That strange “light in light” that seemed to glow around me, as I knelt in reconsecration of myself, a little more than a year ago, has not left me, though it is dimmed by this present regret, and I shall walk on in it through paths yet untried.
Yesterday I sat in the same room and the same chair where, eight years ago, Mr. Brooks first suggested that my place might be in the Episcopal Church. I had not thought it possible, and did not see it so then. To be sitting there in his study, where I had not been again since that first talk with him, as one of his people, and to hear him speak of the strangeness to him of his own new outlook upon life and work,--of the suddenness with which the change has come to him: “First it seemed impossible, and then it became inevitable,” he said,--brought back that other day and all the time between, and my own experience in being lifted out of my old associations into the Church,--for it seems to me that unseen hands at last lifted me into my place.
Well might he speak of that room as a sacred room, where so many souls had been strengthened and led on into light. I wish he need not leave his house when he becomes bishop; it is so truly identified with his life. Our place is partly ourself. I am sure he needs a change, after so many years of incessant service, doing the work of twenty men, apparently. He will still have hard work to do, but it will not be of the same kind.
I do believe that the hand of God is in his election as bishop. It is not so much the Episcopal Church (much as he loves it, and believes in it) that is to be benefited: the whole church--the whole community--will feel the difference in the freedom and depth of spiritual life that can but radiate from such a man, wherever he goes. I do want to live at least ten years longer, to have a part in the good time.
Mr. Whittier writes to me: “The very air of Massachusetts is freer and sweeter, since his election,” and these are the words of a seer.
And still it is a haunting regret that I shall no longer hear his words in the old familiar way, at Trinity Church.
MY DEAR FRIEND,--I do not think the weather would have kept me here quite, last week, but I also have had to call myself half-sick. I think it must be the “grippe” or the effect of some subtle seizure of that fiend, for I am unaccountably good-for-nothing, in many ways. I had to lie still all last Sunday. I _must_ go to Boston next Sunday, for it is the Communion Service, which has become very dear to me, and more so _now_.