A dead man's diary

by Coulson Kernahan

CHAPTER XII.

I SEE THE BROTHER WHOM WE HAVE ALL LOST.

"You believe probably in God, in Christ, and in Immortality, and you look with joy and gladness to the life beyond the grave. Probably, too, you have suffered, as we all have at some time, from bodily pain, mental affliction or bereavement, until your heart has been broken and crushed, and you have felt that you could bear your burden no longer were it not for the consolation that sorrow can last no longer than life, and that the next world will set this world right. But have you never asked yourself, 'How if it should not be so after all? 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? And have you never recognised that your failures have been the life-element of your successes, and that, since failure is the law of progress, an existence in which all your endeavours were successful would probably become monotonous and tame?"

The above is an extract from a letter (it lies on the desk before me) from one whom I had known in my early boyhood, and who had been for many years my constant companion and friend. Had she continued to be my companion it is possible that my story might have been a different one, but she went to live in America some months before I was twenty, and I never saw her again until the day that she and I stood face to face in the spirit-world—I in hell and she in heaven.

After we had exchanged greetings, and each had told the other what was necessary to be known of the past, the conversation turned upon the subjects which we had so often discussed in our letters. "Tell me," I said, "now that you really find yourself in heaven, if you are in every way peacefully and perfectly happy."

"One moment, before I give you an answer," she replied. "You are not altogether wrong in calling this heaven, although it is little more than the ante-chamber between earth and heaven. It is my heaven at present, but it will not be my heaven always, any more than it will be always your hell, and although it is heaven, it is not the heaven. Of that neither you nor I can form any shadowy conception. Now for your question. There is only one thing which troubles me, and that is ignorance. I had always thought that in the spirit-world one would know everything. I don't mean that I expected to find myself omniscient, but I did think that I should know all one would wish to know. I need hardly tell you I was wrong. With whatever knowledge we have acquired and with whatever intellectual ability we have developed up to the point of our leaving the earth-world, with that, and with no more, do we make our first start in the spirit realm. I do think our capability of intuitionally apprehending truth is in some way intensified by the transition which you speak of as death: but of intellectual change there is absolutely none; and there are things relating to the after-life, as well as to the earthly one, concerning which (never having studied them whilst I was in the body) I am far more ignorant than are many dwellers under the sun."

"That I can well believe," I replied; "but putting aside the fact that you are troubled sometimes by a consciousness of ignorance, tell me if in other respects you are happy."

"No good can come to one of being in a place where everything is too easy," she answered, "and if heaven were the abode of perfect happiness—this heaven, I mean—I think we should find it somewhat wearisome. When I was on earth I longed for heaven, not that I might be delivered from sorrow, but from sinfulness; and I think I may say that I am as happy here as my failures will let me be."

"Your failures!" 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 and paltry; we feel it so, we cannot but feel it so, when it is viewed in the lofty light of our possibilities. Each morning finds us beginning the world afresh, and with the high hope that at last the time has come when we shall be true to ourselves and to our aspirations, that at last we shall veritably and indeed do some lasting work for God and for our fellow-creatures. And each evening! ah! each evening! is it not ever the same sad story, ever the same old bitter experience? You have spoken of it yourself in those verses you sent me so many years ago:

"'Each morning hails a new Endeavour's birth,
Each evening weeps its pitiful corpse before.'

"Hardly has the freshness faded out of the morning air before the world spirit is at our side again; she is whispering in our ear; her white wooing arms are around us; her warm breath is on our cheek; there is a brief,—how brief and feeble!—attempt at resistance, and then, ah! then, we are broken and undone. And often as, with lips hot and dry, with cheeks fevered and flushed, we look back to that serene-souled self, which but a few short hours ago stood in rapt adoration under the silence of a midnight sky, and held high communion with its Creator, we can hardly bring ourselves to believe that we and it are one and the same being. Yet, in spite of the paltriness of the earth-life, in spite of the vice, and the shame, there is one element in the strife which lends dignity even to our very failures, for in our battling against the ever-present evil, and in our struggle towards the ever-unattained good, we come within sight of a possibility, higher, perhaps, than that of which even angels can conceive. The sin and the shame are after all but human; the effort and determination to overcome them are Divine.

"Well, without some sense of difficulty to be overcome, some sense even of comparative failure, this effort and this determination could never be; and in heaven, the place of infinite progress and possibilities, there is a certain Divine discontent which I know not how to explain better to you than by calling it the heavenly counterpart of this earthly effort.

"But now tell me about yourself," she said, after a moment's pause, "for I can see that you have been through sore suffering since you came here."

Through sore suffering I had indeed been, and had already grown old in hell, but the lines which she had quoted from my boyish verses, and the words she had said about the "divine discontent" of heaven, had set stirring some hidden spring in my memory, and at the time she spoke I was thinking of what Robert Louis Stevenson has said about "that little beautiful brother whom we once all had, and whom we have all lost and mourned—the man we ought to have been, the man we hoped to be." She must have known what was in my thoughts, for, taking my hand in her own, she repeated some verses which she had written and sent to me on that Easter morning (a morning which must ever shine out white and fair in my memory) when she and I had knelt side by side after confirmation to take our first communion. I remember that she called them "This Only," and had headed them with the words, "Why call ye Me Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say?"

"O feeble lips that lapse from fervent prayer,
To smile at sin, and lightly laugh at shame,
That in the chamber loud your love declare,
And in the world scarce dare to breathe His name,
Whence would ye call Him Lord?
"O changeful soul! now mounting like thin fire,
Skyward and Godward; now like thing of night,
Low-grovelling, smirched, and mid foul mud and mire
Trailing white pinions given for starry flight,
Darest thou call Him Lord?
"O morning's hope! O evening's dull despair!
O lofty purpose! puny, paltry deed!
O high resolve! heart big with longings fair!
O loveless life that bears nor flower nor seed!
Dare ye to call Him Lord?
"Yea, I would call Him Lord, and all the more
For this my sin, else were I sore undone;
Say, who should seek Him, if not I? He wore
This fleshy garb, yet in Him sin was none,
So may I call Him Lord.
"No heaven I ask, no crystal-shining shore,
Nor realm of flowers—this only would I pray,
That mid all sinnings, stumblings sad and sore,
I still may cling to Thee, dear Lord, alway,
And still may call Thee Lord."

She ended, and as her voice died away into a whisper sweet and low as the restful ripple of the rain, I hid my head between my hands and sobbed aloud, for something there was in the words and in her way of repeating them, which carried me back in thought to that vanished season of Youth and Hope when pictures and poetry, flowers and music, as well as sunrise, sunset, and the play of evening light upon the sea, had seemed but as the visible embodiment of my own thoughts, and were indeed to me as a part of my aspiration towards a loftier, lovelier life.

And then I remembered what manner of man I was, and as the shadow-horror of my sin arose spectre-like between myself and my distant childhood, I saw that "little brother," the child that I once had been, shrink back and back with sad reproachful eyes, until with a sudden cry of anguish and despair he turned from me, and fled into the night.