LIVING IN A BOOK

If you have lived in one house all your life, it becomes so familiar to you that you do not think of its corners and angles, how the light comes and the shadows fall through the windows. You do not remember its upper chamber, because you are living in that chamber, nor that quiet inner room where you sometimes go to pray, because you are still going in there, closing the door and falling upon your knees when times are hard in your spirit, and asking for a little comfort. But some day when the door is shut and you are left outside, carried away by some wind of destiny, bereaved of these intimate associations with it, then you remember all the inside of that house, every board in the walls, where you slept and where you worked, the place you used to sit with folded hands when the day’s work was done.

So it has been with me about the Bible. As long as Lundy lived we were in it. It seems to me I was always traveling its pages back and forth from the old dispensation to the new dispensation, from one Gospel to another Gospel, wandering around in Revelation as one walks upon the shores of a strange land, mystified.

In those days it never occurred to me to quote the Scriptures. I left Lundy to do that. I was not even aware of being word-perfect in them. But after his death they came back to me, and I had the use of them as if they belonged to me at last according to my own mind. I recall them by my association with him. I use them right and left as he never would have dared to use them. The little kind ones are like bright footpaths that lead now more particularly to my own God, which I used to travel with him in the shadows. The great ones stretch away before and after me beyond the limits of time and sense. I do not try to reduce them to the dimensions of my own thoughts; I simply spread myself in them and feel immortality eased in all this space.

When you have only one book you use it a great deal. I have read many books, but I never had my own personal rights to but one, the Bible. The others belong to the authors who wrote them. They have been created, but, broadly speaking, they are not creative. The Bible is. I may be pardoned then for referring to it frequently as the source from which I have received most of my inspiration in living and thinking.

Now it is a mistake to fit your life to one or two Scriptures when there is such a wide choice of them. So when these moods of godly depression fall upon me and I am feeling like a poor old How-Firm-a-Foundation, or like a spiritual leaf that has been used a long time for the fattening or healing of the ungodly, I stir about in the Gospels for a better prophecy of myself. Something like this, for example: ‘And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.’

Nothing is changed, you understand; the same law of the spiritual world is demanding the laying down of my life for His sake; but I get an extension of that law for my own mortal sake. Somewhere, sometime I shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, and whatsoever I do shall prosper! I am not above making a literal interpretation of such a promise in the fairing weather of my mind. I begin to feel greener, fresher in my boughs. Suddenly I am conscious of many rivers of kind water that have flowed close to the roots of my life. I have sinned quite a good deal and come short of my own glories, much less the Lord’s glory. Still I have not lost much, only a few of my dearer treasures laid up where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt. I am very well off here. After all, for a bush of my size I have brought forth considerable fruit. I am not old; I feel everlasting. Therefore let the years come; time cannot defeat or harm me.

In such a mood I can swing paragraphs by the hour from the tip of my pen, or I can go forth and plant a field, strutting in the conviction that whatsoever I do shall prosper. It is a grand feeling, kin to that liberty the old-fashioned preachers used to claim when they made sure the Holy Ghost had descended upon them and they fell upon their congregations with power.

It all comes to this again and again when you get the chance to see through your glass clearly for a moment: The Scriptures were made for us. They are the literature of what we are, the great reference book of man. We are not created like victims to fulfill them. By living we do fulfill them, no matter how we live, in the flesh or in the spirit, or, like the mortal hyphens we really are, halfway between. I use my Scriptures this way, regardless of what may happen to the favorite creeds and doctrines of other people. The idea of a church God or a national God is too diffused to meet my personal needs and peculiarities.

I believe this is true of every man.

I cannot tell now how I missed even the faintest association with the Scriptures in the minds of the people who knew me best. Maybe it was because I was never prominent in church work; maybe it was because after the shadows fell upon me and I had premonitions of Lundy’s fate I did not ask the prayers of all Christian people, nor take even one saint into my confidence lest he should suffer by this betrayal. In any case, after he was gone, and I stepped forth in my own written word caparisoned in so many of his favorite passages from the Bible, some of these people were scandalized as if a light and humorous person masqueraded in sacred garments. My own church regarded me askance for a long time. I was never offended. On the contrary, I comprehended their anxiety with a sort of sympathy.

Comparatively few people inherit the Scriptures; they get them as we Protestants accuse the Catholics of getting theirs--predigested, interpreted, laid down for them in creeds and doctrines. My poor brethren could not be sure that I would not presently rise up in the insolence of my own mortal mind and deny the divinity of Jesus Christ or commit some other damnable heresy. This is frequently the way with those who interpret the word for themselves. They want to square it with some half-developed science which will be changed or refuted to-morrow, or they go off on a purely intellectual tangent. As a spiritually endowed person I have always had the sense to look down upon our finite reasoning powers and to despise my intellectual tangents.

I have discovered, however, that in dealing with Christians of whatever denomination it is discreet and valorous to use my mortal wits as shrewdly as if I dealt with the impious. They may not be subject to the same vices, but they have a record as long as the history of man for persecution. That is still an active principle of the religious conscience. I had my doubts about whether a mere woman would be considered eligible to a church trial for heresy, not having heard of one in my times who had suffered this distinction. Still, it was just as well to settle down somewhere beyond the reach of this honor. So, long since, I have allowed my membership to lapse. Not even a presiding elder can summon me before a quarterly conference to be tried either for my sins or my views concerning this or that doctrine. I am a Methodist unconfined, outside in the Lord’s pasture at large. If my church puts on a million-dollar drive for funds, I dutifully give my widow’s mite and spend my real Christian charity on a family of Hardshell Baptists who are in graver need of help than a rich and prosperous church.

When the Southern Methodist Church unites with the Northern branch of this same denomination, as now seems imminent, I contemplate reducing the widow’s mite of my contribution. As the devoted bystander of the Southern Methodist Church, I am opposed to this Union; not on account of prejudices connected with the reconstruction period, when we escaped their maudlin sentimentality concerning the negroes by withdrawing from them. I merely remember that as a warning, but my real objection is that we can be better brethren in Christ further apart.