CHAPTER XVII
LET THE DEAD BURY THEIR DEAD
Winifred and Hubert walked a part of the way home in silence. At length the former spoke.
"It seems to me we have been rather blind concerning the object of missions," she said. "What do you think of it now, Hubert?"
"I am convinced that I have taken a very shallow view of it," Hubert replied. "It is a marvel to me now that I could have missed so completely the true motive of missions. It is as clear as daylight in the Bible. It is humiliating to think one has been so contentedly provincial in thoughts of God's salvation. I am ashamed of it."
"So am I," agreed Winifred, and then they walked on in silence. An uneasy thought was gnawing at her heart that hardly found expression. Had it been put in words it would have been something like this:
"How are we to act with reference to new light on the will of God? If Hubert and I are really His children, called into His fellowship, then we must be sympathetic with His wish and do what we can to forward it. What would that be?"
Soon they reached the door of their home. Home! What a pleasant word it is. How easily the accustomed key turned in the latch, and how familiarly the house belongings greeted them as they entered. Ay, "there's no place like home," and its cords wind themselves about us silently, certainly, until it seems almost a sacrilege to think of leaving it.
Hubert went at once to his room, to the spot where questions were wont to be settled, and when dinner was announced he begged to be excused.
Winifred and her father sat alone at the table. He inquired concerning the missionary meeting, and she rehearsed to him much of what Mr. Carew had said.
"Ah, very good—very good," Mr. Gray said. "Very conclusive, I should think."
But it did not occur to him how a conclusive argument and a life action might stand related. Theories cost nothing when only the mind assents to them. But wrought in the heart, they mold lives after them.
In Hubert's room a painful heart process was going on. Sunk in a deep, capacious chair, with head resting upon his hand, he set in order before himself the axiomatic truths he had heard.
"God's supreme work is salvation," he meditated. "The field for this work is the world—the whole world. Salvation is wrought—as to man's part—through faith in a message preached. The message requires a messenger. In vast proportions of the field the messengers are wanting. What should be done about it? Clearly, the messengers should rally at the command of God. But it must be at His command. Men cannot go self-sent."
This thought gave a brief respite to the haunting sense of a responsibility.
"Whom shall I send and who will go for us?" The double questions heard by Isaiah in the temple repeated itself now in Hubert's mind.
"There are two questions there," he said. "'Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?' A man can only answer, finally, the second. God must answer His own first query,—although Isaiah did suggest, 'send me.' Must not any loyal child if he hear his Father's appeal say, 'Here am I'?"
Hubert's head sank lower upon his hand.
"Have I heard the voice of His need?" he asked, but hesitated to answer his own question. "Yes," he said finally, aloud, in a strained voice, "I have heard. I can never un-hear His words. I may disregard them, make myself forget them, but I can never go back to the place of twelve hours ago and be as though I had never known His mind. I have been in His temple—I, a worshiper purged by His infinite grace, I have seen a vision of His will, and have heard the voice of His need. I can never undo the fact."
Lines that somebody had written repeated themselves in his mind:
"Light obeyed increaseth light;
Light rejected bringeth night.
Who shall give me power to choose,
If the love of light I lose?"
Why did he still hesitate? Why did his "here am I" linger for hours unsaid? A sense of the reality of present things and of home surroundings swept over him. These were the possible things. But those—? He shuddered. Dim, misty, in a veil of unreality lay China, a distant land. What relation had he with it? There were missionaries, a strange, separated, unusual folk, specially created for the purpose, no doubt; but he, a practical, everyday, intensely real sort of being—what had he to do with things so far away? Oh, no! It was not for him. Let him put aside the overwrought fancies of the day, and return to practical life again.
He almost rose from his seat as though to emphasize his sober thought, but an impression restrained him.
"And so I lose My witnesses!" he imagined his Lord saying with grief. "They are walking by sight and not by faith, and the seen, tangible things hold them. Who will stretch out his hands to lay hold upon the things of eternal life?"
Hubert sank in rebuked silence under the spell of the afternoon's disclosure. It was reality, if he were a Christian. It must be faced. But how the seen things wrestled with the heavenly vision! Habit, long association, and tender love mingled a cup of sacrifice that he must drink. Could he leave all these for the sake of the joyful message of his Lord?
Now imagination pictured the leavetaking. How the familiar scenes of his home and native city remonstrated with his choice! In fancy he wrung for the last time his father's hand, he bade one last farewell to the flower-dressed grave of his gentle mother, and—and Winifred!
A dry, tearless sob shook him. O sweet sister, loved most of all since the days when, her jealous-eyed protector, he walked beside her to the school, shared sturdily but keenly her childish woes and fought all battles for her! Loved now with a closer, spiritual tie in their mutual devotion to their blessed Lord! How could he give her up? How could he leave her undefended now by his watchful love?
The scene of three years ago when he handed the sword of his self-served and self-defended life to Jesus Christ, and purposed in His heart to follow Him at any cost, was vividly rehearsed in his memory. Possessions, home, kindred, all things, were nominated in the bond of the whole-hearted surrender to his Lord. The time had come to hold to those honest terms.
Hubert rose from his seat with a pale face, and a death-like sinking at his heart. "Yes, Lord Jesus," he uttered with dry lips, "I am at Thy command. Forgive my coward halting. If Thou wilt send me, I will go."
On the other side of the hall, in her pretty room, Winifred had prayed: "We have seen the glance of Thine eye, O Lord, and know Thy longing. Open our eyes to see how we may serve Thee, and strengthen our hearts to bear—nay, to love!—Thy will. If we must give each other up"—a long pause, broken by storms of weeping, intervened—"then let us see—oh, let us see Thy face!"
When Winifred and Hubert first met in the hall next morning some gleams of comfort had already stolen into both their hearts. He put his arm about her as they descended the stairs together, and at the foot they paused.
"Dear little sister!" he said caressingly.
Her eyes filled at his unusual tenderness; for Hubert's love, however fervent and well believed-in, was not demonstrative. She looked up in his face with a long, serious question. He answered it by asking:
"Shall I go?—for Him, Winnie?"
"Yes, Hubert," she said earnestly, "oh, yes!" But the color flickered in her cheeks and her lips grew white.
They stood for a moment together but neither spoke. Together they presented afresh their offering to God, and He knew that it was costly.
At breakfast neither spoke of the matter that was uppermost in their hearts. But later Hubert sought his father in the library and made known to him the step he had taken.
Grief, dismay, and almost anger, struggled in the older man's heart.
He looked at his son with sorrowful sternness.
"Then—then, Hubert," he said very slowly, "you have concluded to leave me."
A pang shot through Hubert's heart, keener than any thought of his own pain, but he answered steadily:
"I have concluded, father, to follow Christ."
Mr. Gray frowned. He was not conscious of frowning at the name of Christ, or at so pure a sentiment as that uttered, but grief made him insensible to what he did.
"And is that," he asked with some irony, "the only way you can find of following Him? Can no one follow Him at home?"
"I do not see that he can if he is called abroad, father."
"And are you called?" he asked sharply, still the pain at his heart dulling any sense of shame that he could speak unsympathetically of such a thing.
Hubert answered gently.
"I believe I am, father," he said.
Mr. Gray stared at his son silently. His face grew ashen and the hand upon the table before him trembled visibly. Hubert stood in an agony of mute sympathy. At last the father rose without a word and prepared to leave the room. His face looked older by a decade than an hour before. Hubert made a movement to detain him and opened his lips to speak; but the other waved him aside with a quick gesture of the trembling hand. And so they parted.
Hubert looked after his father with a breaking heart. He had thought the crisis of his grief was passed when alone in his room he wrestled out the problem for his own heart. But now a heavier weight rested upon his soul. Must he break his father's heart? Must the hope of happy comradeship in future years be put aside, and with the disappointment his father age and weaken irrecoverably? He saw him walk down the path slowly and heavily, and a feeling of awful guilt swept over him. Was he his father's murderer? Was he following a delusion that would make himself an exile and lay his father prematurely in his grave? The thought overpowered him. He sank helplessly in a chair and groaned out his burden to the Lord.
"O Lord," he prayed, "am I walking in Thy footsteps, or am I a deluded wretch, bringing sorrow, and it may be death, to those I love most?" He paused, and his head sank deeply. "Lord, this is grief," he groaned. "This is grief. I have not known it before."
And so it seemed. Thoughts of his own loneliness and possible hardships seemed light compared with this.
"Grief!" he repeated, as though he found relief in the pitiful uttering of the word whose depths he was sounding. Then memory framed a passage which held the same word. "A man of sorrows," it repeated, "and acquainted with grief!"
How sweet the words sounded! And how dear the imagined face of Him of whom they were spoken!
"Tell me of Thy grief," he whispered. "Didst Thou cause grief?"
Words of Scripture again came to his help.
"Yea, a sword shall pierce through thine own soul," he heard Simeon say to the mother of his Lord, and it dawned upon him that when Jesus faced the cross with its agony He must have felt through His tenderest of hearts the sword-piercing of His Mother's sorrow. Ah, yes! He caused grief. And as He took His own way to the cross He raised a standard for those who follow of pitiless separations and of broken ties, if need be, for His kingdom's sake. "If any man cometh unto Me, and, hateth not his own father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple."
Texts that Hubert had passed lightly before were now illuminated with meaning and power as the occasion rose for them to be translated into life. He found a rare sweetness of comfort in those which assured him that he need not fear he was out of the path of the Saviour's footprints, though he found them blood-marked or washed with many tears. He turned to some familiar words which he wished to see before him again in plain black and white. They were found toward the end of the ninth chapter of Luke.
"Lord, suffer me first to go and bury my father," said one in response to his Lord's "follow me." And said Jesus, "Let the dead bury their dead, but go thou and preach the kingdom of God."
"Let the dead bury their dead!" What a strange expression, and what could it mean! Hubert pondered the text, no longer in keen agony of mind, for his distress had lightened as he saw even on the painful way the light of God's will shining. Anything could be borne, if the face of the Lord still shone upon it!
"What does it mean?" he queried in deep meditation.
Slowly a meaning, not the full one, doubtless, but suited to his need, dawned upon him. Let the spiritually dead attend to the affairs of death. Let them follow the conventional, natural round, and answer always to the cries of human love and longing. Let them keep to earthly ties and earthly work. But let the living be about the affairs of life! A ministry waits that only living hands can serve. Let filial hearts render unto earthly love that which is due, but see that thou, child of God, render also unto God the things which are God's.
"There are a thousand things," thought Hubert, "that unregenerated men can do quite as well as any. Indeed, they have an affinity with earthly things that is lacking in the heaven-born man. To trade in iron and amass wealth does not require a living man. I will let others do it. The supreme business of my Father calls, and I must be about it. But my earthly father? Shall I wait first to bury him? The Lord says, No."
Hubert studied his pattern in His life as well as words.
"He was subject to His parents," he reflected, "until the time came for His ministry and He had reached mature years of responsibility. Then, when He had entered upon His task, not even His mother's voice could turn Him from it. When His friends thought Him beside Himself, and she with them sought to take Him away from His work, He said, 'Who is My mother? . . . Whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother and sister and mother.' But He still was not unfilial. When not even the thought of the sword through her heart could take Him from the cross, He made provision for her, commending her to John's faithful love."
Hubert's eyes grew soft again with thoughts of his father. There was no need to think of provision for him, for he had enough. But he longed to give him always the joy of a son's tender love and companionship. Still the supreme call was inexorable, and another Father's business demanded filial fellowship.
"Thou must care for him, Lord," he said, and with a sudden impulse he knelt beside the library table and prayed that God would take away all the sting of his father's grief, and give him joy instead; joy in fellowship with the great Father in His giving.
After prayer he was much relieved and went to his work as usual, admitting to his office soon after his arrival Mr. Carew, who called in response to his wish of the day before. Hubert had more to offer than the financial gift contemplated.