Methought, while I slept, my son and I stood together hand in hand in the Church where we were accustomed to worship. We were very near the altar, but with our faces directed toward the organ and front gallery. There is in my mind some recollection of another person, I believe our Rector, near us but a little behind us.
Presently the surface of the gallery extended itself in breadth and height, so greatly as to cover the entire organ-loft with it’s increased plane, and it became an immense practising-board, such as, upon a small scale, teachers of mathematics use to resolve problems upon for the instruction of a class, and it immediately assumed the deep slate-coloured hue that such boards are frequently painted.
And now there arranged themselves upon this board, in white characters, problem after problem in Equation; the Rule in which we had been exercising. I cannot describe the celerity with which these problems were stated upon the board, and worked out to the intense gratification of my son and myself; the most difficult and apparently unequal quantities being with the rapidity of thought interchanged neutralized reduced and determined, so that what seemed at the outset extremely involved, became lucid as day, and the unknown quantities made specific to our perfect satisfaction in an instant of time.
We were delighted with the lesson. I felt the hand of my son gently pressing mine, as he was accustomed to do when he would evince his satisfaction at any thing we examined successfully together; and we agreed with each other to cherish the recollection of these elucidations for future practice.
Turning again toward the board, we found it entirely freed from any trace of what had been wrought upon it. And now, in a manner which I have no possible means of imparting to the Reader, the good and evil of Life formed the specific and the unknown quantities that were wrought out upon the board. Problem succeeded problem, formed out of various conditions of life, with the same rapidity as those in Arabicks had been, and though vastly more complicated, with the same satisfactory result. Every variety and combination of circumstances in life seemed exhibited; positive negative neutral in a moment; until certain trials and occurrences led to certain virtues, with the same precision as in the preceding series of demonstrations x had for example been shewn to be equal to 8. Our joy was beyond expression in words; we embraced each other and I well remember saying, ‘My dear Hal, this is Truth; positive Truth; moral, but as certain and as irrefragible, as any mathematical Truth is or ever can be shewn to be.’
We turned again toward the Board, and another course altogether of demonstrations passed over the surface of it, and was made scrutable to our perceptions. By one process the illimitable power of God was borne in upon my apprehension with a vividness of conception that I had never felt before.
By another I well remember Truth and Wisdom were shewn to be one and the same, and all Truth to proceed from and to be an attribute of God. By another, Infinite Justice, deduced from Infinite Power and Infinite Truth, was arrived at, as His essential and necessary quality. Again, the revealed Word of God as declared in the Bible was established in my mind as the irresistible result of another process; and, although several had intermediately passed over the Board, this was I think the last. The Board faded, the figure at our side disappeared, we were out of church, and presently I awoke, and lo! it was a Dream! But the recollection of that dream has never faded from my memory, and I trust that the influences of it may never be lost.
My mind for some time previous had been much afflicted with considerations and doubts respecting the free agency of man, and the truth of the Scriptures so far as they relate to everlasting punishment, and to the prescience of God. These doubts had been infused in conversation by the reasoning of an eminent lawyer. If you believe in the doctrine of everlasting punishment said he, and believe also in the prescience of God, and in His Omnipotence, must you not admit that God might prevent the sinner from entering at all into this world of probation? into this world of trial which is to prove too severe for his powers of resistance? If I know that a candle that I purpose lighting will, from any accident, or by any other hand after I shall have lighted it, be made to burn my neighbor’s house; am I not in some degree participant or accessary to the consequence if I persist in the intention? Why is man to be made subject to consequences more direful to him than if he had never been born at all into this world of evil? He has had no voice in determining his mission into it, nor has his will been consulted in the creation of his spirit, nor in the qualities with which that spirit is endued; his existence also in a state of indulgence of wicked impulse, how short and limited it has been; and how frequently mingled with the disposition if not with repeated Effort toward goodness; shall he for twenty years of vice, be subjected to everlasting punishment? how can this consist with Divine Justice and Mercy? You say that he has had the free option of good and evil; possibly so; but he has not chosen the good, he has not adopted the course that leads to everlasting happiness, and his everlasting misery might have been prevented; why then should he have been called into being? Is not this misery ordained to him, since it is not prevented, and since it has always been apparent as the result of life to the creative power which must know, and which could prevent, and has yet determined to create?
Now these doubts were weighing on my heart when I first stood before that board; and when I had left the church, they were all removed. They had made themselves—air, into which they vanished. My hands were clasped together in pleasure at the relief; and when I awoke, a sensation, the purest perhaps that life affords, had entire possession of my heart, my mind, my soul. It was that gentle, yet etherial sensation—that yellow-green of the ransomed spirit—when gratitude that has never drawn a chain behind it, gratitude free as joy, gratitude beautiful as hope, melts into love toward Him, ‘who first hath loved us!’
‘Parent of Heaven! great Master of mankind!