Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, to the strangers scattered throughout
Asia Minor, addressed the urgent appeal that _as_ strangers—strangers and
pilgrims—they should abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the
soul.
Consider what you are, he seems to say, as his words are paraphrased
by the greatest of all commentators on his first epistle: “If you were
citizens of this world, then you might drive the same trade” with the
men of this world, “and follow the same lusts; but seeing you are chosen
and called out of this world, and invested into a new society, made free
of another city, and are therefore here but travellers passing through
to your own country, it is very reasonable that there be this difference
betwixt you and the world, that while they live at home your carriage be
such as fits strangers, not glutting yourselves with their pleasures,
nor surfeiting upon their delicious fruits, as some unwary travellers
do abroad; but as wise strangers living warily and soberly, and still
minding most of all your journey homewards, suspecting dangers and snares
in your way, and so walking with a holy fear, as the Hebrew word for a
stranger imports.”
The topic is one upon which Archbishop Leighton ever writes feelingly.
As again in his comment on the psalmist’s profession of being a stranger
with God, and a sojourner as all his fathers were, the same devout
expositor observes that he who looks on himself as a stranger, and is
sensible of the darkness round about him in this wilderness, will often
put up that request with David, “I am a stranger in the earth: hide not
Thy commandments from me.” What, Leighton asks, is the joy of our life,
but the thoughts of that other life, our home before us? “And certainly
he that lives much in these thoughts, set him where you will here, he is
not much pleased nor displeased; but if His Father call him home, that
word gives him his heart’s desire.”
Once again, in the sixth of his lectures on the immortality of the soul,
Leighton expatiates on the fact that this is not our rest, that we have
no place of residence here below: “it is the region of fleas and gnats;
and while we search for happiness among these mean and perishing things,
we are not only sure to be disappointed, but also not to escape those
miseries which, in great numbers, continually beset us; so that we may
apply to ourselves the saying of the famous artist confined in the island
of Crete, and truly say,—
“‘Nec tellus nostræ, nec patet unda fugæ,
Restat iter cœli, cœlo tentabimus ire.’”
(“The earth and the sea are shut up against us, and neither of them can
favour our escape; the way to heaven is alone open, and this way we will
strive to go.”)
Incidentally, it adds to the interest of every such passage in Leighton’s
writings to remember a noteworthy circumstance respecting his death.
He had been used to say that if he were to choose a place to die in it
should be an inn—for that would look so like a pilgrim’s going home, to
whom this world was all as an inn. It was his opinion, also, as we read
in the memoir of him by Aikman, that “the officious tenderness and care
of friends was an entanglement to a dying man, and that the unconcerned
attendance of those who could be procured in such a place would give less
disturbance.” He had his wish. At the Bell Inn, Warwick Lane, Robert
Leighton, in his seventy-fourth year, stranger and pilgrim, drew his last
breath.
“An inn receives me, where, unknown,
I solitary sit me down;
Many I hear, and some I see—
I nought to them, they nought to me.
Thus, in those regions of the dead,
A pilgrim’s wandering life I lead;
And still at every step declare
I’ve no abiding city here.
...
The world is like an inn; for there
Men call and storm and drink and swear;
While undisturbed the Christian waits,
And reads and writes and meditates.
Though in the dark ofttimes I stray,
The Lord shall light me on my way;
And to the city of the sun
Conduct me, when my journey’s done.
There by these eyes shall He be seen,
Who sojourned for me at an inn;
On Sion’s hill I those shall hail
From whom I parted in the vale.”
Of him who walks by faith and not by sight, who places eternity by the
side of time, and so regards the one as a mere path or stepping-stone to
the other, it is well said by Dr. Chalmers that he actually moves through
life in the spirit of a traveller, feels his home to be heaven, and all
his dearest hopes and interests to be laid up there; “walking therefore
over the world with a more light and unencumbered step than other men,
just because all its adversities to him are but the crosses of a rapid
journey, and all its joys but the shifting scenery of the land through
which he is travelling, and visions of passing loveliness.”
As in the pilgrim’s song of a contemporary clerical poet:
“My rest is in heaven; my rest is not here:
Then why should I murmur when trials are near?
Be hushed, my dark spirit! the worst that can come
But shortens thy journey, and hastens thee home.
...
A scrip on my back, and a staff in my hand,
I march on in haste through an enemy’s land:
The road may be rough, but it cannot be long;
And I’ll smooth it with hope, and I’ll cheer it with song.”
The second of Bishop Beveridge’s Resolutions comprises this
utterance,—after the expression of a longing that he could be ever on
the mount, taking a view of the land of Canaan, for then what dreams and
shadows would all things here below appear to be,—“Well! by the grace of
God, I am resolved no longer to tie myself to sense and sight, the sordid
and trifling affairs of this life, but always to walk as one of the other
world; to behave myself in all places, and at all times, as one already
possessed of my inheritance and an inhabitant of the New Jerusalem;—by
faith assuring myself I have but a few more days to live below, a little
more work to do, and be admitted to a nearer vision and fruition of God,
and see Him face to face.” And thus, although at present here in the
flesh, the believer’s resolve is to look upon himself as more really an
inhabitant of heaven than abiding (for here we have no continuing city)
upon earth.
In the words of _l’exilé_ of Lamennais, “La patrie n’est point ici-bas;
l’homme vainement l’y cherche; ce qu’il prend pour elle n’est qu’un gite
d’une nuit.” Happy they, exclaims Pascal in his _Pensées_, whose tears
are shed, not at the evanescence of all things earthly and perishable,
but when they remember Sion—_dans le souvenir de leur chère patrie_—the
heavenly Jerusalem, after which they sigh continually in the weariness of
their exile. But as Schiller’s Thekla replies to Neubrunn’s comment on
“the journey’s weary length,”—
“The pilgrim, travelling to a distant shrine
Of hope and healing, does not count the leagues.”
John Foster describes the Israelite indeed, who is a pilgrim indeed, as
resembling a person whose eye, while he is conversing with you about an
object or a succession of objects, should glance every moment towards
some great obstacle appearing on the distant horizon. “He seems to
talk to his friends in somewhat of the manner of expression with which
you can imagine that Elijah spoke, if he remarked to his companion any
circumstance in the journey from Bethel to Jericho, and from Jericho
to the Jordan; a manner betraying the sublime anticipation which was
pressing on his thoughts.” To other pilgrims the vision of the land that
is very far off may be, as Professor Maurice puts it, not so clear as
they wish; but it is more clear than their vision of anything which lies
about them; and without it all would be shadow and darkness. “There, in
that state, must lie all that they dream of and hope for.” “There only
they must live, or have no life.” “When they pray ‘Thy kingdom come,’
they ask that the Great Shepherd will lead them and their brethren out of
a land of pits, a thirsty wilderness, a valley of the shadow of death,
to a peaceable habitation and a sure dwelling-place.” There is a bleak
desert, in the words of one who wrote sacred songs, though himself no
sacred poet,—
... “where daylight grows weary
Of wasting its smiles on a desert so dreary—
What may that desert be?
’Tis life, cheerless life, where the few joys that come
Are lost like that daylight, for ’tis not their home.
There is a lone pilgrim, before whose faint eyes
The water he pants for but sparkles and flies—
Who may that pilgrim be?
’Tis man, hapless man, through this life tempted on
By fair shining hopes, that in shining are gone.”
In that essay of John Foster’s, from which a citation has already been
made, the essayist protests against the care so many popular writers
seem to take to guard against the inroad of ideas pertaining to another
life—as much care as the inhabitants of Holland take against the
irruption of the sea; and their writings, he adds, do really form a kind
of moral dyke against the invasion from the other world. “They do not
instruct a man to act, to enjoy, and to suffer, as a being that may by
to-morrow have finally abandoned this orb; everything is done to beguile
the feeling of his being ‘a stranger and a pilgrim on the earth.’” They
fail to recognise the _c’est vrai_ of the Christian lyrist’s avowal, the—
“_’Tis true_, we are but strangers
And sojourners below;
And countless snares and dangers
Surround the path we go:
Though painful and distressing,
Yet there’s a rest above;
And onward still we’re pressing,
To reach that land of love.”
The object of such a pilgrim is progress—or, rather, progress is the
means to an end; and the end is not yet, is not here, but will surely
come, and come quickly, and will not tarry. There is a wicket gate
towards which they are making progress, and it is the portal of a
city that hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God. They who
professedly sojourn here as in a strange country, who obey the call to go
out into a place which they shall after receive for an inheritance; who
confess, and act on the confession, that they are strangers and pilgrims
on the earth; they that say and do such things declare plainly that they
seek a country, a better country—that is, a heavenly.
Chaucer’s “old style” conveys a meaning the world can never be too old to
learn:
“Here is no home, here is but wyldyrnesse.
Forth, pilgrime! forth, best out of thy stalle!
Look up on hye, and thonke God of alle;
Weyve thy lust, and let thy goste thee lede,[18]
And trouthe shall thee delyver, it is no drede.”
We are strangers and sojourners before God, as were all our fathers.
By faith it was that Abraham sojourned in the land of promise, as in a
strange country, dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs
with him of the same promise; in tabernacles, that bespeak the stranger
and pilgrim upon earth; not in houses built to endure. For he confessed,
and denied not, but confessed that here he had no continuing city. True,
a citizen he was of no mean city. But it was not of the earth, earthy.
For he looked for a city which hath foundations, more everlasting than
the hills. Meanwhile, God’s statutes were his songs in the house of his
pilgrimage.
The Bird of God is Wordsworth’s epithet for that “resplendent wanderer”
called by Eastern islanders the Bird of Heaven, and by us of the West,
Bird of Paradise; and, as usual with the serenely meditative bard of
Rydal, there is moral, nay, religious teaching in the symbolism of his
strain:—
“The Bird of God! whose blessed will
She seems performing as she flies
Over the earth and through the skies,
In never-wearied search of Paradise—
Region that crowns her beauty with the name
She bears for us—for us how blest,
How happy at all seasons, could like aim
Uphold our spirits urged to kindred flight
On wings that fear no glance of God’s pure sight,
No tempest from His breath, their promised rest
Seeking with indefatigable quest
Above a world that deems itself most wise
When most enslaved by gross realities!”
An appalling pestilence raged in Carthage, and so gave deadly emphasis to
the exhortations of St. Cyprian, when he, a good shepherd, sought to lead
the sheep of his flock to green pastures and still waters of comfort;
reminding them, as he stood between the living and the dead, while as yet
the plague was stayed not, that they had renounced the world, and were
abiding here as strangers and pilgrims only. “Let us,” he besought them,
“embrace that time which gives to each one his home, which, delivering
us from this world, and loosing us from worldly snares, restores us to
paradise and the kingdom.” Who, he asks, that is placed in a foreign
land, would not hasten to return to his own country? Who that saileth
towards his own, would not eagerly desire a prosperous wind to bring him
swiftly to the embrace of those he loves? “Our country we believe to be
paradise: the patriarchs we esteem our parents. Why, then, do we not
speed and run, that we may behold our country and salute our parents?”
Salutary though the sentiment be, however, it admits of one-sided
exaggeration. There are good people who, for instance, exalt and
expatiate upon the death of godly infants, as though to quit this earth
of ours at the very earliest date were the most blessed of privileges.
The idea of man being sent into the world for any definite purpose
never seems, it has been justly said, to enter the minds of these good
people. “With them life is but an irksome omnibus-journey—the shorter
the better—and to be got over by each without any regard to the comfort
or requirements of his fellow-travellers.” Only in part are these
strictures on “the shorter the better” applicable, if at all, to the
theme and expression of Mrs. Browning’s sonnet:—
“I think we are too ready with complaint
In this fair world of God’s. Had we no hope
Indeed beyond the zenith and the slope
Of yon grey blank of sky, we might grow faint
To muse upon eternity’s constraint
Round our aspirant souls. But since the scope
Must widen early, is it well to droop
For a few days consumed in loss and taint?
O pusillanimous heart! be comforted,
And, like a cheerful traveller, take the road,
Singing beside the hedge. What if the bread
Be bitter in thine inn, and thou unshod
To meet the flints?—At least it may be said,
‘Because the way is _short_, I thank thee, God!’”
Addison devotes a paragraph in one of his _Spectators_ to the fact of
men being in Scripture called strangers and sojourners upon earth, and
life a pilgrimage. And he refers to several heathen as well as Christian
authors, who under the same kind of metaphor have represented the world
as an inn, which was only designed to furnish us with accommodation in
this our passage. It is therefore very absurd, urges our moral essayist,
to think of setting up our rest before we come to our journey’s end; and
not rather to take care of the reception we shall there meet with, than
to fix our thoughts on the little conveniences and advantages which we
enjoy one above another in the way to it.
“The Illusiveness of Life” is the title of a sermon on the patriarchs
as sojourners in a strange country, by the late F. W. Robertson, of
Brighton; who with characteristic force and insight explains the
deception of life’s promise, and the meaning of that deception. He shows
how our natural anticipations deceive us—every human life being a fresh
one, bright with hopes that will never be realized. With our affections,
he goes on to say, it is still worse, because they promise more. “Men’s
affections are but the tabernacles of Canaan—the tents of a night—not
permanent habitations, even for this life.” Where, he asks, are the
charms of character, the perfection and the purity and the truthfulness
which seemed so resplendent in our friend? They were only the shape of
our own conceptions—our creative shaping intellect projected its own
fantasies on him; and hence we outgrow our early friendships—outgrow
the intensity of all: we dwell in tents; we never find a home, even in
the land of promise, any more than Abraham did. “Life is an unenjoyable
Canaan, with nothing real or substantial in it.” But there is another
beside the sentimental way, trite enough, of considering this aspect of
life—as a bubble, a dream, a delusion, a phantasm, and that other is the
way of faith. “The ancient saints felt as keenly as any moralist could
feel the brokenness of life’s promises: they confessed that they were
strangers and pilgrims here; they said that they had here no continuing
city; but they did not mournfully moralize on this; they said it
cheerfully, and rejoiced that it was so.” Strangers—the very term implies
a distant home. Pilgrims—the law of whose pilgrimage is to make progress.
Forgetting the things behind; rating at their true worth the things
around; earnestly pressing forward to the things before. Keble’s devout
lyric on the escape to Zoar is pitched in this key:—
“Sweet is the smile of home; the mutual look
When hearts are of each other sure;
Sweet all the joys that crowd the household nook,
The haunt of all affections pure;
Yet in the world even these abide, and we
Above the world our calling boast:
Once gain the mountain-top, and thou art free:
Till then, who rest, presume; who turn to look, are lost.”
_THE FALSITY OF THE FAMILIAR FRIEND._
PSALM xli. 9.
The psalmist’s enemies were speaking evil of him: when should he die,
and his name perish? All that hated him were whispering together against
him, and devising hurt. But this he could bear, on the part of declared
foes. What he could not bear was that his own familiar friend, in whom he
trusted, and who ate of his bread, should have lifted up his heel against
him.
Hengstenberg remarks that in Judas the expression, “Which did eat of my
bread,” receives its full, its frightful verification, in the fact of his
participating in the Last Supper—to say nothing of habitually sharing in
previous and everyday meals.
Even a comparatively slight wound may be severe when dealt by a friend.
Dr. Colani thinks that never could the Son of man have felt so acutely
the pain caused by opposition and non-recognition as when He received
the message from John the Baptist, inquiring into the credentials of His
Divine mission. That the rulers of the people, that one of the twelve,
that those of His own kin, should doubt or dispute His mission, was hard
enough to bear, but perhaps easy to foresee. But when he who had baptized
Him, who had, so to speak, revealed Him to Himself,—when His “spiritual
father” took his stand among the doubters, “Jesus must have felt a
heartrending surprise, a veritable consternation:” for the Baptist was
not a reed shaken with the wind, and yet, if the Divine hand rested on
that support, what but a reed was it, to pierce, even while it gave way?
The _Et tu, Brute!_ of dying Cæsar is a large utterance, hardly more
deep in reproachful pathos than wide of application. The bitterness of
its import, varying in intensity, has sufficed to choke bad men and good
and indifferent,—as a pang more sharp than all. What stung Jugurtha to
the heart was the treachery of his confidential agent, Bomilcar, who
intrigued to betray him to the Romans. What Cicero professes to have felt
most keenly, during the Clodian troubles, was the perfidious conduct to
him of that Serranus to whom, when consul, he had been so kind; nor was
it the least bitter drop in the cup he had to drain at the last, that the
leader of the band who took his life was one whose life Cicero had once
saved, as counsel for the defence. Antony in the tragedy is naturally
made to brood most resentfully on the being betrayed by one on whose
bosom he had “slept secure of injured faith.” He can forgive a foe, but
not a friend:
“Treason is there in its most horrid shape,
Where trust is greatest.”
Herod the Great felt the pang when that dark and horrible secret, as
Milman calls it, came to light, that Antipater, the beloved son, for whom
he had imbrued his hands in the blood of his own children—Antipater, the
heir of his kingdom—was “clearly proved to have conspired with Pheroras
(B.C. 5) to poison his old and doting father, and thus to secure and
accelerate his own succession.” Michelet’s narrative of the decline and
death of the Emperor Frederick II. comprises this record: “Finally his
chancellor, his dearest friend, Peter de Vineâ, attempted to poison him.
After this last blow it only remained for him to veil his face, like
Cæsar on the ides of March.” And familiar to us all is the story of our
Henry II., sick and bedridden, inquiring the names of the supporters
of his rebellious son Richard. He was for declaring John, the youngest
of his sons, and as he thought the most attached to him, heir to all
his continental dominions. But on hearing the name of his beloved John,
highest on the list of Richard’s adherents, Henry was seized with a sort
of convulsive agitation, sat up in bed, and gazing around with searching
and haggard look, exclaimed, “Can it be true that John, my heart, the
son of my choice, on whom I doted more than on all the rest, and my love
for whom has brought on me all my woes, has fallen from me?” Assured
that so it was, “Well then,” sighed Henry, falling back on his bed, and
turning his face to the wall, “henceforward let all go on as it may; I
no longer care for myself nor for the world.” And in this connection may
be mentioned the dying exclamation of Henry’s murdered chancellor. “What
is this, Reginald?” cried Becket to Fitzurse, when the latter made up to
him, bared sword in hand: “I have loaded you with favours, and _you_ come
to me armed, and in the church?” The last stroke that broke down the aged
Pope Boniface VIII., bowed with the weight of eighty-six years, was the
defection of his favourite and favoured nephew. One may apply to such
defections the upbraidal in a latter-day poem on Old Pictures in Florence:
“Giotto, how, with that soul of yours,
Could you play me false who loved you so?
Some slight if a certain heart endures,
It feels, I would have your fellows know.
Well—I perceive not why I should care
To break a silence that suits them best;
But the thing grows somewhat hard to bear
When I find a Giotto join the rest.”
Most painful to Luther, in his last moments, was the controversy forced
upon him by the defection of so dear a friend as Agricola, the leader of
the Antinomians. He had long before that expressed his “astoundment” at
the secession of Œcolampadius and Regius, and other intimate associates.
“Why should I fret and fume against the papists?” he wrote in 1531: “all
they have done against me has been in fair, open war; we are declared
enemies, and act as such. They who hurt me are my own dear children. My
brothers, _fraterculi mei, aurei amiculi mei_.... I thought I had gone
through, had exhausted all the adversities the evil one could inflict;
but it was not so. My Absalom, the child of my heart, had not deserted
his father, had not poured out ignominy upon David; my Judas, the traitor
who delivered up his master, had not sold me: he has done so now.”
If Mary Stuart had any quarter to which, in her disastrous condition,
she might look for love and favour, it was, says the most popular of
historians of Scotland, her brother Murray. _His_ kindness and compassion
she deserved, after loading him with favours, as well as pardoning him
considerable offences. But his acceptance of the regency broke all
remaining ties of tenderness betwixt him and his sister. Scott is not
romancing when, in an historical romance, he describes her reception
of the news. “The queen gave a sort of shriek, and clapping her hands
together, exclaimed, ‘Comes the arrow out of his quiver?—out of my
brother’s bow?’” When Elizabeth appointed commissioners to inquire into
Mary’s case, the Regent Murray appeared before them, “in the odious
character of the accuser of his sister, benefactress, and sovereign.”
To adopt the sentiment of the most sententious of stage moralists, When
ingratitude barbs the dart of injury, the wound has double danger in it.
What touched Cortez most nearly, at the time of the expulsion from
Mexico, was to find the name of his trusted friend, his _intimado_, his
_privado_, the secretary Duero, at the head of the paper of remonstrance
presented by his disaffected soldiers. We find Louis XVI., on the eve
of his execution, inquiring with calm curiosity, and as though not
personally affected, how certain members of the convention whom he knew
had voted at his trial. Told that his cousin of Orleans had voted for
his death, “Ah!” he exclaimed to Malesherbes, “that affects me more than
all the rest.” It was, remarks Lamartine, the comment of Cæsar when he
recognised the face of Brutus amongst his murderers; he alone roused him
to speak.
So spake the captain of Plymouth, but with more of anger in his sorrow,
in the New England hexameters devoted by Longfellow to Miles Standish,
when he charged John Alder with having supplanted, defrauded, betrayed
him:—
“Yours is the greater treason, for yours is a treason to friendship!
You, who lived under my roof, whom I cherished and loved as a brother;
You, who have fed at my board and drunk of my cup, to whose keeping
I have entrusted my honour, my thoughts the most sacred and secret,—
You too, Brutus! ah, woe to the name of friendship hereafter!”
It was the revolt of his beloved son Conrad which crushed to the earth
the emperor Henry IV. What Dean Milman calls “the almost fatal effect” of
his conduct on his father, can only be ascribed to profound affection,
deeply, cruelly, wantonly wounded. “The revolt of Conrad seemed to crush
the aged Emperor to the earth. He had borne all the vicissitudes of his
earlier life with unbroken courage, he had risen from his humiliation
at Canosa with refreshed energy; he now abandoned himself to despair,
threw off the robes and insignia of royalty, and was hardly prevented
by his friends from falling on his own sword.”—There is a spice of the
_et tu Brute_ bitterness in Becket’s exclamation to John of Poitiers,
when even that most ardent of his admirers followed him to Etampes, and
implored him to yield. “And you too,” cried the primate, in a pang of
wrath, “will you strangle us”—_ut quid nos et vos strangulatis_?—The
great Emperor Frederick II. reproached Pope Gregory IX., in the height of
their contest, as having been, while in the lower orders of the Church,
his familiar friend; but that no sooner had he reached the height of
his ambition than he threw off all gratitude, and became his determined
foe.—When Queen Elizabeth broke out on a party of the peers for urging
her whither she would not, Norfolk she as good as called traitor and
conspirator, and Pembroke she said talked like a foolish soldier; but to
Leicester it was that she exclaimed, “You, my lord, you! If all the world
forsook me I thought that you would be true!”—Charles I.’s celebrated
letter to Prince Rupert after the loss of Bristol, depriving him of his
command, begins with assuring him that the surrender, in such a manner,
and by his trusted, no longer trusty nephew, of that most important city,
was the greatest trial of his constancy that had yet befallen him: “For
what is to be done, after one that is so near me as you are, both in
blood and friendship, submits himself to so mean an action (I give it the
easiest term)? such—I have so much to say, that I will say no more of
it.” The tone is that of the duke in Mr. Browning’s _Colombe’s Birthday_:
“Ah, the first bitterness is over now!
Bitter I may have felt it to confront
The truth, and ascertain those natures’ value
I had so counted on—that was a pang.”
Corneille, in his historical tragedy of _Cinna_, treats in a like strain
the effect upon Augustus of the discovered conspiracy:
“Quoi! mes plus chers amis! quoi! Cinna! quoi! Maxime!
Les deux que j’honorais d’une si haute estime,
A qui j’ouvrais mon cœur, et dont j’avais fait choix
Pours les plus importants et plus nobles emplois!
Après qu’entre leurs mains j’ai remis mon empire,
Pour m’arracher le jour l’un et l’autre conspire!”
But a later scene proves that Augustus is not even yet aware of all the
accomplices; and the conviction of Æmilie as one of them, wrings from
him, as Brutus from the elder Cæsar, the upbraiding cry, _Et toi, ma
fille, aussi!_
One touching incident marks the horror of the murder of the Czar Paul in
1801. The dress of Ouvaroff, one of the conspirators, is said to have
caused him to be mistaken by the Emperor for his son Constantine; and,
according to Bignon, the last words which the unhappy monarch uttered
were, “And you too, my Constantine!”
Very worthless objects have sometimes been very undeservedly
Et-tu-Brutefied. The first Lord Holland, when forsaken by the selfish
friends, as they have justly been described, with whom he had jobbed and
made merry and laughed at principle, had yet retained enough belief in
the social virtues to be made seriously unhappy by the conduct of his
worthless companions, particularly by that of Rigby, the most worthless
of them all;
“White-liver’d Grenville and self-loving Gower
Shall never cause one peevish moment more; ...
Slight was the pain they gave, and short its date;
I found I could not both despise and hate;
But, Rigby, what did I for thee endure?”
A man as pious as Henry Fox was otherwise, has declared that he knew
few things which so darken one’s views of the moral government of God,
as the experience of baseness and treachery in persons who have won our
confidence; that it tempts one to question the reality of human virtue,
to suspect the hollowness of all appearance of truth and piety, whence
there is but a step to calling in question the moral purpose for which
we are placed on earth. Hawthorne somewhere intimates that the young and
pure are not apt to find out how actually sin is in the world, until that
miserable truth is brought home to them by the guiltiness of some trusted
friend. “Trust ye not in a friend,”—but ah, the pity of it, for him who
has to take up with these words of the Morasthite,—“A man’s enemies are
the men of his own house.”—How many variations on this general theme
might be played from Shakespeare’s plays! Sir Valentine, for instance,
denouncing the falsity of that other, so-called, but so far mis-called,
Gentleman of Verona:
... “Now I dare not say
I have one friend alive; thou wouldst disprove me.
Who should be trusted now, when one’s right hand
Is perjured to the bosom? Proteus,
I am sorry I must never trust thee more,
But count the world a stranger for thy sake.
The private wound is deepest: O time most curst!
’Mongst all foes that a friend should be the worst!”
Polixenes, again, argues touching the breach of amity between him
and Leontes, that revenge is like to be all the more bitter for the
cordiality of past confidence. Then, too, the implication of Lord Scroop,
of Masham, in the conspiracy with Grey and Cambridge against Henry V.,—
“Nay, but the man that was his bedfellow,
Whom he hath cloy’d and graced with princely favours,—
That he should, for a foreign purse, so sell
His sovereign’s life to death and treachery!”
Henry reminds Scroop that he bore the key of all his counsels, and knew
the very bottom of his soul; and he wept for _him_,—“for this revolt of
thine, methinks, is like another fall of man.”—A later king of England,
Edward IV., is made to despair when he sees his brother Clarence among
the supporters of the foe: “Yea, brother of Clarence, art thou here too?
Nay, then, I see that Edward needs must down.”—And once again, there is
the _Et tu Brute_ cue from which we started, thus set forth in all its
suggestive force by Shakespeare’s Antony:
“For Brutus, as you know, was Cæsar’s angel:
Judge, O you gods, how dearly Cæsar loved him!
This was the most unkindest cut of all:
For when the noble Cæsar saw _him_ stab,
Ingratitude, more strong than traitor’s arms,
Quite vanquish’d him: then burst his mighty heart.”
But as we recur to this, as the first among these secular annotations on
a Scripture text, so we recur to Scripture, in conclusion, for a pathetic
parallel, also from the Book of Psalms: “For it was not an enemy that
reproached me; then I could have borne it; neither was it he that hated
me that did magnify himself against me: then I would have hid myself from
him. But it was thou, a man mine equal, my guide, and mine acquaintance.
We took sweet counsel together, and walked unto the house of God in
company.” The companionship past intensifies the cruelty present.
Without so recent and vivid a remembrance of sweet counsel together, and
companionship hallowed by the sanctuary itself, the present cruelty could
have been borne; but with them it hardly can.
“_JUDGE NOT._”
ST. MATTHEW vii. 1.
A stringent motive is adduced to enforce the strenuous monition, “Judge
not,”—and it is, “that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge,
ye shall be judged; and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured
to you again.” There is one Lawgiver, who is able to save and to destroy;
even He who hath committed all judgment unto the Son: who art thou that
judgest another?
* * * * *
Appalled were all who gazed on the last struggles of Cardinal Beaufort,
rendered hideous by the tortures of agonizing remorse. Hope had he none.
Despair was impersonated in the frenzied contortions of that dying man.
King and peers stood beside the death-bed, awe-stricken and shocked. The
king prayed for the cardinal, that the Eternal mover of the heavens might
“look with a gentle eye upon this wretch:
O beat away the busy meddling fiend
That lays strong siege upon this wretch’s soul,
And from his bosom purge this black despair.”
See, says a less gentle observer, Warwick, how the pangs of death do make
him grin. Royal Henry, on devouter thoughts intent, bids “peace to his
soul,” in parting, “if God’s pleasure be.” And then the monarch solemnly,
urgently, importunes the moribund cardinal to give some token, ere he
quite depart, that Despair has not made him all her own: “Lord cardinal,
if thou think’st on heaven’s bliss, hold up thy hand, make signal of
thy hope.” But the cardinal—dies, and makes no sign. The appeal is
fruitless: no hand is held up; no signal of hope displayed. The baffled
prince, cut to the heart, can but exclaim, “He dies, and makes no sign:
O God, forgive him!” Warwick again interposes a harsher voice, “So bad a
death argues a monstrous life,” he is sure. But his sovereign hushes his
damning criticism with a right royal veto:—
“FORBEAR TO JUDGE, _for we are sinners all_.
...
Close up his eyes, and draw the curtain close;
And let us all to meditation.”
Forbear to judge. And the Shakspearean Henry practises in person the
monition thus enforced. It is his rule to check in himself every tendency
to uncharitable judgment. As when proof all but positive distresses him
of his uncle Gloster’s death being due to violence, he yet restrains the
bent of his convictions by the prayer,—
“O Thou that judgest all things, stay my thoughts:
My thoughts, that labour to persuade my soul
Some violent hands were laid on Humphrey’s life!
If my suspèct be false, forgive me, God;
For judgment only doth belong to Thee!”
It is by the deathbed of the man self-convicted of Duke Humphrey’s death,
that Henry can yet say, even of him, when from so bad a death is argued a
monstrous life, Forbear to judge, for we are sinners all.
Are we to infer that Shakspeare was himself for backing to the full this
royal veto? That, perhaps, were going too far. The veto is dramatically
true to character, and designedly characteristic of the royal speaker.
But if Shakspeare himself (we are assuming him to _be_ the author of this
disputed play) would or could scarcely in this particular instance have
enforced such a lesson of charity, we may at least be assured, from
the large tolerance and subtle apprehension so patent in his own kingly
nature, that he would in spirit have echoed the king’s _forbear_. Perhaps
his own feeling might be as nearly as possible expressed in other words
of his, put into the mouth of quite another character, and referring to
quite another occasion:—
“And how his audit stands, who knows, save heaven?
But, in our circumstance and course of thought,
’Tis heavy with him.”
Forbear to judge, is, nevertheless, the moral of this strain, as of the
other. Human ignorance in the one case, human frailty in the other, ousts
human nature from the judgment-seat.
No man, avers Sir Thomas Browne, can justly censure or condemn another;
because, in fact, no man truly knows another. “This I perceive in myself;
for I am in the dark to all the world, and my nearest friends behold me
but in a cloud.... Further, no man can judge another, because no man
knows himself.” In a former section of this his profession of faith, this
good physician warns those who, upon a rigid application of the law,
sentence Solomon unto damnation,[19] that they condemn not only him, but
themselves, and the whole world; “for, by the letter and written word
of God, we are without exception in the state of death: but there is a
prerogative of God, and an arbitrary pleasure above the letter of His
own law, by which alone we can pretend unto salvation, and through which
Solomon might be as easily saved as those who condemn him.”
The Vicar of Gravenhurst, in his position of parish priest, owns himself
compelled to confess that the best people are not the best in every
relation of life, and the worst not bad in every relation of life; so
that, with experience, he finds himself growing lenient in his blame, if
also reticent in his praise. “Again and again I say to myself that only
the Omniscient can be the equitable judge of human beings—so complicated
are our virtues with our failings, and so many are the hidden virtues,
as well as hidden vices, of our fellow-men.” If judge at all we dare, and
do, be it in the spirit and to the letter of Wordsworth’s counsel:—
“From all rash censure be the mind kept free;
He only judges right who weighs, compares,
And, in the sternest sentence which his voice
Pronounces, ne’er abandons Charity.”
Well and wisely said La Bruyère, that “La règle de Descartes, qui ne
veut pas que l’on décide sur les moindres vérités avant qu’elles soient
connues clairement et distinctement, est assez belle et assez juste pour
devoir s’étendu au jugement que l’on fait des personnes.” Real character,
as William Hazlitt says, is not one thing, but a thousand things: actual
qualities do not conform to any factitious standard in the mind, but
rest upon their own truth and nature. “The dull stupor under which we
labour in respect of those whom we have the greatest opportunities of
inspecting nearly, we should do well to imitate, before we give extreme
and uncharitable verdicts against those whom we only see in passing, or
at a distance.”
“Well—after all—
What know we of the secret of a man?
His nerves were wrong. What ails us; who are sound,
That we should mimic this raw fool, the world,
Which charts us all in its coarse blacks or whites,
As ruthless as a baby with a worm,
As cruel as a schoolboy ere he grows
To pity—more from ignorance than will.”
Who can say, asks Samuel Rogers, “In such circumstances I should have
done otherwise?” Who, did he but reflect by what slow gradations, often
by how many strange occurrences, we are led astray; with how much
reluctance, how much agony, how many efforts to escape, how many sighs,
how many tears—who, did he but reflect for a moment, would have the heart
to cast a stone?[20]
The autobiographer of one of Mr. Wilkie Collins’s earlier fictions
proposes in an opening chapter to give a sketch of his character. But
he sensibly refrains from the execution of a too ambitious plan. For,
“what man can say: I will sound the depth of my own vices and measure the
height of my own virtues; and be as good as his word? We can neither know
nor judge ourselves—others may judge, but cannot know us—God alone judges
and knows too.”
“Who made the heart, ’tis He alone
Decidedly can try us;
He knows each chord—its various tone,
Each spring, its various bias:
Then at the balance let’s be mute,
We never can adjust it.”
Dunsford the essayist’s objection to all hasty judgment of our
fellow-creatures is based on the ground of its being “such an
unscientific proceeding.” You comment, he says, upon another man’s
conduct, and attribute motives to him. Now an ingenious and imaginative
person—a lawyer making a speech for him—might show many different motives
of equal probability. You fix upon one, perhaps because it is consonant
to your own mind and nature, or because it is the uppermost or easiest
one to conjecture; but really you often ignore the doctrine of chances,
and perhaps you will find upon strict calculation that the chances are
fairly four to one against your having named the right motive. As the
winning horse is often “a dark one,” at any rate not the favourite, so
after all some obscure and improbable motive is often the true cause of
a man’s actions. In short, Dunsford maintains that our condemnation of
others is often as unscientific as it is unchristian.
When the Doge of Venice, Foscari, in Byron’s tragedy, agitated by the
summons to judge his son, speculates somewhat wildly on the burden of the
mystery of all this unintelligible world, Marina submissively suggests
that
“These are things we cannot judge
On earth.”