The Gates Ajar by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps & Claudia Stokes & Elizabeth Duquette

Author:Elizabeth Stuart Phelps & Claudia Stokes & Elizabeth Duquette
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-05-13T16:00:00+00:00

IX

June 1.

Aunt Winifred went to the office this morning, and met Dr. Bland, who walked home with her. He always likes to talk with her.

A woman who knows something about fate, free-will, and foreknowledge absolute, who is not ignorant of politics, and talks intelligently of Agassiz’s latest fossil, who can understand a German quotation, and has heard of Strauss and Neander, who can dash her sprightliness ably against his old dry bones of metaphysics and theology, yet never speak an accent above that essentially womanly voice of hers, is, I imagine, a phenomenon in his social experience.

I was sitting at the window when they came up and stopped at the gate. Dr. Bland lifted his hat to me in his grave way, talking the while; somewhat eagerly, too, I could see. Aunt Winifred answered him with a peculiar smile and a few low words that I could not hear.

“But, my dear madam,” he said, “the glory of God, you see, the glory of God is the primary consideration.”

“But the glory of God involves these lesser glories, as a sidereal system, though a splendid whole, exists by the multiplied differing of one star from another star. Ah, Dr. Bland, you make a grand abstraction out of it, but it makes me cold,”—she shivered, half playfully, half involuntarily,—“it makes me cold. I am very much alive and human; and Christ was human God.”

She came in smiling a little sadly, and stood by me, watching the minister walk over the hill.

“How much does that man love his wife and children?” she asked abruptly.

“A good deal. Why?”

“I am afraid that he will lose one of them, then, before many more years of his life are past.”

“What! he has n’t been telling you that they are consumptive or anything of the sort?”

“O dear me, no,” with a merry laugh, which died quickly away: “I was only thinking,—there is trouble in store for him; some intense pain,—if he is capable of intense pain,—which shall shake his cold, smooth theorizing to the foundation. He speaks a foreign tongue when he talks of bereavement, of death, of the future life. No argument could convince him of that, though, which is the worst of it.”

“He must think you shockingly heterodox.”

“I don’t doubt it. We had a little talk this morning, and he regarded me with an expression of mingled consternation and perplexity that was curious. He is a very good man. He is not a stupid man. I only wish that he would stop preaching and teaching things that he knows nothing about.

“He is only drifting with the tide, though,” she added, “in his views of this matter. In our recoil from the materialism of the Romish Church, we have, it seems to me, nearly stranded ourselves on the opposite shore. Just as, in a rebound from the spirit which would put our Saviour on a level with Buddha or Mahomet, we have been in danger of forgetting ‘to begin as the Bible begins,’ with his humanity. It is the grandeur of inspiration, that it knows how to balance truth.

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