Part 64 (1/2)

The wind must roar awfully there in the winter; but the mountains stand away with their avalanches, and all the summer long keep the cold off the gra.s.sy fields.

The same evening, he was already weary. The next morning it rained. It rained fiercely all day. He would leave the place on the morrow. In the evening it began to clear up. He walked out. The sun was setting. The snow-peaks were faintly tinged with rose, and the ragged ma.s.ses of vapour that hung lazy and leaden-coloured about the sides of the abyss, were partially dyed a sulky orange red. Then all faded into gray. But as the sunlight vanished, a veil sank from the face of the moon, already half-way to the zenith, and she gathered courage and shone, till the mountain looked lovely as a ghost in the gleam of its snow and the glimmer of its glaciers. 'Ah!' thought Falconer, 'such a peace at last is all a man can look for--the repose of a spectral Elysium, a world where pa.s.sion has died away, and only the dim ghost of its memory to disturb with a shadowy sorrow the helpless content of its undreaming years. The religion that can do but this much is not a very great or very divine thing. The human heart cannot invent a better it may be, but it can imagine grander results.'

He did not yet know what the religion was of which he spoke. As well might a man born stone-deaf estimate the power of sweet sounds, or he who knows not a square from a circle p.r.o.nounce upon the study of mathematics.

The next morning rose brilliant--an ideal summer day. He would not go yet; he would spend one day more in the place. He opened his valise to get some lighter garments. His eye fell on a New Testament. Dr. Anderson had put it there. He had never opened it yet, and now he let it lie. Its time had not yet come. He went out.

Walking up the edge of the valley, he came upon a little stream whose talk he had heard for some hundred yards. It flowed through a gra.s.sy hollow, with steeply sloping sides. Water is the same all the world over; but there was more than water here to bring his childhood back to Falconer. For at the spot where the path led him down to the burn, a little crag stood out from the bank,--a gray stone like many he knew on the stream that watered the valley of Rothieden: on the top of the stone grew a little heather; and beside it, bending towards the water, was a silver birch. He sat down on the foot of the rock, shut in by the high gra.s.sy banks from the gaze of the awful mountains. The sole unrest was the run of the water beside him, and it sounded so homely, that he began to jabber Scotch to it. He forgot that this stream was born in the clouds, far up where that peak rose into the air behind him; he did not know that a couple of hundred yards from where he sat, it tumbled headlong into the valley below: with his country's birch-tree beside him, and the rock crowned with its tuft of heather over his head, the quiet as of a Sabbath afternoon fell upon him--that quiet which is the one altogether lovely thing in the Scotch Sabbath--and once more the words arose in his mind, 'My peace I give unto you.'

Now he fell a-thinking what this peace could be. And it came into his mind as he thought, that Jesus had spoken in another place about giving rest to those that came to him, while here he spoke about 'my peace.'

Could this my mean a certain kind of peace that the Lord himself possessed? Perhaps it was in virtue of that peace, whatever it was, that he was the Prince of Peace. Whatever peace he had must be the highest and best peace--therefore the one peace for a man to seek, if indeed, as the words of the Lord seemed to imply, a man was capable of possessing it. He remembered the New Testament in his box, and, resolving to try whether he could not make something more out of it, went back to the inn quieter in heart than since he left his home. In the evening he returned to the brook, and fell to searching the story, seeking after the peace of Jesus.

He found that the whole pa.s.sage stood thus:--

'Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.'

He did not leave the place for six weeks. Every day he went to the burn, as he called it, with his New Testament; every day tried yet again to make out something more of what the Saviour meant. By the end of the month it had dawned upon him, he hardly knew how, that the peace of Jesus (although, of course, he could not know what it was like till he had it) must have been a peace that came from the doing of the will of his Father. From the account he gave of the discoveries he then made, I venture to represent them in the driest and most exact form that I can find they will admit of. When I use the word discoveries, I need hardly say that I use it with reference to Falconer and his previous knowledge.

They were these:--that Jesus taught--

First,--That a man's business is to do the will of G.o.d:

Second,--That G.o.d takes upon himself the care of the man:

Third,--Therefore, that a man must never be afraid of anything; and so,

Fourth,--be left free to love G.o.d with all his heart, and his neighbour as himself.

But one day, his thoughts having cleared themselves a little upon these points, a new set of questions arose with sudden inundation--comprised in these two:--

'How can I tell for certain that there ever was such a man? How am I to be sure that such as he says is the mind of the maker of these glaciers and b.u.t.terflies?'

All this time he was in the wilderness as much as Moses at the back of h.o.r.eb, or St. Paul when he vanishes in Arabia: and he did nothing but read the four gospels and ponder over them. Therefore it is not surprising that he should have already become so familiar with the gospel story, that the moment these questions appeared, the following words should dart to the forefront of his consciousness to meet them:--

'If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of G.o.d, or whether I speak of myself.'

Here was a word of Jesus himself, announcing the one means of arriving at a conviction of the truth or falsehood of all that he said, namely, the doing of the will of G.o.d by the man who would arrive at such conviction.

The next question naturally was: What is this will of G.o.d of which Jesus speaks? Here he found himself in difficulty. The theology of his grandmother rushed in upon him, threatening to overwhelm him with demands as to feeling and inward action from which his soul turned with sickness and fainting. That they were repulsive to him, that they appeared unreal, and contradictory to the nature around him, was no proof that they were not of G.o.d. But on the other hand, that they demanded what seemed to him unjust,--that these demands were founded on what seemed to him untruth attributed to G.o.d, on ways of thinking and feeling which are certainly degrading in a man,--these were reasons of the very highest nature for refusing to act upon them so long as, from whatever defects it might be in himself, they bore to him this aspect.

He saw that while they appeared to be such, even though it might turn out that he mistook them, to acknowledge them would be to wrong G.o.d. But this conclusion left him in no better position for practice than before.

When at length he did see what the will of G.o.d was, he wondered, so simple did it appear, that he had failed to discover it at once. Yet not less than a fortnight had he been brooding and pondering over the question, as he wandered up and down that burnside, or sat at the foot of the heather-crowned stone and the silver-barked birch, when the light began to dawn upon him. It was thus.

In trying to understand the words of Jesus by searching back, as it were, for such thoughts and feelings in him as would account for the words he spoke, the perception awoke that at least he could not have meant by the will of G.o.d any such theological utterances as those which troubled him. Next it grew plain that what he came to do, was just to lead his life. That he should do the work, such as recorded, and much besides, that the Father gave him to do--this was the will of G.o.d concerning him. With this perception arose the conviction that unto every man whom G.o.d had sent into the world, he had given a work to do in that world. He had to lead the life G.o.d meant him to lead. The will of G.o.d was to be found and done in the world. In seeking a true relation to the world, would he find his relation to G.o.d?

The time for action was come.

He rose up from the stone of his meditation, took his staff in his hand, and went down the mountain, not knowing whither he went. And these were some of his thoughts as he went:

'If it was the will of G.o.d who made me and her, my will shall not be set against his. I cannot be happy, but I will bow my head and let his waves and his billows go over me. If there is such a G.o.d, he knows what a pain I bear. His will be done. Jesus thought it well that his will should be done to the death. Even if there be no G.o.d, it will be grand to be a disciple of such a man, to do as he says, think as he thought--perhaps come to feel as he felt.'