 | XI. The gates ajar |  |
11. XI.
July 16.
We took a trip to-day to East Homer
for butter. Neither angels nor principalities
could convince Phœbe that any butter but
“Stephen David's” might, could, would, or
should be used in this family. So to Mr. Stephen
David's, a journey of four miles, I meekly
betake myself at stated periods in the domestic
year, burdened with directions about firkins
and half-firkins, pounds and half-pounds, salt
and no salt, churning and “working-over”;
some of which I remember and some of which
I forget, and to all of which Phœbe considers
me sublimely incapable of attending.
The afternoon was perfect, and we took
things leisurely, letting the reins swing from
the hook, — an arrangement to which Mr.
Tripp's old gray was entirely agreeable, —
and, leaning back against the buggy-cushions,
wound along among the strong, sweet pine-smells,
lazily talking or lazily silent, as the
spirit moved, and as only two people who
can talk or be silent.
We rode home by Deacon Quirk's, and, as
we jogged by, there broke upon our view a
blooming vision of the Deacon himself, at work
in his potato-field with his son and heir, who,
by the way, has the reputation of being the
most awkward fellow in the township.
The amiable church-officer, having caught
sight of us, left his work, and coming up to the
fence “in rustic modesty unscared,” guiltless
of coat or vest, his calico shirt-sleeves rolled
up to his huge brown elbows, and his dusty
straw hat flapping in the wind, rapped on the
rails with his hoe-handle as a sign for us to
stop.
“Are we in a hurry?” I asked, under my
breath.
“O no,” said Aunt Winifred. “He has somewhat
to say unto me, I see by his eyes. I
have been expecting it. Let us hear him out.
Good afternoon, Deacon Quirk.”
“Good afternoon, ma'am. Pleasant day?”
She assented to the statement, novel as it
was.
“A very pleasant day,” repeated the Deacon,
looking for the first time in his life, to my
should say next. “Remarkable fine day for
riding. In a hurry?”
“Well, not especially. Did you want anything
of me?”
“You 're a church-member, are n't you,
ma'am?” asked the Deacon, abruptly.
“I am.”
“Orthodox?”
“O yes,” with a smile. “You had a reason
for asking?”
“Yes, ma'am; I had, as you might say, a
reason for asking.”
The Deacon laid his hoe on the top of the
fence, and his arms across it, and pushed his
hat on the back of his head in a becoming
and argumentative manner.
“I hope you don't consider that I 'm taking
liberties if I have a little religious conversation
with you, Mrs. Forceythe.”
“It is no offence to me if you are,” replied
Mrs. Forceythe, with a twinkle in her eye;
but both twinkle and words glanced off from
the Deacon.
“My wife was telling me last night,” he began,
with an ominous cough, “that her niece,
Clotildy Bentley — Moses Bentley's daughter,
that reads poetry, and is easy enough led away
by vain delusions and false doctrine — was
under your charge at Sunday school. Now
Clotildy is intimate with my wife, — who is her
aunt on her mother's side, and always tries to
do her duty by her, — and she told Mrs. Quirk
what you 'd been a saying to those young
minds on the Sabbath.”
He stopped, and observed her impressively,
as if he expected to see the guilty blushes of
arraigned heresy covering her amused, attentive
face.
“I hope you will pardon me, ma 'am, for
repeating it, but Clotildy said that you told
her she should have a pianna in heaven. A
pianna, ma 'am!”
“I certainly did,” she said quietly.
“You did? Well, now, I did n't believe it,
nor I would n't believe it, till I 'd asked you!
I thought it warn't more than fair that I
should ask you, before repeating it, you know.
It 's none of my business, Mrs. Forceythe, any
more than that I take a general interest in the
spiritooal welfare of the youth of our Sabbath
school; but I am very much surprised! I am
very much surprised!”
“I am surprised that you should be, Deacon
Quirk. Do you believe that God would take
a poor little disappointed girl like Clo, who
has been all her life here forbidden the enjoyment
of a perfectly innocent taste, and keep
her in His happy heaven eternal years, without
finding means to gratify it? I don't.”
“I tell Clotildy I don't see what she
wants of a pianna-forte,” observed “Clotildy's”
uncle, sententiously. “She can go
to singin' school, and she 's been in the
choir ever since I have, which is six years
come Christmas. Besides, I don't think
it 's our place to speckylate on the mysteries
of the heavenly spere. My wife told
her that she must n't believe any such things
as that, which were very irreverent, and contrary
to the Scriptures, and Clo went home
crying. She said: `It was so pretty to think
about.' It is very easy to impress these
delusions of fancy on the young.”
“Pray, Deacon Quirk,” said Aunt Winifred,
leaning earnestly forward in the carriage, “will
you tell me what there is `irreverent' or `unscriptural'
in the idea that there will be instrumental
music in heaven?”
“Well,” replied the Deacon after some
be harps, I suppose. Harpers harping with
their harps on the sea of glass. But I don't
believe there will be any piannas. It 's a
dreadfully material way to talk about that
glorious world, to my thinking.”
“If you could show me wherein a harp is
less `material' than a piano, perhaps I should
agree with you.”
Deacon Quirk looked rather nonplussed for
a minute.
“What do you suppose people will do in
heaven?” she asked again.
“Glorify God,” said the Deacon, promptly
recovering himself, — “glorify God, and sing
Worthy the Lamb! We shall be clothed in
white robes with palms in our hands, and bow
before the Great White Throne. We shall be
engaged in such employments as befit sinless
creatures in a spiritooal state of existence.”
“Now, Deacon Quirk,” replied Aunt Winifred,
looking him over from head to foot, — old
straw hat, calico shirt, blue overalls, and cow-hide
boots, coarse, work-worn hands, and
“narrow forehead braided tight,” — “just imagine
yourself, will you? taken out of this life
this minute, as you stand here in your potato-field
evident uneasiness), and put into another life,
— not anybody else, but yourself, just as you
left this spot, — and do you honestly think that
you should be happy to go and put on a white
dress and stand still in a choir with a green
branch in one hand and a singing-book in the
other, and sing and pray and never do anything
but sing and pray, this year, next year,
and every year forever?”
“We-ell,” he replied, surprised into a momentary
flash of carnal candor, “I can't say
that I should n't wonder for a minute, maybe,
how Abinadab would ever get those potatoes hoed
without me. — Abinadab! go back to your
work!”
The graceful Abinadab had sauntered up
during the conversation, and was listening,
hoe in hand and mouth open. He slunk away
when his father spoke, but came up again
presently on tiptoe when Aunt Winifred was
talking. There was an interested, intelligent
look about his square and pitifully embarrassed
face, which attracted my notice.
“But then,” proceeded the Deacon, re-enforced
by the sudden recollection of his duties
as a father and a church-member, “that
know. I expect to be transformed by the
renewing of my mind to appreciate the glories
of the New Jerusalem, descending out of heaven
from God. That 's what I expect, marm.
Now I heerd that you told Mrs. Bland, or that
Mary told her, or that she heerd it someway,
that you said you supposed there were trees
and flowers and houses and such in heaven.
I told my wife I thought your deceased husband
was a Congregational minister, and I
did n't believe you ever said it; but that 's the
rumor.”
Without deeming it necessary to refer to
her “deceased husband,” Aunt Winifred replied
that “rumor” was quite right.
“Well!” said the Deacon, with severe significance,
“I believe in a spiritooal heaven.”
I looked him over again, — hat, hoe, shirt,
and all; scanned his obstinate old face with its
stupid, good eyes and animal mouth. Then I
glanced at Aunt Winifred as she leaned
forward in the afternoon light; the white,
finely cut woman, with her serene smile and
rapt, saintly eyes, — every inch of her, body
and soul, refined not only by birth and training,
but by the long nearness of her heart to
Christ.
“Of the earth, earthy. Of the heavens,
heavenly.” The two faces sharpened themselves
into two types. Which, indeed, was
the better able to comprehend a “spiritooal
heaven”?
“It is distinctly stated in the Bible, by
which I suppose we shall both agree,” said
Aunt Winifred, gently, “that there shall be a
new earth, as well as new heavens. It is noticeable,
also, that the descriptions of heaven,
although a series of metaphors, are yet singularly
earthlike and tangible ones. Are flowers
and skies and trees less `spiritual' than
white dresses and little palm-branches? In
fact, where are you going to get your little
branches without trees? What could well be
more suggestive of material modes of living,
and material industry, than a city marked into
streets and alleys, paved solidly with gold,
walled in and barred with gates whose jewels
are named and counted, and whose very length
and breadth are measured with a celestial
surveyor's chain?”
“But I think we 'd ought to stick to what
the Bible says,” answered the Deacon, stolidly.
“If it says golden cities and does n't say
flowers, it means cities and does n't mean
Mrs. Forceythe, if you do hold such oncommon
doctrine, and I don't doubt you mean well
enough, but I don't think that we ought to
trouble ourselves about these mysteries of a
future state. I 'm willing to trust them to
God!”
The evasion of a fair argument by this self-sufficient
spasm of piety was more than I
could calmly stand, and I indulged in a subdued
explosion. — Auntie says it sounded like
Fourth of July crackers touched off under a
wet barrel.
“Deacon Quirk! do you mean to imply
that Mrs. Forceythe does not trust it to God?
The truth is, that the existence of such a world
as heaven is a fact from which you shrink.
You know you do! She has twenty thoughts
about it where you have one; yet you set up
a claim to superior spirituality!”
“Mary, Mary, you are a little excited, I fear.
God is a spirit, and they that worship him
must worship him in spirit and in truth!”
The relevancy of this last, I confess myself
incapable of perceiving, but the good man
seemed to be convinced that he had made a
point, and we rode off leaving him under that
blissful delusion.
“If he were n't a good man!” I sighed.
“But he is, and I must respect him for it.”
“Of course you must; nor is he to blame
that he is narrow and rough. I should scarcely
have argued as seriously as I did with him,
but that, as I fancy him to be a representative
of a class, I wanted to try an experiment.
Is n't he amusing, though? He is precisely
one of Mr. Stopford Brooke's men `who can
understand nothing which is original.'”
“Are there, or are there not, more of such
men in our church than in others?”
“Not more proportionately to numbers.
But I would not have them thinned out. The
better we do Christ's work, the more of uneducated,
neglected, or debased mind will be
drawn to try and serve Him with us. He
sought out the lame, the halt, the blind, the
stupid, the crotchety, the rough, as well as the
equable, the intelligent, the refined. Untrained
Christians in any sect will always have
their eccentricities and their littlenesses, at
which the silken judgment of high places,
where the Carpenter's Son would be a strange
guest, will sneer. That never troubles me. It
only raises the question in my mind whether
cultivated Christians generally are sufficiently
wayside ground.”
“Now take Deacon Quirk,” I suggested,
when we had ridden along a little way under
the low, green arches of the elms, “and put
him into heaven as you proposed, just as he is,
and what is he going to do with himself? He
can dig potatoes and sell them without cheating,
and give generously of their proceeds to
foreign missions; but take away his potatoes,
and what would become of him? I don't
know a human being more incapacitated to
live in such a heaven as he believes in.”
“Very true, and a good, common-sense
argument against such a heaven. I don't
profess to surmise what will be found for him
to do, beyond this, — that it will be some very
palpable work that he can understand. How
do we know that he would not be appointed
guardian of his poor son here, to whom I suspect
he has not been all that father might be in
this life, and that he would not have his body
as well as his soul to look after, his farm as
well as his prayers? to him might be committed
the charge of the dews and the rains and
the hundred unseen influences that are at
work on this very potato-field.”
“But when his son has gone in his turn,
and we have all gone, and there are no more
potato-fields? An Eternity remains.”
“You don't know that there would n't be
any potato-fields; there may be some kind of
agricultural employments even then. To
whomsoever a talent is given, it will be given
him wherewith to use it. Besides, by that
time the good Deacon will be immensely
changed. I suppose that the simple transition
of death, which rids him of sin and of grossness,
will not only wonderfully refine him, but will
have its effect upon his intellect.”
“If a talent is given, use will be found for it?
Tell me some more about that.”
“I fancy many things about it; but of
course can feel sure of only the foundation
principle. This life is a great school-house.
The wise Teacher trains in us such gifts as, if
we graduate honorably, will be of most service
in the perfect manhood and womanhood that
come after. He sees, as we do not, that a
power is sometimes best trained by repression.
`We do not always lose an advantage when
we dispense with it,' Goethe says. But the
suffocated lives, like little Clo's there, make
my heart ache sometimes. I take comfort in
the air, by and by. There are a great many
of them. We tread them underfoot in our
careless stepping now and then, and do not see
that they have not the elasticity to rise from
our touch. `Heaven may be a place for those
who failed on earth,' the Country Parson
says.”
“Then there will be air enough for all?”
“For all; for those who have had a little
bloom in this world, as well. I suppose the
artist will paint his pictures, the poet sing his
happy songs, the orator and author will not find
their talents hidden in the eternal darkness of
a grave; the sculptor will use his beautiful gift
in the moulding of some heavenly Carrara; `as
well the singer as the player on instruments
shall be there.' Christ said a thing that has
grown on me with new meanings lately: — `He
that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.'
It, you see, — not another man's life, not a
strange compound of powers and pleasures,
but his own familiar aspirations. So we shall
best `glorify God,' not less there than here, by
doing it in the peculiar way that He himself
marked out for us. But — ah, Mary, you see
it is only the life `lost' for His sake that shall
goes to heaven because he is great. He must
go, as the meanest of his fellow-sinners go,
with face towards Calvary, and every golden
treasure used for love of Him who showed him
how.”
“What would the old Pagans — and modern
ones, too, for that matter — say to that?
Was n't it Tacitus who announced it as his
belief, that immortality was granted as a special
gift to a few superior minds? For the
people who persisted in making up the rest of
the world, poor things! as it could be of little
consequence what became of them, they might
die as the brute dieth.”
“It seems an unbearable thing to me sometimes,”
she went on, “the wreck of a gifted
soul. A man who can be, if he chooses, as
much better and happier than the rest of us
as the ocean reflects more sky than a mill-pond,
must also be, if he chooses, more wicked
and more miserable. It takes longer to reach
sea-shells than river-pebbles. I am compelled
to think, also, that intellectual rank must in
heaven bear some proportion to goodness.
There are last and there are first that shall
have changed places. As the tree falleth,
holiness of which a man leaves this life the
possessor, he must start in another. I have
seen great thinkers, `foremost men' in science,
in theology, in the arts, who, I solemnly
believe, will turn aside in heaven, — and will
turn humbly and heartily, — to let certain day-laborers
and paupers whom I have known go
up before them as kings and priests unto
God.”
“I believe that. But I was going to ask, —
for poor creatures like your respected niece,
who has n't a talent, nor even a single absorbing
taste, for one thing above another thing,
— what shall she do?”
“Whatever she liketh best; something very
useful, my dear, don't be afraid, and very
pleasant. Something, too, for which this life
has fitted you; though you may not understand
how that can be, better than did poor Heine
on his `matrazzen-gruft,' reading all the books
that treated of his disease. `But what good
this reading is to do me I don't know,' he said,
`except that it will qualify me to give lectures
in heaven on the ignorance of doctors on earth
about diseases of the spinal marrow.'”
“I don't know how many times I have
who said that his idea of heaven was to lie on
the sofa and read novels. That touches the
lazy part of us, though.”
“Yes, they will be the active, outgoing,
generous elements of our nature that will be
brought into use then, rather than the self-centred
and dreamy ones. Though I suppose
that we shall read in heaven, — being influenced
to be better and nobler by good and noble
teachers of the pen, not less there than here.”
“O think of it! To have books, and music,
— and pictures?”
“All that Art, `the handmaid of the Lord,'
can do for us, I have no doubt will be done.
Eternity will never become monotonous. Variety
without end, charms unnumbered within
charms, will be devised by Infinite ingenuity
to minister to our delight. Perhaps, —
this is just my fancying, — perhaps there will
be whole planets turned into galleries of art,
over which we may wander at will; or into
orchestral halls where the highest possibilities
of music will be realized to singer and to
hearer. Do you know, I have sometimes had
a flitting notion that music would be the
language of heaven? It certainly differs in
We have most of us felt it in our different ways.
It always seems to me like the cry of a great,
sad life dragged to use in this world against its
will. Pictures and statues and poems fit themselves
to their work more contentedly. Symphony
and song struggle in fetters. That
sense of conflict is not good for me. It is
quite as likely to harm as to help. Then
perhaps the mysteries of sidereal systems will
be spread out like a child's map before us.
Perhaps we shall take journeys to Jupiter and
to Saturn and to the glittering haze of nebulæ,
and to the site of ruined worlds whose `extinct
light is yet travelling through space.' Occupation
for explorers there, you see!”
“You make me say with little Clo, `O, why,
I want to go!' every time I hear you talk.
But there is one thing, — you spoke of families
living together.”
“Yes.”
“And you spoke of — your husband. But
the Bible —”
“Says there shall be no marrying nor giving
in marriage. I know that. Nor will there be
such marrying or giving in marriage as there
is in a world like this. Christ expressly goes
heaven. How do we know what heavenly
unions of heart with heart exist among the
angels? It leaves me margin enough to live
and be happy with John forever, and it holds
many possibilities for the settlement of all
perplexing questions brought about by the
relations of this world. It is of no use to talk
much about them. But it is on that very verse
that I found my unshaken belief that they will
be smoothed out in some natural and happy
way, with which each one shall be content.”
“But O, there is a great gulf fixed; and on
one side one, and on the other another, and
they loved each other.”
Her face paled, — it always pales, I notice,
at the mention of this mystery, — but her eyes
never lost by a shade their steadfast trust.
“Mary, don't question me about that. That
belongs to the unutterable things. God will
take care of it. I think I could leave it to him
even if he brought it for me myself to face. I
feel sure that he will make it all come out
right. Perhaps He will be so dear to us, that
we could not love any one who hated him. In
some way the void must be filled, for he shall
wipe away tears. But it seems to me that the
and in that there can, is this: that Christ, who
loves us even as his Father loves him, can be
happy in spite of the existence of a hell. If
it is possible to him, surely he can make it
possible to us.”
“Two things that He has taught us,” she
said after a silence, “give me beautiful assurance
that none of these dreams with which I
help myself can be beyond his intention to
fulfil. One is, that eye hath not seen it, nor
ear heard it, nor the heart conceived it, — this
lavishness of reward which he is keeping for
us. Another is, that `I shall be satisfied
when I awake.'”
“With his likeness.”
“With his likeness. And about that I
have other things to say.”
But Old Gray stopped at the gate and
Phœbe was watching for her butter, and it was
no time to say them then.
| XI. The gates ajar | |