WE have said before, what we now repeat, that it is impossible to
write a story of New England life and manners for superficial thought
or shallow feeling. They who would fully understand the springs which
moved the characters with whom we now associate must go down with us to
the very depths.
Never was there a community where the roots of common life shot down
so deeply, and were so intensely grappled around things sublime and
eternal. The founders of it were a body of confessors and martyrs, who
turned their backs on the whole glory of the visible to found in the
wilderness a republic of which the God of heaven and earth should be
the sovereign power. For the first hundred years grew this community,
shut out by a fathomless ocean from the existing world, and divided
by an antagonism not less deep from all the reigning ideas of nominal
Christendom.
In a community thus unworldly must have arisen a mode of thought,
energetic, original, and sublime. The leaders of thought and feeling
were the ministry, and we boldly assert that the spectacle of the
early ministry of New England was one to which the world gives no
parallel. Living an intense, earnest, practical life, mostly tilling
the earth with their own hands, they yet carried on the most startling
and original religious investigations with a simplicity that might
have been deemed audacious, were it not so reverential. All old
issues relating to government, religion, ritual, and forms of church
organization having for them passed away, they went straight to the
heart of things, and boldly confronted the problem of universal being.
They had come out from the world as witnesses to the most solemn
and sacred of human rights. They had accustomed themselves boldly to
challenge and dispute all sham pretensions and idolatries of past
ages—to question the right of kings in the State and of prelates in the
Church; and now they turned the same bold inquiries towards the Eternal
Throne, and threw down their glove in the lists as authorized defenders
of every mystery in the Eternal Government. The task they proposed to
themselves was that of reconciling the most tremendous facts of sin and
evil, present and eternal, with those conceptions of Infinite Power
and Benevolence which their own strong and generous natures enabled
them so vividly to realize. In the intervals of planting and harvesting
they were busy with the toils of adjusting the laws of a universe.
Solemnly simple, they made long journeys in their old one-horse chaises
to settle with each other some nice point of celestial jurisprudence,
and to compare their maps of the Infinite. Their letters to each
other form a literature altogether unique. Hopkins sends to Edwards
the younger his scheme of the universe, in which he starts with the
proposition that God is infinitely above all obligations of any kind
to his creatures. Edwards replies with the brusque comment:—‘This is
wrong; God has no more right to injure a creature than a creature has
to injure God;’ and each probably about that time preached a sermon on
his own views, which was discussed by every farmer, in intervals of
plough and hoe, by every woman and girl, at loom, spinning-wheel, or
wash-tub. New England was one vast sea, surging from depths to heights
with thought and discussion on the most insoluble of mysteries. And it
is to be added that no man or woman accepted any theory or speculation
simply _as_ theory or speculation; all was profoundly real and vital—a
foundation on which actual life was based with intensest earnestness.
The views of human existence which resulted from this course of
training were gloomy enough to oppress any heart which did not
rise above them by triumphant faith, or sink below them by brutish
insensibility; for they included every moral problem of natural or
revealed religion, divested of all those softening poetries and tender
draperies which, forms, ceremonies, and rituals had thrown around
them in other parts and ages of Christendom. The human race, without
exception, coming into existence ‘under God’s wrath and curse,’ with
a nature so fatally disordered, that, although perfect free agents,
men were infallibly certain to do nothing to Divine acceptance until
regenerated by the supernatural aid of God’s Spirit, this aid being
given to a certain decreed number of the human race only; the rest,
with enough free agency to make them responsible, but without this
indispensable assistance exposed to the malignant assaults of evil
spirits versed in every art of temptation, were sure to fall hopelessly
into perdition. The standard of what constituted a true regeneration,
as presented in such treatises as Edwards on the Affections, and others
of the times, made this change to be something so high, disinterested,
and superhuman, so removed from all natural and common habits and
feelings, that the most earnest and devoted, whose whole life had
been a constant travail of endeavour, a tissue of almost unearthly
disinterestedness, often lived and died with only a glimmering hope of
its attainment.
According to any views then entertained of the evidences of a true
regeneration, the number of the whole human race who could be supposed
as yet to have received this grace was so small, that, as to any
numerical valuation, it must have been expressed by an infinitesimal.
Dr. Hopkins, in many places, distinctly recognizes the fact, that the
greater part of the human race, up to his time, had been eternally
lost; and boldly assumes the ground, that this amount of sin and
suffering, being the best and most necessary means of the greatest
final amount of happiness, was not merely permitted, but distinctly
chosen, decreed, and provided for, as essential in the schemes of
Infinite Benevolence. He held that this decree not only _permitted_
each individual act of sin, but also took measures to make it certain,
though, by an exercise of infinite skill, it accomplished this result
without violating human free agency.
The preaching of those times was animated by an unflinching consistency
which never shrank from carrying an idea to its remotest logical
verge. The sufferings of the lost were not kept from view, but
proclaimed with a terrible power. Dr. Hopkins boldly asserts, that ‘all
the use which God will have for them is to suffer; this is all the
end they can answer; therefore all their faculties, and their whole
capacities, will be employed and used for this end.... The body can by
omnipotence be made capable of suffering the greatest imaginable pain
without producing dissolution, or abating the least degree of life
or sensibility.... One way in which God will show his power in the
punishment of the wicked, will be in strengthening and upholding their
bodies and souls in torments which otherwise would be intolerable.’
The sermons preached by President Edwards on this subject are so
terrific in their refined poetry of torture, that very few persons of
quick sensibility could read them through without agony; and it is
related that when in those calm and tender tones, which never rose to
passionate enunciation, he read these discourses, the house was often
filled with shrieks and wailings, and that a brother minister once
laid hold of his skirts, exclaiming, in an involuntary agony, ‘Oh! Mr.
Edwards! Mr. Edwards! is God not a God of mercy?’
Not that these men were indifferent or insensible to the dread words
they spoke; their whole lives and deportment bore thrilling witness to
their sincerity. Edwards set apart special days of fasting, in view of
the dreadful doom of the lost, in which he was wont to walk the floor,
weeping and wringing his hands. Hopkins fasted every Saturday. David
Brainerd gave up every refinement of civilized life to weep and pray
at the feet of hardened savages, if by any means he might save _one_.
All, by lives of eminent purity and earnestness, gave awful weight and
sanction to their words.
If we add to this statement the fact, that it was always proposed to
every inquiring soul, as an evidence of regeneration, that it should
truly and heartily accept all the ways of God thus declared right and
lovely, and from the heart submit to Him as the only just and good,
it will be seen what materials of tremendous internal conflict and
agitation were all the while working in every bosom. Almost all the
histories of religious experience of those times relate paroxysms of
opposition to God and fierce rebellion, expressed in language which
appals the very soul, followed at length by mysterious elevations
of faith and reactions of confiding love, the result of Divine
interposition, which carried the soul far above the region of the
intellect, into that of direct spiritual intuition.
President Edwards records that he was once in this state of enmity,
that the facts of the Divine administration seemed horrible to him, and
that this opposition was overcome by no course of reasoning, but by an
‘_inward and sweet sense_’ which came to him once when walking alone in
the fields, and, looking up into the blue sky, he saw the blending of
the Divine majesty with a calm, sweet, and almost infinite meekness.
The piety which grew up under such a system was, of necessity,
energetic; it was the uprousing of the whole energy of the human soul,
pierced and wrenched and probed from her lowest depths to her topmost
heights, with every awful life-force possible to existence. He whose
faith in God came clear through these terrible tests, would be sure
never to know greater ones. He might certainly challenge earth or
heaven, things present or things to come, to swerve him from this grand
allegiance.
But it is to be conceded that these systems, so admirable in relation
to the energy, earnestness, and acuteness of their authors, when
received as absolute truth, and as a basis of actual life, had, on
minds of a certain class, the effect of a slow poison, producing
life-habits of morbid action very different from any which ever
followed the simple reading of the Bible. They differ from the New
Testament as the living embrace of a friend does from his lifeless
body, mapped out under the knife of the anatomical demonstrator; every
nerve and muscle is there, but to a sensitive spirit there is the very
chill of death in the analysis.
All systems that deal with the infinite are, besides, exposed to danger
from small, unsuspected admixtures of human error, which become deadly
when carried to such vast results. The smallest speck of earth’s dust,
in the focus of an infinite lens, appears magnified among the heavenly
orbs as a frightful monster.
Thus it happened that while strong spirits walked, palm-crowned, with
victorious hymns, along these sublime paths, feebler and more sensitive
ones lay along the track, bleeding away in life-long despair. Fearful
to them were the shadows that lay over the cradle and the grave. The
mother clasped her babe to her bosom, and looked with shuddering to the
awful coming trial of free agency, with its terrible responsibilities
and risks, and, as she thought of the infinite chances against her
beloved, almost wished it might die in infancy. But when the stroke of
death came, and some young, thoughtless head was laid suddenly low, who
can say what silent anguish of loving hearts sounded the dread depths
of eternity with the awful question, _Where?_
In no other time or place of Christendom have so fearful issues been
presented to the mind. Some church interposed its protecting shield;
the Christian born and baptized child was supposed in some wise rescued
from the curse of the fall, and related to the great redemption, to be
a member of Christ’s family, and, if ever so sinful, still infolded in
some vague sphere of hope and protection. Augustine solaced the dread
anxieties of trembling love by prayers offered for the dead, in times
when the Church above and on earth presented itself to the eye of the
mourner as a great assembly with one accord lifting interceding hands
for the parted soul.
But the clear logic and intense individualism of New England deepened
the problems of the Augustinian faith, while they swept away all those
softening provisions so earnestly clasped to the throbbing heart of
that great poet of theology. No rite, no form, no paternal relation,
no faith or prayer of church, earthly or heavenly, interposed the
slightest shield between the trembling spirit and Eternal Justice. The
individual entered eternity alone, as if he had no interceding relation
the universe.
This, then, was the awful dread which was constantly underlying life.
This it was which caused the tolling bell in green hollows and lonely
dells to be a sound which shook the soul and searched the heart with
fearful questions. And this it was that was lying with mountain weight
on the soul of the mother, too keenly agonized to feel that doubt in
such a case was any less a torture than the most dreadful certainty.
Hers was a nature more reasoning than creative and poetic; and whatever
she believed bound her mind in strictest chains to its logical results.
She delighted in the regions of mathematical knowledge, and walked them
as a native home; but the commerce with abstract certainties fitted her
mind still more to be stiffened and enchained by glacial reasonings, in
regions where spiritual intuitions are as necessary as wings to birds.
Mary was by nature of the class who never reason abstractly, whose
intellections all begin in the heart, which sends them coloured with
its warm life-tint to the brain. Her perceptions of the same subjects
were as different from Mrs. Marvyn’s as his who revels only in colour
from his who is busy with the dry details of mere outline. The one
mind was arranged like a map, and the other like a picture. In all the
system which had been explained to her, her mind selected points on
which it seized with intense sympathy, which it dwelt upon and expanded
till all else fell away. The sublimity of disinterested benevolence,
the harmony and order of a system tending in its final results to
infinite happiness, the goodness of God, the love of a self-sacrificing
Redeemer, were all so many glorious pictures, which she revolved in her
mind with small care for their logical relations.
Mrs. Marvyn had never, in all the course of their intimacy, opened
her mouth to Mary on the subject of religion. It was not an uncommon
incident of those times for persons of great elevation and purity of
character to be familiarly known and spoken of as living under a cloud
of religious gloom; and it was simply regarded as one more mysterious
instance of the workings of that infinite decree which denied to them
the special illumination of the Spirit.
When Mrs. Marvyn had drawn Mary with her into her room, she seemed
like a person almost in frenzy. She shut and bolted the door, drew her
to the foot of the bed, and, throwing her arms round her, rested her
hot and throbbing forehead on her shoulder. She pressed her thin hand
over her eyes, and then, suddenly drawing back, looked her in the face
as one resolved to speak something long suppressed. Her soft brown
eyes had a flash of despairing wildness in them, like that of a hunted
animal turning in its death-struggle on its pursuer.
‘Mary,’ she said, ‘I can’t help it,—don’t mind what I say, but I
must speak or die! Mary, I cannot, will not, be resigned!—it is all
hard, unjust, cruel!—to all eternity I will say so! To me there is no
goodness, no justice, no mercy in anything! Life seems to me the most
tremendous doom that can be inflicted on a helpless being! _What had
we done_ that it should be sent upon us? Why were we made to love so,
to hope so,—our hearts so full of feeling, and all the laws of Nature
marching over us,—never stopping for our agony? Why, we can suffer so
in this life that we had better never have been born!
‘But, Mary, think what a moment life is! think of those awful ages of
eternity! and then think of all God’s power and knowledge used on the
lost to make them suffer! think that all but the merest fragment of
mankind have gone into this, are in it now! The number of the elect is
so small we can scarce count them for anything! Think what noble minds,
what warm, generous hearts, what splendid natures are wrecked and
thrown away by thousands and tens of thousands! How we love each other!
how our hearts weave into each other! how more than glad we should be
to die for each other! And all this ends—O God, how must it end? Mary!
it isn’t _my_ sorrow only! What right have I to mourn? Is _my_ son
any better than any other mother’s son? Thousands of thousands, whose
mothers loved them as I loved mine, are gone there! Oh, my wedding-day!
Why did they rejoice? Brides should wear mourning, the bells should
toll for every wedding; every new family is built over this awful pit
of despair, and only one in a thousand escapes!’
Pale, aghast, horror-stricken, Mary stood dumb, as one who in the dark
and storm sees by the sudden glare of lightning a chasm yawning under
foot. It was amazement and dimness of anguish; the dreadful words
struck on the very centre where her soul rested. She felt as if the
point of a wedge were being driven between her life and her life’s
life, between her and her God. She clasped her hands instinctively
on her bosom, as if to hold there some cherished image, and said in
a piercing voice of supplication, ‘_My_ God! _my_ God! oh, where art
Thou?’
Mrs. Marvyn walked up and down the room with a vivid spot of red in
each cheek and a baleful fire in her eyes, talking in rapid soliloquy,
scarcely regarding her listener, absorbed in her own enkindled thoughts.
‘Dr. Hopkins says that this is all best, better than it would have
been in any other possible way; that God _chose_ it because it was
for a greater final good; that He not only chose it, but took means
to make it certain, that He ordains every sin, and does all that is
necessary to make it certain; that He creates the vessels of wrath and
fits them for destruction; and that He has an infinite knowledge by
which He can do it without violating their free agency. So much the
worse! What a use of infinite knowledge! What if men should do so?
What if a father should take means to make it certain that his poor
little child should be an abandoned wretch, without violating his free
agency? So much the worse, I say! They say He does this so that He may
show to all eternity, by their example, the evil nature of sin and
its consequences! This is all that the greater part of the human race
have been used for yet; and it is all right, because an overplus of
infinite happiness is yet to be wrought out by it! It is _not_ right!
No possible amount of good to ever so many can make it right to deprave
ever so few; happiness and misery cannot be measured so! I never can
think it right, never! Yet they say our salvation depends on our loving
God, loving Him better than ourselves, loving Him better than our
dearest friends. It is impossible! it is contrary to the laws of my
nature! I can never love God! I can never praise Him! I am lost! lost!
lost! And what is worse, I cannot redeem my friends! Oh, I _could_
suffer for ever, how willingly! if I could save _him_! But oh,
eternity, eternity! Frightful, unspeakable woe! No end! no bottom! no
shore! no hope! O God! O God!’
[Illustration: _The Comforter._
_Page 215._
Sampson Low, Son & Co. Septr. 20th, 1859.]
Mrs. Marvyn’s eyes grew wilder,—she walked the floor, wringing her
hands,—and her words, mingled with shrieks and moans, became whirling
and confused, as when in autumn a storm drives the leaves in dizzy
mazes.
Mary was alarmed,—the ecstasy of despair was just verging on insanity.
She rushed out and called Mr. Marvyn.
‘Oh! come in! do! quick!—I’m afraid her mind is going!’ she said.
‘It is what I feared,’ he said, rising from where he sat reading his
great Bible, with an air of heartbroken dejection. ‘Since she heard
this news, she has not slept nor shed a tear. The Lord hath covered us
with a cloud in the day of His fierce anger.’
He came into the room, and tried to take his wife to his arms. She
pushed him violently back, her eyes glistening with a fierce light.
‘Leave me alone!’ she said,—‘I am a lost spirit!’
These words were uttered in a shriek that went through Mary’s heart
like an arrow.
At this moment, Candace, who had been anxiously listening at the door
for an hour past, suddenly burst into the room.
‘Lor’ bress ye, Squire Marvyn, we won’t hab her goin’ on dis yer way,’
she said. ‘Do talk _gospel_ to her, can’t ye—ef you can’t, I will.’
‘Come, ye poor little lamb,’ she said, walking straight up to Mrs.
Marvyn, ‘come to ole Candace!’—and with that she gathered the pale
form to her bosom, and sat down and began rocking her, as if she had
been a babe. ‘Honey, darlin’, ye a’n’t right, dar’s a drefful mistake
somewhar,’ she said. ‘Why, de Lord a’n’t like what ye tink,—He _loves_
ye, honey! Why, jes’ feel how _I_ loves ye,—poor ole black Candace,—an’
I a’n’t better’n Him as made me! Who was it wore de crown o’ thorns,
lamb?—who was it sweat great drops o’ blood?—who was it said, “Father,
forgive dem”? Say, honey!—wasn’t it de Lord dat made ye?—Dar, dar,
now ye’r’ cryin’!—cry away, and ease yer poor little heart! He died
for Mass’r Jim,—loved him and _died_ for him,—jes’ give up His sweet,
precious body and soul for him on de cross! Laws, jes’ _leave_ him in
Jesus’ hands! Why, honey, dar’s de very print o’ de nails in his hands
now!’
The flood-gates were rent; and healing sobs and tears shook the frail
form, as a faded lily shakes under the soft rains of summer. All in the
room wept together.
‘Now, honey,’ said Candace, after a pause of some minutes, ‘I knows our
Doctor’s a mighty good man, an’ larned,—an’ in fair weather I ha’n’t no
’bjection to yer hearin’ all about dese yer great an’ mighty tings he’s
got to say. But, honey, dey won’t do for you now; sick folks mus’n’t
hab strong meat; an’ times like dese, dar jest a’n’t but one ting to
come to, an’ dat ar’s _Jesus_. Jes’ come right down to whar poor ole
black Candace has to stay allers,—it’s a good place, darlin’! _Look
right at Jesus._ Tell ye, honey, ye can’t live no other way now. Don’t
ye ’member how He looked on His mother, when she stood faintin’ an’
tremblin’ under de cross, jes’ like you? He knows all about mothers’
hearts; He won’t break yours. It was jes’ ’cause He know’d we’d come
into straits like dis yer, dat He went through all dese tings,—Him,
de Lord o’ Glory! Is dis Him you was a-talkin’ about?—Him you can’t
love? Look at Him, an’ see ef you can’t. Look an’ see what He is!—don’t
ask no questions, and don’t go to no reasonin’s,—jes’ look at _Him_,
hangin’ dar, so sweet and patient, on de cross! All dey could do
couldn’t stop his lovin’ ’em; He prayed for ’em wid all de breath He
had. Dar’s a God you can love, a’n’t dar? Candace loves Him,—poor, ole,
foolish, black, wicked Candace,—and she knows He loves her,’—and here
Candace broke down into torrents of weeping.
They laid the mother, faint and weary, on her bed, and beneath the
shadow of that suffering cross came down a healing sleep on those weary
eyelids.
‘Honey,’ said Candace, mysteriously, after she had drawn Mary out of
the room, ‘don’t ye go for to troublin’ yer mind wid dis yer. I’m clar
Mass’r James is one o’ de ’lect; and I’m clar dar’s consid’able more
o’ de ’lect dan people tink. Why, Jesus didn’t die for nothin’,—all
dat love a’n’t gwine to be wasted. De ’lect is more’n you or I knows,
honey! Dar’s de _Spirit_,—He’ll give it to ’em; and ef Mass’r James
_is_ called an’ took, depend upon it de Lord has got him ready,—course
He has,—so don’t ye go to layin’ on yer poor heart what no mortal
creetur can live under; ’cause, as we’s got to live in dis yer world,
it’s quite clar de Lord must ha’ fixed it so we _can_; and ef tings was
as some folks suppose, why, we _couldn’t_ live, and dar wouldn’t be no
sense in anyting dat goes on.’
The sudden shock of these scenes was followed, in Mrs. Marvyn’s case,
by a low, lingering fever. Her room was darkened, and she lay on her
bed, a pale, suffering form, with scarcely the ability to raise her
hand. The shimmering twilight of the sick-room fell on white napkins,
spread over stands, where constantly appeared new vials, big and
little, as the physician made his daily visit, and prescribed now this
drug and now that, for a wound that had struck through the soul.
Mary remained many days at the white house, because, to the invalid,
no step, no voice, no hand was like hers. We see her there now, as she
sits in the glimmering by the bed-curtains,—her head a little drooped,
as droops a snowdrop over a grave;—one ray of light from a round hole
in the closed shutters falls on her smooth-parted hair, her small hands
clasped on her knees, her mouth has lines of sad compression, and in
her eyes are infinite questionings.