Thomas Wingfold, Curate V3
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George MacDonald >> Thomas Wingfold, Curate V3
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"You must do your best for him," said Wingfold, but in his heart he
wished, with an honest affection, that he might not succeed.
Leopold, however, seemed to have no idea of his condition, and the
curate wondered what he would think or do were he to learn that he
was dying. Would he insist on completing his confession, and urging
on a trial? He had himself told him all that had passed with the
magistrate, and how things now were as he understood them, but it
was plain that he had begun to be uneasy about the affair, and was
doubtful at times whether all was as it seemed. The curate was not
deceived. He had been present during a visit from Mr. Hooker, and
nothing could be plainer than the impression out of which the good
man spoke. Nor could he fail to suspect the cunning kindness of
George Bascombe in the affair. But he did not judge that he had now
the least call to interfere. The poor boy had done as much as lay
either in or out of him in the direction of duty, and was daily
becoming more and more unfit either to originate or carry out a
further course of action. If he was in himself capable of anything
more, he was, in his present state of weakness, utterly unable to
cope with the will of those around him.
Faber would have had him leave the country for some southern
climate, but he would not hear of it, and Helen, knowing to what
extremities it might drive him, would not insist. Nor, indeed, was
he now in a condition to be moved. Also the weather had grown
colder, and he was sensitive to atmospheric changes as any creature
of the elements.
But after a fortnight, when it was now the middle of the autumn, it
grew quite warm again, and he revived and made such progress that he
was able to be carried into the garden every day. There he sat in a
chair on the lawn, with his feet on a sheepskin, and a fur cloak
about him. And for all the pain at his heart, for all the misery in
which no one could share, for all the pangs of a helpless jealousy,
checked only by a gnawing remorse, both of which took refuge in the
thought of following through the spheres until he found her, cast
himself at her feet, spoke the truth, and became, if he might, her
slave for ever, failing which he could but turn and go wandering
through the spheres, seeking rest and finding none, save indeed
there were some salvation even for him in the bosom of his God--I
say that, somehow, with all this on the brain and in the heart of
him, the sunshine was yet pleasant to his eyes, while it stung him
to the soul; the soft breathing of the wind was pleasant to his
cheek, while he cursed himself for the pleasure it gave him; the few
flowers that were left looked up at him mournfully and he let them
look, nor turned his eyes away, but let the tears gather and flow.
The first agonies of the encounter of life and death were over, and
life was slowly wasting away. Oh what might not a little joy do for
him! But where was the joy to be found that could irradiate such a
darkness even for one fair memorial moment?
One hot noon Wingfold lay beside him on the grass. Neither had
spoken for some time: the curate more and more shrunk from speech to
which his heart was not directly moved. As to what might be in
season or out of season, he never would pretend to judge, he said,
but even Balaam's ass knew when he had a call to speak. He plucked a
pale red pimpernel and handed it up over his head to Leopold. The
youth looked at it for a moment, and burst into tears. The curate
rose hastily.
"It is so heartless of me." said Leopold, "to take pleasure in such
a childish innocence as this!"
"It merely shows," said the curate, laying his hand gently on his
shoulder, "that even in these lowly lovelinesses, there is a
something that has its root deeper than your pain; that, all about
us, in earth and air, wherever eye or ear can reach, there is a
power ever breathing itself forth in signs, now in a daisy, now in a
windwaft, a cloud, a sunset; a power that holds constant and
sweetest relation with the dark and silent world within us; that the
same God who is in us, and upon whose tree we are the buds, if not
yet the flowers, also is all about us--inside, the Spirit; outside,
the Word. And the two are ever trying to meet in us; and when they
meet, then the sign without, and the longing within, become one in
light, and the man no more walketh in darkness, but knoweth whither
he goeth."
As he ended thus, the curate bent over and looked at Leopold. But
the poor boy had not listened to a word he said. Something in his
tone had soothed him, but the moment he ceased, the vein of his
grief burst out bleeding afresh. He clasped his thin hands together,
and looked up in an agony of hopeless appeal to the blue sky, now
grown paler as in fear of the coming cold, though still the air was
warm and sweet, and cried,
"Oh! if God would only be good and unmake me, and let darkness cover
the place where once was me! That would be like a good God! All I
should be sorry for then would be, that there was not enough of me
left for a dim flitting Will-o'-the-wisp of praise, ever singing my
thankfulness to him that I was no more.--Yet even then my deed would
remain, for I dare not ask that she should die outright also--that
would be to heap wrong upon wrong. What an awful thing being is! Not
even my annihilation could make up for my crime, or rid it out of
the universe."
"True, Leopold!" said the curate. "Nothing but the burning love of
God can rid sin out of anywhere. But are you not forgetting him who
surely knew what he undertook when he would save the world? No more
than you could have set that sun flaming overhead, with its
million-miled billows and its limitless tempests of fire, can you
tell what the love of God is, or what it can do for you, if only by
enlarging your love with the inrush of itself. Few have such a cry
to raise to the Father as you, such a claim of sin and helplessness
to heave up before him, such a joy even to offer to the great
Shepherd who cannot rest while one sheep strays from his flock, one
prodigal haunts the dens of evil and waste. Cry to him, Leopold, my
dear boy. Cry to him again and yet again, for he himself said that
men ought always to pray and not faint, for God did hear and would
answer although he might seem long about it. I think we shall find
one day that nobody, not the poet of widest sweep and most daring
imagination, not the prophet who soars the highest in his ardour to
justify the ways of God to men, not the child when he is most fully
possessed of the angel that in heaven always beholds the face of the
Father of Jesus, has come or could have come within sight of the
majesty of his bestowing upon his children. For did he not, if the
story be true, allow torture itself to invade the very soul's
citadel of his best beloved, as he went to seek the poor ape of a
prodigal, stupidly grinning amongst his harlots?"
Leopold did not answer, and the shadow lay deep on his face for a
while; but at length it began to thin, and at last a feeble
quivering smile broke through the cloud, and he wept soft tears of
refreshing.
It was not that the youth had turned again from the hope of rest in
the Son of Man; but that, as everyone knows who knows anything of
the human spirit, there must be in its history days and seasons,
mornings and nights, yea deepest midnights. It has its alternating
summer and winter, its storm and shine, its soft dews and its
tempests of lashing hail, its cold moons and prophetic stars, its
pale twilights of saddest memory, and its golden gleams of brightest
hope. All these mingled and displaced each other in Leopold's ruined
world, where chaos had come again, but over whose waters a mightier
breath was now moving.
And now after much thought, the curate saw that he could not hope to
transplant into the bosom of the lad the flowers of truth that
gladdened his own garden: he must sow the seed from which they had
sprung, and that seed was the knowledge of the true Jesus. It was
now the more possible to help him in this way, that the wild beast
of his despair had taken its claws from his bosom, had withdrawn a
pace or two, and couched watching. And Wingfold soon found that
nothing calmed and brightened him like talk about Jesus. He had
tried verse first--seeking out the best within his reach wherein
loving souls have uttered their devotion to the man of men; but here
also the flowers would not be transplanted. How it came about he
hardly knew, but he had soon drifted into rather than chosen another
way, which way proved a right one: he would begin thinking aloud on
some part of the gospel story, generally that which was most in his
mind at the time--talking with himself, as it were, all about it. He
began this one morning as he lay on the grass beside him, and that
was the position in which he found he could best thus soliloquize.
Now and then but not often Leopold would interrupt him, and perhaps
turn the monologue into dialogue, but even then Wingfold would
hardly ever look at him: he would not disturb him with more of his
presence than he could help, or allow the truth to be flavoured with
more of his individuality than was unavoidable. For every
individuality, he argued, has a peculiar flavour to every other, and
only Jesus is the pure simple humanity that every one can love, out
and out, at once. In these mental meanderings, he avoided nothing,
took notice of every difficulty, whether able to discuss it fully or
not, broke out in words of delight when his spirit was moved, nor
hid his disappointment when he failed in getting at what might seem
good enough to be the heart of the thing. It was like hatching a
sermon in the sun instead of in the oven. Occasionally, when, having
ceased, he looked up to know how his pupil fared, he found him fast
asleep--sometimes with a smile, sometimes with a tear on his face.
The sight would satisfy him well. Calm upon such a tormented sea
must be the gift of God; and the curate would then sometimes fall
asleep himself--to start awake at the first far-off sound of Helen's
dress as it swept a running fire of fairy fog-signals from the half-
opened buds of the daisies, and the long heads of the rib-grass,
when he would rise and saunter a few paces aside, and she would bend
over her brother, to see if he were warm and comfortable. By this
time all the old tenderness of her ministration had returned, nor
did she seem any longer jealous of Wingfold's.
One day she came behind them as they talked. The grass had been mown
that morning, and also she happened to be dressed in her riding-
habit and had gathered up the skirt over her arm, so that on this
occasion she made no sound of sweet approach. Wingfold had been
uttering one of his rambling monologues--in which was much without
form, but nothing void.
"I don't know quite," he had been saying, "what to think about that
story of the woman they brought to Jesus in the temple--I mean how
it got into that nook of the gospel of St. John, where it has no
right place.--They didn't bring her for healing or for the rebuke of
her demon, but for condemnation, only they came to the wrong man for
that. They dared not carry out the law of stoning, as they would
have liked, I suppose, even if Jesus had condemned her, but perhaps
they hoped rather to entrap him who was the friend of sinners into
saying something against the law.--But what I want is, to know how
it got there,--just there, I mean, betwixt the seventh and eighth
chapters of St. John's Gospel. There is no doubt of its being an
interpolation--that the twelfth verse, I think it is, ought to join
on to the fifty-second. The Alexandrian manuscript is the only one
of the three oldest that has it, and it is the latest of the three.
I did think once, but hastily, that it was our Lord's text for
saying I AM THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD, but it follows quite as well on
his offer of living water. One can easily see how the place would
appear a very suitable one to any presumptuous scribe who wished to
settle the question of where it should stand.--I wonder if St. John
told the lovely tale as something he had forgotten, after he had
finished dictating all the rest. Or was it well known to all the
evangelists, only no one of them was yet partaker enough of the
spirit of him who was the friend of sinners, to dare put it on
written record, thinking it hardly a safe story to expose to the
quarrying of men's conclusions? But it doesn't matter much: the tale
must be a true one. Only--to think of just this one story, of
tenderest righteousness, floating about like a holy waif through the
world of letters!--a sweet gray dove of promise that can find no
rest for the sole of his foot! Just this one story of all stories a
kind of outcast! and yet as a wanderer, oh, how welcome! Some
manuscripts, I understand, have granted it a sort of outhouse-shelter
at the end of the gospel of St. Luke. But it all matters nothing, so
long as we can believe it; and true it must be, it is so like him
all through. And if it does go wandering as a stray through the
gospels, without place of its own, what matters it so long as it
can find hearts enough to nestle in, and bring forth its young of
comfort!--Perhaps the woman herself told it, and, as with the woman
of Samaria, some would and some would not believe her.--Oh! the eyes
that met upon her! The fiery hail of scorn from those of the Pharisees--the
light of eternal sunshine from those of Jesus!--I was reading the
other day, in one of the old Miracle Plays, how each that looked on
while Jesus wrote with his finger on the ground, imagined he was
writing down his individual sins, and was in terror lest his neighbour
should come to know them.--And wasn't he gentle even with those to
whom he was sharper than a two-edged sword! and oh how gentle to her
he would cover from their rudeness and wrong! LET THE SINLESS THROW!
And the sinners went out, and she followed--to sin no more. No reproaches,
you see! No stirring up of the fiery snakes! Only don't do it again.--I
don't think she did it again:--do you?"
It was just here that Helen came and stood behind Leopold's chair.
The curate lay on the grass, and neither saw her.
CHAPTER XVI.
HOW JESUS SPOKE TO WOMEN.
"But why wasn't he as gentle with good women?" said Leopold.
"Wasn't he?" said the curate in some surprise.
"He said What have I to do with thee to his own mother?"
"A Greek scholar should go to the Greek," said the curate. "Our
English is not perfect. You see she wanted to make him show off, and
he thought how little she knew what he came to the world for. Her
thoughts were so unlike his that he said, What have we in common! It
was a moan of the God-head over the distance of its creature.
Perhaps he thought: How then will you stand the shock when at length
it comes? But he looked at her as her own son ought to look at every
blessed mother, and she read in his eyes no rebuke, for instantly,
sure of her desire, she told them to do whatever he said."
"I hope that's the right way of it," said Leopold, "for I want to
trust him out and out. But what do you make of the story of the poor
woman that came about her daughter? Wasn't he rough to her? It
always seemed to me such a cruel thing to talk of throwing the meat
of the children to the dogs!"
"We cannot judge of the word until we know the spirit that gave
birth to it. Let me ask you a question: What would you take for the
greatest proof of downright friendship a man could show you?"
"That is too hard a question to answer all at once."
"Well, I may be wrong, but the deepest outcome of friendship seems
to me, on the part of the superior at least, the permission, or
better still, the call, to share in his sufferings. And in saying
that hard word to the poor Gentile, our Lord honoured her thus
mightily. He assumed for the moment the part of the Jew towards the
Gentile, that he might, for the sake of all the world of Gentiles
and Jews, lay bare to his Jewish followers the manner of spirit they
were of, and let them see what a lovely humanity they despised in
their pride of election. He took her to suffer with him for the
salvation of the world. The cloud overshadowed them both, but what
words immediately thereafter made a glory in her heart! He spoke to
her as if her very faith had reached an arm into the heavens, and
brought therefrom the thing she sought.--But I confess," the curate
went on, "those two passages have both troubled me. So I presume
will everything that is God's, until it becomes a strength and a
light by revealing its true nature to the heart that has grown
capable of understanding it. The first sign of the coming capacity
and the coming joy, is the anxiety and the question.--There is
another passage, which, although it does not trouble me so much, I
cannot yet get a right perception of. When Mary Magdalene took the
Master of Death for the gardener--the gardener of the garden of the
tombs! no great mistake, was it?--it is a lovely thing, that
mistaking of Jesus for the gardener!--how the holy and the lowly,
yea the holy and the common meet on all sides! Just listen to their
morning talk--the morning of the eternal open world to Jesus, while
the shadows of this narrow life still clustered around Mary:--I can
give it you exactly, for I was reading it this very day.
"'Woman, why weepest thou? Whom seekest thou?'
"'Sir, if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid
him, and I will take him away.'
"'Mary.'
"'Master!'
"'Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father: but go to my
brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father and your
Father; and to my God and your God.'
"Why did he say, DO NOT TOUCH ME? It could not be that there was any
defilement to one in the new body of the resurrection, from contact
with one still in the old garments of humanity. But could it be that
there was danger to her in the contact? Was there something in the
new house from Heaven hurtful to the old tabernacle? I can hardly
believe it. Perhaps it might be. But we must look at the reason the
Master gives--only of all words hard to understand, the little
conjunctions are sometimes the hardest. What can that FOR mean?
'Touch me not, FOR I am not yet ascended to my Father.' Does it
mean, 'I must first present myself to my Father; I must first have
His hand laid on this body new-risen from the grave; I must go home
first?' The child must kiss his mother first, then his sisters and
brothers: was it so with Jesus? Was he so glad in his father, that
he must carry even the human body he had rescued eternal from the
grave, home to show him first? There are many difficulties about the
interpretation, and even if true, it would still shock every heart
whose devotion was less than absolutely child-like. Was not God WITH
him, as close to him as even God could come to his eternal son--in
him--ONE with him, all the time? How could he get nearer to him by
going to Heaven? What head-quarters, what court of place and
circumstance should the Eternal, Immortal, Invisible hold? And yet
if from him flow time and space, although he cannot be subject to
them; if his son could incarnate himself--cast the living,
responsive, elastic, flowing, evanishing circumstance of a human
garment around him; if, as Novalis says, God can become whatever he
can create, then may there not be some central home of God, holding
relation even to time and space and sense? But I am bewildered about
it.--Jesus stood then in the meeting point of both worlds, or rather
in the skirts of the great world that infolds the less. I am talking
like a baby, for my words cannot compass or even represent my
thoughts. This world looks to us the natural and simple one, and so
it is--absolutely fitted to our need and education. But there is
that in us which is not at home in this world, which I believe holds
secret relations with every star, or perhaps rather, with that in
the heart of God whence issued every star, diverse in kind and
character as in colour and place and motion and light. To that in
us, this world is so far strange and unnatural and unfitting, and we
need a yet homelier home. Yea, no home at last will do, but the home
of God's heart. Jesus, I say, was now looking, on one side, into the
region of a deeper life, where his people, those that knew their own
when they saw him, would one day find themselves tenfold at home;
while, on the other hand, he was looking into the region of their
present life, which custom and faithlessness make them afraid to
leave. But we need not fear what the new conditions of life will
bring, either for body or heart, for they will be nearer and sweeter
to our deeper being, as Jesus is nearer and dearer than any man
because he is more human than any. He is all that we can love or
look for, and at the root of that very loving and looking.--'In my
Father's house are many mansions,' he said. Matter, time, space, are
all God's, and whatever may become of our philosophies, whatever he
does with or in respect of time, place, and what we call matter, his
doing must be true in philosophy as well as fact. But I am
wandering."
The curate was wandering, but the liberty of wandering was essential
to his talking with the kind of freedom and truth he wanted to
mediate betwixt his pupil and the lovely things he saw.
"I wonder where the penitent thief was all the time," said Leopold.
"Yes, that also is a difficulty. There again come in the bothering
time and space, bothering in their relation to heavenly things, I
mean. On the Friday, the penitent thief, as you call him, was to be
with Jesus in Paradise; and now it was Sunday, and Jesus said he had
not yet been up to see his Father. Some would say, I am too literal,
too curious; what can Friday and Sunday have to do with Paradise?
But words MEAN in both worlds, for they are not two but one--surely
at least when Jesus thinks and speaks of them; and there can be no
wrong in feeling ever so blindly and dully after WHAT they mean.
Such humble questioning can do no harm, even if, in face of the
facts, the questions be as far off and SILLY--in the old sweet
meaning of the word--as those of any infant concerning a world he
has not proved.--But about Mary Magdalene: He must have said the
word TOUCH ME NOT. That could not have crept in. It is too hard for
an interpolation, I think; and if no interpolation, it must mean
some deep-good thing we don't understand. One thing we can make sure
of: it was nothing that should hurt her; for see what follows. But
for that, when he said TOUCH ME NOT, FOR I AM NOT YET ASCENDED TO MY
FATHER, she might have thought--'Ah! thou hast thy Father to go to,
and thou wilt leave us for him.'--BUT, he went on, GO TO MY BRETHREN
AND SAY UNTO THEM: I ASCEND UNTO MY FATHER, AND YOUR FATHER; AND MY
GOD AND YOUR GOD. What more could she want? Think: the Father of
Jesus, with whom, in all his knowledge and all his suffering, the
grand heart was perfectly, exultingly satisfied,--that Father he
calls our Father too. He shares with his brethren--of his best, his
deepest, his heartiest, most secret delight, and makes it their and
his most open joy: he shares his eternal Father with us, his perfect
God with his brethren. And whatever his not having yet ascended to
him may mean, we see, with marvel and joy, that what delayed
him--even though, for some reason perfect in tenderness as in truth,
he would not be touched--was love to Mary Magdalene and his mother
and his brethren. He could not go to the Father without comforting
them first. And certainly whatever she took the TOUCH ME NOT to mean
or point at, it was nothing that hurt her.--It just strikes me--is
it possible he said it in order to turn the overwhelming passion of
her joy, which after such a restoration would have clung more than
ever to the visible presence, and would be ready to suffer the pains
of death yet again when he parted from her--might it be to turn that
torrent into the wider and ever widening channel of joy in his
everlasting presence to the innermost being, his communion, heart to
heart, with every child of his Father? In our poor weakness and
narrowness and self-love, even of Jesus the bodily may block out the
spiritual nearness, which, however in most moods we may be unable to
realise the fact, is and remains a thing unutterably lovelier and
better and dearer--enhancing tenfold what vision of a bodily
presence may at some time be granted us. But how any woman can help
casting herself heart and soul at the feet of such a lowly grandeur,
such a tender majesty, such a self-dissolving perfection--I cannot
imagine. The truth must be that those who kneel not have not seen.
You do not once read of a woman being against him--except indeed it
was his own mother, when she thought he was going all astray and
forgetting his high mission. The divine love in him towards his
Father in heaven and his brethren of men, was ever melting down his
conscious individuality in sweetest showers upon individual hearts;
he came down like rain upon the mown grass, like showers that water
the earth. No woman, no man surely ever saw him as he was and did
not worship!"
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