"It may be so, Ian! But I want to hear how you got away from the wolves."
"I fired and fired; and still they kept rushing on the tree-hole, heaping themselves against it, those behind struggling up on the backs of those next it, in a storm of rage and hunger and jealousy. Not a few who had just helped to eat some of their fellows, were themselves eaten in turn, and not a scrap of them left; but it was a large pack, and it would have taken a long time to kill enough to satisfy those that remained. I killed and killed until my ammunition was gone, and then there was nothing for it but await the light. When the morning began to dawn, they answered its light with silence, and turning away swept like a shadow back into the wood. Strange to tell, I heard afterwards that a child had been killed by them in the earlier part of that same night. But even now sometimes, as I lie awake, I grow almost doubtful whether the whole was not a hideous dream.
"Not the less for that was what I went through between the time my powder came to an end and the dawn of the morning, a real spiritual fact.
"In the midst of the howling I grew so sleepy that the horrible noise itself seemed to lull me while it kept me awake, and I fell into a kind of reverie with which my dream came back and mingled. I seemed to be sitting in the tree with the little shining girl, and she was my own soul; and all the wrong things I had in me, and all the wrong things I had done, with all the weaknesses and evil tendencies of my nature, whether mine by fault or by inheritance, had taken shape, and, in the persons of the howling wolves below, were besieging me, to get at me, and devour me. Suddenly my soul was gone. Above were the still, bright stars, shining unmoved; beneath was the white, betraying snow, and the howling wolves; away through the forest was fleeting, ever fleeting, my poor soul, in the likeness of a white-faced child! All at once came a great stillness, as of a desert place, where breathed nor life of man nor life of beast. I was alone, frightfully alone—alone as I had never been before. The creatures at the foot of the tree were still howling, but their cry sounded far away and small; they were in some story I had been reading, not anywhere in my life! I was left and lost—left by whom?—lost by whom?—in the waste of my own being, without stay or comfort. I looked up to the sky; it was infinite—yet only a part of myself, and much too near to afford me any refuge from the desert of my lost self. It came down nearer; the limitless space came down, and clasped me, and held me. It came close to me—as if I had been a shape off which all nature was taking a mould. I was at once everything and nothing. I cannot tell you how frightful it was! In agony I cried to God, with a cry of utter despair. I cannot say whether I may believe that he answered me; I know this, that a great quiet fell upon me—but a quiet as of utter defeat and helplessness. Then again, I cannot tell how, the quiet and the helplessness melted away into a sense of God—a feeling as if great space all about me was God and not emptiness. Wolf nor sin could touch me! I was a wide peace—my very being peace! And in my mind—whether an echo from the Bible, I do not know—were the words:—'I, even I, am he that comforteth thee. I am God, thy saviour!' Whereas I had seemed all alone, I was with God, the only withness man can really share! I lifted my eyes; morning was in the east, and the wolves were slinking away over the snow."
How to receive the strange experience the mother did not know. She ought to say something, for she sorely questioned it! Not a word had he spoken belonging to the religion in which she had brought him up, except two—SIN and GOD! There was nothing in it about the atonement! She did not see that it was a dream, say rather a vision, of the atonement itself. To Ian her interpretation of the atonement seemed an everlasting and hopeless severance. The patience of God must surely be far more tried by those who would interpret him, than by those who deny him: the latter speak lies against him, the former speak lies for him! Yet all the time the mother felt as in the presence of some creature of a higher world—one above the ordinary race of men—whom the powers of evil had indeed misled, but perhaps not finally snared. She little thought how near she was to imagining that good may come out of evil—that there is good which is not of God! She did not yet understand that salvation lies in being one with Christ, even as the branch is one with the vine;—that any salvation short of knowing God is no salvation at all. What moment a man feels that he belongs to God utterly, the atonement is there, the son of God is reaping his harvest.
The good mother was not, however, one of those conceited, stiff-necked, power-loving souls who have been the curse and ruin of the church in all ages; she was but one of those in whom reverence for its passing form dulls the perception of unchangeable truth. They shut up God's precious light in the horn lantern of human theory, and the lantern casts such shadows on the path to the kingdom as seem to dim eyes insurmountable obstructions. For the sake of what they count revealed, they refuse all further revelation, and what satisfies them is merest famine to the next generation of the children of the kingdom. Instead of God's truth they offer man's theory, and accuse of rebellion against God such as cannot live on the husks they call food. But ah, home-hungry soul! thy God is not the elder brother of the parable, but the father with the best robe and the ring—a God high above all thy longing, even as the heavens are high above the earth.
CHAPTER XV.
THE GULF THAT DIVIDED.
When Ian ceased, a silence deep as the darkness around, fell upon them. To Ian, the silence seemed the very voice of God, clear in the darkness; to the mother it was a darkness interpenetrating the darkness; it was a great gulf between her and her boy. She must cry to him aloud, but what should she cry? If she did not, an opportunity, perhaps the last, on which hung eternal issues, would be gone for ever! Each moment's delay was a disobedience to her conscience, a yielding to love's sinful reluctance! With "sick assay" she heaved at the weight on her heart, but not a word would come. If Ian would but speak again, and break the spell of the terrible stillness! She must die in eternal wrong if she did not speak! But no word would come. Something in her would not move. It was not in her brain or her lips or her tongue, for she knew all the time she could speak if she would. The caitiff will was not all on the side of duty! She was not FOR the truth!—could she then be OF the truth? She did not suspect a divine reluctance to urge that which was not good.
Not always when the will works may we lay hold of it in the act: somehow, she knew not how, she heard herself speaking.