TRULY THE LIGHT IS SWEET.
The cry of the human heart in all ages and in every moment is, "Where is
God and how shall I find him?"--No, friend, I will not accept your
testimony to the contrary--not though you may be as well fitted as ever
one of eight hundred millions to come forward with it. You take it for
granted that you know your own heart because you call it yours, but I
say that your heart is a far deeper thing than you know or are capable
of knowing. Its very nature is hid from you. I use but a poor figure
when I say that the roots of your heart go down beyond your
knowledge--whole eternities beyond it--into the heart of God. If you
have never yet made one discovery in your heart, your testimony
concerning it is not worth a tuft of flue; and if you have made
discoveries in it, does not the fact reveal that it is but little known
to you, and that there must be discoveries innumerable yet to be made in
it? To him who has been making discoveries in it for fifty years, the
depths of his heart are yet a mystery--a mystery, however, peopled with
loveliest hopes. I repeat whether the man knows it or not, his heart in
its depths is ever crying out for God.
Where the man does not know it, it is because the unfaithful Self, a
would-be monarch, has usurped the consciousness; the demon-man is
uppermost, not Christ-man; he is down in the crying heart, and the
demon-man--that is the self that worships itself--is trampling on the
heart and smothering it up in the rubbish of ambitions, lusts, and
cares. If ever its cry reaches that Self, it calls it childish folly,
and tramples the harder. It does not know that a child crying on God is
mightier than a warrior dwelling in steel.
If we had none but fine weather, the demon-Self would be too much for
the divine-Self, and would always keep it down; but bad weather,
misfortune, ill-luck, adversity, or whatever name but punishment or the
love of God men may call it, sides with the Christ-self down below, and
helps to make its voice heard. On the other hand if we had nothing but
bad weather, the hope of those in whom the divine Self is slowly rising
would grow too faint; while those in whom the bad weather had not yet
begun to work good would settle down into weak, hopeless rebellion.
Without hope can any man repent?
To the people at Burcliff came at length a lovely morning, with sky and
air like the face of a repentant child--a child who has repented so
thoroughly that the sin has passed from him, and he is no longer even
ashamed. The water seemed dancing in the joy of a new birth, and the
wind, coming and going in gentle conscious organ-like swells, was at it
with them, while the sun kept looking merrily down on the glad commotion
his presence caused.
"Ah," thought the mother, as she looked from her windows ere she began
to dress for this new live day, "how would it be if the Light at the
heart of the sun were shining thus on the worlds made in his image!"
She was thinking of her boy, whom perhaps, in all the world, she only
was able to love heartily--there was so little in the personal being of
the lad, that is, in the thing he was to himself, and was making of
himself, to help anyone to love him! But in the absolute mere existence
is reason for love, and upon that God does love--so love, that he will
suffer and cause suffering for the development of that existence into a
thing in its own full nature lovable, namely, an existence in its own
will one with the perfect love whence it issued; and the mother's heart
more than any other God has made is like him in power of loving. Alas
that she is so seldom like him in wisdom--so often thwarting the work of
God, and rendering more severe his measures with her child by her
attempts to shield him from His law, and save him from saving sorrow.
How often from his very infancy--if she does not, like the very nurse
she employs, actively teach him to be selfish--does she get between him
and the right consequences of his conduct, as if with her one feeble
loving hand, she would stay the fly-wheel of the holy universe. It is
the law that the man who does evil shall suffer; it is the only hope for
him, and a hope for the neighbor he wrongs. When he forsakes his evil,
one by one the dogs of suffering will halt and drop away from his track;
and he will find at last they have but hounded him into the land of his
nativity, into the home of his Father in heaven.
As soon as breakfast was over, the whole family set out for a walk. Mr.
Raymount seldom left the house till after lunch, but even he, who cared
comparatively little for the open air, had grown eager after it.
Streets, hills and sands were swarming with human beings, all drawn out
by the sun.
"I sometimes wonder," he said, "that so many people require so little to
make them happy. Let but the sun break through the clouds, and he sets
them all going like ants in an ant-hill!"
"Yes," returned his wife, "but then see how little on the other hand is
required to make them miserable! Let the sun hide his head for a day,
and they grumble!"
Making the remark, the good woman never thought of her son Cornelius,
the one of her family whose conduct illustrated it. At the moment she
saw him cheerful, and her love looked upon him as good. She was one of
the best of women herself: whatever hour she was called, her lamp was
sure to have oil in it; and yet all the time since first he lay in her
arms, I doubt if she had ever done anything to help the youth to conquer
himself. Now it was too late, even had she known what could be done. But
the others had so far turned out well: why should not this one also? The
moment his bad humors were over, she looked on him as reformed; and when
he uttered worldliness, she persuaded herself he was but jesting. But
alas! she had no adequate notion--not a shadow of one--of the
selfishness of the man-child she had given to the world. This matter of
the black sheep in the white flock is one of the most mysterious of the
facts of spiritual generation.
Sometimes, indeed, the sheep is by no means so black as to the whiter
ones he seems; perhaps neither are they so much whiter as their friends
and they themselves think; for to be altogether respectable is not to be
clean; and the black sheep may be all the better than some of the rest
that he looks what he is, and does not dye his wool. But on the other
hand he may be a great deal worse than some of his own family think him.
"Then," said Hester, after a longish pause, "those that need more to
make them happy, are less easily made unhappy?"
To this question rather than remark, she received no reply. Her father
and mother both felt it not altogether an easy one to answer: it
suggested points requiring consideration. To Cornelius, it was a mere
girl's speech, not worth heeding where the girl was his sister. He
turned up at it a mental nose, the merest of snubs; and well he might,
for he had not the least notion of what it meant or involved.
As little notion had his father that his son Cornelius was a black
sheep. He was not what the world would have called a black sheep, but
his father, could he have seen into him, would have counted him a very
black sheep indeed--and none the whiter that he recognized in the
blackness certain shades that were of paternal origin. It was, however,
only to the rest of the family that Cornelius showed his blackness: of
his father he was afraid; and that father, being proud of his children,
would have found it hard to believe anything bad of them: like his
faults they were his own! His faith in his children was in no small
measure conceit of that which was his, and blinded him to their faults
as it blinded him to some of his own. The discovery of any serious fault
in one of them would be a sore wound to his vanity, a destruction of his
self-content.
The co-existence of good and evil in the same person is perhaps the most
puzzling of all facts. What a shock it gives one to hear a woman who
loves God, and spends both time and money on the betterment of her kind,
call a pauper child a _brat_, and see her turn with disgust from
the idea of treating any strange child, more especially one of low
birth, as her own. "O Christ!" cries the heart, "is this one of the
women that follows thee?" And she _is_ one of the women that follow
him--only she needs such a lesson as he gave his disciples through the
Syrophenician woman.
Mr. Raymount had such an opinion of himself, that while he never
obtruded his opinions upon others, he never imagined them disregarded in
his own family. It never entered his mind that any member of it might in
this or that think differently from himself. But both his wife and
Hester were able to think, and did think for themselves, as they were
bound in the truth of things to do; and there were considerable
divergements of the paths in which they walked from that he had trodden.
He had indeed always taken too much for granted, and ought to have used
more pains to have his notions understood by them, if he laid so much on
their intellectual sympathy. He supposed all the three read what he
wrote; and his wife and daughter did read the most of it; but what would
he think when he came to know that his son not only read next to nothing
of it, but read that little with a contempt not altogether
unconscious--for no other reason than that it was his father who wrote
it? Nor was the youth quite without justification--for was he not
himself a production of his father? But then he looked upon the latter
as one of altogether superior quality! It is indeed strange how vulgar
minds despise the things they have looked upon and their hands have
handled, just because they have looked upon them and their hands have
handled them; is there not in the fact a humiliating lesson, which yet
they are unable to read, of the degrading power of their own presence
upon themselves and their judgments? Whether a man is a hero to his
valet or the opposite, depends as much on the valet as on the man: The
bond, then, between the father and the son, was by no means so strong as
the father thought it. Indeed the selfishness of Cornelius made him
almost look upon his father as his enemy, because of his intentions with
regard to the division of his property. And selfishness rarely fails of
good arguments. Nor can anything destroy it but such a turning of things
upside down as only he that made them can work.