Despairs Last Journey | Page 7

the strictest
Calvinistic school; but my heart had revolted against the creed, and
from the time when I was five-and-twenty my mind had rejected it with
equal decision and disdain. I looked for no other faith or form of faith.
At the centre of the negation in which I lived there was this one thought:
There may, for anything I can tell, be a great First Cause. I cannot
know. I can neither affirm nor deny, for the whole question is beyond
my understanding. But this at least seems clear: If there be a God at all,
He is far away. He is great beyond our dreaming--distant beyond our
dreaming. If there be a scheme in the universe, there is at least no care
for the atoms which compose it. God sits far withdrawn, beyond our
prayers, beyond our tears and fears. This fretful insect of an hour, who
cannot even measure the terms he uses, speaks of the Eternal, the
Immutable, and strives by his prayers to change Its purposes. I am

writing now by lamplight, and the agonies of the singed moths whose
little bodies encrust my lamp-glass do not move me from my purpose. I
realize their anguish at this moment with a deep pity, but I do not stay
to save them. My heavier purpose will not wait for them. Thus I
dreamed it was, likening smallest things to the greatest, with God.
'At my father's death a change began to work in my opinions. I had
convinced myself that this life was all that man enjoyed or suffered, but
I began to be conscious that I was under tutelage. I began--at first
faintly and with much doubting--to think that my father's spirit and my
own were in communion. I knew that he had loved me fondly, and to
me he had always seemed a pattern of what is admirable in man. Now
he seemed greater, wiser, milder. I grew to believe that he had survived
the grave, and that he had found permission to be my guide and
guardian. The creed which slowly grew up in my mind and heart, and is
now fixed there, was simply this: that as a great Emperor rules his
many provinces, God rules the universe, employing many
officers--intelligences of loftiest estate, then intelligences less lofty;
less lofty still beneath these, and at the last the humbler servants, who
are still as gods to us, but within our reach, and His messengers and
agents. Then God seemed no longer utterly remote and impossible to
belief, and I believed. And whether this be true or false, I know one
thing: this faith has made me a better man than I should have been
without it My beloved father, wise and kind, has seemed to lead me by
the hand. I have not dared in the knowledge of his sleepless love to do
many things to which I have been tempted. I have learned from him to
know--if I know anything--that life from its lowest form is a striving
upward through uncounted and innumerable grades, and that in each
grade something is learned that fits us for the next, or something lost
which has to be won back again after a great purgation of pain and
repentance.
'It is three days since I began to write, and I am so weak that I can
barely hold the pen. Send this to Paul. He has gone far wrong. He will
come back again to the right. I have asked that I may guide him, and
my prayer has been granted. From the hour at which I quit this flesh
until he joins me my work is appointed me, and I shall not leave him.

Goodbye, dear child. Be at peace, for all will yet be well.
'When Paul sees these last words of mine, he will know that I am with
him.'
The letter ended there, and the reader's dazzled eyes looked into the
darkness. One flickering flame hovered above the embers of the fire
and seemed to leave them and return, to die and break to life again. At
last it fluttered upward and was gone.
The runnel, like the greater stream below, had many voices. It chattered
light-hearted trifles, lamented child-like griefs, and sobbed itself to
sleep over and over and over. In the black cañon the river bellowed its
rage and triumph and despair. The shadows of the night were deep, and
silence brooded within them, and the ears thrilled and tingled to the
monitions of its voiceless sea.
'Father!' he whispered.
The night gave no response, but the answer sounded in the lonely man's
heart:
'I am here.'

III
In the broad daylight it was not easy to believe that the experience of
the night-time was more than an excitement