I never forgot the lesson. But my readers must not think that my father often talked like this. He was not at all favourable to much talk about religion. He used to say that much talk prevented much thought, and talk without thought was bad. Therefore it was for the most part only upon extraordinary occasions, of which this is an example, that he spoke of the deep simplicities of that faith in God which was the very root of his conscious life.
He was silent after this utterance, which lasted longer than I have represented, although unbroken, I believe, by any remark of mine. Full of inward repose, I fell asleep in his arms.
When I awoke I found myself very cold. Then I became aware that my father was asleep, and for the first time began to be uneasy. It was not because of the cold: that was not at all unendurable; it was that while the night lay awful in white silence about me, while the wind was moaning outside, and blowing long thin currents through the peat walls around me, while our warm home lay far away, and I could not tell how many hours of cold darkness had yet to pass before we could set out to find it,--it was not all these things together, but that, in the midst of all these, I was awake and my father slept. I could easily have waked him, but I was not selfish enough for that: I sat still and shivered and felt very dreary. Then the last words of my father began to return upon me, and, with a throb of relief, the thought awoke in my mind that although my father was asleep, the great Father of us both, he in whose heart lay that secret place of refuge, neither slumbered nor slept. And now I was able to wait in patience, with an idea, if not a sense of the present care of God, such as I had never had before. When, after some years, my father was taken from us, the thought of this night came again and again, and I would say in my heart: “My father sleeps that I may know the better that The Father wakes.”
At length he stirred. The first sign of his awaking was, that he closed again the arms about me which had dropped by his sides as he slept.
“I’m so glad you’re awake, father,” I said, speaking first.
“Not so very long, but I felt lonely without you.”
“Are you very cold? _I_ feel rather chilly.”