It was at this time, I think, that a great change came over my thoughts,
or rather that I realised that a great change had gradually taken place.
Till now, I had been dominated and haunted by memories of my latest life
upon earth; but at intervals there had visited me a sense of older and
purer recollections. I cannot describe exactly how it came about--and,
indeed, the memory of what my heavenly progress had hitherto been, as
opposed to my earthly experience, was never very clear to me; but I
became aware that my life in heaven--I will call it heaven for want of a
better name--was my real continuous life, my home-life, so to speak,
while my earthly lives had been, to pursue the metaphor, like terms
which a boy spends at school, in which he is aware that he not only
learns definite and tangible things, but that his character is hardened
and consolidated by coming into contact with the rougher facts of
life--duty, responsibility, friendships, angers, treacheries,
temptations, routine. The boy returns with gladness to the serener and
sweeter atmosphere of home; and just in the same way I felt I had
returned to the larger and purer life of heaven. But, as I say, the
recollection of my earlier life in heaven, my occupations and
experience, was never clear to me, but rather as a luminous and haunting
mist. I questioned Amroth about this once, and he said that this was the
universal experience, and that the earthly lives one lived were like
deep trenches cut across a path, and seemed to interrupt the heavenly
sequence; but that as the spirit grew more pure and wise, the
consciousness of the heavenly life became more distinct and secure. But
he added, what I did not quite understand, that there was little need of
memory in the life of heaven, and that it was to a great extent the
inheritance of the body. Memory, he said, was to a great extent an
interruption to life; the thought of past failures and mistakes, and
especially of unkindnesses and misunderstandings, tended to obscure and
complicate one's relations with other souls; but that in heaven, where
activity and energy were untiring and unceasing, one lived far more in
the emotion and work of the moment, and less in retrospect and prospect.
What mattered was actual experience and the effect of experience; memory
itself was but an artistic method of dealing with the past, and
corresponded to fanciful and delightful anticipations of the future.
"The truth is," he said, "that the indulgence of memory is to a great
extent a mere sentimental weakness; to live much in recollection is a
sign of exhausted and depleted vitality. The further you are removed
from your last earthly life, the less tempted you will be to recall it.
The highest spirits of all here," he said, "have no temptation ever to
revert to retrospect, because the pure energies of the moment are
all-sustaining and all-sufficing."
The only trace I ever noticed of any memory of my past life in heaven
was that things sometimes seemed surprisingly familiar to me, and that I
had the sense of a serene permanence, which possessed and encompassed
me. Indeed I came to believe that the strange feeling of permanence
which haunts one upon earth, when one is happy and content, even though
one knows that everything is changing and shifting around one, and that
all is precarious and uncertain, is in itself a memory of the serene and
untroubled continuance of heaven, and a desire to taste it and realise
it.
Be this as it may, from the time of my finding my settled task and
ordered place in the heavenly community the memories of my old life upon
earth began to fade from my thoughts. I could, indeed, always recall
them by an effort, but there seemed less and less inclination to do so
the more I became absorbed in my heavenly activities.
One thing I noticed in these days; it surprised me very greatly, till I
reflected that my surprise was but the consequence of the strange and
mournful blindness with regard to spiritual things in which we live
under the dark skies of earth. We have there a false idea that somehow
or other death takes all the individuality out of a man, obliterating
all the whims, prejudices, the thorny and unreasonable dislikes and
fancies, oddities, tempers, roughnesses, and subtlenesses from a
temperament. Of course there are a good many of these things which
disappear together with the body, such as the glooms, suspicions, and
cloudy irritabilities, which are caused by fatigue and malaise, and by
ill-health generally. But a man's whims and fancies and dislikes do not
by any means disappear on earth when he is in good health; on the
contrary, they are often apt to be accentuated and emphasised when he is
free from pain and care and anxiety, and riding blithely over the waves
of life. Indeed there are men whom I have known who are never kind or
sympathetic till they are in some wearing trouble of their own; when
they are prosperous and cheerful, they are frankly intolerable, because
their mirth turns to derision and insolence.
But one of the reasons why the heavenly life is apt to appear in
prospect so wearisome a thing is, because we are brought up to feel that
the whole character is flattened out and charged with a serene kind of
priggishness, which takes all the salt out of life. The word "saintly,"
so terribly misapplied on earth, grows to mean, to many of us, an
irritating sort of kindness, which treats the interests and animated
elements of life with a painful condescension, and a sympathy of which
the basis is duty rather than love. The true sanctification, which I
came to perceive something of later, is the result of a process of
endless patience and infinite delay, and the attainment of it implies a
humility, seven times refined in the fires of self-contempt, in which
there remains no smallest touch of superiority or aloofness. How utterly
depressing is the feigned interest of the imperfect human saint in
matters of mundane concern! How it takes at once both the joy out of
holiness and the spirit out of human effort! It is as dreary as the
professional sympathy of the secluded student for the news of athletic
contests, as the tolerance of the shrewd man of science for the feminine
logic of religious sentiment!
But I found to my great content that whatever change had passed over the
spirits of my companions, they had at least lost no fibre of their
individuality. The change that had passed over them was like the change
that passes over a young man, who has lived at the University among
dilettante literary designs and mild sociological theorising, when he
finds himself plunged into the urgent practical activities of the world.
Our happiness was the happiness which comes of intense toil, with no
fatigue to dog it, and from a consciousness of the vital issues which
we were pursuing. But my companions had still intellectual faults and
preferences, self-confidence, critical intolerance, boisterousness,
wilfulness. Stranger still, I found coldness, anger, jealousy, still at
work. Of course in the latter case reconciliation was easier, both in
the light of common enthusiasm and, still more, because mental
communication was so much swifter and easier than it had been on earth.
There was no need of those protracted talks, those tiresome explanations
which clever people, who really love and esteem each other, fall into on
earth--the statements which affirm nothing, the explanations which
elucidate nothing, because of the intricacies of human speech and the
fact that people use the same words with such different implications and
meanings. All those became unnecessary, because one could pierce
instantaneously into the very essence of the soul, and manifest, without
the need of expression, the regard and affection which lay beneath the
cross-currents of emotion. But love and affection waxed and waned in
heaven as on earth; it was weakened and it was transferred. Few souls
are so serene on earth as to see with perfect equanimity a friend, whom
one loves and trusts, becoming absorbed in some new and exciting
emotion, which may not perhaps obliterate the original regard, but which
must withdraw from it for a time the energy which fed the flame of the
intermitted relation.
It was very strange to me to realise the fact that friendships and
intimacies were formed as on earth, and that they lost their freshness,
either from some lack of real congeniality or from some divergence of
development. Sometimes, I may add, our teachers were consulted by the
aggrieved, sometimes they even intervened unasked.
I will freely confess that this all immensely heightened the interests
to me of our common life. One could see two spirits drawn together by
some secret tie of emotion, and one could see some further influence
strike across and suspend it. One case of this I will mention, which is
typical of many. There came among us an extremely lively and rather
whimsical spirit, more like a boy than a man. I wondered at first why he
was chosen for this work, because he seemed both fitful and even
capricious; but I gradually realised in him an extraordinary fineness of
perception, and a swiftness of intuition almost unrivalled. He had a
power of weighing almost by instinct the constituent elements of
character, which seemed to me something like the power of tonality in a
musician, the gift of recognising, by pure faculty, what any notes may
be, however confusedly jangled on an instrument. It was wonderful to me
how often his instantaneous judgments proved more sagacious than our
carefully formed conclusions.
This boy became extraordinarily attractive to an older woman who was one
of our number, who was solitary and abstracted, and of an intense
seriousness of devotion to her work. It was evident both that she felt
his charm intensely and that her disposition was wholly alien to the
disposition of the boy himself. In fact, she simply bored him. He took
all that he did lightly, and achieved by an intense momentary
concentration what she could only achieve by slow reflection. This
devotion had in it something that was strangely pathetic, because it
took the form in her of making her wish to conciliate the boy's
admiration, by treating thoughts and ideas with a lightness and a humour
to which she could by no means attain, and which made things worse
rather than better, because she could read so easily, in the thoughts of
others, the impression that she was attempting a handling of topics
which she could not in the least accomplish. But advice was useless.
There it was, the old, fierce, constraining attraction of love, as it
had been of old, making havoc of comfortable arrangements, attempting
the impossible; and yet one knew that she would gain by the process,
that she was opening a door in her heart that had hitherto been closed,
and learning a largeness of view and sympathy in the process. Her fault
had ever been, no doubt, to estimate slow and accurate methods too
highly, and to believe that all was insecure and untrustworthy that was
not painfully accumulated. Now she saw that genius could accomplish
without effort or trouble what no amount of homely energy could effect,
and a new horizon was unveiled to her. But on the boy it did not seem to
have the right result. He might have learned to extend his sympathy to a
nature so dumb and plodding; and this coldness of his called down a
rebuke of what seemed almost undue sternness from one of our teachers.
It was not given in my presence, but the boy, bewildered by the severity
which he did not anticipate, coupled indeed with a hint that he must be
prepared, if he could not exhibit a more elastic sympathy, to have his
course suspended in favour of some more simple discipline, told me the
whole matter. "What am I to do?" he said. "I cannot care for Barbara;
her whole nature upsets me and revolts me. I know she is very good and
all that, but I simply am not myself when she is by; it is like taking a
run with a tortoise!"
"Well," I said, "no one expects you to give up all your time to taking
tortoises for runs; but I suppose that tortoises have their rights, and
must not be jerked along on their backs, like a sledge."
"Oh," said he, "you are all against me, I know; and I am not sure that
this place is not rather too solemn for me. What is the good of being
wiser than the aged, if one has more commandments to keep?"
Things, however, settled down in time. Barbara, I think, must have been
taken to task as well, because she gave up her attempts at wit; and the
end of it was that a quiet friendship sprang up between the incongruous
pair, like that between a wayward young brother and a plain, kindly,
and elderly sister, of a very fine and chivalrous kind.
It must not be thought that we spent our time wholly in these emotional
relations. It was a place of hard and urgent work; but I came to realise
that, just as on earth, institutions like schools and colleges, where a
great variety of natures are gathered in close and daily contact, are
shot through and through with strange currents of emotion, which some
people pay no attention to, and others dismiss as mere sentimentality,
so it was also bound to be beyond, with this difference, that whereas on
earth we are shy and awkward with our friendships, and all sorts of
physical complications intervene, in the other world they assume their
frank importance. I saw that much of what is called the serious business
of life is simply and solely necessitated by bodily needs, and is really
entirely temporary and trivial, while the real life of the soul, which
underlies it all, stifled and subdued, pent-up uneasily and cramped
unkindly like a bright spring of water under the superincumbent earth,
finds its way at last to the light. On earth we awkwardly divide this
impulse; we speak of the relation of the soul to others and of the
relation of the soul to God as two separate things. We pass over the
words of Christ in the Gospel, which directly contradict this, and which
make the one absolutely dependent on, and conditional on, the other. We
speak of human affection as a thing which may come in between the soul
and God, while it is in reality the swiftest access thither. We speak as
though ambition were itself made more noble, if it sternly abjures all
multiplication of human tenderness. We speak of a life which sacrifices
material success to emotion as a failure and an irresponsible affair.
The truth is the precise opposite. All the ambitions which have their
end in personal prestige are wholly barren; the ambitions which aim at
social amelioration have a certain nobility about them, though they
substitute a tortuous by-path for a direct highway. And the plain truth
is that all social amelioration would grow up as naturally and as
fragrantly as a flower, if we could but refine and strengthen and awaken
our slumbering emotions, and let them grow out freely to gladden the
little circle of earth in which we live and move.