Coulson Kernahan

“ I am a child of eternity dreaming the dream of time, and even while I dream I am half awake and know that I am but dreaming. Life is to me—not poetically only, but positively—a dream and unsubstantial. The world is a dream, things and persons are but dreams, and exist for me only in my thoughts of them. My self-consciousness becomes [Pg 89] awake, and I look in and down upon myself with a wonder as fresh and novel as if the mystery of my own existence had never caused me wonder or surprise before. ”

“ Yes, murderer, for seduction is moral murder; and the man who has thus sinned against a woman is fit only to stand side by side with him who has taken a life. Ay, and his is not seldom the more awful punishment, for God will as surely require the spiritual life at the hands of the seducer, as He will the bodily life at the hand of the murderer.
The one thing of all others which added to the unutterable horror of that moment, was the memory of the false and lying excuses with which I had striven to palliate my sin to myself. ”

“ The only mystery which still sometimes troubles me is that most terrible of all mysteries—the mystery of human suffering. But even that I am content to leave, for is not our God Himself a suffering God? and who that witnessed the sufferings of Jesus Christ (and what sufferings were ever like to His?) could have foreseen that the cruel Cross whereon He hung should hereafter be the finger-post to point the way to heaven? or that beneath His cry of agony in the garden, God heard the triumph-song of a ransomed world? ”

“ But in every inspired poem or perfect picture, in the soaring and sobbing of music, in sunrise and sunset, or in the sighing of the wind upon my cheek, there is something which speaks to me of her, and which beckons my spirit forth in search of her, as if by the leading of an unseen hand. And sometimes, but only in my dreaming, musing moments, my thoughts, as they wander forth into the blue expanse around me, take colour and shape, and I see her standing by a tiny cot in a cosy room where the warm firelight flickers on walls gay with pictures. ”

“ Yes, lying here in this sun-filled meadow on this summer morning, I am conscious that I love my life, and that I should be loath to leave it. I love to feel the wind upon my cheek, and to hear it as it whistles by me, singing in my ears, as in the hollow convolutions of a shell. I love to stand and look out upon the sea, or upon open plains and broad sky-spaces, which give us eyesight room and room for our souls to be. ”

“ That they must die out at their deaths, as do the beasts, I am convinced, for what can God find for such men to do in heaven?—men to whom the earth, its prototype, is nothing but a gigantic shop, and to whom Music, Art, and Song are but as dead letters and foolishness; men who are susceptible to no emotion save the greed for gain; and who have let the infinite soul within them pine away and perish for the want of the wherewithal to keep that soul alive. ”

“ Then I turned me round and gazed whence we came, but could nothing discern save remote plains of darkness, athwart the gloom of which I saw flash ever and anon (as one sees flash the eyes of a beast at midnight) the glimmer of a moving world. Then the angel stretched forth his hand, pointing me yet again to the distant east, and far away beyond the beauteous realm I beheld a vast plain of desolation, and beyond that a land whereof I could nothing see, save that a darkness, as of a twilight in which there is no moon, brooded above it like a cloud. ”

“ Yes, I love this world, and the things of it. To me the mere consciousness of life is a gladness, the pulsing of my heart a [Pg 34] pleasure. I pencil the latter part of this chapter while lying lazily in a sun-filled meadow, and as I write I seem to feel the very drawing of my breath a joy. The sky spreads above me, a shimmering sea of blue—not the cool, crystalline sapphire of early morning, but the deep dense azure of a midsummer noon. ”

“ Well, perhaps I am mad—mad with the horror of my unbelief; but why should it not be as I say, I ask you? I have brooded over it all a thousand times, and am convinced that I have solved the riddle, and I will tell you why I think so.
"God is answerable to Himself for His actions, and when He made man, He made a man, and not a puppet—a being of infinite possibilities for good as well as for evil, and to whom it was given to choose for himself between the doing of the right or the wrong. But God knew that many of those whom He so made would sin away all memory of their Divine origin. ”

“ Nor did the vision pass from me until, out of that seething vortex of lust and infamy, I saw arise the black phantom of an immortal [Pg 209] soul which was lost for ever, crying out unto God and His Christ for judgment upon the seducer!
As these hideous spectres of the past arose again before me, I fell to the ground, and shrieked out under the burden of my sin, as only he can shriek who is torn by hell-torture and despair. ”

“ Not only have we turned a deaf ear to the thunders and the threats of old-fashioned orthodoxy, with its talk of everlasting punishment and lakes of brimstone, but many of us pooh-pooh the thought of a hell at all, and speak of God as though He were a good-natured and weakly-indulgent parent, on whose leniency we might lightly presume, forgetting that sin—unrepented sin—never can and never must go unpunished. ”

“ But not so lonely as one might imagine, for his boy seldom leaves him, and the work which God has set apart for the poet-son, and which is to him the resting-work of heaven, is to be with his father in all sorrow, to minister to him in all pain, and to be with him in every wakeful or weary moment, his unseen comforter and friend. ”

“ Remember, then, when next you are called upon to make choice, be it in never so trifling a matter, between good and evil, between obeying conscience or disobeying her, that you are choosing in that moment between hell and between heaven, not for to-day, this week, or to-morrow, but for eternity! ”

“ Has God some fearful fate in store for the sinner, which may one day fall upon me and mine, as it has already fallen upon them?' As I felt the shadow of that dark misgiving resting on my heart, I knew that for me another horror had arisen in hell, and that rest thenceforth there could be none until I had solved the mystery. ”

“ Is it likely, then, that any wife, mother, or sister, worthy the name, would be content to settle down idle-handed in heaven knowing that a loved one was in hell and in agony? I know there are folk on earth who try to smooth out the creases that crop up in the creed-roll of their convictions, by asserting that the truly regenerate soul will unconditionally surrender everything to the will of God, and that they, for their part, are quite prepared to leave the fate of their erring fellow-creatures in the hands of the Creator. ”

“ What the awakened life for which I am waiting will be like, I know not consciously, but something there is within me that does know, and that has a dumb inarticulate knowledge of it, like the memory of a dream which we have not all forgotten, yet cannot all recall. ”

“ But Christianity does more for a man than merely forgive him his debts. It sets the bankrupt upon his legs again, a solvent man and sane, with a clean bill of health, and with a fresh start in life. It is the religion of Hope, for none is too sinful for the Saviour to save, and to the man who brings his sins, as well as his inability to resist his sins, to the feet of Christ, there is indeed a present Help and Hope in all his troubles! ”

“ To look up by night at the cold glitter of the stars, and to fancy my disembodied spirit winging its weary way thereto, through fathomless leagues of void and voiceless ether, causes me ever to shiver, and to turn shudderingly to earth again; but the thought of passing peacefully away upon some sunny, summer morning seems less like dying than like stepping out of doors to be among the birds and the butterflies. ”

“ No it is man's world—the world which devotes itself to gain, or to the wish to be somebody in society; to the frittering away of our days in fashionable frivolity, or in struggling to outdo our neighbour, not in the purity of our lives, or the dignity of our actions, but in our clothes, our carriages, and the company we keep—this world it is which cannot be rightly loved by one in whom dwelleth the love of the Father. ”

“ The seventh is of nobler seed; he perseveres, fights his way manfully through great trials. His faithful dog, an ugly little monster, but very faithful, dies at last. He, himself, fainting, and well-nigh despairing, meets an old man, Indra disguised, who offers to open for him the gates of heaven. "But where are my brothers?" he asks; "are they there?" "No, they are all in hell." "Then I will go to hell too, and stop with them, unless you get them out." So saying, he turns off and trudges away. Indra pities him, and gets his brothers out of hell. The six enter heaven first, the seventh stops. ”

“ I know my own evil nature too well not to be aware that there will be times when she will find it hard to prevent love being turned into loathing and confidence into contempt; and I think, with sinking of spirit, of the sore disappointment she will feel when she finds what a shabby-souled common-place creature her husband is, compared with the being into whom her love had idealized him. ”

“ To die is not to close the eyes on earth [Pg 109] merely to open them the next minute in heaven; it is not a sudden transition from darkness to light, or from light to darkness. No, it is a slow and gradual awakening, for no human soul could bear so sudden a shock. Your own transition was, comparatively speaking, an exceptionally rapid one, but I know of some who have been 'changed' for a quarter of a century, and are only now becoming conscious of the fact. Of one thing you may be certain, and that is that God is never in a hurry in the education of a human soul. ”

“ This is the way in which I had repeatedly striven to silence my conscience, and it is but one instance of the way in which many others on this earth are now striving to silence theirs. "For God's sake," I would say to them, "beware!" Such hardening of the heart against the Holy Spirit, such God-murdering (for it is the wish to kill [Pg 83] God, and to silence His voice for ever) is the one unpardonable sin which is a thousand-fold more awful in its consequences than is the crime which it seeks to conceal. ”

“ I exclaimed, wonderingly, "your failures!"
"Yes," she said, "my failures. On earth failure is, as you know, the law of progress, and even here progress is only achieved through that which is, after all, in some degree a non-success. I don't quite know how to make my meaning clear to you, but perhaps we can't do better than look back to the old earth-life for an illustration. That earth-life—the life which we lead on earth, I mean—is, as you know, poor, pitiable [Pg 173] and paltry; we feel it so, we cannot but feel it so, when it is viewed in the lofty light of our possibilities. ”

“ Now let me give the results of my experiences, premising only that in regard to what I have to say about the after life, it must be understood that I am speaking only of that ante-chamber of the spirit-world—that in some sense purgatory, as I am half inclined to hold it—into which I have had admittance.
My experiences, then, are briefly these. The good and the bad are not parted, but exist together as they exist here, and heaven and hell as separate places have no existence. ”

“ It is not blind love, or foolish idolatry. She knows all my faults—the pitiful paltriness of my life, the selfish acts and foolish words, the vanity and the vice—she knows them all, and yet she loves me, me, not them, but the true me which these faults cannot altogether conceal from her, for she knows that they are not my life, but the trouble of it. ”

“ If all earth-dwellers were as spiritually-minded as yonder poet's poet-father, and were as capable of apprehending how real a thing spiritual companionship may be, our dead would soon cease to be called our 'lost ones,' and death would no longer be spoken of as the 'great parting.' Death gives us more friends than he takes from us, and often brings us nearer to those who have gone before, than we were during their lifetime. ”

“ The thought of dying in the night, and of finding this thin and aërial something, which I have learned to call "my soul," being driven remorselessly nightward, as Adam and Eve were driven from Paradise; the seeing it in imagination, a spectral, unsubstantial shadow of myself, flitting a-shivering out into the black-wombed darkness, and fumbling with filmy hands that it might clasp [Pg 14] the closer around it the warm familiar robe of flesh, only to find that robe fallen away for ever—this thought, I must confess, fills me at all times with an abhorrent loathing and dread. ”

“ I love, too, the companionship of those who love the things that I love—my spiritual brethren and fellow-worshippers; for, to my thinking, the lovers of Art, Music, Nature, Poetry, or of Religion, are all of them in one attitude of mind, and are animated by one and the same spirit—I call it the Worshipping Spirit. ”

“ So faithful that she can see all his little faults (though she takes care no one else shall see them) , yet would as soon think of loving him the less for these, as of ceasing to look up to heaven because there are a few clouds in the sky. So true and so fond that she needs neither to vex him with her constancy nor burden him with her love, since both are self-existent and entirely independent of anything he gives or takes away. Thus she will marry neither from liking nor esteem, nor gratitude for his love, but from the fulness of her own. If they never marry, as sometimes happens ... ”

“ How if I should open my eyes in the next world to find again all the old sorrows, the old heart-burnings, and the thousand and one trivialities which have made this world so weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable?' Have you never considered that the mere fact of the existence of these sorrows in this world—the only one of which you know anything—is in itself a reason why it is likely that such sorrows, or similar ones, should exist in the world of which you know nothing? ”

“ Even this grim old London is full of beauty and of boundlessness; of beauty which strikes me breathless, and of boundlessness of life, and sky; for in what slum of it, be it never so stifling, are we quite shut out from view of the stars or the sunshine, or of the human faces that come and go in the streets? ”

“ The literature purporting to describe the state of mankind after death, whether as Hades, Intermediate State, Purgatory, Hell, or Heaven, has mostly erred in the direction of too great detail. On the one hand, we have had those who with Swedenborg declare "that after death a man is so little changed that he even does not know but he is living in the present world; that the resemblances between the two worlds are so great, that in the spiritual world there are cities, with palaces and houses, and also writings and books, employments and merchandises." ”