A DEAD MAN'S DIARY.




  A DEAD MAN'S DIARY



  Written after his Decease.

  WITH A PREFACE BY

  G.T. BETTANY, M.A.

  "I sent my Soul through the Invisible,
  Some letter of that After Life to spell:
    And by-and-by my Soul return'd to me,
  And answered, 'I myself am Heav'n and Hell.'"

  Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.
  (_Fitzgerald's Translation._)

  WARD, LOCK AND CO.,

  LONDON, NEW YORK AND MELBOURNE.

  1890.

  (_All rights reserved._)




PREFACE.


The literature purporting to describe the state of mankind after death,
whether as Hades, Intermediate State, Purgatory, Hell, or Heaven, has
mostly erred in the direction of too great detail. On the one hand,
we have had those who with Swedenborg declare "that after death a man
is so little changed that he even does not know but he is living in
the present world; that the resemblances between the two worlds are so
great, that in the spiritual world there are cities, with palaces and
houses, and also writings and books, employments and merchandises."
On the other hand, we have the picture drawn by the writer of "Letters
from Hell," of imaginary houses and scenes, of seeming actions, of
semblances of men compelled to appear to be doing after death the
very things they did in life, despair all the while gnawing at their
hearts. Archdeacon Farrar, in Chapter IV. of his "Mercy and Judgment,"
has given a varied and horrifying series of extracts from ancient
and modern divines describing their detailed conceptions about the
future of the wicked. As to the future of the beatified, no one
needs reminding of the multitude of word-pictures, often mutually
contradictory, in which their existence has been depicted.

Thus we see that the human mind cannot choose but speculate in some
fashion on the future state, while no man has the right to claim
that he had said the last word on the subject. It may therefore be
confidently anticipated that the remarkable narrative here presented,
of which considerable portions have already appeared, serially, in the
English edition of "Lippincott's Monthly Magazine," will find a very
large number of interested readers, who will be glad to peruse it in
the connected and completed form, in which it is best calculated to
express the author's full meaning and experiences. It will not by its
length or excess of detail overburden the reader, nor does it claim
to be more than a narrative of experience which may be left to convey
its own lessons. The writer, who prefers to remain anonymous, is one
whose essays and stories have been received with high appreciation on
both sides of the Atlantic. His narrative is put forth as his actual
experience during a lengthened absence from the body, during which
he was believed to be dead. Of course no other living person can
confirm or deny his experiences, though many may deem them incredible,
fictitious, or the imaginings or visions of a trancelike state. I do
not pretend to decide to what category they belong, nor do I feel
called upon to condemn or approve any of the assertions or opinions
thus put forward. If any one holds theological convictions which appear
to conflict with them, I would remark that the publishers, in letting
the "Dead Man" speak for himself, do not hold themselves responsible
for his opinions, merely having assured themselves of the serious
spirit in which they are narrated.

The record of these experiences being given in the form of a diary, the
writer has not felt bound to tell his story with the simple directness
which is expected in a work of fiction, but has noted down in his
narrative, as is the manner of diarists, the thoughts which the record
of his experiences have aroused. Though these occasional digressions
have no immediate bearing upon the facts recorded, they will, I think,
be found to contain some interesting reading, nor do they, in my
opinion, interfere seriously with the completeness of the narrative as
an artistic whole.

In conclusion, I would add that the writer only desires that his
experiences may be read in a candid spirit, and that as no man can
prove him to be wrong who has not actually entered the world of
spirits, those who reject his narrative will endeavour to maintain
an attitude of suspended judgment, until they are in a position to
judge for themselves. For myself, I can but say that the moral of the
author's teaching is worthy of the most serious attention, and if put
into practice there can be no question that it would conduce greatly to
the happiness of mankind.

  G.T. Bettany.




CONTENTS.


                                                       PAGE

  PREFACE                                                5


  CHAPTER I.

  EXPLAINS MY TITLE                                     13


  CHAPTER II.

  DEALS WITH DEATH AND THE DREAD OF IT                  19


  CHAPTER III.

  DEALS WITH LIFE AND THE LUST OF IT, BUT HAS
  NO DIRECT BEARING ON MY STORY                         26


  CHAPTER IV.

  I DIE                                                 46


  CHAPTER V.

  IS OF AN EXPLANATORY NATURE ONLY                      58


  CHAPTER VI.

  TELLS OF MY FIRST AWFUL AWAKENING IN HELL,
  AND OF THE SHAMEFUL SIN WHICH BROUGHT
  ME THITHER                                            67


  CHAPTER VII.

  SHOWS THE FITNESS OF MY PUNISHMENT                    87


  CHAPTER VIII.

  I MAKE AN UNEXPECTED DISCOVERY IN HELL, AND
  MEET WITH AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE                         94


  CHAPTER IX.

  I SEE SOME STRANGE SIGHTS IN HELL, AND AM
  FAVOURED WITH SOMETHING IN THE NATURE
  OF A SERMON                                          113


  CHAPTER X.

  A LOVE-STORY IN HELL                                 128


  CHAPTER XI.

  THE MYSTERY OF "THE DEAD WHO DIE"                    148


  CHAPTER XII.

  I SEE THE BROTHER WHOM WE HAVE ALL LOST             167


  CHAPTER XIII.

  A DREAM OF ETERNAL REST                             180


  CHAPTER XIV.

  HOPE                                                206


  CHAPTER XV.

  HEAVEN                                              213




[Illustration]




CHAPTER I.

_EXPLAINS MY TITLE._


It has always been a favourite fancy of mine that I should like to
die upon some sunny, songful morning, in spring or early summer. The
thought of dying in the night, and of finding this thin and aërial
something, which I have learned to call "my soul," being driven
remorselessly nightward, as Adam and Eve were driven from Paradise;
the seeing it in imagination, a spectral, unsubstantial shadow of
myself, flitting a-shivering out into the black-wombed darkness, and
fumbling with filmy hands that it might clasp the closer around it
the warm familiar robe of flesh, only to find that robe fallen away
for ever--this thought, I must confess, fills me at all times with an
abhorrent loathing and dread.

To look up by night at the cold glitter of the stars, and to fancy my
disembodied spirit winging its weary way thereto, through fathomless
leagues of void and voiceless ether, causes me ever to shiver, and to
turn shudderingly to earth again; but the thought of passing peacefully
away upon some sunny, summer morning seems less like dying than like
stepping out of doors to be among the birds and the butterflies. _Then_
the heaven of my hopes would not seem so very distant after all (and
oh! how much more heavenly and homelike would that heaven appear did
I but know it to be _this_ side of the stars!), and my first entry
into the dim and shadowy realm of the spirit-world would seem the
less strange and unfamiliar for my having to pass out on my way to it
through the fields, the flowers, and the sunshine that I love so well.

To me, however, in the utter solitude of midnight waking, and in the
scarcely less utter solitude of day-dreaming in the midst of men, the
thought which ever most oppresses me in the contemplation of death, is
not so much the Unknown which lies beyond, as the thought of its awful
loneliness,--the thought that human faces may shine on my face, human
hands lie clasped in mine, and human voices bear me company up to the
very boundary line of that still and silent land, but that when that
boundary line is once reached, all these must fail and forsake me, and
I must turn to face the unknown darkness naked, desolate, and alone.

But why do I allow my thoughts, you say, to brood thus morbidly upon
death and the death moment? I will tell you. Because I who now write
to you have--save only in the last and uttermost giving up of the
spirit--been for some narrow space of time dead; because on me there
once fell that thin and impalpable veil which cuts off, as by a wall
of vast and impenetrable night, the dead one from those whom he leaves
behind.

The facts of the matter are simply these. Some years ago I became
seriously ill, grew worse day by day, and was pronounced dying, and
finally dead. Dead I apparently was, and dead I remained to all intents
and purposes for the greater part of two days, after which, to the
intense and utter astonishment of my friends and of the physicians, I
exhibited symptoms of returning vitality, and in the course of a week
or two was convalescent. The medical and scientific aspects of the
case are, I am assured by those most competent to judge, of unusual
interest, but it is not to them that I now wish to direct attention. It
is rather to that dim borderland betwixt life and death, wherein the
spirit hovers on uncertain pinion, as if hesitating whether to return
to the body it has lately tenanted, or to wing its way to the shadowy
heights of the world Unseen.

Where, during those two-score hours, I would ask, was my soul, ghost,
or life-principle? Had it passed into some intermediate spirit-realm,
there to await till the Father of Spirits should command it either
finally to quit the mortal habitation in which it had so long found
a home, or to return thereto till such time as He should call it to
Himself? Or was it still hovering over the body, struggling and
striving to free itself from the fetters which bound it to that which,
without it, were but a senseless and inanimate clod?

To that question I am prepared with an answer, and so strange a
one, that I cannot hope my story will be regarded with anything but
incredulity, nor can I reasonably expect it to be otherwise, for
I am aware that what I am about to relate I myself should reject
unhesitatingly were it proffered me on the testimony of another.

[Illustration]




[Illustration]




CHAPTER II.

_DEALS WITH DEATH AND THE DREAD OF IT._


If the thoughts which are coursing through my brain at this moment be
not less gruesome to read than they are to write, this chapter will, I
fear, be but sorry reading; for I feel strangely depressed and nervous,
as I settle down to the opening pages of my diary.

The wind is raging and roaring outside until the stout walls of the
house seem to rock and sway like tree-tops, and the sudden gusts and
squalls make my startled heart bound and beat faster in my bosom, and
turn me sick with a sense of loneliness and of loss.

Even when I lie warm in my bed the sound of the wind at midnight
strikes a chill through me, so that I shiver in spite of the blankets.
As it comes shrieking and sobbing through key-hole and lattice, the
very doors and windows seem to partake of my superstition, and to be
touched with some uncanny dread; for long after it has died away I
hear them creaking complainingly among themselves, as if they too were
nervous and in fear. In the wind's shriek at such times there is always
to me some suggestion of the sights it has seen, and of the ruin it has
wrought. I seem to see, as I listen to its wailing, a weary moon that
looks out white and wan upon a bleak heath, where a dead woman lies
straining a living babe to her milkless breast; or upon a waste of
hurrying waters that heave and roar and hurl themselves in huge billows
upon one desolate figure, clinging despairingly to a broken mast. And
then there is a sudden lull in the storm; the moon is hidden by clouds
once more, and the infant's wail, the strong man's cry, and the shriek
of the wind, gloating in savage exultation over its ghastly secrets,
die away into a distant rumble, and all is still save the beating of my
heart, and the stealthy creaking of door and casement.

Even as I write I can hear its wailing so die away in the distance, and
I seem to see it crouching, still and quiet and panther-like, yet ever
gathering itself together, and creeping nearer and nearer, so that it
may take me unaware, and in one sudden bound sweep down upon me, as an
eagle swoops upon his prey, and bear me away to destruction.

Listen to it now!--whistling, wailing, shrieking, like a live thing! Is
it any wonder, on such a night, and with a sound in the air like that
of innumerable lamentations, that I feel strangely conscious of the
near approach of death, and cannot dissociate my thoughts from

  "The knell, the shroud, the mattock, and the grave,
  The deep damp vault, the darkness, and the worm?"

For I _do_ fear death, as I believe we all do in some moods.
Notwithstanding our reiterated beliefs in Christ and in Immortality;
notwithstanding our prayers, hymn-singing, and heartfelt declarations
of our trust in God, and in His care for us, are there not moments
in the life of each of us when the human nature within recoils in
dumb and desolate protest from the thought of an existence in which
the body will be left to decay? We think at such times of our own
death and burial. We picture the mourning coaches setting out, with
solemn pomp and pageantry of woe, to bear us away to our last earthly
resting-place. We see them drive back--briskly now, and as though the
grief were left behind with the coffin--to the darkened house, and
we see the mourners alight and re-enter to draw up the blinds with a
sigh of thinly-disguised satisfaction, and to turn with a natural if
humiliating relief to life and the things of life again. And as we
think of the darkness coming on, and of that deserted body of ours,
which had once so craved for light and warmth and human companionship,
lying, in the first awful night of desolation, away out under the sods
in that dreary cemetery, we can almost fancy that we see the uneasy
soul, restless even in heaven, stealing sadly to earth again, and
hovering, for very companionship, over the forsaken mound that covers
its ancient comrade.

So, too, there are moments of midnight waking, when we lie on our bed
as in a grave, and feel the awful thought of death borne in upon us
with unutterable, intolerable horror. Then the darkness which shuts
out those objects that in the day-time distract the attention of our
outward eye, and of our mind, serves only to make our mental vision
doubly keen, and to concentrate all our faculties, as to one inward
focal point of light, on that hateful thought. Then do we seem to
feel the earth rushing swiftly on its way, as if eager to hurry us
to our own dissolution; and then do we stretch forth impotent hands
and vain, striving hopelessly to stay it on its course. Yet ever is
our striving of none avail: Death, hideous and inexorable, stares us
in the face--a wall of vast and impenetrable night, which closes
in upon us on every side. We gasp and choke as though some bony and
cruel fingers lay clutching at our throat. "Is there no way," we cry,
with heart strained unto bursting, "is there no way by which we may
escape the Inescapable?--no loop-hole through which we may creep, and
elude this black and grisly thing?" But from the hollow womb of night
comes back the sullen answer, "Escape there is none," and then, like
doomed criminals who snatch greedily at a day's reprieve, we thrust
the ghastly thing away from us, and strive to distract our thoughts in
folly.

[Illustration]




[Illustration]




CHAPTER III.

_DEALS WITH LIFE AND THE LUST OF IT, BUT HAS NO DIRECT BEARING ON MY
STORY._[1]

    Shall we not weary in the windless days
        Hereafter, for the murmur of the sea,
        The cool salt air across some grassy lea?
    Shall we not go bewildered through a maze
    Of stately streets with glittering gems ablaze,
      Forlorn amid the pearl and ivory,
      Straining our eyes beyond the bourne to see
  Phantoms from out life's dear forsaken ways?


  Give us again the crazy clay-built nest,
      Summer, and soft unseasonable spring,
      Our flowers to pluck, our broken songs to sing,
  Our fairy gold of evening in the West;
      Still to the land we love our longings cling,
  The sweet vain world of turmoil and unrest.

  --Graham R. Tomson.


Let me frankly confess that I love this world and the things of it,
and so, I believe, do all in whom the "great, glad, aboriginal" and
God-given love of life is whole and healthy, and not stunted by
sickness of mind or body. For the bereaved and the sorrow-stricken
I make every allowance and would have all tenderness, but I suspect
either the honesty or the health (and by "health" I mean, of course,
mental as well as physical soundness) of those who express themselves
as being "desirous of departing," or who assert that love of this
world is irreconcilable with the love of God.

It is not God's world, with its love and friendship and little
children, its fields and flowers, sea and sky, sunlight and starshine,
and sweet consolations of Art and Song, against which we are bidden to
beware. No it is _man's_ world--the world which devotes itself to gain,
or to the wish to be somebody in society; to the frittering away of our
days in fashionable frivolity, or in struggling to outdo our neighbour,
not in the purity of our lives, or the dignity of our actions, but in
our clothes, our carriages, and the company we keep--_this_ world it is
which cannot be rightly loved by one in whom dwelleth the love of the
Father.

But God's world we can never love half enough, can never sufficiently
appreciate and enjoy. Suppose that you and I, my reader, had to make
a world--call it a heaven if you will--of our own designing, and were
entrusted with infinite potentialities for the purpose. Could we, could
all of us combined, ever conceive of anything half so beautiful as this
world at which so many of us gaze with apathetic eyes?

  "An idle poet, here and there,
    Looks round him, but for all the rest,
  The world, unfathomably fair,
    Is duller than a witling's jest."

At best we could but copy, but if it so happened that we, to whom it
was given to create, had never been permitted to set eyes even upon
this earth beforehand, what sort of a world then, think you, should we
contrive to construct?

I believe that if God were to make a man, a full-grown man in a moment,
and were to set him down in the midst of the world, to look upon it
with new eyes, and for the first time, instead of letting him grow up
from a child, _to become accustomed to it_--for it is true, as Mr.
Lowell says, that "we glance carelessly at the sunrise, and get used to
Orion and the Pleiades,"--I believe that that man would be in danger
of delirium from his overwhelming joy and wonder at the beauty and the
boundlessness of that which he saw around.

Even this grim old London is full of beauty and of boundlessness; of
beauty which strikes me breathless, and of boundlessness of life, and
sky; for in what slum of it, be it never so stifling, are we quite shut
out from view of the stars or the sunshine, or of the human faces that
come and go in the streets? But a moment ago, while looking out from
my window upon a crowded, choking city thoroughfare, I caught one
glimpse of a woman's profile, as she passed with her head poised, and
half-turned towards me; and though the vision was gone in an instant,
the sweep of the queenly neck, ivory-white and stately as a lily-stem,
set my senses vibrating with a thrill of exquisite pleasure. And
yonder, looking into a window, I see another face, the sweet pure face
of a maiden. I run my eye like a finger along the profile, I follow
the flowing line of the hair; but even as I look, she turns, is gone
and is forgotten, for her place is taken by a girl with a basket of
flowers, the flowers that I love as I love nothing else but poetry.
It is Emerson, I think, who tells us that God's loveliest gifts are
the commonest; and that sun and sky and flowers are scarce denied to
a beggar's call; and it is pitiful, as he says in another passage,
the things by which we call ourselves rich or poor. Why, I have gone
home from my morning's walk, feeling richer in the possession of a
handful of honey-suckle than if I had found a purse of sovereigns by
the wayside; nor could all the art-treasures of Bond Street (not that
I fail to appreciate them, either) give me a more exquisite thrill of
sweetly-saddened pleasure than does the tender perfume of a bunch of
violets.

As a child I used to fancy that I found in a flower all my whitest
and purest thoughts crystallized into a thing; and now, though I am
a man, the white-pure thoughts of my childhood still live for me in
every flower that blossoms in the meadows; for the flowers bring me
back not only my vanished childhood, but my childhood's innocence
and peace. Even in those remote child-days I was persuaded that the
flowers were not of earth, but of heaven, nor while I had them could
I believe heaven to be so very far off, after all. "Else how could the
flower-seeds have been blown over its edge, and fallen down to the
earth-land?" I would say to myself. And I find myself fancying now, as
I fancied then, that God takes the flowers home to His heaven in the
winter, and every spring when I welcome them back, I feel that they
have come as direct from Him and from heaven as if He had leant down
out of the skies to give them to me; and I feel that they are not my
flowers, but His flowers; for even as I gather them to call them mine,
He puts forth His hand and claims them, so that they fade away again to
the heaven whence they came.

Yes, I love this world, and the things of it. To me the mere
consciousness of life is a gladness, the pulsing of my heart a
pleasure. I pencil the latter part of this chapter while lying lazily
in a sun-filled meadow, and as I write I seem to feel the very drawing
of my breath a joy. The sky spreads above me, a shimmering sea of
blue--not the cool, crystalline sapphire of early morning, but the deep
dense azure of a midsummer noon. How hot the bees must feel in that
furry coat! As I lie here, basking in the sunlight, and watching the
buttercups dancing and dipping above the grass, like golden banners
amid an army of green-bladed bayonets, I do not wonder that the poor
bees keep up a dull droning hum of monotonous murmuring. I can see the
hot air simmering and quivering above the clover fields, but all else
is drowsily, dreamily still. I know that the streets of the far-off
city are reeking and smoking with dry and dusty heat, but here I am in
another world, and the bees and the birds are my brothers. This meadow
is my boundless prairie; my head is below the level of the grass tops,
and they spread feathery, filmy arms above, like the boughs of a vast
forest.

Yes, lying here in this sun-filled meadow on this summer morning, I am
conscious that I love my life, and that I should be loath to leave it.
I love to feel the wind upon my cheek, and to hear it as it whistles
by me, singing in my ears, as in the hollow convolutions of a shell.
I love to stand and look out upon the sea, or upon open plains and
broad sky-spaces, which give us _eyesight room_ and room for our souls
to be. I love to lie and listen to the song of the wind among the
pine-trees,--the "sailing" pine trees,--and to watch them swing and
sway like storm-tossed barks at sea. I love to see the rook beat up
against the wind, and poise and hover and soar, and slide down upon the
edge of the blast with rigid blade-like wings that shear the air like a
knife. And when I watch him cut the ether in circles as full and fair
as the curves of a woman's bosom, I think of him less as a bird than as
some winged artist of the heights, who delights in flowing line, and
grace of form and feature; and I too feel buoyant and airy, and to my
very limbs is lent the lightness of his flight.

I love, too, the companionship of those who love the things that
I love--my spiritual brethren and fellow-worshippers; for, to my
thinking, the lovers of Art, Music, Nature, Poetry, or of Religion,
are all of them in one attitude of mind, and are animated by one
and the same spirit--I call it the Worshipping Spirit. It may body
itself forth in the homage-love of the musician for harmony, in the
artist-worship of sensuous beauty, or, highest of all, in the adoration
of Christ and of that which is spiritually perfect; and yet all these
loves are not many loves, but one love, for they are but different
expressions of one and the same spirit. Hence to turn from a chapter
of St. John to a sunset, a sonnet from Wordsworth, or a picture by
Botticelli, is to me not unseemly, but natural, for each of these
arouses, in different degrees, one and the same emotion, and that
emotion has its source in one and the same Worshipping Spirit.

I love also travel, change and adventure. I love the Botticellis, the
Fra Angelicos and the Leonardo of our own princely National Gallery,
not the less, but the better for an occasional ramble in the Louvre, or
among the galleries of Holland or Italy. I love the life, the stir and
bustle of our London streets; but I love, too, the old-world rest and
repose of Bruges or of Berne; and many a time have I lingered the long
day through in the antique streets of Antwerp, listening to the sweet
uproar and silvern wrangling that ripples, cloud-borne and wind-wafted,
from where the stately belfry soars lark-like above the world. To
me to have been happy once is to establish a claim upon happiness
thenceforward, and it is for this reason, I suppose, that I love so
to re-live the past, and to dwell on the memory of former sights and
scenes. It is true, as Frederick Robertson says, that the "first time
never returns," and shall I ever forget the exultation of the moment
when, after repeated failures, I first set foot on that inaccessible
mountain-height which I had risked my life to scale? Even now, lying
here in this sunny English meadow, I seem to re-live that moment, and
to see that scene again. Before me rises one wild and wasteful world of
white--a white on which the fierce rays of the sun beat and burn with
blinding, blazing, intolerable brilliance. Above, swimming and soaring
away into unfathomable azure, spreads the silent heaven, but around,
about, beneath, all is white, deathly-white, save only where the vast
angles of ice-crag or column deepen into a lustrous turquoise, or where
a blue mist broods athwart the mouth of yawning crevasse or cavern.
Below me and afar--so far that it seems as if I were cut off from it
for ever,--lies the sunny village that I left so many toilsome hours
ago, just visible, a wee white dot upon the green. There the air is
sweet with the breath of flowers and of the clover-fields, there, too,
are the bees, and the butterflies, and the music of rushing water.
But here, where the wasteful snows writhe and wreathe around in arch
and cave and column, vast and wonderful to behold--above, the shining
zenith, below, the sheer abyss and the treacherous descent--here in the
solemn solitude and silence of this whited wilderness, I can scarcely
believe that I am still on the earth, and of it, and that the dazzling
dome on which I am standing is but the white and swelling bosom of the
Great Mother from whom we all sprang.

Or, weary of the silence and the snow-solitudes, I close my eyes,
and lo! I am down in the valley again, and all around me spreads a
blithe and beauteous scene of serenest summer. On every breeze that
sings from sunny slope or smiling pasture is borne the windy chime and
clamour of countless cattle-bells from the hillside, but beyond that,
and the unbroken _buzz_ and _burr_, which bespeak the deep content of
innumerable bees, all is still, drowsily still. Here, if anywhere, one
can realize for a moment the deep, dreamy peacefulness that pervades
the opening lines of Mr. Swinburne's majestic "Garden of Proserpine,"--

  "Here, where the world is quiet,
    Here, where all trouble seems
  Dead winds' and spent waves' riot
    In doubtful dream of dreams;
  I watch the green field growing,
  For reaping folk and sowing,
  For harvest time and mowing,
    A sleepy world of streams."

Here are the bees, the birds, and the butterflies; here, too, nestling
cosily on hillside or meadow, are dotted dozens of umber-brown châlets,
each of which seems to suggest that "haunting sense of human history"
of which George Macdonald speaks, when he says that "many a simple home
will move one's heart like a poem, many a cottage like a melody."

And now there is a change in the picture: the drowsiness and
the dreaminess are gone, and there is the free, fresh sense of
motion, and of the open. In my ears is the journeying music of the
_diligence_--music which despite its jingle never becomes monotonous,
for every now and then the horses toss their heads to shake off the too
persistent flies, and sprinkle the air with spray of silvery sounds.
The road winds along a mountain path overlooking a lake, and the
mirroring of sunset fire upon the surface of the water, the cool clear
crystal of the blue depths that swim away below, the purple distance
of the farther hills, fast-shrouding in light-drawn mist, and lastly,
the solemn splendour of that sky-hung, soaring summit, brooding like
a presence athwart the skies,--all these make up a scene upon which I
am never weary of dwelling, and which I dearly love to recall; a scene
of such indescribable loveliness as to leave me at last bowed and
breathless, and

  "Sad with the whole of pleasure."

I thought when I penned the last paragraph that I had made an end
of telling you of my love of life and of the things of it, but that
half-line which I have quoted from Rossetti's most beautiful sonnet
sets me thinking of another love of which I have not yet spoken. Need I
say that I mean the love of music? not only of the music which is "like
soft hands stealing into ours in the dark, and holding us fast without
a spoken word," but also of those sobbing soaring strains, which sound
as sadly in our ears as does the wintry flittering of dead leaves upon
a withered bough? To those who feel that every ray of morning sunlight
which strikes across their path calls them to a higher and holier
living; to whose hearts the pure petals of a primrose are as a silent
reproach against their own impurity; to whom a glint of blue sky,
gleaming out between rain-beaten tree-tops is as an aspiration towards
a loftier, lovelier life; to whom the very wind, as it sings from the
gates of morning, cries out "Unclean! unclean!"--to such, I suppose,
music must ever contain less of joy than of sadness, if, indeed, it
appeal not with a pleasure which cuts to the heart like a pain. It is
to them as if an angel from heaven had cast, for one passing second,
upon a cloud-screen drawn across the soul, a vision of what they
_might_ be, of what they were _meant_ to be, and of what in God's good
time they may yet become; and as if at the very moment when the spirit
was pouring itself forth in one unutterable cry of longing after the
Divine beauty of that ideal, there rose before them the shadow-horror
of what they really are.


FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: Then why print it here? asks the reader. For the reason,
I reply, that this Diary is the history, not only of a sin, but of a
soul; and that to leave the aspect of my subject here treated unnoticed
would be to give but a maimed and one-sided representation. I do not
think any reader who studies my sketch-outline as a whole will consider
the introduction of this chapter as inartistic.]

[Illustration]




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CHAPTER IV.

_I DIE._


I pass on now to tell of my death moments. The room in which I died was
the room in which I had been born. One half of it was my bedroom, and
the other half--that near the window--was my study. There I had done
all my work, and there were my books and papers. There, too, grouped
around the walls, were portraits of the men and women who seem to me
sometimes to be more myself, as Emerson puts it, than even I am, and
who are nearer to me and dearer to me, many of them, than are some of
those who sit daily with me in the household--I mean the portraits of
my favourite writers.

I do not know whether the literary associations of the room had any
part--probably they had--in determining the current of my thought, but
I remember that, during the first few hours of the morning preceding my
death, I found my mind running on poets and poetry. I recollect that I
was thinking chiefly of Rossetti, and of the fact that he was haunted,
as he lay a-dying, by passages from his own poems. Not that I saw or
see any cause in that fact for wonder, for I can recall lines of his
which I can believe would haunt one even in heaven.

Those of my readers who fail to appreciate in its fulness the saying
of "Diana of the Crossways" that in poetry "those that have souls
meet their fellows," or that of the _Saturday Review_, that "there
is an incommunicable magic in poetry which is foolishness to the
multitude,"--may think this an exaggeration. Ah well, they are of the
"multitude,"--the more pity for them!--and can never understand how
the soul is stirred by a simple sentence in the god-like language of
Shakespeare, or is as irresistibly swayed as are trees in a whirlwind
by a single stanza from Swinburne; how the magic witchery of a couplet
by Keats can bring tears to the eyes; or how the tender grace of a line
from Herrick can set the senses vibrating with an exquisite thrill of
joy. Nay, I could indicate sentences in the diamond-pointed prose of
George Meredith, pellucid sentences, crystal-clear and luminous as the
scintillations of Sirius (and for all their judicial poise and calmness
emitted like the Sirius scintillations at a white heat),--which affect
me in a similar way. There are few other writers of whom I could
affirm this with the like confidence; but Meredith's thoughts have
crystallized into a brain-stimulating prose--every sentence of which is
a satisfying mouthful to our intellectual hunger--which is sometimes
pure poetry.

Poetry is to my diary, however, and in fact to all I think or say,
what King Charles's head was to Mr. Dick's memorial, and it is time I
returned to my narrative.

The possibility of a fatal ending to my illness had never occurred to
myself or to my family, until that ending was nigh at hand, and so it
was that death came upon me in every way unawares. I remember my father
bending over me, and asking gently if I knew that I was dying, and I
recollect looking up to whisper back, "No: is it so?" and receiving
his sorrowful response. It was too late then for me to do more than
recognise the fact as a fact, for my brain was so strangely affected
that I was utterly incapable of following out that fact to its result.
I knew that I was dying--knew it much as I might have known it of some
other person--but felt no individual pang of terror or surprise. This
state of indifferent acquiescence in that which was about to occur
was followed by a sense of regret at having to leave a volume which I
had in hand unfinished, and then, with the ruling passion strong in
death, I found myself endeavouring to find fitting words to describe
my sensations. It is so with me ever and always. Art and Poetry have
become such realities, that I cannot take them up and lay them aside
at pleasure, but must needs bear them with me whithersoever I go. I
carry my poetry with me to bed and to breakfast; and I can sit and
write, or carry on a conversation, with the consciousness of Mr. Lang's
latest _Ballade_, or Mr. Theodore Watts's last sonnet, running like an
undercurrent in my mind. I am perpetually striving to fix in language
the fleeting colours of sea and sky. I can never listen to the trickle
and purl of a brooklet tinkling over its pebbly bed, without making
diligent search in my vocabulary for a word--the golden word--which
seems most to babble and to blab of water. As surely as I find in
Wordsworth's poems a background of sky and mountain, just as surely do
I find in mountain and sky an echo of Wordsworth's song. To me, too,
the sonnet which rises involuntarily to my lips, as I gaze out upon
the deep, is as much a part of the scene before me, as is the sun or
the sand upon the shore; and I have come to feel with Mr. Lowell, as
if a sunset were "like a quotation from Dante or Milton," and that "if
Shakespeare be read in the very presence of the sea itself, his voice
shall but seem nobler for the sublime criticism of ocean."

I was telling you that as I lay a-dying, I found myself endeavouring
to find fitting words to describe my sensations. At this point,
however, the train of my thoughts was disturbed--and I recollect
a slight reawakening of my old characteristic irritability at the
interruption--by the entrance of a sister who had come from a distance
to see me. I remember slightly lifting my head to speak to her, and
then glancing round the room to see if all were present. Yes, close
beside me, and with his head bowed over his hands, sat my father, and
round about the bed were gathered the remainder of the family. Nor were
these all, for standing among them were three other figures--that of my
brother Fred, whose grave as yet was hardly green, and of my mother and
my little sister Comfort, both of whom had died when I was a child. If
my conviction that I have indeed been dead be a delusion,--as I doubt
not many of my readers will think,--is it not strange, I would ask,
that these faces should have been with me at the end? Had there been
any conjecture in my mind as to the probability of my meeting with my
lost ones, I could readily believe that what I saw was the creation
of my own brain. But there had been no such conjecture, for death
had taken me, as I have already explained, entirely unawares, and no
thought of the dead had as much as occurred to me. Their presence,
however, so far from causing me any surprise, seemed perfectly natural,
for the fact that they were dead did not dawn upon my consciousness.

This, I am ready to allow, strongly supports the theory that these
experiences may be nothing more than dreams, for in dreams it not
seldom happens that we re-live the past, and hold converse with our
departed ones, all oblivious of the death which has come between us.
It _may_ be so, I admit, but in my heart of hearts I cannot think it;
for if all that I have to tell be but a dream, then does it seem to me
the strangest dream ever dreamed by man. Moreover, with these three
figures was a fourth--a figure which at first had escaped my notice;
and it is the presence of this figure in the room which is to me most
unaccountable. My mother, when I first saw her, was standing at the
foot of the bed, with my dead brother and sister looking over her
shoulder, but at the sight of my father's grief, she went gently round
to where he was sitting, and with a caress of infinite pity stooped
down as if to whisper in his ear. It was then that I saw for the first
time that she held by the hand a little child--a little child whom I
had never seen before, but across whose face, as he looked up at me,
there flitted the phantom of a resemblance I could not catch.

I remember that even then, brain-benumbed and dying as I was, I
wondered who that little child could be; but there dawned upon me no
shadowy suspicion of the truth, and I passed away with that wonder
unremoved.

I think now--nay, I am sure--that I know who that child was. It was my
brother James John, the eldest of the family, who had died before I was
born, and whom, in this world, therefore, I had never seen.

I have little left to tell of my death, for nothing else occurred of
any moment, and I am resolved to confine myself strictly to facts. I
remember that immediately after I had seen my mother, and while I was
wondering who the child she held by the hand could be, there came over
me a strange and sudden sense of loss--of physical loss, I think it
was, as though some life-element had gone out from me. Of pain there
was none, nor was I disturbed by any mental anxiety. I recollect only
an ethereal lightness of limb, and a sense of soul-emancipation and
peace--a sense of soul-emancipation such as one might feel were he to
awaken on a sunny morning to find that all sorrow and sin were gone
from the world for ever; a peace ample and restful as the hallowed
hush and awe of summer twilight, without the twilight's tender pain.

Then I seemed to be sinking slowly and steadily through still depths
of sun-steeped, light-filled waters that sang in my ears with a sound
like a sweet-sad sobbing and soaring of music, and through which there
swam up to me, in watered vistas of light, scenes of sunny seas and
shining shores where smiling isles stretched league beyond league afar.
And so life ebbed and ebbed away, until at last there came a time--the
moment of death, I believe--when the outward and deathward setting tide
seemed to reach its climax, and when I felt myself swept shoreward and
lifeward again on the inward-setting tide of that larger life into
which I had died.

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[Illustration]




CHAPTER V.

_IS OF AN EXPLANATORY NATURE ONLY._


When the first rough draft of this diary was lying on my study table,
there called to see me, at a time when I chanced to be out, a certain
novelist who is an old and intimate friend of mine. He was shown into
the study to await my coming, and, on my return, I found him amusing
himself with these papers. Of the reality of my death-experiences
(which he persistently refused to regard as other than dreams) I had
never been able to convince him, and I was not surprised therefore
when, after the conversation turned upon the work each of us had in
hand, he referred to my booklet in his usual sceptical tone.

"My dear fellow," he said, laying one hand upon the offending
manuscript, "I haven't the slightest intention of disputing the truth
of your statements, or of denying that your diary has a certain
unwholesome interest of its own, but seriously, I don't think fiction
is altogether in your line."

"Nor satire in yours," I replied; "but what have you to say against the
thing now?"

"This," he answered, more evidently in earnest, "that you haven't
scored as you might have done, but have let slip what opportunities you
had for turning out something original. 'Letters from Hell' (which, by
the bye, you must expect to be charged with imitating, though _that_
needn't trouble you much) was confessedly a work of pure imagination,
and I shouldn't be surprised if the fact helped somewhat to lessen
the interest of the volume. Now your book has just enough shadow of
probability or possibility to sustain the delusion, and all that
will tell in its favour. The public likes--just as Dick Swiveller's
Marchioness did--to 'make believe' in the reality of that which is
meant to interest it; and books or plays can't be too life-like or
realistic nowadays. You have 'made believe' until you have brought
yourself to believe in the reality of something which I can't think
ever happened; but that isn't my business. What I complain of is
this:--that although you have a story to tell with sufficient shadow
of probability or possibility, as I have said, to make it interesting,
and to keep up the delusion, you have failed most lamentably to turn
your opportunities to account. Take your death scene, for instance. Any
practical writer of ordinary ability could _imagine_ the sensations
of dying, and could draw a far more powerful picture of them than you
have done, who profess to have actually experienced those sensations
personally. Then what you have to say about Heaven and Hell, and all
the rest of it, is curious, and some may think it not uninteresting,
but you haven't given us any idea of what the places are like, after
all. Why didn't you draw on your imagination, man? Why didn't you go
in for the grim, and grey, and ghastly? Why didn't you revel in the
weird (never mind Mr. Lang's abuse of the word), or conjure up blissful
dreams of the blest and of Paradise? I know a dozen men who could have
made twice as much capital, and far more saleable copy, out of that
idea of yours about a man dying, or nearly so, and then coming back to
relate what he has seen, as it appears from the standpoint of frail
mortality; and I tell you frankly that I don't think you have scored as
you ought to have done."

"But what has all this," says the reader, "to do with your diary? We
are willing to hear what you have to tell about your experiences,
but we didn't bargain for an article setting forth the opinion of
your friends on the subject, and we can't help thinking that the
introduction of this chapter is somewhat uncalled for."

Well, perhaps it is so, but it is because the conversation given
above touches upon some points concerning which I am anxious that the
reader should come to a right understanding before he enters upon my
after-death experience, that I have inserted it here, and if a very
few minutes' indulgence be granted me, I will say what I have to say
as briefly as possible. I could, I am sure, by drawing a little on
my imagination, have written a far more striking description of the
sensations of death, than that which I have given in the preceding
chapter, for of such description, in the sense of "working-up a
situation" there is absolutely none. All that I have tried to do is
to relate my story with a resolute avoidance of anything akin to the
sensational. If aught of the sensational there be in the narrative, it
is because the thing is sensational in itself, and not because I have
attempted to make it so. As George Eliot says, it is far easier to draw
a griffin, with wings and claws filled in according to our own fancy,
than to correctly limn the outlines of a lion; and to keep to the
truth has been the hardest part of my task.

When the mental picture or impression left on my mind is but an
imperfect one, I have not attempted, as I might easily and perhaps
pardonably have done, to fill in the missing outline from my
imagination, but have given the picture or impression for what it
is worth, and have left it so. My memory is, generally speaking,
excellent, and during the first few hours of consciousness after the
return of vitality, the recollection of that which I had seen was
as fresh as are the events of yesterday. Within a week, however, I
found that the greater part of it had gone from me, and that all my
efforts to recall the mental pictures were unavailing. I have sometimes
wondered if it can be possible that when my presence was missed
from the realms into which I had so untimely wandered, some angelic
messenger was despatched with instructions to wipe out from the tablets
of my memory the records of my experiences. Whether it be so, or not,
I cannot say, but this I do know, that had I commenced my diary within
a week of my return to life, the booklet would have been one such as
it is not often given to man to write. The subject, however, seemed
then, and for a long time after, too solemn to be turned to account
for "copy," and each of the several years which have elapsed since I
died, has taken with it some part of the recollections that remained
to me; and now that I have all too tardily set about my task, I have
but blurred and broken reminiscences to offer in place of a life-like
picture.

These reminiscences, vague, disconnected, and fragmentary as they
are, I have given for what they are worth. If any reader think that I
have overrated the value of my experiences, and that I have failed to
verify the promise with which I started, I can only assure him that
the failure is due, not to the insufficiency of what is strange and
striking in my experiences, but to my inability to recall what I have
seen, and to my incompetency to do fitting justice to my singular
subject.

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[Illustration]




CHAPTER VI.

_TELLS OF MY FIRST AWFUL AWAKENING IN HELL, AND OF THE SHAMEFUL SIN
WHICH BROUGHT ME THITHER._

  The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
    Is lust in action; and till action, lust
  Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
    Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,
  Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight,
    Past reason hunted, and no sooner had
  Past reason hated, as a swallowed bait,
    On purpose laid to make the taker mad;
  Mad in pursuit, and in possession so;
    Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
  A bliss in proof, and, proved, a very woe;
    Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
  All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
  To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

  _Shakespeare's 129th Sonnet._


Time, which is the name we give to our petty portion of Eternity, has
no existence in that Eternity which has been defined as the "lifetime
of the Almighty"; and so it was that though I remained in the spirit
realm but two days, it seemed to me as if weeks, months, years, had
elapsed between my death and the hour when I first became conscious of
that death.

I have told you that as I lay a-dying, I felt my life slowly
but steadily ebbing away, until at last there came a time--the
moment of death, I believe it to have been--when the outward and
deathward-setting tide seemed to reach its climax, and when I felt
myself swept shoreward and lifeward again. I know there are some who
will say that the turning-point which I have called the moment of death
was nothing more or less than the moment which marked the decline of
the disease, and the return of vitality, but this theory, plausible and
even probable as it seems, leaves the strangest part of my experience
unexplained, and I cannot entertain it; neither, I think, will the
reader, when he has heard me out.

Whether my death was succeeded by a season of slumber, in which certain
divinely ordered dreams were caused to be dreamed by me, or whether
God caused the hands on the dial of Time to be put back for a space in
order that I might see the past as He sees it, I neither knew nor know;
but I distinctly remember that the first thing of which I was conscious
after my dissolution was that the events of my past life were rising
before me. Yes, it was my past life, which I saw in that awful moment,
my past life standing out in its own naked and intolerable horror, an
abomination in the sight of God, and of my own conscience.

The hands on the dial of Time went back half a score, a score, and
finally a score and a half of years, and once more I was a young man of
twenty-one. The chambers in which I was then living were situated in
one of the well-known Inns off Holborn, and the housekeeper of the wing
where I was quartered was a widow, who, with her daughter Dorothy, a
girl of seventeen, resided on the premises.

As it was Dorothy's part to wait upon the occupants of the chambers,
she had occasion to come to my room several times in the day, and I
could not help noticing her loveliness, which, indeed, reminded me not
a little of my favourite Greuze picture. When I first knew her she
seemed maidenly and modest, but was vain beyond a question, and her
manner to the opposite sex was shy and self-conscious, with occasional
dashes of an artless and even childish coquetry which was most
bewitching. By this girl I was irresistibly and fatally fascinated. I
was young, susceptible, and singularly impressionable to female beauty,
whilst the loneliness and the monotony of the life I was leading were
in themselves elements of considerable danger; and to make matters
worse, it was only too evident that Dorothy was not indifferent to
my admiration. As I knew that it was but the fascination of form and
feature which attracted me, and that nothing but mischief was likely
to come of such a passion, I strove my hardest to steel myself against
her; but Fate seemed adverse, for one summer evening while I was
sitting in my study, waiting for a friend, there burst over London the
most fearful thunderstorm which I have ever witnessed. The lightning
was so vivid and the thunder so terrific, that even I, who am by no
means nervous about such things, felt strangely moved and unsettled;
and I was not a little glad, therefore, to hear what I took to be my
friend's knock. When I went to the door, however, I found that it was
not he, but Dorothy, and that she was white with fear, and trembling
from head to foot. "Oh, sir," she sobbed, "mother's out, and there's no
one else in but you, and I'm so frightened that I can't stay by myself.
If you'll only let me be here till she comes back, I'll be very quiet
and not disturb you in any way."

Knowing my weakness and her great beauty, I had up to that moment
studiously refrained from allowing so much as a wandering glance to
rest on her; but I could not avoid looking at her now, and I remember
that her eyes, bright and pitiful and beseeching, "her bosom's gentle
neighbourhood," and the very consciousness of her presence as she stood
before me, set my heart beating so wildly, that it was all I could do
to refrain from taking her in my arms then and there, and telling her
(forgive the profanation of a holy word) that I "loved" her.

The virtuous determination to be on our guard against some besetting
sin or constitutional failing comes to us generally, _not_ during
the moment of temptation, when we are most in need of such a moral
reminder, but _after_ the event, and when the determination is too
late; but on this occasion I heard the inward monitor speak out a
timely warning, and that with no uncertain tongue. By a great effort
I nerved myself to my accustomed control, and though I knew Dorothy
would think me churlish and cruel, I told her coldly that she had
better go downstairs and wait the return of her mother. The words had
scarcely time to pass my lips (I doubt, indeed, if she could have heard
them), before they were lost in a terrific thunder-peal, following
almost instantaneously upon a blinding flash of lightning. It had been
better for both of us, as I have often since thought, if that flash
had struck us dead as we stood there; for, with one cry of passion and
fear, and calling me by my name--my Christian name--in a tone that none
could misinterpret, Dorothy flung her arms around me, and the next
moment I found myself pressing her to my heart with a fierce and almost
savage exultation, and telling her, amid a score of burning kisses,
that I loved her.

Almost immediately afterwards we heard the opening of doors, which
indicated her mother's home-coming, but not before Dorothy had time to
tell me in return that she too loved me, and had always done so. And
then she slipped from my arms, and tripped away with tumbled hair and
flaming cheeks to join her mother, turning as she reached the door to
look back with a shy smile and to say--innocently and unsuspectingly
enough as I knew well--that the room directly over mine was her own,
and that she often lay awake at night listening to my restless pacing
to and fro, and wondering what could keep me up so late.

Of the hellish thought which rose in my heart as I listened--the
thought that she would not refuse me admittance to her room should I
seek her there that night--she could have had no suspicion, for it was
a thought of which, at any other time, I should have deemed myself
incapable. I remember that I did not fling the hateful suggestion from
me, as I should have done an hour earlier, although, passion-maddened
as I was, I recoiled from it, and vowed that I would never entertain
it. But I brooded over the horrible idea, and sketched out how easily
it might be acted upon, were I the foul thing to do it, which I still
declared to myself I was not. Had I arisen in trembling horror, and
thrust the vile conception from me, she and I might even then have been
saved, but I let it enter and take up its abode in my heart, and from
thenceforward I strove to drive it forth in vain.

Oh! in God's name, in the name of Love and Truth and Purity, when
any such evil or impure thought so much as casts the shadow of its
approaching presence on your soul, then, in all the strength of your
manhood, arise and thrust it out, ere it be too late! Argue not, delay
not, listen not, but hurl the loathsome whisper from you as though it
were some poisonous reptile, and bid it be gone for ever!

From the moment that I gave audience to that messenger of Satan, hell
and its furies laid hold on me. Sometimes I seemed to be gaining
ground, sometimes I seemed to be recovering my balance of mind. "I
_will_ do the right!" I cried, "I will _not_ be guilty of this accursed
thing!" but even as I strove to fix my feeble purpose to the sticking
point, some moral screw seemed to give way within me, and I felt that
purpose ebbing away like life-blood from a fatal wound.

At last the struggle seemed to cease, and there was borne in upon me a
sense of peace, deep, and sweet, and restful. I know now that it was
but exhaustion consequent upon the strain I had endured, that it was
nothing more than the inevitable reaction from the high soul-tension to
which I had been subjected. To me, however, it seemed as the very peace
of God and as a sign from heaven, and lulled into a false security, I
let my thoughts wander back to dwell again upon the temptation. Need
I tell the remainder of my story? Need I say that my passion had but
simulated defeat, as passion often does, in order that it might turn in
an unguarded moment, and rend me with redoubled fury? The next moment I
saw my last gasping effort to will the right sink amid the tempestuous
sea of sinful wishes, as a drowning man sinks after he has risen for
the third time; and deliberately thrusting away, in the very doggedness
of despair, the invisible hand which yet strove to stay me, I arose and
sought the room that I had prayed I might never enter.

       *       *       *       *       *

You may wonder, perhaps, how it is that I am able to recall so vividly
the circumstances of an event which happened many years ago. You would
cease so to wonder, had you seen, as I have seen, the ghost of your
dead self rise up to cry for vengeance against you, and to condemn
you before the judgment seat of God, and of your own conscience. For
this was my first glimpse of Hell; this was my Day of Judgment. The
recording angel of my own indestructible and now God-awakened memory
showed me my past life as God saw it, and as it appeared when robbed of
the loathsome disguises with which I had so long contrived to hide my
own moral nakedness. "Sin looks much more terrible to those who look
at it, than to those who do it," says the author of the "Story of an
African Farm." "A convict, or a man who drinks, seems something so far
off and horrible when we see him, but to himself he seems quite near
to us, and like us. We wonder what kind of a creature he is, but he is
just we ourselves." It was so indeed that I had thought and wondered.
I had read often of "adulterers" and "murderers" in the newspapers,
and had thought of them as I thought of lepers or of cannibals,
in no way imagining that _my_ youthful escapade could render such
words applicable to me. I had accustomed myself to calling my crime
"gallantry" in my own thoughts, and I should have regarded one who used
harsher language as wanting in delicacy and in breeding; and now I
found myself branded as "Murderer" and "Seducer" to all Eternity!

"Murderer!" you say. Yes, murderer, for seduction _is_ moral murder;
and the man who has thus sinned against a woman is fit only to stand
side by side with him who has taken a life. Ay, and his is not seldom
the more awful punishment, for God will as surely require the spiritual
life at the hands of the seducer, as He will the bodily life at the
hand of the murderer.

The one thing of all others which added to the unutterable horror of
that moment, was the memory of the false and lying excuses with which I
had striven to palliate my sin to myself. I remember that such excuses
took form and shape, and haunted and tortured me like devils--as indeed
they were--of my own begetting. "The relation of the sexes," I had
often said when striving to silence an uneasy conscience, "Bah! it is
but a yoke of man's imposing. I take the woman I love to live with
me, and she and I are shunned as lepers. Yonder is a man who follows
the same precedent and from the same motive; and because a priest has
murmured a few words of sanction over the contract, he and his partner
are fêted and flattered. How can the indulgence of a natural passion
which in one set of circumstances is fair and honourable, in another be
sinful and foul? Fair is fair, and foul is foul, and no muttering of a
man can transform the one into the other."

This is the way in which I had repeatedly striven to silence my
conscience, and it is but one instance of the way in which many others
on this earth are now striving to silence theirs. "For God's sake," I
would say to them, "beware!" Such hardening of the heart against the
Holy Spirit, such God-murdering (for it _is_ the wish to kill God, and
to silence His voice for ever) is the one unpardonable sin which is a
thousand-fold more awful in its consequences than is the crime which it
seeks to conceal. It was the foulest stain on the soul of him who hung
by the dying Saviour, and it is, I believe at this moment, the one and
only thing which still keeps Hell Hell, and Satan Satan.

Must I write further of the torture-throes of that awful moment, when
I first saw my sin in its true light? God only knows how even now I
shudder and shrink at the mere thought of it; but I have told you of
my crime, and it is right that I should speak also of my punishment.
I remember that when the realization of what I was, and what I had
done, was first borne in upon me, I fell to the ground and writhed and
shrieked in agony. The tortures of a material hell,--of a thousand
material hells,--I would have endured with joyfulness could such
torture have drowned for one moment the thought-anguish that tore me.
Nay, mere physical suffering--physical suffering meted out to me as
punishment, and in which, though it were powerless to expiate, I could
at least participate by enduring--I would have welcomed with delirious
gladness, but of such relief or diversion of thought there was none.
From the mere mention of annihilation--the personal annihilation of
soul and body, of thought and sensation--I had ever shrunk with abject
loathing and dread; but to annihilation, had it been then within my
reach, I would have fought my way through a thousand devils. But in
hell there is no escape through annihilation; suicide, the last refuge
of tyrannous and cowardly despair, is of none avail,

  "And death once dead there's no more dying then."

What had to be endured I found _must_ be endured, and that unto the
uttermost, for in all horrid hell there was no nook or cranny into
which I could creep to hide myself from the hideous spectres of the
past. I remember that I rose up in my despair, and stretching vain
hands to the impotent heavens, shrieked out as only one can shriek who
is torn by hell-torture and despair. I fell to the ground and writhed
and foamed in convulsive and bloody agony. I dug my cruel nails deep
into my burning eyeballs, and tearing those eyeballs from their tender
sockets, flung them bleeding from me; but not thus could I blind myself
to the sights of hell, nor could mere physical pain wipe out from my
brain the picture of the ruin I had wrought.

And then--but no, I am sick, I am ill, I am fainting; I cannot, I
cannot write more.

[Illustration]




[Illustration]




CHAPTER VII.

_SHOWS THE FITNESS OF MY PUNISHMENT._

 "But there will come another era, when it shall be light, and when man
 shall awaken from his lofty dreams and find _his dreams still there,
 and that nothing is gone save his sleep_."--Jean Paul.--_Preface to
 "Hesperus."_


The following paragraph is taken from a diary which I kept before my
decease. I will explain later on my reason for giving the extract
here:--

"It has been said that no man can realize to the full the certainty of
his own dissolution; that each acknowledges the inevitability of death
in regard to others and to the race, but cherishes a secret conviction
that he himself will, through some strange and unforeseen circumstance,
prove the solitary exception.

"Of the truth of this assertion as a general rule, I cannot of
course speak, but I know that I at least have never so thought. On
the contrary, there are moments when death (by which I do not mean
annihilation, but the dying into life) seems the only certainty there
is before me, all else being shadowy and unreal. I am a child of
eternity dreaming the dream of time, and even while I dream I am half
awake and know that I am but dreaming. Life is to me--not poetically
only, but positively--a dream and unsubstantial. The world is a dream,
things and persons are but dreams, and exist for me only in my thoughts
of them. My self-consciousness becomes awake, and I look in and down
upon myself with a wonder as fresh and novel as if the mystery of my
own existence had never caused me wonder or surprise before. I stretch
out my hand, as an infant does, and open and shut the fingers, and ask
myself who I am and what I am doing here. I tell myself my name, and I
see that the hand, the body, and the clothes that I look down upon have
a strangely familiar aspect, but the name conveys no meaning to me, the
familiarity is but the familiarity of an oft-dreamed dream, and is, I
know, but the sign that I am still dreaming.

"I look out each day upon the face of the earth with as much wonder and
surprise as if I were some new-comer thereon, and were opening my eyes
upon it for the first and only time. Upon London and the life of it,
though I passed half my days within the sound of St. Paul's, I gaze and
wonder as upon some dream-pageant, with ever-increasing awe. I look
up upon that ample dome, large-looming, and brooding like a Presence
athwart the skies, until its surroundings and itself and those who come
and go in the streets are to me as unsubstantial as 'a city visioned in
a dream.'

"So supremely conscious am I at such times that

                            'We are such stuff
  As dreams are made of, and our little life
  Is rounded with a sleep,'

that were I, while this mood is on me, to open my eyes one morning and
find that all this present world and its dream-creations had passed
away for ever, there would hardly stir in my heart one momentary
thrill of surprise, for I should but sigh and say, 'Ah, then, at last
it has come, and now I am asleep no longer!'

"What the awakened life for which I am waiting will be like, I know not
consciously, but something there is within me that does know, and that
has a dumb inarticulate knowledge of it, like the memory of a dream
which we have not all forgotten, yet cannot all recall. That it will
be _Life_, I am sure--a life which though orbing in ampler cycle and
vaster sweep than this life, is yet on one and the same plane with it,
and in no way separate and distinct. Nay, even now this dream-world
would seem to be surrounded and insphered by the waking one, even as
'time is but a parenthesis in eternity;' for there are realities in
this unreal existence, flowers and faces, love and poetry, and the
morning and evening skies, which have to me no part in this perishable
world, but which 'torment me ever with invitations to their own
inaccessible home.'"

I have transcribed this extract from my earlier diary, not because I
think there is anything in it worth preservation, but because I believe
it very aptly illustrates the suitability of the punishment meted out
to me in hell to my own peculiar temperament. I was one of those who
lived only in thought. "The world is a dream," I said, "things and
persons are but dreams, and exist for me only in my thought of them."
Hence to make my punishment a _thought_, to confront me with the memory
of my crime and of its consequences, and to leave me thus hell-haunted
by the cry of an awakened conscience, was to inflict a torment upon me
a thousand-fold more terrible than material pain.

To those, however, who think with Heine, that "mental torture is more
easily to be endured than physical pain," I have a word to say. When I
was in hell, I saw there the souls of men and women whom I had known in
life, and I learnt something of the nature of their sufferings. Unlike
my own, that punishment was, in many cases, not mental but physical;
and to those who are incapable of realizing what agony a thought
can bring, let me say that hell has too its bodily punishment, and
punishment from which there is no escape.




[Illustration]




CHAPTER VIII.

_MAKE AN UNEXPECTED DISCOVERY IN HELL, AND MEET WITH AN OLD
ACQUAINTANCE._

 "The servants said unto Him, Wilt Thou then that we go and gather
 them up? But He said, Nay; lest while ye gather up the tares, ye
 root up also the wheat with them. _Let both grow together until the
 harvest._"--Matt. xiii. 28, 29, 30.


I come now to what I think is the strangest part of my story. "When
any one dies," I had been told in childhood, "he goes to one or the
other of two places--either to hell or to heaven--according to whether
he has been a good or bad man," and I recollect being not a little
troubled in my childish mind as to what became of the people whose
virtues were about equally matched with their vices (as I had even then
discovered was not seldom the case), and whose chances between hell and
heaven were what we used to call in my schoolboy days (I do not say it
irreverently) a "toss-up."

"Even God must be puzzled sometimes," I used to think to myself, "to
know what to do with the folk who are not wicked enough for hell, but
a little too bad for heaven." Once after I had been taken to hear a
long evangelical sermon, I thought I saw a way out of the difficulty by
assuming that when God "weighed" a man (I use the phraseology of the
sermon referred to, and I remember that not being clear as to how much
of the language was figurative or otherwise I had an idea that souls
really were weighed in some sort of celestial balance) and found him
"wanting," He turned the scale in the sinner's favour by pouring in
some of the blood of Christ. I can recall, too, that for a day or two
I went about fancying myself quite a juvenile theologian, until the
conviction that even God must draw the line somewhere, set me thinking
that a good many folk would thus be consigned to the bad place for
doing that which was only a very little more wicked than was done by
those who were admitted to the good one.

My ideas about hell and heaven, even at the time of my death, were
not very clear and not very many, although I do not think they were
more cloudy and less practical than are the ideas entertained upon the
subject by other folk. I had been brought up in all the old-fashioned
orthodox and scriptural notions, and "going to heaven" was as
inseparable in my mind from upward motion of some sort as "going to
hell" was with downward motion. Each of the places was a separate
and distinct one--the former being situated, according to my belief,
somewhere in the direction of the zenith, while the latter I localized
in the bowels of the earth, and connected in my thoughts with fire and
darkness. Now let me give the results of my experiences, premising
only that in regard to what I have to say about the after life, it
must be understood that I am speaking only of that ante-chamber of the
spirit-world--that in some sense purgatory, as I am half inclined to
hold it--into which I have had admittance.

My experiences, then, are briefly these. _The good and the bad are not
parted, but exist together as they exist here, and heaven and hell as
separate places have no existence._

I will tell you how I first came to discover this. I have said that
after my change (in the spirit-world that which we call "death" is
spoken of as the "change") I awoke to find myself in "hell," and I
ought perhaps to add that I used the word as indicating a state of
mental or physical suffering--in my case the former--and not with any
local significance.

Even in hell, however, there are moments when the intensity of the
suffering is, for a narrow space of time at least, relaxed, and when
the anguish-stricken spirit is mercifully allowed a temporary reprieve.
Such a moment occurred after the first awful paroxysm of self-loathing
and torture which I experienced when my past life was made known to
me in its true colours, and it was in this saner, and comparatively
painless interval, that I met in the spirit realm one whom I had known
and honoured on earth as a woman of the purest life and character.
Being still under the impression that I was in "hell" in the sense in
which I had been accustomed to think of that place, I started back upon
seeing her, and hardly noticing her words of greeting, cried out in
astonishment, "You here! _You!_ and in Hades!"

"Where else should I be except where _he_ is?" she answered quietly,
adding, as she observed my look of evident perplexity, "It is Arthur,
of course, of whom I speak."

I remembered then that when I had known her first, her only living
relative was a worthless brother of that name, to whom she was
passionately attached, but who had been dead so long that I had hardly
any recollection of him. Before I could question her further, I suppose
she saw something in my face which told her all that was necessary
to be known of my own story, for she suddenly burst into tears, and
taking both my hands in her own with a gesture of compassionate grief,
exclaimed, "Forgive me my foolish and selfish forgetfulness! Oh, I am
so, so sorry!"

It was from her that I first gathered that even for me there was yet
hope, and it was from her lips that I learned much of that which I have
to tell of the spirit-world.

"Do you think," said she to me, when I had again expressed my wonder
at finding that heaven and hell were not as I had supposed, separate
places, "Do you think that I could be happy anywhere separated from my
brother? Why, even Dives in the parable was unable to forget the five
brethren he had left behind him, and cried out amid the flames, asking
that Lazarus might be sent to warn them, lest they too should come to
that place of torment. Is it likely, then, that any wife, mother, or
sister, worthy the name, would be content to settle down idle-handed in
heaven knowing that a loved one was in hell and in agony? I know there
are folk on earth who try to smooth out the creases that crop up in the
creed-roll of their convictions, by asserting that the truly regenerate
soul will unconditionally surrender everything to the will of God,
and that they, for their part, are quite prepared to leave the fate
of their erring fellow-creatures in the hands of the Creator. I don't
say that they are not right in so speaking, although, as far as I am
concerned, I have more sympathy with old Dives and his wish to warn his
sinning brethren. But how are we to know what is the final will of God
in regard to one's fellows? When we are satisfied that a man who has
fallen into the water is dead, we may not unnaturally conclude that
the will of God, as far as this world is concerned, is that he should
come to an end by drowning, and we must bow to that will; but as long
as we can see a 'kick' left in him, we feel that we must do all we can
to bring him round again. Isn't that natural?"

I suppose I must have manifested some surprise at the plainness of her
speaking, for after glancing at me for a moment with an amused smile,
and with a twinkle of her old humour (I mean that kindly eye-twinkling
of humour which is not far removed from the trickle of a tear-drop,
and which, for all her piety, had been a noticeable element in her
personality), she said, as if in reply to what was in my mind, "No, I
don't speak like a sanctified spirit, do I?"

I was a little taken aback by her question, but answered that I was
somewhat surprised at the homeliness of her speech, but was glad to
find that death had left her old personality unaltered.

"Of course it has," she answered, "my personality is just the old
personality of my earth-life, and I should not wish it to be otherwise.
To awaken after the change, which you call death, only to find that
one's personality had been transformed into that of another person--no
matter how excellent that other person might be--would not be
immortality but transmutation. But you were about to ask me a question
concerning my brother before we got upon the subject of personality,"
she continued; "you didn't put your question into words, but your looks
expressed it, and thoughts cannot be concealed in the spirit-world."

"Yes," I said, "I had a question to ask you, and it is this: You
know how surprised I was to find that heaven and hell are not, as I
supposed, separate places. Now what is God's reason for allowing the
good and the bad to exist together here, as they do on earth? Is it
because He shrinks from breaking up the old family-life (as it must be
broken, if right-doers and wrong-doers be set apart), and because He
would still use the influence of the good to reclaim the evil?"

"Even that," she said, "I cannot tell you, for I am a mere child in His
kingdom. I do know that many of heaven's noblest are engaged, as I am,
in striving to stir up souls to repentance; but whether our efforts to
save the sinner from his sin after death are of any avail, I cannot
say positively, for it has not been given me to know. We are told that
after His death our crucified Lord preached to the spirits in prison;
and although the theologians will explain it all away for you if you
will let them, I believe that He came here to hell in search of the
so-called lost, and I don't think I can be doing anything opposed to
His will, in trying all I can to save my brother."

"When you and I were on earth together," she continued, after a pause,
"you once sent me a copy of the _Contemporary Review_, containing
an article written by Dr. Knighton. The name of the article was
'Conversations with Carlyle,' and the writer related one conversation
in which I was very much interested, and which I have often thought of
since. I read it so many times, that I think I can remember it word for
word.

"'I was going to tell you about an Indian poem which some one sent me
translated,' said Carlyle. 'I think it was called the "Mahabarat." It
describes seven sons as going off to seek their fortunes. They all go
different ways, and six of them land in hell after many adventures.
The seventh is of nobler seed; he perseveres, fights his way manfully
through great trials. His faithful dog, an ugly little monster, but
very faithful, dies at last. He, himself, fainting, and well-nigh
despairing, meets an old man, Indra disguised, who offers to open for
him the gates of heaven. "But where are my brothers?" he asks; "are
they there?" "No, they are all in hell." "Then I will go to hell too,
and stop with them, unless you get them out." So saying, he turns
off and trudges away. Indra pities him, and gets his brothers out of
hell. The six enter heaven first, the seventh stops. "My poor faithful
dog," says he; "I will not leave him." Indra remonstrates, but it is
useless. The faithful dog, ugly as he was, is too well remembered,
and he will not have paradise without it. He succeeds finally, Indra
relents, and lets even the dog in. But, sir,' added Carlyle, 'there is
more pathos about that dog than in a thousand of our modern novels,
pathos enough to make a man sit down and cry almost.'"

"Yes," I said, "I remember the story well. I wonder what old Carlyle
would say about it now? Have you ever seen him here? or Emerson? or
Richter? or Robertson of Brighton?"

"Robertson!" she answered; "as yet I know only one of the many circles
into which the spirit-world seems naturally to resolve it; but I
suspect that if you and I could see where Robertson is, we should find
him infinitely nearer to the Father-heart of the universe than I at
least can for countless ages ever hope to attain!"

"What do you mean by 'circles'?" I said. "Am I to understand that there
is a kind of sifting and sorting process going on, by which each human
soul is, on its arrival here, assigned a fitting place and level among
his or her spiritual fellows?"

"I don't know that I should express it quite in those words," she
answered, "although I cannot think just now of a less clumsy way of
putting it, but there is some such gathering of like to like as that of
which you speak. The majority begin, as we did, in this lower circle,
and remain here until they are fitted to move onward to a higher
sphere. Others take a place in that higher sphere immediately, and some
few are led into the Holy Presence straightway. To die is not to close
the eyes on earth merely to open them the next minute in heaven; it
is not a sudden transition from darkness to light, or from light to
darkness. No, it is a slow and gradual awakening, for no human soul
could bear so sudden a shock. Your own transition was, comparatively
speaking, an exceptionally rapid one, but I know of some who have
been 'changed' for a quarter of a century, and are only now becoming
conscious of the fact. Of one thing you may be certain, and that is
that God is never in a hurry in the education of a human soul. He works
in this world as in the natural one, not by fits and starts and sudden
convulsions, but by slow and imperceptible developments, and none but
Himself knows what He is going to make of us before He has done--if
indeed He ever will have done, which I question. Whatever sphere of
work He may assign to us here is the one for which He has all along
been preparing us. Our Saviour told the disciples that in His Father's
house were many mansions, not one big one where they were all to dwell
together, but 'many mansions,' and that He went to prepare a place for
them; and you may be positive that He would not so have spoken were not
some individual preparation necessary.

"I do not know in which of these 'mansions of the blest' Frederick
Robertson, of whom you ask, is now dwelling, but you must not
think because his spiritual circle is far removed from mine that
all communication and companionship are cut off between us. On the
contrary, he is often, very often, here, and I have not seldom held
soul-communion with him and felt his spirit near to me. This circle,
however, is but the outer edge of the spirit-world--only one step,
indeed, removed from the life of the earth and of the body--and I don't
think we are capable yet of understanding the finer distinctions of
spiritual companionship." And then her voice seemed to sound to me like
the voice of one in the far distance, I felt the darkness closing in
upon me on every side, and knew that my hour of punishment was again at
hand.

Upon the details of that punishment it would serve no good purpose
again to dwell, and if in the next two or three chapters I make only
a passing allusion to my subsequent sufferings in Hades, the reader
must understand that it is not because those sufferings had in any way
ceased to be, but because I wish to put more prominently forward the
singular facts in regard to the condition of others, which came to my
knowledge during the time of my sojourning in the spirit-world. That
these facts were not without their own influence in bringing about
the change in myself, hereafter to be described, will, I think, be
apparent to all, but that change I shall not attempt to trace out, step
by step, to its ultimate development. It is of what I saw and heard,
rather than of what I endured, that I now come to speak, and although
my recollections are all too disconnected and fragmentary I give those
recollections just as they still linger in my memory, and without
attempting to follow too closely the narrative of my own personal
doings in Hades.

[Illustration]




[Illustration]




CHAPTER IX.

_I SEE SOME STRANGE SIGHTS IN HELL, AND AM FAVOURED WITH SOMETHING IN
THE NATURE OF A SERMON._

  "They eat, and drink, and scheme, and plod,
    They go to church on Sunday;
  And many are afraid of God,
    And more of Mrs. Grundy."


It is a long time ago since Religion first took to preaching at the
World, and now at last the World has grown wearied of it, and has
taken in her turn to preaching at Religion; and in this verse by Mr.
Locker-Lampson she has a text which is sternly, trenchantly, grimly
true in its satire. I know there are folk who affect to be scandalized
at what they consider an irreverence, but I for one can recall no
sermon in which the worldliness and the worthlessness of many so-called
Christians have received as terrible a rebuke as they have in these
lines by a writer of _vers de société_.

I will tell you why I have introduced this topic into my diary. When
I was in hell, I saw one there whom, save for his averted looks and
pitiable endeavours to escape my observation, I should probably have
passed unnoticed. He was one of those at whom the verse I have quoted
is directed. His pitfall in life had been nothing more vicious than
vanity. He was a coward who was so blind in his cowardice that he
feared God less than he feared Mrs. Grundy, and who, in order to
secure the approval of man, had not scrupled to do that which he knew
was hateful to his Maker. His life had been a living lie. Love of
approbation was so strong in him that he was never happy except in
perpetually posing and in endeavouring to pass himself off for that
which he knew he was not. And with what result? That he had spent his
days in preparing for himself his punishment. The one and only aim of
his existence had been to win the approval of others, and, lo! one
morning he awoke in Hades to find himself the despised of the despised
and the laughing stock of the very Devil. He had so pandered to his
love of approbation that it had grown at last into a disease, and I saw
few more pitiable sights in my wanderings than that of this wretched
creature, slinking shamefacedly through hell, and wincing, as from a
blow, at the glance of every passer.

Of all vices none is so vindictive to its wretched victim as vanity.
It is continually craving for the wherewithal to gratify its insatiate
appetite, whilst growing but the hungrier for a meal. The very
clamorousness of its demands not seldom defeats its own purpose, for
sooner or later it is sure to be discovered, and none of us honour
the man whom we suspect of "jumping" to gain our good opinion. Of the
power which vanity may acquire over a human soul I read lately an awful
instance. We are told that the last emotion visible on the face of
Pranzini, the French murderer, as he stood waiting to be despatched
into eternity, was a simper of gratified vanity (and what share vanity
had in bringing him to that scaffold only He who reads all hearts
can tell) at being the prominent object of interest to so large and
distinguished an assembly. And that as he was about to step with blood
upon his soul into the presence of the Great Avenger!

       *       *       *       *       *

"Men create their God after their own image," says Mr. Stigand in his
"Life of Heine"; and it is a fact that the conception of God changes
with the manners and morals of a people. To our Puritan forefathers
He was a just but awful Judge, who, from His home in the vast abysses
of space, kept an unwinking watch upon us, His creatures, and, with
eyes of telescopic minuteness, noted every breach of His commandments,
in order that He might visit it with a fiery and fearful vengeance.
That man-created God is no more: He is dead, and another God reigns
in His stead; but in our natural reaction from the conception of the
vindictive God of past generations, we have come, in these days, to
lose sight of the fact that our God is a chastening one. Not only have
we turned a deaf ear to the thunders and the threats of old-fashioned
orthodoxy, with its talk of everlasting punishment and lakes of
brimstone, but many of us _pooh-pooh_ the thought of a hell at all,
and speak of God as though He were a good-natured and weakly-indulgent
parent, on whose leniency we might lightly presume, forgetting that
sin--unrepented sin--never can and never must go unpunished.

It was in this contemptuously indifferent way that one whom I knew
well on earth was accustomed to speak. He was a man of free and open
disposition, with a perfect genius for friendship, but his life would
not bear too close an inquiry. I remember his being warned in my
presence of the punishment which must await the course he was pursuing,
and his answering, as I had often heard him answer before, that even
if he _were_ on the road to hell (if, indeed, such a place existed,
which he was inclined to doubt), he had at least the consolation of
knowing that plenty of other "good fellows" were bound for the same
destination, and that he was quite sure that he should feel more at
home among the sinners in hell than he should among the saints in
heaven.

Well, when I was in hell, I saw a sight there which is worth recording
as an example of the ingenuity of the Devil in apportioning to each
person the punishment best fitted to his individual case. I say "of
the Devil," because I learned that he has a part (under certain
restrictions and by Divine permission) in the imposition of necessary
chastisement, and he is therefore an unwitting worker in the kingdom of
heaven. He has indeed been such a worker from the beginning, for in
spite of his serpent-like cunning and subtlety, he was the first fool,
and will be the last. The acknowledged and ancient enemy of God, he is
and has been playing into the hands of the Almighty for ages, and among
all fools none is so simple a fool as he.

The sight, then, to which I have referred was that of a desolate plain,
low-lying and unlighted, and in the centre of it there roamed one who
called out ever and anon, as if in search of a companion, but to whom
there came no answer save the distant echo of his own cry. A more
lonely and lifeless spot I have never seen. The silence which brooded
over the place seemed sometimes to oppress the forsaken wanderer like a
presence, for, with a half-affrighted and despairing cry, he set off at
a panic-stricken run, as if seeking to escape this silence by flight;
but, notwithstanding his haste, he made, I observed, no progress, for
he was but moving round and round in one continuous ring. Of this,
however, he seemed unaware; for once, when he passed near me, I heard
him cry out as if in despair, "Is there no living soul in all this void
and voiceless desert?" And, as he hurried by, and I caught a sight of
his face, I saw that it was the face of the man who had said that hell
would not be hell to him so long as he and his boon companions were
together.

       *       *       *       *       *

Another former acquaintance that I met there interested me even more.
He was a man whom I had always regarded as deeply religious, and his
presence in hell (by which I mean as one who was undergoing punishment)
was to me the greater cause for surprise.

"What is it," I said to him, "that brings you here? not impurity,
surely? and I cannot think of any other reason."

"No," he answered, "it is not impurity, for that was never one of my
failings. To this day, I am unable to understand the relish with which
most young men (and occasionally, be it said with shame, those who
are not young) listen to the kind of conversation which is current
sometimes in the smoking-room. We hold our handkerchiefs to our noses
when we pass a place where there is an unpleasant odour, and turn
hastily away if we come upon a repulsive sight; and impure talk affects
me always as does a disgusting object or a nauseous smell.

"You are surprised at finding me here in hell, because you have always
believed me to be one who thought much and felt deeply on religious
subjects. But you forget that to have religious feeling, and to act
upon religious principle, are in many ways distinct. There are men who,
though they are naturally incapable of lofty thought, would scorn to
do anything immoral or mean; and, on the other hand, there are men who
feel intensely on all religious subjects, who pray fervently and often,
sing hymns with eyes streaming with tears of heartfelt earnestness,
and yet their actions are not seldom unworthy, and their lives will
not bear too close an inquiry. 'There is no self-delusion more fatal,'
as Mr. Lowell has said, 'than that which makes the conscience dreamy
with the anodyne of lofty sentiment, while the life is grovelling and
sensual.' It is a delusion which bids a man close his eyes lest he see
where he is going; it comes to him with its harlot-beauties daintily
draped in the robes of an angel of light, and sings hymns before the
very gates of hell. It is because I am one who so deluded, or who
tried so to delude himself, that you and I meet here to-day. We set
out together with the broad path and the narrow path before us. You,
by one fatal and irrevocable step, swerved to the broad path from
the narrow, and that single step plunged you headlong and hopeless
into this abyss. And I, well, I appeared to myself and to others to
be walking in the narrow way; and yet, by the making of continual
divergences, so trifling as to seem of but little or no account, I
find myself eventually in the same awful abyss that you are in, and
on a level fully as loathsome as your own. Though I have committed no
such crime as you have committed, I was, in the petty details of my
daily life, habitually untrue; and so the time came at last, in which,
with every desire to serve God faithfully and to follow the dictates
of conscience, I found that the power to make my will subservient to
my wishes had slipped unnoticed from me. Habit has the strength of a
giant, for good as well as for evil, and the will to do right on every
occasion is as much a matter of training as is mere physical strength.
The man who is habitually untrue in small things, cannot, even though
he wish it, do right in great ones, any more than the man of untrained
muscle can, by a mere exercise of volition, lift weights which would
try the practised athlete. The only way in which to become Christlike
is not to endeavour to feel so, not to seek to arouse sentiment or
emotion (as drunkards fly for strength to stimulants), but to make
Christliness the persistent and unconditional _habit_ of our lives. We
must learn day by day to resist the first rising of a desire to do,
or to say, or to think, that which we know diverges by the hundredth
part of an inch from the path which conscience would have us to walk;
and we must so school ourselves that we can, by sheer force of will,
rise above the mood of the moment, so that we act not by impulse or by
inclination, but by conscience."

He stopped, and, reading my thoughts, said, in reply to them: "Yes,
there is, indeed, something grimly humorous in my setting up to
preach to others; but it cost me my hope of heaven, and a lifetime,
to learn the lesson, and God knows I have it by heart at last! One
more illustration and I have done. Let us suppose that you and I are
standing on the deck of a ship which is steering straight for a certain
haven, and that you put your hand on the helm and shift her a fraction
of an inch from the line on which she is running. The angle at which
you have swerved from that line may be so utterly infinitesimal that it
might be measured by a hair's breadth, but let that angle be carried
out to its ultimate destination, and you will be borne miles and miles
away from the harbour for which you are bound.

"Remember, then, when next you are called upon to make choice, be
it in never so trifling a matter, between good and evil, between
obeying conscience or disobeying her, that you are choosing in that
moment between hell and between heaven, not for to-day, this week, or
to-morrow, but for eternity!"

[Illustration]




[Illustration]




CHAPTER X.

_A LOVE STORY IN HELL._

  "And shall my sense pierce love,--the last relay
  And ultimate outpost of eternity?"--D.G. Rossetti.


Some years ago, a near relative of mine, the editor of a certain paper,
was taken seriously ill, and was told by the doctors that complete
rest was absolutely necessary for his recovery. As I had frequently
assisted him in the preparation of "copy," and was acquainted with the
routine of his office, it was arranged that I should attend on certain
days in each week, and be answerable for the work during his absence.
The journal was one which was made up largely of extracts from other
papers, and my duties consisted less in the selection of original
matter, than in the more prosaic plying of paste-brush and scissors;
but the number of manuscripts received was large, and for a week or two
at least I tried conscientiously to give each separate packet something
like a fair consideration. I remember that the very first manuscript on
which I was called to pronounce judgment was one entitled, "The Strange
Confessions of a Bachelor." It is too lengthy to be printed here in
full, but as the love-story from which my chapter takes its heading
was largely attributable to the publication of this manuscript, I have
transcribed some paragraphs from it, which I think will serve to give
the reader a general idea of its tone.


The Strange Confessions of a Bachelor.

"Yes, I am in love, although as yet I could not tell what the name of
my love is or will be. But in every inspired poem or perfect picture,
in the soaring and sobbing of music, in sunrise and sunset, or in the
sighing of the wind upon my cheek, there is something which speaks to
me of her, and which beckons my spirit forth in search of her, as if by
the leading of an unseen hand. And sometimes, but only in my dreaming,
musing moments, my thoughts, as they wander forth into the blue expanse
around me, take colour and shape, and I see her standing by a tiny cot
in a cosy room where the warm firelight flickers on walls gay with
pictures. I see her bend with eyes that brim with tears of blessing to
fold two dimpled hands together, and to listen to a baby voice which
whispers after hers the hallowed words to 'Our Father in Heaven.' And
as the little voice dies away into the holy hush of the last Amen, and
the little lids droop like the petals of a primrose over the tired
eyes, my dream-picture changes again, and I am rambling among the walks
I love so well, but no longer alone, no longer wrapt in melancholy
musing for--now trudging cheerily along with hand clasped fast in mine
and face upturned to listen, now darting bird-like aside in search of
fly or flower--there journeys ever with me my little son and hers. We
wander merrily through that sunny stretch of meadow--the children's
meadow, as we call it--where the grass grows lush and long, and where
the blithe day through the skylark ever sings and soars; we cross the
stile and enter the shady shelter of the 'Lover's Lane,' dark, as it
always is, with the dense green of overarching ash and hazel, and then
we reach that sunny, wind-swept and sloping hillside, where he and I
love to linger, watching the slow sailing of stately clouds above, or
listening to the tinkle and purl of the brooklet which ripples over
the pebbles in the valley far below. In the joyous wonder of the child
heart beside me at all that is beautiful in this beautiful world, I
forget the books and the making of books with which my brain is busied;
and when the first flush of rapture is over and the little brain has
sobered into calm, I tell my boy of the Brother-Lord who loves him, and
who was once such a little child as he, and of the dear Lord-Father by
whom all that is beautiful was made."

The writer of the "Confessions" then goes on to speak of love, and of
the woman he loves; but as his concluding paragraph will sufficiently
serve to give an idea of his thoughts on the subject, it is hardly
necessary to quote the passage in full. "Yes, I love her, I love her
truly, and she too loves me, or will. It is not blind love, or foolish
idolatry. She knows all my faults--the pitiful paltriness of my life,
the selfish acts and foolish words, the vanity and the vice--she knows
them all, and yet she loves me, me, not them, but the true me which
these faults cannot altogether conceal from her, for she knows that
they are not my life, but the trouble of it. So also is my love for
her. I love her not only for her present self, but for the sake of the
self she is seeking to be--the self which in some measure indeed she
now is; for that which in our truer moments we have striven to be; the
Ideal upon which our eyes are ever fixed, to which (no matter how
sorely we may have sinned against it in the struggle of the day) our
thoughts return at night with but the more unutterable if despairing
longing and love--_that_ in some manner we are, and shall be,
notwithstanding our ever-recurrent failure and sin.

"I do not ask or expect that she shall be always true to her high
ideal, for I know that to none of us is it given to walk with
unfaltering feet. I remember, too, that she is no angel, but a woman
with womanly weakness and human faults, for all of which I am touched
with true and tender sympathy, to love her not the less, but the more.
But that she should _have_ such an ideal, and be capable of such an
aim--for that reason, if for no other, I must love and honour her with
the deepest love and honour of my soul. I am not so blind as to suppose
it will be all summer and sunshine in the life which she and I will, I
hope, one day lead together. I know my own evil nature too well not to
be aware that there will be times when she will find it hard to prevent
love being turned into loathing and confidence into contempt; and I
think, with sinking of spirit, of the sore disappointment she will feel
when she finds what a shabby-souled common-place creature her husband
is, compared with the being into whom her love had idealized him. At
such times of despondency, however, I try to remember what Miss Muloch
has said about wedded life--and who has written more helpful words than
she? 'I would have every woman marry,' she says, 'not merely liking a
man well enough to accept him as a husband, but loving him so wholly
that, wedded or not, she feels she is at heart his wife, and none
other's, to the end of her life. So faithful that she can see all his
little faults (though she takes care no one else shall see them), yet
would as soon think of loving him the less for these, as of ceasing to
look up to heaven because there are a few clouds in the sky. So true
and so fond that she needs neither to vex him with her constancy nor
burden him with her love, since both are self-existent and entirely
independent of anything he gives or takes away. Thus she will marry
neither from liking nor esteem, nor gratitude for his love, but from
the fulness of her own. If they never marry, as sometimes happens ...
God will cause them to meet in the next existence. They cannot be
parted; they belong to one another.'

"These are helpful words, and true; but there is a passage by poor
George Eliot (alas for that adjective!), which to me is still more
beautiful, and with which I cannot do better than conclude. 'What
greater thing is there,' she says, 'for two human souls, than to feel
that they are joined for life, to strengthen each other in all labour,
to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all
pain,' and, 'to be one with each other in silent, unspeakable memories
at the moment of the last parting?'"

       *       *       *       *       *

I was interested in this article as well as in the writer, and asked
him for further contributions. He responded by sending a couple of
sonnets, and although the "swing of his arm" was, to quote Rossetti,
"freer in prose than in verse," I accepted, and printed them in the
journal of which I had charge. When I came to know him afterwards, I
found that he was young, and of that highly-strung nervous and poetic
temperament which often proves little less than a calamity to its
possessor. A more morbidly sensitive being I never met. The emotional
part of his nature seemed in excess, and he felt all--the small as
well as the great, the pleasant as well as the painful--intensely. His
nervous vitality was too near the surface. He was easily "worked-up,"
and took life, or rather its incidents, too seriously. The one
intellectual thing which men of such a temperament would be wise to
refrain from doing, is not seldom the very thing they do--abandon
themselves passionately to the pursuit of poetry. After that there is
little hope for them. The world may be the richer by many a work of
art, but from thenceforth and for ever Sorrow will have them for her
own. "Poetry strikes as nothing else does, deep into the roots of
things," says Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and "one finds everywhere some
strain at the roots of one's heart." Moreover, the pursuit of poetry
is a practice which as surely grows upon one as does the use of drug
or opiate, and my advice to the men and women of a highly-strung and
supersensitive temperament--if they wish to make comfort their first
consideration--is, "Avoid poetry as you would poison, making instead
a study of that which is animal and coarse. Music and all other
'softening' influences you will, in accordance with the contention
of Plato in 'The Republic,' deliberately eschew, striving rather
to acquire that delightful pachydermatous condition of feeling and
enviable indifference to the susceptibilities of others, which add so
immeasurably to the comfort of life."

However, to return to the writer of "The Strange Confessions." The
number of the journal containing his article had not been published
more than a couple of days, before I received a letter signed by a
lady who was unknown to me, asking that I would favour her with the
address of the contributor. I replied, of course, that I could not
do so without his permission, but that if she wished to be put into
communication with him, and would send a letter addressed to the office
of the paper, it should be duly forwarded. She did so, and when, as
was natural enough, he wrote a cordial reply, she found something
else in his letter about which to question him, and a correspondence
consequently ensued. Whether she was or was not a heartless and
accomplished flirt I never knew; but if ever a woman deliberately
set herself to win, and--as subsequent events showed--to break a
man's heart, it was this lady. I learned afterwards that she was very
beautiful, and as she herself wrote occasional tales and verses for
the magazines, it was not to be wondered at that my contributor should
be greatly interested in her epistles. She succeeded before long in
making his acquaintance, and set herself to carry on in earnest the
work which her insinuating letters had begun. She did not, however,
find him quite the easy prey which she had perhaps expected; for though
it is certain that he loved her from the moment of meeting, he was shy
and self-depreciatory, and sought persistently to avoid her. But she
paused at nothing to effect her purpose. She had set her heart upon "a
scalp," and by looks, words, and deeds, she strove to convince him that
she loved him, and strove at last successfully. I remember meeting him
one morning, and thinking, as I watched the light which came into his
face when he spoke of her, of the graceful lines in Mr. Austin Dobson's
"Story of Rosina." In the poem, however, it is the woman, and not the
man, who is heart-broken:--

  "As for the girl, she turned to her new being,
    Came, as a bird that hears its fellow call;
  Blessed as the blind that blesses God for seeing;
    Grew as a flower on which the sun-rays fall,
  Loved if you will; she never named it so;
    Love comes unseen, we only see it go."

When I saw him again all was over. I had sought him out in his
chambers, not having heard from him for a month, and he did not hear
me enter. Her portrait (the one she had given him) was before him, and
he had fallen by the table, half-kneeling, half-lying, with his head
on his arm. It is a fearful thing to hear a strong man sob as he was
sobbing then! God grant that I may never hear another, or see a face of
such hopeless haggard misery as was his when he raised it!

It is not of him, however, that I wish now to speak, but of her. Of
all the faces which I saw in hell, there was one which had for me a
fascination beyond any other. It was the face of a beautiful woman,
queenly of manner and fair of figure as a full-blown lily, and with
those deep dark eyes that _seem_ to shine out from soul-depths, deep as
the distant heaven, and yet _may_ mean no more than does the shallow
facing of quicksilver behind a milliner's mirror. I recognised her
instantly by the portrait, and never out of hell have I seen such
misery on any woman's face as I saw on hers. The sentence in punishment
of her sin was a strange one. It was that she should now love him
whose heart she had broken, with the same passionately intense but
hopeless love with which he had loved her. It was a just but awful
retribution. As some death-stricken and hunted creature presses
frantically on as if to escape the arrow that it carries in its breast,
so, heedless of all that was passing around her, heedless of shadow or
shine, she pressed on and on through the realms of hell, her eyes fixed
and wide-distended in agony, and her hands clutching ceaselessly at
her bosom, as if the heart of her were being riven in twain. "O God!"
I heard her cry, as she passed me, "my heart is broken! my heart is
broken! and, alas, one cannot die of a broken heart in hell."

I saw her once again. She had fallen to the ground, and with hopeless
hands pressed against burning brows was writhing as if in physical
pain, and with her very soul consumed of passion. One whom I knew--it
was his sister--was kneeling beside her, and with gentle words
besought her to calm herself, but she pushed the ministering hand away
despairingly, crying out: "A heart cannot break as mine is breaking
without a shriek. If I had loved him, and he me, and he had died," she
said, "I could have borne it, knowing that I should meet him hereafter,
but to live loveless through a loveless Eternity, _that_ is the thought
which kills me;" and then with a great cry of, "Oh! why should a
merciful God let any of His creatures suffer as I am suffering now?"
she rose up, and fled away before me.

I never saw her again, nor do I know whether or not it was given her
to win back the love she had lost; but, after she had gone, I turned
to his sister--the woman who had striven to comfort her brother's
betrayer--saying that I thought the punishment greater than the sin.

"Greater than the sin!" was the reply. "It may be that, being his
sister, I judge her harshly; but if yours is the most awful crime which
your sex can commit against womanhood, then it seems to me that hers--a
like breach of trust--is the blackest sin which a woman can commit
against a man. Nor can it be said of hers that it was the deed of a
moment--a moment of over-mastering passion, for it was deliberate and
cruel. I say that that woman killed my brother!" she cried fiercely;
"killed him body and soul, and sent him away heart-broken, and bereft
of faith in womanhood and in God. And to gratify what? her vanity--a
passion as selfish and hateful, if less brutal, than your own. You
have recognised the loathsomeness of your act; but she, God help her!
thinks of nothing but herself, and while she so thinks, heaven itself
would be but hell to her, and in all hell there is as yet for her no
hope of heaven."

[Illustration]




[Illustration]




CHAPTER XI.

_THE MYSTERY OF "THE DEAD WHO DIE."_

 "Of all these mysteries there is none which fills me with such abject
 horror and dread as the mystery of 'the dead who die.'"

      "Through many days they toil; then comes a day
    They die not,--never having lived,--but cease;
  And round their narrow lips the mould falls close."

  _Rossetti_--"The Choice."


It may occur to those of my readers who have neglected to bear in mind
the concluding words of Chapter VIII., that notwithstanding the remorse
which I have pictured myself as suffering in Hades, I do not appear
to have been altogether indifferent to the consolations of social
intercourse, and that existence in the Unseen, as represented in the
pages of this diary, would seem to consist largely of conversation
between the "spirits in prison." But because I have confined myself in
my last three chapters to the relation of such facts in regard to the
condition of others, as, either through observation or conversation,
came to my knowledge in the course of my singular experiences, it must
not be supposed that my own sufferings had in any way ceased. What
those sufferings were as described by me in my sixth chapter, they
continued to be during the whole of the time in which it was ordained
that I should remain in Hades, and each of the conversations here
recorded took place during that comparatively painless interval of
which I have elsewhere spoken, and was separated from the conversation
preceding or following it by a space of terrible pain. With which
necessary reminder I pass on to tell of "the dead who die."

During the time of my wanderings in the spirit world, it happened that
I had occasion to speak to one to whom I was personally unknown, but
who had lived for many years in a country town in which I had myself
once resided. Though comparatively guiltless, as I learned he was, of
any criminal offence, he seemed to be incessantly consumed by a spirit
of strange unrest, and I noticed that, even in his moments of reprieve,
he appeared unable to free himself from some singularly disturbing
thought. I was aware that he had at one time been intimate with a
former neighbour of mine, and something in our conversation recalling
this man's name to my memory I asked my companion if he knew "what had
become of Henry Marshall?"

The words had scarcely fallen from my lips before there passed over his
features a spasm of uncontrollable fear, and with a quick gasping cry,
and covering his face with his hand, as if to shut out some ghastly
vision, he exclaimed: "He is dead; he is dead--but why do you speak of
him? Know you not that he is of the dead who die?"

"Of the dead who die?" I repeated wonderingly; "I do not understand
you. Surely all who are dead must die?"

To this he made no answer, and seeing that he was strangely moved, I
forbore to question him further, but by-and-by he became calmer and of
his own accord continued the conversation.

"You asked me about Henry Marshall," he said, "and I will tell you
all I know about him; but first let me explain that, next to the love
of money which has been my ruin, my sorest hindrance on earth was my
unbelief and faithlessness; and that here in hell the punishment of
the unbeliever is that he shall be consumed by the anguish of his own
unbelief. Once when I _might_ have believed, I would not, and now,
though I would believe, I cannot, but am for ever torn by hideous
apprehensions and doubts as to my own future and the future of those
dear to me. Moreover, there are many things which, clear and plain
as they may be to the faithful of heart and to the believing, are to
my doubting eyes wrapt around in mystery and in gloom. Into these
mysteries it has been ordained as part of my punishment that I shall
ever desire to look, and of all these mysteries there is not one which
fills me with such abject horror and dread as the mystery of the dead
who die."

"Of the dead who die?" I said again; "what do you mean by those strange
words?"

"They are my words," he cried excitedly, and with a hysterical laugh,
"mine, mine; the words I use to myself when I think of the mystery
which they strove so carefully to conceal from me, but which for all
their cunning I have discovered. Listen, and I will tell you about it.
When I first came here, I saw, either in hell or in heaven, the faces
of most of the dead whom I had known on earth, but some faces there
were (Henry Marshall's was one of them) which I missed, and which from
that time to this I have never seen. 'Where, then, are they?' I asked
myself, 'since neither earth, hell, nor heaven knows them more? Has
God some fearful fate in store for the sinner, which may one day fall
upon me and mine, as it has already fallen upon them?' As I felt the
shadow of that dark misgiving resting on my heart, I knew that for me
another horror had arisen in hell, and that rest thenceforth there
could be none until I had solved the mystery.

"And so it came about that all the moments of my release from suffering
were spent in the search for those missing faces. Sometimes I took
counsel with those who were in hell as I was, but they could teach
me only that which I already knew; sometimes I asked the help of the
souls in Paradise, but they told me nothing save that I must be no more
faithless but believing. And then I sought to know of the angels where
were those lost ones, but with a look of sad and pitiful meaning, they
passed on and left me unanswered. Ah! but they could not hide their
secrets from me! No, no, I was not one of the credulous, nor was I to
be put off with a frown, and I have found out their mystery, and you
shall share it.

"When you and I were children, we were taught that every human being is
made in the image of God, and is born with an immortal soul. But they
did not tell us that just as neglected diseases can kill the body, so
unchecked sin can kill the soul, and that we have it in our power to so
deface the Divine Image that we become like unto, if not lower, than
the beasts which perish, and die out at our deaths as they. But it is
so, and that is what I meant when I said that he of whom you asked was
'of the dead who die.'

"You shake your head, and mutter that I am mad, and that you cannot
credit such a statement. Well, perhaps I am mad--mad with the horror
of my unbelief; but why should it not be as I say, I ask you? I have
brooded over it all a thousand times, and am convinced that I have
solved the riddle, and I will tell you why I think so.

"God is answerable to Himself for His actions, and when He made man,
He made a man, and not a puppet--a being of infinite possibilities
for good as well as for evil, and to whom it was given to choose for
himself between the doing of the right or the wrong. But God knew that
many of those whom He so made would sin away all memory of their Divine
origin. God did not _will_ it so, for He made us men, not machines,
and the evil we do is of our own choosing, but God _foreknew_ it; and,
fore-knowing that, God owed it to Himself not to call a creature into
being, the result of whose creation would be that creature's infinite
and eternal misery. No, even the Omnipotent dared not perpetrate so
wanton and wicked a deed as that, for God is the inexorable Judge who
sits in judgment upon God; and hence it was that He decreed that those
for whom there could be no hope of heaven should die out at their
deaths like the brutes. Doesn't that seem to you a probable solution?
and isn't it rational and feasible upon the face of it? Our life--such
as it is--is from God, and may not God take His own again, and withdraw
that life if He wish it? and could anything better happen to many
people whom you and I know, than that they should be allowed to die
out, and the very memory of them pass away for ever?"

I was convinced that he was mad--mad, as he had himself hinted, with
the horror of his unbelief; but I was interested in what he had to say,
and in his singular fancies.

"Tell me more of these missing faces, and of the 'dead who die,'" I
answered. "Who are they, for the most part?--murderers and criminals of
the most bestial nature?"

"Not always," he replied excitedly, "not always; and that is the reason
why I am so fearful about my own future. Most of them are those who in
their lifetime were regarded as belonging to the respectable classes,
and who, so far from having come at any time within reach of the law,
were looked upon as good citizens and estimable members of society.
Shall I tell you what killed the immortal soul in them, and in me, and
turned us into mere animated clay, fit only to die out like the beasts
which perish? It was money--money, the love of which is often more
deadening to the spiritual nature than actual vice or sin.

"I set out in life with one steadfast purpose before me--the purpose of
devoting myself body and soul to business and to the making of money.
It was not that I was indifferent to the attractions of a profession,
and still less that I was wanting in appreciation of higher things,
for I liked books and pictures and music. Sometimes, too, when I was
listening to my sister's singing of Herrick's lines, 'To Anthea,' or to
Ben Jonson's 'Drink to me only with thine eyes,' I felt bitterly the
littleness of my aims, and seemed to know, as I never knew at any other
time, what it was to love a woman with that high, whole-hearted, and
deathless devotion which brings redemption and ennoblement to the soul
of the man to whom it comes. But I said to myself: 'Patience; first of
all let me grow rich; let me make all the money I can get together, and
then, when I have sufficient for all my requirements, I will forsake
the money-making, and turn my thoughts to love and poetry and pictures;
and through them, perhaps on to religion, for I knew even then that
though love and poetry are not religion, that they yet serve, before a
higher faith has been called into being, to keep the life of the soul
alive, and to open up the way for holier things.

"And so I became what is called a good business man. I made business
the motive of my life. I thought of nothing else, and read nothing
but the papers, and these I only scanned for the purpose of observing
the influence of political or other passing events upon the markets.
At last I became rich. And with what result? That when I no longer
needed business, I found I could live no longer without it; that it had
become my life, and I its slave, and that I could awaken no lasting
interest in anything which did not pertain to the making of money. It
is true that I had at that time a wife and children (the former of
whom I had married chiefly for her fortune), and was not without a
certain half-selfish love for them as part and parcel of myself; that I
possessed a handsome house and gardens in which I took pride as being
of my own acquirement; and that I went into society with enjoyment;
and found a certain pompous pleasure in extending my patronage to
Sunday-schools, bazaars and Young Men's Christian Associations. But
where my treasure was, there my heart was also, and at heart I was
a business man, and nothing more. I did not know myself then as I
do now, and so far from being in any way dissatisfied, I had no more
suspicion that I was other than one of the most enviable of men, than
has the grinning savage with his handful of beads. But I know now the
thing I am, and what I have missed, and I tell you that the most sorely
swindled simpleton in existence is the man whose business capability
is so keen, that though he has never been bested in a bargain, he has
bartered away his own happiness for a bauble, and (so skilful a schemer
to defraud us is old Satan) has become bankrupt of all that makes life
worth the living, in order that he may boast a heavy balance at his
banker's!

"Yes, I was a good business man--a smart and shrewd business man, as
business men go--and I know much of such men and of their transactions;
and I tell you that, since the days of Judas Iscariot, the money-lover
and grubber who sold his God for thirty pieces of silver, as thousands
are selling their infinite souls this day, there have been no more
soulless and selfish creatures upon God's earth, than the men who have
made what should be a means to an end an end in itself, and who live
_for_ business, instead of _by_ it.

"They go to church, many of them, on Sundays, and subscribe liberally
to coal clubs and soup kitchens, thinking, poor fools! to offer such
acts as those as a set-off to God for the sordid self-seeking which
has been the secret of their success in their commercial calling;
never suspecting that in their respectable selfishness and sordidness
of spirit, they are lower in the scale of being and farther from the
kingdom of heaven than is the lurking prostitute shivering at the
street corner, or the drunken sot reeling home after a night's debauch.

"That they must die out at their deaths, as do the beasts, I am
convinced, for what can God find for such men to do in heaven?--men to
whom the earth, its prototype, is nothing but a gigantic shop, and to
whom Music, Art, and Song are but as dead letters and foolishness; men
who are susceptible to no emotion save the greed for gain; and who have
let the infinite soul within them pine away and perish for the want of
the wherewithal to keep that soul alive.

"And I, I am one of them, and am of the dead who die! I have bartered
away love and life and happiness for such Dead Sea fruit as this; I who
once was young, and not altogether, as I now am, a soulless creature
of clay! For I can remember the time when flowers, pictures, beautiful
faces and music set stirring always some strong emotion within me, in
which it seemed that I saw hidden away in a crystal cell in the depths
of my own strange heart, the shining form of a white-robed Soul-maiden,
who cried out to me, 'Ah! cannot you make your life as pure and
beautiful as the flowers and the music, that so you may set me free?'

"But I chose the ignoble part, and gave myself up body and soul to the
greed for gain. And often in the hour when, tempted by an evil thought,
I turned to do some shameful or selfish action, I seemed to see the
white arms of the Soul-maiden uplifted in piteous entreaty to heaven,
until at last the time came when her voice was silent, and when I knew
that I had thrust her down and down into a darkness whence she would
never again come forth!

"And now nor picture, nor poem, nor music moves me more, for the soul
of me is dead!--is dead! and I have become like unto the beasts that
perish, and know not that at any moment I may flicker out like a spent
taper, and become as the dead who die!"

So saying, he burst into a shriek of insane and unearthly laughter, and
foaming at the mouth like a madman, turned from me, and fled gibbering
into the night.

[Illustration]




[Illustration]




CHAPTER XII.

_I SEE THE BROTHER WHOM WE HAVE ALL LOST._


"You believe probably in God, in Christ, and in Immortality, and you
look with joy and gladness to the life beyond the grave. Probably,
too, you have suffered, as we all have at some time, from bodily pain,
mental affliction or bereavement, until your heart has been broken and
crushed, and you have felt that you could bear your burden no longer
were it not for the consolation that sorrow can last no longer than
life, and that the next world will set this world right. But have you
never asked yourself, 'How if it should _not_ be so after all? How
if I should open my eyes in the next world to find again all the old
sorrows, the old heart-burnings, and the thousand and one trivialities
which have made this world so weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable?'
Have you never considered that the mere fact of the existence of these
sorrows in this world--the only one of which you know anything--is in
itself a reason why it is likely that such sorrows, or similar ones,
should exist in the world of which you know nothing? And have you
never recognised that your failures have been the life-element of your
successes, and that, since failure is the law of progress, an existence
in which all your endeavours were successful would probably become
monotonous and tame?"

The above is an extract from a letter (it lies on the desk before me)
from one whom I had known in my early boyhood, and who had been for
many years my constant companion and friend. Had she continued to be my
companion it is possible that my story might have been a different one,
but she went to live in America some months before I was twenty, and I
never saw her again until the day that she and I stood face to face in
the spirit-world--I in hell and she in heaven.

After we had exchanged greetings, and each had told the other what was
necessary to be known of the past, the conversation turned upon the
subjects which we had so often discussed in our letters. "Tell me," I
said, "now that you really find yourself in heaven, if you are in every
way peacefully and perfectly happy."

"One moment, before I give you an answer," she replied. "You are not
altogether wrong in calling this heaven, although it is little more
than the ante-chamber between earth and heaven. It is my heaven at
present, but it will not be my heaven always, any more than it will be
always your hell, and although it is heaven, it is not _the_ heaven.
Of that neither you nor I can form any shadowy conception. Now for
your question. There is only one thing which troubles me, and that is
ignorance. I had always thought that in the spirit-world one would know
everything. I don't mean that I expected to find myself omniscient,
but I did think that I should know all one would wish to know. I need
hardly tell you I was wrong. With whatever knowledge we have acquired
and with whatever intellectual ability we have developed up to the
point of our leaving the earth-world, with that, and with no more, do
we make our first start in the spirit realm. I do think our capability
of intuitionally apprehending truth is in some way intensified by
the transition which you speak of as death: but of intellectual
change there is absolutely none; and there are things relating to the
after-life, as well as to the earthly one, concerning which (never
having studied them whilst I was in the body) I am far more ignorant
than are many dwellers under the sun."

"That I can well believe," I replied; "but putting aside the fact that
you are troubled sometimes by a consciousness of ignorance, tell me if
in other respects you are happy."

"No good can come to one of being in a place where everything is
too easy," she answered, "and if heaven were the abode of perfect
happiness--this heaven, I mean--I think we should find it somewhat
wearisome. When I was on earth I longed for heaven, _not that I might
be delivered from sorrow, but from sinfulness_; and I think I may say
that I am as happy here as my failures will let me be."

"Your failures!" I exclaimed, wonderingly, "your failures!"

"Yes," she said, "my failures. On earth failure is, as you know, the
law of progress, and even here progress is only achieved through that
which is, after all, in some degree a non-success. I don't quite
know how to make my meaning clear to you, but perhaps we can't do
better than look back to the old earth-life for an illustration. That
earth-life--the life which we lead on earth, I mean--is, as you know,
poor, pitiable and paltry; we feel it so, we cannot but feel it so,
when it is viewed in the lofty light of our possibilities. Each morning
finds us beginning the world afresh, and with the high hope that at
last the time has come when we shall be true to ourselves and to our
aspirations, that at last we shall veritably and indeed do some lasting
work for God and for our fellow-creatures. And each evening! ah! each
evening! is it not ever the same sad story, ever the same old bitter
experience? You have spoken of it yourself in those verses you sent me
so many years ago:

  "'Each morning hails a new Endeavour's birth,
  Each evening weeps its pitiful corpse before.'

"Hardly has the freshness faded out of the morning air before the world
spirit is at our side again; she is whispering in our ear; her white
wooing arms are around us; her warm breath is on our cheek; there is
a brief,--how brief and feeble!--attempt at resistance, and then, ah!
then, we are broken and undone. And often as, with lips hot and dry,
with cheeks fevered and flushed, we look back to that serene-souled
self, which but a few short hours ago stood in rapt adoration under the
silence of a midnight sky, and held high communion with its Creator, we
can hardly bring ourselves to believe that we and it are one and the
same being. Yet, in spite of the paltriness of the earth-life, in spite
of the vice, and the shame, there is one element in the strife which
lends dignity even to our very failures, for in our battling against
the ever-present evil, and in our struggle towards the ever-unattained
good, we come within sight of a possibility, higher, perhaps, than
that of which even angels can conceive. The _sin and the shame are
after all but human; the effort and determination to overcome them are
Divine_.

"Well, without some sense of difficulty to be overcome, some sense even
of comparative failure, this effort and this determination could never
be; and in heaven, the place of infinite progress and possibilities,
there is a certain Divine discontent which I know not how to explain
better to you than by calling it the heavenly counterpart of this
earthly effort.

"But now tell me about yourself," she said, after a moment's pause,
"for I can see that you have been through sore suffering since you came
here."

Through sore suffering I had indeed been, and had already grown old in
hell, but the lines which she had quoted from my boyish verses, and
the words she had said about the "divine discontent" of heaven, had set
stirring some hidden spring in my memory, and at the time she spoke I
was thinking of what Robert Louis Stevenson has said about "that little
beautiful brother whom we once all had, and whom we have all lost and
mourned--the man we ought to have been, the man we hoped to be." She
must have known what was in my thoughts, for, taking my hand in her
own, she repeated some verses which she had written and sent to me on
that Easter morning (a morning which must ever shine out white and fair
in my memory) when she and I had knelt side by side after confirmation
to take our first communion. I remember that she called them "This
Only," and had headed them with the words, "Why call ye Me Lord, Lord,
and do not the things which I say?"

  "O feeble lips that lapse from fervent prayer,
    To smile at sin, and lightly laugh at shame,
  That in the chamber loud your love declare,
    And in the world scarce dare to breathe His name,
          Whence would _ye_ call Him Lord?

  "O changeful soul! now mounting like thin fire,
    Skyward and Godward; now like thing of night,
  Low-grovelling, smirched, and mid foul mud and mire
    Trailing white pinions given for starry flight,
          Darest _thou_ call Him Lord?

  "O morning's hope! O evening's dull despair!
    O lofty purpose! puny, paltry deed!
  O high resolve! heart big with longings fair!
    O loveless life that bears nor flower nor seed!
          Dare _ye_ to call Him Lord?

  "Yea, I would call Him Lord, and all the more
    For this my sin, else were I sore undone;
  Say, who should seek Him, if not I? He wore
    This fleshy garb, yet in Him sin was none,
          So may I call Him Lord.

  "No heaven I ask, no crystal-shining shore,
    Nor realm of flowers--this only would I pray,
  That mid all sinnings, stumblings sad and sore,
    I still may cling to Thee, dear Lord, alway,
          And still may call Thee Lord."

She ended, and as her voice died away into a whisper sweet and low as
the restful ripple of the rain, I hid my head between my hands and
sobbed aloud, for something there was in the words and in her way of
repeating them, which carried me back in thought to that vanished
season of Youth and Hope when pictures and poetry, flowers and music,
as well as sunrise, sunset, and the play of evening light upon the sea,
had seemed but as the visible embodiment of my own thoughts, and were
indeed to me as a part of my aspiration towards a loftier, lovelier
life.

And then I remembered what manner of man I was, and as the
shadow-horror of my sin arose spectre-like between myself and my
distant childhood, I saw that "little brother," the child that I once
had been, shrink back and back with sad reproachful eyes, until with a
sudden cry of anguish and despair he turned from me, and fled into the
night.

[Illustration]




[Illustration]




CHAPTER XIII.

_A DREAM OF ETERNAL REST._


"Do you see that young man with the dark, delicate features?" she
continued, giving an unexpected turn to the conversation. "I mean the
one with the brown eyes that have so strange a look in them. He is a
poet, and when he was on earth he was blind, but his songs were sad as
the sighing of the wind in the pine trees, and sweet with sound, and
perfume, and the love of woman. He and I were then, as now, the most
devoted of friends, and it was our custom to spend one evening at least
in each week together. Sometimes we talked of places or of pictures
(in both of which, notwithstanding his blindness, he took a singular
interest), sometimes of poetry or flowers. Not seldom he would sketch
out for me the plot of some story he was writing, and often I would
read aloud while he sat listening with tranquil face and closed eyes in
his accustomed place by the fireside. I remember that on one occasion
the piece which we thus read together was Jean Paul's Dream of the Dead
Christ saying there is no God, and that when next I saw my poet-friend,
he told me that after I had left him, he had fallen asleep, and dreamed
a dream which he spoke of as 'the most impudent piece of plagiaristic
imitation which ever was perpetrated,' and which he called his 'Dream
of Eternal Rest.'

"'As I sat here in the darkness which has now become to me like a house
of which I am the only tenant,' he said, 'I fell asleep and dreamed
that I saw my life lying behind me like the line of phosphorescent
light which marks the track of a fallen star--a line traced in
darkness, and which arising in darkness dies away into darkness again;
and in my dream an angel appeared unto me, and, laying his hand upon my
shoulder, said, "Thou who probest the mysteries of life, and peerest
into the time which is to be, arise, come with me, and I will show thee
something of that which thou seekest." So saying, he stretched forth
his hand, which I clasped, and we set forth on our infinite journey.

"'What abysmal realms of space we passed I know not, for I was as one
bewildered by the swiftness of our flight and by the rushing beat of
the angel's pinions. I remember that ever and anon there swam up
in the darkness a gleam of light that was at first no bigger than a
single star, but which, as I looked, loomed out ever larger and larger,
and each moment seemed to double in magnitude, until I trembled lest
it should break the bounds of the heavens; but even as I trembled,
it swept whirling by with a sound like that of infinite thunders,
and, receding again, lessened before my eyes as visibly as it had
increased, and finally dwindling to a mere point of light, died away
into darkness. Ere long, however, there appeared a flush in the distant
east, and as we drew nearer I saw that, below me and afar, there lay
a land in which the sun shone with such exceeding splendour, that the
atmosphere, light-filled and luminous unto sparkling, was in colour
like unto the colour of a rainbow. And I saw also that the rays neither
dazzled nor scorched, as do the rays of the earthly sun. And far as
the eye could reach stretched shining hills, seen through soft vistas
of purple and gold, and sunny meadows wherein bloomed flowers beautiful
as the blush of a maiden, and pure as an angel's thought. And winding
in and out among the meadows ran many a rippling river; and fountains
also I saw, the waters of which, as they rose and fell scintillating
like a shower of starbeams or spray of diamonds, discoursed music
sweeter than the sighing of Æolian harps. Then as I looked yet closer,
I saw, wandering hand in hand among the meadows, many white-clad
figures, whereat my soul wept for gladness; and I turned to the angel
saying, "Surely this is that Heaven whereof we read and wherein I would
rest for ever? for I am sore wearied with the toil and the labour
of earth." But he answered me, "Mortal, thou knowest not what thou
askest. Lift up thine eyes, and see if thou beholdest aught else."

"'And I looked to the right hand and to the left, yet saw I only the
sunny meadows and rivers of the land of flowers, and the blue distance
of the bordering hills. Then I turned me round and gazed whence we
came, but could nothing discern save remote plains of darkness, athwart
the gloom of which I saw flash ever and anon (as one sees flash the
eyes of a beast at midnight) the glimmer of a moving world. Then the
angel stretched forth his hand, pointing me yet again to the distant
east, and far away beyond the beauteous realm I beheld a vast plain of
desolation, and beyond that a land whereof I could nothing see, save
that a darkness, as of a twilight in which there is no moon, brooded
above it like a cloud.

"'Whereat a shuddering horror seized me, so that I could look no more,
and turning to the angel, I said, "Alas! lieth the region of endless
night so nigh unto the realm of eternal day?" But he answered me
sternly, "Mortal, thou speakest that of which thou art ignorant. Come,
let us go thither, that thou mayest see, and seeing, learn." And I cast
a longing look upon the beauteous land, and, lo! on the faces of those
who walked therein, I saw a shadow as of something incomplete--not
discontent, neither sorrow nor care, but the look as of an unfulfilled
aspiration; but, even as I gazed, the angel smote the air with eagle
pinion, and I beheld no more until we came nigh unto our journey's end.
Then, every stroke of his wing bringing us nearer, he turned to me,
once again bidding me "See, and seeing, learn," but at my heart lay
such a nameless terror that I was as one spell-bound, and durst not
look upon his face. And with trembling voice I made answer, "Suffer me
rather to depart, I pray thee! for I would not that mine eyes should
behold the horrors whereof I have heard, and my soul longeth to return
to the land of flowers wherein they toil not, neither sorrow, and where
I shall cease from labour and be at rest."

"'But for the third time he bade me "See, and seeing, learn;" and as I
looked upon the land which lay below me, I saw--instead of the realm
of endless night--a shining city of such unimaginable beauty, that my
heart sank within me in breathless awe. Then the angel spread forth his
wings still and motionless, and we reposed on the azure air as a planet
floats upon the purple bosom of night; and though neither sun nor moon
was set in the peaceful heaven, I saw that there rested over the
city the soft splendour as of a world of far-off stars. There was but
one gate, and over that was written in letters of light, "_My Father
worketh hitherto, and I work_," at which I marvelled exceedingly; and
inside the gate walked beings of such divine dignity and soul beauty
that I could have knelt worshipping before them, were it not that they
too were of human form and feature; and I saw that all were earnestly
but unhastily engaged in some manner of work, at which they toiled
serenely. And on every forehead was set the seal of a high purpose,
and over the city there rested the calm of an immeasurable peace. Then
silently upstole in the sky the dawnings of a great light, deep and
wide as the infinite of Heaven, and athwart the glory thereof there
spread the fore-splendours as of the approach of an Awful Presence.

"'And around me fell a darkness like unto midnight, and, turning to me
yet again the angel said, "Mortal, thou mayest behold no more. Return
to thy home and to thy labour, never more to murmur or complain, and
when thou longest after the repose of the world to come, know for a
surety that there is no rest either in earth or in heaven, save in the
fulfilment of the work which God would have thee to do;" and so saying,
he too passed away into the darkness, and--I awoke.'"

"That is a singular dream," I said, "although it was scarcely necessary
to have mentioned that your friend had been making a study of Jean
Paul. But I suppose there really _is_ work to do in Heaven?"

"It is very much as it is on earth in that respect," she answered,
"excepting that here one loves one's work, and, although here
too, there are alternate periods of labour and repose, it would be
difficult for some of us to say which is the sweeter. I could tell
you which _I_ love the more, but then all our work is of our Father's
ordering, and He knows just what is best for each of us. Some who
come here (never mind my smile! I was thinking of the 'tired woman'
who was 'going to do nothing for ever and ever') have to take a very
long holiday before they are allowed to put hand to anything; and
others there are whose first task it is to learn those lessons which,
through unfavourable circumstances or the accidents of their birth,
it was hardly to be expected they could have learned on earth. There
are some of the poorest of the poor in East London, among whom by our
Father's direction I am now working, who I believe have had scarcely
more opportunity of knowing what Christianity means to them than have
the very heathen. Some, when they come here, have to start from the
beginning, so you can believe that for you who can write, as well as
for those who can preach, there is every opportunity for the exercise
of God's gifts--only remember!" she added sadly, but with a smile,
"that the popular preacher of earth, be he poet or parson, is not
always the man who can do most good in heaven, for here one is expected
to practise as well as to preach."

"So you are entrusted with the task of ministering to certain of the
poor in East London?" I said; "I had no idea that our Father permitted
those who had once left the world to return to it again."

"Half of our work, and more, is on earth," she made answer. "It was to
tell you of that that I pointed out my poet-friend, the dreamer of
dreams, to you. Himself a poet, he was the son of a poet, who had lived
to see all else he loved on earth pass away before him; and when this
boy, his darling hope and only companion, was also taken, the old man
was left lonely, desolate and infirm. But not so lonely as one might
imagine, for his boy seldom leaves him, and the work which God has set
apart for the poet-son, and which is to him the resting-work of heaven,
is to be with his father in all sorrow, to minister to him in all
pain, and to be with him in every wakeful or weary moment, his unseen
comforter and friend."

I was interested in what she related, for I remembered that when I was
sitting one evening with the poet-father, he had told me that, for
all his loneliness, he was never alone. "No, I am never lonely," he
said, "although you will perhaps think what I am going to tell you is
but an old mans' fancy. A night or two after my dear boy died, I was
thinking of my dead youth, and of my dead wife, of my dead friends and
my dead children, until it seemed to me as if I, too, ought long since
to have been buried, for I was lingering on (like a spectral moon when
the sun is high) the living ghost of a vanished past. The generation
had departed which I knew, and the one which was growing up around me
was too busy listening to the songs of its own singers to give ear to
mine. As the thought of my loneliness, my loveless life, and my boy's
newly-made grave, away out in the dreary cemetery, came over me, I did
that which was cowardly and faithless, and dropped my head upon my
hands and wept. Then it was that there came a touch upon my arm, and a
voice in my ear, and though I knew none else was in the room, I was not
afraid, but answered without looking up: 'Who is it?'

"'It is only I, dear father,' the voice replied, 'only your boy. You
must not be unhappy about me, for though I have greatly sinned, yet I
have been greatly forgiven, and am perfectly, peacefully happy.'

"My son then went on to tell me," the old man continued, "that for me
there was to be no more loneliness, for that in all my sleepless nights
and sorrowful days, he would be with me ever and always, my constant
companion and comforter, until for me too the time shall come when,

  "'Midnight waking, twilight weeping, heavy noontide--all are done.'"

       *       *       *       *       *

"That is a very touching incident," said my friend, when I had
related this conversation to her. "If all earth-dwellers were as
spiritually-minded as yonder poet's poet-father, and were as capable
of apprehending how real a thing spiritual companionship may be, our
dead would soon cease to be called our 'lost ones,' and death would no
longer be spoken of as the 'great parting.' Death gives us more friends
than he takes from us, and often brings us nearer to those who have
gone before, than we were during their lifetime. Though it is nineteen
hundred years since our Master, Christ, trod the earth a visible
Presence, yet He is more to the world to-day, and nearer to each
separate soul in it, than ever He was to the men and women who touched
garments with Him when He walked the fields of Palestine. _Then_ such
as sought His aid had often to wait His coming in weariness and
weakness of soul, whilst not seldom it happened that they could not
obtain access to him 'because of the throng,' and we read even of one
who was fain to climb a tree to catch a glimpse of Him in passing.
_Now_ He stands by each of us, waiting and willing to hear. _Then_ they
had to go to Him; _now_ He comes to us, and is with us always and in
every place. I tell you that Jesus Christ is as real a Presence to-day
in the streets of London or Boston, as He was in the homes of Nazareth
or Jerusalem. He is as near to us now as He was to Martha and to Mary,
and is as willing to help and hear you or me, as He was to heal the
sick, or to pardon the dying thief;" and then in a low, sweet voice she
repeated the following lines from Whittier's poem, "Our Master":--

  "But warm, sweet, tender, even yet
    A present help is He;
  And faith has still its Olivet,
    And love its Galilee.

  "The healing of His seamless dress
    Is by our beds of pain;
  We touch Him in life's throng and press,
    And we are whole again.

  "Through Him the first fond prayers are said,
    Our lips of childhood frame,
  The last low whispers of our dead
    Are burdened with His name."

"The thought that the 'last low whispers' of the loved ones who have
left us were 'burdened' with the Name which we first learned to lisp
at our mother's knee is a very tender and beautiful one," she said
reverently, after a moment's silence. "We seem to see our own fathers
and mothers, and their fathers and mothers, linked to ourselves, and
through us to our children and our children's children, until all the
generations of the world--past, present, and future--become as one
family in a great bond of fellowship, even as all the joy and sorrow of
humanity find one common home in the heart of the Lord Christ who loves
us."

"I am not sure that I realize this love of His of which you speak," I
said sadly. "It is so vague and vast that I become lost, and feel that
I have no personal hold upon it. How can He love the whole world, and
yet love each separate individual in it with an affection as distinct
as that which I feel for my wife and children?"

"You cannot realize it as existing in yourself," she made answer,
"although even you love all your children, and yet love each one of
them with a distinct and personal love; but then you cannot order the
succession of the seasons, or stay a planet upon its course, and you
might just as well try to measure God's power by your power, as try to
apprehend the love which passeth understanding by likening it to your
own. But you will know what Christ is to us one day."

"Tell me more of Him," I whispered eagerly; "tell me more of Him. Did
you love Him as earnestly and believe in Him as trustfully when you
were on earth as you do now?"

"Not always," she answered sadly, "not always (and, oh! it was such
'cold comfort'--the talk of the Pantheists and the Deists to whom
I had gone), but I came at last to see that the Cross of Christ is
humanity's only hope. I came, too, to think that I could better bear
to disbelieve in a God at all than to disbelieve in the Saviour. 'By
Atheism,' I said to myself, 'I lose only a Deity of whom (excepting
for the gospel-revelation) I know practically nothing, but in losing
Christ I lose all--this world's hope as well as the next's.' There is
not a creed which has been offered us during the last eighteen hundred
years as a substitute for faith in the Saviour which does not take the
very basis of its being from Christianity."

"Yes," I said; "but many people will tell you that Christianity is
nothing more than a skilfully-framed fable, cunningly devised to adapt
itself to our human needs."

"Christ was, and Christianity was before humanity or its needs came
into being," she made answer; "and the sacrifice of the Cross was no
afterthought given as a concession to our human requirements. On the
contrary, our human requirements were given us that we, through them,
might come by way of Calvary to the feet of Christ; and it is because
it has been God's purpose from all eternity to save the sinner by the
sacrifice of Himself that you and I feel our need of a Saviour."

"Yes," I said, "I do indeed feel that whatever help comes to me must be
something outside myself, and that no sorrowing of mine can atone for
the past; but I feel also that I, and I only, am responsible for what I
have done, and that to lay that responsibility upon another is utterly
inadequate to satisfy even my limited sense of justice--besides which
I never can and never will believe in the possibility of the innocent
being allowed to suffer for the guilty."

"But the innocent do suffer for the guilty," she said, "even in the
very earth-world, by the laws of which you wish to judge the heavenly
one. You profess yourself willing to abide by the evidence of your
senses, and if you will only look back upon the earth-life which you
have left, you will see that the sins of the fathers are visited upon
the children, and that the innocent are suffering for the guilty every
day, and that God, for some good reason of His own, allows it to be so.
As for what you say about your sense of justice, I agree with you that
if a man run into your debt--run into your debt by wilful and wicked
courses--he must be held answerable for the repayment of the money.
But supposing one comes forward who loves him, and who has watched his
sinnings with sorrow, and says, 'I will pay for my friend that which he
cannot pay for himself,' would not your sense of justice be satisfied?"

"Even then the moral obligation remains," I objected.

"Yes, but that obligation has been transferred," she said, "although
as a matter of fact, it is against God rather than against man, that
our blackest sins are committed. But, independently of that side of
the question, Christ has taken the consequences of your sin, and of
the wrong you did Dorothy--the consequences to her, as well as to
yourself--upon Himself, and has suffered for you and for her in His own
person, and if He be willing to forgive, then are you forgiven indeed!

"That reconciliation by the Saviour should at any time have been to
me an intellectual stumbling-block is now beyond my comprehension,"
she continued earnestly. "In its very adaptability to our human needs,
Christianity bears the stamp of its divine origin. Left to himself, the
very best of us must feel his inability either to atone for the evil
he has already done, or to withstand the temptations which yet await
him in the future, and though he struggle right manfully to clamber
out of the gulf into which he has fallen, the dead-weight of his sins,
which he carries and must carry chained log-like about him, is ever the
heaviest clog to drag him back. But Christianity does more for a man
than merely forgive him his debts. It sets the bankrupt upon his legs
again, a solvent man and sane, with a clean bill of health, and with
a fresh start in life. It is _the_ religion of Hope, for none is too
sinful for the Saviour to save, and to the man who brings his sins,
as well as his inability to resist his sins, to the feet of Christ,
there is indeed a present Help and Hope in all his troubles! There is
much--very much--in Christianity that I cannot and do not pretend to
understand, but I can understand enough to make me very loving and
very trustful. The only mystery which still sometimes troubles me is
that most terrible of all mysteries--the mystery of human suffering.
But even that I am content to leave, for is not our God Himself a
suffering God? and who that witnessed the sufferings of Jesus Christ
(and what sufferings were ever like to His?) could have foreseen that
the cruel Cross whereon He hung should hereafter be the finger-post
to point the way to heaven? or that beneath His cry of agony in the
garden, God heard the triumph-song of a ransomed world?"

[Illustration]




[Illustration]




CHAPTER XIV.

_HOPE._


At last there came a time, even in hell, when the burden of my sin lay
so heavily upon me, that I felt I could bear it no longer, and that if
succour there came none, the very soul of me must wither away and die.
It was not that I wanted to evade the punishment of my crime, for I
was willing and wished to undergo it to the uttermost. No, that which
was so terrible to me was the thought that not all the sufferings of
eternity could avail to wipe away the awful stain upon my spirit, or
to undo the evil which I had brought upon the woman I had ruined. Of
myself and of my future, save for the continual crying-out of my soul
after its lost purity, I scarcely cared now to think. It was of Dorothy
that my heart was full; it was for Dorothy that I never ceased to
sorrow, to lament, and--sinner, though I was--to pray. I saw then the
inevitable consequences of the wrong I had done her pictured forth in
all their horror. I saw her, with the sense of her sin as yet but fresh
upon her, shrinking from every glance, and fancying that she read the
knowledge of her guilt in every eye. I saw her, "not knowing where to
turn for refuge from swiftly-advancing shame, and understanding no more
of this life of ours than a foolish lost lamb wandering farther and
farther in the nightfall," stealing stealthily forth at dusk to hide
herself from her fellow-creatures.

I saw her, when the secret of her shame could no longer be concealed,
recoiling in mute terror from the glance of coarse admiration on the
faces of sensual men, or shrinking in quivering agony from the look
of curious scorn in the eyes of maids and mothers, who drew aside
their skirts as she passed them, as if fearful of being contaminated
by her touch. And then--driven out from their midst by the very
Christian women who should have been the first to have held out a hand
to save her--I saw her turn away with a heart hardened into brazen
indifference, and plunge headlong into a bottomless gulf of ignominy
and sin.

Nor did the vision pass from me until, out of that seething vortex
of lust and infamy, I saw arise the black phantom of an immortal
soul which was lost for ever, crying out unto God and His Christ for
judgment upon the seducer!

       *       *       *       *       *

As these hideous spectres of the past arose again before me, I fell to
the ground, and shrieked out under the burden of my sin, as only he can
shriek who is torn by hell-torture and despair. But even as I shrieked,
I felt that burden lifted and borne away from me, and then I saw, as in
a vision, One kneeling in prayer. And I, who had cried out that I could
bear the burden of my sin no longer, saw that upon Him was laid, not
only my sin, but the sins of the whole world, and that He stooped of
His own accord to receive them. And as I looked upon the Divine dignity
of that agonized form--forsaken of His Father that we might never be
forsaken, and bowed down under a burden, compared to which, all the
horrors of hell were but as the passing phantom of a pain--I saw great
beads of blood break out like sweat upon His brow, and I heard wrung
from Him a cry of such unutterable anguish as never before rose from
human lips. And at that cry the vision passed, and I awoke to find
myself in hell once more, but in my heart there was a stirring as of
the wings of hope--the hope which I had deemed dead to me for ever.

_Could_ it be--O God of mercy! was it possible that even now it might
not be too late?--that there was indeed One who could make my sin as
though it had never been?--who of His great love for Dorothy and for
me, would bear it and its consequences as His own burden? and who by
the cleansing power of the blood which He had shed upon the cross,
could wash her soul and mine whiter than the whiteness of snow?

But to this hope there succeeded a moment when the agonized thought:
"How if there be no Christ?" leapt out at me, like the darkness which
looms but the blacker for the lightning-flash; a moment when hell gat
hold on me again, and a thousand gibbering devils arose to shriek in my
ear: "And though there be a Christ, is it not now too late?"

I reeled at that cry, and the darkness seemed once more to close in
around. A horde of hideous thoughts, the very spawn of hell, swarmed
like vermin in my mind; there was the breath as of a host of contending
fiends upon my face; a hundred hungry hands laid hold on me, and strove
to drag me down and down as to a bottomless pit; but with a great cry
to God, I flung the foul things from me; and battling, beating, like a
drowning man for breath, I fell at the feet of a woman, white-veiled,
and clad in robes like the morning, whose hand it was that had plucked
me from the abyss in which I lay.

[Illustration]




[Illustration]




CHAPTER XV.

_HEAVEN._


It seemed to me then that I fell into a sleep, deep, and sweet, and
restful, in which I dreamt that I was a child lying upon the bosom of
God. I remember that, as I lay, I stirred in my slumber, and, raising
myself, chanced in opening my eyes to look below, but that with a
cry of terror I turned and clung like a frighted babe to my Father's
breast,--for beneath me and afar, there yet yawned the mouth of hell,
from which, ever and anon, rolled dense clouds of hot and hissing
smoke, that seemed to twist and writhe like souls in agony, and which
in colour were like unto the colour of blood.

And I thought that, seeing my fear, my Father stooped to me as a mother
stoops to comfort her frightened babe, and that as He stooped I beheld
His face, and knew it for the face of the Lord Jesus, and that He bade
me be of good cheer, "for underneath thee are the everlasting arms."

As He so spake I awoke, and saw that she whose hand had plucked me out
of the abyss of horror into which I had fallen, yet knelt beside me in
tender ministry and prayer, and that she was singing a hymn softly to
herself whereof I heard only a verse:--

  "I know not where His islands lift
    Their fronded palms in air;
  I only know I cannot drift
    Beyond His love and care."

She ceased, and I arose, but ere I had time to question her, I
was conscious of a sudden stillness, like the hush which follows
benediction after prayer. "Don't you hear it?" she whispered eagerly,
as with upraised hand enjoining silence, she turned her head as if to
catch some far-off murmur, "Don't you hear it? They are praying for you
at home: kneel down!" And as her words died away, there seemed to float
towards me the sound of air-borne music that stayed for one moment
to fold me round with the sweet consolations of loving companionship
and of peace, and in the next stole swiftly and softly away as if
journeying onward and upward to the throne of God.

And with a great cry of anguish I fell to my knees and prayed: "O Lord
Christ! I am foul and selfish and sinful! I do not know that I love
Thee! I do not know that I have repented of my sins even! I only know
that I cannot do the things I would do, and that I can never undo the
evil I have done. But I come to Thee, Lord Jesus, I come to Thee as
Thou biddest me. Send me not away, O Saviour of sinners. Amen."

As I ended, it seemed that my companion turned to leave me, and I fell
to sobbing and sorrowing, until at last for very anguish I could sob
no more. But soon I heard again her returning footsteps, and, looking
up, I saw One who stood beside her, thorn-crowned, and clad in robes of
white. _His features were the features of a man, but His face was the
face of God!_

And as I looked upon that face, I shrank back dazed and breathless
and blinded;--shrank back with a cry like the cry of one smitten of
the lightning; for beneath the wide white brow there shone out eyes,
before the awful purity of which my sin-stained soul seemed to scorch
and shrivel like a scroll in a furnace. But as I lay, lo! there came a
tender touch upon my head, and a voice in my ear that whispered, "Son."

And as the word died away into a silence like the hallowed hush
of listening angels, and I stretched forth my arms with a cry of
unutterable longing and love, I saw that He held one by the hand--even
she who had plucked me out of the abyss into which I had fallen--and I
saw that she was no longer veiled. It was Dorothy--Dorothy whom He had
of His infinite love sought out and saved from the shame to which my
sin had consigned her, and whom He had sent to succour me, that so He
might set upon my soul the seal of His pardon and of His peace. And to
Him be the praise. Amen.

[Illustration: THE END.]




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 41 Cook's Boston Monday Lectures. 1st Series. 340 pp., _2s. 6d._


 42 Cook's Boston Monday Lectures. 2nd Series. 300 pp., _2s. 6d._


 43 Newman Smyth's Works. Containing "Old Faiths in New Light," "The
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 44 Hallam's Literature of Europe during the 15th, 16th, and 17th
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 45 Lamb's Essays of Elia and Eliana. 850 pp., _3s. 6d._


 46 History of Rome. By D. Rose. Edited by H.W. Dulcken, Ph.D. 500 pp.,
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 47 History of Greece. By D. Rose. Edited by H.W. Dulcken, Ph.D. 480
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 48 Palgrave's History of the Anglo-Saxons. _2s. 6d._


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