Upon reëntering the wonderful place which I had begun to call Heaven,
and to which I still give that name, though not, I must say, with
perfect assurance that the word is properly applied to that phase of the
life of which I am the yet most ignorant recorder, I found myself more
weary than I had been at any time since my change came. I was looking
about, uncertain where to go, feeling, for the first time, rather
homeless in this new country, when I was approached by a stranger, who
inquired of me what I sought:
“Rest,” I said promptly.
“A familiar quest,” observed the stranger, smiling.
“You are right, sir. It is a thing I have been seeking for forty years.”
“And never found?”
“Never found.”
“I will assist you,” he said gently, “that is, if you wish it. What will
you have first?”
“Sleep, I think, first, then food. I have been through exciting scenes.
I have a touch--a faint one--of what below we called exhaustion. Yet now
I am conscious in advance of the rest which is sure to come. Already I
feel it, like the ebbing of the wave that goes to form the flow of the
next. How blessed to know that one _can’t_ be ill!”
“How do you know that?” asked my companion.
“On the whole, I don’t know that I do,” I answered, with embarrassment,
“I suppose it is a remnant of one’s old religious teaching: ‘The
inhabitant shall not say I am sick.’ Surely there were such words.”
“And you trusted them?” asked the stranger.
“The Bible was a hard book to accept,” I said quickly, “I would not have
you overestimate my faith. I tried to believe that it was God’s message.
I think I _did_ believe it. But the reason was clear to me. I could not
get past that if I wished to.”
“What, then, was the reason,” inquired my friend, solemnly, “why you
trusted the message called the Word of God, as received by the believing
among His children on earth?”
“Surely,” I urged, “there is but one reason. I refer to the history of
our Lord. I do not know whether all in this place are Christians; but I
was one.--Sir! I anticipate your question. I was a most imperfect,
useless one--to my sorrow and my shame I say it--but, so far as I went,
I was an honest one.”
“Did you love Him?--Him whom you called Lord?” asked the stranger, with
an air of reserve. I replied that I thought I could truly say that He
was dear to me.
I began to be deeply moved by this conversation. I stole a look at the
stranger, whom I had at first scarcely noticed, except as one among many
passing souls. He was a man of surpassing majesty of mien, and for
loveliness of feature I had seen no mortal to vie with him. “This,” I
thought, “must be one of the beings we called angels.” Astonishing
brightness rayed from him at every motion, and his noble face was like
the sun itself. He moved beside me like any other spirit, and
condescended to me so familiarly, yet with so unapproachable a dignity,
that my heart went out to him as breath upon the air. It did not occur
to me to ask him who he was, or whither he led me. It was enough that he
led, and I followed without question or reply. We walked and talked for
a long time together.
He renewed the conversation by asking me whether I had really staked my
immortal existence upon the promise of that obscure, uneducated Jew,
twenty centuries in his grave,--that plain man who lived a fanatic’s
life, and died a felon’s death, and whose teachings had given rise to
such bigotry and error upon the earth. I answered that I had never been
what is commonly called a devout person, not having a spiritual
temperament, but that I had not held our Master responsible for the
mistakes of either his friends or his foes, and that the greatest regret
I had brought with me into Heaven was that I had been so unworthy to
bear His blessed name. He next inquired of me, if I truly believed that
I owed my entrance upon my present life to the interposition of Him of
whom we spoke.
“Sir,” I said, “you touch upon sacred nerves. I should find it hard to
tell you how utterly I believe that immortality is the gift of Jesus
Christ to the human soul.”
“I believed this on earth,” I added, “I believe it in Heaven. I do not
_know_ it yet, however. I am a new-comer; I am still very ignorant. No
one has instructed me. I hope to learn ‘syllable by syllable.’ I am
impatient to be taught; yet I am patient to be ignorant till I am found
worthy to learn. It may be, that you, sir, who evidently are of a higher
order of life than ours, are sent to enlighten me?”
My companion smiled, neither dissenting from, nor assenting to my
question, and only asked me in reply, if I had yet spoken with the Lord.
I said that I had not even seen Him; nay, that I had not even asked to
see Him. My friend inquired why this was, and I told him frankly that it
was partly because I was so occupied at first--nay, most of the time
until I was called below.
“I had not much room to think. I was taken from event to event, like a
traveler. This matter that you speak of seemed out of place in every way
at that time.”
Then I went on to say that my remissness was owing partly to a little
real self-distrust, because I feared I was not the kind of believer to
whom He would feel quickly drawn; that I felt afraid to propose such a
preposterous thing as being brought into His presence; that I supposed,
when He saw fit to reveal Himself to me, I should be summoned in some
orderly way, suitable to this celestial community; that, in fact, though
I had cherished this most sweet and solemn desire, I had not mentioned
it before, not even to my own father who conducted me to this place.
“I have not spoken of it,” I said, “to any body but to you.”
The stranger’s face wore a remarkable expression when I said this, as if
I had deeply gratified him; and there glittered from his entire form
and features such brightness as well-nigh dazzled me. It was as if,
where a lesser being would have spoken, or stirred, he shone. I felt as
if I conversed with him by radiance, and that living light had become a
vocabulary between us. I have elsewhere spoken of the quality of
reflecting light as marked among the ordinary inhabitants of this new
life; but in this case I was aware of a distinction, due, I thought, to
the superior order of existence to which my friend belonged. He did not,
like the others, reflect; he radiated glory. More and more, as we had
converse together, this impressed, until it awed me. We remained
together for a long time. People who met us, greeted the angel with
marked reverence, and turned upon me glances of sympathetic delight; but
no one interrupted us. We continued our walk into a more retired place,
by the shore of a sea, and there we had deep communion.
My friend had inquired if I were still faint, and if I preferred to turn
aside for food and rest; but when he asked me the question I was amazed
to find that I no longer had the need of either. Such delight had I in
his presence, such invigoration in his sympathy, that glorious
recuperation had set in upon my earth-caused weariness. Such power had
the soul upon the celestial body! Food for the first was force to the
other.
It seemed to me that I had never known refreshment of either before; and
that Heaven itself could contain no nutriment that would satisfy me
after this upon which I fed in that high hour.
It is not possible for me to repeat the solemn words of that interview.
We spoke of grave and sacred themes. He gave me great counsel and fine
sympathy. He gave me affectionate rebuke and unfathomable resolve. We
talked of those inner experiences which, on earth, the soul protects,
like struggling flame, between itself and the sheltering hand of God. We
spoke much of the Master, and of my poor hope that I might be permitted
after I had been a long time in Heaven, to become worthy to see Him,
though at the vast distance of my unworthiness. Of that unworthiness
too, we spoke most earnestly; while we did so, the sense of it grew
within me like a new soul; yet so divinely did my friend extend his
tenderness to me, that I was strengthened far more than weakened by
these finer perceptions of my unfitness, which he himself had aroused in
me. The counsel that he gave me, Eternity could not divert out of my
memory, and the comfort which I had from him I treasure to this hour.
“Here,” I thought, “here, at last, I find reproof as gentle as sympathy,
and sympathy as invigorating as reproof. Now, for the first time in all
my life, I find myself truly understood. What could I not become if I
possessed the friendship of such a being! How shall I develop myself so
as to obtain it? How can I endure to be deprived of it? Is this too,
like friendship on earth, a snatch, a compromise, a heart-ache, a mirror
in which one looks only long enough to know that it is dashed away? Have
I begun that old pain again, _here_?”
For I knew, as I sat in that solemn hour with my face to the sea and my
soul with him, while sweeter than any song of all the waves of Heaven
or earth to sea-lovers sounded his voice who did commune with
me,--verily I knew, for then and forever, that earth had been a void to
me because I had him not, and that Heaven could be no Heaven to me
without him.
All which I had known of human love; all that I had missed; the dreams
from which I had been startled; the hopes that had evaded me; the
patience which comes from knowing that one may not even try not to be
misunderstood; the struggle to keep a solitary heart sweet; the
anticipation of desolate age which casts its shadow backward upon the
dial of middle life; the paralysis of feeling which creeps on with its
disuse; the distrust of one’s own atrophied faculties of loving; the
sluggish wonder if one is ceasing to be lovable; the growing difficulty
of explaining oneself even when it is necessary, because no one being
more than any other cares for the explanation; the things which a lonely
life converts into silence that cannot be broken, swept upon me like
rapids, as, turning to look into his dazzling face, I said:
“This--_all_ this he understands.”
But when, thus turning, I would have told him so, for there seemed to be
no poor pride in Heaven, forbidding soul to tell the truth to
soul,--when I turned, my friend had risen, and was departing from me, as
swiftly and mysteriously as he came. I did not cry out to him to stay,
for I felt ashamed; nor did I tell him how he had bereft me, for that
seemed a childish folly. I think I only stood and looked at him.
“If there is any way of being worthy of your friendship,” I said below
my breath, “I will have it, if I toil for half Eternity to get it.”
Now, though these words were scarcely articulate, I think he heard them,
and turning, with a smile which will haunt my dreams and stir my deeds
as long as I shall live, he laid his hand upon my head, and blessed
me--but what he said I shall tell no man--and so departed from me, and I
was left upon the shore alone, fallen, I think, in a kind of sleep or
swoon.
When I awoke, I was greatly calmed and strengthened, but disinclined, at
first, to move. I had the reaction from what I knew was the intensest
experience of my life, and it took time to adjust my feelings to my
thoughts.
A young girl came up while I sat there upon the sands, and employed
herself in gathering certain marvelous weeds that the sea had tossed up.
These weeds fed upon the air, as they had upon the water, remaining
fresh upon the girl’s garments, which she decorated with them. She did
not address me, but strolled up and down silently. Presently, feeling
moved by the assurance of congeniality that one detects so much more
quickly in Heaven than on earth, I said to the young girl:--
“Can you tell me the name of the angel--you must have met him--who has
but just left me, and with whom I have been conversing?”
“Do you then truly not know?” she asked, shading her eyes with her hand,
and looking off in the direction my friend had taken; then back again,
with a fine, compassionate surprise at me.
“Indeed I know not.”
“That was the Master who spoke with you.”
“What did you _say_?”
“That was our Lord Himself.”