George MacDonald

“ Here comes the dead man, welcome as never was child from the womb—new-born, and in him all the human race new-born from the grave! ‘Loose him and let him go,’ and the work is done. The sorrow is over, and the joy is come. Home, home, Martha, Mary, with your Lazarus! He too will go with you, the Lord of the Living. Home and get the feast ready, Martha! Prepare the food for him who comes hungry from the grave, for him who has called him thence. Home, Mary, to help Martha! What a household will yours be! What wondrous speech will pass between the dead come to life and the living come to die! ”

“ Nature has God at her heart; she is but the garment of the Invisible. God wears his singing robes in a day like this, and says to his children, ‘Be not afraid: your brothers and sisters up there in London are in my hands; go and help them. I am with you. Bear to them the message of joy. Tell them to be of good cheer: I have overcome the world. Tell them to endure hunger, and not sin; to endure passion, and not yield; to admire, and not desire. Sorrow and pain are serving my ends; for by them will I slay sin; and save my children.’”
“I wish I could believe as you do, Mr. Walton.” ”

“ Is not the sin all ours, and the life in us all God’s? We cannot be the creatures of God without partaking of his nature. Every motion of our conscience, every admiration of what is pure and noble, is a sign and a result of this. Is not every self-accusation a proof of the presence of his spirit? That comes not of ourselves—that is not without him. These are the clouds of glory we come trailing from him. All feelings of beauty and peace and loveliness and right and goodness, we trail with us from our home. God is the only home of the human soul. ”

“ The death of darkness comes down over the earth; but a deeper death, the death of sleep, descends on you. A power overshadows you; your eyelids close, you cannot keep them open if you would; your limbs lie moveless; the day is gone; your whole life is gone; you have forgotten everything; an evil man might come and do with your goods as he pleased; you are helpless. But the God of the Resurrection is awake all the time, watching his sleeping men and women, even as a mother who watches her sleeping baby, only with larger eyes and more full of love than hers ”

“ That is as if a man should give himself into the hands and will and caprice of an organ-grinder, to work upon him, not with the music of the spheres, but with the wretched growling of the streets.”
“But,” said Wynnie, “I have heard you yourself, papa, make excuse for people’s ill-temper on this very ground, that they were out of health. Indeed,” she went on, half-crying, “I have heard you do so for myself, when you did not know that I was within hearing.”
“Yes, my dear, most assuredly. It is no fiction, but a real difference that lies between excusing ourselves and excusing other people. ”

“ What an awful thing to think that here we are on this great round tumbling ball of a world, held by the feet, and lifting up the head into infinite space—without choice or wish of our own—compelled to think and to be, whether we will or not! Just God must know it to be very good, or he would not have taken it in his hands to make individual lives without a possible will of theirs. He must be our Father, or we are wretched creatures—the slaves of a fatal necessity! Did it ever strike you, Turner, that each one of us stands on the apex of the world? ”

“ If they go farther, and refuse to consider it God’s mercy when a man is drowned, that is just the sin of the world—the want of faith. But the man who creeps out of the drowning, choking billows into the glory of the new heavens and the new earth—do you think his thanksgiving for the mercy of God which has delivered him is less than that of the man who creeps, exhausted and worn, out of the waves on to the dreary, surf-beaten shore? In nothing do we show less faith than the way in which we think and speak about death. ”

“ From selfishness to love—is not this a rising from the dead? The man whose ambition declares that his way in the world would be to subject everything to his desires, to bring every human care, affection, power, and aspiration to his feet—such a world it would be, and such a king it would have, if individual ambition might work its will! if a man’s opinion of himself could be made out in the world, degrading, compelling, oppressing, doing everything for his own glory!—and such a glory!—but a pang of light strikes this man to the heart ”

“ In the closest contact of human soul with human soul, when all the atmosphere of thought was rosy with love, again and yet again on the far horizon would the dun, lurid flame of unrest shoot for a moment through the enchanted air, and Psyche would know that not yet had she reached her home. As I thought this I lifted my eyes, and saw those of my wife and Connie fixed on mine, as if they were reproaching me for saying in my soul that I could not be quite at home with them. Then I said in my heart, “Come home with me, beloved—there is but one home for us all. ”

“ This very childplay, as you call it, of Nature, is her assertion of the secret that life is the deepest, that life shall conquer death. Those who believe this must bear the good news to them that sit in darkness and the shadow of death. Our Lord has conquered death—yea, the moral death that he called the world; and now, having sown the seed of light, the harvest is springing in human hearts, is springing in this dance of radiance, and will grow and grow until the hearts of the children of the kingdom shall frolic in the sunlight of the Father’s presence. ”

“ The old knight’s work is done too; his day has set in the storm of battle, and he is lying lapt in the coming peace. They are bearing him home to his couch and his grave. Look at their faces in the dusky light. They are all mourning for and honouring the life that is ebbing away. But he is gathered to his fathers like a shock of corn fully ripe; and so the harvest stands golden in the valley beneath. The picture would not be complete, however, if it did not tell us of the deep heaven overhead, the symbol of that heaven whither he who has done his work is bound. ”

“ But, as I turned to leave the room, Wynnie’s voice called me in a whisper. Approaching her bed, I saw her wide eyes, like the eyes of the darkness, for I could scarcely see anything of her face.
“Awake, darling?” I said.
“Yes, papa. I have been awake a long time; but isn’t Connie sleeping delightfully? She does sleep so well! Sleep is surely very good for her.”
“It is the best thing for us all, next to God’s spirit, I sometimes think, my dear. But are you frightened by the storm? Is that what keeps you awake?” ”

“ When He comes to you, no mystery, no unknown feeling, will any longer distress you. You will say, ‘He knows, though I do not.’ And you will be at the secret of the things he has made. You will feel what they are, and that which his will created in gladness you will receive in joy. One glimmer of the present God in this glory would send you home singing. But do not think I blame you, Wynnie, for feeling sad. I take it rather as the sign of a large life in you, that will not be satisfied with little things. I do not know when or how it may please God to give you the quiet of mind that you need ”

“ We turned our steps along the edge of the down, and descended upon the breakwater, where we seated ourselves upon the same spot where in the darkness I had heard the voices of Joe and Agnes. What a different night it was from that! The sea lay as quiet as if it could not move for the moonlight that lay upon it. The glory over it was so mighty in its peacefulness, that the wild element beneath was afraid to toss itself even with the motions of its natural unrest. The moon was like the face of a saint before which the stormy people has grown dumb. ”

“ There are young creatures whose turn it is, and perhaps whose duty it would be, to play at leap-frog if there was any necessity for putting the matter in that light; and for us, we have the privilege, or if we will not accept the privilege, then I say we have the duty, of enjoying their leap-frog. But if we must withdraw in a measure from sociable relations with our fellows, let it be as the wise creatures that creep aside and wrap themselves up and lay themselves by that their wings may grow and put on the lovely hues of their coming resurrection. ”

“ Why should not a man be happy when he is growing old, so long as his faith strengthens the feeble knees which chiefly suffer in the process of going down the hill? True, the fever heat is over, and the oil burns more slowly in the lamp of life; but if there is less fervour, there is more pervading warmth; if less of fire, more of sunshine; there is less smoke and more light. Verily, youth is good, but old age is better—to the man who forsakes not his youth when his youth forsakes him. ”

“ The depth of the sky overhead, which you could not see for the arrangement of the picture, was mirrored lovelily in a piece of water that lay in the centre of the valley.
“My dear fellow,” I cried, “why did you not show me this first, and save me from saying so many unkind things? Here is a picture to my own heart; it is glorious. Look here, Wynnie,” I went on; “you see it is evening; the sun’s work is done, and he has set in glory, leaving his good name behind him in a lovely harmony of colour. ”

“ Then his face brightened.
“I see what you mean, sir,” he said. “I fancy you don’t mean the resurrection of the body, but the resurrection of righteousness.”
“I do, Joe. Did it ever strike you that the whole history of the Christian life is a series of such resurrections? Every time a man bethinks himself that he is not walking in the light, that he has been forgetting himself, and must repent, that he has been asleep and must awake, that he has been letting his garments trail, and must gird up the loins of his mind—every time this takes place, there is a resurrection in the world. ”

“ But of all world-worn, sad-looking churches, that one—sad, even in the sunset—was the dreariest I had ever beheld. Surely, it needed the gospel of the resurrection fervently preached therein, to keep it from sinking to the dust with dismay and weariness. Such a soul alone could keep it from vanishing utterly of dismal old age. Near it was one huge mound of grass-grown rubbish, looking like the grave where some former church of the dead had been buried, when it could stand erect no longer before the onsets of Atlantic winds. ”

“ The face anxious, wrinkled, peering, troubled, on whose lines you read the dread of hunger, poverty, and nakedness, thaws into a smile; the eyes reflect in courage the light of the Father’s care, the back grows erect under its burden with the assurance that the hairs of its head are all numbered. But the face can with all its changes set but dimly forth the rising from the dead which passes within. The heart, which cared but for itself, becomes aware of surrounding thousands like itself, in the love and care of which it feels a dawning blessedness undreamt of before. ”

“ The tide was ebbing now, but almost every other wave swept the breakwater. They burst on the rocks at the end of it, and rushed in shattered spouts and clouds of spray far into the air over their heads. “Will the time ever come,” I thought, “when man shall be able to store up even this force for his own ends? Who can tell?” The solitary form of a man stood at some distance gazing, as I was gazing, out on the ocean. I walked towards him, thinking with myself who it could be that loved Nature so well that he did not shrink from her even in her most uncompanionable moods. ”

“ We do not believe what he offers us is salvation. We think it is slavery, and therefore continue slaves. Friends, I will speak to you who think you do believe in him. I am not going to say that you do not believe in him; but I hope I am going to make you say to yourselves that you too deserve to have those words of the Saviour spoken to you that were spoken to Peter, ‘O ye of little faith!’ Floating on the sea of your troubles, all kinds of fears and anxieties assailing you, is He not on the mountain-top? Sees he not the little boat of your fortunes tossed with the waves and the contrary wind? ”

“ Ear and eye, touch and smell, were alike invaded with blessedness. I ought to have kept this to give my reader in Connie’s room; but he shall share with her presently. The sense of space—of mighty room for life and growth—filled my soul, and I thanked God in my heart. The wind seemed to bear that growth into my soul, even as the wind of God first breathed into man’s nostrils the breath of life, and the sun was the pledge of the fulfilment of every aspiration. I turned and looked at Wynnie. She stood pleased but listless amidst that which lifted me into the heaven of the Presence. ”

“ Sometimes, after thinking about something for a long time, you come to a conclusion about it, and you think you have settled it plain and clear to yourself, for ever and a day. You hang it upon your wall, like a picture, and are satisfied for a fortnight. But some day, when you happen to cast a look at it, you find that instead of hanging flat on the wall, your picture has gone through it—opens out into some region you don’t know where—shows you far-receding distances of air and sea—in short, where you thought one question was settled for ever, a hundred are opened up for the present hour. ”

“ Wynnie’s face was bright with the brightness of the morning star, ever growing pale and faint over the amber ocean that brightens at the sun’s approach; for life looked to Wynnie severe in its light, and somewhat sad because severe. Connie’s face was bright with the brightness of a lake in the rosy evening, the sound of the river flowing in and the sound of the river flowing forth just audible, but itself still, and content to be still and mirror the sunset. Dora’s was bright with the brightness of a marigold that follows the sun without knowing it ”

“ Often when life looked dreary about me, from some real or fancied injustice or indignity, has a thought of truth been flashed into my mind from a flower, a shape of frost, or even a lingering shadow—not to mention such glories as angel-winged clouds, rainbows, stars, and sunrises. Therefore I hope that in my loving delay over such aspects of Nature as impressed themselves upon me in this most memorable part of my history I shall not prove wearisome to my reader, for therein I should utterly contravene my hope and intent in the recording of them. ”

“ O Grave, where is thy victory?’ says the apostle. ‘Here, here, here,’ cry the Christian people, ‘everywhere. It is an awful sting, a fearful victory. But God keeps it away from us many a time when we ask him—to let it pierce us to the heart, at last, to be sure; but that can’t be helped.’ I mean this is how they feel in their hearts who do not believe that God is as merciful when he sends death as when he sends life; who, Christian people as they are, yet look upon death as an evil thing which cannot be avoided, and would, if they might live always, be content to live always. ”

“ I will come and see you again to-morrow, if you like.”
“Please do, sir; I shall be very grateful.”
As I rode home I thought, if the lifting of one sin off the human heart was like a resurrection, what would it be when every sin was lifted from every heart! Every sin, then, discovered in one’s own soul must be a pledge of renewed bliss in its removing. And when the thought came again of what St. Paul had said somewhere, “whatsoever is not of faith is sin,” I thought what a weight of sin had to be lifted from the earth, and how blessed it might be. ”

“ I spent it chiefly in my study and in Connie’s room. A world of mist hung over the sea; it refused to hold any communion with mortals. As if ill-tempered or unhappy, it folded itself in its mantle and lay still.
What was it thinking about? All Nature is so full of meaning, that we cannot help fancying sometimes that she knows her own meanings. She is busy with every human mood in turn—sometimes with ten of them at once—picturing our own inner world before us, that we may see, understand, develop, reform it. ”