The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss Part 58

And yet it is hardly possible to realise that this brilliant young life has forever vanished away from earth, for she seemed formed alike by nature and Providence for length of days. Already her character gave the fairest promise of a perfect woman. It possessed a strength and maturity beyond her years. Although not yet twenty-one, her varied mental culture and her knowledge of almost every branch of English literature, history, poetry, fiction, even physical science, were quite remarkable; nor was she ignorant of some of the best French and German, not to speak of Latin, authors. We have never known one of her age whose intellectual tastes were of a higher order. She seemed to feel equally at home in reading Shakespeare and Goethe; Prescott, Motley, and Froude; Mrs.

Austin, Scott, and d.i.c.kens; Taine, Huxley, and Tyndall; or the popular biographies and fictions of the day. And yet her studious habits and devotion to books did not render her any the less the unaffected, attractive, and whole-hearted girl. Her friends, both old and young, greatly admired her, but they loved her still more. As was natural in one of so much character, she was very decided in her ways; but she was also perfectly frank, truthful, and conscientious--resembling in this respect, as she did in some other excellent traits, her honored grandfather, Mr. Sturges.

Several years before her death she was enrolled among the disciples of Jesus. How vividly the writer recalls her earnest look and tones of voice when she declared to him her desire publicly to confess her Saviour and to remember Him at His table! When from beneath the deep sea the news that she was dangerously ill and then soon after that she was dead stole upon her friends here like a thief in the night, almost stunning them with grief; their first feeling was one of tender sympathy for the desolate, sorely-smitten parents, and of prayer that G.o.d would be pleased to comfort and uphold them in their affliction.

From many hearts, we are sure, that prayer has been offered up oftentimes since. If it were not for the relief which comes of faith and prayer, what a cloud of hopeless gloom would enshroud such an event!

Blessed be G.o.d for this exceeding great and precious relief. The dark cloud is not indeed dispersed even by faith and prayer, but with what a silver lining they are able to invest it! If we really believed that such tragical events are solely the effects of chance or mere natural law--if we did not believe that the hand of infinite wisdom and love is also in them, surely the gra.s.s would turn black beneath our feet. _The Lord gave; the Lord hath taken away; and blessed be the name of the Lord._

G. L. P.

H.

_Extracts front Dr. Vincent's Memorial Discourse._

The men and women who know how to comfort human sorrow, and to teach their fellows to turn it to its highest uses, are among G.o.d's best gifts to the world. The office and the name of Comforter have the highest and purest a.s.sociations. It is the Holy Spirit of G.o.d who calls Himself by that name, and to be a true comforter is to be indeed a co-worker with G.o.d. But even as the _word_ "comfort" goes deeper than those pitying commonplaces which even nature teaches us to utter to those who are in any trouble, so the _office_ of a true comforter requires other qualifications than mere natural tenderness of heart, or even the experience of suffering. One must know how to _interpret_ as well as how to _feel_ sorrow; must know its _lessons_ as well as its _smart_. Hence it is that G.o.d makes His comforters by processes of His own; by hard masters ofttimes, and by lessons not to be found in books.

It is in ill.u.s.tration of this truth that I bring to you to-day some memorials of the experience, character, and life-work of one widely known, deeply beloved, and greatly honored by G.o.d as an instrument of Christian instruction and of Christian comfort. It would, indeed, be possible to strike some other keynote. A character presenting so many points of interest might be studied from more than one of those points with both pleasure and profit; but, on the whole, it seems to me that the thought of a _Christian comforter_ best concentrates the lessons of her life, and best represents her mission to society; so that we might aptly choose for our motto those beautiful words of the Apostle: "Blessed be G.o.d, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, and the G.o.d of all comfort, who comforteth us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of G.o.d."

In endeavoring to depict a life which was largely shaped by sorrow, I am not going to open the record of a sorrowful life, but rather of a joyful one; not of a starved and meager life, but of a very rich one, both in itself and in its fruits; yet it may be profitable for us to see through what kind of discipline that life became so rich, and to strike some of the springs where arose the waters which refreshed so many of the children of pain and care.

The daughter of Edward Payson might justly have appropriated her father's words: "Thanks to the fervent, effectual prayers of my righteous parents, and the tender mercies of my G.o.d upon me, I have reason to hope that the pious wishes breathed over my infant head are in some measure fulfilled." She might have said with Cowper:

"My boast is not that I deduce my birth From loins enthroned and rulers of the earth; But higher far my proud pretensions rise; The child of parents pa.s.sed into the skies."

The life and work of that devoted minister of Jesus Christ have pa.s.sed into the religious history of New England--not to say of our whole country--and no student of that history is unfamiliar with that character so tried, yet so exalted by suffering; with that ministry so faithful, so unselfish, marked by such yearning for souls, and with such persistence, tact, and success in leading them to Christ; with that intellect so richly endowed and so well trained; that devotional spirit so rapt, that conscience so acutely sensitive; with that life so fruitful and that death so triumphant....

In the summer of 1869 she found a lovely and peaceful retreat among the hills of Vermont. There arose that tasteful home with which, perhaps more than any other spot, memory loves to a.s.sociate her. There, for ten happy summers, she enjoyed the communion with Nature's "visible forms,"

and heard her "various language," and felt her healing touch on the wearied brain and overstrung nerves; there, as I think she would have wished, she took leave of earth amid the pomp and flush of the late summer, and gladly ascended to the eternal suns.h.i.+ne of heaven; and there, in the shadow of the giant hills which "brought peace" to her, and the changing moods of which she so loved to study, her ashes await the morning of the Resurrection.

In reviewing this life of nearly sixty years, we find its keynote, as was said at the outset, in the thought of the Christian comforter. We see in her one whom G.o.d commissioned, so far as we can judge, to bring light and comfort to mult.i.tudes, and whom He prepared for that blessed work by peculiar and severe discipline.

There is nothing in which ordinary minds are more commonly mistaken than in their estimate of _suffering._ They seem often unable to conceive it except in its a.s.sociation with appreciable tragedies, in those grosser forms in which it waits upon visible calamity. Such do not know that the heart is often the scene of tragedies which can not be written, and that there are sufferings more subtle and more acute than any which torture the nerve or wring the brow. Take a character like this with which we are dealing; combine the nature to which love was a necessity of being with those high and pure ideals of character which culled cautiously the objects of affection; add the intense sensitiveness without the self- esteem which so often serves as a rock of refuge to the most sensitive; add the sharply-cut individuality which could only see and do and express in its own way, and which, therefore, so frequently exposed its subject to the misunderstanding of strangers or of unappreciative souls; crown all with the stern conscientiousness which would not compromise the truth even for love's sake, and the exquisite selfreverence, if you will allow the expression, which held the region of religious emotion as holy ground, and which regarded the attempt to open or to penetrate the inner shrines of Christian feeling as something akin to sacrilege--and blend all these in a delicate, highly-strung, nervous organization, and you have the elements of a fearful capacity for suffering.

Besides this _capacity_ for suffering, Mrs. Prentiss had a very clear cognition of the sacred _office_ of suffering, and of its relation to perfection of character. There were two ideas which pervaded her whole theory of religious experience. The one was that whenever G.o.d has special work for His children to do, He always fits them for it by suffering. She had the most intense conviction of any one I ever knew of the necessity of suffering to perfection of character or of work.

Doubtless there have been others who have learned as well as she its value as a purifying and exalting power, but very few, I think, who have so early and so uncompromisingly taken that truth into their theory of Christian education. She quoted with approval the words of Madame Guyon, that "G.o.d rarely, if ever, makes the educating process a painless one when He wants remarkable results." Such must drink of Christ's cup and be baptized with His baptism. Along with this went another and a complementary thought, viz., that as G.o.d prepares His workmen for great work by suffering, so there is another cla.s.s of His children whom He does not find competent to this preparation; who escape much of the conflict and suffering, but never attain the highest enjoyments or fight the decisive battles of time.... In a volume of Fenelon's Christian Counsel, which was one of her favorite closet companions, this pa.s.sage is scored: G.o.d "attacks all the subtle resources of self-love within, especially in those souls who have generously and without reserve delivered themselves up to the operations of His grace. The more He would purify them, the more He exercises them interiorly." And she has added a special note at the foot of the page: "He never forces Himself on ungenerous souls for this work."

Along with this went the thought that G.o.d's discipline was intended to make not only _models_, but _ministers_; that one who had pa.s.sed through the furnace with Christ was to emerge from the fiery baptism not merely to be _gazed_ at, but to go down to his brethren telling with power the story of the "form of the Fourth." This is the sentiment of some lines addressed by her to an afflicted friend:

"O that this heart with grief so well acquainted Might be a fountain, rich and sweet and full, For all the weary that have fallen and fainted In life's parched desert--thirsty, sorrowful.

"Thou Man of Sorrows, teach my lips that often Have told the sacred story of my woe, To speak of Thee till stony griefs I soften-- Till those that know Thee not, learn Thee to know."

At a comparatively early period of her Christian experience, the theme of her prayer was: "I beseech Thee, show me Thy glory"; for in the answer to that prayer there seemed, as she said, to be summed up everything that she needed or could desire. In a paper in which she recorded some of her aspirations, she wrote: "Let my life be an all-day looking to Jesus. Let my love to G.o.d be so deep, earnest, and all-pervading, that I can not have even the pa.s.sing emotion of rebellion to suppress. There is such a thing as an implicit faith in, and consequent submission to, Christ. Let me never rest till they are fully mine."

I do not know the precise date, but I think it could not have been very late when she received a mighty answer to the prayer to behold G.o.d's glory. New views of Christian privilege and of the relation of Christ to believing souls came with prayerful searching of the Scriptures.

She entered, to use her own words, upon "a life of incessant peace and serenity--notwithstanding it became, by degrees, one of perpetual self- denial and effort." The consciousness of G.o.d never left her. The whole world seemed holy ground. Prayer became a perpetual delight. The pride and turbulence of nature grew quiet under these gentle influences, and anything from G.o.d's hand seemed just right and quite good.

The secret of her peace and of her usefulness lay very largely in the prayerfulness of her life. From her early years, prayer was her delight.

In describing the comforts of her chamber in the school at Richmond, she noted as its crowning charm the daily presence of the Eternal King, who condescended to make it His dwelling-place. With the deeper experiences of which we have spoken came a fresh delight in prayer. "It was very delightful," she says, "to pray all the time; all day long; not only for myself, but for the whole world--particularly for all those who loved Christ." Her views of prayer were Scriptural, and, therefore, discriminating. She fully accepted Paul's statement that "we know not what we should pray for as we ought" without the help of the Spirit; and, therefore, she always spoke of prayer as something to be _learned_.

If she believed that a Christian "learns to pray when first he lives,"

she believed also that the prayer of the infant Christian life was like the feeble breath of infancy. She understood by prayer something far more and higher than the mere preferring of pet.i.tions. It was _communion_; G.o.d's Spirit responding harmoniously to our own. With Coleridge she held, that the act of praying with the total concentration of the faculties is the very highest energy of which the human heart is capable. Hence she was accustomed to speak of _learning_ the mysterious art of prayer by an apprentices.h.i.+p at the throne of grace. She somewhere wrote: "I think many of the difficulties attending the subject of prayer would disappear if it could be regarded in early life as an art that must be acquired through daily, persistent habits with which nothing shall be allowed to interfere." She saw that prayer is not to be made dependent on the various emotive states in which one comes to G.o.d. "The question," she said, "is not one of mere delight." The Roman Catholic poet accurately expressed her thought on this point:

"Prayer was not meant for luxury, Nor selfish pastime sweet; It is the prostrate creature's place At the Creator's feet."

She ill.u.s.trated in her own quaint way the truth that moods have nothing to do with the duty of prayer. When one of your little brothers asks you to lend him your knife, do you inquire first what is the state of his mind? If you do, what reply can he make but this: "The state of my mind is, I want your knife."

With her natural temperament and inherited tendencies she might, perhaps, under other influences have been drawn too far over to the emotional, or at least to the contemplative side of religious life.

But she saw and avoided the danger. She discerned the harmony and just balance between the contemplative and the active Christian life, and felt that they ought to co-exist in every genuine experience. She attached as little meaning to a life of mere raptures as to one of bare, loveless duty. "Christian life," she wrote, "is not all contemplation and prayer; it is not all muscle and sinew. It is a perfect, practicable union of the two. I believe in your joyful emotions if they result in self-denying, patient work for Christ--I believe in your work if it is winged by faith and prayer." She had scored this pa.s.sage in her copy of Fenelon: "To be constantly in a state of enjoyment that takes away the feeling of the cross, and to live in a fervor of devotion that continually keeps Paradise open--this is not dying upon the cross and becoming nothing."

Such experience and such views were behind the active side of her life, as represented by her personal ministries and by the work of her pen.

The one book in which she endeavored to embody _formally_ her views of Christian doctrine and experience did not, as might have been expected, find the same reception or the same response which were accorded to other productions. It was a book which appealed to a smaller and higher cla.s.s of readers. But, when she wrought these same truths into pictures of living men and women--when she ill.u.s.trated them at the points where they touched the drudgery and commonplace of thousands of lives--when she opened outlooks for hundreds of discouraged souls upon the roads where hundreds more were bearing the very same burdens, and yet stepping heavenward under their pressure--when she, who had walked in the fire herself, went to her sisters in the same old furnace and told them of her vision of the form of the Fourth--when she went down to the many who were sadly working out the mistakes of ill-judged alliances, and lifted the veil from sorrows which separate their subject from human sympathy because they must be borne in silence--when she told such how heaven might come even into their life--when she, with her hands yet bleeding from the grasp of her own cross, came to other sufferers, not to mock them by the show of an unattainable beauty and an impossible peace, but to _offer_ them _divine_ peace and the beauty of the Lord in the name of her Saviour--then she spoke with a power which mult.i.tudes felt and confessed.

I am sure that hers is, in an eminent degree, the blessing of them that were ready to perish. Weary, overtaxed mothers; misunderstood and unappreciated wives, servants, pale seamstresses, delicate women forced to live in an atmosphere of drunkenness and coa.r.s.e brutality, widows and orphans in the bitterness of their bereavement, mothers with their tears dropping over empty cradles--to thousands of such she was a messenger from heaven.

Of all her seventeen or eighteen published volumes, "Stepping Heavenward" is the one which best represents her and her life-work--not that she produced nothing else of value, nor that many of her other books were not widely read, greatly enjoyed, and truly useful; but "Stepping Heavenward" seemed to meet so many real, deep, inarticulate cravings in such a mult.i.tude of hearts, that the response to it was instant and general....

She wrote for readers of all ages. Not the least fruitful work of her pen was bestowed upon the little ones; and in the number of copies circulated, the Susy Books stand next to Stepping Heavenward. Through those little half allegories she initiated the children into the rudiments of self-control, discipline and consecration, and taught eyes and hands and tongue and feet the n.o.ble uses of the kingdom of G.o.d. Even from these children's stories the thought of the discipline of suffering was not absent, and _Mr. Pain_, as many mothers will remember, figures among Little Susy's Six Teachers. With the same pure and wholesome lessons, and with the same easy vivacity she appealed to youth through "The Flower of the Family," "The Percys," and "Nidworth," and it would be hard to say by readers of what age was monopolised the interest in "Aunt Jane's Hero," "Fred and Maria and Me," and those two little gems--"The Story Lizzie Told," and "Gentleman Jim."

While all her writings were _religious_ in the best sense, they were in nothing more so than in their _cheerfulness_. They were not only happy and hopeful in their general tone, but sparkled with her delicate and sprightly humor. The children of her books were not religious puppets, moving in time to the measured wisdom of their elders, but real children of flesh and blood, acting and talking out their impish conceits, and in nowise conspicuous by their precocious goodness.

I think that those who knew her best in her literary relations, will agree with me that no better type of a consecrated literary talent can be found in the lists of authors. She received enough evidences of popular appreciation to have turned the heads of many writers. Over 200,000 bound volumes of her books have been sold in this country alone, to say nothing of the circulation in England, France, and Germany. She was not displeased at success, as I suppose no one is--but success to her meant doing good. She did not write for popularity, and her aversion to having her own literary work mentioned to her was so well known by her friends, that even those who wished to express to her their grat.i.tude for the good they had received from her books were constrained to be silent. "While," says her publisher, "she was very sensitive to any criticism based on a misconception or a perversion of her purpose, never, in all my intercourse with her, did I discover the slightest evidence of a spirit of literary pique, or pride, or ambition."

In attempting to sum up the characteristics of her writings, time will suffer me only to state the more prominent features without enlarging upon details.

First, and most prominent, was their _purpose_. Her pen moved always and only under a sense of _duty_. She held her talent as a gift from G.o.d, and consecrated it sacredly to the enforcement and diffusion of His truth. If I may quote once more the words of her publisher in his tribute to her memory--"her great desire and determination to educate in the highest and best schools was never overlooked or forgotten. She never, like many writers of religious fiction, caught the spirit of sensationalism that is in the air, or sought for effects in unhealthy portraiture, corrupt style, or unnatural combinations."

Second, she was _unconventional_. Her writings were not religious in any stereotyped, popular sense. Her characters were not stenciled. The holiest of them were strongly and often amusingly individualized. She did not try to make automatons to repeat religious commonplaces, but actual men and women, through whose very peculiarities the Holy Spirit revealed His presence and work.

Third, I have already referred to her _sprightliness_. She had naturally a keen sense of humor which overflowed both in her conversation and in her books. She saw nothing in the nature of the faith she professed which bade her lay violent hands on this propensity; and she once said that if her religion could not stand her saying a funny thing now and then it was not worth much. But, whatever she might say or write of this character, one never felt that it betrayed any irreverent lightness of spirit. The undertone of her life was so deeply reverential, so thoroughly pervaded with adoring love for Christ, that it made itself felt through all her lighter moods, like the ground-swell of the sea through the sparkling ripples on the surface.

Fourth, her style was easy, colloquial, never stilted or affected, marked at times by an energy and incisiveness which betrayed earnest thought and intense feeling. She aimed to impress the truth, not her style, and therefore aimed at plainness and directness. Her hard common sense, of which her books reveal a goodly share, was offset by her vivid fancy which made even the region of fable tributary to the service of truth.

Fifth, her books were intensely _personal_; expressions, I mean, of her own experience. Many of her characters and scenes are simple transcripts of fact, and much of what she taught in song, was a repet.i.tion of what she had learned in suffering.

To go back once more to her office of consoler. She exercised this not only through her books, but also through her personal ministries in those large and widening circles which centred in her literary and pastoral life. Those who were favored with her friends.h.i.+p in times of sorrow found her a comforter indeed. Her letters, of which, at such times, she was prodigal, were to many sore hearts as leaves from the tree of life. She did not expect too much of a sufferer. She recognized human weakness as well as divine strength. But in all her attempts at consolation, side by side with her deep and true sympathy, went the _lesson_ of the _harvest_ of sorrow. She was always pointing the mourner _past_ the floods, to the high place above them--teaching him to sing even amid the waves and billows--"the Lord will command His loving-kindness"; "I shall yet praise Him for the help of His countenance." "I knew," she wrote to a bereaved friend, "that G.o.d would never afflict you so, if He had not something beautiful and blissful to give in place of what He took." The insight which her writings revealed into many and subtle aspects of sorrow, made her the recipient of hosts of letters from strangers, opening to her their griefs, and asking her counsel; and to all she gave freely and joyfully as far as her strength and time and judgment would allow. There was a tonic vein mingling with her comforts. Her touch was firm as well as tender. She knew the shoals of morbid sentimentality which skirt the deeps of trouble, and sought to pilot the sorrowing past the shoals to the sh.o.r.e.

And now, having thus spoken of her preparation for G.o.d's work, the work itself, and its fruits, how can we gather up and depict the many personal traits and a.s.sociations which crowd upon the memory? Of such things how many are incapable of reproduction, their fine flavor vanis.h.i.+ng with the moment. How often that which most commends them to remembrance lies in the glance of an eye, an inflection of the voice, an expression of the face, which neither pen nor pencil can put on record.

How many such recollections, for example, group themselves round that beautiful home among the hills. How it bore her mark and was pervaded with her presence, and seemed, more than any other spot, the appropriate setting of her life. Now she was at her chamber window studying the ever s.h.i.+fting lights and shadows on the hills; now rambling over the fields and through the woods and returning with her hands laden with flowers and gra.s.ses; now busy with her ferns in her garden; again beguiling the hours with her pencil, or stealing away to develop some happy fancy or fresh thought on which her mind had been working for days. And how pleasant her talk. How she would dart off sometimes from the line of the gravest theme into some quaint, mirth-provoking conceit. How many odd things she had seen; of how many strange adventures she had partaken, and how graphically and charmingly she told them. With what relish she would bring forth some good thing saved up to tell to one who would appreciate it; yet, on the other hand, how earnestly, how intelligently, with what simplicity, with what eager delight would she pursue the discussion of the deep things of G.o.d. Nor was her home merely a place of rest and retirement. Its doors were ever wide open to congenial spirits, and also to some of Christ's poor, to whom the healing breath of the mountains and the rare sights and sounds of country life were as gifts from heaven. In that little community she was not content to be a mere summer idler. There, too, she pursued her ministry of comfort and of instruction. Eternity alone will reveal the fruitage of the seeds she sowed in her weekly Bible-reading, to which the women came for miles over the mountain roads, through storm and through suns.h.i.+ne.

And here the end came. Death, if a surprise at all to her, could only be a pleasant surprise. In one of her stories an old family servant says of her departed mistress: "Often's the time I've heard her talk about dying, and I mind a time when she thought she was going, and there was a light in her eye, and it was just as she looked when she said, 'Mary, I'm going to be married.'" It was a leaf out of her own life. She had marked in one of her books of devotion a pa.s.sage which, I imagine, summed up her view of the whole matter: "A true Christian is neither fond of life nor weary of it." She had no sentimental disgust with life, but her overmastering desire was to see and be like her Lord, and death was the entrance gate to that perfect vision. Only the opening of that portal could bring the full answer to her prayer of years, "I beseech Thee, show me Thy glory." In this att.i.tude the messenger found her. I will not dwell on the closing scenes.... It is pleasanter to turn from that long, weary Sabbath, when nature in its perfect beauty and repose seemed to mock the bitter agony of the death-chamber, to the hour when, with the first full brightness of the morning, the silver cord was loosed, and she was present with the Lord. Surely it was something more than an accidental coincidence that, in the little "Daily Food," which for nearly forty years had been her closet companion, the pa.s.sage for the 13th of August was: "I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, Write, blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth: yea, saith the Spirit, that they may rest from their labors; and their works do follow them." That summer afternoon when she was laid to rest had a brightness which was not all of the glories of the setting sun, as he burst forth from the encircling clouds, and touched with his parting splendor the gates of the grave. Nature, with its fulness of summer life, was set in the key of the resurrection by the a.s.surance of her victory over death, and it was with a new and mighty sense of their truth that we spoke over her ashes the words of the Apostle: "It is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?"

So now, as then, _more_ even than then, since these months have given us time to study the lesson of that life and the sources of its power, we give thanks to G.o.d through Jesus Christ our Lord; thanks for the divine processes which moulded a daughter of consolation; thanks for the fountains of comfort opened by her along life's highways and which continue to flow while she sleeps in Jesus; thanks for a good and fruitful life ended "in the communion of the Holy Catholic Church, in the confidence of a certain faith, in the comfort of a reasonable, religious, and holy hope, in charity with all mankind, and in peace with G.o.d."