Читать книгу A Woman of Yesterday - Caroline Atwater Mason - Страница 5

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Children of men! the unseen Power whose eye

Forever doth accompany mankind,

Hath looked on no religion scornfully

That man did ever find.

Which has not taught weak wills how much they can?

Which has not fall’n on the dry heart like rain?

Which has not cried to sunk, self-weary man:

Thou must be born again!

—Matthew Arnold.

Anna Mallison’s working theory of the human family in its moral and religious relations (and she recognized no other as of importance) was as destitute of shading as a carpenter’s house plan. Indeed, her hypothesis unconsciously bore a certain pictorial resemblance to the ground plan of a colonial house—a hall running through the middle with two rooms on each side! There was, straight through the centre of her moral universe, a wide, divisive, neutral passage in which dwelt uneasily all people who had not been regenerated, but who had not rejected salvation formally and forever. Here were such heathen and young children, and such thoughtless and unhardened impenitent as might yet listen to the divine call. At the right of this central hall, following Anna’s scheme of the race, were two wide rooms: the first bright with a subdued and varied light; the second, opening beyond the first, overflowing with undimmed and celestial radiance. The first was the Church, the place of saints on earth, the second was heaven, easily reached from the first. But the entrance to the first room from the central space was obscure, difficult, and mysterious, and few were they who found it.

At the left of the great hall were likewise two vast connecting chambers. A wide door stood ever open into the first, through which a throng continually passed. Here were dimness and dread, lighted only by false and baleful gleams; and in the room beyond, the blackness of darkness, and that forever.

This first room was the abode of those who deliberately chose the world and turned away from God, whose fitting end was in the awful gloom of that place of torment and wailing beyond.

Above the right-hand division, high and lifted up, dwelt in unthinkable glory the God of her fathers, holy, but to her subconscious sense, ineffective, else why were earthquakes, murders, prisons, insanities? and why, indeed, those populous chambers on the left?

Over them presided a rapid, hurtling Spirit, always engaged in her imagination in falling like lightning from heaven. He was Miltonic necessarily, but also much like one of Ossian’s heroes, and, on the whole, a more imposing force than the Creator whose power he seemed so successfully to have usurped.

In fine, Anna believed in two gods, an infinite spirit of good, and an infinite spirit of evil, although she would have called herself strictly monotheistic.

The neutral space between the realms of the Good and Evil was the battleground of these two mighty spirits. Here prophets, apostles, and preachers were calling loudly and untiringly upon all men to repent, and to find the entrance to the company of the redeemed. From time to time some swift and valorous spirit of man or angel would even make excursion into the dim outer room on the left, and bring thence a scorched and spotted soul, saved, but so as by fire. But such events were rare and not to be presumed upon or expected.

It was all perfectly clear to Anna, the classification and grouping precise, exact, and satisfactory. Black was very black; and white, very white. She had herself until very recently belonged in the neutral hall, but she now believed herself to be “experiencing religion,” a fine old phrase, which was in effect to be pressing successfully through that obscure opening which led into the outer court of heaven.

But just here there was a weakness in the system. Theologians and preachers like her father boldly declared the contrary, and asserted that the processes of entering the kingdom of heaven were as marked and unmistakable as the great general divisions of saints and sinners. The conversion of Saul of Tarsus was always depicted as norm and type. To be sure, all the processes were not in each case marked by equal distinctness, but the logical order was the same. In the first stage of the progress the sinner was said to be “under conviction” or “experiencing a sense of sin”; and the more bitter and overwhelming was this first phase, the better was the diagnosis from the professional point of view. At this point the penitent was to realize that, whatever his former life had been, even if a life of prayer and unselfish devotion, it had been wholly displeasing to God, and that, as tending to self-righteousness, such a life was peculiarly dangerous. By nature, there could not be in the human character any real moral excellence, or what was more technically known as “evangelical virtue.”

All this Samuel Mallison had recently set forth in a series of sermons on “Human Depravity; its Degree, its Extent, its Derivation, and its Punishment,” which had been considered of extraordinary value and merit.

But it was just here that his daughter, for all the logic and learning to which she was privileged to listen, stumbled and stood still. For weeks her spiritual development appeared to be arrested. She was silent, uncommunicative, and disappointing to all the older members and office-bearers in her father’s church.

“What is the matter with Anna?” was the frequent question put to Mrs. Mallison in the parish. “Why don’t she come out?”

“Oh, she is under conviction all the time,” would be the reply, with a somewhat decided shake of the head. “We let her alone pretty much, Mr. Mallison and I. It isn’t best to say too much, you know, when anybody has reached that point. We can see that conscience is working with her.”

The questioner would depart with the belief that Anna’s conviction was of an unusually profound and interesting nature, like a disease with a complication; but if they had asked Anna herself, she might have told them that it was from the absence of this conviction, rather than from its intensity, that she was suffering. She was too honest to assume a virtue, or even a vice, if she had it not, and seek it as she would, a poignant sense of sin did not visit her. She had cast about her, and searched her own heart and life in a distinct embarrassment at finding so few clearly defined and indubitable sins of which to plead guilty; she had even secretly reproached her parents in her heart for having insisted upon an almost faultless standard of daily living, since conformity to their will seemed to be in itself a snare, and to place her at a distinct disadvantage now as compared with the flagrant sinner. Why had they taught her to pray, since she was now told that the prayers of the unregenerate were displeasing to God?

She used to sit during the Sunday morning service and look at the neighbours in their pews around her, at their children and grandchildren, and at the members of her own family, seeking to find a person whom she was conscious of having wronged, or toward whom she cherished a feeling of enmity or envy. The only result of this species of self-examination had been to bring to her remembrance a childish, half-forgotten grudge against a girl with fair curls, Malvina Loveland by name, who had once ridiculed her at school, for wearing one of Lucia’s dresses made over. Anna drew this dim and fading fault remorselessly up to the light, and formally and forever forgave the unconscious “Mally.” But the longing for a deep experience of the “exceeding sinfulness of sin” remained unsatisfied. Like many another sincere and seeking soul of that day, she yearned in vain to fill out in its rigid precision of sequence that spiritual programme which the theologians prescribed.

Her father gave her free access to the precious, if narrow, resources of his library, and she read the Edwards, both elder and younger, the elder Dwight, Bunyan, Baxter, and the rest, in place of her dear pagans whose end she now clearly foresaw. She read of the “depraved moral conduct of every infant who lives so long as to be capable of moral action”; she read that “the heart of Man, after all abatements are made for certain innocent and amiable characteristics, is set to do evil in a most affecting and dreadful manner”; and that “the darling and customary pleasures of men furnish an advantageous proof of the extreme depravity of our nature.”

“Was I a very wicked little child?” she asked her mother one day.

“Wicked!” cried her mother, artlessly, resenting the thought. “You were like a little angel, Benigna, even from the very first. So was it that I gave you my sainted mother’s name. Even your looks were all love; all saw it, and strangers too. You a bad child, indeed who never gave your mother a harsh word or a heartache since you were born!”

Anna Benigna, for so her mother called her, bent and kissed her mother, a rare caress in that family.

“I am glad I pleased you,” she whispered. There were tears in her eyes, and as she walked without further word from the room, her mother perceived the significance of question and reply, and pondered long.

Then suddenly, as ice breaks up in the spring, and the freshet bears down everything before it, a moment of crisis and perception came, one of those moments which, albeit varying with each human experience, remains in each supreme.

Under all her outward conformity to law and love, Anna realized now that there had lain for years a deep, half-conscious resentment toward the Creator, a cold dislike of God. How could he look upon her with approval while such a disposition remained in her heart? She had loved the human; she had not loved the divine.

A sense of the absolute and eternal Good from which she was alienated, to which she was antagonistic, smote her with force. She now seemed to herself in the presence of God as a speck of dust against a dazzling mountain of snow—incalculably small, hatefully impure. A passion of contrition and surrender mastered her; vague regenerating fires tried her soul; and then came an exhaustion of spirit, as of a child whom its Father has chastened, and who is reconciled and at peace. This succession of emotions she was able to recall distinctly as long as she lived.

This had been a month ago. Anna had recounted these spiritual exercises to her father, and he had told her that they denoted conversion, and advised her presenting herself to the church for admission. This she had done, but when he asked her, further, to what cause, if any, she ascribed this past sense of enmity against God, she had been silent.

However, her father was fully satisfied. Like a physician with a well-declared fever of a certain type, he felt it to be a clear case. Considering his child’s blameless innocence of life, it was an unexpectedly satisfactory one from the theologian’s point of view.

As she sat now in the warm gloom of the June night, with the dark trees murmuring softly under the wind, and the sky with many stars bending near, only the gable jutting above her head to keep its splendours off, Anna travelled back in thought to her childish days and found there the answer to her father’s question.