LET THE DEAD BURY THEIR DEAD
Winifred and Hubert walked a part of the way home in silence. At
length the former spoke.
"It seems to me we have been rather blind concerning the object of
missions," she said. "What do you think of it now, Hubert?"
"I am convinced that I have taken a very shallow view of it," Hubert
replied. "It is a marvel to me now that I could have missed so
completely the true motive of missions. It is as clear as daylight in
the Bible. It is humiliating to think one has been so contentedly
provincial in thoughts of God's salvation. I am ashamed of it."
"So am I," agreed Winifred, and then they walked on in silence. An
uneasy thought was gnawing at her heart that hardly found expression.
Had it been put in words it would have been something like this:
"How are we _to act_ with reference to new light on the will of God?
If Hubert and I are really His children, called into His fellowship,
then we must be sympathetic with His wish and do what we can to forward
it. What would that be?"
Soon they reached the door of their home. Home! What a pleasant word
it is. How easily the accustomed key turned in the latch, and how
familiarly the house belongings greeted them as they entered. Ay,
"there's no place like home," and its cords wind themselves about us
silently, certainly, until it seems almost a sacrilege to think of
leaving it.
Hubert went at once to his room, to the spot where questions were wont
to be settled, and when dinner was announced he begged to be excused.
Winifred and her father sat alone at the table. He inquired concerning
the missionary meeting, and she rehearsed to him much of what Mr. Carew
had said.
"Ah, very good--very good," Mr. Gray said. "Very conclusive, I should
think."
But it did not occur to him how a conclusive argument and a life action
might stand related. Theories cost nothing when only the mind assents
to them. But wrought in the heart, they mold lives after them.
In Hubert's room a painful heart process was going on. Sunk in a deep,
capacious chair, with head resting upon his hand, he set in order
before himself the axiomatic truths he had heard.
"God's supreme work is salvation," he meditated. "The field for this
work is the world--the whole world. Salvation is wrought--as to man's
part--through faith in a message preached. The message requires a
messenger. In vast proportions of the field the messengers are
wanting. What should be done about it? Clearly, the messengers should
rally at the command of God. But it must be at His command. Men
cannot go self-sent."
This thought gave a brief respite to the haunting sense of a
responsibility.
"_Whom shall I send and who will go for us_?" The double questions
heard by Isaiah in the temple repeated itself now in Hubert's mind.
"There are two questions there," he said. "'Whom shall _I send_, and
who will go for us?' A man can only answer, finally, the second. God
must answer His own first query,--although Isaiah did suggest, 'send
me.' Must not any loyal child _if he hear_ his Father's appeal say,
'Here am I'?"
Hubert's head sank lower upon his hand.
"Have I heard the voice of His need?" he asked, but hesitated to answer
his own question. "Yes," he said finally, aloud, in a strained voice,
"I have heard. I can never un-hear His words. I may disregard them,
make myself forget them, but I can never go back to the place of twelve
hours ago and be as though I had never known His mind. I have been in
His temple--I, a worshiper purged by His infinite grace, I have seen a
vision of His will, and have heard the voice of His need. I can never
undo the fact."
Lines that somebody had written repeated themselves in his mind:
"Light obeyed increaseth light;
Light rejected bringeth night.
Who shall give me power to choose,
If the love of light I lose?"
Why did he still hesitate? Why did his "here am I" linger for hours
unsaid? A sense of the reality of present things and of home
surroundings swept over him. These were the possible things. But
those--? He shuddered. Dim, misty, in a veil of unreality lay China,
a distant land. What relation had he with it? There were
missionaries, a strange, separated, unusual folk, specially created for
the purpose, no doubt; but _he_, a practical, everyday, intensely real
sort of being--what had he to do with things so far away? Oh, no! It
was not for him. Let him put aside the overwrought fancies of the day,
and return to practical life again.
He almost rose from his seat as though to emphasize his sober thought,
but an impression restrained him.
"And so I lose My witnesses!" he imagined his Lord saying with grief.
"They are walking by sight and not by faith, and the seen, tangible
things hold them. Who will stretch out his hands to lay hold upon the
things of eternal life?"
Hubert sank in rebuked silence under the spell of the afternoon's
disclosure. It was reality, if he were a Christian. It must be faced.
But how the seen things wrestled with the heavenly vision! Habit, long
association, and tender love mingled a cup of sacrifice that he must
drink. Could he leave all these for the sake of the joyful message of
his Lord?
Now imagination pictured the leavetaking. How the familiar scenes of
his home and native city remonstrated with his choice! In fancy he
wrung for the last time his father's hand, he bade one last farewell to
the flower-dressed grave of his gentle mother, and--and _Winifred_!
A dry, tearless sob shook him. O sweet sister, loved most of all since
the days when, her jealous-eyed protector, he walked beside her to the
school, shared sturdily but keenly her childish woes and fought all
battles for her! Loved now with a closer, spiritual tie in their
mutual devotion to their blessed Lord! How could he give her up? How
could he leave her undefended now by his watchful love?
The scene of three years ago when he handed the sword of his
self-served and self-defended life to Jesus Christ, and purposed in His
heart to follow Him at any cost, was vividly rehearsed in his memory.
Possessions, home, kindred, all things, were nominated in the bond of
the whole-hearted surrender to his Lord. The time had come to hold to
those honest terms.
Hubert rose from his seat with a pale face, and a death-like sinking at
his heart. "Yes, Lord Jesus," he uttered with dry lips, "I am at Thy
command. Forgive my coward halting. If Thou wilt send me, I will go."
On the other side of the hall, in her pretty room, Winifred had prayed:
"We have seen the glance of Thine eye, O Lord, and know Thy longing.
Open our eyes to see how we may serve Thee, and strengthen our hearts
to bear--nay, to love!--Thy will. If we must give each other up"--a
long pause, broken by storms of weeping, intervened--"then let us
see--oh, _let us see Thy face_!"
When Winifred and Hubert first met in the hall next morning some gleams
of comfort had already stolen into both their hearts. He put his arm
about her as they descended the stairs together, and at the foot they
paused.
"Dear little sister!" he said caressingly.
Her eyes filled at his unusual tenderness; for Hubert's love, however
fervent and well believed-in, was not demonstrative. She looked up in
his face with a long, serious question. He answered it by asking:
"Shall I go?--for Him, Winnie?"
"Yes, Hubert," she said earnestly, "oh, yes!" But the color flickered
in her cheeks and her lips grew white.
They stood for a moment together but neither spoke. Together they
presented afresh their offering to God, and He knew that it was costly.
At breakfast neither spoke of the matter that was uppermost in their
hearts. But later Hubert sought his father in the library and made
known to him the step he had taken.
Grief, dismay, and almost anger, struggled in the older man's heart.
He looked at his son with sorrowful sternness.
"Then--then, Hubert," he said very slowly, "you have concluded to leave
me."
A pang shot through Hubert's heart, keener than any thought of his own
pain, but he answered steadily:
"I have concluded, father, to follow Christ."
Mr. Gray frowned. He was not conscious of frowning at the name of
Christ, or at so pure a sentiment as that uttered, but grief made him
insensible to what he did.
"And is that," he asked with some irony, "the only way you can find of
following Him? Can no one follow Him at home?"
"I do not see that he can if he is called abroad, father."
"And are you called?" he asked sharply, still the pain at his heart
dulling any sense of shame that he could speak unsympathetically of
such a thing.
Hubert answered gently.
"I believe I am, father," he said.
Mr. Gray stared at his son silently. His face grew ashen and the hand
upon the table before him trembled visibly. Hubert stood in an agony
of mute sympathy. At last the father rose without a word and prepared
to leave the room. His face looked older by a decade than an hour
before. Hubert made a movement to detain him and opened his lips to
speak; but the other waved him aside with a quick gesture of the
trembling hand. And so they parted.
Hubert looked after his father with a breaking heart. He had thought
the crisis of his grief was passed when alone in his room he wrestled
out the problem for his own heart. But now a heavier weight rested
upon his soul. Must he break his father's heart? Must the hope of
happy comradeship in future years be put aside, and with the
disappointment his father age and weaken irrecoverably? He saw him
walk down the path slowly and heavily, and a feeling of awful guilt
swept over him. Was he his father's murderer? Was he following a
delusion that would make himself an exile and lay his father
prematurely in his grave? The thought overpowered him. He sank
helplessly in a chair and groaned out his burden to the Lord.
"O Lord," he prayed, "am I walking in Thy footsteps, or am I a deluded
wretch, bringing sorrow, and it may be death, to those I love most?"
He paused, and his head sank deeply. "Lord, this is grief," he
groaned. "This is grief. I have not known it before."
And so it seemed. Thoughts of his own loneliness and possible
hardships seemed light compared with this.
"Grief!" he repeated, as though he found relief in the pitiful uttering
of the word whose depths he was sounding. Then memory framed a passage
which held the same word. "A man of sorrows," it repeated, "and
_acquainted with grief_!"
How sweet the words sounded! And how dear the imagined face of Him of
whom they were spoken!
"Tell me of Thy grief," he whispered. "Didst Thou cause grief?"
Words of Scripture again came to his help.
"Yea, a sword shall pierce through thine own soul," he heard Simeon say
to the mother of his Lord, and it dawned upon him that when Jesus faced
the cross with its agony He must have felt through His tenderest of
hearts the sword-piercing of His Mother's sorrow. Ah, yes! He caused
grief. And as He took His own way to the cross He raised a standard
for those who follow of pitiless separations and of broken ties, if
need be, for His kingdom's sake. "_If any man cometh unto Me, and,
hateth not his own father, and mother, and wife, and children, and
brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be My
disciple_."
Texts that Hubert had passed lightly before were now illuminated with
meaning and power as the occasion rose for them to be translated into
life. He found a rare sweetness of comfort in those which assured him
that he need not fear he was out of the path of the Saviour's
footprints, though he found them blood-marked or washed with many
tears. He turned to some familiar words which he wished to see before
him again in plain black and white. They were found toward the end of
the ninth chapter of Luke.
"Lord, suffer me first to go and bury my father," said one in response
to his Lord's "follow me." And said Jesus, "_Let the dead bury their
dead, but go thou and preach the kingdom of God_."
"Let the dead bury their dead!" What a strange expression, and what
could it mean! Hubert pondered the text, no longer in keen agony of
mind, for his distress had lightened as he saw even on the painful way
the light of God's will shining. Anything could be borne, if the face
of the Lord still shone upon it!
"What does it mean?" he queried in deep meditation.
Slowly a meaning, not the full one, doubtless, but suited to his need,
dawned upon him. Let the spiritually dead attend to the affairs of
death. Let them follow the conventional, natural round, and answer
always to the cries of human love and longing. Let them keep to
earthly ties and earthly work. But let the living be about the affairs
of life! A ministry waits that only living hands can serve. Let
filial hearts render unto earthly love that which is due, but see that
_thou_, child of God, render also unto God the things which are God's.
"There are a thousand things," thought Hubert, "that unregenerated men
can do quite as well as any. Indeed, they have an affinity with
earthly things that is lacking in the heaven-born man. To trade in
iron and amass wealth does not require a living man. I will let others
do it. The supreme business of my Father calls, and I must be about
it. But my earthly father? Shall I wait first to bury him? The Lord
says, No."
Hubert studied his pattern in His life as well as words.
"He was subject to His parents," he reflected, "until the time came for
His ministry and He had reached mature years of responsibility. Then,
when He had entered upon His task, not even His mother's voice could
turn Him from it. When His friends thought Him beside Himself, and she
with them sought to take Him away from His work, He said, 'Who is My
mother? . . . Whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my
brother and sister and mother.' But He still was not unfilial. When
not even the thought of the sword through her heart could take Him from
the cross, He made provision for her, commending her to John's faithful
love."
Hubert's eyes grew soft again with thoughts of his father. There was
no need to think of provision for him, for he had enough. But he
longed to give him always the joy of a son's tender love and
companionship. Still the supreme call was inexorable, and another
Father's business demanded filial fellowship.
"Thou must care for him, Lord," he said, and with a sudden impulse he
knelt beside the library table and prayed that God would take away all
the sting of his father's grief, and give him joy instead; joy in
fellowship with the great Father in His giving.
After prayer he was much relieved and went to his work as usual,
admitting to his office soon after his arrival Mr. Carew, who called in
response to his wish of the day before. Hubert had more to offer than
the financial gift contemplated.