“My lady!” said Malcolm, and drew a step nearer to Clementina.
She looked up. How lovely she was with the trouble in her eyes! Thought Malcolm, “If only she were what she might be! If the form were but filled with the spirit! the body with life!”
“My lady!” he repeated, just a little embarrassed, “I should like to tell you one thing that came to me only lately—came to me when thinking over the hard words you spoke to me that day in the park. But it is something so awful that I dare not speak of it except you will make your heart solemn to hear it.”
He stopped, with his eyes questioning hers. Clementina’s first thought once more was madness, but as she steadily returned his look, her face grew pale, and she gently bowed her head in consent.
“I will try then,” said Malcolm. “—Everybody knows what few think about, that once there lived a man who, in the broad face of prejudiced respectability, truth-hating hypocrisy, common-place religion, and dull book-learning, affirmed that he knew the secret of life, and understood the heart and history of men—who wept over their sorrows, yet worshipped the God of the whole earth, saying that he had known him from eternal days. The same said that he came to do what the Father did, and that he did nothing but what he had learned of the Father. They killed him, you know, my lady, in a terrible way that one is afraid even to think of. But he insisted that he laid down his life; that he allowed them to take it. Now I ask whether that grandest thing, crowning his life, the yielding of it to the hand of violence, he had not learned also from his Father. Was his death the only thing he had not so learned? If I am right, and I do not say if in doubt, then the suffering of those three terrible hours was a type of the suffering of the Father himself in bringing sons and daughters through the cleansing and glorifying fires, without which the created cannot be made the very children of God, partakers of the divine nature and peace. Then from the lowest, weakest tone of suffering, up to the loftiest pitch, the divinest acme of pain, there is not one pang to which the sensorium of the universe does not respond; never an untuneful vibration of nerve or spirit but thrills beyond the brain or the heart of the sufferer to the brain, the heart of the universe; and God, in the simplest, most literal, fullest sense, and not by sympathy alone, suffers with his creatures.”
“Well, but he is able to bear it; they are not: I cannot bring myself to see the right of it.”
“Nor will you, my lady, so long as you cannot bring yourself to see the good they get by it.—My lady, when I was trying my best with poor Kelpie, you would not listen to me.”
“You are ungenerous,” said Clementina, flushing.
“My lady,” persisted Malcolm, “you would not understand me. You denied me a heart because of what seemed in your eyes cruelty. I knew that I was saving her from death at the least, probably from a life of torture: God may be good, though to you his government may seem to deny it. There is but one way God cares to govern—the way of the Father-king—and that way is at hand.—But I have yet given you only the one half of my theory: If God feels pain, then he puts forth his will to bear and subject that pain; if the pain comes to him from his creature, living in him, will the endurance of God be confined to himself, and not, in its turn, pass beyond the bounds of his individuality, and react upon the sufferer to his sustaining? I do not mean that sustaining which a man feels from knowing his will one with God’s and God with him, but such sustaining as those his creatures also may have who do not or cannot know whence the sustaining comes. I believe that the endurance of God goes forth to uphold, that his patience is strength to his creatures, and that, while the whole creation may well groan, its suffering is more bearable therefore than it seems to the repugnance of our regard.”
“That is a dangerous doctrine,” said Clementina.