It happened a little after this time that the minister's invalid
wife improved--somewhat unexpectedly in health, and, as Bathsheba was
beginning to suffer from imprisonment in her sick-chamber, the physician
advised very strongly that she should vary the monotony of her life by
going out of the house daily for fresh air and cheerful companionship.
She was therefore frequently at the house of Olive Eveleth; and as
Myrtle wanted to see young people, and had her own way now as never
before, the three girls often met at the parsonage. Thus they became
more and more intimate, and grew more and more into each other's
affections.
These girls presented three types of spiritual character which are to be
found in all our towns and villages. Olive had been carefully trained,
and at the proper age confirmed. Bathsheba had been prayed for, and in
due time startled and converted. Myrtle was a simple daughter of Eve,
with many impulses like those of the other two girls, and some that
required more watching. She was not so safe, perhaps, as either of the
other girls, for this world or the next; but she was on some accounts
more interesting, as being a more genuine representative of that
inexperienced and too easily deluded, yet always cherished, mother of
our race, whom we must after all accept as embodying the creative idea
of woman, and who might have been alive and happy now (though at a great
age) but for a single fatal error.
The Rev. Ambrose Eveleth, Rector of Saint Bartholomew's, Olive's father,
was one of a class numerous in the Anglican Church, a cultivated man,
with pure tastes, with simple habits, a good reader, a neat writer, a
safe thinker, with a snug and well-fenced mental pasturage, which his
sermons kept cropped moderately close without any exhausting demand upon
the soil. Olive had grown insensibly into her religious maturity, as
into her bodily and intellectual developments, which one might
suppose was the natural order of things in a well-regulated
Christian--household, where the children are brought up in the nurture
and admonition of the Lord.
Bathsheba had been worried over and perplexed and depressed with vague
apprehensions about her condition, conveyed in mysterious phrases and
graveyard expressions of countenance, until about the age of fourteen
years, when she had one of those emotional paroxysms very commonly
considered in some Protestant sects as essential to the formation of
religious character. It began with a shivering sense of enormous guilt,
inherited and practised from her earliest infancy. Just as every breath
she ever drew had been malignantly poisoning the air with carbonic acid,
so her every thought and feeling had been tainting the universe with
sin. This spiritual chill or rigor had in due order been followed by the
fever-flush of hope, and that in its turn had ushered in the last stage,
the free opening of all the spiritual pores in the peaceful relaxation
of self-surrender.
Good Christians are made by many very different processes. Bathsheba had
taken her religion after the fashion of her sect; but it was genuine, in
spite of the cavils of the formalists, who could not understand that the
spirit which kept her at her mother's bedside was the same as that which
poured the tears of Mary of Magdala on the feet of her Lord, and led her
forth at early dawn with the other Mary to visit his sepulchre.
Myrtle was a child of nature, and of course, according to the out-worn
formulae which still shame the distorted religion of humanity, hateful
to the Father in Heaven who made her. She had grown up in antagonism
with all that surrounded her. She had been talked to about her corrupt
nature and her sinful heart, until the words had become an offence and
an insult. Bathsheba knew her father's fondness for young company too
well to suppose that his intercourse with Myrtle had gone beyond the
sentimental and poetical stage, and was not displeased when she found
that there was some breach between them. Myrtle herself did not profess
to have passed through the technical stages of the customary spiritual
paroxysm. Still, the gentle daughter of the terrible preacher loved her
and judged her kindly. She was modest enough to think that perhaps the
natural state of some girls might be at least as good as her own after
the spiritual change of which she had been the subject. A manifest
heresy, but not new, nor unamiable, nor inexplicable.
The excellent Bishop Joseph Hall, a painful preacher and solid divine of
Puritan tendencies, declares that he prefers good-nature before grace
in the election of a wife; because, saith he, “it will be a hard Task,
where the Nature is peevish and froward, for Grace to make an entire
Conquest whilst Life lasteth.” An opinion apparently entertained by many
modern ecclesiastics, and one which may be considered very encouraging
to those young ladies of the politer circles who have a fancy for
marrying bishops and other fashionable clergymen. Not of course that
“grace” is so rare a gift among the young ladies of the upper social
sphere; but they are in the habit of using the word with a somewhat
different meaning from that which the good Bishop attached to it.