John and Helen had not gone at once to Lockhaven; they spent a fortnight
in wandering about through the mountains on horseback. The sweet June
weather, the crystal freshness of the air, and the melodious stillness of
the woods and fields wrapped those first heavenly days of entire
possession in a mist of joy. Afterwards, John Ward felt that it had
blinded the eyes of his soul, and drifted between him and his highest
duty; he had not been able to turn away from the gladness of living in
her presence to think of what had been, during all their engagement, an
anxiety and grief, and, he had promised himself, should be his earliest
thought when she became his wife:--the unsaved condition of her soul.
When he had first seen her, before he knew he loved her, he had realized
with distress and terror how far she was from what he called truth; how
indifferent to what was the most important thing in the whole world to
him,--spiritual knowledge. He listened to what she said of her uncle's
little Episcopal church in Ashurst, and heard her laugh good-naturedly
about the rector's sermons, and then thought of the doctrines which were
preached from his own pulpit in Lockhaven.
Helen had never listened to sermons full of the hopelessness of
predestination; she frankly said she did not believe that Adam was her
federal head and representative, and that she, therefore, was born in
sin. "I'm a sinner," she said, smiling; "we're all miserable sinners, you
know, Mr. Ward, and perhaps we all sin in original ways; but I don't
believe in original sin."
When he spoke of eternal punishment, she looked at him with grave
surprise in her calm brown eyes. "How can you think such a thing?" she
asked. "It seems to me a libel upon the goodness of God."
"But justice, Miss Jeffrey," he said anxiously; "surely we must
acknowledge the righteousness and justice of God's judgments."
"If you mean that God would send a soul to hell forever, if you call that
his judgment, it seems to me unrighteous and unjust. Truly, I can think
of no greater heresy, Mr. Ward, than to deny the love of God; and is not
that what you do when you say he is more cruel than even men could be?"
"But the Bible says"--he began, when she interrupted him.
"It does not seem worth while to say, 'the Bible says,'" she said,
smiling a little as she looked into his troubled face. "The Bible was the
history, and poetry, and politics of the Jews, as well as their code of
ethics and their liturgy; so that, unless we are prepared to believe in
its verbal inspiration, I don't see how we can say, as an argument, 'the
Bible says.'"
"And you do not believe in its verbal inspiration?" he said slowly.
"No," Helen answered, "I could not."
It was not for John Ward to ask how she had been taught, or to criticise
another minister's influence, but as he walked home, with anxious,
downcast eyes, he wondered what Dr. Howe's belief could be, and how it
had been possible for her soul to have been so neglected. This woman,
whose gracious, beautiful nature stirred him with profound admiration,
was in the darkness of unbelief; she had never been taught the truth.
As he said this to himself, John Ward knew, with sudden, passionate
tenderness, that he loved her. Yet it was months before he came and told
her. What right had he to love her? he said to himself, when he knelt and
prayed for her soul's salvation: she was an unbeliever; she had never
come to Christ, or she would have known the truth. His duty to his people
confronted him with its uncompromising claim that the woman whom he
should bring to help him in his labors among them should be a Christian,
and he struggled to tear this love out of his heart.
John Ward's was an intellect which could not hold a belief subject to
the mutations of time or circumstances. Once acknowledged by his soul,
its growth was ended; it hardened into a creed, in which he rested in
complete satisfaction. It was not that he did not desire more light; it
was simply that he could not conceive that there might be more light. And
granting his premise that the Bible was directly inspired by God, he was
not illogical in holding with a pathetic and patient faith to the
doctrines of the Presbyterian Church.
Helen's belief was as different as was her mode of thought. It was
perhaps a development of her own nature, rather than the result of her
uncle's teaching, though she had been guided by him spiritually ever
since he had taken her to his own home, on the death of her parents, when
she was a little child. "Be a good girl, my dear," Dr. Howe would say. So
she learned her catechism, and was confirmed just before she went to
boarding-school, as was the custom with Ashurst young women, and sung in
the choir, while Mr. Denner drew wonderful chords from the organ, and she
was a very well-bred and modest young woman, taking her belief for
granted, and giving no more thought to the problems of theology than
girls usually do.
But this was before she met John Ward. After those first anxious
questions of his, Helen began to understand how slight was her hold upon
religion. But she did not talk about her frame of mind, nor dignify the
questions which began to come by calling them doubts; how could they be
doubts, when she had never known what she had believed? So, by degrees,
she built up a belief for herself.
Love of good was really love of God, in her mind. Heaven meant
righteousness, and hell an absence from what was best and truest; but
Helen did not feel that a soul must wait for death before it was
overtaken by hell. It was very simple and very short, this creed of
hers; yet it was the doorway through which grief and patience were to
come,--the sorrow of the world, the mystery of sin, and the hope of that
far-off divine event.
There was no detail of religious thought with Helen Jeffrey; ideas
presented themselves to her mind with a comprehensiveness and simplicity
which would have been impossible to Mr. Ward. But at this time he knew
nothing of the mental processes that were leading her out of the calm,
unreasoning content of childhood into a mist of doubt, which, as she
looked into the future, seemed to darken into night. He was struggling
with his conscience, and asking himself if he had any right to seek her
love.
"Be not unequally yoked together with unbelievers," he said to himself.
To his mind, Helen's lack of belief in certain doctrines--for it had
hardly crystallized into unbelief--was sin; and sin was punishable by
eternal death. Here was his escape from conscience. Should this sweet
soul, that he loved more than his own, be lost? No; surely, it was a
sacred right and duty to win her heart and marry her, that he might take
her away from the atmosphere of religious indifference in which she
lived, and guide her to light and life.
Love won the day. "I will save her soul!" he said to himself; and with
this purpose always before him to hide a shadow, which whispered,--so he
thought,--"This is a sin," he asked her to be his wife.
He did not have to plead long. "I think I have always loved you," Helen
said, looking up into his eyes; and John was so happy that every thought
of anxiety for her soul was swallowed up in gratitude to God for her
love.
It was one midsummer afternoon that he reached Ashurst; he went at once
to the rectory, though with no thought of asking Dr. Howe's permission to
address his niece. It seemed to John as though there were only their two
souls in the great sunny world that day, and his love-making was as
simple and candid as his life.
"I've come to tell you I love you," he said, with no preface, except to
take her hands in his.
He did not see her often during their engagement, nor did he write her of
his fears and hopes for her; he would wait until she was quite away from
Ashurst carelessness, he thought; and beside, his letters were so full of
love, there was no room for theology. But he justified silence by saying
when they were in their own home he would show her the beauty of revealed
religion; she should understand the majesty of the truth; and their
little house, which was to be sacred as the shrine of human love, should
become the very gate of heaven.
It was a very little house, this parsonage. Its sharp pitch roof was
pulled well down over its eyes, which were four square, shining windows,
divided into twenty-four small panes of glass, so full of bubbles and
dimples that they made the passer-by seem sadly distorted, and the spire
of the church opposite have a strange bend in it.
John Ward's study had not a great many books. He could not afford them,
for one reason; but, with a row of Edwards, and some of Dr. Samuel
Hopkins' sermons, and pamphlets by Dr. Emmons, he could spare all but one
or two volumes of Hodge and Shedd, who, after all, but reiterate, in a
form suited to a weaker age, the teachings of Dr. Jonathan Edwards.
The dim Turkey carpet was worn down to the nap in a little path in front
of his bookshelves, where he used to stand absorbed in reading, or where
he walked back and forth, thinking out his dark and threatening sermons.
For before his marriage John preached the law rather than the gospel.
"So I am going to hear you preach on Sunday?" Helen said, the Saturday
morning after their return. "It's odd that I've never heard you, and we
have known each other more than a year."
He was at his desk, and she rested her hand lightly on his shoulder. He
put down his pen, and turned to look up into her face. "Perhaps you will
not like my sermons;" there was a little wistfulness in his dark eyes as
he spoke.
"Oh, yes, I shall," she said, with smiling certainty. "Sermons are pretty
much alike, don't you think? I know some of uncle Archie's almost by
heart. Really, there is only one thing to say, and you have to keep
saying it over and over."
"We cannot say it too often," John answered. "The choice between eternal
life and eternal death should sound in the ears of unconverted men every
day of their lives."
Helen shook her head. "I didn't mean that, John. I was thinking of the
beauty of holiness." And then she added, with a smile, "I hope you don't
preach any awful doctrines?"
"Sometimes the truth is terrible, dear," he said gently.
But when she had left him to write his sermon, he sat a long while
thinking. Surely she was not ready yet to hear such words as he had meant
to speak. He would put this sermon away for some future Sunday, when the
truth would be less of a shock to her. "She must come to the knowledge of
God slowly," he thought. "It must not burst upon her; it might only drive
her further from the light to hear of justice as well as mercy. She is
not able to bear it yet."
So he took some fresh paper, and wrote, instead of his lurid text from
Hebrews, "Ye shall be my sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty."
But when Helen went out of the study, she thought very little of sermons
or doctrines. John filled her mind, and she had no room for wondering
about his beliefs; he could believe anything he chose; he was hers,--that
was enough.
She went into her small kitchen, the smile still lingering upon her lips,
and through its open doorway saw her little maid, Alfaretta, out in the
sunny garden at the back of the house. She had an armful of fresh white
tea-towels, which had been put out to dry on the row of gooseberry bushes
at the end of the garden, and was coming up the path, singing cheerily,
with all the force of her strong young lungs. Helen caught the words as
she drew near:--
"My thoughts on awful subjects roll,
Damnation and the dead.
What horrors seize the guilty soul,
Upon the dying bed!
"Where endless crowds of sinners lie,
And darkness makes their chains,
Tortured with keen despair they cry,
Yet wait for fiercer pains!"
"Oh, Alfaretta!" her mistress cried, in indignant astonishment. "How can
you say such terrible words!" Alfaretta stood still, in open-mouthed
amazement, an injured look in her good-natured blue eyes. The incongruity
of this rosy-faced, happy girl, standing in the sunshine, with all the
scents and sounds of a July day about her, and singing in her cheerful
voice these hopeless words, almost made Helen smile; but she added
gravely, "I hope you will not sing that again. I do not like it."
"But ma'am--but Mrs. Ward," said the girl, plainly hurt at the reproof,
"I was practicing. I belong to the choir."
Alfaretta had dropped the tea-towels, hot with sunshine and smelling of
clover-blossoms, upon her well-scoured dresser, and then turned and
looked at her mistress reproachfully. "I don't know what I am going to do
if I can't practice," she said.
"You don't mean to say you sing that in church?" cried Helen. "Where do
you go?"
"Why, I go to your church," said the still injured Alfaretta,--"to Mr.
Ward's. We're to have that hymn on Sabbath"--
"Oh, there must be some mistake," remonstrated Helen. "I'm sure Mr. Ward
did not notice that verse."
"But it's all like that; it says"--
"Don't tell me any more," Helen said. "I've heard enough. I had no idea
such awful words were written." Then she stopped abruptly, feeling her
position as the preacher's wife in a way of which she had never thought.
Alfaretta's father was an elder in John's church, which gave her a
certain ease in speaking to her mistress that did not mean the slightest
disrespect.
"Is it the words of it you don't like?" said Alfaretta, rather relieved,
since her singing had not been criticised.
"Yes," Helen answered, "it is the words. Don't you see how dreadful they
are?"
Alfaretta stood with her plump red hands on her hips, and regarded Mrs.
Ward with interest. "I hadn't ever thought of 'em," she said. "Yes,
ma'am. I suppose they are awful bad," and swinging back and forth on her
heels, her eyes fixed meditatively on the ceiling, she said,--
"'Then swift and dreadful she descends
Down to the fiery coast,
Amongst abominable fiends'--
Yes, that does sound dreadful. Worst of it is, you get used to 'em, and
don't notice 'em much. Why, I've sung that hymn dozens of times in
church, and never thought of the meanin'. And there's Tom Davis: he
drinks most of the time, but he has sung once or twice in the choir
(though he ain't been ever converted yet, and he is really terrible
wicked; don't do nothin' but swear and drink). But I don't suppose he
noticed the words of this hymn,--though I know he sung it,--for he keeps
right on in his sin; and he couldn't, you know, Mrs. Ward, if that hymn
was true to him."
Helen left Alfaretta to reflect upon the hymn, and went back to the
study; but the door was shut, and she heard the scratching of her
husband's pen. She turned away, for she had lived in a minister's
household, and had been brought up to know that nothing must disturb
a man who was writing a sermon. But John had hurriedly opened the door.
"Did you want to speak to me, dearest?" he said, standing at the foot of
the stairs, his pen still between his fingers. "I heard your step."
"But I must not interrupt you," she answered, smiling at him over the
balusters.
"You never could interrupt me. Come into the study and tell me what it
is."
"Only to ask you about a hymn which Alfaretta says is to be sung on
Sunday," Helen said. "Of course there is some mistake about it, but
Alfaretta says the choir has been practicing it, and I know you would not
want it."
"Do you remember what it was, dear?"
"I can't quote it," Helen answered, "but it began something about
'damnation and the dead.'"
"Oh, yes, I know;" and then he added, slowly, "Why don't you like it,
Helen?"
She looked at him in astonishment. "Why, it's absurd; it's horrible."
John was silent for a few moments, and then he sighed: "We will not sing
it, dear."
"But, John," she cried, "how could such a hymn ever have been printed? Of
course I know people used to think such things, but I had no idea anybody
thought of hell in that literal way to-day, or that hell itself was a
real belief to very many people; however, I suppose, if such hymns are
printed, the doctrine is still taught?"
"Yes," John said, "it is as real to-day as God himself,--as it always has
been and must be; and it is believed by Christians as earnestly as ever.
We cannot help it, Helen."
Helen looked at him thoughtfully. "It is very terrible; but oh, John,
what sublime faith, to be able to believe God capable of such awful
cruelty, and yet to love and trust Him!"
John's face grew suddenly bright. "'Though He slay me, yet will I trust
Him,'" he said, with the simplicity of assurance. But when he went back
again to his sermon, he was convinced that he had been wise to put off
for a little while the instruction in doctrine of which his wife's soul
stood in such sore need.
"I was right," he thought; "the Light must come gradually, the blaze of
truth at once would blind her to the perfection of justice. She would not
be able to understand there was mercy, too."
So the choir was told the hymn would be "Welcome, sweet day of rest,"
which, after all, was much better suited to the sermon.