The Seaboard Parish Vol. 2
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George MacDonald >> The Seaboard Parish Vol. 2
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"Do you call that _all_, Connie? Believe me, there is more power in that
than any human being knows the tenth part of yet. It is indeed _all_."
I said no more then. I told my wife about it that night, but we were well
into another month before I told Connie.
When I left her, I went to Joe's room to see how he was, and found him
having some gruel. I sat down on the edge of his bed, and said,
"Well, Joe, this is better than under water. I hope you won't be the worse
for it."
"I don't much care what comes of me, sir. It will be all over soon."
"But you ought to care what comes of you, Joe. I will tell you why. You are
an instrument out of which ought to come praise to God, and, therefore, you
ought to care for the instrument."
"That way, yes, sir, I ought."
"And you have no business to be like some children who say, 'Mamma won't
give me so and so,' instead of asking her to give it them."
"I see what you mean, sir. But really you put me out before the young
woman. I couldn't say before her what I meant. Suppose, you know, sir,
there was to come a family. It might be, you know."
"Of course. What else would you have?"
"But if I was to die, where would she be then?"
"In God's hands; just as she is now."
"But I ought to take care that she is not left with a burden like that to
provide for."
"O, Joe! how little you know a woman's heart! It would just be the greatest
comfort she could have for losing you--that's all. Many a woman has married
a man she did not care enough for, just that she might have a child of her
own to let out her heart upon. I don't say that is right, you know. Such
love cannot be perfect. A woman ought to love her child because it is her
husband's more than because it is her own, and because it is God's more
than either's. I saw in the papers the other day, that a woman was brought
before the Recorder of London for stealing a baby, when the judge himself
said that there was no imaginable motive for her action but a motherly
passion to possess the child. It is the need of a child that makes so
many women take to poor miserable, broken-nosed lap-dogs; for they are
self-indulgent, and cannot face the troubles and dangers of adopting
a child. They would if they might get one of a good family, or from a
respectable home; but they dare not take an orphan out of the dirt, lest
it should spoil their silken chairs. But that has nothing to do with our
argument. What I mean is this, that if Agnes really loves you, as no one
can look in her face and doubt, she will be far happier if you leave her
a child--yes, she will be happier if you only leave her your name for
hers--than if you died without calling her your wife."
I took Joe's basin from him, and he lay down. He turned his face to the
wall. I waited a moment, but finding him silent, bade him good-night, and
left the room.
A month after, I married them.
CHAPTER XIII.
THE HARVEST.
It was some time before we got the bells to work to our mind, but at
last we succeeded. The worst of it was to get the cranks, which at first
required strong pressure on the keys, to work easily enough. But neither
Joe nor his cousin spared any pains to perfect the attempt, and, as I say,
at length we succeeded. I took Wynnie down to the instrument and made her
try whether she could not do something, and she succeeded in making the old
tower discourse loudly and eloquently.
By this time the thanksgiving for the harvest was at hand: on the morning
of that first of all would I summon the folk to their prayers with the
sound of the full peal. And I wrote a little hymn of praise to the God of
the harvest, modelling it to one of the oldest tunes in that part of the
country, and I had it printed on slips of paper and laid plentifully on the
benches. What with the calling of the bells, like voices in the highway,
and the solemn meditation of the organ within to bear aloft the thoughts of
those who heard, and came to the prayer and thanksgiving in common, and the
message which God had given me to utter to them, I hoped that we should
indeed keep holiday.
Wynnie summoned the parish with the hundredth psalm pealed from aloft,
dropping from the airy regions of the tower on village and hamlet and
cottage, calling aloud--for who could dissociate the words from the music,
though the words are in the Scotch psalms?--written none the less by an
Englishman, however English wits may amuse themselves with laughing at
their quaintness--calling aloud,
"All people that on earth do dwell
Sing to the Lord with cheerful voice;
Him serve with mirth, his praise forth tell--
Come ye before him and rejoice."
Then we sang the psalm before the communion service, making bold in the
name of the Lord to serve him with _mirth_ as in the old version, and not
with the _fear_ with which some editor, weak in faith, has presumed to
alter the line. Then before the sermon we sang the hymn I had prepared--a
proceeding justifiable by many an example in the history of the church
while she was not only able to number singers amongst her clergy, but those
singers were capable of influencing the whole heart and judgment of the
nation with their songs. Ethelwyn played the organ. The song I had prepared
was this:
"We praise the Life of All;
From buried seeds so small
Who makes the ordered ranks of autumn stand;
Who stores the corn
In rick and barn
To feed the winter of the land.
We praise the Life of Light!
Who from the brooding night
Draws out the morning holy, calm, and grand;
Veils up the moon,
Sends out the sun,
To glad the face of all the land.
We praise the Life of Work,
Who from sleep's lonely dark
Leads forth his children to arise and stand,
Then go their way,
The live-long day,
To trust and labour in the land.
We praise the Life of Good,
Who breaks sin's lazy mood,
Toilsomely ploughing up the fruitless sand.
The furrowed waste
They leave, and haste
Home, home, to till their Father's land.
We praise the Life of Life,
Who in this soil of strife
Casts us at birth, like seed from sower's hand;
To die and so
Like corn to grow
A golden harvest in his land."
After we had sung this hymn, the meaning of which is far better than the
versification, I preached from the words of St. Paul, "If by any means I
might attain unto the resurrection of the dead. Not as though I had already
attained, either were already perfect." And this is something like what I
said to them:
"The world, my friends, is full of resurrections, and it is not always of
the same resurrection that St. Paul speaks. Every night that folds us up
in darkness is a death; and those of you that have been out early and have
seen the first of the dawn, will know it--the day rises out of the night
like a being that has burst its tomb and escaped into life. That you may
feel that the sunrise is a resurrection--the word resurrection just means a
rising again--I will read you a little description of it from a sermon by a
great writer and great preacher called Jeremy Taylor. Listen. 'But as when
the sun approaching towards the gates of the morning, he first opens a
little eye of heaven and sends away the spirits of darkness, and gives
light to a cock, and calls up the lark to matins, and by and by gilds the
fringes of a cloud, and peeps over the eastern hills, thrusting out his
golden horns like those which decked the brows of Moses, when he was forced
to wear a veil, because himself had seen the face of God; and still, while
a man tells the story, the sun gets up higher, till he shows a fair face
and a full light, and then he shines one whole day, under a cloud often,
and sometimes weeping great and little showers, and sets quickly; so is a
man's reason and his life.' Is not this a resurrection of the day out of
the night? Or hear how Milton makes his Adam and Eve praise God in the
morning,--
'Ye mists and exhalations that now rise
From hill or streaming lake, dusky or gray,
Till the sun paint your fleecy skirts with gold,
In honour to the world's great Author rise,
Whether to deck with clouds the uncoloured sky,
Or wet the thirsty earth with falling showers,
Rising or falling still advance his praise.'
But it is yet more of a resurrection to you. Think of your own condition
through the night and in the morning. You die, as it were, every night. The
death of darkness comes down over the earth; but a deeper death, the death
of sleep, descends on you. A power overshadows you; your eyelids close, you
cannot keep them open if you would; your limbs lie moveless; the day is
gone; your whole life is gone; you have forgotten everything; an evil man
might come and do with your goods as he pleased; you are helpless. But the
God of the Resurrection is awake all the time, watching his sleeping men
and women, even as a mother who watches her sleeping baby, only with larger
eyes and more full of love than hers; and so, you know not how, all at once
you know that you are what you are; that there is a world that wants you
outside of you, and a God that wants you inside of you; you rise from the
death of sleep, not by your own power, for you knew nothing about it; God
put his hand over your eyes, and you were dead; he lifted his hand and
breathed light on you and you rose from the dead, thanked the God who
raised you up, and went forth to do your work. From darkness to light; from
blindness to seeing; from knowing nothing to looking abroad on the mighty
world; from helpless submission to willing obedience,--is not this a
resurrection indeed? That St. Paul saw it to be such may be shown from his
using the two things with the same meaning when he says, 'Awake, thou that
sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light.'
No doubt he meant a great deal more. No man who understands what he is
speaking about can well mean only one thing at a time.
"But to return to the resurrections we see around us in nature. Look at the
death that falls upon the world in winter. And look how it revives when the
sun draws near enough in the spring to wile the life in it once more out of
its grave. See how the pale, meek snowdrops come up with their bowed heads,
as if full of the memory of the fierce winds they encountered last spring,
and yet ready in the strength of their weakness to encounter them again. Up
comes the crocus, bringing its gold safe from the dark of its colourless
grave into the light of its parent gold. Primroses, and anemones, and
blue-bells, and a thousand other children of the spring, hear the
resurrection-trumpet of the wind from the west and south, obey, and leave
their graves behind to breathe the air of the sweet heavens. Up and up they
come till the year is glorious with the rose and the lily, till the trees
are not only clothed upon with new garments of loveliest green, but the
fruit-tree bringeth forth its fruit, and the little children of men are
made glad with apples, and cherries, and hazel-nuts. The earth laughs out
in green and gold. The sky shares in the grand resurrection. The garments
of its mourning, wherewith it made men sad, its clouds of snow and hail and
stormy vapours, are swept away, have sunk indeed to the earth, and are now
humbly feeding the roots of the flowers whose dead stalks they beat upon
all the winter long. Instead, the sky has put on the garments of praise.
Her blue, coloured after the sapphire-floor on which stands the throne of
him who is the Resurrection and the Life, is dashed and glorified with the
pure white of sailing clouds, and at morning and evening prayer, puts on
colours in which the human heart drowns itself with delight--green and gold
and purple and rose. Even the icebergs floating about in the lonely summer
seas of the north are flashing all the glories of the rainbow. But, indeed,
is not this whole world itself a monument of the Resurrection? The earth
was without form and void. The wind of God moved on the face of the waters,
and up arose this fair world. Darkness was on the face of the deep: God
said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light.
"In the animal world as well, you behold the goings of the Resurrection.
Plainest of all, look at the story of the butterfly--so plain that the
pagan Greeks called it and the soul by one name--Psyche. Psyche meant with
them a butterfly or the soul, either. Look how the creeping thing, ugly to
our eyes, so that we can hardly handle it without a shudder, finding itself
growing sick with age, straightway falls a spinning and weaving at its
own shroud, coffin, and grave, all in one--to prepare, in fact, for its
resurrection; for it is for the sake of the resurrection that death exists.
Patiently it spins its strength, but not its life, away, folds itself up
decently, that its body may rest in quiet till the new body is formed
within it; and at length when the appointed hour has arrived, out of the
body of this crawling thing breaks forth the winged splendour of the
butterfly--not the same body--a new one built out of the ruins of the
old--even as St. Paul tells us that it is not the same body _we_ have in
the resurrection, but a nobler body like ourselves, with all the imperfect
and evil thing taken away. No more creeping for the butterfly; wings of
splendour now. Neither yet has it lost the feet wherewith to alight on all
that is lovely and sweet. Think of it--up from the toilsome journey over
the low ground, exposed to the foot of every passer-by, destroying the
lovely leaves upon which it fed, and the fruit which they should shelter,
up to the path at will through the air, and a gathering of food which hurts
not the source of it, a food which is but as a tribute from the loveliness
of the flowers to the yet higher loveliness of the flower-angel: is not
this a resurrection? Its children too shall pass through the same process,
to wing the air of a summer noon, and rejoice in the ethereal and the pure.
"To return yet again from the human thoughts suggested by the symbol of the
butterfly"--
Here let me pause for a moment--and there was a corresponding pause, though
but momentary, in the sermon as I spoke it--to mention a curious, and to me
at the moment an interesting fact. At this point of my address, I caught
sight of a white butterfly, a belated one, flitting about the church.
Absorbed for a moment, my eye wandered after it. It was near the bench
where my own people sat, and, for one flash of thought, I longed that the
butterfly would alight on my Wynnie, for I was more anxious about her
resurrection at the time than about anything else. But the butterfly would
not. And then I told myself that God would, and that the butterfly was only
the symbol of a grand truth, and of no private interpretation, to make
which of it was both selfishness and superstition. But all this passed in a
flash, and I resumed my discourse.
--"I come now naturally to speak of what we commonly call the Resurrection.
Some say: 'How can the same dust be raised again, when it may be scattered
to the winds of heaven?' It is a question I hardly care to answer. The
mere difficulty can in reason stand for nothing with God; but the apparent
worthlessness of the supposition renders the question uninteresting to me.
What is of import is, that I should stand clothed upon, with a body which
is _my_ body because it serves my ends, justifies my consciousness of
identity by being, in all that was good in it, like that which I had
before, while now it is tenfold capable of expressing the thoughts and
feelings that move within me. How can I care whether the atoms that form
a certain inch of bone should be the same as those which formed that bone
when I died? All my life-time I never felt or thought of the existence of
such a bone! On the other hand, I object to having the same worn muscles,
the same shrivelled skin with which I may happen to die. Why give me the
same body as that? Why not rather my youthful body, which was strong, and
facile, and capable? The matter in the muscle of my arm at death would not
serve to make half the muscle I had when young. But I thank God that St.
Paul says it will _not_ be the same body. That body dies--up springs
another body. I suspect myself that those are right who say that this body
being the seed, the moment it dies in the soil of this world, that moment
is the resurrection of the new body. The life in it rises out of it in a
new body. This is not after it is put in the mere earth; for it is dead
then, and the germ of life gone out of it. If a seed rots, no new body
comes of it. The seed dies into a new life, and so does man. Dying and
rotting are two very different things.--But I am not sure by any means. As
I say, the whole question is rather uninteresting to me. What do I care
about my old clothes after I have done with them? What is it to me to know
what becomes of an old coat or an old pulpit gown? I have no such clinging
to the flesh. It seems to me that people believe their bodies to be
themselves, and are therefore very anxious about them--and no wonder then.
Enough for me that I shall have eyes to see my friends, a face that they
shall know me by, and a mouth to praise God withal. I leave the matter with
one remark, that I am well content to rise as Jesus rose, however that was.
For me the will of God is so good that I would rather have his will done
than my own choice given me.
"But I now come to the last, because infinitely the most important part
of my subject--the resurrection for the sake of which all the other
resurrections exist--the resurrection unto Life. This is the one of which
St. Paul speaks in my text. This is the one I am most anxious--indeed, the
only one I am anxious to set forth, and impress upon you.
"Think, then, of all the deaths you know; the death of the night, when the
sun is gone, when friend says not a word to friend, but both lie drowned
and parted in the sea of sleep; the death of the year, when winter lies
heavy on the graves of the children of summer, when the leafless trees moan
in the blasts from the ocean, when the beasts even look dull and oppressed,
when the children go about shivering with cold, when the poor and
improvident are miserable with suffering or think of such a death of
disease as befalls us at times, when the man who says, 'Would God it were
morning!' changes but his word, and not his tune, when the morning comes,
crying, 'Would God it were evening!' when what life is left is known to us
only by suffering, and hope is amongst the things that were once and are no
more--think of all these, think of them all together, and you will have but
the dimmest, faintest picture of the death from which the resurrection
of which I have now to speak, is the rising. I shrink from the attempt,
knowing how weak words are to set forth _the_ death, set forth _the_
resurrection. Were I to sit down to yonder organ, and crash out the most
horrible dissonances that ever took shape in sound, I should give you but
a weak figure of this death; were I capable of drawing from many a row of
pipes an exhalation of dulcet symphonies and voices sweet, such as Milton
himself could have invaded our ears withal, I could give you but a faint
figure of this resurrection. Nevertheless, I must try what I can do in my
own way.
"If into the face of the dead body, lying on the bed, waiting for its
burial, the soul of the man should begin to dawn again, drawing near from
afar to look out once more at those eyes, to smile once again through those
lips, the change on that face would be indeed great and wondrous, but
nothing for marvel or greatness to that which passes on the countenance,
the very outward bodily face of the man who wakes from his sleep, arises
from the dead and receives light from Christ. Too often indeed, the
reposeful look on the face of the dead body would be troubled, would vanish
away at the revisiting of the restless ghost; but when a man's own right
true mind, which God made in him, is restored to him again, and he wakes
from the death of sin, then comes the repose without the death. It may take
long for the new spirit to complete the visible change, but it begins at
once, and will be perfected. The bloated look of self-indulgence passes
away like the leprosy of Naaman, the cheek grows pure, the lips return to
the smile of hope instead of the grin of greed, and the eyes that made
innocence shrink and shudder with their yellow leer grow childlike and
sweet and faithful. The mammon-eyes, hitherto fixed on the earth, are
lifted to meet their kind; the lips that mumbled over figures and sums of
gold learn to say words of grace and tenderness. The truculent, repellent,
self-satisfied face begins to look thoughtful and doubtful, as if searching
for some treasure of whose whereabouts it had no certain sign. The face
anxious, wrinkled, peering, troubled, on whose lines you read the dread of
hunger, poverty, and nakedness, thaws into a smile; the eyes reflect in
courage the light of the Father's care, the back grows erect under its
burden with the assurance that the hairs of its head are all numbered. But
the face can with all its changes set but dimly forth the rising from the
dead which passes within. The heart, which cared but for itself, becomes
aware of surrounding thousands like itself, in the love and care of which
it feels a dawning blessedness undreamt of before. From selfishness to
love--is not this a rising from the dead? The man whose ambition declares
that his way in the world would be to subject everything to his desires, to
bring every human care, affection, power, and aspiration to his feet--such
a world it would be, and such a king it would have, if individual ambition
might work its will! if a man's opinion of himself could be made out in
the world, degrading, compelling, oppressing, doing everything for his own
glory!--and such a glory!--but a pang of light strikes this man to the
heart; an arrow of truth, feathered with suffering and loss and dismay,
finds out--the open joint in his armour, I was going to say--no, finds out
the joint in the coffin where his heart lies festering in a death so dead
that itself calls it life. He trembles, he awakes, he rises from the dead.
No more he seeks the slavery of all: where can he find whom to serve? how
can he become if but a threshold in the temple of Christ, where all serve
all, and no man thinks first of himself? He to whom the mass of his
fellows, as he massed them, was common and unclean, bows before every human
sign of the presence of the making God. The sun, which was to him but a
candle with which to search after his own ends, wealth, power, place,
praise--the world, which was but the cavern where he thus searched--are now
full of the mystery of loveliness, full of the truth of which sun and
wind and land and sea are symbols and signs. From a withered old age of
unbelief, the dim eyes of which refuse the glory of things a passage to the
heart, he is raised up a child full of admiration, wonder, and gladness.
Everything is glorious to him; he can believe, and therefore he sees. It
is from the grave into the sunshine, from the night into the morning, from
death into life. To come out of the ugly into the beautiful; out of the
mean and selfish into the noble and loving; out of the paltry into the
great; out of the false into the true; out of the filthy into the clean;
out of the commonplace into the glorious; out of the corruption of disease
into the fine vigour and gracious movements of health; in a word, out of
evil into good--is not this a resurrection indeed--_the_ resurrection of
all, the resurrection of Life? God grant that with St. Paul we may attain
to this resurrection of the dead.
"This rising from the dead is often a long and a painful process. Even
after he had preached the gospel to the Gentiles, and suffered much for the
sake of his Master, Paul sees the resurrection of the dead towering grandly
before him, not yet climbed, not yet attained unto--a mountainous splendour
and marvel, still shining aloft in the air of existence, still, thank God,
to be attained, but ever growing in height and beauty as, forgetting those
things that are behind, he presses towards the mark, if by any means he may
attain to the resurrection of the dead. Every blessed moment in which a man
bethinks himself that he has been forgetting his high calling, and sends up
to the Father a prayer for aid; every time a man resolves that what he has
been doing he will do no more; every time that the love of God, or the
feeling of the truth, rouses a man to look first up at the light, then down
at the skirts of his own garments--that moment a divine resurrection is
wrought in the earth. Yea, every time that a man passes from resentment to
forgiveness, from cruelty to compassion, from hardness to tenderness, from
indifference to carefulness, from selfishness to honesty, from honesty to
generosity, from generosity to love,--a resurrection, the bursting of a
fresh bud of life out of the grave of evil, gladdens the eye of the Father
watching his children. Awake, then, thou that sleepest, and arise from the
dead, and Christ will give thee light. As the harvest rises from the wintry
earth, so rise thou up from the trials of this world a full ear in the
harvest of Him who sowed thee in the soil that thou mightest rise above it.
As the summer rises from the winter, so rise thou from the cares of eating
and drinking and clothing into the fearless sunshine of confidence in
the Father. As the morning rises out of the night, so rise thou from the
darkness of ignorance to do the will of God in the daylight; and as a man
feels that he is himself when he wakes from the troubled and grotesque
visions of the night into the glory of the sunrise, even so wilt thou feel
that then first thou knowest what thy life, the gladness of thy being, is.
As from painful tossing in disease, rise into the health of well-being. As
from the awful embrace of thy own dead body, burst forth in thy spiritual
body. Arise thou, responsive to the indwelling will of the Father, even as
thy body will respond to thy indwelling soul.
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