"God moves in a mysterious way,"
was one of my first and dearest. It reminded me of the rolling of
thunder through the sky; and, understood as little as the thunder
itself, which my mother told me was God's voice, so that I bent my ear
and listened, expecting to hear it shaped into words, it still did give
me an idea of the presence of One Infinite Being, that thrilled me with
reverent awe. And this was one of the best lessons taught in the
Puritan school,--the lesson of reverence, the certainty that life meant
looking up to something, to Some One greater than ourselves, to a Life
far above us, which yet enfolded ours.
The thought of God, when He was first spoken of to me, seemed as
natural as the thought of my father and mother. That He should be
invisible did not seem strange, for I could not with my eyes see
through the sky, beyond which I supposed he lived. But it was easy to
believe that He could look down and see me, and that He knew all about
me. We were taught very early to say "Thou, God, seest me"; and it was
one of my favorite texts. Heaven seemed nearer, because somebody I
loved was up there looking at me. A baby is not afraid of its father's
eyes.
The first real unhappiness I remember to have felt was when some one
told me, one day, that I did not love God. I insisted, almost
tearfully, that I did; but I was told that if I did truly love Him I
should always be good. I knew I was not that, and the feeling of sudden
orphanage came over me like a bewildering cloud. Yet I was sure that I
loved my father and mother, even when I was naughty, Was He harder to
please than they?
Then I heard of a dreadful dark Somewhere, the horror of which was that
it was away from Him. What if I should wake some morning, and find
myself there? Sometimes I did not dare to go to sleep for that dread.
And the thought was too awful to speak of to anybody. Baby that I was,
I shut my lips in a sort of reckless despair, and thought that if I
could not be good, I might as well be naughty, and enjoy it. But
somehow I could not enjoy it. I felt sorry and ashamed and degraded
whenever I knew that I had been cross or selfish.
I heard them talk about Jesus as if He were a dead man, one who died a
great while ago, whose death made a great difference to us, I could not
understand how. It seemed like a lovely story, the loveliest in the
world, but it sounded as if it were only a story, even to those who
repeated it to me; something that had happened far away in the past.
But one day a strange minister came into the Sabbath-school in our
little chapel, and spoke to us children about Him, oh! so differently!
"Children," he said, "Jesus is not dead. He is alive: He loves you, and
wants you to love Him! He is your best Friend, and He will show you how
to be good."
My heart beat fast. I could hardly keep back the tears. The New
Testament, then, did really mean what it said! Jesus said He would come
back again, and would always be with those who loved Him.
"He is alive! He loves me! He will tell me how to be good!" I said it
over to myself, but not to anybody else. I was sure that I loved Him.
It was like a beautiful secret between us two. I felt Him so alive and
so near! He wanted me to be good, and I could be, I would be, for his
sake.
That stranger never knew how his loving word had touched a child's
heart. The doors of the Father's house were opened wide again, by the
only hand that holds the key. The world was all bright and fresh once
more. It was as if the May sun had suddenly wakened the flowers in an
overshadowed wayside nook.
I tried long afterward, thinking that it was my duty, to build up a
wall of difficult doctrines over my spring blossoms, as if they needed
protection. But the sweet light was never wholly stifled out, though I
did not always keep my face turned towards it: and I know now, that
just to let his lifegiving smile shine into the soul is better than any
of the theories we can invent about Him; and that only so can young or
old receive the kingdom of God as a little child.
I believe that one great reason for a child's love of hymns, such as
mine was, is that they are either addressed to a Person, to the Divine
Person,--or they bring Him before the mind in some distinct way,
instead of being written upon a subject, like a sermon. To make Him
real is the only way to make our own spirits real to ourselves.
I think more gratefully now of the verses I learned from the Bible and
the Hymn-Book than of almost anything that came to me in that time of
beginnings. The whole Hymn-Book was not for me then, any more than the
whole Bible. I took from both only what really belonged to me. To be
among those who found in the true sources of faith and adoration, was
like breathing in my native air, though I could not tell anything about
the land from which I had come. Much that was put in the way of us
children to climb by, we could only stumble over; but around and above
the roughnesses of the road, the pure atmosphere of worship was felt
everywhere, the healthiest atmosphere for a child's soul to breathe in.
I had learned a great many hymns before the family took any notice of
it. When it came to the knowledge of my most motherly sister Emilie,--I
like to call her that, for she was as fond of early rising as Chaucer's
heroine:--
"Up rose the sun, and up rose Emilie;"
and it is her own name, with a very slight change,--she undertook to
see how many my small memory would contain. She promised me a new book,
when I should have learned fifty; and that when I could repeat any one
of a hundred hymns, she would teach me to write. I earned the book when
I was about four years old. I think it was a collection of some of Jane
Taylor's verses. "For Infant Minds," was part of the title. I did not
care for it, however, nearly so much as I did for the old, thumb-worn
"Watts' and Select Hymns." Before I was five I bad gone beyond the
stipulated hundred.
A proud and happy child I was, when I was permitted to dip a goose
quill into an inkstand, and make written letters, instead of printing
them with a pencil on a slate.
My sister prepared a neat little writing-book for me, and told me not
to make a mark in it except when she was near to tell me what to do. In
my self-sufficient impatience to get out of "pothooks and trammels"
into real letters and words I disobeyed her injunction, and disfigured
the pages with numerous tell-tale blots. Then I hid the book away under
the garret eaves, and refused to bring it to light again. I was not
allowed to resume my studies in penmanship for some months, in
consequence. But when I did learn to write, Emilie was my teacher, and
she made me take great pains with my p's and q's.
It is always a mistake to cram a juvenile mind. A precocious child is
certainly as far as possible from being an interesting one. Children
ought to be children, and nothing else. But I am not sorry that I
learned to read when so young, because there were years of my childhood
that came after, when I had very little time for reading anything.
To learn hymns was not only a pastime, but a pleasure which it would
have been almost cruel to deprive me of. It did not seem to me as if I
learned them, but as if they just gave themselves to me while I read
them over; as if they, and the unseen things they sang about, became a
part of me.
Some of the old hymns did seem to lend us wings, so full were they of
aspiration and hope and courage. To a little child, reading them or
hearing them sung was like being caught up in a strong man's arms, to
gaze upon some wonderful landscape. These climbing and flying
hymns,--how well I remember them, although they were among the first I
learned! They are of the kind that can never wear out. We all know them
by their first lines,--
"Awake, our souls! away, our fears!"
"Up to the hills I lift mine eyes."
"There is a land of pure delight."
"Rise, my soul, and stretch thy wings,
Thy better portion trace!"
How the meeting-house rafters used to ring to that last hymn, sung to
the tune of "Amsterdam!" Sometimes it seemed as if the very roof was
lifted off,--nay, the roof of the sky itself--as if the music had burst
an entrance for our souls into the heaven of heavens.
I loved to learn the glad hymns, and there were scores of them. They
come flocking back through the years, like birds that are full of the
music of an immortal spring!
"Come, let us join our cheerful songs
With angels round the throne."
"Love divine, all love excelling;
Joy of heaven, to earth come down."
"Joy to the world! the Lord is come!"
"Hark! the song of jubilee,
Loud as mighty thunders' roar,
Or the fullness of the sea
When it breaks upon the shore!
"Hallelujah! for the Lord
God Omnipotent shall reign!
Hallelujah! let the word
Echo round the earth and main."
Ah, that word "Hallelujah!" It seemed to express all the joy of spring
mornings and clear sunshine and bursting blossoms, blended with all
that I guessed of the songs of angels, and with all that I had heard
and believed, in my fledgling soul, of the glorious One who was born in
a manger and died on a cross, that He might reign in human hearts as a
king. I wondered why the people did not sing "Hallelujah" more. It
seemed like a word sent straight down to us out of heaven.
I did not like to learn the sorrowful hymns, though I did it when they
were given to me as a task, such as--
"Hark, from the tombs," and
"Lord, what a wretched land is this,
That yields us no supply."
I suppose that these mournful strains had their place, but sometimes
the transition was too sudden, from the outside of the meeting-house to
the inside; from the sunshine and bobolinks and buttercups of the merry
May-day world, to the sad strains that chanted of "this barren land,"
this "vale of tears," this "wilderness" of distress and woe. It let us
light-hearted children too quickly down from the higher key of mirth to
which our careless thoughts were pitched. We knew that we were happy,
and sorrow to us was unreal. But somehow we did often get the
impression that it was our duty to try to be sorrowful; and that we
could not be entirely good, without being rather miserable.
And I am afraid that in my critical little mind I looked upon it as an
affectation on the part of the older people to speak of life in this
doleful way. I thought that they really knew better. It seemed to me
that it must be delightful to grow up, and learn things, and do things,
and be very good indeed,--better than children could possibly know how
to be. I knew afterwards that my elders were sometimes, at least,
sincere in their sadness; for with many of them life must have been a
hard struggle. But when they shook their heads and said,--"Child, you
will not be so happy by and by; you are seeing your best days now," I
still doubted. I was born with the blessing of a cheerful temperament;
and while that is not enough to sustain any of us through the
inevitable sorrows that all must share, it would have been most
unnatural and ungrateful in me to think of earth as a dismal place,
when everything without and within was trying to tell me that this good
and beautiful world belongs to God.
I took exception to some verses in many of the hymns that I loved the
most. I had my own mental reservations with regard even to that
glorious chant of the ages,--
"Jerusalem, my happy home,
Name ever dear to me."
I always wanted to skip one half of the third stanza, as it stood in
our Hymn-Book:
"Where congregations ne'er break up,
And Sabbaths have no end."
I did not want it to be Sabbath-day always. I was conscious of a
pleasure in the thought of games and frolics and coming week-day
delights that would flit across my mind even when I was studying my
hymns, or trying to listen to the minister. And I did want the
congregation to break up some time. Indeed, in those bright spring
days, the last hymn in the afternoon always sounded best, because with
it came the opening of doors into the outside air, and the pouring in
of a mingled scent of sea winds and apple blossoms, like an invitation
out into the freedom of the beach, the hillsides, the fields and
gardens and orchards. In all this I felt as if I were very wicked. I
was afraid that I loved earth better than I did heaven.
Nevertheless I always did welcome that last hymn, announced to be sung
"with the Doxology," usually in "long metre," to the tune of "Old
Hundred." There were certain mysterious preliminaries,--the rustling of
singing-book leaves, the sliding of the short screen-curtains before
the singers along by their clinking rings, and now and then a
premonitory groan or squeak from bass-viol or violin, as if the
instruments were clearing their throats; and finally the sudden
uprising of that long row of heads in the "singing-seats."
My tallest and prettiest grown-up sister, Louise, stood there among
them, and of all those girlish, blooming faces I thought hers the very
handsomest. But she did not open her lips wide enough to satisfy me. I
could not see that she was singing at all.
To stand up there and be one of the choir, seemed to me very little
short of promotion to the ranks of cherubim and seraphim. I quite
envied that tall, pretty sister of mine. I was sure that I should open
my mouth wide, if I could only be in her place. Alas! the years proved
that, much as I loved the hymns, there was no music in me to give them
voice, except to very indulgent ears.
Some of us must wait for the best human gifts until we come to heavenly
places. Our natural desire for musical utterance is perhaps a prophecy
that in a perfect world we shall all know how to sing. But it is
something to feel music, if we cannot make it. That, in itself, is a
kind of unconscious singing.
As I think back to my childhood, it seems to me as if the air was full
of hymns, as it was of the fragrance of clover-blossoms, and the songs
of bluebirds and robins, and the deep undertone of the sea. And the
purity, the calmness, and the coolness of the dear old Sabbath days
seems lingering yet in the words of those familiar hymns, whenever I
bear them sung. Their melody penetrates deep into my life, assuming me
that I have not left the green pastures and the still waters of my
childhood very far behind me.
There is something at the heart of a true song or hymn which keeps the
heart young that listens. It is like a breeze from the eternal hills;
like the west wind of spring, never by a breath less balmy and clear
for having poured life into the old generations of earth for thousands
of years; a spiritual freshness, which has nothing to do with time or
decay.