He appeared not to notice my tears, and, though they still forced their way, they had lost their bitterness.
“I went home,” continued he, “and said to my wife, ‘Mrs. Cheerlove was in church this morning; I shall step down and wish her joy:’ and I put this little book in my pocket to read you a few lines, which I thought you would enter into. What I like myself, I can’t help expecting others to like;—others, I mean, in whom exists some similarity of taste and feeling. You know I have known what it is to be brought very close to an unseen world, and to have been raised up again quite contrary to all expectation; and, therefore, I can sympathise very truly with you.”
“You had so many things to make life dear,” said I, dejectedly, “and so many depending on you in your family and parish, that your death would have been a very heavy misfortune; but I have not one near tie left! My work, which was never very important, seems done; and I am, in fact, little more now than a cumberer of the ground. I therefore cannot feel quite as thankful perhaps, for recovery as I ought.”
“That proceeds,” replied he, quietly, “from rather a morbid state of feeling, which is not at all natural to you, and which will in a great measure pass off with your present exhaustion. But nevertheless, I can quite understand that a Christian believer, brought very close to the threshold of God’s kingdom,—so as almost to hear the voices on the other side the door, and very sincerely desirous to enter His awful presence, under the assured protection of the Redeemer,—may feel a kind of disappointment at being sent back again into this wilderness-world—just as the Israelites were when they were on the very confines of the promised land. But all we have to do in such case is to submit, and to trust; and I think this little hymn very experimentally teaches us our duty.” Then, in a very feeling, calming voice, he read:—
“‘It is thy will, my Lord, my God!—
And I, whose feet so lately trod
The margin of the tomb,
Must now retrace my weary way,
And in this land of exile stay,
Far from my heavenly home.