Читать книгу A Woman of Yesterday - Caroline Atwater Mason - Страница 9

Table of Contents

Life! life! thou sea-fugue, writ from east to west,

Love, Love alone can pore

On thy dissolving score

Of harsh half-phrasings,

Blotted ere writ,

And double erasings

Of chords most fit.

—Sidney Lanier.

From the time of the missionary meeting and the announcement of his daughter’s determination to devote herself to the service of Christ in a heathen land, Samuel Mallison’s health declined rapidly. His Nunc Dimittis was of literal import, and prophetic.

Whether the death which all who loved him saw that he was soon to accomplish could be called dying of heart-break or dying of fulfilled desire, would have been hard to determine. Heart and flesh cried out against the separation from his best-beloved child, while the triumphant spirit blessed God for answered prayer, and for the fruition in that cherished life of his child of hopes and aspirations which had been but scantily fulfilled in his own.

“I have not been a successful man, Anna,” he said to her one autumn day when they were alone in his study. He sat erect in his straight chair, but with an unmistakable languor in every line of face and frame, and with a feverish brightness in his prominent dark eyes.

Anna laid her hand upon his with endless gentleness.

“No man in Haran is so beloved, father. No man has done so much good.”

“Perhaps,” he answered sadly, “and I am satisfied. It is the will of God. Anna, I have seemed, perhaps, cold and silent, and without feeling as you have seen me; but the fire within has burned unceasingly, and I am consumed.”

The last words were spoken lower and with an unconscious pathos which moved Anna unspeakably.

“I do not understand, father dear, not fully. Can you tell me all? I love you so.”

They were the simplest words of the most natural affection, and yet it was the first time in her life that Anna had spoken after this sort to her father.

“My girl,” he said simply, taking her hand within his own. Then, after a pause, he continued speaking.

“It is after this manner that life has gone with me. I believe I ought to retrace my past with you—for perhaps there may be light upon your path, if you know all. When I entered the ministry it was with sincerely right purpose; all the influences of my life pointed me in that direction, but it was, perhaps, more as an intellectual and congenial profession than from deeper reasons. I began my ministry, in 1841, in Boston. I was considered to have certain gifts which were valued in that day, and all went well, on the surface. But it was the period of a literary awakening in our nation, of which Boston was the centre of influence. An American literature was just becoming a visible reality, and a new impulse was at work and stirring everywhere. Men of original force were suddenly multiplied before us, and the contagion of intellectual ambition was felt in an altogether new degree. To me it became all-controlling. Transcendental philosophy, Platonism, and classic learning acquired for me a supreme attraction, and I gave myself more and more to the study of them, and to the translation of Greek poetry. This had no unfavourable effect upon my preaching in the opinion of my congregation, rather the reverse, and I may say without vanity that I had reached comparatively early a certain eminence to which I was by no means indifferent.”

Samuel Mallison paused a moment, while Anna silently reflected that this narrative would in the end explain the buried books of her dear old garret delight.

“Learning was young among us in those days, Anna,” Samuel Mallison began again humbly, after a little space, “else this would not have happened; in the year 1848 I received a call to a professorship of the Greek language and literature in Harvard College.”

Anna felt her own young blood rush to her cheeks in pride and wonder and amazement. To her little-village simplicity and scanty experience this seemed a surpassing distinction, and one which placed her father among the great men of the earth.

“The day after the mind of the authorities had been made known to me, was the day of my life which I remember best,” Samuel Mallison continued.

“I went to my study that morning with a programme of what would take place somewhat definitely before my mind. I was about to seek, humbly and devoutly, an interview with God, in which I would lay before him this new and momentous opening in my life, and seek to have his will for me made clear. What this will would be, or what I should take it to be, was, just below the surface of my mind, a foregone conclusion. In fact, my letter of acceptance was substantially framed in my mind already. I had never been favoured with voices and visions and revelations clear and conclusive in my religious experience, and I foresaw a decision based upon general reasonableness and preference, touched with a pleasant sense of the divine favour, which might naturally be expected to rest upon so congenial a course, and one so worthily justified by precedent. I read, as a preparatory exercise, with perfect satisfaction, the twelfth chapter of John’s Gospel, then closed my Bible and knelt in prayer. This was exactly as I had foreseen—an orderly series of exercises befitting my position. But, oh; how mechanical, how cold, how barren! With such perfunctory practices I could think to take leave of the sacred calling of the ministry, so dead had my spirit grown to the claims of the blessed gospel, and its mission of salvation to a lost and perishing world!

“I knelt and thought to pray, but, like the king in ‘Hamlet’, my words flew up, my thoughts remained below. Between me and Him whom I would have approached, interposed, like a palpable barrier, a solemn reiterated echo of words just read: ‘Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. He that loveth his life shall lose it.’

“I rose from my knees and walked up and down the room in great anxiety of spirit. This new work which I thought to undertake was educational, ennobling, necessary; in no way contrary to sound doctrine, in no way a betrayal of sacred responsibility; I was fitted for it by nature, by tastes, and attainments. Why was it opened to me? To mock me? to tempt? I could not believe it, I had welcomed it as coming in the providence of God.

“But my heart-searching grew swift and deep, and it was given me to see the absoluteness, the finality, of the vows which I had assumed, from which I straightway realized that no argument of those with which I was equipped sufficed to release me. Feebly and imperfectly, yet sensibly, I began to grasp the import of what the apostle calls the fellowship of Christ’s sufferings, the being made conformable unto his death. Oh, the depth of the mystery hid in that saying! All these years I have sounded it—Anna, all these years I have died, in my own natural life—I have striven to give all I had to give, but the ‘much fruit’—where has it been?”

An expression of pain, hardly less than agony, was impressed upon Samuel Mallison’s face, and Anna hid her eyes, finding it too bitter to bear to see him suffer thus.

“I put it all away from me, then and there. Nothing was possible but for me to decline the invitation which had been given, you can see. Further, I saw that my studies had been my snare. My love of poetry and philosophy and learning, the prominence of my pulpit, the social and intellectual affinities I had formed, all had contributed to my spiritual deadness and decline. It was then that I put away in that box, now upstairs, the books which had particularly ministered to the tastes which had led me so far from the true conception of my life work. Never since that day have I allowed myself to follow the instinct for poetic expression. That longing had to be cut out, even if some life-blood flowed in the doing it. Henceforth, I wished to know nothing but Christ, and him—Anna, do not fail to grasp this—him, not triumphant, but crucified. The offence of the cross to the natural spirit, how hardly can it be overcome! No child’s play, no easy and harmonious growth in grace, has it been to me, but a conflict all the way. Your mother has a different type of religious life. Be thankful if her temperament shall prove to be yours.

“That is the story. I left my church not very long after and sought this rugged, remote section, because it offered hard work and a needy field, which some men shunned. Some years before I had met your mother, and we were married. Twenty years of my life and its best activity have been spent here in Haran. Those first few years and what made life to me in them I have looked upon as a false start. From that day, I sought only this one gift: an especial enduement of the Holy Spirit to give me power with men unto salvation. I desired this gift supremely, but I have not received it in any signal manner. My ministry has not been wholly unfruitful, but it has been lacking in the results for which I hoped; I have not had power with God and men, as have some of my more favoured brethren. The end is near now, very near, but I come with almost empty hands and a humbled, contrite heart to meet my Judge. But, my child, whatever the conflicts of the past years, the last thing which I could wish for to-day would be to have reversed that early decision. My life, from the merely human point of view, might, perhaps, on the line of intellectual effort have been counted successful, while as a minister of Christ it has not been so to any marked degree: but what is success, and what failure, when the things of time fade before our eyes?”

Samuel Mallison’s head drooped upon one supporting hand, and an expression of solemn musing rested on his face, while Anna’s tears flowed fast.

“Just to do our own little day’s work faithfully, not knowing what its part may be in the great whole, just to hold fast to the word of God and the testimony of Jesus, and, having begun the race, to continue to the end—is not this enough?”

There was silence between them for some moments, and then the father said, making a sign to Anna to rise:—

“I want you to leave me now, dear child. I must rest. The one earthly hope to which I still cling is that to you may be given the reward of ‘much fruit,’ which I have failed to win. Remember this, if all the other teaching I have given you shall be forgotten in the years which are to try you, of what stuff you are made: with greatness we have nothing at all to do; faithfulness only is our part.”

Anna Mallison listened to these words with reverent sympathy and loving response, but the deeper meaning of them did not reveal itself to her, her time for perception being not yet fully come.