The History of David Grieve

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

'Two nights ago I thought I was standing beside her. She was lying on the long couch under the sycamore tree whither we used to carry her. At first, everything was wholly lifelike and familiar. Sandy was somewhere near. She had the grey camel's hair shawl over her shoulders, which I remember so well, and the white frilled cap drawn loosely together under her chin, over bandages and dressings, as usual. She asked me to fetch something for her from the house, and I went, full of joy. There seemed to be a strange mixed sense at the bottom of my heart that I had somehow lost her and found her again.

'When I came back, nurse was there, and everything was changed. Nurse looked at me with meaning, startled eyes, as much as to say, "Look closely, it is not as you think." And as I went up to her, lying still and even smiling on her couch, there was an imperceptible raising of her little white hand as though to keep me off. Then in a flash I saw that it was not my living Lucy; that it could only be her spirit. I felt an awful sense of separation and yet of yearning; sitting down on one of the mossy stones beside her, I wept bitterly, and so woke, bathed in tears.

'... It has often seemed to me lately that certain elements in the Resurrection stories may be originally traced to such experiences as these. I am irresistibly drawn to believe that the strange and mystic scene beside the lake, in the appendix chapter to the Gospel of St. John, arose in some such way. There is the same mixture of elements—of the familiar with the ghostly, the trivial with the passionate and exalted—which my own consciousness has so often trembled under in these last visionary months.

The well-known lake, the old scene of fishers and fishing-boats, and on the shore the mysterious figure of the Master, the same, yet not the same, the little, vivid, dream-like details of the fire of coals, the broiled fish, and bread, the awe and longing of the disciples—it is borne in upon me with extraordinary conviction that the whole of it sprang, to begin with, from the dream of grief and exhaustion. Then, in an age which attached a peculiar and mystical importance to dreams, the beautiful thrilling fancy passed from mouth to mouth, became almost immediately history instead of dream,—just as here and there a parable misunderstood has taken the garb of an event,—was after a while added to and made more precise in the interest of apologetics, or of doctrine, or of the simple love of elaboration, and so at last found a final resting-place as an epilogue to the fourth Gospel.'

'NOVEMBER 4TH.—To-night I have dared to read again Browning's "Rabbi ben Ezra." For months I have not been able to read it, or think of it, though for days and weeks towards the end of her life it seemed to be graven on my heart.

Look not thou down, but up!
To uses of a cup,
The festal board, lamp's flash, and trumpet's peal
The new wine's foaming glow,
The Master's lips a-glow!

Thou heaven's consummate cup, what need'st thou with earth's wheel?

'Let me think again, my God, of that astonishing ripening of her last days!—of all her little acts of love and gratitude towards me, towards her nurse, towards the people in the house, who had helped to tend her—of her marvellous submission, when once the black cloud of the fear of death, and the agony of parting from life had left her.

'And such facts alone in the world's economy are to have no meaning, point no-whither? I could as soon believe it as that, in the physical universe, the powers of the magnet, or the flash of the lightning, are isolated and meaningless—tell us nothing and lead nowhere.

'November 10th.—In the old days—there is a passage of the kind in an earlier part of this journal—I was constantly troubled, and not for myself only, but for others, the poor and unlearned especially, who, as it seemed to me, would lose most in the crumbling of the Christian mythology—as to the intellectual difficulties of the approach to God. All this philosophical travail of two thousand years—and so many doubts and darknesses! A world athirst for preaching, and nothing simple or clear to preach—when once the miracle-child of Bethlehem had been dispossessed. And now it is daylight-plain to me that in the simplest act of loving self-surrender there is the germ of all faith, the essence of all lasting religion. Quicken human service, purify and strengthen human love, and have no fear but that the conscience will find its God! For all the time this quickening and this purification are His work in thee. Around thee are the institutions, the ideals, the knowledge and beliefs, ethical or intellectual, in which that work, that life, have been so far fragmentarily and partially realised. Submit thyself and press forward. Thou knowest well what it means to be better: more pure, more loving, more self-denying. And in thy struggle to be all these, God cometh to thee and abides.... But the greatest of these is love!'