Only a minute part of its infinite prophecy was fulfilled in those flames of the Paradise of Lot. For the two fires were the sign of the presence of the Person who accepted the covenant, in passing between the pieces of the victim. And they shone, therefore, for the signature of His Name; that name which we [[156]]pray may be hallowed; and for what that name entirely means;—‘the Lord, merciful and gracious,—and that will by no means clear the guilty.’
For as on the one side He is like a refiner’s fire, so that none may abide the day of His coming,—so on the other He is the Light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world. And all the pain of grief and punishment, temporal or eternal, following on the broken covenant; and all the sweet guidance of the lamp to the feet and the light to the path, granted to those who keep it, are meant by the passing of the darkened and undarkened flames.
Finish now the learning this whole chapter accurately, and when you come to the eighteenth verse, note how much larger the promised land was, than we usually imagine it; and what different manner of possession the Israelites got of its borders, by the waters of Babylon, and rivers of Egypt, (compare Jeremiah xxxix. 9, with xliii. 6 and 7) than they might have had, if they had pleased.
And now, when you have got well into your heads that the Holy Land is, broadly, the mountain or highland of the Amorites, (compare Deut. i. 7, 20, 44, Numbers xiii. 29,) look to the verse which you have probably quoted often, “Behold upon the mountains the feet of Him that bringeth good tidings,”—without ever asking what mountains, or what tidings. The mountains are these Amorite crags, and the tidings are of the last destruction of the Hamite power, in the other three great brethren, [[157]]Cush, Mizraim, and Phut. Read your Nahum through slowly; and learn the eighth and ninth verses of the third chapter, to be always remembered as the completion of the fifteenth, which you know the first half of so well already—though I suppose you rarely go on to its practical close, “Oh Judah, keep thy solemn feasts, perform thy vows; for the wicked shall no more pass through thee”—this ‘passing,’ observe, being the ruinous war of the bitter and hasty nation, (compare Habakkuk i. 6–8, with the last verse of Nahum,) which spiritually is the type of all ruinous and violent passion, such as now passes continually to and fro in this English land of ours.
I am not much in a humour to examine further to-day the passing of its slower molluscous Assyrians; but may at least affirm what I believe at last to be the sure conclusion of my young hunter of Arundel; that the spiral of the shell uniformly increases its coil, from birth to maturity. Here are examples of the minute species, sent me by Mr. Sillar, in three stages of growth; the little black spots giving them in their natural size (with much economic skill of Mr. Burgess’ touch). The [[158]]three magnified spirals you may as well copy, and find out how many these little creatures may have. I had taken them for the young of the common snail when I wrote last; but we will have all our facts clear some day, both concerning bees, and slugs, and the larger creatures, industrious or lazy, whom they are meant to teach.
But I want to finish my letter for this time with a word or two more of my Scottish Amorite aunt, after she was brought down into Lowland life by her practical tanner. She, a pure dark-eyed dove-priestess, if ever there was one, of Highland Dodona.[2] Strangely, the kitchen servant-of-all-work in the house at Rose Terrace was a very old “Mause” who might well have been the prototype of the Mause of ‘Old Mortality,’[3] but had even [[159]]a more solemn, fearless, and patient faith, fastened in her by extreme suffering; for she had been nearly starved to death when she was a girl, and had literally picked the bones out of cast-out dust-heaps to gnaw; and ever afterwards, to see the waste of an atom of food was as shocking to her as blasphemy. “Oh, Miss Margaret!” she said once to my mother, who had shaken some crumbs off a dirty plate out of the window, “I had rather you had knocked me down.” She would make her dinner upon anything in the house that the other servants wouldn’t eat;—often upon potato skins, giving her own dinner away to any poor person she saw; and would always stand during the whole church service, (though at least seventy years old when I knew her, and very feeble,) if she could persuade any wild Amorite out of the streets to take her seat. Her wrinkled and worn face, moveless in resolution, and patience; incapable of smile, and knit sometimes perhaps too severely against Jessie and me, if we wanted more creamy milk to our porridge, or jumped off our favourite box on Sunday,—(‘Never mind, John,’ said Jessie to me, once, seeing me in an unchristian state of provocation on this subject, ‘when we’re married, we’ll jump off boxes all day long, if we like!’) may have been partly instrumental in giving me that slight bias against the Evangelical religion which I confess to be sometimes traceable in my later works: but I never can be thankful enough for having seen, in her, the Scottish Puritan spirit in its perfect faith and force; and been enabled therefore [[160]]afterwards to trace its agency in the reforming policy of Scotland with the reverence and honour it deserves.
My aunt was of a far gentler temper, but still, to me, remained at a wistful distance. She had been much saddened by the loss of three of her children, before her husband’s death. Little Peter, especially, had been the corner-stone of her love’s building; and it was thrown down swiftly:—white-swelling came in the knee; he suffered much; and grew weaker gradually, dutiful always, and loving, and wholly patient. She wanted him one day to take half a glass of port wine,—and took him on her knee, and put it to his lips. ‘Not now, mamma;—in a minute,’ said he; and put his head on her shoulder, and gave one long, low sigh, and died. Then there was Catherine; and—I forget the other little daughter’s name. I did not see them; my mother told me of them;—eagerly always about Catherine, who had been her own favourite. My aunt had been talking earnestly one day with her husband about these two children; planning this and that for their schooling and what not: at night, for a little while she could not sleep; and as she lay thinking, she saw the door of the room open; and two spades come into it, and stand at the foot of her bed. Both the children were dead within brief time afterwards. I was about to write ‘within a fortnight’—but I cannot be sure of remembering my mother’s words accurately.
But when I was in Perth, there were still—Mary, her eldest daughter, who looked after us children when Mause [[161]]was too busy,—James and John, William and Andrew; (I can’t think whom the unapostolic William was named after; he became afterwards a good physician in London, and Tunbridge Wells; his death, last year, is counted among the others that I have spoken of as recently leaving me very lonely). But the boys were then all at school or college,—the scholars, William and Andrew, only came home to tease Jessie and me, and eat the biggest jargonel pears; the collegians were wholly abstract; and the two girls and I played in our quiet ways on the North-inch, and by the ‘Lead,’ a stream, ‘led’ from the Tay past Rose Terrace, into the town for molinary purposes; and long ago, I suppose, bricked over, or choked with rubbish; but then lovely, and a perpetual treasure of flowing diamond to us children. Mary, by the way, was nearly fourteen—fair, blue-eyed, and moderately pretty; and as pious as Jessie, without being quite so zealous. And I scarcely know if those far years of summer sunshine were dreams, or if this horror of darkness is one, to-day, at St. Albans, where, driven out of the abbey, unable to bear the sight of its restorations, and out of the churchyard, where I would fain have stayed to draw, by the black plague-wind, I take refuge from all in an old apple-woman’s shop, because she reminds me of my Croydon Amorite aunt,—and her little window of the one in the parlour beside the shop in Market Street. She sells comic songs as well as apples. I invest a penny in ‘The Union Jack,’ and find, in the course [[162]]of conversation, that the result of our unlimited national prosperity upon her, is, that where she used to take twopence from one customer, she now takes five farthings from five,—that her rates are twelve shillings instead of six,—that she is very tired of it all, and hopes God will soon take her to heaven.