PHAakd /e '—^i^O BERT URDETTE Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2007 with funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/alphaomegaalittlOOburdrich Alpha and Omega [A Little Cluster of Easter Blossoms^ By Robert J. Burdette **/ am the Resurrection and the Life; he that believeth in Me, though he ivere dead, yet shall he live; and luhosoe'ver liveth and believeth in Me, shall never die." JOHNll,25. r\ ^• ^A '15'^af R I G H T , 1914 BY Robert J. Bubdette To My Little Granddaughter AROLINE VIRGINIA BURDETTE A Loving Easter Greeting: To a Tiny Bud of Human Immortality A Little Life that please God Will unfold its tender leaves into Fragrant Petals of Beautiful Childhood Radiant Blossoms of Happy Girlhood Perfumed Fruitage of Gracious Womanhood All the Way of Her Pilgrimage may Hope run singing before her Faith walk praying beside her And God*s twin angels, Mercy and Peace, Follow close after her. f\(YP9,9M Alpha s ^ 1^ TIGHT. Silence. A struggle for the I ^^ light. And he did not know what light ^ was. An effort to cry. And he did not /know that he had a voice. 'j^-^ THe opened his eyes, "and there was light." "Me had never used his eyes before, but he could .see with them. He parted his lips and hailed this world with pa cry for help. A tiny craft in sight of new shores; he wanted his latitude and longitude. He could not tell from what port he had clear- ed; he did not know where he was; he had no reckoning, no chart, no pilot. He did not know the language of the inhabi- tants of the planet upon which Providence had cast him. So he saluted them in the one uni- versal speech of God's creatures — a cry. Every- body — every one of God's children, understands that. Nobody knew whence he came. Some one said, "He came from heaven." They did not even know the name of the little life that came throbbing out of the darkness into the light. They had only said, "If it should be a boy," [7] Alpha and, "If it should be a girl." They did n61 know. And the baby himself knew as little about it^, as did the learned people gathered to welcome him. He heard them speak. He had never used his ears until now, but he could hear with them. "A good lusty cry," some one said. He did not understand the words, but he kept on crying. Possibly he had never entertained any con- ception of the world into whose citizenship he?^ ' i was now received, but evidently he did not like it. ^ The noises of it were harsh to his sensitive nerves. There was a man's voice — the doctor' strong and reassuring. There was a woman's voice, soothing and comforting — the voice of the nurse. And one was a mother's voice. There is none other like it. It was the first music he heard in this world. And the sweetest. By and by, somebody laughed softly and said, in coaxing tones, "There — there — there — give him his dinner." His face was laid close against the fount of life, warm and white and tender. Nobody told him what to do. Nobody taught him. He knew. Placed suddenly on the guest-list of this J, [8] Alpha anging old caravansary, he knew his way at once to the two best places in it — his bed room and the dining room. herever he came from he must have made aGjong journey, for he was tired and hungry when he reached here. Wanted something to eat right away. When he got it, he went to sleep. Slept a great deal. When he awoke, he clamored again, in the universal volapuk, for fe-^reshment. Had it, and went to sleep again. When he grew older, the Wise Men told him the worst thing in all this world, of many good and bad things that he could do, was to eat just efore going to sleep. But the baby, not having learned the language of the Wise Men, did this very worst of all bad things, and having no fear of the Wise Men and no modern knowledge of eugenics, defiantly throve upon it. He looked young, but made himself at home with the easy assurance of an old traveler. Knew the best room in the house, demanded it, and got it. Nestled into his mother's arms as though he had been measured for them. Found that "gracious hollow that God made" in his mother's shoulder that fit his head as pil- lows of down never could. Cried when they [9] Alpha took him away from it, when he was a tiny bab "with no language but a cry." Cried once again, twenty-five or thirty years afterward, when GocTT took it away from him. All the languages he f^ had learned, and all the eloquent phrasing the colleges had taught him, could not then so well voice the sorrow of his heart as the tears he^ tried to check. The true, sweet, loving, honest tears of which he was so foolishly ashamed. Poor little baby! Had to go to school first day he got here. Had to begin his lessons>^^'« at once. Got praised when he learned them.\^^ Got punished when he missed them. Bit his own toes and cried when he learne there was pain in this world. Studied the subject forty years before he learned in how many ways suffering can be self-inflicted. Reached for the moon and cried because he couldn't get it. Reached for the candle and cried because he could. First lessons in men- suration. Took him fifty or sixty years of hard reading to learn why God put so many beau- tiful things out of our longing reach. Made everybody laugh long before he could laugh himself, by going into a temper because his clothes didn't fit him or his dinner wasn't [10] Alpha s^*ferved promptly. "Just like a man," the nurse said. Nobody in the family could tell where he got his temper. Either he brought it witk him, or found it wrapped and addressed to his room when he got here. At any rate, he began to use ^t^very shortly after his arrival. I y)>>r- Always said he lost his temper, when most ^^^€€ftainly he had it and was using it. Played so hard sometimes that it made him cry. Took him a great many years to learn Yxh2it too much play is sure to make anybody cry. J By and by, he learned to laugh. That came later than some of the other things ; much later han crying. It is a higher accomplishment, and more artificial. It is much harder to learn, and much harder to do. He never cried unless he wished, and felt just like it. But he learned to laugh, many, many times when he wanted to cry. Laughed when his body ached, his head ached, and his heart ached. Grew so, after awhile, that he could laugh with a heart so full of tears they glistened in his eyes. Then people praised his laughter the most — "it shone in his very eyes," they said. Laughed, one baby day, to see the motes dance in the sunshine. Laughed at them once [11] Alpha again, though not quite so cheerily, many ye later, when he discovered they were only motes Motes of the common dust, at that. Cried, one baby day, when he was tire play and wanted to be lifted in the mother arms and sung to sleep. Cried again one day whem his hair was white, because he was tired of work and wanted to be lifted in the arms of God and hushed to rest. Wished one-half his life that he was a ma Then turned around and wished all the rest of it>^^v that he was a boy. H Seeing, hearing, playing, working, resting, believing, suffering and loving, all his life Ion he kept on learning the same things he began to study when he was a baby. [12] Omega NTIL at last, when he had learned all his lessons and school was out, somebody lifted him, just as they had done at the Darkened was the room, and quiet; now, as it had been then. Other people stood about im, very like the people who stood there on at other time. There was a doctor now, as then; only this tor wore a graver look, and carried a Book in his hand. There was a man's voice — the doc- tor's, strong and reassuring. There was a wo- man's voice, low and comforting — a wife's. The mother voice had passed into silence. But that was yet the one he could most distinctly hear. The others he heard, as he heard voices like them years ago. He could not then under- stand what they said; he did not understand them now. He parted his lips again, but all his school- acquired wealth of many-syllabled eloquence, all his clear, lucid phrasing, had gone back to the old inarticulate cry. Somebody at his bedside wept. Tears now, as then. But now they were not tears from his eyes. [13] Omega Then, some one, bending over him, had sai ''He came from heaven." Now, some one, stoop ing above him, said, "He has gone to heaven/' The blessed, unfaltering faith that welcomed him, now bade him Godspeed, just as loving and trusting as ever, one unchanging thing in tl^i world of change. '^^ So the baby had walked in a little circle, after all, as all men, lost in a great trackless wilder- ness, are said always to do. As it was written thousands of years ago-^''V "The dove found no rest for the sole of her foot,H and she returned unto him in the Ark." He felt weary now, as he was tired then. B and by, having then for the first time opened his eyes, now for the last time he closed them. And so, as one who in the gathering darkness retraces his steps by a half-remembered path, much in the same way as he had come into this world, he went out of it. Silence. Light. [14] Sleeping in the Garden THE Book begins with a garden — the Garden of Work — a garden to be kept and tilled. It reaches its human climax n the Garden of Renunciation — Gethsemane — here the will of God is the fruitage of all the ossoming of the ages. It closes with the divine d human perfection in the Garden of Para- dise, sinless and pure. Gardens of Service, of ubmission, of Rest. Always God's beautiful world a garden of use and loveliness, of bloom and fruitage. In the Garden of Eden the Tree of Life was a thing forbidden, hedged in by law and com- mandment. A tree of death. In the Garden of the City it is the chief joy and beauty. Its very leaves are for '^the healing of the nations." It is watered and nourished by the fountains of the River of Everlasting Life, to which all the world is bidden to "come and drink freely." No angel with flaming sword stands guard at the forbid- den gates, "for the gates thereof shall not be shut by night or day." In lands not so fair and pleasant as this earth- ly paradise of our own California, I have [IS] Sleeping in the Garden \_-^ preached, and I have heard learned men, rii in gifts of scholarship, fragrant with eloquence preach Easter sermons from the resurrection text— "I am the Resurrection and the Life; he that believeth in Me though he were dead, yet shall^^ he live;" — and there, as a rule, the preachei closed the unfinished text. The final, crownii sentence, — "And whosoever liveth and believeth in Me shall never die," was omitted. "It wi hard saying; who should hear it?" That thex^ dead in Christ should live again, that we knew^H But that the living believer should never die? Oh, but the disciples did die. "Our fathers dii eat manna in the wilderness, and are dead." All men, who ever tasted the sweetness of life, should drink the bitterness of death. Even the Lord of Eternal Life, walking the pilgrimage of human- ity, lay in the darkness of the sepulcher, man- acled in the iron bands of death. So, because I could but faultily comprehend it myself, I never preached from that phrase of the great Resur- rection text. Then, in a happy day, I came to live, and to preach the gospel of the living Christ in Califor- nia. My first funeral service fell on a mid-win- \ !^ ^ [16] Sleeping in the Garden day. The one who had "fallen asleep" was an old saint who, living and dying, had "be- ^^^lieved in the Lord Tesus Christ." And wliere J^^^Ji)^ would I find the symbols of Easter — the signs \^=^ *°: jw*v ^f ^he glorious Resurrection? There were none. V^IV-^^ X^^.^^ut all around the open grave December was " ' smiling with the laughter of June. Not the Res- urrection, but Life Everlasting proclaimed the winter landscape. December — and the roses of hite and crimson sang together — "Everlasting Y^Lifel" Midwinter — and lily and heliotrope and ^^ycarnation chanted, "Eternal Life!" Oak and pine and cypress shouted to the violets bathing heir feet with incense, and the sunshine crown- ing their heads with glory, "There is no death!" Mockingbird, meadow lark and robin joined with blossoming shrub and perfumed vine in the joyous chanson — "Life, Life, Everlasting Life!" And then I saw that all the year of God's love was spring and summer. There was no pathetic month of the fading blossom. No chilling sea- son of the falling leaf. No barren winter of the dead garden. All the circling year, from Janu- ary to December, sang "Life," and the blossoms of Christmas were ever the bloom of Easter. With clearer light in my brain, with tenderer 1^' > 7 [17] Sleeping in the Garden ^d: love in my heart, with brighter faith in soul, I preached the words of the Lord Jesus, "Whosoever liveth and believeth in Me, shalf never die." Even Death could not abide in the sepulcher tomb wherein lay His sleeping body — the bodyX that men called dead. N 1 The fountain of life is opened on the crosi The last prayer for all mankind — "Father, for- give them" — is uttered out of the fullness of a love that conquers agony and forgets self. "It> ' is finished," falls from the dying lips of the ever-\^"^ living Christ. Light shines out of the darkness that covers the earth. Sublime courage growi up out of abject fear. Love and Faith come to reanimate the souls of the disciples. Tender hands take the body of Jesus from the cross and lay it away in a holy and a beautiful place "for in the place where He was crucified there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb." "A sep- ulcher in a garden." How sweetly must He have slumbered there. They tenderly washed from the dear face and body all stains of cruelty. They cleansed with their kisses the mangled hands and washed with their tears the riven side and cruel halo made ¥5, [18] Sleeping in the Garden the crown of thorns. In the pure white wrap- pings of the dead, sweet with the cleansing mix- ture of the myrrh and aloes, they laid Him away. Then they rolled the great stone across the mouth of the sepulcher and so shut out the garish light nd all discordant sounds of earthly life and fret, and left Him there, after the fearful tumult and discordant clamor of the day, sleeping quietly in God's dear, restful, gracious, beautiful silence — ^^Oh, death hath made his darkness beautiful with Thee!" Then, as though the world should kneel at His dead feet, Rome set her seal upon the stone, that no one should dare molest His quiet and His peace. And all around the tomb smiled "the garden." About Him, grasses that His feet had pressed. Around Him, the lilies that He loved. Winging their way above Him, the happy birds whose careless flight His eye had noted. Here and there, the trees beneath whose shelter- ing arms He had loved to pray. Close to the gray rocks the dainty pink and white of the cy- clamen, found everywhere in Palestine. Be- yond loomed the mountains which are "round about Jerusalem." The opal skies arched over- head, and now and then the soft, cool shadow of some white cloud, a ship in the pleasant blue, [19] Sleeping in the Garden drifted across the garden. Such a sweet, beau ful place for one to sleep. O child of God, the graves of all who fall asleep are made in gar-^' dens of loveliness. Birds of eternal hope and blossoms of faith fringe every sleeping place, and the gentle earth lies lightly on the ashe that we love. Every cemetery in Christendom is a garden. Today, in climes more rigorous than ours, men smile with tender joy to see that the grass is green in the sun-gleams that caress the little mounds>^^'^ where loved ones lie asleep, and the children\"^ c^T'^ find the delicate anemones like stars shining down in the graveyard grasses. In every hom there is a pictured face on the wall that brings the longing ache into the heart. But the dear absent one sleeps in a garden, and everything in the garden, grasses and buds and dainty wild flowers, stately lily and queenly rose, majestic palm and oak, and pine — everything in the gar- den sings, and sings, and sings of life — life — life — and ever more life! Not of decay and death. It was not by chance they laid our blessed Lord in "a sepulcher which was in a garden." Had they lain Him in a desert, the wilderness had blossomed around Him, and the gray rocks had [20] Sleeping in the Garden roken out into melody of song like caroling birds! Still do we make our sepulchers in gardens, the beautiful place of the dead is sweet with blossoms and the perfume of the field and wood; ^e starred forget-me-nots nestle close to the sleeping face; April and May and June meet amid the white stones that mark that spot which love remembers; and the sunshine comes with a tenderer glory to kiss the growing, living em- fs^blems of immortality. Art, at the bidding of i^/loving memory, touched with tender pride, comes to grave the stone into shapes of beauty, nd rear the lofty monument in the stately ma- jesty of grief. Men carve their tributes into the face of the marble and granite. But ever- more the beauty, and grace and splendor, the majesty and the prophecy of the sepulcher is "the garden" in which it stands. [21] God's Days and Mine THERE are two days in the week abou which I never worry. Two Golden Days, kept sacredly free from fear and apprehension. • C^ One of these Days is Yesterday. \ ,^J^ Yesterday, with all its cares and frets and disappointments, with all its pains and sorrows, has passed forever beyond the power of my con- trol, beyond the reach of my recall. I cannot undo an act that I wrought; I cannot recall s^st word that I said; I cannot calm a storm that-, raged on Yesterday. All that it holds of my; life, of regret or sorrow, or wrong, is in th hands of the Mighty Love that can bring oil out of the rock and sweet waters out of the bit- ter desert — the Love that can make the wrong things right, and turn mourning into laughter. Save for the beautiful memories, sweet and ten- der, that linger like perfume of dried roses in the heart of the day that is gone, I have nothing to do with Yesterday. It was mine ; it is God's. And the other Day I do not worry over, is To-morrow. To-morrow, with all its possible cares, its burdens, its sorrows, its perils, its boastful prom- [22] God's Days and Mine fes and poor performings, its good intentions and its bitter mistakes, is as far beyond my reach of mastership, as its dead sister, Yester- day. Its sun may rise in roseate splendor or behind a mask of weeping clouds. But it will rise. And it will be God's Day. It is God's Day. It will be mine. Save for the star of Hope that gleams forever on its brow, shining th tender promise into the heart of To-day, ave no possession in To-morrow. All else s in the safe keeping of the same infinite Love hat holds the treasures of Yesterday. All that To-morrow has for me I can trust to the Love Jhat is wider than the skies, deeper than the seas, igher than the stars. There is left for myself, then, nothing but To-day. And any man can fight the battle of To-day. Any man can carry the burdens of just one Day. Any man can resist To-day's temptations. This is the strength that makes the way of my pil- grimage joyous. I think, and I do, and I jour- ney, but one Day at a time. That is the Easy Day; that is, the Human Day. And while I do that, God the Almighty and the All-Loving, takes care of Yesterday and To-morrow, which I could never do. [23] S UNIYERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY, g BERKELEY THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE STAMPED BELOW Books not returned on time are subject to a fine of 50c per volume after the third day overdue, increasing to $1.00 per volume after the sixth day. Books not in demand may be renewed if application is made before expiration of loan period. ==—===== WftH 2 ^"^ IP 1832 15m7,'25 DESIGNED AND PF FRED S. LANG CO., 3or;-^3S UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA UBRARY