James Jackson Jarves

“It is with certain Good Qualities as with the Senses; those who are entirely deprived of them, can neither appreciate nor comprehend them.”—La Rochefoucauld.

There are some natures like the orange-tree, upon which the blossom and fruit meet at the same time. In their capacity for joy they receive more from one glowing, self-forgetting impulse, than colder and more calculating persons are able to gather in a lifetime. With such are generally permitted on earth only glimpses of ecstatic happiness, far-off sights of their promised land, the eternal future, through the never ending ages of which their affections and intellect shall steadily advance towards infinite Love and Wisdom, each emotion a new bliss, and each thought a deeper current from the infinitude of divine knowledge.

Who are those that realize their hopes on earth; here find their homes, content with the present and its material gifts, without heart-yearnings for deeper, truer, and more satisfying affections; without soul-strivings to penetrate the mysterious Beyond? Who are such? Through the length and breadth of every land myriads respond, “Give us a sufficiency of treasure on earth, and we will not seek to scale heaven. Our loves, our lands, our gold and our silver, our mistresses, our wives and our children; our well-garnished tables and our fine houses; the riches for which our hands and minds labor, and which our hearts covet; all that we can see, feel, weigh and compare; the honors by which we are exalted above our neighbors, the fame by which our names are in the world’s mouths; these are our desires. Give us abundantly of these that we may eat, drink, and be merry, and we ask not for more. This earth is good enough for us.”

Do they have their reward? Yea, verily! as they sow, so they reap. Few there are who steadily give themselves to the pursuit of these desires, but receive houses and lands, honor and fame, meats and drinks, handsome women or fine men, such children as such parentage can give birth to, stocks in all banks but that of Eternity. There is no lack of wealth like this to the earnest seeker.

God is a provident father. He has created everything good of its kind, and bestowed self-will upon man that he might himself elect his manner of life. The standard of enjoyment for his own soul is at his own option, whether he will discipline it here for its higher good hereafter, or whether he will enjoy here without reference to that hereafter, the knowledge of which is suggested in some way or other to all men. Man is highly distinguished. For is not creation made for him? There is neither gift nor discipline but can be made subservient to his moral growth; to his conquest of the kingdom of heaven. There is nothing, also, but may be transformed by sensual, selfish, short sighted desire, by his weaknesses or passions; by his false logic or falser ambition, into a morass of error, into which he will ever plunge deeper and deeper, unless he resolutely bends his steps towards the firm land of hope and faith that is never wholly shut out of the gloomiest horizon.

Just in proportion to the quality of the treasure we seek, is the degree of enjoyment that springs from its realization. All that belongs solely to earth has incorporated with it change, decay, satiety, fear, and care. These are warning angels, to urge the spirit to temperance, that it may not mar its capacity for nobler enjoyments. As they are disregarded, and man seeks only that which is perishable, he finds his pleasures pall and his appetites wane. Abuse extinguishes gratification. Want of aspiration towards the perfect development of all man’s faculties leaves him a monotonous, abdominal animal, content with husks wherewith to fill his belly. There is no increase in store for him, because he can conceive of nothing better than what his feeble hands or vainglorious mind have gathered around him. Nature reads to him no moral lesson, because he uses her only as a slave, to administer to his material wants. He sees not that there is in all things a deeper principle than mere use for the body.

The vital element that pervades all nature, uniting it in a chain of harmonious progression, the eternal laws of which even his stolid spirit cannot ultimately avoid, however much he now seeks to bury it beneath the grosser particles of matter, escapes his perception. Guided only by his finite, perishable sensorium, in vain attempt to grasp at once the entire treasure, he often plunges his suicidal knife into the ovary which daily laid him a golden egg. Thus man destroys his own birthright through brutal ignorance and sensual impatience. The truly wise count all things at their right worth, and find a sympathy in every natural object, in varied degree, according as it speaks to them the thought of a common Creator, and connects them in one common end. They have, therefore, a double enjoyment. First, that which springs from the right material use of every object or sense; secondly, the language which both speak to them of hope and faith in more refined enjoyments and more perfect conditions of existence. The very trials and incompleteness of present experiences are so many testimonies of future and nobler realizations. Thus God speaks as kindly through the so-called evils and disappointments of life, as through the more readily distinguished blessings; for if they see in the latter hope and happiness, so in the former they distinguish that chastening which, through paternal discipline, seeks to guide and strengthen.

Few situations could be more trying to moral firmness than the circumstances under which we left Olmedo and Beatriz. Free from all external restraint of church discipline, with no censorship beyond their own consciences; reason and passion both pleading their right to be united; their past by its friendship casting a bright light upon their future and closer union; doomed to pass their lives, while still in the flush of life, away from all that had made other homes dear; twin exiles, each sustaining the other and now alone, amid a joyous seductive nature, every motion and aspect of which was pleading for love;—was there not in all this sufficient temptation to have overcome them? Neither were ascetic by nature nor principle. No two human beings, by organization, were better fitted to enjoy lawfully all the indulgences wholesome instincts and the tenderness of united hearts craved. The very restraint which former circumstances and the absence of love had produced, now that both were removed, but made them more susceptible to the reaction. We must not, therefore, judge that kiss too harshly. Less passion would have removed them from our sympathies. Now they have vindicated their humanity, will they be able to vindicate their duty? Duty as their religion taught them!

Olmedo’s heart beat wildly. His face was flushed and fevered. He would have repeated the embrace, but something instinctively alarmed Beatriz, and she sadly whispered, putting her hand on his forehead, and looking directly at him, with an expression of affection and alarm, “You do not love me, Olmedo!”

Had the voice of the Almighty called to him, as it did to Adam in the garden, a greater change could not have come over Olmedo. It was the voice of the Almighty in the pure soul of Beatriz, and it spoke to an answering conscience. He became breathless, pale, and faint, as the full meaning of those soft words pierced through his soul. They spoke volumes. His passion was quenched, and true wisdom descended upon him. In an instant he was another being, loving not less, but less selfishly—able to sacrifice indulgence to Duty, to her and to his faith; for he would not peril her soul through the entreaties of passion, or the pleadings of what might be selfish reason.

Holding her hand tenderly as might a father, he said, “Beatriz, my daughter in faith, thou art my saviour in action. Love thee! let me prove how I do love thee. I dare not think of what we might be to each other, were not I wedded to the Holy Church. No blessing will follow vows broken, because circumstances tempt. Help me to be true to my religion and to thee! Forgive my passion thou wilt, because thou knowest the strength of passion. Be to me sister, spirit-bride—all of woman in tenderness, love and friendship thou canst, and as I am true to thy confiding faith, so God deal with me. In his own wise providence and good time will he recompense our faith in Him and our love to each other. Had my passions overpowered us both, however much our union might have brought us pleasure, we should have sought to hide our heads in shame and confusion, as the conviction that we had purchased it by the violated faith of a soul, consecrated to heaven, grew upon us. Heaven spoke through thee, Beatriz; angel woman hast thou ever proved to me.”

Kneeling upon the ground, with Beatriz besides him, every passion harmonized by gratitude and hope and faith, Olmedo lifted up his head and said, “Father, I thank thee, that thou hast spared me this crime. Thine be the praise, and not to my own feeble will, which without thee, in the hour of temptation, thou hast permitted me to see is as a broken reed. I praise thee, I thank thee, Father, that thou hast pitied thy servant, and in saving him from error hast given him further opportunity for thy service and of getting wisdom. In creating man, thou has bestowed upon him affections for wise purposes, and I now see that thou delightest no more in their sacrifice than in innocent blood. I thank thee that I am a man; that I possess from thee the desires and aspirations for love eternal as the heavens, and that thou hast permitted me to find, even in my solitary profession, a heart which makes mine beat warmer, truer and better. May it ever be a strength and a support, and this love, which I now confess before thee, our Father, be a bond of stricter service and accountability for every thought and action, and finally unite us in spirit among the just made perfect.”

Thus plead the Man with his Maker. In his aroused emotions, the formal language of priestly prayer was forgotten, and the genuine, sincere thought of the heart ascended freely and welcome to God, with nature’s true eloquence. Does the Great Heart not hear such prayers? Heart to heart and soul to soul make answer! When man conquers himself and ascends in spirit to his eternal home in the heavens, asking from God direct, life and light to guide and keep him through his earthly trials, the sympathetic voice of the entire heavens echoes his prayer, and repeats to him the assurance of aid. Prayer is to the soul what the plough is to the soil. It opens it to vivifying rays. As the disturbed water sends circle after circle, wider and wider over its surface, so in the moral world, each thought or action for good or evil, spreads likewise, and awakes throughout its infinity its circle of affinities. Angels rejoice with man in his rise, and fiends exult in his fall. Be cautious, therefore, fellow-man, for thou canst not calculate the extent of thy influence in either life.

Beatriz felt her power and her responsibility, and was troubled. Silently, but with deep earnestness, she followed Olmedo in his prayer. Both rose from that forest sanctuary dearer to each other, because there was now no secret thought between them. Each felt that the salvation of the other was a solemn charge from heaven.