From a Cornish Window / A New Edition

by Arthur Quiller-Couch

In my childhood I used to spend long holidays with my grandparents in Devonshire, and afterwards lived with them for a while when the shades of the prison-house began to close and I attended my first 'real' school as a day-boy. I liked those earlier visits best, for they were holidays, and I had great times in the hayfields and apple orchards, and rode a horse, and used in winter-time to go shooting with my grandfather and carry the powder-flask and shot-flask for his gun—an old muzzle-loader. Though stern in his manner, he was (as I grew to learn) extraordinarily, even extravagantly, kind; and my grandmother lived for me, her eldest grandchild. Years afterwards I gathered that in the circle of her acquaintance she passed for a satirical, slightly imperious, lady: and I do seem to remember that she suffered fools with a private reserve of mirth. But she loved her own with a thoroughness which extended—good housewife that she was—down to the last small office.

In short, here were two of the best and most affectionate grandparents in the world, who did what they knew to make a child happy all the week. But in religion they were strict evangelicals, and on Sunday they took me to public worship and acquainted me with Hell. From my eighth to my twelfth year I lived on pretty close terms with Hell, and would wake up in the night and lie awake with the horror of it upon me. Oddly enough, I had no very vivid fear for myself—or if vivid it was but occasional and rare. Little pietistic humbug that I was, I fancied myself among the elect: but I had a desperate assurance that both my parents were damned, and I loved them too well to find the conviction bearable. To this day I wonder what kept me from tackling my father on the state of his soul. The result would have been extremely salutary for me: for he had an easy sense of humour, a depth of conviction of his own which he united with limitless tolerance, and a very warm affection for his mother-in-law. Let it suffice that I did not: but for two or three years at least my childhood was tormented with visions of Hell derived from the pulpit and mixed up with two terrible visions derived from my reading—the ghost of an evil old woman in red-heeled slippers from Sir Walter Scott's story, The Tapestried Room, and a jumble of devils from a chapter of Samuel Warren's Diary of a Late Physician. I had happened on these horrors among the dull contents of my grandfather's book-case.

For three or four years these companions—the vision of Hell particularly and my parents in it—murdered my childish sleep. Then, for no reason that I can give any account of, it all faded, and boy or man I have never been troubled at all by Hell or the fear of it.

The strangest part of the whole affair is that no priest, from first to last, has ever spoken to me in private of any life but this present one, or indeed about religion at all. I suppose there must be some instinct in the sacerdotal mind which warns it off certain cases as hopeless from the first… and yet I have always been eager to discuss serious things with the serious.

There has been no great loss, though—apart from the missing of sociableness—if one may judge the arguments that satisfy my clerical friends from the analogies they use in the pulpit. The subject of a future life is one, to be sure, which can hardly be discussed without resort to analogy. But there are good and bad analogies, and of all bad ones that which grates worst upon the nerves of a man who will have clear thinking (to whatever it lead him) is the common one of the seed and the flower.

"The flowers that we behold each year
In chequer'd meads their heads to rear,
New rising from the tomb;
The eglantines and honey daisies,
And all those pretty smiling faces
That still in age grow young—
Even those do cry
That though men die,
Yet life from death may come,"

"The flowers that we behold each year
In chequer'd meads their heads to rear,
New rising from the tomb;
The eglantines and honey daisies,
And all those pretty smiling faces
That still in age grow young—
Even those do cry
That though men die,
Yet life from death may come,"

Wrote John Hagthorpe in verses which generations of British schoolboys have turned into Latin alcaics; and how often have we not 'sat under' this argument in church at Easter or when the preacher was improving a Harvest Festival? Examine it, and you see at once that the argument is not in pari materiâ; that all the true correspondence between man and the flower-seed begins and ends in this world. As the seed becomes a plant, blossoms and leaves the seeds of other flowers, so of seed man is begotten, flourishes and dies, leaving his seed behind him—all in this world. The 'seed' argument makes an illicit jump from one world to another after all its analogies have been met and satisfied on this side of the grave. If flowers went to heaven and blossomed there (which is possible indeed, but is not contended) it might be cogent. As things are, one might as validly reason from the man to prove that flowers go to heaven, as from the flower to prove that man goes thither. St. Paul (as I do not forget) uses the similitude of the seed: but his argument is a totally different one. St. Paul bids us not be troubled in what form the dead shall be raised; for as we sow "not the body that shall be, but bare grain, it may chance of wheat or of some other grain," so God will raise the dead in what form it pleases Him: in other words, he tells us that since bare grain may turn into such wonderful and wonderfully different things as wheat, barley, oats, rye, in this world, we need not marvel that bare human bodies planted here should be raised in wonderful form hereafter. Objections may be urged against this illustration: I am only concerned to point out that it illustrates an argument entirely different from the common pulpit one, which (I suspect) we should have to endure far less frequently were it our custom to burn our dead, and did not interment dig a trap for facile rhetoric.

Further, St. Paul's particular warning, if it do not consciously contain, at least suggests, a general warning against interpreting the future life in terms of this one, whereas its delights and pains can have little or nothing in common with ours. We try to imagine them by expanding or exaggerating and perpetuating ours—or some of them; but the attempt is demonstrably foolish, and leads straight to its own defeat. It comes of man's incapacity to form a conception of Eternity, or at any rate to grasp and hold it long enough to reason about it; by reason of which incapacity he falls back upon the easier, misleading conception of 'Everlasting Life.' In Eternity time is not: a man dies into it to-day and awakes (say) yesterday, for in Eternity yesterday and to-day and to-morrow are one, and ten thousand years is as one day. This vacuum of time you may call 'Everlasting Life,' but it clearly differs from what men ordinarily and almost inevitably understand by 'Everlasting Life,' which to them is an endless prolongation of time. Therefore, when they imagine heaven as consisting of an endless prolongation and exaggeration or rarefication of such pleasures as we know, they invite the retort, "And pray what would become of any one of our known pleasures, or even of our conceivable pleasures, if it were made everlasting?" As Jowett asked, with his usual dry sagacity, in his Introduction to the Phædo—

"What is the pain that does not become deadened after a thousand years? or what is the nature of that pleasure or happiness which never wearies by monotony? Earthly pleasures and pains are short in proportion as they are keen, of any others which are both intense and lasting we have no experience and can form no idea.… To beings constituted as we are the monotony of singing psalms would be as great an affliction as the pains of hell, and might even be pleasantly interrupted by them."