THE seagulls from the upper reaches pass down the river in sober steady flight seeking the open sea.I shall miss the swoop and circle of silver wings in the sunlight and the plaintive call which sounds so strangely away from rock and shore, but it is good to know that they have gone from mudbank and murky town back to the free airs of their inheritance, to the shadow of sun-swept cliffs and the curling crest of the wind-beaten waves, to brood again over the great ocean of a world's tears.
My little tree is gemmed with buds, shy, immature, but full of promise.The sparrows busied with nest-building in the neighbouring pipes and gutters use it for a vantage ground, and crowd there in numbers, each little beak sealed with long golden straw or downy feather.
The river is heavy with hay barges, the last fruits of winter's storehouse; the lengthening days slowly and steadily oust the dark;the air is loud with a growing clamour of life: spring is not only proclaimed, but on this Feast she is crowned, and despite the warring wind the days bring their meed of sunshine.We stand for a moment at the meeting of the ways, the handclasp of Winter and Spring, of Sleep and Wakening, of Life and Death; and there is between them not even the thin line which Rabbi Jochanan on his death-bed beheld as all that divided hell from heaven.
"SPHAERA CUJUS CENTRUM UBIQUE, CIRCUMFERENTIA NULLIBUS," was said of Mercury, that messenger of the gods who marshalled reluctant spirits to the Underworld; and for Mercury we may write Life with Death as its great sacrament of brotherhood and release, to be dreaded only as we dread to partake unworthily of great benefits.
Like all sacraments it has its rightful time and due solemnities;the horror and sin of suicide lie in the presumption of free will, the forestalling of a gift, - the sin of Eve in Paradise, who took that which might only be given at the hand of the Lord.It has too its physical pains, but they are those of a woman in travail, and we remember them no more for joy that a child-man is born into the world naked and not ashamed: beholding ourselves as we are we shall see also the leaves of the Tree of Life set for the healing of the nations.
We are slowly, very slowly, abandoning our belief in sudden and violent transitions for a surer and fuller acceptance of the doctrine of evolution; but most of us still draw a sharp line of demarcation between this world and the next, and expect a radical change in ourselves and our surroundings, a break in the chain of continuity entirely contrary to the teaching of nature and experience.In the same way we cling to the specious untruth that we can begin over and over again in this world, forgetting that while our sorrow and repentance bring sacramental gifts of grace and strength, God Himself cannot, by His own limitation, rewrite the Past.We are in our sorrow that which we have made ourselves in our sin; our temptations are there as well as the way of escape.
We are in the image of God.We create our world, our undying selves, our heaven, or our hell."QUI CREAVIT TE SINE TE NONSALVABIT TE SINE TE." It is stupendous, magnificent, and most appalling.A man does not change as he crosses the threshold of the larger room.His personality remains the same, although the expression of it may be altered.Here we have material bodies in a material world - there, perhaps, ether bodies in an ether world.
There is no indecency in reasonable speculation and curiosity about the life to come.One end of the thread is between our fingers, but we are haunted for the most part by the snap of Atropos'
shears.
