163, 333, above. 329 From this point of view, the contrasts between the healthy and the morbid mind, and between the once-born and the twice-born types, of which I spoke in earlier lectures (see pp. 162-167), cease to be the radical antagonisms which many think them. The twice-born look down upon the rectilinear consciousness of life of the once-born as being "mere morality," and not properly religion. "Dr. Channing," an orthodox minister is reported to have said, "is excluded from the highest form of religious life by the extraordinary rectitude of his character." It is indeed true that the outlook upon life of the twice-born--holding as it does more of the element of evil in solution--is the wider and completer. The "heroic" or "solemn" way in which life comes to them is a "higher synthesis" into which healthy- mindedness and morbidness both enter and combine. Evil is not evaded, but sublated in the higher religious cheer of these persons (see pp. 47-52, 362-365). But the final consciousness which each type reaches of union with the divine has the same practical significance for the individual; and individuals may well be allowed to get to it by the channels which lie most open to their several temperaments. In the cases which were quoted in Lecture IV, of the mind-cure form of healthy-mindedness, we found abundant examples of regenerative process. The severity of the crisis in this process is a matter of degree. How long one shall continue to drink the consciousness of evil, and when one shall begin to short-circuit and get rid of it, are also matters of amount and degree, so that in many instances it is quite arbitrary whether we class the individual as a once-born or a twice-born subject. 330 Compare, e.g., the quotation from Renan on p. 37, above. 331 "Prayerful" taken in the broader sense explained above on pp. 463 ff. 332 How was it ever conceivable, we ask, that a man like Christian Wolff, in whose dry-as-dust head all the learning of the early eighteenth century was concentrated, should have preserved such a baby-like faith in the personal and human character of Nature as to expound her operations as he did in his work on the uses of natural things? This, for example, is the account he gives of the sun and its utility:-- "We see that God has created the sun to keep the changeable conditions on the earth in such an order that living creatures, men and beasts, may inhabit its surface. Since men are the most reasonable of creatures, and able to infer God's invisible being from the contemplation of the world, the sun in so far forth contributes to the primary purpose of creation: without it the race of man could not be preserved or continued.... The sun makes daylight, not only on our earth, but also on the other planets; and daylight is of the utmost utility to us; for by its means we can commodiously carry on those occupations which in the night-time would either be quite impossible, or at any rate impossible without our going to the expense of artificial light. The beasts of the field can find food by day which they would not be able to find at night. Moreover we owe it to the sunlight that we are able to see everything that is on the earth's surface, not only near by, but also at a distance, and to recognize both near and far things according to their species, which again is of manifold use to us not only in the business necessary to human life, and when we are traveling, but also for the scientific knowledge of Nature, which knowledge for the most part depends on observations made with the help of sight, and, without the sunshine, would have been impossible. If any one would rightly impress on his mind the great advantages which he derives from the sun, let him imagine himself living through only one month, and see how it would be with all his undertakings, if it were not day but night. He would then be sufficiently convinced out of his own experience, especially if he had much work to carry on in the street or in the fields.... From the sun we learn to recognize when it is midday, and by knowing this point of time exactly, we can set our clocks right, on which account astronomy owes much to the sun.... By help of the sun one can find the meridian.... But the meridian is the basis of our sun-dials, and generally speaking, we should have no sun-dials if we had no sun." Vernünftige Gedanken von den Absichten der natürlichen Dinge, 1782, pp. 74-84. Or read the account of God's beneficence in the institution of "the great variety throughout the world of men's faces, voices, and handwriting," given in Derham's Physico-theology, a book that had much vogue in the eighteenth century. "Had Man's body," says Dr. Derham, "been made according to any of the Atheistical Schemes, or any other Method than that of the infinite Lord of the World, this wise Variety would never have been: but Men's Faces would have been cast in the same, or not a very different Mould, their Organs of Speech would have sounded the same or not so great a Variety of Notes; and the same Structure of Muscles and Nerves would have given the Hand the same Direction in Writing. And in this Case, what Confusion, what Disturbance, what Mischiefs would the world eternally have lain under! No Security could have been to our persons; no Certainty, no Enjoyment of our Possessions; no Justice between Man and Man; no Distinction between Good and Bad, between Friends and Foes, between Father and Child, Husband and Wife, Male or Female; but all would have been turned topsy-turvy, by being exposed to the Malice of the Envious and ill-Natured, to the Fraud and Violence of Knaves and Robbers, to the Forgeries of the crafty Cheat, to the Lusts of the Effeminate and Debauched, and what not! Our Courts of Justice can abundantly testify the dire Effects of Mistaking Men's Faces, of counterfeiting their Hands, and forging Writings. But now as the infinitely wise Creator and Ruler hath ordered the Matter, every man's Face can distinguish him in the Light, and his Voice in the Dark; his Hand-writing can speak for him though absent, and be his Witness, and secure his Contracts in future Generations. A manifest as well as admirable Indication of the divine Superintendence and Management." A God so careful as to make provision even for the unmistakable signing of bank checks and deeds was a deity truly after the heart of eighteenth century Anglicanism. I subjoin, omitting the capitals, Derham's "Vindication of God by the Institution of Hills and Valleys," and Wolff's altogether culinary account of the institution of Water:-- "The uses," says Wolff, "which water serves in human life are plain to see and need not be described at length. Water is a universal drink of man and beasts. Even though men have made themselves drinks that are artificial, they could not do this without water. Beer is brewed of water and malt, and it is the water in it which quenches thirst. Wine is prepared from grapes, which could never have grown without the help of water; and the same is true of those drinks which in England and other places they produce from fruit.... Therefore since God so planned the world that men and beasts should live upon it and find there everything required for their necessity and convenience, he also made water as one means whereby to make the earth into so excellent a dwelling. And this is all the more manifest when we consider the advantages which we obtain from this same water for the cleaning of our household utensils, of our clothing, and of other matters.... When one goes into a grinding- mill one sees that the grindstone must always be kept wet and then one will get a still greater idea of the use of water." Of the hills and valleys, Derham, after praising their beauty, discourses as follows: "Some constitutions are indeed of so happy a strength, and so confirmed an health, as to be indifferent to almost any place or temperature of the air. But then others are so weakly and feeble, as not to be able to bear one, but can live comfortably in another place. With some the more subtle and finer air of the hills doth best agree, who are languishing and dying in the feculent and grosser air of great towns, or even the warmer and vaporous air of the valleys and waters. But contrariwise, others languish on the hills, and grow lusty and strong in the warmer air of the valleys. "So that this opportunity of shifting our abode from the hills to the vales, is an admirable easement, refreshment, and great benefit to the valetudinarian, feeble part of mankind; affording those an easy and comfortable life, who would otherwise live miserably, languish, and pine away. "To this salutary conformation of the earth we may add another great convenience of the hills, and that is affording commodious places for habitation, serving (as an eminent author wordeth it) as screens to keep off the cold and nipping blasts of the northern and easterly winds, and reflecting the benign and cherishing sunbeams, and so rendering our habitations both more comfortable and more cheerly in winter. "Lastly, it is to the hills that the fountains owe their rise and the rivers their conveyance, and consequently those vast masses and lofty piles are not, as they are charged, such rude and useless excrescences of our ill-formed globe; but the admirable tools of nature, contrived and ordered by the infinite Creator, to do one of its most useful works. For, was the surface of the earth even and level, and the middle parts of its islands and continents not mountainous and high as now it is, it is most certain there could be no descent for the rivers, no conveyance for the waters; but, instead of gliding along those gentle declivities which the higher lands now afford them quite down to the sea, they would stagnate and perhaps stink, and also drown large tracts of land. "[Thus] the hills and vales, though to a peevish and weary traveler they may seem incommodious and troublesome, yet are a noble work of the great Creator, and wisely appointed by him for the good of our sublunary world." 333 Until the seventeenth century this mode of thought prevailed. One need only recall the dramatic treatment even of mechanical questions by Aristotle, as, for example, his explanation of the power of the lever to make a small weight raise a larger one. This is due, according to Aristotle, to the generally miraculous character of the circle and of all circular movement. The circle is both convex and concave; it is made by a fixed point and a moving line, which contradict each other; and whatever moves in a circle moves in opposite directions. Nevertheless, movement in a circle is the most "natural" movement; and the long arm of the lever, moving, as it does, in the larger circle, has the greater amount of this natural motion, and consequently requires the lesser force. Or recall the explanation by Herodotus of the position of the sun in winter: It moves to the south because of the cold which drives it into the warm parts of the heavens over Libya. Or listen to Saint Augustine's speculations: "Who gave to chaff such power to freeze that it preserves snow buried under it, and such power to warm that it ripens green fruit? Who can explain the strange properties of fire itself, which blackens all that it burns, though itself bright, and which, though of the most beautiful colors, discolors almost all that it touches and feeds upon, and turns blazing fuel into grimy cinders?... Then what wonderful properties do we find in charcoal, which is so brittle that a light tap breaks it, and a slight pressure pulverizes it, and yet is so strong that no moisture rots it, nor any time causes it to decay." City of God, book xxi. ch. iv. Such aspects of things as these, their naturalness and unnaturalness, the sympathies and antipathies of their superficial qualities, their eccentricities, their brightness and strength and destructiveness, were inevitably the ways in which they originally fastened our attention. If you open early medical books, you will find sympathetic magic invoked on every page. Take, for example, the famous vulnerary ointment attributed to Paracelsus. For this there were a variety of receipts, including usually human fat, the fat of either a bull, a wild boar, or a bear; powdered earthworms, the _usnia_, or mossy growth on the weathered skull of a hanged criminal, and other materials equally unpleasant--the whole prepared under the planet Venus if possible, but never under Mars or Saturn. Then, if a splinter of wood, dipped in the patient's blood, or the bloodstained weapon that wounded him, be immersed in this ointment, the wound itself being tightly bound up, the latter infallibly gets well,--I quote now Van Helmont's account,--for the blood on the weapon or splinter, containing in it the spirit of the wounded man, is roused to active excitement by the contact of the ointment, whence there results to it a full commission or power to cure its cousin-german, the blood in the patient's body. This it does by sucking out the dolorous and exotic impression from the wounded part. But to do this it has to implore the aid of the bull's fat, and other portions of the unguent. The reason why bull's fat is so powerful is that the bull at the time of slaughter is full of secret reluctancy and vindictive murmurs, and therefore dies with a higher flame of revenge about him than any other animal. And thus we have made it out, says this author, that the admirable efficacy of the ointment ought to be imputed, not to any auxiliary concurrence of Satan, but simply to the energy of the _posthumous character of Revenge_ remaining firmly impressed upon the blood and concreted fat in the unguent. J. B. VAN HELMONT: A Ternary of Paradoxes, translated by WALTER CHARLETON, London, 1650.--I much abridge the original in my citations. The author goes on to prove by the analogy of many other natural facts that this sympathetic action between things at a distance is the true rationale of the case. "If," he says, "the heart of a horse, slain by a witch, taken out of the yet reeking carcase, be impaled upon an arrow and roasted, immediately the whole witch becomes tormented with the insufferable pains and cruelty of the fire, which could by no means happen unless there preceded a conjunction of the spirit of the witch with the spirit of the horse. In the reeking and yet panting heart, the spirit of the witch is kept captive, and the retreat of it prevented by the arrow transfixed. Similarly hath not many a murdered carcase at the coroner's inquest suffered a fresh hæmorrhage or cruentation at the presence of the assassin?--the blood being, as in a furious fit of anger, enraged and agitated by the impress of revenge conceived against the murderer, at the instant of the soul's compulsive exile from the body. So, if you have dropsy, gout, or jaundice, by including some of your warm blood in the shell and white of an egg, which, exposed to a gentle heat, and mixed with a bait of flesh, you shall give to a hungry dog or hog, the disease shall instantly pass from you into the animal, and leave you entirely. And similarly again, if you burn some of the milk either of a cow or of a woman, the gland from which it issued will dry up. A gentleman at Brussels had his nose mowed off in a combat, but the celebrated surgeon Tagliacozzus digged a new nose for him out of the skin of the arm of a porter at Bologna. About thirteen months after his return to his own country, the engrafted nose grew cold, putrefied, and in a few days dropped off, and it was then discovered that the porter had expired, near about the same punctilio of time. There are still at Brussels eye-witnesses of this occurrence," says Van Helmont; and adds, "I pray what is there in this of superstition or of exalted imagination?" Modern mind-cure literature--the works of Prentice Mulford, for example--is full of sympathetic magic. 334 Compare Lotze's doctrine that the only meaning we can attach to the notion of a thing as it is "in itself" is by conceiving it as it is _for_ itself; i.e., as a piece of full experience with a private sense of "pinch" or inner activity of some sort going with it. 335 Even the errors of fact may possibly turn out not to be as wholesale as the scientist assumes. We saw in Lecture IV how the religious conception of the universe seems to many mind-curers 'verified' from day to day by their experience of fact. "Experience of fact" is a field with so many things in it that the sectarian scientist, methodically declining, as he does, to recognize such "facts" as mind-curers and others like them experience, otherwise than by such rude heads of classification as "bosh," "rot," "folly," certainly leaves out a mass of raw fact which, save for the industrious interest of the religious in the more personal aspects of reality, would never have succeeded in getting itself recorded at all. We know this to be true already in certain cases; it may, therefore, be true in others as well. Miraculous healings have always been part of the supernaturalist stock in trade, and have always been dismissed by the scientist as figments of the imagination. But the scientist's tardy education in the facts of hypnotism has recently given him an apperceiving mass for phenomena of this order, and he consequently now allows that the healings may exist, provided you expressly call them effects of "suggestion." Even the stigmata of the cross on Saint Francis's hands and feet may on these terms not be a fable. Similarly, the time-honored phenomenon of diabolical possession is on the point of being admitted by the scientist as a fact, now that he has the name of "hystero-demonopathy" by which to apperceive it. No one can foresee just how far this legitimation of occultist phenomena under newly found scientist titles may proceed--even "prophecy," even "levitation," might creep into the pale. Thus the divorce between scientist facts and religious facts may not necessarily be as eternal as it at first sight seems, nor the personalism and romanticism of the world, as they appeared to primitive thinking, be matters so irrevocably outgrown. The final human opinion may, in short, in some manner now impossible to foresee, revert to the more personal style, just as any path of progress may follow a spiral rather than a straight line. If this were so, the rigorously impersonal view of science might one day appear as having been a temporarily useful eccentricity rather than the definitively triumphant position which the sectarian scientist at present so confidently announces it to be. 336 Hume's criticism has banished causation from the world of physical objects, and "Science" is absolutely satisfied to define cause in terms of concomitant change--read Mach, Pearson, Ostwald. The "original" of the notion of causation is in our inner personal experience, and only there can causes in the old-fashioned sense be directly observed and described. 337 When I read in a religious paper words like these: "Perhaps the best thing we can say of God is that he is _the Inevitable Inference_," I recognize the tendency to let religion evaporate in intellectual terms. Would martyrs have sung in the flames for a mere inference, however inevitable it might be? Original religious men, like Saint Francis, Luther, Behmen, have usually been enemies of the intellect's pretension to meddle with religious things. Yet the intellect, everywhere invasive, shows everywhere its shallowing effect. See how the ancient spirit of Methodism evaporates under those wonderfully able rationalistic booklets (which every one should read) of a philosopher like Professor Bowne (The Christian Revelation, The Christian Life, The Atonement: Cincinnati and New York, 1898, 1899, 1900). See the positively expulsive purpose of philosophy properly so called:-- "Religion," writes M. Vacherot (La Religion, Paris, 1869, pp. 313, 436, et passim), "answers to a transient state or condition, not to a permanent determination of human nature, being merely an expression of that stage of the human mind which is dominated by the imagination.... Christianity has but a single possible final heir to its estate, and that is scientific philosophy." In a still more radical vein, Professor Ribot (Psychologie des Sentiments, p. 310) describes the evaporation of religion. He sums it up in a single formula--the ever-growing predominance of the rational intellectual element, with the gradual fading out of the emotional element, this latter tending to enter into the group of purely intellectual sentiments. "Of religious sentiment properly so called, nothing survives at last save a vague respect for the unknowable _x_ which is a last relic of the fear, and a certain attraction towards the ideal, which is a relic of the love, that characterized the earlier periods of religious growth. To state this more simply, _religion tends to turn into religious philosophy_.--These are psychologically entirely different things, the one being a theoretic construction of ratiocination, whereas the other is the living work of a group of persons, or of a great inspired leader, calling into play the entire thinking and feeling organism of man." I find the same failure to recognize that the stronghold of religion lies in individuality in attempts like those of Professor Baldwin (Mental Development, Social and Ethical Interpretations, ch. x.) and Mr. H. R. Marshall (Instinct and Reason, chaps, viii. to xii.) to make it a purely "conservative social force." 338 Compare, for instance, pages 203, 219, 223, 226, 249 to 256, 275 to 278. 339 American Journal of Psychology, vii. 345. 340 Above, p. 184. 341 Above, p. 145. 342 Above, p. 400. 343 Example: Henri Perreyve writes to Gratry: "I do not know how to deal with the happiness which you aroused in me this morning. It overwhelms me; I want to _do_ something, yet I can do nothing and am fit for nothing.... I would fain do _great things_." Again, after an inspiring interview, he writes: "I went homewards, intoxicated with joy, hope, and strength. I wanted to feed upon my happiness in solitude, far from all men. It was late; but, unheeding that, I took a mountain path and went on like a madman, looking at the heavens, regardless of earth. Suddenly an instinct made me draw hastily back--I was on the very edge of a precipice, one step more and I must have fallen. I took fright and gave up my nocturnal promenade." A. GRATRY: Henri Perreyve, London, 1872, pp. 92, 89. This primacy, in the faith-state, of vague expansive impulse over direction is well expressed in Walt Whitman's lines (Leaves of Grass, 1872, p. 190):-- "O to confront night, storms, hunger, ridicule, accidents, rebuffs, as the trees and animals do.... Dear Camerado! I confess I have urged you onward with me, and still urge you, without the least idea what is our destination, Or whether we shall be victorious, or utterly quell'd and defeated." This readiness for great things, and this sense that the world by its importance, wonderfulness, etc., is apt for their production, would seem to be the undifferentiated germ of all the higher faiths. Trust in our own dreams of ambition, or in our country's expansive destinies, and faith in the providence of God, all have their source in that onrush of our sanguine impulses, and in that sense of the exceedingness of the possible over the real. 344 Compare LEUBA: Loc. cit., pp. 346-349. 345 The Contents of Religious Consciousness, in The Monist, xi. 536, July, 1901. 346 Loc. cit., pp. 571, 572, abridged. See, also, this writer's extraordinarily true criticism of the notion that religion primarily seeks to solve the intellectual mystery of the world. Compare what W. BENDER says (in his Wesen der Religion, Bonn, 1888, pp. 85, 38): "Not the question about God, and not the inquiry into the origin and purpose of the world is religion, but the question about Man. All religious views of life are anthropocentric." "Religion is that activity of the human impulse towards self-preservation by means of which Man seeks to carry his essential vital purposes through against the adverse pressure of the world by raising himself freely towards the world's ordering and governing powers when the limits of his own strength are reached." The whole book is little more than a development of these words. 347 Remember that for some men it arrives suddenly, for others gradually, whilst others again practically enjoy it all their life. 348 The practical difficulties are: 1, to "realize the reality" of one's higher part; 2, to identify one's self with it exclusively; and 3, to identify it with all the rest of ideal being. 349 "When mystical activity is at its height, we find consciousness possessed by the sense of a being at once _excessive_ and _identical_ with the self: great enough to be God; interior enough to be me. The 'objectivity' of it ought in that case to be called _excessivity_, rather, or exceedingness." RÉCÉJAC: Essai sur les fondements de la conscience mystique, 1897, p. 46. 350 The word "truth" is here taken to mean something additional to bare value for life, although the natural propensity of man is to believe that whatever has great value for life is thereby certified as true. 351 Above, p. 455. 352 Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. vii. p. 305. For a full statement of Mr. Myers's views, I may refer to his posthumous work, "Human Personality in the Light of Recent Research," which is already announced by Messrs. Longmans, Green & Co. as being in press. Mr. Myers for the first time proposed as a general psychological problem the exploration of the subliminal region of consciousness throughout its whole extent, and made the first methodical steps in its topography by treating as a natural series a mass of subliminal facts hitherto considered only as curious isolated facts, and subjecting them to a systematized nomenclature. How important this exploration will prove, future work upon the path which Myers has opened can alone show. Compare my paper: "Frederic Myers's Services to Psychology," in the said Proceedings, part xlii., May, 1901. 353 Compare the inventory given above on pp. 483-4, and also what is said of the subconscious self on pp. 233-236, 240-242. 354 Compare above, pp. 419 ff. 355 One more expression of this belief, to increase the reader's familiarity with the notion of it:-- "If this room is full of darkness for thousands of years, and you come in and begin to weep and wail, 'Oh, the darkness,' will the darkness vanish? Bring the light in, strike a match, and light comes in a moment. So what good will it do you to think all your lives, 'Oh, I have done evil, I have made many mistakes'? It requires no ghost to tell us that. Bring in the light, and the evil goes in a moment. Strengthen the real nature, build up yourselves, the effulgent, the resplendent, the ever pure, call that up in every one whom you see. I wish that every one of us had come to such a state that even when we see the vilest of human beings we can see the God within, and instead of condemning, say, 'Rise, thou effulgent One, rise thou who art always pure, rise thou birthless and deathless, rise almighty, and manifest your nature.' ... This is the highest prayer that the Advaita teaches. This is the one prayer: remembering our nature." ... "Why does man go out to look for a God?... It is your own heart beating, and you did not know, you were mistaking it for something external. He, nearest of the near, my own self, the reality of my own life, my body and my soul.--I am Thee and Thou art Me. That is your own nature. Assert it, manifest it. Not to become pure, you are pure already. You are not to be perfect, you are that already. Every good thought which you think or act upon is simply tearing the veil, as it were, and the purity, the Infinity, the God behind, manifests itself--the eternal Subject of everything, the eternal Witness in this universe, your own Self. Knowledge is, as it were, a lower step, a degradation. We are It already; how to know It?" SWAMI VIVEKANANDA: Addresses, No. XII., Practical Vedanta, part iv. pp. 172, 174, London, 1897; and Lectures, The Real and the Apparent Man, p. 24, abridged. 356 For instance, here is a case where a person exposed from her birth to Christian ideas had to wait till they came to her clad in spiritistic formulas before the saving experience set in:-- "For myself I can say that spiritualism has saved me. It was revealed to me at a critical moment of my life, and without it I don't know what I should have done. It has taught me to detach myself from worldly things and to place my hope in things to come. Through it I have learned to see in all men, even in those most criminal, even in those from whom I have most suffered, undeveloped brothers to whom I owed assistance, love, and forgiveness. I have learned that I must lose my temper over nothing, despise no one, and pray for all. Most of all I have learned to pray! And although I have still much to learn in this domain, prayer ever brings me more strength, consolation, and comfort. I feel more than ever that I have only made a few steps on the long road of progress; but I look at its length without dismay, for I have confidence that the day will come when all my efforts shall be rewarded. So Spiritualism has a great place in my life, indeed it holds the first place there." Flournoy Collection. 357 "The influence of the Holy Spirit, exquisitely called the Comforter, is a matter of actual experience, as solid a reality as that of electro-magnetism." W. C. BROWNELL, Scribner's Magazine, vol. xxx. p. 112. 358 That the transaction of opening ourselves, otherwise called prayer, is a perfectly definite one for certain persons, appears abundantly in the preceding lectures. I append another concrete example to reinforce the impression on the reader's mind:-- "Man can learn to transcend these limitations [of finite thought] and draw power and wisdom at will.... The divine presence is known through experience. The turning to a higher plane is a distinct act of consciousness. It is not a vague, twilight or semi-conscious experience. It is not an ecstasy; it is not a trance. It is not super-consciousness in the Vedantic sense. It is not due to self- hypnotization. It is a perfectly calm, sane, sound, rational, common-sense shifting of consciousness from the phenomena of sense- perception to the phenomena of seership, from the thought of self to a distinctively higher realm.... For example, if the lower self be nervous, anxious, tense, one can in a few moments compel it to be calm. This is not done by a word simply. Again I say, it is not hypnotism. It is by the exercise of power. One feels the spirit of peace as definitely as heat is perceived on a hot summer day. The power can be as surely used as the sun's rays can be focused and made to do work, to set fire to wood." The Higher Law, vol. iv. pp. 4, 6, Boston, August, 1901. 359 Transcendentalists are fond of the term "Over-soul," but as a rule they use it in an intellectualist sense, as meaning only a medium of communion. "God" is a causal agent as well as a medium of communion, and that is the aspect which I wish to emphasize. 360 Transcendental idealism, of course, insists that its ideal world makes _this_ difference, that facts _exist_. We owe it to the Absolute that we have a world of fact at all. "A world" of fact!--that exactly is the trouble. An entire world is the smallest unit with which the Absolute can work, whereas to our finite minds work for the better ought to be done within this world, setting in at single points. Our difficulties and our ideals are all piecemeal affairs, but the Absolute can do no piecework for us; so that all the interests which our poor souls compass raise their heads too late. We should have spoken earlier, prayed for another world absolutely, before this world was born. It is strange, I have heard a friend say, to see this blind corner into which Christian thought has worked itself at last, with its God who can raise no particular weight whatever, who can help us with no private burden, and who is on the side of our enemies as much as he is on our own. Odd evolution from the God of David's psalms! 361 See my Will to Believe and other Essays in Popular Philosophy, 1897, p. 165. 362 Such a notion is suggested in my Ingersoll Lecture On Human Immortality, Boston and London, 1899. 363 Tertium Quid, 1887, p. 99. See also pp. 148, 149.