The Old Stone House by Constance Fenimore Woolson (sites to read books for free .txt) 📕

Aunt Faith did not reply. She knew when to be silent, and she had long hoped that the gentle, fervent words of the good old man would yet bring her impulsive nephew into the right path. She knew that much harm was sometimes done by too much urging, and when she saw that Mr. Hays’ words had made an impression upon Hugh, she left the impression to sink by its own weight.

The Sunday-noon meal at the old stone house was always a simple lunch, prepared the previous day in order to give the servants full liberty to attend church. It was, however, abundant and attractive. In the winter, Aunt Faith added a hot soup, prepared by her own hands, but at this season of the year, cold dishes were the most appetizing. Directly after lunch the family dispersed, Sibyl, Bessie, and Hugh going to their rooms, and Aunt Faith remaining in the sitting-room with Tom and Gem while they looked over their Sunday school lessons. At half-past two, the children started for the church, and then Aunt Faith rested quietly on the sofa until it was time to prepare for afternoon service at the chapel where Mr. Leslie officiated, a mission in whose welfare she was much interested. There was never any regularity about attending this afternoon service; sometimes Aunt Faith would go alone, sometimes Sibyl would accompany her, and sometimes the three cousins would all go. This afternoon they all came down, and Aunt Faith welcomed them pleasantly; she knew that Hugh might have been influenced by the beauty of the weather, Bessie by Hugh’s companionship, and Sibyl by the opportunity of seeing Mr. Leslie; but she believed that all her children were truly reverent at heart, and she had large faith in the solemn influence of the house of God, so she always encouraged them to go to church whenever they would, and on this occasion she made the walk pleasant with her cheerful conversation.

The chapel stood in one of the suburbs of Westerton, where the houses of the railroad workmen were crowded together in long rows, with the smoke from the mills and shops hanging in a cloud over them all the week. Busy, grimy men lived there, careless, tired women, and a throng of children, some neglected, some apparently well-tended, but all poor. In the midst of this bustle and smoke Mr. Leslie lived and worked. When he first came to Westerton, this chapel was almost deserted, but now it was filled with a congregation of its own, a congregation drawn from the neighboring houses, the laborers and their families whose zeal and liberty according to their means, might have put to shame many a church record in the rich quarters of the town.

Aunt Faith and her party entered the door as the little bell rang out its last note, and took their seats upon the benches, for there were no pews, and the sittings were free to all. The organ was played by a young workman, a German, with the national taste for music, and when the hymn was given out, the congregation as with one voice took up the strain, and in a powerful burst of melody, carried the words, as it were, high towards heaven. The music was inspiring, as true congregational music always is. All sang the air, but the harmony was well supplied by the organ; all sang, men, women, and children, and if there were any discordant voices, they were lost in the powerful melody. Hugh liked to sing, and he liked the simple hymns which Mr. Leslie always selected for his congregation; so he found all the places and sang with real enjoyment, while Bessie, looking over the same book, joined in after awhile in her low alto, as if borne along by his example. Then came the sermon, and, as Mr. Leslie gave out his text, Aunt Faith recognized it as one of the verses which she had read in the morning,—St. John, the seventeenth chapter, and the fifteenth verse, “I pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil.” “My friends,” said Mr. Leslie, speaking as usual without notes, “we often hear and read of the great desire felt by Christians of this and all ages to leave this world, this world of sickness and sorrow, of labor and poverty, and enter immediately into another life. Young persons who have lost dear friends wish to go and join them, for life looks dreary without love, and the days seem very long when they are not broken by the sound of that well-known footstep on the walk, and the words of love in that well-known voice which they can never hear on earth again. ‘I cannot stay on earth alone,’ they cry; ‘I shall grow wicked in my wild grief. Let me go to them, since they cannot come back to me.’ The middle-aged who have outlived the quick feelings of youth, sigh over the years still before them, years neither dark nor light, neither hard nor easy, the dull, monotonous path lengthening out before them, with neither great joy to lighten it, or great sorrow to darken it, the same commonplace cares and duties until the end. ‘This is doing us no good,’ they think; ‘life is slowly withering, zeal is gone. A flower cannot bloom in the desert! Let me go to a better country.’

“The old, who are past all labor, sometimes grow weary of waiting. ‘I am of no use,’ they say; ‘I am only a burden to myself and every one else. I have outlived my time, and it would be better for the world if I was taken out of it. My day is over. Let me go.’ Thus they all lament, and thus they sometimes pray, forgetting that the Lord knoweth best.

“The feeling is natural, and is founded upon the innate aspiration of the soul towards immortality, the consciousness and certainty that better things are laid up in store for us in another world. This innate consciousness of immortality is found in all men, even the most ignorant heathen possessing a glimmering of the idea, and this fact is an eternal contradiction to the arguments of the atheist; he cannot destroy this soul hope, for even if he should succeed in blighting it in the father, it would be there to confront him in the child, and so on from generation to generation. That there are persons who have wilfully stifled this divinely-given hope, that there are persons who have brought themselves to contradict their very being is an idea so awful that we shudder to think of it. A man may murder his companion and yet repent and be forgiven; but a man who murders his soul, a man who turns his back upon his Creator cannot repent, for he does not believe in his sin, and he cannot ask for forgiveness because he cannot believe in the existence of a power to forgive. My friends, the idea of such a man is almost super-human; and some wise persons have said that no such men have ever existed. They may think they have stifled their consciences and souls, and even live a long life in this belief, but sooner or later the terrible certainty of their mistake will overwhelm them, and they will find themselves stripped of their poor sophistries, of all sinners the most miserable.

“I hope and believe that there are no such persons in this congregation to-day. Do you not, on the contrary, feel in your hearts, the certainty of another and better life? I feel sure that you do,—that there is not one of you who is not looking forward to that happiness which God has prepared for those who love Him; a happiness which eye has not seen, which ear has not heard, and which it has not entered into the heart of men to conceive.

“But this precious engrafted hope must not be abused. It must not be twisted into an excuse for neglecting our duties here on earth. We are put into the world to live in it, and the duties which lie nearest to us must be faithfully performed, no matter how humble or how commonplace they may be. We must not go sighing through life, deluding ourselves with the idea that we are too good for our lot, and that it is praiseworthy to hold ourselves above common labor and dull routine, and devote our time to so-called religious aspiration. If the labor and routine are placed before us, it is our duty to accept them, and, whatever we do, do it with our might. I tell you, my friends, our path is clear before us, and we are sinning if we turn out of it. Suppose we are afflicted, suppose our loved ones are taken from us; we may weep, for Jesus wept. But we must not throw down our appointed work, and sit with idle hands and gloomy regret, while the precious time slips by. The mourner who stays in her darkened room, and refuses to interest herself in anything but her sorrow, is far less a Christian mourner than she who goes forth to take up her tasks again, thinking of her lost ones as only ‘gone before.’

“Those of us who have dull lives, with neither the sunshine nor the thunder-cloud to vary the monotonous gray of our horizon, must still strive to perform faithfully our uninteresting duties. We must not murmur over our lot, or think we are fitted for better things; we are not so fitted if the Lord keeps us there. There is, perhaps, some fatal weakness in our character which needs just that routine; we must learn patience and humility in the world, not out of it. Here is our school-house. This is our appointed lesson.

“The old, also, who are full of eagerness to go,—they, too, are wrong. To them, life with its joys and sorrows, its labor and care, is over, and they look uneasily around them; their occupation is gone. Perhaps they were busy workers, and it is hard to be idle; perhaps they were self-reliant, and it is hard to become a care to others; perhaps they have had powerful intellects, and it is hard to endure the consciousness that their mental powers are failing, day by day. Still, there is one duty remaining, and that they must learn. It is this: to wait. To wait patiently for the Lord in the world in which He has placed them. And this is, sometimes, the hardest duty of a long life.

“My friends, I cannot too heartily condemn the spirit of scorn for this world which we sometimes meet among Christians. The world is full of beauty. God Himself pronounced it very good. The evil, and the sorrow in it, are owing to man. What can be more fair than this very summer afternoon? What more beautiful than that lake, with those white clouds heaped over the horizon? Let us enjoy it, and praise God for His goodness; it is ungrateful not to admire and love His tender care for us in every flower by the roadside, in every tree that shades the heated land. I say, then, love this fair world; notice its beauties; take pleasure in the gifts it offers to you, its fruits and its flowers, its spring-time and harvest. Learn to admire them; thank God for them, and teach your children to appreciate them. The same words apply here which the beloved disciple used in reference to our love for our fellow-men: ‘For he that loveth not his brother