The funeral was appointed for the second day thereafter. The house was
set in order for the occasion. Chairs were brought in from the
neighbors. A little table, with a Bible upon it, was placed in the
entrance-way at the foot of the stairs, that all might hear what the
clergyman should say. The body lay in the parlor, with the Major's sword
and cocked hat upon the coffin; and the old gentleman's face had never
worn an air of so much dignity as it wore now. Death had refined away
all trace of his irritable humors, of his passionate, hasty speech. It
looked like the face of a good man,--so said nine out of ten who gazed
on it that day; yet when the immediate family came up to take their last
glimpse,--the two girls being in tears,--in that dreary half-hour after
all was arranged, and the flocking-in of the neighbors was waited for,
Benjamin, as calm as the dead face below him, was asking himself if the
poor gentleman, his father, had not gone away to a place of torment. He
feared it; nay, was he not bound to believe it by the whole force of his
education? and his heart, in that hour, made only a feeble revolt
against the belief. In the very presence of the grim messenger of the
Eternal, who had come to seal the books and close the account, what
right had human affection to make outcry? Death had wrought the work
given him to do, like a good servant; had not he, too,--Benjamin,--a
duty to fulfil? the purposes of Eternal Justice to recognize, to
sanction, to approve? In the exaltation of his religious sentiment it
seemed to him, for one crazy moment at least, that he would be justified
in taking his place at the little table where prayer was to be said, and
in setting forth, as one who knew so intimately the shortcomings of the
deceased, all those weaknesses of the flesh and spirit by which the
Devil had triumphed, and in warning all those who came to his burial of
the judgments of God which would surely fall on them as on him, except
they repented and believed. Was he not, indeed, commissioned, as it
were, by the lips of the dead man to "cry aloud and spare not"?
Happily, however, the officiating clergyman was of a more even temper,
and he said what little he had to say in way of "improvement of the
occasion" to the text of "judge not, that ye be not judged."
"We are too apt," said he, (and he was now addressing a company that
crowded the parlors and flowed over into the yard in front, where the
men stood with heads uncovered,) "we are too apt to measure a man's
position in the eye of God, and to assign him his rank in the future, by
his conformity to the external observances of religion,--not
remembering, in our complacency, that we see differently from those who
look on from beyond the world, and that there are mysterious and secret
relations of God with the conscience of every man, which we cannot
measure or adjust. Let us hope that our deceased friend profited by such
to insure his entrance into the Eternal City, whose streets are of gold,
and the Lamb the light thereof."
The listeners said "Amen" to this in their hearts; but the son, still
exalted by the fervor of that new purpose which he had formed by the
father's death-bed, and riveted more surely as he looked last on his
face, asked himself, if the old preacher had not allowed a kindly
worldly prudence to blunt the sharpness of the Word. "Why not tell these
friendly mourners," thought he, "that they may well shed their bitterest
tears, for that this old man they mourn over has lived the life of the
ungodly, has neglected all the appointed means of escape, has died the
death of the unrighteous, and must surely suffer the pains of the second
death? Should not the swift warning be brought home to me and to them?"
Sudden contact with Death had refined all his old religious impressions
to an intensity that shaped itself into a flaming sword of retribution.
All this, however, as yet, lay within his own mind, not beating down his
natural affection, or his grief, but struggling for reconcilement with
them; no outward expression, even to those who clung to him so nearly,
revealed it. The memorial-stone which he placed over his father's grave,
and which possibly is standing now within the old churchyard of
Canterbury, bore only this:--
HERE LIES THE BODY OF
REUBEN JOHNS.
A GOOD HUSBAND; A KIND FATHER;
A PATRIOT, WHO DIED FOR HIS COUNTRY,
1ST SEPT., 1814.