Part 48 (2/2)
Then Dr. Howe burst into a torrent of indignant remonstrance. A clergyman send his wife from him because she does not believe some dogma! Were we back in the dark ages? It was too monstrously absurd! If the idiots he preached to forced him to do it, let him leave them; let him come to Ashurst. The rector would build him a meeting-house, and he could preach his abominable doctrine to anybody who was fool enough to go and hear him.
Dr. Howe was walking hastily up and down the room, gesticulating as he talked. Helen's patient eyes followed him. Again and again she tried to point out to him her husband's intense sincerity, and the necessity which his convictions forced upon him. But the rector refused to think Mr.
Ward's att.i.tude worthy of serious consideration. ”The man is insane!”
he cried. ”Send his wife away from him to force her into a certain belief? Madness,--I tell you, madness!”
”I cannot hear you speak so of my husband,” Helen said very quietly, but it caused Dr. Howe to conceal his wrath.
”He'll think differently in a day or two,” he said. ”This nonsense won't last.”
Then Helen, having exhausted all her arguments to show that John was immovable, said, ”Let me read you what he says himself; then you will understand, perhaps, how real it all is to him, and how he cannot help it.”
”Bah!” cried Dr. Howe, and certainly it was trying to have Helen attempt to excuse such folly. ”I've no patience with--There, there! I didn't mean to lose my temper, but bless my soul, this is the worst thing I ever knew. See here, Helen, if the man is so determined, you'll have to change your views, or go back to your old views, I mean,--I don't know what you do believe,--that's all there is about it.”
Helen was unfolding John's letter, and she looked up at her uncle with a fleeting smile. ”Change my views so that I can go back? Do you think that would satisfy John? Do you think I could? Why, uncle Archie, do you believe in eternal d.a.m.nation? I know you pray to be delivered from it in the Litany, but do you believe in it?”
”That has nothing to do with the question, Helen,” he answered, frowning, ”and of course I believe that the consequences of sin are eternal.”
”You know that is not what the prayer means,” she insisted; ”you have to put your private interpretation upon it. Well, it is my private interpretation which John thinks is sin, and sin which will receive what it denies.”
”Well, you must believe it, then,” the rector said, striking his fist on the arm of his chair; ”it is the wife's place to yield; and while I acknowledge it is all folly, you must give in.”
”You mean,” she said, ”that I must say I believe it. Can I change a belief? You know I cannot, uncle Archie. And when you hear what John says, you will see I must be true, no matter where truth leads me.”
Helen knew every word of that letter by heart. She had read it while she drove towards the depot, and when she dismissed the carriage it was with a vague idea of flying to Lockhaven, and brus.h.i.+ng all this cobweb of unreason away, and claiming her right to take her place at her husband's side. But as she sat in the station, waiting, every sentence of the letter began to burn into her heart, and she slowly realized that she could not go back. The long day pa.s.sed, and the people, coming and going, looked curiously at her; one kindly woman, seeing the agony in her white face, came up and asked her if she were ill, and could she help her?
Helen stared at her like a person in a dream, and shook her head. Then, in a numb sort of way, she began to understand that she must go back to Ashurst. She did not notice that it had begun to rain, or think of a carriage, but plodded, half blind and dazed, over the country road to her old home, sometimes sitting down, not so much to rest as to take the letter from its envelope again and read it.
She looked at it now, with a sudden gasp of pain; it was as though a dagger had been turned in a wound. It seemed too sacred to read to Dr.
Howe, but it was just to John that it should be heard, even if only partly understood; and it was also just to her--for Helen had one of those healthy souls which could be just to itself. With the letter had come a clear and logical statement of the doctrine of reprobation, together with the arguments and reasons for holding it; besides this, there was a list of books which he meant to send her. All these she handed to her uncle.
”I will not read you all he writes,” she said, ”but even a little will show you the hopelessness of thinking I can ever go back to him. He tells me first of a meeting of his Session, where the elders told him they wished to have me summoned before them, and of another visit from Mr.
Dean, of whom I spoke to you, insisting that John had been faithless in his duty to his church and me. 'I could only listen,' he writes, 'in a.s.senting anguish, when he charged me with having been careless of your spiritual life; and when he said that the sin of your unbelief had crept from soul to soul, like an insidious and fatal disease unseen by the eyes of the church, until spiritual death, striking first one and then another, roused us to our danger. How can I write that word ”us,” as though I arrayed myself with them against you, dearest! Yet it is not you, but this fatal unbelief! They charged me, these elders, whose place it is to guard the spiritual life of the church, with having preached peace to them, when there was no peace, and leaving unspoken the words of warning that eternal death awaits unrepented sin. They told me Davis had died in his sin, not having had the fear of h.e.l.l before his eyes to convert his soul. And, Helen, I know it is all true! When they insisted that you, like any other member of the church, should be brought before the Session, that they might reason with you, and by the blessing of G.o.d convert your soul to a saving knowledge of the truth, or at least bind you to silence for the sake of others, I would not listen. Here I felt my right was greater than theirs, for you are like my own soul. I told them I would not permit it; I knew it would but drive you further from grace.
I cannot think I sinned in this, though I apparently neglect a means of salvation for you; but I could not subject you to that,--I could not put your soul into their hands. I distrust myself (I have need, having loved earthly happiness more than your immortal peace, and called it wisdom), yet I think I am right in this. G.o.d grant that the means of grace which I choose instead, which will crucify my own heart, may, by his blessing, save your soul. And I have faith to believe it will. The promises of G.o.d fail not.
”'Oh, Helen, if I loved you less! Sometimes, in these two weeks, while this purpose has been growing up in my mind, I have shrunk back, and cried that I could not drink of the cup, and in the depth of human weakness I have felt, if I loved her less, I could not do what I have to do, and so the pain would be spared. But love is too mighty for me. I shall save you! When I think of the months since we were married, which I have kept unruffled by a single entreaty that you would turn from darkness into light, my eyes are blasted by the sight of my own sin; despair and death lay hold upon me. But He has had mercy upon me. He has shown me one way in which you shall be saved, and by his strength I am not disobedient to the heavenly vision. Reason and argument have not shown you the light. Joy and peace have not led you to it. There is one other path, beloved, which I have faith to believe shall not fail. It is sorrow. Sorrow can bring the truth home to you as no other thing will.
The relentless pressure of grief will force you to seek for light. It will admit of no evasion; it will receive no subtilty; it will bring you face to face with the eternal verities; it will save your soul. And what sorrow, Helen, can come to you such as making me suffer? And is there a pang which can tear my soul in this world like absence from my beloved? I trample my own happiness under my feet. Too long I have been weak, too long I have loved you with but half my nature; now I am strong. Therefore I say, before G.o.d, for your soul's sake, you shall not see my face until you have found the truth. This pain, which will be to me but the just punishment for my sin, will be to you like some sharp and bitter medicine which shall heal you of what would otherwise bring eternal death. Even as I write I am filled with strength from G.o.d to save you. For G.o.d has shown me the way. And it shall be soon,--I know it shall be soon. The Lord's hand is not shortened that it cannot save. He has revealed to me the one last way of showing you the truth, and He will lighten your eyes. Yet, oh, my love, my wife, help me to be strong for you,--my Helen, help me in these days or weeks of waiting.
”'There is one mercy vouchsafed to me who am all unworthy of the least favor: it is the knowledge of your understanding it all,--the bitter distress, the absolute conviction, and the necessity which follows it.
You see what the temptation was to fly with you to some spot where your unbelief could not injure any one, and there work and pray for your salvation; leaving these souls, which my neglect of you and so of them, has allowed to drift deep into sin. You will understand that, believing (oh, knowing, Helen, knowing) that salvation depends upon a right conception of truth, I have no choice but to force you by any means to save your soul. This knowledge makes me strong. So I am set, with strength which you yourself give me, to inflict this suffering upon you.
Take this absence and use its bitterness to sting you to search for truth. Take its anguish to G.o.d. Pray for light, pray for the Spirit of G.o.d. And when light comes--Oh, love, the thought of that joy seems too great to bear except before the throne of G.o.d! I shall not write again; you will meet this grief in the solitude of your own soul, where even I dare not come to break the silence which may be the voice of G.o.d. Write me any questionings, that I may help those first faint stirrings of the Holy Spirit, but unless questionings come I shall be silent.'”
Helen had not read all of this aloud, and there was yet more, on which she looked a moment before she folded the letter. The closing words were full of a human tenderness too divine and holy for any heart but her own; a faint smile crept about her lips for a moment, as she leaned out of her distress to rest upon her husband's love, and then she woke again to the present.
CHAPTER XXVII.
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