Standing, shortly after dusk yesterday evening, upon the edge of the
slope which drops suddenly into the valley enclosing our village and its
church, my ear was filled with a variety of sounds, all of them
familiar, yet none somehow quite recognisable; all with a certain
strangeness about them, born no doubt of the mist and of the oncoming
obscurity.
Sounds which reach our ears after nightfall never seem to be quite the
same sounds as in the daytime, even though they may be produced by
exactly the same means. Commonplace in reality, they are never perfectly
commonplace in their effect. They awaken curious echoes. They bring back
odd, and half-vanished thoughts. They play the same rather uncanny
tricks with the brain as they doubtless did in the days of the
Patriarchs, or of the Shepherd Kings. The bark of a dog half a mile away
will conjure up visions of hunting scenes, swift and phantasmagoric as
the pageant of a dream. The sharp “click-clack” of a horse’s hoof; the
crunching of a waggon-wheel; most of all, perhaps, the thin,
lamentable, bleating of sheep floating up from the valley; all these set
vibrating fibres within us which have their roots as far back in the
history of the race as anything well can be. Our life of to-day, with
all its crowded impedimenta, tends at such moments to sink suddenly, and
to disappear. We realise--if only during the duration of a lightning
flash--that we are standing, not in the least upon any apex, merely upon
some small peak on one of the sides of the great organic mountain. That
we are looking at a scene which has witnessed the arrival of our race,
as of other races, upon it, and which will assuredly one day witness its
departure again. That all that we can discern is but, as it were, a few
front streaks upon the surface of an ocean, rolling on without bourne or
limit. And at that realisation the mind is apt to start, and to shiver
instinctively, as before some yawning gulf, opening unexpectedly below
the feet.
Such little mental peaks afford, in truth, but a dizzy standing ground,
and are best, perhaps for that reason, not ascended too often. Just as
the trade of the astronomer is said to need a sound leaven of stolidity
before it can be safely embarked upon, so only a very strong head can
with safety peer long into a void, hardly less perturbing and
intoxicating than that into which it is his business to pry. Those
capricious little particles, upon which all our comfort depends,
dislike it, and they are probably right in doing so. It is true that
what we call the Past, that which is entirely put away, and done with,
might seem to be a harmless enough subject of contemplation. So
conceivably it might be, were it not for the fact that in following it
one is apt to find oneself brought suddenly face to face with the other,
and the far more formidable brother; the one whose kingdom lies, not
behind us, but ahead. At those dim barriers all real advance is
inexorably stayed; into the recesses beyond them no secular lantern has
ever peered; while even our most authoritative, our most convinced
guides, can at best assure us as to its geography with hesitating, and
often curiously conflicting voices.
To abstain from all attempts at peering into that obscurity is more
perhaps than can be asked of mortals. The less of such peerings we
indulge in, however, surely the better, because the saner, because,
also, the more trustful. Of all the cataracts of words, poured in verbal
Niagaras over this momentous topic, have there been many, I wonder,
wiser or truer than these of old Hooker? I write them down as they have
lodged in my memory; probably therefore quite incorrectly.
“Rash were it for the feeble mind of man to wade far into the doings of
the Almighty. For though ’tis Joy to know Him, and Pride to make mention
of His name, yet our deepest Wisdom is to know that we know Him not, and
our truest Homage is our Silence.”