THE seagulls from the upper reaches pass down the river in sober steady
flight seeking the open sea. I shall miss the swoop and circle of silver
wings in the sunlight and the plaintive call which sounds so strangely
away from rock and shore, but it is good to know that they have gone from
mudbank and murky town back to the free airs of their inheritance, to the
shadow of sun-swept cliffs and the curling crest of the wind-beaten
waves, to brood again over the great ocean of a world’s tears.
My little tree is gemmed with buds, shy, immature, but full of promise.
The sparrows busied with nest-building in the neighbouring pipes and
gutters use it for a vantage ground, and crowd there in numbers, each
little beak sealed with long golden straw or downy feather.
The river is heavy with hay barges, the last fruits of winter’s
storehouse; the lengthening days slowly and steadily oust the dark; the
air is loud with a growing clamour of life: spring is not only
proclaimed, but on this Feast she is crowned, and despite the warring
wind the days bring their meed of sunshine. We stand for a moment at the
meeting of the ways, the handclasp of Winter and Spring, of Sleep and
Wakening, of Life and Death; and there is between them not even the thin
line which Rabbi Jochanan on his death-bed beheld as all that divided
hell from heaven.
“_Sphæra cujus centrum ubique_, _circumferentia nullibus_,” was said of
Mercury, that messenger of the gods who marshalled reluctant spirits to
the Underworld; and for Mercury we may write Life with Death as its great
sacrament of brotherhood and release, to be dreaded only as we dread to
partake unworthily of great benefits. Like all sacraments it has its
rightful time and due solemnities; the horror and sin of suicide lie in
the presumption of free will, the forestalling of a gift,—the sin of Eve
in Paradise, who took that which might only be given at the hand of the
Lord. It has too its physical pains, but they are those of a woman in
travail, and we remember them no more for joy that a child-man is born
into the world naked and not ashamed: beholding ourselves as we are we
shall see also the leaves of the Tree of Life set for the healing of the
nations.
We are slowly, very slowly, abandoning our belief in sudden and violent
transitions for a surer and fuller acceptance of the doctrine of
evolution; but most of us still draw a sharp line of demarcation between
this world and the next, and expect a radical change in ourselves and our
surroundings, a break in the chain of continuity entirely contrary to the
teaching of nature and experience. In the same way we cling to the
specious untruth that we can begin over and over again in this world,
forgetting that while our sorrow and repentance bring sacramental gifts
of grace and strength, God Himself cannot, by His own limitation, rewrite
the Past. We are in our sorrow that which we have made ourselves in our
sin; our temptations are there as well as the way of escape. We are in
the image of God. We create our world, our undying selves, our heaven,
or our hell. “_Qui creavit te sine te non salvabit te sine te_.” It is
stupendous, magnificent, and most appalling. A man does not change as he
crosses the threshold of the larger room. His personality remains the
same, although the expression of it may be altered. Here we have
material bodies in a material world—there, perhaps, ether bodies in an
ether world. There is no indecency in reasonable speculation and
curiosity about the life to come. One end of the thread is between our
fingers, but we are haunted for the most part by the snap of Atropos’
shears.
Socrates faced death with the magnificent calm bred of dignified
familiarity. He had built for himself a desired heaven of colour, light,
and precious stones—the philosophic formula of those who set the
spiritual above the material, and worship truth in the beauty of
holiness. He is not troubled by doubts or regrets, for the path of the
just lies plain before his face. He forbids mourning and lamentations as
out of place, obeys minutely and cheerily the directions of his
executioner, and passes with unaffected dignity to the apprehension of
that larger truth for which he had constantly prepared himself. His
friends may bury him provided they will remember they are not burying
Socrates; and that all things may be done decently and in order, a cock
must go to Æsculapius.
Long before, in the days of the Captivity, there lived in godless,
blood-shedding Nineveh an exiled Jew whose father had fallen from the
faith. He was a simple man, child-like and direct; living the careful,
kindly life of an orthodox Jew, suffering many persecutions for
conscience’ sake, and in constant danger of death. He narrates the story
of his life and of the blindness which fell on him, with gentle
placidity, and checks the exuberance of his more emotional wife with the
assurance of untroubled faith. Finally, when his pious expectations are
fulfilled, his sight restored, and his son prosperously established
beside him, he breaks into a prayer of rejoicing which reveals the secret
of his confident content. He made use of two great faculties: the sense
of proportion, which enabled him to apprise life and its accidents
justly, and the gift of in-seeing, which led Socrates after him, and
Blessed John in lonely exile on Patmos, to look through the things
temporal to the hidden meanings of eternity.
“Let my soul bless God the great King,” he cries; and looks away past the
present distress; past the Restoration which was to end in fresh
scattering and confusion; past the dream of gold, and porphyry, and
marble defaced by the eagles and emblems of the conqueror; until his eyes
are held by the Jerusalem of God, “built up with sapphires, and emeralds,
and precious stones,” with battlements of pure gold, and the cry of
‘Alleluia’ in her streets.
Many years later, when he was very aged, he called his son to him and
gave him as heritage his own simple rule of life, adding but one request:
“Keep thou the law and the commandments, and shew thyself merciful and
just, that it may go well with thee. . . . Consider what alms doeth, and
how righteousness doth deliver. . . . And bury me decently, and thy
mother with me.” Having so said, he went his way quietly and contentedly
to the Jerusalem of his heart.
It is the simple note of familiarity that is wanting in us; that by which
we link world with world. Once, years ago, I sat by the bedside of a
dying man in a wretched garret in the East End. He was entirely
ignorant, entirely quiescent, and entirely uninterested. The minister of
a neighbouring chapel came to see him and spoke to him at some length of
the need for repentance and the joys of heaven. After he had gone my
friend lay staring restlessly at the mass of decrepit broken chimney pots
which made his horizon. At last he spoke, and there was a new note in
his voice:—
“Ee said as ’ow there were golding streets in them parts. I ain’t no
ways particler wot they’re made of, but it’ll feel natral like if there’s
chimleys too.”
The sun stretched a sudden finger and painted the chimney pots red and
gold against the smoke-dimmed sky, and with his face alight with
surprised relief my friend died.
We are one with the earth, one in sin, one in redemption. It is the
fringe of the garment of God. “If I may but touch the hem,” said a
certain woman.
On the great Death-day which shadows the early spring with a shadow of
which it may be said _Umbra Dei est Lux_, the earth brought gifts of
grief, the fruit of the curse, barren thorns, hollow reed, and the wood
of the cross; the sea made offering of Tyrian purple; the sky veiled her
face in great darkness, while the nation of priests crucified for the
last time their Paschal lamb. “I will hear, saith the Lord; I will hear
the heavens, and they shall hear the earth, and the earth shall hear the
corn and wine and oil, and they shall hear Jezreel, and I will sow her
unto me in the earth; and I will have mercy upon her that had not
obtained mercy, and I will say unto them which were not my people, ‘Thou
art my people,’ and they shall say ‘Thou art my God.’”
The second Adam stood in the garden with quickening feet, and all the
earth pulsed and sang for joy of the new hope and the new life quickening
within her, to be hers through the pains of travail, the pangs of
dissolution. The Tree of Life bears Bread and Wine—food of the wayfaring
man. The day of divisions is past, the day of unity has dawned. One has
risen from the dead, and in the Valley of Achor stands wide the Door of
Hope—the Sacrament of Death.
Scio Domine, et vere scio . . . quia non sum dignus accedere ad
tantum mysterium propter nimia peccata mea et infinitas negligentias
meas. Sed scio . . . quia tu potes me facere dignum.