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Title: Abraham's Bosom
Author: King, William Benjamin Basil (1859-1928)
Date of first publication: June, 1918
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   New York and London: Harper & Brothers, June, 1918
   (first edition)
Date first posted: 22 November 2010
Date last updated: 22 November 2010
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #661

This ebook was produced by:
Barbara Watson, James Wright
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net

This file was produced from images generously made available
by the Internet Archive/The Library of Congress




                             ABRAHAM'S BOSOM




Books by the
AUTHOR OF "THE INNER SHRINE"
[BASIL KING]


THE LIFTED VEIL. Illustrated.
THE SIDE OF THE ANGELS. Illustrated.
THE LETTER OF THE CONTRACT. Illustrated.
THE WAY HOME. Illustrated.
THE WILD OLIVE. Illustrated.
THE INNER SHRINE. Illustrated.
THE STREET CALLED STRAIGHT. Illustrated.
LET NOT MAN PUT ASUNDER. Post 8vo.
IN THE GARDEN OF CHARITY. Post 8vo.
THE STEPS OF HONOR. Post 8vo.
THE GIANT'S STRENGTH. Post 8vo.


HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK
Established 1817


[Frontispiece: uncaptioned sepia photograph of the Author playing the
Church organ.]


ABRAHAM'S
BOSOM

BY
BASIL KING
_Author of_ "THE HIGH HEART"
"THE INNER SHRINE" ETC.



HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON




Abraham's Bosom

Copyright, 1918, by Harper & Brothers
Printed in the United States of America
Published June, 1918




ABRAHAM'S BOSOM




_L'me ne peut se mouvoir, s'veiller, ouvrir les yeux, sans sentir
Dieu. On sent Dieu avec l'me comme on sent l'air avec le corps._

_Oserai-je le dire? On connait Dieu facilement pourvu qu'on ne se
contraigne pas  le dfinir._


The soul cannot move, awake or open the eyes without perceiving God.
We perceive God by the soul as we feel air by the body.

Shall I dare to say it? We know God easily so long as we do not force
ourselves to define him.
                                          --Joseph Joubert, 1754-1824.




                          ABRAHAM'S BOSOM




                             CHAPTER I


Because he was unaccustomed to doctors, and thought it the right thing
to say, he asked the physician to name his malady frankly.

"I wish you'd tell me. I can stand it, you know."

In the bottom of his heart he was sure there was nothing to be afraid
of. He was only sixty, which in the twentieth century is young, and as
hale as he had been at thirty. This weakness, this sudden pain, this
sense of suffocation, from which he had been suffering for the past few
months, might be the beginning of a new phase in his life, the period
commonly known as that of breaking up; but even so, he had good years
still before him.

He could wait for the doctor's answer, then, without undue anxiety,
turning toward him an ascetic, clean-cut profile stamped with a lifetime
of high, kind, scholarly meditations.

The doctor tilted slightly backward in his chair, fitting his finger
tips together, before he spoke. Any telltale expression there might have
been in his face was concealed by a scraggy beard and mustache that grew
right up to the edges of a lipless mouth.

"It's what is called Hutchinson's disease," he said at last. "I've known
a few cases of it; but it's rather rare"--he added, as if
reluctantly--"and obscure."

"But I've heard of it. Wasn't it," the patient continued, after a
second's thinking, "the trouble with poor Ned Angel?"

"You mean the organist chap at Saint Thomas's--the near-sighted fellow
with a limp--the one you had to get rid of?"

A sharp hectic spot like a splash of red paint came out in each of the
clergyman's wax-like cheeks.

"That's the man. It--it carried him off in less than two months."

The doctor was used to embarrassing situations.

"I believe it did," he responded in a tone that seemed to make the fact
of slight importance. "I remember hearing that he put up no fight; that
he didn't want to live. You knew him better than I did--"

"I knew him very well indeed; and a sweeter soul never breathed." There
seemed to be something that the rector of St. Thomas's was anxious to
explain. "He'd played our organ and trained our choir for forty
years--ever since the church was a little mission chapel, none too sure
of its future. He was a chemist by profession, you may remember, and
he'd done our work entirely without salary. But you know what American
churches are. Once we'd become big and wealthy we had to have the best
music money could provide; and so poor Angel had to go."

"And it killed him."

"No; I don't think so. People say it did; but I don't agree with them.
It nearly killed me when I had to tell him--the parish put it up to me;
but as for him he simply seemed to feel that his life on earth was over.
He had fought his good fight and finished his course. That was the
impression he made on me. He wasn't like a man who has been killed; he
was rather like one who has been translated. He just--was not. All the
same it's been a good deal on my mind; on my conscience, I might say--"

But the doctor had other patients in the waiting-room and was obliged to
think of them.

"Quite so; and, therefore, you see that in his case there were
contributing causes; whereas in yours--"

It was the patient's turn to interrupt:

"And for this Hutchinson's disease, is there any cure?"

In spite of his efforts to seem casual the doctor's voice fell.

"None that science knows of--as yet. But able men have taken it up as a
specialty--"

"And its progress is generally rapid, isn't it?"

"Since you ask the question, I can only say, yes--generally. That
doesn't mean, however, that in the case of a man of temperate life, like
you--"

But Berkeley Noone had heard enough. He listened to what the doctor had
to say in the way of advice; he promised to carry out all orders; but he
was sure his death sentence had been pronounced. He took it as most men
take death sentences--calmly as far as the eye could see, but with an
inner sense of being stunned. Getting himself out of the office without
betraying the fact that he knew he had heard his doom he roamed the city
aimlessly.

By degrees he was able to think, though thinking led no farther than to
the overwhelming knowledge that he was to be cut off. Cut off in his
prime were the words he used. He had never been more vigorous than in
the past few years--except for those occasional spasms that latterly had
come and gone, and left him troubled and wondering. They had not,
however, interfered with his work, seeing that he had preached and
lectured and visited his parishioners and written books as usual.
Moreover, he had fulfilled his duties with a power and an authority for
which no younger man would have had the experience. For another ten
years, he had been reckoning, he could go on at the same pace; and now
the ten years were not coming!




                             CHAPTER II


Nevertheless, when, a few weeks later, he was confined to bed he began
to see that his situation was not without advantages of which he had
taken no note at first. For one thing, he was tired. He had not
recognized the fact till he had kept his room a week. A day having come
when he was slightly better, it was suggested that he might get up and
go out. But he didn't want to. He preferred to stay where he was. His
lack of zest surprised him. It surprised him still more when he crept
back into bed, with the conviction that it was the spot he liked best of
all. Bed by day had always fired him with impatience. Now it seemed to
him a haven, delicious and remote. The world might wag in the distance,
but the wagging had nothing to do with him.

Nothing to do with him when all his working life had been spent at the
heart of its energies! He had wrought and fought, and struggled and
suffered, and lost and won. He had been maligned and abused and
misunderstood, and had found enemies where he might have looked for
friends; and yet he had never been more himself than when in the
excitement of battle. It was the less credible then that the world
should have no interest for him any more, and that he should find it a
relief to get away from it.

And he should get away from St. Thomas's. Six months ago he would have
been angry with the man who had suggested that as a possible form of
solace; and yet the fact was there. The parish had been his life. He had
come to it as its first rector; his preaching had built it up. He had
hardly ever taken a holiday without regulating beforehand every service
and meeting that would take place in his absence. He had hardly ever
come back without the sense of being just where he belonged. And now he
should never again go into the pulpit and instruct other men as to what
they ought to do! Never again should he make his round of calls on
kindly, carping parishioners! He should not have to take the respectful
admonitions of his vestry any more, or try to appease its members, or
defend himself for writing books. All that was over. He sank back among
his pillows, with a sigh of comfort. He should get away from it.

Later he made a discovery that astonished him and gave him pain. He
should get away from his wife.

A little thing revealed this, too, as an escape. Emily had bustled into
his bedroom with a cup of broth. She liked plenty of salt in her broth,
and he very little; but it was one of those small differences of taste
to which she had never become reconciled. It fretted her that he
shouldn't know when things were as they ought to be; and, not to fret
her, he had during two-and-thirty years submitted to her wishes
docilely. But to-day he felt privileged to put up a mild protest.

"Isn't there too much salt in this broth, dear?"

Standing by his bedside, she took the cup and tasted it.

"No, darling. It's very good indeed. I seasoned it myself. It's exactly
right."

"Thanks, dearest." As broth exactly right, he forced himself to swallow
it.

Having relieved him of the cup she went on to make him comfortable. He
had been comfortable as it was, but she didn't believe it. She had
always declared that if he would only rest as she did he would get more
repose. She proceeded, therefore, to show him how, as she had shown him
how perhaps a million times in the course of their life together.
Patiently he allowed himself to be pulled and shunted while the sheets
were straightened and the pillows smoothed, and he composed his figure
to the lines that suited hers. Patiently, too, he pretended to be more
at ease than he had been before, though he was saying to himself, with
some eagerness, that death would take him away from this worrying wifely
affection which never let him alone.

The anticipation gave him pangs of conscience, since they had lived
together with quite the average degree of happiness, and he loved her
with a deep and quiet love. Moreover, in spite of her double chin and
her increase in waist-line, he had never ceased to see in her the timid,
wild-eyed nymph of a thing who had incarnated for him all that was
poetry in the year when he was twenty-eight. Not till after their first
child was born had her bird-like shyness yielded by degrees to an
assumption of authority, which in the end became a sort of lordship over
him. By the time they had had three children she had formed the habit of
correcting the thousand and one small faults into which he fell without
knowing it. The way he ate; the way he sat at table; the way he held a
book; the way he coughed; the way he yawned; the way he shook hands; the
way he pronounced certain of his words; the way he gave out his notices
in church; the way he allowed other men to walk over him--these, with a
hundred similar details, had become the sphere of her loving, conjugal
discipline.

For more than twenty of their thirty-two years of married life her
comments on his oddities had trickled on like a stream that flows and
stops, and stops and flows, and never dries up entirely. He had borne it
all because she could at any time, even now, throw him that look of the
startled dryad which touched some hidden spring in him; but the moment
had arrived when he couldn't help saying that he would be glad to get
away from it.

And then, as his children roamed back one by one to see him die, it came
to him that he should be glad to get away from them. That was a
discovery which shocked him to the core. His children had been part of
himself. They had been good children, too--on the whole. There were five
of them, and their ages ran from thirty-one to twenty-two. From a
worldly point of view they were all doing reasonably well--and yet they
were doing reasonably well in ways that never turned to him for
sympathy.

Berkeley, Junior, was a broker in New York, and lived on Staten Island
with a wife and a baby son. He seldom came home now, except for a
wedding or a funeral. The father had had hopes for something more
brilliant for the lad in the year when he was born; hopes that had grown
with the boy's growth and followed him to school and college, only to
fade when the young man struck out for himself.

Then there was Constantia, who had been such a wonderful little girl.
Beauty and cleverness had been her portion, with a command of the piano
that had promised the career of a Carreo. But she had married an
agnostic professor in a Western state university, where, owing to the
necessity of doing her own housework, she had given up her music, while
in submission to her husband's teaching she refused to let her children
be baptized.

The twins, Herbert and Philip, were in modern phases of business, the
one selling agricultural implements in Texas, the other automobiles in
Detroit. There was nothing a father could complain of in this. Berkeley
Noone would not have so much as sighed if it hadn't been for his hopes.
They had been such angelic little boys, and so quick at everything! He
had placed them in the ideal walks of life; one perhaps as a historian
or philosopher, and one--one at least--as a clergyman. But they had
preferred the great career of making money, and, like their elder
brother, rarely came home nowadays.

Beatrice was the enigmatic one. Though but twenty-two, she was restless
and eager, and sometimes unhappy in ways as to which she never gave her
mother or himself her confidence. Nominally living at home, she was
oftener than not away on the pretext of studying art. All he knew of her
with certainty was that she moved in the advanced brigade of the woman's
agitation, that she had extraordinary friendships with young men, and
that she smoked a great many cigarettes. Affectionate enough, but wilful
and mysterious, it pleased her to keep her parents in ignorance as to
her doings, once she had closed their door behind her.

If his offspring had disappointed him it was not precisely
disappointment that had worn him out; it was a sense of the futility of
bringing children into the world at all. He had put his strength into
theirs and they hadn't needed it. So long as they had let him, he had
lived their lives with them, and shared their struggles, and suffered
their pains; he had yearned and longed and looked forward for them more
than they had ever yearned and longed and looked forward for themselves.
He had seen them all as children of destiny! Whatever they might become,
they could never be commonplace! Even when they had crosses to carry and
cares to endure, their places in life could never be anything but high
ones! And now--now they were all there, each absorbed in what seemed to
him a merely starveling way of life, waiting for him to die in order
that they might return to it as quickly as steam and electricity could
carry them. Vitally and essentially he was no more to them than the
parent bird to the robin that has mated and made its nest in another
tree.

So he gave up his yearnings over them. As they came and went in his room
he watched them with the same detachment they betrayed toward him. He
would have said he had outlived them had he ventured to use a word in
which life was a compound. Certainly there was a sense in which he had
outgrown them. He had left them behind in some race that had more than
death for its goal. The effort to keep going back to them, going back
and pulling them along, was too wearisome to keep up.

In the place for which he was bound he would get rest from the cravings
on their behalf that had haunted him ever since the minute when he knew
the first of them was to be born.




                             CHAPTER III


And yet his thoughts were not all of rest. Far from it! He was of
Puritan stock and traditions. Though in later life he had abandoned that
belief in an angry God in which his childhood had been nursed, something
of the early teaching clung to him. Won as he had been by the modern
doctrine of eternal hope, he still lapsed into moments when death became
to him, in biblical phrase, "a certain fearful looking for of judgment."

He had been a great sinner. Though no one knew it but himself, a great
sinner he had been. He had preached to others, and warned them, and
consoled them, and prepared them for death, and had passed as a man of
God; and no one suspected the depths of evil that lay beneath the
dignified surface of his life. There had been wicked thoughts, hasty
words, carnal desires, envies, antipathies, doubtings, angers,
rashnesses, and everything else that makes a man's inner life something
which he hides from others, and that often appals himself.

This was true even of his later life. And when he went back to his
earlier manhood, to his youth, to his boyhood, to his childhood--

There were nights when the cold sweat broke out all over him as he
thought of these things. In a few days now--in a fortnight or three
weeks at furthest--he would have to give an account of all that was
recorded against him. When the Throne was set and the Books were opened
he might be blasted forever under the Judge's keen, all-seeing glance.
That glance itself would be the worm that dieth not and the fire that
never should be quenched.

But he had other moments of exalted and somewhat desperate trust in a
redeeming love that had paid the penalty for these offenses and won
their forgiveness. He was not very clear as to how this vicarious
atonement could ever have been made; but since the thought of it was all
there was to cling to he did his best to cling to it. He repeated hymns
and prayers and passages of Scripture as he had repeated them at the
bedsides of men and women who had been facing the crisis he was facing
in his turn. He told himself he was comforted; he almost persuaded
himself that he was; and yet at the back of his mind there lay the
suspicion of a mere self-administered spiritual drug.

So day by day he receded from the world, from his work, from his wife,
from his family and from all that had formed his interests, seemingly
making that peaceful end for which those who cared for him watched and
prayed. But inwardly he was like a man sweating blood. Death was
abhorrent to him. There were minutes when he could have doubted the
goodness of a God who had foreordained it. What was the good of birth
and effort and love if they could only end in this? There was the great
question with which he wrestled as he had never wrestled with anything
before.

He reminded himself of One who said, "If a man keep my saying, he shall
never taste of death." But for sinners like himself there was nothing in
the promise, or in any promise similar; and there never had been. He
should have to taste of death. He should have to eat its last morsel and
drink its last dregs. Hutchinson's disease had got him by as many
tentacles as the octopus gets its victim. It was swathing him round, and
dragging him down, and darkening his intelligence. He was going the way
of all flesh. His wife would come after him, and their children after
them, and their children after them; and so on till the globe collapsed.
What was the good of it? What was the good of it? Why could not the
All-intelligent, if there was such a Being, have given man a life that
wouldn't have to come to this miserable wreckage?

These were his thoughts as he waited for his last agony. That it was
expected soon he judged by the way in which the doctor shook his head,
and his wife relaxed her bustling to watch him with tearful eyes. Two or
three times a day the boys tiptoed into the room, gazed at him with
solemn, sympathetic faces, and tiptoed out again. Beatrice cried in
corners, and Constantia helped the nurse when her mother was obliged to
rest.

Practically they had taken their farewell of him; but there came a day
when they did it in actual fact. It was a bright summer afternoon, with
the sunshine streaming in at all the windows. The nurse had given the
sign by summoning Emily; Emily had called Constantia; and Constantia,
Beatrice and the boys. They all kissed him, and stood or sat about the
bed, his wife holding one hand and Phil the other. He hardly knew by
what signs they judged, since he felt but little weaker than on other
days and not much more pain. They seemed to know, however, that the time
had come, and to treat him a little like the jailers and sheriffs who
notify the condemned that the supreme minute is approaching.

He could only let them do as they thought right, fixing his eyes
somewhat vacantly on a picture which had long hung at the foot of his
bed, and which was a favorite. It was a steel engraving of Holman Hunt's
"Light of the World," purchased on his honeymoon, after Emily and he had
seen the original at Oxford. Neither of them had been expert critics of
painting, but they had stood together and spoken of the light thrown out
by the lantern in the Saviour's hand as one of the most beautiful things
they knew. For the figure and face they had not cared. They had cared
for nothing but that light. For him, if not for her, it had remained a
lasting memory. He had been able to see it in the steel engraving's
black-and-white splotch during all the intervening years, and to
identify its glow with England and Oxford, and young love and his soul's
striving.

And he saw it now. It was odd--but he did. It positively burned in the
lantern. He was glad of the illusion, because it helped him, he thought,
to get nearer the last minute without knowing it. It would come, of
course--that last minute. There would be an instant, perhaps in half an
hour, when his soul would tear its way out of his body and he should be
thrust, a naked, quivering bundle of spiritual nerves, before angels and
archangels and principalities and powers, and a God whose first
question would be that which was put to Cain: "What hast thou done?" If,
then, he was not to hear the sentence, "Depart from me, ye cursed, into
everlasting fire," it would only be because there had been a cross on
Calvary. Mentally he clung to that cross as he watched the light grow
brighter and brighter in the lantern in the print.

He was dimly conscious of a man he knew, a brother clergyman who had
administered the last sacrament to him on the previous day, coming into
the room and kneeling at his bedside. Dimly he was conscious that the
family knelt down and that there were prayers. They were prayers that
came to him as if from such a long way off as hardly to reach his ear.
When the murmur of "Our Father" traveled up it was like a rumble from a
world below him. He tried to join in it; but he couldn't keep his mind
on the phrases. He couldn't keep his mind on the phrases because of the
shining of the light. It was becoming an amazing light, bursting the
limits of the lantern, making glory of the figure, making beauty of the
face, turning the crown of thorns into jewels, and throwing a sunshine
brighter than the sunshine on the wall.

It was a pleasant illusion, he told himself--the action of the
self-administered spiritual drug he distrusted and yet relied on. At any
rate, it made things easier. It gave him a sense of relief that might
even be called physical. He noticed, all at once, that his pain was
gone. That, of course, was illusion, too--probably no more than the end
of his power to feel; but the iron claws that Hutchinson's disease had
dug into his flesh had loosened their grip. He was breathing easily for
the first time in months. Had he not known that he couldn't really be
better, he would have been tempted to say he was well. He would have
been able to get up; only that it was so delicious to lie there
seemingly free--he reminded himself that it could be no more than
seemingly free--from torture, and with his mental burdens gone. What had
dispelled them he didn't know; but it was a fact that they had rolled
away.




                             CHAPTER IV


"This is rest!" he murmured to himself.

A voice answered him promptly:

"Yes; it's rest, because you're now beginning to realize as a fact what
you've always taken as no more than a lovely spiritual image--that
underneath are the everlasting arms."

He was not surprised at the voice. Familiar with the fancies of the
dying, he knew to what to ascribe it. He reminded himself that he must
hold on to his senses till he was deprived of them, and so made no
effort to reply.

Instead, he watched the spreading of the light that flooded the room and
glorified its occupants. Wife and son and daughter were all beside him;
but in that light they were different. They were also doing things he
didn't clearly understand. All he knew was that he felt toward them an
extraordinary tenderness, and that something similar came from them to
him.

"I suppose this must be dying," he said to himself, as he noticed that
the new day had blotted out the sunlight.

"No," came the voice again; "because there's no such thing as death."

To Berkeley Noone, this was the real point at issue. It was worth taking
up, even if only in delirium.

"Of course there's no such thing as death from the spiritual point of
view--"

"And there is no other."

"I know there'll be no other in the next life; but--"

"But there's no next life. There's only one life."

"In a sense--yes," he admitted, not without a shadow of impatience. "And
yet I'm--I'm dying."

"No; you're only waking--waking from the deep sleep that fell on Adam
and on all Adam's so-called children."

He fixed his attention on but one of these points:

"Why do you say so-called?"

"Because they're only the offspring of a dream."

"I don't see how they can be the offspring of a dream when a dream is
nothing--"

"Pardon me; a dream is something--while it lasts. It's only seen to be
nothing when we wake and know it for what it was."

"And do you mean to tell me that all my past life has had no reality?"

"Not all your past life; only whatever in it may have been evil, mortal,
or unhappy. Once we've thrown off that, we come to our genuine
birthright. You're probably able to prove it by some heightening of your
faculties already."

"Do you mean the light I see from the picture at the foot of my bed?"

There was genuine curiosity in the tone:

"Won't you tell me what it's like?"

He complied with this request. The voice continued:

"That's very like my own experience--only that in my case the increase
of perception was in the way of what our mortal senses call sound. You
were with me at the time, and may remember."

"I?"

"According to the reckoning of time it was in June over a year ago. The
day was close and the windows were open. The noises of the street came
up to my room rather distressingly. I tried not to listen to them or be
annoyed by them; but it was beyond me. Then by degrees all such noises
merged into something else--into music--into floods of music--into
floods on floods of music; and I was made to understand that in the
Reality there is no such thing as ugly sound; that it's only the senses
of the Man of Dust that degrade to harshness and discord that which in
itself is harmonious and lovely."

With some surprise Berkeley Noone became aware that behind the voice
there was a personality. Timidly he asked the question:

"Aren't you Angel?"

The answer came with what he would hitherto have called a smile. It
struck him now as an effulgence:

"The name will do for the present. You and I are still within the sphere
of mortal thought--you, of course, more than I; but we shall work away
from it."

Among the questions Berkeley Noone was eager to ask, one presented
itself as most pressing to his curiosity. It stood for years of
speculation, wonder, and hope.

"Then," he began, still timidly, "you're really able to come back and be
with us--here in my room?"

There was a repetition of what seemed to him an effulgence.

"You must remember that what you call your room is only a phase of
mortal consciousness. It's one of the expedients by which the Man of
Dust makes use of his limitations. Being finite himself he can think
only in terms of spaces and walls and tables and chairs, which he sees
to stand for other ideas as soon as he begins to see at all. What you've
said of the new light makes a very good illustration."

"But that's only the illusion of a dying man."

"It's more than that. It's the point by which your waking thought
catches on to actuality. What you've seen in your picture hitherto has
not been what was there; it was what the Man of Dust put there as the
best he could do. It's been a sheet of white paper with some printing in
black; but it was as much as the eye of Dust could see. Your mind, on
the other hand, got hold of the immortal conception when your mortal
vision was blind to it."

"And by the immortal conception you mean--"

"We'll see that if we go back to your picture. Jesus spoke of Himself as
the Light of the World; but He never meant that He was such a light as
mortal discovery draws from electricity. He was a light in
consciousness. As a light in consciousness He has appeared to every
generation since He uttered the words. As a light in consciousness the
artist saw Him, even though he himself couldn't get beyond canvas and
paint. But it was the light in consciousness that appealed to the
engraver who copied the work, and through him to you. The engraver was
trying to give you some of that light, and some of it you got. Now
you're getting more of it. You haven't it all, by any means; but you can
see for yourself that you've made a long step forward from paper and
ink. You'll find that ever to be making new and beautiful discoveries,
and yet never to exhaust them, is one of the joys of the new condition."

Berkeley Noone returned to the point he had raised before.

"What interests me most is that the departed can really come back--"

A ripple in the effulgence might have corresponded to laughter.

"But there are no departed. Absence and presence are states of
consciousness. When you've learned more of infinity you'll see that it's
so. I've been with you ever since what you called my death, and you've
been with me."

There was here new matter for surprise.

"I've been with you? I confess I don't understand--"

"You've been with me in the sense in which a sleeping man is with the
waking one who sits beside him and watches. You've been dreaming of
me--"

"I've been thinking of you--a good deal--if that's what you mean."

"The expression will pass. And, as we've been so much in each other's
thoughts, I happen to be the one with whom you can most easily come into
touch, now that--"

"But I don't see you."

"You don't see me partly because, if I may go on using mortal terms,
you've never seen anything in your life." Before a protest could be
expressed, the voice continued: "Though the Man of Dust knows he never
sees anything farther off than a reflection on the retina of the eye of
Dust--a reflection turned upside down, and which he has always to be
correcting mentally--he rarely stops to consider that. He talks of
seeing; he persuades himself that he sees. Knowing that, strictly
speaking, you were blind, you, nevertheless, taught yourself to think
that a mere reflection was Edward Angel, when, as a matter of fact, I
was something else."

"If you were something else--what were you?"

"You'll know that as you go on. At present let me say that I was not the
short-sighted fellow, with a limp, who played the organ at Saint
Thomas's. He was the illusion of the Man of Dust. He saw me, he made me
see myself, with infirmities that never existed, except in the mind of
Dust."

"But even the mind of Dust, as you call it, can take cognizance of--"

"It can take cognizance of nothing but in corrupting facts and
disfiguring them. The Man of Dust has no faculty for understanding
things as they are, otherwise than remotely."

It suited Berkeley Noone to argue, since the process dulled his
anticipation of the last event. It annoyed him somewhat that the bases
of existence, as he had always conceived of it, should be so radically
called into question. He seized, therefore, on what seemed to him an
admission.

"But remotely, your Man of Dust can understand?"

"Doesn't your present experience answer that? You have seen the 'Light
of the World' as clearly as it could be transmitted to you through
canvas and paint or through paper and ink. Now you're looking at it more
nearly as it is."

"But you allow that I've seen it already to some degree?"

"If you hadn't seen it already to some degree you wouldn't be getting
this fuller conception of it now. Light is one of the most radiant
symbols we have for God; and all through the ages of time men have loved
darkness. Those who love darkness must go on in darkness till they win
out to a glimmer of perception. Those who love Light inherit it. There
are no leaps and bounds in life. What mortals call death takes them
where it finds them--as every day and hour does the same. If through the
mortal years you hadn't been working away from mortality--"

"I should still be seeing in the 'Light of the World' no more than the
engraver could show me. I shouldn't have reached what you call the
immortal conception. I think I follow you." He harked back to the
consideration he thought not to have been fully met. "And yet I don't
understand why, if I can see the 'Light of the World,' I can't, for
example, see you."

"Aren't you still keeping too close to Dust conceptions? Aren't you
forgetting that in the Dust condition you were blind? You never got
beyond your own eyeball. You never really saw a person or an object of
any kind. Before you could think so, you had to learn a whole series of
Dust conventions. You had to be taught shapes and colors and distances
and comparative sizes, and come to an agreement with other Men of Dust
that a bed was a bed and a chair was a chair, when in reality you didn't
know what they were."

"I knew a chair was a chair by sitting in it, and that a bed was a bed
by lying down."

"Did you? What are you lying in now?"

"Am I not lying in my--"

But the sentence died on his lips. When he sought for his bed, with its
pillows and its sheets, he found something else.

"Well?"

The word was accompanied by a renewal of the quiver of amusement in the
radiance.

Berkeley Noone answered very slowly:

"My bed--seems to be--a wonderful--comforting--sustaining--knowledge
that--that I am--supported."

"And isn't that what I told you at first--that it's positively a fact
that underneath are the everlasting arms? The Man of Dust takes these
eternal truths and makes them temporary, material, destructible. For
inexhaustible sustenance, protection, and supply he uses as his symbols
trivial things, like tables and beds and walls and floors, and food to
eat and money to spend. In the very act of yearning for the actual he
contents himself with a falsification, just as a child who grasps at the
moon can be satisfied with a tinseled toy. Sight, which is an attribute
of Infinite Intelligence, he locates in a blind material physique; and,
even while admitting his mistake, he goes on making it."

Berkeley Noone endeavored to show the mortal impulse as less culpable
than it was represented.

"And yet we Men of Dust, as you call us, admit that we see with the
intelligence. We don't merely speak of seeing with the eye. One of our
commonest expressions is, I see!--as applied to comprehension."

"Which goes to prove what I've been telling you. The Man of Dust is
rarely without some gleam of true understanding. It has to be remembered
that the mist which, as mortals saw for themselves in the book of
Genesis, went up from the earth is less dense in some places than it is
in others; that the deep sleep which fell on Adam is a restless sleep.
At times the Man of Dust is haunted by nightmare; he exists in a
delirium of terror and pain. At times he is so nearly awake as to catch
a glimpse of the blissful and peaceful reality. In his music, for
instance, and all his arts; in goodness and all high thoughts; in love
and compassion, and learning and knowledge, and every honest pursuit, he
sees some ray of that reality which you're beginning to perceive as you
never did before; and he strains toward it."

"So that when a man says I see!--in the sense that he understands--he
puts himself on a higher plane than when he merely tells himself he sees
with the physical senses."

"You must be getting that conviction for yourself. It must be growing
plainer to you that mortal intelligence is less deceptive than the
mortal senses. The mortal eye, like everything else that is made of
Dust, is poorly adapted to its purposes. Assuming that it ever sees more
than an inverted reflection, its range is still limited; and within that
range it is subject to a thousand errors and infirmities. The mortal
intelligence, being nearer akin to actual Intelligence, is less liable
to error, even though it errs. Man only sees when he sees altogether
through the mind; and it is in mind only that I shall see you and you
will see me."




                             CHAPTER V


Berkeley Noone withdrew from communication with his invisible companion
in order to assimilate some of these ideas. In his effort to cling to
his faculties, as he called it, he put it plainly to himself that he was
in a state betwixt reality and dreamland. The very clarity of his mind
was like that produced by some mighty stimulant. It was one of the
phases of dying he had heard about; but it was at least a pleasant
phase, putting the evil moment a little further off. Meantime he watched
his wife and children with renewed perplexity.

It puzzled him that, while he was lying at the very point of death, they
should apparently be going and coming on errands not directly connected
with himself.

A few minutes ago his wife was holding his right hand and Phil his left.

Each of the others was watching him, as he was watching them, with eyes
of piteous farewell. He might have supposed that, for the rest of the
time he stayed with them, they would have no other preoccupation.

But now they seemed bent on obeying some lord who was not death.
Moreover, in the "Light of the World," they continued to undergo a
transfiguration he could neither describe nor define. They were
themselves but themselves glorified. Emily was again the dryad of their
youthful days; but a dryad with ways of light and tenderness he had
never known her to possess. Each of the children was bathed in the same
beautifying radiance. He knew them--and yet he didn't know them. All he
could affirm of them exactly was that his doubts and worryings and
disappointments on account of them were past. He felt what Angel had
just been telling him, that he was waking from some troubled dream on
their behalf. The boys were not sordid; Beatrice was not wilful;
Constantia was not a renegade to her God. That he should ever have
thought so began to seem to him incomprehensible.

Angel spoke, as if there had been no interruption:

"It's because mortals never see each other, except as wearing grotesque
masks, behind which the true and normal features are hidden. The Dream
Man may catch the shadow of God's Man; but he never beholds him as he
is. He invents another Dream Man. The Dream Man is to God's Man no more
than the reflection in the hollow of a silver spoon to the face it is
supposed to give back."

Once more Berkeley Noone was quick to seize a point that made for mortal
reality:

"But there is a face there."

"Oh, yes; there is a face there. The Man of Dust never creates anything.
He only takes what God has created and distorts it. His senses have
about the same degree of accuracy as wind-swept water, which shows the
objects standing above it not only upside down but quivering, broken--a
succession of shadows that appear and disappear and reappear, and have
no stability."

"But your Man of Dust has intelligence; he has power. Look at his
development through the ages; look at his discoveries, his inventions,
his mastery of the elements."

"You mean that he has his approaches to actuality. True! There are spots
where he so penetrates the mist that it grows very thin. His great
advances are in the direction of truth. His use of steam, of
electricity, of the Hertzian waves, brings him nearer to things as they
are; and so nearer to God. It's one of his limitations that he can only
think of coming nearer to God ethically. He sees God in His relation to
moral right and wrong, and he hardly ever sees Him in any other way. He
practically never takes the telephone, for instance, or the motor-car,
as his demonstration of God's power. He looks upon them as his own
discoveries or inventions, having nothing to do with God; and so directs
his advantages not to good ends but to evil."

While Berkeley Noone was considering a response to this, Angel's voice,
after a brief pause, went on:

"How are the Children of Dust making use of the knowledge they've gained
during the last fifty years of their counting? Is it to help one
another? Is it to benefit themselves? Is it to make the world happier,
or more peaceful, or more prosperous? Haven't they taken all their new
resources, all their increased facilities, all their approximations to
Truth, all their approaches to God--the things which belonged to their
peace, as Jesus of Nazareth called them--and made them instruments of
mutual destruction? Aren't they straining their ingenuity to devise
undreamed-of methods for doing one another harm?

"You think me harsh toward them; but can you consider for a moment their
colossal stupidity and not be harsh? Isn't it fair to say of the carnal
mind that its promptest use of a blessing is to turn it into a curse? Is
there any good thing that it has not, at one time or another, so
perverted that it becomes difficult to see what useful end it was meant
to serve? Isn't it a fact that the most beautiful things in mortal
existence--the love of husband and wife, for instance, or the affection
of parent and child--are so wrested by the carnal mind from the purposes
for which they were ordained that they become the causes of misery?"

Berkeley Noone having reluctantly admitted this, the quiet voice pursued
its line of reasoning:

"The best that can be said of the carnal point of view is that it
doesn't last. The Man of Dust is fully aware that he has only a brief
day. From the beginning he foresees his end. Dust he is, and to Dust he
must return. He can pervert the facts for no more than threescore years
and ten, or fourscore years--or a hundred years at most. Knowing that,
he keeps his worst error in reserve."

"And his worst error is--"

"The invention of death."

"Ah, but is death an invention? Isn't it the most real of all realities?
Here am I, a dying man--"

"Everything is real to which we lend reality. It has just the reality we
lend to it. The Man of Dust persuades himself that his return to his
natural nothingness is the most fearful form of destruction. He
frightens his children into the belief that, with the passing of
delusion, something vital in them ends. He calls into existence a
hundred bogies--a future life, another world, a hades, a purgatory, a
hell. Even of a heaven he turns the lofty spiritual imagery of John, in
the Revelation, into a tedious, useless materiality. He stops at nothing
that will add terror to man's blessed waking from his night of
phantasms. You yourself were probably not free from some alarms, any
more than I."

The thought that had been forming in Berkeley Noone's mind now burst
from him with extreme intensity of awe:

"But am I--am I--dead?"

Again there was that dancing of the radiance which might have
represented laughter.

"How can you be dead when there is no death? Do you think yourself
dead?"

He sought another way of putting it:

"Then--then--has the great change taken place?"

"There's been no great change to take place--for you. All your life
you've been doing your best to throw off mortality; and now you're
succeeding. That's all! As for a great change--well, that's for those
who still remain in the mortal state. They are saying you're dead; but
you best know whether you are or not."

In the enlarged consciousness, amazement struggled with relief. It was
the latter that triumphed as he asked, incredulously:

"But is it--is it--over?"

"Haven't you been looking for a shock, when life, as we know it, has
nothing but sweet and gentle transitions?"

Berkeley Noone was still unable to convince himself.

"But how can I be"--unable to find any other, he used the word
again--"how can I be dead when I'm still in my room, with my family?"

"You mean that you haven't fully abandoned your mortal point of view.
That will come by degrees. Even as it is, you see some things
differently, don't you?"

This could not be denied. As Berkeley Noone looked about him--if looking
was the word--he began to note a transmutation of all the things with
which he had been familiar. It was true of them, as of the members of
his family, that they were the same, yet not the same. If he could have
found words to describe his new perceptions he would have said that he
was getting to the inner essence of objects of which he had hitherto
known but the surfaces. Mortal symbols had, on the whole, been well
enough, so far as they went; they had only been inadequate. They had
been inadequate and, as he found himself able to observe, unsatisfying.
They had been unsatisfying because they brought tremendous truths down
to the temporary or the trivial.

He found himself moving about the well-known chamber. Everything was
around him that he had known of old; objects he had once possessed but
had lost or otherwise parted with seemed also to be his again; and yet
each thing was there with a significance he had never supposed to be
inherent in workaday bits of furniture. He had already seen his bed melt
into a knowledge of support; his arm-chair was now an assurance of rest,
with its complement of strength.

Where there had been his bedroom desk, with papers and pens, and the
paraphernalia of a busy life, there was the promise of activity. The
floor became a sense of the solidity of his new condition; and the wall
a guaranty of privacy, of independence, of a place for him as an
individual in an infinite world of work.

Whatever had been matter he saw as thought; but thought which,
nevertheless, projected a new type of objectivity. The rugs were
thoughts; the pictures were thoughts; each tiny trifle, useful or
useless, as the case might be, represented some eternal, indestructible
idea. A few rows of books, some of which he had not taken from their
shelves for years, were a thronging variety of thoughts, glowing,
glorious, crowding one another, and yet making room for one another,
like jewels in a treasury or flowers in a field.

It was his bedroom. He had no doubt of that. It was the intimate
environment his needs and tastes had created, and which expressed him.
But it was to be his forever. It was not a spot he had been allowed to
love and permitted to rest in, and from which he was to be torn away.
There had been no such futility to life; no such lack of purpose in its
development. What he had gathered he was to keep; what he had cared for
he was to continue to enjoy. The dear familiar things that the Man of
Dust had told him could be his but for a little while were to abide with
him--not only as the medium through which his spirit had worked outward,
but as an earnest of security.

He could hardly tell by what means he apprehended this, or whether the
physical senses were still at his command or not. He could not have said
whether sight and hearing had become amplified, or whether they had
yielded to some higher method of perception. He was like a new-born
child, so abundantly endowed with gifts that as yet he is incapable of
appraising any one of them. He could only perceive--and enjoy. He could
only enjoy--and delight in the knowledge that he was beyond the range of
vicissitude.

Love and its blessings were not to be snatched away from him. The past,
with its ties and its kindly, simple associations, had not been lived
through in vain. He was not to be wrenched from them abruptly, or sent
to strange spiritual countries, where even the highest pleasures would
be alien. He was merely living on; living on with heightened powers,
doubtless, and with a more exact valuation of men and things--but living
on.

It ceased to be a question in his mind as to whether he was still within
his room or not, because space, as he had known it, no longer had
significance. Words like "where" and "when" began to give up their
meaning. That which was vital to the past being his forever, conditions
of time and place did not arise. All the taxed and tired recesses of his
being, so worn with the struggle against chance and change and mortal
fear, could rest.

"After all," Angel answered to these reflections, "rest is humanity's
primary craving. It asserts itself above all demands for joy or power.
Just as the infant's capacity for sleep is beyond any other of its
functions, so to those emerging from mortality the mere knowledge of
safety is a reason for taking that perfect, delicious repose which the
Man of Dust never permits to himself or to his children. It isn't sleep,
for the reason that the true mind never has to relax. But not to have to
be afraid any more!... Never again to have to worry or be anxious, or to
fret oneself!... He who comes where at last he sees this finds nothing
so blissful as just to rest and rejoice."

So Berkeley Noone rejoiced and rested. It was occupation enough, it was
happiness enough, to be getting the true meaning of his past. The
knowledge that life was not the fleeting thing it had always been
described to him, that it had everlasting values, was in itself a
satisfaction of which his spirit took long draughts. All that was good
and useful and honest and well-intentioned remained as a perpetual
inheritance. He returned to the fact again and again. There was only one
life, as Angel had told him; there was only one world. No sudden
transplanting made a shadow of the one, and no violent breaking-off a
monstrosity of the other. He lived and saw; he lived and knew; he saw
and knew and lived. He lived with the old things he had always lived
with, discovering only their full uses; he lived with the old ties,
learning only their stability and permanence; he lived with the old
duties, perceiving only that as he would fulfil them thenceforth in
higher ways they would lead to higher issues.

And as he thought of higher issues another question arose in his mind.
It was a startling question:

"If I'm dead, why don't I--see God?"

Angel's voice replied, as though the words had been actually spoken:

"Aren't you seeing Him?"

"Why, no!"

"Why not? What did you expect to see?"

Before this simple inquiry Berkeley Noone was dumb. When he tried to
formulate his hope it was brokenly.

"I've always understood that--that I should be taken before the Great
White Throne; and that, high and lifted up--"

"You'd see a supernal Man, or three supernal Men, taking great delight
in an adoring chorus from a white-robed throng?" A pause preceded the
next words, like a pause of reflection. "'The letter killeth, but the
spirit giveth life,'" the unseen companion quoted. "There have been few
for whom John didn't write the book of his Revelation quite in vain. It
has been the conviction of the Man of Dust that if he didn't see a
reflection turned upside down on the retina of Dust he didn't see at
all. He has persuaded himself that he lives in a world where God is
invisible, when, as a matter of fact, even he, with his Dust
limitations, is always seeing Him."

"Oh, but I haven't been always seeing Him," Berkeley Noone began to
plead. "If I had--"

"You've been seeing Him and you didn't know it. Go back to what we said
as to sight being not the action of a temporary optic nerve, but
essentially the power to understand. We see God by what we understand of
Him; we understand Him by His attributes; and we measure His attributes
by their beauty and goodness and practicality. Wherever there has been a
blessing for you to enjoy, you've seen God. Whenever love has cheered
you or kindness helped you, you've seen God. In sunrise and sunset and
moonlight and starlight, and trees and fields and harvest and flowers
and ice and snow and air, and health and beauty, and generosity and
friendship, and all that gives pleasure to existence, you've seen God.
He hasn't been invisible. There is not one world in which God is seen
and another world in which He is not. There is not a life with God and
another life away from Him. There is only one world, and God fills it;
there is only one life, to which God is All-in-All."

"And yet we speak of the Unseen--"

"The Man of Dust speaks of it; and, to make him understand, it may
sometimes be necessary to employ his terms. He has other such
expressions, too, in his vocabulary. He has a beyond the veil, and a
beyond the clouds, and a beyond the tomb, and a dozen other misleading
tokens. But there is no Beyond. There is only a universal Here! There is
only an ever-present Now! 'No man hath ascended up to heaven,'" Angel
quoted again, "'but He that came down from heaven, even the Son of man
which is in heaven.' To the true Son of man, who is also the true Son of
God, heaven is not another world or an afterworld; it's the only world.
It's a state of consciousness He never leaves and of which He never
loses the assurances. He has the highest authority for knowing that in
it His angels do always behold the face of His Father.'"

"His angels--yes; but that doesn't necessarily mean Himself."

"Doesn't it? What are angels? Aren't they messengers? Aren't they
messages? And haven't you always been sending your messages and
messengers straight to Him? In yearnings and prayers and aspirations and
hopes, and a thousand other impulses of your being, what have you been
doing but sending troops of your angels to see His face? Abandon the
inverted reflection on the mortal retina as a necessity for sight--and
you see Him at once."

"So you would say that in my present more accurate knowledge of things
as they are--"

"You are seeing God as you've always seen Him, even though not so
radiantly as now. What more remains is not for me to say, since I am
doing only that much myself. All I can affirm is what Jesus of Nazareth
affirmed, that to know God is eternal life, and that they who possess
even the rudiments of that knowledge shall never and can never die. What
the end of that knowledge shall be surpasses our capacity to guess at,
as God Himself surpasses it. For the present we are the inheritors of
love, joy, and peace; and in proportion as we have them--whatever the
stage of our progress out of material beliefs--we see at least the
fringe of the robe of Him whose qualities they are."

Thus, to Berkeley Noone the Vision of God began to unfold itself. He was
seeing where he had supposed himself blind; he was blind in ways in
which he thought he had seen. Hymns of praise broke from him
spontaneously--not in set phrases, nor with what he had hitherto called
melody, nor with singing of the voice; but in an irrepressible
gratitude. That nothing of the past was wasted was the theme of his
ever-recurring song. To see evil pass into nothingness in the degree to
which Dust theories were shaken off was like emerging into sunlit air
after existence underground. Once he beheld the unity of life, the unity
of purpose, the unity of good, his being became incense, viol, and harp,
and he was ready to cast his crown before the Throne, saying:

"'Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honor and power: for
Thou hast created all things, and for Thy pleasure they are and were
created.'"

And within the vision of God he saw his wife and children--always busied
in ways he didn't understand; always occupied on errands that had
nothing to do with him. It was not continuously that he saw them, and it
was not near, and it was not all together. They came to him singly, or
in groups, or in glimpses. Such communication as he could hold with them
was chiefly in a sense of well-being and of mutual love.

"You'll come closer to them by degrees," he was informed by his guide.
"It's a matter of perception. All things will be possible in the measure
in which you free yourself from mortal restrictions."

"But what are they doing?"

"They're about their Father's business, as you and I are."

The answer both rejoiced and troubled him.

"I'm afraid they were not--or they weren't wholly--"

"When you as a Dream Man saw them as other Dream Men? No! But the Dream
Man always misinterprets. The Children of Dust see each other as lying
and cheating and hating and killing, and given over to every kind of
wickedness and frightfulness. That is the inversion of what they are
actually doing as the Children of Light. What puzzles you is that, in
throwing off the dream, you are seeing those who are dear to you not as
you supposed them to be, but as they are. Each one of them is doing his
Father's business, positively and always, no matter what grotesque or
hideous perversion the dream consciousness may try to fix in him. In the
Reality there is no thwarting of the Almighty, even though mortals pride
themselves on being able to do it." He added, gently and yet joyously,
"Great is the mystery of being!"

"'And great is the mystery of godliness,'" the other quoted, in his
turn.

"And wonderful is it to emerge from darkness and half lights into the
daylight of the Sun of Righteousness."

"But blessed," Berkeley Noone went on, fervently, "are they who, in half
lights and darkness, are able to see that they shall emerge quietly,
simply, naturally--and not be violently thrust into glories or terrors
they cannot understand.

"More blessed are they who learn to live in God as in the One Vast
Certainty--which created every one, and supplies every one, and upholds
every one, and defends every one, and loves every one; and does it all
with unlimited intelligence and might--'to whom be glory and dominion
for ever and ever.'"

"Amen! and Amen!"


THE END




Transcriber's Note:

On page 19, the following change was made to the original text:

from his work, from his wife from his family and from all
=> from his work, from his wife, from his family and from all




[End of _Abraham's Bosom_ by Basil King]
