THE life of words is like in some ways to the life of men; the soul
changes within them, though the form remains the same. Yet while
language is still living it may regain something of its old power
beneath the poet's healing fingers, and now and again a master of words
will recall for us some dying form of speech. A writer of power is
needed, surely to win us back the older and wiser use of the word
sacrament as a spiritual symbol, the revelation of the unseen through
the visible, the unfolding of the unknown through the known. "The image
of the world," wrote Bacon, [22] "is a message of the Divine
wisdom and power"; to many a mystic it has been more even than this, and
nature has been full of sacraments bringing life from things not seen.
The story is told of the old Calabrian Abbot, Joachim da Fiore, that as
he was saying vespers in some little church among the mountains, the
glory of the setting sun caught his eye through the open [p.86 ] door of
the nave. Suddenly realizing how much more beautiful was the great
temple of the sunlit sky than the painted stone walls of his little
building made with hands, he led his congregation out into the open air,
and with nature's ritual around them they went on praying, gazing upon
the picture of that evening landscape and the wonder of the sunset
above. Though he was the adopted father of many admirable heretics, and
for long a suspect himself, Blessed Joachim did not offend thus more
than once, as far as we know, against the laws of ritual. But many
another saint must have been tempted to do as he did. It is, indeed,
easy for us to understand how in the old days every high place had its
altar, and how again and again in later times solitude upon a mountain
has seemed to give the most congenial atmosphere for prayer.
Unconsciously, and quite apart from our beliefs, we instinctively turn
in physical weariness, and often in other troubles, to the calm rest of
nature. However much at times we may ponder her sterner side, and search
in vain to explain to ourselves the mysteries of death and pain with
which she confronts us constantly, it is not these things of which she
speaks to man, when he goes to her sad and weary, like a tired child to
his nurse. A feeling of quietness, beneath which lies strength, the dim
apprehension of law, inexplicable indeed, but majestic and even
beautiful, and above all that indefinable sense of peace which comes to
us sometimes when we [p.87] are in the presence of that which is
immeasurably greater than ourselves, all this may nature bring to us,
when we go to her alone with our troubles. The old stoics must have
sometimes felt this, though to the Roman mind at least wild nature did
not usually possess the attractive power it has for us. One cannot but
feel that when Marcus Aurelius cries to the Universe "that which is
harmonious to thee, is to me too," he is conscious of something of this
feeling in which our petty cares and troubles sink into nothingness amid
the waters of the great ocean of universal life; though he arrived at
the sense of this rather by inward meditation than by the contemplation
of nature without him. And whatever the philosophers may have felt, one
has no doubt of the poets. Propertius, alone in the Umbrian highlands by
the sources of the Tiber, and Catullus, listening to the ripple of the
waves of Garda, were able for a moment to rise above the pain and fire
of passion into a calmer air; and yet the Roman poets have no such sense
of the overwhelming majesty and order of nature as came to the Hebrew
Psalmists.
The Roman had still in dim recesses of his consciousness the feelings of
an earlier age, for which every wild wood was peopled with mysterious
powers; nature was full of unknown agencies whose workings man could but
dimly perceive, and the ancient rites of his religion were the charms by
which he held at bay the strange potencies of evil that surrounded him.
The [p.88] Hebrew poet looked on nature even in her sterner aspects with
the eyes of faith; hailstorm and thunder, and the very sea his people
thought of with such dread, brought revelations to him of the Divine
power controlling all; and because of this sense of unity, the mystery
and wonder of the starry sky seemed to his inward ear vocal with
harmonies. In some ways there has come to us in the last two centuries
fuller knowledge of that reign of law which formed a part of the
religious consciousness of the poets of ancient Israel. Science speaks
to us of the insignificance of man beside the illimitable greatness of
the universe of which he is ever striving to gain some knowledge, and
trains us to revere the majesty of laws which he can only imperfectly
apprehend. Yet it is well known how sadly one great leader of modern
science regretted that in his old age he was no longer able to know the
feeling of the beauty and majesty of the Alpine landscape which had so
often helped him in the past, because, as it seemed to him, the habit of
scientific analysis had taken from him that simpler sense of the earlier
years, the direct consciousness of a beauty he could not explain. So
true it is that the child's eyes and the childlike spirit only find the
entrance into the Kingdom of Heaven, which is hid to the wise. One must
not suppose, indeed, that the closing of this one door into the unseen
means that others, too, are shut, or else the lot of the city-dweller
would be even worse than it is. Dr. Johnson, kindliest and best [p.89]
of townsmen, though he said that to see one green field was to see all
green fields, was yet keenly sensitive to many of the lesser sacraments
of man's social life; and those who read his prayers and meditations
know that the invisible realities were to him no mere object of
intellectual belief, but the atmosphere of his inmost thought. Yet it is
a thing to be regretted that the habit of scientific research and the
ordinary course of town life do too often so mould our faculties as to
impede that vision which the contemplation of Nature still brings to the
simple heart. The student's loss has its compensations, and may even
involve in it an element of the noblest sacrifice; but this cannot be
said of the man whose whole life is wrapped up in the making of money
and in the pleasures and concerns of conventional urban society. Such
men are robbing not only themselves and their families of the things
which make life worth living, but a far wider circle; for they are
helping to keep in being a civilization which deprives thousands of city
children of ever knowing what the sacraments of nature mean. The
majority of Londoners have never seen the sun rise, save over smoking
chimneys; they have never been able to watch the full moon sailing
across the clear blue of a cloudless night; never known a morning filled
with the joyous exhilaration of sunlight only dimmed by the mist of the
vanishing dew. Still less do such town-dwellers understand of the lonely
silence of the night in the [p.90] open country, in which men may feel
themselves back again amid the childhood of the race. True, the amber
haze of day in London and the flicker of the gas lamps in the streets at
night have a beauty of their own; but it is dearly bought if the price
must be, at least for the greater part of our poorer men and women, and
for almost all the children, so heavy a one as this. The civilization
which shuts out from its gaze the vision of the stars may well grow
blind to greater mysteries; if men will not listen to the music of the
spheres, how should they hear the angel's song?