Chronicles of the Schonberg-Cotta Family Part 12

Mary, mother of G.o.d, Virgin of virgins, mother of divine grace--holy Sebastian and all martyrs--great father Augustine and all holy doctors, intercede for me, that my penances may be accepted as a satisfaction for my sins, and may pacify my Judge.

_March_ 25.--ANNUNCIATION OF THE HOLY VIRGIN.

My preceptor has put into my hands the Bible bound in red morocco which Brother Martin, he says, used to read so much. I am to study it in all the intervals which the study of the fathers, expeditions for begging, the services of the Church, and the menial offices in the house which fall to the share of novices, allow. These are not many. I have never had a Bible in my hands before, and the hours pa.s.s quickly indeed in my cell which I can spend in reading it. The preceptor, when he comes to call me for the midnight service, often finds me still reading.

It is very different from what I expected. There is nothing oratorical in it, there are no laboured disquisitions, and no minute rules, at least in the New Testament.

I wish sometimes I had lived in the Old Jewish times, when there was one temple wherein to wors.h.i.+p, certain definite feasts to celebrate, certain definite ceremonial rules to keep.

If I could have stood in the Temple courts on that great day of atonement, and seen the victim slain, and watched till the high priest came out from the holy place with his hands lifted up in benediction, I should have known absolutely that G.o.d was satisfied, and returned to my home in peace. Yes, to my _home_! there were no monasteries, apparently, in those Jewish times. Family life was G.o.d's appointment then, and family affections had his most solemn sanctions.

In the New Testament, on the contrary, I cannot find any of those definite rules. It is all addressed to the heart; and who can make the heart right? I suppose it is the conviction of this which has made the Church since then restore many minute rules and discipline, in imitation of the Jewish ceremonial; for in the Gospels and Epistles I can find no ritual, ceremonial, or definite external rules of any kind.

What advantage, then, has the New Testament over the old? Christ has come. "G.o.d so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son." This _ought_ surely to make a great difference between us and the Jews. But how?

_April_ 9.--ST. GREGORY OF NYSSA.

I have found, in my reading to-day, the end of Eva's sentence--"G.o.d so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, _that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life_."

How simple the words are!--"Believeth;" that would mean, in any other book, "trusteth," "has reliance" in Christ;--simply to confide in him, and then receive his promise not to perish.

But _here_--in this book, in theology--it is necessarily impossible that believing can mean anything so simple as that; because, at that rate, any one who merely came to the Lord Jesus Christ in confiding trust would have everlasting life, without any further conditions; and this is obviously out of the question.

For what can be more simple than to confide in one worthy of confidence?

and what can be greater than everlasting life?

And yet we know, from all the teaching of the doctors and fathers of the Church, that nothing is more difficult than obtaining everlasting life; and that, for this reason, monastic orders, pilgrimages, penances, have been multiplied from century to century; for this reason saints have forsaken every earthly joy, and inflicted on themselves every possible torment;--all to obtain everlasting life, which, if this word "believeth" meant here what it would mean anywhere but in theology, would be offered freely to every pet.i.tioner.

Wherefore it is clear that "believeth," in the Scriptures, means something entirely different from what it does in any secular book, and must include contrition, confession, penance, satisfaction, mortification of the flesh, and all else necessary to salvation.

Shall I venture to send this end of Eva's sentence to her?

It might mislead her. Dare I for her sake?--dare I still more for my own?

One hour I have sat before this question; and whither has my heart wandered? What confession can retrace the flood of bitter thoughts which have rushed over me in this one hour?

I had watched her grow from childhood into early womanhood; and until these last months, until that week of anguish, I had thought of her as a creature between a child and an angel. I had loved her as a sister who had yet a mystery and a charm about her different from a sister. Only when it seemed that death might separate us did it burst upon me that there was something in my affection for her which made her not one among others, but in some strange sacred sense the only one on earth to me.

And as I recovered came the hopes I must never more recall, which made all life like the woods in spring, and my heart like a full river set free from its ice-fetters, and flowing through the world in a tide of blessing.

I thought of a home which might be, I thought of a sacrament which should transubstantiate all life into a symbol of heaven, a home which was to be peaceful and sacred as a church, because of the meek and pure, and heavenly creature who should minister and reign there.

An then came to me that terrible vision of a city smitten by the pestilence which I had brought, with the recollection of the impulse I had had in the forest at midnight, and more than once since then, to take the monastic vows. I felt I was like Jonah flying from G.o.d; yet still I hesitated until she was stricken. And then I yielded. I vowed if she were saved I would become a monk.

Not till she was stricken, whose loss would have made the whole world a blank to me: not till the sacrifice was worthless,--did I make it! And will G.o.d accept such a sacrifice as this?

At least Brother Martin had not this to reproach himself with. He did not delay his conversion until his whole being had become possessed by an image no prayers can erase; nay, which prayer and holy meditations on heaven itself, only rivet on the heart, as the purest reflection of heaven memory can recall.

Brother Martin, at least did not trifle with his vocation until too late.

VII.

Else's Story.

_January_ 23.

It is too plain now why Fritz would not look back as he went down the street. He thought it would be looking back from the kingdom of G.o.d.

The kingdom of G.o.d, then, is the cloister, and the world, _we_ are that!--father, mother, brothers, sisters, friends, home, that is the world! I shall never understand it. For if all my younger brothers say is true, either all the priests and monks are not in the kingdom of G.o.d, or the kingdom of G.o.d is strangely governed here on earth.

Fritz was helping us all so much. He would have been the stay of our parents' old age. He was the example and admiration of the boys, and the pride and delight of us all; and to _me_! My heart grows so bitter when I write about it, I seem to hate and reproach every one. Every one but Fritz; I cannot, of course, hate him. But why was all that was gentlest and n.o.blest in him made to work towards this last dreadful step?

If our father had only been more successful, Fritz need not have entered on that monastic foundation at Erfurt, which made his conscience so sensitive; if my mother had only not been so religious, and taught us to reverence Aunt Agnes as so much better than herself, he might never have thought of the monastic life; if I had been more religious he might have confided more in me, and I might have induced him to pause, at least, a few years before taking this unalterable step. If Eva had not been so wilful, and insisted on braving the contagion from me, she might never have been stricken, and that vow might not yet, might never have been taken. If G.o.d had not caused him so innocently to bring the pestilence among us! But I must not dare to say another word of complaint, or it will become blasphemy. Doubtless it is G.o.d who has willed to bring all this misery on us; and to rebel against G.o.d is a deadly sin. As Aunt Agnes said, "The Lord is a jealous G.o.d," he will not suffer us to make idols. We must love him best, first, alone. We must make a great void in our heart by renouncing all earthly affections, that he may fill it. We must mortify the flesh, that we may live. What, then, is the flesh? I suppose all our natural affections, which the monks call our fleshly l.u.s.ts. These Fritz has renounced. Then if all our natural affections are to die in us, what is to live in us? The "spiritual life," they say in some of the sermons, and "the love of G.o.d." But are not my natural affections my _heart_; and if I am not to love G.o.d with my heart, with the heart with which I love my father and mother, what am I to love him with?

It seems to me, the love of G.o.d to us is something quite different from any human being's love to us.

When human beings love us they like to have us with them; they delight to make us happy; they delight in our being happy, whether they make us so or not, if it is a right happiness, a happiness that does us good.

But with G.o.d's love it must be quite different. He warns us not on any account to come too near Him. We have to place priests, and saints, and penances between us and Him, and then approach Him with the greatest caution, lest, after all, it should be in the wrong way, and He should be angry. And, instead of delighting in our happiness, He is never so much pleased as when we renounce all the happiness of our life, and make other people wretched in doing so, as Fritz, our own Fritz, has just done.

Therefore, also, no doubt, the love G.o.d requires we should feel for Him is something entirely different from the love we give each other. It must, I suppose, be a serious, severe, calm adoration, too sublime to give either joy or sorrow, such as had left its stamp on Aunt Agnes's grave impa.s.sive face. I can never, never even attempt to attain to it.

Certainly at present I have no time to think of it.

Thank Heaven, thou livest still, mother of mercy! In _thy_ face there have been tears, real, bitter, human tears; in _thine_ eyes there have been smiles of joy, real, simple, human joy. Thou wilt understand and have pity. Yet oh, couldst not thou, even thou, sweet mother, have reminded him of the mother he has left to battle on alone? thou who art a mother, and didst bend over a cradle, and hadst a little lowly home at Nazareth once?

But I know my own mother would not even herself have uttered a word to keep Fritz back. When first we heard of it, and I entreated her to write and remonstrate, although the tears were streaming from her eyes, she said, "Not a word, Else, not a syllable. Shall not I give my son up freely to Him who gave him to me. G.o.d might have called him away from earth altogether when he lay smitten with the plague, and shall I grudge him to the cloister? I shall see him again," she added, "once or twice at least. When he is consecrated priest, shall I not have joy then, and see him in his white robes at the altar, and, perhaps, even receive my Creator from his hands!"

"Once or twice!--O mother!" I sobbed, "and in church, amongst hundreds of others! What pleasure will there be in that?"

"Else," she said softly, but with a firmness unusual with her, "my child, do not say another word. Once I myself had some faint inclination to the cloister, which, if I had nourished it, might have grown into a vocation. But I saw your father, and I neglected it. And see what troubles my children have to bear! Has there not also been a kind of fatal spell on all your father's inventions? Perhaps G.o.d will at last accept from me in my son what I withheld in myself, and will be pacified towards us, and send us better days; and then your father's great invention will be completed yet. But do not say anything of what I told you to him!"

I have never seen our father so troubled about anything.

"Just as he was able to understand my projects!" he said, "and I would have bequeathed them all to him!"

For some days he never touched a model! but now he has crept back to his old follies and his instruments, and tells us there was something in Fritz's horoscope which might have prepared us for this, had he only understood it a little before. However, this discovery, although too late to warn us of the blow, consoles our father, and he has resumed his usual occupations.

Eva looks very pale and fragile, partly, no doubt, from the effects of the pestilence; but when first the rumour reached us, I sought some sympathy from her, and said, "O Eva, how strange it seems, when Fritz always thought of us before himself, to abandon us all thus without one word of warning."

"Cousin Else," she said, "Fritz has done now as he always does. He _has_ thought of us first, I am as sure of it as if I could hear him say so.

He thought he would serve us best by leaving us thus, or he would never have left us."

She understood him best of all, as she so often does. When his letter came to our mother, it gave just the reasons she had often told me she was sure had moved him.