A Noble Life

by Dinah Maria Mulock Craik

"A guinea, I think, today, because I am so very happy."

This answer, which the two elders overheard, was told by them next day to every body, and remembered along the loch-side for years.

Cairnforth Kirk, like most other Scotch churches of ancient date, is very plain within and without, and the congregation then consisted almost entirely of hillside farmers, shepherds, and the like, who arrived in families—dogs, and all, for the dogs always came to church, and behaved there as decorously as their masters. Many the people walked eight, ten, and even twelve miles, from the extreme boundary of the parish, and waited about in the kirk or kirk-yard on fine Sundays, and in the Manse kitchen on wet ones—which were much the most frequent—during the two hours' interval between sermons.

In the whole congregation there was hardly a person above the laboring class except in the minister's pew and that belonging to the Castle, which had been newly lined and cushioned, and in a corner of which, safely deposited by Malcolm, the little earl now sat—sat always, even during the prayer, at which some of the congregation looked reprovingly round, but only saw the little figure wrapped in a plaid, and the sweet, wan, childish, and yet unchild-like face, with the curly dark hair, and large dark eyes.

Whatever in the earl was "no a'richt," it certainly could not be his mind, for a brighter, more intelligent countenance was never seen. It quite startled the minister with the intentness of its gaze from the moment he ascended the pulpit; and though he tried not to look that way, and was very nervous, he could not get over the impression it made. It was to him almost like a face from the grave—this strange, eerie child's face, so strongly resembling that of the dead countess, who, despite the difference in rank, had, during the brief year she lived and reigned at Cairnforth, been almost like an equal friend and companion to his own dead wife. Their two faces—Lady Cairnforth's as she looked the last time he saw her in her coffin, and his wife's as she lay in hers—mingled together, and affected him powerfully.

The good minister was not remarkable for the brilliance of his sermons, which he wrote and "committed"—that is, learned by heart, to deliver in pseudo-extempore fashion, as was the weary custom of most Scotch ministers of his time. But this Sunday, all that he had committed slipped clean out of his memory. He preached as he had never been known to preach before, and never preached again—with originality, power, eloquence; speaking from his deepest heart, as if the words thence pouring out had been supernaturally put into it; which, with a superstition that approached to sublimest faith, he afterward solemnly believe they had been.

The text was that verse about "all things working together for good to them that love God;" but, whatever the original discourse had been, it wandered off into a subject which all who knew the minister recognized as one perpetually close to his heart—submission to the will of God, whatever that will might be, and however incomprehensible it seemed to mortal eyes.

"Not, my friends," said he, after speaking for a long time on this head —speaking rather than sermonizing, which, like many cultivated but not very original minds, he was too prone to do—"not that I would encourage or excuse that weak yielding to calamity which looks like submission, but is, in fact, only cowardice; submitting to all things as to a sort of fatality, without struggling against them, or trying to distinguish how much of them is the will of God, and how much our own weak will; daunted by the first shadow of misfortune, especially misfortunes in our worldly affairs, wherein so much often happens for which we have ourselves only to blame. Submission to man is one thing, submission to God another. The latter is divine, the former is often merely contemptible. But even to the Almighty Father we should yield not a blind, crushed resignation, but an open-eyed obedience, like that we would fain win from our own children, desiring to make of them children, not slaves.

"My children—for I speak to the very youngest of you here, and do try to understand me if you can, or as much as you can—it is right —it is God's will—that you should resist, to the very last, any trial which is not inevitable. There are in this world countless sorrows, which, so far appears, we actually bring on ourselves and others by our own folly, wickedness, or weakness—which is often as fatal as wickedness; and then we blame providence for it, and sink into total despair. But when, as sometimes happens, His heavy hand is laid upon us in a visible, inevitable misfortune which we can not struggle against, and from which no human aid can save us, then we ought to learn His hardest lesson—to submit. To submit—yet still, while saying 'Thy will be done,' to strive, so far as we can, to do it. If He have taken from us all but one talent, even that, my children, let us not bury in a napkin. Let us rather put it out a usury, leaving to Him to determine how much we shall receive again; for it is according to our use of what we have, and not of what we have not, that He will call us 'good and faithful servants,' and at last, when the long struggle of living shall be over, will bid us 'enter into the joy of our Lord.'"

When the minister sat down, he saw, as he had seen consciously or unconsciously, all through the service, and above the entire congregation, those two large intent eyes fixed upon him from the Cairnforth pew.