Title:  The Child of the Dawn

Author:  Arthur Christopher Benson

Release Date:  May 31, 2005 [EBook #15964]

Language:  English

Character set encoding:  ASCII

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The child of the dawn

By Arthur Christopher Benson

Fellow of Magdalene college Cambridge

[Greek:  edu ti tharsaleais ton makron teiein bion elpisin]

Author of the Upton letters, from A college window, beside still waters, the altar fire, the schoolmaster, at large, the gate of death, the silent Isle, John Ruskin, leaves of the tree, child of the dawn, Paul the minstrel

1912

To my best and dearest friend
Herbert Francis William Tatham
in love and hope

INTRODUCTION

I think that a book like the following, which deals with a subject so great and so mysterious as our hope of immortality, by means of an allegory or fantasy, needs a few words of preface, in order to clear away at the outset any misunderstandings which may possibly arise in a reader’s mind.  Nothing is further from my wish than to attempt any philosophical or ontological exposition of what is hidden behind the veil of death.  But one may be permitted to deal with the subject imaginatively or poetically, to translate hopes into visions, as I have tried to do.

The fact that underlies the book is this:  that in the course of a very sad and strange experience—­an illness which lasted for some two years, involving me in a dark cloud of dejection—­I came to believe practically, instead of merely theoretically, in the personal immortality of the human soul.  I was conscious, during the whole time, that though the physical machinery of the nerves was out of gear, the soul and the mind remained, not only intact, but practically unaffected by the disease, imprisoned, like a bird in a cage, but perfectly free in themselves, and uninjured by the bodily weakness which enveloped them.  This was not all.  I was led to perceive that I had been living life with an entirely distorted standard of values; I had been ambitious, covetous, eager for comfort and respect, absorbed in trivial dreams and childish fancies.  I saw, in the course of my illness, that what really mattered to the soul was the relation in which it stood to other souls; that affection was the native air of the spirit; and that anything which distracted the heart from the duty of love was a kind of bodily delusion, and simply hindered the spirit in its pilgrimage.