VENTURES IN SCRIPTURES

I was eleven years younger than my husband, being really in the plastic period of adolescence. He was the gentlest of men, but he had a brilliant and mature mind, a queer temple of intellectual loveliness with pure classical lines. He did his thinking as a master architect does his drawing, with delicacy and precision. He was never overbearing, but the elegance, sweetness, and sincerity of his mind confounded my younger wits. I supposed that a man who could think like that must be correct in his conclusions, and for something like ten years I surrendered my own mind and left him to do our thinking. Most of it was pious, but always informed with that effulgence of the spirit peculiar to the rarer saints. My impression now is that I became a very good young person, by ear, so to speak, and that I was strangely stupid. The mental background I had acquired from much ravenous reading before my marriage faded. I forgot Tasso’s great poetry and settled down on the hillside of a mountain circuit with Lundy and the beatitudes. Maybe this was good for me spiritually, but it was diminishing mentally, which, in my opinion, was never meant to be the effect of any Scriptures upon the mind.

Lundy was not a practical man spiritually. I remember distinctly how determined he was to remain poor in spirit that he might become one of those legitimate heirs to the Kingdom of Heaven. I imitated his poverty here with the same artless sincerity a child imitates an older person, though I could never put much feeling into the idea of being poor in spirit. The effect upon him was that with his nature elegant to the point of fastidiousness, and his scholarly mind, he walked humbly hand in hand with the meanest of his flock, making himself literally one of the least of them.

It was all wrong. I call your attention to the fact that Jesus went up into a mountain and set Him above the multitude before He began that great Sermon on the Mount. And when He finished it and came down the great multitude followed Him. I do not suppose He was jostled by that crowd. He was apart and far beyond them, and so held Himself there and everywhere else. It will not do to be intimately poor in spirit with people who have no sense of your meaning. If you do they will keep you poorer than the Scriptures require both in spirit and fact.

Lundy was the same way about that beatitude which recommends those that mourn for they shall be comforted. We were rich in love and peace and were being as good as it is possible for human beings to live, but he would mourn in spite of everything for his transgressions, any transgression he could remember. He was the most unforgiving man of himself I ever knew.

In this connection I remember the first theological ruction we had after our marriage. He had harked up one of his former sins and was making himself miserable about it. I tried every way to smooth over his transgression--in vain. Finally I lost patience and called his attention to the generous forgiving Gospel he preached to other sinners. Did he believe he preached the truth? Certainly he did, was his reply.

‘Well then,’ I retorted, ‘why should you malign the goodness of God by imagining you yourself are not forgiven according to the same Gospel?’

This was one of the many clinches we had over these beatitudes. He said that a man’s conscience must be his guide in such matters. He reserved the right to repent of his own sins! He went on to imply that I might be morally obtuse. This was the straw that broke my camel’s back. I retorted that I was tired, and I supposed the Lord was tired of the vain repetition of his repentance over some little dead and forgotten transgression. I thought such conduct was morally debilitating. From this we had hot words and I flung myself upon the bed and wept bitterly.

My belief is that I had some glimmerings even as far back as that of the true meaning of these particular Scriptures. I know now that they are emergency remedies for the soul and not designed to create a perpetual state of mind. The effort to practice them all the time will victimize any man in his relations to his fellow men. I feel better most of the time, but now and then I have known what it is to be poor in spirit before the Lord on the occasion of some defalcation in virtue or patience or courage; but it is not my idea to tell any one else about it. I do my mourning and hurry on as quickly as possible to the more cheerful part of this beatitude which says ‘for they shall be comforted,’ feeling that I do myself credit by taking the Lord at His word as soon as possible. I have practiced swiftness in acts of faith and found it profitable. If the Bible means anything at all, you have a right to believe it. That is the test of the truth of the Scriptures--believe them, and if they do not come true you have the right to deny them. I have never had the chance to deny a single one, though of course I have lacked the spiritual capacity to try out the whole thing.

But there is that one which says, ‘Blessed are the meek’--meaning teachable--‘for they shall inherit the earth.’ It is not my nature to be teachable, but I have been in such tight quarters all my life that I have been obliged to learn a great deal with meekness. And it is a fact, I have inherited more of the earth than I deserve. To be strictly honest, I have never hungered and thirsted after righteousness to the point of egotism characteristic of some saints. I always had a feeling of modest limitations along this line; but now that I think back to those first years of my married life, it seems to be anguishing and pitiful the way I strove to be good. It was so terribly necessary if I was to keep up with Lundy.

The motive was a trifle crooked, as you will see; but the Lord honored it as He did that woman’s faith who had the issue of blood, which was an unintelligent faith. For as I look back now it seems to me that I was pretty well filled with righteousness then according to the other end of that beatitude. With me, being merciful is not a virtue. It comes too easy for me to have deserved much in return, like some kind of happy weakness of character. Still, I have finally been overwhelmed with mercies. I feel sometimes that I might have used them to a better advantage further back in the years when my needs were very great. But the point I make is that this Scripture was fulfilled. I have even been pure enough in heart at rare intervals to see God. But not often when I was up and shining. Usually it would be when I was passing through some valley of the shadow of great grief. After the pain is over I have always been able to look back and know that sorrows are much more purifying and elevating to the mind than joys.

But when it comes to that verse which says ‘Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God,’ it has depended upon the circumstances whether I came out of the scrimmage like such a child. I have known myself to forgo the blessing and refuse to make a peace that left me in the lurch. In that case I hunted up some such Scripture as an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, and took what satisfaction I could get from that. Never yet have I parted with an eye or a tooth, or turned the other cheek except to my Lord, who is the only one who has the right to smite me.

These, of course, are my favorable experiences with the truth of the Bible. I have suffered a-plenty from the unfavorable passages, such as, ‘Judge not.... For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged.’ I have had this experience a thousand times. Some one who knows me, or a stranger of whom I have never heard, rises up and passes judgment upon me as if it was a harsh and sacred duty he performed--without ever suspecting, I suppose, that he is measuring to me again unfair and superficial criticisms I have passed on other people. They do have somewhat the advantage in this business, because there are so many more of them than there is of me, and one person cannot spare the time to pass as many adverse judgments as one author endures. Even at that, I fare very well on account of getting so many more favorable judgments than I deserve from the same sources.

I was so much involved in the purely spiritual struggle of trying to live above and without the world until I was thirty years old that I became a sort of ignoramus. I cannot now recall what were the social and intellectual conditions of this period. I remember who the great preachers were, but not the name of a single statesman or public servant except one old congressman who used to do his electioneering at Sunday-school picnics. Readers of the circuit-rider stories must have observed that these are records in religious living to the exclusion of all earthly interests.

I suppose this is the reason why even ‘My Book and Heart’ produces the impression upon some readers of being the chronicle of a narrow and dreary life. I do not think it is, you understand. It seems to me that almost any person with a provincial mind might fail to appreciate the literature of a foreign country with which they were totally unfamiliar. The spiritual world which I inhabited at that time is not known now by a great many people otherwise very well informed. They are unable therefore to appreciate the vividness and romance of such an existence. It seems drab to them because they live in sums and dividends and secular realities and the same kind of diversions, not in sublime illusions.

But try chasing an impractical saint up one Jacob’s ladder after another for twelve years and find out for yourself what a varied and stimulating experience it is. Hunting big game in a jungle is nothing to the risks you take and the rarefied hardships you endure and the keen relief you feel now and then between adventures. I cannot claim that it was mentally exhilarating, but I developed considerable wing power of the spirit very helpful to me when I finally did go back, pick up my mind, shake some of the star dust off, and begin to use it with a good conscience for my own benefit in this present world.

But never so long as I live can I escape the tragic effects upon my life of these early years. My mind is free now, and I can reason as clearly as the next one about what a dear and blessed gift from God the world has been to me; but in my heart I seem still to belong back there in the years upon the lower rungs of that ever-upward-stretching ladder I used to climb toward Lundy’s God. I cannot get over feeling hard pressed spiritually sometimes, as if I was in dangerous need of chastening--I suppose the steel bridge never forgets the furnace in which its girders were melted and forged; I would give anything now and then to rest from this smelting sense of God and be comfortable in my carnal mind, but I never can be.