LETTER IV.

My Dear A——: I had supposed my last letter would end our correspondence. Your kind reply has gratified me more than I can express. Without further words, let me take up at once the question that you put, I am sure, sincerely. You ask, "What is 'the way of settlement that the Bible opens to the great questions that press us?'"

The questions of supreme interest are few and simple. Is there a God? Is there a future existence for us? How can that existence be made a safe and satisfying one? If you are willing to allow any authority to the Bible at all, there can be no doubt as to the first two questions. There is a God by whom we were created and to whom we are responsible; there is a future existence. Those two questions are settled, if the Bible can settle anything. And they are settled, let me add, in harmony with the profoundest instincts and the most imperative demands of our nature. Whatever a few souls in their struggling dissatisfaction and sad unrest may persuade themselves, the great yearning heart of humanity will quiet itself on nothing less than God and immortality. Even your former guide, Mr. —— (let me hope I may speak of him now as only your former guide), cries out in the presence of the dead and before the awful silence of the grave, "Immortality is a word that hope through all the ages has been whispering to love. All wish for happiness beyond this life; all hope to meet again the loved and lost." Yes, there are hours when the most hopeless are glad to turn to the hope that the Bible alone gives, when the bitterest rejecters of God and his word long for the consolation that only the rejected word affords.

Let us turn to the other question. If, when we are through with this life—as we soon shall be through with it—we are not through with existence—if there is a life beyond the present not measured by years or ages,—how can it be made worth having? Is there any way in which our immortality can be assured to us as an immortal good? After all the doubts and darkness, the mystery and suffering, the bitterness and disappointment, of this life, may it in any way be found a great and a good thing, after all, that we have lived? To answer these questions we must come back to the old truth—the truth of your childhood. The "advanced thought" of our day has discovered nothing to change the fact that men are out of the way, they are not what they should be. Every man knows this. The Bible expresses it in a very plain way by saying they are sinners. As such it deals with them; to such alone it opens its door of hope. The Bible is of no use to you unless you are a sinner. If you call this cant, I am sorry for it, but I cannot help it; I cannot change it. The only men for whom God is dealing here for good, for whom he is making possible an immortality of honor and happiness, are the sinful. And is not this well for us? Does it not at once bring hope to you—a hope as great as it is mysterious? You know that life has not been to you an unstained thing any more than it has been to any of us. To know this is to know sin, the one appalling fact of the universe, the one unspeakable woe of our being.

In the simplest way, then, my dear A——, let me say that the first step in your coming right with God, and so right with the future, is to know and to feel that you are wrong. The Bible closes the door of hope for ever on the man who comes claiming the brightness and the good of a life beyond the grave because he is worthy of it. These words were once familiar to you: "By the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified." Rom. iii. 20.

Can he who is wrong make himself right? Can he be all he ought to be? Can he do all he ought to do? Can you set right all the wrong and all the failure of the past? Can you make the future without error? To ask these questions is to answer them to every honest conscience.

For one who is wrong there must be the consequences of wrong, and these must be as fearful and as far-reaching as sin itself. "Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap," and evermore and everywhere the harvest is greater than the seed. The coming tribulation and anguish of the unsaved souls that do evil is a law of nature as well as of revelation. The wages of sin is death. You know this. You have felt it in its measure. You have seen it in the unhappiness, the misery, the woe, the despair and death with which sin reigns everywhere around us. Take the brightest view of life that you can, and the darkness in which it ends is terrible. To go out of it without God is to go out without hope. Am I wrong in believing that you need no argument here, that no conviction is more sorrowfully intense with you than this?

Will you go now a step farther? Standing in your wrong and your weakness and your unrest, with the heavy shadows of the future falling upon you, are you willing to draw near to the open portal of a better life? Are you willing to look up and read over it—"God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life"? John iii. 16. Are you willing to submit your faith to the mystery—beyond all depth except the love of God—that the Son of God in our nature has borne our sins in his own body on the tree—that he has died for us, the Just for the unjust? In other words, are you willing to receive the kingdom of heaven as a little child—to be saved, if saved you may be, in God's own way?

In a former letter I spoke of the testimony of Webster to the reality of the Christian religion; and, though it is true that Christianity does not depend upon the patronage of any man, it is well to know that greater intellects than those that would persuade you to reject it have bowed before it and found their supreme hope in it. Let me give you, then, another testimony from this greatest of American statesmen and jurists. It was his last night on earth; that life of extraordinary influence and honor was closing. As his family and friends stood around his bed his physician repeated the immortal hymn of Cowper:

As upon the night-air died away the final stanza—

the majestic voice that had thrilled courts and senates, was heard in a clear thrice-repeated "Amen! Amen! Amen!" And so he passed, let us hope, to have part in that final song. Pity, infinite pity, that he had not made more of that magnificent intellect for the Giver of it! But at least he was too great a man to deny the Love and the Sacrifice by which alone the life of the greatest as well as the feeblest can be saved from being an eternal tragedy.

I know, my dear A——, the derision with which all this may be received, but my hope is that you have passed beyond that point of intellectual self-conceit and moral self-murder. At all events, this is the only ground of a safe immortality that the Bible holds out, and beyond the Bible there is no ground. If you ever settle safely the solemn questions of the future, you will settle them here. If you ever find the rest for which I know you are weary, you will find it at the cross and in the presence of Him who hung upon it, and whose words are to-day, as of old, "Come unto me, and I will give you rest."

In all this I know there is nothing new to you. I had nothing new to say; I wished simply to make a plea for the faith of your earlier years. It is easy to put it aside, but, after all, it is a faith that will stand. The evidence of nineteen centuries from millions of honest and intelligent witnesses, of all ranks and conditions, living and dying, to the power of this faith to sustain in the most solemn crises of life, when flesh and heart are failing, and when the darkness and anguish and mystery of death are rocking the soul to its foundations, cannot wisely be dismissed as a delusion: there must be a reality behind it. The lights that have gone out from your own home and heart you were right in believing have "not gone out in darkness," but you will not forget that as they went into purer light they went with Him who has brought life and immortality to light, who is the Resurrection and the Life, in whom believing, though we were dead, yet shall we live.

Here I must rest. I can only commend you to God and to the word of his grace—to the written word and to the incarnate Word, to the Bible and to Christ. I am as certain as I am of my own existence that if you will give yourself up to the guidance of these you will be satisfied and you will be saved. If you will only take the Bible and follow it, you will find an assurance of its truth that cannot be shaken; you will find rest, for you will find Christ. And surely it is not too much to ask that in a matter of such infinite importance you make a fair, honest and thorough trial of that which no man ever yet made trial of to be disappointed.

Yet let me not fail to impress as a final thought that this result of good and of peace will come only by the power of the Holy Spirit. It is his to take of the things of Christ and show them to us; unless he does this, we cannot see them. My last word of entreaty, then, is—and I would make it as earnestly as conviction and feeling and language can make it—yield to the Spirit of God. The end you want is too great for your own strength. You have proved this. You have struggled on long enough in your own plans and your own way, seeking rest, and you are as far from rest as ever. Try now another way. Take hold of a higher strength. "Ask, and ye shall receive; seek, and ye shall find." I plead with you by all the memories of the past and by all the hopes of the future. You have sinned, and I would not heal the hurt slightly. No one knows better than you that if the Bible is true you have a long and dark account against you—if not of open and flagrant sin, yet to the Mind that makes no mistakes of that which is perhaps far worse, of calm, deliberate, persistent rejection of Christ and of his Spirit. It would be faithlessness and cruelty to hide the fact that by all the verities of God you are in peril—in fearful peril. To stand in darkness where no light is is sad enough; but when Light is come into the world and men stand in darkness, there is sin that seals its own doom. As the case is now, the very unrest of your soul—its dark gropings, its unsatisfied yearnings, its sighs of despair—all this is the living witness of your danger, the prophecy of a deeper gloom and woe to come.

But as yet it is also the voice of God's mercy; it is the plea of his Spirit calling you to the only rest that the universe has for the erring and the sinful. The Spirit of God is very pitiful. Every thought of good is from him; every desire for a better life is his inspiration; every penitent sigh is his breath. I believe he is not far from you; I believe, therefore, you are not far from the kingdom of heaven. Quench not the Spirit. Do not go down in darkness in sight of the City of Light.

You remember the circumstances of our return from Europe in the fall of 18—. We were young then, but the events are still vivid in my memory, as they are no doubt in yours. For two days we were delayed in Liverpool by a fearful storm. In that storm the Royal Charter was coming in, having made successfully the voyage of the world. She had been signaled, and was already in the Channel; her arrival was looked for every hour. Dear friends of those we were leaving were on board. The fires were lighted on the hearth, and the table was spread for the long-absent ones, and glad hearts were waiting impatiently to give them joyful welcome. But they never came; in sight of the harbor and of the lights of home they went down—the four hundred of that doomed ship. The next day we passed the silent wreck as we came out, and I am sure you thought, as I did, how unutterably sad and pathetic is such an end, to perish in sight of home.

Our voyage, dear A——, is almost over. The harbor is near; the lights of the eternal home are in sight; the table is spread, and dear ones—yours and mine—are waiting there to give us glad and everlasting welcome. Do not make wreck of life and hope and immortality in the very sight of home.

Yours, in the bonds of early years,

C——.

Since these letters were written, he to whom they were addressed has gone where human arguments and pleadings cannot reach him. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, he passed from the scenes of a busy, honored and prosperous life into the solemn mysteries that lie beyond our horizon. On his desk was found the following unfinished letter, written the night before his death:

My Dear C——:

I have not misapprehended the spirit and motive of your letters. I have read them—more than once—with care and, I believe, with candor. When a man stands in the shadow of a great and awful change—and my physician warns me that my lifework may end suddenly—he is a fool who deals any other way than seriously and honestly with the questions you discuss. If I cannot say that your reasoning removes all my doubts, I can most sincerely say this, even though it may be, in your judgment, at the cost of my consistency: I would give the world to have your faith and hope. While I have been glad to have the arguments of Mr. —— to support my own faith or want of faith, I will be candid and say that I have not been at rest. Life has been terribly empty and hopeless since I felt, with Professor Clifford, that "the Great Companion is dead." I have had success, as the world goes, but what of it? What does it amount to? What is to be the end of it all? No God! No immortality! Nothing beyond this little circle whose utmost limit I seem to be even now touching! Is it so?

I am writing at midnight—an hour when these questions often come to me with the pressure of despair. Oh to be a child again with a child's faith, a child's peace! My mother—

Here the letter ended. Did the thought of his mother open the door of his aching heart to his mother's God and his mother's Christ? So let us hope. There is a mercy that is from everlasting to everlasting upon them that fear God, and a righteousness that is unto children's children to such as keep his covenant.

Lying upon the letter was the following slip, cut from a newspaper. It was stained apparently with tears, and was probably the last thing that my friend read. It could hardly be the expression of any heart to whom the "hand of mercy" was not already "opening the wicket-gate:"

DIFFICULTIES OF THE BIBLE.