THOMAS HUGHES.
[Preliminary Note.—Having somewhat rashly consented to write a short biographical preface to a volume of selections to be made in America from the writings of my friend, Mr. Hughes, I applied to him directly for the needful facts and dates. His answer was an autobiographical letter which I found so interesting that I resolved to print it, omitting only a few intimate allusions natural in such a communication, but with which the public has nothing to do. My temptation was the greater that the letter was not intended for publication, and had, therefore, that charm of unpremeditated confidence which is so apt to be wanting in more deliberate autobiographies. I cannot consult him, (and I confess that I purposely waited till I could not) for he is already at sea, on his way to America, and I fear that friendship may have tempted me to an unwarrantable liberty, but I could not bring myself, even at the risk of seeming indiscreet, to deny to others what had given me so much pleasure. At any rate, the indiscretion is wholly my own and in direct violation of the injunction with which Mr. Hughes’ letter concludes: “I hate the idea of being presented in any guise to any public; so if you can’t squelch the plan altogether, give only the driest and meagrest facts and dates.” I feel somewhat as if I had been reporting a private conversation, and take upon myself in advance all the reproach that belongs of right to that scourge and desecrator of modern life, the “Interviewer.” For the first time, I look forward with dread to my next meeting with an old friend, after having thus practised the familiar[vi] stage device of putting the right letter into the wrong cover. As the brief record of a well-spent and honorable life, devoted to unselfish ends and associated with notable friendships, Mr. Hughes’ letter has a higher than merely personal interest. Of any critical introduction to American readers no one could stand in less need than he. The same qualities of manliness, frankness, simplicity and sympathy, with whatever is generous and humane, that gave and continue to “Tom Brown” a success that may be compared with that of “Robinson Crusoe,” are not wanting in his other works.—J. R. L.]

“I was born on October 20th, 1822, at Uffington, Berks, of which village my grandfather was Vicar. He was also a Canon of St. Paul’s, and spent half the year at his house in Amen Corner, with which my first memories of London are connected. It was, till this year, the strangest quiet old nook in the city, behind its big timber gates, within one hundred yards of Fleet street on one side, and Newgate Market on the other, but the distant murmur of life only made the repose more striking in those days. Now they are building some new minor Canons’ houses on the vacant ground beyond which will be opened out towards Newgate street, and the corner will be a thoroughfare. The most remarkable fact of my childhood happened there, as I was in the house (I believe) with Sir Walter Scott, a great friend of my grandfather, on his last sad visit to London.

“My grandmother was a very notable woman in many ways, and a great economist and early riser. She used to take me and my brother out shopping in the early morning, and our excursions extended as far as Billingsgate fish-market, then at the height of the career which has secured for it an unenviable place in our English vocabulary. It was certainly a strange place for a lady and small boys, and is connected with the most vivid of my childish memories. Toddling after my grandmother to the stall where she made her purchases, we came one morning on the end of a quarrel[vii] between a stalwart fish-fag and her fancy man. She struck him on the head with a pewter pot which flattened with the blow. He fell like a log, the first blood I had ever seen, gushing from his temples, and the scene is as fresh as ever in my memory at the end of half a century. The narrow courts in that neighborhood are still my favorite haunts in London.

“But my town visits were short. I was a thorough country-bred boy, and passed eleven months in the year at the foot of the Berkshire chalk-hills, much in the manner depicted in ‘Tom Brown.’

“I was sent to school at the early age of eight, to accompany my elder brother. It was a preparatory school for Winchester, and the best feature about it was the Winchester custom, called ‘standing up,’ which means that we were encouraged to learn a great deal of poetry by heart, for which we got extra marks at the end of the half year. We were allowed (within limits) to choose our own poets, and I always chose Scott from family tradition, and in this way learned the whole of the ‘Lady of the Lake,’ and most of the ‘Lay of the last Minstrel’ and ‘Marmion,’ by heart, and can repeat much of them to this day. Milton reckoned highest for marks, but I was prejudiced against him in this wise: Not far from the school was Addington, a place of the then Duke of Buckingham, who was also a friend of my grandfather, who, with my grandmother, paid him a visit at the end of our first half year. We went over to sleep, and travel back home next day with the old folk, and in the morning before starting, the Duchess gave us each a sovereign, neatly wrapped up in white, glossy paper. It was the first piece of gold I ever had, and I kept it in my hand to look at on the journey. I was leaning out of the window of the carriage when my attention was suddenly called to some roadside sight, and I dropped the precious metal. My shout of anguish and dismay brought the carriage to a stand-still, and I had to confess. After some trouble my sovereign was found, and[viii] taken charge of by my grandmother, who, in due course, returned it to me, no longer in current coin of the realm, but in the shape of a pocket edition of Milton’s poems, with ‘Thomas Hughes from the Duchess of Buckingham and Chandos’ written on the title page. I still possess the odious small volume, and have learnt to forgive the great Puritan,—indeed, I have read Masson’s life of him with real interest in these latter days. But I never learnt a line of him by heart as a boy, and regret it to this day.

“Those were evil days in Wessex, the time of the Swing riots and machine and rick burning. My father was the most active magistrate in the district, and was constantly in the saddle, keeping the King’s peace. He was an old fashioned Tory, but with true popular sympathies, and had played cricket and football all his life with the men and boys of our village, and it is one of my proudest memories that only one man from Uffington joined the rioters, and he came back after three weeks ashamed and penitent. Amongst other good deeds, my father rode off alone one night and saved the house and chapel of a dissenting minister in a neighboring village from being sacked and burned. Nevertheless I can not pretend to say that I was brought up to look upon dissenters as anything but a stiff-necked and perverse generation.

“At the age of ten, February 1834, I was sent on to Rugby with my brother, as, happily for us, Arnold had been a college friend of my father. Here I stayed till I was nearly nineteen, starting from the bottom and ending in the sixth form, though by no means at the head of the school.

“It was a very rough, not to say brutal, place when I went there, but much mended during those years.

“I was a very idle boy so far as the regular lessons were concerned, and I expect I should have been advised to go elsewhere early in my career but for a certain fondness for history and literature which Arnold discovered in me and[ix] which (I fancy) covered a multitude of sins. He first struck it at a monthly examination of the Shell, then the form intervening between the fourth and fifth. He asked the head boy why it was the Romans had so specially rejoiced over the terms of a certain treaty with the Parthians (we were reading Horace, I think). It came all down to the lowest bench where I was, and I said, ‘because they got back the eagles taken from Crassus,’ and sent a gleam of pleasure into the Doctor’s face which was getting rather grim. Up I went to the top of the form, and from that time he often asked me questions outside the text book and specially by way of illustration from Scott’s novels, to which he was fond of referring. I could generally come to the point, having them at my fingers’ ends, and was proud of my consequent recognition. To this day I remember the feeling of grief and humiliation which came across me when I failed him on a critical occasion. It was years after the above event when I was in the sixth, and some distinguished visitor (Bunsen, I think it was) was present at the lesson. We were reading the passage in Aristotle about old age, (is it in the Ethics or Politics? I’m sure I forget) and he asked the head of the school to illustrate from Scott’s novels what Aristotle says about the characteristic of old age, to be absorbed in petty interests and to be careless about great contemporary events. Down came the question, past some very able and some very studious boys, since distinguished one way or another—past John Connington, Matt. Arnold, Sir R. Cross, to me—and then the Doctor paused for several seconds with a confident look. But no response came and he passed on, ‘and I was left lamenting.’ No one answered, and he had to remind us of the old Abbot, pottering away in his garden on the border, when Mary and her defeated followers ride up before Crossing, and the old monk leans on his spade and looks after them, saying, ‘I could pity this poor Queen and these Lords, but what are these things to a man of four score—and it’s a[x] fine growing morning for the young kale-wort’—and so goes to his spading again.

“I cannot help to this day wondering at the patience and forbearance both of him and my tutor, Cotton, afterwards Bishop of Calcutta, over my frightful copies of verses, and Greek and Latin prose. As I was head of the eleven at cricket, and of bigside at football, I naturally had but small leisure to devote to such matters, and consequently my copies were notorious for the number of picture frames they were certain to contain,—picture frames being the strong black marks which the Doctor used to make round bad, false concords munus hospitalis or quantities munera stare

“He used to do it slowly and grimly, his under lip seeming to grow out as the pen went deliberately round the wretched words, and one did not feel good during the operation. But as no boy enjoyed the sausage seller’s buffooneries, or Socrates’ banters more than I, (tho’ I made sad hashes in construing them) I remained in favor, tho’ incorrigible, till the end.

“I carried away from Rugby dreadfully bad scholarship, but two invaluable possessions. First, a strong religious faith in and loyalty to Christ; and secondly, open mindedness. It was said (and is still said, I believe,) of Arnold, by way of censure, that to him everything was an open question every morning of his life. And though he never made any direct effort to unsettle any of our convictions that I can remember, we went out into the world the least hampered intellectually of any school of English boys of that time. To this day I am always ready to change an old opinion the moment I can get a better one, and so I think it has been with many of my old school-fellows, though we believed ourselves to be a thorough true blue school.

[xi]

“Perhaps I also owe to Rugby my strong democratic bias, but I don’t think it. I guess I was born so (or barn-zo, as Wessex chaw-bacon pronounced it in the famous story). As a little scrap in petticoats nothing pleased me so much as playing with the village children, and I could never understand why they shouldn’t have all the things I had. At any rate it was at Rugby that I first was able to indulge my radical propensities. Up to my time, the school-close (or playgrounds) was kept as sacred ground, no ‘lout’ (as we politely called the neighboring lieges) being allowed to set foot within the precincts, and I had often noticed the insolent airs with which casual intruders in fustian or corduroy had been extruded. So when I became head of the eleven (and so a sort of constitutional monarch in the close) I asked the best cricketers amongst the ‘louts’ to come in and practice with me on summer evenings, and got up matches with their club, to the great advantage, I still believe, of school as well as town.

“I was dreadfully loath to leave, and when I was obliged, (as nineteen is the limit of ages) was much averse to going up to Oxford. I knew that my scholarship was too weak to allow me to take anything like high honors, and so, as my profession was to be the Bar, I wanted to go up to London at once and enter at an Inn of Court. My father, however, after consulting his legal friends, decided that I should go to Oxford, and accordingly I went up to his old College, Oriel, in February, 1842. My first year at Oxford was utterly wasted, except that I learned to pull a good oar, and perfected myself in boxing, which was then much in vogue, several prize-fighters being generally kept in pay by the under-graduates. The lectures were perfectly easy to me as I had read all the books at Rugby, and I employed no private tutor. I knew I couldn’t take high honors, (or at any rate choose to think so) and as I happened to fall into an idle, fast set, just did as the rest, and made a fool of myself in all the usual[xii] ways. But I never much enjoyed that kind of thing and got very sick of it by the time I had taken my little-go, and towards the end of my second year, just before I was of age, the most important event of my life happened, for in the long vacation I became engaged to my wife, then a schoolgirl, the great friend of my only sister. This pulled me up short. Our parents very properly said we were silly young people and must not see one another for years, or correspond, that we might see whether we really knew our minds. I went back to Oxford quite a new man, knocked off all not absolutely necessary expense, and lived decently and soberly for the rest of my time, taking my degree the first moment I could without coaching, by which I saved money. Consequently, with the help of a small legacy of ￡200, which came to me at twenty-one from an old great-aunt, I came away quite out of debt and with some small balance towards furnishing chambers in London, which was fairly creditable, as, there being three of us up at once, my father only allowed us ￡200 a year each. This was supposed to be too small for a fellow to live on!! Alas, it is even worse now, I fear!

“I had the good luck to be under Clough (the poet) and Fraser, now Bishop of Manchester, who were Oriel tutors at that time, and the latter of whom is still one of my closest friends. I went up, as I have said, believing myself still a Tory, but left Oxford a Radical. Something of the change was owing to the insolence of undergraduate life at that day, but more to a tour I took with a pupil through the North in the long vacation of my third year. My pupil was the son of a neighboring Berkshire squire, and all his father wanted was that I should keep him out of mischief. If he could be interested or taught anything, so much the better. We happened to stop at a Commercial hotel in Lancashire on our way North, and in the bagman’s room I got into an argument with some of the North county travellers on the subject of the Corn Laws, then prominently before Parliament. On this[xiii] first night I came speedily to the conclusion that I knew very little about the matter, and before I returned to Oxford for Michaelmas term I had become a good free-trader.

“I was nearly twenty-two when I went up to London, straight from Oxford, to begin my legal career. My father kindly suggested that I should take a run on the Continent before settling down, to get up my French and German to the point at any rate of tolerably fluent small talk, and here again I have no doubt but he was right, as the want of early training of ear and tongue has left me a helpless mortal ever since. However, I was determined to lose not a month or a week if I could help it, and soon found myself in small rooms on the third floor at No. 15 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, from the windows of which, on a fine day, I could see the Surrey hills. I paid ￡30 a year for the chambers, and lived in them for another ￡70, keeping down my whole expenditure within ￡100 a year, a feat I am still rather proud of. I never could have done it but for a glorious old woman who kept the house, and did for all the inhabitants, of whom only two lived in their chambers. She had come up from Devonshire as a girl some fifty years before to that house where she had been ever since, and in all that time had never seen the Thames, which is, as you know, not five minutes’ walk from Lincoln’s Inn Fields; nor St. Paul’s, except the dome, from the top windows of No. 15. She still spoke with a delightful Devonshire accent, all her U’s being as soft as if she had left Torquay yesterday, and I won her heart at once by professing, or I should say acknowledging, a passion for junket, which she prepared in a reverent and enthusiastic manner on the slightest excuse. As my wife that was to be lived in Devonshire, the coincidence was peculiarly grateful to me, and the dear old woman, Roxworthy by name, could not have had my interests more at heart had I been her own son.

“There I lived for two years and upwards pleasantly enough, for several old school and college friends had chambers[xiv] in the neighborhood. My engagement was a constant stimulus to work and economy, and made me indifferent as to society. I just visited two or three family friends on Sundays, and for the rest did very well without it. From my own experience I would have every youngster get engaged by the time he is twenty-one, though I am not prepared to maintain that a long engagement is so good for girls as for boys. Mine at any rate was the making of me. My democratic instincts grew in strength during these years, notwithstanding the failure of my first practical endeavors to act up to them. One of these I will mention. Every house in the Square was entitled to a key of the five gardens, in which I spent most of the long summer evenings; and, seeing the number of ragged children who came round the railings and looked wistfully through at the lawns and beds within, I extended my privilege to them and used to let them in by the scores, and watch them tumbling on the grass and gathering the daisies with entire satisfaction. From the first, this outrageous proceeding greatly scandalized the Beadle, whose remonstrances I entirely disregarded, until at last a notice came from the Trustees of the Square that the key of No. 15 would be called in. This threat so alarmed poor Mrs. Roxworthy that I was fain to promise amendment, and so ceased myself to frequent the gardens. At the end of thirty years a strong effort is being made, as you may see in the papers, to throw the gardens open; so I live in hopes before long of seeing my revenge on the ghost of the Beadle of my day.

“I read hard at the law, but it was very much against the grain, and my endeavors to master the subtleties of contingent remainders, executory devises, the scintilla juris, and all the rest of it, were only partially successful. I sometimes think I might have taken con amore to common law and to criminal business, but conveyancing and real property law had no attractions for me, beyond the determination, if I could, to make a living by them. I read with a very able conveyancer[xv] and kindly old gentleman, who did his best to impart the mysteries to some six pupils. He soon found where my strength, such as it was, lay, and employed me in the preparation of deeds—such as appointments of new Trustees, where the operative part was quite simple common form, but long statements of fact had to be made in the recitals. These I rather excelled at, and on the whole, by the time I was of standing to be called to the Bar, was probably about as fit for that ceremony as the average of my cotemporaries.

“Three months before it took place I was married, the probation which my wife’s parents had very properly insisted on, having expired at the beginning of 1847, and we being found entirely in the same mind after our three years of separation. Most of our friends thought us mad, as we started on the vast income of ￡400 a year. It was confidently foretold that we should be living on our friends or in the workhouse before long, which prophesies however were entirely falsified. We started in tiny lodgings, almost opposite the house we now live in, and always managed to pay our way in the worst of times. And though I admit the experiment was a risky one, I have never repented it.

“The year of my call, 1848, was the year of revolutions, and on the 10th of April I paraded, like the rest of respectable society, as a special constable, though with shrewd misgivings in my own mind that the Chartists had a great deal to say for themselves. In which belief I soon found sympathizers. Frederick Maurice had recently been appointed Chaplain of Lincoln’s Inn, and was gathering round him a number of young Barristers and Students, whom he was putting to work in their spare time at a ragged school, and visiting the poor in a miserable district near Lincoln’s Inn. Contact with our wretched clients soon made it clear to us that something more radical and systematic was needed to raise them to anything like independence. They were almost all in the[xvi] hands of slop sellers, chamber masters, or other grinders of the faces of the poor. What could be done to deliver them? In the autumn, one of our number spent some time in Paris and came back full of the material and moral effects of association amongst the workmen there.

“We resolved to try the experiment and accordingly formed ourselves into a society for promoting Workingmen’s Associations, with Maurice as president. The idea grew on us apace, and soon called out an amount of enthusiasm which surprised ourselves. We were all busy men, tied to offices from ten till five, so we met at six in the morning and eight at night to settle our rules, and organize our work. We were all poor men too, but soon scraped together enough money to start our first Association. This we resolved should be a tailoring establishment, for which we could ourselves, with the help of our friends, find sufficient custom in the first instance. We had no difficulty in hiring good airy workshops, but how to fill them was the rub. We were now in communication with a number of poor workpeople, especially amongst the Chartists, and, to cut a long story short, started our Association with a slop-worker who had been in prison as manager, and some dozen associates of kindred opinions in the workroom.

“I needn’t trouble you with any details of the Christian Socialist movement, of which this was a beginning, and which made a great noise in the press and elsewhere at the time. It has survived any number of follies and failures, and has gradually spread till there is a union of Societies all over the kingdom, doing a work for our poorer classes which one can only wonder at and be thankful for.

“We wrote tracts, and started a small paper, ‘The Christian Socialist,’ and were soon at open strife with nearly the whole of our press, both the ‘Edinburgh’ and the ‘Quarterly’ condescending to bestow on us contemptuous, but very angry articles, in which they were joined by weeklies and dailies[xvii] innumerable. But we were young, saucy, and so thoroughly convinced we were right that ‘we cared, shall I say, not a d—n for their damning.’

“Most of my friends looked very serious, and prophesied that my prospects at the Bar would be ruined by my crotchets, and indeed I was dreadfully afraid of this myself. But the state of things in England was so serious, and I was so thoroughly convinced of the necessity of work in this direction, that I couldn’t give it up. No doubt I lost some business by it, but other business came, as I was wonderfully punctual at Chambers and soon got to be friends with my few clients, who even got to pardon, with a shrug of the shoulders, the queer folk they often found there. And queer no doubt they were for a Chancery barrister’s chambers, as emissaries from the tailors’, shoemakers’, printers’, and builders’ Associations (we had a dozen of them going by this time) were often in and out about their rules and accounts and squabbles. I only remember one instance in which I really suffered. A dear old gentleman, a family friend of ours, had managed with much difficulty to persuade his solicitor to give me some business. That most respectable of men, head of a firm which could have made any young barrister’s fortune, arrived one afternoon at my chambers with a brief, and was asked by my clerk to sit down for a moment till I was disengaged. This he did, graciously enough, though no doubt with the thought ‘how little I could know my business to keep him waiting even for a moment,’ when my door opened, and a full-blown black person (lately from the West Indies in quest of advice and aid for the freedmen there) walked out. This was too much for my intending client, who hurried away, saying he would call again, but I never saw his brief or him.

“So things went on for some years during which I managed to maintain my growing family without dropping my work for the Associations. We had migrated to Wimbledon,[xviii] for health’s sake, where we built a house side by side with one of the other Promoters, which had one large room common to both houses, the subject of much chaff and fun to our visitors and acquaintance. Our garden was also in common, and both arrangements, I think, answered well.

“About this time Maurice became convinced that if Associations of working people were to succeed, the men must be better educated in the highest sense. So he set to work to establish the Workingmen’s College, of which he was the first and I am the present Principal. It is a very noteworthy institution, at which, by the way, Emerson and Goldwin Smith, besides Stanley, Kingsley, Huxley, and other eminent Englishmen, have delivered opening addresses, at the beginning of the academical year, in October.

“I found it at first very hard to discover my mission at the college. I tried lectures on the law of combination and association, but they did not draw, and all the other classes for which I was competent, were filled by much better teachers from amongst our number. So, noting how badly set up the men were with round shoulders, and slouching gait, and how much they needed some strong exercise to supple them, I started a boxing class, and had some horizontal and parallel bars put up in the back-yard. These proved a great success, and at last it became clear to me, that all my Oxford time spent on such matters had not been thrown away. In connection with the boxing and gymnastic classes, we started social gatherings for talk and songs, over a cup of tea, which also were wonderfully successful. I remember Hawthorne coming to one of them; brought by his friend, H. Bright, of Liverpool, and quite losing his shyness and reserve for the evening.

“By this time we had a boy of eight, and, thinking over what I should like to say to him before he went to school, I took to writing a story as the easiest way of bringing out what I wanted. It was done mainly in the long vacation of 1856,[xix] but wasn’t published till early in the next year, and made such a hit that the publishers soon betrayed the secret, and I became famous!

“Whereupon arose again the professional bugbear, now set at rest for years. I had managed to get over and live down Christian Socialism, but who on earth would bring business to a successful author! I considered whether I shouldn’t throw over Lincoln’s Inn and take to writing, but decided that the law was best for me, and determined to stop writing. This good resolution held for two years, when the Berkshire festival of scouring the White Horse, (an old Danish or Saxon, certainly Pagan figure, still left on our chalk-hills,) came round, and my old country friends made such a point of having an account of it from me that I gave in and wrote my book No. 2.

“By this time my clients had become case-hardened, and finding no particular ill effects from my previous escapades, I gave in in a weak moment to a tempting offer of Macmillan’s, and wrote ‘Tom Brown at Oxford,’ for his magazine. Moreover, I had now made a plunge into public life, and was one of the leaders of a semi-political party. This is how it came about: There had been roused in me lively sympathies with the Abolitionists, and I had followed eagerly the progress of events through the Fugitive Slave, and Free Soil agitations. There was no warmer sympathizer with Garrison and John Brown and Levi Coffin, in England; so when the Lincoln election came, and South Carolina led off the seceding states with jubilant applause of society in England, I went at once fiercely into the other camp. You may judge of the difficulty of getting our public men of note to take active sides with the North (tho’ many of them didn’t conceal their sympathy, and were ready to speak in Parliament, and write,) by the fact that I was about the most prominent speaker at the first great public meeting, which was held in London. This proved to be such an extraordinary success, that there was no further[xx] effort on the part of the jingoes (that name hadn’t yet been invented, but it was precisely the same party,) to demonstrate publicly in the metropolis. In other centres there was need of such work, and I went to Birmingham and Liverpool to speak and deliver lectures on the war and its causes and issues. It was supposed that there was to be a row at the latter place, which was the stronghold of the Rebels; but all went off quietly.

“It was mainly in consequence of these doings that I was asked by the working folk in South London to stand for Lambeth in 1865. I did so, and was brought in triumphantly at the head of the Poll, and almost all the expense paid by subscription. From that time I gradually gave up legal business, and in 1868 took silk, as it is called, i. e., became a Queen’s Counsel. In 1869 I wrote ‘Alfred the Great’ for Macmillan’s Sunday Series. I now made it my chief business to attend to Social-Political questions in Parliament; sat on two Trades unions Commissions; got amendments to the Industrial and Friendly Societies Acts through the House, but never took to party politics.

“In 1870, as I hope you remember, I paid my delightful visit to America.

“In 1872 I lost my dear eldest brother, and soon after wrote the memoir of him for my family. Maurice also died, and I became Principal of the Workingmen’s College.

“Before the next election (1874) the Co-operative question had come to the front. The success of the Upper Class London Supply Societies [copies of our working-class Associations in their main principle and features] had roused the tradesmen throughout the country. I was a candidate for Marylebone, and was fiercely opposed by the tradesmen, and supported by the professional and working classes. There were three Liberal candidates for only two seats, so it was agreed to refer it to the Attorney General to say who should[xxi] retire, and he decided that I had the worst chance of winning the seat (on one-sided and insufficient evidence, as my supporters maintained, and I think rightly). I therefore retired, and got no chance of entering that Parliament. For by this time the Trades Protection Society had been organized, to fight against neither small nor great, but only against those accursed revolutionists who had supported the Co-operative movement, and refused to flinch from it.

“So it happened that I was again thrown out at the election this year. I had consented, on the unanimous and unsolicited request of the Liberal party in Salisbury, to stand there, and all went well till just before the election, when the Trades Protective people permitted the party organization to throw me over. I doubt if I shall ever return to the House, as my views on the Church question make me an almost hopeless candidate in the North of England, and my support of Co-operation a perfectly hopeless one at present in the South. I care, however, very little about it, having plenty to do outside in keeping irons hot, especially that most interesting of all my irons, the Tennessee settlement, which I hope to keep very hot indeed, and look upon as about the most hopeful of the many New Jerusalems which have attracted me during my pilgrimage. I am off to open Chapter II. of that Romance [Chapter I., the getting the titles clear, buying the land, &c., having taken some two years.] on the 12th of next month, and I can’t tell you how much my heart is in it.

“And so end my confessions. The only other points of interest, omitted above, are the publication of the ‘Old Church,’ in 1877, when the disestablishment movement began to get serious, and ‘The Manliness of Christ,’ this Spring, (1880), which latter has been already republished on your side in four different forms; and lastly, my share in the Volunteer movement, which I joined at its start in 1859. The Workingmen’s College raised a corps of two[xxii] companies at once, of which, after serving for a few weeks as private, I was made Captain. It soon swelled into a regiment, the 19th Middlesex, of which I became Colonel, and served in it twelve years.”
TRUE MANLINESS. Chapter 1
THE conscience of every man recognizes courage as the foundation of true manliness, and manliness as the perfection of human character, and if Christianity runs counter to conscience in this matter, or indeed in any other, Christianity will go to the wall.

But does it? On the contrary, is not perfection of character—“Be ye perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect,” perfection to be reached by moral effort in the faithful following of our Lord’s life on earth—the final aim which the Christian religion sets before individual men, and constant contact and conflict with evil of all kinds the necessary condition of that moral effort,[14] and the means adopted by our Master in the world in which we live, and for which he died? In that strife, then, the first requisite is courage or manfulness, gained through conflict with evil—for without such conflict there can be no perfection of character, the end for which Christ says we were sent into this world.
Chapter 2
“Manliness and manfulness” are synonymous, but they embrace more than we ordinarily mean by the word “courage;” for instance, tenderness and thoughtfulness for others. They include that courage which lies at the root of all manliness, but is, in fact, only its lowest or rudest form. Indeed, we must admit that it is not exclusively a human quality at all, but one which we share with other animals, and which some of them—for instance the bulldog and weasel—exhibit with a certainty and a thoroughness, which is very rare amongst mankind.

In what, then, does courage, in this ordinary sense of the word, consist? First, in persistency, or the determination to have one’s own way, coupled with contempt for safety and ease, and readiness to risk pain or death in getting one’s own way. This is, let us readily admit, a valuable, even a noble quality, but an animal quality rather than a human or manly one. Proficiency[15] in athletic games is not necessarily a test even of animal courage, but only of muscular power and physical training. Even in those games which, to some extent, do afford a test of the persistency, and contempt for discomfort or pain, which constitute animal courage—such as rowing, boxing, and wrestling—it is of necessity a most unsatisfactory one. For instance, Nelson—as courageous an Englishman as ever lived, who attacked a Polar bear with a handspike when he was a boy of fourteen, and told his captain, when he was scolded for it, that he did not know Mr. Fear—with his slight frame and weak constitution, could never have won a boat-race, and in a match would have been hopelessly astern of any one of the crew of his own barge; and the highest courage which ever animated a human body would not enable the owner of it, if he were himself untrained, to stand for five minutes against a trained wrestler or boxer.

Athleticism is a good thing if kept in its place, but it has come to be very much over-praised and over-valued amongst us.

True manliness is as likely to be found in a weak as in a strong body. Other things being equal, we may perhaps admit (though I should hesitate to do so) that a man with a highly-trained and developed body will be more courageous than a weak man. But we must take this caution with us, that a great athlete may be a brute or a coward, while a truly manly man can be neither.
Chapter 3
Let us take a few well-known instances of courageous deeds and examine them; because, if we can find out any common quality in them we shall have lighted on something which is of the essence of, or inseparable from, that manliness which includes courage—that manliness of which we are in search.

I will take two or three at hazard from a book in which they abound, and which was a great favorite some years ago, as I hope it is still, I mean Napier’s Peninsular War. At the end of the storming of Badajos, after speaking of the officers, Napier goes on: “Who shall describe the springing valor of that Portuguese grenadier who was killed the foremost man at Santa Maria? or the martial fury of that desperate rifleman, who, in his resolution to win, thrust himself beneath the chained sword-blades, and then suffered the enemy to dash his head in pieces with the end of their muskets.”

Again, at the Coa: “A north-of-Ireland man, named Stewart, but jocularly called ‘the boy,’ because of his youth, nineteen, and of his gigantic stature and strength, who had fought bravely and displayed great intelligence beyond the river, was one of the last men who came down to the bridge, but he would not pass. Turning round he regarded the French with a grim look, and spoke aloud as follows, ‘So this is the end of our brag. This is our first battle, and we retreat! The boy[17] Stewart will not live to hear that said.’ Then striding forward in his giant might he fell furiously on the nearest enemies with the bayonet, refused the quarter they seemed desirous of granting, and died fighting in the midst of them.”

“Still more touching, more noble, more heroic, was the death of Sergeant Robert McQuade. During McLeod’s rush, this man, also from the north of Ireland, saw two men level their muskets on rests against a high gap in a bank, awaiting the uprise of an enemy. The present Adjutant-general Brown, then a lad of sixteen, attempted to ascend at the fatal spot. McQuade, himself only twenty-four years of age, pulled him back, saying in a calm, decided tone, ‘You are too young, sir, to be killed,’ and then offering his own person to the fire, fell dead pierced with both balls.” And, speaking of the British soldier generally, he says in his preface, “What they were their successors now are. Witness the wreck of the Birkenhead, where four hundred men, at the call of their heroic officers, Captains Wright and Girardot, calmly and without a murmur accepted death in a horrible form rather than endanger the women and children saved in the boats. The records of the world furnish no parallel to this self-devotion.”

Let us add to these two very recent examples: the poor colliers who worked day and night at Pont-y-pridd with their lives in their hands, to rescue their[18] buried comrades; and the gambler in St. Louis who went straight from the gaming-table into the fire, to the rescue of women and children, and died of the hurts after his third return from the flames.

Looking, then, at these several cases, we find in each that resolution in the actors to have their way, contempt for ease, and readiness to risk pain or death, which we noted as the special characteristics of animal courage, which we share with the bulldog and weasel.

So far all of them are alike. Can we get any further? Not much, if we take the case of the rifleman who thrust his head under the sword-blades and allowed his brains to be knocked out sooner than draw it back, or that of “the boy Stewart.” These are intense assertions of individual will and force—avowals of the rough hard-handed man that he has that in him which enables him to defy pain and danger and death—this and little or nothing more; and no doubt a very valuable and admirable thing as it stands.

But we feel, I think, at once, that there is something more in the act of Sergeant McQuade, and of the miners in Pont-y-pridd—something higher and more admirable. And it is not a mere question of degree, of more or less, in the quality of animal courage. The rifleman and “the boy Stewart” were each of them persistent to death, and no man can be more. The acts were, then, equally courageous, so far as persistency and scorn of danger and death are concerned.[19] We must look elsewhere for the difference, for that which touches us more deeply in the case of Sergeant McQuade than in that of “the boy Stewart,” and can only find it in the motive. At least, it seems to me that the worth of the last lies mainly in the sublimity of self-assertion, of the other in the sublimity of self-sacrifice.

And this holds good again in the case of the Birkenhead. Captain Wright gave the word for the men to fall in on deck by companies, knowing that the sea below them was full of sharks, and that the ship could not possibly float till the boats came back; and the men fell in, knowing this also, and stood at attention without uttering a word, till she heeled over and went down under them. And Napier, with all his delight in physical force and prowess, and his intense appreciation of the qualities which shine most brightly in the fiery action of battle, gives the palm to these when he writes, “The records of the world furnish no parallel to this self-devotion.” He was no mean judge in such a case; and, if he is right, as I think he is, do we not get another side-light on our inquiry, and find that the highest temper of physical courage is not to be found, or perfected, in action but in repose. All physical effort relieves the strain and makes it easier to persist unto death under the stimulus and excitement of the shock of battle, or of violent exertion of any kind, than when the effort has to be made with grounded arms. In[20] other words, may we not say that in the face of danger self-restraint is after all the highest form of self-assertion, and a characteristic of manliness as distinguished from courage.
Chapter 4

The courage which is tested in times of terror, on the battle-field, in the sinking ship, the poisoned mine, the blazing house, presents but one small side of a great subject. Such testing times come to few, and to these not often in their lives. But on the other hand, the daily life of every one of us teems with occasions which will try the temper of our courage as searchingly, though not as terribly, as battle-field or fire or wreck. For we are born into a state of war; with falsehood and disease, and wrong and misery in a thousand forms lying all around us, and the voice within calling on us to take our stand as men in the eternal battle against these.

And in this life-long fight, to be waged by every one of us single-handed against a host of foes, the last requisite for a good fight, the last proof and test of our courage and manfulness, must be loyalty to truth—the most rare and difficult of all human qualities. For such loyalty, as it grows in perfection, asks ever more and more of us, and sets before us a standard of manliness always rising higher and higher.

And this is the great lesson which we shall learn from Christ’s life, the more earnestly and faithfully we study it. “For this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, to bear witness to the truth.” To bear this witness against avowed and open enemies is comparatively easy; but, to bear it against those we love; against those whose judgment and opinions we respect, in defense or furtherance of that which approves itself as true to our own inmost conscience, this is the last and abiding test of courage and of manliness.
Chapter 5
How natural, nay, how inevitable it is, that we should fall into the habit of appreciating and judging things mainly by the standards in common use amongst those we respect and love. But these very standards are apt to break down with us when we are brought face to face with some question which takes us ever so little out of ourselves and our usual moods. At such times we are driven to admit in our hearts that we, and those we respect and love, have been looking at and judging things, not truthfully, and therefore not courageously and manfully, but conventionally. And then comes one of the most searching of all trials of courage and manliness, when a man or woman is called to stand by what approves itself to their consciences as true, and to protest[22] for it through evil report and good report, against all discouragement and opposition from those they love or respect. The sense of antagonism instead of rest, of distrust and alienation instead of approval and sympathy, which such times bring, is a test which tries the very heart and reins, and it is one which meets us at all ages, and in all conditions of life. Emerson’s hero is the man who, “taking both reputation and life in his hand, will with perfect urbanity dare the gibbet and the mob, by the resolute truth of his speech and rectitude of his behavior.”
Chapter 6
After all, what would life be without fighting, I should like to know? From the cradle to the grave, fighting, rightly understood, is the business, the real, highest, honestest business of every son of man. Every one who is worth his salt has his enemies, who must be beaten, be they evil thoughts and habits in himself, or spiritual wickednesses in high places, or Russians, or border-ruffians.

It is no good for Quakers, or any other body of men to uplift their voices against fighting. Human nature is too strong for them, and they don’t follow their own precepts. Every soul of them is doing his own piece of fighting, somehow and somewhere. The world might be a better world without fighting, for anything I know,[23] but it wouldn’t be our world; and therefore I am dead against crying peace, when there is no peace, and isn’t meant to be. I am as sorry as any man to see folks fighting the wrong people and the wrong things, but I’d a deal sooner see them doing that, than that they should have no fight in them.
Chapter 7
You can’t alter society, or hinder people in general from being helpless and vulgar—from letting themselves fall into slavery to the things about them if they are rich, or from aping the habits and vices of the rich if they are poor. But you may live simple, manly lives yourselves, speaking your own thought, paying your own way, and doing your own work, whatever that may be. You will remain gentlemen so long as you follow these rules, if you have to sweep a crossing for your livelihood. You will not remain gentlemen in anything but the name, if you depart from them, though you may be set to govern a kingdom.
Chapter 8
In testing manliness as distinguished from courage, we shall have to reckon sooner or later with the idea of duty. Nelson’s column stands in the most conspicuous site in all London, and stands there with all[24] men’s approval, not because of his daring courage. Lord Peterborough, in a former generation, Lord Dundonald in the one which succeeded, were at least as eminent for reckless and successful daring. But it is because the idea of devotion to duty is inseparably connected with Nelson’s name in the minds of Englishmen, that he has been lifted high above all his compeers in England’s capital.
Chapter 9
In the throes of one of the terrible revolutions of the worst days of imperial Rome—when probably the cruelest mob and most licentious soldiery of all time were raging round the palace of the C?sars, and the chances of an hour would decide whether Galba or Otho should rule the world, the alternative being a violent death—an officer of the guard, one Julius Atticus, rushed into Galba’s presence with a bloody sword, boasting that he had slain his rival, Otho. “My comrade, by whose order?” was his only greeting from the old Pagan chief. And the story has come down through eighteen centuries, in the terse, strong sentences of the great historian, Tacitus.

Comrade, who ordered thee? whose will art thou doing? It is the question which has to be asked of every fighting man, in whatever part of the great battlefield he comes to the front, and determines the manliness[25] of soldier, statesman, parson, of every strong man, and suffering woman.
“Three roots bear up Dominion; knowledge, will,
These two are strong; but stronger still the third,
Obedience: ’tis the great tap-root, which still
Knit round the rock of Duty, is not stirred,
Though storm and tempest spend their utmost skill.”

I think that the more thoroughly we sift and search out this question the more surely we shall come to this as the conclusion of the whole matter. Tenacity of will, or wilfulness, lies at the root of all courage, but courage can only rise into true manliness when the will is surrendered; and the more absolute the surrender of the will the more perfect will be the temper of our courage and the strength of our manliness.
“Strong Son of God, immortal Love,”

the laureate has pleaded, in the moment of his highest inspiration.
“Our wills are ours to make them thine.”

And that strong Son of God to whom this cry has gone up in our day, and in all days, has left us the secret of his strength in the words, “I am come to do the will of my Father and your Father.”
Chapter 10
Haste and distrust are the sure signs of weakness, if not of cowardice. Just in so far as they prevail in any life, even in the most heroic, the man fails, and his work will have to be done over again. In Christ’s life there is not the slightest trace of such weakness or cowardice. From all that we are told, and from all that we can infer, he made no haste, and gave way to no doubt, waiting for God’s mind, and patiently preparing himself for whatever his work might be. And so his work from the first was perfect, and through his whole public life he never faltered or wavered, never had to withdraw or modify a word once spoken. And thus he stands, and will stand to the end of time, the true model of the courage and manliness of boyhood and youth and early manhood.
Chapter 11
The man whose yea is yea and his nay nay, is, we all confess, the most courageous, whether or no he may be the most successful in daily life. And he who gave the precept has left us the most perfect example of how to live up to it.
Chapter 12
It is his action when the danger comes, not when he is in solitary preparation for it, which marks the man of courage.
Chapter 13
In all the world’s annals there is nothing which approaches, in the sublimity of its courage, that last conversation between our Saviour and the Roman procurator, before Pilate led him forth for the last time and pleaded scornfully with his nation for the life of their king. There must be no flaw or spot on Christ’s courage, any more than on his wisdom and tenderness and sympathy. And the more unflinchingly we apply the test the more clear and sure will the response come back to us.
Chapter 14
Quit yourself like men; speak up, and strike out if necessary, for whatsoever is true and manly, and lovely, and of good report; never try to be popular, but only to do your duty and help others to do theirs, and, wherever you are placed, you may leave the tone of feeling higher than you found it, and so be doing good which no living soul can measure to generations yet unborn.
Chapter 15
We listened to Dr. Arnold, as all boys in their better moods will listen (aye, and men too for the matter of[28] that,) to a man whom we felt to be, with all his heart and soul and strength, striving against whatever was mean and unmanly and unrighteous in our little world. It was not the cold, clear voice of one giving advice and warning from serene heights to those who were struggling and sinning below, but the warm, living voice of one who was fighting for us by our sides, and calling on us to help him and ourselves and one another. And so, wearily and little by little, but surely and steadily on the whole, was brought home to the young boy the meaning of his life; that it was no fool’s or sluggard’s paradise into which he had wandered by chance, but a battle-field ordained from of old, where there are no spectators, but the youngest must take his side, and the stakes are life and death. And he who roused this consciousness in them, showed them at the same time, by every word he spoke in the pulpit, and by his whole daily life, how that battle was to be fought; and stood there before them their fellow-soldier and the captain of their band. The true sort of a captain, too, for a boys’ army, one who had no misgivings and gave no uncertain word of command, and, let who would yield or make truce, would fight the fight out (so every boy felt) to the last gasp and the last drop of blood. Other sides of his character might take hold of and influence boys here and there, but it was this thoroughness and undaunted courage which more than anything else won his way to the hearts of the great mass of those on whom he left his mark, and made them believe first in him, and then in his Master.
Chapter 16
To stand by what our conscience witnesses for as truth, through evil and good report, even against all opposition of those we love, and of those whose judgment we look up to and should ordinarily prefer to follow; to cut ourselves deliberately off from their love and sympathy and respect, is surely one of the most severe trials to which we can be put. A man has need to feel at such times that the Spirit of the Lord is upon him in some measure, as it was upon Christ when he rose in the synagogue of Nazareth and, selecting the passage of Isaiah which speaks most directly of the Messiah, claimed that title for himself, and told them that to-day this prophecy was fulfilled in him.

The fierce, hard, Jewish spirit is at once roused to fury. They would kill him then and there, and so settle his claims once for all. He passes through them, and away from the quiet home where he had been brought up—alone, it would seem, so far as man could make him so, and homeless for the remainder of his life. Yet not alone, for his Father is with him; nor homeless for he has the only home of which man can be sure, the home of his own heart shared with the Spirit of God.
Chapter 17
We have been told recently, by more than one of those who profess to have weighed and measured Christianity and found it wanting, that religion must rest on reason, based on phenomena of this visible, tangible world in which we are living.

Be it so. There is no need for a Christian to object. We can meet this challenge as well as any other. We need never be careful about choosing our own battlefield. Looking, then, at that world as we see it, laboring heavily along in our own time—as we hear of it through the records of the ages—I must repeat that there is no phenomenon in it comparable for a moment to that of Christ’s life and work. The more we canvass and sift and weigh and balance the materials, the more clearly and grandly does his figure rise before us, as the true Head of humanity, the perfect Ideal, not only of wisdom and tenderness and love, but of courage also, because He was and is the simple Truth of God—the expression, at last, in flesh and blood of what He who created us means each one of our race to be.
Chapter 18
“My father,” said Hardy, “is an old commander in the royal navy. He was a second cousin of Nelson’s[31] Hardy, and that, I believe, was what led him into the navy, for he had no interest whatever of his own. It was a visit which Nelson’s Hardy, then a young lieutenant, paid to his relative, my grandfather, which decided my father, he has told me; but he always had a strong bent to sea, though he was a boy of very studious habits.

“However, those were times when brave men who knew and loved their profession couldn’t be overlooked, and my dear old father fought his way up step by step—not very fast, certainly, but still fast enough to keep him in heart about his chances in life.

“He was made commander towards the end of the war, and got a ship, in which he sailed with a convoy of merchantmen from Bristol. It was the last voyage he ever made in active service; but the Admiralty was so well satisfied with his conduct in it that they kept his ship in commission two years after peace was declared. And well they might be, for in the Spanish main he fought an action which lasted, on and off, for two days, with a French sloop-of-war, and a privateer, either of which ought to have been a match for him. But he had been with Vincent in the Arrow, and was not likely to think much of such small odds as that. At any rate, he beat them off, and not a prize could either of them make out of his convoy, though I believe his ship was never fit for anything afterwards, and was broken up as soon as she was out of commission. We have got her compasses,[32] and the old flag which flew at the peak through the whole voyage, at home now. It was my father’s own flag, and his fancy to have it always flying. More than half the men were killed or badly hit—the dear old father among the rest. A ball took off part of his knee-cap, and he had to fight the last six hours of the action sitting in a chair on the quarter-deck; but he says it made the men fight better than when he was among them, seeing him sitting there sucking oranges.

“Well, he came home with a stiff leg. The Bristol merchants gave him the freedom of the city in a gold box, and a splendidly-mounted sword with an inscription on the blade, which hangs over the mantel-piece at home. When I first left home, I asked him to give me his old service-sword, which used to hang by the other, and he gave it me at once, though I was only a lad of seventeen, as he would give me his right eye, dear old father, which is the only one he has now; the other he lost from a cutlass-wound in a boarding party. There it hangs, and those are his epaulettes in the tin case. They used to be under my pillow before I had a room of my own, and many a cowardly down-hearted fit have they helped me to pull through; and many a mean act have they helped to keep me from doing. There they are always; and the sight of them brings home the dear old man to me as nothing else does, hardly even his letters. I must be a great scoundrel to go very wrong with such a father.

[33]

“Let’s see—where was I? Oh, yes; I remember. Well, my father got his box and sword, and some very handsome letters from several great men. We have them all in a book at home, and I know them by heart. The ones he values most are from Collinwood, and his old captain, Vincent, and from his cousin, Nelson’s Hardy, who didn’t come off very well himself after the war. But my poor old father never got another ship. For some time he went up every year to London, and was always, he says, very kindly received by the people in power, and often dined with one and another Lord of the Admiralty who had been an old mess-mate. But he was longing for employment, and it used to prey on him while he was in his prime to feel year after year slipping away and he still without a ship. But why should I abuse people and think it hard, when he doesn’t? ‘You see, Jack,’ he said to me the last time I spoke to him about it, ‘after all, I was a battered old hulk, lame and half-blind. So was Nelson, you’ll say; but every man isn’t a Nelson, my boy. And though I might think I could con or fight a ship as well as ever, I can’t say other folk who didn’t know me were wrong for not agreeing with me. Would you, now, Jack, appoint a lame and blind man to command your ship, if you had one?’ But he left off applying for work soon after he was fifty (I just remember the time), for he began to doubt then whether he was quite so fit to command a small vessel as a younger man; and though he[34] had a much better chance after that of getting a ship (for William IV. came to the throne, who knew all about him), he never went near the Admiralty again. ‘God forbid,’ he said, ‘that his Majesty should take me if there’s a better man to be had.’”
Chapter 19
The object of wrestling and of all other athletic sports is to strengthen men’s bodies, and to teach them to use their strength readily, to keep their tempers, to endure fatigue and pain. These are all noble ends. God gives us few more valuable gifts than strength of body, and courage, and endurance—to laboring men they are beyond all price. We ought to cultivate them in all right ways for they are given us to protect the weak, to subdue the earth, to fight for our homes and country if necessary.
Chapter 20
To you young men, I say, as Solomon said, rejoice in your youth; rejoice in your strength of body, and elasticity of spirits and the courage which follows from these; but remember, that for these gifts you will be judged—not condemned, mind, but judged. You will have to show before a judge who knoweth your inmost[35] hearts, that you have used these his great gifts well; that you have been pure and manly, and true.
Chapter 21
At last in my dream, a mist came over the Hill, and all the figures got fainter and fainter, and seemed to be fading away. But as they faded, I could see one great figure coming out clearer through the mist, which I had never noticed before. It was like a grand old man, with white hair and mighty limbs, who looked as old as the hill itself, but yet as if he were as young now as he ever had been; and at his feet were a pickaxe and spade, and at his side a scythe. But great and solemn as it looked, I felt that the figure was not a man, and I was angry with it. Why should it come in with its great pitiful eyes and smile? Why were my brothers and sisters, the men and women, to fade away before it?

“The labor that a man doeth under the sun, it is all vanity. Prince and peasant, the wise man and the fool they all come to me at last and I garner them away, and their place knows them no more!” So the figure seemed to say to itself, and I felt melancholy as I watched it sitting there at rest, playing with the fading figures.

At last it placed one of the little figures on its knee, half in mockery, as it seemed to me, and half in sorrow.[36] But then all changed; and the great figure began to fade, and the small man came out clearer and clearer. And he took no heed of his great neighbor, but rested there where he was placed; and his face was quiet, and full of life as he gazed steadily and earnestly through the mist. And the other figures came flitting by again and chanted as they passed, “The work of one true man is greater than all thy work. Thou hast nought but a seeming power over it, or over him. Every true man is greater than thee. Every true man shall conquer more than thee; for he shall triumph over death, and hell, and thee, oh, Time!”
Chapter 22
The strain and burden of a great message of deliverance to men has again and again found the weak places in the faith and courage of the most devoted and heroic of those to whom it has been entrusted. Moses pleads under its pressure that another may be sent in his place, asking despairingly, “Why hast thou sent me?” Elijah prays for death. Mohammed passes years of despondency and hesitation under the sneers of those who scoff, “There goeth the son of Abdallah, who hath his converse with God!” Such shrinkings and doubtings enlist our sympathy, make us feel the tie of a common humanity which binds us to such men.[37] But no one, I suppose, will maintain that perfect manliness would not suppress, at any rate, the open expression of any such feelings. The man who has to lead a great revolution should keep all misgivings to himself, and the weight of them so kept must often prove the sorest part of his burden.
Chapter 23
We have most of us, at one time or another of our lives, passed through trying ordeals, the memory of which we can by no means dwell on with pleasure. Times they were of blinding and driving storm, and howling winds, out of which voices as of evil spirits spoke close in our ears—tauntingly, temptingly, whispering to the mischievous wild beast which lurks in the bottom of all our hearts—now, “Rouse up! art thou a man and darest not do this thing;” now, “Rise, kill and eat—it is thine, wilt thou not take it? Shall the flimsy scruples of this teacher, or the sanctified cant of that, bar thy way and balk thee of thine own? Thou hast strength to have them—to brave all things in earth or heaven, or hell; put out thy strength, and be a man!”

Then did not the wild beast within us shake itself, and feel its power, sweeping away all the “Thou shalt nots,” which the Law wrote up before us in letters of fire, with the “I will” of hardy, godless, self-assertion?[38] And all the while, which alone made the storm really dreadful to us, was there not the still small voice, never to be altogether silenced by the roarings of the tempest of passion, by the evil voices, by our own violent attempts to stifle it;—the still small voice appealing to the man, the true man, within us, which is made in the image of God, calling on him to assert his dominion over the wild beast—to obey, and conquer, and live. Aye! and though we may have followed other voices, have we not, while following them, confessed in our hearts that all true strength, and nobleness, and manliness was to be found in the other path. Do I say that most of us have had to tread this path and fight this battle? Surely I might have said all of us; all, at least, who have passed the bright days of their boyhood. The clear and keen intellect no less than the dull and heavy; the weak, the cold, the nervous, no less than the strong and passionate of body. The arms and the field have been divers—can have been the same, I suppose, to no two men, but the battle must have been the same to all. One here and there may have had a foretaste of it as a boy; but it is the young man’s battle, and not the boy’s, thank God for it! That most hateful and fearful of all relatives, call it by what name we will—self, the natural man, the old Adam—must have risen up before each of us in early manhood, if not sooner, challenging the true man within[39] us, to which the Spirit of God is speaking, to a struggle for life or death.
Gird yourself, then, for the fight, my young brother, and take up the pledge which was made for you when you were a helpless child. This world, and all others, time and eternity, for you hang upon the issue. This enemy must be met and vanquished—not finally, for no man while on earth, I suppose, can say that he is slain; but, when once known and recognized, met and vanquished he must be, by God’s help, in this and that encounter, before you can be truly called a man; before you can really enjoy any one even of this world’s good things.
Chapter 24
In the course of my inquiries on the subject of muscular Christians, their works and ways, a fact has forced itself on my attention, which, for the sake of ingenious youth, ought not to be passed over. I find then, that, side by side with these muscular Christians, and apparently claiming some sort of connection with them (the same concern, as the pirates of trade-marks say) have risen up another set of persons, against whom I desire to caution my readers. I must call the persons in question “musclemen,” as distinguished from muscular Christians; the only point in common between the two being that both hold it to be a good thing to have strong[40] and well-exercised bodies, ready to be put at the shortest notice to any work of which bodies are capable, and to do it well. Here all likeness ends; for the “muscleman” seems to have no belief whatever as to the purposes for which his body has been given him, except some hazy idea that it is to go up and down the world with him, belaboring men and captivating women for his benefit or pleasure, at once the servant and fomenter of those fierce and brutal passions which he seems to think it a necessity, and rather a fine thing than otherwise, to indulge and obey. Whereas, so far as I know, the least of the muscular Christians has hold of the old chivalrous and Christian belief, that a man’s body is given him to be trained and brought into subjection, and then used for the protection of the weak, the advancement of all righteous causes, and the subduing of the earth which God has given to the children of men. He does not hold that mere strength or activity are in themselves worthy of any respect or worship, or that one man is a bit better than another because he can knock him down, or carry a bigger sack of potatoes than he. For mere power, whether of body or intellect, he has (I hope and believe) no reverence whatever, though, c?teris paribus, he would probably himself, as a matter of taste prefer the man who can lift a hundred-weight round his head with his little finger to the man who can construct a string of perfect Sorites.
Chapter 25
As a rule, the more thoroughly disciplined and fit a man may be for any really great work, the more conscious will he be of his own unfitness for it, the more distrustful of himself, the more anxious not to thrust himself forward. It is only the zeal of the half-instructed when the hour of a great deliverance has come at last—of those who have had a glimpse of the glory of the goal, but have never known or counted the perils of the path which leads to it—which is ready with the prompt response, “Yes—we can drink of the cup, we can be baptized with the baptism.”
Chapter 26
How can we be ever on the watch for the evil which is so near us? We cannot; but one is with us, is in us, who can and will, if we will let him.

Men found this out in the old time, and have felt it and known it ever since. Three thousand years ago this truth dawned upon the old Psalmist, and struck him with awe. He struggled with it; he tried to escape from it, but in vain. “Whither shall I go,” he says “from thy Spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the[42] sea; even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.”

Is any of us stronger or wiser than the Psalmist? Is there any place for us to flee to, which was not open to him? My brethren, had we not better make up our minds to accept and acknowledge the truth, to which our own consciences bear witness, that not only in heaven, and in hell, and in the uttermost parts of sea and earth, He is present, but that in the inmost recesses of our own hearts there is no escape from his Spirit—that He is there also, sustaining us, pleading with us, punishing us.

We know it by the regret we feel for time wasted and opportunities neglected; by the loathing coming back to us, time after time, for our every untrue, or mean thought, word, or deed; by every longing after truth, and righteousness, and purity, which stirs our sluggish souls. By all these things, and in a thousand other ways, we feel it, we know it.

Let us, then, own this and give ourselves up to his guidance. At first it will be hard work; our will and spirits will be like a lump of ice in a man’s hand, which yields but slowly to the warm pressure. But do not despair; throw yourselves on his guidance, and he will guide you, he will hide you under his wings, you shall be safe under his feathers, his faithfulness and truth shall be your shield and buckler.

The ice will melt into water, and the water will lie[43] there in the hollow of the hand, moving at the slightest motion, obeying every impulse which is given to it.

My brethren, the Spirit of God which is in every one of us—the spirit of truth and love unchangeable—will take possession of our spirits, if we will but let him, and turn our whole lives into the lives of children of God, and joint-heirs of heaven with his Son.
Chapter 27
“As the world was plastic and fluid in the hands of God, so it is ever to so much of his attributes as we bring to it,” may be a startling saying of Mr. Emerson’s, but is one which commends itself to our experience and reason, if we only consult them honestly. Let us take the most obvious examples of this law. Look at the relations of man to the brute creation. One of us shall have no difficulty in making friends of beasts and birds, while another excites their dread and hate, so that even dogs will scarcely come near him. There is no need to go back to the traditions of the hermits in the Thebaid, or St. Francis of Assisi, for instances of the former class. We all know the story of Cowper and his three hares, from his exquisite letters and poem, and most of you must have read, or heard of the terms on which Waterton lived with the birds and beasts in his Yorkshire home, and of Thoreau, unable to get rid of wild squirrels and birds who would come and live with him,[44] or from a boat, taking fish which lay quietly in his hand till he chose to put them back again into the stream. But I suppose there is scarcely one of us who has not himself seen such instances again and again, persons of whom the old words seemed literally true, “At destruction and famine thou shalt laugh; neither shalt thou be afraid of the beasts of the earth. For thou shalt be in league with the stones of the field, and the beasts of the field shall be at peace with thee.”

I remember myself several such; a boy who was friends even with rats, stoats, and snakes, and generally had one or other of them in his pockets; a groom upon whose shoulders the pigeons used to settle, and nestle against his cheeks, whenever he went out into the stable-yard or field. Is there any reasonable way of accounting for this? Only one, I think, which is, that those who have this power over, and attraction for, animals, have always felt toward them and treated them as their Maker intended—have unconsciously, perhaps, but still faithfully, followed God’s mind in their dealings with his creatures, and so have stood in true relations to them all, and have found the beasts of the field at peace with them.

In the same way the stones of the field are in league with the geologist, the trees and flowers with the botanist, the component parts of earth and air with the chemist, just in so far as each, consciously or unconsciously, follows God’s methods with them—each part[45] of his creation yielding up its secrets and its treasures to the open mind of the humble and patient, who is also at bottom always the most courageous learner.
Chapter 28
What is true of each of us beyond all question—what every man who walks with open eyes and open heart knows to be true of himself—must be true also of Christ. And so, though we may reject the stories of the clay birds, which he modeled as a child, taking wing and bursting into song round him, (as on a par with St. Francis’ address to his sisters, the swallows, at Alvia, or the flocks in the marshes of Venice, who thereupon kept silence from their twitterings and songs till his sermon was finished), we cannot doubt that in proportion as Christ was more perfectly in sympathy with God’s creation than any medi?val saint, or modern naturalist, or man of science, he had more power than they with all created things from his earliest youth. Nor could it be otherwise with the hearts and wills of men. Over these we know that, from that time to this, he has exercised a supreme sway, infinitely more wonderful than that over birds and beasts, because of man’s power of resistance to the will Christ came to teach and to do, which exists, so far as we can see, in no other part of creation.
 
I think, then, it is impossible to resist the conclusion that he must have had all these powers from his childhood, that they must have been growing stronger from day to day, and he, at the same time, more and more conscious of possessing them, not to use on any impulse of curiosity or self-will, but only as the voice within prompted. And it seems the most convincing testimony to his perfect sonship, manifested in perfect obedience, that he should never have tested his powers during those thirty years as he did at once and with perfect confidence as soon as the call came. Had he done so his ministry must have commenced sooner; that is to say, before the method was matured by which he was to reconstruct, and lift into a new atmosphere and on to a higher plane, the faith and life of his own nation and of the whole world. For it is impossible to suppose that the works which he did, and the words he spoke, at thirty—which at once threw all Galilee and Judea into a ferment of hope and joy and doubt and anger—should have passed unnoticed had they been wrought and spoken when he was twenty. Here, as in all else, he waited for God’s mind: and so, when the time for action came, worked with the power of God. And this waiting and preparation must have been the supreme trial of his faith. The holding this position must have been, in those early years, the holding of the very centre of the citadel in man’s soul, (as Bunyan so quaintly terms it), against which the assaults of the tempter must[47] have been delivered again and again while the garrison was in training for the victorious march out into the open field of the great world, carrying forth the standard which shall never go back.

And while it may be readily admitted that Christ wielded a dominion over all created things, as well as over man, which no other human being has ever approached, it seems to me to be going quite beyond what can be proved, or even fairly assumed, to speak of his miracles as supernatural, in the sense that no man has ever done, or can ever do, the like. The evidence is surely all the other way, and seems rather to indicate that if we could only have lived up to the standard which we acknowledge in our inmost hearts to be the true one—could only have obeyed every motion and warning of the voice of God speaking in our hearts from the day when we first became conscious of and could hear it—if, in other words, our wills had from the first been disciplined, like the will of Christ, so as to be in perfect accord with the will of God—I see no reason to doubt that we, too, should have gained the power and the courage to show signs, or, if you please, to work miracles, as Christ and his Apostles worked them.
Chapter 29
Christ’s whole life on earth was the assertion and example of true manliness—the setting forth in living act[48] and word what man is meant to be, and how he should carry himself in this world of God’s—one long campaign, in which “the temptation” stands out as the first great battle and victory. The story has depths in it which we can never fathom, but also clear, sharp lessons which he who runs may read, and no man can master too thoroughly. We must follow him reverently into the wilderness, where he flies from the crowds who are pressing to the Baptist, and who to-morrow will be thronging around him, if he goes back among them, after what the Baptist has said about him to-day.

Day after day in the wilderness the struggle goes on in his heart. He is faint from insufficient food in those solitudes, and with bodily weakness the doubts grow in strength and persistence, and the tempter is always at his side, soliciting him to end them once for all, by one act of self-assertion. All those questionings and misgivings as to his origin and mission which we have pictured to ourselves as haunting him ever since his first visit to Jerusalem, are now, as it were, focussed. There are mocking voices whispering again as of old, but more scornfully and keenly in his ear, “Are you really the Messiah, the Son of God, so long looked for? What more proof have you to go upon than you have had for these many years, during which you have been living as a poor peasant in a Galilean village? The word of this wild man of the wilderness? He is your own cousin, and a powerful preacher no doubt, but a[49] wayward, wilful man, clad and fed like a madman, who has been nursing mad fancies from his boyhood, away from the holy city, the centre of national life and learning. This sign of a descending dove, and a voice which no one has heard but yourself? Such signs come to many—are never wanting when men are ready to deceive themselves—and each man’s fancy gives them a different meaning. But the words, and the sign, and the voice, you say, only meet a conviction which has been growing these thirty years in your own heart and conscience? Well, then, at least for the sake of others if not for your own sake, put this conviction to the proof, here, at once, and make sure yourself, before you go forth and deceive poor men, your brethren, to their ruin. You are famishing here in the wilderness. This, at least, cannot be what God intends for his Son, who is to redeem the world. Exercise some control over the meanest part of your Father’s kingdom. Command these stones to become bread, and see whether they will obey you. Cast yourself down from this height. If you are what you think, your Father’s angels will bear you up. Then, after they have borne you up, you may go on with some reasonable assurance that your claim is not a mere delusion, and that you will not be leading these poor men whom you call your brethren to misery and destruction.”

And when neither long fasting and weakness, or natural doubt, distrust, impatience, or the most subtle[50] suggestions of the tempter, can move his simple trust in his Father, or wring from him one act of self-assertion, the enemy changes front and the assault comes from another quarter. “You may be right,” the voices seemed now to be saying; “You may not be deceived, or dreaming, when you claim to be the Son of God, sent to redeem this fair world, which is now spread out before you in all its glory. That may be your origin, and that your work. But, living as you have done till now in a remote corner of a despised province, you have no experience or knowledge of the methods or powers which sway men, and establish and maintain these kingdoms of the world, the glory of which you are beholding. These methods and powers have been in use in your Father’s world, if it be his, ever since man has known good from evil. You have only to say the word, and you may use and control these methods and powers as you please. By their aid you may possibly ‘see of the travail of your soul and be satisfied;’ without them you will redeem nothing but perhaps a man here and there—without them you will postpone instead of hastening the coming of your Father’s kingdom, to the sorrow and ruin of many generations, and will die a foiled and lonely man, crushed by the very forces you have refused to use for your Father’s service. If they were wholly evil, wholly unfit for the fulfillment of any purpose of his, would he have left them in command of his world till this day? It is only through them that the[51] world can be subdued. Your time is short, and you have already wasted much of it, standing shivering on the brink, and letting the years slip by in that cottage at Nazareth. The wisest of your ancestors acknowledged and used them, and spread His kingdom from the river to the Great Sea. Why should you reject them?”

This, very roughly and inadequately stated, is some shadow of the utmost part, or skirt as it were, of the trial-crisis, lasting forty days, through which Christ passed from his private to his public career. For forty days the struggle lasted before he could finally realize and accept his mission with all that it implied. At the end of that time he has fairly mastered and beaten down every doubt as to his call, every tempting suggestion to assert himself, or to accept or use any aid in establishing his Father’s kingdom which does not clearly bear his Father’s stamp and seal on the face of it. In the strength of this victory he returns from the desert, to take up the burden which has been laid on him, and to set up God’s kingdom in the world by the methods which he has learned of God himself—and by no other.
Chapter 30
The second period of our Lord’s ministry is one, in the main, of joyful progress and triumph, in which the test of true manliness must be more subtle than when[52] the surroundings are hostile. It consists, I think, at such times, in the careful watchfulness not to give wrong impressions, not to mislead those who are touched by enthusiasm, conscious of new life, grateful to him who has kindled that life in them.

It is then that the temptation to be all things to all men in a wrong sense—to adapt and accommodate teaching and life to a lower standard in order to maintain a hold upon the masses of average men and women who have been moved by the words of lips touched by fire from the altar of God—has generally proved too much for the best and strongest of the world’s great reformers. It is scarcely necessary to elaborate this point, which would, I think, be sorrowfully admitted by those who have studied most lovingly and carefully the lives of such men, for instance, as Savonarola or Wesley. If you will refer to a valuable work on the life of a greater than either of these, Mr. Bosworth Smith’s “Mohammed and Mohammedanism,” you will find there perhaps the best illustration which I can give you of this sad experience.

When Mohammed returns from Medina, sweeping at last all enemies out of his path, as the prophet of a new faith, and the leader of an awakened and repentant people, his biographer pauses to notice the lowering of the standard, both in his life and teaching. Power, he pleads, brings with it new temptations and new failures. The more thoroughly a man is carried away by his inspiration,[53] and convinced of the truth and goodness of his cause and his message, the more likely is he to forget the means in the end, and to allow the end to justify whatever means seem to lead to its triumph. He must maintain as he can, and by any means, his power over the motley mass of followers that his mission has gathered round him, and will be apt to aim rather at what will hold them than at what will satisfy the highest promptings of his own conscience.

We may allow the plea in such cases, though with sorrow and humiliation. But the more minutely we examine the life of Christ the more we shall feel that here there is no place for it. We shall be impressed with the entire absence of any such bending to expediency, or forgetting the means in the end. He never for one moment accommodates his life or teaching to any standard but the highest: never lowers or relaxes that standard by a shade or a hair’s-breadth, to make the road easy to rich or powerful questioners, or to uphold the spirit of his poorer followers when they are startled and uneasy, as they begin half-blindly to recognize what spirit they are of. This unbending truthfulness is, then, what we have chiefly to look for in this period of triumphant progress and success, questioning each act and word in turn whether there is any swerving in it from the highest ideal.

Chapter 31

We may note that our Lord accepts at once the imprisonment of the Baptist as the final call to himself. Gathering, therefore, a few of John’s disciples round him, and welcoming the restless inquiring crowds who had been roused by the voice crying in the wilderness, he stands forward at once to proclaim and explain the nature of that new kingdom of God, which has now to be set up in the world. Standing forth alone, on the open hillside, the young Galilean peasant gives forth the great proclamation, which by one effort lifted mankind on to that new and higher ground on which it has been painfully struggling ever since, but on the whole with sure though slow success, to plant itself and maintain sure foothold.

In all history there is no parallel to it. It stands there, a miracle or sign of God’s reign in this world, far more wonderful than any of Christ’s miracles of healing. Unbelievers have been sneering at and ridiculing it, and Christian doctors paring and explaining it away ever since. But there it stands, as strong and fresh as ever, the calm declaration and witness of what mankind is intended by God to become on this earth of his.

As a question of courageous utterance, I would only ask you to read it through once more, bearing in mind who the preacher was—a peasant, already repudiated by his own neighbors and kinsfolk, and suspected by the[55] national rulers and teachers; and who were the hearers—a motley crowd of Jewish peasants and fishermen, Romish legionaries, traders from Damascus, Tyre, and Sidon, and the distant isles of Greece, with a large sprinkling of publicans, scribes, Pharisees, and lawyers.

The immediate result of the sermon was to bow the hearts of this crowd for the time, so that he was able to choose followers from amongst them, much as he would. He takes fishermen and peasants, selecting only two at most, from any rank above the lowest, and one of these from a class more hated and despised by the Jews than the poorest peasant, the publicans. It is plain that he might at first have called apostles from amongst the upper classes had he desired it—as a teacher with any want of courage would surely have done. But the only scribe who offers himself is rejected.

The calling of the Apostles is followed by a succession of discourses and miracles, which move the people more and more, until, after that of the loaves, the popular enthusiasm rises to the point it had so often reached in the case of other preachers and leaders of this strange people. They are ready to take him by force and make him a king.

The Apostles apparently encouraged this enthusiasm, for which he constrains them into a ship, and sends them away before him. After rejoining them and rebuking their want of understanding and faith, he returns with them to the multitudes, and at once speaks of himself[56] as the bread from heaven, in the discourse which offends many of his disciples, who from this time go back and walk no more with him. The brief season of triumphant progress is drawing to an end, during which he could rejoice in spirit in contemplating the human harvest which he and his disciples seem to be already successfully garnering.
Chapter 32
The more carefully we study the long wrestle of Christ with the blind leaders of a doomed nation, the more we shall recognize the perfect truthfulness, and therefore the perfect courage, which marks his conduct of it. From beginning to end there is no word or act which can mislead friend or foe. The strife, though for life and death, has left no trace or stain on his nature. Fresh from the last and final conflict in the temple court, he can pause on the side of Olivet to weep over the city, the sight of which can still wring from him the pathetic yearnings of a soul purified from all taint of bitterness.

It is this most tender and sensitive of the sons of men—with fibres answering to every touch and breath of human sympathy or human hate—who has borne with absolutely unshaken steadfastness the distrust and anger of kinsfolk, the ingratitude of converts, the blindness of disciples, the fitful and purblind worship and[57] hatred, and fear, of the nation of the Jews. So far, we can estimate to some extent the burden and the strain, and realize the strength and beauty of the spirit which could bear it all. Beyond and behind lie depths into which we can but glance. For in those last hours of his life on earth the question was to be decided whether we men have in deed and truth a brotherhood, in a Son of Man, the head of humanity, who has united mankind to their Father, and can enable them to know him.
Chapter 33
It is around the life of the Son of Man and Son of God that the fiercest controversies of our time are raging. Is it not also becoming clearer every day that they will continue to rage more and more fiercely—that there can be no rest or peace possible for mankind—until all things are subdued to him, and brought into harmony with his life?

It is to this work that all churches and sects, that all the leading nations of the world, known collectively as Christendom, are pledged: and the time for redeeming that pledge is running out rapidly, as the distress and perplexity, the threatening disruption and anarchy of Christendom too clearly show. It is to this work too that you and I, every man and woman of us, are also called; and if we would go about it with any hope and courage, it can only be by keeping the life of Christ[58] vividly before us day by day, and turning to it as to a fountain in the desert, as to the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.

From behind the shadow the still small voice—more awful than tempest or earthquake—more sure and persistent than day and night—is always sounding, full of hope and strength to the weariest of us all, “Be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.”
Chapter 34
Nicodemus was a leading member of the Sanhedrim, a representative of that section of the rulers who, like the rest of the nation, were expecting a deliverer, a king who should prevail against the C?sar. They had sent to the Baptist, and had heard of his testimony to the young Galilean, who had now come to Jerusalem, and was showing signs of a power which they could not but acknowledge. For, had he not cleansed the temple, which they had never been able to do, but, notwithstanding their pretended reverence for it, had allowed to be turned into a shambles and an exchange? They saw that a part of the people were ready to gather to him, but that he had refused to commit himself to them. This, then, the best of them must have felt, was no mere leader of a low, fierce, popular party or faction. Nicodemus at any rate was evidently inclined to doubt whether he might not prove to be the king they were[59] looking for, as the Baptist had declared. The doubt must be solved, and he would see for himself.

And so he comes to Christ, and hears directly from him, that he has indeed come to set up a kingdom, but that it is no visible kingdom like the C?sars’, but a kingdom over men’s spirits, one in which rulers as well as peasants must become new men before they can enter—that a light has come into the world, and “he that doeth truth cometh to that light.”

From beginning to end there is no word to catch this ruler, or those he represented; no balancing of phrases or playing with plausible religious shibboleths, with which Nicodemus would be familiar, and which might please, and perchance reconcile this well-disposed ruler, and the powerful persons he represented. There is, depend upon it, no severer test of manliness than our behavior to powerful persons, whose aid would advance the cause we have at heart. We know from the later records that the interview of that night, and the strange words he had heard at it, made a deep impression on this ruler. His manliness, however, breaks down for the present. He shrinks back and disappears, leaving the strange young peasant to go on his way.

The same splendid directness and incisiveness characterize his teaching at Samaria. There, again, He attacks at once the most cherished local traditions, showing that the place of worship matters nothing, the object of worship everything. That object is a Father of men’s[60] spirits, who wills that all men shall know and worship him, but who can only be worshipped in spirit and in truth. He, the peasant who is talking to them, is himself the Messiah, who has come from this Father of them and him, to give them this spirit of truth in their own hearts.

The Jews at Jerusalem had been clamoring round him for signs of his claim to speak such words, and in the next few days his own people would be crying out for his blood when they heard them. These Samaritans make no such demand, but hear and recognize the message and the messenger. The seed is sown and he passes on, never to return and garner the harvest; deliberately preferring the hard, priest-ridden lake-cities of the Jews as the centre of his ministry. He will leave ripe fields for others to reap. This decision, interpret it as we will, is that of no soft or timid reformer. Take this test and compare Christ’s choice of his first field for work with that of any other great leader of men.
Chapter 35
Happy is the man who is able to follow straight on, though often wearily and painfully, in the tracks of the divine ideal who stood by his side in his youth, though sadly conscious of weary lengths of way, of gulfs and chasms, which since those days have come to stretch[61] between him and his ideal—of the difference between the man God meant him to be—of the manhood he thought he saw so clearly in those early days—and the man he and the world together managed to make of him.

I say, happy is that man. I had almost said that no other than he is happy in any true or noble sense, even in this hard materialistic nineteenth century, when the faith, that the weak must go to the wall, that the strong alone are to survive, prevails as it never did before—which on the surface seems specially to be organized for the destruction of ideals and the quenching of enthusiasms. I feel deeply the responsibility of making any assertion on so moot a point; nevertheless, even in our materialistic age, I must urge you all, as you would do good work in the world, to take your stand resolutely and once for all, and all your lives through, on the side of the idealists.
Chapter 36
He who has the clearest and intensest vision of what is at issue in the great battle of life, and who quits himself in it most manfully, will be the first to acknowledge that for him there has been no approach to victory except by the faithful doing day by day of the work which lay at his own threshold.

On the other hand, the universal experience of mankind—the[62] dreary confession of those who have merely sought a “low thing,” and “gone on adding one to one;” making that the aim and object of their lives—unite in warning us that on these lines no true victory can be had, either for the man himself or for the cause he was sent into the world to maintain.

No, there is no victory possible without humility and magnanimity; and no humility or magnanimity possible without an ideal. Now there is not one amongst us all who has not heard the call in his own heart to put aside all evil habits, and to live a brave, simple, truthful life. It is no modern, no Christian experience, this. The choice of Hercules, and numberless other Pagan stories, the witness of nearly all histories and all literatures, attest that it is an experience common to all our race. It is of it that the poet is thinking in those fine lines of Emerson which are written up in the Hall of Marlborough College:
“So close is glory to our dust,
So near is God to man—
When duty whispers low, ‘thou must,’
The youth replies, ‘I can.’”

It is this whisper, this call, which is the ground of what I have, for want of a better name, been speaking of as idealism. Just in so far as one listens to and welcomes it he is becoming an idealist—one who is rising out of[63] himself, and into direct contact and communion with spiritual influences, which even when he shrinks from them, and tries to put them aside, he feels and knows to be as real—to be more real than all influences coming to him from the outside world—one who is bent on bringing himself and the world into obedience to these spiritual influences. If he turns to meet the call and answers ever so feebly and hesitatingly, it becomes clearer and stronger. He will feel next, that just in so far as he is becoming loyal to it he is becoming loyal to his brethren: that he must not only build his own life up in conformity with its teaching, must not only find or cut his own way straight to what is fair and true and noble, but must help on those who are around him and will come after him, and make the path easier and plainer for them also.

I have indicated in outline, in a few sentences, a process which takes a life-time to work out. You all know too, alas! even those who have already listened most earnestly to the voice, and followed most faithfully, how many influences there are about you and within you which stand across the first steps in the path, and bar your progress; which are forever dwarfing and distorting the ideal you are painfully struggling after, and appealing to the cowardice and laziness and impurity which are in every one of us, to thwart obedience to the call. But here, as elsewhere, it is the first step which costs, and tells. He who has once taken that, consciously[64] and resolutely, has gained a vantage-ground for all his life.
Chapter 37
Our race on both sides of the Atlantic has, for generations, got and spent money faster than any other, and this spendthrift habit has had a baleful effect on English life. It has made it more and more feverish and unsatisfying. The standard of expenditure has been increasing by leaps and bounds, and demoralizing trade, society, every industry, and every profession until a false ideal has established itself, and the aim of life is too commonly to get, not to be, while men are valued more and more for what they have, not for what they are.

The reaction has, I trust, set in. But the reign of Mammon will be hard to put down, and all wholesome influences which can be brought to bear upon that evil stronghold will be sorely needed.

I say, deliberately, that no man can gauge the value, at this present critical time, of a steady stream of young men, flowing into all professions and all industries, who have learnt resolutely to speak in a society such as ours, “I can’t afford;” who have been trained to have few wants and to serve these themselves, so that they may have always something to spare of power and of means to help others; who are “careless of the comfits and[65] cushions of life,” and content to leave them to the valets of all ranks.

And take my word for it, while such young men will be doing a great work for their country, and restoring an ideal which has all but faded out, they will be taking the surest road to all such success as becomes honest men to achieve, in whatever walk of life they may choose for themselves.
Chapter 38

The first aim for your time and your generation should be, to foster, each in yourselves, a simple and self-denying life—your ideal to be a true and useful one, must have these two characteristics before all others. Of course purity, courage, truthfulness are as absolutely necessary as ever, without them there can be no ideal at all. But as each age and each country has its own special needs and weaknesses, so the best mind of its youth should be bent on serving where the need is sorest, and bringing strength to the weak places. There will be always crowds ready to fall in with the dapper, pliant ways which lead most readily to success in every community. Society has been said to be “always and everywhere in conspiracy against the true manhood of every one of its members,” and the saying, though bitter, contains a sad truth. So the faithful idealist will have to learn, without arrogance and with perfect good[66] temper, to treat society as a child, and never to allow it to dictate. So treated, society will surely come round to those who have a high ideal before them, and therefore firm ground under their feet.
“Coy Hebe flies from those that woo
And shuns the hand would seize upon her;
Live thou thy life, and she will sue,
To pour for thee the cup of honor.”

Let me say a word or two more on this business of success. Is it not, after all, the test of true and faithful work? Must it not be the touchstone of the humble and magnanimous, as well as of the self-asserting and ambitious? Undoubtedly; but here again we have to note that what passes with society for success, and is so labeled by public opinion, may well be, as often as not actually is, a bad kind of failure.

Public opinion in our day has, for instance, been jubilant over the success of those who have started in life penniless and have made large fortunes. Indeed, this particular class of self-made men is the one which we have been of late invited to honor. Before doing so, however, we shall have to ask with some care, and bearing in mind Emerson’s warnings, by what method the fortune has been made. The rapid accumulation of national wealth in England can scarcely be called a success by any one who studies the methods by which it has been made, and its effects on the national character.[67] It may be otherwise with this or that millionaire, but each case must be judged on its own merits.
Chapter 39
I remember hearing, years ago, of an old merchant who, on his death-bed, divided the results of long years of labor, some few hundreds in all, amongst his sons. “It is little enough, my boys,” were almost his last words, “but there isn’t a dirty shilling in the whole of it.” He had been a successful man too, though not in the “self-made” sense. For his ideal had been, not to make money, but to keep clean hands. And he had been faithful to it.
Chapter 40
In reading the stories of many persons whom the English nation is invited to honor, I am generally struck with the predominance of the personal element. The key-note seems generally some resolve taken in early youth connected with their own temporal advancement. This one will be Lord Mayor; this other Prime Minister; a third determines to own a fine estate near the place of his birth, a fourth to become head of the business in which he started as an errand-boy. They did indeed achieve their ends, were faithful to the idea they had set before themselves as boys; but I doubt if we[68] can put them anywhere but in the lower school of idealists. For the predominant motive being self-assertion, their idealism seems never to have got past the personal stage, which at best is but a poor business as compared with the true thing.
Chapter 41
Christ is the great idealist. “Be ye perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect,” is the ideal he sets before us—the only one which is permanent and all-sufficing. His own spirit communing with ours is the call which comes to every human being.
Chapter 42
Blessed is the man who has the gift of making friends; for it is one of God’s best gifts. It involves many things, but above all, the power of going out of one’s self, and seeing and appreciating whatever is noble and living in another man.

But, even to him who has the gift, it is often a great puzzle to find out whether a man is really a friend or not. The following is recommended as a test in the case of any man about whom you are not quite sure; especially if he should happen to have more of this world’s goods, either in the shape of talents, rank, money, or what not, than you:
 
Fancy the man stripped stark naked of every thing in the world, except an old pair of trousers and a shirt, for decency’s sake, without even a name to him, and dropped down in the middle of Holborn or Piccadilly. Would you go up to him then and there, and lead him out from among the cabs and omnibuses, and take him to your own home, and feed him, and clothe him, and stand by him against all the world, to your last sovereign and your last leg-of-mutton? If you wouldn’t do this, you have no right to call him by the sacred name of friend. If you would, the odds are that he would do the same by you, and you may count yourself a rich man; for, probably, were friendship expressible by, or convertible into current coin of the realm, one such friend would be worth to a man at least ￡100,000. How many millionaires are there in England? I can’t even guess; but more by a good many, I fear, than there are men who have ten real friends. But friendship is not so expressible or convertible. It is more precious than wisdom, and wisdom “can not be gotten for gold, nor shall rubies be mentioned in comparison thereof.” Not all the riches that ever came out of earth and sea are worth the assurance of one such real abiding friendship in your heart of hearts.

But for the worth of a friendship commonly so called—meaning thereby a sentiment founded on the good dinners, good stories, opera stalls, and days’ shooting, you have gotten or hope to get out of a man, the snug[70] things in his gift, and his powers of procuring enjoyment of one kind or another to your miserable body or intellect—why, such a friendship as that is to be appraised easily enough, if you find it worth your while; but you will have to pay your pound of flesh for it one way or another—you may take your oath of that. If you follow my advice, you will take a ￡10 note down, and retire to your crust of bread and liberty.
Chapter 43
The idea of entertaining, of being hospitable, is a pleasant and fascinating one to most young men; but the act soon gets to be a bore to all but a few curiously constituted individuals. With these hospitality becomes first a passion and then a faith—a faith the practice of which, in the cases of some of its professors, reminds one strongly of the hints on such subjects scattered about the New Testament. Most of us feel, when our friends leave us, a certain sort of satisfaction, not unlike that of paying a bill; they have been done for, and can’t expect anything more for a long time. Such thoughts never occur to your really hospitable man. Long years of narrow means can not hinder him from keeping open house for whoever wants to come to him, and setting the best of everything before all comers. He has no notion of giving you anything but the best he can command.[71] He asks himself not, “Ought I to invite A or B? do I owe him anything?” but, “Would A or B like to come here?” Give me these men’s houses for real enjoyment, though you never get anything very choice there—(how can a man produce old wine who gives his oldest every day?)—seldom much elbow-room or orderly arrangement. The high arts of gastronomy and scientific drinking, so much valued in our highly-civilized community, are wholly unheeded by him, are altogether above him, are cultivated, in fact, by quite another set, who have very little of the genuine spirit of hospitality in them; from whose tables, should one by chance happen upon them, one rises, certainly with a feeling of satisfaction and expansion, chiefly physical, but entirely without that expansion of heart which one gets at the scramble of the hospitable man. So that we are driven to remark, even in such every-day matters as these, that it is the invisible, the spiritual, which, after all, gives value and reality even to dinners; and, with Solomon, to prefer to the most touching diner Russe the dinner of herbs where love is, though I trust that neither we nor Solomon should object to well-dressed cutlets with our salad, if they happen to be going.
Chapter 44
There are few of us who do not like to see a man living a brave and righteous life, so long as he keeps[72] clear of us; and still fewer who do like to be in constant contact with one who, not content with so living himself, is always coming across them, and laying bare to them their own faint-heartedness, and sloth, and meanness. The latter, no doubt, inspires the deeper feeling, and lays hold with a firmer grip of the men he does lay hold of, but they are few. For men can’t keep always up to high pressure till they have found firm ground to build upon, altogether outside of themselves; and it is hard to be thankful and fair to those who are showing us, time after time, that our foothold is nothing but shifting sand.
Chapter 45
Reader! had you not ever a friend a few years older than yourself, whose good opinion you were anxious to keep? A fellow teres atque rotundus; who could do everything better than you, from Plato and tennis down to singing a comic song and playing quoits? If you have had, wasn’t he always in your rooms or company whenever anything happened to show your little weak points?
Chapter 46
To come back home after every stage of life’s journeying with a wider horizon—more in sympathy with men and nature, knowing ever more of the righteous and[73] eternal laws which govern them, and of the righteous and loving will which is above all, and around all, and beneath all, this must be the end and aim of all of us, or we shall be wandering about blind-fold, and spending time and labor and journey-money on that which profiteth nothing.
Chapter 47
What man among us all, if he will think the matter over calmly and fairly, can honestly say that there is any spot on the earth’s surface in which he has enjoyed so much real, wholesome, happy life as in a hay field? He may have won on horseback or on foot at the sports and pastimes in which Englishmen glory; he may have shaken off all rivals, time after time, across the vales of Aylesbury, or of Berks, or any other of our famous hunting counties; he may have stalked the oldest and shyest buck in Scotch forests, and killed the biggest salmon of the year in the Tweed, and trout in the Thames; he may have made topping averages in first-rate matches of cricket; or have made long and perilous marches, dear to memory, over boggy moor, or mountain, or glacier; he may have successfully attended many breakfast-parties within drive of Mayfair, on velvet lawns, surrounded by all the fairy-land of pomp, and beauty, and luxury, which London can pour out; his voice may have sounded over hushed audiences at St.[74] Stephens or in the law-courts; or he may have had good times in any other scenes of pleasure or triumph open to Englishmen; but I much doubt whether, on putting his recollections fairly and quietly together he would not say at last that the fresh-mown hay-field is the place where he has spent the most hours which he would like to live over again, the fewest which he would wish to forget.

As children, we stumble about the new-mown hay, revelling in the many colors of the prostrate grass and wild flowers, and in the power of tumbling where we please without hurting ourselves; as small boys, we pelt one another, and the village school-girls, and our nurse-maids, and young lady cousins with the hay, till, hot and weary, we retire to tea or syllabub beneath the shade of some great oak or elm standing up like a monarch out of the fair pasture; or, following the mowers, we rush with eagerness on the treasures disclosed by the scythe stroke—the nest of the unhappy late-laying titlark, or careless field-mouse; as big boys, we toil ambitiously with the spare forks and rakes, or climb into the wagons and receive with open arms the delicious load as it is pitched up from below, and rises higher and higher as we pass along the long lines of haycocks: a year or two later we are strolling there with our first sweethearts, our souls and tongues loaded with sweet thoughts, and soft speeches; we take a turn with the scythe as the bronzed mosses lie in the shade for their[75] short rest, and willingly pay our footing for the feat. Again, we come back with book in pocket, and our own children tumbling about us as we did before them; now romping with them, and smothering them with the sweet-smelling load—now musing and reading and dozing away the delicious summer evenings. And so shall we not come back to the end, enjoying as grandfathers the love-making and the rompings of younger generations yet?

Were any of us ever really disappointed or melancholy in a hay-field? Did we ever lie fairly back on a hay-cock and look up into the blue sky, and listen to the merry sounds, the whetting of scythes, and the laughing prattle of women and children, and think evil thoughts of the world or our brethren? Not we! or, if we have so done, we ought to be ashamed of ourselves, and deserve never to be out of town again during hay-harvest.

There is something in the sights and sounds of a hay-field which seems to touch the same chord in one as Lowell’s lines in the “Lay of Sir Launfal,” which end:
“For a cap and a bell our lives we pay,
We wear out our lives with toiling and tasking;
It is only Heaven that is given away;
It is only God may be had for the asking.”

But the philosophy of the hay-field remains to be written. Let us hope that whoever takes the subject in[76] hand will not dissipate all its sweetness in the process of the inquiry wherein the charm lies.
Chapter 48
Who among you, dear readers, can appreciate the intense delight of grassing your first big fish after a nine-months’ fast? All first sensations have their special pleasure; but none can be named, in a small way, to beat this of the first fish of the season. The first clean leg-hit for four in your first match at Lord’s—the grating of the bows of your racing-boat against the stern of the boat ahead in your first race—the first half-mile of a burst from the cover-side in November, when the hounds in the field ahead may be covered in a tablecloth, and no one but the huntsman and a top sawyer or two lies between you and them—the first brief after your call to the bar, if it comes within the year—the sensations produced by these are the same in kind; but cricket, boating, getting briefs, even hunting, lose their edge as time goes on. But the first fish comes back as fresh as ever, or ought to come, if all men had their rights, once in a season. So, good luck to the gentle craft and its professors, and may the Fates send us much into their company! The trout-fisher, like the landscape-painter, haunts the loveliest places of the earth, and haunts them alone. Solitude, nature, and[77] his own thoughts—he must be on the best terms with all these; and he who can take kindly the largest allowance of these is likely to be the kindliest and truest with his fellow-men.
Chapter 49
How many spots in life are there which will bear comparison with the beginning of a college boy’s second term at Oxford? So far as external circumstances are concerned, it seems hard to know what a man could find to ask for at that period of his life, if a fairy godmother were to alight in his rooms and offer him the usual three wishes. In our second term we are no longer freshmen, and begin to feel ourselves at home, while both “smalls” and “greats” are sufficiently distant to be altogether ignored if we are that way inclined, or to be looked forward to with confidence that the game is in our own hands if we are reading men. Our financial position—unless we have exercised rare ingenuity in involving ourselves—is all that heart can desire; we have ample allowances paid in quarterly to the university bankers without thought or trouble of ours, and our credit is at its zenith. It is a part of our recognized duty to repay the hospitality we have received as freshmen; and all men will be sure to come to our first parties, to see how we do the thing; it will be our own fault if we do not keep them in future. We[78] have not had time to injure our characters to any material extent with the authorities of our own college, or of the university. Our spirits are never likely to be higher, or our digestions better. These, and many other comforts and advantages, environ the fortunate youth returning to Oxford after his first vacation; thrice fortunate, however, if it is Easter term to which he is returning; for that Easter term, with the four days’ vacation, and little Trinity term at the head of it, is surely the cream of the Oxford year. Then, even in this our stern Northern climate, the sun is beginning to have power, the days have lengthened out, great-coats are unnecessary at morning chapel, and the miseries of numbed hands and shivering skins no longer accompany every pull on the river and canter on Bullingdon. In Christ-church meadows and the college gardens the birds are making sweet music in the tall elms. You may almost hear the thick grass growing, and the buds on tree and shrub are changing from brown, red, or purple, to emerald green under your eyes; the glorious old city is putting on her best looks and bursting out into laughter and song. In a few weeks the races begin, and Cowley marsh will be alive with white tents and joyous cricketers. A quick ear, on the towing-path by the Gut, may feast at one time on those three sweet sounds, the thud, thud of the eight-oar, the crack of the rifles at the Weirs, and the click of the bat on the Magdalen ground. And then Commemoration rises in the[79] background, with its clouds of fair visitors, and visions of excursions to Woodstock and Nuneham in the summer days—of windows open on to the old quadrangles in the long still evenings, through which silver laughter and strains of sweet music, not made by man, steal out and puzzle the old celibate jackdaws, peering down from the battlements with heads on one side. To crown all, long vacation, beginning with the run to Henley regatta, or up to town to see the match with Cambridge at Lord’s, and taste some of the sweets of the season before starting on some pleasure tour or reading-party, or dropping back into the quiet pleasures of English country life! Surely the lot of young Englishmen who frequent our universities is cast in pleasant places. The country has a right to expect something from those for whom she finds such a life as this in the years when enjoyment is keenest.
Chapter 50
In all the wide range of accepted British maxims there is none, take it for all in all, more thoroughly abominable than the one as to the sowing of wild oats. Look at it on what side you will, and you can make nothing but a devil’s maxim of it. What a man—be he young, old, or middle-aged—sows, that, and nothing else shall he reap. The one only thing to do with wild oats is to put them carefully into the hottest part of the[80] fire, and get them burnt to dust, every seed of them. If you sow them, no matter in what ground, up they will come, with long, tough roots like couch-grass, and luxuriant stalks and leaves as sure as there is a sun in heaven—a crop which it makes one’s heart cold to think of. The devil, too, whose special crop they are, will see that they thrive, and you, and nobody else will have to reap them; and no common reaping will get them out of the soil, which must be dug down deep again and again. Well for you if, with all your care, you can make the ground sweet again by your dying day. “Boys will be boys,” is not much better, but that has a true side to it; but this encouragement to the sowing of wild oats is simply devilish, for it means that a young man is to give way to the temptations and follow the lusts of his age. What are we to do with the wild oats of manhood and old age—with ambition, over-reaching, the false weights, hardness, suspicion, avarice—if the wild oats of youth are to be sown and not burnt? What possible distinction can we draw between them? If we may sow the one, why not the other?
Chapter 51
Man of all ages is a selfish animal, and unreasonable in his selfishness. It takes every one of us in turn many a shrewd fall, in our wrestlings with the world to convince us that we are not to have everything our own[81] way. We are conscious in our inmost souls that man is the rightful lord of creation; and, starting from this eternal principle, and ignoring, each man-child of us in turn, the qualifying truth that it is to man in general, including women, and not to one man in particular, that the earth has been given, we set about asserting our kingships each in his own way, and proclaiming ourselves kings from our own little ant-hills of thrones. And then come the struggles and the down-fallings, and some of us learn our lesson, and some learn it not. But what lesson? That we have been dreaming in the golden hours when the vision of a kingdom rose before us? That there is in short, no kingdom at all, or that, if there be, we are no heirs of it?

No—I take it that, while we make nothing better than that out of our lesson, we shall go on spelling at it and stumbling over it, through all the days of our life, till we make our last stumble, and take our final header out of this riddle of a world, which we once dreamed we were to rule over, exclaiming “vanitas vanitatum” to the end. But man’s spirit will never be satisfied without a kingdom, and was never intended to be satisfied so; and a wiser than Solomon tells us, day by day, that our kingdom is about us here, and that we may rise up and pass in when we will at the shining gates which he holds open, for that it is His, and we are joint heirs of it with Him.
Chapter 52
The world is clear and bright, and ever becoming clearer and brighter to the humble, and true, and pure of heart—to every man and woman who will live in it as the children of the Maker and Lord of it, their Father. To them, and to them alone, is that world, old and new, given, and all that is in it, fully and freely to enjoy. All others but these are occupying where they have no title; “they are sowing much, but bringing in little; they eat, but have not enough; they drink but are not filled with drink; they clothe themselves, but there is none warm; and he of them who earneth wages earneth wages to put them into a bag with holes.” But these have the world and all things for a rightful and rich inheritance; for they hold them as dear children of Him in whose hand it and they are lying, and no power in earth or hell shall pluck them out of their Father’s hand.
Chapter 53
The great Danish invasion of England in the ninth century is one of those facts which meet us at every turn in the life of the world, raising again and again the deepest of all questions. At first sight it stands out simply as the triumph of brute force, cruelty, and anarchy, over civilization and order. It was eminently[83] successful, for the greater part of the kingdom remained subject to the invaders. In its progress all such civilization as had taken root in the land was for the time trodden out; whole districts were depopulated; lands thrown out of cultivation; churches, abbeys, monasteries, the houses of nobles and peasants, razed to the ground; libraries (such as then existed) and works of art ruthlessly burnt and destroyed. It threw back all Alfred’s reforms for eight years. To the poor East Anglian or West Saxon, churl or monk, who had been living his quiet life there, honestly, and in the fear of God, according to his lights—to him hiding away in the swamps of the forest, amongst the swine, running wild now for lack of herdsmen, and thinking bitterly of the sack of his home, and murder of his brethren, or of his wife and children by red-handed Pagans, the heavens would indeed seem to be shut, and the earth delivered over to the powers of darkness. Would it not seem so to us if we were in like case? Have we any faith which would stand such a strain as that?

Who shall say for himself that he has? And yet what Christian does not know, in his heart of hearts, that there is such a faith for himself and for the world—the faith which must have carried Alfred through those fearful years, and strengthened him to build up a new and better England out of the ruins the Danes left behind them? For, hard as it must be to keep alive any belief or hope during a time when all around us is reeling,[84] and the powers of evil seem to be let loose on the earth, when we look back upon these “days of the Lord” there is no truth which stands out more clearly on the face of history than this, that they all and each have been working towards order and life, that “the messengers of death have been messengers of resurrection.”
Chapter 54
When the corn and wine and oil, the silver and the gold, have become the main object of worship—that which men or nations do above all things desire—sham work of all kinds, and short cuts, by what we call financing and the like will be the means by which they will attempt to gain them.

When that state comes, men who love their country will welcome Danish invasions, civil wars, potato diseases, cotton famines, Fenian agitations, whatever calamity may be needed to awake the higher life again, and bid the nation arise and live.

That such visitations do come at such times as a matter of fact is as clear as that in certain states of the atmosphere we have thunder-storms. The thunder-storm comes with perfect certainty, and as a part of a natural and fixed order. We are all agreed upon that now. We all believe, I suppose, that there is an order—that there are laws which govern the physical world, asserting[85] themselves as much in storm and earthquake as in the succession of night and day, of seed-time and harvest. We who are Christians believe that order and those laws to proceed from God, to be expressions of His will. Do we not also believe that men are under a divine order as much as natural things? that there is a law of righteousness founded on the will of God, as sure and abiding as the law of gravitation? that this law of righteousness, this divine order, under which human beings are living on this earth, must and does assert and vindicate itself through and by the acts and lives of men, as surely as the divine order in nature asserts itself through the agency of the invisible power in earth and sea and air?

Surely Christianity, whatever else it teaches, at any rate assures us of this. And when we have made this faith our own, when we believe it, and not merely believe that we believe it, we have in our hand the clue to all human history. Mysteries in abundance will always remain. We may not be able to trace the workings of the law of righteousness in the confusions and bewilderments of our own day, or through the darkness and mist which shrouds so much of the life of other times and other races. But we know that it is there, and that it has its ground in a righteous will, which was the same a thousand years ago as it is to-day, which every man and nation can get to know; and just in so far as they know[86] and obey which, will they be founding families, institutions, states, which will abide.

If we want to test this truth in the most practical manner, we have only to take any question which has troubled, or is troubling, statesmen and rulers, and nations, in our own day. The slavery question is among the greatest of these. In the divine order, that institution was not recognized, there was no place at all set apart for it; on the contrary, He on whose will that order rests had said that he came to break every yoke. And so slavery would give our kindred in America no rest, just as it would give England no rest in the first thirty years of the century. The nation, desiring to go on living its life, making money, subduing a continent,
“Pitching new states as old-world men pitch tents,”

tried every plan for getting rid of the “irrepressible negro” question, except the only one recognized in the divine order—that of making him free. The ablest and most moderate men, the Websters and Clays, thought and spoke and worked to keep it on its legs. Missouri compromises were agreed to, “Mason and Dixon’s lines” laid down, joint committees of both houses—at last even a “crisis committee,” as it was called—invented plan after plan to get it finally out of the way by any means except the only one which the eternal law, the law of righteousness, prescribed. But[87] he whose will must be done on earth was no party to Missouri compromises, and Mason and Dixon’s line was not laid down on his map of North America. And there never were wanting men who could recognize His will, and denounce every compromise, every endeavor to set it aside, or escape from it, as a “covenant with death and hell.” Despised and persecuted men—Garrisons and John Browns—were raised up to fight this battle, with tongue and pen and life’s blood, the weak things of this world to confound the mighty; men who could look bravely in the face the whole power and strength of their nation in the faith of the old prophet: “Associate yourselves and ye shall be broken in pieces; gather yourselves together and ye shall come to nought, for God is with us.” And at last the thunder-storm broke, and when it cleared away the law of righteousness had asserted itself once again, and the nation was delivered.

And so it has been, and is, and will be to the end of time with all nations. We have all our “irrepressible” questions of one kind or another, more or less urgent, rising up again and again to torment and baffle us, refusing to give us any peace until they have been settled in accordance with the law of righteousness, which is the will of God. No clever handling of them will put them to rest. Such work will not last. If we have wisdom and faith enough amongst us to ascertain and do that will, we may settle them for ourselves in clear skies.[88] If not, the clouds will gather, the atmosphere grow heavy, and the storm break in due course, and they will be settled for us in ways which we least expect or desire, for it is “the Lord’s controversy.”

In due course, perhaps! but what if this due course means lifetimes, centuries? Alas! this is indeed the cry which has been going up from the poor earth these thousands of years:
“The priests and the rulers are swift to wrong,
And the mills of God are slow to grind.”

How long, O Lord, how long? The precise times and seasons man shall never know on this earth. These the Lord has kept in his own power. But courage, my brother! Can we not see, the blindest of us, that the mills are working swiftly, at least in our day? This is no age in which shams or untruths, whether old or new, are likely to have a quiet time or a long life of it. In all departments of human affairs—religious, political, social—we are travelling fast, in England and elsewhere, and under the hand and guidance, be sure, of Him who made the world, and is able and willing to take care of it. Only let us quit ourselves like men, trusting to Him to put down whatsoever loveth or maketh a lie, and in his own time to establish the new earth in which shall dwell righteousness.
Chapter 55
In these days when our wise generation, weighed down with wealth and its handmaid vices on the one hand, and exhilarated by some tiny steps it has managed to make on the threshold of physical knowledge of various kinds on the other, would seem to be bent on ignoring its Creator and God altogether—or at least of utterly denying that he has revealed, or is revealing himself, unless it be through the laws of nature—one of the commonest demurrers to Christianity has been, that it is no faith for fighters, for the men who have had to do the roughest and hardest work for the world. I fear that some sections of Christians have been too ready to allow this demurrer, and fall back on the Quaker doctrines; admitting thereby that such “Gospel of the kingdom of heaven” as they can for their part heartily believe in, and live up to, is after all only a poor cash-gospel, and cannot bear the dust and dirt, the glare and horror of battle-fields. Those of us who hold that man was sent into this earth for the express purpose of fighting—of uncompromising and unending fighting with body, intellect, spirit, against whomsoever and whatsoever causeth or maketh a lie, and therefore, alas! too often against his brother-man—would, of course, have to give up Christianity if this were true; nay, if they did not believe that precisely the contrary of this is true, that Christ can call them as plainly in[90] the drum beating to battle, as in the bell calling to prayer, can and will be as surely with them in the shock of angry hosts as in the gathering before the altar. But without entering further into the great controversy here, I would ask readers fairly and calmly to consider whether all the greatest fighting that has been done in the world has not been done by men who believed, and showed by their lives that they believed, they had a direct call from God to do it, and that He was present with them in their work. And further (as I cheerfully own that this test would tell as much in favor of Mahommet as of Cromwell, Gustavus Adolphus, John Brown) whether, on the whole, Christian nations have not proved stronger in battle than any others? I would not press the point unfairly, or overlook such facts as the rooting out of the British by the West Saxons when the latter were Pagans; all I maintain is, that faith in the constant presence of God in and around them has been the support of those who have shown the strongest hearts, the least love of ease and life, the least fear of death and pain.
Chapter 56
Supposing the whole Bible, every trace of Christendom to disappear to-morrow, we should each of us be conscious of a presence, which we are quite sure is not ourself, in the deepest recesses of our own heart, communing[91] with us there and calling us to take up our two-fold birthright as man—the mastery over visible things, and above all the mastery over our own bodies, actions, thoughts—and the power, always growing, of a mysterious communion with the invisible.
Chapter 57
“Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way? Even by ruling himself after Thy word.” The question of questions this, at the most critical time in his life for every child of Adam who ever grew to manhood on the face of our planet; and so far as human experience has yet gone, the answer of answers. Other answers have been, indeed, forthcoming at all times, and never surely in greater number or stranger guise than at the present time: “Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way?” Even by ruling himself in the faith “that human life will become more beautiful and more noble in the future than in the past.” This will be found enough “to stimulate the forces of the will, and purify the soul from base passion” urge, with a zeal and ability of which every Christian must desire to speak with deep respect, more than one school of our nineteenth century moralists.

“Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way?” Even by ruling himself on the faith “that it is probable that God exists, and that death is not the end of life;”[92] or again, “that this is the only world of which we have any knowledge at all.” Either of these creeds, says the philosopher of the clubs, if held distinctly as a dogma and consistently acted on, will be found “capable of producing results on an astonishing scale.” So one would think, but scarcely in the direction of personal holiness, or energy. Meantime, the answer of the Hebrew psalmist, three thousand years old, or thereabouts, has gone straight to the heart of many generations, and I take it will scarcely care to make way for any solution likely to occur to modern science or philosophy. Yes, he who has the word of the living God to rule himself by—who can fall back on the strength of Him who has had the victory over the world, the flesh and the devil—may even in this strange disjointed time of ours carry his manhood pure and unsullied through the death-grips to which he must come with “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life.” He who will take the world, the flesh, and the devil by the throat in his own strength, will find them shrewd wrestlers. Well for him if he escape with the stain of the falls which he is too sure to get, and can rise up still a man, though beaten and shamed, to meet the same foes in new shapes in his later years. New shapes, and ever more vile, as the years run on: “Three sorts of men my soul hateth,” says the son of Sirach, “a poor man that is proud, a rich man that is a liar, and an old adulterer that doateth.”
 
We may believe the Gospel history to be a fable, but who amongst us can deny the fact that each son of man has to go forth into the wilderness—for us “the wilderness of the wide world in an atheistic century”—and there do battle with the tempter as soon as the whisper has come in his ear: “Thou too art a man; eat freely. All these things will I give thee.”
Chapter 58
“How is it that ye sought me? Wist ye not that I must be in my Father’s courts, about his business?”

Full of this new question and great wonder, Christ went home to the village in Galilee with his parents, and was subject to them; and the curtain falls for us on his boyhood and youth and early manhood. But as nothing but what is most important, and necessary for understanding all of his life which we need for our own growth into his likeness, is told in these simple gospel narratives, it would seem that this vivid light is thrown on that first visit to Jerusalem because it was the crisis in our Lord’s early life which bears most directly on his work for our race. If so, we must, I think, allow that the question, once fairly presented to the boy’s mind, would never again have left it. Day by day it would have been coming back with increasing insistency, gathering power and weight. And as he submitted it day by day to the God whom prophet and Psalmist had taught[94] every child of the nation to look upon as “about his path and about his bed, and knowing every thought of his heart,” the consciousness must have gained strength and power. As the habit of self-surrender and simple obedience to the voice within grew more perfect, and more a part of his very being, the call must have sounded more and more clearly.

And, as he was in all things tempted like as we are, again and again must his human nature have shrunk back and tried every way of escape from this task, the call to which was haunting him; while every succeeding month and year of life must have disclosed to him more and more of its peril and its hopelessness, as well as of its majesty.

We have, then, to picture to ourselves this struggle and discipline going on for eighteen years—the call sounding continually in his ears, and the boy, the youth, the strong man, each in turn solicited by the special temptations of his age, and rising clear above them through the strength of perfect obedience, the strength which comes from the daily fulfilment of daily duties—that “strength in the Lord” which St. Paul holds up to us as possible for every human being. Think over this long probation, and satisfy yourselves whether it is easy, whether it is possible to form any higher ideal of perfect manliness.

And without any morbid curiosity, and I think with profit, we may follow out the thoughts which this long[95] period of quiet suggests. We know from the evangelists only this, that he remained in obscurity in a retired village of Galilee, and subject to his reputed father and mother. That he also remained in great seclusion while living the simple peasant life of Nazareth we may infer from the surprise, not unmixed with anger and alarm, of his own family, when, after his baptism, he began his public career amongst them. And yet, on that day, when he rose to speak in the synagogue, it is clear that the act was one which commended itself in the first instance to his family and neighbors. The eyes of all present were at once fixed on him as on one who might be expected to stand in the scribe’s place, from whom they might learn something, a man who had a right to speak.

Indeed, it is impossible to suppose that he could have lived in their midst from childhood to full manhood without attracting the attention, and stirring many questionings in the minds, of all those with whom he was brought into contact. The stories in the Apocryphal Gospels of the exercise of miraculous powers by Christ as a child and boy may be wholly disregarded; but we may be sure that such a life as his, though lived in the utmost possible seclusion, must have impressed every one with whom he came in contact, from the scribe who taught the Scriptures in Nazareth to the children who sat by his side to learn, or met him by chance in the vineyards or on the hill-sides. That he was diligent in using such[96] means for study as were within his reach, if it needed proof, would appear from his perfect familiarity with the laws and history of his country at the opening of his ministry. And the mysterious story of the crisis immediately following his baptism, in which he wrestled, as it were, face to face with the tempter and betrayer of mankind, indicates to us the nature of the daily battle which he must have been waging, from his earliest infancy, or at any rate ever since his first visit to Jerusalem. No one can suppose for a moment that the trial came on him for the first time after the great prophet to whom all the nation were flocking had owned him as the coming Christ. That recognition removed, indeed, the last doubt from his mind, and gave him the signal for which he had been patiently waiting, that the time was come and he must set forth from his retirement. But the assurance that the call would come at some time must have been growing on him in all those years, and so when he does come he is perfectly prepared.

In his first public discourse in the synagogue of Nazareth we find him at once announcing the fulfilment of the hopes which all around him were cherishing. He proclaims, without any preface or hesitation, with the most perfect directness and confidence, the full gospel of the kingdom of heaven: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand.” He takes for the text of his first discourse the passage in Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to[97] preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captive, the recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord,” and proceeds to expound how “this day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears.” And within the next few days he delivers his Sermon on the Mount, of which we have the full record, and in which we find the meaning, and character, and principles of the kingdom laid down once and for all. Mark, that there is no hesitation, no ambiguity, no doubt as to who he is, or what message he has to deliver. “I have not come to destroy but to fulfil the law which my Father and your Father has given you, and which you have misunderstood. This which I am now unfolding to you is the meaning of that law, this is the will of my Father who is in heaven.”

Thus he springs at once, as it were, full-armed into the arena; and it is this thorough mastery of his own meaning and position from the first—this thorough insight into what he has to do, and the means by which it is to be done—upon which we should fix our thoughts if we want to understand, or to get any notion at all of, what must have been the training of those eighteen years.

How had this perfect insight and confidence been reached? “This young peasant, preaching from a boat or on a hill-side, sweeps aside at once the traditions of our most learned doctors, telling us that this, which we[98] and our fathers have been taught, is not what the God of Israel intended in these commandments of his; but that he, this young man, can tell us what God did really intend. He assumes to speak to us as one having authority. Who gave him this authority?” These, we know, are the kind of questionings with which Christ was met at once, and over and over again. And they are most natural and necessary questionings, and must have occurred to himself again and again, and been answered by him to himself, before he could have stood up to proclaim with the tone of absolute authority his good news to the village congregations in Galilee, or the crowds on the Mount, or by the lake.

Who gave thee this authority? We can only reverentially, and at a distance, picture to ourselves the discipline and struggles by which the answer was reached, which enabled him to go out without the slightest faltering or misgiving, and deliver his full and astounding message, the moment the sign came that the time had come, and that it was indeed he to whom the task was intrusted.

But the lines of that discipline, which in a measure is also the discipline of every one of us, are clearly enough indicated for us in the story of the temptation.

In every subtle form this question must have been meeting the maturing Christ day after day. Art thou indeed the Son of God who is said to be coming to redeem this enslaved and degraded people, and with and[99] beside them all the kingdoms of the world? Even if these prophets have not been dreaming and doting, art not thou at least dreaming and doting? At any rate if that is your claim put it to some test. Satisfy yourself, and show us, while satisfying yourself, some proof of your title, which we, too, can recognize. Here are all these material, visible things which, if your claim be true, must be subject to you. Show us your power over some of them—the meanest, if you will, the common food which keeps men alive. There are spiritual invisible forces too, which are supposed to be the ministers of God, and should therefore be under the control of his Son—give us some sign that you can guide or govern the least of them. Why pause or delay? Is the burden growing lighter on this people? Is the Roman getting year by year less insolent, the publican less fraudulent and exacting, the Pharisees and rulers less godless, the people, your own kin amongst them, less degraded and less brutal? You are a grown man, with the full powers of a man at any rate. Why are you idling here when your Father’s work (if God be your Father) lies broadcast on every side, and no man standing forth to “the help of the Lord against the mighty,” as our old seers used to rave?

I hope I may have been able to indicate to you, however imperfectly, the line of thought which will enable each of you for yourselves to follow out and realize, more or less, the power and manliness of the character[100] of Christ implied in this patient waiting in obscurity and doubt through the years when most men are at full stretch—waiting for the call which shall convince him that the voice within has not been a lying voice—and meantime making himself all that God meant him to be, without haste and without misgiving.
Chapter 59
In Christ, after the discipline of long-waiting years, there was no ambition, no self-delusion. He had measured the way, and counted the cost, of lifting his own people and the world out of bondage to visible things and false gods, and bringing them to the only Father of their spirits, into the true kingdom of their God. He must, indeed, have been well enough aware how infinitely more fit for the task he himself was than any of his own brethren in the flesh, with whom he was living day by day, or of the men of Nazareth with whom he had been brought up. But he knew also that the same voice which had been speaking to him, the same wisdom which had been training him, must have been speaking to and training other humble and brave souls, wherever there were open hearts and ears, in the whole Jewish nation. As the humblest and most guileless of men, he could not have assumed that no other Israelite had been able to render that perfect obedience of which he was himself conscious. And so he may well have hurried to the[101] Jordan in the hope of finding there, in this prophet of the wilderness, “Him who should come,” the Messiah, the great deliverer—and of enlisting under his banner, and rendering him true and loyal service, in the belief that, after all, he himself might only be intended to aid and hold up the hands of a greater than himself. For we must remember that Christ could not have heard before he came to Bethabara that John had disclaimed the great title. It was not till the very day before his own arrival that the Baptist had told the questioners from Jerusalem, “I am not he.”

But if any such thought had crossed his mind, or hope filled his heart, on the way to the Baptist, it was soon dispelled, and he, left again in his own loneliness, now more clearly than ever before, face to face with the task, before which even the Son of God, appointed to it before the world was, might well quail, as it confronted him in his frail human body. For John recognizes him, singles him out at once, proclaims to the bystanders, “This is he! Behold the Lamb of God! This is he who shall baptize with the fire of God’s own Spirit. Here is the deliverer whom all our prophets have foretold.” And by a mysterious outward sign, as well as by the witness in his own heart and conscience, Christ is at once assured of the truth of the Baptist’s words—that it is indeed he himself and no other, and that his time has surely come.

That he now thoroughly realized the fact for the first[102] time, and was startled and severely tried by the confirmation of what he must have felt for years to be probable, is not only what we should look for from our own experiences, but seems the true inference from the gospel narratives. For, although as soon as the full truth breaks upon him he accepts the mission and work to which God is calling him, and speaks with authority to the Baptist, “Suffer it to be so now,” yet the immediate effect of the call is to drive him away into the wilderness, there in the deepest solitude to think over once again, and for the last time to wrestle with and master the tremendous disclosure.
Chapter 60
In following the life of Christ so far as we have any materials, we have found one main characteristic to be patience—a resolute waiting on God’s mind. I have asked you to test, in every way you can, whether this kind of patience does not constitute the highest ideal we can form of human conduct, is not in fact the noblest type of true manliness. Pursue the same method as to the isolated section of that life, the temptation, which I readily admit has much in it that we cannot understand. But take the story simply as you find it (which is the only honest method, unless you pass it by altogether, which would be cowardly) and see whether you can detect any weakness, any flaw in the perfect manliness of[103] Christ under the strain of which it speaks—whether he does not here also realize for us the most perfect type of manliness in times of solitary and critical trial. Spare no pains, suppress no doubt, only be honest with the story, and with your own conscience.

There is scarcely any life of first-rate importance to the world in which we do not find a crisis corresponding to this, but the nearest parallel must be sought amongst those men, the greatest of all kind, who have founded or recast one of the great religions of the world. Of these (if we except the greatest of all, Moses) Mohammed is the only one of whose call we know enough to speak. Whatever we may think of him and the religion he founded, we shall all probably admit that he was at any rate a man of the rarest courage. In his case too it is only at the end of long and solitary vigils in the desert that the vision comes which seals him for his work. The silver roll is unfolded before his eyes, and he who holds it bids him read therein the decree of God, and tells him, “Thou art the prophet of God, and I his angel.”

He is unmanned by the vision, and flies trembling to his wife, whose brave and loving counsel, and those of his friends and first disciples, scarcely keep him from despair and suicide.

I would not press the parallel further than to remark that Christ came out of the temptation with no human aid, having trod the wine-press alone, serene and resolute[104] from that moment for the work to which God had called him.
Chapter 61
The strongest and most generous natures are always fondest of those who lean on them.
Chapter 62
How utterly inadequate must be any knowledge of a human being which does not get beneath the surface? How difficult to do so to any good purpose! For that “inner,” or “eternal,” or “religious” life (call it which you will, they all mean the same thing) is so entirely a matter between each human soul and God, is at best so feebly and imperfectly expressed by the outer life.

There are none of us but must be living two lives—and the sooner we come to recognize the fact clearly the better for us—the one life in the outward material world, in contact with the things which we can see, and taste, and handle, which are always changing and passing away; the other in the invisible, in contact with the unseen; with that which does not change or pass away—which is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever. The former life you must share with others, with your family, your friends, with everyone you meet in business or pleasure. The latter you must live alone,[105] in the solitude of your own inmost being, if you can find no spirit there communing with yours—in the presence of, and in communion with, the Father of your spirit, if you are willing to recognize that presence. The one life will no doubt always be the visible expression of the other; just as the body is the garment in which the real man is clothed for his sojourn in time. But the expression is often little more than a shadow, unsatisfying, misleading. One of our greatest English poets has written:
“The one remains, the many change and pass,
Heaven’s light forever shines, earth’s shadows fly.
Time, like a dome of many-colored glass,
Stains the bright radiance of eternity,
Until death tramples it to fragments.”

And so you and I are living now under the dome of many-colored glass, and shall live as long as we remain in these bodies, a temporal and an eternal life—“the next world,” which too many of our teachers speak of as a place which we shall first enter after death, being in fact “next” only in the truest sense of the word; namely, that it is nearest to us now. The dome of time can do nothing more (if we even allow it to do that) than partially to conceal from us the light which is always there, beneath, around, above us.

“The outer life of the devout man,” it has been well said, “should be thoroughly attractive to others. He would be simple, honest, straightforward, unpretending,[106] gentle, kindly;—his conversation cheerful and sensible; he would be ready to share in all blameless mirth, indulgent to all save sin.”
Chapter 63
In a noisy and confused time like ours, it does seem to me that most of us have need to be reminded of, and will be the better for bearing in mind, the reserve of strength and power which lies quietly at the nation’s call, outside the whirl and din of public and fashionable life, and entirely ignored in the columns of the daily press. There are thousands of Englishmen of high culture, high courage, high principle, who are living their own quiet lives in every corner of the kingdom, from John o’ Groat’s to the Land’s-End, bringing up their families in the love of God and their neighbor, and keeping the atmosphere around them clean, and pure, and strong, by their example—men who would come to the front, and might be relied on, in any serious national crisis.

One is too apt to fancy, from the photographs of the nation’s life which one gets day by day, that the old ship has lost the ballast which has stood her in such good stead for a thousand years, and is rolling more and more helplessly, in a gale which shows no sign of abating, for her or any other national vessel, until at last she must roll over and founder. But it is not so. England[107] is in less stress, and in better trim, than she has been in many a stiffer gale.

The real fact is, that nations, and the families of which nations are composed, make no parade or fuss over that part of their affairs which is going right. National life depends on home life, and foreign critics are inclined to take the chronicles of our Divorce Court as a test by which to judge the standard of our home-life, like the old gentleman who always spelt through the police reports to see “what people were about.” An acquaintance, however, with any average English neighborhood, or any dozen English families taken at random, ought to be sufficient to re-assure the faint-hearted, and to satisfy them that (to use the good old formula) the Lord has much work yet for the nation to do, and the national manliness and godliness left to do it all, notwithstanding superficial appearances.
Chapter 64
If the angel Gabriel were to come down from heaven, and head a successful rise against the most abominable and unrighteous vested interest which this poor world groans under, he would most certainly lose his character for many years, probably for centuries, not only with upholders of said vested interest, but with the respectable mass of the people whom he had delivered. They wouldn’t ask him to dinner, or let their names appear[108] with his in the papers; they would be very careful how they spoke of him in the Palaver, or at their clubs. What can we expect, then, when we have only poor, gallant, blundering men like Kossuth, Garibaldi, Mazzini, and righteous causes do not always triumph in their hands; men who have holes enough in their armor, God knows, easy to be hit by respectabilities sitting in their lounging-chairs, and having large balances at their bankers?

But you who only want to have your heads set straight to take the right side, bear in mind that majorities, especially respectable ones, are nine times out of ten in the wrong; and that if you see a man or boy striving earnestly on the weak side, however wrong-headed or blundering he may be, you are not to go and join the cry against him. If you can’t join him and help him, and make him wiser, at any rate remember that he has found something in the world which he will fight and suffer for, which is just what you have got to do for yourselves; and so think and speak of him tenderly.
Chapter 65
If you have not already felt it, you will assuredly feel, that your lot is cast in a world which longs for nothing so much as to succeed in shaking off all belief in anything which cannot be tested by the senses, and gauged and measured by the intellect, as the trappings[109] of a worn-out superstition. Men have been trying, so runs the new gospel, to live by faith, and not by sight, ever since there is any record at all of their lives; and so they have had to manufacture for themselves the faiths they were to live by. What is called the life of the soul or spirit, and the life of the understanding, have been in conflict all this time, and the one has always been gaining on the other. Stronghold after stronghold has fallen till it is clear almost to demonstration that there will soon be no place left for that which was once deemed all-powerful. The spiritual life can no longer be led honestly. Man has no knowledge of the invisible on which he can build. Let him own the truth and turn to that upon which he can build safely—the world of matter, his knowledge of which is always growing; and be content with the things he can see and taste and handle. Those who are telling you still in this time that your life can and ought to be lived in daily communion with the unseen—that so only you can loyally control the visible—are either wilfully deceiving you or are dreamers and visionaries.

So the high priests of the new gospel teach, and their teaching echoes through our literature, and colors the life of the streets and markets in a thousand ways; and a mammon-ridden generation, longing to be rid of what they hope are only certain old and clumsy superstitions—which they try to believe injurious to others, and are quite sure make them uneasy in their own efforts to[110] eat, drink, and be merry—applauds as openly as it dare, and hopes soon to see the millennium of the flesh-pots publicly declared and recognized.

Against which, wherever you may encounter them, that you may be ready and able to stand fast, is the hope and prayer of many anxious hearts; in a time, charged on every side with signs of the passing away of old things, such as have not been seen above the horizon in Christendom since Luther nailed his protest on the church-door of a German village.
Chapter 66
The gospel of work is a true gospel, though not the only one, or the highest, and has been preached in our day by great teachers. Listen, for instance, to the ring of it in the rugged and incisive words of one of our strongest poets:
“That low man seeks a little thing to do,
Sees it and does it.
This high man, with a great thing to pursue,
Dies ere he knows it.
That low man goes on adding one to one,
His hundreds soon hit.
This high man aiming at a million,
Misses a unit.”

This sounds like a deliberate attack on the idealist, a[111] direct preference of low to high aims and standards, of the seen to the unseen. It is in reality only a wholesome warning against aiming at any ideal by wrong methods, though the use of the words “low” and “high” is no doubt likely to mislead. The true idealist has no quarrel with the lesson of these lines; indeed, he would be glad to see them written on one of the door-posts of every great school, if only they were ballasted on the other by George Herbert’s quaint and deeper wisdom:
“Pitch thy behavior low, thy projects high,
So shalt thou humble and magnanimous be.
Sink not in spirit: who aimeth at the sky
Shoots higher much than he that means a tree.”

Both sayings are true, and worth carrying in your minds as part of their permanent furniture, and you will find that they will live there very peaceably side by side.
Chapter 67
The consciousness of the darkness in one and around one brings the longing for light. And then the light dawns; through mist and fog, perhaps, but enough to pick one’s way by.
Chapter 68
It is a strange, blind sort of world we are in, with lots of blind alleys, down which we go blundering in the fog after some seedy gaslight, which we take for the sun till we run against the wall at the end, and find out that the light is a gaslight, and that there’s no thoroughfare. But for all that, one does get on. You get to know the sun’s light better and better, and to keep out of the blind alleys; and I am surer and surer every day that there’s always sunlight enough for every honest fellow, and a good sound road under his feet, if he will only step out on it.
Chapter 69
We all have to learn, in one way or another, that neither men nor boys get second chances in this world. We all get new chances till the end of our lives, but not second chances in the same set of circumstances; and the great difference between one person and another is, how he takes hold of and uses his first chance, and how he takes his fall if it is scored against him.
Chapter 70
You will all find, if you haven’t found it out already, that a time comes in every human friendship when you[113] must go down into the depths of yourself, and lay bare what is there to your friend, and wait in fear for his answer. A few moments may do it; and it may be that you never do it but once. But done it must be, if the friendship is to be worth the name. You must find out what is there, at the very root and bottom of one another’s hearts; and if you are at one there, nothing on earth can, or at least ought, to sunder you.
Chapter 71
It is only through our mysterious human relationships—through the love and tenderness and purity of mothers and sisters and wives—through the strength and courage and wisdom of fathers and brothers and teachers—that we can come to the knowledge of Him in whom alone the love, and the tenderness, and the purity, and the strength, and the courage, and the wisdom of all these dwell for ever and ever in perfect fulness.
Chapter 72
Almost nightly, for years, Tom and Arthur, and by degrees East occasionally, and sometimes one, sometimes another of their friends, read a chapter of the Bible together, and talked it over afterwards. Tom was at first utterly astonished, and almost shocked, at the[114] sort of way in which Arthur read the book and talked about the men and women whose lives are there told. The first night they happened to fall on the chapters about the famine in Egypt, and Arthur began talking about Joseph as if he were a living statesman; just as he might have talked about Lord Grey and the Reform Bill; only that they were much more living realities to him. The book was to him, Tom saw, the most vivid and delightful history of real people, who might do right or wrong, just like any one who was walking about Rugby—the doctor, or the masters, or the sixth-form boys. But the atmosphere soon passed off, the scales seemed to drop from his eyes, and the book became at once and forever to him the great human and divine book, and the men and women, whom he had looked upon as something quite different from himself, became his friends and counsellors.

Arthur, Tom, and East were together one night, and read the story of Naaman coming to Elisha to be cured of his leprosy. When the chapter was finished, Tom shut his Bible with a slap.

“I can’t stand that fellow Naaman,” said he, “after what he’d seen and felt, going back again and bowing himself down in the house of Rimmon, because his effeminate scoundrel of a master did it. I wonder Elisha took the trouble to heal him. How he must have despised him.”

“Yes, there you go off as usual, with a shell on your[115] head,” struck in East, who always took the opposite side to Tom: half from love of argument, half from conviction. “How do you know he didn’t think better of it? how do you know his master was a scoundrel? His letter don’t look like it, and the book don’t say so.”

“I don’t care,” rejoined Tom; “why did Naaman talk about bowing down, then, if he didn’t mean to do it? He wasn’t likely to get more in earnest when he got back to Court, and away from the Prophet.”

“Well, but, Tom,” said Arthur, “look what Elisha says to him, ‘Go in peace.’ He wouldn’t have said that if Naaman had been in the wrong.”

“I don’t see that that means more than saying, ‘You’re not the man I took you for.’”

“No, no, that won’t do at all,” said East; “read the words fairly, and take men as you find them. I like Naaman, and think he was a very fine fellow.”

“I don’t,” said Tom, positively.

“Well, I think East is right,” said Arthur; “I can’t see but what it’s right to do the best you can, though it mayn’t be the best absolutely. Every man isn’t born to be a martyr.”

“Of course, of course,” said East; “but he’s on one of his pet hobbies. How often have I told you, Tom, that you must drive a nail where it’ll go?”

“And how often have I told you,” rejoined Tom, “that it’ll always go where you want, if you only stick[116] to it and hit hard enough? I hate half-measures and compromises.”

“Yes, he’s a whole-hog man, is Tom. Must have the whole animal, hair and teeth, claws and tail,” laughed East. “Sooner have no bread any day than half a loaf.”

“I don’t know,” said Arthur, “it’s rather puzzling; but ain’t most right things got by proper compromises, I mean where the principle isn’t given up?”

“That’s not the point,” said Tom; “I don’t object to a compromise, where you don’t give up your principle.”

“Not you,” said East laughingly. “I know him of old, Arthur, and you’ll find him out some day. There isn’t such a reasonable fellow in the world to hear him talk. He never wants anything but what’s right and fair; only when you come to settle what’s right and fair, it’s everything that he wants, and nothing that you want. Give me the Brown compromise when I’m on his side.”

“Now, Harry,” said Tom, “no more chaff—I’m serious. Look here—this is what makes my blood tingle;” and he turned over the pages of his Bible and read: “Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego answered and said to the king, ‘O Nebuchadnezzar, we are not careful to answer thee in this matter. If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning, fiery furnace, and He will deliver us out of thine hand,[117] O king. But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up.’” He read the last verse twice, emphasizing the nots, and dwelling on them as if they gave him actual pleasure and were hard to part with.

They were silent a minute, and then Arthur said, “Yes, that’s a glorious story, but it don’t prove your point, Tom, I think. There are times when there is only one way, and that the highest, and then the men are found to stand in the breach.”

“There’s always a highest way, and it’s always the right one,” said Tom. “How many times has the Doctor told us that in his sermons in the last year I should like to know!”

“Well, you ain’t going to convince us—is he Arthur? No Brown compromise to-night,” said East, looking at his watch. “But it’s past eight, and we must go to first lesson.”

So they took down their books and fell to work; but Arthur didn’t forget, and thought long and often over the conversation.
Chapter 73
“Tom,” said Arthur, “I’ve had such strange thoughts about death lately. I’ve never told a soul of them, not even my mother. Sometimes, I think they’re wrong,[118] but, do you know I don’t think in my heart I could be sorry at the death of any of my friends.”

Tom was taken quite aback.

“What in the world is the young un after now?” thought he; “I’ve swallowed a good many of his crotchets, but this altogether beats me. He can’t be quite right in his head.”

He didn’t want to say a word, and shifted about uneasily in the dark; however, Arthur seemed to be waiting for an answer, so at last he said, “I don’t think I quite see what you mean, Geordie. One’s told so often to think about death, that I’ve tried it on sometimes, especially this last week. But we won’t talk of it now. I’d better go—you’re getting tired, and I shall do you harm.”

“No, no, indeed—I ain’t Tom; you must stop till nine, there’s only twenty minutes. I’ve settled you must stop till nine. And oh! do let me talk to you—I must talk to you. I see it’s just as I feared. You think I’m half-mad—don’t you now?”

“Well, I did think it odd what you said, Geordie, as you ask me.”

Arthur paused a moment, and then said quickly, “I’ll tell you how it all happened. At first, when I was sent to the sick-room, and found I had really got the fever, I was terribly frightened. I thought I should die, and I could not face it for a moment. I don’t think it was sheer cowardice at first, but I thought how hard it was[119] to be taken away from my mother and sisters, and you all, just as I was beginning to see my way to many things, and to feel that I might be a man and do a man’s work. To die without having fought and worked, and given one’s life away, was too hard to bear. I got terribly impatient, and accused God of injustice, and strove to justify myself; and the harder I strove, the deeper I sank. Then the image of my dear father often came across me, but I turned from it. Whenever it came, a heavy numbing throb seemed to take hold of my heart, and say ‘Dead—dead, dead.’ And I cried out, ‘The living, the living shall praise thee O God; the dead cannot praise Thee. There is no work in the grave; in the night no man can work. But I can work. I can do great things. I will do great things. Why wilt Thou slay me.’ And so I struggled and plunged, deeper and deeper, and went down into a living black tomb. I was alone there, with no power to stir or think; along with myself; beyond the reach of all human fellowship; beyond Christ’s reach, I thought, in my nightmare. You who are brave and bright and strong, can have no idea of that agony. Pray to God you never may. Pray as for your life.”

Arthur stopped—from exhaustion, Tom thought; but what between his fear lest Arthur should hurt himself, his awe, and longing for him to go on, he couldn’t ask, or stir to help him. Presently he went on, but quite calm and slow:
 

“I don’t know how long I was in that state. For more than a day, I know; for I was quite conscious, and lived my outer life all the time, and took my medicines, and spoke to my mother, and heard what they said. But I didn’t take much note of time; I thought time was over for me, and that that tomb was what was beyond. Well, on last Sunday morning, as I seemed to lie in that tomb, alone, as I thought, for ever and ever, the black, dead wall was cleft in two, and I was caught up and borne through into the light by some great power, some living, mighty spirit. Tom, do you remember the living creatures and the wheels in Ezekiel? It was just like that: ‘when they went I heard the noise of their wings, like the noise of great waters, as the voice of the Almighty, the voice of speech, as the noise of an host; when they stood they let down their wings’—‘and they went every one straight forward; whither the spirit was to go they went, and they turned not when they went.’ And we rushed through the bright air, which was full of myriads of living creatures, and paused on the brink of a great river. And the power held me up, and I knew that great river was the grave, and death dwelt there; but not the death I had met in the black tomb—that I felt was gone forever. For on the other bank of the great river I saw men and women and children rising up pure and bright, and the tears were wiped from their eyes, and they put on glory and strength, and all weariness and pain fell away. And[121] beyond were a multitude which no man could number, and they worked at some great work; and they who rose from the river went on and joined them in the work. They all worked, and each worked in a different way, but all at the same work. And I saw there my father, and the men in the old town whom I knew when I was a child; many a hard, stern man, who never came to church, and whom they called atheist and infidel. There they were, side by side with my father, whom I had seen toil and die for them, and women and little children, and the seal was on the foreheads of all. And I longed to see what the work was, and could not; so I tried to plunge in the river, for I thought I would join them, but I could not. Then I looked about to see how they got into the river. And this I could not see, but I saw myriads on this side, and they too worked, and I knew that it was the same work; and the same seal was on their foreheads. And though I saw there was toil and anguish in the work of these, and that most that were working were blind and feeble, yet I longed no more to plunge into the river, but more and more to know what the work was. And as I looked I saw my mother and my sisters, and I saw the Doctor, and you, Tom, and hundreds more whom I knew; and at last I saw myself, too, and I was toiling and doing ever so little a piece of the great work. Then it all melted away, and the power left me, and as it left me I thought I heard a voice say, ‘The vision is for an appointed time;[122] though it tarry, wait for it, for in the end it shall speak and not lie, it shall surely come, it shall not tarry.’ It was early morning I know, then, it was so quiet and cool, and my mother was fast asleep in the chair by my bedside; but it wasn’t only a dream of mine. I know it wasn’t a dream. Then I fell into a deep sleep, and only woke after afternoon chapel; and the Doctor came and gave me the sacrament. I told him and my mother I should get well—I knew I should; but I couldn’t tell them why. Tom,” said Arthur, gently, after another minute, “do you see why I could not grieve now to see my dearest friend die? It can’t be—it isn’t, all fever or illness. God would never have let me see it so clear if it wasn’t true. I don’t understand it all yet—it will take me my life and longer to do that—to find out what the work is.”
Chapter 74
“Hullo, Brown! here’s something for you,” called out the reading man. “Why, your old master, Arnold of Rugby, is dead.”

Tom’s hand stopped half-way in his cast, and his line and flies went all tangling round and round his fishing-rod; you might have knocked him over with a feather.

Neither of his companions took any notice of him, luckily; and with a violent effort he set to work mechanically to disentangle his line. He felt completely[123] carried off his moral and intellectual legs, as if he had lost his standing-point in the invisible world. Besides which, the deep loving loyalty he felt for his old leader made the shock intensely painful. It was the first great wrench of his life, the first gap which the angel Death had made in his circle, and he felt numbed, and beaten down, and spiritless. Well, well! I believe it was good for him and for many others in like case; who had to learn by that loss, that the soul of man cannot stand or lean upon any human prop, however strong, and wise, and good; but that He upon whom alone it can stand and lean will knock away all such props in His own wise and merciful way, until there is no ground or stay left but Himself, the Rock of Ages, upon whom alone a sure foundation for every soul of man is laid.
Chapter 75
At the school-gates Tom made a dead pause; there was not a soul in the quadrangle—all was lonely, and silent, and sad. So with another effort he strode through the quadrangle, and into the school-house offices.

He found the little matron in her room in deep mourning; shook her hand, tried to talk, and moved nervously about; she was evidently thinking of the same subject as he, but he couldn’t begin talking.
 
“Where shall I find Thomas?” said he at last, getting desperate.

“In the servants’ hall, I think, sir. But won’t you take anything?” said the matron looking rather disappointed.

“No, thank you,” said he, and strode off again to find the old verger, who was sitting in his little den as of old puzzling over hieroglyphics.

He looked up through his spectacles, as Tom seized his hand and wrung it.

“Ah! you’ve heard all about it, sir, I see,” said he.

Tom nodded, and then sat down on the shoe-board, while the old man told his tale, and wiped his spectacles, and fairly flowed over with quaint, homely, honest sorrow.

By the time he had done, Tom felt much better.

“Where is he buried, Thomas?” said he at last.

“Under the altar in the chapel, sir,” answered Thomas. “You’d like to have the key, I dare say.”

“Thank you, Thomas. Yes, I should very much.” And the old man fumbled among his bunch, and then got up as though he would go with him; but after a few steps stopped short and said, “Perhaps you’d like to go by yourself, sir?”

Tom nodded, and the bunch of keys were handed to him with an injunction to be sure and lock the door after him, and bring them back before eight o’clock.

We walked quickly through the quadrangle and out[125] into the close. The longing which had been upon him and driven him thus far, like the gad-fly in the Greek legends, giving him no rest in mind or body, seemed all of a sudden not to be satisfied, but to shrivel up, and pall. “Why should I go on? It is no use,” he thought, and threw himself at full length on the turf, and looked vaguely and listlessly at all the well-known objects. There were a few of the town-boys playing cricket, their wicket pitched on the best piece in the middle of the big-side ground, a sin about equal to sacrilege in the eyes of a captain of the eleven. He was very nearly getting up to go and send them off. “Pshaw! they won’t remember me. They’ve more right there than I,” he muttered. And the thought that his sceptre had departed, and his mark was wearing out, came home to him for the first time, and bitterly enough. He was lying on the very spot where the fights came off; where he himself had fought six years ago his first and last battle. He conjured up the scene till he could almost hear the shouts of the ring, and East’s whisper in his ear; and looking across the close to the Doctor’s private door, half-expected to see it open, and the tall figure in cap and gown come striding under the elm-trees towards him.

No, no! that sight could never be seen again. There was no flag flying on the round tower; the school-house windows were all shuttered up; and when the flag went up again, and the shutters came down, it would be to[126] welcome a stranger. All that was left on earth of him whom he had honored, was lying cold and still under the chapel-floor. He would go in and see the place once more, and then leave it once for all. New men and new methods might do for other people; let those who would, worship the rising star; he at least would be faithful to the sun which had set. And so he got up, and walked to the chapel-door and unlocked it, fancying himself the only mourner in all the broad land, and feeding on his own selfish sorrow.

He passed through the vestibule, and then paused for a moment to glance over the empty benches. His heart was still proud and high, and he walked up to the seat which he had last occupied as a sixth-form boy, and sat himself down there to collect his thoughts.

And, truth to tell, they needed collecting and setting in order not a little. The memories of eight years were all dancing through his brain, and carrying him about whither they would; while, beneath them all, his heart was throbbing with the dull sense of a loss that could never be made up to him. The rays of the evening sun came solemnly through the painted windows above his head, and fell in gorgeous colors on the opposite wall, and the perfect stillness soothed his spirit by little and little. And he turned to the pulpit, and looked at it, and then, leaning forward with his head on his hands, groaned aloud:

“If he could only have seen the Doctor again for one[127] five minutes—have told him all that was in his heart, what he owed to him, how he loved and reverenced him, and would by God’s help follow his steps in life and death—he could have borne it all without a murmur. But that he should have gone away for ever without knowing it all, was too much to bear.”—“But am I sure he does not know it all?”—the thought made him start—“May he not even now be near me, in this very chapel? If he be, am I sorrowing as he would have me sorrow—as I should wish to have sorrowed when I shall meet him again?”

He raised himself up and looked around; and after a minute rose and walked humbly down to the lowest bench, and sat down on the very seat which he had occupied on his first Sunday at Rugby. And then the old memories rushed back again, but softened and subdued, and soothing him as he let himself be carried away by them. And he looked up at the great painted window above the altar, and remembered how when a little boy he used to try not to look through it at the elm-trees and the rocks, before the painted glass came—and the subscription for the painted glass, and the letter he wrote home for money to give to it. And there, down below, was the very name of the boy who sat on his right hand on that first day, scratched rudely in the oak paneling.

And then came the thought of all his own school-fellows; and form after form of boys nobler, and braver,[128] and purer than he, rose up and seemed to rebuke him. Could he not think of them, and what they had felt and were feeling, they who had honored and loved from the first, the man whom he had taken years to know and love? Could he not think of those yet dearer to him who was gone, who bore his name and shared his blood, and were now without a husband or a father? Then the grief which he began to share with others became gentle and holy, and he rose up once more, and walked up the steps to the altar; and while the tears flowed freely down his cheeks, knelt down humbly and hopefully, to lay down there his share of a burden which had proved itself too heavy for him to bear in his own strength.
Chapter 76
“It will be forty years ago next month,” said the old Captain, “since the ship I was then in came home from the West Indies station, and was paid off. I had nowhere in particular to go just then, and so was very glad to get a letter, the morning after I went ashore at Portsmouth, asking me to go down to Plymouth for a week or so. It came from an old sailor, a friend of my family, who had been Commodore of the fleet. He lived at Plymouth; he was a thorough old sailor—what you young men would call ‘an old salt’—and couldn’t live out of sight of the blue sea and the shipping. It is[129] a disease that a good many of us take who have spent our best years on the sea. I have it myself—a sort of feeling that we must be under another kind of Providence, when we look out and see a hill on this side and a hill on that. It’s wonderful to see the trees come out and the corn grow, but then it doesn’t come so home to an old sailor. I know that we’re all just as much under the Lord’s hand on shore as at sea; but you can’t read in a book you haven’t been used to, and they that go down to the sea in ships, they see the works of the Lord and His wonders in the deep. It isn’t their fault if they don’t see His wonders on the land so easily as other people.

“But, for all that, there’s no man enjoys a cruise in the country more than a sailor. It’s forty years ago since I started for Plymouth, but I haven’t forgotten the road a bit, or how beautiful it was; all through the New Forest, and over Salisbury Plain, and then on by the mail to Exeter, and through Devonshire. It took me three days to get to Plymouth, for we didn’t get about so quick in those days.

“The Commodore was very kind to me when I got there, and I went about with him to the ships in the bay, and through the dock-yard, and picked up a good deal that was of use to me afterwards. I was a lieutenant in those days, and had seen a good deal of service, and I found the old Commodore had a great nephew whom he had adopted, and had set his whole heart[130] upon. He was an old bachelor himself, but the boy had come to live with him, and was to go to sea; so he wanted to put him under some one who would give an eye to him for the first year or two. He was a light slip of a boy then, fourteen years old, with deep set blue eyes and long eyelashes, and cheeks like a girl’s, but as brave as a lion and as merry as a lark. The old gentleman was very pleased to see that we took to one another. We used to bathe and boat together; and he was never tired of hearing my stories about the great admirals, and the fleet, and the stations I had been on.

“Well, it was agreed that I should apply for a ship again directly, and go up to London with a letter to the Admiralty from the Commodore to help things on. After a month or two I was appointed to a brig, lying at Spithead; and so I wrote off to the Commodore, and he got his boy a midshipman’s berth on board, and brought him to Portsmouth himself a day or two before we sailed for the Mediterranean. The old gentleman came on board to see his boy’s hammock slung, and went below into the cockpit to make sure that all was right. He only left us by the pilot-boat when we were well out in the Channel. He was very low at parting from his boy, but bore up as well as he could; and we promised to write to him from Gibraltar, and as often afterwards as we had a chance.

“I was soon as proud and fond of little Tom Holdsworth as if he had been my own younger brother, and,[131] for that matter, so were all the crew, from our captain to the cook’s boy. He was such a gallant youngster, and yet so gentle. In one cutting-out business we had, he climbed over the boatswain’s shoulders, and was almost first on deck; how he came out of it without a scratch I can’t think to this day. But he hadn’t a bit of bluster in him, and was as kind as a woman to any one who was wounded or down with sickness.

“After we had been out about a year we were sent to cruise off Malta, on the look-out for the French fleet. It was a long business, and the post wasn’t so good then as it is now. We were sometimes for months without getting a letter, and knew nothing of what was happening at home, or anywhere else. We had a sick time too on board, and at last he got a fever. He bore up against it like a man, and wouldn’t knock off duty for a long time. He was midshipman of my watch; so I used to make him turn in early, and tried to ease things to him as much as I could; but he didn’t pick up, and I began to get very anxious about him. I talked to the doctor, and turned matters over in my own mind, and at last I came to think he wouldn’t get any better unless he could sleep out of the cockpit. So one night, the 20th of October it was—I remember it well enough, better than I remember any day since; it was a dirty night, blowing half a gale of wind from the southward, and we were under close-reefed topsails—I had the first watch, and at nine o’clock I sent him down to my cabin to sleep there,[132] where he would be fresher and quieter, and I was to turn into his hammock when my watch was over.

“I was on deck three hours or so after he went down, and the weather got dirtier and dirtier, and the scud drove by, and the wind sang and hummed through the rigging—it made me melancholy to listen to it. I could think of nothing but the youngster down below, and what I should say to his poor old uncle if anything happened. Well, soon after midnight I went down and turned into his hammock. I didn’t go to sleep at once, for I remember very well listening to the creaking of the ship’s timbers as she rose to the swell, and watching the lamp, which was slung from the ceiling, and gave light enough to make out the other hammocks swinging slowly all together. At last, however, I dropped off, and I reckon I must have been asleep about an hour, when I woke with a start. For the first moment I didn’t see anything but the swinging hammocks and the lamp; but then suddenly I became aware that some one was standing by my hammock, and I saw the figure as plainly as I see any of you now, for the foot of the hammock was close to the lamp, and the light struck full across on the head and shoulders, which was all that I could see of him. There he was, the old Commodore; his grizzled hair coming out from under a red woollen night cap, and his shoulders wrapped in an old thread-bare blue dressing-gown which I had often seen him in. His face looked pale and drawn, and there was a wistful, disappointed[133] look about the eyes. I was so taken aback I could not speak, but lay watching him. He looked full at my face once or twice, but didn’t seem to recognize me; and, just as I was getting back my tongue and going to speak, he said slowly: ‘Where’s Tom? this is his hammock. I can’t see Tom;’ and then he looked vaguely about and passed away somehow, but how I couldn’t see. In a moment or two I jumped out and hurried to my cabin, but young Holdsworth was fast asleep. I sat down, and wrote down just what I had seen, making a note of the exact time, twenty minutes to two. I didn’t turn in again, but sat watching the youngster. When he woke I asked him if he had heard anything of his great uncle by the last mail. Yes, he had heard; the old gentleman was rather feeble, but nothing particular the matter. I kept my own counsel and never told a soul in the ship; and, when the mail came to hand a few days afterwards with a letter from the Commodore to his nephew, dated late in September, saying that he was well, I thought the figure by my hammock must have been all my own fancy.

“However, by the next mail came the news of the old Commodore’s death. ‘It had been a very sudden break-up,’ his executor said. He had left all his property, which was not much, to his great nephew, who was to get leave to come home as soon as he could.

“The first time we touched at Malta, Tom Holdsworth left us and went home. We followed about two[134] years afterwards, and the first thing I did after landing was to find out the Commodore’s executor. He was a quiet, dry little Plymouth lawyer, and very civilly answered all my questions about the last days of my old friend. At last I asked him to tell me as near as he could the time of his death; and he put on his spectacles, and got his diary, and turned over the leaves. I was quite nervous till he looked up and said, ‘Twenty-five minutes to two, sir, A.M., on the morning of October 21st; or it might be a few minutes later.’

“‘How do you mean, sir?’ I asked.

“‘Well,’ he said, ‘it is an odd story. The doctor was sitting with me, watching the old man, and, as I tell you, at twenty-five minutes to two, he got up and said it was all over. We stood together, talking in whispers for, it might be, four or five minutes, when the body seemed to move. He was an odd old man, you know, the Commodore, and we never could get him properly to bed, but he lay in his red nightcap and old dressing-gown, with a blanket over him. It was not a pleasant sight, I can tell you, sir. I don’t think one of you gentlemen, who are bred to face all manner of dangers, would have liked it. As I was saying, the body first moved, and then sat up, propping itself behind with its hands. The eyes were wide open, and he looked at us for a moment, and said slowly, “I’ve been to the Mediterranean, but I didn’t see Tom.” Then the body sank back again, and this time the old Commodore was really[135] dead. But it was not a pleasant thing to happen to one, sir. I do not remember anything like it in my forty years’ practise.’”

There was a silence of a few seconds after the captain had finished his story, all the men sitting with eyes fixed on him, and not a little surprised at the results of their call. Drysdale was the first to break the silence, which he did with a long respiration; but, as he did not seem prepared with any further remark, Tom took up the running.

“What a strange story,” he said; “and that really happened to you, Captain Hardy?”

“To me, sir, in the Mediterranean, more than forty years ago.”

“The strangest thing about it is that the old Commodore should have managed to get all the way to the ship, and then not have known where his nephew was,” said Blake.

“He only knew his nephew’s berth, you see, sir,” said the Captain.

“But he might have beat about through the ship till he had found him.”

“You must remember that he was at his last breath, sir,” said the Captain; “you can’t expect a man to have his head clear at such a moment.”

“Not a man, perhaps; but I should a ghost,” said Blake.
 
“Time was everything to him,” went on the Captain, without regarding the interruption, “space nothing. But the strangest part of it is that I should have seen the figure at all. It’s true I had been thinking of the old uncle, because of the boy’s illness; but I can’t suppose he was thinking of me, and, as I say, he never recognized me. I have taken a great deal of interest in such matters since that time, but I have never met with just such a case as this.”

“No, that is the puzzle. One can fancy his appearing to his nephew well enough,” said Tom.

“We can’t account for these things, or for a good many other things which ought to be quite as startling, only we see them every day.”
Chapter 77
Christianity is in no more real danger now than it was a hundred and fifty years ago, when Dean Swift, and many other greater wits than we have amongst us nowadays, thought and said that it was doomed. We hold in perfect good faith, that the good news our Lord brought is the best the world will ever hear; that there has been a revelation in the man Jesus Christ, of God the Creator of the world as our Father, so that the humblest and poorest man can know God for all purposes for which men need to know him in this life, and[137] can have his help in becoming like him, the business for which they were sent into it: and that there will be no other revelation, though this one will be, through all time, unfolding to men more and more of its unspeakable depth, and glory, and beauty, in external nature, in human society, in individual men. That, I believe to be a fair statement of the positive religious belief of average Englishmen, if they had to think it out and to put it in words; and all who hold it must of course look upon Christ’s gospel as the great purifying, reforming, redeeming power in the world, and desire that it shall be free to work in their own country on the most favorable conditions which can be found for it.
Chapter 78
We should remember that truth is many-sided; that all truth comes from one source. There is only one sun in the heavens, yet, as you know, there are many beautiful colors, all of which come from the one sun. You cannot say that the red is better and truer than the blue, or that the blue is better and truer than the yellow. You may prefer one to the other; you may see that one color is more universal, more applicable for different purposes than another, but there is truth in each. In the same way there is only one earth, but there are a great many different trees which grow out of[138] it, and which derive their nourishment from it; and although the oak may be very much better suited to England and the fir to Norway, yet we admit that there is truth in each; that one is just as good and true a tree as the other. Therefore, let us who are apt to think in the church and other religious communities that we have got all the truth ourselves, remember that truth is wider than can be apprehended by any body of human beings, and let us be tolerant to one another, not forgetting that those who are not in the same community with us hold their side of the truth as strongly as we do ours.

Each religious community has witnessed, and is witnessing, to some side of the truth. Religious communities are not perfect in themselves like trees or flowers, but for that very reason it is all the more necessary that the members of them should be tolerant, and should make the greatest effort to understand those of other religious beliefs.
Chapter 79
I can take little interest in the questions which divide Christian churches and sects, can see no reason why they should not now be working side by side to redeem our waste places, and to make the kingdoms of this world the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ.

St. Ambrose was a holy man, and exceeding zealous, even to slaying for the one true creed. One day as he[139] was walking in deep meditation as to how to bring all men to his own mind, he was aware of a stream, and a youth seated beside it. He had never seen so beautiful a countenance, and sat down by him to speak of those things on which his mind continually dwelt. To his horror he found that the beautiful face covered a most heretical mind, and he spoke in sorrowful anger to the youth of his danger. Whereupon the young stranger produced six or seven vases, all of different shapes and colors, and, as he filled them from the brook, said to the saint (as the legend is versified by Mr. Lowell):—
“Now Ambrose, thou maker of creeds, look here—
As into these vases this water I pour;
One shall hold less, another more,
But the water the same in every case,
Shall take the figure of the vase.
O thou who wouldst unity reach through strife,
Canst thou fit this sign to the Waters of Life.”

When Ambrose looked up, the youth, the vases, and the stream were gone; but he knew he had talked with an angel, and his heart was changed. I wish that angel would come and do a great deal of preaching to our English Ambroses.
Chapter 80
“There is no doubt,” as Lord Russell says, “that concession gives rise to demands for fresh concession,[140] and it is right that it should be so. The true limit is, that all it is just to concede should be conceded; all that it is true to affirm should be affirmed; but that which is false should be denied.” Besides this power of concession, which she has in a much greater degree than any other religious body, the English Church, if she be a Catholic Church, as she pretends to be, has also greater power of assimilation. Let her not be afraid of those sides of the truth which have been most prominently put forward by other religious communities. She can assimilate them if she pleases, and it is her duty to assimilate whatever is true in them. Her mission in this world is not to hold her own in the sense of resisting all reform, of resisting all concession, but her duty and her mission is to go to the lost people of our country, and of every country where she is established or where she exists, and to draw those together into her fold who cannot get into that of other religious bodies, which have such limits as I have been speaking of to bar the gates of admission. Her great mission is to seek and save those which are lost in every community. The highest title of her ministers is Servi servorum Dei (the servants of the servants of God), and, if she remembers this high mission, if she endeavors by her life to exemplify her Master’s spirit and to illustrate His life, she never need be afraid of disestablishment or disendowment. What did the greatest of churchmen who ever lived say on the point of people carrying on those miserable[141] squabbles that are dividing us in this day? They were saying, “We are of Paul,” “We are of Apollos,” “We are of Peter?” and he said, “Who is Paul? Who is Apollos? Who is Peter?” If you only understand to what an inheritance you are called to, “all things are yours, whether Paul, or Apollos, or Peter, or the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come, all are yours, for ye are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s.”
Chapter 81
It is said by some, as I think, unwise defenders of the faith, that a colorless Christianity is no Christianity at all, that you can have no church without a definite creed. To the first I would reply that, after all, the bright white light is, in its purity, better than all color. To the second, I admit that every church must have a definite creed, but the more simple and broad that creed is the better. It is only the simplest creed which can give us the unity, or the tolerance in diversity, for which all good men are longing.
Chapter 82
Meekness, liberality, tolerance of other confessions! These are great virtues, but hard, very hard to practise in such hurrying, driving, democratic, competitive times as ours, when respect for authority seems to have almost died out. Nevertheless, they must be practised, if the church is ever to fulfil her great mission, and to become in a larger and truer sense than she has ever yet been, “The Church of the People.”
Chapter 83
Poor conscience! to what pitiful uses is that sacred name turned! The stolid Essex peasant, one of the Peculiar People, lets his child die because he will not allow it to take medicine, and believes himself to be suffering for conscience’s sake because he is summoned before a magistrate to answer for its life. And he has far more reason on his side than the Ritualist martyrs. I desire neither to speak nor think scornfully or bitterly of them, but this at least I must say, that men who can make matters of conscience of such trivialities as the shape and color of vestments, the burning of candles and incense, the position of tables, and the like, and in defence of these things are prepared to defy authority, and break what they know to be the law of their country, are not fit to be trusted with the spiritual guidance of any portion of our people. England has a great work still to do in the world, for which she needs children with quite other kind of consciences than these—consciences which shall be simple, manly, obedient, qualities[143] which must disappear under such examples and teaching as these men are giving.
Chapter 84
Let us look to the One life as our model, and turn to Him who lived it on our earth, as to the guide, and friend, and helper, who alone can strengthen the feeble knees, and lift up the fainting heart. Just in so far as we cleave to that teaching and follow that life, shall we live our own faithfully.
Chapter 85

In certain crises in one’s life nothing is so useful or healthy for one, as coming into direct and constant contact with an intellect stronger than one’s own, which looks at the same subjects from a widely different standpoint.
Chapter 86
Ah! light words of those whom we love and honor, what a power ye are, and how carelessly wielded by those who can use you! Surely for these things also God will ask an account.

Chapter 87
On went the talk and laughter. Two or three of the little boys in the long dormitory were already in bed, sitting up with their chins on their knees. The light burned clear, the noise went on. It was a trying moment for Arthur, the poor little lonely boy; however, this time he didn’t ask Tom what he might or might not do, but dropped on his knees by his bedside, as he had done every day from his childhood, to open his heart to Him who heareth the cry and beareth the sorrows of the tender child, and the strong man in agony....

There were many boys in the room by whom that little scene was taken to heart before they slept. But sleep seemed to have deserted the pillow of poor Tom. For some time his excitement, and the flood of memories which chased one another through his brain kept him from thinking or resolving. His head throbbed, his heart leapt, and he could hardly keep himself from springing out of bed and rushing about the room. Then the thought of his own mother came across him, and the promise he had made at her knee, years ago, never to forget to kneel by his bedside, and give himself up to his Father, before he laid his head on the pillow, from which it might never rise; and he lay down gently and cried as if his heart would break. He was only fourteen years old.
 
It was no light act of courage in those days for a little fellow to say his prayers publicly, even at Rugby. A few years later, when Arnold’s manly piety had begun to leaven the school, the tables turned; before he died, in the school-house, at least, and I believe in the other houses, the rule was the other way. But poor Tom had come to school in other times. The first few nights after he came he did not kneel down because of the noise, but sat up in bed till the candle was out, and then stole out and said his prayers, in fear lest some one should find him out. So did many another poor little fellow. Then he began to think that he might just as well say his prayers in bed, and then it didn’t matter whether he was kneeling, or sitting, or lying down. And so it had come to pass with Tom, as with all who will not confess their Lord before men; and for the last year he had probably not said his prayers in earnest a dozen times.

Poor Tom! the first and bitterest feeling which was likely to break his heart was the sense of his own cowardice. The vice of all others which he loathed was brought in and burned in on his own soul. He had lied to his mother, to his conscience, to his God. How could he bear it? And then the poor little weak boy, whom he had pitied and almost scorned for his weakness, had done that which he, braggart as he was, dared not do. The first dawn of comfort came to him in swearing to himself that he would stand by that boy[146] through thick and thin, and cheer him, and help him, and bear his burdens, for the good deed done that night. Then he resolved to write home next day and tell his mother all, and what a coward her son had been. And then peace came to him, as he resolved lastly, to bear his testimony next morning. The morning would be harder than the night to begin with, but he felt that he could not afford to let one chance slip. Several times he faltered, for the devil showed him first all his old friends calling him “Saint” and “Square-toes,” and a dozen hard names, and whispered to him that his motives would be misunderstood, and he would only be misunderstood, and he would only be left alone with the new boy; whereas it was his duty to keep all means of influence, that he might do good to the largest number. And then came the more subtle temptation, “Shall I not be showing myself braver than others by doing this? Have I any right to begin it now? Ought I not rather to pray in my own study, letting other boys know that I do so, and trying to lead them to it, while in public at least I should go on as I have done?” However, his good angel was too strong that night, and he turned on his side and slept, tired of trying to reason, but resolved to follow the impulse which had been so strong, and in which he had found peace.

Next morning he was up and washed and dressed, all but his jacket and waistcoat, just as the ten minutes’ bell began to ring, and then in the face of the[147] whole room knelt down to pray. Not five words could he say—the bell mocked him; he was listening for every whisper in the room—what were they all thinking of him? He was ashamed to go on kneeling, ashamed to rise from his knees. At last, as it were from his inmost heart, a still small voice seemed to breathe forth the words of the publican, “God be merciful to me a sinner!” He repeated them over and over, clinging to them as for his life, and rose from his knees comforted and humbled, and ready to face the whole world. It was not needed: two other boys besides Arthur had already followed his example, and he went down to the great school with a glimmering of another lesson in his heart—the lesson that he who has conquered his own coward spirit has conquered the whole outward world; and that other one which the old prophet learned in the cave in Mount Horeb, when he hid his face, and the still small voice asked, “What doest thou here, Elijah,” that however we may fancy ourselves alone on the side of good, the King and Lord of men is nowhere without his witnesses; for in every society, however seemingly corrupt and godless, there are those who have not bowed the knee to Baal.
Chapter 88
“It is about the toughest part of a man’s life, I do[148] believe,” said Hardy, “the time he has to spend at college. My university life has been so different altogether from what yours will be, that my experience isn’t likely to benefit you.”

“I wish you would try me, though,” said Tom; “you don’t know what a teachable sort of fellow I am, if anybody will take me the right way. You taught me to scull, you know; or at least put me in the way to learn. But sculling, and rowing, and cricket, and all the rest of it, with such reading as I am likely to do, won’t be enough. I feel sure of that already.”

“I don’t think it will,” said Hardy. “No amount of physical or mental work will fill the vacuum you were talking of just now. It is the empty house swept and garnished, which the boy might have had glimpses of, but the man finds yawning within him, and which must be filled somehow. It’s a pretty good three-years’ work to learn how to keep the devils out of it, more or less, by the time you take your degree. At least I have found it so.”

Hardy rose and took a turn or two up and down his room. He was astonished at finding himself talking so unreservedly to one of whom he knew so little, and half-wished the words recalled. He lived much alone, and thought himself morbid and too self-conscious; why should he be filling a youngster’s head with puzzles? How did he know that they were thinking of the same thing?
 

But the spoken word cannot be recalled; it must go on its way for good or evil; and this one set the hearer staring into the ashes, and putting many things together in his head.

It was some minutes before he broke silence, but at last he gathered up his thoughts, and said, “Well, I hope I sha’n’t shirk when the time comes. You don’t think a fellow need shut himself up, though? I’m sure I shouldn’t be any the better for that.”

“No, I don’t think you would,” said Hardy.

“Because, you see,” Tom went on, waxing bolder and more confidential, “if I were to take to moping by myself, I shouldn’t read as you or any sensible fellow would do; I know that well enough. I should just begin, sitting with my legs up on the mantle-piece, and looking into my own inside. I see you are laughing, but you know what I mean, don’t you, now?”

“Yes; staring into the vacuum you were talking of just now; it all comes back to that,” said Hardy.

“Well, perhaps it does,” said Tom; “and I don’t believe it does a fellow a bit of good to be thinking about himself and his own doings.”

“Only he can’t help himself,” said Hardy. “Let him throw himself as he will into all that is going on up here, after all he must be alone for a great part of his time—all night at any rate—and when he gets his oak sported, it’s all up with him. He must be[150] looking more or less into his own inside as you call it.”

“Then I hope he won’t find it as ugly a business as I do. If he does, I’m sure he can’t be worse employed.”

“I don’t know that,” said Hardy; “he can’t learn anything worth learning in any other way.”

“Oh, I like that!” said Tom; “it’s worth learning how to play tennis, and how to speak the truth. You can’t learn either by thinking about yourself ever so much.”

“You must know the truth before you can speak it,” said Hardy.

“So you always do in plenty of time.”

“How?” said Hardy.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Tom; “by a sort of instinct, I suppose. I never in my life felt any doubt about what I ought to say or do; did you?”

“Well, yours is a good, comfortable, working belief, at any rate,” said Hardy, smiling; “and I should advise you to hold on to it as long as you can.”

“But you don’t think I can for very long, eh?”

“No; but men are very different. There’s no saying. If you were going to get out of the self-dissecting business altogether though, why should you have brought the subject up at all to-night? It looks awkward for you, doesn’t it?”

Tom began to feel rather forlorn at this suggestion,[151] and probably betrayed it in his face, for Hardy changed the subject suddenly.
Chapter 89
“You don’t mean to say,” said Tom, “that it makes any real difference to a man in society here in Oxford, whether he is poor or rich; I mean, of course, if he is a gentleman and a good fellow?”

“Yes, it does—the very greatest possible. But don’t take my word for it. Keep your eyes open and judge for yourself; I daresay I’m prejudiced on the subject.”

“Well, I sha’n’t believe it if I can help it,” said Tom; “you know you said just now that you never called on any one. Perhaps you don’t give men a fair chance. They might be glad to know you if you would let them, and may think it’s your fault that they don’t.”

“Very possibly,” said Hardy; “I tell you not to take my word for it.”

“It upsets all one’s ideas so,” went on Tom, “why, Oxford ought to be the place in England where money should count for nothing. Surely, now, such a man as Jervis, our captain, has more influence than all the rich men in the college put together, and is more looked up to?”

“He’s one of a thousand,” said Hardy; “handsome, strong, good-tempered, clever, and up to everything.[152] Besides, he isn’t a poor man; and mind, I don’t say that if he were he wouldn’t be where he is. I am speaking of the rule, and not of the exceptions.”

Here Hardy’s scout came in to say that the Dean wanted to speak to him. So he put on his cap and gown, and Tom rose also.

“Well, I’m sorry to turn you out,” said Hardy, “and I’m afraid I’ve been very surly and made you very uncomfortable. You won’t come back again in a hurry.”

“Indeed I will though, if you will let me,” said Tom; “I have enjoyed my evening immensely.”

“Then come whenever you like,” said Hardy.

“But I am afraid of interfering with your reading,” said Tom.

“Oh, you needn’t mind that; I have plenty of time on my hands; besides, one can’t read all night, and from eight till ten you’ll find me generally idle.”

“Then you’ll see me often enough. But promise, now, to turn me out whenever I am in the way.”

“Very well,” said Hardy, laughing; and so they parted for the time.

Some twenty minutes afterwards Hardy returned to his room after his interview with the Dean, who merely wanted to speak to him about some matter of college business. He flung his cap and gown on to the sofa, and began to walk up and down his room, at first hurriedly, but soon with his usual regular tramp. However expressive a man’s face may be, and however well you[153] may know it, it is simply nonsense to say that you can tell what he is thinking about by looking at it, as many of us are apt to boast. Still more absurd would it be to expect readers to know what Hardy is thinking about, when they have never had the advantage of seeing his face even in a photograph. Wherefore, it would seem that the author is bound on such occasions to put his readers on equal vantage-ground with himself, and not only to tell them what a man does, but, so far as may be, what he is thinking about also.

His first thought, then, was one of pleasure at having been sought out by one who seemed to be just the sort of friend he would like to have. He contrasted our hero with the few men with whom he generally lived, and for some of whom he had a high esteem—whose only idea of exercise was a two hours’ constitutional walk in the afternoons, and whose life was chiefly spent over books and behind sported oaks—and felt that this was more of a man after his own heart. Then came doubts whether his new friend would draw back when he had been up a little longer, and knew more of the place. At any rate he had said and done nothing to tempt him; “if he pushes the acquaintance—and I think he will—it will be because he likes me for myself. And I can do him good too, I feel sure,” he went on, as he ran over rapidly his own life for the last three years. “Perhaps he won’t flounder into all the sloughs that I have had to drag through; he will get too much of the[154] healthy, active life up here for that, which I never had; but some of them he must get into. All the companionship of boating and cricketing, and wine-parties and supper-parties, and all the reading in the world won’t keep him from many a long hour of mawkishness, and discontent, and emptiness of heart; he feels that already himself. Am I sure of that, though? I may be only reading myself into him. At any rate, why should I have helped to trouble him before the time? Was that a friend’s part? Well, he must face it, and the sooner the better perhaps. At any rate it is done. But what a blessed thing if one can only help a youngster like this to fight his way through the cold clammy atmosphere which is always hanging over him, and ready to settle down on him—can help to keep some living faith in him, that the world, Oxford and all, isn’t a respectable piece of machinery set going some centuries back! Ah! it’s an awful business, that temptation to believe, or think you believe, in a dead God. It has nearly broken my back a score of times. What are all the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil to this? It includes them all. Well, I believe I can help him, and, please God, I will, if he will only let me; and the very sight of him does me good; so I won’t believe we went down the lasher together for nothing.”
Chapter 90
Don’t let reformers of any sort think that they are going really to lay hold of the working boys and young men of England by any educational grapnel whatever, which hasn’t some bona fide equivalent for the games of the old country “veast” in it; something to put in the place of the back-swording and wrestling and racing; something to try the muscles of men’s bodies, and the endurance of their hearts, and to make them rejoice in their strength. In all the new-fangled comprehensive plans which I see, this is all left out: and the consequence is, that your great Mechanics’ Institutes end in intellectual priggism, and your Christian Young Men’s Societies in religious Pharisaism.

Well, well, we must bide our time. Life isn’t all beer and skittles—but beer and skittles, or something better of the same sort, must form a good part of every Englishman’s education. If I could only drive this into the heads of you rising Parliamentary Lords, and young swells who “have your ways made for you,” as the saying is—you, who frequent palaver houses and West-end Clubs, waiting always to strap yourselves on to the back of poor dear old John Bull, as soon as the present used-up lot (your fathers and uncles), who sit there on the great Parliamentary-majorities’ pack-saddle, and make believe they’re grinding him with their[156] red-tape bridle, tumble, or have to be lifted off!

I don’t think much of you yet—I wish I could; though you do go talking and lecturing up and down the country to crowded audiences, and are busy with all sorts of philanthropic intellectualism, and circulating libraries and museums, and heaven only knows what besides, and try to make us think, through newspaper reports, that you are, even as we, of the working classes. But, bless your hearts, we ain’t so “green,” though lots of us of all sorts toady you enough certainly, and try to make you think so.

I’ll tell you what to do now: instead of all this trumpeting and fuss, which is only the old Parliamentary-majority dodge over again—just you go, each of you (you’ve plenty of time for it, if you’ll only give up the other line), and quietly make three or four friends, real friends, among us. You’ll find a little trouble in getting at the right sort, because such birds don’t come lightly to your lure—but found they may be. Take, say, two out of the professions, lawyer, parson, doctor—which you will; one out of trade, and three or four out of the working classes, tailors, engineers, carpenters, engravers—there’s plenty of choice. Let them be men of your own ages, mind, and ask them to your homes; introduce them to your wives and sisters, and get introduced to theirs; give them good dinners, and talk to them about what is really at the bottom of your hearts, and box, and run, and row with them, when you[157] have a chance. Do all this honestly as man to man, and by the time you come to ride old John, you’ll be able to do something more than sit on his back, and may feel his mouth with some stronger bridle than a red-tape one.

Ah, if you only would! But you have got too far out of the right rut, I fear. Too much over-civilization, and the deceitfulness of riches. It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. More’s the pity. I never came across but two of you who could value a man wholly and solely for what was in him; who thought themselves verily and indeed of the same flesh and blood as John Jones, the attorney’s clerk, and Bill Smith, the costermonger, and could act as if they thought so.
Chapter 91
The change in Tom’s opinions and objects of interest brought him now into more intimate relations with a set of whom he had as yet seen little. For want of a better name, we may call them “the party of progress.” At their parties, instead of practical jokes, and boisterous mirth, and talk of boats, and bats, and guns, and horses, the highest and deepest questions of morals, and politics, and metaphysics, were discussed, and discussed with a freshness and enthusiasm which is apt to wear off when doing has to take the place of talking,[158] but has a strange charm of its own while it lasts, and is looked back to with loving regret by those for whom it is no longer a possibility.

With this set Tom soon fraternized, and drank in many new ideas, and took to himself also many new crotchets besides those with which he was really weighted. Almost all his new acquaintances were Liberal in politics, but a few only were ready to go all lengths with him. They were all union men, and Tom, of course, followed the fashion, and soon propounded theories in that institution which gained him the name of Chartist Brown.

There was a strong mixture of self-conceit in it all. He had a kind of idea that he had discovered something which it was creditable to have discovered, and that it was a very fine thing to have all these feelings for, and sympathies with, “the masses,” and to believe in democracy, and “glorious humanity,” and “a good time coming,” and I know not what other big matters. And, although it startled and pained him at first to hear himself called ugly names, which he had hated and despised from his youth up, and to know that many of his old acquaintances looked upon him, not simply as a madman, but as a madman with snobbish proclivities; yet, when the first plunge was over, there was a good deal on the other hand which tickled his vanity, and was far from being unpleasant.

To do him justice, however, the disagreeables were[159] such that, had there not been some genuine belief at the bottom, he would certainly have been headed back very speedily into the fold of political and social orthodoxy. As it was, amidst the cloud of sophisms, and platitudes, and big one-sided ideas half-mastered, which filled his thoughts and overflowed in his talk, there was growing in him and taking firmer hold on him daily a true and broad sympathy for men as men, and especially for poor men as poor men, and a righteous and burning hatred against all laws, customs, or notions, which, according to his light, either were or seemed to be setting aside, or putting anything else in the place of, or above the man. It was with him the natural outgrowth of the child’s and boy’s training (though his father would have been much astonished to be told so), and the instincts of those early days were now getting rapidly set into habits and faiths, and becoming a part of himself.

In this stage of his life, as in so many former ones, Tom got great help from his intercourse with Hardy, now the rising tutor of the college. Hardy was travelling much the same road himself as our hero, but was somewhat further on, and had come into it from a different country, and through quite other obstacles. Their early lives had been so different; and, both by nature and from long and severe self-restraint and discipline, Hardy was much the less impetuous and demonstrative of the two. He did not rush out, therefore (as Tom was too much inclined to do), the moment he had seized[160] hold of the end of a new idea which he felt to be good for him and what he wanted, and brandish it in the face of all comers, and think himself a traitor to the truth if he wasn’t trying to make everybody he met with eat it. Hardy, on the contrary, would test his new idea, and turn it over, and prove it as far as he could, and try to get hold of the whole of it, and ruthlessly strip off any tinsel or rose-pink sentiment with which it might happen to be mixed up.

Often and often did Tom suffer under this severe method, and rebel against it, and accuse his friend, both to his face and in his own secret thought, of coldness, and want of faith, and all manner of other sins of omission and commission. In the end, however, he generally came round, with more or less of rebellion, according to the severity of the treatment, and acknowledged that, when Hardy brought him down from riding the high horse, it was not without good reason, and that the dust in which he was rolled was always most wholesome dust.

For instance, there was no phrase more frequently in the mouths of the party of progress than “the good cause.” It was a fine big-sounding phrase, which could be used with great effect in perorations of speeches at the union, and was sufficiently indefinite to be easily defended from ordinary attacks, while it saved him who used it the trouble of ascertaining accurately for himself or settling for his hearers what it really did mean.[161] But, however satisfactory it might be before promiscuous audiences, and so long as vehement assertion or declaration was all that was required to uphold it, this same “good cause” was liable to come to much grief when it had to get itself defined. Hardy was particularly given to persecution on this subject, when he could get Tom, and, perhaps, one or two others, in a quiet room by themselves. While professing the utmost sympathy for “the good cause,” and a hope as strong as theirs that all its enemies might find themselves suspended to lamp-posts as soon as possible, he would pursue it into corners from which escape was most difficult, asking it and its supporters what it exactly was, and driving them from one cloud-land to another, and from “the good cause” to the “people’s cause,” “the cause of labor,” and other like troublesome definitions, until the great idea seemed to have no shape or existence any longer even in their own brains.

But Hardy’s persecution, provoking as it was for the time, never went to the undermining of any real conviction in the minds of his juniors, or the shaking of anything which did not need shaking, but only helped them to clear their ideas and brains as to what they were talking and thinking about, and gave them glimpses—soon clouded over again, but most useful, nevertheless—of the truth, that there were a good many knotty questions to be solved before a man could be quite sure that he had found out the way to set the world[162] thoroughly to rights, and heal all the ills that flesh is heir to.

Hardy treated another of his friend’s most favorite notions even with less respect than this one of “the good cause.” Democracy, that “universal democracy,” which their favorite author had recently declared to be “an inevitable fact of the days in which we live,” was, perhaps, on the whole the pet idea of the small section of liberal young Oxford, with whom Tom was now hand and glove. They lost no opportunity of worshipping it, and doing battle for it; and, indeed, did most of them very truly believe that that state of the world which this universal democracy was to bring about and which was coming no man could say how soon, was to be in fact that age of peace and good-will which men had dreamt of in all times, when the lion should lie down with the kid, and nation should not vex nation any more.

After hearing something to this effect from Tom on several occasions, Hardy cunningly lured him to his rooms on the pretence of talking over the prospects of the boat club, and then, having seated him by the fire, which he himself proceeded to assault gently with the poker, propounded suddenly to him the question:

“Brown, I should like to know what you mean by ‘democracy?’”

Tom at once saw the trap into which he had fallen, and made several efforts to break away, but unsuccessfully;[163] and, being seated to a cup of tea, and allowed to smoke, was then and there grievously oppressed, and mangled, and sat upon, by his oldest and best friend. He took his ground carefully, and propounded only what he felt sure that Hardy himself would at once accept—what no man of any worth could possibly take exception to. “He meant much more,” he said, “than this; but for the present purpose it would be enough for him to say that, whatever else it might mean, democracy in his mouth always meant that every man should have a share in the government of his country.”

Hardy, seeming to acquiesce, and making a sudden change in the subject of their talk, decoyed his innocent guest away from the thought of democracy for a few minutes, by holding up to him the flag of hero-worship, in which worship Tom was, of course, a sedulous believer. Then, having involved him in most difficult country, his persecutor opened fire upon him from masked batteries of the most deadly kind, the guns being all from the armory of his own prophets.

“You long for the rule of the ablest man, everywhere, at all times? To find your ablest man, and then give him power, and obey him—that you hold to be about the highest act of wisdom which a nation can be capable of?”

“Yes; and you know you believe that too, Hardy, just as firmly as I do.”

“I hope so. But then, how about our universal[164] democracy, and every man having a share in the government of his country?”

Tom felt that his flank was turned; in fact, the contrast of his two beliefs had never struck him vividly before, and he was consequently much confused. But Hardy went on tapping a big coal gently with the poker, and gave him time to recover himself and collect his thoughts.

“I don’t mean, of course, that every man is to have an actual share in the government,” he said at last.

“But every man is somehow to have a share; and, if not an actual one, I can’t see what the proposition comes to.”

“I call it having a share in the government when a man has share in saying who shall govern him.”

“Well, you’ll own that’s a very different thing. But, let’s see; will that find our wisest governor for us—letting all the foolishest men in the nation have a say as to who he is to be?”

“Come now, Hardy, I’ve heard you say that you are for manhood suffrage.”

“That’s another question; you let in another idea there. At present we are considering whether the vox populi is the best test for finding your best man. I’m afraid all history is against you.”

“That’s a good joke. Now, there I defy you, Hardy.”

“Begin at the beginning, then, and let us see.”

“I suppose you’ll say, then, that the Egyptian and[165] Babylonian empires were better than the little Jewish republic.”

“Republic! well, let that pass. But I never heard that the Jews elected Moses, or any of the judges.”

“Well, never mind the Jews; they’re an exceptional case: you can’t argue from them.”

“I don’t admit that. I believe just the contrary. But go on.”

“Well, then, what do you say to the glorious Greek republics, with Athens at the head of them?”

“I say that no nation ever treated their best men so badly. I see I must put on a lecture in Aristophanes for your special benefit. Vain, irritable, shallow, suspicious old Demus, with his two oboli in his cheek, and doubting only between Cleon and the sausage-seller, which he shall choose for his wisest man—not to govern, but to serve his whims and caprices. You must call another witness, I think.”

“But that’s a caricature.”

“Take the picture, then, out of Thucydides, Plato, Xenophon, how you will—you won’t mend the matter much. You shouldn’t go so fast, Brown; you won’t mind my saying so, I know. You don’t get clear in your own mind before you pitch into every one who comes across you, and so do your own side (which I admit is mostly the right one) more harm than good.”

Tom couldn’t stand being put down so summarily, and fought over the ground from one country to another,[166] from Rome to the United States, with all the arguments he could muster, but with little success. That unfortunate first admission of his, he felt it throughout, like a mill-stone round his neck, and could not help admitting to himself, when he left, that there was a good deal in Hardy’s concluding remark: “You’ll find it rather a tough business to get your ‘universal democracy,’ and ‘government by the wisest,’ to pull together in one coach.”

Notwithstanding all such occasional reverses and cold baths, however, Tom went on strengthening himself in his new opinions, and maintaining them with all the zeal of a convert. The shelves of his bookcase, and the walls of his room, soon began to show signs of the change which was taking place in his ways of looking at men and things. Hitherto a framed engraving of George III. had hung over his mantel-piece; but early in this, his third year, the frame had disappeared for a few days, and when it reappeared, the solemn face of John Milton looked out from it, while the honest monarch had retired into a portfolio. A facsimile of Magna Charta soon displaced a large colored print of “A Day with the Pycheley;” and soon afterwards the death-warrant of Charles I., with its grim and resolute rows of signatures and seals, appeared on the wall in a place of honor, in the neighborhood of Milton.
Chapter 92
“I can’t for the life of me fancy, I confess,” wrote Tom, “what you think will come of speculating about necessity and free will. I only know that I can hold out my hand before me, and can move it to the right or left, despite of all powers in heaven or earth. As I sit here writing to you I can let into my heart, and give the reins to, all sorts of devils’ passions, or to the Spirit of God. Well, that’s enough for me. I know it of myself, and I believe you know it of yourself, and everybody knows it of themselves or himself; and why you can’t be satisfied with that, passes my comprehension. As if one hasn’t got puzzles enough, and bothers enough, under one’s nose, without going afield after a lot of metaphysical quibbles. No, I’m wrong—not going afield—anything one has to go afield for is all right. What a fellow meets outside himself he isn’t responsible for, and must do the best he can with. But to go on forever looking inside of one’s self, and groping about amongst one’s own sensations, and ideas, and whimsies of one kind and another, I can’t conceive a poorer line of business than that. Don’t you get into it now, that’s a dear boy.

“Very likely you’ll tell me you can’t help it; that every one has his own difficulties, and must fight them out, and that mine are one sort, and yours another. Well, perhaps you may be right. I hope I’m getting to[168] know that my plummet isn’t to measure all the world. But it does seem a pity that men shouldn’t be thinking about how to cure some of the wrongs which poor dear old England is pretty near dying of, instead of taking the edge off their brains, and spending all their steam in speculating about all kinds of things, which wouldn’t make any poor man in the world—or rich one either, for that matter—a bit better off, if they were all found out, and settled to-morrow.”
Chapter 93
William Cobbett was born in 1762 at Farnham, the third son of a small farmer, honest, industrious, and frugal, from whom, as his famous son writes, “if he derived no honor, he derived no shame,” and who used to boast that he had four boys, the eldest but fifteen, who did as much work as any three men in the parish of Farnham. “When I first trudged afield,” William writes, “with my wooden bottle and satchel slung over my shoulder, I was hardly able to climb the gates and stiles.” From driving the small birds from the turnip-seed and rooks from the peas, he rose to weeding wheat, hoeing peas, and so up to driving the plough for 2d. a day, which paid for the evening school where he learned to read and write, getting in this rough way the rudiments of an education over which he rejoices as he contrasts it triumphantly with that of the “frivolous idiots[169] that are turned out from Winchester and Westminster Schools, or from those dens of dunces called Colleges and Universities,” as having given him the ability to become “one of the greatest terrors to one of the greatest and most powerful bodies of knaves and fools that were ever permitted to afflict this or any other country.”

At eleven he was employed in clipping the boxedgings in the gardens of Farnham Castle, and, hearing from one of the gardeners of the glories of Kew, he started for that place with 1s. 1?d. in his pocket, 3d. of which sum he spent in buying “Swift’s Tale of a Tub.” The book produced a “birth of intellect” in the little rustic. He carried it with him wherever he went, and at twenty-four lost it in a box which fell overboard in the Bay of Fundy, a “loss which gave me greater pain than I have ever felt at losing thousands of pounds.” He returned home, and continued to work for his father till 1782, attending fairs and hearing Washington’s health proposed by his father at farmers’ ordinaries. In that year he went on a visit to Portsmouth, saw the sea for the first time, and was with difficulty hindered from taking service at once on board a man-of-war. He returned home “spoilt for a farmer,” and next year started for London. He served in a solicitor’s office in Gray’s Inn for eight months (where he worked hard at grammar), then enlisted in the 54th regiment, and after a few weeks’ drill at Chatham embarked for Nova Scotia, where the corps were serving. Here his temperate[170] habits, strict performance of duty, and masterly ability and intelligence, raised him in little more than a year to the post of sergeant-major over the heads of fifty comrades his seniors in service. His few spare hours were spent in hard study, especially in acquiring a thorough mastery of grammar. He had bought Lowth’s Grammar, which he wrote out two or three times, got it by heart, and imposed on himself the task of saying it over to himself every time he was posted sentinel. When he had thoroughly mastered it, and could write with ease and correctness, he turned to logic, rhetoric, geometry, French, to Vauban’s fortification, and books on military exercise and evolutions. In this way, by the year 1791, when the 54th was recalled, he had become the most trusted man in the regiment. The colonel used him as a sort of second adjutant; all the paymaster’s accounts were prepared by him; he coached the officers, and used to make out cards with the words of command for many of them, who, on parade, as he scornfully writes, “were commanding me to move my hands and feet in words I had taught them, and were in everything except mere authority my inferiors, and ought to have been commanded by me.” Notwithstanding the masterfulness already showing itself, Cobbett was a strictly obedient soldier, and left the army with the offer of a commission, and the highest character for ability and zeal.

No sooner, however, was his discharge accomplished,[171] than he set himself to work to expose and bring to justice several of the officers of his regiment, who had systematically mulcted the soldiers in their companies of their wretched pay. His thorough knowledge of the regimental accounts made him a formidable accuser; and, after looking into the matter, the then Judge-Advocate-General agreed to prosecute, and a court-martial was summoned at Woolwich for the purpose in 1792. But Cobbett did not appear. He found that it would be necessary to call his clerks, still serving in the regiment, and the consequences to them in those days were likely to be so serious, that he preferred to abandon his attempt. Accordingly, he did not appear, and the fact was bitterly used against him in later days by his political opponents. The whole story is worth reading, and is very fairly given by Mr. Smith. He had now made a happy marriage with the girl to whom he had entrusted all his savings years before, and started with her to Paris; but, hearing on the way of the king’s dethronement, and the Bastile riots, he turned aside and embarked for America.

He arrived in Philadelphia in October 1792, enthusiastic for the land of liberty, and an ardent student of Paine’s works, and set to work to gain his living by teaching English to the French emigrants there, and by such literary work as he could get. In both he was very successful, but soon found himself in fierce antagonism with the American press, and, after publishing[172] several pamphlets, “A Kick for a Bite,” “A Bone to Gnaw for the Democrats,” &c., established his first famous periodical, “Peter Porcupine,” which soon gained him the reputation in England as well as America of a staunch and able loyalist, and severe critic of Republican institutions. The only serious mistake in his American career was his attack on Dr. Priestly, then also an emigrant in Philadelphia. The States had become an undesirable place of residence for him before 1798, when an intimation reached him through the British Embassy that the English Government were sensible of the obligations they owed him, and were prepared to advance his interests. These overtures he steadily refused; but, finding a Royalist’s life was becoming too hot, and having been beaten in a libel suit, which nearly ruined him (though his expenses were nominally defrayed by the subscriptions of his American admirers), he closed the brilliant career of “Peter Porcupine’s Gazette,” and returned to England, having at last, to use his own phrase, “got the better of all diffidence in my own capacity.”

He reached home in 1800, and found himself at once courted and famous. He was entertained by Ministers of State and publishers, but after looking round him in his own sturdy fashion, and finding the condition of the political and literary world by no means to his mind, while that of the great body of the people was becoming worse every day, he resisted all temptations[173] and started on the career which he followed faithfully till his death. In 1802 appeared the first number of “Cobbett’s Political Register,” which (with the break of two months in 1817, when he fled from the new Gagging Act to America) continued to appear weekly till June 1835, and remains a wonderful witness to the strength and the weaknesses of the Sussex ploughboy. During those long years, and all the fierce controversies which marked them, he was grandly faithful, according to his lights, to the cause of the poor:—“I for my part should not be at all surprised,” he wrote in 1806, “if some one were to propose selling the poor, or mortgaging them to the fund-holders. Ah! you may wince; you may cry Jacobin or leveller as long as you please. I wish to see the poor men of England what the poor men of England were when I was born; and from endeavoring to accomplish this wish nothing but the want of means shall make me desist.” And loyally he maintained the fight against sinecures, place-hunting, and corruption of all kinds until his death, full of years, the member for Oldham, and the popular leader of the widest influence among the Liberal party of the first Reform period. For the incidents of the long struggle—how the government press turned savagely on the man whom they had hailed on his return from America as one “whom no corruption can seduce nor any personal danger intimidate from the performance of his duty;” how Attorney-Generals watched him and prosecuted; how[174] he insisted on conducting his own causes, and so spent two years in jail, and was mulcted again and again in heavy damages; how he fought through it all, and tended his farm and fruit-trees, and wrote his “Rural Rides” and “Cottage Economy,” and was a tender and loving man in his own home, and retained the warm regard of such men as Wyndham and Lord Radnor, while he was the best hated and abused man in England—we must refer all (and we hope there are many) who care to know about them to the second volume of Edward Smith’s life of Cobbett.

There are few lives that we know of better worth careful study in these times. We have no space here to do more than quote the best estimate of the man’s work which has ever come from one of those classes who for thirty-five years looked on him as their most dangerous enemy:—
“I know him well, on every side
Walled round with wilful prejudice;
A self-taught peasant rough in speech,
Self-taught, and confident to teach,
In blame not overwise.
What matter, if an honest thought
Sometimes a homely phrase require?
Let those who fear the bracing air
Look for a milder sky elsewhere,
[175]Or stay beside the fire.
There are worse things in this bad world
Than bitter speech and bearing free—
I hail thee, genuine English born—
Not yet the lineage is outworn
That owns a man like thee.”
Chapter 94
The state of Europe thirty years ago was far more dead and hopeless than now. There were no wars, certainly, and no expectations of wars. But there was a dull, beaten-down, pent-up feeling abroad, as if the lid were screwed down on the nations, and the thing which had been, however cruel and heavy and mean, was that which was to remain to the end. England was better off than her neighbors, but yet in bad case. In the south and west particularly, several causes had combined to spread a very bitter feeling abroad amongst the agricultural poor. First among these stood the new poor law, the provisions of which were rigorously carried out in most districts. The poor had as yet felt the harshness only of the new system. Then the land was in many places in the hands of men on their last legs, the old sporting farmers, who had begun business as young men while the great war was going on, had made money hand over hand for a few years out of the war prices, and had tried to go on living with grayhounds and yeomanry uniforms—“horse to ride and weapon to[176] wear”—through the hard years which had followed. These were bad masters in every way, unthrifty, profligate, needy, and narrow-minded. The younger men who were supplanting them were introducing machinery, threshing machines and winnowing machines, to take the little bread which a poor man was still able to earn out of the mouths of his wife and children—so at least the poor thought and muttered to one another; and the mutterings broke out every now and then in the long nights of the winter months in blazing ricks and broken machines. Game preserving was on the increase. Australia and America had not yet become familiar words in every English village, and the labor market was everywhere overstocked; and last, but not least, the corn laws were still in force, and the bitter and exasperating strife in which they went out was at its height. And while Swing and his myrmidons were abroad in the counties, and could scarcely be kept down by yeomanry and poor-law guardians, the great towns were in almost worse case. Here too emigration had not yet set in to thin the labor market; wages were falling, and prices rising; the corn-law struggle was better understood and far keener than in the country; and Chartism was gaining force every day, and rising into a huge threatening giant, waiting to put forth his strength, and eager for the occasion which seemed at hand.

You generation of young men, who were too young then to be troubled with such matters, and have grown[177] into manhood since, you little know—may you never know!—what it is to be living the citizens of a divided and distracted nation. For the time that danger is past. In a happy hour, and so far as man can judge, in time, and only just in time, came the repeal of the corn laws, and the great cause of strife and the sense of injustice passed away out of men’s minds. The nation was roused by the Irish famine, and the fearful distress in other parts of the country, to begin looking steadily and seriously at some of the sores which were festering in its body, and undermining health and life. And so the tide had turned, and England had already passed the critical point, when 1848 came upon Christendom, and the whole of Europe leapt up into a wild blaze of revolution.

Is any one still inclined to make light of the danger that threatened England in that year, to sneer at the 10th of April, and the monster petition, and the monster meetings on Kennington and other commons? Well, if there be such persons amongst my readers, I can only say that they can have known nothing of what was going on around them and below them, at that time, and I earnestly hope that their vision has become clearer since then, and that they are not looking with the same eyes that see nothing, at the signs of to-day. For that there are questions still to be solved by us in England, in this current half-century, quite as likely to tear the nation in pieces as the corn laws, no man with[178] half an eye in his head can doubt. They may seem little clouds like a man’s hand on the horizon just now, but they will darken the whole heaven before long, unless we can find wisdom enough amongst us to take the little clouds in hand in time, and make them descend in soft rain.
Chapter 95
The years 1848-9 had been years of revolution, and, as always happens at such times, the minds of men had been greatly stirred on many questions, and especially on the problem of the social condition of the great mass of the poor in all European countries. In Paris, the revolution had been the signal for a great effort on the part of the workmen; and some remarkable experiments had been made, both by the Provisional Government of 1848 and by certain employers of labor, and bodies of skilled mechanics, with a view to place the conditions of labor upon a more equitable and satisfactory footing, or, to use the common phrase of the day, to reconcile the interests of capital and labor. The government experiment of “national workshops” had failed disastrously, but a number of the private associations were brilliantly successful. The history of some of these associations—of the sacrifices which had been joyfully made by the associates in order to collect the small funds necessary to start them—of the ability and[179] industry with which they were conducted, and of their marvellous effect on the habits of all those engaged in the work, had deeply interested many persons in England. It was resolved to try an experiment of the same kind in England, but the conditions were very different. The seed there had already taken root amongst the industrial classes, and the movement had come from them. In England the workpeople, as a rule, had no belief in association, except for defensive purposes. It was chiefly amongst young professional men that the idea was working, and it was necessary to preach it to those whom it most concerned. Accordingly a society was formed, chiefly of young barristers, under the presidency of the late Mr. Maurice, who was then Chaplain of Lincoln’s Inn, for the purpose of establishing associations similar to those in Paris. It was called the Society for Promoting Working Men’s Associations, and I happened to be one of the original members, and on the Council. We were all full of enthusiasm and hope in our work, and of propagandist zeal: anxious to bring in all the recruits we could. I cannot even now think of my own state of mind at the time without wonder and amusement. I certainly thought (and for that matter have never altered my opinion to this day) that here we had found the solution of the great labor question; but I was also convinced that we had nothing to do but just to announce it, and found an association or two, in order to convert all England, and usher in the millennium[180] at once, so plain did the whole thing seem to me. I will not undertake to answer for the rest of the Council, but I doubt whether I was at all more sanguine than the majority. Consequently we went at it with a will: held meetings at six o’clock in the morning (so as not to interfere with our regular work) for settling the rules of our central society, and its off-shoots, and late in the evening, for gathering tailors, shoemakers, and other handicraftsmen, whom we might set to work; started a small publishing office, presided over by a diminutive one-eyed costermonger, a rough-and-ready speaker and poet (who had been in prison as a Chartist leader), from which we issued tracts and pamphlets, and ultimately a small newspaper; and, as the essential condition of any satisfactory progress, commenced a vigorous agitation for such an amendment in the law as would enable our infant associations to carry on their business in safety, and without hindrance. We very soon had our hands full. Our denunciations of unlimited competition brought on us attacks in newspapers and magazines, which we answered, nothing loth. Our opponents called us Utopians and Socialists, and we retorted that at any rate we were Christians; that our trade principles were on all-fours with Christianity, while theirs were utterly opposed to it. So we got, or adopted, the name of Christian Socialists, and gave it to our tracts, and our paper. We were ready to fight our battle wherever we found an opening, and got support from the most unexpected[181] quarters. I remember myself being asked to meet Archbishop Whately, and several eminent political economists, and explain what we were about. After a couple of hours of hard discussion, in which I have no doubt I talked much nonsense, I retired, beaten, but quite unconvinced. Next day, the late Lord Ashburton, who had been present, came to my chambers and gave me a cheque for ￡50 to help our experiment; and a few days later I found another nobleman, sitting on the counter of our shoemakers’ association, arguing with the manager, and giving an order for boots.

It was just in the midst of all this that my brother came to live with us. I had already converted him, as I thought. He was a subscribing member of our Society, and dealt with our Associations; and I had no doubt would now join the Council, and work actively in the new crusade. I knew how sound his judgment was, and that he never went back from a resolution once taken, and therefore was all the more eager to make sure of him, and, as a step in this direction, had already placed his name on committees, and promised his attendance. But I was doomed to disappointment. He attended one or two of our meetings, but I could not induce him to take any active part with us. At a distance of more than twenty years it is of course difficult to recall very accurately what passed between us, but I can remember his reasons well enough to give the substance of them. And first, as he had formerly[182] objected to the violent language of the leaders of the Anti-Corn-Law agitation, so he now objected to what he looked upon as our extravagance.

“You don’t want to divide other people’s property?”

“No,” I answered.

“Then why call yourselves Socialists?”

“But we couldn’t help ourselves: other people called us so first.”

“Yes; but you needn’t have accepted the name. Why acknowledge that the cap fitted?”

“Well, it would have been cowardly to back out. We borrow the ideas of these Frenchmen, of association as opposed to competition as the true law of industry; and of organizing labor—of securing the laborer’s position by organizing production and consumption—and it would be cowardly to shirk the name. It is only fools who know nothing about the matter, or people interested in the competitive system of trade, who believe, or say, that a desire to divide other people’s property is of the essence of Socialism.”

“That may be very true: but nine-tenths of mankind, or at any rate, of Englishmen, come under one or the other of those categories. If you are called Socialists, you will never persuade the British public that this is not your object. There was no need to take the name. You have weight enough to carry already, without putting that on your shoulders.”

This was his first objection, and he proved to be right.[183] At any rate, after some time we dropped the name, and the “Christian Socialist” was changed into the “Journal of Association.” English Socialists generally have instinctively avoided it ever since, and called themselves “co-operators,” thereby escaping much abuse in the intervening years. And when I look back, I confess I do not wonder that we repelled rather than attracted men who, like my brother, were inclined theoretically to agree with us. For I am bound to admit that a strong vein of fanaticism and eccentricity ran through our ranks, which the marvellous patience, gentleness, and wisdom of our beloved president were not enough to counteract or control. Several of our most active and devoted members were also strong vegetarians, and phonetists. In a generation when beards and wide-awakes were looked upon as insults to decent society, some of us wore both, with a most heroic indifference to public opinion. In the same way, there was often a trenchant, and almost truculent, tone about us, which was well calculated to keep men of my brother’s temperament at a distance. I rather enjoyed it myself, but learnt its unwisdom when I saw its effects on him, and others, who were inclined to join us, and would have proved towers of strength. It was right and necessary to denounce the evils of unlimited competition, and the falsehood of the economic doctrine of “every man for himself;” but quite unnecessary, and therefore unwise, to speak of the whole system of trade as “the disgusting[184] vice of shop-keeping,” as was the habit of several of our foremost and ablest members.
Chapter 96
Hardy had a way of throwing life into what he was talking about, and, like many men with strong opinions, and passionate natures, either carried his hearers off their legs and away with him altogether, or roused every spark of combativeness in them. The latter was the effect which his lecture on the Punic Wars had on Tom. He made several protests as Hardy went on; but Grey’s anxious looks kept him from going fairly into action, till Hardy stuck the black pin, which represented Scipio, triumphantly in the middle of Carthage, and, turning round said, “And now for some tea, Grey, before you have to turn out.”

Tom opened fire while the tea was brewing.

“You couldn’t say anything bad enough about aristocracies this morning, Hardy, and now to-night you are crowing over the success of the heaviest and cruelest oligarchy that ever lived, and praising them up to the skies.”

“Hullo! here’s a breeze!” said Hardy, smiling; “but I rejoice, O Brown, in that they thrashed the Carthaginians, and not, as you seem to think, in that they, being aristocrats, thrashed the Carthaginians; for oligarchs they were not at this time.”
 
“At any rate they answer to the Spartans in the struggle, and the Carthaginians to the Athenians; and yet all your sympathies are with the Romans to-night in the Punic Wars, though they were with the Athenians before dinner.”

“I deny your position. The Carthaginians were nothing but a great trading aristocracy—with a glorious family or two I grant you, like that of Hannibal; but, on the whole, a dirty, bargain-driving, buy-cheap-and-sell-dear aristocracy—of whom the world was well rid. They like the Athenians indeed! Why, just look what the two people have left behind them——”

“Yes,” interrupted Tom; “but we only know the Carthaginians through the reports of their destroyers. Your heroes trampled them out with hoofs of iron.”

“Do you think the Roman hoof could have trampled out their Homer if they ever had one?” said Hardy. “The Romans conquered Greece too, remember.”

“But Greece was never so near beating them.”

“True. But I hold to my point. Carthage was the mother of all hucksters, compassing sea and land to sell her wares.”

“And no bad line of life for a nation. At least Englishmen ought to think so.”

“No, they ought not; at least if ‘Punica fides’ is to be the rule of trade. Selling any amount of Brummagem wares never did nation or man much good, and never will. Eh, Grey?”
 
Grey winced at being appealed to, but remarked that he hoped the Church would yet be able to save England from the fate of Tyre and Carthage, the great trading nations of the old world: and then, swallowing his tea, and looking as if he had been caught robbing a hen-roost, he made a sudden exit, and hurried away out of college to the night-school.

“What a pity he is so odd and shy,” said Tom; “I should so like to know more of him.”

“It is a pity. He is much better when he is alone with me. I think he has heard from some of the set that you are a furious Protestant, and sees an immense amount of stiff-neckedness in you.”

“But about England and Carthage,” said Tom, shirking the subject of his own peculiarities; “you don’t really think us like them? It gave me a turn to hear you translating ‘Punica fides’ into Brummagem wares just now.”

“I think that successful trade is our rock ahead. The devil who holds new markets and twenty per cent. profits in his gift is the devil that England has most to fear from. ‘Because of unrighteous dealings, and riches gotten by deceit, the kingdom is translated from one people to another,’ said the wise man. Grey falls back on the Church, you see, to save the nation; but the Church he dreams of will never do it. Is there any that can? There must be surely, or we have believed a lie. But this work of making trade righteous, of Christianizing[187] trade, looks like the very hardest the Gospel has ever had to take in hand—in England at any rate.”

Hardy spoke slowly and doubtfully, and paused as if asking for Tom’s opinion.

“I never heard it put in that way. I know very little of politics or the state of England. But come, now; the putting down the slave-trade and compensating our planters, that shows that we are not sold to the trade-devil yet, surely.”

“I don’t think we are. No, thank God, there are plenty of signs that we are likely to make a good fight of it yet.”
Chapter 97
The newest school of philosophy preaches an “organized religion,” an hierarchy of the best and ablest. In an inarticulate way the confession rises from the masses that they feel on every side of them the need of wise and strong government—of a will to which their will may loyally submit—before all other needs; have been groping blindly after it this long while; begin to know that their daily life is in daily peril for want of it, in a country of limited land, air, and water, and practically unlimited wealth. But Democracy—how about Democracy? We had thought a cry for it, and not for kings, God made or of any other kind, was the characteristic[188] of our time. Certainly kings, such as we have seen them, have not gained or deserved much reverence of late years, are not likely to be called for with any great earnestness by those who feel most need of guidance and deliverance, in the midst of the bewildering conditions and surroundings of our time and our life.

Thirty years ago the framework of society went all to pieces over the greater part of Christendom, and the kings just ran away or abdicated, and the people, left pretty much to themselves, in some places made blind work of it. Solvent and well-regulated society caught a glimpse of that same “big black democracy,”—the monster, the Frankenstein, as they hold him, at any rate the great undeniable fact of our time—a glimpse of him moving his huge limbs about, uneasily and blindly. Then, mainly by the help of broken pledges and bayonets, the so-called kings managed to get the gyves put on him again, and to shut him down in his underground prison. That was the sum of their work in the great European crisis; not a thankworthy one from the people’s point of view. However, society was supposed to be saved, and the “party of order,” so called, breathed freely. No; for the 1848 kind of king there is surely no audible demand anywhere. In England in that year we had our 10th of April, and muster of half a million special constables of the comfortable classes, with much jubilation over such muster, and mutual congratulations that we were not as other men,[189] or even as these Frenchmen, Germans, and the like. Taken for what it was worth, let us admit that the jubilations did not lack some sort of justification. The 10th of April muster may be perhaps accepted as a sign that the reverence for the constable’s staff has not quite died out amongst us. But let no one think that for this reason democracy is one whit less inevitable in England than on the Continent, or that its sure and steady advance, and the longing for its coming, which all thoughtful men recognize, however little they may sympathize, with them, in the least incompatible with the equally manifest longing for what our people intend by this much-worshipped and much-hated name.

For what does democracy mean to Englishmen? Simply an equal chance for all; a fair field for the best men, let them start from where they will, to get to the front; a clearance out of sham governors, and of unjust privilege, in every department of human affairs. It cannot be too often repeated, that they who suppose the bulk of our people want less government, or fear the man who “can rule and dare not lie,” know little of them. Ask any representative of a popular constituency, or other man with the means of judging, what the people are ready for in this direction. He will tell you that, in spite perhaps of all he can say or do, they will go for compulsory education, the organization of labor (including therein the sharp extinction of able-bodied pauperism), the utilization of public lands, and[190] other reforms of an equally decided character. That for these purposes they desire more government, not less; will support with enthusiasm measures, the very thought of which takes away the breath and loosens the knees of ordinary politicians; will rally with loyalty and trustfulness to men who will undertake these things with courage and singleness of purpose.
Chapter 98
The corners of Hardy’s room were covered with sheets of paper of different sizes, pasted against the wall in groups. In the line of sight, from about the height of four to six feet, there was scarcely an inch of the original paper visible, and round each centre group there were outlying patches and streamers, stretching towards floor or ceiling, or away nearly to the bookcases or fireplace.

“Well, don’t you think it a great improvement on the old paper?” said Hardy. “I shall be out of rooms next term, and it will be a hint to the College that the rooms want papering. You’re no judge of such matters, or I should ask you whether you don’t see great artistic taste in the arrangement.”

“Why, they’re nothing but maps, and lists of names and dates,” said Tom, who had got up to examine the decorations. “And what in the world are all these[191] queer pins for?” he went on, pulling a strong pin with a large red sealing-wax head out of the map nearest to him.

“Hullo! take care there; what are you about?” shouted Hardy, getting up and hastening to the corner. “Why, you irreverent beggar, those pins are the famous statesmen and warriors of Greece and Rome.”

“Oh, I beg your pardon; I didn’t know I was in such august company;” saying which, Tom proceeded to stick the red-headed pin back into the wall.

“Now, just look at that,” said Hardy, taking the pin out from the place where Tom had stuck it. “Pretty doings there would be amongst them with your management. This pin is Brasidas; you’ve taken him away from Naupactus, where he was watching the eleven Athenian galleys anchored under the temple of Apollo, and stuck him down right in the middle of the Pnyx, where he will be instantly torn in pieces by a ruthless and reckless mob. You call yourself a Tory indeed! However, ’twas always the same with you Tories; calculating, cruel, and jealous. Use your leaders up, and throw them over—that’s the golden rule of aristocracies.”

“Hang Brasidas,” said Tom, laughing; “stick him back at Naupactus again. Here, which is Cleon? The scoundrel! give me hold of him, and I’ll put him in a hot berth.”

“That’s he, with the yellow head. Let him alone, I[192] tell you, or all will be hopeless confusion when Grey comes for his lecture. We’re only in the third year of the war.”

“I like your chaff about Tories sacrificing their great men,” said Tom, putting his hands in his pockets to avoid temptation. “How about your precious democracy, old fellow? Which is Socrates?”

“Here, the dear old boy!—this pin with the great gray head, in the middle of Athens, you see. I pride myself on my Athens. Here’s the Pir?us and the long walls, and the hill of Mars. Isn’t it as good as a picture?”

“Well, it is better than most maps, I think,” said Tom; “but you’re not going to slip out so easily. I want to know whether your pet democracy did or did not murder Socrates.”

“I’m not bound to defend democracies. But look at my pins. It may be the natural fondness of a parent, but I declare they seem to me to have a great deal of character, considering the material. You’ll guess them at once, I’m sure, if you mark the color and shape of the wax. This one now, for instance, who is he?”

“Alcibiades,” answered Tom, doubtfully.

“Alcibiades!” shouted Hardy; “you fresh from Rugby, and not know your Thucydides better than that. There’s Alcibiades, that little purple-headed, foppish pin, by Socrates. This rusty colored one is that respectable old stick-in-the-mud, Nicias.”
 
“Well, but you’ve made Alcibiades nearly the smallest of the whole lot,” said Tom.

“So he was, to my mind,” said Hardy; “just the sort of insolent young ruffian whom I should have liked to buy at my price, and sell at his own. He must have been very like some of our gentlemen-commoners, with the addition of brains.”

“I should really think, though,” said Tom, “it must be a capital plan for making you remember the history.”

“It is, I flatter myself. I’ve long had the idea, but I should never have worked it out and found the value of it but for Grey. I invented it to coach him in his history. You see we are in the Grecian corner. Over there is the Roman. You’ll find Livy and Tacitus worked out there, just as Herodotus and Thucydides are here; and the pins are stuck for the Second Punic War, where we are just now. I shouldn’t wonder if Grey got his first, after all, he’s picking up so quick in my corners; and says he never forgets any set of events when he has pricked them out with the pins.”
Chapter 99
The Reformation had to do its work in due course, in temporal as well as in spiritual things, in the visible as in the invisible world; for the Stuart princes asserted in temporal matters the powers which the Pope had claimed in spiritual. They, too, would acknowledge the sanctity[194] of no law above the will of princes—would vindicate, even with the sword and scaffold, their own powers to dispense with laws. So the second great revolt of the English nation came, against all visible earthly sovereignty in things temporal. Puritanism arose, and Charles went to the block, and the proclamation went forth that henceforth the nation would have no king but Christ; that he was the only possible king for the English nation from that time forth, in temporal as well as spiritual things, and that his kingdom had actually come. The national conscience was not with the Puritans as it had been with Henry at the time of the Reformation, but the deepest part of their protest has held its own, and gained strength ever since, from their day to ours. The religious source and origin of it was, no doubt, thrust aside at the Revolution, but the sagacious statesmen of 1688 were as clear as the soldiers of Ireton and Ludlow in their resolve, that no human will should override the laws and customs of the realm. So they, too, required of their sovereigns that they should “solemnly promise and swear to govern the people of this kingdom of England, and the dominions thereto belonging, according to the statutes in Parliament agreed on, and the laws and customs of the same; ... that they will to the utmost of their power maintain the laws of God, the true profession of the Gospel, and the Protestant reformed religion established by law.” The same protest in a far different form came forth again at[195] the great crisis at the end of the eighteenth century, when the revolutionary literature of France had set Europe in a blaze, and the idea of the rights of man had shrunk back, and merged in the will of the mob. Against this assertion of this form of self-will again the English nation took resolute ground. They had striven for a law which was above popes and kings, to which these must conform on pain of suppression. They strove for it now against mob-law, against popular will, openly avowing its own omnipotence, and making the tyrant’s claim to do what was right in its own eyes. And so through our whole history the same thread has run. The nation, often confusedly and with stammering accents, but still on the whole consistently, has borne the same witness as the Church, that as God is living and reigning there must be a law, the expression of his will, at the foundation of all human society, which priests, kings, rulers, people must discover, acknowledge, obey.
Chapter 100
Christians may acknowledge that, as a rule, and in the long run, the decision of a country, fairly taken, is likely to be right, and that the will of the people is likely to be more just and patient than that of any person or class. No one can honestly look at the history of our race in the last quarter of a century, to go no[196] farther back, and not gladly admit the weight of evidence in favor of this view. There is no great question of principle which has arisen in politics here, in which the great mass of the nation has not been from the first on that which has been at last acknowledged as the right side. In America, to take one great example, the attitude of the Northern people from first to last, in the great civil war, will make proud the hearts of English-speaking men as long as their language lasts.
Chapter 101
The real public opinion of a nation, expressing its deepest conviction (as distinguished from what is ordinarily called public opinion, the first cry of professional politicians and journalists, which usually goes wrong,) is undoubtedly entitled to very great respect. But after making all fair allowances, no honest man, however warm a democrat he may be, can shut his eyes to the facts which stare him in the face at home, in our colonies, in the United States, and refuse to acknowledge that the will of the majority in a nation, ascertained by the best processes yet known to us, is not always or altogether just, or consistent, or stable; that the deliberate decisions of the people are not unfrequently tainted by ignorance, or passion, or prejudice.

Are we, then, to rest contented with this ultimate[197] regal power, to resign ourselves to the inevitable, and admit that for us, here at last in this nineteenth century, there is nothing higher or better to look for; and if we are to have a king at all, it must be king people or king mob, according to the mood in which our section of collective humanity happens to be? Surely we are not prepared for this any more than the Pope is. Many of us feel that Tudors, and Stuarts, and Oliver Cromwell, and cliques of Whig or Tory aristocrats, may have been bad enough; but that any tyranny under which England has groaned in the past has been light by the side of what we may come to, if we are to carry out the new political gospel to its logical conclusion, and surrender ourselves to government by the counting of heads, pure and simple.

But if we will not do this is there any alternative, since we repudiate personal government, but to fall back on the old Hebrew and Christian faith, that the nations are ruled by a living, present, invisible King, whose will is perfectly righteous and loving, the same yesterday, to-day, and forever? It is beside the question to urge that such a faith throws us back on an invisible power, and that we must have visible rulers. Of course we must have visible rulers, even after the advent of the “confederate social republic of Europe.” When the whole people is king it must have viceroys like other monarchs. But is public opinion visible? Can we see “collective humanity?” Is it easier for princes or statesmen—for[198] any man or men upon whose shoulders the government rests—to ascertain the will of the people than the will of God? Another consideration meets us at once, and that is, that this belief is assumed in our present practice. Not to insist upon the daily usage in all Christian places of worship and families throughout the land, the Parliament of the country opens its daily sittings with the most direct confession of this faith which words can express, and prays—addressing God, and not public opinion, or collective humanity—“Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done.” Surely it were better to get rid of this solemn usage as a piece of cant, which must demoralize the representatives of the nation, if we mean nothing particular by it, and either recast our form of prayer, substituting “the people,” or what else we please, for “God,” or let the whole business alone, as one which passes man’s understanding. If we really believe that a nation has no means of finding out God’s will, it is hypocritical and cowardly to go on praying that it may be done.

But it will be said, assuming all that is asked, what practical difference can it possibly make in the government of nations? Admit as pointedly as you can, by profession and by worship, and honestly believe, that a Divine will is ruling in the world, and in each nation, what will it effect? Will it alter the course of events one iota, or the acts of any government or governor. Would not a Neapolitan Bourbon be just as ready to[199] make it his watchword as any English Alfred! Might not a committee of public safety placard the scaffold with a declaration of this faith? It is a contention for a shadow.

Is it so? Does not every man recognize in his own life, and in his own observation of the world around him, the enormous and radical difference between the two principles of action and the results which they bring about? What man do we reckon worthy of honor, and delight to obey and follow—him who asks, when he has to act, what will A, B, and C say to this? or him who asks, is this right, true, just, in harmony with the will of God. Don’t we despise ourselves when we give way to the former tendency, or in other words, when we admit the sovereignty of public opinion? Don’t we feel that we are in the right and manly path when we follow the latter? And if this be true of private men, it must hold in the case of those who are in authority.

Those rulers, whatever name they may go by, who turn to what constituents, leagues, the press are saying or doing, to guide them as to the course they are to follow, in the faith that the will of the majority is the ultimate and only possible arbiter, will never deliver or strengthen a nation however skilful they may be in occupying its best places.
Chapter 102
All the signs of our time tell us that the day of earthly kings has gone by, and the advent to power of the great body of the people, those who live by manual labor, is at hand. Already a considerable percentage of them are as intelligent and provident as the classes above them, and as capable of conducting affairs, and administering large interests successfully. In England, the co-operative movement and the organization of the trade societies should be enough to prove this, to any one who has eyes, and is open to conviction. In another generation that number will have increased tenfold, and the sovereignty of the country will virtually pass into their hands. Upon their patriotism and good sense the fortunes of the kingdom will depend as directly and absolutely as they have ever depended on the will of earthly king or statesman. It is vain to blink the fact that democracy is upon us, that “new order of society which is to be founded by labor for labor,” and the only thing for wise men to do is to look it in the face, and see how the short intervening years may be used to the best advantage. Happily for us, the task has been already begun in earnest. Our soundest and wisest political thinkers are all engaged upon the great and inevitable change, whether they dread, or exult in the prospect. Thus far, too, they all agree that the great danger of the future lies in that very[201] readiness of the people to act in great masses, and to get rid of personal and individual responsibility, which is the characteristic of the organizations by which they have gained, and secured, their present position. Nor is there any danger as to how this danger is to be met. Our first aim must be to develop to the utmost the sense of personal and individual responsibility.

But how is this to be done? To whom are men wielding great powers to be taught that they are responsible? If they can learn that there is still a King ruling in England through them, whom if they will fear they need fear no other power in earth or heaven, whom if they can love and trust they will want no other guide or helper, all will be well, and we may look for a reign of justice in England such as she has never seen yet, whatever form our government may take. But, in any case, those who hold the old faith will still be sure that the order of God’s kingdom will not change. If the kings of the earth are passing away, because they have never acknowledged the order which was established for them, the conditions on which they were set in high places, those who succeed them will have to come under the same order, and the same conditions. When the great body of those who have done the hard work of the world, and got little enough of its wages hitherto—the real stuff of which every nation is composed—have entered on their inheritance, they may sweep away many things, and make short work with thrones and kings.[202] But there is one throne which they cannot pull down—the throne of righteousness, which is over all the nations; and one King whose rule they cannot throw off—the Son of God and Son of Man, who will judge them as he has judged all kings and all governments before them.
Chapter 103
Kings, priests, judges, whatever men succeed to, or usurp, or are thrust into power, come immediately under that eternal government which the God of the nation has established, and the order of which cannot be violated with impunity. Every ruler who ignores or defies it saps the national life and prosperity, and brings trouble on his country, sometimes swiftly, but always surely. There is the perpetual presence of a King, with whom rulers and people must come to a reckoning in every national crisis and convulsion, and who is no less present when the course of affairs is quiet and prosperous. The greatest and wisest men of the nation are those in whom this faith burns most strongly. Elijah’s solemn opening, “As the Lord liveth, before whom I stand;” David’s pleading, “Whither shall I go from thy Spirit, or whither shall I flee from thy presence?”—his confession that in heaven or hell, or the uttermost parts of the sea, “there also shall thy hand lead, and thy right hand shall guide me”—are[203] only well-known instances of a universal consciousness which never wholly leaves men or nations, however much they may struggle to get rid of it.
Chapter 104

“Who is that who has just come in, in beaver?” said Tom, touching the next man to him.

“Oh, don’t you know? That’s Blake; he’s the most wonderful fellow in Oxford,” answered his neighbor.

“How do you mean?” said Tom.

“Why, he can do everything better than almost anybody, and without any trouble at all. Miller was obliged to have him in the boat last year though he never trained a bit. Then he’s in the eleven, and is a wonderful rider, and tennis-player, and shot.”

“Aye, and he’s so awfully clever with it all,” joined in the man on the other side. “He’ll be a safe first, though I don’t believe he reads more than you or I. He can write songs, too, as fast as you can talk nearly, and sings them wonderfully.”

“Is he of our College, then?”

“Yes, of course, or he couldn’t have been in our boat last year.”

“But I don’t think I ever saw him in chapel or hall.”

“No, I dare say not. He hardly ever goes to either, and yet he manages never to get hauled up much, no[204] one knows how. He never gets up now till the afternoon, and sits up nearly all night playing cards with the fastest fellows, or going round singing glees at three or four in the morning.”

Tom looked with great interest at the admirable Crichton of St. Ambrose’s; and, after watching him a few minutes, said in a low tone to his neighbor:

“How wretched he looks! I never saw a sadder face.”

Poor Blake! one can’t help calling him “poor,” although he himself would have winced at it more than at any other name you could have called him. You might have admired, feared, or wondered at him, and he would have been pleased; the object of his life was to raise such feelings in his neighbors; but pity was the last which he would have liked to excite.

He was indeed a wonderfully gifted fellow, full of all sorts of energy and talent, and power and tenderness; and yet, as his face told only too truly to any one who watched him when he was exerting himself in society, one of the most wretched men in the College. He had a passion for success—for beating everybody else in whatever he took in hand, and that, too, without seeming to make any great effort himself. The doing a thing well and thoroughly gave him no satisfaction unless he could feel that he was doing it better and more easily than A, B, or C, and that they felt and acknowledged this. He had had his full swing of success[205] for two years, and now the Nemesis was coming.

For, although not an extravagant man, many of the pursuits in which he had eclipsed all rivals were far beyond the means of any but a rich one, and Blake was not rich. He had a fair allowance, but by the end of his first year was considerably in debt, and, at the time we are speaking of, the whole pack of Oxford tradesmen, into whose books he had got (having smelt out the leanness of his expectations), were upon him, besieging him for payment. This miserable and constant annoyance was wearing his soul out. This was the reason why his oak was sported, and he was never seen till the afternoons, and turned night into day. He was too proud to come to an understanding with his persecutors, even had it been possible; and now, at his sorest need, his whole scheme of life was failing him; his love of success was turning into ashes in his mouth; he felt much more disgust than pleasure at his triumphs over other men, and yet the habit of striving for such successes, notwithstanding its irksomeness, was too strong to be resisted.

Poor Blake! he was living on from hand to mouth, flashing out with all his old brilliancy and power, and forcing himself to take the lead in whatever company he might be; but utterly lonely and depressed when by himself—reading feverishly in secret, in a desperate effort to retrieve all by high honors and a fellowship.[206] As Tom said to his neighbors, there was no sadder face than his to be seen in Oxford.
Chapter 105
One of the moralists whom we sat under in my youth—was it the great Richard Swiveller, or Mr. Stiggins?—says: “We are born in a vale, and must take the consequences of being found in such a situation.” These consequences, I for one am ready to encounter. I pity people who weren’t found in a vale. I don’t mean a flat country, but a vale; that is a flat country bounded by hills. The having your hill always in view if you choose to turn towards him, that’s the essence of a vale. There he is for ever in the distance, your friend and companion; you never lose him as you do in hilly districts.
Chapter 106
All dwellers in and about London are, alas, too well acquainted with that never-to-be-enough-hated change which we have to undergo once, at least, in every spring. As each succeeding winter wears away, the same thing happens to us.

For some time we do not trust the fair lengthening days, and cannot believe that the dirty pair of sparrows[207] who live opposite our window are really making love and going to build, notwithstanding all their twittering. But morning after morning rises fresh and gentle; there is no longer any vice in the air; we drop our overcoats; we rejoice in the green shoots which the privet-hedge is making in the square garden, and hail the returning tender-pointed leaves of the plane-trees as friends; we go out of our way to walk through Covent Garden Market to see the ever-brightening show of flowers from the happy country.

This state of things goes on sometimes for a few days only, sometimes for weeks, till we make sure that we are safe for this spring at any rate. Don’t we wish we may get it! Sooner or later, but sure—sure as Christmas bills, or the income-tax, or anything, if there be anything surer than these—comes the morning when we are suddenly conscious as soon as we rise that there is something the matter. We do not feel comfortable in our clothes; nothing tastes quite as it should at breakfast; though the day looks bright enough, there is a fierce dusty taint about it as we look out through windows, which no instinct now prompts us to throw open, as it has done every day for the last month.

But it is only when we open our doors and issue into the street, that the hateful reality comes right home to us. All moisture, and softness, and pleasantness has gone clean out of the air since last night; we seem to inhale yards of horsehair instead of satin; our skins dry[208] up; our eyes, and hair, and whiskers, and clothes are soon filled with loathsome dust, and our nostrils with the reek of the great city. We glance at the weathercock on the nearest steeple, and see that it points N.E. And so long as the change lasts, we carry about with us a feeling of anger and impatience as though we personally were being ill-treated. We could have borne with it well enough in November; it would have been natural, and all in the day’s work in March; but now, when Rotten-row is beginning to be crowded, when long lines of pleasure-vans are leaving town on Monday mornings for Hampton Court or the poor remains of dear Epping Forrest, when the exhibitions are open or about to open, when the religious public is up, or on its way up, for May meetings, when the Thames is already sending up faint warnings of what we may expect as soon as his dirty old life’s blood shall have been thoroughly warmed up, and the Ship, and Trafalgar, and Star and Garter are in full swing at the antagonist poles of the cockney system, we do feel that this blight which has come over us and everything is an insult, and that while it lasts, as there is nobody who can be made particularly responsible for it, we are justified in going about in general disgust, and ready to quarrel with anybody we may meet on the smallest pretext.

This sort of east-windy state is perhaps the best physical analogy for certain mental ones through which most of us pass. The real crisis over, we drift into the[209] skirts of the storm, and lay rolling under bare poles, comparatively safe, but without any power as yet to get the ship well in hand, and make her obey her helm. The storm may break over us again at any minute, and find us almost as helpless as ever.
Chapter 107
Amongst other distractions which Tom tried at one crisis of his life, was reading. For three or four days running, he really worked hard—very hard, if we were to reckon by the number of hours he spent in his own rooms over his books with his oak sported—hard, even though we should only reckon by results. For, though scarcely an hour passed that he was not balancing on the hind legs of his chair with a vacant look in his eyes, and thinking of anything but Greek roots or Latin constructions, yet on the whole he managed to get through a good deal, and one evening, for the first time since his quarrel with Hardy, felt a sensation of real comfort—it hardly amounted to pleasure—as he closed his Sophocles some hour or so after hall, having just finished the last of the Greek plays which he meant to take in for his first examination. He leaned back in his chair and sat for a few minutes, letting his thoughts follow their own bent. They soon took to going wrong, and he jumped up in fear lest he should be drifting back[210] into the black stormy sea, in the trough of which he had been laboring so lately, and which he felt he was by no means clear of yet. At first he caught up his cap and gown as though he were going out. There was a wine party at one of his acquaintance’s rooms; or, he could go and smoke a cigar in the pool-room, or at any one of the dozen other places. On second thoughts, however, he threw his academicals back on to the sofa, and went to his bookcase. The reading had paid so well that evening that he resolved to go on with it. He had no particular object in selecting one book more than another, and so took down carelessly the first that came to hand.

It happened to be a volume of Plato, and opened of its own accord in the “Apology.” He glanced at a few lines. What a flood of memories they called up! This was almost the last book he had read at school; and teacher, and friends, and lofty oak-shelved library stood out before him at once. Then the blunders that he himself and others had made rushed through his mind, and he almost burst into a laugh as he wheeled his chair round to the window, and began reading where he had opened, encouraging every thought of the old times when he first read that marvellous defence, and throwing himself back into them with all his might. And still, as he read, forgotten words of wise comment, and strange thoughts of wonder and longing, came back to him. The great truth which he had been led to the[211] brink of in those early days rose in all its awe and all its attractiveness before him. He leant back in his chair, and gave himself up to his thought; and how strangely that thought bore on the struggle which had been raging in him of late; how an answer seemed to be trembling to come out of it to all the cries, now defiant, now plaintive, which had gone out of his heart in this time of trouble! For his thought was of that spirit, distinct from himself, and yet communing with his inmost soul, always dwelling in him, knowing him better than he knew himself, never misleading him, always leading him to light and truth, of which the old philosopher spoke. “The old heathen, Socrates, did actually believe that—there can be no question about it;” he thought, “Has not the testimony of the best men through these two thousand years borne witness that he was right—that he did not believe a lie! That was what we were told. Surely I don’t mistake! Were we not told, too, or did I dream it, that what was true for him is true for every man—for me? That there is a spirit dwelling in me, striving with me, ready to lead me into all truth if I will submit to his guidance?

“Ah! submit, submit, there’s the rub! Give yourself up to his guidance! Throw up the reins, and say you’ve made a mess of it. Well, why not? Haven’t I made a mess of it? Am I fit to hold the reins?

“Not I,”—he got up and began walking about his rooms—“I give it up.”
 
“Give it up!” he went on presently; “yes, but to whom? Not to the d?mon, spirit, whatever it was, who took up his abode in the old Athenian—at least, so he said, and so I believe. No, no! Two thousand years and all that they have seen have not passed over the world to leave us just where he was left. We want no d?mons or spirits. And yet the old heathen was guided right, and what can a man want more? and who ever wanted guidance more than I now—here—in this room—at this minute? I give up the reins; who will take them?” And so there came on him one of those seasons when a man’s thoughts cannot be followed in words. A sense of awe came upon him, and over him, and wrapped him round; awe at a presence of which he was becoming suddenly conscious, into which he seemed to have wandered, and yet which he felt must have been there, around him, in his own heart and soul, though he knew it not. There was hope and longing in his heart mingling with the fear of that presence, but withal the old reckless and daring feeling which he knew so well, still bubbling up untamed, untamable it seemed to him.
Chapter 108
Men and women occupied with the common work of life—who are earning their bread in the sweat of their brows, and marrying, and bringing up children, and[213] struggling, and sinning, and repenting—feel that certain questions which school-men are discussing are somehow their questions. Not indeed in form, for not one in a thousand of the persons whose minds are thus disturbed care to make themselves acquainted with the forms and modes of theological controversies. If they try to do so, they soon throw them aside with impatience. They feel, “No, it is not this. We care not what may be said about ideology, or multitudinism, or evidential views, or cogenogonies. At the bottom of all this we suspect—nay, we know—there is a deeper strife, a strife about the very foundations of faith and human life. We want to know from you learned persons, whether (as we have been told from our infancy) there is a faith for mankind, for us as well as for you, for the millions of our own countrymen, and in all Christian and heathen lands, who find living their lives a sore business, and have need of all the light they can get to help them.”

It cannot be denied. The sooner we face the fact, the better. This is the question, and it has to be answered now, by us living Englishmen and Englishwomen; the deepest question which man has to do with, and yet—or rather, therefore—one which every toiling man must grapple with, for the sake of his own honesty, of his own life.
Chapter 109
For many years I have been thrown very much into the society of young men of all ranks. I spend a great part of my time with them, I like being with them, and I think they like being with me. I know well, therefore, how rare anything like a living faith—a faith in and by which you can live, and for which you would die—is amongst them. I know that it is becoming rarer every day. I find it every day more difficult to get them to speak on the subject: they will not do so unless you drive them to it.

I feel deeply that for the sake of England they must be driven to it, and therefore that it is the bounden duty of every man who has any faith himself, and who has a chance of being listened to by them, to speak out manfully what he has to say, concealing nothing, disguising nothing, and leaving the issue to God.
Chapter 110
That which has been called the “negative theology,” has been spreading rapidly these last few years, though for the most part silently. In the first instance it may have been simply “a recoil from some of the doctrines which are to be heard at church and chapel; a distrust of the old arguments for, or proofs of, a miraculous revelation;[215] and a misgiving as to the authority, or extent of the authority of the Scriptures.” But as was sure to be the case, the “negative theology” could not stop, and has not stopped here. Men who have come across these recoils, distrusts, misgivings, will soon find, if they are honest and resolute with themselves, that there is another doubt underlying all these, a doubt which they may turn from in horror when it is first whispered in their hearts, but which will come back again and again. That doubt is whether there is a God at all, or rather, whether a living, personal God, thinking, acting, and ruling in this world in which we are, has ever revealed Himself to man.

This is the one question of our time, and of all times; upon the answer which nations or men can give to it hang life and death.... One cannot stand upon a simple negation. The world is going on turning as it used to do, night succeeding day and generation generation; nations are waking into life, or falling into bondage; there is a deal of wonderful work of one sort or another going on in it, and you and I in our little corner have our own share of work to get done as well as we can. If you put out my old light, some light or other I must have, and you would wish me to have. What is it to be?

You will answer, probably, that I have touched the heart of the matter in putting my question. Night follows day, and generation, generation. All things are[216] founded on a “permanent order,” “self-sustaining and self-evolving powers pervade all nature.” Of this order and these powers we are getting to know more every day; when we know them perfectly, man, the colossal man, will have reached the highest development of which he is capable. We need not trouble ourselves about breaking them, or submitting to them; some of you would add, for we cannot either break them or submit to them. They will fulfil themselves. It is they, these great generalizations, which are alone acting in, and ruling the world. We, however eccentric our actions may be, however we may pride ourselves on willing and working, are only simple links in the chain. A general law of average orders the unruly wills and affections of sinful men.

But here I must ask, on what is this permanent order, on what are these laws which you tell me of, founded? I acknowledge a permanent order, physical laws, as fully as you can, but believe them to be expressions of a living and a righteous will; I believe a holy and true God to be behind them, therefore I can sit down humbly, and try to understand them, and when I understand, to obey. Are the permanent order, the laws you speak of, founded on a will? If so, on whose will? If on the will of a God, of what God? Of a God who has revealed His character, His purpose, Himself, to you? If so, where, how, when?

But if you tell me that these laws, this order, are not[217] founded on any living will, or that you do not know that they are, then I say you are holding out to me “an iron rule which guides to nothing and ends in nothing—which may be possible to the logical understanding, but is not possible to the spirit of man”—and you are telling me, since worship is a necessity of my being, to worship that. In the name and in the strength of a man, and a man’s will I utterly reject and defy your dead laws, for dead they must be. They may grind me to powder, but I have that in me which is above them, which will own no obedience to them. Dead laws are, so far as I can see, just what you and I and all mankind have been put into this world to fight against. Call them laws of nature if you will, I do not care. Take the commonest, the most universal; is it or is it not by the law of nature that the ground brings forth briers and all sorts of noxious and useless weeds if you let it alone? If it is by the law of nature, am I to obey the law, or to dig my garden and root out the weeds? Doubtless I shall get too old to dig, and shall die, and the law will remain, and the weeds grow over my garden and over my grave, but for all that I decline to obey the law.

I see a law of death working all around me; I feel it in my own members. Is this one of your laws, a part of the “permanent order,” which is to serve me instead of the God of my fathers? If it be I mean to resist it to the last gasp. I utterly hate it. No noble or true[218] work is done in this world except in direct defiance of it. What is to become of the physician’s work, of every effort at sanitary reform, of every attempt at civilizing and raising the poor and the degraded, if we are to sit down and submit ourselves to this law?

Am I never to build a house, out of respect to the law of gravitation? Sooner or later the law will assert itself, and my house will tumble down. Nevertheless I will conquer the law for such space as I can. In short, I will own no dead law as my master. Dead laws I will hate always, and in all places, with all my heart, with all my soul, with all my mind, and with all my strength.
Chapter 111
We ought to welcome with all our hearts the searching scrutiny, which students and philosophers of all Christian nations, and of all shades of belief, whether Christian or not, are engaged upon, as to the facts on which our faith rests. The more thorough that scrutiny is the better should we be pleased. We may not wholly agree with the last position which the ablest investigators have laid down, that unless the truth of the history of our Lord—the facts of his life, death, resurrection, and ascension—can be proved by ordinary historical evidence, applied according to the most approved and latest methods, Christianity must be given[219] up as not true. We know that our own certainty as to these facts does not rest on a critical historical investigation, while we rejoice that such an investigation should be made by those who have leisure, and who are competent for it. At the same time, as we also know that the methods and principles of historical investigation are constantly improving and being better understood, and that the critics of the next generation will work, in all human likelihood, at as great an advantage in this inquiry over those who are now engaged in it, as our astronomers and natural philosophers enjoy over Newton and Franklin—and as new evidence may turn up any day which may greatly modify their conclusions—we cannot suppose that there is the least chance of their settling the controversy in our time. Nor, even if we thought them likely to arrive at definite conclusions, can we consent to wait the results of their investigations, important and interesting as these will be. Granting then cheerfully, that if these facts on the study of which they are engaged are not facts—if Christ was not crucified, and did not rise from the dead, and ascend to God his father—there has been no revelation, and Christianity will infallibly go the way of all lies, either under their assaults or those of their successors—they must pardon us if even at the cost of being thought and called fools for our pains, we deliberately elect to live our lives on the contrary assumption. It is useless to tell us that we know nothing of these things,[220] that we can know nothing until their critical examination is over; we can only say: “Examine away; but we do know something of this matter, whatever you may assert to the contrary, and, mean to live on the knowledge.”

But while we cannot suspend our judgment on the question until we know how the critics and scholars have settled it, we must do justice, before passing on, to the single-mindedness, the reverence, the resolute desire for the truth before all things, wherever the search for it may land them which characterizes many of those who are no longer of our faith, and are engaged in this inquiry, or have set it aside as hopeless, and are working at other tasks. The great advance of natural science within the last few years, and the devotion with which many of our ablest and best men are throwing themselves into this study, are clearing the air in all the higher branches of human thought and making possible a nation, and in the end a world, of truthful men—that blessedest result of all the strange conflicts and problems of the age, which the wisest men have foreseen in their most hopeful moods. In this grand movement even those who are nominally, and believe themselves to be really, against us, are for us: all at least who are truthful and patient workers. For them, too, the spirit of all truth, and patience, and wisdom is leading; and their strivings and victories—aye, and their backslidings and reverses—are making clearer day by day that[221] revelation of the kingdom of God in nature, through which it would seem that our generation, and those which are to follow us, will be led back again to that higher revelation of the kingdom of God in man.

The ideal American, as he has been painted for us of late, is a man who has shaken off the yoke of definite creeds, while retaining their moral essence, and finds the highest sanctions needed for the conduct of human life in experience tempered by common sense. Franklin, for instance, is generally supposed to have reached this ideal by anticipation, and there is a half-truth in the supposition. But whoever will study this great master of practical life will acknowledge that it is only superficially true, and that if he never lifts us above the earth or beyond the dominion of experience and common sense, he retained himself a strong hold on the invisible which underlies it, and would have been the first to acknowledge that it was this which enabled him to control the accidents of birth, education, and position, and to earn the eternal gratitude and reverence of the great nation over whose birth he watched so wisely, and whose character he did so much to form.
Chapter 112
“From one thing to another,” said Tom, “they got to cathedrals, and one of them called St. Paul’s ‘a disgrace to a Christian city.’ I couldn’t stand that, you know. I was always bred to respect St. Paul’s; weren’t you?”

“My education in that line was neglected,” said Hardy, gravely. “And so you took up the cudgels for St. Paul’s?”

“Yes, I plumped out that St. Paul’s was the finest cathedral in England. You’d have thought I had said that lying was one of the cardinal virtues—one or two just treated me to a sort of pitying sneer, but my neighbors were down upon me with a vengeance. I stuck to my text though, and they drove me into saying I liked the Ratcliffe more than any building in Oxford; which I don’t believe I do, now I come to think of it. So when they couldn’t get me to budge for their talk, they took to telling me that everybody who knew anything about church architecture was against me—of course meaning that I knew nothing about it—for the matter of that, I don’t mean to say that I do.” Tom paused; it had suddenly occurred to him that there might be some reason in the rough handling he had got.

“But what did you say to the authorities?” said Hardy, who was greatly amused.

“Said I didn’t care a straw for them,” said Tom;[223] “there was no right or wrong in the matter, and I had as good a right to my opinion as Pugin—or whatever his name is—and the rest.”

“What heresy!” said Hardy, laughing; “you caught it for that, I suppose?”

“Didn’t I! They made such a noise over it, that the men at the other end of the table stopped talking (they were all freshmen at our end), and when they found what was up, one of the older ones took me in hand, and I got a lecture about the middle ages, and the monks. I said I thought England was well rid of the monks; and then we got on to Protestantism, and fasting, and apostolic succession, and passive obedience, and I don’t know what all! I only know I was tired enough of it before coffee came; but I couldn’t go, you know, with all of them on me at once, could I?”

“Of course not; you were like the six thousand unconquerable British infantry at Albuera. You held your position by sheer fighting, suffering fearful loss.”

“Well,” said Tom, laughing, for he had talked himself into good humor again. “I dare say I talked a deal of nonsense; and, when I come to think it over, a good deal of what some of them said had something in it. I should like to hear it again quietly; but there were others sneering and giving themselves airs, and that puts a fellow’s back up.”

“Yes,” said Hardy, “a good many of the weakest and vainest men who come up take to this sort of thing now.[224] They can do nothing themselves, and get a sort of platform by going in for the High Church business from which to look down on their neighbors.”

“That’s just what I thought,” said Tom; “they tried to push mother Church, mother Church, down my throat at every turn. I’m as fond of the Church as any of them, but I don’t want to be jumping up on her back every minute, like a sickly chicken getting on the old hen’s back to warm its feet whenever the ground is cold, and fancying himself taller than all the rest of the brood.”
Chapter 113
I have spoken of that which I cannot believe; let me speak to you now of that which I do believe, of that which I hold to be a faith, the faith, the only faith for mankind. Do not turn from it because it seems to be egotistic. I can only speak for myself, for what I know in my own heart and conscience. While I keep to this, I can speak positively, and I wish above all things to speak positively.

I was bred as a child and as a boy to look upon Christ as the true and rightful King and Head of our race, the Son of God and the Son of man. When I came to think for myself I found the want, the longing for a perfectly righteous king and head, the deepest of which I was conscious—for a being in whom I could rest, who was in perfect sympathy with me and all men.[225] “Like as the hart panteth after the water-brooks, so longeth my soul after thee, O God. My soul is athirst for God, yea, even for the living God,”—these, and the like sayings of the Psalmist, began to have a meaning for me.

Then the teaching which had sunk into me unconsciously rose up and seemed to meet this longing. If that teaching were true, here was He for whom I was in search. I turned to the records of His life and death. I read and considered as well as I could, the character of Christ, what he said of himself and his work; his teachings, his acts, his sufferings. Then I found that this was indeed He. Here was the Head, the King, for whom I had longed. The more I read and thought the more absolutely sure I became of it. This is He. I wanted no other then, I have never wanted another since. Him I can look up to and acknowledge with the most perfect loyalty. He satisfies me wholly. There is no recorded thought, word or deed of his that I would wish to change—that I do not recognize and rejoice in as those of my rightful and righteous King and Head. He has claimed for me, for you, for every man, all that we can ask for or dream of, for He has claimed every one of us for his soldiers and brethren, the acknowledged children of his and our Father and God.

But this loyalty I could never have rendered, no man can ever render, I believe, except to a Son of man. He must be perfect man as well as perfect God to satisfy[226] us—must have dwelt in a body like ours, have felt our sorrows, pains, temptations, weaknesses. He was incarnate by the Spirit of God of the Virgin. In this way I can see how he was indeed perfect God and perfect Man. I can conceive of no other in which he could have been so. The Incarnation is for me the support of all personal holiness, and the key to human history.

What was Christ’s work on earth? He came to make manifest, to make clear to us, the will and nature of this Father, our God. He made that will and nature clear to us as the perfectly loving and long-suffering and righteous will and nature. He came to lead us men, his brethren, back into perfect understanding of and submission to that will—to make us at one with it; and this he did triumphantly by his own perfect obedience to that will, by sacrificing himself even to death for us, because it was the will of his and our Father that he should give himself up wholly and unreservedly; thus, by his one sacrifice, redeeming us and leaving us an example that we too should sacrifice ourselves to Him for our brethren. Thus I believe in the Atonement.
Chapter 114
Christ was not only revealed to those who saw him here. He did not only go about doing his Father’s will[227] here on earth for thirty-three years, eighteen hundred years ago, and then leave us. Had this been so, he would certainly in one sense have been revealed, in the only sense in which some orthodox writers seem to teach that he has been revealed. He would have been revealed to certain men, at a certain time, in history, and to us in the accounts which we have of him in the Gospels, through which accounts only we should have had to gain our knowledge of him, judging of such accounts by our own fallible understandings. But He said, “I will be with you always, even to the end of the world.” “I will send my Spirit into your hearts to testify of me;” and He has fulfilled his promise. He is revealed, not in the Bible, not in history, not in or to some men at a certain time, or to a man here and there, but in the heart of you, and of me, and of every man and woman who is now, or ever has been, on this earth. His Spirit is in each of us, striving with us, cheering us, guiding us, strengthening us. At any moment in the lives of any one of us we may prove the fact for ourselves; we may give ourselves up to his guidance, and He will accept the trust, and guide us into the knowledge of God, and of all truth. From this knowledge, (more certain to me than any other, of which I am ten thousand times more sure than I am that Queen Victoria is reigning in England, that I am writing with this pen at this table,) if I could see no other manifestation of Christ in creation, I believe in the Trinity in Unity,[228] the name on which all things in heaven and earth stand, which meets and satisfies the deepest needs and longings of my soul.

The knowledge of this name, of these truths, has come to me, and to all men, in one sense, specially and directly through the Scriptures. I believe that God has given us these Scriptures, this Bible, to instruct us in these the highest of all truths. Therefore I reverence this Bible as I reverence no other book; but I reverence it because it speaks of him, and his dealings with us. The Bible has no charm or power of its own. It may become a chain round men’s necks, an idol in the throne of God, to men who will worship the book, and not Him of whom the book speaks. There are many signs that this is, or is fast becoming, the case with us; but it is our fault, and not the Bible’s fault. We persist in reading our own narrowness and idolatry into it, instead of hearing what it really is saying to us.
Chapter 115
I believe that the writers of Holy Scripture were directly inspired by God, in a manner, and to an extent, in and to which no other men whose words have come down to us have been inspired. I cannot draw the line between their inspiration and that of other great teachers of mankind. I believe that the words of these, too, just in so far as they have proved themselves true words,[229] were inspired by God. But though I cannot, and man cannot, draw the line, God himself has done so; for these books have been filtered out, as it were, under his guidance, from many others, which, in ages gone by, claimed a place beside them, and are now forgotten, while these have stood for thousands of years, and are not likely to be set aside now. For they speak if men will read them, to needs and hopes set deep in our human nature, which no other books have ever spoken to, or ever can speak to, in the same way—they set forth his government of the world as no other books ever have set it forth, or ever can set it forth.

But though I do not believe that the difference between the inspiration of Isaiah and Shakespeare is expressible by words, the difference between the inspiration of the Holy Scripture—the Bible as a whole—and any other possible or conceivable collection of the utterances of men seems to me clear enough. The Bible has come to us from the Jewish nation, which was chosen by God as the one best fitted to receive for all mankind, and to give forth to all mankind, the revelation of Him—to teach them His name and character—that is, to enable them to know Him and in knowing Him, to feel how they and the world need redemption, and to understand how they and the world have been redeemed. This Bible, this Book of the chosen people, taken as a whole, has done this, is in short the written revelation of God. This being so, there can be[230] no other inspired book in the same sense in which the Bible is inspired, unless we, or some other world, are not redeemed, require another redemption and another Christ. But as we and all worlds are redeemed, and Christ is come, and God has revealed his name and his character in Christ so that we can know Him, the Bible is and must remain the inspired Book, the Book of the Church for all time, to which nothing can be added, from which nothing can be taken, as they will find who try to take from it or add to it. There may be another Homer, Plato, Shakespeare; there can be no other Bible.
Chapter 116
The longing for a Deliverer and Redeemer of himself and his race was the strongest and deepest feeling in the heart of every Jewish patriot. His whole life was grounded and centred on the promise and hope of such an one. Just therefore when his utterances would be most human and noble, most in sympathy with the cries and groanings of his own nation and the universe, they would all point to and centre in that Deliverer and Redeemer—just in so far as they were truly noble, human, and Godlike, they would shadow forth His true character, the words He would speak, the acts He would do. Doubtless the prophet would have before his mind any notable deliverance, and noble sufferer, or[231] deliverer of his own time; his words would refer to these. But from these he would be inevitably drawn up to the great promised Deliverer and Redeemer of his nation and his race, because he would see after all how incomplete the deliverance wrought by these must be, and his faith in the promise made to his fathers and to his nation—the covenant of God in which he felt himself to be included—would and could be satisfied with nothing less than a full and perfect deliverance, a Redeemer who should be the Head of men, the Son of man, and the Son of God.

Men may have insisted, may still insist, on seeing all sorts of fanciful references to some special acts of his in certain words of the Bible. But I must again insist that men’s fancies about the Bible and Christ are not the question, but what the Bible itself says, what Christ is. The whole book is full of Him, there is no need to read Him into any part of it as to which there can be any possible doubt.

Holding this faith as to the Scriptures, I am not anxious to defend them. I rejoice that they should be minutely examined and criticised. They will defend themselves, one and all, I believe. Men may satisfy themselves—perhaps, if I have time to give to the study, they may satisfy me—that the Pentateuch was the work of twenty men; that Baruch wrote a part of Isaiah; that David did not write the Psalms, or the Evangelists the Gospels; that there are interpolations here and[232] there in the originals; that there are numerous and serious errors in our translation. What is all this to me? What do I care who wrote them, what is the date of them, what this or that passage ought to be? They have told me what I wanted to know. Burn every copy in the world to-morrow, you don’t and can’t take that knowledge from me, or any man. I find them all good for me; so, as long as a copy is left, and I can get it, I mean to go on reading them all, and believing them all to be inspired.
Chapter 117
Our Lord came proclaiming a kingdom of God, a kingdom ordained by God on this earth, the order and beauty of which the unruly and sinful wills of men had deformed, so that disease, and death, and all miseries and disorder, had grown up and destroyed the order of it, and thwarting the perfectly loving will of God.

In asserting this kingdom and this order, our Lord claimed (as he must have claimed if indeed he were the Son of God) dominion over disease and death. This dominion was lower than that over the human heart and will, but he claimed it as positively. He proved his claim to be good in other ways, but specially for our present purpose by healing the sick, and raising the dead. Were these works orderly or disorderly? Every one of them seems to me to be the restoring of[233] an order which had been disturbed. They were witnesses for the law of life, faithful and true manifestations of the will of a loving Father to his children.

Yes, you may say, but he did other miracles besides those of healing. He turned water into wine, stilled the waves, multiplied loaves and fishes. These at any rate were capricious suspensions of natural laws. You say you believe in natural laws which have their ground in God’s will. Such laws he suspended or set aside in these cases. Now were these suspensions orderly?

I think they were. The natural laws which Christ suspended, such as the law of increase, are laws of God. Being his laws, they are living and not dead laws, but they are not the highest law; there must be a law of God, a law of his mind, above them, or they would be dead tyrannous rules. Christ seems to me to have been asserting the freedom of that law of God by suspending these natural laws, and to have been claiming here again, as part of his and our birthright, dominion over natural laws.

All the other miracles, I believe, stand on the same ground. None have been performed except by men who felt that they were witnessing for God, with glimpses of his order, full of zeal for the triumph of that order in the world, and working as Christ worked, in his spirit, and in the name of his Father, or of him. If there are any miracles which do not on a fair examination fulfil these conditions—which are such as a[234] loving Father educating sons who had strayed from or rebelled against him would not have done—I am quite ready to give them up.
Chapter 118
You have another charge against Christianity. You say it is after all a selfish faith, in which, however beautiful and noble the moral teaching may be, the ultimate appeal has always been to the hope of reward and fear of punishment. You will tell me that in ninety-nine of our churches out of a hundred I shall hear this doctrine, and shall find it in ninety-nine out of every hundred of theological or religious works.

If it be so I am sorry for it. But I am speaking of Christ’s Gospel, and I say that you will not find the doctrine you protest against there. I cannot go through our Lord’s teaching and his disciples’ to prove this. I ask you to read for yourselves, bringing honest and clear heads to the study, and not heads full of what you have thought, or this and the other man has preached or written, and I say that then you will give up this charge.

But as I have tried to do in all other cases, so here, I will tell you exactly what my own faith on this matter is.

Christ has told me that the only reward I shall ever get will be “life eternal,” and that life eternal is to[235] know God and Him. That is all the reward I care about. The only punishment I can ever bring on myself will be, to banish myself from his presence and the presence of all who know him, to dwell apart from him and my brethren, shut up in myself. That is the only punishment I dread.

But this reward he has given us already, here. He has given us to know God, and knowing God involves entering his kingdom, and dwelling in it. That kingdom Christ has opened to you, and to me, here. We, you and I may enter in any hour we please. If we don’t enter in now, and here, I can’t see how we are ever likely to enter in in another world. Why should not we enter in? It is worth trying. There are no conditions. It is given for the asking.

I think you will find it all you are in search of and are longing for. Above all, you will find in it and nowhere else, rest, peace—“not a peace which depends upon compacts and bargains among men, but which belongs to the very nature and character and being of God. Not a peace which is produced by the stifling and suppression of activities and energies, but the peace in which all activities and energies are perfected and harmonized. Not a peace which comes from the toleration of what is base or false, but which demands its destruction. Not a peace which begins from without, but a peace which is first wrought in the inner man, and thence comes forth to subdue the world. Not a peace[236] which a man gets for himself by standing aloof from the sorrows and confusions of the world in which he is born, of the men whose nature he shares, choosing a calm retreat and quiet scenery and a regulated atmosphere; but a peace which has never thriven except in those who have suffered with their suffering kind, who have been ready to give up selfish enjoyments, sensual or spiritual, for their sakes, who have abjured all devices of escape from ordained toils and temptations; the peace which was His who bore the sorrows and sins and infirmities of man, who gave up himself that he might become actually one with them, who thus won for them a participation in the Divine nature, and inheritance in that peace of God which passeth all understanding.”

This kingdom of God is good enough for me at any rate. I can trust him who has brought me into it to add what he will, to open my eyes, and strengthen my powers, that I may see and enjoy ever more and more of it, in this world, or in any other in which he may put me hereafter. Where that may be is no care of mine; it will be in his kingdom still, that I know; no power in Heaven or Hell, or Earth can cast me out of that, except I myself. While I remain in it I can freely use and enjoy every blessing and good gift of his glorious earth, the inheritance which he has given to us, his father’s children, his brethren. When it shall be his good pleasure to take me out of it he will not take me out of but bring me into more perfect communion with[237] him and with my brethren. He nourisheth my heart with good things on this earth, he will not cease to do this anywhere else. He reveals himself to me here, though as a man I cannot take in his full and perfect revelation, but when I awake up after his likeness I shall be satisfied—and not till then.
Chapter 119
One stumbling block in your way is, you say, that you are revolted and kept at arm’s-length by the separatist and exclusive habits and maxims of those who profess to have the faith you want. Many of them are kind, exemplary men, but just because they are Christians, and in so far forth as they are Christians, they are calling to you to come out from amongst the people of the world—to separate yourselves from an adulterous generation.

Against this call something which you know to be true and noble in you rises up. You have felt that what your age is crying out for, is union. You acknowledge the power of that cry in your own hearts. You want to feel with all men, and for all men. If you need a faith at all, it is one which shall meet that cry, which shall teach you how all men are bound together; not how some may be separated from the rest. You will not be false to your age. You will have no faith at all, or a faith for all mankind.
 

Keep to that; take nothing less than that; only look again and see whether that is not just what Christ offers you. Again I urge you not to look at his followers, real or professing—look at him, look at his life.

Was He exclusive? Did ever man or woman come near him and he turn away? Did he not go amongst all ranks, into every society? Did he not go to the houses of great men and rulers; of Pharisees, of poor men, of publicans? Did he not frequent the temple, the marketplace, the synagogue, the sea-shore, the hillside, the haunts of outcasts and harlots? Was he not to be found at feasts and at funerals? Wherever men and women were to be found, there was his place and his work; and there is ours. He who believes in him must go into every society where he has any call whatever. Who are we that we should pick and choose? The greatest ruffian, the most abandoned woman, that ever walked the face of this earth, were good enough for our Lord to die for. If he sends us amongst them, he will take care of us, and has something for us to do or speak, for or to them. The greatest king, the holiest saint on earth, is not too high company for one for whom Christ died, as he did for you and me. So, if he sends us amongst great or holy people, let us go, and learn what he means us to learn there.

I know how deeply many of you feel and mourn over the miseries and disorder of England and the world—how you long to do something towards lightening ever[239] so small a part of those miseries, rescuing ever so small a corner of the earth from that disorder. I know well how earnestly many of you are working in one way or another for your country and your brethren. I know what high hopes many of you have for the future of the world and the destiny of man. I say, mourn on, work on; abate not one jot of any hope you have ever had for the world or for man. Your hopes, be they what they may, have never been high enough—your work never earnest enough. But I ask you whether your hopes and your work have not been marred again and again, whether you have not been thrown back again and again into listlessness and hopelessness, by failures of one kind or another, whether you have not felt that those failures have been caused more or less by your own uncertainty, by your having had to work and fight without a leader, with comrades to whom you were bound only by chance, to journey without any clear knowledge of the road you were going, or where it led to?

At such times have you not longed for light and guidance? What would you have not given for a well of light and hope and strength, springing up within you and renewing your powers and energies? What would you not have given for the inward certainty that the road you were travelling was the right one, however you might stumble on it; that the line of battle in which you stood was the line for all true men, and was marching[240] break at the point which had been given you to hold, whatever might become of you? Well, be sure that light and guidance, that renewal of strength and hope, that certainty as to your side and your road, you are meant to have; they have been prepared, and are ready, for every man of you, whenever you will take them. The longings for them are whispered in your hearts by the Leader, whose cross, never turned back, ever triumphing more and more over all principalities and powers of evil, blazes far ahead in the van of our battles. He has been called the Captain of our Salvation, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Lamb who was slain for the world; He has told us his name, the Son of God and the Son of Man; He has claimed to be the redeemer, deliverer, leader of mankind.
Chapter 120
My younger brothers, I am not speaking to you the words of enthusiasm or excitement, but the words of sober every-day knowledge and certainty. I tell you that all the miseries of England and of other lands consist simply in this and in nothing else, that we men, made in the image of God, made to know him, to be one with him in his Son, will not confess that Son our Lord and Brother, to be the Son of God and Son of man, the living Head of our race and of each one of us. I tell[241] you that if we would confess him and lay hold of him and let him enter into and rule and guide us and the world, instead of trying to rule and guide ourselves and the world without him, we should see and know that the kingdom of God is just as much about us now as it will ever be. I tell you that we should see all sorrow and misery melting away and drawn up from this fair world of God’s like mountain mist before the July sun.
Chapter 121
I do not ask you to adopt any faith of mine. But as you would do good work in your generation, I ask of you to give yourselves no peace till you have answered these questions, each one for himself, in the very secret recesses of his heart, “Do I, does my race, want a head? Can we be satisfied with any less than a Son of man and a Son of God? Is this Christ, who has been so long worshipped in England, He?”

If you can answer, though with faltering lips, “Yes, this is He,” I care very little what else you accept, all else that is necessary or good for you will come in due time, if once he has the guidance of you.
Chapter 122

My faith has been no holiday or Sunday faith, but one for every-day use; a faith to live and die in, not to[242] argue or talk about. It has had to stand the wear and tear of life; it was not got in prosperity. It has had to carry me through years of anxious toil and small means, through the long sicknesses of those dearer to me than my own life, through deaths amongst them both sudden and lingering. Few men of my age have had more failures of all kinds; no man has deserved them more, by the commission of all kinds of blunders and errors, by evil tempers, and want of faith, hope, and love.

Through all this it has carried me, and has risen up in me after every failure and every sorrow, fresher, clearer, stronger. Why do I say “it?” I mean He. He has carried me through it all; He who is your Head and the Head of every man, woman, child, on this earth, or who has ever been on it, just as much as he is my Head. And he will carry us all through every temptation, trial, sorrow, we can ever have to encounter, in this world or any other, if we will only turn to him, lay hold of him, and cast them all upon him, as he has bidden us.

My younger brothers, you on whom the future of your country, under God, at this moment depends, will you not try him? Is he not worth a trial?
Chapter 123
Precious as his love was to him, and deeply as it affected his whole life, Tom felt that there must be something[243] beyond it—that its full satisfaction would not be enough for him. The bed was too narrow for a man to stretch himself on. What he was in search of must underlie and embrace his human love, and support it. Beyond and above all private and personal desires and hopes and longings, he was conscious of a restless craving and feeling about after something which he could not grasp, and yet which was not avoiding him, which seemed to be mysteriously laying hold of him and surrounding him.

The routine of chapels, and lectures, and reading for degree, boating, cricketing, union-debating—all well enough in their way—left this vacuum unfilled. There was a great outer visible world, the problems and puzzles of which were rising before him and haunting him more and more; and a great inner and invisible world opening round him in awful depth. He seemed to be standing on the brink of each—now, shivering and helpless, feeling like an atom about to be whirled into the great flood and carried he knew not where—now, ready to plunge in and take his part, full of hope and belief that he was meant to buffet in the strength of a man with the seen and the unseen, and to be subdued by neither.
Chapter 124
Far on in the quiet night he laid the whole before the[244] Lord and slept! Yes, my brother, even so: the old, old story; but start not at the phrase, though you may never have found its meaning.—He laid the whole before the Lord, in prayer, for his friend, for himself, for the whole world.

And you, too, if ever you are tried—as every man must be in one way or another—must learn to do the like with every burthen on your soul, if you would not have it hanging round you heavily, and ever more heavily, and dragging you down lower and lower till your dying day.
Chapter 125
The English prejudice against Franklin on religious grounds is quite unreasonable. He was suspected of being a Freethinker, and was professedly a philosopher and man of science; he was a friend of Tom Paine and other dreadful persons; he had actually published “An Abridgment of the Church Prayer-Book,” dedicated “to the serious and discerning,” by the use of which he had the audacity to suppose that religion would be furthered, unanimity increased, and a more frequent attendance on the worship of God secured. Any one of these charges was sufficient to ruin a man’s religious reputation in respectable England of the last generation, but it is high time that amends were made in these days. Let us glance at the real facts. As a boy, Franklin had the[245] disease which all thoughtful boys have to pass through, and puzzled himself with speculations as to the attributes of God and the existence of evil, which landed him in the conclusion that nothing could possibly be wrong in the world, and that vice and virtue were empty distinctions. These views he published at the mature age of nineteen, but became disgusted with them almost immediately, and abandoned metaphysics for other more satisfactory studies. Living in the eighteenth century, when happiness was held to be “our being’s end and aim,” he seems to have now conformed to that popular belief; but as he came also to the conclusion that “the felicity of life” was to be attained through “truth, sincerity, and integrity in dealings between man and man,” and acted up to this conclusion, no great objection from a moral or religious standpoint can be taken to this stage of his development. At the age of twenty-two he composed a little liturgy for his own use, which he fell back on when the sermons of the minister of the only Presbyterian church in Philadelphia had driven him from attendance at chapel. He did not, however, long remain unattached, and after his marriage joined the Church of England, in which he remained till the end of his life. What his sentiments were in middle life may be gathered from his advice to his daughter on the eve of his third departure for England: “Go constantly to church, whoever preaches. The act of devotion in the Common Prayer-Book is[246] your principle business there, and if properly attended to will do more toward amending the heart than sermons.... I do not mean you should despise sermons, even of the preachers you dislike, for the discourse is often much better than the man, as sweet and clear waters come through very dirty earth. I am the more particular on this head as you seem to express some inclination to leave our church, which I would not have you do.” As an old man of eighty, he reminded his colleagues of the National Convention (in moving unsuccessfully that there should be daily prayers before business) how in the beginnings of the contest with Britain “we had daily prayers in this room.... Do we imagine we no longer need assistance? I have lived now a long time, and the longer I live the more convincing proofs I see of this truth, that God rules in the affairs of men.” Later yet, in answer to President Yates, of Yale College, who had pressed him on the subject, he writes, at the age of eighty-four: “Here is my creed: I believe in one God, the Creator of the universe; that he governs it by his providence; that he ought to be worshipped; that the most acceptable service we render to him is doing good to his other children; that the soul of man is immortal, and will be treated with justice in another life respecting its conduct in this.” These are his “fundamentals,” beyond which he believes that Christ’s system of morals and religion is the best the world is ever likely to see, though[247] it has been much corrupted. To another friend he speaks with cheerful courage of death, which “I shall submit to with less regret as, having seen during a long life a good deal of this world, I feel a growing curiosity to be acquainted with some other; and can cheerfully, with filial confidence, resign my spirit to the conduct of that great and good Parent of mankind who has so graciously protected and prospered me from my birth to the present hour.” One more quotation we cannot resist; it is his farewell letter to his old friend David Hartley: “I cannot quit the coasts of Europe without taking leave of my old friend. We were long fellow-laborers in the best of all works, the work of peace. I leave you still in the field, but, having finished my day’s task, I am going home to bed. Wish me a good night’s rest, as I do you a pleasant evening. Adieu, and believe me ever yours most affectionately,—B. Franklin.”

As to his relations with Paine, they should have reassured instead of frightened the orthodox, for he did his best to keep the author of “The Rights of Man” from publishing his speculations. Franklin advises him that he will do himself mischief and no benefit to others. “He who spits against the wind, spits in his own face.” Paine is probably indebted to religion “for the habits of virtue on which you so justly value yourself. You might easily display your excellent talents of reasoning upon a less hazardous subject, and thereby obtain a rank[248] amongst our most distinguished authors. For among us it is not necessary, as among the Hottentots, that a youth, to be raised into the company of men, should prove his manhood by beating his mother.”
Chapter 126
Of course, it is more satisfactory to one’s own self-love, to make every one who comes to one to learn, feel that he is a fool, and we wise men; but, if our object is to teach well and usefully what we know ourselves there cannot be a worse method. No man, however, is likely to adopt it, so long as he is conscious that he has anything himself to learn from his pupils; and as soon as he has arrived at the conviction that they can teach him nothing—that it is henceforth to be all give and no take—the sooner he throws up his office of teacher the better it will be for himself, his pupils, and his country, whose sons he is misguiding.
Chapter 127
“When one thinks what a great centre of learning and faith like Oxford ought to be—that its highest educational work should just be the deliverance of us all from flunkeyism and money-worship—and then looks at matters here without rose-colored spectacles, it gives[249] one sometimes a sort of chilly, leaden despondency, which is very hard to struggle against.”

“I am sorry to hear you talk like that, Jack, for one can’t help loving the place after all.”

“So I do, God knows. If I didn’t, I shouldn’t care for its shortcomings.”

“Well, the flunkeyism and money-worship were bad enough, but I don’t think they were the worst things—at least not in my day. Our neglects were almost worse than our worships.”

“You mean the want of all reverence for parents? Well, perhaps that lies at the root of the false worships. They spring up on the vacant soil.”

“And the want of reverence for women, Jack. The worst of all, to my mind!”

“Perhaps you are right. But we are not at the bottom yet.”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean that we must worship God before we can reverence parents or women, or root out flunkeyism and money-worship.”

“Yes. But after all can we fairly lay that sin on Oxford? Surely, whatever may be growing up side by side with it, there’s more Christianity here than almost anywhere else.”

“Plenty of common-room Christianity—belief in a dead God. There, I have never said it to any one but you, but that is the slough we have got to get out of.[250] Don’t think that I despair for us. We shall do it yet; but it will be sore work, stripping off the comfortable wine-party religion in which we are wrapped up—work for our strongest and our wisest.”
Chapter 128
Everybody, I suppose, knows the dreamy delicious state in which one lies, half asleep, half awake, while consciousness begins to return after a sound night’s rest in a new place which we are glad to be in, following upon a day of unwonted excitement and exertion. There are few pleasanter pieces of life. The worst of it is that they last such a short time; for nurse them as you will, by lying perfectly passive in mind and body, you can’t make more than five minutes or so of them. After which time the stupid, obstrusive, wakeful entity which we call “I,” as impatient as he is stiff-necked, spite of our teeth will force himself back again, and take possession of us down to our very toes.
Chapter 129
The sun was going down behind the copse, through which his beams came aslant, chequered and mellow. The stream ran dimpling down, sleepily swaying the masses of weed, under the surface and on the surface; and the trout rose under the banks, as some moth or[251] gnat or gleaming beetle fell into the stream; here and there one more frolicsome than his brethren would throw himself joyously into the air. The swifts rushed close by, in companies of five or six, and wheeled, and screamed, and dashed away again, skimming along the water, baffling the eye as one tried to follow their flight. Two kingfishers shot suddenly up on to their supper station, on a stunted willow stump, some twenty yards below him, and sat there in the glory of their blue backs and cloudy red waistcoats, watching with long sagacious beaks pointed to the water beneath, and every now and then dropping like flashes of light into the stream, and rising again, with what seemed one motion, to their perches. A heron or two were fishing about the meadows; and Tom watched them stalking about in their sober quaker coats, or rising on slow heavy wing, and lumbering away home with a weird cry. He heard the strong pinions of the wood pigeon in the air, and then from the trees above his head came the soft call, “Take-two-cow-Taffy, take-two-cow-Taffy,” with which that fair and false bird is said to have beguiled the hapless Welchman to the gallows. Presently, as he lay motionless, the timid and graceful little water-hens peered out from their doors in the rushes opposite, and, seeing no cause for fear, stepped daintily into the water, and were suddenly surrounded by little bundles of black soft down, which went paddling about in and out of the weeds, encouraged by the occasional sharp, clear, parental[252] “keck—keck,” and merry little dabchicks popped up in mid-stream, and looked round, and nodded at him, pert and voiceless, and dived again; even old cunning water-rats sat up on the bank with round black noses and gleaming eyes, or took solemn swims out, and turned up their tails and disappeared for his amusement. A comfortable low came at intervals from the cattle, revelling in the abundant herbage. All living things seemed to be disporting themselves, and enjoying, after their kind, the last gleams of the sunset, which were making the whole vault of heaven glow and shimmer; and, as he watched them, Tom blessed his stars as he contrasted the river-side with the glare of lamps and the click of balls in the noisy pool-room.

And then the summer twilight came on, and the birds disappeared, and the hush of night settled down on river, and copse, and meadow—cool and gentle summer twilight, after the hot bright day. He welcomed it too, as it folded up the landscape, and the trees lost their outline, and settled into soft black masses rising here and there out of the white mist, which seemed to have crept up to within a few yards all round him unawares. There was no sound now but the gentle murmur of the water, and an occasional rustle of reeds, or of the leaves over his head, as a stray wandering puff of air passed through them on its way home to bed. Nothing to listen to, and nothing to look at; for the moon had not risen, and the light mist hid everything[253] except a star or two right up above him. So, the outside world having left him for the present, he was turned inwards on himself.
Chapter 130
The nights are pleasant in May, short and pleasant for travel. We will leave the city asleep, and do our flight in the night to save time. Trust yourselves, then, to the story-teller’s a?rial machine. It is but a rough affair, I own, rough and humble, unfitted for high or great flights, with no gilded panels, or dainty cushions, or C-springs—not that we shall care about springs, by the way, until we alight on terra-firma again—still, there is much to be learned in a third-class carriage if we will only not look while in it for cushions, and fine panels, and forty miles an hour travelling, and will not be shocked at our fellow-passengers for being weak in their h’s and smelling of fustian. Mount in it, then, you who will, after this warning; the fares are holiday fares, the tickets return tickets. Take with you nothing but the poet’s luggage,
“A smile for Hope, a tear for Pain,
A breath to swell the voice of Prayer,”

and may you have a pleasant journey, for it is time that the stoker should be looking to his going gear!

So now we rise slowly in the moonlight from St. Ambrose’s quadrangle, and, when we are clear of the clock-tower,[254] steer away southwards, over Oxford city and all its sleeping wisdom and folly, over street and past spire, over Christ Church and the canons’ houses, and the fountain in Tom quad; over St. Aldate’s and the river, along which the moonbeams lie in a pathway of twinkling silver, over the railway sheds—no, there was then no railway, but only the quiet fields and foot-paths of Hincksey hamlet. Well, no matter; at any rate, the hills beyond, and Bagley Wood, were there then as now: and over hills and wood we rise, catching the purr of the night-jar, the trill of the nightingale, and the first crow of the earliest cock-pheasant, as he stretches his jewelled wings, conscious of his strength and his beauty, heedless of the fellows of St. John’s, who slumber within sight of his perch, on whose hospitable board he shall one day lie, prone on his back, with fair larded breast turned upwards for the carving knife, having crowed his last crow. He knows it not; what matters it to him? If he knew it, could a Bagley Wood cock-pheasant desire a better ending?

We pass over the vale beyond; hall and hamlet, church, and meadow, and copse, folded in mist and shadow below us, each hamlet holding in its bosom the materials of three-volumed novels by the dozen, if we could only pull off the roofs of the houses and look steadily into the interiors; but our destination is farther yet. The faint white streak behind the distant Chilterns reminds us that we have no time for gossip by the way;[255] May nights are short, and the sun will be up by four. No matter; our journey will now be soon over, for the broad vale is crossed, and the chalk hills and downs beyond. Larks quiver up by us, “higher, ever higher,” hastening up to get a first glimpse of the coming monarch, careless of food, flooding the fresh air with song. Steady plodding rooks labor along below us, and lively starlings rush by on the look-out for the early worm; lark and swallow, rook and starling, each on his appointed round. The sun arises, and they get them to it; he is up now, and these breezy uplands over which we hang are swimming in the light of horizontal rays, though the shadows and mists still lie on the wooded dells which slope away southwards.

This is no chalk, this high knoll which rises above—one may almost say hangs over—the village, crowned with Scotch firs, its sides tufted with gorse and heather. It is the Hawk’s Lynch, the favorite resort of Englebourn folk, who come up for the view, for the air, because their fathers and mothers came up before them, because they came up themselves as children—from an instinct which moves them all in leisure hours and Sunday evenings, when the sun shines and the birds sing, whether they care for view or air or not. Something guides all their feet hitherward; the children, to play hide-and-seek and look for nests in the gorse-bushes; young men and maidens, to saunter and look and talk, as they will till the world’s end—or as long,[256] at any rate, as the Hawk’s Lynch and Englebourn last—and to cut their initials, inclosed in a true lover’s knot, on the short rabbit’s turf; steady married couples, to plod along together consulting on hard times and growing families; even old tottering men, who love to sit at the feet of the firs, with chins leaning on their sticks, prattling of days long past, to any one who will listen, or looking silently with dim eyes into the summer air, feeling perhaps in their spirits after a wider and more peaceful view which will soon open for them. A common knoll, open to all, up in the silent air, well away from every-day Englebourn life, with the Hampshire range and the distant Beacon Hill lying soft on the horizon, and nothing higher between you and the southern sea, what a blessing the Hawk’s Lynch is to the village folk, one and all! May Heaven and a thankless soil long preserve it and them from an inclosure under the Act!
Chapter 131
In January, 878, King Alfred disappears from the eyes of Saxon and Northmen, and we follow him, by such light as tradition throws upon these months, into the thickets and marshes of Selwood. It is at this point, as is natural enough, that romance has been most busy, and it has become impossible to disentangle the actual facts from monkish legend and Saxon ballad. In happier[257] times Alfred was in the habit himself of talking over the events of his wandering life pleasantly with his courtiers, and there is no reason to doubt that the foundation of most of the stories still current rests on those conversations of the truth-loving king, noted down by Bishop Asser and others.

The best known of these is, of course, the story of the cakes. In the depths of the Saxon forests there were always a few neat-herds and swine-herds, scattered up and down, living in rough huts enough we may be sure, and occupied with the care of the cattle and herds of their masters. Amongst these in Selwood was a neat-herd of the king, a faithful man, to whom the secret of Alfred’s disguise was intrusted, and who kept it even from his wife. To this man’s hut the king came one day alone, and, sitting himself down by the burning logs on the hearth, began mending his bows and arrows. The neat-herd’s wife had just finished her baking, and, having other household matters to attend to, confided her loaves to the king, a poor, tired looking body, who might be glad of the warmth, and could make himself useful by turning the batch, and so earn his share while she got on with other business. But Alfred worked away at his weapons, thinking of anything but the good housewife’s batch of loaves, which in due course were not only done, but rapidly burning to a cinder. At this moment the neat-herd’s wife comes back, and flying to the hearth to rescue the bread, cries out, “D’rat the[258] man! never to turn the loaves when you see them burning. I’ze warrant you ready enough to eat them when they’re done.” But beside the king’s faithful neat-herd, whose name is not preserved, there are other churls in the forest, who must be Alfred’s comrades just now if he will have any. And even here he has an eye for a good man, and will lose no opportunity to help one to the best of his power. Such a one he finds in a certain swine-herd called Denewulf, whom he gets to know, a thoughtful Saxon man, minding his charge there in the oak woods. The rough churl, or thrall, we know not which, has great capacity, as Alfred soon finds out, and desire to learn. So the king goes to work upon Denewulf under the oak trees, when the swine will let him, and is well satisfied with the results of his teachings and the progress of his pupil.

But in those miserable days the commonest necessaries of life were hard enough to come by for the king and his few companions, and for his wife and family, who soon joined him in the forest, even if they were not with him from the first. The poor foresters cannot maintain them, nor are this band of exiles the men to live on the poor. So Alfred and his comrades are soon foraging on the borders of the forest, and getting what subsistence they can from the Pagan, or from the Christians who had submitted to their yoke. So we may imagine them dragging on life till near Easter when a gleam of good news comes up from the west, to gladden[259] the hearts and strengthen the arms of these poor men in the depths of Selwood.

Soon after Guthrum and the main body of the Pagans moved from Gloster, southwards, the Viking Hubba, as had been agreed, sailed with thirty ships of war from his winter quarters on the South Welsh coast, and landed in Devon. The news of the catastrophe at Chippenham, and of the disappearance of the king, was no doubt already known in the west; and in the face of it Odda the alderman cannot gather strength to meet the Pagans in the open field. But he is a brave and true man, and will make no term with the spoilers; so, with other faithful thegns of King Alfred and their followers, he throws himself into a castle or fort called Cynwith, or Cynnit, there to abide whatever issue of this business God will send them. Hubba, with the war-flag Raven, and a host laden with the spoil of rich Devon vales, appear in due course before the place. It is not strong naturally, and has only “walls in our own fashion,” meaning probably rough earth-works. But there are resolute men behind them, and on the whole Hubba declines the assault, and sits down before the place. There is no spring of water, he hears, within the Saxon lines, and they are otherwise wholly unprepared for a siege. A few days will no doubt settle the matter, and the sword or slavery will be the portion of Odda and the rest of Alfred’s men; meantime there is spoil enough in the camp from Devonshire homesteads, which brave[260] men can revel in round the war-flag Raven, while they watch the Saxon ramparts. Odda, however, has quite other views than death from thirst, or surrender. Before any stress comes, early one morning, he and his whole force sally out over their earth-works, and from the first “cut down the Pagans in great numbers;” eight hundred and forty warriors (some say one thousand two hundred), with Hubba himself, are slain before Cynnit fort; the rest, few in number, escape to their ships. The war-flag Raven is left in the hands of Odda and the men of Devon.

This is the news which comes to Alfred, Ethelnoth the alderman of Somerset, Denewulf the swine-herd, and the rest of the Selwood Forest group, some time before Easter. These men of Devonshire, it seems, are still staunch, and ready to peril their lives against the Pagans. No doubt up and down Wessex, thrashed and trodden out as the nation is by this time, there are other good men and true, who will neither cross the sea or the Welsh marches, nor make terms with the Pagan; some sprinkling of men who will yet set life at stake, for faith in Christ and love of England. If these can only be rallied, who can say what may follow? So, in the lengthening days of spring, council is held in Selwood and there will have been Easter services in some chapel, or hermitage, in the forest, or, at any rate in some quiet glade. The “day of days” will surely have had its voice of hope for this poor remnant. Christ is[261] risen and reigns; and it is not in these heathen Danes, or in all the Northmen who ever sailed across the sea, to put back his kingdom, or enslave those whom he has freed.

The result is, that, far away from the eastern boundary of the forest, on a rising ground—hill it can scarcely be called—surrounded by dangerous marshes formed by the little rivers Thone and Parret, fordable only in summer, and even then dangerous to all who have not the secret, a small fortified camp is thrown up under Alfred’s eye, by Ethelnoth and the Somersetshire men, where he can once again raise his standard. The spot has been chosen by the king with the utmost care, for it is his last throw. He names it the Etheling’s eig or island, “Athelney.” Probably his young son, the Etheling of England, is there amongst the first, with his mother and his grand-mother Eadburgha, the widow of Ethelred Mucil, the venerable lady whom Asser saw in later years, and who has now no country but her daughter’s. There are, as has been reckoned, some two acres of hard ground on the island, and around vast brakes of alder-bush, full of deer and other game. Here the Somersetshire men can keep up constant communication with him, and a small army grows together. They are soon strong enough to make forays into the open country, and in many skirmishes they cut off parties of the Pagans, and supplies. “For, even when overthrown and cast down,” says Malmesbury,[262] “Alfred had always to be fought with; so then, when one would esteem him altogether worn down and broken, like a snake slipping from the hand of him who would grasp it, he would suddenly flash out again from his hiding-places, rising up to smite his foes in the height of their insolent confidence, and never more hard to beat than after a flight.”

But it was still a trying life at Athelney. Followers came in slowly, and provender and supplies of all kinds are hard to wring from the Pagan, and harder still to take from Christian men. One day, while it was yet so cold that the water was still frozen, the king’s people had gone out “to get them fish or fowl, or some such purveyance as they sustained themselves withal.” No one was left in the royal hut for the moment but himself and his mother-in-law, Eadburgha. The king (after his constant wont whensoever he had opportunity) was reading from the Psalms of David, out of the Manual which he carried always in his bosom. At this moment a poor man appeared at the door and begged for a morsel of bread “for Christ his sake.” Whereupon the king, receiving the stranger as a brother, called to his mother-in-law to give him to eat. Eadburgha replied that there was but one loaf in their store, and a little wine in a pitcher, a provision wholly insufficient for his own family and people. But the king bade her, nevertheless, to give the stranger part of the last loaf, which she accordingly did. But when he had been served, the[263] stranger was no more seen, and the loaf remained whole, and the pitcher full to the brim. Alfred, meantime, had turned to his reading, over which he fell asleep and dreamed that St. Cuthbert of Lindisfarne stood by him, and told him it was he who had been his guest, and that God had seen his afflictions and those of his people, which were now about to end, in token whereof his people would return that day from their expedition with a great take of fish. The king awaking, and being much impressed with his dream, called to his mother-in-law and recounted it to her, who thereupon assured him that she too had been overcome with sleep, and had had the same dream. And while they yet talked together on what had happened so strangely to them, their servants came in, bringing fish enough, as it seemed to them, to have fed an army.

The monkish legend goes on to tell that on the next morning the king crossed to the mainland in a boat, and wound his horn thrice, which drew to him before noon five hundred men. What we may think of the story and the dream, as Sir John Spelman says, “is not here very much material,” seeing that whether we deem it natural or supernatural, “the one as well as the other serves at God’s appointment, by raising or dejecting of the mind with hopes or fears, to lead man to the resolution of those things whereof he has before ordained the event.”
Chapter 132
“Mrs. Winburn is ill, isn’t she?” asked Tom, after looking his guide over.

“Ees, her be—terrible bad,” said the constable.

“What is the matter with her, do you know?”

“Zummat o’ fits, I hears. Her’ve had ’em this six year, on and off.”

“I suppose it’s dangerous. I mean she isn’t likely to get well?”

“’Tis in the Lord’s hands,” replied the constable, “but her’s that bad wi’ pain, at times, ’twould be a mussy if ’twoud plaase He to tak’ her out on’t.”

“Perhaps she mightn’t think so,” said Tom, superciliously; he was not in the mind to agree with any one. The constable looked at him solemnly for a moment and then said:

“Her’s been a God-fearin’ woman from her youth up, and her’s had a deal o’ trouble. Thaay as the Lord loveth He chasteneth, and ’tisn’t such as thaay as is afeard to go afore Him.”

“Well, I never found that having trouble made people a bit more anxious to get ‘out on’t,’ as you call it,” said Tom.

“It don’t seem to me as you can ’a had much o’ trouble to judge by,” said the constable, who was beginning to be nettled by Tom’s manner.

“How can you tell that?”
 

“Leastways ’twould be whoam-made, then,” persisted the constable; “and ther’s a sight o’ odds atween whoam-made troubles and thaay as the Lord sends.”

“So there may; but I may have seen both sorts for anything you can tell.”

“Nay, nay; the Lord’s troubles leave His marks.”
Chapter 133
“And I be to write to you, sir, then, if Harry gets into trouble?”

“Yes; but we must keep him out of trouble, even home-made ones, which don’t leave good marks, you know,” said Tom.

“And thaay be nine out o’ ten o’ aal as comes to a man, sir,” said David, “as I’ve a told Harry scores o’ times.”

“That seems to be your text, David,” said Tom, laughing.

“Ah, and ’tis a good un too, sir. ’Tis a sight better to have the Lord’s troubles while you be about it, for thaay as hasn’t makes wus for theirselves out o’ nothin’.”
Chapter 134
Grey, who had never given up hopes of bringing Tom round to his own views, had not neglected the opportunities[266] which his residence in town offered, and had enlisted Tom’s services on more than one occasion. He had found him specially useful in instructing the big boys, whom he was trying to bring together and civilize in a “Young Men’s Club,” in the rudiments of cricket on Saturday evenings. But on the morning in question an altogether different work was on hand.

A lady living some eight or nine miles to the northwest of London, who took great interest in Grey’s doings, had asked him to bring the children of his night-school down to spend a day in her grounds, and this was the happy occasion. It was before the days of cheap excursions by rail, so that vans had to be found for the party; and Grey had discovered a benevolent remover of furniture in Paddington, who was ready to take them at a reasonable figure. The two vans, with awnings and curtains in the height of the fashion, and horses with tasselled ear-caps, and everything handsome about them, were already drawn up in the midst of a group of excited children, and scarcely less excited mothers, when Tom arrived. Grey was arranging his forces, and laboring to reduce the Irish children, who formed almost half of his ragged little flock, into something like order before starting. By degrees this was managed, and Tom was placed in command of the rear van, while Grey reserved the leading one to himself. The children were divided, and warned not to lean over the sides and tumble out—a somewhat superfluous caution, as most[267] of them, though unused to riding in any legitimate manner, were pretty well used to balancing themselves behind any vehicle which offered as much as a spike to sit on, out of sight of the driver. Then came the rush into the vans. Grey and Tom took up their places next the doors as conductors, and the procession lumbered off with great success, and much shouting from treble voices.

Tom soon found that he had plenty of work on his hands to keep the peace amongst his flock. The Irish element was in a state of wild effervescence, and he had to draft them down to his own end, leaving the foremost part of the van to the sober English children. He was much struck by the contrast of the whole set to the Englebourn school children, whom he had lately seen under somewhat similar circumstances. The difficulty with them had been to draw them out, and put anything like life into them; here, all he had to do was to repress the superabundant life. However, the vans held on their way, and got safely into the suburbs, and so at last to an occasional hedge, and a suspicion of trees, and green fields beyond.

It became more and more difficult now to keep the boys in; and when they came to a hill, where the horses had to walk, he yielded to their entreaties, and, opening the door, let them out, insisting only that the girls should remain seated. They scattered over the sides of the roads, and up the banks; now chasing pigs and[268] fowls up to the very doors of their owners; now gathering the commonest road-side weeds, and running up to show them to him, and ask their names, as if they were rare treasures. The ignorance of most of the children as to the commonest country matters astonished him. One small boy particularly came back time after time to ask him, with solemn face, “Please, sir, is this the country?” and when at last he allowed that it was, rejoined, “Then, please, where are the nuts?”

The clothing of most of the Irish boys began to tumble to pieces in an alarming manner. Grey had insisted on their being made tidy for the occasion, but the tidiness was of a superficial kind. The hasty stitching soon began to give way, and they were rushing about with wild locks; the strips of what might have once been nether garments hanging about their legs; their feet and heads bare, the shoes which their mothers had borrowed for the state occasion having been deposited under the seat of the van, so when the procession arrived at the trim lodge-gates of their hostess, and his charge descended and fell in on the beautifully clipped turf at the side of the drive, Tom felt some of the sensations of Falstaff when he had to lead his ragged regiment through Coventry streets.

He was soon at his ease again, and enjoyed the day thoroughly, and the drive home; but, as they drew near town again, a sense of discomfort and shyness came over him, and he wished the journey to Westminster well[269] over, and hoped that the carman would have the sense to go through the quiet parts of the town.

He was much disconcerted, consequently, when the vans came to a sudden stop, opposite one of the Park entrances, in the Bayswater road. “What in the world is Grey about?” he thought, as he saw him get out, and all the children after him. So he got out himself, and went forward to get an explanation.

“Oh, I have told the man that he need not drive us round to Westminster. He is close at home here, and his horses have had a hard day; so we can just get out and walk home.”

“What, across the Park?” asked Tom.

“Yes, it will amuse the children, you know.”

“But they’re tired,” persisted Tom; “come now, it’s all nonsense letting the fellow off; he’s bound to take us back.”

“I’m afraid I have promised him,” said Grey; “besides, the children all think it a treat. Don’t you all want to walk across the Park?” he went on, turning to them, and a general affirmative chorus was the answer. So Tom had nothing for it but to shrug his shoulders, empty his own van, and follow into the Park with his convoy, not in the best humor with Grey for having arranged this ending to their excursion.

They might have got over a third of the distance between the Bayswater Road and the Serpentine, when he was aware of a small thin voice addressing him.

[270]

“Oh, please won’t you carry me a bit? I’m so tired,” said the voice. He turned in some trepidation to look for the speaker, and found her to be a sickly undergrown little girl, of ten or thereabouts, with large pleading gray eyes, very shabbily dressed, and a little lame. He had remarked her several times in the course of the day, not for any beauty or grace about her, for the poor child had none, but for her transparent confidence and trustfulness. After dinner, as they had been all sitting on the grass under the shade of a great elm to hear Grey read a story, and Tom had been sitting a little apart from the rest with his back against the trunk, she had come up and sat quietly down by him, leaning on his knee. Then he had seen her go up and take the hand of the lady who had entertained them, and walk along by her, talking without the least shyness. Soon afterwards she had squeezed into the swing by the side of the beautifully-dressed little daughter of the same lady, who, after looking for a minute at her shabby little sister with large round eyes, had jumped out and run off to her mother, evidently in a state of childish bewilderment as to whether it was not wicked for a child to wear such dirty old clothes.

Tom had chuckled to himself as he saw Cinderella settling herself comfortably in the swing in the place of the ousted princess, and had taken a fancy to the child, speculating to himself as to how she could have been brought up, to be so utterly unconscious of differences of[271] rank and dress. “She seems really to treat her fellow-creatures as if she had been studying the Sartor Resartus,” he thought. “She has cut down through all clothes-philosophy without knowing it. I wonder, if she had a chance, whether she would go and sit down in the Queen’s lap?”

He did not at that time anticipate that she would put his own clothes-philosophy to so severe a test before the day was over. The child had been as merry and active as any of the rest during the earlier part of day; but now, as he looked down in answer to her reiterated plea, “Won’t you carry me a bit? I’m so tired!” he saw that she could scarcely drag one foot after another.

What was to be done? He was already keenly alive to the discomfort of walking across Hyde Park in a procession of ragged children, with such a figure of fun as Grey at their head, looking, in his long rusty, straight-cut black coat, as if he had come fresh out of Noah’s ark. He didn’t care about it so much while they were on the turf in the out-of-the-way parts, and would meet nobody but guards, and nurse-maids, and trades-people, and mechanics out for an evening’s stroll. But the Drive and Rotten-row lay before them, and must be crossed. It was just the most crowded time of the day. He had almost made up his mind once or twice to stop Grey and the procession, and propose to sit down for half an hour or so and let the children play, by which time the world would be going home to dinner. But there was[272] no play left in the children; and he had resisted the temptation, meaning, when they came to the most crowded part, to look unconscious, as if it were by chance that he got into such company, and had in fact nothing to do with them. But now, if he listened to the child’s plea, and carried her, all hope of concealment was over. If he did not, he felt that there would be no greater flunkey in the Park that evening than Thomas Brown, the enlightened radical and philosopher, amongst the young gentlemen riders in Rotten-row, or the powdered footmen lounging behind the great glaring carriages in the drive.

So he looked down at the child once or twice in a state of puzzle. A third time she looked up with her great eyes, and said, “Oh, please carry me a bit!” and her piteous, tired face turned the scale. “If she were Lady Mary or Lady Blanche,” thought he, “I should pick her up at once, and be proud of the burden. Here goes!” And he took her up in his arms, and walked on, desperate and reckless.

Notwithstanding all his philosophy, he felt his ears tingling and his face getting red, as they approached the Drive. It was crowded. They were kept standing a minute or two at the crossing. He made a desperate effort to abstract himself wholly from the visible world, and retire into a state of serene contemplation. But it would not do, and he was painfully conscious of the stare of lack-lustre eyes of well-dressed men leaning[273] over the rails, and the amused look of delicate ladies, lounging in open carriages, and surveying him and Grey and their ragged rout through glasses.

At last they scrambled across, and he breathed freely for a minute, as they struggled along the comparatively quiet path leading to Albert Gate, and stopped to drink at the fountain. Then came Rotten-row, and another pause amongst the loungers, and a plunge into the Ride, where he was nearly run down by two men whom he had known at Oxford. They shouted to him to get out of the way; and he felt the hot defiant blood rushing through his veins as he strode across without heeding. They passed on, one of them having to pull his horse out of his stride to avoid him. Did they recognize him? He felt a strange mixture of utter indifference, and longing to strangle them.

The worst was now over; besides, he was getting used to the situation, and his good sense was beginning to rally. So he marched through Albert Gate, carrying his ragged little charge, who prattled away to him without a pause, and surrounded by the rest of the children, scarcely caring who might see him.

They went safely through the omnibuses and carriages on the Kensington Road, and so into Belgravia. At last he was quite at his ease again, and began listening to what the child was saying to him, and was strolling carelessly along, when once more, at one of the crossings, he was startled by a shout from some riders.[274] There was straw laid down in the street, so that he had not heard them as they cantered round the corner, hurrying home to dress for dinner; and they were all but upon him, and had to rein up their horses sharply.

The party consisted of a lady and two gentlemen, one old, the other young; the latter dressed in the height of fashion, and with the supercilious air which Tom hated from his soul. The shout came from the young man, and drew Tom’s attention to him first. All the devil rushed up as he recognized St. Cloud. The lady’s horse swerved against his, and began to rear. He put his hand on its bridle, as if he had a right to protect her. Another glance told Tom that the lady was Mary, and the old gentleman, fussing up on his stout cob on the other side of her, Mr. Porter.

They all knew him in another moment. He stared from one to the other, was conscious that she turned her horse’s head sharply, so as to disengage the bridle from St. Cloud’s hand, and of his insolent stare, and of the embarrassment of Mr. Porter; and then, setting his face straight before him, he passed on in a bewildered dream, never looking back till they were out of sight. The dream gave way to bitter and wild thoughts, upon which it will do none of us any good to dwell. He put down the little girl outside the school, turning abruptly from the mother, a poor widow in scant, well-preserved black clothes, who was waiting for the child, and began thanking him for his care of her; refused Grey’s pressing invitation[275] to tea, and set his face eastward. Bitterer and more wild and more scornful grew his thoughts as he strode along past the Abbey, and up Whitehall, and away down the Strand, holding on over the crossings without paying the slightest heed to vehicle, or horse, or man. Incensed coachmen had to pull up with a jerk to avoid running over him, and more than one sturdy walker turned round in indignation at a collision which they felt had been intended, or at least which there had been no effort to avoid.

As he passed under the window of the Banqueting Hall, and by the place in Charing-cross where the pillory used to stand, he growled to himself what a pity it was that the times for cutting off heads and cropping ears had gone by. The whole of the dense population from either side of the Strand seemed to have crowded out into that thoroughfare to impede his march and aggravate him. The further eastward he got the thicker got the crowd; and the vans, the omnibuses, the cabs, seemed to multiply and get noisier. Not an altogether pleasant sight to a man in the most Christian frame of mind is the crowd that a fine summer evening fetches out into the roaring Strand, as the sun fetches out flies on the window of a village grocery. To him just then it was at once depressing and provoking, and he went shouldering his way towards Temple Bar as thoroughly out of tune as he had been for many a long day.

As he passed from the narrowest part of the Strand[276] into the space round St. Clement Danes’ church, he was startled, in a momentary lull of the uproar, by the sound of chiming bells. He slackened his pace to listen; but a huge van lumbered by, shaking the houses on both sides, and drowning all sounds but its own rattle; and then he found himself suddenly immersed in a crowd, vociferating and gesticulating round a policeman, who was conveying a woman towards the station-house. He shouldered through it—another lull came, and with it the same slow, gentle, calm cadence of chiming bells. Again and again he caught it as he passed on to Temple Bar; whenever the roar subsided the notes of the old hymn-tune came dropping down on him like balm from the air. If the ancient benefactor who caused the bells of St. Clement Danes’ church to be arranged to play that chime so many times a day is allowed to hover round the steeple at such times, to watch the effect of his benefaction on posterity, he must have been well satisfied on that evening. Tom passed under the Bar, and turned into the Temple another man, softened again, and in his right mind.

“There’s always a voice saying the right thing to you somewhere, if you’ll only listen for it,” he thought.
Chapter 135
“It was because you were out of sorts with the world, smarting with the wrongs you saw on every side, struggling[277] after something better and higher, and siding and sympathizing with the poor and weak, that I loved you. We should never have been here, dear, if you had been a young gentleman satisfied with himself and the world, and likely to get on well in society.”

“Ah, Mary, it’s all very well for a man. It’s a man’s business. But why is a woman’s life to be made wretched? Why should you be dragged into all my perplexities, and doubts, and dreams, and struggles?”

“And why should I not?”

“Life should be all bright and beautiful to a woman. It is every man’s duty to shield her from all that can vex, or pain, or soil.”

“But have women different souls from men?”

“God forbid!”

“Then are we not fit to share your highest hopes?”

“To share our highest hopes! Yes, when we have any. But the mire and clay where one sticks fast over and over again, with no high hopes or high anything else in sight—a man must be a selfish brute to bring one he pretends to love into all that.”

“Now, Tom,” she said almost solemnly, “you are not true to yourself. Would you, part with your own deepest convictions? Would you if you could, go back to the time when you cared for and thought about none of these things?”

“He thought a minute, and then, pressing her hand, said:[278]

“No, dearest, I would not. The consciousness of the darkness in one and around one brings the longing for light. And then the light dawns; through mist and fog, perhaps, but enough to pick one’s way by.” He stopped a moment, and then added, “and shines ever brighter unto the-perfect day. Yes, I begin to know it.”

“Then, why not put me on your own level? Why not let me pick my way by your side? Cannot a woman feel the wrongs that are going on in the world? Cannot she long to see them set right, and pray that they may be set right? We are not meant to sit in fine silks, and look pretty, and spend money, any more than you are meant to make it, and cry peace where there is no peace. If a woman cannot do much herself, she can honor and love a man who can.”

He turned to her, and bent over her, and kissed her forehead, and kissed her lips. She looked up with sparkling eyes and said:

“Am I not right, dear?”

“Yes, you are right, and I have been false to my creed. You have taken a load off my heart, dearest. Henceforth there shall be but one mind and one soul between us. You have made me feel what it is that a man wants, what is the help that is meet for him.”

He looked into her eyes, and kissed her again; and then rose up, for there was something within him like a moving of new life, which lifted him, and set him on[279] his feet. And he stood with kindling brow, gazing into the autumn air, as his heart went sorrowing, but hopefully “sorrowing, back through all the faultful past.” And she sat on at first, and watched his face; and neither spoke nor moved for some minutes. Then she rose too, and stood by his side:
And on her lover’s arm she leant,
And round her waist she felt it fold;
And so across the hills they went,
In that new world which is the old.
Chapter 136
There is no recorded end of a life that I know of more entirely brave and manly than the one of Captain John Brown, of which we know every minutest detail, as it happened in the full glare of our modern life not twenty years ago. About that I think there would scarcely be disagreement anywhere. The very men who allowed him to lie in his bloody clothes till the day of his execution, and then hanged him, recognized this. “You are a game man, Captain Brown,” the Southern sheriff said in the wagon. “Yes,” he answered, “I was so brought up. It was one of my mother’s lessons. From infancy I have not suffered from physical fear. I have suffered a thousand times more from bashfulness;” and then he kissed a negro child in its mother’s arms, and walked cheerfully on to the scaffold, thankful that he[280] was “allowed to die for a cause, and not merely to pay the debt of nature, as all must.”

There is no simpler or nobler record in the “Book of Martyrs,” and in passing I would only remind you, that he at least was ready to acknowledge from whence came his strength. “Christ, the great Captain of liberty as well as of salvation,” he wrote just before his death, “saw fit to take from me the sword of steel after I had carried it for a time. But he has put another in my hand, the sword of the Spirit, and I pray God to make me a faithful soldier wherever he may send me.” And to a friend who left him with the words, “If you can be true to yourself to the end how glad we shall be,” he answered, “I cannot say, but I do not think I shall deny my Lord and Master, Jesus Christ.”
Chapter 137
Patience, humility, and utter forgetfulness of self are the true royal qualities.
Chapter 138
“By the light of burning martyr fires Christ’s bleeding feet I track,
Toiling up new Calvaries ever with the cross that turns not back.”

All chance of the speedy triumph of the kingdom of God, humanly speaking, in the lake country of Galilee—the battle-field chosen by himself, where his mightiest[281] works had been done and his mightiest words spoken—the district from which his chosen companions came, and in which clamorous crowds had been ready to declare him king—is now over. The conviction that this is so, that he is a baffled leader, in hourly danger of his life, has forced itself on Christ. Before entering that battle-field, face to face with the tempter in the wilderness, he had deliberately rejected all aid from the powers and kingdoms of this world, and now, for the moment, the powers of this world have proved too strong for him.

The rulers of that people—Pharisee, Sadducee, and Herodian, scribe and lawyer—were now marshalled against him in one compact phalanx, throughout all the coasts of Galilee, as well as in Judea.

His disciples, rough, most of them peasants, full of patriotism, but with small power of insight or self-control, were melting away from a leader who, while he refused them active service under a patriot chief at open war with C?sar and his legions, bewildered them by assuming titles and talking to them in language which they could not understand. They were longing for one who would rally them against the Roman oppressor, and give them a chance, at any rate, of winning their own land again, purged of the heathen and free from tribute. Such an one would be worth following to the death. But what could they make of this “Son of Man,” who would prove his title to that name by giving his body[282] and pouring out his blood for the life of man—of this “Son of God,” who spoke of redeeming mankind and exalting mankind to God’s right hand, instead of exalting the Jew to the head of mankind?

In the face of such a state of things, to remain in Capernaum, or the neighboring towns and villages, would have been to court death, there, and at once. The truly courageous man, you may remind me, is not turned from his path by the fear of death, which is the supreme test and touchstone of his courage. True; nor was Christ so turned, even for a moment.

Whatever may have been his hopes in the earlier part of his career, by this time he had no longer a thought that mankind could be redeemed without his own perfect and absolute sacrifice and humiliation. The cup would indeed have to be drunk to the dregs, but not here, nor now. This must be done at Jerusalem, the centre of the national life and the seat of the Roman government. It must be done during the Passover, the national commemoration of sacrifice and deliverance. And so he withdraws, with a handful of disciples, and even they still wayward, half-hearted, doubting, from the constant stress of a battle which has turned against him. From this time he keeps away from the great centres of population, except when, on two occasions—at the Feast of Tabernacles and the Feast of the Dedication—he flashes for a day on Jerusalem, and then disappears again into some haunt of outlaws, or of wild beasts. This portion[283] of his life comprises something less than the last twelve months, from the summer of the second year of his ministry till the eve of the last Passover, at Easter, in the third year.

In glancing at the main facts of this period, as we have done in the former ones, we have to note chiefly his intercourse with the twelve apostles, and his preparation of them for the end of his own career and the beginning of theirs; his conduct at Jerusalem during those two autumnal and winter feasts, and the occasions when he again comes into collision with the rulers and Pharisees, both at these feasts, and in the intervals between them.

The keynote of it, in spite of certain short and beautiful interludes, appears to me to be a sense of loneliness and oppression, caused by the feeling that he has work to do, and words to speak, which those for whom they are to be done and spoken, and whom they are, first of all men, to bless, will either misunderstand or abhor. Here is all the visible result of his labor and of his travail, and the enemy is gathering strength every day.

This becomes clear, I think, at once, when, in the first days after his quitting the lake shores, he asks his disciples the question, “Whom do the world, and whom do ye, say that I am?” He is answered by Peter in the well-known burst of enthusiasm, that, though the people only look on him as a prophet, such as Elijah or Jeremiah, his own chosen followers see in him “the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

[284]

It is this particular moment which he selects for telling them distinctly, that Christ will not triumph as they regard triumphing; that he will fall into the power of his enemies, and be humbled and slain by them. At once the proof comes of how little even the best of his own most intimate friends had caught the spirit of his teaching or of his kingdom. The announcement of his humiliation and death, which none but the most truthful and courageous of men would have made at such a moment, leaves them almost as much bewildered as the crowds in the lake cities had been a few days before.

Their hearts are faithful and simple, and upon them, as Peter has testified, the truth has flashed once for all, and there can be no other Saviour of men than this man with whom they are living. Still, by what means and to what end the salvation shall come, they are scarcely less ignorant than the people who had been in vain seeking from him a sign such as they desired. His own elect “understood not his saying, and it was hid from them, that they perceived it not.” Rather, indeed, they go straight from that teaching to dispute amongst themselves who of them shall be the greatest in that kingdom which they understand so little. And so their Master has to begin again at the beginning of his teaching, and, placing a little child amongst them, to declare that not of such men as they deem themselves, but of such as this child, is the kingdom of heaven.

The episode of the Transfiguration follows; and[285] immediately after it, as though purposely to warn even the three chosen friends who had been present against new delusions, he repeats again the teaching as to his death and humiliation. And he reiterates it whenever any exhibition of power or wisdom seems likely to encourage the frame of mind in the twelve generally which had lately brought the great rebuke on Peter. How slowly it did its work, even with the foremost disciples, there are but too many proofs.

Amongst his kinsfolk and the people generally, his mission, thanks to the cabals of the rulers and elders, had come by this time to be looked upon with deep distrust and impatience. “How long dost thou make us to doubt? Go up to this coming feast, and there prove your title before those who know how to judge in such matters,” is the querulous cry of the former as the Feast of Tabernacles approaches. He does not go up publicly with the caravan, which would have been at this time needlessly to incur danger, but, when the feast is half over, suddenly appears in the temple. There he again openly affronts the rulers by justifying his former acts, and teaching and proclaiming that he who has sent him is true, and is their God.

It is evidently on account of this new proof of daring that the people now again begin to rally around him. “Behold, he speaketh boldly. Do our rulers know that this is Christ?” is the talk which fills the air, and induces[286] the scribes and Pharisees, for the first time, to attempt his arrest by their officers.

The officers return without him, and their masters are, for the moment, powerless before the simple word of him who, as their own servants testify, “speaks as never man spake.” But if they cannot arrest and execute, they may entangle him further, and prepare for their day, which is surely and swiftly coming. So they bring to him the woman taken in adultery, and draw from him the discourse in which he tells them that the truth will make them free—the truth which he has come to tell them, but which they will not hear, because they are of their father the devil. He ends with asserting his claim to the name which every Jew held sacred, “before Abraham was, I am.” The narrative of the seventh and eighth chapters of St. John, which record these scenes at the Feast of Tabernacles, have, I believe, done more to make men courageous and truly manly than all the stirring accounts of bold deeds which ever were written elsewhere.
Chapter 139
All that was best and worst in the Jewish character and history combined to render the Roman yoke intolerably galling to the nation. The peculiar position of Jerusalem—a sort of Mecca to the tribes acknowledging the Mosaic law—made Syria the most dangerous[287] of all the Roman provinces. To that city enormous crowds of pilgrims of the most stiff-necked and fanatical of all races flocked, three times at least in every year, bringing with them offerings and tribute for the temple and its guardians, on a scale which must have made the hierarchy at Jerusalem formidable even to the world’s master, by their mere command of wealth.

But this would be the least of the causes of anxiety to the Roman governor, as he spent year after year face to face with these terrible leaders of a terrible people.

These high priests and rulers of the Jews were indeed quite another kind of adversaries from the leaders, secular or religious, of any of those conquered countries which the Romans were wont to treat with contemptuous toleration. They still represented living traditions of the glory and sanctity of their nation, and of Jerusalem, and exercised still a power over that nation which the most resolute and ruthless of Roman procurators did not care wantonly to brave.

At the same time the yoke of high priest and scribe and Pharisee was even heavier on the necks of their own people than that of the Roman. They had built up a huge superstructure of traditions and ceremonies round the law of Moses, which they held up to the people as more sacred and binding than the law itself. This superstructure was their special charge. This was, according to them, the great national inheritance, the most valuable portion of the covenant which God had made[288] with their fathers. To them, as leaders of their nation—a select, priestly, and learned caste—this precious inheritance had been committed. Outside that caste, the dim multitude, “the people which knoweth not the law,” were despised while they obeyed, accursed as soon as they showed any sign of disobedience. Such being the state of Judea, it would not be easy to name in all history a less hopeful place for the reforming mission of a young carpenter, a stranger from a despised province, one entirely outside the ruling caste, though of the royal race, and who had no position whatever in any rabbinical school.

In Galilee the surroundings were slightly different, but scarcely more promising. Herod Antipas, the weakest of that tyrant family, the seducer of his brother’s wife, the fawner on C?sar, the spendthrift oppressor of the people of his tetrarchy, still ruled in name over the country, but with Roman garrisons in the cities and strongholds. Face to face with him, and exercising an imperium in imperio throughout Galilee were the same priestly caste, though far less formidable to the civil power and to the people, than in the southern province. Along the western coast of the Sea of Galilee, the chief scene of our Lord’s northern ministry, lay a net-work of towns densely inhabited, and containing a large admixture of Gentile traders. This infusion of foreign blood, the want of any such religious centre as Jerusalem, and the contempt with which the southern Jews regarded[289] their provincial brethren of Galilee, had no doubt loosened to some extent the yoke of the priests and scribes and lawyers in that province. But even here their traditionary power over the masses of the people was very great, and the consequences of defying their authority as penal, though the penalty might be neither so swift or so certain, as in Jerusalem itself. Such was the society into which Christ came.

It is not easy to find a parallel case in the modern world, but perhaps the nearest exists in a portion of our own empire. The condition of parts of India in our day resembles in some respects that of Palestine in the year A. D. 30. In the Mahratta country, princes, not of the native dynasty, but the descendants of foreign courtiers (like the Idumean Herods), are reigning. British residents at their courts, hated and feared, but practically all-powerful as Roman procurators, answer to the officers and garrisons of Rome in Palestine. The people are in bondage to a priestly caste scarcely less heavy than that which weighed on the Judean and Galilean peasantry. If the Mahrattas were Mohammedans, and Mecca were situate in the territory of Scindia or Holkar; if the influence of twelve centuries of Christian training could be wiped out of the English character, and the stubborn and fierce nature of the Jew substituted for that of the Mahratta; a village reformer amongst them, whose preaching outraged the Brahmins, threatened the dynasties, and disturbed the English residents,[290] would start under somewhat similar conditions to those which surrounded Christ when he commenced his ministry.

In one respect, and one only, the time seemed propitious. The mind and heart of the nation was full of the expectation of a coming Messiah—a King who should break every yoke from off the necks of his people, and should rule over the nations, sitting on the throne of David. The intensity of this expectation had, in the opening days of his ministry, drawn crowds into the wilderness beyond Jordan from all parts of Judea and Galilee, at the summons of a preacher who had caught up the last cadence of the song of their last great prophet, and was proclaiming that both the deliverance and the kingdom which they were looking for were at hand. In those crowds who flocked to hear John the Baptist there were doubtless some even amongst the priests and scribes, and many amongst the poor Jewish and Galilean peasantry, who felt that there was a heavier yoke upon them than that of Rome or of Herod Antipas. But the record of the next three years shows too clearly that even these were wholly unprepared for any other than a kingdom of this world, and a temporal throne to be set up in the holy city.

And so, from the first, Christ had to contend not only against the whole of the established powers of Palestine, but against the highest aspirations of the best of his countrymen. These very Messianic hopes, in fact,[291] proved the greatest stumbling-block in his path. Those who entertained them most vividly had the greatest difficulty in accepting the carpenter’s son as the promised Deliverer. A few days only before the end he had sorrowfully to warn the most intimate and loving of his companions and disciples, “Ye know not what spirit ye are of.”
Chapter 140
The Jews were always thinking of their exclusive religious privileges, of the sacredness of the Temple and of the law, and of the questionable and dangerous position of those who were outside the covenant. Now this habit of mind, undoubtedly religious as it was, is not held up to our admiration in the New Testament, but the contrary. It is denounced as being the opposite of a true spirituality. It is shown to us as associated with intolerance, bigotry, hardness, cruelty, as most offensive to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and fruitful of mischief in the world. St. Paul had to undergo the reproach of being disloyal to the religion of his fathers, because he contended against this ecclesiastical spirit. But the reproach was as unjust as it was painful to him. He loved the holy city and the temple and the ordinances of the law and his kindred according to the flesh; but he knew that the proper[292] aim of a devout man was not to hedge round an organization, but to glorify and bear witness to the Divine Spirit.
Chapter 141
Not St. Paul only, but all the Apostles and Evangelists, were continually contemplating the heavenly glory of a brotherhood of men in full harmony with each other because all joined to Christ, of men walking in humility and meekness and love, endeavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is nothing in such an ideal less suited to us to-day than to the Christians of the first age. For ourselves, and for our neighbors and fellow-men, this hope should be in our hearts, this Divine ideal before our eyes. Let us believe that it is the Divine purpose, and that we are called to the fulfilment of it.
Chapter 142
Is it not an express principle in the teaching of our Lord himself and of his Apostles, that means and instruments and agencies are not to be worshipped in themselves but to be estimated with reference to the end they are to promote? Think, for example, what is implied in that pregnant sentence, “The Sabbath was[293] made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.” Means and instruments are not dishonored by this principle. If the end they serve is high and precious, they also will deserve to be valued. If the spiritual freedom of man is important, then the ordinance of a Day of Rest, which ministers to it, may well be sacred. But it is often appointed in the Providence of God that an apparent dishonor should be cast on means, that the minds of men may be forced away from resting upon them. And means may be varied, according to circumstances, whilst the same permanent end is to be sought.
Chapter 143
Wherever there is good, in whatever Samaritan or heathen we may see kindness and the fear of God, there we are to welcome it and rejoice in it in our Father’s name.

There is no respect of persons with God, no acceptance of any man on account of his religion or his profession; under whatever religious garb, he that loveth is born of God, he that doeth righteousness is born of God. There is no danger in being ready to appreciate simple goodness and to refer it to the working of the Divine Spirit wherever we may find it; there is the greatest danger in failing to appreciate it. This is doctrine of unquestionable Divine authority, which we[294] may often have opportunities of putting into practice. Let us remember to cherish it in all our dealings with those who do not belong to our own church. Let us be afraid lest nature and the flesh should make us intolerant and unsympathetic; let us be sure that Christ and the Spirit would win us to modesty and reverence and sympathy.
Chapter 144
“There is one body and one spirit, even as ye were called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.” With this unity, there are distinctions of function; and each member, St. Paul holds, has his own gift of endowment to enable him to fill his own place. Christ is the great Giver, and besides these gifts to the several members of the body, he gave to the body as a whole the apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers, by whose various ministries sinful and self-willed men were to be moulded into true members, and ultimate perfecting of the body to be accomplished. St. Paul looked forward in hope to the time when the Body of Christ might be not only ideally perfect, but actually perfect also, in its adult growth and in the harmonious co-operation of all its parts.
Chapter 145
There may be every sort of defect and irregularity in the men and women whom Christ has called to be his members. The unity is not made by them, and does not depend upon them. Their business is to keep the unity, to conform themselves to it. The supernatural body of Christ is the ideal one, and it is realized with various degrees of imperfection wherever men acknowledge Christ as their head.
Chapter 146
As I understand the word “politician,” it means a man who, whatever his other engagements in life may be, and however he may earn his daily bread, feels above all things deeply interested, feels that he is bound to be deeply interested, and to take as active a part as he can, in the public affairs of his country. I believe that every Englishman, if he is worth anything at all, is bound to be a politician, and can’t for the life of him help taking a deep interest in the public affairs of his country. The object of politics is the well-being of the nation, or in other words to make “a wise and understanding people.” Now, what are the means by which a wise and an understanding people is to be made? Well, of course, the chief means of making a wise and[296] understanding people is by training them up in wisdom and understanding. The State wants men who are brave, truthful, generous; the State wants women who are pure, simple, gentle. By what means is the State to get citizens of that kind?

Such a politician looking around him and seeing how the national conscience is to be touched—for unless the national conscience be touched you can never raise citizens of that kind—finds that the great power which alone can do it, is that which goes by the name of religion.
Chapter 147
The true work of the Liberal Party in a Liberal age is, with singleness of purpose and all its might, to lift the people to a fair and full share of all the best things of this life,—its highest culture, hopes, aspirations, burdens—as well as its loaves and fishes—and, setting before them a truly noble ideal of citizenship, to help them to attain it. Whatever goes beyond that, or beside that, savors of Jacobinism, for then comes in that jealousy which is the bane of true democracy. The true democrat has no old scores to pay, covets no man’s good things, wants nothing for himself which is not open to his neighbors, will destroy nothing which others value merely because he doesn’t value it himself, unless it is palpably and incurably unjust and unrighteous.[297] I need not go on to contrast the Jacobin with him, beyond saying that the one is before all things constructive, the other destructive.
Chapter 148
A liberal politician is a man who looks to the future and not to the past; he looks for progress; he desires to see the whole nation raised; he desires to go on from better things to better things, and he is not afraid of new things; he holds that every institution must be tried by its worth and its value to the nation;—he holds above all things that there should be equality before the law for every institution, for every society, and for every individual citizen.
Chapter 149
Alfred the Great had his problems of anarchy, widespread lawlessness, terrorism, to meet. After the best thought he could give to the business, he met them and prevailed. Like diseases call for like cures; and we may assume without fear that a remedy which has been very successful in one age is at least worth looking at in another.

We too, like Alfred, have our own troubles—our land-questions, labor-questions, steady increase of pauperism, and others. In our struggle for life we fight[298] with different weapons, and have our advantages of one kind or another over our ancestors; but when all is said and done there is scarcely more coherence in the English nation of to-day than in that of 1079. Individualism, no doubt, has its noble side; and “every man for himself” is a law which works wonders; but we cannot shut our eyes to the fact that under their action English life has become more and more disjointed, threatening in some directions altogether to fall to pieces. What we specially want is something which shall bind us more closely together. Every nation of Christendom is feeling after the same thing. The need of getting done in some form that which frank-pledge did for Alfred’s people expresses itself in Germany in mutual-credit banks, open to every honest citizen; in France, in the productive associations of all kinds; at home, in our co-operative movements and trades-union.

No mere machinery, nothing that governments or legislatures can do in our day, will be of much help, but they may be great hindrances. The study of the modern statesman must be how to give such movements full scope and a fair chance, so that the people may be able without let or hindrance to work out in their own way the principle which Alfred brought practically home to his England, that in human society men cannot divest themselves of responsibility for their neighbors, and ought not to be allowed to attempt it.
Chapter 150

The more attentively we study Alfred’s life, the more clearly does the practical wisdom of his methods of government justify itself by results. Of strong princes, with minds “rectified and prepared” on the Machiavellian model, the world has had more than enough, who have won kingdoms for themselves, and used them for themselves, and so left a bitter inheritance to their children and their people. It is well that, here and there in history, we can point to a king whose reign has proved that the highest success in government is not only compatible with, but dependent upon, the highest Christian morality.
Chapter 151
Think well over your important steps in life, and having made up your minds, never look behind.
Chapter 152
A gentleman should shrink from the possibility of having to come on others, even on his own father, for the fulfilment of his obligations, as he would from a lie. I would sooner see a son of mine in his grave than crawling on through life a slave to wants and habits which he must gratify at other people’s expense.
Chapter 153
No two men take a thing just alike, and very few can sit down quietly when they have lost a fall in life’s wrestle, and say, “Well, here I am, beaten no doubt this time. By my own fault too. Now, take a good look at me, my good friends, as I know you all want to do, and say your say out, for I mean getting up again directly and having another turn at it.”
Chapter 154
No man who is worth his salt can leave a place where he has gone through hard and searching discipline, and been tried in the very depths of his heart, without regret, however much he may have winced under the discipline. It is no light thing to fold up and lay by for ever a portion of one’s life, even when it can be laid by with honor and in thankfulness.

The End