scornfully rejoins, "I know his soul is in heaven, fool." One remembers a pretty way amongst the peasants of Tuscany who, when speaking of a dead friend, would add on the mention of his name, the words, "Good soul!" (Buon' anima). Implying, as it were, an assurance of the spirit's welfare. Is not this instinctive sense of the safety of the souls we love when passed beyond our ken, warring against all the cruel dogmas of man, a presage in itself of mercy? As is also that inability of the mind, in its normal state, to believe in annihilation, or eternal punishment, as a possible doom in its own case? Though there is a difference, and many a degree of difference, between the confidence of the man who declared that were he to be told only one person in the whole world was destined to salvation, he should unhesitatingly proclaim, "That man am I!" and the faith of such a one as Robert Louis Stevenson, who wrote from his exile in Samoa, “Life is not all beer and skittles. The inherent tragedy of things works itself out from white to black and blacker, and the poor things of a day look ruefully on. Does it shake my cast-iron faith? I cannot say it does. I believe in an ultimate decency of things; ay, and if I woke in hell, should still believe it!" I "An ultimate decency of things," the "one far-off Divine event, to which the whole creation moves," God's "eternal charity," "sweet mercy "-how the word, or the thought it expresses, shines through our literature! It underlies one of old Quarles' lovely epigrams: 2 "Vailima Letters," “Earth is an island, ported round with fears; The wreck of many a ship, but no man drown'd.” Herrick utters it, in his sweet light prayer : TO HEAVEN. "Open thy gates To him who weeping waits, But that held back by sin. So kind to set me free, Come in, or force the gate." And Young, in his heavy and sombre Thoughts": “Pain is to save from pain; all punishment To make for peace; and death, to save from death; Tennyson, than whom no man ever more fully realised the responsibility of Time to Eternity, and that beyond this mortal life "each stands full-face with all he did below," has put into the lips of the "Grandmother" of his poem an expression of almost careless confidence as to the fate of the departed soul: "To be sure the preacher says, our sins should make us sad; But mine is a time of peace, and there is grace to be had; And God, not man, is the judge of us all when life shall cease; And in this book, little Annie, the message is one of peace." And, according to his son, Tennyson would fain also have found in Dante an exponent of "the larger hope." "Fecemi la divina potestate La somma sapienza, e'l primo amore,' were words," says his biographer, "which he was fond of quoting in this relation as if they were a kind of unconscious confession by Dante that Love must conquer at the last." Anyhow, I would trust the Father, who loved me with a perfect love," says George MacDonald, in the same spirit of childlike trust, "to lead the soul He had made, had compelled to be, through the gates of the death-birth into the light of life beyond "—the appeal from the creature to his Creator being, perhaps, the most powerful appeal of all. "If I were God"—so muses old King Arkel, in Maeterlinck's "Pelléas et Mélisande "-" I should pity the hearts of men." George MacDonald gives the daring phrase in the oft-quoted epitaph in his “David Elginbrod": "Here lie I, Martin Elginbrodde: And in one of Sydney Dobell's poems a bereaved mother cries, in the agony of her soul— "Wilt Thou deny That which to Thee is nothing, but to me Have mercy on me, oh, Lord, Lord!" If I were God! How foolish and futile is the thought! Mother-love, father-pity, brother-compassion, all are but types and mirrors of their eternal Author. If there is a word that is sweeter than mercy, it is love. And He who is to judge us has chosen that word to be a synonym for His own name. Sings a true poet, once perhaps overpraised, but on whom something like oblivion has now fallen, Alexander Smith, in his "Life Drama": "God is love; He yet will wipe away Creation's tears, And all the worlds shall summer in His smile." But, lest it should be thought that the enormity of sin, or perhaps even the majesty of God, were being made light of, this little collection of what some poets and others have said on the everlasting gospel and eternal hope may close with a passage from that gentle Christian philosopher, Sir Thomas Browne: "I thank God, and with joy I mention it, I was never afraid of hell, nor grew pale at the description of that place. I have so fixed my contemplations on heaven, that I have almost forgot the idea of hell; and am afraid rather to lose the joys of the one, than endure the misery of the other: to be deprived of them is a perfect hell, and needs methinks no addition to complete our afflictions. That terrible term hath never detained me from sin, nor do I owe any good action to the name thereof. . . I can hardly think there was ever any scared into heaven. They go the fairest way to heaven that would serve God without a hell: other mercenaries, that crouch unto Him in fear of hell, though they term themselves the servants, are indeed but the slaves of the Almighty." XIX THE PROSPECT "Now wing thee, dear soul, and receive her, Heaven. George Chapman: "Cæsar and Pompey." IT is the strangeness, the wonder of the prospect opening beyond death that occupies some minds, to the exclusion almost of any sense of reluctance or fear. What discovery will burst on us when the door shall be opened, the veil rent, the curtain withdrawn? When the untravelled world, whose margin fades before us "forever and forever as we move,” shows revealed at last, how will it appear to us? When living hands unclasp from ours and we have crossed the boundary, then, as Whittier asks, "What waits me in the land of strangeness? What space shall awe, what brightness blind me? What vast processions sweep before me "What the Traveller said at Sunset." |