The Ravens and the Angels, with Other Stories and Parables

by Elizabeth Rundle Charles

On the night when the old man, the messenger of glad tidings, was borne away, the mother and her children, turning sadly back, from watching him depart, to the blank his going left in the cottage, found that he had left with them a scroll. With trembling expectation they unrolled it, and read. It contained further revelations concerning the King's ship (they would call it the Black Ship no more), and the land to which it bore those for whom it was sent.

The Island was not a detached land set in the midst of a lonely sea. It was a fragment of a great Continent, broken off from the Main Land by some convulsion, long ago. And from this Continent it was divided, not by broad spaces of the heaving ocean, but by a mere strait, in some places narrowed to a chasm of seething waters, in others spreading into a calm lagoon, but everywhere, in itself, quite insignificant.

The Island lay in a land-locked Bay of the great Continent, encompassed on all sides by its Highlands. The little hills, which its inhabitants called mountains, were girt around by the magnificent mountain-ranges of the Main Land. Its colonial settlements, which the dwellers in them called cities, were commanded from the other side by the glorious cities of the kingdom. Its islanders, who called themselves "the world," were compassed about by the victorious ones now at home in the great true world across the waters.

Not only had the King's Son come and reconciled the islanders to the King; not only did He Himself come and receive each one who trusted Him to Himself, making the Black Ship, for all such, no more a phantom of terror, but the messenger of infinite joy; He had not withdrawn Himself to a distance. The mountains where He dwelt rose close above the Island where He had tarried and suffered and overcome, compassing it about on every side. From their heights every nook of the Island was visible to Him, every work of His faithful ones was watched. They were only concealed by a thin but opaque veil of mist, which brooded unceasingly over the strait. This mist was the great mystery of the Island, absolutely impenetrable to all its inhabitants, but from the other side altogether transparent. There were indeed moments when, to the eyes of those who watched some best-beloved borne away from them, this mist became translucent (though not transparent) even in the Island. But once beyond it, once on the other side; once within it, even, on the crossing, it was seen to be absolutely nothing.

Many a creek in the Island itself was wider and more difficult to cross than the strait which divided it from the Main Land. Only, no one could cross that strait at his own will, at his own time, or in his own way.

Not that the crossing was equally calm for all. Some passed over softly across the sunlit lagoon; some in the rush of the surf boiling through the narrow chasm. But, for all, the crossing was but a moment. And for those who, in that moment, on this side, for the first time met the eyes that had been watching them so long across the sea, who can utter what the revelations of that moment were!

The hills of the Fatherland stood round about the Island. The towers of the golden city were watch-towers; at the gates those who had entered in were waiting in joyful expectation,—at the pearly gates, open day and night, from which the songs of welcome had never time to die away, so constantly were the new citizens entering there.

All through the night the mother and sister listened with rapt attention as the brother read. Very much of the scroll contained simple every-day directions as to what was the King's will for the daily living of His subjects. But these, at that time, the three glanced hastily over, as interruptions to the great revelation of the things unseen.

The lifting of the veil had given them such a longing to see it lifted further! The Hand that had raised it had so evidently moved from within, and from above; the veil was so evidently rent from top to bottom; the glimpses were so manifestly glimpses of continuous depths of light, of a full world of wonders, all fully open to the eyes of Him that had given those glimpses, that who could say what else might be made known? Why not more? Why not all?

And as they read and listened, marvellous gleams came. Every now and then the curtain of mist seemed to rise. Fold behind fold the mountain landscape of the Better Country deepened beyond them; depth above depth they saw into its heavens of light. In a rapture of awe they seemed to stand on the threshold of the opening door of a Temple, as if at last all were about to become clear. But almost in the same instant the mist was there again, and the glorious vision vanished.