The Path Through the River.
“A homeless Stranger amongst us came
To this land of death and mourning—
He walked in a path of sorrow and shame,
Through insult, and hate, and scorning.
A Man of Sorrows, of toil, and tears,
An outcast Man and a lonely—
But He looked on me, and through endless years
Him must I love, Him only.
Then from this sad and sorrowful land,
From this land of tears He departed;
But the light of His eyes and the touch of His Hand
Had left me broken-hearted.
And I slave to Him as He turned His Face
From the land that was mine no longer—
The land I had loved in the ancient days,
Ere I knew a love that was stronger.
And I would abide where He abode,
And follow His steps for ever;
His people my people, His God my God,
In the land beyond the river.
And when He died would I also die;
Far dearer a grave beside Him,
Than a kingly place amongst living men,
The place which they denied Him.
Then afar and afar did I follow Him on
To the land where He was going—
To the depths of glory beyond the sun,
Where the golden fields were glowing.
The golden harvest of endless joy,
The joy He had sown in weeping―
How can I tell the blest employ,
The songs of that glorious reaping
The recompense sweet, the full reward,
Which the Lord His God has given―
At rest beneath the wings of the Lord,
At home in the courts of Heaven.”
GERTRUDE and Mechthild spoke together of this sorrow of heart which filled them when they thought of the evil return they made to the Lord for His love and goodness.
But Mechthild told Gertrude that the Lord had comforted her when she was thus cast down and was confessing to Him the coldness of her love, and He had shown her that the fullness of love was in Him and not in her, and that it was in Him that the love of her heart was offered up to the Father, and thus it was accepted by the Father, and well-pleasing in His sight.
For it was as if a drop of water fell into a river wherein it would be lost, and would do as the river did, and flow on no more apart, but one with the river.
“And thus,” she said, “the Lord further taught me that all love and all good works and thoughts that would be called mine are not mine, but His; that it is as one who wears a garment, wherein he works and acts, so am I but the garment, and the Lord it is who works and speaks and loves. And when there is a burden to bear, it is He who bears it, and it is He who feeds and guards and comforts the soul He loves. And as a fish in the water, and a bird in the air, so is the soul in her element in Him.”
Thus did Gertrude and Mechthild speak often together of their Beloved, and comforted themselves together, till the day came, on the 19th of November, year unknown, when Mechthild “departed to be with the Bridegroom,” repeating His Name only as long as she could speak.
And a few years later, A.D. 1330, also on the 19th of November, the Abbess Gertrude “was released from the dungeon of the body and the earthly life.” She had been paralyzed so that she could not speak, but she had written before her illness on her tablet that on the day of her death—according to the Lord’s promise—she should see the glory of the Father, and know the sweetness of the love which is not only unspeakable, but inconceivable to men.
And she was laid to rest in peace and in quiet in the old convent amongst the green hills, with the hazy mountains in the background, and the little town of Eisleben in its hollow on the one side, and the town of Mansfeld with its feudal castle on the other.
And after this the evil days began. For the Emperor Lewis of Bavaria had been excommunicated by the Pope, and declared a heretic, and the Pope had stirred up against him those amongst the German princes who were willing to own the Pope as “the supreme ruler of every human being.” And the Emperor Lewis had not only refused thus to acknowledge the Pope, but he had become the defender of the “heretic “Marsilius, who believed as the” Waldensian Brethren “had believed before him, and as Wiclif in England believed afterward.
And during the reign of the Emperor Lewis the “heresies” of the “Brethren” had so spread in Germany that it is recorded in a chronicle of the year 1317 that they prevailed as widely amongst priests as amongst laymen, amongst the secular clergy as amongst the monks and nuns. And therefore it had now become a fact that the mass of Germany was in open rebellion against Rome.
In fact all the German cities which were not under patrician rule were declared enemies of Rome and defenders of the “heretic” emperor. It is true that it was not necessarily from religious motives that resistance was made against the assumption of supreme temporal authority by the Pope. But the fact of the spread and prevalence of the teaching of the “Waldensian Brethren” through the whole of Germany and of Western Europe remains a fact.
And when at last actual war broke out between the loyal subjects of the Emperor Lewis and the party of the “Parson-emperor” who had been nominated by the Pope, fire and sword were carried into many peaceful regions, many homesteads and religious houses were sacked and burned.
Amongst these was the convent of Hellfde, which twelve years after the death of the Abbess Gertrude was utterly destroyed. Only the site now remains amongst the miners’ cottages.
And after this there swept over Germany a sea of calamities, so that people thought the end of the world was come. After a great comet had been seen which filled them with awe and terror, there came plagues of insects which stripped bare the trees and gardens and fields. And there followed terrible earthquakes. And then came the Black Death, which desolated not Germany alone, but other lands, and everywhere was mourning and dread of what yet might come.
And then things went back to their former state, and men who should have thanked God for the removal of the terrible plagues hardened their hearts like Pharaoh, and turned in rage and fury against the Jews, who had, they said, caused these calamities. And they turned also in fiercer rage and fury against the “Gospellers,” the “Friends of God,” who believed in the same Lord of grace and love as Mechthild and Gertrude, and who preached all over the land and in other lands the Gospel which He had brought to His children in the convent of Hellfde.
And from one end of Germany to the other the fires burnt fiercely around the stakes where the “Friends of God” were praising Him with their last breath. And the enemies of God believed that the victory was won, and the words of grace were silenced.
But 153 years after the Abbess Gertrude had “seen the glory of the Father,” a child was born in the town of Eisleben, near the old convent of Hellfde; the child of miners who worked amongst the hills so familiar to Gertrude and to Mechthild. And as he grew up, and desired himself to live as a monk in a convent, he read the old books of the teachers and preachers who had learned from the lips of the “Friends of God.”
And he too saw, as Gertrude had seen, that “in the place of all his shortcomings and his unworthiness was the mighty love which abides in its fullness in Him who sitteth at the right hand of God.” And he went forth to face the world and the fallen Church, and to face persecution and death, with the same glad tidings as those which Gertrude in her “still hours” had written on her tablet, so that the light which the enemy had thought to quench shone forth again, and we are walking in it now.
The stream had flowed on through hidden places, and the “Friends of God” had prayed and wept in secret, and rejoiced in secret that some were left with whom they could speak freely of the free grace of God. Awl at last it was to become as a great river from which the nations might drink, as we do, if Christ is leading us by the same still waters.
Let us cease to think of the Reformation as a bare protest against Catholic doctrine and practice, and ascribe to Protestantism all the light, and to Roman Catholicism all the darkness. Let us rather look at it as the time when God drew forth to the light the hidden treasures which had lain buried under heaps of human inventions and superstitions, and set free from their shackles those who had been tied and bound in the iron chains of Popery.
And let us remember that the life and power of Protestant Christianity is not to be found in the just and necessary protest against the sins and delusions of Rome, but in that intercourse of the heart with God, by the power of the Holy Ghost, which teaches us the grace denied and ignored in a religion of external works and forms.
The saints and martyrs of the Reformation were men inspired rather by the love of Christ than by hatred to Rome. And their glorious protest became a dead and shriveled form when it was handed down to men who had a name to live and were dead. The records of negative Protestantism are blurred and blotted pages, which would disgrace the history of many a heathen, all the more so because of the orthodoxy of which they boast.
Yet the river of God flowed on, watering the bare deserts of Protestant ages as before the tangled wilderness of mediaeval Christianity. And the Lord raised up His messengers, as the prophets in old times, to preach to dead Protestants the words of life which they needed for their salvation as much as the worshippers of images and relics whom they despised and condemned.
But these messengers were those who protested yet more firmly against the superstitious of Rome, because they had seen and known and loved Him whom Rome had dishonored. They preached the Christ whose blessed work was cast into the background, the God whom the teaching of Rome had made a liar.
And were it not that the stream of life is flowing still, where should we find the living truth, Jesus, who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, amongst all the Gospels of man’s invention in the nineteenth century?