My mother came to me one day, after rambling over my house with a motherly eye to my housekeeping—she who was such a perfect housekeeper—and held up to me a roll of bank bills, which she found lying loose upon my toilet-table. “Oh, they were safe enough!” said I; “my servants I know to be honest!” “That may be,” was her answer; “but don’t you know that you should never place temptation in their way?”
Foremost among my mother’s warm, personal friends, was Dr. Payson. For many years before the removal of our family from Portland, he was her pastor, and afterward, whenever he visited Boston, our house was emphatically his home; my mother welcoming his coming, and sitting spiritually at his feet, as did Mary of old her Christguest. Let me explain how I first came to love him. When I was a little girl, I used to be told by some who visited at our house, that if I was not a good girl, and did not love God, I should go to hell. Now hell seemed, as far as I could make it out from what they said, a place where people were burned forever for their sins on earth—burned, without being consumed, for millions and millions of years; and after that and so on, through a long eternity—a word I did not then, and do not now, comprehend. Well, I used to think about all this; sometimes as I went to school; sometimes as I lay awake in my little bed at night, and sometimes when I woke earlier than anybody else in the morning; and sometimes on Sunday, when I, now and then, caught the word “hell” in the minister’s sermon. I don’t know how it was, but it never frightened me. I think it was because I could not then, any more than I can now, believe it. The idea of loving anybody because I should be punished if I did not, seemed to freeze up the very fountain of love which I felt bubbling up in my heart, and I turned away from it with horror. I could not pray or read my Bible from fear. I did not know what fear was. I did not feel afraid of death, as my playmates did. When they told me to love God, I said that I did love Him. They did not believe me, because I did not like to talk about myself, or have others talk to me about myself; not that I was ashamed, but that it seemed to me, if I did so, that I should cease to feel. Sometimes, when they persisted in questioning and doubting me, I would get troubled, and run away, or hide. I did not like to “say my prayers,” as it is called; and at set times, morning and evening, and get on my knees to do it. I liked to have my prayer rise up out of my heart, and pass over my lips, without moving them to speech; and that wherever I happened to be, in the street, or in company, or wherever and whenever God’s goodness came into my mind, as it did often; for turn which way I would, I could see that his careful footprints had been before me, and his fingers busy, in making what I was sure then, and am sure now, none but a God could make. I did not understand a word of my catechism, though I said it like a parrot, because our minister told me to. “Election,” “Predestination,” and “Foreordaining,” seemed to me very long words, that meant very little; and the more they were “explained” to me, the more misty they grew, and have continued to do so ever since; and I don’t like to hear them talked about.
The God my eyes see, is not a tyrant, driving his creatures to heaven through fear of hell; he accepts no love that comes to him over that compulsory road. He pities us with an infinite pity, even when we turn away from Him; and the mistaken wretch who has done this through a long life, and worn out the patience of every earthly friend, never wears His out, is never forsaken by Him; his fellow men may hunt him to the world’s end, and drive him to despair, and still the God I see, holds out his imploring hands, and says, “Come to me!” and even at the last moment, when he has spent a long life in wasting and perverting every faculty of his soul, the God I see does not pursue him vengefully, or even frown upon him, but ever that small, soft whisper, “Come to me!” floats by him on the sweet air, is written on the warm sunbeam, which refreshes him all the same as if he had never forgotten to utter his thanks for it. Now, if this man dies, and turns away at the last from all this wonderful love, what more terrible “hell” can there be, than to remember that he has done so? that he has never made the slightest return for it, or ever recognized it? that no living creature was ever made better, or purer, or wiser, or happier, that he lived in the world? but that, on the contrary, he has helped them to destroy themselves as he has done himself? What “flames” could scorch like these thoughts? And that, in my opinion, is hell, and all the hell there is. It is just such a hell as wicked men have a foretaste of in this world, when they stop long enough to listen to that heavenly monitor conscience, which they try so hard to stifle. It is just such a hell as the wayward son feels, who runs away from the love and kindness of home, and returns to find only the graves of those who would have died for him.
But I am wandering a long way from what I was to tell you about—Dr. Payson.
I was dressing my doll one day, when my mother called me to come to her. I knew that some visitor had just come, for I heard the bell ring, and then a trunk drop heavily in the entry. I thought very likely it was a minister, for my mother always had a plate and a bed for them, and it made no difference, as I have told you, in her kindness, whether the minister was a big doctor of divinity, or a poor country clergyman, unknown beyond the small village where he preached. Well, as I told you, my mother called me; and it was a minister who had come, and he had gone up to his room with a bad nervous headache, brought on by traveling in the heat and dust; and I was to go up, so my mother said, and bathe his head with a preparation she gave me; very gently, and very quietly, as he reclined in the big easy chair. I did not want to go; I did not like ministers as well as my mother did; and I often used to run out one door, as they came in at another; and I was often obliged to come back, with a very red face, and shake hands with them. I did not like to hear them say to me, that “my heart was as hard as a rock,” and that “if I did not get it changed, I should go to hell.” My heart did not seem hard to me; I loved everybody and everything then; and I loved God too, in my own way, though not in the way they seemed to want me to, because I should go to hell if I did not; this thought made my heart grow hard in a minute—made me “feel ugly,” as children say; and that’s why I ran away from the ministers who kept telling me what a “wicked” child I was.
So you may be sure, when I heard what my mother said, I took the bottle she put in my hand, which I was to use in bathing the minister’s forehead, very unwillingly, and went very slowly up stairs to my task. My mother had been there before me, and closed the blinds, and given him a footstool for his weary feet; and there he sat, looking very pale, with his eyes closed, and his head laid back in the easy chair. He did not look at all like the other ministers I was so afraid of; and I cannot tell you why, as I tip-toed up to his chair, and moistened my fingers to bathe his heated forehead, and pushed back the dark locks from it, that I thought of the pictures I had sometimes seen of our Saviour, which looked to me so very sweet and lovely. He did not speak, or open his eyes, as my fingers moved over his temples; but I knew that it gave him relief, because he soon sank into a gentle slumber, and his head drooped a little on one shoulder.
I cannot tell why I did not then go out of the room—I, who disliked ministers so much—when I might easily have done so; but instead, I sat down on a low seat near him, and watched his face, as if there were some spell in it, which forbade me to go; and I felt so quiet and happy while I sat there, and dreaded lest some one should call me away. By and by he stirred, and passing his hand slowly over his forehead, opened his eyes; they were dark and soft as a woman’s. Holding out his hand to me, with a smile which I have never forgotten to this day, he said, as he drew me to his side, and laid his hand upon my head, “The Lord bless you! my child;” then he seated me upon his knee; but he said not a word to me about “hell,” or my being “wicked,” but closing his eyes again, he began telling me the story of the Saviour’s crucifixion. Now, I had heard it many times before, I had read it myself in the Bible, when I was told to do so, and yet, that day, in that quiet, darkened room, with that gentle hand upon my shoulder, I heard it for the first time. For the first time my tears fell, and my heart went out to the pure, patient sufferer on Calvary. When the story was finished, in those low, sweet tones, I did not speak. Placing his hand upon my head, he said, again, “The Lord bless you! my child;” and so I passed out with his loving benediction, and closing the door, listened still on the other side, as though only there I could learn to be good.
Many, many long years after this, when I was a grown woman, I visited my birthplace, Portland, from which my mother removed when I was six weeks old. I wandered up and down the streets of that lovely, leafy city, and tried to find the church where good Dr. Payson used to preach. Then, too, I wanted to see the house where I was born—the house where he laid hands of blessing on my baby forehead, when it was purple with what they thought was “the death-agony.” But where it was that the little, flickering life began, I could not find out; for my mother had then gone to the “better land.” Ah! who but God can comfort like a mother? who but God can so forgive? How many times I have shut my eyes, that I might recall her face—her blue, loving eyes, her soft, brown, curling hair; and how many times, when in great trouble, I have said, “Mother! mother!” as if she must hear and comfort her child.
