July 22.
Aunt Winifred has connected herself with our church. I think it was
rather hard for her, breaking the last tie that bound her to her
husband’s people; but she had a feeling, that, if her work is to be done
and her days ended here, she had better take up all such little threads
of influence to make herself one with us.
25th.
To-day what should Deacon Quirk do but make a solemn call on Mrs.
Forceythe, for the purpose of asking--and this with a hint that he
wished he had asked before she became a member of the Homer First
Congregational Church--whether there were truth in the rumors, now rife
about town, that she was a Swedenborgian!
Aunt Winifred broke out laughing, and laughed merrily. The Deacon
frowned.
“I used to fancy that I believed in Swedenborg,” she said, as soon as
she could sober down a little.
The Deacon pricked up his ears, with visions of excommunications and
councils reflected on every feature.
“Until I read his books,” she finished.
“Oh!” said the Deacon. He waited for more, but she seemed to consider
the conversation at an end.
“So then you--if I understand--are _not_ a Swedenborgian, ma’am?”
“If I were, I certainly should have had no inducement to join myself to
your church,” she replied, with gentle dignity. “I believe, with all my
heart, in the same Bible and the same creed that you believe in, Deacon
Quirk.”
“And you _live_ your creed, which all such genial Christians do not find
it necessary to do,” I thought, as the Deacon in some perplexity took
his departure, and she returned with a smile to her sewing.
I suppose the call came about in this way. We had the sewing-circle here
last week, and just before the lamps were lighted, and when people had
dropped their work to group and talk in the corners, Meta Tripp came up
with one or two other girls to Aunt Winifred, and begged “to hear some
of those queer things people said she believed about heaven.” Auntie is
never obtrusive with her views on this or any other matter, but, being
thus urged, she answered a few questions that they put to her, to the
extreme scandal of one or two old ladies, and the secret delight of the
rest.
“Well,” said little Mrs. Bland, squeezing and kissing her youngest, who
was at that moment vigorously employed in sticking very long
darning-needles into his mother’s waterfall, “I hope there’ll be a great
many babies there. I should be perfectly happy if I always could have
babies to play with!”
The look that Aunt Winifred shot over at me was worth seeing.
She merely replied, however, that she supposed all our “highest
aspirations,”--with an indescribable accent to which Mrs. Bland was
safely deaf,--if good ones, would be realized; and added, laughing, that
Swedenborg said that the babies in heaven--who outnumber the grown
people--will be given into the charge of those women especially fond of
them.
“Swedenborg is suggestive, even if you can’t accept what seem to the
uninitiated to be his natural impossibilities,” she said, after we had
discussed Deacon Quirk awhile. “He says a pretty thing, too,
occasionally. Did I ever read you about the houses?”
She had not, and I wished to hear, so she found the book on Heaven and
Hell, and read:--
“As often as I have spoken with the angels mouth to mouth, so often I
have been with them in their habitations: their habitations are
altogether like the habitations on earth which are called houses, but
more beautiful; in them are parlors, rooms, and chambers in great
numbers; there are also courts, and round about are gardens,
shrubberies, and fields. Palaces of heaven have been seen, which were so
magnificent that they could not be described; above, they glittered as
if they were of pure gold, and below, as if they were of precious
stones; one palace was more splendid than another; within, it was the
same the rooms were ornamented with such decorations as neither words
nor sciences are sufficient to describe. On the side which looked to the
south there were paradises, where all things in like manner glittered,
and in some places the leaves were as of silver, and the fruits as of
gold; and the flowers on their beds presented by colors as it were
rainbows; at the boundaries again were palaces, in which the view
terminated.”
Aunt Winifred says that our hymns, taken all together, contain the worst
and the best pictures of heaven that we have in any branch of
literature.
“It seems to me incredible,” she says, “that the Christian Church should
have allowed that beautiful ‘Jerusalem’ in its hymnology so long, with
the ghastly couplet,--
‘Where congregations ne’er break up,
And Sabbaths have no end.’
The dullest preachers are sure to give it out, and that when there are
the greatest number of restless children wondering when it will be time
to go home. It is only within ten years that modern hymn books have
altered it, returning in part to the original.
“I do not think we have chosen the best parts of that hymn for our
‘service of song.’ You never read the whole of it? You don’t know how
pretty it is! It is a relief from the customary palms and choirs. One’s
whole heart is glad of the outlet of its sweet refrain,--
‘Would God that I were there!’
before one has half read it. You are quite ready to believe that
‘There is no hunger, heat, nor cold,
But _pleasure every way_.’