Dreams at Sunset

by F. W. Boreham

The shadows lengthen, and, to me, it seems

Apocalyptic glories gild the West;

My feeble hands toy with a million dreams

And weave into this web those I love best.

CONTENTS

Introduction

Part One

1. Dreams at Sunset

2. Spots on the Sun

3. The Hungry Dice

4. The Laureate of the Larrikin

5. The Saratoga

6. A Total Eclipse

7. The Silver Trumpets

8. The Avon and the Yarra

9. The Sergeant-Major’s Love-Story

10. A Son of the Synagogue

11. The Chaplet of Ariadne

Part Two

1. A Baby’s Baggage

2. Earth’s Longest Day

3. Born to the Lancet

4. The Instinct of Saviourhood

5. A Four-Cornered Romance

6. The Priest of the Street-Corner

7. Grilled Mice at Midnight

8. The Poker Face

9. Green Pastures and Still Waters

Part Three

1. The Father of the Man

2. The Music Master

3. The Ideal Congregation

4. There were Six Brothers

5. An Iliad in Ebony

6. The Undersongs of Life

7. The Soul of a Solitary

8. The Cardinal’s Violin

9. Lavender and Old Lace

10. The Mystery of Mysteries

By Way of Introduction

Every now and again I receive a letter bearing a New Zealand postmark. Each such letter contains a photograph. I always examine the picture carefully before reading the epistle. It invariably represents an old couple, grew, furrowed and bent, but looking extremely happy. I know instinctively that it marks a Golden Wedding. But whose? I scan the wrinkled faces for a clue; but seldom find one.

I like to think that these tired veterans, amidst the rejoicings with which they review the fifty years, have given a thought to the minister who, half a century ago, disentangled their love-affairs and officiated at their weddings.

After so long an interval it is a moving experience to see my Mosgiel brides and bridegrooms again in this new guise. What memories do these old people cherish? What thoughts are they thinking? What dreams are they dreaming in the sunset? I wonder.

F. W. Boreham

Kew, Victoria, Australia

3rd March, 1954.

Part I

Chapter 1

Dreams at Sunset

The bairns little know, says Dr. George Macdonald, what the auld folks are thinking. It is an intriguing realm for speculation. The thoughts of youth, they say, are long, long thoughts. What if the thoughts of age are even longer?

Thought-reading is always a hazardous business. It is not so very difficult with people in the full flood of life. But what is a baby thinking?

Looking around him as he sprawls in his cradle, he stares curiously, puckers his brows, seems uncertain as to whether to smile or to cry; and sets everybody wondering as to the ideas that are chasing each other through that plastic brain of his.

At the other end of life the problem is no less acute. Yet those who take the trouble to learn the language of age, and to decipher its code, should have no difficulty in penetrating its secret thought.

I

Faces have a rhetoric of their own, and, of all faces, none are so eloquent as old faces. That is why the great painters delight in depicting grizzled and storm-beaten countenances. Nobody can gaze upon Rembrandt's Old Jew or Whistler's My Mother without recognizing the rich and skilful artistry that was struggling to reveal the thoughts that age is thinking.

Anna Buchan, the brilliant sister of Lord Tweedsmuir, loved to tell of the old lady who would drop in at her father's manse, and, setting everybody at their ease, would sit and darn stocking by the hour. She did not need to be entertained, and indeed, did not mind in the least if everybody went out and left her alone.

She used to tell Anna that middle age is the saddest part of life. The middle-aged see the folly of youth but have forgotten its rapture; they see the pathos of age without realizing its ample compensations. The dimming eyes of age see the picture in its entirety. Anna loved to sit and watch the tell-tale expressions that lit the eyes and illumined the countenance of the good old body.

The thoughts behind such furrowed faces seem to be focused on needle and thread; in reality they are over the hills and far away. To the sympathetic observer those thoughts betray themselves in the alternating smiles and shadows that, like the patches of sunshine and cloud that scud across the hills and hollows of an undulating landscape on an April day, flit fitfully among the corrugated wrinkles.

Most of those thoughts are pleasant ones. The endless succession of romances, comedies and tragedies--many of them extremely embarrassing, or even distressing, in their incomplete stages--furnish the mind with a retrospect uniformly enchanting.

Safe home again, a sailor likes to recount his storms and a soldier his battles. Age enjoys the immense advantage of reviewing life's most harrowing and exciting experiences, knowing how each ended. Days when the course of true love ran anything but smoothly are seen in the light of the rapturous reconciliations. Hours of agonizing suspense make up a pleasing recollection in view of the subsequent deliverance or triumph.

II

It should hearten those who are just embarking on the great adventure, and those who find themselves in the thick of things, to reflect that very few of the old folk regret having been guests at life's banquet. They smack their withered lips as they recall the piquant delicacies that they have tasted, and, on their knees, mingle with their thanksgiving a grateful benediction on the parents who ushered them into such a continuous and variegated luxuriance of felicity.

It is this inward exultation that renders their grandchildren so irresistibly attractive to them. Among the books published in recent years are two--in no way related to each other--that forcibly illustrate my point. One is concerned with a delightful old lady; the other with an equally engaging old gentleman. The old lady is Mrs. Hannah Whitall Smith; whose story is placed on record by one of her grandchildren.

In these pages we have a picture of a particularly dainty little creature whose smile was sunshine, whose laughter was music and whose silvery voice compelled every hearer by its soft persuasiveness. Everybody marvelled at her invincible gaiety and freshness and charm. The years, as they multiplied, could not burden her blithe and joyous spirit; age had no power to wither or oppress her. She kept her girlish vivacity and sparkle to the last. How?

She simply lived for her grandchildren. Dwelling in their society, she shared their romps, their merriment, their ever-varying frolics. Her last words, addressed to her daughter, were: 'I've put the children's fireworks on the top shelf!'

The story of The Man Who Would Not Grow Old, told by Mr. T. Sharper Knowlson is very similar. Horace Temple, the hero of the book, was, in spite of heavy troubles and crushing losses, a boy to the last. He was never so happy as when surrounded by his grandchildren. On the last night of his life, though he had no idea that he was about to pass from them in his sleep, he had them round his bed. Really loving them, he made himself wonderfully attractive to them. And when he died, everybody was astonished at the number of people who sincerely lamented his departure.

III

Such veterans resemble old Lucille in Elizabeth Goudge's Bird in the Tree. Worshipping the young people who thronged around her, she made allowance for their funny fancies and fashions; these were of their generation, and not of hers. But, loving them with all her heart, she exhausted her tired limbs in their service, and tried to build for them a refuge to which they could fly when their fevered ways wearied them beyond endurance. This, she argued, was what grandmothers were for.

The law by which the mountain that looked a molehill in the distance appears stupendous as we approach it gives the old people such a sense of the eternal as the younger generation can scarcely understand. And the sunset glow that lights up their eager and expectant faces begets in them a fervent desire to make life a little easier for those who follow than they themselves have found it.

Chapter 2

Spots on the Sun

It was raining in torrents--had been raining, indeed, for several days. I was occupying the corner of a long and extremely uncomfortable railway carriage--one of those carriages that, fairly common in the early days of New Zealand, had seats along both sides and doors at both ends. Scattered along the two seats were about a dozen disconsolate passengers. Among these was a neatly-attired young busybody who, approaching us each in turn, opened the conversation with a question.

'Do you know,' he began, 'what is causing all this wet weather?' Havign discovered our ignorance, the wiseacre, out of the wealth of his meteorological erudition, proceeded to enlighten us.

'It's caused,' he explained, 'by the spots on the surface of the sun!' Most of us contented ourselves with thanking him for the information, and then changed the subject as adroitly as possible in the hope of lighting upon a topic in which he took no interest. And thus we got rid of him.

But at a tiny country siding there entered the carriage a shaggy and weatherbeaten old man who, very wet and very weary, had obviously travelled a long way to catch the train.

As soon as we were again under way, our weather-wise fellow-passenger approached the newcomer. The old gentleman was very deaf and our scientist had to shout his conundrum. He asked his question, and, having received the inevitable and invariable reply, he tendered the valuable information with which he had dispelled the darkness of us all.

The bearded old man stared at him almost angrily, and then, in a voice almost as loud as that of his questioner, he replied:

'So it's the spots on the surface of the sun that's doing it! Well, young man, and how do you propose to get those spots off? Tell me that!'

The scientist was dumbfounded. He returned tamely to his own seat and, during the remainder of the journey, never again left it.

I have often recalled that experience. It is so easy to go through life talking about the spots on the surface of the sun; it is so difficult to devise some means of removing those disfigurements.

There is no point in criticizing the policy of the Government unless you are prepared to outline a better one.

There is not much sense in talking everlastingly about the defects in the characters of the people about you unless you can say something, or do something, to help them to overcome and obliterate those blemishes.

I like to think that He who came into the world to confront that world with its wickedness went to the Cross in order to provide men with the means by which they could escape both the guilt and the power of their transgressions. He not only draws attention to my sins, He makes an end of them for ever.

Chapter 3

The Hungry Dice

Whilst Captain Arthur Phillip, on the Sirius was scudding across the Southern Ocean from Cape Town, intent on inaugurating the drama of Australian history, a little girl was born in a Hampshire village, the tragedy and comedy of whose life will provoke tears and smiles as long as the annals of our literature endure.

I

Mary Russell Mitford was a doctor's daughter; but the pity of it is that the good man had preoccupations that entirely drove form his wayward mind the aches and pains of any unfortunate patients who may have been misguided enough to consult him.

In his portrayals of Wilkins Micawber and Harold Skimpole, Dickens has often been charged with exaggeration. They are not characters, it has been said, but caricatures. If, however, you were to roll into one all the shiftless, improvident, irresponsible creations of all our novelists, you would not produce a personality worthy of comparison with Dr. George Mitford.

He inherited a fortune, which he quickly squandered on his cards, his dice and his ridiculous investments. He married a lady who, in addition to houses and property, brought him twenty-eight thousand pounds in cash. It all went down the drain.

His one redeeming feature was his passionate devotion to Mary, the future authoress, his only child. By the time that she was three, he had taught her to read aloud, and, standing her on the table, would place a book in her hands and display her prowess to his neighbours and friends. Even in those early days, he had implicit confidence in her future fame.

By the time Mary was nine, the family was reduced to living in a poor tenement near Blackfriars Bridge. Mrs. Mitford was at her wits' end for housekeeping money, whilst her husband was displaying remarkable cunning in evading his creditors.

One day, on a sudden impulse, he took Mary with him to buy a ticket in a lottery. She was to choose the number and any resultant prize-money was to be all her own. She straight-way asked for ticket 2224, and it won a prize of twenty thousand pounds.

II

They at once purchased Grasely Court, a fine old mansion near Reading, replete with all the grandeur and comfort of an ancient English home, including hidden panels, mysterious passages and secret rooms in which, in the days of romance, priests, cavaliers and other fugitives had been known to hide.

Always restless and eager for change, however, the doctor shortly afterwards decided to demolish this antique dwelling and to erect a new home, on modern lines, nearby.

Here at Bertram House, Mary spent the remainder of her girlhood; and then, their finances being, for the old reason, at their lowest ebb, they were driven to content themselves with a modest little dwelling at Three Mile Cross, about a mile away.

It was a cottage so small that, as Mary said, it was scarcely worthy of being called a cottage; but it was here that she wrote Our Village, the work that established her fame.

It is just possible that, at Three Mile Cross, the doctor, who had now dissipated three fortunes, and was living on the literary earnings of his clever daughter, made some slight contribution to the economy of the household. He loved the village. He was hail-fellow-well-met with all the cranks and oddities of the countryside. He described them to Mary and even introduced her to some of them.

So they found their way into the pages of Our Village, and, before long, were endeared to thousands of people all over the country. Charles Lamb and Savage Landor thought her cameos incomparable. The success of the work led her to write four companion productions.

Many possessed an uncanny flair for dissecting, analysing and describing people. She saw through them. Her biography, in three volumes, consists almost exclusively of her letters. These intimate epistles are masterpieces of incisive and penetrating criticism. She tells of the people she has met--many of them famous people--and of the books she has read--many of them popular classics. But name and fame are nothing to Mary. She has a mind of her own; and, in this correspondence of hers, we see the outstanding figures of the nineteenth century in a new and often surprising light.

In the same way, the phenomena of the village took on fresh colour and fresh charm when Mary strolled down the crazy street to do her shopping, or walked on Sunday to the village church. The hamlet of Three Mile Cross became a mirror in which all the simplicity and loveliness of English country life stood reflected, and everybody who loved rural scenes and rural people revelled in her writings.

In the course of a visit to London she was introduced to the theatres, with the result that she tested her powers as a playwright. Three of her dramas, Julian, The Foscari and Rienzi made their appearance at Covent Garden and Drury Lane. She also wrote a good deal of poetry as well as an autobiography and a novel or two; but her claim to remembrance must always rest on her artistry in portraying the idyllic grace of the English countryside.

With the most unselfish and beautiful devotion, Mary supported and tending her parents until they died--the mother in 1830, when Mary was forty-three, and the father thirteen years later. She herself passed away in 1855 at Swallowfield, in Berkshire, the village in which she spent the last five years of her life tasting the fruits of success and enjoying the friendship of Mrs. Browning, Charlotte Brontë and other eminent people of that time. Charlotte and she died within a few weeks of each other.

III

The insoluble mystery of her life consists in her relationship with her scapegrace father. He kept her in a state of chronic impecuniosity. Her records are plentifully punctuated with such phrases as 'pressure for money,' 'financial difficulties' and so on. Yet, although he was the heart-break of her entire existence, she worshipped the ground he trod. The phraseology of all her letters to him is the phraseology of a girl addressing the lover she adores.

Still more incredibly, she implicitly trusted him. He never went to London without getting into all sorts of trouble; yet she confided to him all her business arrangements with her publishers--the making of terms, the control of the manuscripts and even the collection of the money. She knew perfectly well that he could be victimized by any smug and oily-mouthed scoundrel who had some fantastic scheme for turning his pennies into shillings and his shillings into pounds. Her childish confidence in him remained as boundless as it was incomprehensible. Her frailty is one that it is easy to forgive; and we forgive her for the sake of the sheer, downright goodness that made everybody love her.

Chapter 4

The Laureate of the Larrikin

The erection of a monument to C. J. Dennis, who has been denominated The Laureate of the Larrikin will awaken a sympathetic vibration in the hearts of that vast multitude of appreciative admirers whose ears are pleasantly haunted by his lilting melodies. Himself a pendulum, swinging incessantly betwixt a smile and a tear, he carries us all with him into whichever realm he plunges.

It is in line with the imposing traditions of the older lands that the literary annals of Australia should be adorned by a magnetic figure whose dazzling brilliance, human tenderness and exuberant humour are thrown into relief by frailties that evoke alike our pity and our affection.

Sixteen years have now passed since he slipped away from us. How, one wonders, is his unique craftsmanship standing the test of time? His was an extraordinary career; and, as a consequence, he struck a note that was distinctly and exclusively his own. The Sentimental Bloke was modelled on nothing, and nothing could possibly be modelled on it.

When the poet died, at the age of sixty-two, Mr. J. A. Lyons, then Prime Minister, referred to him as the Robert Burns of Australia, whilst, long before that time, some of the most eminent critics had saluted him as a master of his craft.

The sheets of his masterpiece were scarcely off the press when Mr. H. G. Wells wrote the publishers a letter of enthusiastic congratulation. That most fastidious judge, Mr. E. V. Lucas, confessed that he was a little bewildered at finding Australian slang set to music with such superb skill; but he added that the general effect was so moving as to be positively embarrassing; and, since he hated to be seen with moist eyes, he declined to hear the stanzas recited. John Masefield, the Poet Laureate, greeted Dennis as a true bard, and, during his visit to Australia, spent many delightful hours as his guest.

I

Born at a typical up-country inn at Auburn, in South Australia, and moving, whilst still very young, to another inn at Laura, Dennis early acquired the art of expressing vigorous thought in tuneful verse. Possessing a delicate ear for music and a discriminating eye for beauty, he developed an uncanny appreciation of the value and sweetness of words. Like Robert Service, his Canadian contemporary, with whom he had much in common, he was deeply indebted to the maiden aunts who listened with encouraging pride to his prentice ventures in poesy.

Passing from beneath their doting authority, Dennis spent his mature youth and early manhood in drifting from place to place, and from occupation to occupation, groping with blind hands for the glittering but elusive destiny that seemed to lure him on.

Barman, solicitor's clerk, journalist, and what not, he was everything by turns and nothing long. An excellent mixer, singing a rollicking song, enjoying a good square meal and loving a hearty jest, he never lacked companions.

It was during these years of gipsying that he acquired habits that he afterwards deplored, and that eventually brought him, sad and sorry, to the mountain home of Mr. and Mrs. J. G. Roberts, of Kallista, whose hospitality restored his self-respect, captured his heart and gave to the world a poet of renown. Mr. and Mrs. Roberts did for C. J. Dennis what, a generation earlier, Mr. and Mrs. Meynell had done for Francis Thompson.

His work deserves to live. In 'dipping his lid' to C. J. Dennis by contributing a foreword to The Sentimental Bloke, Henry Lawson strikes a note of warning. The book, he says, is very brilliant. Let the reader beware, however, lest its brilliance--brilliance of conception, brilliance of humour and brilliance of pathos--should blind him to something still deeper.

What is that deeper something? It is everywhere. Take, for example, his story of Jim of the Hills. Jim is a timber-worker; he is employed at a sawmill. One day, whilst Jim is busy at his saw, a group of visitors enters the mill.

There were others in the party, but the one that got my stare

Was her with two brown, laughin' eyes, and sunlight in her hair.

Jim, dazzled by the sudden apparition of so much loveliness, trips over some timber and falls against the machine.

Next thing I know the boss is there, an' talking fine and good,

Explainin' to the visitors how trees are made of wood.

They murmur things like 'Marvellous!' an' 'What a monster tree!'

An' then the one with sunlit hair comes right bang up to me.

'I saw you fall,' she sort of sung; you couldn't say she talked,

For her voice had springtime in it, like the way she looked an' walked.

'I saw you fall,' she sung at me; 'I hope you were not hurt':

An' suddenly I was aware I wore my oldest shirt.

The romance represented by Jim and his shirt is but a spark and a scintillation of the greatest romance of all. A tremendous principle lies behind it. You might have told Jim a hundred times that he was going to work in a worn-out shirt: he would have taken no notice. But the moment he saw the sunlit hair and heard the spring-time voice, then suddenly he was aware he wore his oldest shirt! You might have told a certain young Jew a hundred times that he was a man of unclean lips; he would have taken no notice. But when he saw the Lord high and lifted up, his train filling the temple, he cried out, 'Woe is me, for I am undone!' You might have spoken to Peter a hundred times about his waywardness and unbelief: he would have taken no notice. But when he saw the Son of God displaying His divine authority over land and sea, he fell at Jesus' feet, saying, 'Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord!' The work of Dennis abounds in this sort of thing.

II

At first blush there would seem to be no parallel between Dennis and Dante. The Sentimental Bloke does not belong to the same world as the Divine Comedy. Yet Ruskin sums up the Divine Comedy as Dante's love-poem to Beatrice; a song of praise for her watch over his soul. 'She saves him from destruction.' Ruskin continues. 'He is eternally going astray in despair. She comes to his help, and, throughout the ascent of Paradise, leads him from star to star.' The words exactly describe Dennis's poem. The love of Doreen saves Bill from his baser self, lifts his life to a loftier plane and makes a new man of him.

The poem opens dismally. Belonging to the lowest stratum of Melbourne life, Bill has spent most of his time in drinking, gambling and fighting among the purlieus of Little Bourke and Little Lonsdale Streets. He is, however, sick to death of the whole thing.

But why has he so suddenly come to loathe the life that he had so recently loved? Obviously, something must have caused this recoil. It has. On a perfect spring morning he has seen Doreen. It is the principle of the sunlit hair and the tattered shirt in a new setting. At first Doreen will have nothing to do with him. He speaks; but, with a toss of her pretty head and a swish of her billowing skirts, she passes on her queenly way, leaving Bill writhing in the very dust. Yet he loves her all the most for her refusal to make herself cheap.

On this slender but exquisitely human foundation, Dennis rears his philosophy of life. Bill has to choose between his old ways and--Doreen.

Fer 'er sweet sake I've gone and chucked it clean;

The pubs and the schools, an' all that leery game.

Fer when a bloke 'as come to know Doreen,

It ain't the same.

There's 'igher things, she sez, for blokes to do;

An' I am 'arf believin' that it's true.

Just once, two months after their wedding, Bill meets some of his old cronies, slips back into his former courses and turns his steps homeward in the early morning in a condition in which he is ashamed to present himself to Doreen. She puts him to bed, and, a few hours later, tiptoes into the room with tears in her eyes and, in her hands, a basin of beef-tea:

Beef-tea! She treats me like a hinvaleed!

Me! that 'ad caused 'er lovin' 'eart to bleed,

It 'urt me worse than naggin' fer a week!

'Er! 'oo 'ad right to turn dead sour on me,

Fergives like that, an' feeds me wif beef-tea . . .

I tries to speak;

An' then--I ain't ashamed of wot I did--

I 'ides me face . . . an' blubbers like a kid.

In his brief but excellent biography of Dennis, Mr. A. H. Chisholm tells us that this episode is really autobiographical, being based on the welcome extended to Dennis by Mrs. Roberts after one of his unhappy lapses.

III

Like Dante, Dennis chants the victory of Love Triumphant. These are the last lines in the book:

An' I am rich, becos me eyes 'ave seen

The lovelight in the eyes of my Doreen;

An' I am blest becos me feet 'ave trod

A land 'oo's fields reflect the smile o' God.

Sittin' at ev'nin' in this sunset-land,

Wiv 'Er in al the world to 'old me 'and,

Livin' an' lovin'--so life mooches on.

C. J. Dennis has rested for sixteen years in his grave at Box Hill; but Australia can ill afford to let him die.

Chapter 5

The Saratoga

The problem was an acute one. It all happened at Parattah Junction in Tasmania. I was traveling on the south-bound express. Having enjoyed a good dinner in the refreshment-rooms, I discovered that I still had five minutes before the train resumed its journey.

At that very moment, the north-bound express arrived. How better could I spend my spare five minutes than by strolling along the platform on the chance of meeting somebody I knew? And, surely enough, beside one of the central carriages, I caught sight of a young lady, a minister's daughter, at whose home I had often been a guest.

I

I saw at a glance that she was in dire distress.

'Why, Effie!' I exclaimed. 'What's wrong?'

'Oh, I'm in serious trouble,' she replied. 'I've lost my Saratoga!'

'That's dreadful,' I assented, sympathetically. 'But look, you take the front part of the train and I'll take the back, and we'll meet again here in a minute or two!'

I hurried along the carriages that I had assigned to myself, looking high and low for the elusive Saratoga. I sincerely hoped that Effie would find it in that portion of the train that I had allotted to her, for I had to confess to myself that I felt seriously handicapped in my own search by the lamentable circumstances that I had no shadow of an idea as to what a Saratoga was!

It sounded as if it might be a special breed of dog, and I poked with my stick among the bags and boxes hoping that, with a frightened yelp, the little beast would dash out at me. But then again, it might be an article of jewelry, and, for that reason, I scrutinized the asphalt of the platform and the floors of the carriages in the frantic hope that I might detect a sudden glitter.

But then, I reminded myself, a Saratoga might conceivably be some mysterious part of a lady's wearing apparel, and it was because of this possibility that, fearing to embarrass her, I had refrained from asking Effie for exact particulars of the missing treasure.

At any rate I searched my half of the train as closely as my limited time would allow, and, on returning to our appointed rendezvous, was delighted to find Effie with her face beaming and the precious Saratoga at her feet. How was I to know that a Saratoga was a species of suitcase? I congratulated her, waved her a hurried goodbye; and caught my own train by the skin of my teeth.

But, to my dying day, I shall never forget the sensation of searching eagerly for a thing without possessing the faintest clue as to what that thing might be.

II

My experience that day resembles the universal search for happiness. If asked what they were seeking, nine people out of ten--perhaps ninety-nine out of a hundred--would reply that they are seeking happiness. Do they know what they are looking for? Would they recognize it if they saw it? Or is their passionate quest like my own wild pursuit of the Saratoga?

What is it to be happy? Are most people happy? Is happiness more difficult of attainment than it used to be? Little by little we have allowed the idea of happiness to crystallize into a philosophy of life. On the first of January we wish each other a happy New Year: we greet each individual birthday with a desire for many happy returns: we assure every prospective bride and bridegroom of our hope that they will be ecstatically happy: and, once a year, our enthusiasm for our ideal becomes like a river that has burst its banks; the usual term seems pitifully inadequate: and we crave for one another actual merriment at Christmas. What, precisely, have we in mind when we exchange these exuberant salutations?

In her novel All Passion Spent, the Hon. V. Sackville West takes as her heroine Lady Slane, a charming old dowager of eighty-eight. Lady Slane was seldom annoyed; but she hated being asked by casual callers if her long life had been a happy one. The authoress herself pokes fun at the word. It is, she declares, a strange clicking word, with its short vowel and its spitting double 'p's' and its pert tip-tilted 'y' at the end, to express in two syllables a whole summary of life. Had Lady Slane been happy? she asks. It was an unanswerable question. There had been moments in which she had been deliriously, madly, uncontrollably happy; but then again, there had been days of abject wretchedness, days spent in the lowest depths of despair.

The aged peeress maintained that nobody could speak of life as a whole as either happy or unhappy. It is, she used to tell her visitors, like a beautiful lake offering its even surface to many reflections, now gilded by the sun, now silvered by the moon, now darkened by a cloud, and again roughened by a ripple. Yet, she added, it is always a plane, always level, keeping its bounds, not to be rolled up into a tight, hard ball, small enough to be held in the hand, which was what people were trying to do when they asked if one's life had been happy or unhappy.

III

Somebody has suggested that we should take a census on happiness. Let every man be invited to tell us whether or not he finds life to his taste. Sir William Robertson Nicoll once attempted something of the kind and was astonished at the result. The experiment convinced him that most people are extremely happy. Most people, indeed, are happier than they know. Many of those to whom the questionnaire was submitted confessed that, until they attempted to analyse their emotions, they did not realize how happy they actually were.

Sir Alfred Fripp, an eminent surgeon, laid it down as an axiom that happiness is an art which any student, with a little pains, may acquire. Success, Sir Alfred pointed out, cannot come to everybody, nor health; but happiness is within any- body's grasp, even though health and wealth elude him. 'It is distinctly an art,' he insisted. 'As an art, it requires fostering by practice till it becomes a habit.' Any man or woman may master it.

To assist eager students to attain proficiency in this preeminently desirable craft, Sir Alfred lays down a number of rules. Briefly epitomized, they may be stated as follows: I. Always be yourself. 2. Consider the feelings of others. 3. Keep the faith and simplicity of youth. 4. Don't cross bridges till you come to them. 5. Be patient with fools. 6. Keep your friendships in repair. 7. Don't get dragged into quarrels and controversies. 8. Remember that it takes all kinds of people to make a world. 9. Try to understand the man you condemn: to know all is to forgive all. 10. Maintain your independence. 11. Guard your sense of humour and your sense of proportion. 12. Never brood over the past: memory consists in the art of forgetting.

IV

All this leads us up the grassy slopes of an Eastern hillside. The disciples, like all their fellow-men, craved the secret of happiness. We all know what happened. It reminds me of a story from early American history. It was a sultry day: the little meeting-house was crowded; and, to render conditions more tolerable, the doors and windows stood wide open. Whilst the meeting was in progress, the red men emerged silently from the woods and crept like snakes across the open space that surrounded the building. Their chief, the terrible Black Eagle, was at their head. Gliding towards the open door, he was determined to observe the disposition of those within, and at the right moment, to give the signal for the impending massacre. But, as he paused beside the portal, he heard a voice--subdued, reverent and stately--reading some strange and wondrous words. The sentences to which he listened in astonishment were these:

Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.

Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.

Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled ...

and so on.

As stealthily as he had come, Black Eagle crept away. 'If these be the laws of the white men,' he said, 'let them live and teach the red men the same holy doctrine!'

They had found the long-sought secret of happiness. For happiness, as the Beatitudes show, must be rooted in a noble character; such a character can issue only from an exalted faith; but, depend upon it, the man who possesses that faith and develops that character will enjoy a happiness that stands sublimely independent of all the bludgeonings of circumstance.

Chapter 6

A Total Eclipse

Among the minor sensations of the nineteenth century were the thrillers of Guy Thorne. His most dynamic and explosive production, When It Was Dark, was proclaimed as the most daring and original novel of the period, and enjoyed the distinction of being glowingly commended by the Bishop of London from the pulpit of Westminster Abbey.

I

It tells how Constantine Schuabe, a millionaire, loathing Christianity with a venomous hatred, resolves, at any cost, to destroy it. Discovering that Professor Sir Robert Llwellyn, the most brilliant antiquarian and archaeologist of his day, is leading a double life and is up to his ears in debt, Schuabe cultivates his acquaintance, lends him fourteen thousand pounds, and, shortly afterwards, demands repayment under penalty of having the whole vile story of Llwellyn's private life exposed.

Whilst Llwellyn is grovelling at the feet of the plutocrat, begging for time, Schuabe startles him by remarking that it would be easy for him to wipe out the debt and become a wealthy man. How?

Schuabe tells Llwellyn that he must, on the excuse of ill-health, get a year's leave from the British Museum; he must then go to Palestine and discover that the record of the Resurrection is just a pious fraud.

Backed by his unimpeachable reputation, his verdict will be readily accepted, and Christianity will be an exploded myth. What could be more simple?

II

A few months later the world learns with speechless amazement that a new cave has been unearthed in the Holy Land. It contains a slab inscribed, 'I, Joseph of Arimathea, took the body of Jesus from the tomb and hid it in this place.' On a ledge nearby a slight mould is spread, probably all that remains of a decomposed body.

The announcement creates a sensation such as the nation has never previously known. Llwellyn's name carries weight. Press, Parliament and people are alike dumbfounded. Stocks and shares collapse. With the decline of public confidence, commerce is reduced to stagnation and industry is paralysed. Bankruptcy and unemployment become the order of the day. Depression reigns everywhere.

When Cyril Hands, whom Llwellyn had employed to do the spadework of the expedition, returns to England, he is overwhelmed by remorse. A servant finds his body on the hearth rug: a newspaper, with its terrifying columns of wretchedness, desolation and ruin, is clutched in his dead hand.

Those whose religion is of the formal, superficial kind, abandon it: the bubble has burst: they feel ashamed of their own gullibility. But there are others. In churches, chapels and mission-halls up and down the country, there are thousands of simple souls whose personal experience of the Saviour's transforming grace has been so vivid, so profound and so convincing that the wave of unbelief fails to affect them.

III

Among these immovable optimists is Gertrude Hunt, the pretty dancing-girl with whom Sir Robert Llwellyn had become involved. Just before Llwellyn's departure for Palestine, she was taken ill. To Sir Robert Llwellyn's ineffable disgust, Basil Gortre, a young curate visited her, leading her to repentance and faith.

Later on, her sickness having taken a more serious turn, she confronts the bombshell in the newspaper. But it makes no difference. How, with a life as radically changed as hers had been, can she possibly doubt?

Later still, strange thoughts occur to her. Llwellyn was given leave to go to Palestine on the grounds of failing health; yet she, who knew him so intimately, saw no signs of weakness. Why, too, did he brag, before going, that he would startle the world by his discoveries? And why, instead of worrying about his debts, as he used to do, was he now so affluent and reckless of expense?

Moved by a sudden inspiration, she goes to him, pretends that she is tired of being good, and wants everything to be as it once was.

In the surprise of this unexpected denouement, he flings to the winds the forebodings that have increasingly oppressed him, and, in a burst of half-drunken confidence, tells her everything.

As soon as Gertrude leaves him, Llwellyn realizes the enormity of his indiscretion. To relieve his own mind of the intolerable agony, he rushes to Schuabe, the millionaire, and confesses his incredible folly. The two men stare aghast at one another. What is to be done? Nothing can be done: for Gertrude has gone straight to Basil Gortre, the curate who had been the instrument of her regeneration, and put it in his power to hurl into the world a second bombshell.

The general relief is indescribable. Humanity is emancipated. But in the universal rejoicing the principal actors in the drama have no share. Gertrude dies of the malady that has so long afflicted her. Llwellyn, wretched beyond words, completely collapses and passes away whilst confessing to his wife his sordid infidelity. And Schuabe, his immense fortune wrecked by the depression that he has himself created, loses his reason and vanishes from sight. But the world at large is once more bathed in the brightness of the Easter triumph.

Chapter 7

The Silver Trumpets

The postman has this morning brought me a letter that affords me peculiar satisfaction. It invites me to return for one notable Sunday to a pulpit in which, long ago, I spent twelve very happy years.

'We are celebrating our Jubilee,' the minister writes, 'and we all want you to be among us!'

'Our Jubilee!' There is music in the very phrase. The word simply means a blare of trumpets. It takes us back to the Garden of Eden, for the word is based on the name of Jubal, the seventh from Adam, who was the father of all those who handle musical instruments.

You may search all the archives of antiquity, and all the annals of more recent empires, for any enactment more intriguing or more suggestive than the Jewish law of jubilee. Every fiftieth year--the year that was welcomed with the blast of the silver trumpets--all lands and estates reverted to the possession of those who had owned them fifty years earlier. This important consideration was, of course, taken into account in all sales and purchases of property. A block of land sold immediately after the year of Jubilee would be worth about fifty times as much as the same block sold just as the year of Jubilee was approaching.

All persons who, to pay their debts, had sold themselves into slavery during the fifty years, were compulsorily released when the silver trumpets sounded, and, under the laws relating to property, received back any estates which they or their progenitors had possessed when last the Jubilee was celebrated.

The effect of such a law is obvious. No family could become excessively wealthy; none could become degradingly poor. Land monopoly was impossible. Every family and every individual enjoyed a fresh start on the old footing at the end of each half-century.

The year of Jubilee was a year of Redemption; it was a year of Restoration, and it was a year of Emancipation.

I

The year of Jubilee was a year of Redemption. It began on the Great Day of Atonement. When the high priest had donned his garments of snowy white, he took two goats, the one as a sin-offering and the other as a scapegoat. He then solemnly sacrificed the former, and, with its blood, sprinkled the mercy seat and the holy place. Then, coming forth, he laid his hands on the head of the second goat, confessing over it the sins of the congregation. And, whilst the people were weeping and lamenting their transgressions, the animal was driven away into the wilderness. Priest and people watched it vanishing into infinity, and as soon as the scapegoat had entirely disappeared, the silver trumpets rang out; sadness gave way to gladness; the year of Jubilee had begun!

The truth typified by all this stands crystal clear. All our rejoicing is based on redemption. It is because Christ, the Son of God, once suffered for our sins upon the bitter tree, that our hearts overflow with adoring gratitude. All the jubilation of the ages is based on the darkness of Gethsemane and the agony of Calvary. Up to the Cross all the world's sins and sorrows went groaning: down from the Cross all its joys come streaming.

A year of jubilee, to be true to its traditions, should be a year of passionate evangelism, a year in which multitudes of stragglers and waverers should be led into the Valley of Decision.

II

The year of Jubilee was a year of Restoration. Each Jew found himself possessed once more of all that he had lost during the fifty years. That is the message for today. We are in peril of losing the best as life goes on. We are like men who fill their pockets with gold, but have holes in all their pockets. The years are great thieves; they creep upon us with stealthy footsteps and filch away our most precious treasure. Have we not all lost something of the rapture that filled our souls at the time of our conversion? Have we not lost something of the radiance of our first simple faith in Jesus? Like the church at Ephesus, we have lost our first love and no longer do our first works.

But this is the year of Restoration! A man's first love, his first faith, his first vision, his first joy, his first deep, satisfying peace, may all be his again!

III

And the year of Jubilee is a year of Emancipation. The slaves were all set free. It is wonderful how the years enchain us. The world, the flesh and the devil make us their captives. We become enslaved by habit, by business, by pleasure, by fashion, by money, or by any one of a thousand things.

But the day of deliverance has dawned; the bonds, whatever they are, may all be broken.

The year of Jubilee meant a fresh start for everybody. It was the divine festival of a new beginning. Nothing delights God more. He is an inveterate beginner. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. There you have the record, not of the beginning of Creation, but of the creation of Beginnings. Back beyond that, nothing even began; everything always was. If your eyes can peer beyond the boundaries of that beginning, you will see nothing but God--God inhabiting His own beginningless and endless life, dreaming His own beginningless and endless dreams, laying His own supernal plans--plans of Creation and Redemption and wonders inconceivable.

Then came the first beginning. And, having once fashioned a beginning, it became His divine habit. He is always doing it. He begins again with every morning, with every Spring, and with every baby born.

A year of Jubilee must mark a new birth in every man's soul; a new era in every man's life; a new and delightful escape from all the forces that have heretofore hampered and enslaved us. Therein lies the enchanting music of the Silver Trumpets.

Chapter 8

The Avon and the Yarra

I could scarcely credit the evidence of my senses. I had been busy in Melbourne all the morning, and now, with an hour to spare, I had strolled over Princes Bridge and found a pleasant resting-place in the Snowden Gardens, on the grassy slopes beside the Yarra. Almost immediately, a stranger shared my seat.

It occurred to me, as he approached, that his attire was slightly unconventional and that his movements were characterized by an old-world bearing; but, in these days of mass migration, such trifles pass unnoticed. It was when he spoke that he startled me, for his voice was so rich and soft and beautifully modulated that he almost seemed to be singing.

'Is not the Garrick Theatre near here?' he inquired. I pointed to the building that once bore that name, explaining at the same that, as a theatre, it had gone the way of Garrick himself.

I

He seemed disappointed. He explained that he was a stranger to Australia. I asked whence he had come, and it was then that he took my breath away.

'From the seventeenth century,' he replied. As I inspected him more narrowly, a suspicion crept into my mind that almost paralysed me.

It could not be. For one thing, he was not quite tall enough, and, for another, he was a little too portly. And yet the face, with its full cheeks, its little pointed beard, its towering forehead, its lustrous hazel eyes and its shock of rich auburn hair, answered precisely to the traditional conception.

'Not by any fortunate chance, Mr. Shakespeare?' I hazarded. He smiled, very pleasantly, and my felicity was complete.

Stammeringly, I tried to express my delight. 'You know,' I faltered, 'you figure in our history books as a kind of glorious ghost. You never materialize. You haunt that dim old Elizabethan age of yours and never, night or day, emerge from it. With other writers we have become familiar; but you, the greatest of them all, remain shadowy and unreal, a kind of golden legend.'

He said that he was not surprised. 'The records are very scanty,' he remarked. 'You have little or nothing to go upon.' We chatted for some time about the plays: about their varying and fluctuating popularity; and he had much to say on the sources of his inspiration and on the historical setting that suggested some of his most notable compositions.

I told him that many people, including even scholars of great renown, found it difficult to believe that one man, dying at fifty-two, could have written all the masterpieces that bear his name. He turned upon me with something like astonishment. 'Where's the problem?' he asked.

He went on to point out that, since his days, other writers, such as Scott, Dickens, and Trollope, have produced a mass of literature that makes his look small. 'To be sure,' he conceded, 'they wrote prose whilst I gave you blank verse. But it is reasonable to assume that they wrote and rewrote and revised each sentence before giving it its final form. And, as against this, blank verse came easily and naturally to me; I almost talked it. If you are satisfied with the quality of my output, I see no difficulty about the quantity of it.'

II

I asked him as to his earliest and most formative memories. He explained that, when he was only five, two troupes of strolling players visited Stratford within a few months of each other. His father, John Shakespeare, was high bailiff that year and marched out, in his gown of glowing scarlet trimmed with fur, to welcome them.

The vivid scenes made an indelible impression upon his boyish mind, and when he attended the performances of the visitors in the courtyard of the Angel Inn, he felt that to be an actor must be the dizzy climax of human happiness.

Detecting a movement that, I feared, presaged his departure, I ventured upon a more delicate and more intimate theme. He must, I hinted, have noticed that romantic tradition that had gathered about the name of Anne Hathaway; did it please him? He smiled, a little sadly, and paused for some time before replying.

'Poor Anne!' he exclaimed, as if talking to himself rather than to me, 'hers was a rough road. We married far too early. I was just eighteen; she was twenty-six. I suppose that, whenever I found myself with Anne, the emotional strain in my composition--the quality that gives life and colour to my plays--took the bit into its teeth and bolted with me. I completely lost my head. To the disgust and dismay of our people, we insisted on marrying.

'Following the ceremony, Anne came to live at our place. She and my mother struggled bravely to make the unpalatable scheme work smoothly, but nobody liked it. It happened, however, that when our little daughter was born, she had a little playmate waiting for her in the person of an uncle two years older than herself, and the children got on famously with one another. At twenty-one I went to London, and thereafter Anne and I saw very little of each other until, on retiring at forty-seven, I returned to Stratford.'

III

He rose, but I begged permission to ask one more question. 'You composed a verse,' I said, 'to be placed upon your tomb, invoking a curse upon any man who meddled with your bones.' He interrupted me with a burst of hearty laughter, his first real laugh since we met.

'When I was a little chap,' he explained, 'I often watched the sexton dig up old skeletons to make room for new burials. He tossed the ghastly things into a bonehouse which, to me, was the most horrible place on earth. I shuddered lest my own bones should one day meet a similar fate.'

As, with a courtly smile, he left me, I curiously contrasted the contempt that he dreaded with the immortality he now enjoys.

Chapter 9

The Sergeant-Major's Love-Story

It is the early bird that catches the worm; and it was a particularly delicious worm that the sergeant-major caught in the grey dawn of a bitter winter's morning in 1787. It was the year in which he came of age.

It was in Canada, in the province of New Brunswick to be exact. The snow was deep on the ground; icicles were hanging from the eaves of the houses; and a biting wind was blowing.

The few people who were stirring at the outlandish hour must have wondered why on earth the sergeant-major, in his brilliant scarlet uniform, was abroad so early.

It was purely a matter of habit. The grandson of a farm labourer and the son of a small farmer, William Cobbett had been reared in a hard school. 'I do not remember,' he afterwards wrote, 'a time when I did not earn my own living.'

In his sixth year he was trained to rise in the darkness to drive away the small birds before they settled on the turnip seed, and to scare the rooks from the peas. 'When I first trudged afield,' he says, 'with my wooden bottle and satchel slung over my shoulder, I was hardly able to climb the gates and stiles; and, at the close of the day, to reach home was a task of infinite difficulty'

I

It was then, after a scanty meal had been hurriedly swallowed, that the books were brought out, and, with the father as schoolmaster, the business of education tackled. When the boys fell asleep over their lessons, as they often did, they were sent off to bed in disgrace.

There were four of them, and the proud father often boasted that those four boys, the eldest of whom was fifteen, did as much work every day as any three men in the parish. The amazing thing is that, in Cobbett's picturesque descriptions of his strenuous boyhood, there is no syllable of resentment or bitterness.

Those, he avers, were happy days. But, since it was not good that such exacting conditions should continue, he dedicated the best efforts of his life to their amelioration. For some years the burly form of William Cobbett, astride his grey mare, was as familiar to the dwellers along the English highways as the petite figure of Mr. Wesley, similarly mounted, had been a few years earlier.

II

At the age of seventeen, taking counsel of nobody, he set out for London, arriving in the metropolis with exactly half a crown in his pocket. City life, however, was little to his taste. He decided to join the Marines; but, filling in the wrong form, was surprised to find himself a soldier of the line in His Majesty's Fifty-fourth Foot Regiment under orders to sail for Canada.

Cherishing his secret dreams as to the kind of life he aspired to live and the kind of work that he desired to do, he determined to make his military career a stepping-stone to higher things. During his early years in the Army, he devoted his time and thought to the process of self-improvement. He realized that, if he aimed at making thoughtful people think as he wished them to think, he must learn to speak their language and to speak it well.

Every penny that came his way was spent on books and stationery. Unable to afford lamps or candles, he frequently read and wrote by firelight. He often had to study amidst the songs and shouts of the other members of the regiment. Yet no man in the barracks was more popular. He kept the accounts and did the secretarial work of the company; won swift promotion, passing at a bound from the rank of corporal, to that of sergeant-major; and, when he obtained his discharge, was eloquently thanked by his commanding officers.

It was pure force of habit, therefore, that led to his rising so early on that cruel winter morning in New Brunswick. In the course of his matutinal stroll he passed a cottage garden protected by palings. His height permitted him to glance over the palings and across the snow-covered garden to the outhouses, in one of which he was surprised to see a bonny girl rinsing out her tubs after having finished the household washing. It was scarcely light; it was bitterly cold; yet she sang as she watched the vanishing suds. 'That's the girl for me!' soliloquized the sergeant-major.

His presence was unsuspected. He stood there watching her every movement, and, the more he saw of her, the more he liked her. Then, as the dawn strengthened to daylight, and he made out her features more clearly, he recognized her as an artilleryman's daughter to whom he had been introduced at a social function a day or two earlier. Having just put away her tubs, the girl vanished into the cottage, never dreaming that she had been observed; the sergeant-major completed his stroll; and somehow, notwithstanding the sleet and the slush, he was under the impression that it was a lovely morning.

III

The course of true love never did run smooth. On cultivating the closer acquaintance of the young lady whose beauty and diligence had so bewitched him, he made two devastating discoveries. The first was that, although her premature development had imparted to her appearance an impression of ripening womanhood, she was really only thirteen--the age of Shakespeare's Juliet. The other was that her father's regiment had been ordered back to England.

During the years in which the two young people were compelled to live their lives, one on the one side of the Atlantic and the other on the other, he wrote her regularly; and, fearful lest she should ruin her charms by too much toil, he sent her all the money he could scrape together--one hundred and fifty guineas in all. When, after the interminable years, Cobbett himself, no longer a sergeant-major, returned to the homeland, he found her a maid of all work, earning two shillings a week.

Having attained the maturity of sweet seventeen, she smilingly accepted his proposal of marriage, and, at the same time, handed him a parcel which contained the entire sum that he had sent her. To the end of his days Cobbett never tired of singing her praises as a wife and as a mother. Nor was his devotion merely a matter of words.

In one of his telling essays he urges husbands to demonstrate their fondness for their wives, not by endearing epithets, but by real understanding and practical sympathy. When, on one occasion, Mrs. Cobbett was in delicate health and, because of the barking of dogs, found sleep elusive, Cobbett slipped quietly out of the house, and, barefooted, lest she should hear his steps, spent the night in driving the noisy nuisances to a distance.

He was an odd mixture. Strength and tenderness subsisted in him side by side: polish and pugnacity dwelt together in his soul. Upon Cobbett's massive figure, resolute features and robust character, John Leech is said to have based his familiar delineation of John Bull. He constantly blundered, yet his transparent honesty of purpose and his downright goodness of heart won the affection of his bitterest foes. His faults were the faults of the head; never of the heart. He loved the English countryside, the English people, the English language and the English home; and he will always be remembered as both a strong man and a good one.

Chapter 10

A Son of the Synagogue

In the days immediately preceding the Great Plague and the Great Fire, two men pored over manuscripts that were destined to mould the ages. In some respects they present an interesting comparison; in others, a striking contrast.

Clad in his suit of coarse grey cloth, John Milton sits, in summer-time, among the sweet-smelling flowers of his well-kept garden. In winter-time, garbed in black velvet, he imprisons himself in his dreary chamber, hung with its rusty green tapestry, whilst he speeds his inspired fancy on its most audacious flights.

His rich auburn hair, which retained something of its gold to the last, falls in a cataract about his slightly-stooping shoulders, setting off a face remarkable for its sweetness, strength and serenity. His soft grey eyes give no hint of their tragic secret.

Just across the channel, in the quaint old-fashioned village of Voorburg, near The Hague, sits a swarthy, black-haired, well-built youth of singular charm. His features proclaim him of Jewish extraction, whilst his dark olive complexion suggests a Southern origin. His people were, in fact, refugees from Portugal.

A second glance reveals that his face is slightly drawn; his cheeks are unnaturally flushed, and his eyes glisten with the tell-tale lustre that betokens the ravages of consumption.

Milton, well into the fifties, is dictating to his weary daughters the deathless stanzas of Paradise Lost; Spinoza, in his early thirties, and with no hope of ever reaching the fifties, is putting the finishing touches to his Ethics.

A little later, Milton makes his way among the charred ruins of the metropolis to sell his ponderous manuscript for five pounds to a friendly but nervous publisher.

Spinoza, sensing the storm that will break upon his head if he dares to print his philosophy, locks his folios in his desk to take their chance of being burned or broadcast when his pitiless disease has laid him in his tomb.

I

The boyhood of Spinoza was spent in a Jewish home of the best type. The sacred traditions of the synagogue were in his blood. His grandfather and his father had been revered and honoured leaders in Israel. The fact that he was named Baruch, the Blessed, whilst his sisters were Rebekah and Miriam, indicates the atmosphere in which the philosopher was reared.

The most momentous event of his youth was his determination to learn Latin. Three sensational developments attended this step. The first was that he selected as his tutor a doctor named Van Den Ende, an extraordinary character who was hanged in Paris in 1674. The second was that he fell in love with his teacher's pretty daughter, who, a little later, jilted him. And the third was that his new acquirement brought him into touch with modern philosophy and opened up a new world.

As a result of this adventure, he felt himself to be moving on another plane and speaking another language. His old associates suspected his orthodoxy, and, in point of fact, he himself was not very sure about it. He was offered a pension of a thousand florins a year to reaffirm his attachment to his old faith. He indignantly refused, and, in 1656, was solemnly excommunicated from the Commonwealth of Israel.

II

His behaviour at this crisis was characteristic of him. His mind was on pilgrimage and must be free to follow its own bent. Later on, although poorer than any church mouse, he declined a pension from the French king and an appointment as Professor of Philosophy at the University of Heidelberg, lest acceptance of such tempting boons should commit him to teach a little more or a little less than, at the moment, he really believed. For, than, Spinoza, the world has never known a more honest man.

In the course of his brief career, his disciples, pitying his physical frailty, made him handsome gifts, but, for the most part, he supported himself by labouring with his own hands. Like all young Jews of the period, he had learned a trade. He was a skilful polisher of lenses; and the spectacles, microscopes and telescopes that proceeded from his bench were held in the highest repute.

Unfortunately, the dust resulting from the constant grinding and filing of glasses irritated his crazy lungs, aggravating his malady and hastening his death.

One of his greatest admirers was Henry Oldenburg, the first secretary of the Royal Society. Oldenburg more than once visited the little cottage in which Spinoza boarded, and, through the years, maintained with him a voluminous correspondence.

As time went on, however, Oldenburg began to find himself out of his depth. Spinoza seemed to him to be exploring worlds invisible. He twitted his old friend with having forsaken philosophy for theology; he was spending too much of his time with angels and archangels.

III

The simple fact was that, the more Spinoza probed the mysteries of Time and of Eternity, the more certain he became of that spiritual realm of which the material realm is but a shadow. He talked more and more about God as the source of all things, the home of all things, and the destiny of all things. He really loved God and wanted everybody else to love Him. In a phrase that has stuck to his name, Novalis called him the God-intoxicated man.

His consumption slew him at the age of forty-four. He left just enough goods and chattels to pay his debts and funeral expenses. His greatest work, published some time after his death, was hailed by the most eminent thinkers as a masterpiece, and, although now superseded, or incorporated in the work of later writers, exercised a profound influence on the generations that followed.

Chapter 11

The Chaplet of Ariadne

When Theseus set out on that brave adventure in the course of which he hoped to climb the rainbow, stride along the Milky Way and scale the heights of Pleiades, he came upon a mountain, all of solid gold.

Obviously, it had not always been of that valuable substance. The tall trees and daintier saplings had evidently grown normally and been magically transmuted. Logs and boulders lay around that had clearly been of wood and stone, although their corrugations and sharp edges now glittered in the sunlight.

Searching for the cause of this strange transformation, Theseus at length found the Chaplet of Ariadne, lying under the shadow of an immense cliff. Visiting the ranges, the goddess must inadvertently have dropped her treasure, and its potent influence, as it lay there, had turned the summit into shining gold.

I have seen the same thing happen three times over, not in the realm of Mythology, but of History; and, since it is thus to be seen in the actual records of real men and real things, it is, for us, the richer in practical significance.

The wonder was wrought, not by the Chaplet of Ariadne, but by something infinitely more potent and more precious, 'the most valuable thing this world affords', as the Queen was assured in the course of the Coronation Service. The Bible touched three periods of human history which might, but for it, have been little more than commonplace; and it turned each of those three periods into a Golden Age.

The greatness of Scripture is not only impressive; it is infectious; it imparts stateliness and splendour to everything it touches. The greatness of Caesar dwarfed men. In the words of Cassius, he bestrode this narrow world like a colossus, and, as a consequence, ordinary mortals crept under his huge legs and peeped about to find themselves dishonourable graves. The greatness of the Bible, on the contrary, makes men feel great; it invests life with a sense of infinite possibility and dignity and majesty.

The three periods of human history with which the Bible stands most intimately associated have come to be recognized as the three most momentous eras that our little world has known. They represent (1) The Rise of Greek Culture; (2) The Renaissance in Europe; and (3) The Evangelical Revival of the Eighteenth Century. One may search the archives of mankind from the dawn of creation to this very hour without unearthing records that can put these three classical periods to shame. And each of the three finds its explanation and its monument in the sacred volume that is today being issued by the British and Foreign Bible Society in more than a thousand languages.

I

Dean Alford, perhaps the outstanding authority on the subject, declares that one of the most arresting coincidences of all time is the evolution of the Greek tongue during the years immediately preceding the Christian era. In the fairest portion of the south of Europe, amidst the indented coasts and rocky valleys and snow-clad ranges of Greece, there grew to perfection, Alford says, the most beautiful, most fluent and most powerful language that ever flowed from the tongue of man. Among the brilliant intellectuals of Athens it received its edge and polish. In it, as in no other tongue known to men, the most minute turns of human thought found expression. Truths requiring almost microscopic mental discernment were accurately and exquisitely conveyed by it. It was a precision instrument of the finest possible quality. And, to add to its charms, it was an attractive and melodious language, charming the ear with its liquid music as well as gratifying the mind by its philological subtlety. Spread across the world by the conquests of Alexander the Great, himself a pupil of Aristotle and a writer of renown, humanity found itself in possession of an ideal vehicle for its thought at the very moment at which the most startling revelation of all time was about to be made. H. V. Morton declares that the student who would trace the birth of Christianity must go back to a time, three centuries before Bethlehem, when a young man, Alexander by name, tore down the barriers that had divided East from West and launched upon the world that superb culture in which the new faith could become lyrically articulate. Homer and Hesiod and Sophocles did not sing, Alford insists, for the sake of singing; Herodotus and Thucydides and Xenophon did not write for the sake of writing; Demosthenes and his rivals did not produce their masterpieces of oratory as a proud exhibition of consummate artistry; they were divinely chosen, though unconscious, craftsmen, sharpening and brightening and perfecting the instrument which was destined to transfigure the life of mankind.

II

The second of these Summits of Gold was the European Renaissance. It transfigured the lives of all nations, including our own. In those days, as Sir Sidney Lee avers, Englishmen breathed a new atmosphere. They came, he says, under a fresh stimulus, compounded of many elements, each of them inspiring, almost intoxicating. New continents were springing up like mushrooms on a misty morning; new oceans were everywhere being sighted. The entire atlas was recast; the world assumed a startlingly novel shape. It was an age of thrills! One day Bartholomew Diaz gave Africa to the world; the next, Columbus presented it with America; and then Vasco da Gama unveiled India! And whilst Cabot and Balboa and Magellan and Cortes and Pizarro were achieving their triumphs, Copernicus was discovering a new universes in the skies; astronomy was being born again. New inventions revolutionized commerce and industry. It was a regeneration of the human intellect. Men felt a passion for extending the limits of knowledge. In the realms of philosophy, music, art and science, illustrious adventurers, whose names will live for ever, appeared like bright stars that twinkle suddenly out of the age-long dark. An infinite horizon was opened to the simplest minds. Men fell in love with the universe. People who had lived in an age became citizens of all the ages. Those who dwelt in hamlets and villages enjoyed the rapture of the continental.

Moreover, with that revived interest in ancient culture and in distant lands, there awoke in the minds of the people an insatiable desire to possess the Scriptures in their own tongue. And, at that psychological moment, two men arose. The first, William Tyndale. A private tutor in Gloucestershire, he conceived the idea of making the simplest ploughboy as familiar with the inspired writings as the most erudite scholars then were. As a result, he completed his monumental translation in such a masterly way that, except in matters of detail, no subsequent revisers have been able to improve on his majestic production.

The second of these two men was William Caxton. His printing presses surprised the world at the very moment at which the world had something supremely worth printing. The innovation captured the imagination of the populace. Learned men, fashionable women and great nobles thronged the little printing house at Westminster to see how the miracle was performed. Thus the Bible, as we know it, sprang into being; the immensity of the volume became a national reflection of the immensity of the age; and, by contact with it, the immensity of the age became even more imposing.

Just as the Greek language reached perfection just in time to express, by its elegance and exactitude, the most sublime revelation ever given to men, so Caxton's introduction of printing synchronized with Tyndale's historic translation. Both achievements seemed to represent the complementary sections of a master plan. He who is not impressed by the sheer wonder of such coincidences will never, in this world or in any other, be profoundly impressed by anything. He has eyes, but he sees not.

III

The third of these Summits of Gold, these efflorescences of history, was the great evangelical revival that, in the eighteenth century, exercised an influence so overwhelming, so dynamic and so irresistible that it transformed, fundamentally and permanently, every phrase of our national life. In days when ancient thrones were tottering and hoary institutions crumbling, it preserved for us, as Lecky has shown, our national integrity and respect. Men saw the affairs of this world, and of every other, in a new perspective.

The country was regenerated. Apart from the direct spiritual fruitage of the revival, the by-products of that transfiguring movement were literally legion. Social reforms were effected; slavery was abolished: industrial wrongs were righted: the plague--the spectre of the centuries--was banished by purer standards of living and saner sanitation: whilst philanthropic and benevolent institutions arose everywhere. In the sweep of this mountainous and memorable movement, all our great missionary societies sprang into being and a desire was created to give every man living, regardless of colour, race or clime, a copy of the Scriptures in his own tongue.

Thus, by the Bible, history was reconstituted and reconditioned. No single factor has had more to do with the creation of our literature, with the moulding of our legislation and with the determination of our way of life. The minstrelsy of all the world's poets is rooted in the work of these ancient seers and singers; the statutes of all civilized peoples are based on the inflexible mandates of the Mosaic code; whilst all the chivalries and courtesies of life are the natural expression in human conduct of these immemorial ethics and ideals. Under its spell, earth's peaks all glitter.

Part II

Chapter 1

A Baby's Baggage

Find what fault you will with a newborn baby, you cannot justly accuse him of having brought with him an excess of luggage. Birth is the terminus of a long and wonderful journey.

'Where did you come from, Baby dear?' asks Dr. George Macdonald; and he answers his own question by replying: 'Out of the Everywhere into Here!'

On that momentous adventure, we travel light. If, on arrival, a Customs Officer insisted on inspecting our baggage, he would be embarrassed by the paucity of our meagre belongings.

I

Yet, because a fair stock of faith is indispensable to our happiness and well-being, we bring with us an abundance of that priceless commodity. In our early days on this terrestrial sphere, we believe everything. Our credulity is illimitable. All that our grave and reverend seniors tell us, we devour with wondering eyes wide open. Aesop's Fables, Nursery Rhymes, Ghost Stories, Fairy Tales, and the Arabian Nights Entertainment are all grist to the mill of a child's virgin fancy. It never occurs to a youngster to doubt that the cow jumped over the moon or that the dish ran away with the spoon. The singing of the four-and-twenty blackbirds from beneath the pie-crust is, to him, an integral part of the fun of the royal feast. Jack the Giant Killer is, to him, as real as Julius Caesar; he is as sure of the Fairy Godmother as of Queen Victoria; and the Enchanted Castle falls into the same category as Buckingham Palace. To question the existence of Santa Claus would be, to him, the stark climax of a bleak and revolting infidelity.

Faith is part of the charm of childhood; who would wish to accelerate the cruel process of disillusionment? We all remember how the villainous Sir Jake Hardcastle stood his small son on the dining-room table at Hardcastle Hall, stretched out his hands towards him and bade him jump. Harry jumped; the father withdrew his arms and the child fell with a cry to the floor. 'And why did you do that?' demanded the horrified mother. 'To teach him to trust nobody--not even his father!' coldly replied Sir Jake. Such bitter lessons may inculcate caution, or at least cunning, but we instinctively feel that, with the loss of faith from a child's heart, the glory of infancy has departed. The gloss has left the cherry; the bloom has vanished from the peach.

II

The tragedy is by no means confined to the nursery. Faith is the mainspring of the universe, the sheet-anchor of civilization. If it goes, everything goes. Even in the practical realms of politics, of commerce and international relationships, it is the one factor that holds all things together. The orgy of rearmament that has recently startled the world, crippling all its industries and economics, has been made necessary by the complete collapse of the faith of the nations in each other's pledges and treaties. When on the slightest provocation, statesmen renounce and repudiate their most solemn undertakings, faith is impossible and all peoples must prepare for the worst. Peace rests on faith, and, when the foundation is destroyed, the gracious fabric crumbles.

An eminent banker recently pointed out that all sound finance is built on faith. People run in and out of banks with money, money, money. But, except in a few isolated instances, the money is not real money. It is all paper--cheques, bills, notes--that, in itself, is worth less than its weight in old newspapers. But it becomes of equal value with the coin of the realm just so far as it represents the implicit faith of certain people in the promises and pledges of certain other people. The entire financial structure is built upon credit, trust, confidence, faith. So, for that matter, is the entire domestic structure. The home rests foursquare upon faith. Married life can only be saved from misery by the unhesitating and unswerving faith of bride and bridegroom in one another.

III

For this reason, the loss of faith, in any department of human experience of endeavour, is the most devastating loss to which mortals are ever subject. In a charming little poem, Francis Browne describes a band of pilgrims discussing the greatest misfortunes they had ever known. One speaks of a ship that has foundered with all his treasure; another of his lost fortune; a third of a fickle lover; and a fourth of a green, green grave.

But when their tales were done, there stood among them one,

A stranger seeming from all sorrow free:

'Sad losses have ye met, but mine is heavier yet,

For a believing heart hath gone from me.'

'Alas,' those pilgrims said, 'for the living and the dead,

For fortune's cruelty and love's sore cross,

For the wrecks by land and sea; but, howe'er it came to thee,

Thine, stranger, is life's last and heaviest loss.

It is the re-enactment, on a more vital and more tragic scale, of the loss that Harry Hardcastle suffered.

This being so, there is obviously nothing arbitrary or astonishing in the divine demand for faith as an indispensable condition of salvation. It is the most fitting and the most natural thing in the world: it is in harmony with the music of all the spheres.

A solicitor cannot save his client unless the client entrusts him with all the data: a doctor cannot save his patient unless the patient frankly confides to him all the symptoms and all the circumstances: a minister is helpless to advise his parishioner if he instinctively feels that his visitor, distrusting him, is revealing only what he wishes to reveal and concealing what he prefers to conceal.

There is, in short, nothing so paralysing to a would-be saviour as the absence of faith on the part of the person needing salvation. No man can save his brother-man unless his brother-man really and truly trusts him. Nor, of course, can Almighty God.

There are some things that even omnipotence cannot do. God cannot make two hills without a valley between them; and, by a law that is woven into the very web and woof of the universe He cannot save the man who withholds from Him his perfect confidence and trust. But, into the soul of the man who implicitly believes in Him, He pours a wealth of grace that is unsearchable, inexhaustible, unfathomable, unexplorable, and that lasts for evermore.

Chapter 2

Earth's Longest Day

At the very dawn of her nationhood, five kings led their united armies against Israel. The tyrannical confederacy was almost defeated, and, if only the light would hold, might be absolutely routed. And Joshua said in the sight of all Israel, Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the Valley of Ajalon! Nobody knows exactly what happened. A miracle of some kind was performed; the light held out bravely; and the ultimate triumph was overwhelming.

The very fact that a miracle was deemed necessary demonstrates the historic importance of the occasion. Few things in revelation are more striking than the divine frugality in the use of supernatural power. The miracles mentioned in the Old Testament average about one to each century recorded; indeed, there is one period of four hundred years with no miracle at all. When, therefore, we come upon one of these rarities--invariably introduced to set the seal of divine authority on a new institution or a new leader--the wonder if all the more arresting and all the more impressive.

I

There come times--serious times; critical times; pivotal times; times upon which destiny seems tremblingly to hang--when a man must re-adjust his relationship to the general scheme of things. He must assume control. Instead of being negative, he must be positive; instead of being languidly passive, he must be splendidly active; instead of acquiescing in the movements of his time, he must take charge of them. Under normal conditions, when everything is going smoothly, the rising and the setting of the sun are no concern of his. He may let the moon wax and wane as it will. But, in times of crisis and emergency, he must rise to the height of his sublime prerogatives. He must order things about. He must tell the sun when to set: he must shout his commands to the moon: he must regard the stars in their courses as his slaves and subordinates. Instead of being a cog in the machine, he must become the engineer.

By discovering radium, Pierre and Marie Curie gave a new complexion to civilization. What was their secret? They adopted as their motto the words: We take the sun! The sun, that is to say, was to be their servant and not their master; they would bend its powers to their purpose.

Carlyle can see nothing in our history, nor in any other, more notable than the spectacle of a young farmer, Oliver Cromwell by name, putting his horse in the stable and his plough in the shed, and setting out from his fields in Huntingdonshire to hurl the king from his throne, to dismiss the Parliament and to reconstitute the country on a new and better basis. He will put God in His right place, and the Bible in its right place, and the Church in its right place and the people in their right place. The time has come to assert himself.

II

Joshua's experience illustrates the Law of the Second Wind. We often regard ourselves as at the end of our resources when, as a matter of fact, our resources are scarcely tapped. Generally speaking, the strength of the day fits the length of the day. We pass from hour to hour, and, enjoying the experiences of life as they come, feel glad to be alive. But towards night the exhilaration wanes. We grow weary. And by the time that the day draws to its close, we are glad to go to rest, and, closing our eyes, to lose ourselves in slumber. This is very striking and suggestive--this matching of our physical energy to the length of the day. An hour or two before bedtime, and we are too much in love with life to desire sleep. An hour or two past bedtime, and the yawns and nods tell their own tale.

From early summer's dawn to late summer's dusk, Joshua and his men have fought without respite and possibly without refreshment. And now the sun is sinking! In the ordinary course of things they should have been too tired to drag one foot before the other. They should have been ready to drop where they stood and, on the bare earth, to sleep until the sun once more appeared. But this was one of those stupendous hours in which a man flings his weariness to the winds, and, as fresh as when the morning dawned, fights gallantly on.

I remember, with three other young ministers, spending a day in New Zealand on a miserably uncomfortable railway train. The journey occupied eighteen mortal hours; and, when we reached our destination late at night, we were too tired either to eat or to sleep. But, at that very moment, a fire broke out. It was the worst the city had ever seen; the whole place seemed ablaze. We rushed off to see the firemen fight the flames, standing in the crowd for hours, and then, the last tram having left, walking back to our suburban home in the early morning. Weariness was forgotten.

That law confronts us everywhere. However long we have fought, it is always possible to fight a little longer. However much we have done, we can always do a little more. Whatever the sacrifices we have made, a further gift is always within our power. Joshua's men were ready to faint and even fall; but, the great cause demanding a new effort, they deliberately doubled the length of their day and fought with the zest of boys at play

III

No man must allow his intellectual or educational limitations to stand in the way of consecrated service. Joshua, and the scribe who recorded the episode, lived long before Galileo and Copernicus. In their view the sun revolved about the earth. They thought of the sun as a kind of glorified Chinese lantern suspended from the skies to give this central globe a little light. But what did their ignorance matter?

In my student days I attended in London a prayer meeting at which two or three thousand people were present. A little old gentleman in the body of the hall rose to lead us to the Throne of Grace. His voice was clear as a bell; his diction was reverent and beautiful; he prayed like a man inspired. But all at once, his accents became tremulous with emotion and his utterance became confused. After struggling with himself for a second or two, he shook his head sorrowfully. 'Take the meaning, Lord,' he faltered, 'take the meaning!' and sat down. I have forgotten all the other prayers: I shall never forget his. Joshua's request, and the divine response, are placed on permanent record to show that great ignorance may subsist side by side with great spirituality.

IV

I like the man whose vision grows most clear, and whose faith grows most daring, as night closes in. Joshua's soul rose to its greatest grandeur when the sun was setting.

Harold Fortescue has a story of a boy who was very anxious to see God. He asked his father if it was possible: the father ridiculed the idea. The boy formed the acquaintance of an old fisherman who, every day, rowed up the river in his boat. The father asked the boy what the old man was like. 'He's very kind and very good,' answered the boy; 'the only strange thing about him is that, when the sun is setting, he just leans on his oars, looks into the sunset and the tears come into his eyes.' 'Oh,' replied the father, 'you'll be all right with him.' Next evening when the old man rested on his oars and stared into the glowing west, the boy broke the silence. 'Can you see God?' he asked. 'Sonny,' the old man answered, brokenly, 'it's getting that way now that I can see nothing else!'

V

'Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon!' The incident is given such prominence in order that we may realize that there are no limits to the triumph of the man who, trusting God implicitly, is prepared to defy all the bounds of fatigue. Modelling our behaviour on Joshua's, we may all enter into the thrilling experience that visited him. What seems like dusk shall be transformed into dawn; the sun that appears to be sinking shall shine bravely on: and the crisis that threatens us with disaster and defeat shall prove to be our finest hour.

Chapter 3

Born to the Lancet

A red-headed, freckle-faced, sturdily built youngster is driving his cows into the thatched farmhouse at Long Calderwood in Lanarkshire. Notwithstanding the evident seriousness of his countenance, a tell-tale twinkle lurks in the corner of his deep blue eye, and when he calls, either to the cows or to the workers on the farm, all the burrs of the moorlands seem to have been blown into his northern throat.

Johnnie was just the handy-boy about the place. He did the odd jobs; and, according to the programme of his parents, he was to go on doing odd jobs for the rest of his days. For, if the truth must be told, Johnnie was an unwelcome child. When his father and mother, who already had nine children, realized that Johnnie was on the way, they heaved a sigh. Surely nine was enough! The place was overcrowded and they were tired.

They agreed that, in the matter of a vocation, Johnnie must take pot-luck. He must make his own way in life. There could be no thought of a first-class education. Willie and Jimmie had already set their hearts on going to college. How it was to be financed, the distracted pair had no idea. The one thing that was crystal-clear was that they could not possibly indulge the luxury of having three scholars in the family.

Yet, as it turned out, Willie, Jimmie and Johnnie all became doctors, Johnnie the most illustrious of the three. How he managed it remains to this day one of the inscrutable mysteries of the profession. Of degrees and diplomas he knew nothing. Imbued with the simple but rugged faith that was common in Scotland in those days, he felt in his very bones that God had made him to be a surgeon; and, in defiance of all regulations and precedents, he became a surgeon by the simple process of practising surgery.

If James and Agnes Hunter, sitting in their armchairs beside the log fire in the big farm-kitchen at Long Calderwood, had made up their minds, on the birth of their ninth child, that nine should be the limit, they would have deprived the world of a surgeon who is honoured by the scientists of today as one of the greatest surgeons of all time, would have impoverished science to a degree that nobody can contemplate without a shudder, and would have intensified the agonies of millions of sufferers.

I

At the age of seventeen, Johnnie forsook his cows at Calderwood for cabinet-making in Glasgow. Three years later, hearing of Willie's progress in his profession, John pointed out to his brother that a good cabinet-maker should prove an excellent surgeon, and begged that he might be permitted to exercise his craftsmanship, not in the carving of furniture, but in the dissection of human bodies in his brother's anatomical school.

Recognizing the force of the argument, and acceding to Johnnie's audacious request, William soon became convinced that the ambitious youngster had a natural flair for all kinds of novel experiments on the human frame. John became extremely popular with everybody on the premises. He acquired special renown for the skill with which he beat down the prices of the resurrection men, obtaining the ghastly trophies of their nocturnal raids on the silent churchyards at prices at which such ghoulish treasure had never been obtained before.

When it became clear to William that the youthful cabinet-maker was, in reality, a born surgeon, he advised John to pursue his professional studies along more orthodox lines. With a wry face, the youth consented, and at the age of twenty-seven went up to Oxford. But, after a couple of months, he abandoned the academic project as just so much tomfoolery. 'How,' he demanded, 'will a headful of Greek roots and Latin conjugations help me to operate for popliteal anuerism?'

A few years later, when he was told that Jesse Foot had sneered at his ignorance of the dead languages, he retorted that he might not know much about dead languages, but he could teach things about dead bodies that Jesse Foot had never learned in any language, living or dead.

Always somewhat brusque and perhaps a trifle unmannerly, John Hunter lived to become the most eminent surgeon of his day. He was fifty-five when he bought the pretentious mansions in Leicester Square which, because of the array of splendid equipages always waiting near his doors, earned for him the nickname of The Golden Calf of Leicester Square.

II

In his excellent biography of Hunter, Mr. Ernest A. Gray stresses the consistently practical side of the great man's work. He always sniffed at abstract theories. If, in discussing a case with another surgeon, his companion said that he thought that this, that or the other might be done, Hunter would snort: 'Why think? Let's try it!' He kept a huge menagerie of animals, birds, reptiles and fishes, and obtained the right to experiment upon the creatures in the various parks, shows, gardens and zoos. In testing the qualities of certain drugs, he poisoned thousands of specimens, but he gained the knowledge for which his hungry mind was groping.

This passion for practical experiment involved him in tragedy. Because of it, he was unable, for many years, to entertain any thought of romance. In his researches into the incidence of a loathsome disease with which he would not dream of infecting anybody else, he used himself as a guinea-pig, and, as a consequence, had to relinquish all hopes of marriage. At the age of forty-three, however, it was deemed safe to remove the ban, and he was happily united with Anne Home, the lyrical poetess who gave us 'The Flowers of the Forest' and 'My Mother bids me bind my Hair.'

It seemed like the wedding of granite and moss. When Anne invited to her drawing room some of the musical, literary and artistic figures of the world to which she belonged, John would listen to the conversation until he was bored beyond endurance, and then, muttering that it was 'all blawfrum,' would suddenly forsake the room.

Anne's portrait, painted by Masquerier, which matches John's, painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds, shows her to have been a remarkably beautiful woman, and, to the last day of his life he was inordinately proud of her.

III

He died very suddenly at the age of sixty-five, at the very moment at which, on the other side of the Channel, the unhappy Marie Antoinette was being rushed to the guillotine. It was the comfort of his maturer years that, despite all obstacles that had beset his path, he had fulfilled the destiny and done the work for which, he firmly believed, he had been divinely appointed.

On that fatal day he was participating in a heated professional argument with his colleagues when, all at once, he slumped forward and was gone. He was buried in the vaults of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, and, for a long time, the exact place of his sepulture was unknown. Sixty-six years later, however, Frank Buckland, who always regarded Hunter as a peerless prince of the scientific realm, located the coffin, and, with every pomp and circumstance, it was reinterred in Westminster Abbey.

With his passion for ocular demonstration and practical experiment, it was natural that John Hunter should have accumulated a colossal and valuable collection of specimens. Within half a century of his death, Parliament voted about fifty thousand pounds for the acquisition and accommodation of his museum. Mr. Gray claims that it was Hunter who lifted surgery to a science. As long as the world lasts, he says, the burly shadow of John Hunter will fall athwart every operating theatre, every hospital ward and every biological laboratory. It is a noble tribute, nobly earned.

Chapter 4

The Instinct of Saviourhood

Humanity is distinguished by an unconquerable instinct for saviourhood. Is there a man living, or a woman, who has not at some time yearned for the opportunity of saving the life of a fellow-man? We read of the awards conferred by the Royal Humane Society on those who, at the hazard of their own lives, have rescued others from fire or from flood; and we instinctively feel that life would be invested with a new luster if we ourselves were presented with so sublime an opportunity and were able to embrace it.

That feeling itself is significant. Carlyle has shown that hero-worship is the protoplasmic germ from which heroism evolves. The instinct of saviourhood impels many of our young men to become doctors and many of our young women to become nurses.

Few of us actually realize our secret ambition. The chance never comes; or, if it comes, our best efforts prove abortive. In the year 1741, an Irishman named Connell was sentenced to death at Northampton. Philip Doddridge, who represents in his own person the natural link between the age of the Puritans that was passing and the age of the Great Revivalists that was just dawning, happened to be in the full flood of his historic ministry at Northampton at the time.

At great trouble and expense, Dr. Doddridge instituted a rigid scrutiny into the case, and proved, beyond the possibility of a doubt, that Connell was a hundred and twenty miles away when the crime was committed. The course of judgment could not, however, be deflected. Connell was asked if he had any request to make before setting out for the gallows. He answered that he desired the procession to pause in front of the house of Dr. Philip Doddridge, that he might kneel on the minister's doorstep and breathe a benediction on the man who had tried to save him.

'Dr. Doddridge,' he cried, when the procession halted, 'every hair of my head thanks you; every throb of my heart thanks you; every drop of my blood thanks you! You did your best to save me, but you couldn't!' Dr. Doddridge's case is typical of millions. The world is largely populated by aspiring and potential saviours.

The thought is suggested by the fact that I hope on Sunday to preach on the text: He saved others; Himself He could not save. I seem to see four men.

I

There is the Man Who Can Save neither Himself nor Others. This morning's paper tells of an aeroplane, with forty-six people on board, missing over the Gulf of Mexico. It is assumed that the pilot lost his bearings, and, after circling round in a desperate effort to find a landmark, at last plunged into the sea.

It is easy to conjure up the pilot's sensations. How passionately he must have coveted the tribute that the priests and the scribes and the elders paid to Jesus! He saved others; Himself He could not save! He would gladly have died a thousand deaths if only, by the thousand deaths, he could have saved his passengers! But he can save neither himself nor them. It is the melancholy fate of all captains who go down with their ships, of all officers who die in battle with their men; of all leaders who, like O'Hara Burke and Captain Scott, perish with the expeditions that they led.

It reminds us of Paul. 'I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh.' But it cannot be. The travail of saviourhood is there; but, as in the case of Dr. Doddridge, it is doomed to disappointment and frustration.

II

There is the Man Who Can Save Himself but not Others. There are few other sons of whom Australia is more proud than of Sir Douglas Mawson. But there is one experience of which Sir Douglas hates to speak or even think. With Lieutenant Ninnis and Dr. Mertz, Sir Douglas was making his way across the vast Antarctic wastes when the frozen snow beneath them suddenly collapsed and his two companions simply vanished in the frightful chasm that had opened. Faced by the hourly peril of starvation, Dr. Mawson struggled on for thirty terrible days, and thirty still more terrible nights, by himself. The loneliness was maddening; the dangers terrifying; but the climax of his agony was summed up in the reflection that, though he himself had been saved, he had been unable to save his comrades.

In the course of his conversation with the sisters of the Palace Beautiful, Christian was asked a question that, despite his pleasant situation, reduced him to abject wretchedness. It was Charity who made the painful thrust.

'Art thou a married man?' she inquired. Christian instantly detected her meaning. Why was he saving himself--but not others?

Christian wept and declared that he would gladly have brought his wife and children on pilgrimage; but, he explained, he was to them as one that mocked; they simply would not listen to his earnest entreaties.

Had he prayed for them and pleaded with them? Charity pressed. 'Over and over and over again!' replied the broken- hearted man. 'They could see by my countenance, by my tears and by my trembling that I was agonizingly concerned about the judgment awaiting them; but it was all of no use; they would not come!'

So the poor pilgrim was found among those who, saving themselves, could do nothing for others.

III

There is the Man Who Saves Himself by Saving Others. It often happens.

Numb and weary on the mountains, wouldst thou sleep amidst the snow?

Chafe that frozen form beside thee, and, together, both shall glow.

Some little time ago, a mountain-guide returned alone from an expedition that had set out to scale one of the snow-capped and sky-piercing summits of New Zealand. Asked at the inquest to account for his solitary survival, he explained, with obvious emotion, that, when he found all the climbers sick and exhausted, he worked so frantically in chafing their limbs, moving them from place to place and ministering to their countless needs that his own blood was kept pulsing through his veins by his activity. Otherwise, he declared, he could never have lived to make the descent.

It is a great thing to save yourself by your efforts on behalf of others. I often wonder whether I myself would have maintained through all the years my interest in spiritual things and my love for God, His Word, His House and His people had I never been called to spend my life in endeavouring to lead others into the kingdom.

IV

And then there is the Man Who Can Save Others but Cannot Save Himself. At Glenalmond School, in Scotland, there stands a memorial to Alexander Cumine Russell. Soon after he left Glenalmond School, Russell became an officer in the Highland Light Infantry. His regiment was on the Birkenhead when she sank. The women were ordered to the boats. When one of these boats was filled, the captain placed Russell in charge of it with orders to allow nobody else to enter it. Just as the boat was pulling away from the doomed ship, however, a man who had been struggling in the water grasped an oar and pulled himself to a position in which everybody could see his face. A piercing scream rent the air. 'Save him! He's my husband!' a woman cried. Without a second's hesitation, Alexander Cumine Russell leapt overboard; helped the man into the boat and was seen no more. He had joined that illustrious company of which Jesus is the head, the company of those who, saving others, are unable to save themselves.

V

But who are these men who raise this strange cry on the gloomy slopes of Calvary? It is the cry of the chief priests and the scribes and the elders, the very men who had instigated and engineered the crucifixion! He saved others, Himself He could not save! they cried. In two ways they were right and in two ways they were wrong.

They were certainly right in saying that He saved others; although why, knowing His skill as a Saviour, they should wish to destroy Him, is beyond human comprehension. That He saved others was obvious to everybody. There were those in the crowd who gazed upon the Cross with eyes that He had given them. There were those who listened to the tumult with ears that He had opened. There were those mingling with the throng, who, not so long ago, were forbidden to mingle with throngs; they had been leprous and unclean. The daughter of Jairus may have been there; or the son of the widow of Nain; or Lazarus of Bethany--those whom He had raised from the dead.

But if they were right in saying that He saved others, they were wrong in saying that Himself He could not save. Of course He could! It is the old tussle between the material and the spiritual. 'I cannot help it!' cries a distracted woman, as she bursts into a blazing house to save her child. She can; anybody can stand inactive; but some force within her, mightier than her muscles, defies her control. 'I cannot help myself,' exclaims a man who, conscious of his limitations as a swimmer, nevertheless plunges into the boiling surf to save his boy. He can; it requires but little strength to remain upon the beach. But the instinct of saviourhood is stronger than the instinct of self-preservation. The spiritual being infinitely mightier than the physical, he cannot hold back; he must go!

Similarly, Jesus could have saved Himself from the Cross! I have power to lay down my life and I have power to take it again. He could have answered the taunt of his enemies by shaking Himself free of the Cross and all its ghastly appurtenances, as a dog shakes the water from his coat when he leaps from the stream to the bank. He could have done; yet He could not; for a mightier force prevented it. We sometimes sing that 'His love is as great as His power and neither knows measure nor end.' It is an understatement. His love is not only as great as His power; it is greater; that is why, having saved others, He cannot save Himself.

They were right in declaring that He saved others! For see! Here, at the end of my Bible, I catch a vision of the shining host of the redeemed, a multitude that no man can number! He saved them, every one!

They were wrong in saying that He cannot save Himself! For see, in this self-same vision, I see Him, the Lamb upon the Throne, crowned with everlasting honour. Neither in the heavens above nor on the earth beneath, is there anyone more triumphantly saved than He! Having saved others, He has gloriously saved Himself! Hallelujah, what a Saviour!

Chapter 5

A Four-Cornered Romance

For some inscrutable reason, my truant mind reverts today to one of the strangest love-stories of all time. It belongs to the days of the Great Plague and the Great Fire. And, although four people are involved, no sinister element of any kind mars the beauty of the graceful record.

The four principals are John Evelyn, the famous diarist, Mary Browne, Margaret Blagge and Sidney Godolphin.

I

It all began when Evelyn, a lively youth in his twenties, visited France and fell violently in love with a dainty little damsel of twelve.

Mary Browne was the daughter of Sir Richard Browne, the British Resident at the French Court. She married Evelyn in Paris in 1647, he being then twenty-seven and she fourteen.

With shrewd diplomacy, Evelyn discovered a happy way of ingratiating himself in the affectionate esteem of his bride and her people.

They had an obsession. They were everlastingly talking about the charms of Sayes Court at Deptford, the beautiful estate that had once been the proud home of the Browne family but which had been wrenched from them by sequestration.

Evelyn went to England; bought Sayes Court; presented it to his excited little wife; and it was their happy home for forty years.

Evelyn was a good man in an age in which it was not easy to be good. Mr. Arthur Ponsonby says that every man he met was the better for knowing him.

After nearly sixty years of perfect wedded life, he died first, at the age of eighty-six, and she, in her will, begged to be buried by her husband's side, 'his care of my education having been such, to the last moment of his life, as might become a father, a lover, a friend and a husband for tenderness, affection and fidelity'.

John Evelyn had been married to Mary for twenty-one years, and had become the father of nine children, when he met Margaret Blagge.

II

Oddly enough, it was his wife who, lauding her to the skies, introduced him to her. A good woman herself, Mrs. Evelyn was fascinated by the exquisite saintliness of Margaret's life. Like a bright star in a dark sky, Margaret shone with extraordinary radiance as a Maid of Honour at the dissolute Court of Charles the Second. There were saints, we are told, in Nero's household; and there was at least one saint of peerless purity and sweetness in the palace of the profligate English king.

In arguing that, like a lily growing in a coalmine, a real Christian can be a Christian anywhere, Bishop Alexander points to the fact that, amidst a coarse tangle of obscenities and profanities, Margaret Blagge literally dwelt in the secret place of the Most High, abode under the Shadow of the Almighty and kept herself unspotted from the world.

Evelyn and Margaret felt themselves powerfully attracted to each other. Mr. W. G. Hiscock has told the story of their strange friendship. It reached its climax when he presented her with a picture of an altar with a heart in a circle of stars. 'Be this the symbol of inviolable friendship,' it is inscribed. She endorsed the sentiment by appending the words, 'Be it so. M. B.'

'Do you know what you have done?' he asked her. 'You have brought yourself into bonds you can never untie whilst you live. This altar is the marriage of souls, the sign of a friendship that is beyond all relations of flesh and blood.'

They met often, wrote to each other frequently and exchanged gifts which were gladly accepted and reverently treasured. Evelyn often assured her that he could never think of her without feeling a sense of revulsion from the corruption of the world; so much that passes for love, he adds, is no real love at all.

III

Three things remain to be said. Mrs. Evelyn never for a moment regretted having brought Margaret into her husband's life. She always felt that John's character was immensely ennobled and enriched by the friendship.

Even in a court that was notorious for ugly gossip, Margaret's reputation for perfect innocence remained untarnished. She held her place, year after year, as a silent rebuke to licentiousness and a constant incentive to goodness. 'How dim the tapers burned when she left the palace!' it was said.

She left to marry Sidney Godolphin, one of the most renowned of the Stuart diplomats. Her husband was fully aware of her friendship for Evelyn and respected it. A year after her marriage, she died in giving birth to their child.

When the distracted husband realized that Margaret was sinking, he at once sent post-haste for Evelyn, earnestly craving the benefit of his presence, his sympathy and his prayers.

Chapter 6

The Priest of the Street Corner

Those of us who enjoy delightful correspondence with friends in the United States have noticed that the government of that country not long ago issued a new postage stamp in honour of the newsboy. It depicts a newsboy busily plying his trade, whilst, to the right of the design, a torch burns brightly as a symbol of the illumination of which the youngster is the modest instrument. For the newsboy is the Priest of the Street Corner, mediating, as priests will, between the Individual and the Universal.

I

The newsboy is in business in a big way. He deals in immensities. A superficial observer may say that he is selling paper. He is doing nothing of the kind. He is no more selling paper than any other tradesman is selling paper who finds it convenient to wrap his wares in that protective covering

The newsboy is selling news. It is news and not paper that his customers want, and, in the end, they think so little of the paper that they toss it aside as soon as they have absorbed the news that it contains.

The actual paper dispensed by the newsboy counts for less than the paper sold by a bookseller. The man who buys a book buys it for the sake of its contents; but, having devoured those contents, he likes to keep the book on his shelves, partly for consultation and partly for dis- play. But the paper sold by the newsboy counts for nothing; it is the news, and the news alone, that matters. He who thinks of a newsboy as merely a vendor of paper fails to recognized both the dignity of the boy's office and his vital niche in the eternal scheme of things.

A newsboy deals, not in paper, but in earthquakes, wars and revolutions; in fires, famines and pestilences; in assassinations, abdications and coronations; with a few test matches, horse-races, football finals and similar trifles thrown in for good measure. Other tradesmen deal in coats, coals and cabbages; but the newsboy sells you cathedrals and palaces; he offers you the house of parliament and the stock exchange; his stock-in-trade includes armies, navies and air-squadrons; births, marriages and deaths; he holds in his hand all earth's most imposing structures, all the sensations of science and all the ships that sail the seven seas.

II

The point is that the whole world is wrapped up in every paper that the newsboy sells. The city urchin who weaves his way among the traffic to effect a sale, and the country lad who sets out from the general store to carry the paper to the homestead over the hill, are both like Atlas; they bear the entire globe with them.

Watching these boys--the one scurrying to and fro among the bustling pedestrians, and the other trudging slowly along the dusty track through the bush--a natural question springs to mind. Why, among people of all kinds and classes, is there such a general demand for these papers? Why, for example, do the dwellers in the smallest and most remote settlement want the news? Why cannot Bulman's Gully be satisfied with Bulman's Gully? Why cannot Horseshoe Creek be content with Horseshoe Creek? Why should they trouble their heads about the great crowded world beyond?

III

It is not idle curiosity. It is the expression of a passion that, like all our master passions, is woven into the very texture of our humanity.

A man may live in a hut or a humpy at the back of the bush, or in some crazy shelter away at the other end of nowhere, but he will fret for a vista of far-off continents and long for the romance of ten thousand distant islands. Each man wants all men. Be he old or young, rich or poor, he wants the whole wide world, and his cosmopolitan appetite expresses itself in his quenchless thirst for news.

This ravenous craving is one of the sublimest things about us. It is woven into the very warp and woof of our humanity. It is vital, basic, fundamental. In his classical narrative of the emotion and excitement amidst which he at last found Livingstone, Stanley says that the one thing for which the lost explorer clamoured was the news. Stanley urged him to read his letters.

"No, no," cried Livingstone, "the letters can wait a few minutes longer. Tell me the news! How's the world getting on?" Then, buried in that dense African jungle, the two men sat for hours, whilst the one told the other of the countless transformations that had overtaken the world whilst the lost man had been buried in the dark continent. Livingstone became a changed man. Fresh tides of vitality rushed into his frame; his haggard face shone with enthusiasm. "You have brought me new life!" he murmured repeatedly.

The incident is extraordinarily revealing. A man wants the world; a geographical fragment will not satisfy him; a hemisphere is not enough. Stanley poured the world into the starved soul of Livingstone, and every fibre of his being tingled with new animation.

A man's hunger for the world is a pulsation of the infinity which stirs within him. "Thou hast set the world in their hearts," declares an ancient prophet. The wares in which the newsboy deals are the very commodities that the human spirit most passionately craves.

Man was made in the imago of the Most High. It is small wonder, therefore, that, fashioned in that divine similitude, he should share his Maker's all-embracing passion.

God loves the world. That is why man loves the world. And that man is most God-like who, loving the world with all his heart, is prepared to make any sacrifice for its salvation and well-being.

Chapter 7

Grilled Mice at Midnight

It gives a man a nasty turn when, seated at dinner with his wife and family, he hears a crunching sound near his feet and, on peeping under the table, discovers that his pet jackal has just polished off his favourite guinea pig.

Tragedies of this kind were of fairly frequent occurrence in the establishment of Frank Buckland.

The Buckland family provides one of the rare instances in which a father and son both became famous along different lines of research. Anybody who cares to consult an encyclopedia will find William Buckland, the father, listed as an eminent geologist, and Francis Buckland, the son, figuring as a no less notable zoologist.

The father, who was Dean of Westminster, revelled in stones and strata, the inanimate products of prehistoric ages. The son, who became Inspector of British Fisheries, delighted in all the finned and furred and feathered things that flapped or fluttered or flew, ran or leaped or wriggled, in the world immediately around him.

Whilst his father explored a realm that was as dead as the dodo, Frank loved everything that lived, and could never see too much of it.

I

The boy was born as Oxford in 1826. He soon betrayed an extraordinary understanding of animals, large or small, wild or tame, native or foreign. Alive or dead, it mattered little; they all belonged to him.

If alive, he adopted them: if dead he devoured them; and if they were both dead and buried, he exhumed them. When his grave a reverend seniors protested against his eating such nasty fare, he asked them how they knew it was nasty if they had never tried it.

When he slept with other boys in camp or dormitory, he would awaken his companions at midnight, and, their nostrils having been assailed by a savoury aroma, he would regale them with grilled mice, piping hot, which, he assured them, were far tastier than larks.

Squirrel pie, roast viper and frogs in batter were often included in his menu. And, even in the days of his renown, he would entertain his guests with elephant soup, giraffe steak, panther chops or a tasty dish of alligator. He sometimes admitted that, the creature having reposed for too long in its grave, the meal was not quite as toothsome as he had hoped.

His passion for wild things often involved him in serious embarrassment. His schoolfellows eyes suspiciously the bulging pocket from which the head of a snake furtively darted. Unsympathetic masters, ushers and prefects objected to his stuffing his desk with cats, hares and weasels which, though long dead, made their presence unmistakably perceptible.

He surmounted this difficulty by ingratiating himself in the affections of the bell-ringer at the church, who allowed him to take his deceased friends to the top of the tower and leave them there until the bleached skeletons could be added, without odoriferous offence, to his museum.

II

No rose without a thorn, his charming wife used to sigh. Since she had married the most lovable man in the world, she supposed that she could not resent having married a menagerie into the bargain.

His bear and his monkeys got him into tons of trouble. And when the postman entered Albany-street, bearing all kinds of mysterious packages for No. 37, the neighbours discreetly closed their windows and shut their doors, keeping them securely fastened until Mr. Buckland's mail had been safely delivered.

With his predilection for anatomy, and his insistence on holding postmortem examinations on all the dead things round the place, his choice of a profession was a foregone conclusion. He became house surgeon at St. George's Hospital at the age of twenty-six.

One of the most fateful moments of his life was the moment in which he became an angler. He took to fishing as some men take to drinking and soon became gloriously intoxicated. He could talk of nothing but lines and hooks and casts and flies. He often declared that the greatest thrill of his life was the landing of his first salmon.

The inevitable happened: he fell in love with the fish. He studied their haunts and habits so intently that he came to fell as if, in some earlier incarnation, he had himself been a salmon and had retained a vivid memory of a salmon's sensations, difficulties and requirements.

III

It was this that led to his famous invention of the water-ladder, a contrivance by means of which the fish could climb the weir and pass on upstream. When the pontiffs ridiculed his suggestion, his reply was unanswerable. 'Build an inexpensive ladder,' he pleaded, 'and leave the ultimate decision to the salmon.' In the result, the salmon voted unanimously for Buckland.

His investigations were often beset by peril. In taking from the cobra's cage at the zoo a rat that had been bitten by the reptile, the venom passed through a scratch on his finger into his own system. Before he left the gardens, he was staggering like a drunken men: he hovered for some time at death's door.

On another occasion, he maddened a viper until it bit savagely at the glass slide that he held in his hand. Examining the resultant drops under a powerful microscope, he said that their corruscations and crystallizations reminded him of the flashing of the aurora borealis.

He died at fifty-four, confident that his most exciting discoveries were yet to be made. 'God is so very good to the little fishes,' he said, 'that He will never allow their inspector to suffer shipwreck at the last.' Greatly beloved, a monument to his memory is still one of the adornments at South Kensington.

Chapter 8

The Poker Face

In the lounge of his hotel, in the saloon of a ship or in a compartment of a railway train, one sometimes sees a man, engrossed in a game of cards, looking for all the world like a classical bust of Julius Caesar. His countenance is utterly destitute of all expression; never a gleam of excitement, never a glimmer of satisfaction, never a shadow of disappointment.

Such a man is fighting, and fighting desperately, against Nature. Nature, if she had her way, would brighten his face with gladness when things were going well, and would pucker his brows with annoyance when the luck turned against him. But, for reasons of his own, he refuses Nature a free hand.

I

The human face is designed to act as the shop-window of the human soul. It is not, of course, invariably reliable. It by no means follows, because the countenance of a Garrick, an Irving or an Olivier is wreathed in smiles, that the man himself is at that moment radiantly happy, nor, because his features are steeped in gloom, that he is in the depths of despair. The actor is a professional window-dresser, and is giving an exhibition of his craft; that is all. Every day of our lives, in an amateurish kind of way, we each do something of the kind.

Nor does it follow, because there is nothing in the window, that the tradesman's stocks are exhausted. Therein lies the philosophy of the poker-face. The player puts nothing in the window in order to keep you guessing as to the nature of his stock. A poker-face is an artificial face, an unnatural face, a mere mask. It frustrates the very purpose for which faces were created.

II

'My face is my fortune!' boasted the milkmaid in the nursery rhyme. Her proud declaration is, in reality, an understatement.

A single face, differing in general outline from all other faces, is itself a fascinating entertainment; it is capable of such an infinite variety of aspects. Each expression, as it momentarily appears and disappears, is composed of a certain admixture of emotional ingredients. In each such admixture, the component parts are mingled in proportions suggested by the immediate circumstances; and that same admixture, in those identical proportions, is never likely to recur.

The face is a kaleidoscope; the variety of the passions that play upon it is extremely complicated; the same mosaic never appears a second time.

Herein lies the subtle secret of all superlative art. Take the drama, for example. A first-class actor can not only mimic a man, he can mimic any man in any mood. Diderot says that he once saw Garrick pass his head between two screens and, in the space of a few seconds, the expression of his countenance ranged from made joy to moderate joy, from this to tranquillity, from tranquillity to surprise, from surprise to astonishment, from astonishment to gloom, from gloom to utter dejection, from dejection to fear, from fear to horror, from horror to despair; and then re-ascend from the depths of misery to the wild delight with which he started.

The difference between a first-class portrait painter and a second-class one is that the former gives us the expression; the latter gives only the face. Anyone can paint a poker-face.

The poker-face represents the legend of Pygmalion in reverse. In the graceful myth, the statue was transformed into a human. The poker-face changes the human into a statue.

The beasts of the field and the fowls of the air display, in their hairy or feathered faces, little or no evidence of inward emotion. The anthropoid apes occasionally display symptoms of rage and of one or two other basic and elementary sensations; but that is as far as it goes. We humans, however, are built on a very different plan.

We are endowed with faces so sensitive and pliable that, like the seismograph, they reflect and register the slightest internal tremor or disturbance. There is an appropriate outward expression for each inward agitation; and any attempt to prevent the facial mechanism from fulfilling its proper function is a stultification of natural law and a defiance of one of the primary principles of human existence.

The forces that build up the delicate structure of this masterpiece of organism have their roots firmly struck into a hoary antiquity. History has a hand in the shaping of our faces. Thus we speak of the Grecian face, the Asiatic face, the African face, and many anthropologists declare that there is a distinct difference between the type of face that prevailed before the Christian era and the type that has evolved since.

Under normal conditions, the face, of whatever type, becomes the automatic revelation of the personal character. Mendelssohn, the eminent London photographer, always insisted that no fretful, discontented and ill-natured woman can remain for long really beautiful.

III

Nobody knows how Art became possessed of the traditional face of Christ; no portrait was ever painted. Its beauty is, however, a recognition of the fact that, as Paul tells us, the glory of God is manifested in the face of Jesus. The conventional descriptions of heaven may not appeal to the average man; but, as Browning makes David exclaim to Saul:

. . . It shall be

A Face like my face that receives thee; a Man like to me,

Thou shalt love and be loved by, forever; a Hand like this hand

Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee! See the Christ stand!

In the invisible world, as in the visible, a human Face represents revelation's final word.

Chapter 9

Green Pastures and Still Waters

It was a Sunday evening! The rain was lashing down in torrents. John Broadbanks and I were camping away back in the bush at Piripiki Gorge, in New Zealand. There was nothing for it but to remain within our tent. We chatted for a while and then determined to make an early night of it. Before turning in, we each drew from our baggage tiny vest-pocket editions of portions of the Scriptures. Automatically, each glanced at the booklet in the hand of the other.

'Mine is the Gospel according to St. John,' I volunteered. 'I don't know why; but I always take John with me on holiday; and somehow the lovely stories that it contains become, to me, part and part of the holiday scene. I suppose it's just a matter of habit.'

'That's interesting!' John replied, after a characteristic pause. 'I always bring the Psalter. I find that if I read any other book on holiday, my mind starts sermonizing at once. But I find the Psalms devotional without being provocative. And, like you with John, I find the music of the Psalms mingling with the songs of the bush birds and the murmur of the waves.'

This all happened many years ago, but, to this day, I seldom read a Psalm without a thought of John's remarks that wet night in the bush.

I

Breathes there a man with soul so dead that he experiences no little trills of pleasant sensation and cherished recollection whenever some familiar phrase from the Book of Psalms falls upon the ear or rushes to his memory?

The Psalms are so exquisitely simple, so artlessly natural and so palpitatingly human that one feels on reading them as a man might feel when, on idly turning the pages of an album, he suddenly confronts his own photograph.

II

In the course of his deathless allegory, John Bunyan tells us that, when Faithful passed through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, he was terrorized by no hideous demons, and heard no screeching goblins, because he was so happily employed in crooning to himself the Psalms. Yet, if we are asked to account, in precise terms, for the popularity of this particular book, it would be difficult to formulate a satisfactory reply.

It has no great narrative value, like the historical books, assisting us to an appreciation of ancient happenings; it has no plot like those in Esther, Ruth and Jonah; it has no profound theological significance like the gospels and epistles; it does not dazzle us with blinding apocalyptic visions such as we find in Daniel and the Revelation.

The fact is that the Palace Beautiful has its Archives: they are represented by the books of Samuel, Kings and Chronicles. It has its Study in the masterpieces of John, Paul and the other apostles. It has its Observatory in its glorious company of seers and of prophets. But it has also its private chapel, its inner shrine, its Sanctum Sanctorum, and that charming retreat is popularly known as the Book of Psalms.

For this reason, a delicious atmosphere of peace broods over these melodious pages. In Quaker-like quiet, the Psalms have stood aloof from the strident shouts of mortal conflict and from the harsh battle-cries of the controversialists.

Like a leafy glade in a shady wood, they offer a sabbatic hush and a refreshing calm to the heated, and perhaps stricken, combatants from more martial fields.

III

Not by any means that the book has no evidential value. 'John Bright once told me,' said Mr. Gladstone, 'that he would be content to stake upon the Book of Psalms the entire question of the existence of a divine revelation.'

Turning from the abstract to the concrete, history has lent to the songs of this magnetic volume associations that have incalculably deepened the veneration and inflamed the affection in which we should in any case have held them. To the music of the sixty-eighth psalm, for example, the Crusaders marched as they prosecuted their long campaign to deliver the Holy Sepulchre from the hands of the Infidel. It was the battle-cry of the Huguenots: and, not once but many times, its stirring strains rallied the drooping spirits of the Puritans.

In the titanic fight for the emancipation of the slaves, too, the Psalms played their part bravely; and there are few more pathetic and beautiful records in the annals of that memorable campaign than the simple entry in the diary of Wilberforce: 'Walked from Hyde Park Corner repeating the one hundred and nineteenth psalm with infinite comfort.' It was from that secret source that he gathered strength for the stupendous struggle which culminated in his triumphant death in the hour of victory.

IV

The man who marches on his pilgrimage to the music of the Psalms enjoys not only the purest of poesy, but the condensed essence of history and the sublimest unfoldings of prophecy. Take, for example, the twenty-second, twenty-third and twenty-fourth. The twenty-second is the Psalm of the Cross; the twenty-third is the Psalm of the Crook; the twenty-fourth is the Psalm of the Crown. In the twenty-second, he beholds the Christ of Calvary; in the twenty-third, he sees the Saviour as the Good Shepherd; and, in the twenty-fourth, he is dazzled by the vision of his Redeemer's coronation.

Jerome declares that the shepherds, the vine-dressers, the sowers, the ploughmen and the reapers of Palestine accomplished their daily task softly humming to themselves the Psalms of David; and nothing is more certain than that those same haunting melodies will lighten the burdens of the last generation of the sons of men.

There's lots of music in the Psalms,

Those dear, sweet Psalms of old,

With visions bright of lands of light,

And shining streets of gold;

I hear them ringing, singing still,

In memory, soft and clear,

'Such pity as a father hath

Unto his children dear.'

They seem to sing for evermore

Of better, sweeter days,

When the lilies of the love of God

Bloomed white in all earth's ways;

And still I hear the solemn strains

In the quaint old meeting flow,

'O greatly blest the people are

The joyful sound that know.'

For thirty centuries these lilting psalms have dispelled men's doubts, illumined their gloom, wiped away their bitterest tears and revived their dearest hopes. They have, as Baldwin Brown finely puts it, furnished the bridal hymns, the battle-songs, the pilgrim marches, the penitential prayers and the public praises of every nation in Christendom since Christendom was born.

They have rolled through the din of every battle and have pealed through the scream of every storm. They have crossed the ocean with the Mayflower pilgrims; and have inspired the pioneers and pathfinders in all their gallant quests by land and sea.

In palace halls, by happy hearths, in squalid attics, in pauper wards, in prison cells, in crowded sanctuaries, in lonely deserts; everywhere these psalms have uttered humanity's moan of contrition, its song of triumph, its passionate plaints and its most fervent supplications.

In our own time, the psalms have figured prominently amidst the splendours of a royal wedding. For, when Her Majesty the Queen was preparing for her bridal appearance in the Abbey, she specially asked that a metrical psalm should be used--

The Lord's my Shepherd, I'll not want:

He makes me down to lie

In pastures green; He leadeth me

The quiet waters by.

And the Queen-Mother, delighted at her daughter's request, begged that it might be sung to the tune of Crimond, made familiar to her in her Scottish girlhood.

And so I turn afresh to the book that has wiped the tears from so many eyes and set so many lips singing. And, as I do so, I admire across the long, long years, the spiritual perspicacity that led my old friend to make it the companion of his holiday hours in the days of auld lang syne.

Part III

Chapter 1

The Father of the Man

In one of the most inspired moments Wordsworth declared that the child is the father of the man. The laureate's epigram has its practical implications.

If maturity can imbibe all that infancy can impart, the golden age of which the seers of the ages have dreamed may not be as remote as we sometimes fancy. The fresh and sparkling-eyed youngster has much that he can teach his prosaic and blasé senior.

Sir John Kirk, the eminent naturalist, once declared that, if he had his way, a little child should be always available in the heart of London, perhaps somewhere in the precincts of Westminster Abby or St. Paul's Cathedral, and no man should be allowed to contest a seat in Parliament, or become a candidate for any public office, until he had spent at least a day with the child and had passed an examination in his novel methods of thought, feeling and expression.

The glory of childhood lies in the fact that it sees things whole; its world has no hemisphere and no frontiers. The realm of Romance and the realm of Reality merge naturally and blend easily. This, of course, is in keeping with the eternal fitness of things; for the division of the globe into hemispheres and sections is as arbitrary and artificial as anything on the planet.

To a child there is no such thing as Fact and no such thing as Fancy. Jack the Giant Killer is, to him--as I remember once writing--as real as Julius Caesar; he is as sure of the Fairy Godmother as of Queen Victoria; the Enchanted Castle falls into the same category as the Buckingham Palace. Chesterton has an essay, running into forty pages, in which he lashes the stupidity of unimaginative adults for their failure to appreciate the charms of Fairyland.

Chesterton extols the genius of childhood in recognizing the inherent beauty of a story, whether its plots happens to be laid in Fairyland or in Bethnal Green. Let grown-up people sneer as they will, Fairyland remains, Chesterton maintains, the sunny country of common sense. More than anything else, it prepares the mind for that subtle element of mystery that lurks everywhere in life and for the inexorable chain of causes and consequences that, day by day, confronts us at every turn.

St. Chrysostom thought that the preeminent charm of childhood lay in its scorn of those social distinctions that later in life enslave us. A child will make no bones about turning his back on an uninteresting duke to chat with an interesting gardener. Some time back, a small boy, charged with the task of presenting a bouquet to the Queen, horrified the assembled dignitaries by rummaging around Her Majesty's feet. He was, he afterward explained, looking for the mouse that, on her visit to London to look at the Queen, the cat saw under the chair. To a child, monarchs and mice are of equal interest.

'If,' says Chrysostom, 'you show him a queen with a crown, he will not prefer her to his mother, albeit clothed in rags, but will cling to his mother in her poor attire rather than the queen in all her bravery.'

A child possesses an infinite capacity for penetrating the inwardness of things. Arguing that a child is the only natural poet, Macaulay enlarges upon the theme in his essay on Milton; Wordsworth sings of it in his Ode on Immortality; George Eliot writes of it with enthusiasm in Adam Bede; Professor Illingworth argues from it in his treatise on Personality. And the historian, the poet, the novelist and the philosopher are all of them indisputably right.

A child exhibits an innate sensitiveness to mysticism. His insight is astounding. Tell a child the story of Bethlehem, the vigil of the shepherds, the quest of the Magi, the song of the angels and the babe in the manger. He drinks it all in. An adult, similarly situated, opens a discussion on what he is pleased to call the doctrine of the Incarnation. Tell a child the story of the Cross; he accepts it avidly, finding no difficulty anywhere. Relate to an adult the same impressive facts and he will ask learnedly for a theory of the Atonement.

The archives of inspiration contain few gems more affecting than the record of the way in which the Savior of Men took a little child and set him in the midst of the disciples, not that the child might aim at becoming like Peter and James and John, but that Peter and James and John might covet the sweetness and simplicity of the little child.

Chapter 2

The Music Master

If ever a massive and mountainous personality bestrode this narrow world like a colossus, his name was Sebastian Bach. Few could resist his magnetism. Those who met him on the street instinctively turned to enjoy a second and more leisurely glance. Wherever he came, he conquered. Frederick the Great collected celebrities and notabilities as some men collect birds' eggs, sea-shells and postage stamps. In 1747, he commanded the composer to visit him at Potsdam. Bach, who was sixty-two, regarded the invitation as the climax of his renown. 'Here comes old Bach!' exclaimed the king, under his breath, as the gallant figure was being ushered into his presence. But a day or two later, having cultivated his guest's acquaintance and been held spellbound by his artistry, he shouted amidst his applause: `There is only one Bach! There is only one Bach!' The episode is typical of the impression that the eminent organist invariably created.

I

The most colourful and satisfying portrait of Bach has been given us by Esther Meynell in her Little Chronicle of Magdalena Bach. Mrs. Meynell confesses that, in her vivid and convincing delineation of her hero, she has occasionally given rein to her imagination. But anybody familiar with the life of Bach will find it difficult to place his finger on any passage in her attractive chronicle that cannot be substantiated by a reference to the more sombre and pretentious biographies.

The fictional lapses can only consist of splashes of colour introduced to give to the total impression its just and realistic effect. Macaulay argues that Sir Walter Scott's novels are better entitled to be regarded as history than many of the forbidding volumes that consist of continents of facts and oceans of figures. 'The perfect historian,' he maintains, 'is he in whose work the character and spirit of an age is exhibited in miniature.' That being so, Mrs. Meynell deserves to be saluted as a queen of biographers. Her flesh-and-blood chronicle has certainly endeared Sebastian Bach to readers who, to their own sorrow, have little or no ear for his music.

II

Bach was a gigantic human. He loved life; he loved men and women; he loved boys and girls; he loved congenial company, convivial conversation, hearty laughter, woodland scenery, fragrant gardens, and he dearly loved a good square meal. It goes without saying that he loved music. He was drenched in it. Coming of a long line of musicians, sweet sounds were to him the light of his eyes and the breath of his nostrils. He thought musically; he talked musically; he walked through this world to the music of some world unseen.

He was essentially a home-bird. Twice married, he had seven children by his first wife and thirteen by the second. As was usual in those days of prodigious families, many of the youngsters died; but their father dearly loved and cherished the survivors. One or two of them involved him in heartache and heart-break; but his affection never wavered. His golden hours were the hours in which he sat with them at meals: chatted with them by the fireside; played and sang with them in their domestic concerts; or picnicked with them in the woods.

Although the image of gravity and even severity on serious occasions, he secretly overflowed with fun. When he married Magdalena, his second wife, she begged him to teach her music, that her life might be more perfectly attuned to his. 'My dear,' he replied, 'there's nothing to learn. You merely strike the right note in the right way at the right time and the organ does the rest.'

Sometimes his sense of humour invaded his art, as in the Coffee Cantata. It is based on the story of a girl who was so addicted to coffee that her father swore that he would never consent to her marriage till she gave it up, a threat to which the daughter replied by saying that she would never accept a proposal unless her lover promised that she should still have her coffee. And, in the home, Sebastian composed all sorts of quodlibets, gay little minuets and catchy snatches of nonsense--songs for the delectation of the bairns.

As a teacher, he was a benevolent tyrant. He knew how to be stern. A student rejected his advice. 'I think it sounds better this way,' the youth explained. 'Sir,' Bach replied, 'thou art too advanced for my teaching: we must part.' And they did. But he also knew how to be gentle. If he found a student doing his best, but doing it badly, he would say: 'My son, suppose you were to try it this way!' And he would play it himself with the air of a fellow-learner who was making a modest suggestion. Is it any wonder that his students worshipped him? 'Master,' burst out one of them, when I hear you play, I feel that I cannot do anything wrong for at least a week!'

III

An intensely devout man, his great religious masterpieces were the natural outpourings of his inmost soul. 'Deep down in his great heart,' we read in the Little Chronicle, 'he always carried his Lord Crucified, and his noblest music is his secret cry for a dearer vision of the risen Christ. In his lullaby in the Christmas Cantata he could write music tender enough for the Babe of Bethlehem; in the Crucifixion of his Great Mass he could find strains grand enough for the Saviour of Calvary. At the end of his earlier scores he always inscribed the letters S.D.G.--'To God be the glory!' It mirrored the motive of the man.

One of the most fascinating realms of biographical conjecture is presented by the speculation as to what would have happened if Bach and Handel had met and formed each other's friendship. Born within a month of one another, their lives ran along parallel lines. They were moved by the same lofty ideals; each admired the other's work; both became blind and both were operated upon by the same surgeon.

Bach did even more than Handel to lay the foundations on which much of our modern music securely rests. Masters like Mendelssohn, Schumann, Wagner and Brahms have gratefully acknowledged the incalculable debt that they owed to that lovable creator of a million harmonics who, amidst the tears of his admiring contemporaries, died suddenly of apoplexy two hundred years ago.

Chapter 3

The Ideal Congregation

There may be some question as to which is the largest congregation in the world: there may be some doubt as to which is the richest: but there can be no uncertainty as to which is the best. The best congregation in the world is a congregation of one. And the best of that best congregation is that anyone can enjoy the privilege of addressing it.

I

Mr. Chesterton says that, between one and two there is often a difference of millions. There is certainly a difference of millions between a congregation of one and a congregation of two. A congregation of one takes every word in a direct and personal sense; but, in a congregation of two, each auditor takes it for granted that the preacher is referring to the other. Nathan had a congregation of one when, in unfolding his parable of the one ewe lamb, he looked into the face of David and cried Thou art the man! By means of that clever artifice and lightning-flash application, Nathan brought his congregation of one to its knees.

Shakespeare must have studied this story of Nathan before writing his own Hamlet. Adopting Nathan's strategy. Hamlet trained the strolling players to reproduce the king's crime before the royal but guilty party; and, when the monarch saw his own evil deeds enacted on the stage before him, the blood left his face, his heart stood still, the lights swam in blurred confusion before his failing sight, and, pleading sudden sickness, he staggered from the theatre. Every actor seemed to be pointing straight at him. Every voice cried: Thou art the man!

Just occasionally, of course, a preacher finds it easy to make his appeal to the individual conscience. Dr. Lyman Beecher, for example, loved to tell of a memorable Sunday in the early days of his ministry. He had promised to exchange pulpits with a country preacher. When the day arrived, the hedgerows were buried in snow. His horse could scarcely plough its way through the deep drifts.

When service-time came, Dr. Beecher had the building all to himself. He was just about to remount and ride back when one solitary worshipper stole in. Now what ought he to do? After a brief consideration, he recalled the sense of guidance that he had experienced when preparing for the service. He thereupon decided to behave just as if the church were crowded. He did. Twenty years later a gentleman in Ohio, stepping up to Dr. Beecher, addressed him by name.

'Have we met before?' asked the doctor.

'We have!' replied his companion. 'Do you remember, twenty years ago, preaching to a single person?'

'I do, indeed,' admitted Dr. Beecher, grasping his hand, 'and, if you are the man, I want you to know that I have been looking for you ever since!'

'I am the man, sir; and that sermon, leading me to the Saviour, made a minister of me. Yonder is my church! The converts of that sermon are all over Ohio!'

The task of reaching the individual ear and the individual conscience is not always as simple a matter as, on that notable occasion, Dr. Beecher found it.

II

In the beginning, the evangelism of the Church was done, not by the minister, but by his people. The New Testament never contemplated the conquest of the world by public oratory. To the primitive Church, such a thing was out of the question. Gatherings such as those that we are able to hold on Sundays were never dreamed of. The early Church was hunted and harassed by cruel persecution. Her services were held in secret. Her sanctuaries were places of peril. The only persons present, therefore, were devout believers. The only objects sought were worship and fellowship. An evangelistic address would have been strangely out of place.

Yet, despite the select character of its assemblies, that early Church was nevertheless a passionately evangelistic Church. Its members rejoiced, and its persecutors complained, that its teachings spread like wild-fire. 'We are but of yesterday,' wrote Tertullian, 'yet we have filled your cities, islands, towns and boroughs; we are in the camp, the Senate and the Forum. Our foes lament that every sex, age and condition, and persons of every rank, are converts to the name of Christ.' And in three centuries, the Roman Empire itself capitulated unconditionally to the triumphant Church!

The Church had conquered the world, not through the attendance of the world at her services, nor even by her public witness outside other church walls, but by the private influence of her members over those with whom, during the week, they came in contact. She brought the nations to her feet, not by public evangelism, but by an exquisitely beautiful representation, in private conduct and conversation, of the merciful and majestic teachings of her Divine Lord. The individual captured the individual. The work of evangelization was done at the bench and at the desk, in the workroom and in the kitchen, during the week; and then, on Sunday, each member introduced his converts to the delighted assembly. The carpenter brought his mates; the maid brought her mistress; the master brought his men. On Monday morning, each member went forth weeping, bearing precious seed; on Sunday, he came again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him.

III

Even public evangelism is only effective so far as its appeal is individualized. Men cannot be won for Christ in shoals; they must be brought in one by one. The heaven-born evangelist knows that a crowd is a nuisance unless you know how to take it to pieces. A lawyer cannot deal with clients in crowds; a doctor cannot deal with patients in crowds; and, faced by a crowd, an evangelist is just as helpless. A crowd is like a nut. You break the nut to find the kernel; you crack the crowd to find the individual soul. The preacher who has to face a crowd must be a skilful psychologist as well as an earnest evangelist. A crowd has no conscience to be stirred, no heart to be broken and no soul to be saved. The man who stands before a crowd can only hope to succeed so far as he can disentangle the individual from the mass.

Wesley and Whitefield, Spurgeon and Moody knew how to preach to crowds. They conquered the crowd by ignoring it. So far from forgetting the individual in the crowd, they forgot the crowd in the individual. They liked to see a multitude of faces, just as an angler likes to feel that his line is surrounded by a multitude of fish; it enhances his chance of catching, in quick succession, first one and then another; but that is as far as it goes. To the great evangelists, the crowd was simply the multiplied opportunity of individual conquest.

Jean Baptiste Massillon, the man whose preaching terrified yet magnetized Louis the Fourteenth, had an oratorical trick by means of which, even in a thronged cathedral, he secured for himself, not one congregation of two thousand, but two thousand congregations of one.

'The dome has vanished,' he would exclaim dramatically, 'the ceiling has disappeared: nothing now intervenes between you and Almighty God! And see, the walls have evaporated; the great congregation has dispersed; you and I are left alone together! Just you and I!' And then, like a skilful surgeon alone with his patient, he would probe to the very depths of the heart's secret being.

Louis the Magnificent used to say that he enjoyed hearing other preachers; he never enjoyed Massillon, for Massillon seemed to tear his very soul wide open. Yet, if he had to select one preacher and hear him only, he would wish that one preacher to be Massillon.

One of the greatest days in Mr. Wesley's life was June 17, 1739. In the early morning, he preached to eight thousand people at Moorfields; in the afternoon he preached to a similar concourse on Kennington Common. At the first service, John Nelson, the stout-hearted stonemason, was converted; at the second, a soldier was led to the Saviour. It is interesting to compare their testimonies.

'O that was a blessed morning to my soul,' writes John Nelson. 'As soon as Mr. Wesley stood up and stroked back his hair, he fixed his eye on me. It made my heart beat like the pendulum of a clock; and, when he began to speak, I thought his whole discourse was aimed directly at me!'

'When Mr. Wesley began to speak,' says the soldier, 'his words made me tremble. I thought he spoke to no one but me; and I durst not look up, for I imagined that all the people were looking at me!'

On each occasion there were thousands present, yet Mr. Wesley made each hearer feel that preacher and listener were alone together. Every man felt as David felt when Nathan pointed at him and cried, Thou art the man! Every man felt as Louis the Fourteenth felt when listening to Massillon. It is the topmost pinnacle of the preacher's art.

But why should I have troubled my head about Massillon or Wesley or anybody else? The supreme example still awaits our contemplation. In his exquisite little Life of Christ, Dr. Stalker shows that Jesus ever kept His divine eyes wide open for any opportunity of preaching to the best of all congregations, a congregation of one. He seized any such chance with avidity. Dr. Stalker declares. 'Although he was worn out with fatigue, He talked to the woman at the well; He chatted with Zacchaeus under the sycamore tree; He received Nicodemus alone at night; He taught Mary in the home at Bethany. Brief as the gospels are, they contain nineteen records of such personal interviews.' As an evangelist, as in every other respect, He is the model.

Chapter 4

There were Six Brothers

It was late at night. The chair was cosy; the fire was glowing genially; the only sound was the drowsy ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece. In the caress of conditions so tranquil, I must have dozed.

Earlier in the evening I had been reading, in the sixteenth of Luke, of the mental anguish of a lost soul. Dives, we are told, was suddenly seized with terrified concern for his five brothers. In his abject misery, he sought the divine mercy on their behalf. Strange that a man who had completed his earthly pilgrimage without bowing the knee should, as soon as he had passed beyond redemption, have acquired the art of prayer! Having failed dismally in his supplications for himself, he passionately interceded for his brothers. He entreated that Lazarus might be dispatched from heaven on an evangelistic mission to these worldly relatives of his.

In answer to his agonized petition, Dives was told that he was enormously exaggerating the appeal of the supernatural. A messenger from the invisible world would prove less convincing to earth-men than the suppliant imagined. 'They have Moses and the prophets,' he was told, 'let them hear them!' 'Nay, Father Abraham,' Dives persisted, 'but if one went unto them from the dead, they will repent!' He was assured, however, that, if those five brothers of his turned a deaf ear to Moses and the prophets, they would pay very little heed to anything said to them by a visitor from among the dead.

I

I can easily believe it. For, reclining in that comfortable chair last night, I dreamed a dream. Indeed, I dreamed two.

In my first dream, I saw these five men spending the evening together after having attended their brother's funeral. After chatting about old times, as men will under such circumstances, they sat down to supper. The meal was scarcely finished when the eldest, peering into the shadows at the far end of the room, manifested the most extraordinary agitation.

'Do you see what I see?' he cried, his face blanching.

'It's a ghost!' exclaimed the brother seated next him.

'It looks to me like Lazarus, the beggar who used to lie at Dives' gate!' stammered the third.

'It is Lazarus,' declared the fourth, 'only he is now able to stand erect, whilst his horrid sores have all disappeared!'

'What do you want?' demanded the fifth addressing the spectre.

'I am here,' explained Lazarus, 'because your brother in hell begged in his torment that I might be sent to you five brothers to call you to repentance!' And, on the instant, he vanished.

The five now sat for a while, pale and trembling. Then, after a few commonplaces, they bade one another Good-night. Before actually retiring, however, each pondered in solitude the weird experience that had overtaken him. Then doubts supervened. Perhaps the wine at supper had affected them. Had they really seen and heard an apparition, or, unstrung by the emotional strain of the funeral, had they been victimized by some kind of auto-suggestion, induced by the startling question of their eldest brother?

Talking it over next day with a few intimate friends, so much was said about imaginative reactions, psychic impressions and the elusive phenomena of astral planes that they thought no more of the call to repentance which was the real purpose of the ghostly visit.

II

In my second dream, the five brothers are spending the evening together after having attended the funeral of Dives. After supper they begin to talk.

'You know,

Remarked the eldest, 'a death like this sets you thinking. I was reading this morning in the Scroll of the Law. Do you remember the days when Father and Mother made us recite the Ten Commandments every Sabbath and sometimes read to us all the curses to which, in the old days, the people had to say Amen? Well, I went over it all this morning, and I don't mind confessing to you that I felt scared. I really believe that, in the course of the years, I've broken every one of those Commandments and brought on myself every one of those curses! I tell you, I'm very thankful that I wasn't cut down suddenly, as Dives was!'

''Strange you should say that,' replied the second brother, 'for, during the service at the Synagogue today, I went over the life I've lived since, as boys, Dives and I played together, and it made me feel that my soul was as black as pitch. I was never so miserable in my life!'

'It happens,' added the third, 'that I was listening last week to this new preacher--Jesus of Nazareth, they call Him--who is moving about Judea and Galilee just now. You should hear Him talk about God and righteousness and sin and repentance and forgiveness! His words went to my heart like a knife. And now that this has happened , it all comes back to me. Death's a dreadful thing; it's so final; and then, after death, there's the judgment!'

The fourth told how his conscience had been troubling him. 'It's a queer thing, conscience,' he added. 'You talk about the Commandments and the curses,' he said, as he turned towards the first speaker, 'but the things that conscience says from within are the very same things that the Law says from without. Makes you wonder if there's some kind of connection between them!' He turned inquiringly to the youngest brother.

The youngest was something of a philosopher in his modest way. He confessed that the death of Dives had thrown him into a pensive mood; and then he proceeded, in his quiet fashion to unfold the thoughts concerning life and death and immortality that had been pressing upon his mind whilst he had been assisting with the funeral arrangements.

III

They were all deeply moved; I detected a glint of moisture in the eyes of more than one of them. And I saw what Jesus meant when he said that, if men will not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither would they be persuaded though one rose from the dead.

We do not need visitants from other worlds. We know enough of God, of eternity and of our own hearts, to drive us to repentance. A thousand voices from within and from without stress our desperate need of a Saviour. If those myriad and mighty voices do not hurry our laggard footsteps to the Cross, no spectral apparition from another world would succeed in doing so.

Chapter 5

An Iliad in Ebony

Uncle Tom's Cabin is a hundred years old; and although, in the course of the century, other edifices, much more pretentious and much more palatial, have gone to dust and ashes, the cabin stands in modest grandeur as one of the most familiar and famous structures of all time.

You may say, if you will, that Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe's masterpiece was just an avalanche of propaganda, launched on a susceptible world at an impressionable moment, to place beyond doubt the ultimate triumph of a great cause.

You may say, if you will, that it was just a welter of melodrama, skilfully prepared by a cunning hand for the delectation of a generation that, at that psychological moment, was in the mood to enjoy the luxury of a good cry.

But when you have said either the one or the other, or both, you have failed to explain why the book was sold by the million in about forty languages, why it did more than anything else to emancipate the slaves, and why it earned for its authoress Abraham Lincoln's epithet--'The little lady who made the big war.' If a tree is to be judged by its fruits, Mrs. Stowe's fame is secure.

I

Our harassed housewives will like to reflect that Uncle Tom's Cabin was written by a harassed little housewife of forty. Our most vivid description of her is her own: 'I am a little bit of a woman, somewhat more than forty, just as thin and dry as a pinch of snuff; never very much to look at in my best days and very much used-up by now.' She had spent her life in an atmosphere in which the theology was inexorable, the drudgery illimitable, the finances infinitesimal and the children innumerable.

She produced Uncle Tom's Cabin soon after the birth of her seventh child. She used to say that she was always glad when the time for her accouchement came because it gave her an excuse for going to bed for a week or two and enjoying a delicious rest.

It is an interesting sidelight on the temper of the time that her first children, twin girls, were four months old before their father, who was visiting England, was aware of their existence. He left on his return home when they were two months old: the news of their birth had not reached him on his embarkation: the voyage occupied two more months: and it was not until his arrival in America that he learned of his good fortune.

Other children came in quick succession. Professor Stowe's resources were strained to the utmost by the growing demands of his rapidly increasing household. Was there any way of augmenting his slender salary? Mrs. Stowe's fingers had always itched to write. Defying the multiplicity of her domestic duties, she resolves to make the attempt. She produced a thin little volume of stories that did little or nothing to relieve the strained economy of the home and that gave little or no promise of better things to come. But a crisis followed, and, with the crisis, came a challenge that awoke a sensitive soul to a grandeur that approached sublimity.

II

Born in 1811, Harriet Beecher Stowe was a minister's daughter; she herself married a minister, and she had six brothers in the ministry. She cited these facts for all they were worth whenever she heard it affirmed, as it often was, that the churches looked with approbation or at least with tolerance, upon slavery.

'I ought to know,' she would retort, 'and, indeed, I do know; you may take it from me that the churches hate slavery like poison!' There were exceptions, of course, but, generally speaking, her contention was sound.

In 1832, the year in which Hatty came of age, her father was made president of Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati, and four years later she herself married one of the professors on his staff. Cincinnati is separated only by a narrow waterway from Kentucky.

Whenever she crossed that barrier, Hatty had the opportunity of witnessing the horrors of slavery. She said little at the time; but she was stung to the quick by the revolting indignities to which the coloured girls were exposed; by the pitiless way in which members of families were torn from each other by the auctioneer's hammer; and by the callous cruelty of the inhuman marketeers. She even helped some of the slaves to escape.

III

The idea that the whole iniquitous traffic might be abolished, and that she herself might become a potent instrument in its destruction, never entered Hatty's head until a sister-in-law wrote saying that, if she possessed Hatty's literary gift, she would write a book that would stir the whole nation to a recognition of the evils of slavery.

Mrs. Stowe rose from her chair, clasping the letter in her hand. Pacing the floor for a moment, she suddenly turned to those about her. 'I will!' she exclaimed. 'I will!' And as the world very well knows, she did.

'The death-knell of American slavery,' says David Livingstone, in writing to his daughter Agnes, 'the death-knell of American slavery was rung by a woman's hand.' And what was it that prepared the soul of Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe to respond to the tremendous challenge when it came? She herself has told us.

Harriet was reared in a haunted house, a house that was pervaded, through and through, by the spirit of her dead mother. Nobody in the home could think of the beautiful soul that had departed without thinking of a text that, in some strange way, was invariably associated with her. It was this, 'For ye are not come unto the mount that burned with fire, nor unto blackness and darkness and tempest; but ye are come unto Mount Sion, the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels, to the general assembly and church of the firstborn, and to the spirits of just men made perfect.' 'We all knew,' Mrs. Stowe continues, 'that this was what our father repeated to his wife when she was dying, and we often repeated it to each other. It was to that we felt we must attain, though we scarcely knew how. In every scene of family joy or sorrow, or when father wished to make an appeal to our hearts that he knew we could not resist, he spoke of her and her text.'

The book by means of which Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe contrived to infect the world with her own implacable hatred of slavery is drenched from cover to cover with the noble thought embedded in that stately passage. When, for example, little Eva lies dying, with Uncle Tom sitting sadly beside her, she speaks of the heavenly Jerusalem and of the innumerable company of angels and of Jesus. And Uncle Tom's eyes sparkle at every word.

The argument is obvious and unanswerable. If a slave can come to Mount Sion and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels, to the general assembly and church of the firstborn, which are written in heaven, and to God the Judge of all, and to the spirit of just men made perfect, and to Jesus, how can you set him up on an auction block and sell him, body and soul, from one white man to another? That was the sublime and sensational revelation that underlay the abolition of slavery.

The book was written on tattered scraps of paper in such odd moments as could be snatched from making beds, cooking meals, mending socks and washing babies.

On the day of its publication three thousand copies were sold; within a year three hundred thousand had been demanded; and the numbers soon ran into millions. It was dramatized and played in first-class theatres all over the world. For the first time in her life, Mrs. Stowe was lifted above pecuniary anxiety, although the wealth that surprised her was but an insignificant fraction of what it would have been had her rights in the work been properly secured.

Chapter 6

The Undersongs of Life

In one of his most rapturous and seraphic predictions concerning the coming Redeemer, Isaiah declares that His voice shall be quiet, subdued, restrained. 'He shall not scream nor shout, nor advertise Himself.' His utterance, that is to say, shall be expressive, persuasive, effective; but there shall be nothing loud or self-assertive about it. The eloquence of heaven is always couched in delicate and melodious undertones.

I

On the very last pages of his Confessions of an Uncommon Attorney, Reginald Hine paints an exquisite picture of the idyllic scenes amidst which he is laying aside his pen. It is a beautiful estate at Minsden in Hertfordshire, the haunt of every kind of wild flower and of every species of feathered songster. Among countless other attractions, it boasts the ruins of an old fourteenth-century church, the Church of St. Nicholas. So soothing is the perfume of the flowers and the song of the birds that Mr. Hine feels that, if all those would visit the place whose minds and whose hearts are, like the crumbling sanctuary, in ruins, they would find healing and succour in the very atmosphere that would there unfold them. It would, he says, be a lovely place to die in.

Peaceful as the place is, Mr. Hine makes it clear that its tranquillity does not consist in its silence. 'The very air,' he says, 'is tremulous with that faint murmur--call it the undersong of the earth, the music of the spheres, the sigh of departed time, or what you will--which only the more finely attuned spirits overhear--

Stillness accompanied with sound so soft

Charms more than silence. Meditation here

May think down hours to moments.

'For those who have ears to hear,' Mr. Hine adds, 'how peaceful and assuaging it is to listen to the murmur of the breeze's call, the night wind's lovely vesper hymn!' There are sounds so soft and satisfying that they sweeten and sanctify the silence.

For silence in itself can be maddening. As those who have endured solitary confinement know, silence hath its horrors no less renowned than noise. What, one wonders, was the world like before the hurricane of mechanization awoke the screech and the crash and the roar by which all modern generations have been tortured? In a state of nature, Man would be familiar with many sounds; but it is safe to assume that they would all be beneficent sounds--pleasant sounds designed for his delectation and unpleasant sounds designed to warn him of the proximity of his natural enemies. Between a sound and a noise there is all the difference in the world. A noise will awaken a child; the mother, in restoring it to its slumbers, will resort, not to silence, but to sound; she will croon a lullaby.

In Lockhart's beautiful description of the passing of Sir Walter Scott, he makes it clear that it was not by silence, but by something lovelier, that Scott's last moments were solaced. 'It was so quiet a day that the sound he loved best, the gentle ripple of the Tweed over its pebbles, was distinctly audible as we knelt around his bed whilst his eldest son kissed and closed his eyes.' Sir Walter's requiem was chanted by Nature in a lyrical and almost celestial murmur.

Life is very largely moulded by its undertones and undersongs--the whispering among the leaves, the humming of insects, the twittering of birds, the lapping of waves and all those hushed and subdued sounds that, every day of our lives, pacify, fortify and strengthen us.

II

The phenomenon may easily become an allegory. There are, in every life, soft and almost inaudible undersongs that are far more truly the articulation of the man than the louder and more voluble utterances that almost drown them.

The biographer of Sir William Osler, Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, tells how, one day, sir William was passing along the ward of a children's hospital. Around him were some really desperate cases, children in the grip of horrible and painful diseases for whom nothing could be done. Suddenly the great doctor turned away from this distressing group and strode, whistling, from the ward.

A companion ventured a remonstrance. 'How,' he asked, 'can you whistle, seeing what you have seen?' 'My dear sir,' replied Sir William, 'I just had to whistle or weep; so I whistled.' More often than we think, the apparent frivolity of men is a subterfuge to conceal their real emotions. If we had ears to hear, we should catch the deeper notes of the undersong.

III

In one of his greatest novels, Trollope declares that there is scarcely a mood that such sounds will not match. Resting near the Rhine, his heroine is enjoying the delicious music of its rapidly moving waters. 'If you are chatting with your friend,' Trollope observes, 'such melodious sounds wrap up your speech, keeping it to your two selves. If you would sleep, it is of all lullabies the sweetest. If you are alone, and would think, it aids your thoughts. If you are alone, and, because thought would be too painful, you do not wish to think, it gently dispels your sorrow.' All this goes to show that, whilst silence is infinitely preferable to noise, there is something even more grateful to the ear than silence. Such subdued sounds mingle with the songs of life and with the silences of life to produce that essential symphony of repose in which the ordinary man may find his soul. Every man should, occasionally, lend his ear to life's melodious and eloquent undertones.

All through life, the voices that most profoundly impress us, and that most imperatively command us, are gentle and perfectly controlled voices. We may be hectored into compliance by bellow and bluster, but it is the whisper that more often secures our whole-hearted co-operation.

Is it any wonder, then, that the divine voice, whenever and wherever heard, is invariably marked by softness, calmness and restraint? We learn, with Elijah, that the most convincing and compelling exhibitions of superhuman power come, not in the earthquake nor in the fire, but in the still small voice. Reason speaks in an undertone; so does conscience; and so does Jesus. He does not scream, nor shout, nor advertise Himself. Amidst the sanctities of the soul, He whispers, 'Come unto Me!' and those who recognize the sublime authority of that celestial undertone respond without an instant's delay.

Chapter 7

The Soul of a Solitary

He who would cultivate the acquaintance of one of the loneliest souls in history should study the singular personality and fascinating career of Henry David Thoreau. Through the forty-five years of his brief pilgrimage, he preferred nobody's company to his own.

Hazlitt begins his famous essay On Going a Journey by saying that, when he sets out on such an excursion, he likes to go by himself. Thoreau was very much of his contemporary's mind. It was not so much because he was passionately in love with himself: it was rather because he never found anybody on whom he could lavish his confidence, devotion and affection

I

Like Mark Rutherford, he longed for a friend as blind men long for light; but, like Mark Rutherford, he could never find one. His retirement, at the age of twenty-eight, to his one-room cabin in the woods beside the Walden Pond was simply the inevitable climax of that process of spiritual evolution that produced an incorrigible anchorite. Thoreau was a born hermit.

He paid the penalty of his solitude. Having lost touch with men and things, he was always hesitant and uncertain in his movements. He resembles a boatman who, out of sight of land, is never quite sure of his bearings. Confronted by those tremendous issues that, sooner or later, every man must face, Thoreau was hopelessly at sea.

He lived practically his whole life at Concord, that Eden of the West with which Emerson and Hawthorne have familiarized us. But neither Emerson nor Hawthorne saw in Concord the enchantment that Thoreau discovered there.

In the course of his life he made a few timid journeys into the world beyond; but he returned to Concord on each occasion convinced that Concord was the home of all beauty and the summit of all grandeur.

The Thoreaus were by no means wealthy, and it strained their resources to the utmost to send Henry from school to Harvard University. And then the trouble began. He was no mixer; and his fellow students could make neither head nor tail of him. He moved about the college precincts like an uneasy ghost. Yet he did reasonably well; qualified as a surveyor; bade goodbye to Harvard; and went back to Concord to wrestle with the problem of his future. What should he do? What should he be?

II

He wanted a profession that would bring him as little as possible into touch with his fellow-men. As shy as a school-girl, he hated to be drawn into conversation, blushing furiously whenever he was introduced to a stranger. He detested ordinary fireside chatter because he somehow sense that very little of it was sincere. People say what they are expected to say, or what it is pleasant to say or what will tickle the ears of the company.

Even when, a few years later, he found himself grouped with the most eminent figures of his day, he was as uncomfortable as a toad under a harrow.

The only people with whom he felt perfectly happy were ploughboys, axemen, trappers and the like. He did not care how uncouth or ungrammatical a man might be: if he said what he meant, and meant what he said, that was all that Henry Thoreau cared. He would stand in the fields talking to such a man by the hour at a stretch.

Of women he could make nothing at all; they were apocalyptic mysteries, sealed with seven seals. If he came upon a cluster of them, he would stumble over his own feet, collide with the tables and chairs, and stutter and stammer to the point of incomprehensibility.

III

It was in 1845 that he built the little cabin beside the pond at Walden. The land was Emerson's and was cheerfully placed at his disposal. Borrowing an axe, he fashioned his hermitage with his own hands. Its total cost was about eight pounds. Here he lived for two blissful and fruitful years.

Those who have revelled in his Walden know how well the time was spent. He wove the wail of the whip-poor-will, the cry of the screech-owl, the call of the peewee and the mew of the cheewink into an exquisite prose poem that has become one of his country's choicest classics. It is the western counterpart to Gilbert White's Natural History of Selborne.

Strangely enough, on his emergence from his hermitage, his career assumed an entirely new complexion. His soul caught fire. From being a recluse, he became a warrior. The country was in the grip of the agitation for the emancipation of the slaves. Henry Thoreau came into touch with John Brown whose soul, according to the song, still marches on.

Thoreau's enthusiasm was aroused, and, with voice and with pen, he laboured day and night to ensure the triumph of the abolitionist cause.

But, in 1862, his consumption caught up with him. In the most revered little god's-acre in the Western world, the pine-fringed cemetery at Sleepy Hollow in Concord, he lies with Hawthorne, Emerson and Louisa Alcott, whilst his name, like theirs, liveth for evermore.

Chapter 8

The Cardinal's Violin

The only moments of joyous and unrestrained self-expression that, in the course of his ninety years, Cardinal Newman ever knew were those that he spent in the delightful and melodious company of his violin.

Passing his entire life in an agony of heartrending loneliness, his face shone and his heart glowed as, to the delicious strains of some lovely passage from Beethoven, he paced his secluded apartment, lost to all the world in transports of indescribable ecstasy.

The sensuous rapture of these intervals of carefree abandonment was so overpowering that his ascetic soul sometimes cried out in indignant protest, and, doubtful as to whether mortals should allow themselves a banquet of such excessive bliss, he sadly restored the instrument to its case, and allowed it, for many moons, to lie there.

In his youth, he was a martyr to toothache, and very often, with swollen face and throbbing nerve, would turn for solace to his violin. When the agony was most excruciating, the music rose to a shrill crescendo, whilst, as the pain abated, it sank to a low and plaintive murmur.

Later in life, he daily endured the tortures of dyspepsia. It was as though a colony of rats was gnawing at his vitals. When his suffering seemed to break all bounds, and pills and potions failed to afford the slightest alleviation or relief, it was always to his violin that he turned for consolation.

I

Painful as were these physical torments, his two greatest troubles were of a very different kind. He was afflicted by a constitutional inability to make up his mind. Whenever the roads forked and he had to choose between this course and that one, he suffered indescribable agonies of indecision.

Mr. Churchill says of Lord Asquith that he possessed a mind that, confronted by alternatives, closed with a snap. The issue was determined; the thing was settled; the decision was made and the gates of hell could not prevail against it. Newman was the exact opposite. His mind, like a pendulum, was always on the swing. Those who have studied his career in Ireland must have grown terribly tired of his interminable attempts to decide for himself the question of his resignation. Many a man, far less gifted, would have resolved in hours problems that worried Newman for as many years.

His father was to blame. A shiftless creature who, both as a banker and a brewer, headed straight for the Bankruptcy Court, he bequeathed to more than one of his children a mind that, on all practical issues, was woefully unstable. When John was fifteen, for example, his father decided to send him to university. But which?

The post-chaise was actually at the door before the good man had made up his mind. At that crucial moment, a curate called and the distracted father begged his advice. 'Send him to Oxford!' said the cleric. And Oxford it was! Oxford fashioned him into Cardinal Newman. Had the curate said 'Cambridge!' John might easily have fallen under the spell of Charles Simeon and have spent his life as an evangelical missionary on the upper reaches of the Yangtse or among the malarial swamps of Central Africa.

It is possible that this inherited tendency to vacillation accounts in part for Newman's hold on the public mind. If a tightrope walker strides out upon his perilous path and crosses the chasm with the utmost ease, the spectators feel that the entertainment has been strangely tame. But if he pauses halfway, stumbles, sways, and appears uncertain of his balance, he holds every eye spellbound.

So was it with Newman. When, full of doubt and uncertainty, he retired to Littlemore to decide once and for all the question of his future loyalties and affinities, an entire populace awaited the outcome with the strained intensity with which, at other times, it would have awaited the result of a test match, a general election or a naval engagement.

And all through those cruel days, in which his mind seemed to be going round in circles, his violin sang to him the most wonderful songs. There were times when the enchanting music seemed to come from some source outside of himself; he could scarcely believe that it was the creation of his own hand.

II

The second burden that weighed him down was his brother. Charles was the skeleton in the family cupboard; and the cupboard-door had an awkward way of swinging open at the most embarrassing moments.

Charles was a frail, pathetic creature who, as a boy, was always the centre of some awkward scrape. As he grew to maturity, his misdemeanours became more serious and he often had to be rescued from the squalid scenes of his disgusting debauches. There were times when these hideous outbreaks nearly broke his brother's heart.

Eventually, it was arranged that Charles should be committed to the care of a good woman on the Welsh coast. With a tender solicitude that is above all praise, the Cardinal provided for him and ministered to him to the very end. More than once, Newman left the Oratory and went down to Wales to visit his unhappy brother, only to be refused an audience on arrival. But it made no difference. He pitied and loved the weakling in spite of everything. And often, when anxiety about Charles blotted out all happier and holier thoughts, it was the soft sweet strains of the violin that lured heaven back to his heart.

III

I like to remember that, as a very old man, Cardinal Newman went down to Devonshire to stay with the Pattesons--the family from which John Coleridge Patteson, the Martyr Bishop of Melanesia, had sprung. One morning the aged Cardinal came down late to breakfast. He had asked them not to wait and they had taken him at his word. As he entered the room, moving slowly towards his vacant place at the table and receiving smilingly the greetings of the family, his eyes became fascinated by a tiny child, with blue eyes and flaxen hair, who occupied a high chair immediately opposite his own. The aged prelate stood for a fraction of a moment, lost in ecstatic admiration.

'Isn't he beautiful?' he asked; 'I must give him my blessing!'

He moved softly round to the high chair and laid his two wrinkled hands on the fresh young head of the child. Everybody instinctively rose. And then, after a second's impressive silence, the Cardinal pronounced a benediction in Latin. Nobody knew exactly the significance of the words he uttered; but, as the Cardinal lifted his hands from the child's head and quietly took his own seat, there were few dry eyes in the room. That was the real John Henry Newman. He must have spent a heavenly hour with Beethoven and his beloved violin in his attic room overnight.

Chapter 9

Lavender and Old Lace

The calendar on my desk frigidly informs me that it is the fourteenth of February. If calendars were capable of emotion, the letters would be printed in gold and the numerals in silver. In every community, there are elderly men and women who like to recall, perhaps with a nostalgic smile, the time when, on the fourteenth of February, the postman was as heavily-laden as on Christmas Eve, whilst the air around him was perfumed with all the spices of Araby.

In those days, all the resources of art, and all the craftsmanship of the most skilful experts, were annually requisitioned in order that the new season's valentines might be a little more romantic, or a little more dainty, or a little more fragrant than any that had previously appeared.

St. Valentine's Day, with its lavender and its lace, its posies and its pompadours, represented an unashamed orgy of sentiment; and it fell into desuetude and decay when it became unfashionable to carry one's heart on one's sleeve.

I

There was one thing which, according to George Eliot, Adam Bede saw more clearly than anything else. 'Ever since I was a young 'un,' Adam exclaimed, 'I've seen perfectly clear as religion's something else besides notions. It ain't notions as sets people doing the right thing: it's feelings!' In this shrewd morsel of homely philosophy, the Hayslope carpenter puts his finger on one of the nerve-centres of human action and experience.

Immanuel Kant, perhaps the most penetrating metaphysician of all time, declared that a man's nature is made up of intelligence, will and emotion; but life has taught us little unless we have learned that, in the great crises of human experience, when everything is at stake, it is by the emotions rather than by the intelligence of the will that men are guided and controlled. Oddly enough, however, this dominant factor in our composition is one of which we are least proud. The man has never been born who has any serious doubt about the presence of Kant's first two ingredients, intelligence and will, in the complex mechanism of his being; yet it is very seldom that we meet a man who is prepared to confess that very much in the way of sentiment has entered into his heterogeneous temperament and constitution.

A palpitating bundle of emotion, the average man cannot bear to be suspected of such weakness. He will force a laugh or make a jest to conceal the fact that his heart is breaking. We resemble animals that like to endure their pain in silence and in secrecy. Cowper likens himself, during one of the emotional crises of his strange career, to the stricken deer that leaves the herd, its panting side transfixed with many an arrow. Yet, whilst no man likes to regard himself as being emotional, and particularly hates to be thought so by his friends, no man has any doubt about the sentimental propensities of all other men.

In his secret soul, every man knows that, in the last resort, it is by sentiment that the world is swayed. 'How limited,' exclaims Lord Beaconsfield in Coningsby, 'is the force of human reason! We are not indebted to the reason of man for any of the great achievements which are the landmarks of human action and human progress. It was not reason that besieged Troy. It was not reason that sent forth the Saracen from the desert to conquer the world; it was not reason that inspired the Crusader and established the Monastic Orders; it was not reason that created the French Revolution. Man is only great when he acts from the passions; never irresistible but when he appeals to the imagination.' Lord Beaconsfield agrees with Adam Bede; notions are insignificant as compared with emotions. It is by sentiment that men live, and by a common sentiment that they are bound together.

An ancient legend tells how, when her fortunes were at their lowest ebb, Sparta sought a leader from Athens. To the general disgust, the man sent them was a lame little school-master, Tyrtaeus by name. They soon discovered, however, that this dwarfish oddity could make music that set every soul on fire. His stirring ballads and patriotic melodies awoke the slumbering ardour of the citizens; and, as a result, the arms of Sparta were soon crowned with resounding victories.

Let any man question himself as to his favourite poet, and he will probably confess that his interest was first awakened and his admiration excited, by something in the work of the bard that appealed to the softer side of his nature. The greatest novels are the novels that move us by their romance or terrify us by their tragedy. Most of the world's triumphs of art are paintings that bring us to the verge of tears.

II

Sentiment is the mainspring and nerve-centre of our humanity. The novelist has no doubt about it, for he knows that there is no date on which Samuel Richardson discovered that fiction would be amazingly more popular if suffused with the spirit of romance. The statesman knows it, for experience has taught him that, at the hustings, there is no appeal quite as effective as a sentimental appeal. The barrister knows it, for he has addressed too many juries to be ignorant of their susceptibilities. The actor knows it; has not Dame Sybil Thorndike told us that the supreme moment in an actor's life is the moment at which he feels himself and his audience caught in the swirl of some tremendous gust of emotion?

Dame Sybil goes further. A thousand things tend to divide men and to arrange them in hostile camps. Get them to share, even for an hour or two, a heartrending emotional experience and you have bound them to each other with hoops of steel.

Even your dearest enemy, she maintains, is a different person if you have sat next to him, sharing the same desolating grief and the same paralysing fear, crying when he cried and laughing when he laughed.

III

We all recognize, when we come to think of it, that love, hate, pity, shame, jealousy, sympathy, revenge--the great master-passions that sway us and make us what we are--are all of them matters of sentiment, and that sentiment governs the world.

The story of the Church herself is written in chapters of profound emotional experience. 'Speak ye home to the heart of Jerusalem,' was the divine command to an ancient prophet. The Hebrew words indicate, Sir George Adam Smith tells us, that the preacher is to stir the soul of the people as a lover stirs the heart of a lass when he utters his passionate appeal and makes her his own. From the day of Pentecost until this day the pivotal epochs of church history have been distinguished by waves of emotion, storms of feeling, tempests of tears. Men were 'cut to the heart', as an inspired chronicler puts it. In describing the effect of the evangelism of George Whitefield on the American continent, Whittier says that--

The flood of emotion, deep and strong,

Troubled the land as it swept along,

But left a result of holier lives.

On every level of life, secular and sacred, notions count for much, but emotions count for immensely more. The trappings and drapery of St. Valentine's day may fade and decay, but the spirit underlying it is as immortal as man and will endure to the end of time.

Chapter 10

The Mystery of Mysteries

I have made up my mind to preach on Sunday on a subject a million sizes too big for me; a million sizes too big for my congregation; a million sizes too big for any preacher or any congregation. I shall commence the service with the hymn--

Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty!

Early in the morning our song shall rise to Thee:

Holy, Holy, Holy! merciful and mighty,

God in Three Persons, blessed Trinity!

and that last line will represent my theme.

I shall approach my stupendous task with the conviction that neither I nor my hearers will have acquired a more intelligent grasp of the sublime topic as a result of our mutual study: yet it is good for children to bathe now and then in the sea even though they cannot conceive of its infinite breadths and infinite depths. When I leave the pulpit at the close of my service, I shall find comfort in the thought that the gospel transcends at every point the intelligence of the poor preacher who is called on to expound it. It is higher than all the heights; deeper than all the depths; wider than all the immensities and infinities and eternities of his most dazzling dreams. Like the peace of God, it passeth all understanding.

"Can you understand Jesus Christ?" someone asked Daniel Webster one day, when the great statesman was surrounded by a group of his literary acquaintances. "No!" he replied, "I would be ashamed to acknowledge Him as my Saviour if I could understand Him. I need a superhuman Saviour--one so great and glorious that I cannot comprehend Him!"

I sometimes think that Christian people, if they take their religion seriously, should be a little brainier, as well as a little better, than ordinary mortals. If much exercise strengthens the muscles, then much thinking on such tremendous themes as the Trinity, the Creation, the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection and the Immortality of the Soul, should expand and invigorate the mind. A Christian should possess, not only a greater wealth of faith and feeling than ordinary men, but a mightier intellect as well. But this is by the way.

I

At the very outset of our invasion of these infinitudes, I find two modest little reflections that facilitate my approach to our theme.

The first is this: Is it any wonder that I cannot grasp the idea of the Trinity of the Godhead when I find myself puzzled by the trinity that I discover within the compass of my own personality?

I am physical. I have a body, just as the animals have. It throbs with animal instincts and animal appetites and animal passions. But those instincts and appetites and passions are my instincts and my appetites and my passions; they are an integral part of the warp and woof of my own personality.

My congregation will see this material body of mine as I stand in the pulpit. But if they elect to close their eyes, they will still be conscious of me. For my voice will convey to them my thought. They will thus become aware of the second element in my composition. I am intellectual as well as physical. Such an achievement is impossible to the beasts that perish; I am able to survey the past, contemplate the future, reason out the problems of the present and read the riddles of the stars.

And what of that opening hymn? The congregation will not be looking at me when they sing it, and they will certainly not hear my voice as I sing with them. Yet their souls will thrill to the thought of the indescribable majesty of the Trinity, and so will mine. That secret and indefinable and mutual thrill represents the evidence of the spiritual in them and in me. And, in that spiritual element, and spiritual fellowship, you have the third factor in the trinity of my being.

And yet my body is me, and my mind is me, and my spirit is me. They are not mere possessions, like my fountain-pen and my watch and my walking-stick. Each is part and parcel of my personality. Each stands in vital relationship with the other two. All the three together contribute to the completeness of myself! I do not understand it. I cannot define the boundary at which the visible brain ends and the invisible mind begins; I cannot place my finger on the point at which physical indulgence ends and intellectual gratification begins; I am out of my depth. And if I am out of my depth in contemplating the triune character of my own personality, is it any wonder that I am baffled and bewildered by the thought of the Triune Personality of Almighty God?

The second of these trivial ideas that assist my approach to so august a subject is the reflection that, when a workman makes an article--no matter what--he unconsciously stamps it with the hall-mark of his own individuality. So long as that piece of workmanship endures, there will always be something of him about it. One can detect traces of the idiosyncrasies of Turner in every picture that he painted; one can discern the rugged personality of Carlyle in every sentence that he penned; one can feel the peculiarities of Beethoven's temperament in each of his compositions.

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. Now, if He be, in deed and in truth, a triune God, we should expect to find some quality of triunity in the very fabric and tissue of His workmanship. And the striking thing is that, if you examine the heaven and the earth with wide-open eyes, you find the brand of three-ness everywhere. Ministers are often twitted with the way in which, in their sermons, they divide everything into three parts. They must always have a Firstly and a Secondly and a Thirdly. They are not to blame for that. But they are to blame for doing it without understanding why they do it. Every theme that they handle divides itself into three parts for the simple reason that the element of three-ness is the hall-mark of divine manufacture. Everything that God has said, and everything that God has done, and everything that God has made has that distinctive and distinguishing element about it. A Triune God necessarily scatters triunity everywhere.

The material realm around us consists of three kingdoms--animal, vegetable and mineral. Humanity divides itself into three--men, women and children. Or, if you prefer to analyse it historically, you find three races--the yellow races, the sons of Shem; the black races, the sons of Ham; and the white races, the sons of Japhet. Or if, instead of taking the mass, you take the individual, you find that he is made up of spirit, soul and body--three again. Or, if you fancy Kant's more philosophical analysis, he consists of intelligence, emotion and will--still three! You glance round upon the universe and you say that it consists of sun, moon and stars. Or, confining your attention to things immediately around you, you divide them up into sea, earth and sky. The stately pageant of time consists of past, present and future. Even the money in your pocket falls into three parts--pounds, shillings and pence!

In attempting to describe a thing you employ one or other of three degrees of comparison: in attempting to measure a thing you are confronted by three dimensions, length, breadth and thickness. The indispensabilities of mortal existence are three: air, food and water. The Bible abounds in trinities. It divides human conduct into thought, word and deed; it marshals the forces of evil as the world, the flesh and the devil; it breaks up the life of grace into faith, hope and charity. The epic of the Temptation in the Wilderness consists of three stanzas: the desert stanza, the temple stanza, and the world stanza.

Admirers of the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table will remember that he remarks upon the way in which, in describing a person, we invariably employ three adjectives. We say that a man is honourable, courteous and brave, or that a woman is graceful, charming and kind. In his delineations of character, Dr. Samuel Johnson is famous for his everlasting threes.

And it is worth recalling that when Jerome K. Jerome published Three Men in a Boat he explained that the frolic was based on his profound conviction that three is the ideal number for an excursion. Two get tired of each others society. A party of four or more soon splits up into groups and cliques. But three is perfection.

The figure three, then, is inscribed upon everything that God has fashioned; and men will never solve the mystery of the universality of that inscription unless they have grasped the fact that the universe that bears this brand is the handiwork of a Triune God.

II

But I am paddling in the shallows. I must get nearer to the deeps. And, in order that I may do so, let me accept a helping hand first from Ireland, then from Scotland, and finally from England--a trinity of nationalities.

To Ireland first! Everybody knows the haunting little Irish melody about the 'dear little shamrock, the sweet little shamrock, the dear little, sweet little shamrock of Ireland." The song declares that it was St. Patrick himself, sure, that set it.

And the sun on his labour with pleasure did smile,

And the dew from his eye often wet it.

But why? The thing that charmed St. Patrick as he gazed upon the shamrock was the fact that it seemed to throw just one welcome ray of light on the most excellent mystery of the Trinity. 'Have I here three leaves,' he asked himself, as he fondly fingered the dainty trefoil, 'or have I here one leaf? It is three in one!' And for that reason he made it the emblem of Ireland.

To Scotland next! Everybody knows how much Scotland owes to the Erskines. I have never visited Scotland without baring my head before their tombs. Henry Erskine, the father of Ralph and Ebenezer, has left us much that is notable and memorable, but he has bequeathed to us few treasures more valuable than his Parable of the Honey. God the Father, he would say, is like honey in the flower--sweetness potential; God the Son is like honey in the bee--sweetness communicable: whilst God the Holy Spirit is like honey in the mouth--sweetness appropriable and enjoyable.

And now to England! Preaching in the pulpit of St. Paul's Cathedral, Canon Liddon said that nothing helped him more to an intelligent apprehension of the awful doctrine of the Trinity than a glass prism. He held the tiny trinket in his hand and caught the pure white ray of sunlight. Straightway there were thrown upon the wall the three cardinal colours--red, blue and yellow. The three were one, and the one was three! You may see them in unity or in diversity, just as you will.

III

I do not understand all this; do not begin to understand it; never expect to understand it. Yet I realize that it meets the deepest needs of my heart. For I often feel that I am but a little child, and need a Father; I am a sinful man and I desperately need a Saviour; I am troubled and heart-broken, and I need the Spirit, the Paraclete, the Comforter. I once saw a painting entitled The Paraclete. It represented a good old woman sitting down beside a young widow to comfort her. That is the idea of the word exactly--one who comes alongside. I need Fathering; I need Saving; I need Comforting; and, in the Holy Trinity, I find all my needs divinely met.

I shall close my sermon on Sunday by entreating the young people in my congregation not to become bewildered or confused. "You all know Jesus," I shall say. "His face and form seem familiar to you. You love the very thought of Him. Well, think of the Trinity in the terms of your reverent intimacy with Jesus. He is the express image of the Father. He Himself declared that he that hath seen Him hath actually seen the Father. And, as to the Holy Spirit, He has no desire that you should think of Him apart from your thought of Jesus. It is His supreme mission to impress you with the love of Christ!"

And if I can lead that congregation of mine to the feet of Jesus, and leave them in penitence and adoration there, I shall feel that I have achieved my end, and that, concerning the wonder of the Trinity, there is no more to be said.