XXX.
Elsè's Story.
Wittemberg, August, 1524.
The slow lingering months of decline are over. Yesterday our grandmother died. As I looked for the last time on the face that had smiled on me from childhood, the hands which rendered so many little loving services to me, none of which can evermore be returned to her, what a sacred tenderness is thrown over all recollection of her, how each little act of thoughtful consideration and self-denial rushes back on the heart, what love I can see glowing through the anxious care which sometimes made her a little querulous, especially with my father, although never lately.
Can life ever be quite the same again? Can we ever forget to bear tenderly with little infirmities such as those of hers which seem so blameless now, or to prize with a thankfulness which would flood with sunshine our little cares, the love which must one day be silent to us as she is now?
Her death seems to age us all into another generation! She lived from the middle of the old world into the full morning of the new; and a whole age of the past seems to die with her. But after seeing those Bohemian deputies and knowing that Fritz and Eva were married, she ceased to wish to live. She had lived, she said, through two mornings of time on earth, and now she longed for the daybreak of heaven.
But yesterday morning, one of us! and now one of the heavenly host! Yesterday we knew every thought of her heart, every detail of her life, and now she is removed into a sphere of which we know less than of the daily life of the most ancient of the patriarchs. As Dr. Luther says, an infant on its mother's breast has as much understanding of the life before it, as we of the life before us after death. "Yet," he saith also, "since God hath made his world of earth and sky so fair, how much fairer that imperishable world beyond!"
All seems to me clear and bright after the resurrection; but now? where is that spirit now, so familiar to us and so dear, and now so utterly separated?
Dr. Luther said, "A Christian should say, I know that it is thus I shall journey hence; when my soul goes forth, charge is given to God's kings and high princes, who are the dear angels, to receive me and convoy me safely home. The Holy Scriptures, he writes, teach nothing of purgatory, but tell us that the spirits of the just enjoy the sweetest and most delightful peace and rest. How they live there, indeed, we know not, or what the place is where they dwell. But this we know assuredly, they are in no grief or pain, but rest in the grace of God. As in this life they were wont to fall softly asleep in the guard and keeping of God and the dear angels, without fear of harm, although the devils might prowl around them; so after this life do they repose in the hand of God."