The time I used to dread most of all in my life, after that great
bereavement which laid it waste, is come. I am in the monotonous level
of solitary middle age. The sunny heights of childhood, and even the
joyous breezy slopes of youth, are almost out of sight behind me; and
the snowy heights of reverend age, from which we can look over into the
promised land beyond, are almost as far before me. Other lives have
grown from the bubbling spring into the broad and placid river, while
mine is still the little narrow stream it was at first; only, creeping
slow and noiseless through the flats, instead of springing gladly from
rock to rock, making music wherever it came. Yet I am content;
absolutely, fully content. I am sure that my life also has been ordered
by the highest wisdom and love; and that (as far as my faithless heart
does not hinder it) God is leading me also on to the very highest and
best destiny for me.
I did not always think so. I used to fear that not only would this
bereavement throw a shadow on my earthly life, but that it would stunt
and enfeeble my nature for ever; that missing all the sweet, ennobling
relationships of married life, even throughout the ages I should be but
an undeveloped, one-sided creature.
But one day I was reading in Dr. Luther's German Bible the chapter about
the body of Christ, the twelfth of First Corinthians, and great comfort
came into my heart through it. I saw that we are not meant to be
separate atoms, each complete in itself, but members of a body, each
only complete through union with all the rest. And then I saw how
entirely unimportant it is in what place Christ shall set me in his
body; and how impossible it is for us to judge what he is training us
for, until the body is perfected and we see what we are to be in it.
On the Dueben Heath also, soon after, when I was walking home with Else's
Gretchen, the same lesson came to me in a parable, through a clump of
trees under the shade of which we were resting. Often, from a distance,
we had admired the beautiful symmetry of the group, and now, looking up,
I saw how imperfect every separate tree was, all leaning in various
directions, and all only developed on one side. If each tree had said,
"I am a beech tree, and I ought to throw out branches on every side,
like my brother standing alone on the heath," what would have become of
that beautiful clump? And looking up through the green interwoven leaves
to the blue sky I said,--
"Heavenly Father, thou art wise! I will doubt no more. Plant me where
thou wilt in thy garden, and let me grow as thou wilt! Thou wilt not let
me fail of my highest end."
Dr. Luther also said many things which helped me from time to time, in
conversation or in his sermons.
"The barley," he said, "must suffer much from man. First, it is cast
into the earth that it may decay. Then, when it is grown up and ripe, it
is cut and mown down. Then it is crushed and pressed, fermented and
brewed into beer.
"Just such a martyr also is the linen or flax. When it is ripe it is
plucked, steeped in water, beaten, dried, hacked, spun, and woven into
linen, which again is torn and cut. Afterwards it is made into plaster
for sores, and used for binding up wounds. Then it becomes lint, is laid
under the stamping machines in the paper mill, and torn into small bits.
From this they make paper for writing and printing.
"These creatures, and many others like them, which are of great use to
us, must thus suffer. Thus also must good, godly Christians suffer much
from the ungodly and wicked. Thus, however, the barley, wine, and corn
are ennobled; in man becoming flesh, and in the Christian man's flesh
entering into the heavenly kingdom."
Often he speaks of the "dear, holy cross, a portion of which is given to
all Christians."
"All the saints," he said once, when a little child of one of his
friends lay ill, "must drink of the bitter cup. Could Mary even, the
dear mother of our Lord, escape? All who are dear to him must suffer.
Christians conquer when they suffer; only when they rebel and resist are
they defeated and lose the day."
He, indeed, knows what trial and temptation mean. Many a bitter cup has
he had to drink, he to whom the sins, and selfishness, and divisions of
Christians are personal sorrow and shame. It is therefore, no doubt,
that he knows so well how to sustain and comfort. Those, he says, who
are to be the bones and sinews of the Church must expect the hardest
blows.
Well I remember his saying, when, on the 8th of August, 1529, before his
going to Coburg, he and his wife lay sick of a fever, while he suffered
also from sciatica, and many other ailments,--
"God has touched me sorely. I have been impatient; but God knows better
than I whereto it serves. _Our Lord God is like a printer who sets the
letters backwards, so that here we cannot read them. When we are printed
off yonder, in the life to come, we shall read all clear and
straightforward._ Meantime we must have patience."
In other ways more than I can number he and his words have helped me. No
one seems to understand as he does what the devil is and does. It is the
_temptation_ in the sorrow which is the thing to be dreaded and guarded
against. This was what I did not understand at first when Bertrand died.
I thought I was rebellious, and dared not approach God till I ceased to
feel rebellious. I did not understand that the malignant one who tempted
me to rebel also tempted me to think God would not forgive. I had
thought before of affliction as a kind of sanctuary where naturally I
should feel God near. I had to learn that it is also night-time, even
"the hour of darkness," in which the prince of darkness draws near
unseen. As Luther says, "The devil torments us in the place where we are
most tender and weak, as in Paradise he fell not on Adam, but on Eve."
Inexpressible was the relief to me when I learned who had been
tormenting me, and turned to Him who vanquished the tempter of old to
banish him now from me. For terrible as Dr. Luther knows that fallen
angel to be,--"the antithesis," as he said, "of the Ten Commandments,"
who for thousands of years has been studying with an angel's
intellectual power, or how most effectually to distress and ruin
man,--he always reminds us that, nevertheless, the devil is a
vanquished foe, that the victory has not now to be won; that, bold as
the evil one is to assail and tempt the unguarded, a word or look of
faith will compel him to flee "like a beaten hound." It is this blending
of the sense of Satan's power to tempt, with the conviction of his
powerlessness to injure the believing heart, which has so often
sustained me in Dr. Luther's words.
But it is not only thus that he has helped me. He presses on us often
the necessity of occupation. It is better, he says, to engage in the
humblest work, than to sit still alone and encounter the temptations of
Satan. "Oft in my temptations I have need to talk even with a child, in
order to expel such thoughts as the devil possesses me with; and this
teaches me not to boast as if of myself I were able to help myself, and
to subsist without the strength of Christ. I need one at times to help
me who in his whole body has not as much theology as I have in one
finger." "The human heart," he says, "is like a millstone in a mill:
when you put wheat under it, it turns, and grinds, and bruises the wheat
to flour; if you put no wheat it still grinds on, but then it is itself
it grinds and wears away. So the human heart, unless it be occupied with
some employment, leaves space for the devil, who wriggles himself in,
and brings with him a whole host of evil thoughts, temptations,
tribulations, which grind away the heart."
After hearing him say this, I tried hard to find myself some occupation.
At first it seemed difficult. Else wanted little help with her children,
or only occasionally. At home the cares of poverty were over, and my
dear father and mother lived in comfort, without my aid. I used
discontentedly to wish sometimes that we were poor again, as in Else's
girlish days, that I might be needed, and really feel it of some use to
spin and embroider, instead of feeling that I only worked for the sake
of not being idle, and that no one would be the better for what I did.
At other times I used to long to seclude myself from all the happy life
around, and half to reproach Dr. Luther in my heart for causing the
suppression of the convents. In a nunnery, at least, I thought I should
have been something definite and recognized, instead of the negative,
undeveloped creature, I felt myself to be, only distinguished from those
around by the absence of what made their lives real and happy.
My mother's recovery from the plague helped to cure me of that, by
reminding me of the home blessings still left. I began, too, to confide
once more in God, and I was comforted by thinking of what my grandmother
said to me one day when I was a little girl, crying hopelessly over a
tangled skein and sobbing, "I shall never untangle it." "Wind, dear
child, _wind on_, inch by inch, undo each knot one by one, and the skein
will soon disentangle itself." So I resolved to wind on my little thread
of life day by day, and undo one little knot after another, until now,
indeed, the skein has disentangled itself.
Few women, I think, have a life more full of love and interest than
mine. I have undertaken the care of a school for little girls, among
whom are two orphans, made fatherless by the peasants' war, who were
sent to us; and this also I owe to Dr. Luther. He has nothing more at
heart than the education of the young; nothing gives him more pain than
to see the covetousness which grudges funds for schools; and nothing
more joy than to see the little ones grow up in all good knowledge. As
he wrote to the Elector John from Coburg twelve years ago:--
"The merciful God shows himself indeed gracious in making his Word so
fruitful in your land. The tender little boys and maidens are so well
instructed in the Catechism and Scriptures, that my heart melts when I
see that young boys and girls can pray, believe, and speak better of God
and Christ than all the convents and schools could in the olden time.
"Such youth in your grace's land are a fair Paradise, of which the like
is not in the world. It is as if God said, 'Courage, dear Duke John, I
commit to thee my noblest treasure, my pleasant Paradise; thou shalt be
father over it. For under thy guard and rule I place it, and give thee
the honour that thou shalt be my gardener and steward.' This is
assuredly true. It is even as if our Lord himself were your grace's
guest and ward, since his Word and his little ones are your perpetual
guests and wards."
For a little while a lady, a friend of his wife, resided in his house in
order to commence such a school at Wittemberg for young girls; and now
it has become my charge. And often Dr. Luther comes in and lays his
hands on the heads of the little ones, and asks God to bless them, or
listens while they repeat the Catechism or the Holy Scriptures.
_December_ 25, 1542.
Once more the Christmas tree has been planted in our homes at
Wittemberg. How many such happy Christian homes there are among us! Our
Else's, Justus Jonas', and his gentle, sympathizing wife, who, Dr.
Luther says, "always brings comfort in her kind pleasant countenance."
We all meet at Else's home on such occasions now. The voices of the
children are better than light to the blind eyes of my father, and my
mother renews her own maternal joys again in her grandchildren, without
the cares.
But of all these homes, none is happier or more united than Dr.
Luther's. His child-like pleasure in little things makes every family
festival in his house so joyous; and the children's plays and pleasures,
as well as their little troubles, are to him a perpetual parable of the
heavenly family, and of our relationship to God. There are five children
in his family now; Hans, the first born; Magdalen, a lovely, loving girl
of thirteen; Paul, Martin, and Margaretha.
How good it is for those who are bereaved and sorrowful that our
Christian festivals point forward and upward as well as backward; that
the eternal joy to which we are drawing ever nearer is linked to the
earthly joy which has passed away. Yes, the old heathen tree of life,
which that young green fir from the primeval forests of our land is said
to typify, has been christened into the Christmas tree. The old tree of
life was a tree of sorrow, and had its roots in the evanescent earth,
and at its base sat the mournful Destinies, ready to cut the thread of
human life. Nature ever renewing herself contrasted mournfully with the
human life that blooms but once. But our tree of life is a tree of joy,
and is rooted in the eternal Paradise of joy. The angels watch over it,
and it recalls the birth of the Second Man--the Lord from heaven--who is
not merely "a living soul, but a life-giving spirit." In it the
evanescence of Nature, immortal as she seems, is contrasted with the
true eternal life of mortal man. In the joy of the little ones, once
more, thank God, my whole heart seems to rejoice; for I also have my
face towards the dawn, and I can hear the fountain of life bubbling up
whichever way I turn. Only, _before_ me it is best and freshest! for it
is springing up to life everlasting.
_December_, 1542.
A shadow has fallen on the peaceful home of Dr. Luther: Magdalen, the
unselfish, obedient, pious, loving child--the darling of her father's
heart--is dead; the first-born daughter, whose portrait, when she was a
year old, used to cheer and delight him at Coburg.
On the 5th of this last September she was taken ill, and then Luther
wrote at once to his friend Marcus Crodel to send his son John from
Torgau, where he was studying, to see his sister. He wrote,--
"Grace and peace, my Marcus Crodel. I request that you will conceal from
my John what I am writing to you. My daughter Magdalen is literally
almost at the point of death--soon about to depart to her Father in
heaven, unless it should yet seem fit to God to spare her. But she
herself so sighs to see her brother, that I am constrained to send a
carriage to fetch him. They indeed loved one another greatly. May she
survive to his coming! I do what I can, lest afterwards the sense of
having neglected anything should torture me. Desire him, therefore,
without mentioning the cause, to return hither at once with all speed in
this carriage; hither,--where she will either sleep in the Lord or be
restored. Farewell in the Lord."
Her brother came, but she was not restored.