She explained to him her joy by the words of that psalm, the ninety-second, which forms a key-note to the poems of the Béguine Matilda, of her to whom the Lord had taught “the song and the music of heaven,” whom He had made glad through His work, who triumphed in the work of His hands.
It was in the work “wrought in the land of the Jews,” the great work that “loosed the bolt with which Adam had barred the heavenly door,” that Matilda the Béguine rejoiced, showing forth the Lord’s lovingkindness in the morning, and his faithfulness every night—the work which “the brutish man knoweth not, neither doth the fool understand it,” for “the preaching of the Cross is to them that perish foolishness,” “the foolishness of God that is wiser than men.”
In the work which brought her into the “sweet garden of Paradise,” where she was no more a stranger, which had won for her the right to eat of the Tree of Life, which is in the midst of the Paradise of God, and to pluck the flowers, which were hers, because they were Christ’s.
It may truly be said that if there is anything distinctive in the writing of Matilda the Béguine, it is that she wrote from her own experience of the gladness of the heavenly place, revealed to her whilst yet in the body on the earth. She had learnt that there is an “earthly Paradise,” earthly not because it is of the earth, but because it is a foretaste and earnest of the heavenly, given to those who are still pilgrims upon the earth.
To reach it the river had to be crossed, wherein the old things pass away, and all things become new; where the things that are behind are forgotten, and the things that are before become the possession, by faith, of the redeemed soul. Her sins were amongst the forgotten things, for God remembered them no more, and the sorrow of the earth was forgotten, swallowed up in the tide of eternal joy, and
“The longing and love were past and gone,
For all that is less than God alone.”
Thus, in the poem of Dante, does Matelda draw him through the water of the river at the moment when the remembrance of his sin had stung him at the heart, so that he fell overpowered and helpless and ashamed. It needed that the sin should be left behind amongst the former things that had passed away.
Those who have known the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, the Fountain opened for sin and for uncleanness, will gladly own that this is the true Christian experience of the saints of God—the land of Canaan beyond the river, reached and entered before the warfare and the trial of faith are over; the Father’s house become a familiar place before the murmuring of the self-righteous is for ever silenced.
Did Dante know it as the Béguine knew it? Was it in his case but a vague sense of a place of joy and beauty which the soul might find on this side of heaven? Did he know that the river was a river of death—the death which is the death of deaths, “in the land of the Jews” so long ago?