‘MY DEAREST MARY,—I have lived through many wonderful scenes since I
saw you last; my life has been so adventurous that I scarcely know
myself when I think of it. But it is not of _that_ I am going now to
write; I have written all that to mother, and she will show it to you:
but since I parted from you there has been another history going on
within me, and _that_ is what I wish to make you understand if I can.
‘It seems to me that I have been a changed man from that afternoon
when I came to your window where we parted. I have never forgotten how
you looked then, nor what you said; nothing in my life ever had such
an effect on me. I thought that I loved you before; but I went away
feeling that _love_ was something so deep, and high, and sacred, that
_I_ was not worthy to name it to you; I cannot think of the man in the
world that _is_ worthy of what you said you felt for me. From _that_
hour there was a new purpose in my soul—a purpose which has led me
upward ever since.
‘I thought to myself in this way, “There is some secret source from
whence this inner life springs;” and I knew that it was connected
with the Bible which you gave me, and so I thought I would read it
carefully and deliberately, to see what I could make of it. I began
with the beginning; it impressed me with a sense of something quaint
and strange—something rather fragmentary; and yet there were spots all
along that went right to the heart of a man who has to deal with life
and things as I did.
‘Now I must say that the Doctor’s preaching, as I told you, never
impressed me much in any way. I could not make any connection between
it and the men I had to manage, and the things I had to do in my daily
life. But there were things in the Bible that struck me otherwise;
there was _one_ passage in particular, and that was where Jacob started
off from all his friends, to go off and seek his fortune in a strange
country, and lay down to sleep all alone in the field, with only a
stone for his pillow. It seemed to me exactly the image of what every
young man is like when he leaves his home, and goes out to shift for
himself in this hard world. I tell you, Mary, that _one man alone_ on
the great ocean of life feels himself a very weak thing: we are held
up by each other more than we know, till we go off by ourselves into
this great experiment. Well, there he was, as lonesome as _I_ upon the
deck of my ship; and so lying with this stone under his head, he saw
a ladder in his sleep between him and heaven, and angels going up and
down. That was a sight which came to the very point of his necessities;
he saw that there was a way between him and God, and that there were
those above who did care for him, and who could come to him to help him.
‘Well, so the next morning he got up, and set up the stone to mark the
place; and it says “Jacob vowed a vow, saying, If God will be with me,
and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat
and raiment to put on, so that I come again to my father’s house in
peace, _then_ shall the Lord be my God.” Now there was something that
looked to me like a tangible foundation to begin on.
‘If I understand Dr. Hopkins, I believe he would have called that
all selfishness. At first sight it does look a little so, but then I
thought of it in this way. Here he was, all alone; God was entirely
invisible to him, and how could he feel certain that He really existed
unless he could come into some kind of connection with Him? The point
that he wanted to be sure of was more than merely to know that there
was a God who made the world; he wanted to know whether He cared
anything about men, and would do anything to help them. And so, in
fact, it was saying “If there is a God who interests himself at all in
me, and will be my friend and protector, I will obey Him so far as I
can find out His will.”
‘I thought to myself, “This is the great experiment, and I will try
it.” I made in my heart exactly the same resolution, and just quietly
resolved to assume for a while, as a fact, that there _was_ such a God,
and whenever I came to a place where I could not help myself, just to
ask His help honestly in so many words, and see what would come of it.
‘Well, as I went on reading through the Old Testament, I was more
and more convinced that all the men of those times had tried this
experiment, and found that it would bear them; and, in fact, I did
begin to find in my own experience a great many things happening so
remarkably that I could not but think that somebody did attend even
to my prayers: I began to feel a trembling faith that _somebody_ was
guiding me, and that the events of my life were not happening by
accident, but working themselves out by His will.
‘Well, as I went on in this way there were other and higher thoughts
kept rising in my mind. I wanted to be better than I was; I had a
sense of a life much nobler and purer than anything I had ever lived,
that I wanted to come up to. But in the world of men, as I found it,
such feelings are always laughed down as romantic and impracticable
and impossible. But about this time I began to read the New Testament,
and then the idea came to me that the same Power that helped me in the
lower sphere of life would help me carry out these higher aspirations.
Perhaps the Gospels would not have interested me so much if I had begun
with them first; but my Old Testament life seemed to have schooled me,
and brought me to a place where I wanted, something higher, and I began
to notice that my prayers now were more that I might be noble, and
patient, and self-denying, and constant in my duty, than for any other
kind of help. And then I understood what met me in the very first of
Matthew, “He shall be called Jesus, for He shall save His people from
their sins.”
‘I began now to live a new life, a life in which I felt myself coming
into sympathy with you; for, Mary, when I began to read the gospels I
took knowledge of you, that you had been with Jesus.
‘The crisis of my life was that dreadful night of the shipwreck. It
was as dreadful as the day of judgment. No words of mine can describe
to you what I felt when I knew that our rudder was gone, and saw those
hopeless rocks before us—what I felt for our poor men!—but in the midst
of it all the words came into my mind, “And Jesus was in the hinder
part of the vessel asleep on a pillow,” and at once I felt He _was_
there; and when the ship struck, I was only conscious of an intense
going out of my soul to Him, like Peter’s when he threw himself from
the ship to meet Him in the waters.
‘I will not recapitulate what I have already written—the wonderful
manner in which I was saved, and in which friends, and help, and
prosperity, and worldly success came to me again after life had seemed
all lost, but now I am ready to return to my country, and I feel as
Jacob did when he said, “With my staff I passed over this Jordan, but
now am I become two bands.” I do not need any arguments now to convince
me that the Bible is from above. There is a great deal in it that I
cannot understand—a great deal that seems to me inexplicable; but all
I can say is, that I have tried its directions, and find that in my
case they do work; that it is a book that I can _live_ by, and that is
enough for me.
‘And now, Mary, I am coming home again quite another man from what I
went out; with a whole new world of thought and feeling in my heart,
and a new purpose, by which, please God, I mean to shape my life. All
this, under God, I owe to you; and if you will let me devote my whole
life to you, it will be a small return for what you have done for me.
‘You know I left you wholly free: others must have seen your loveliness
and felt your worth, and you may have learnt to love some better man
than I; but I know not what hope tells me that this will not be, and I
shall find true what the Bible says of love, that “many waters cannot
quench it, nor floods drown.” In any case I shall be always from my
very heart yours, and yours only, till death.
‘JAMES MARVYN.’
Mary rose after reading this letter wrapped into a divine state of
exaltation,—the pure joy in contemplating an infinite good to another,
in which the question of self was utterly forgotten. He was then what
she had always hoped and prayed he would be, and she pressed the
thought triumphantly to her heart. He was that true and victorious
man; that Christian able to subdue life, and to show in a perfect
and healthy manly nature a reflection of the image of the superhuman
excellence. Her prayers that night were aspirations and praises; and
she felt how possible it might be so to appropriate the good, and the
joy, and the nobleness of others, so as to have in them an eternal and
satisfying pleasure. And with this came the dearer thought that she in
her weakness and solitude had been permitted to put her hand to the
beginning of a work so noble. The consciousness of good done to an
immortal spirit is wealth that neither life nor death can take away.
And so, having prayed, she lay down with that sleep which God giveth to
His beloved.