3
3
There are many rooms in the House of Pain. I have asked that I may not miss any room where a reader of this book is or shall be. A daughter writing of her beautiful mother shall speak for me:
“There were days—sad days they were—when her faith was tuned to the minor key; when the note it struck was one of wistful yearning, of a blind ‘holding on’ in the dark, not any longer of victorious progress from strength to strength. In the last sad year, when those who loved her longed and prayed for some very special vision of faith and conviction to support her—who all her life had staked everything on the venture of faith—it was not given.”{5}
Behind that sentence lie such gallant years that I think the angels must have marveled. “That now unto the principalities and the powers in heavenly places might be made known through the church the manifold wisdom of God” (“the wisdom which is never at a loss to carry out its purposes of grace, be the problems presented by its subject what they may”), her life illustrated those words. And yet this last boon was withheld. “And I cannot help wondering why,” said one in speaking of a similar denial; “I should have expected an entrance ‘in full sail’ for all such heroic souls.”
Perhaps one of the pleasures of heaven will be found in the shining forth of the answer to such questions, if indeed they have not vanished like the dew and the cloud; but now we know in part, and the answer in part is this: There are some whom our Lord has so proved that He can trust them with any withholding, even the withholding of light. To one whose mind was as clear as her faith was true there could hardly have been a more searching test of endurance, nor could one more painful have been asked of those whom she loved. But their Lord could trust them too. And as the so great a cloud of witnesses compassed about the traveler, then, very nearly Home, what must have been their loving joy as they saw her cross that bar of shadow and walk into the Land of Light?
As I pondered the matter I remembered something I had not wished to be in the last word of this book. We had to search for the picture. Several were sent to us, but either the bright path ended in a dark sky or dark hills, or there was something else about it which made it not just what I wanted. (I wanted darkness, but not ultimate darkness; clouds, but light beyond; and on the water a clear path of unbroken light.) The only possible picture had a break on the lighted path. And I regretted this.
I see its purpose now. It is the perfect figure of the true, for, to some, that break in the brightness is the final trial of their faith. Beyond the narrow darkness is brightness that grows brighter and brighter, never to darken again. And beyond and above, never for one moment dimmed, the blessed light is shining. That bar of shadow will look very narrow when it has been crossed.
This thought of crossing a shadow to walk into light may help to comfort a distress about what ignorance calls an “untimely death” (as though anything untimely could possibly be in the life of one whose times are in the hand of God). It must have been delightful for Enoch when, as a child said, “He walked so far that he could not come back, but just went on.” Sometimes it is different, and then the angels are sent to carry the one who is tired of walking. Do they say to him, “Let us go into the House of the Lord”? If they do, perhaps his heart replies in long-familiar words, “I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go into the House of the Lord.” When that is so we almost hear another word: “If ye loved Me, ye would rejoice, because I said, I go unto the Father.”
And if there was not that happy going, but only a disabling accident, then the call to you, his friend, is to conquering faith. Spiritual marvels are wrought in answer to the prayer of faith. In the days of the great struggle for the freedom of Italy the vile prisons of Naples and elsewhere were crowded with tortured men, heavily chained. And they were there for life. In the prison song of one, Giovanni Nicotera, there are haunting words about what God can do for captive men:
“No darkness is so deep, but white
Wings of the angels through can pierce;
Nor any chain such heaps lies in
But God’s own hand can hold it light;
Nor is there any flame so fierce
But Christ Himself can stand therein.”