Heart to heart letters

Preface

WHILE I was at school and college, I received many letters from my mother, written in round hand, and such letters as any mother would write to any son. In 1875 I went to England to live, and from that date became the recipient of weekly letters. In course of time, her handwriting so strikingly altered as to reveal a new personality. A few sentences will explain the marvellous change, which came to her life, after she was well past forty.

I was for many years her only son. I was born when she was in her early twenties. She made me her companion, when I was only eight years old. I worshiped her. We sang together. She prayed out loud, before me. She took me to all the Church Services, in the Methodist churches, of which my father was the pastor. In those years she was a shy, reserved woman, terribly in earnest about her religion, but without peace. She tried to believe in God, as her Church believed in Him, in those days. I knew she held communion with invisible things. I could not guess what she saw, but I knew it was a vision beyond my ken. Now I know.

Her self from God she could not free, She huilded better than she knew.

It cost something to be a Mehodlst In those days, and she paid a top price. She was told it was her duty to speak in class meeting and to

V lead the singing, and I held her hand in class meeting, and I can hear the Leader say, "Sister Margaret, tell us what the Lord has done for your soul." She would spring up and, her face flushed with the effort, just softly reply, "The Lord is very gracious unto His servant." Never more than this in those far-off days. How blind I was. But not so dull as to mistake a knowledge of a force, which used to make my hand tingle as I held her hand in mine. She was passing through a furnace of affliction. She took up the cross of a minister's wife, and tasted that peculiar vintage, which only those know, who experienced the narrowness and bigotry of the religious life of the fifties and sixties. All the time she was beating out the music of her woman's heart; and at long last, she quietly emerged from years of meditation and disillusion, of misunderstanding and prejudice, and entered into an experience, which was to be as a fountain of living waters for the women of her age. She outpoured to me in her letters to England the drama of her widening life and influence. The women who had patronized her, in former years, now followed her lead. She had arrived!

Year by year, she wrote to me, as she wrote to no one else, for we had our confidences, and she knew that I knew, and so she wrote as the spirit gave her utterance. But though I was too engrossed with a new life, fully to appreciate them then, I kept them all, and now I know, that what was passing be-

VI fore me as it had done all my life, was the making of a soul, for the revelation of God to her own generation. There are multitudes of women, who will agree to this, that they never heard her speak, in public or in private, without feeling a thrill of a strange vital force pass from her into their own hearts. For when she used voice or pen, it was a woman who knew, who wrote or spoke! Now if I was the only judge, I should hesitate to publish extracts from these letters, just because I am her son. But one of the greatest critics of English Letters and biography, Ernest Hartley Coleridge, gave me his opinion of them. I can see him now, as he said with the force of absolute conviction, "You have a treasure here the world must share."

For some years, I have kept my treasure-trove close. But now that my brothers have shared my joy, in reading and editing them, it would be selfish in me to refuse to share them, not only with those who knew and loved her personally, but with that wide circle of men and women who knew her through her writings. I agree with my brothers' view, that only extracts should be given, and that matters personal to me and to my family should not be published. And even now I print but few of them ; and amongst these one or two written to my oldest daughter. Few as they are, they speak for themselves. They ring true. They touch one with the pressure which sets the lights aflame in the room, and reveals the hidden things.

VII

Who writes letters now? Such letters? Do you know anyone who sits down and writes long, intimate, stirring letters, to people whom they have never met, but who have begged for a letter, as they would for a cup of cold water when athirst. This was her labour of love for many years. Now the hand, often so tired, writes no more. The tender loving voice is not heard. Yet she still speaks; I would fain believe that; speaks from lips who heard her message, and translated it into their own speech and action. Here as I write these words, revisiting the city which she knew from slums to palaces, as I feel the electric atmosphere of this nerve-destroying civilization, see the faces which vibrate to the swift erratic pulse of the times, I say to myself, let me at least bring back the memory of one who seeing it as we see it now, saw also, more clearly and with abiding joy, the things which make for peace. I see the high buildings, the swift moving of the population, here and there; I see the wealth, and pride, and organization, and material strength, but these things, great as they are, were not the source of this nation's greatness. Those springs rose in Walden Pond and the House of Seven Gables, in Emerson's home, in the shades of peace where Whittier and Longfellow and their little brotherhood lived, wrought, suffered and triumphed; in the little parsonages up and down the land, where the Puritan tradition held sway.

I wish to share with my brothers this privi-

VIII lege, of bringing to a wider circle, some of these rare and vital thoughts from her letters. These Personalities whose hands wrought at our tasks, whose hearts agonized and triumphed in the very problems we try to solve, come to us, in their writings, with a rare comradeship. They are like deep silent wells, unthought of in the busy fields, where men gather the harvest; awaiting the hour, when they come in to slake their thirst, and let down the bucket, for those cooling waters which never fail to inspire and console. They bid us be brave and press forward, treading where they trod, upheld by the same sustaining grace.

To no self-satisfied, and self-centered person will one word in these letters appeal. But if anyone in the struggle, in the dead set of the tide of a lower life asks, "How did they win through," here are some words from one who had sounded the depths, and found anchorage in the Father's Will, the Son's Love, the Spirit's quickening Power.

William McDonald Bottome,

IX

IT is as mild as spring, and the sky is so beautifully blue. No, I do not think it easy to live on both sides of the Atlantic, but I do believe that those who are separated by the wide sea, may live above land and sea, and be like eagles: mount up with wings as eagles! O how quietly they fly above the earth, and on earthly things look down! The Son of Man, which is in Heaven, He hved here, and yet He was in Heaven. O, there are heights and depths we have not yet attained unto ! I seem these days to be growing down ; I am like the roots stretching underground for water. It becomes more and more clear to me that our one need is God. Those old lines of Charles Wesley are more than ever to me.

Give me Thyself, from every boast, From every wish set free; — Let all I am in Thee be lost, But give Thyself to me !

FOR so many years I "stuck to it" that the trouble was with the inside machinery, if we were not happy. I have said to your father more times than I can count, "No, if we are not happy under these circumstances, we would not be happy under other circumstances. It is the self, the selfish self that makes the trouble." Self is the irksome weight.

'Tis we, not they, who are at fault When others seem so wrong.

All this I am surer of to-day than ever: our one need is God. We need the truth that lies behind the words: Thou in me, and I in Thee; a fullness of love. We are made for love; it is the only thing worth living for; and outside of the perfect love of God, we shall starve.

WE are here on this earth to do the will of God. It isn't to have a Church, unless that is the will of God. It isn't this or that or anything else, but to do the will of God. I have a feehng that you are passing through unusual trials. Now turn from the outward to the inward. As I look back, I can see how closely I held myself to the condition of my own heart in the sight of God, and of course everything was small compared with that. What I am in His sight, is a business. Experimental religion is the one thing needful; God is the one necessity. What a lovely day this has been ! rainy outside, but so beautiful within. I cannot finish my letter : my hand gives out.

IT Is often true that those we call worldly people, show far more of what has been called the "milk of human kindness" than those from whom we might naturally expect it. There should be more discrimination in this matter of gifts, and the Bible rules are unheeded by those who talk most of the Bible. We are to give to those who cannot requite us; and then there Is such danger of our withholding the little things, because they are so little, when love would make them valuable. St. Augustine said, love is your weight. As the years go on, this whole matter of what we call religion (or better, Christianity) Is so simplified In my mind and Wesley was right. Christian perfection should be sought ; kt us go on unto perfection.

MY "word" for the Talk I give to-morrow is acquaint thyself with Him and he at peace; thereby good shall come to thee. Only one ac^ quaintance can insure us perfect peace, perpetual good, and how few seem to be interested to become acquainted with Him? Time is used for everybody, for everything, except the cultivation of acquaintance with God; and yet this is life eternal, to know Him ! In my childhood, I knew a very old and very illiterate man, who hardly ever said but one thing, O do get acquainted with God! O do get acquainted with God! And the echo of those words has never left me. How well I remember the house we lived in then; it had an old-fashioned garret, and by a small window, on a bit of carpet, I had my chair. And on a little table were my Bible, and Thomas a Kempis' Imitation of Christ. And there I used to spend hours, getting "better acquainted" with God!

I AM so Impressed at this time with the "weight" of ourselves; rather than of what we have done. I know / must be a success before God, and that Is no little thing. It Is no little thing to be true; true to what you know Is true. Beecher once said that all the steps upward did not count, If the last step was not taken. Someone said, "I don't see that, Mr. Beecher." "Well," said he, "if you jump and just miss It, what becomes of the jumpf Wasn't that like Beecher? Now I am thinking of God's scales: they are unerring: what you are; and If we are wanting In ourselves, It Is an eternal want. If we have Christ, we do not want; and He only can meet that deep want.

THE word "amusement" seems to me to be used so much more than it used to be, as if it were the end of life. And the word *'vacation" is to me a modern word. I cannot get accustomed to it. All the vacations I had for forty years, as a wife and mother, were in going to Camp Meeting for about ten days each year, and if I had ten dollars to spend, I was rich. When I reached the Camp I worked hard, from morning till night, and heard no such words as "amusement" and "vacation."

WE start for home to-morrow ; and I go back on my way to health, I trust. The rheumatism is not worth speaking about. I walk as straight as anybody but I take no romantic walks, you may be sure. I am commanded to do what Walt Whitman advised : loaf and invite my soul. An old minister I met the other day said: "If you have rheumatism, don't pet it: there is nothing it likes so much as to have attention paid to it." I shall be too busy on our return to pay it much attention: we have got to get to housekeeping.

THERE are times when I feel I cannot go to funerals. Very few funerals seem to be Christian or human; I should like one or the other! How dreadfully mixed things are. I shall be so glad when that which is in part shall be done away; and that which is perfect shall have come. But my faith triumphs. I read today that Mr. Moody, when a young minister In Chicago, was Invited to attend a funeral. So he took his New Testament to see what Jesus did at funerals, and he found that every funeral He attended, He broke up! Life broke up death !

YOU see I am not away from home now, and really if my feet were not painful, I should be just the same as ever, "flying about." I have been thinking this morning of those words, He will keep the feet of His Saints. I asked George about it yesterday; but he repHed, "the emphasis is on the Saints. "Well," I said, "I was thinking of that too," and then I saw the laughter in his eyes. However I think I understand it better now. Feet stand for service. Where have my feet loved to go ? To church, to prayer meeting, to camp meetings. Now why may I not think He will keep the interests, which the service of my feet indicated? There is a ministry in pain, as well as a mystery of pain.

lO

1AM thankful for my hand this morning, because it means to me that I can still hold a pen. Once these hands held you, undressed you; but that is, how many years ago? The Doctor said to me the other day, ''I wish I could put you back fifty years." I wondered he did not think of me fifty years hence! O! I should like to see myself fifty years from now. What a pity we do not live more in the future ! Everybody talks of houses; going to have them "fixed up;" going to move into something better; but so few seem to be anticipating the Father's House. Think how beautiful it must be. Let us live in Him more definitely now; then we shall live with Him hereafter in His House !

II

GOD has given you what not "one in a thousand" have; facilities for education, hearts that love you; those who trust in you and hope in you, as well as for you. I know you have much to struggle against. I know the inspired penman says, man is fearfully and wonderfully made, but it does seem to me that some natures are more fearfully and wonderfully made than others, and yet it is these very natures that can be so wonderful for humanity, if they only overcome. O, what a word that is, and yet only those who overcome are crowned, and crowned here! Crowns are made here and worn here, if they are worn anywhere. So buckle on the armor; fight the good fight of faith; faith in God; His help. His Presence in you. Not outside you merely, but work out the God in you. Every noble impulse, every desire to be grand, to be good, is God in you.

THIS is the anniversary of my marriage. Fifty-three years ago today I was married, and I am here at Ocean Grove, and I might as well be here as at any other place. I have no one that I can talk to, about that beautiful September afternoon. If I hadn't a beautiful faith, I would be sad, but my faith "shuts out." I believe my dear ones are on a fairer shore than this, and that I am on the way to meet them ; and while the storm is sweeping this coast, I am saying, "no storm can reach my inmost calm." There is a wedding day ahead, which is indeed the wedding day; and all other wedding days are only a figure of that true wedding.

I SAID in an address I made this afternoon, that Christ's picture of humanity was true. A few words tell it, but they are tremendous: Robbed! Wounded! Stripped! Left half dead! — that is a picture of humanity. Now upon this scene comes Christ to "take care" of this wounded, stripped, half dead humanity; bringing with Him oil, wine, bandages, and binding up. He said He was sent to bind up but somehow we do not expect Him to do it. Then He said when He gave the man over to his fellow men, 'take care of him.' He does take care of us. What a picture is His parable of His own divine compassion!

WE are face to face with great problems here. The Church (sad as it sounds) does not meet the need; and that need is salvation from sin. You have prayers you repeat, but who expects the prayer Vouchsafe to keep us this day without sin to be answered? I shall never forget hearing a Methodist minister say, forty years ago, that the masterpiece of Satan is in getting professing Christians to disbelieve that they can be saved from sin! When St. Paul said so long ago therefore being free from sin, ye have fruit unto righteousness, he meant it. But something must come to us before we believe it. We shall have to have another Pentecost. There Is an absence of belief in the power of the Holy Ghost.

IS

I AM on "old Long Island's sea girt shore." The spiritual life is so much more to me than any other life, that I shall have the experience of what came to me last night, long after everything else is forgotten. The truth was so real to me in the night, when the moan of the ocean was in my ears (for I am right on the ocean here) : "like the sea which cannot rest." And it was so plain to me ; no matter what one has, or what one has not, without having God, we cannot rest. Rest in the Lord! You cannot rest in circumstances. You cannot rest in any creature. If you do, you are liable to be disturbed. There is an ideal life which I am sure we may have, of seeing God in everything. Whittier saw God when he saw the white caps, that are so beautiful this afternoon, and he called them the whitewinged messengers, hastening to prayers, and he added:

They kneel upon the sloping sand As bends the human knee, A beautiful and tireless band, The priesthood of the sea.

One feels like saying:

Waves of God's boundless sea of love, O come and wash my shore!

i6

AS I listen to the critics on every side, I say, Yes! I cannot touch you, but there is a sea which perhaps you may never have reached: the sea of the inner spiritual life, one that is not dependent on mere scholarship or intellectual thought; it is the child life of the spirit. Mind you, I do not say that neither men of science nor scholars have this life, but it is a life that is guided by the laws of grace. I am glad these days that I was brought up a Methodist and in the doctrines of Methodism: the witness of the Spirit, the knowledge of the forgiveness of sins, the being filled with love. There is enough of the Bible left for me, after all which the critics take. Christ said, have faith in God. It is God I want to know, and no man, by understanding, can find out God. It is the pure in heart who see Him; it is with the heart that man believeth unto righteousness!

THIS little roof garden where I write, seems a fitting figure of my life at this time. On the top of everything, the flowers are in bloom. I seem to have everything: I abound! The shadows here flee away, very largely. I don't want to give you the idea that all that I have today, I have as a reward of merit! Far from it. As an old friend said when he came to die, I cannot stand on my past record! I can say that too; but still over all, and under all, is the mercy of God, the tenderness, the loving kindness, the forgiving love! "O how merciful, how pitiful, the Lord has been to me." I do love that old hymn:

God of my life, whose gracious power Through varied deaths my soul has led, And turned aside the fatal hour, And lifted up my sinking head!

All I can do is to bless His holy Name I i8

I THOUGHT I would not write my Christmas Letter on the dark-edged paper; the white and gold seems so much more appropriate.

They are all robed in spotless white And conquering palms they bear!

The past and future have so blended at this Christmas time, that I have gone through the present as if there was no present, or as if the past and future were present with me. Of course I am reaping what I have sown. I think one gets accustomed to looking at the things which are not seen, through the mere habit of looking at them. Today he has what we cannot even imagine; he is the rich one today!

I MUST get Pilgrim's Progress and read again about Pilgrim coming in sight of the Delectable Mountains, because I think I must be there. I am constantly looking forward. I am really acting out what has been an ideal with me. I have seen so many gloomy Christians, and I have said to myself, Why, I should think, if God has given their loved ones Paradise, and they are on their way to join them, they would want to make this world as bright as possible for those who have to stay here. And this is more real now to me than ever. For months before your Father went, I lived on this: / am the Life, and when the change came, that men call death, I had only to pass on to and he that liveth and believeth in me shall never die. There I stopped, and there Hive I

^0

DO you know this passage, the mountains shall bring peace? I have seen a sight this morning I shall never see again, when I leave these Alps, till I

Summer high in Heaven Among the Hills of God.

I wakened long before daylight. I thought of Mt. Blanc as I saw him yesterday, in his whiteness that is never tarnished, always white, though the whiteness leaves his kindred hills, his smaller brethren. No change ever comes to Mt. Blanc ! As I thought of it all, such a desire to be white and clean came to me, and to be kept clean, and with it such a sense of my sinfulness. And never in my life did I pray, more truly, as my heart uttered the words I had so often sung. Wash me and make me thus thine own. And then I thought of that perfect Atonement, and of the Blood that cleanseth. My head had been buried in the pillow, and I had not noticed that it had become day. Just then a little bird began to sing, and as I reached the window the sun was kissing the face of Mt. Blanc, and the chimes began to play and as I leaned my head on the window, and saw the sun touch one after another of those wonderful Alps, my heart said.

And I shall walk in soft white light, With Kings and Priests abroad.

And I shall summer high in heaven, Among the Hills of God.

O! OUR beautiful faith! Our dead die not. I know that death is not blessed; but blessed are the dead, and blessed are they who have their blessed dead. It is refreshing to see what I read a few moments ago: ''Know of a truth that only the time shadows have perished or are perishable ; that the real being of whatever is, and whatever was, and whatever will be, is, even now and forever. This should it (unhappily) seem new, thou mayest ponder at thy leisure for the next twenty years or the next twenty centuries. Believe it! Thou must understand, if thou cans' t not." So said Carlyle.

MY friends have wondered that I could endure it, to let you go away from me. They do not know the springs of my life. All my fresh springs are in Thee, the Psalmist said, and so can I. I could not see you leave me, the son on whom I had expected to lean, and be to me what I had so longed for, if it were not for the truth behind the motto you once gave me : the love of Christ constraineth me. For His sake, I give you up. I have no language to express the unutterable longing I have, that you will do for Christ the work your Mother has so often longed to do. Make Him known to a dying world! No human learning, no human gifts will suffice. Nothing, nothing less than the baptism of Fire, will lit you for your work, and make yours a burning ministry!

SOMEBODY says the meanest record of thyself has worth. Your father came in a few moments ago with a basket full of letters, and among them some letters of mine, written thirty years ago. I smiled as I looked at this sentence written in a letter to your father: "If you look after Christ's interests, He will look after yours;'' and only early this morning, I had the same thought. Those old letters breathe the air of devotion to Christ. I was then a little over twenty. How strange it seemed to handle those old letters; and to be introduced to my old self. A whole generation has passed since then. The letters did me good and will help me.

THIS is the eve of Thanksgiving. There are times when I feel about twenty, and there are times when I feel a little older; and the quiet of my room is very delightful to me, and anniversary days are days when, if I do not thereby lessen the enjoyment of others, I like to be alone. All the same, I assure you this is a day of devout Thanksgiving with me. I am thankful for all that God has given to your father. What it must be to have Paradise, I must wait a little while to know. To see the Face that makes Paradise; to see the faces of those one has so dearly loved, what must it be! I am thankful I have my Faith; I am thankful I have the Comforter; and I certainly have Him. So I am full of Thanksgiving at this anniversary time: but it is all the outcome of a Past; everything was leading up to this.

1 THINK there is such danger in depending upon God, and yet in some way (it may seem only a little thing) being disloyal to conscience. No matter how we pray, or trust in God, we shall be wrecked, if we are disloyal to the "man within" as the Indians call conscience. There is some reason why we do not come into the Harbour for which we were built. That Harbour is God, and never till we are in communion and fellowship with Him, are we fulfilling our destiny. He ?tiade us for Himself, and the soul has no home but the bosom of God; and to come into fellowship with Him, there must be a "clearing of ourselves." It is interesting to see how nature is studied, how to address nature, as they say. The wire is placed so that the lightning can reach it; the factories are built so as to have the advantage of the river; the one thing seems to be how to get in position, so that our little power can come into connection with a greater power.