Let those who say they never do “such silly things,” deny; the wise, who dare affirm or acknowledge the foible, will be a large majority.
By whatever power or influence my ring held me, its putting away was an advantageous thing. Since Robert’s death my life had been, to my own apprehension, two-fold: a sharply defined life above consciousness, and a vague, haunting, dreamlike life 331 below consciousness. The latter had troubled most of my hours of rest and solitude; and living in it, either waking or sleeping, I was sad with regrets and self-accusations. A night spent in its gloom robbed the next day of vitality and active mentality. I was depressed, and work of any kind is not done as well as it could be, if gone to with cheerfulness, yes, even with gladness. But with the removal of the ring from my person, the last link between the past and the present life was broken. I know not how it came about, but gradually I was able to dismiss “Memory’s rapturous pain.”
“For when I drank of that divinest anguish,
How could I taste the empty world again?”
Yes, I began to forget. At first I could not believe it, and I struggled against the fact. I told my heart to remember, but it was only telling love to do what love had once done of itself. I found it useless, as all have done, and will do to struggle against the deepest nature of things. For God has appointed time to console affliction, and living loves and inexorable wants and duties, compel us to accept the present as compensation for all that has been taken away, and so for a while,
“... we do not quite forget,
Nor quite remember, till the past days seem,
The waving memory of a lovely dream.”
Every event has two or three causes, and probably quite as many issues, and Mr. Johnston’s friendship carried Lilly back to mission work. She went with him and a Mr. Swartout to the Five Points Mission one Sunday afternoon, and at this time the Five Points Mission was the pet philanthropy of New York. There was always a great number of visitors there on the Sabbath, but it was the number of poor children that attracted Lilly. She had a singular aptitude for interesting and managing them, and this faculty had been trained and exercised by her famous pastor, Dr. Joseph Brown of the Kent Road Church, Glasgow, especially in the poor children’s dinners supplied by 332 the city and private charity. So this Sunday afternoon decided her life for the next two years or more, and also had a helpful influence on our own home.
For the attention of the Reverend George Mingens, Superintendent of New York’s city missions, was soon drawn to her fine voluntary work, and he asked her to join his missionary helpers. But I was extremely averse to her even visiting the Five Points district, though I acknowledged to myself the native and natural quality of her evangelism. My father delighted in his home missions, and my Uncle John died at Sierra Leone after seven years missionary labor there. A picture of his lonely grave in the African desert hung in my father’s study, and was one of the first things I heard a story about. It was only a poor woodcut taken from a Churchman Magazine, but as I grew older my imagination easily supplied the lions on the horizon, and the negro kneeling beside it.