And ever-burning light
Of the sun’s flaming disk that Thou art throned, O God?
One of the stanzas suggested that the Divine seat might be in some region of the starry universe:
“Far in the unmeasured, unimagined Heaven,
So distant that its light
Could never reach our sight
Though with the speed of thought for endless ages driven.”
Ideas like these used to make my cheek turn pale and lift me as if on wings; and naturally Religion was the great storehouse of them. But I think, even in childhood, there was in me a good deal beside of the moral, if not yet the spiritual element of real Religion. Of course the great beauty and glory of Evangelical Christianity, its thorough amalgamation of the ideas of Duty and Devotion (elsewhere often so lamentably distinct), was very prominent in my parents’ lessons. God was always to me the All-seeing Judge. His eye looking into my heart and beholding all its naughtiness and little duplicities (which of course I was taught to consider serious sins) was so familiar a conception that I might be said to live and move in the sense of it. Thus my life in childhood morally, was much the same as it is physically to live in a room full of sunlight. Later on, the evils which belong to this Evangelical training, the excessive self-introspection and self-consciousness, made themselves painfully felt, but in early years there was nothing that was not perfectly wholesome in the religion which I had so readily assimilated.
Further, I was, as I have said, a very happy child, even conscious of my own happiness; and gratitude to God or man has always come to me as a sentiment enhancing my enjoyment of the good for which I have been thankful. Thus I was,—not conventionally merely,—but genuinely and spontaneously grateful to the Giver of all the pleasures which were poured on my head. I think I may say, that I loved God, when I was quite a young child. I can even remember being dimly conscious that my good father and mother performed their religious exercises more as a duty,—whereas to me such things, so far as I could understand them, were real pleasures; like being taken to see somebody I loved. I have since recognised that both my parents were, in Evangelical parlance, “under the law;” while in my childish heart the germ of the mysterious New Life was already planted. I think my mother was aware of something of the kind and looked with a little wonder, blended with her tenderness at my violent outbursts of penitence, and at my strange fancy for reading the most serious books in my playhours. My brothers had not exhibited any such symptoms, but then they were healthy schoolboys, always engaged eagerly in their natural sports and pursuits; while I was a lonely, dreaming girl.
When I was seven years old, my father undertook to read the Pilgrim’s Progress to my brothers, then aged from 12 to 18, and I was allowed to sit in the room and provided with a slate and sums. The sums, it appeared, were never worked, while my eyes were fixed in absorbed interest on the reader, evening after evening. Once or twice when the delightful old copy of Bunyan was left about after the lesson, my slate was covered with drawings of Apollyon and Great Heart which were pronounced “wonderful for the child.” By the time Christian had come to the Dark River, all pretence of arithmetic was abandoned and I was permitted, proud and enchanted, to join the group of boys and listen with my whole soul to the marvellous tale. When the reading was over my father gave the volume (which had belonged to his grandmother) to me, for my “very own”; and I read it over and over continually for years, till the idea it is meant to convey,—Life a progress to Heaven—was engraved indelibly on my mind. It seems to me that few of those who have praised Bunyan most loudly have recognized that he was not only a great religious genius, but a born poet, a Puritan-Tinker-Shelley; possessed of what is almost the highest gift of poetry, the sense of the analogy between outward nature and the human soul. He used allegory instead of metaphor, a clumsier vehicle by far, but it carried the same exquisite thoughts. I have the dear old book still, and it is one of my treasures with its ineffably quaint old woodcuts and its delicious marginal notes; as, for example, when “Giant Despair” is said to be unable one day to maul the pilgrims in his dungeon, because he had fits. “For sometimes,” says Bunyan, “in sunshiny weather Giant Despair has fits.” Could any one believe that this gem of poetical thought and deep experience is noted by the words in the margin, “His Fits!”? My father wrote on the flyleaf of the blessed old book these still legible words:—