John Ward, Preacher. Margaret Wade Campbell Deland

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СКАЧАТЬ desire more light; it was simply that he could not conceive that there might be more light. And granting his premise that the Bible was directly inspired by God, he was not illogical in holding with a pathetic and patient faith to the doctrines of the Presbyterian Church.

      Helen's belief was as different as was her mode of thought. It was perhaps a development of her own nature, rather than the result of her uncle's teaching, though she had been guided by him spiritually ever since he had taken her to his own home, on the death of her parents, when she was a little child. "Be a good girl, my dear," Dr. Howe would say. So she learned her catechism, and was confirmed just before she went to boarding-school, as was the custom with Ashurst young women, and sung in the choir, while Mr. Denner drew wonderful chords from the organ, and she was a very well-bred and modest young woman, taking her belief for granted, and giving no more thought to the problems of theology than girls usually do.

      But this was before she met John Ward. After those first anxious questions of his, Helen began to understand how slight was her hold upon religion. But she did not talk about her frame of mind, nor dignify the questions which began to come by calling them doubts; how could they be doubts, when she had never known what she had believed? So, by degrees, she built up a belief for herself.

      Love of good was really love of God, in her mind. Heaven meant righteousness, and hell an absence from what was best and truest; but Helen did not feel that a soul must wait for death before it was overtaken by hell. It was very simple and very short, this creed of hers; yet it was the doorway through which grief and patience were to come—the sorrow of the world, the mystery of sin, and the hope of that far-off divine event.

      There was no detail of religious thought with Helen Jeffrey; ideas presented themselves to her mind with a comprehensiveness and simplicity which would have been impossible to Mr. Ward. But at this time he knew nothing of the mental processes that were leading her out of the calm, unreasoning content of childhood into a mist of doubt, which, as she looked into the future, seemed to darken into night. He was struggling with his conscience, and asking himself if he had any right to seek her love.

      "Be not unequally yoked together with unbelievers," he said to himself. To his mind, Helen's lack of belief in certain doctrines—for it had hardly crystallized into unbelief—was sin; and sin was punishable by eternal death. Here was his escape from conscience. Should this sweet soul, that he loved more than his own, be lost? No; surely, it was a sacred right and duty to win her heart and marry her, that he might take her away from the atmosphere of religious indifference in which she lived, and guide her to light and life.

      Love won the day. "I will save her soul!" he said to himself; and with this purpose always before him to hide a shadow, which whispered—so he thought—"This is a sin," he asked her to be his wife.

      He did not have to plead long. "I think I have always loved you," Helen said, looking up into his eyes; and John was so happy that every thought of anxiety for her soul was swallowed up in gratitude to God for her love.

      It was one midsummer afternoon that he reached Ashurst; he went at once to the rectory, though with no thought of asking Dr. Howe's permission to address his niece. It seemed to John as though there were only their two souls in the great sunny world that day, and his love-making was as simple and candid as his life.

      "I've come to tell you I love you," he said, with no preface, except to take her hands in his.

      He did not see her often during their engagement, nor did he write her of his fears and hopes for her; he would wait until she was quite away from Ashurst carelessness, he thought; and beside, his letters were so full of love, there was no room for theology. But he justified silence by saying when they were in their own home he would show her the beauty of revealed religion; she should understand the majesty of the truth; and their little house, which was to be sacred as the shrine of human love, should become the very gate of heaven.

      It was a very little house, this parsonage. Its sharp pitch roof was pulled well down over its eyes, which were four square, shining windows, divided into twenty-four small panes of glass, so full of bubbles and dimples that they made the passer-by seem sadly distorted, and the spire of the church opposite have a strange bend in it.

      John Ward's study had not a great many books. He could not afford them, for one reason; but, with a row of Edwards, and some of Dr. Samuel Hopkins' sermons, and pamphlets by Dr. Emmons, he could spare all but one or two volumes of Hodge and Shedd, who, after all, but reiterate, in a form suited to a weaker age, the teachings of Dr. Jonathan Edwards.

      The dim Turkey carpet was worn down to the nap in a little path in front of his bookshelves, where he used to stand absorbed in reading, or where he walked back and forth, thinking out his dark and threatening sermons. For before his marriage John preached the law rather than the gospel.

      "So I am going to hear you preach on Sunday?" Helen said, the Saturday morning after their return. "It's odd that I've never heard you, and we have known each other more than a year."

      He was at his desk, and she rested her hand lightly on his shoulder. He put down his pen, and turned to look up into her face. "Perhaps you will not like my sermons;" there was a little wistfulness in his dark eyes as he spoke.

      "Oh, yes, I shall," she said, with smiling certainty. "Sermons are pretty much alike, don't you think? I know some of uncle Archie's almost by heart. Really, there is only one thing to say, and you have to keep saying it over and over."

      "We cannot say it too often," John answered. "The choice between eternal life and eternal death should sound in the ears of unconverted men every day of their lives."

      Helen shook her head. "I didn't mean that, John. I was thinking of the beauty of holiness." And then she added, with a smile, "I hope you don't preach any awful doctrines?"

      "Sometimes the truth is terrible, dear," he said gently.

      But when she had left him to write his sermon, he sat a long while thinking. Surely she was not ready yet to hear such words as he had meant to speak. He would put this sermon away for some future Sunday, when the truth would be less of a shock to her. "She must come to the knowledge of God slowly," he thought. "It must not burst upon her; it might only drive her further from the light to hear of justice as well as mercy. She is not able to bear it yet."

      So he took some fresh paper, and wrote, instead of his lurid text from Hebrews, "Ye shall be my sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty."

      But when Helen went out of the study, she thought very little of sermons or doctrines. John filled her mind, and she had no room for wondering about his beliefs; he could believe anything he chose; he was hers—that was enough.

      She went into her small kitchen, the smile still lingering upon her lips, and through its open doorway saw her little maid, Alfaretta, out in the sunny garden at the back of the house. She had an armful of fresh white tea-towels, which had been put out to dry on the row of gooseberry bushes at the end of the garden, and was coming up the path, singing cheerily, with all the force of her strong young lungs. Helen caught the words as she drew near:—

      "My thoughts on awful subjects roll,

       Damnation and the dead.

       What horrors seize the guilty soul,

       Upon the dying bed!

      "Where endless crowds of sinners lie,

       And darkness makes their chains,

       Tortured with keen despair they cry,

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