"It will be a fight to your last day," I tell them, "but be men, and fight for your soul"s life. For Christ says it can be lost, even while you go to church every Sunday morning, and are diligent in business all the week. It can be lost. If you should lose your money, what a lamentation there would be; but a _soul can be lost without noise, without observation_." What reincarnation has to say on this subject, I do not fully accept. My early Methodism clings to me, and I believe firmly that G.o.d is not willing, that _any_ soul should be lost, but that all should find the safety of his Great Father Love.
The future is not a torture chamber nor a condemned cell nor a reformatory. Even if we do make our bed in h.e.l.l, G.o.d is there, and light, and truth, and love are there; and effort shall follow effort, and goal succeed goal, until we reach the colossal wisdom and goodness of spiritual beings. "Yet," and reincarnation has a yet, though many like myself are loth to entertain it; but this "yet" is better expressed in the following verses than I can frame it. No one can be the worse for considering the possibility they infer:
"If thou art base and earthly, then despair; Thou art but mortal, as the brute that falls.
Birds weave their nests, the lion finds a lair, Man builds his halls,
"These are but coverts from earth"s war and storm; Homes where our lesser lives take shape and breath.
_But if no heavenly man has grown, what form Clothes thee at death?_
"And when thy meed of penalty is o"er And fire has burned the dross where gold is none, Shall separate life but wasted heretofore, Still linger on?
"G.o.d fills all s.p.a.ce--whatever doth offend From His unbounded Presence shall be spurned; Or deem"st thou, He should garner tares, whose end Is to be burned.
"If thou wouldst see the Power that round thee sways, In whom all motion, thought, and life are cast, Know that the pure who travel heavenward ways, See G.o.d at last."
Further I press upon the young, not to be ashamed of their disposition to be sentimental or religious. It is the sentimental young men who conquer; it is the men steeped in religious thought and aspiration, who _do_ things. Whatever the scientists may say, if we take the supernatural out of life, we leave only the unnatural. But science is the magical word of the day, and scientists too often profess to doubt, whether we have a soul for one life, not to speak of a mult.i.tude of lives. "There is no proof!" they cry. "No proof! No proof of the soul"s existence." Neither is there any proof of the existence of the mind. But the mind bores tunnels, and builds bridges and conceived aviation. And the soul can re-create a creature of clay, and of the most animal instincts, until he reaches the colossal manhood of a Son of G.o.d. Religion is life, not science.
It is now the twenty-seventh of October, 1912, and a calm, lovely Sabbath. I have been quite alone for three weeks, and have finished this record in unbroken solitude and peace. Mary is in Florida, and Alice is in New York with her sister Lilly. Sitting still in the long autumn evenings, I have drawn the past from the eternity into which it had fallen, to look at it again, and to talk to myself very intimately about it; and I confess, that though it is the nature of the soul to adore what it has lost, that I prefer what I possess. Though youth and beauty have departed, the well springs of love and imagination are, in my nature, too deep to be touched by the frost of age. Nourished by the dews of the heart and the intellect they will grow sweeter and deeper and more refreshing to the end of my life; for the things of the soul and the heart are eternal.
I have lived among "things unseen" as well as seen, always nursing in my heart that sweet promise of the times of rest.i.tution. Neither is the fire of youth dead, it glows within, rather than flames without--that is all. And there is a freshness, all its own, reserved for the aged who have _come uphill all the way_, and at last found the clearer air, and serener solitudes of those heights, beyond the fret and stir of the restless earth.
I have told my story just as I lived it; told it with the utmost candor and truthfulness. I have exaggerated nothing, far from it. This is especially true as regards all spiritual experiences. I hold them far too sacred to be added to, or taken from. My life has been a drama of sorrow and loss, of change and labor, but G.o.d wrote it, and I would not change anything He ordained.
"I would not miss one sigh or tear, Heart pang, or throbbing brow.
Sweet was the chastis.e.m.e.nt severe, And sweet its memory now."
For as my day, so has my strength been; not once, but always. There was an hour, forty-five years ago, when all the waves and billows of the sea of sorrow went over my head. Then He said to me, "Am I not sufficient?" And I answered, "Yes, Lord." Has He failed me ever since?
Not once. Always, the power, has come with the need.
Farewell, my friends! You that will follow me through the travail and labor of eighty years, farewell! I shall see very few of you face to face in this life, but somewhere--perhaps--somewhere, we may meet and _know each other on sight_. And if you find in these red leaves of a human heart, a word of strength, or hope, or comfort, that is my great reward. Again farewell! Be of good cheer. Fear not. (2 Esdras, 6:33.) There is hope and promise in the years to come.
I will now let the curtain fall over my past, with a grateful acknowledgment that every sorrow has found its place in my life, and I should have been a loser without it. Even chance acquaintances have had their meaning, and done their work, and the web of life could not have been better woven of love alone.
G.o.d has not spoken His last word to me, though I am nearly eighty-one years old. When I have rested my eyes, I am ready for the work, ready for me. And I do not feel it too late, to offer daily the great prayer of Moses for consolation, "Comfort us again, for the years wherein we have seen evil." As for the cares and exigencies of daily life, I commit them to Him, who has never yet failed me, and
"If I should let all other comfort go, And every other promise be forgot, My soul would sit and sing, because I know He faileth not!
"He faileth not! What winds of G.o.d may blow, What safe or perilous ways may be my lot, Gives but little care; for this I know, He faileth not!"
Sustained by this confidence, I can face without fear the limitations of age, and the transition we call death. I have love and friendship around me; I give help and sympathy whenever I can, and I do my day"s work gladly. The rest is with G.o.d.
APPENDICES
APPENDIX I
HUDDLESTON LORDS OF MILLOM
If I followed my own desire, instead of the general custom, I should place the genealogical history of the Huddlestons of Millom before my own story and not after it. For to the n.o.ble men and women who pa.s.sed on the name to me, I owe everything that has made my life useful to others, and happy to myself. They conserved for me, upon the wide seas of the world and the mountains and fells of c.u.mberland, that splendid vitality, which still at eighty-two years of age enables me to do continuously eight and nine hours of steady mental work without sense of fatigue, which keeps me young in heart and brain and body. They transmitted to me their n.o.ble traditions of faith in G.o.d, and of pa.s.sionate love for their country. From them I received that eternal hope which treads disaster under its feet, that courage which never fails, because G.o.d never can fail, and that natural religious trust which is the abiding foundation of a life that has continually turned sorrow into joy and apparent failure into certain success.
I honor all my predecessors as I honor my father and my mother, and I have had the promise added to that commandment. "My days have been long in the land which the Lord, my G.o.d, has given me." These few natal notes are all I now know of them, but I have a sure faith that in some future the bare facts will grow into the living romances they only now hint of. I shall know them all and all of them will know me; and we shall talk together of the different experiences we met on our widely different roads to the same continuing home--a home not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.
A. E. B.
HUDDLESTON LORDS OF MILLOM
The pedigree of this very ancient family is traced back to five generations before the Conquest. The first, however, of the name who was lord of Millom was,
SIR JOHN HUDDLESTON, KNIGHT, who was the son of Adam, son of John, son of Richard, son of Reginald, son of Nigel, son of Richard, son of another Richard, son of John, son of Adam, son of Adam de Hodleston in co. York. The five last named according to the York _MS_ were before the Conquest.
SIR JOHN DE HODLESTON, KNIGHT, in the year 1270 was witness to a deed in the Abbey of St. Mary in Furness. By his marriage with the Lady Joan, Sir John became lord of Anneys in Millom. In the 20th Edward I, 1292, he proved before Hugh Cressingham, justice itinerant, that he possessed JURA REGALIA within the lordship of Millom. In the 25th, 1297, he was appointed by the king warder or governor of Galloway in Scotland. In the 27th, 1299, he was summoned as baron of the realm, to do military service; in the next year, 1300, he was present at the siege of Carlaverock. In the 29th, 1301, though we have no proof that he was summoned, he attended the Parliament in Lincoln, and subscribed as a baron the celebrated letter to the Pope, by the t.i.tle of lord of Anneys. He was still alive in the 4th of Edward IV, 1311. Sir John had three sons--John who died early, and Richard and Adam.
The Hudlestons of Hutton--John--were descended from a younger branch of the family at Millom, as were the Hudlestons of Swaston co., Cambridge, who settled there temp. Henry VIII, in consequence of a marriage with one of the co-heiresses of the Marquis Montague.
RICHARD HUDLESTON, son and heir, succeeded his father. Both he and his brother Adam are noticed in the later writs of Edward I. They were both of the faction of the Earl of Lancaster, and obtained in the 7th Edward II, 1313, a pardon for their partic.i.p.ation with him in the death of the king"s favorite, Gaveston. Adam was taken prisoner with the earl in the Battle of Boroughbridge in 1322, where he bore for arms gules fretted with silver, with a label of azure. Richard was not at that battle and in the 19th of the king, 1326, when Edward II summoned the Knights of every county to the Parliament at Westminster, was returned the first among the Knights of c.u.mberland. He married Alice, daughter of Richard Troughton in the 13th, Edward II, 1319-1320, and had issue.
JOHN HUDLESTON, son of the above named Richard, who succeeded his father in 1337, and married a daughter of Henry Fenwick, lord of Fenwick, co. of Northumberland.
RICHARD HUDLESTON, son of John.
SIR RICHARD HUDLESTON, KNIGHT, served as a banneret at the Battle of Agincourt, 1415. He married Anne, sister of Sir William Harrington K.
G., and served in the wars in France, in the retinue of that knight.
SIR JOHN HUDLESTON, KNIGHT, son of Richard, was appointed to treat with the Scottish commissioners on border matters in the 4th Edward IV, 1464; was knight of the shire in the 7th, 1467; appointed one of the conservators of the peace on the borders in the 20th, 1480; and again in the 2nd of Richard, 1484; and died on the 6th of November in the 9th of Henry VII, 1494. He married Joan, one of the co-heirs of Sir Miles Stapleton of Ingham in Yorkshire. He was made bailiff and keeper of the king"s woods and chases in Barnoldwick, in the county of York; sheriff of the county of c.u.mberland, by the Duke of Gloucester for his life steward of Penrith, and warden of the west marches. He had three sons----
1. Sir Richard K. B., who died in the lifetime of his father, 1st Richard III. He married Margaret, natural daughter of Richard Nevill, earl of Warwick, and had one son and two daughters, viz:
Richard married Elizabeth, daughter of Lady Mabel Dacre, and died without issue, when the estates being entailed pa.s.sed to the heir male, the descendant of his Uncle John.
Johan married to Hugh Fleming, Esq., of Rydal.
Margaret married to Launcelot Salkeld, Esq., of Whitehall.
2. Sir John.
3. Sir William.
SIR JOHN HUDLESTON, second son of Sir John and Joan his wife, married Joan, daughter of Lord Fitz Hugh, and dying the 5th Henry VIII, 1513-1514, was succeeded by his son.
SIR JOHN HUDLESTON K. B., espoused firstly the Lady Jane Clifford, youngest daughter of Henry, earl of c.u.mberland, by whom he had no issue. He married secondly Joan, sister of Sir John Seymour, Kn"t, and aunt of Jane Seymour, queen consort of Henry VIII, and by her he had issue----
ANTHONY his heir.
ANDREW, who married Mary, sister and co-heiress of Thomas Hutton, Esq., of Hutton--John, from whom descended the branch at that mansion.