The results of Jordan morning were chiefly four.
First, I was left with a certainty of belief in God, a sense of authority in my knowledge of Him, and an ever-present memory of His nearness and reality, that faith without experience could never have furnished. I apprehended once and for all the folly and futility of all intellectual reasoning about God, all attempts to bolster Him up by argument; to prove Him. Vain beatings about the bush! You do not beat about the Burning Bush: you enter within, and there is God.
Second, from that day onwards I could never again be sure that life was real. After the blinding reality of my moment with God, all things around me seemed faded and unsubstantial; they were the shadows of a dream, of the dream that I was, alive. After a while, as my soul travelled back to the habits of normal experience, the notion haunted me less; but it has never completely left me.
Third, having received the knowledge of God, I knew that it was the one thing worth living for. I knew I must show myself worthy of possessing Him, and fit to receive Him again. The sense of perfect holiness I had experienced filled me with a yearning for goodness and purity that was almost morbidly intense. I tried every moment of the day to make myself more like the Holy Spirit, more capable of feeling within me the holiness I had for one moment felt. Conscience was ever at hand: for a long space I obeyed her every bidding. The fact that I was happier put spite and revenge and morbid broodings under better control. Heredity and habit, the taint within and the harsh surroundings without, kept me dismal-Jenny enough: but from the day of my baptism my bouts of misery were less frequent, less prolonged, and less cruel. I had always the memory of that tender triumphant ineffable moment with God.
Fourth, and most curious, I found myself farther away from my Grandmother. We had the same religion, yet different religions; knew the One God, yet different Gods. Or rather the difference was not in Him, but in our two selves, in the two temperaments with which we experienced Him. All my life I had envied my Grandmother's joy and serenity in the Lord; I had obtained a joy as perfect, yet I knew that it was another joy; not greater nor less, but different. Her chief delight was in contemplating the salvation of all souls achieved through the sacrifice on Calvary; mine was the Spirit of God filling and irradiating the heart. Not that I ever doubted that it was through and because of the Cross that the knowledge of the Lord had been vouchsafed me so miraculously; but the emotional result interested me, not the theological cause. In all my earnest strivings to be good it was never the sacrifice of Jesus that spurred me on; but always the memory of the Holy Spirit. I must be clean and good and holy like Him, and worthy to welcome Him again. I have put the distinction between Aunt Jael and Grandmother as this: Aunt Jael was an Old Testament woman, Grandmother a New Testament one. But the real distinction between the three of us was this. God is Triune and One: Aunt Jael revered the First Person, Grandmother loved the Second, and I adored the Third.
Trouble began in this way. Unlike Grandmother, now that I had got religion I took a strong dislike to talking of it. To her "Do 'ee love the Lord?" I could only reply with passionate truth, "Yes, Grandmother"; but I found that (where before my baptism it was the sense of insincerity in my reply that had troubled me) now it was a certain indelicacy in the question itself that offended. "If in my heart"—this is approximately what I felt—"I have the mystery of the love of the Lord, that is a private and sacred bond between Him and me. Whose business is it else? What right have they to pry?" I felt a curious shame, resembling the shame of nakedness, but more intense and spiritual; as the soul is more sensitive than the body.
"Do you contemplate hourly the Cross of Christ?" "Is the Means of Salvation your only joy?" "Do you think always of the blessed Gospel plan?" "Is the Atonement everything to 'ee, my dear?" No worldlyhead, no scoffer could have hated these searching questions as did I. My Grandmother perceived the distaste, and was profoundly puzzled and pained. Her own answer to these questions would have been "Yes," in the weeks after her baptism (she must have said to herself), a fervent triumphant Yes.
One day an incident showed how wide the spiritual breach was becoming, and widened it still further. It was a Saturday morning: I was sitting on the bottom stair of the staircase, pulling on my boots to go for a walk. My Grandmother, coming from the little pantry at the head of the cellar steps, stooped down as she passed, and asked in a loud whisper of intense earnestness: "The Cross, my dear: is it giving you joy now?" She bent and peered, poking her face right into mine. It was so sudden, the irritation and distaste so powerful, that I drew back sharply with a quick gesture of annoyance. There had been no time for dissimulation, and the look on my face was unmistakable. So was the look on hers—pain, and a rare and terrible thing, anger.
"You dare draw back like that? What is it? Du my breath smell bad?"
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