" may not
"perceive, by properties within itself," when danger is imminent, and
so "run cold and dull"? Did any such monitor within, one wonders, warn
him at all that the hand of death was uplifted to strike, and that its
shadow lay upon him? Judging from the words that fell from his pen
that day we might almost think that it was so--we might almost go
further, and guess with what hopes and fears he looked into the
darkness beyond. Never at any time does he appear to have been greatly
troubled by speculative doubt. There is no evidence in his life, no
evidence in his letters, no evidence in his books, that he had ever
seen any cause to question the truth of the reply which Christianity
gives to the world-old problems of man's origin and destiny. For
abstract speculation he had not the slightest turn or taste. In no
single one of his characters does he exhibit any fierce mental
struggle as between truth and error. All that side of human
experience, with its anguish of battle, its despairs, and its
triumphs, seems to have been unknown to him. Perhaps he had the
stronger grasp of other matters in consequence--who knows? But the
fact remains. With a trust quite simple and untroubled, he held
through life to the faith of Christ. When his children were little, he
had written prayers for them, had put the Bible into simpler language
for their use. In his will, dated May 12, 1869, he had said, "I commit
my soul to the mercy of God through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ,
and I exhort my dear children humbly to try to guide themselves by the
broad teaching of the New Testament in its broad spirit, and to put
no faith in any man's narrow construction of its letter here or
there." And now, on this last day of his life, in probably the last
letter that left his pen, he wrote to one who had objected to some
passage in "Edwin Drood" as irreverent: "I have always striven in my
writings to express veneration for the life and lessons of our
Saviour--because I feel it." And with a significance, of which, as I
have said, he may himself have been dimly half-conscious, among the
last words of his unfinished story, written that very afternoon, are
words that tell of glorious summer sunshine transfiguring the city of
his imagination, and of the changing lights, and the song of birds,
and the incense from garden and meadow that "penetrate into the
cathedral" of Cloisterham, "subdue its earthy odour, and preach the
Resurrection and the Life."