THE OLD HOUSE OF GLASTON.
The same evening Dorothy and her father walked to the Old House. Already
the place looked much changed. The very day the deeds were signed, Mr.
Drake, who was not the man to postpone action a moment after the time
for it was come, had set men at work upon the substantial repairs. The
house was originally so well built that these were not so heavy as might
have been expected, and when completed they made little show of change.
The garden, however, looked quite another thing, for it had lifted
itself up from the wilderness in which it was suffocated, reviving like
a repentant soul reborn. Under its owner's keen watch, its ancient plan
had been rigidly regarded, its ancient features carefully retained. The
old bushes were well trimmed, but as yet nothing live, except weeds, had
been uprooted. The hedges and borders, of yew and holly and box, tall
and broad, looked very bare and broken and patchy; but now that the
shears had, after so long a season of neglect, removed the gathered
shade, the naked stems and branches would again send out the young
shoots of the spring, a new birth would begin everywhere, and the old
garden would dawn anew. For all his lack of sympathy with the older
forms of religious economy in the country, a thing, alas! too easy to
account for, the minister yet loved the past and felt its mystery. He
said once in a sermon--and it gave offense to more than one of his
deacons, for they scented in it _Germanism_,--"The love of the past, the
desire of the future, and the enjoyment of the present, make an
eternity, in which time is absorbed, its lapse lapses, and man partakes
of the immortality of his Maker. In each present personal being, we have
the whole past of our generation inclosed, to be re-developed with
endless difference in each individuality. Hence perhaps it comes that,
every now and then, into our consciousnesses float strange odors of
feeling, strange tones as of bygone affections, strange glimmers as of
forgotten truths, strange mental sensations of indescribable sort and
texture. Friends, I should be a terror to myself, did I not believe that
wherever my dim consciousness may come to itself, God is there."
Dorothy would have hastened the lighter repairs inside the house as
well, so as to get into it as soon as possible; but her father very
wisely argued that it would be a pity to get the house in good
condition, and then, as soon as they went into it, and began to find how
it could be altered better to suit their tastes and necessities, have to
destroy a great part of what had just been done. His plan, therefore,
was to leave the house for the winter, now it was weather-tight, and
with the first of the summer partly occupy it as it was, find out its
faults and capabilities, and have it gradually repaired and altered to
their minds and requirements. There would in this way be plenty of time
to talk about every thing, even to the merest suggestion of fancy, and
discover what they would really like.
But ever since the place had been theirs, Dorothy had been in the habit
of going almost daily to the house, with her book and her work, sitting
now in this, now in that empty room, undisturbed by the noises of the
workmen, chiefly outside: the foreman was a member of her father's
church, a devout man, and she knew every one of his people. She had
taken a strange fancy to those empty rooms: perhaps she felt them like
her own heart, waiting for something to come and fill them with life.
Nor was there any thing to prevent her, though the work was over for a
time, from indulging herself in going there still, as often as she
pleased, and she would remain there for hours, sometimes nearly the
whole day. In her present condition of mind and heart, she desired and
needed solitude: she was one of those who when troubled rush from their
fellows, and, urged by the human instinct after the divine, seek refuge
in loneliness--the cave on Horeb, the top of Mount Sinai, the closet
with shut door--any lonely place where, unseen, and dreading no eye, the
heart may call aloud to the God hidden behind the veil of the things
that do appear.
How different, yet how fit to merge in a mutual sympathy, were the
thoughts of the two, as they wandered about the place that evening!
Dorothy was thinking her commonest thought--how happy she could be if
only she knew there was a Will central to the universe, willing all that
came to her--good or seeming-bad--a Will whom she might love and thank
for _all_ things. He would be to her no God whom she could thank only
when He sent her what was pleasant. She must be able to thank Him for
every thing, or she could thank Him for nothing.
Her father was saying to himself he could not have believed the lifting
from his soul of such a gravestone of debt, would have made so little
difference to his happiness. He fancied honest Jones, the butcher, had
more mere pleasure from the silver snuff-box he had given him, than he
had himself from his fortune. Relieved he certainly was, but the relief
was not happiness. His debt had been the stone that blocked up the gate
of Paradise: the stone was rolled away, but the gate was not therefore
open. He seemed for the first time beginning to understand what he had
so often said, and in public too, and had thought he understood, that
God Himself, and not any or all of His gifts, is the life of a man. He
had got rid of the dread imagination that God had given him the money in
anger, as He had given the Israelites the quails, nor did he find that
the possession formed any barrier between him and God: his danger, now
seemed that of forgetting the love of the Giver in his anxiety to spend
the gift according to His will.
"You and I ought to be very happy, my love," he said, as now they were
walking home.
He had often said so before, and Dorothy had held her peace; but now,
with her eyes on the ground, she rejoined, in a low, rather broken
voice,
"Why, papa?"
"Because we are lifted above the anxiety that was crushing us into the
very mud," he answered, with surprise at her question.
"It never troubled me so much as all that," she answered. "It is a great
relief to see you free from it, father; but otherwise, I can not say
that it has made much difference to me."
"My dear Dorothy," said the minister, "it is time we should understand
each other. Your state of mind has for a long time troubled me; but
while debt lay so heavy upon me, I could give my attention to nothing
else. Why should there be any thing but perfect confidence between a
father and daughter who belong to each other alone in all the world?
Tell me what it is that so plainly oppresses you. What prevents you from
opening your heart to me? You can not doubt my love."
"Never for one moment, father," she answered, almost eagerly, pressing
to her heart the arm on which she leaned. "I know I am safe with you
because I am yours, and yet somehow I can not get so close to you as I
would. Something comes between us, and prevents me."
"What is it, my child? I will do all and every thing I can to remove
it."
"You, dear father! I don't believe ever child had such a father."
"Oh yes, my dear! many have had better fathers, but none better than I
hope one day by the grace of God to be to you. I am a poor creature,
Dorothy, but I love you as my own soul. You are the blessing of my days,
and my thoughts brood over you in the night: it would be in utter
content, if I only saw you happy. If your face were acquainted with
smiles, my heart would be acquainted with gladness."
For a time neither said any thing more. The silent tears were streaming
from Dorothy's eyes. At length she spoke.
"I wonder if I could tell you what it is without hurting you, father!"
she said.
"I can hear any thing from you, my child," he answered. "Then I will
try. But I do not think I shall ever quite know my father on earth, or
be quite able to open my heart to him, until I have found my Father in
Heaven."
"Ah, my child! is it so with you? Do you fear you have not yet given
yourself to the Saviour? Give yourself now. His arms are ever open to
receive you."
"That is hardly the point, father.--Will you let me ask you any question
I please?"
"Assuredly, my child." He always spoke, though quite unconsciously, with
a little of the _ex-cathedral_ tone.
"Then tell me, father, are you just as sure of God as you are of me
standing here before you?"
She had stopped and turned, and stood looking him full in the face with
wide, troubled eyes.
Mr. Drake was silent. Hateful is the professional, contemptible is the
love of display, but in his case they floated only as vapors in the air
of a genuine soul. He was a true man, and as he could not say _yes_,
neither would he hide his _no_ in a multitude of words--at least to his
own daughter: he was not so sure of God as he was of that daughter, with
those eyes looking straight into his! Could it be that he never had
believed in God at all? The thought went through him with a great pang.
It was as if the moon grew dark above him, and the earth withered under
his feet. He stood before his child like one whose hypocrisy had been
proclaimed from the housetop.
"Are you vexed with me, father?" said Dorothy sadly.
"No, my child," answered the minister, in a voice of unnatural
composure. "But you stand before me there like, the very thought started
out of my soul, alive and visible, to question its own origin."
"Ah, father!" cried Dorothy, "let us question our origin."
The minister never even heard the words.
"That very doubt, embodied there in my child, has, I now know, been
haunting me, dogging me behind, ever since I began to teach others," he
said, as if talking in his sleep. "Now it looks me in the face. Am I
myself to be a castaway?--Dorothy, I am _not_ sure of God--not as I am
sure of you, my darling."
He stood silent. His ear expected a low-voiced, sorrowful reply. He
started at the tone of gladness in which Dorothy cried--
"Then, father, there is henceforth no cloud between us, for we are in
the same cloud together! It does not divide us, it only brings us closer
to each other. Help me, father: I am trying hard to find God. At the
same time, I confess I would rather not find Him, than find Him such as
I have sometimes heard you represent Him."
"It may well be," returned her father--the _ex-cathedral_, the
professional tone had vanished utterly for the time, and he spoke with
the voice of an humble, true man--"it may well be that I have done Him
wrong; for since now at my age I am compelled to allow that I am not
sure of Him, what more likely than that I may have been cherishing wrong
ideas concerning Him, and so not looking in the right direction for
finding Him?"
"Where did you get your notions of God, father--those, I mean, that you
took with you to the pulpit?"
A year ago even, if he had been asked the same question, he would at
once have answered, "From the Word of God;" but now he hesitated, and
minutes passed before he began a reply. For he saw now that it was not
from the Bible _he_ had gathered them, whence soever they had come at
first. He pondered and searched--and found that the real answer eluded
him, hiding itself in a time beyond his earliest memory. It seemed
plain, therefore, that the source whence first he began to draw those
notions, right or wrong, must be the talk and behavior of the house in
which he was born, the words and carriage of his father and mother and
their friends. Next source to that came the sermons he heard on Sundays,
and the books given him to read. The Bible was one of those books, but
from the first he read it through the notions with which his mind was
already vaguely filled, and with the comments of his superiors around
him. Then followed the books recommended at college, this author and
that, and the lectures he heard there upon the attributes of God and the
plan of salvation. The spirit of commerce in the midst of which he had
been bred, did not occur to him as one of the sources.
But he had perceived enough. He opened his mouth and bravely answered
her question as well as he could, not giving the Bible as the source
from which he had taken any one of the notions of God he had been in the
habit of presenting.
"But mind," he added, "I do not allow that therefore my ideas must be
incorrect. If they be second-hand, they may yet be true. I do admit that
where they have continued only second-hand, they can have been of little
value to me."
"What you allow, then, father," said Dorothy, "is that you have yourself
taken none of your ideas direct from the fountain-head?"
"I am afraid I must confess it, my child--with this modification, that I
have thought many of them over a good deal, and altered some of them not
a little to make them fit the molds of truth in my mind."
"I am so glad, father!" said Dorothy. "I was positively certain, from
what I knew of you--which is more than any one else in this world, I do
believe--that some of the things you said concerning God never could
have risen in your own mind."
"They might be in the Bible for all that," said the minister, very
anxious to be and speak the right thing. "A man's heart is not to be
trusted for correct notions of God."
"Nor yet for correct interpretation of the Bible, I should think," said
Dorothy.
"True, my child," answered her father with a sigh, "--except as it be
already a Godlike heart. The Lord says a bramble-bush can not bring
forth grapes."
"The notions you gathered of God from other people, must have come out
of their hearts, father?"
"Out of somebody's heart?"
"Just so," answered Dorothy.
"Go on, my child," said her father. "Let me understand clearly your
drift."
"I have heard Mr. Wingfold say," returned Dorothy, "that however men may
have been driven to form their ideas of God before Christ came, no man
can, with thorough honesty, take the name of a Christian, whose ideas of
the Father of men are gathered from any other field than the life,
thought, words, deeds, of the only Son of that Father. He says it is not
from the Bible as a book that we are to draw our ideas of God, but from
the living Man into whose presence that book brings us, Who is alive
now, and gives His spirit that they who read about Him may understand
what kind of being He is, and why He did as He did, and know Him, in
some possible measure, as He knows Himself.--I can only repeat the
lesson like a child."
"I suspect," returned the minister, "that I have been greatly astray.
But after this, we will seek our Father together, in our Brother, Jesus
Christ."
It was the initiation of a daily lesson together in the New Testament,
which, while it drew their hearts closer to each other, drew them, with
growing delight, nearer and nearer to the ideal of humanity, Jesus
Christ, in whom shines the glory of its Father.
A man may look another in the face for a hundred years and not know him.
Men _have_ looked Jesus Christ in the face, and not known either Him or
his Father. It was needful that He should appear, to begin the knowing
of Him, but speedily was His visible presence taken away, that it might
not become, as assuredly it would have become, a veil to hide from men
the Father of their spirits. Do you long for the assurance of some
sensible sign? Do you ask why no intellectual proof is to be had? I tell
you that such would but delay, perhaps altogether impair for you, that
better, that best, that only vision, into which at last your world must
blossom--such a contact, namely, with the heart of God Himself, such a
perception of His being, and His absolute oneness with you, the child of
His thought, the individuality softly parted from His spirit, yet living
still and only by His presence and love, as, by its own radiance, will
sweep doubt away forever. Being then in the light and knowing it, the
lack of intellectual proof concerning that which is too high for it,
will trouble you no more than would your inability to silence a
metaphysician who declared that you had no real existence. It is for the
sake of such vision as God would give that you are denied such vision as
you would have. The Father of our spirits is not content that we should
know Him as we now know each other. There is a better, closer, nearer
than any human way of knowing, and to that He is guiding us across all
the swamps of our unteachableness, the seas of our faithlessness, the
desert of our ignorance. It is so very hard that we should have to wait
for that which we can not yet receive? Shall we complain of the shadows
cast upon our souls by the hand and the napkin polishing their mirrors
to the receiving of the more excellent glory! Have patience, children of
the Father. Pray always and do not faint. The mists and the storms and
the cold will pass--the sun and the sky are for evermore. There were no
volcanoes and no typhoons but for the warm heart of the earth, the soft
garment of the air, and the lordly sun over all. The most loving of you
can not imagine how one day the love of the Father will make you love
even your own.
Much trustful talk passed between father and daughter as they walked
home: they were now nearer to each other than ever in their lives
before.
"You don't mind my coming out here alone, papa?" said Dorothy, as, after
a little chat with the gate-keeper, they left the park. "I have of late
found it so good to be alone! I think I am beginning to learn to think."
"Do in every thing just as you please, my child," said her father. "I
can have no objection to what you see good. Only don't be so late as to
make me anxious."
"I like coming early," said Dorothy. "These lovely mornings make me feel
as if the struggles of life were over, and only a quiet old age were
left."
The father looked anxiously at his daughter. Was she going to leave him?
It smote him to the heart that he had done so little to make her life a
blessed one. How hard no small portion of it had been! How worn and pale
she looked! Why did she not show fresh and bright like other young
women--Mrs. Faber for instance? He had not guided her steps into the way
of peace! At all events he had not led her home to the house of wisdom
and rest! Too good reason why--he had not himself yet found that home!
Henceforth, for her sake as well as his own, he would besiege the
heavenly grace with prayer.
The opening of his heart in confessional response to his daughter,
proved one of those fresh starts in the spiritual life, of which a man
needs so many as he climbs to the heavenly gates.