CHAPTER V. THE OLD CHURCH

I followed him deep into the pine-forest. Neither of us said much while

yet the sacred gloom of it closed us round. We came to larger and yet

larger trees--older, and more individual, some of them grotesque with

age. Then the forest grew thinner.

“You see that hawthorn?” said my guide at length, pointing with his

beak.

I looked where the wood melted away on the edge of an open heath.

“I see a gnarled old man, with a great white head,” I answered.

“Look again,” he rejoined: “it is a hawthorn.”

“It seems indeed an ancient hawthorn; but this is not the season for the

hawthorn to blossom!” I objected.

“The season for the hawthorn to blossom,” he replied, “is when the

hawthorn blossoms. That tree is in the ruins of the church on your

home-farm. You were going to give some directions to the bailiff about

its churchyard, were you not, the morning of the thunder?”

“I was going to tell him I wanted it turned into a wilderness of

rose-trees, and that the plough must never come within three yards of

it.”

“Listen!” said the raven, seeming to hold his breath.

I listened, and heard--was it the sighing of a far-off musical wind--or

the ghost of a music that had once been glad? Or did I indeed hear

anything?

“They go there still,” said the raven.

“Who goes there? and where do they go?” I asked.

“Some of the people who used to pray there, go to the ruins still,” he

replied. “But they will not go much longer, I think.”

“What makes them go now?”

“They need help from each other to get their thinking done, and their

feelings hatched, so they talk and sing together; and then, they say,

the big thought floats out of their hearts like a great ship out of the

river at high water.”

“Do they pray as well as sing?”

“No; they have found that each can best pray in his own silent

heart.--Some people are always at their prayers.--Look! look! There goes

one!”

He pointed right up into the air. A snow-white pigeon was mounting, with

quick and yet quicker wing-flap, the unseen spiral of an ethereal stair.

The sunshine flashed quivering from its wings.

“I see a pigeon!” I said.

“Of course you see a pigeon,” rejoined the raven, “for there is the

pigeon! I see a prayer on its way.--I wonder now what heart is that

dove’s mother! Some one may have come awake in my cemetery!”

“How can a pigeon be a prayer?” I said. “I understand, of course, how

it should be a fit symbol or likeness for one; but a live pigeon to come

out of a heart!”

“It MUST puzzle you! It cannot fail to do so!”

“A prayer is a thought, a thing spiritual!” I pursued.

“Very true! But if you understood any world besides your own, you would

understand your own much better.--When a heart is really alive, then it

is able to think live things. There is one heart all whose thoughts

are strong, happy creatures, and whose very dreams are lives. When some

pray, they lift heavy thoughts from the ground, only to drop them on it

again; others send up their prayers in living shapes, this or that, the

nearest likeness to each. All live things were thoughts to begin with,

and are fit therefore to be used by those that think. When one says to

the great Thinker:--‘Here is one of thy thoughts: I am thinking it now!’

that is a prayer--a word to the big heart from one of its own little

hearts.--Look, there is another!”

This time the raven pointed his beak downward--to something at the foot

of a block of granite. I looked, and saw a little flower. I had never

seen one like it before, and cannot utter the feeling it woke in me by

its gracious, trusting form, its colour, and its odour as of a new world

that was yet the old. I can only say that it suggested an anemone, was

of a pale rose-hue, and had a golden heart.

“That is a prayer-flower,” said the raven.

“I never saw such a flower before!” I rejoined.

“There is no other such. Not one prayer-flower is ever quite like

another,” he returned.

“How do you know it a prayer-flower?” I asked.

“By the expression of it,” he answered. “More than that I cannot tell

you. If you know it, you know it; if you do not, you do not.”

“Could you not teach me to know a prayer-flower when I see it?” I said.

“I could not. But if I could, what better would you be? you would not

know it of YOURSELF and ITself! Why know the name of a thing when the

thing itself you do not know? Whose work is it but your own to open your

eyes? But indeed the business of the universe is to make such a fool of

you that you will know yourself for one, and so begin to be wise!”

But I did see that the flower was different from any flower I had ever

seen before; therefore I knew that I must be seeing a shadow of the

prayer in it; and a great awe came over me to think of the heart

listening to the flower.