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see the long avenues of restful shadow, which then turn and wind so suddenly that we may only see enough to assure our hearts that our beloved are in a garden of refreshment and of peace. And yet even this is not all. We may distantly hear the sound of holy voices in conscious communion with the Lord, and the gentle tread of many footsteps, where the Shepherd of Love and His flock, the white flock of the blessed dead, pass, though of us unseen, by the living streams and through the quiet meadows of the Paradise of God. Yes; Christ, hanging upon the cross, did not delude nor mislead our thoughts when He so gently spoke of Paradise to the dying penitent, and though even those Divine words did not, nor could, fully unveil the peace of the holy dead, they sufficiently reveal the beauty and restfulness of the land of their perpetual life. Even if the mystery, that isolates that dear garden from too near or curious an approach, also forbids any degrading of its super-sensuous conditions by our too earthly conceptions, especially in these days that are so unhappily out of touch with the spiritual and the unseen, yet we receive with deep thankfulness the Divine images of Paradise, and that, not as though they were leading us into paths of thought that only stray and miss, but as bringing us to the very gates, that we may look longingly within, though we may not yet enter that beatific garden.

But, first, let us hear of the mystical ladder of grace which alone can make the soul able to ascend and to climb to the quiet land of the everlasting life. In the old patriarchal story it is told how, when the son of Isaac fled from his home in fear of Esau his brother, 'he lighted upon a certain place, and tarried there all night, because the sun was set; and he took of the stones of that place and put them for his pillows, and lay down in that place to sleep. And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it

reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it. And, behold, the Lord stood above it.'*

These words have given, we would suppose, its title to the 'Scala Paradisi,' or The Ladder of Paradise,' evidently for very long a favourite manual of devotion in the ancient Church; for, being anonymous,† it has been republished even among the collected works of such famous and holy men as St. Augustine, the greatest, and St. Bernard, the latest of the Latin Fathers. In translating the greater part of this venerable treatise, the words of the unknown author have been given with so much literal accuracy as may best preserve the devout spirit and intention. It is good sometimes to look back through the past ages lying behind us, like the dark aisles of a forest, chequered here and there with pencil-rays of golden light, that fall and slant amid the deep gloom and the shadows, that we may recognise how, even in times of religious darkness, the light of God shone into the hearts of many, and gave them their true and only joy in the contemplation and the enjoyment of Himself. Let not, then, the fact that this treatise is probably medieval (though it has been ascribed to even so early a Father as St. Augustine, and has a place in the appendix of the Benedictine edition of his works) prejudice or blind us to its beauty. Many in the long-distant centuries have taken it to their hearts for the spiritual comfort they found in it. It is a venerable witness that in all ages the interior love and devotion of the true and invisible Church of Christ have been one and the same; that, in the midst even of the invincible ignorance of the dark ages, the inner soul of all those who were by grace the members of Christ and of His

* Gen. xxviii. 11-13.

+ Yet in the Benedictine edition of St. Bernard it has been ascribed to Guigo, prior of the Carthusians (ii. 311).

mystical body, reserved* from the idolatrous uses and general superstitions of their unhappy times, remained ever united to the living Personality of the Lord, who is Himself the One Divine Fountain of all truth and grace to the predestinate.

The sacred story, with its true human pathos, leads our thoughts almost to the commencement of the patriarchal times. We see Jacob, the son of Isaac and grandson of Abraham, flying for his life from the hatred of Esau, his brother, across the wild and stony uplands that lie upon the borders of Ephraim. On his way to Padan-Aram he must cross Central Palestine, and, the sun being now set, worn out by weariness and sorrow, he lays himself down in that place to sleep. Imagination may fancy the wayworn man, not only in terror from Esau's passionate hatred, but in fear also of the wild hordes of Canaan, throwing himself at last recklessly down in the exhaustion of his long flight on that hard desert couch, so miserably unlike the luxury† of the patriarchal home.

The glorious stars are coming out in the clear transparency of the Eastern skies, but what poor heart in watchful vigil by a sick-bed, when those sleepless eyes of heaven look in at the casement through the outside darkness, until they become familiar in their orderly rising and setting; or what unhappy soul, wandering in the high fever of a great unrest, and seeking solitude in the excess of its pain and anguish among the fields and desolate places, does not painfully know how coldly unsuffering nature looks down upon our suffering hearts, as if it had neither pity nor compassion? Such must have been the feeling of Jacob. Those stars might keep watch and ward as sentinels in the heights of heaven they might be worshipped as patron-deities by the

* Cf. I Kings xix. 18.

It has been remarked how the whole miserable history of the stolen blessing reveals a self-indulgent degeneracy in the home of Isaac, very contrary to the disciplined and frugal life of Abraham.

heathen villages, near to which he, of the chosen race, so desolately lay that night; but no prayer, wrung from a breaking heart, could change their cold glance into the warm eyes of love. Only the sob of the wind, sighing through the stunted acacia-trees, or soughing like a human thing in pain over the bleak wolds,* seemed to have any voice of nature's sorrow, unless it were, perhaps, the sudden scream of some poor victim to the night birds, or to the cruel beasts of the forest, for that, at least, would bring to the fugitive even in its inarticulate cries some echo of a common suffering terribly real. And yet the worst rage of the brute beasts is far more tolerable than are the fierce passions of human hatred and envy.

Now, while the pilgrim slept, he dreamed, and lo, a ladder was set up on the earth, whose top reached to heaven, with angels ascending and descending upon it, and above it the bright vision of the uncreated glory† shone like a crown of golden light. Bishop Hall has truly said, in his Contemplation upon this vision, 'Never are we nearer to God than when we are nearest to trouble.' Had he not been fleeing for his life, Jacob would never have had this consolation. Not, indeed, that the good Bishop would venture any, the least, excuse for the patriarch's falseness and fraud, or for one instant palliate his sin. Far otherwise! Yet God will not leave this homeless wanderer a victim to Esau's un

The shame of that one

brotherly vengeance. He will take the punishment of His unhappy child into His own hand. mean and miserable sin must haunt his onward steps to the very sunset-hour of the overcast day of his life. Even now, a hunted thing,—so soon has the shadow of the retribution begun to fall,—and sharing the restless terror of the wild things of the wood, whose uneasy eyes reflect so piteously

* A good description of the desolate plateau of Beitîn, or Bethel, will be found in Sir Charles Wilson's' Picturesque Palestine,' i., pp. 219-221. + Targum; The Word of the Lord standing;' and cf. Justin Martyr, Dial. cum Trypho., cap. 58.

the universal evil of the Fall, he (but, alas! without their innocence) must become an exile and a vagabond. Yet he shall have this consolatory dream. He shall see the home of God opened, and in the mystic ladder the symbol of earth and heaven reunited. His own sad wandering from the home of his fathers is transfigured into a shining parable of man's return to the home and love of God. Is not this poor outlaw a copy-alas! how many such there are on the canvas of time !—of those hapless children of the first fair Paradise, when man sought himself instead of God, and found only death and misery in his going forth from that blessed home and life in innocence and in God? Alike in this also, that each exile had its own vision of mercy like the first faint outlines of the morning upon the eastern hills. In those early days the memory of the lost Eden made man 'long for home, as loath to stay

With murmurers and foes;

He sighed for Eden, and would often say
"Ah! what bright days were those !"
Nor was Heav'n cold unto him; for each day
The valley or the mountain

Afforded visits, and still Paradise lay

In some green shade or fountain.

Angels lay Leiger here; each bush and cell,

Each oak and highway, knew them:

Walk but the fields, or sit down at some well,

And he was sure to view them.

Almighty Love, where art Thou now? mad man
Sits down, and freezeth on :

He raves, and swears to stir nor fire nor fan,

But bids the thread be spun.

I see thy curtains are close-drawn; Thy bow
Looks dim, too, in the cloud;

Sin triumphs still, and man is sunk below
The Centre, and his shroud.'*

* Henry Vaughan, Poems, p. 86 (A.D. 1654). Cf. also the lovely poem, 'Religion' (p. 31), where the same thought is expressed.

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