Occasionally, also, unpleasantly shrewd questions begin to be asked by some one, we know not who, who sits somewhere behind our shoulder. We get to know him better afterward.
Now we carry the questions to the grown-up people, and they give us answers. We are more or less satisfied for the time. The grown-up people are very wise, and they say it was kind of God to make hell, and very loving of Him to send men there; and besides, he couldn't help Himself, and they are very wise, we think, so we believe them--more or less.
IV.
Then a new time comes, of which the leading feature is, that the shrewd questions are asked louder. We carry them to the grown-up people; they answer us, and we are not satisfied.
And now between us and the dear old world of the senses the spirit-world begins to peep in, and wholly clouds it over. What are the flowers to us?
They are fuel waiting for the great burning. We look at the walls of the farmhouse and the matter-of-fact sheep-kraals, with the merry sunshine playing over all; and do not see it. But we see a great white throne, and him that sits on it. Around Him stand a great multitude that no man can number, harpers harping with their harps, a thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands. How white are their robes, washed in the blood of the Lamb! And the music rises higher, and rends the vault of heaven with its unutterable sweetness. And we, as we listen, ever and anon, as it sinks on the sweetest, lowest note, hear a groan of the damned from below.
We shudder in the sunlight.
"The torment," says Jeremy Taylor, whose sermons our father reads aloud in the evening, "comprises as many torments as the body of man has joints, sinews, arteries, etc., being caused by that penetrating and real fire of which this temporal fire is but a painted fire. What comparison will there be between burning for a hundred years' space and to be burning without intermission as long as God is God!"
We remember the sermon there in the sunlight. One comes and asks why we sit there nodding so moodily. Ah, they do not see what we see.
"A moment's time, a narrow space, Divides me from that heavenly place, Or shuts me up in hell."
So says Wesley's hymn, which we sing evening by evening. What matter sunshine and walls, men and sheep?
"The things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal." They are real.
The Bible we bear always in our breast; its pages are our food; we learn to repeat it; we weep much, for in sunshine and in shade, in the early morning or the late evening, in the field or in the house, the devil walks with us.
He comes to a real person, copper-coloured face, head a little on one side, forehead knit, asking questions. Believe me, it were better to be followed by three deadly diseases than by him. He is never silenced--without mercy.
Though the drops of blood stand out on your heart he will put his question.
Softly he comes up (we are only a wee bit child); "Is it good of God to make hell? Was it kind of Him to let no one be forgiven unless Jesus Christ died?"
Then he goes off, and leaves us writhing. Presently he comes back.
"Do you love Him?"--waits a little. "Do you love Him? You will be lost if you don't."
We say we try to.
"But do you?" Then he goes off.
It is nothing to him if we go quite mad with fear at our own wickedness.
He asks on, the questioning devil; he cares nothing what he says. We long to tell some one, that they may share our pain. We do not yet know that the cup of affliction is made with such a narrow mouth that only one lip can drink at a time, and that each man's cup is made to match his lip.
One day we try to tell some one. Then a grave head is shaken solemnly at us. We are wicked, very wicked, they say we ought not to have such thoughts. God is good, very good. We are wicked, very wicked. That is the comfort we get. Wicked! Oh, Lord! do we not know it? Is it not the sense of our own exceeding wickedness that is drying up our young heart, filling it with sand, making all life a dust-bin for us?
Wicked? We know it! Too vile to live, too vile to die, too vile to creep over this, God's earth, and move among His believing men. Hell is the one place for him who hates his master, and there we do not want to go. This is the comfort we get from the old.
And once again we try to seek for comfort. This time great eyes look at us wondering, and lovely little lips say:
"If it makes you so unhappy to think of these things, why do you not think of something else, and forget?"
Forget! We turn away and shrink into ourself. Forget, and think of other things! Oh, God! do they not understand that the material world is but a film, through every pore of which God's awful spirit world is shining through on us? We keep as far from others as we can.
One night, a rare clear moonlight night, we kneel in the window; every one else is asleep, but we kneel reading by the moonlight. It is a chapter in the prophets, telling how the chosen people of God shall be carried on the Gentiles' shoulders. Surely the devil might leave us alone; there is not much to handle for him there. But presently he comes.
"Is it right there should be a chosen people? To Him, who is father to all, should not all be dear?"
How can we answer him? We were feeling so good till he came. We put our head down on the Bible and blister it with tears. Then we fold our hands over our head and pray, till our teeth grind together. Oh, that from that spirit-world, so real and yet so silent, that surrounds us, one word would come to guide us! We are left alone with this devil; and God does not whisper to us. Suddenly we seize the Bible, turning it round and round, and say hurriedly:
"It will be God's voice speaking to us; His voice as though we heard it."
We yearn for a token from the inexorably Silent One.
We turn the book, put our finger down on a page, and bend to read by the moonlight. It is God's answer. We tremble.
"Then fourteen years after I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas, and took Titus with me also."
