ROBERT'S PLAN OF SALVATION.
For some time after the loss of his friend, Robert went loitering and mooning about, quite neglecting the lessons to which he had not, it must be confessed, paid much attention for many weeks.Even when seated at his grannie's table, he could do no more than fix his eyes on his book: to learn was impossible; it was even disgusting to him.
But his was a nature which, foiled in one direction, must, absolutely helpless against its own vitality, straightway send out its searching roots in another.Of all forces, that of growth is the one irresistible, for it is the creating power of God, the law of life and of being.Therefore no accumulation of refusals, and checks, and turnings, and forbiddings, from all the good old grannies in the world, could have prevented Robert from striking root downward, and bearing fruit upward, though, as in all higher natures, the fruit was a long way off yet.But his soul was only sad and hungry.He was not unhappy, for he had been guilty of nothing that weighed on his conscience.He had been doing many things of late, it is true, without asking leave of his grandmother, but wherever prayer is felt to be of no avail, there cannot be the sense of obligation save on compulsion.Even direct disobedience in such case will generally leave little soreness, except the thing forbidden should be in its own nature wrong, and then, indeed, 'Don Worm, the conscience,' may begin to bite.But Robert felt nothing immoral in playing upon his grandfather's violin, nor even in taking liberties with a piece of lumber for which nobody cared but possibly the dead; therefore he was not unhappy, only much disappointed, very empty, and somewhat gloomy.There was nothing to look forward to now, no secret full of riches and endless in hope--in short, no violin.
To feel the full force of his loss, my reader must remember that around the childhood of Robert, which he was fast leaving behind him, there had gathered no tenderness--none at least by him recognizable as such.All the women he came in contact with were his grandmother and Betty.He had no recollection of having ever been kissed.From the darkness and negation of such an embryo-existence, his nature had been unconsciously striving to escape--struggling to get from below ground into the sunlit air--sighing after a freedom he could not have defined, the freedom that comes, not of independence, but of love--not of lawlessness, but of the perfection of law.Of this beauty of life, with its wonder and its deepness, this unknown glory, his fiddle had been the type.It had been the ark that held, if not the tables of the covenant, yet the golden pot of angel's food, and the rod that budded in death.And now that it was gone, the gloomier aspect of things began to lay hold upon him; his soul turned itself away from the sun, and entered into the shadow of the under-world.Like the white-horsed twins of lake Regillus, like Phoebe, the queen of skyey plain and earthly forest, every boy and girl, every man and woman, that lives at all, has to divide many a year between Tartarus and Olympus.
For now arose within him, not without ultimate good, the evil phantasms of a theology which would explain all God's doings by low conceptions, low I mean for humanity even, of right, and law, and justice, then only taking refuge in the fact of the incapacity of the human understanding when its own inventions are impugned as undivine.In such a system, hell is invariably the deepest truth, and the love of God is not so deep as hell.Hence, as foundations must be laid in the deepest, the system is founded in hell, and the first article in the creed that Robert Falconer learned was, 'Ibelieve in hell.' Practically, I mean, it was so; else how should it be that as often as a thought of religious duty arose in his mind, it appeared in the form of escaping hell, of fleeing from the wrath to come? For his very nature was hell, being not born in sin and brought forth in iniquity, but born sin and brought forth iniquity.And yet God made him.He must believe that.And he must believe, too, that God was just, awfully just, punishing with fearful pains those who did not go through a certain process of mind which it was utterly impossible they should go through without a help which he would give to some, and withhold from others, the reason of the difference not being such, to say the least of it, as to come within the reach of the persons concerned.And this God they said was love.It was logically absurd, of course, yet, thank God, they did say that God was love; and many of them succeeded in believing it, too, and in ordering their ways as if the first article of their creed had been 'I believe in God'; whence, in truth, we are bound to say it was the first in power and reality, if not in order; for what are we to say a man believes, if not what he acts upon? Still the former article was the one they brought chiefly to bear upon their children.This mortar, probably they thought, threw the shell straighter than any of the other field-pieces of the church-militant.Hence it was even in justification of God himself that a party arose to say that a man could believe without the help of God at all, and after believing only began to receive God's help--a heresy all but as dreary and barren as the former.No one dreamed of saying--at least such a glad word of prophecy never reached Rothieden--that, while nobody can do without the help of the Father any more than a new-born babe could of itself live and grow to a man, yet that in the giving of that help the very fatherhood of the Father finds its one gladsome labour; that for that the Lord came; for that the world was made;for that we were born into it; for that God lives and loves like the most loving man or woman on earth, only infinitely more, and in other ways and kinds besides, which we cannot understand; and that therefore to be a man is the soul of eternal jubilation.
