JACOB'S VOW.
"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 forgot how you
looked then, nor what you said. Nothing in my life ever had such an
effect upon 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
who 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 had 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 out 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 and
seek his fortune in a strange country, and laid 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 the 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 upon.
"If I understand Dr. H., 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, 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 those 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: 'Thou shall call his name 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 ship 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, and
now I am 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 me. 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.
"JAMES MARVYN."
Mary rose, after reading this letter, rapt 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 as to have in them an
eternal and satisfying treasure. 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 to that sleep which God giveth to
his beloved.