Part 8

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 doesn’t say flowers, it means cities and doesn’t mean flowers. I dare say you’re a good woman, 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 _weren’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. Isn’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 _cultivators_, scattering their golden gifts on 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 wouldn’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 thinking how they will bud and blossom up 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 be so beautifully found. A great man never 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? Wasn’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, there shall it lie, and with that amount of 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 hasn’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 thought of--I believe it was the poet Gray, 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 some indescribable manner from the other arts. 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 on to state, that we shall be _as_ the angels in 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 only thought in which there can be any _rest_, 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.

XII.

July 22.

Aunt Winifred has connected herself with our church. I think it was rather hard for her, breaking the last tie that bound her to her husband’s people; but she had a feeling, that, if her work is to be done and her days ended here, she had better take up all such little threads of influence to make herself one with us.

25th.

To-day what should Deacon Quirk do but make a solemn call on Mrs. Forceythe, for the purpose of asking--and this with a hint that he wished he had asked before she became a member of the Homer First Congregational Church--whether there were truth in the rumors, now rife about town, that she was a Swedenborgian!

Aunt Winifred broke out laughing, and laughed merrily. The Deacon frowned.

“I used to fancy that I believed in Swedenborg,” she said, as soon as she could sober down a little.

The Deacon pricked up his ears, with visions of excommunications and councils reflected on every feature.

“Until I read his books,” she finished.

“Oh!” said the Deacon. He waited for more, but she seemed to consider the conversation at an end.

“So then you--if I understand--are _not_ a Swedenborgian, ma’am?”

“If I were, I certainly should have had no inducement to join myself to your church,” she replied, with gentle dignity. “I believe, with all my heart, in the same Bible and the same creed that you believe in, Deacon Quirk.”

“And you _live_ your creed, which all such genial Christians do not find it necessary to do,” I thought, as the Deacon in some perplexity took his departure, and she returned with a smile to her sewing.

I suppose the call came about in this way. We had the sewing-circle here last week, and just before the lamps were lighted, and when people had dropped their work to group and talk in the corners, Meta Tripp came up with one or two other girls to Aunt Winifred, and begged “to hear some of those queer things people said she believed about heaven.” Auntie is never obtrusive with her views on this or any other matter, but, being thus urged, she answered a few questions that they put to her, to the extreme scandal of one or two old ladies, and the secret delight of the rest.

“Well,” said little Mrs. Bland, squeezing and kissing her youngest, who was at that moment vigorously employed in sticking very long darning-needles into his mother’s waterfall, “I hope there’ll be a great many babies there. I should be perfectly happy if I always could have babies to play with!”

The look that Aunt Winifred shot over at me was worth seeing.

She merely replied, however, that she supposed all our “highest aspirations,”--with an indescribable accent to which Mrs. Bland was safely deaf,--if good ones, would be realized; and added, laughing, that Swedenborg said that the babies in heaven--who outnumber the grown people--will be given into the charge of those women especially fond of them.

“Swedenborg is suggestive, even if you can’t accept what seem to the uninitiated to be his natural impossibilities,” she said, after we had discussed Deacon Quirk awhile. “He says a pretty thing, too, occasionally. Did I ever read you about the houses?”

She had not, and I wished to hear, so she found the book on Heaven and Hell, and read:--

“As often as I have spoken with the angels mouth to mouth, so often I have been with them in their habitations: their habitations are altogether like the habitations on earth which are called houses, but more beautiful; in them are parlors, rooms, and chambers in great numbers; there are also courts, and round about are gardens, shrubberies, and fields. Palaces of heaven have been seen, which were so magnificent that they could not be described; above, they glittered as if they were of pure gold, and below, as if they were of precious stones; one palace was more splendid than another; within, it was the same the rooms were ornamented with such decorations as neither words nor sciences are sufficient to describe. On the side which looked to the south there were paradises, where all things in like manner glittered, and in some places the leaves were as of silver, and the fruits as of gold; and the flowers on their beds presented by colors as it were rainbows; at the boundaries again were palaces, in which the view terminated.”

Aunt Winifred says that our hymns, taken all together, contain the worst and the best pictures of heaven that we have in any branch of literature.

“It seems to me incredible,” she says, “that the Christian Church should have allowed that beautiful ‘Jerusalem’ in its hymnology so long, with the ghastly couplet,--

‘Where congregations ne’er break up, And Sabbaths have no end.’

The dullest preachers are sure to give it out, and that when there are the greatest number of restless children wondering when it will be time to go home. It is only within ten years that modern hymn books have altered it, returning in part to the original.

“I do not think we have chosen the best parts of that hymn for our ‘service of song.’ You never read the whole of it? You don’t know how pretty it is! It is a relief from the customary palms and choirs. One’s whole heart is glad of the outlet of its sweet refrain,--

‘Would God that I were there!’

before one has half read it. You are quite ready to believe that

‘There is no hunger, heat, nor cold, But _pleasure every way_.’

Listen to this:--

‘Thy houses are of ivory, Thy windows crystal clear, Thy tiles are made of beaten gold; O God, that I were there!

‘We that are here in banishment Continually do moan.

* * * * *

‘Our sweet is mixed with bitter gall, Our pleasure is but pain, Our joys scarce last the looking on, Our sorrows still remain.

‘But there they live in such delight, _Such pleasure and such play_, As that to them a thousand years Doth seem as yesterday.’

And this:--

‘Thy gardens and thy gallant walks Continually are green; There grow such sweet and pleasant flowers As nowhere else are seen.

‘There cinnamon, there sugar grows, There nard and balm abound, What tongue can tell, or heart conceive The joys that there are found?

‘Quite through the streets, with silver sound, The flood of life doth flow, Upon whose banks, on every side, The wood of life doth grow.’

I tell you we may learn something from that grand old Catholic singer. He is far nearer to the Bible than the innovators on his MSS. Do you not notice how like his images are to the inspired ones, and yet how pleasant and natural is the effect of the entire poem?

“There is nobody like Bonar, though, to sing about heaven. There is one of his, ‘We shall meet and rest,’--do you know it?”

I shook my head, and knelt down beside her and watched her face,--it was quite unconscious of me, the musing face,--while she repeated dreamily:--

“Where the faded flower shall freshen,-- Freshen nevermore to fade; Where the shaded sky shall brighten,-- Brighten nevermore to shade; Where the sun-blaze never scorches; Where the star-beams cease to chill; Where no tempest stirs the echoes Of the wood, or wave, or hill;.... Where no shadow shall bewilder; Where life’s vain parade is o’er; Where the sleep of sin is broken, And the dreamer dreams no more; Where the bond is never severed,-- Partings, claspings, sob and moan, Midnight waking, twilight weeping, Heavy noontide,--all are done; Where the child has found its mother; Where the mother finds the child; Where dear families are gathered, That were scattered on the wild;.... Where the hidden wound is healed; Where the blighted life reblooms; Where the smitten heart the freshness Of its buoyant youth resumes;.... Where we find the joy of loving, As we never loved before,-- Loving on, unchilled, unhindered, Loving once, forevermore.” ...

30th.

Aunt Winifred was weeding her day-lilies this morning, when the gate creaked timidly, and then swung noisily, and in walked Abinadab Quirk, with a bouquet of China pinks in the button-hole of his green-gray linen coat. He had taken evident pains to smarten himself up a little, for his hair was combed into two horizontal _dabs_ over his ears, and the green-gray coat and blue-checked shirt-sleeves were quite clean; but he certainly is the most uncouth specimen of six feet five that it has ever been my privilege to behold. I feel sorry for him, though. I heard Meta Tripp laughing at him in Sunday school the other day,--“Quadrangular Quirk,” she called him, a little too loud, and the poor fellow heard her. He half turned, blushing fiercely; then slunk down in his corner with as pitiable a look as is often seen upon a man’s face.

He came up to Auntie awkwardly,--a part of the scene I saw from the window, and the rest she told me,--head hanging, and the tiny bouquet held out.

“Clo sent these to you,” he stammered out,--“my cousin Clo. I was coming ’long, and she thought, you know,--she’d get me, you see, to--to--that is, to--bring them. She sent her--that is--let me see. She sent her respect--ful--respectful--no, her love; that was it. She sent her love ’long with ’em.”

Mrs. Forceythe dropped her weeds, and held out her white, shapely hands, wet with the heavy dew, to take the flowers.

“O, thank you! Clo knows my fancy for pinks. How kind in you to bring them! Won’t you sit down a few moments? I was just going to rest a little. Do you like flowers?”