University of Virginia Library

18. CHAPTER XVIII.
EVIDENCES.

The Doctor sat at his study-table. It was evening,
and the slant beams of the setting sun shot
their golden arrows through the healthy purple
clusters of lilacs that veiled the windows. There
had been a shower that filled them with drops of
rain, which every now and then tattooed with a
slender rat-tat on the window-sill, as a breeze
would shake the leaves and bear in perfume on
its wings. Sweet, fragrance-laden airs tripped stirringly
to and fro about the study-table, making
gentle confusions, fluttering papers on moral ability,
agitating treatises on the great end of creation,
mixing up subtile distinctions between amiable
instincts and true holiness, and, in short,
conducting themselves like very unappreciative and
unphilosophical little breezes.

The Doctor patiently smoothed back and rearranged,
while opposite to him sat Mary, bending
over some copying she was doing for him. One
stray sunbeam fell on her light brown hair, tinging

it to gold; her long, drooping lashes lay over the
wax-like pink of her cheeks, as she wrote on.

“Mary,” said the Doctor, pushing the papers
from him.

“Sir,” she answered, looking up, the blood just
perceptibly rising in her cheeks.

“Do you ever have any periods in which your
evidences seem not altogether clear?”

Nothing could show more forcibly the grave,
earnest character of thought in New England at
this time than the fact that this use of the term
“evidences” had become universally significant
and understood as relating to one's right to citizenship
in a celestial, invisible commonwealth.

So Mary understood it, and it was with a deepening
flush she answered gently, “No, Sir.”

“What! never any doubts?” said the Doctor.

“I am sorry,” said Mary, apologetically; “but
I do not see how I can have; I never could.”

“Ah!” said the Doctor, musingly, “would I
could say so! There are times, indeed, when I
hope I have an interest in the precious Redeemer,
and behold an infinite loveliness and beauty in
Him, apart from anything I expect or hope. But
even then how deceitful is the human heart!
how insensibly might a mere selfish love take
the place of that disinterested complacency which
regards Him for what He is in Himself, apart
from what He is to us! Say, my dear friend,

does not this thought sometimes make you tremble?”

Poor Mary was truth itself, and this question
distressed her; she must answer the truth. The
fact was, that it had never come into her blessed
little heart to tremble, for she was one of those
children of the bride-chamber who cannot mourn
because the bridegroom is ever with them; but
then, when she saw the man for whom her reverence
was almost like that for her God thus distrustful,
thus lowly, she could not but feel that
her too calm repose might, after all, be the shallow,
treacherous calm of an ignorant, ill-grounded
spirit, and therefore, with a deep blush and a faltering
voice, she said, —

“Indeed, I am afraid something must be wrong
with me. I cannot have any fears, — I never
could; I try sometimes, but the thought of God's
goodness comes all around me, and I am so happy
before I think of it!”

“Such exercises, my dear friend, I have also
had,” said the Doctor; “but before I rest on them
as evidences, I feel constrained to make the following
inquiries: — Is this gratitude that swells
my bosom the result of a mere natural sensibility?
Does it arise in a particular manner because God
has done me good? or do I love God for what
He is, as well as for what He has done? and for
what he has done for others, as well as for what

He has done for me? Love to God which is
built on nothing but good received is not incompatible
with a disposition so horrid as even to
curse God to His face. If God is not to be loved
except when He does good, then in affliction we
are free. If doing us good is all that renders
God lovely to us, then not doing us good divests
Him of His glory, and dispenses us from obligation
to love Him. But there must be, undoubtedly,
some permanent reason why God is to be
loved by all; and if not doing us good divests
Him of His glory so as to free us from our obligation
to love, it equally frees the universe; so
that, in fact, the universe of happiness, if ours be
not included, reflects no glory on its Author.”

The Doctor had practised his subtile mental
analysis till his instruments were so fine-pointed
and keen-edged that he scarce ever allowed a
flower of sacred emotion to spring in his soul
without picking it to pieces to see if its genera
and species were correct. Love, gratitude, reverence,
benevolence, — which all moved in mighty
tides in his soul, — were all compelled to pause
midway while he rubbed up his optical instruments
to see whether they were rising in right order.
Mary, on the contrary, had the blessed gift of
womanhood, — that vivid life in the soul and sentiment
which resists the chills of analysis, as a
healthful human heart resists cold; yet still, all

humbly, she thought this perhaps was a defect in
herself, and therefore, having confessed, in a depreciating
tone, her habits of unanalyzed faith and
love, she added, —

“But, my dear Sir, you are my best friend. I
trust you will be faithful to me. If I am deceiving
myself, undeceive me; you cannot be too severe
with me.”

“Alas!” said the Doctor, “I fear that I may be
only a blind leader of the blind. What, after all,
if I be only a miserable self-deceiver? What if
some thought of self has come in to poison all
my prayers and strivings? It is true, I think, —
yes, I think,” said the Doctor, speaking very slowly,
and with intense earnestness, — “I think, that, if I
knew at this moment that my name never would
be written among those of the elect, I could still
see God to be infinitely amiable and glorious, and
could feel sure that He could not do me wrong,
and that it was infinitely becoming and right that
He should dispose of me according to His sovereign
pleasure. I think so; — but still my deceitful
heart! — after all, I might find it rising in rebellion.
Say, my dear friend, are you sure, that,
should you discover yourself to be forever condemned
by His justice, you would not find your
heart rising up against Him?”

“Against Him?” said Mary, with a tremulous,
sorrowful expression on her face, — “against my
Heavenly Father?”

Her face flushed, and faded; her eyes kindled
eagerly, as if she had something to say, and then
grew misty with tears. At last she said, —

“Thank you, my dear, faithful friend! I will
think about this; perhaps I may have been deceived.
How very difficult it must be to know
one's self perfectly!”

Mary went into her own little room, and sat
leaning for a long time with her elbow on the
window-seat, watching the pale shells of the apple-blossoms
as they sailed and fluttered downward into
the grass, and listened to a chippering conversation
in which the birds in the nest above were settling
up their small housekeeping accounts for the day.

After awhile, she took her pen and wrote the
following, which the Doctor found the next morning
lying on his study-table: —

There are in this world two kinds of natures, —
those that have wings, and those that have feet, —
the winged and the walking spirits. The walking
are the logicians; the winged are the instinctive
and poetic. Natures that must always walk find
many a bog, many a thicket, many a tangled
brake, which God's happy little winged birds flit
over by one noiseless flight. Nay, when a man
has toiled till his feet weigh too heavily with the
mud of earth to enable him to walk another step,
these little birds will often cleave the air in a right
line towards the bosom of God, and show the way
where he could never have found it.

The Doctor paused in his ponderous and heavy
reasonings to read this real woman's letter; and
being a loving man, he felt as if he could have
kissed the hem of her garment who wrote it. He
recorded it in his journal, and after it this significant
passage from Canticles: —

“I charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem,
by the roes, and by the hinds of the field, that ye

stir not up nor awake this lovely one till she
please.”

Mrs. Scudder's motherly eye noticed, with satisfaction,
these quiet communings. “Let it alone,”
she said to herself; “before she knows it, she will
find herself wholly under his influence.” Mrs. Scudder
was a wise woman.