CHAPTER XXIII.
WE have said before, what we now repeat, that it is impossible towrite a story of New England life and manners for superficial thoughtor shallow feeling. They who would fully understand the springs whichmoved the characters with whom we now associate must go down with us tothe very depths.
Never was there a community where the roots of common life shot downso deeply, and were so intensely grappled around things sublime andeternal. The founders of it were a body of confessors and martyrs, whoturned their backs on the whole glory of the visible to found in thewilderness a republic of which the God of heaven and earth should bethe sovereign power. For the first hundred years grew this community,shut out by a fathomless ocean from the existing world, and dividedby an antagonism not less deep from all the reigning ideas of nominalChristendom.
In a community thus unworldly must have arisen a mode of thought,energetic, original, and sublime. The leaders of thought and feelingwere the ministry, and we boldly assert that the spectacle of theearly ministry of New England was one to which the world gives noparallel. Living an intense, earnest, practical life, mostly tillingthe earth with their own hands, they yet carried on the most startlingand original religious investigations with a simplicity that mighthave been deemed audacious, were it not so reverential. All oldissues relating to government, religion, ritual, and forms of churchorganization having for them passed away, they went straight to theheart of things, and boldly confronted the problem of universal being.They had come out from the world as witnesses to the most solemnand sacred of human rights. They had accustomed themselves boldly tochallenge and dispute all sham pretensions and idolatries of pastages—to question the right of kings in the State and of prelates in theChurch; and now they turned the same bold inquiries towards the EternalThrone, and threw down their glove in the lists as authorized defendersof every mystery in the Eternal Government. The task they proposed tothemselves was that of reconciling the most tremendous facts of sin andevil, present and eternal, with those conceptions of Infinite Powerand Benevolence which their own strong and generous natures enabledthem so vividly to realize. In the intervals of planting and harvestingthey were busy with the toils of adjusting the laws of a universe.Solemnly simple, they made long journeys in their old one-horse chaisesto settle with each other some nice point of celestial jurisprudence,and to compare their maps of the Infinite. Their letters to eachother form a literature altogether unique. Hopkins sends to Edwardsthe younger his scheme of the universe, in which he starts with theproposition that God is infinitely above all obligations of any kindto his creatures. Edwards replies with the brusque comment:—‘This iswrong; God has no more right to injure a creature than a creature hasto injure God;’ and each probably about that time preached a sermon onhis own views, which was discussed by every farmer, in intervals ofplough and hoe, by every woman and girl, at loom, spinning-wheel, orwash-tub. New England was one vast sea, surging from depths to heightswith thought and discussion on the most insoluble of mysteries. And itis to be added that no man or woman accepted any theory or speculationsimply _as_ theory or speculation; all was profoundly real and vital—afoundation on which actual life was based with intensest earnestness.
The views of human existence which resulted from this course oftraining were gloomy enough to oppress any heart which did notrise above them by triumphant faith, or sink below them by brutishinsensibility; for they included every moral problem of natural orrevealed religion, divested of all those softening poetries and tenderdraperies which, forms, ceremonies, and rituals had thrown aroundthem in other parts and ages of Christendom. The human race, withoutexception, coming into existence ‘under God’s wrath and curse,’ witha nature so fatally disordered, that, although perfect free agents,men were infallibly certain to do nothing to Divine acceptance untilregenerated by the supernatural aid of God’s Spirit, this aid beinggiven to a certain decreed number of the human race only; the rest,with enough free agency to make them responsible, but without thisindispensable assistance exposed to the malignant assaults of evilspirits versed in every art of temptation, were sure to fall hopelesslyinto perdition. The standard of what constituted a true regeneration,as presented in such treatises as Edwards on the Affections, and othersof the times, made this change to be something so high, disinterested,and superhuman, so removed from all natural and common habits andfeelings, that the most earnest and devoted, whose whole life hadbeen a constant travail of endeavour, a tissue of almost unearthlydisinterestedness, often lived and died with only a glimmering hope ofits attainment.
According to any views then entertained of the evidences of a trueregeneration, the number of the whole human race who could be supposedas yet to have received this grace was so small, that, as to anynumerical valuation, it must have been expressed by an infinitesimal.Dr. Hopkins, in many places, distinctly recognizes the fact, that thegreater part of the human race, up to his time, had been eternallylost; and boldly assumes the ground, that this amount of sin andsuffering, being the best and most necessary means of the greatestfinal amount of happiness, was not merely permitted, but distinctlychosen, decreed, and provided for, as essential in the schemes ofInfinite Benevolence. He held that this decree not only _permitted_each individual act of sin, but also took measures to make it certain,though, by an exercise of infinite skill, it accomplished this resultwithout violating human free agency.
The preaching of those times was animated by an unflinching consistencywhich never shrank from carrying an idea to its remotest logicalverge. The sufferings of the lost were not kept from view, butproclaimed with a terrible power. Dr. Hopkins boldly asserts, that ‘allthe use which God will have for them is to suffer; this is all theend they can answer; therefore all their faculties, and their wholecapacities, will be employed and used for this end.... The body can byomnipotence be made capable of suffering the greatest imaginable painwithout producing dissolution, or abating the least degree of lifeor sensibility.... One way in which God will show his power in thepunishment of the wicked, will be in strengthening and upholding theirbodies and souls in torments which otherwise would be intolerable.’
The sermons preached by President Edwards on this subject are soterrific in their refined poetry of torture, that very few persons ofquick sensibility could read them through without agony; and it isrelated that when in those calm and tender tones, which never rose topassionate enunciation, he read these discourses, the house was oftenfilled with shrieks and wailings, and that a brother minister oncelaid hold of his skirts, exclaiming, in an involuntary agony, ‘Oh! Mr.Edwards! Mr. Edwards! is God not a God of mercy?’
Not that these men were indifferent or insensible to the dread wordsthey spoke; their whole lives and deportment bore thrilling witness totheir sincerity. Edwards set apart special days of fasting, in view ofthe dreadful doom of the lost, in which he was wont to walk the floor,weeping and wringing his hands. Hopkins fasted every Saturday. DavidBrainerd gave up every refinement of civilized life to weep and prayat the feet of hardened savages, if by any means he might save _one_.All, by lives of eminent purity and earnestness, gave awful weight andsanction to their words.
If we add to this statement the fact, that it was always proposed toevery inquiring soul, as an evidence of regeneration, that it shouldtruly and heartily accept all the ways of God thus declared right andlovely, and from the heart submit to Him as the only just and good,it will be seen what materials of tremendous internal conflict andagitation were all the while working in every bosom. Almost all thehistories of religious experience of those times relate paroxysms ofopposition to God and fierce rebellion, expressed in language whichappals the very soul, followed at length by mysterious elevationsof faith and reactions of confiding love, the result of Divineinterposition, which carried the soul far above the region of theintellect, into that of direct spiritual intuition.
President Edwards records that he was once in this state of enmity,that the facts of the Divine administration seemed horrible to him, andthat this o
pposition was overcome by no course of reasoning, but by an‘_inward and sweet sense_’ which came to him once when walking alone inthe fields, and, looking up into the blue sky, he saw the blending ofthe Divine majesty with a calm, sweet, and almost infinite meekness.
The piety which grew up under such a system was, of necessity,energetic; it was the uprousing of the whole energy of the human soul,pierced and wrenched and probed from her lowest depths to her topmostheights, with every awful life-force possible to existence. He whosefaith in God came clear through these terrible tests, would be surenever to know greater ones. He might certainly challenge earth orheaven, things present or things to come, to swerve him from this grandallegiance.
But it is to be conceded that these systems, so admirable in relationto the energy, earnestness, and acuteness of their authors, whenreceived as absolute truth, and as a basis of actual life, had, onminds of a certain class, the effect of a slow poison, producinglife-habits of morbid action very different from any which everfollowed the simple reading of the Bible. They differ from the NewTestament as the living embrace of a friend does from his lifelessbody, mapped out under the knife of the anatomical demonstrator; everynerve and muscle is there, but to a sensitive spirit there is the verychill of death in the analysis.
All systems that deal with the infinite are, besides, exposed to dangerfrom small, unsuspected admixtures of human error, which become deadlywhen carried to such vast results. The smallest speck of earth’s dust,in the focus of an infinite lens, appears magnified among the heavenlyorbs as a frightful monster.
Thus it happened that while strong spirits walked, palm-crowned, withvictorious hymns, along these sublime paths, feebler and more sensitiveones lay along the track, bleeding away in life-long despair. Fearfulto them were the shadows that lay over the cradle and the grave. Themother clasped her babe to her bosom, and looked with shuddering to theawful coming trial of free agency, with its terrible responsibilitiesand risks, and, as she thought of the infinite chances against herbeloved, almost wished it might die in infancy. But when the stroke ofdeath came, and some young, thoughtless head was laid suddenly low, whocan say what silent anguish of loving hearts sounded the dread depthsof eternity with the awful question, _Where?_
In no other time or place of Christendom have so fearful issues beenpresented to the mind. Some church interposed its protecting shield;the Christian born and baptized child was supposed in some wise rescuedfrom the curse of the fall, and related to the great redemption, to bea member of Christ’s family, and, if ever so sinful, still infolded insome vague sphere of hope and protection. Augustine solaced the dreadanxieties of trembling love by prayers offered for the dead, in timeswhen the Church above and on earth presented itself to the eye of themourner as a great assembly with one accord lifting interceding handsfor the parted soul.
But the clear logic and intense individualism of New England deepenedthe problems of the Augustinian faith, while they swept away all thosesoftening provisions so earnestly clasped to the throbbing heart ofthat great poet of theology. No rite, no form, no paternal relation,no faith or prayer of church, earthly or heavenly, interposed theslightest shield between the trembling spirit and Eternal Justice. Theindividual entered eternity alone, as if he had no interceding relationthe universe.
This, then, was the awful dread which was constantly underlying life.This it was which caused the tolling bell in green hollows and lonelydells to be a sound which shook the soul and searched the heart withfearful questions. And this it was that was lying with mountain weighton the soul of the mother, too keenly agonized to feel that doubt insuch a case was any less a torture than the most dreadful certainty.
Hers was a nature more reasoning than creative and poetic; and whatevershe believed bound her mind in strictest chains to its logical results.She delighted in the regions of mathematical knowledge, and walked themas a native home; but the commerce with abstract certainties fitted hermind still more to be stiffened and enchained by glacial reasonings, inregions where spiritual intuitions are as necessary as wings to birds.
Mary was by nature of the class who never reason abstractly, whoseintellections all begin in the heart, which sends them coloured withits warm life-tint to the brain. Her perceptions of the same subjectswere as different from Mrs. Marvyn’s as his who revels only in colourfrom his who is busy with the dry details of mere outline. The onemind was arranged like a map, and the other like a picture. In all thesystem which had been explained to her, her mind selected points onwhich it seized with intense sympathy, which it dwelt upon and expandedtill all else fell away. The sublimity of disinterested benevolence,the harmony and order of a system tending in its final results toinfinite happiness, the goodness of God, the love of a self-sacrificingRedeemer, were all so many glorious pictures, which she revolved in hermind with small care for their logical relations.
Mrs. Marvyn had never, in all the course of their intimacy, openedher mouth to Mary on the subject of religion. It was not an uncommonincident of those times for persons of great elevation and purity ofcharacter to be familiarly known and spoken of as living under a cloudof religious gloom; and it was simply regarded as one more mysteriousinstance of the workings of that infinite decree which denied to themthe special illumination of the Spirit.
When Mrs. Marvyn had drawn Mary with her into her room, she seemedlike a person almost in frenzy. She shut and bolted the door, drew herto the foot of the bed, and, throwing her arms round her, rested herhot and throbbing forehead on her shoulder. She pressed her thin handover her eyes, and then, suddenly drawing back, looked her in the faceas one resolved to speak something long suppressed. Her soft browneyes had a flash of despairing wildness in them, like that of a huntedanimal turning in its death-struggle on its pursuer.
‘Mary,’ she said, ‘I can’t help it,—don’t mind what I say, but Imust speak or die! Mary, I cannot, will not, be resigned!—it is allhard, unjust, cruel!—to all eternity I will say so! To me there is nogoodness, no justice, no mercy in anything! Life seems to me the mosttremendous doom that can be inflicted on a helpless being! _What hadwe done_ that it should be sent upon us? Why were we made to love so,to hope so,—our hearts so full of feeling, and all the laws of Naturemarching over us,—never stopping for our agony? Why, we can suffer soin this life that we had better never have been born!
‘But, Mary, think what a moment life is! think of those awful ages ofeternity! and then think of all God’s power and knowledge used on thelost to make them suffer! think that all but the merest fragment ofmankind have gone into this, are in it now! The number of the elect isso small we can scarce count them for anything! Think what noble minds,what warm, generous hearts, what splendid natures are wrecked andthrown away by thousands and tens of thousands! How we love each other!how our hearts weave into each other! how more than glad we should beto die for each other! And all this ends—O God, how must it end? Mary!it isn’t _my_ sorrow only! What right have I to mourn? Is _my_ sonany better than any other mother’s son? Thousands of thousands, whosemothers loved them as I loved mine, are gone there! Oh, my wedding-day!Why did they rejoice? Brides should wear mourning, the bells shouldtoll for every wedding; every new family is built over this awful pitof despair, and only one in a thousand escapes!’
Pale, aghast, horror-stricken, Mary stood dumb, as one who in the darkand storm sees by the sudden glare of lightning a chasm yawning underfoot. It was amazement and dimness of anguish; the dreadful wordsstruck on the very centre where her soul rested. She felt as if thepoint of a wedge were being driven between her life and her life’slife, between her and her God. She clasped her hands instinctivelyon her bosom, as if to hold there some cherished image, and said ina piercing voice of supplication, ‘_My_ God! _my_ God! oh, where artThou?’
Mrs. Marvyn walked up and down the room with a vivid spot of red ineach cheek and a baleful fire in her eyes, talking in rapid soliloquy,scarcely regarding her listener, absorbed in her own enkindled thoughts.
‘Dr. Hopkins says th
at this is all best, better than it would havebeen in any other possible way; that God _chose_ it because it wasfor a greater final good; that He not only chose it, but took meansto make it certain, that He ordains every sin, and does all that isnecessary to make it certain; that He creates the vessels of wrath andfits them for destruction; and that He has an infinite knowledge bywhich He can do it without violating their free agency. So much theworse! What a use of infinite knowledge! What if men should do so?What if a father should take means to make it certain that his poorlittle child should be an abandoned wretch, without violating his freeagency? So much the worse, I say! They say He does this so that He mayshow to all eternity, by their example, the evil nature of sin andits consequences! This is all that the greater part of the human racehave been used for yet; and it is all right, because an overplus ofinfinite happiness is yet to be wrought out by it! It is _not_ right!No possible amount of good to ever so many can make it right to depraveever so few; happiness and misery cannot be measured so! I never canthink it right, never! Yet they say our salvation depends on our lovingGod, loving Him better than ourselves, loving Him better than ourdearest friends. It is impossible! it is contrary to the laws of mynature! I can never love God! I can never praise Him! I am lost! lost!lost! And what is worse, I cannot redeem my friends! Oh, I _could_suffer for ever, how willingly! if I could save _him_! But oh,eternity, eternity! Frightful, unspeakable woe! No end! no bottom! noshore! no hope! O God! O God!’
_The Comforter._
_Page 215._
Sampson Low, Son & Co. Septr. 20th, 1859.]
Mrs. Marvyn’s eyes grew wilder,—she walked the floor, wringing herhands,—and her words, mingled with shrieks and moans, became whirlingand confused, as when in autumn a storm drives the leaves in dizzymazes.
Mary was alarmed,—the ecstasy of despair was just verging on insanity.She rushed out and called Mr. Marvyn.
‘Oh! come in! do! quick!—I’m afraid her mind is going!’ she said.
‘It is what I feared,’ he said, rising from where he sat reading hisgreat Bible, with an air of heartbroken dejection. ‘Since she heardthis news, she has not slept nor shed a tear. The Lord hath covered uswith a cloud in the day of His fierce anger.’
He came into the room, and tried to take his wife to his arms. Shepushed him violently back, her eyes glistening with a fierce light.‘Leave me alone!’ she said,—‘I am a lost spirit!’
These words were uttered in a shriek that went through Mary’s heartlike an arrow.
At this moment, Candace, who had been anxiously listening at the doorfor an hour past, suddenly burst into the room.
‘Lor’ bress ye, Squire Marvyn, we won’t hab her goin’ on dis yer way,’she said. ‘Do talk _gospel_ to her, can’t ye—ef you can’t, I will.’
‘Come, ye poor little lamb,’ she said, walking straight up to Mrs.Marvyn, ‘come to ole Candace!’—and with that she gathered the paleform to her bosom, and sat down and began rocking her, as if she hadbeen a babe. ‘Honey, darlin’, ye a’n’t right, dar’s a drefful mistakesomewhar,’ she said. ‘Why, de Lord a’n’t like what ye tink,—He _loves_ye, honey! Why, jes’ feel how _I_ loves ye,—poor ole black Candace,—an’I a’n’t better’n Him as made me! Who was it wore de crown o’ thorns,lamb?—who was it sweat great drops o’ blood?—who was it said, “Father,forgive dem”? Say, honey!—wasn’t it de Lord dat made ye?—Dar, dar,now ye’r’ cryin’!—cry away, and ease yer poor little heart! He diedfor Mass’r Jim,—loved him and _died_ for him,—jes’ give up His sweet,precious body and soul for him on de cross! Laws, jes’ _leave_ him inJesus’ hands! Why, honey, dar’s de very print o’ de nails in his handsnow!’
The flood-gates were rent; and healing sobs and tears shook the frailform, as a faded lily shakes under the soft rains of summer. All in theroom wept together.
‘Now, honey,’ said Candace, after a pause of some minutes, ‘I knows ourDoctor’s a mighty good man, an’ larned,—an’ in fair weather I ha’n’t no’bjection to yer hearin’ all about dese yer great an’ mighty tings he’sgot to say. But, honey, dey won’t do for you now; sick folks mus’n’thab strong meat; an’ times like dese, dar jest a’n’t but one ting tocome to, an’ dat ar’s _Jesus_. Jes’ come right down to whar poor oleblack Candace has to stay allers,—it’s a good place, darlin’! _Lookright at Jesus._ Tell ye, honey, ye can’t live no other way now. Don’tye ’member how He looked on His mother, when she stood faintin’ an’tremblin’ under de cross, jes’ like you? He knows all about mothers’hearts; He won’t break yours. It was jes’ ’cause He know’d we’d comeinto straits like dis yer, dat He went through all dese tings,—Him,de Lord o’ Glory! Is dis Him you was a-talkin’ about?—Him you can’tlove? Look at Him, an’ see ef you can’t. Look an’ see what He is!—don’task no questions, and don’t go to no reasonin’s,—jes’ look at _Him_,hangin’ dar, so sweet and patient, on de cross! All dey could docouldn’t stop his lovin’ ’em; He prayed for ’em wid all de breath Hehad. Dar’s a God you can love, a’n’t dar? Candace loves Him,—poor, ole,foolish, black, wicked Candace,—and she knows He loves her,’—and hereCandace broke down into torrents of weeping.
They laid the mother, faint and weary, on her bed, and beneath theshadow of that suffering cross came down a healing sleep on those wearyeyelids.
‘Honey,’ said Candace, mysteriously, after she had drawn Mary out ofthe room, ‘don’t ye go for to troublin’ yer mind wid dis yer. I’m clarMass’r James is one o’ de ’lect; and I’m clar dar’s consid’able moreo’ de ’lect dan people tink. Why, Jesus didn’t die for nothin’,—alldat love a’n’t gwine to be wasted. De ’lect is more’n you or I knows,honey! Dar’s de _Spirit_,—He’ll give it to ’em; and ef Mass’r James_is_ called an’ took, depend upon it de Lord has got him ready,—courseHe has,—so don’t ye go to layin’ on yer poor heart what no mortalcreetur can live under; ’cause, as we’s got to live in dis yer world,it’s quite clar de Lord must ha’ fixed it so we _can_; and ef tings wasas some folks suppose, why, we _couldn’t_ live, and dar wouldn’t be nosense in anyting dat goes on.’
The sudden shock of these scenes was followed, in Mrs. Marvyn’s case,by a low, lingering fever. Her room was darkened, and she lay on herbed, a pale, suffering form, with scarcely the ability to raise herhand. The shimmering twilight of the sick-room fell on white napkins,spread over stands, where constantly appeared new vials, big andlittle, as the physician made his daily visit, and prescribed now thisdrug and now that, for a wound that had struck through the soul.
Mary remained many days at the white house, because, to the invalid,no step, no voice, no hand was like hers. We see her there now, as shesits in the glimmering by the bed-curtains,—her head a little drooped,as droops a snowdrop over a grave;—one ray of light from a round holein the closed shutters falls on her smooth-parted hair, her small handsclasped on her knees, her mouth has lines of sad compression, and inher eyes are infinite questionings.