Surgeon Paul Faber by George MacDonald (e book free reading txt) 📕

if it be but to desire, is better than to have all you offer us in the name of truth. Through such desire and the hope of its attainment, all greatest things have been wrought in the earth: I too have my unbelief as well as you-I can not believe that a lie on the belief of which has depended our highest development. You may say you have a higher to bring in. But that higher you have become capable of by the precedent lie. Yet you vaunt truth! You would sink us low indeed, making out falsehood our best nourishment-at some period of our history at least. If, however, what I call true and high, you call false and low-my assertion that you have never seen that of which I so speak will not help-then is there nothing left us but to part, each go his own road, and wait the end-which according to my expectation will show the truth, according to yours, being nothing, will show nothing.

"I can not help thinking, if we could only get up there," Dorothy went on,-"I mean into a life of which I can at least dream-if I could but get my head and heart into the kingdom of Heaven, I should find that every thing else would come right. I believe it is God Himself I want-nothing will do but Himself in me. Mr. Wingfold says that we find things all wrong about us, that they keep going against our will and our liking, just to drive things right inside us, or at least to drive us where we can get them put right; and that, as soon as their work is done, the waves will lie down at our feet, or if not, we shall at least walk over their crests."

"It sounds very nice, and would comfort any body that wasn't in trouble," said Juliet; "but you wouldn't care one bit for it all any more than I do, if you had pain and love like mine pulling at your heart."

"I have seen a mother make sad faces enough over the baby at her breast," said Dorothy. "Love and pain seem so strangely one in this world, the wonder is how they will ever get parted. What God must feel like, with this world hanging on to Him with all its pains and cries-!"

"It's His own fault," said Juliet bitterly. "Why did He make us-or why did He not make us good? I'm sure I don't know where was the use of making me!"

"Perhaps not much yet," replied Dorothy, "but then He hasn't made you, He hasn't done with you yet. He is making you now, and you don't like it."

"No, I don't-if you call this making. Why does He do it? He could have avoided all this trouble by leaving us alone."

"I put something like the same question once to Mr. Wingfold," said Dorothy, "and he told me it was impossible to show any one the truths of the kingdom of Heaven; he must learn them for himself. 'I can do little more,' he said, 'than give you my testimony that it seems to me all right. If God has not made you good, He has made you with the feeling that you ought to be good, and at least a half-conviction that to Him you have to go for help to become good. When you are good, then you will know why He did not make you good at first, and will be perfectly satisfied with the reason, because you will find it good and just and right-so good that it was altogether beyond the understanding of one who was not good. I don't think,' he said, 'you will ever get a thoroughly satisfactory answer to any question till you go to Himself for it-and then it may take years to make you fit to receive, that is to understand the answer.' Oh Juliet! sometimes I have felt in my heart as if-I am afraid to say it, even to you,-"

" I shan't be shocked at any thing; I am long past that," sighed Juliet.

"It is not of you I am afraid," said Dorothy. "It is a kind of awe of the universe I feel. But God is the universe; His is the only ear that will hear me; and He knows my thoughts already. Juliet, I feel sometimes as if I must be good for God's sake; as if I was sorry for Him, because He has such a troublesome nursery of children, that will not or can not understand Him, and will not do what He tells them, and He all the time doing the very best for them He can."

"It may be all very true, or all great nonsense, Dorothy, dear; I don't care a bit about it. All I care for is-I don't know what I care for-I don't care for any thing any more-there is nothing left to care for. I love my husband with a heart like to break-oh, how I wish it would! He hates and despises me and I dare not wish that he wouldn't. If he were to forgive me quite, I should yet feel that he ought to despise me, and that would be all the same as if he did, and there is no help. Oh, how horrid I look to him! I can't bear it. I fancied it was all gone; but there it is, and there it must be forever. I don't care about a God. If there were a God, what would He be to me without my Paul?"

"I think, Juliet, you will yet come to say, 'What would my Paul be to me without my God?' I suspect we have no more idea than that lonely fly on the window there, what it would be to have a God ."

"I don't care. I would rather go to hell with my Paul than go to Heaven without him," moaned Juliet.

"But what if God should be the only where to find your Paul?" said Dorothy. "What if the gulf that parts you is just the gulf of a God not believed in-a universe which neither of you can cross to meet the other-just because you do not believe it is there at all?"

Juliet made no answer-Dorothy could not tell whether from feeling or from indifference. The fact was, the words conveyed no more meaning to Juliet than they will to some of my readers. Why do I write them then? Because there are some who will understand them at once, and others who will grow to understand them. Dorothy was astonished to find herself saying them. The demands of her new office of comforter gave shape to many half-formed thoughts, substance to many shadowy perceptions, something like music to not a few dim feelings moving within her; but what she said hardly seemed her own at all.

Had it not been for Wingfold's help, Dorothy might not have learned these things in this world; but had it not been for Juliet, they would have taken years more to blossom in her being, and so become her own. Her faint hope seemed now to break forth suddenly into power. Whether or not she was saying such things as were within the scope of Juliet's apprehension, was a matter of comparatively little moment. As she lay there in misery, rocking herself from side to side on the floor, she would have taken hold of nothing. But love is the first comforter, and where love and truth speak, the love will be felt where the truth is never perceived. Love indeed is the highest in all truth; and the pressure of a hand, a kiss, the caress of a child, will do more to save sometimes than the wisest argument, even rightly understood. Love alone is wisdom, love alone is power; and where love seems to fail it is where self has stepped between and dulled the potency of its rays.

Dorothy thought of another line of expostulation.

"Juliet," she said, "suppose you were to drown yourself and your husband were to repent?"

"That is the only hope left me. You see yourself I have no choice."

"You have no pity, it seems; for what then would become of him? What if he should come to himself in bitter sorrow, in wild longing for your forgiveness, but you had taken your forgiveness with you, where he had no hope of ever finding it? Do you want to punish him? to make him as miserable as yourself? to add immeasurably to the wrong you have done him, by going where no word, no message, no letter can pass, no cry can cross? No, Juliet-death can set nothing right. But if there be a God, then nothing can go wrong but He can set it right, and set it right better than it was before."

"He could not make it better than it was."

"What!-is that your ideal of love-a love that fails in the first trial? If He could not better that, then indeed He were no God worth the name."

"Why then did He make us such-make such a world as is always going wrong?"

"Mr. Wingfold says it is always going righter the same time it is going wrong. I grant He would have had no right to make a world that might go further wrong than He could set right at His own cost. But if at His own cost He turn its ills into goods? its ugliness into favor? Ah, if it should be so, Juliet! It may be so. I do not know. I have not found Him yet. Help me to find Him. Let us seek Him together. If you find Him you can not lose your husband. If Love is Lord of the world, love must yet be Lord in his heart. It will wake, if not sooner, yet when the bitterness has worn itself out, as Mr. Wingfold says all evil must, because its heart is death and not life."

"I don't care a straw for life. If I could but find my husband, I would gladly die forever in his arms. It is not true that the soul longs for immortality. I don't. I long only for love-for forgiveness-for my husband."

"But would you die so long as there was the poorest chance of regaining your place in his heart?"

"No. Give me the feeblest chance of that, and I will live. I could live forever on the mere hope of it."

"I can't give you any hope, but I have hope of it in my own heart."

Juliet rose on her elbow.

"But I am disgraced!" she said, almost indignantly. "It would be disgrace to him to take me again! I remember one of the officers' wives--. No, no! he hates and despises me. Besides I could never look one of his friends in the face again. Every body will say I ran away with some one-or that he sent me away because I was wicked. You all had a prejudice against me from the very first."

"Yes, in a way," confessed Dorothy. "It always seemed as if we did not know you and could not get at you, as if you avoided us-with your heart, I mean;-as if you had resolved we should not know you-as if you had something you were afraid we should discover."

"Ah, there it was, you see!" cried Juliet. "And now the hidden thing is revealed! That was it: I never could get rid of the secret that was gnawing at my life. Even when I was hardly aware of it,