The seagulls from the upper reaches pass down the river in sober steady flight seeking the open sea. I shall miss the swoop and circle of silver wings in the sunlight and the plaintive call which sounds so strangely away from rock and shore, but it is good to know that they have gone from mudbank and murky town back to the free airs of their inheritance, to the shadow of sun-swept cliffs and the curling crest of the wind-beaten waves, to brood again over the great ocean of a world’s tears.
My little tree is gemmed with buds, shy, immature, but full of promise. The sparrows busied with nest-building in the neighbouring pipes and gutters use it for a vantage ground, and crowd there in numbers, each little beak sealed with long golden straw or downy feather.
The river is heavy with hay barges, the last fruits of winter’s storehouse; the lengthening days slowly and steadily oust the dark; the air is loud with a growing clamour of life: spring is not only proclaimed, but on this Feast she is crowned, and despite the warring wind the days bring their meed of sunshine. We stand for a moment at the meeting of the ways, the handclasp of Winter and Spring, of Sleep and Wakening, of Life and Death; and there is between them not even the thin line which Rabbi Jochanan on his death-bed beheld as all that divided hell from heaven.
“Sphæra cujus centrum ubique, circumferentia nullibus,” was said of Mercury, that messenger of the gods who marshalled reluctant spirits to the Underworld; and for Mercury we may write Life with Death as its great sacrament of brotherhood and release, to be dreaded only as we dread to partake unworthily of great benefits. Like all sacraments it has its rightful time and due solemnities; the horror and sin of suicide lie in the presumption of free will, the forestalling of a gift,—the sin of Eve in Paradise, who took that which might only be given at the hand of the Lord. It has too its physical pains, but they are those of a woman in travail, and we remember them no more for joy that a child-man is born into the world naked and not ashamed: beholding ourselves as we are we shall see also the leaves of the Tree of Life set for the healing of the nations.
We are slowly, very slowly, abandoning our belief in sudden and violent transitions for a surer and fuller acceptance of the doctrine of evolution; but most of us still draw a sharp line of demarcation between this world and the next, and expect a radical change in ourselves and our surroundings, a break in the chain of continuity entirely contrary to the teaching of nature and experience. In the same way we cling to the specious untruth that we can begin over and over again in this world, forgetting that while our sorrow and repentance bring sacramental gifts of grace and strength, God Himself cannot, by His own limitation, rewrite the Past. We are in our sorrow that which we have made ourselves in our sin; our temptations are there as well as the way of escape. We are in the image of God. We create our world, our undying selves, our heaven, or our hell. “Qui creavit te sine te non salvabit te sine te.” It is stupendous, magnificent, and most appalling. A man does not change as he crosses the threshold of the larger room. His personality remains the same, although the expression of it may be altered. Here we have material bodies in a material world—there, perhaps, ether bodies in an ether world. There is no indecency in reasonable speculation and curiosity about the life to come. One end of the thread is between our fingers, but we are haunted for the most part by the snap of Atropos’ shears.
Socrates faced death with the magnificent calm bred of dignified familiarity. He had built for himself a desired heaven of colour, light, and precious stones—the philosophic formula of those who set the spiritual above the material, and worship truth in the beauty of holiness. He is not troubled by doubts or regrets, for the path of the just lies plain before his face. He forbids mourning and lamentations as out of place, obeys minutely and cheerily the directions of his executioner, and passes with unaffected dignity to the apprehension of that larger truth for which he had constantly prepared himself. His friends may bury him provided they will remember they are not burying Socrates; and that all things may be done decently and in order, a cock must go to Æsculapius.
Long before, in the days of the Captivity, there lived in godless, blood-shedding Nineveh an exiled Jew whose father had fallen from the faith. He was a simple man, child-like and direct; living the careful, kindly life of an orthodox Jew, suffering many persecutions for conscience’ sake, and in constant danger of death. He narrates the story of his life and of the blindness which fell on him, with gentle placidity, and checks the exuberance of his more emotional wife with the assurance of untroubled faith. Finally, when his pious expectations are fulfilled, his sight restored, and his son prosperously established beside him, he breaks into a prayer of rejoicing which reveals the secret of his confident content. He made use of two great faculties: the sense of proportion, which enabled him to apprise life and its accidents justly, and the gift of in-seeing, which led Socrates after him, and Blessed John in lonely exile on Patmos, to look through the things temporal to the hidden meanings of eternity.
“Let my soul bless God the great King,” he cries; and looks away past the present distress; past the Restoration which was to end in fresh scattering and confusion; past the dream of gold, and porphyry, and marble defaced by the eagles and emblems of the conqueror; until his eyes are held by the Jerusalem of God, “built up with sapphires, and emeralds, and precious stones,” with battlements of pure gold, and the cry of ‘Alleluia’ in her streets.
Many years later, when he was very aged, he called his son to him and gave him as heritage his own simple rule of life, adding but one request: “Keep thou the law and the commandments, and shew thyself merciful and just, that it may go well with thee. . . . Consider what alms doeth, and how righteousness doth deliver. . . . And bury me decently, and thy mother with me.” Having so said, he went his way quietly and contentedly to the Jerusalem of his heart.
It is the simple note of familiarity that is wanting in us; that by which we link world with world. Once, years ago, I sat by the bedside of a dying man in a wretched garret in the East End. He was entirely ignorant, entirely quiescent, and entirely uninterested. The minister of a neighbouring chapel came to see him and spoke to him at some length of the need for repentance and the joys of heaven. After he had gone my friend lay staring restlessly at the mass of decrepit broken chimney pots which made his horizon. At last he spoke, and there was a new note in his voice:—