The Vicars Daughter | Page 9

for then, he said, they ceased to be
worship at all, and were a mere pagan rite, better far left alone. I
remember also he said, that those, however good they might be, who
urged attention to the forms of religion, such as going to church and
saying prayers, were, however innocently, just the prophets of
Pharisaism; that what men had to be stirred up to was to lay hold upon
God, and then they would not fail to find out what religious forms they
ought to cherish. "The spirit first, and then the flesh," he would say. To
put the latter before the former was a falsehood, and therefore a
frightful danger, being at the root of all declensions in the Church, and
making ever-recurring earthquakes and persecutions and repentances
and reformations needful. I find what my father used to say coming
back so often now that I hear so little of it,--especially as he talks much
less, accusing himself of having always talked too much,--and I
understand it so much better now, that I shall be always in danger of
interrupting my narrative to say something that he said. But when I
commence the next chapter, I shall get on faster, I hope. My story is
like a vessel I saw once being launched: it would stick on the stocks,
instead of sliding away into the expectant waters.

CHAPTER III
.
MY WEDDING.
I confess the first thing I did when I knew myself the next morning was
to have a good cry. To leave the place where I had been born was like
forsaking the laws and order of the Nature I knew, for some other
Nature it might be, but not known to me as such. How, for instance,
could one who has been used to our bright white sun, and our pale
modest moon, with our soft twilights, and far, mysterious skies of night,
be willing to fall in with the order of things in a planet, such as I have
read of somewhere, with three or four suns, one red and another green

and another yellow? Only perhaps I've taken it all up wrong, and I do
like looking at a landscape for a minute or so through a colored glass;
and if it be so, of course it all blends, and all we want is harmony. What
I mean is, that I found it a great wrench to leave the dear old place, and
of course loved it more than I had ever loved it. But I would get all my
crying about that over beforehand. It would be bad enough afterwards
to have to part with my father and mother and Connie, and the rest of
them. Only it wasn't like leaving them. You can't leave hearts as you do
rooms. You can't leave thoughts as you do books. Those you love only
come nearer to you when you go away from them. The same rules don't
hold with thinks and _things_, as my eldest boy distinguished them the
other day.
But somehow I couldn't get up and dress. I seemed to have got very
fond of my own bed, and the queer old crows, as I had called them
from babyhood, on the chintz curtains, and the Chinese paper on the
walk with the strangest birds and creeping things on it. It Was a lovely
spring morning, and the sun was shining gloriously. I knew that the rain
of the last night must be glittering on the grass and the young leaves;
and I heard the birds singing as if they knew far more than mere human
beings, and believed a great deal more than they knew. Nobody will
persuade me that the birds don't mean it; that they sing from any thing
else than gladness of heart. And if they don't think about cats and guns,
why should they? Even when they fall on the ground, it is not without
our Father. How horridly dull and stupid it seems to say that "without
your Father" means without his knowing it. The Father's mere
knowledge of a thing--if that could be, which my father says can't--is
not the Father. The Father's tenderness and care and love of it all the
time, that is the not falling without him. When the cat kills the bird, as I
have seen happen so often in our poor little London garden, God yet
saves his bird from his cat. There is nothing so bad as it looks to our
half-sight, our blinding perceptions. My father used to say we are all
walking in a spiritual twilight, and are all more or less affected with
twilight blindness, as some people are physically. Percivale, for one,
who is as brave as any wife could wish, is far