DR. STANLEY DISCOURSES CONCERNING THE DIVERSIONS OF THE SAINTS.
At the hour agreed upon, Mrs. Joe left Stormpoint to fetch Natalie. As the latter had done in the morning, and in order to inspect the newly-erected headstone, she alighted from her carriage at the cemetery and passed through various alleys, when, as she approached her destination, she suddenly halted.
A woman was stretched upon the grave, who, on hearing the ejaculation of Mrs. Joe, partly raised her head, disclosing an earth-bedaubed face, and emitting sounds not human, but rather the moans of a tortured animal.
Mrs. Joe ran and seized her shoulder, and at the touch Natalie half arose. Her gleaming eyes, her face distorted and soiled with earth—these presented an appalling spectacle.
The lady of Stormpoint could hardly have told how the task was accomplished, but she succeeded in inducing the frantic woman to enter the carriage, and, thus separated from the grave, she became quieter, though never ceasing to mutter phrases which caused the listener to shudder. Mrs. Joe was a woman of varied experience. She had heard the oaths of mining camps when pistols and knives were out and frenzied ruffians were athirst for blood; she would have thought no form of profanity strange to her ears; yet she had heard no blasphemy equal to that uttered by her companion, repeated as a weary child asleep may repeat some hard-learned sentence impressed upon a tired brain.
Arrived home, and Natalie in her bed, and withal lying quiet, and the carriage dispatched at full speed for Dr. Stanley, there was time to consider the next step.
"Send for Father Cameril," urged Paula.
"What is Leonard's address?" asked the lady, ignoring the suggestion.
"Dear," said Paula, caressingly, and taking Natalie's hand, "where is Leonard?"
"In hell," was the answer. "I am overjoyed in hearing the howlings of hell. My joy is increased as I gaze upon Leonard in the midst of that sea of suffering."
"Good Lord deliver us!" ejaculated Mrs. Joe. Paula fell upon her knees. "Father in heaven!" she commenced.
Natalie looked at her with languid interest "The sight of hell-torments exalts the happiness of the saints," she said.
At this delectable quotation from Jonathan Edwards Mrs. Joe wrung her hands; Paula uttered a half scream and burst into tears; in the same moment Dr. Stanley was ushered into the room.
"A frightful shock!" was his verdict. "Absolute quiet! No tears; no exorcisms," with a warning finger upheld for Paula. "I'll send a nurse at once and return soon."
By night he was again in the house, having received bulletins from the nurse in the meanwhile. The patient was asleep; had been so for nearly three hours. "Excellent!" he said to Mrs. Joe, finding that lady awaiting his report in the library. "It's a fine brain, Mrs. Claghorn. Let us hope it may prove a strong one. Can you explain further than you could this afternoon?"
"The keeper of the cemetery knows nothing. Her maids are here. I sent James for them, and have kept them to be questioned by you."
The maids only knew that Mrs. Leonard had visited the house, and had spent the day in the library; that one of them, noting that her mistress had neglected the luncheon that had been laid out for her, had ventured to look into the room. "She was crouched on the floor, reading; I could not well see her face. When I spoke she waved her hand, as though I was not to interrupt. That was about two o'clock. I went back to the kitchen, just putting the tea on the range so's to heat it. Then neither Martha nor I thought anything more about her, until about five Martha thought she heard the front door slam. We looked in the library; she was gone. She hadn't touched the lunch." Such, relieved of some circumlocution, was the report of the maid most glib of speech. They were dismissed by the doctor.
"She has done," was his comment, "that which creed-adherents usually omit. She has read, and as a consequence is crazed."
"Crazed as a consequence of reading!" exclaimed Mrs. Joe.
"Mrs. Leonard has sustained a shock; there must be a cause. No external injury is discoverable. The cause is to be found in her moral, or, if you please, her spiritual constitution—I don't care what you call it—among other things in strong maternal yearnings—subjective causes these, and not sufficient to explain the seizure; there must have been an agent. The maid found her deeply absorbed; people that read crouched on the floor are so; therefore a book——"
"I took this from her," exclaimed the lady, producing the Reverend Eliphalet's "Call to the Careless."
"Aha!" exclaimed the doctor, pouncing upon the volume and glancing at the title-page, "here we have it; here's enough to convert a lying-in hospital into Bedlam."
Mrs. Joe gazed upon the fat little volume in the hand of the speaker, with the same expression with which a novice might contemplate an overgrown spider impaled upon the card of a collector.
"This unctuous treatise," proceeded the doctor, who, finding his hobby saddled, was impatient to mount, "was written by a shining light of that family to which you and I have been graciously permitted to ally ourselves. In this volume are recorded the ecstatic transports of one of the most blessed of the blessed Claghorns. Our patient may have derived her tendency to exaltation from this very rhapsodist. Here, with the Reverend Eliphalet, we may revel in angelic joys; with him, we may, god-like, gloat over sinners damned, and, enraptured, contemplate Flames, Torment and Despair; here our ears may be charmed with the Roars of Age, the Howls of Youth, the Screams of Childhood and the Wails of Infancy; all in linked sweetness long drawn out; all in capital letters, and all extorted by the Flames that Lick the Suffering Damned!"
"Doctor!" exclaimed the lady, scandalized at that which she supposed was a burst of profanity.
"Shocked? Well, shocking it is—in me, who refuse to believe it, but edifying in Eliphalet. Ah! madam, the evil that men do lives after them. Was truth ever better exemplified? Listen to this: The writer pictures himself in heaven and looking down into hell. 'What joy to behold Truth vindicated from all the horrid aspersions of hellish monsters!' (that's me) 'I am overjoyed at hearing the everlasting Howlings of the Haters of the Almighty! Oh! Sweet, sweet. My heart is satisfied!'"
The lady attempted to interrupt, but the doctor continued to read: "The saints in glory will see and better understand (than we do) how terrible the sufferings of the damned are! When they have this sight it will excite them to joyful praises,' that's a choice bit from Jonathan Edwards. What do you think of the diversions of 'the saints in glory?'"
"It's blasphemy!"
"Blasphemy! Tell it not in Hampton! But listen to Jonathan again. Here is his picture of a sinner just condemned. His parents are witnesses of his terror and agony, and thus they righteously gloat: 'When they shall see what manifestations of amazement will be in you at the hearing of this dreadful sentence; when they shall behold you with a frightened and amazed countenance, trembling and astonished, and shall hear you groan and gnash your teeth, these things will not move them at all to pity you, but you will see them with a holy joy in their countenances and with songs in their mouths. When they shall see you turned away and beginning to enter into the great furnace, and shall see how you shrink at it, and hear how you shriek and cry out, yet they will not be at all grieved for you; but at the same time you will hear from them renewed praises and hallelujahs for this true and righteous judgment of God in so dealing with you!'"
"If," interjected the listener, "that is written there, the devil wrote it."
"The devil may have had a hand in the matter, but it was written by no less a person than Jonathan Edwards, regarded, and justly, by the Reverend Eliphalet and others, as a great man. He is also quoted here as saying to his hearers, 'If you perish hereafter, it will be an occasion of joy to all the godly'; one is hardly surprised that he didn't get on with his congregation. Imagine Father Cameril making that announcement with you and Miss Paula in the front pew."
"Doctor, if you are not inventing——"
"I could not. My imagination is not warmed by the flames of hell or by celestial visions. This book is filled with similar elegant extracts."
"I have heard enough, Doctor. Really——"
"Permit me one or two more. We have hardly heard the author himself as yet."
"But to what end?"
"You were incredulous when I asserted that a day's reading in Leonard's library would account for the present condition of his wife. It's only fair to allow me to justify my assertion."
"You have read enough to drive me crazy, if for one moment I believed it."
"Hardly. You are not a recently bereaved mother; you are not just emerging from a condition consequent upon disturbance of the physical economy which has reacted upon the mental; you are not inclined to mysticism, to see visions, to find pictures in goblets of water or in grate fires; in short, while you have your own idiosyncrasies, they are not of a character to render you liable to this sort of transport. But there are organizations which, though seduced by mystic lore, can hardly contemplate such matters without injury. The compiler of this book, the men he quotes, the ecstatics in general—revivalists, hermits, nuns and monks in all ages—do you believe that as a class they were well balanced? Peering into heaven is a dangerous business."
"The men you have quoted seem to have peered into hell."
"That is the Puritan mode of ecstatic enjoyment. Our Catholic—I beg your pardon, our Roman Catholic—enthusiasts, being more artistic, and lovers of the beautiful, prefer contemplation of heaven. Unlike the smug Puritan, they do not spare their bodies. They fast and flog, wear hair shirts, roll in ashes and wash seldom, but their eyes are turned upward; they urge the spirit to rejoice. Your fat and well-fed Calvinist prefers a gloom irradiated by the flames of hell, in which he can behold the writhing victims of God's vanity——"
"Doctor, you are as bitter as all your brethren; you unbeliever——"
"I don't know that I'm more of an unbeliever than you are. I'm sure if the Reverend Eliphalet has not by this time modified his opinions, he has no expectation of meeting you in heaven. Hear him as he warns humanity against the devices of Satan: 'Of which,' he says, 'the traces are visible even in the church. In these days there hath arisen a delusive hope as to infants. Some hold, and a few dare to assert, though with bated breath, that all infants die in the grace of God. Who saith this? Not God, who, by His Eternal Decree, hath declared that none but His Elect are saved. Not our Confession of Faith, formulated at Westminster in earnest prayer and reverence for the Word. Not the framers of that Confession, of whom I may mention Twisse, as having specially wrote against this new-born folly, extorted by the cunning of the Enemy of Souls by means of the bleatings of foolish mothers—search the Scripture, reader! Nowhere shalt thou find any saved but His Elect.'"
"Abominable!" ejaculated the lady.
"Poetical. 'Bleatings of foolish mothers' is quite so. And now our good man actually drops into the poetry of the Reverend Michael Wigglesworth, whose 'Day of Doom' he quotes at length. I will not inflict the whole fifteen stanzas upon you; but listen to a morsel or two. This is the Argument: The Still-born appear at the Seat of Mercy, and put in a plea for grace that might have weight in Senegambia, but which has none in the heaven of Eliphalet and of Hampton:
'Then to the bar they all drew near who died in Infancy,
And never had, or good or bad, effected personally,
But from the womb unto the tomb were straightway carried
(Or at the least, ere they transgressed), who thus began to plead.'
"Their plea is that since Adam, the actual delinquent, has been 'set free, and saved from his trespass,' they are on better grounds entitled to consideration. To the finite intelligence there would seem to be some force in the infantile argument. What says Omnipotence?
'I may deny you once to try, or grace to you to tender,
Though he finds Grace before my face who was the chief offender.
You sinners are, and such a share as sinners may expect,
Such you shall have, for I do save none but mine own elect;
Yet to compare your sin with their who sinned a longer time,
I do confess yours is much less, though every sin's a crime;
A crime it is, therefore in bliss you may not hope to dwell,
But unto you I shall allow THE EASIEST ROOM IN HELL.'"
The doctor closed the book. "I submit that I have proved my contention," he said. "Do you doubt now that Mrs. Leonard was affected by her browsings among Leonard's books? The men who wrote the matter of which this volume is made up were largely the founders of Hampton, men whose names she has heard venerated as almost inspired of God."
"Even so, how could she believe such absurdities?"
"I do not assert that she believed. Belief in the impossible is impossible. But have you never been deeply impressed by fiction; never been scared by a ghost story? Have you shed tears over the sorrows of Colonel Newcome? The few quotations you have heard cause you to shrink, though you are well aware they are but foolish words. But if you could see the scenes herein depicted, I do not think you could bear the prospect. I am sure I should howl as lustily as any hellish monster here referred to. Well, Mrs. Leonard being so constituted, has actually seen these horrors, and, in the central figure, has contemplated the writhings of her child."
"Oh, Doctor!" she spoke in a subdued tone, her eyes expressing more than her words.
"Even you, here in this well-lighted and cheerful room, with me, a very material and matter-of-fact person, beside you, even you can feel a faint reflection of the terrors in which this woman spent the day. Alone, without food, a deserted room, a gloomy house, but lately cheerful with the prattle of a childish voice, forever silent, but of which the echoes still linger in the mother's ears—here's enough and more than enough to disturb an exalted temperament, a morbid imagination. Add this"—the doctor shook the book in his hand—"and what need of belief, if by belief you mean the result of a reasoning process? The ideas suggested here took possession of her! Belief! Pshaw! nobody believes in this stuff; but Hampton says it believes."
"But that's monstrous!"
"Nothing more common than loud assertions of belief where is no belief. That's politics, partisanship."
"But this is religion——"
"So-called."
"But——"
"The Westminster Confession is a written document. The men who composed it knew what they wished to say, and said it so clearly that nobody can misapprehend their meaning. Your own creed of compromises—pardon me, compromise is always the resort of politicians who understand their business—was wiser, or luckier; its Articles are all loopholes in regard to this doctrine of Election——"
"Doctor, your ignorance of my church is so palpable that I decline to take your word concerning Hampton and the Confession of Faith. I've never read it——"
"Even its adherents are not so rash. It becomes a serious matter as to one's self-respect to maintain a monstrous absurdity, after one knows it. Nevertheless, the Westminster Confession teaches as truth all that the Reverend Eliphalet says, or that Michael Wigglesworth grotesquely sings. Moreover, it is annually published under the title of 'The Constitution and Standards of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America'—a solemn declaration that God, before the creation of man, damned the great majority to everlasting agony so excruciating as to be beyond conception, and all for His own glory and pleasure."
"Yet I know, and you ought to know, that Christianity offers salvation to every soul through the medium of its Founder."
"Denied in toto by Westminster. According to the Confession, not even Jesus Christ could diminish the number of the damned, fixed before the creation of a single soul. If Mrs. Leonard's baby was born to be damned, damned he is."
"Now I know you are asserting what is not so. I have heard infant damnation denied by Hampton professors."
"And may again. I do not claim that a single human being believes the Westminster Confession; but I do maintain that he who acknowledges that Confession as his standard, and retains membership in that church, which annually promulgates the same as truth, either believes an outrageous absurdity, or says he believes it. If he is not willing to do this, he has no right in the organization; why, only the other day Dr. Willis was requested to get out because he declined to say he believed that which he does not believe."
"Doctor, I am sorry to say it, but your statements are not credible——"
"Don't apologize. Of course they are not; but they are true. I certainly don't blame you for doubting my word. But you shall ask Hodge; I'll lend you his commentary. Hodge hopes as to infants, but is honest enough to admit that in the Confession there is no ground for hope. He damns all heathen incontinently, which includes all the babies I ever knew, though he may have known babies that were not heathen. And, after all, why this solicitude for babies? Why is it less monstrous to condemn to eternal torture a being six feet long than one of three? Why, on the last occasion I was in a church I heard these words: 'The sentiment which sorrows over what God reveals as His will is simply maudlin. When the Christian finds out who are in the regions of despair he will neither be affected by their number nor by the duration of their punishment.' That's not much better than 'bleating mothers.' And in the meanwhile"—he concluded a tirade so rapidly uttered that his auditor had had no opportunity to interrupt—"they are quarreling about Socrates and tobacco, crusading against my bottle of claret, and sending missionaries to Japan." Who "they" were he had no opportunity to designate, for at this moment a messenger from the nurse announced that the patient was awake.
When the doctor and the lady entered the room, Natalie looked at them, but betrayed no surprise. Mrs. Joe was startled by the expression of her face, which was peaceful, even happy. "Heaven is beautiful," she said, without other preface. "Birds and flowers and little children. Oh! the happy little children and Lenny among them; all so happy, so rosy! Ah, I am glad!" And even as she sighed her gladness she sank into slumber. The doctor watched her anxiously for many minutes; then he signed to Mrs. Joe to follow, and they softly left the room.
"Is it death?" asked the lady, who had been frightened by his anxious face.
"Such visions often mean death; there's nothing certain yet, but every hope. Go to bed, Mrs. Claghorn; I shall remain here."
But though the lady declined to go to bed, the discussion was not resumed.
About four in the morning he went alone to the room, and soon returned with a smiling face. "She is sleeping naturally," he said. "A few hours since I feared for her reason; now I have great hope. I shall return at eight o'clock. Let nobody go near her. Burn that thing; she must never see it again." He pointed to the "Call to the Careless," and left the house.