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Page 35
One thing I noticed in these days; it surprised me very greatly, till I
reflected that my surprise was but the consequence of the strange and
mournful blindness with regard to spiritual things in which we live
under the dark skies of earth. We have there a false idea that somehow
or other death takes all the individuality out of a man, obliterating
all the whims, prejudices, the thorny and unreasonable dislikes and
fancies, oddities, tempers, roughnesses, and subtlenesses from a
temperament. Of course there are a good many of these things which
disappear together with the body, such as the glooms, suspicions, and
cloudy irritabilities, which are caused by fatigue and malaise, and by
ill-health generally. But a man's whims and fancies and dislikes do not
by any means disappear on earth when he is in good health; on the
contrary, they are often apt to be accentuated and emphasised when he is
free from pain and care and anxiety, and riding blithely over the waves
of life. Indeed there are men whom I have known who are never kind or
sympathetic till they are in some wearing trouble of their own; when
they are prosperous and cheerful, they are frankly intolerable, because
their mirth turns to derision and insolence.
But one of the reasons why the heavenly life is apt to appear in
prospect so wearisome a thing is, because we are brought up to feel that
the whole character is flattened out and charged with a serene kind of
priggishness, which takes all the salt out of life. The word "saintly,"
so terribly misapplied on earth, grows to mean, to many of us, an
irritating sort of kindness, which treats the interests and animated
elements of life with a painful condescension, and a sympathy of which
the basis is duty rather than love. The true sanctification, which I
came to perceive something of later, is the result of a process of
endless patience and infinite delay, and the attainment of it implies a
humility, seven times refined in the fires of self-contempt, in which
there remains no smallest touch of superiority or aloofness. How utterly
depressing is the feigned interest of the imperfect human saint in
matters of mundane concern! How it takes at once both the joy out of
holiness and the spirit out of human effort! It is as dreary as the
professional sympathy of the secluded student for the news of athletic
contests, as the tolerance of the shrewd man of science for the feminine
logic of religious sentiment!
But I found to my great content that whatever change had passed over the
spirits of my companions, they had at least lost no fibre of their
individuality. The change that had passed over them was like the change
that passes over a young man, who has lived at the University among
dilettante literary designs and mild sociological theorising, when he
finds himself plunged into the urgent practical activities of the world.
Our happiness was the happiness which comes of intense toil, with no
fatigue to dog it, and from a consciousness of the vital issues which
we were pursuing. But my companions had still intellectual faults and
preferences, self-confidence, critical intolerance, boisterousness,
wilfulness. Stranger still, I found coldness, anger, jealousy, still at
work. Of course in the latter case reconciliation was easier, both in
the light of common enthusiasm and, still more, because mental
communication was so much swifter and easier than it had been on earth.
There was no need of those protracted talks, those tiresome explanations
which clever people, who really love and esteem each other, fall into on
earth--the statements which affirm nothing, the explanations which
elucidate nothing, because of the intricacies of human speech and the
fact that people use the same words with such different implications and
meanings. All those became unnecessary, because one could pierce
instantaneously into the very essence of the soul, and manifest, without
the need of expression, the regard and affection which lay beneath the
cross-currents of emotion. But love and affection waxed and waned in
heaven as on earth; it was weakened and it was transferred. Few souls
are so serene on earth as to see with perfect equanimity a friend, whom
one loves and trusts, becoming absorbed in some new and exciting
emotion, which may not perhaps obliterate the original regard, but which
must withdraw from it for a time the energy which fed the flame of the
intermitted relation.
It was very strange to me to realise the fact that friendships and
intimacies were formed as on earth, and that they lost their freshness,
either from some lack of real congeniality or from some divergence of
development. Sometimes, I may add, our teachers were consulted by the
aggrieved, sometimes they even intervened unasked.
I will freely confess that this all immensely heightened the interests
to me of our common life. One could see two spirits drawn together by
some secret tie of emotion, and one could see some further influence
strike across and suspend it. One case of this I will mention, which is
typical of many. There came among us an extremely lively and rather
whimsical spirit, more like a boy than a man. I wondered at first why he
was chosen for this work, because he seemed both fitful and even
capricious; but I gradually realised in him an extraordinary fineness of
perception, and a swiftness of intuition almost unrivalled. He had a
power of weighing almost by instinct the constituent elements of
character, which seemed to me something like the power of tonality in a
musician, the gift of recognising, by pure faculty, what any notes may
be, however confusedly jangled on an instrument. It was wonderful to me
how often his instantaneous judgments proved more sagacious than our
carefully formed conclusions.
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