CHILD does not easily comprehend even the plain fact of death.
Though I had looked upon my father's still,pale face in his coffin,the impression it left upon me was of sleep;more peaceful and sacred than common slumber,yet only sleep.My dreams of him were for a long time so vivid that I would say to myself,"He was here yesterday;he will be here again to-morrow,"with a feeling that amounted to expectation.
We missed him,we children large and small who made up the yet untrained home crew,as a ship misses the man at the helm.His grave,clear perception of what was best for us,his brief words that decided,once for all,the course we were to take,had been far more to us than we knew.
It was hardest of all for my mother,who had been accustomed to depend entirely upon him.Left with her eight children,the eldest a boy of eighteen years,and with no property except the roof that sheltered us and a small strip of land,her situation was full of perplexities which we little ones could not at all understand.To be fed like the ravens and clothed like the grass of the field seemed to me,for one,a perfectly natural thing,and I often wondered why my mother was so fretted and anxious.
I knew that she believed in God,and in the promises of the Bible,and yet she seemed sometimes to forget everything but her troubles and her helplessness.I felt almost like preaching to her,but I was too small a child to do that,I well knew;so Idid the next best thing I could think of--I sang hymns as if singing to myself,while I meant them for her.Sitting at the window with my book and my knitting,while she was preparing dinner or supper with a depressed air because she missed the abundant provision to which she held been accustomed,I would go from hymn to hymn,selecting those which I thought would be most comforting to her,out of the many that my memory-book contained,and taking care to pronounce the words distinctly.
I was glad to observe that she listened to "Come,ye disconsolate,"and "How firm a foundation;"and that she grew more cheerful;though I did not feel sure that my singing cheered her so much as some happier thought that had come to her out of her own heart.Nobody but my mother,indeed,would have called my chirping singing.But as she did not seem displeased,I went on,a little more confidently,with some hymns that I loved for their starry suggestions,--"When marshaled on the nightly plain,"and "Brightest and best of the sons of the morning,"and "Watchman,tell us of the night?"The most beautiful picture in the Bible to me,certainly the loveliest in the Old Testament,had always been that one painted by prophecy,of the time when wild and tame creatures should live together in peace,and children should be their fearless play-mates.Even the savage wolf Poverty would be pleasant and neighborly then,no doubt!A Little Child among them,leading them,stood looking wistfully down through the soft sunrise of that approaching day,into the cold and darkness of the world.
Oh,it would be so much better than the garden of Eden!
Yes,and it would be a great deal better,I thought,to live in the millennium,than even to die and go to heaven,although so many people around me talked as if that were the most desirable thing of all.But I could never understand why,if God sent us here,we should be in haste to get away,even to go to a pleas-anter place.
I was perplexed by a good many matters besides.I had learned to keep most of my thoughts to myself,but I did venture to ask about the Ressurrection--how it was that those who had died and gone straight to heaven,and had been singing there for thousands of years,could have any use for the dust to which their bodies had returned.Were they not already as alive as they could be?Ifound that there were different ideas of the resurrection among "orthodox"people,even then.I was told however,that this was too deep a matter for me,and so I ceased asking questions.But Ipondered the matter of death;what did it mean?The Apostle Paul gave me more light on the subject than any of the ministers did.
And,as usual,a poem helped me.It was Pope's Ode,beginning with,--"Vital spark of heavenly flame,"--which I learned out of a reading-book.To die was to "languish into life."That was the meaning of it!and I loved to repeat to myself the words,--"Hark!they whisper:angels say,'Sister spirit,come away!'""The world recedes;it disappears!
Heaven opens on my eyes!my ears With sounds seraphic ring."A hymn that I learned a little later expressedto me the same satisfying thought:
"For strangers into life we come,And dying is but going home."The Apostle's words,with which the song of "The Dying Christian to his Soul"ends,left the whole cloudy question lit up with sunshine,to my childish thoughts:--"O grave,where is thy 'victory?
O death,where is thy sting?"
My father was dead;but that only meant that be bad gone to a better home than the one be lived in with us,and by and by we should go home,too.
Meanwhile the millennium was coming,and some people thought it was very near.And what was the millennium?Why,the time when everybody on earth would live just as they do in heaven.Nobody would be selfish,nobody would be unkind;no!not so much as in a single thought.What a delightful world this would be to live in then!Heaven itself could scarcely be much better!Perhaps people would not die at all,but,when the right time came,would slip quietly away into heaven,just as Enoch did.
My father had believed in the near millennium.His very last writing,in his sick-room,was a penciled computation,from the prophets,of the time when it would begin.The first minister who preached in our church,long before I was born,had studied the subject much,and had written books upon this,his favorite theme.The thought of it was continually breaking out,like bloom and sunshine,from the stern doctrines of the period.
