As the good friar in Shakspeare has it,—

“A greater power than we can contradict

Hath thwarted our intents,”

well laid and discreetly devised as they seemed to be.

And as with the seemingly laudable plans of the prudent, so with the

arrogant designs of the self-confident. The enemy said, “I will pursue,

I will overtake, I will divide the spoil; my lust shall be satisfied

upon them; I will draw my sword; my hand shall destroy them.” Thus said

the enemy, even Pharaoh’s host, on the shores of the Red Sea. But then

sang Moses and the children of Israel this song unto the Lord: “Thou

didst blow with Thy wind, the sea covered them; they sank as lead in the

mighty waters.” It is but an emphasised reading of the standard text,

that the Lord bringeth the counsel of the heathen to nought, and maketh

the devices of the people of none effect, and casteth out the counsel

of princes. Whereas, turning from man proposing to God disposing, “The

counsel of the Lord shall endure for ever, and the thoughts of His heart

from generation to generation.” The same is He of whom it is written that

He turneth wise men backwards, and maketh their knowledge foolish.

Wordsworth, ever a moralist, moralised his song when, at a critical

juncture in the legend of the “White Doe of Rylstone,” he interposed this

reflection:—

“But quick the turns of chance and change,

And knowledge has a narrow range;

Whence idle fears, and needless pain,

And wishes blind, and efforts vain.”

For a closing variation on the present theme, a worse might be found than

this from the play within the play of “Hamlet:”—

“But, orderly to end where I begun,—

Our wills, our fates, do so contrary run,

That our devices still are overthrown;

Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own.”

But, with a slight change of title and text, the same theme is pursued,

in the section next ensuing, through another fugue-course of variations.

_MAN DEVISING, GOD DIRECTING._

PROVERBS xvi. 9.

“A man’s heart deviseth his way; but the Lord directeth his steps.”

Man devises, God directs; man proposes, God disposes. There is a way

that seemeth right unto a man, and practicable, plausible, easy of

accomplishment, and sure of success. But the counsel of the Lord puts a

veto on the scheme; and the counsel of the Lord, that shall stand.

Luther charges it against princes and potentates in his day, that when

they take in hand an enterprise, they do not pray before they begin, but

set to work calculating: three times three make nine, twice seven are

fourteen—so-and-so will do so-and-so—in this manner will the business

come to a prosperous issue: “but our Lord God says unto them, For whom

then do ye hold me? for a cypher? Do I sit here above in vain, and to no

purpose? Ye shall know, that I will twist your accounts about finely, and

make them all false reckonings.”

Says old Alice, in “Mary Barton,” “I sometimes think the Lord is against

planning. Whene’er I plan over much, He is sure to send and mar all

my plans, as if He would ha’ me put the future into His hands. Afore

Christmas-time I was as full as full could be of going home for good

and all; yo has heard how I’ve wished it this terrible long time....

Many a winter’s night did I lie awake and think that, please God,

come summer, I’d go home at last. Little did I think how God Almighty

would baulk me for not leaving my days in His hands, who had led me

through the wilderness hitherto.” It is very like Rousseau to say, in

reference to a fully determined project of his, for the fulfilment of

which nothing was wanting but “ce qui ne dépend pas des hommes dans les

projets les mieux concertés,”—that “on dirait qu’il n’y a que les noirs

complots des méchants qui réussissent; les projets innocents des bons

n’ont presque jamais d’accomplissement.” But who can hope for anything

like contentment, as Mr. Helps somewhere asks, so long as he continues

to attach that ridiculous degree of importance to the events of this

life which so many people are inclined to do? Observe, he bids us, the

effect which it has upon them: they are most uncomfortable if their

little projects do not turn out according to their fancy—nothing is to

be angular to them—they regard external things as the only realities;

and as they have fixed their abode here, they must have it arranged to

their mind. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu assures one of her correspondents

that never had she been so little mistress of her own time and actions as

since she lived alone; and going on to account for this, she observes,

“Mankind is placed in a state of dependency, not only on one another

(which all are in some degree), but so many inevitable accidents thwart

our designs and limit our best-laid projects.” The poor efforts of our

utmost prudence, and political schemes, she fancies must appear in the

eyes of some superior beings, like the pecking of a young linnet to break

a wire cage, or the climbing of a squirrel in a hoop. If to this bit of

morality from the greatest of lady letter-writers in England, a parallel

passage may readily be cited from the greatest of lady letter-writers in

France, there is a characteristic difference, in the tone of religious

feeling, conspicuous generally by its absence in Lady Mary’s case, but

a pervading, though underlying, force in that of Madame de Sévigné. The

latter describes on one occasion the “cruel derangement” of her family

plans, so nicely arranged, and so ripe for completion; then adds, if with

a sigh, with a sigh of gentle resignation, “La Providence le veut ainsi.

Elle est tellement maitresse de toutes nos actions, que nous n’exécutons

rien que sous son bon plaisir, et je tache de ne faire de projets que le

moins qu’il m’est possible, afin de n’être pas si souvent trompée; car

qui compte sans elle compte deux fois.” How vain, exclaims the author of

“Destiny,” are all our schemes for futurity! Human wisdom exhausts itself

in devising what a higher Power shows to be vanity. We decide for to-day,

and a passing moment scatters our decisions as chaff before the wind. We

resolve for to-morrow, to-morrow comes but to root up our resolutions.

We scheme for our works to remain monuments of our power and wisdom, and

the most minute, the most trivial event is sufficient to overturn all

our purposes, and cast down to the dust the thoughts and the labours of a

life. Truly, “it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps.”

Were the affairs of this world to be guided implicitly by human wisdom,

suggests one of Scott’s sententious doctors of divinity, or were they

uniformly to fall out according to the conjectures of human foresight,

events would no longer be under the domination of that time and chance

which happen unto all men; since we should, in the one case, work out

our own purposes to a certainty, by our own skill; and, in the other,

regulate our conduct according to the views of unerring prescience.

“But man is, while in this vale of tears, like an uninstructed bowler,

so to speak, who thinks to attain the jack by delivering the bowl

straightforward upon it, being ignorant that there is a concealed bias

within the spheroid, which will make it, in all probability, swerve away,

and lose the cast.” The future, in the words of a later fiction, is not

a blank sheet of paper, for us to write any story we please upon, but a

wonderful chart, mapped out by a Divine and unerring hand.

Ούδέ τις ἀνθρώπων ἐργάζεται, ἐν φρεσὶν εἰδὼς

Ἐς τέλος, εἴτ’ ἀγαθὸν γίγνεται εἴτε κακὸν.

Πολλάκι γαρ δοκέων θήσειν κακόν, ἐσθλὸν ἔθηκε,

Καί τε δοκῶν θήσειν ἐσθλόν, ἔθηκε κακόν.

Ὀυδέ τῳ ἀνθρώπων παραγίγνεται ὅσσ’ ἐθέλησεν.

When Mr. Thackeray propounds the query, Who can foresee everything, and

always? and returns his own answer (a sufficiently safe one), Not the

wisest amongst us,—he does so in reference to the counsels of the worldly

woman who governed and directed the Newcome family; which counsels bore

results so different from what that elderly lady desired, and foresaw.

And he proceeds to point his moral by the tale of a French king’s fall.

“When his majesty, Louis XIV., jockied his grandson on to the throne of

Spain (founding thereby the present revered dynasty of that country), did

he expect to peril his own, and bring all Europe about his royal ears?

Could a late King of France, eager for the advantageous establishment

of one of his darling sons, and anxious to procure a beautiful Spanish

princess, with a crown and kingdom in reversion, for the simple and

obedient youth, ever suppose that the welfare of his whole august race

and reign would be upset by that smart speculation?” The master of irony

professes to take only the most noble examples to illustrate the conduct

of such a noble old personage as her ladyship of Kew, who brought a

prodigious deal of trouble upon some of the innocent members of her

family, whom no doubt she thought to better in life by her experienced

guidance, and undoubted worldly wisdom. We may be as deep as Jesuits, he

continues,—may know the world ever so well, lay the best ordered plans,

and the profoundest combinations,—and by a certain not unnatural turn

of fate, we, and our plans and combinations, are sent flying before

the wind. “We may be as wise as Louis Philippe, that many counselled

Ulysses whom the respectable world admired so; and after years of patient

scheming, and prodigies of skill; after coaxing, wheedling, doubling,

bullying wisdom, behold, yet stronger powers interpose: and schemes and

skill and violence are nought.” As Schiller’s Wallenstein puts it, in his

rather heathenish way—

“For jealous are the powers of destiny.

Joy premature, and shouts ere victory,

Encroach upon their rights and privileges.

We sow the seed, and they the growth determine.”

“Il y a,” in the words of a masterly French moralist, “je ne sais quelle

_force cachée_, a dit Lucrèce (ce que d’autres avec Bossuet nommeront

Providence), qui semble se plaire à briser les choses humaines, à faire

manquer d’un coup l’appereil établi de la puissance, et à déjouer la

pièce, juste au moment ou elle promettait de mieux aller.” O fate of

fools! exclaims Zara, in the “Mourning Bride,”—“officious in contriving;

in executing, puzzled, lame, and lost;” a rebuke which Selim deprecates

in his reply:—

“Prescience is Heaven’s alone, not given to man.

If I have failed in what, as being man,

I needs must fail, impute not as a crime

My nature’s want.”

So with the resolute undertaking of Argantes, in Tasso, to slay Tancred,

the slayer of his betrothed; all the people applauding his resolve, and

rejoicing in the assurance that this—

“... boaster stout

Would kill the prince who late had slain his love.

O promise vain! it otherwise fell out.

Men purpose, but high gods dispose above;

For underneath his sword this boaster died,

Whom there he scorned and threatened in his pride.”

In Homer, again, how grieves Achilles, and, impetuous, vents to all his

myrmidons his loud laments?

“By what vain promise, gods! did I engage,

When, to console Menætius’ feeble age,

I vowed his much-loved offspring to restore;

Charged with rich spoils to fair Opuntia’s shore.

But mighty Jove cuts short, with just disdain,

The long, long views of poor designing man!”

_A PURSEBEARER’S PROTEST AGAINST PURPOSELESS WASTE._

ST. JOHN xii. 5.

It was very costly ointment of spikenard that Mary took and anointed

therewith the feet of Jesus, so that the house was filled with the

odour of the ointment. So costly, that it set one of His apostles to

work, counting the cost. Judas Iscariot was this ready reckoner. He

was conversant with figures. He was the pursebearer of the apostolic

circle, and knew, it seems, how and when and why to keep a tight finger

on the purse-strings. The wasted contents—waste he accounted it—of that

alabaster box might have been sold for three hundred denarii, and the

proceeds given to the poor. As pursebearer he protested. And nominally

his protest was in behalf of the poor.

Referring to that text in Exodus which tells how the people brought much

more than enough for the service of the work which the Lord commanded to

make, the question was put by a divine who, being dead, yet speaketh:

When will the earth again hear that glad announcement? Yet, until we

bring more than enough, he said, at least until there is kindled in

us a spirit which will make us desire to do so, we shall never bring

enough. “And ought we not? Your economists will say _No._ They who would

think the sun a useful creature, if he would come down from the sky and

light their fires, will gravely reprehend such wasteful extravagance.”

This last figure of speech has its parallel in Mr. Carlyle’s estimate

of “the uses of this Dante:” he declines to say much about his “uses;”

he holds that an influence working, like Dante’s, into the depths of

our existence, and feeding through long times the life-roots of all

excellent things whatsoever, is not to be very satisfactorily computed

by “utilities.” Dante shall therefore be invaluable, or of no value: “We

will not estimate the sun by the quantity of gas-light it saves us.”

Judas the pursebearer was, as a French divine characterizes him,

_exact_, _positif_, _calculateur_; one who habituated himself to compute

everything by a ready-money standard, and to appraise every action by

the rule of immediate utility. He might be accurate to a fraction in

his reckoning of what that “wasted” ointment would have fetched in the

market; but, had not his heart been already in some sort ossified, he

would have comprehended that “au dessus de l’utile il y a le beau, et

au dessus du calcul le dévouement, et qu’ à une âme qui déborde d’une

joie extraordinaire il faut des moyens extraordinaires aussi pour

exprimer ce qu’elle éprouve. Judas a perdu le sens des réalités purement

spirituelles, qui lui paraissent vagues, parce que, comme l’infini, elles

résistent aux chiffres.”

When Dr. Justus Jonas told Dr. Martin Luther of a certain potent

landholder, who said to Duke John Frederic, when commending to him the

gospel of Christ, “Sir, the gospel pays no interest,”—“Have you no

grains?” was Luther’s interrogative comment,—citing the words of the

swine at the lion’s feast, when invited to feast on recondite dainties.

Even so, said Dr. Martin, there are inveterate worldlings who, when

invited to the spiritual feast of fat things well refined, “turn up their

snouts, and ask for guilders. Offer a cow nutmeg, and she will reject it

for old hay.”

It is a too true bill of indictment against the mass of men, that,

knowing that two and two make four, and that four is of a higher value

than three, they practically conclude, carrying out into practice the

conclusion, that to amass is to become wealthy, and that to bestow is

to become the poorer. With this arithmetic the children of this world

are wise in their generation, and add field to field, house to house,

to some purpose. But by what right, asks a voice from the sanctuary, do

they take upon themselves to pronounce on such qualities and realities

as devotion and charity, as detachment from the “good things of this

life” and renunciation of indulgence to the senses? If they witness a

deed of noble self-sacrifice, they can but wag their heads, in shocked

surprise and bewilderment at such a blunder in arithmetic, _une telle

faute de calcul_. “Ils ne comprennent pas qu’on puisse soupirer après

d’autres biens que ceux de la matière, après d’autres vérités que celles

de l’arithmétique.” There are many, very many more things than are dreamt

of in their philosophy; dreaming, indeed, is rather out of their way; and

perhaps philosophy too, for the matter of that.

Coleridge, denouncing the “moral” consequences of Napoleon’s tyranny, as

far more to be dreaded than the worst of those outward and calculable

evils, which chiefly shock the imaginations of men, is out of all

patience with such objections as, “What _good_ will the Tyrolese do

themselves by their heroic resistance?” “What are the Spaniards fighting

for?” etc.,—as if man were made only to eat above ground, and be

eaten; as if we had no dignity to preserve, no conscience to obey, no

immortality to expect.

What good can it do him? demands the vulgar fine lady in “Cecil,” who

hears that a certain well-to-do man of genius has written a book. A man,

she argues, writes for money or distinction: what can be this man’s

object? he don’t want to be made a baronet, nor does he want to increase

his income. Where can be the _use_ of writing? And where, she is (by

cross-questioning) answered, can be the use to the aloe of its flower,

to the mine of its gold? Oldbuck of Monkbarns might have done worse than

parody, as he did, the “brutal ignorance” of your _cui bono_ querists of

the baser sort, in the strain of Gray’s Bard,—

“Weave the warp and weave the woof,

The winding-sheet of wit and sense;

Dull garment of defensive proof

’Gainst all that does not gather pence.”

That a new machine, a new experiment, the discovery of a salt, or of a

bone, should, in England, receive a wider homage, than the most profound

speculation from which no obvious results are apprehended,—this way

of contemplating affairs Mr. Buckle was prompt to own as certainly

productive of great good. But he also took care to declare it to be,

with equal certainty, a one-sided way, satisfying a part only of the

human mind—many of the noblest intellects craving for something which it

cannot supply. There are mortals who, as a clerical essayist has said,

cannot understand or sympathise with the gratification arising from a

study of graceful and beautiful objects; who think that the supply of

animal necessities is all that any man (but themselves, perhaps) can

need. What more can he want? they exclaim, if the man be well-fed, and

well-dressed, and well-lodged. Why, if he had been a horse or a pig, is

the answer, he would have wanted nothing more; but the possession of a

rational soul brings with it pressing wants which are not of a material

nature, not to be supplied by material things, and not felt by pigs and

horses. And the craving for surrounding objects of grace and beauty is

held to be one of these. Mr. Emerson, in his far-going way, goes so far

as to say, as regards the “base rate at which the highest mental and

moral gifts are held” in his country,—that let a man attain the highest

and broadest culture that any American has possessed, then let him die

by sea-storm, railroad collision, or other accident, “and all America

will acquiesce that the best thing has happened to him; that, after the

education has gone far, such is the expensiveness of America, that the

best use to put a fine person to, is, to drown him to save his board.”

M. de Tocqueville somewhere observes, that to cross almost impenetrable

forests, to swim deep rivers, to encounter pestilential marshes, to

sleep exposed to the damp air of the woods,—these are efforts which an

American easily conceives, if a dollar is to be gained by them—that is

the point; but that a man should take such journeys from curiosity, he

cannot understand. The German poet is often cited for his remark, that

the Cow of Isis is to some the divine symbol of knowledge, to others but

the milch cow, only regarded for the pounds of butter she will yield. An

English sympathiser exclaims, “O tendency of our age, to look on Isis as

the milch cow! Gaze on the goddess,” he bids a sordid aspirant, “and get

ready the churn and thy scales, and let us see what butter will fetch

in the market.” When Judge Haliburton’s typical Yankee is asked by the

old minister what he thinks of Niagara, and forthwith expatiates on the

“grand spec” it offers for factory purposes—for carding mills, fulling

mills, cotton mills, grain mills, saw mills, plaster mills, and never a

want of water for any or all of them, his pastor upbraids him with almost

sacrilege in that style of talk; exclaiming, “How that dreadful thirst

of gain has absorbed all other feelings in our people, when such an idea

could be entertained for a moment! It [Niagara] is a grand spectacle, it

is the voice of nature in the wilderness, proclaiming to the untutored

tribes there of the power and majesty and glory of God.... Talk not

to me of mills, factories, and machinery, sir, nor of introducing the

money-changers into the temple of the Lord.”

_LIGHT AT EVENING-TIME._

ZECHARIAH xiv. 7.

The promise, or prediction, to be found in the words of the son of

Berechiah, that “at evening-time it shall be light,” is gratefully

accepted by devout souls in perhaps a strained and wrested sense; but

a sense so comforting, so full of tenderness and beauty, that one is

fain to believe the words may favour, if they cannot be said to warrant,

this “accommodation of Scripture.” Divines are fain to give technical

divinity the go-by for the nonce, while, as they confess, the deepening

twilight seldom fails to suggest to them this cheering promise, a promise

which “tells how the Christian’s day shall end, how the day of life may

be somewhat overcast and dreary, but light shall come on the darkened

way at last.” In the same spirit are welcome the words of Amos, the

herdsman of Tekoa, concerning One who turneth the shadow of death into

the morning. To Him the darkness and the light are both alike; and at His

bidding, when despondent sufferers are in a horror of great darkness, and

say surely the darkness shall cover them,—even the night shall be light

about them; and in some sort to them, even as to Him, the night shineth

as the day; or at least, in the language of Zechariah, there is light,

which if not clear, is yet not dark; neither wholly day nor night, but

twilight—soft, soothing, tranquillizing—instead of the dreaded darkness

which may be felt. Even thus He brings the blind by a way that they knew

not, making darkness light before them.

Even thus, at the last, He delivers them who through fear of death were

all their lifetime subject to bondage. Bunyan exemplifies such in Mr.

Fearing, the pilgrim, who at the entrance of the Valley of the Shadow

of Death was “ready to die for fear.” But the valley was quiet from

troublers. “I suppose those enemies here had now a special check from our

Lord, and a command not to meddle until Mr. Fearing had passed over it.”

“And here also I took notice of what was very remarkable—the water of

that river was lower at this time than ever I saw it in all my life; so

he went over at last, not much above wetshod.

“_Honesty_: Then it seems he was well at last?”

“_Greatheart_: Yes, yes; I never had a doubt about it.”

Often, observes Schleiermacher in one of his letters, the last radiant

moment is called rapidly into being, even in souls wherein the eternal

Light has not always shone with bright effulgence.

Biographers of Dr. Johnson tell us how, when at length the moment,

dreaded through so many years, came close, the dark cloud passed away

from his mind; how his temper became unusually patient and gentle, and

he ceased to think with terror of death, and of that which lieth beyond

death, and spoke much of the mercy of God and of the propitiation of

Christ. One might apply to him in effect the lines of the poet of the

Seasons.

“Joy seized his withered veins, and one bright gleam

Of setting life shone on her evening hours.”

Meditating on various senses in which the words of the promise of light

at evening-time speak truly, in which its great principle holds good, the

signal blessing shall come when it is needed most and expected least,

Dr. Boyd, thinks mainly how sometimes, at the close of the chequered and

sober day, the Better Sun has broken through the clouds and made the

flaming west all purple and gold. He pictures the chamber of death, while

hushed and mournful gazers see also the summer sun in glory going down.

“But it is only to us who remain that the evening darkness is growing,

only for us that the sun is going down.” As the evening falls on us, but

not on the departing believer; as the shadows deepen on us, but not on

him; as the darkness gathers on us, but not on him; the “glorious promise

has found its perfect fulfilment, that ‘at the evening-time there shall

be light.’”

Secular literature has its analogous instances. Dr. Holmes describes

Elsie Venner’s storm-tossed, vagrant spirit as composed and serene at

the last; the cold glitter died out of the diamond eyes, and the stormy

scowl disappeared from the dark brows. “It seemed to her father as if

the malign influence—evil spirit it might almost be called—which had

pervaded her being had at last been driven forth or exorcised,” and that

the tears she now shed were “at once the sign and the pledge of her

redeemed nature. But now she was to be soothed and not excited. After her

tears she slept again, and the look her face wore was peaceful as never

before.” And the devoted father, to whom her life-long career had been

until now a perturbing trial, now thanked God for the brief interval of

peace which had been granted her, and for the sweet communion they had

enjoyed in these last days. There are those of whom it may be said that

it comes to pass, when midday is over, and they cast wistful glances, and

perhaps even reproachful petitions heavenwards, until evening-time, that

there is from above neither voice, nor any to answer, nor seemingly any

that regardeth; but with evening-time comes an answer and comes light.

Applicable to the subject, in this sense, are the lines in “Paracelsus,”

on one who lived without God in the world:—

“Then died, grown old; and just an hour before—

Having lain long with blank and soulless eyes—

He sate up suddenly, and with natural voice

Said, that in spite of thick air and closed doors

God told him it was June.”

Of Margaret Arundel, in “The Gordian Knot,” we read, in her hour of

household desolation and distress, that could we have seen her fair face,

now pale with pain, now flushed with emotion, we should have pitied her;

but “it may be that some superior intelligence witnessed her suffering,

and pitied her not; knowing that all she was to undergo was but the

fiery trial destined for those for whom in the evening there is light.”

Stephen Blackpool, in “Hard Times,” who has found life “aw a muddle,”

and meets with his death in the pit, is tranquillized with light at the

last—light which he identifies with the star that shone upon him while he

lay mangled in the old shaft. “Often as I coom to myseln, and found it

shinin’ on me down there in my trouble, I thowt it were the very star as

guided to our Saviour’s home. I awmost think it be the very star.” His

rescuers lift him up, and he is overjoyed to find they are about to take

him in the direction whither the star seems to him to lead. Very gently

they carry him along the fields and down the lanes; but it is soon a

funeral procession. “The star had shown him where to find the God of the

poor; and through humility and sorrow and forgiveness, he had gone to

his Saviour’s rest.” It is not every life the early prime of which has

been blissful enough to warrant the exclamation,—

“Ne’er tell me of glories serenely adorning

The close of our day, the calm eve of our night:

Give me back, give me back, the wild freshness of morning,

Its smiles and its tears are worth evening’s best light.”

For sometimes the light comes at evening-time that has never come before.

Cellini opens his autobiography with a placid record of the enjoyment

of his present lot, in life’s decline, in contrast with the storms and

turmoil of his previous course. We read of James Watt, that not until he

had reached what is termed the grand climacteric of man’s life did he

know real freedom from bodily infirmities; and that his spirits became

more equable as the principal causes of his anxiety and occasional

depression were removed; so that although he was destined to be one of

those “who are so strong that they come to fourscore years,” his strength

even then, while it could scarcely be termed “labour,” was certainly

very far from “sorrow.” The cloud which had so long hung over him was

gently lifted up, and the curtain parted, to disclose a happier scene.

“It is curious that even physical ease and enjoyment should come so

late; but so it was. The term which commenced with his release from the

evils of active business was a serene and golden time, in which he found

repose”—with the softening retrospect of a struggle past and a victory

won. John Galt, in “The Entail,” exemplifies a kindred experience in the

widow Walkinshaw, whose deliverance from an all but lifelong thraldom,

late in the day as it came, yet came in time enough to “allow the

original brightness of her mind to shine out in the evening with a serene

and pleasing lustre.”

Dr. Boyd quotes the dying speech of a poor English day labourer, than

which, he affirms, few sentences ever touched him more with their

hopeless pathos: “Wut wi’ faeth, and wut wi’ the earth goin’ round the

sun, and wut wi’ the railways all a-whuzzing and a-buzzing, I’m clean

muddled, confoozled, and bet!” It is Stephen Blackpool again in spirit,

and to the letter. With that sentence the dying man is said to have

feebly turned to the wall, and spoken no more. “Well, let us hope that

light came at the evening-time upon that blind, benighted way.”

Among the dying words of Mrs. Schimmelpenninck, honourably known by

her “Memoirs of Port Royal,” and other works, the remark is preserved

that she had often in her life been inclined to occupy herself with the

prospect close at hand, from finding the bleak, hard outline of the

eternal hills cold and barren to her sight; but that, as she drew nearer,

God’s mercy made His light to shine full upon them, so that she could now

perceive they were covered with magnificent trees of the forest, and were

rich in fruit and flowers far more pleasant than those close at hand, and

yet a continuation of them.

A commentator on the text of “promised light at evening-time,” explains

that by evening is understood the gradual withdrawal of the light; it is

the lessening light that makes the evening-time: because of _that_ the

daisies close, and the birds fly to their nests, and a hush comes over

nature. And it is just because evening is the time when, in the ordinary

course of things, the light is going and the darkness is coming, that

there is found to be anything remarkable in the text of _um den Abend

wird es licht seyn_, as Luther’s version runs. The promise, or prophecy,

is that “light shall come at a time when it is not natural, when in the

common course of things it is not looked for.” It would be no surprise,

as this divine proceeds to remark, that light should come at noonday: we

expect it then, it is just what we are accustomed to see. “But if, when

the twilight shadows were falling deeper and deeper, ... with a sudden

burst the noonday light were to spread around,—that would be a surprise.”

One of his personal illustrations of its import is the instance of

the Christian poet who passed away almost in despair,—the gloom that

overshadowed his spirit enduring almost to the end: “but even in the

last moment there came a wonderful change”—and they tell us how even on

his dead face there remained, till it was hidden for ever, a look of

bright and beautiful and sudden surprise; the reflection of that light at

evening that had been long in coming, but had come at last. At eventide

light may break forth as the morning; light rising in obscurity, and

darkness becoming as the noonday.

Light in darkness—light springing up out of darkness—the blessedness of

this is emphatically recognised both by signal example and in special

promise, in Holy Writ. When the hand of Moses was stretched out toward

heaven, and darkness fell over the land of Egypt, even darkness which

might be felt—a thick darkness in all the land of Egypt for three

days—the Egyptians saw not one another, neither rose any from his place

for three days. But all the children of Israel had light in their

dwellings. “When I sit in darkness, the Lord shall be a light unto

me.” “For thou wilt light my candle; the Lord my God will enlighten my

darkness.” In the same Psalm that tells how clouds and darkness are round

about Him, the Father of lights, is contained the exulting assurance,

that “light is sown for the righteous.” The light of the righteous

rejoiceth, when the lamp of the wicked hath been put out. Well may

spiritual aspirations be fervent for light to be sent forth, to lead and

to guide to His holy hill and tabernacle, lest the feet of the wayfarer

slip in a way that he knows not; and, above all, when they stumble on the

dark mountains, or lose their footing in the swelling of Jordan.

_Lux è tenebris_—who will not prize it? who does not need it? For—

“What am I?

An infant crying in the night,

An infant _crying for the light_,

And with no language but a cry.”

An exceeding bitter cry this crying for the light sometimes is, in such

as those, for instance, whom Robertson of Brighton describes as “turning

from side to side,” feeling with horror the old, and all they hold dear,

crumbling away—the ancient light going out—more than half suspecting

the falsehood of the rest, and with an earnestness amounting to agony,

leaving their home, like the Magians, and inquiring for fresh light.

Turning from side to side, with the wailing note of interrogation, “Who

will show us any good?” And then, more earnestly than ever, “Lord, lift

Thou up the LIGHT of Thy countenance upon us.” In vain we turn from side

to side. To whom should we go but unto Thee? Turn us again, O Lord God of

hosts; show the LIGHT of Thy countenance, and we shall be saved.

Observable for special application is what Locke makes observable as a

general fact, that new-born children always turn their eyes to that part

whence the light comes, lay them how you please.

When the blind are operated on for the restoration of sight, it is

suggestively remarked by an eminent author, that the same succouring

hand which has opened to them the visible world, immediately shuts out

the bright prospect again for a time, a bandage being passed over the

eyes, lest in the first tenderness of their recovered sense, they should

be fatally affected by the sudden transition from darkness to light.

But, as he goes on to say, between the awful blank of total privation of

vision, and the temporary blank of vision merely veiled, there lies the

widest difference. “In the moment of their restoration the blind have

but one glimpse of light, flashing on them in an overpowering gleam of

brightness, which the thickest, closest veiling cannot extinguish. The

new darkness is not like the void darkness of old: it is filled with

rapid, changing visions of brilliant colours and ever-varying forms,

rising, falling, whirling hither and thither with every second.” And thus

is it made evident that even when the handkerchief is passed over them,

the once sightless eyes, though bandaged fast, are yet not blinded as

they were before. All the more, however, they now dread the blankness

of that total eclipse, now that, as it were, to them that walked in the

shadow of death, light is sprung up. Light, how much the more precious

for that background of blackness of darkness, darkness that still may be

felt!

Light that may be felt, is the theme of blind old Œdipus, in Sophocles,

at the hour of his mysterious departure—the hour and the power of

darkness. Farewell he bids to—

“Light, sweet Light!

Rayless to me—mine once, and even now

I feel thee palpable, round this worn form

Clinging in last embrace.”

Immortal as Homer is the prayer of his Ajax to die, if die he must, in

the light. Contrast with this the _modus moriendi_ of Pompey the Great,

as pictured in Corneille:—

“D’un des pans de sa robe it couvre son visage,

A son mauvais dentin en aveugle obéit,

Et dédaigne de voir le ciel qui le trahit.”

So with the Greek wife in Landor’s Hellenics, who resists the bidding to

fall not on her knees, but to look up:—

“The hand

That is to slay me, best may slay me thus.

I dare no longer see the light of heaven.”[35]

But to die in the light is the almost universal craving. “As a matter of

fact, nothing,” it has been remarked, “is more common than the craving

and demand for light a little before death;” a remark confirmed by the

sad experience of many who have tended and watched the last moments of

a friend. “What more frequent than a prayer to open the shutters, and

let in the sun? What complaint more repeated, and more touching than

that ‘it is growing dark’?” We are told of a sufferer who did not seem

in immediate danger, suddenly ordering the sick room to be lit up as for

a gala. When this was mentioned to the physician, he said, gravely, “No

worse sign.” We all remember the tenor of the last words of Dr. Adam, of

the High School, Edinburgh, as recorded (however variously) by Scott and

Lord Cockburn and others. It was in his bed-chamber, and in the forenoon,

that he died; and finding that he could not see, the old schoolmaster,

believing himself in the familiar school-room, exclaimed, “It is getting

dark, boys; we must put off the rest till to-morrow.” It was the darkness

of death. And to the living, to-morrow, above all, _that_ to-morrow,

never comes.

M. de Lescure, dying of the wounds he had received at the battle

of Chollet, awaited with his usual serenity the advent of his last

hour. “Open the windows,” said he to his wife, who was watching by

his bedside, “is it clear?” “Yes,” she said, “the sun is shining.” “I

have, then,” replied the dying general, “a veil before my eyes.” A

veil that no man could raise. Chateaubriand, in describing the last

hours of his sister, Madame de Beaumont—the Lucile of his “Memoires

d’outre-tombe”—incidentally relates that “she begged of me to open the

window.... A ray of sunshine rested upon her bed, and seemed to rejoice

her spirit.” The same circumstance is related of the dying Emperor

Alexander. So it is of Dr. Channing. Karl Ludwig Sand, on the scaffold,

begged that the bandage over his eyes might be so placed that he could,

until his last moment, see the light. And it was so. Turner’s biographer

tells us that almost at the very hour of the old painter’s death, his

landlady wheeled his chair to the window, that he might see the sunshine

he had loved so much, mantling the river, and glowing on the sails of the

passing boats. “The old painter died with the winter-morning sun shining

upon his face, as he was lying in his bed. The attendant drew up the

window-blind, and the morning sun shone on the dying artist—the sun he

had so often beheld with such love and such veneration,” and painted, at

sundry times and in divers manners, with such force.

Rousseau’s wish, when in a dying state, to be carried into the open

air, that he might have “a parting look at the glorious orb of day,” is

referred to by one of the many biographers of Robert Burns, in recording

that poet’s remark one beautiful evening, when the sun was shining

brightly through the casement. The hand of death was then upon him, and a

young friend rose to let down the window-blinds, fearing the light might

be too much for him. Burns thanked her, with a look of great benignity,

but prayed her to let the sun shine on: “he will not shine long for me.”

Tender and true is the pathos in one of Mrs. Richard Trench’s letters,

touching the death of her endeared child, Bessy, where we read: “The

last phrase she uttered, except those expressive of her latest wants and

pain, was a desire the window-curtain might be withdrawn, that she might

look at the stars.” Sunlight or starlight, it is light we cherish, and

that cherishes us. Light from the first, light to the last. Happy, if the

light we cherish is the shining light, that shineth more and more unto

the perfect day.

Another set of variations on the same theme will form the section next

ensuing.

_WISHED-FOR DAY._

ACTS xxvii. 29.

It was in a ship of Alexandria, sailing into Italy, when sailing was now

dangerous, because of the advanced season; it was during a voyage which

Paul, a passenger, foresaw and foretold would be with hurt and much

damage, not only of the lading and ship, but also of lives two hundred

threescore and sixteen; it was after there had arisen against the ship

a tempestuous wind called Euroclydon, before which the vessel became a

helpless drift; then it was that the crew and passengers, exceedingly

tossed with the tempest, and not comforted—except the apostle, gave up,

with the same exception, all hope of escape, and gloomily awaited the

bitter end. On the third day they cast out the tackling of the ship. And

when neither sun nor stars in many days appeared, and no small tempest

lay on them, all hope that they should be saved was then taken away. The

fourteenth night was come, and they were driven up and down in Adria, and

about midnight the shipmen deemed that they drew near to some country,

and sounded once and again, and found reason to fear lest they should

have fallen upon rocks. So they cast four anchors out of the stern, and

_wished for the day_—ηὔχοντο ἡμέραν γενέσθαι. If ’tis double death to

die in sight of shore, as Shakspeare says, it is also, or nearly, double

death to die in the dark. Some would almost say, Surely the bitterness of

death is past, if light be vouchsafed to the dying, and so the shadows

flee away. Well can they understand a pregnant symbolism in that incident

of patriarchal days, when a deep sleep fell upon Abram as the sun was

going down; and, lo, a horror of a great darkness fell upon him. With

something of a shuddering sympathy can they connect the fact that, on the

day whence all Good Fridays take their name, there was darkness over all

the land unto the ninth hour, with that other fact that about the ninth

hour there was heard a wailing cry, whose echo reverberates through all

space and time, _Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?_

Ever memorable in classical lore is the supplication of the Greek warrior

in Homer, not to die in the dark. Let him see his foe, and see his end,

however imminent, however inevitable. King Edward II., in Christopher

Marlowe’s historical tragedy, left alone in the Berkeley Castle dungeon

with Lightborn, a murderer, exclaims:—

“I see my tragedy written in thy brows;

Yet stay awhile, forbear thy bloody hand,

And let me see the stroke before it comes,

That even then, when I shall lose my life,

My mind may be more steadfast on my God.”

Frequent in historical narrative are instances like that of Labedoyère,

who when brought out to be shot, refused to have his eyes bandaged, and

looking straight at the levelled muskets, exclaimed in a loud voice,

“Fire, my friends!” Marshal Ney, a week or two later, also refused to

have his eyes bandaged. “For five-and-twenty years,” he said, “I have

been accustomed to face the balls of the enemy.” Then taking off his hat

with his left hand, and placing his right upon his heart, he too said in

a loud voice, fronting the soldiers, “My comrades, fire on me.” Murat

fell in a like manner, after a like request,—but gazing to the last on a

medallion which contained portraits of his wife and four children.

What mainly tends to pile up the agony of Goisvintha, in the historical

romance of “Antonina,” when alone in the vaults with the madman Ulpius,

is the distracting absence of light. “Bewildered and daunted by the

darkness and mystery around her, she vainly strained her eyes to look

through the obscurity, as Ulpius drew her on into the recess.... Suddenly

he heard her pause, as if panic-stricken in the darkness, and her voice

ascended to him, groaning, ‘Light, light! oh, where is the light?’” She

is held forth at this crisis, as a terrible evidence of the debasing

power of crime, as she now stands, enfeebled by the weight of her own

avenging guilt, and “by the agency of darkness, whose perils the innocent

and the weak have been known to brave.” It is only your melodramatic

villain that flings forth his flourish in the style of Velasquez in

“Braganza,”—addressing the duke, his judge:—

“Yes, in your gloomiest dungeons plunge me down.

Welcome, congenial darkness! horrors, hail!

No more these loathing eyes shall see that sun

Whose irksome beams light up thy pageant triumph.”

And thus Sir Walter Scott has full warranty for proving the exceptional

courage of his captive Englishman, when subjected to a midnight trial

in the vaults of the _Vehmgericht_, by showing him unappalled by even

the utter darkness of that terrible court. “Even in these agitating

circumstances, the mind of the undaunted Englishman remained unshaken,

and his eyelid did not quiver nor his heart beat quicker, though he

seemed, according to the expression of Scripture, to be a pilgrim in the

valley of the shadow of death, beset by numerous snares, and encompassed

by total darkness, where light was most necessary for safety.” It is only

in an oblique sense that what Euripides says is true, of the coward

being very valiant in the dark—ἐν ὄρφνῃ δραπέτης μέγα σθένει.

Dr. Croly applies the Homeric prayer of Ajax to an incident in the long

war with France, when twenty-seven thousand British were eager, under

Abercrombie and the Duke of York, to attack the French lines, and at the

first tap of the drum a general cheer was given from all the columns.

But the day, we read, had scarcely broke when a dense fog fell suddenly

upon the whole horizon, and rendered movement almost impossible. “Nothing

could exceed the vexation of the army at this impediment, and if our

soldiers had ever heard of Homer there would have been many a repetition

of his warrior’s prayer, that ‘live or die, it might be in the light of

day.’” One is reminded of the lines in Racine:—

“Enfin toute l’horreur d’un combat ténébreux;

Que pouvait la valeur dans ce trouble funeste?”

It has been observed of a certain railway catastrophe, where the crash

and collision occurred in a tunnel—in that very place which nobody, even

on ordinary occasions, passes through without a slight shudder and an

undefined dread of some such disaster as the one in question—that “Ajax’s

prayer has been muttered by many who never heard of Ajax; and if we are

to die, it is at least a mitigation of the hour of fate when it overtakes

us in daylight.”

In tracing, psychologically, the development within us of the sense

of awe, Professor Newman attributes to the gloom of night (_deadly

night_, as Homer terms it), more universally perhaps than to any other

phenomenon, the first awakening of an uneasy sense of vastness. A young

child, as he says, accustomed to survey the narrow limits of a lighted

room, wakes in the night, and is frightened at the dim vacancy. “No

nurse’s tales about spectres are needed to make the darkness awful.”

Nor, he adds, is it from fear of any human or material enemy: it is the

negation, the unknown, the unlimited, which excites and alarms; and

sometimes the more if mingled with glimpses of light.

The last words audible of Goethe were, “_More light!_” The final darkness

grew apace, in the words of his ablest biographer; and he whose eternal

longings had been for more light, gave a parting cry for it as he was

passing under the shadow of death.

“Light! give me more light,” is the cry of the dying woman in “The Dead

Secret,”—whereby hangs that tale. How often Lord Lytton remarks, is

“light!” the last word of those round whom the shades are gathering. And

he says it in reference to the last hours of one of the characters he

has described with most success as well as elaboration, John Burley, who

discourses of what is precious in light, as the darkness closes about

him. When he lies down, and the attendant would withdraw the light, he

moves uneasily. “Not that,” he murmurs, “light to the last!” And putting

forth a wan hand, he draws aside the curtain, so that the light may

fall full on his face. When his only friend returns, and steals back to

Burley’s room on tiptoe, it is to see light stream through the cottage

lattice—not the miserable ray lit by a human hand—but the still and holy

effulgence of a moonlit heaven. Burley has died in sleep—calmly, and

the half open eyes have the look of inexpressible softness which death

sometimes leaves; “and still they were turned towards the light; and the

light burned clear.” Which things are an allegory.

Mr. Dickens intensifies the wretchedness of his prisoner at Marseilles

by the deprivation of light in a prison that, like a well, like a vault,

like a tomb, had no knowledge of the brightness outside, and would have

kept its polluted atmosphere intact, in one of the spice islands of the

Indian Ocean. What light he does get comes languishing down a square

funnel that blinds a window in the staircase wall, through which the sky

is never seen—nor anything else. What he does see of the “light of day”

he calls the light of yesterday week, the light of six months ago, the

light of six years ago: so slack and dead. Bitter indeed is the import of

the curse, “Let it look for light and have none.” Piteous indeed is the

import of the pathetic remonstrance, “Wherefore is light given to him in

misery?” Graphic indeed is the description of a place “where the light is

as darkness.” Darkness and light are both alike to One only.

The record of the last day in the life of Patrick Fraser Tytler opens as

follows:—“On Sunday, the 23rd, he grew confused in memory, experienced

difficulty in swallowing, and complained of darkness. The curtain was

drawn, and the light of the winter morning was suffered to stream on his

bed; but in vain. He folded his hands, and exclaimed, ‘I see how it is.’”

John Foxe relates this incident in his narrative of the martyrdom of

William Hunter, apprentice to a silk weaver in London, but discharged

from his master’s employment for refusing to attend mass, and finally

condemned to the stake as an incorrigible heretic. “Then said William,

‘Son of God, shine upon me!’ and immediately the sun in the element shone

out of a dark cloud so full in his face that he was constrained to look

another way, whereat the people mused, because it was dark a little time

before.”

_THE MORE THAN BROTHERHOOD OF A BOSOM FRIEND._

PROVERBS xviii. 24.

In the last book of the Pentateuch we meet with a verse which,

incidentally, seems to recognise how much more vitally close and intimate

may be the affinity between a man and his bosom friend, than between

the same man and his own brother. The brother is spoken of without

descriptive epithet or adjunct of any kind; while of the friend it is

added, “which is as thine own soul.”[36] An ever memorable verse in the

book of Proverbs has immortalized the truth, that “there is a friend that

sticketh closer than a brother.”

None too many are the testimonies on record of brotherly attachment such

as Columbus signalizes in his correspondence. To his elder son, Diego,

the affectionate father writes concerning the younger, Fernando, then a

stripling midway in his teens, “To thy brother conduct thyself as the

elder brother should unto the younger. Thou hast no other, and I praise

God that this is such a one as thou dost need. Ten brothers would not be

too many for thee. Never have I found a better friend to right or left

than my brothers.” General testimony points the other way. Cicero, who,

himself a good brother, in one place moots the question whether it is

just to prefer our friends to our relations—_quæritur sitne æquum amicos

cognatis anteferre_,—in another decides that friendship is better than

relationship: _præstat amicitia propinquitati_. It has been remarked

by Samuel Bailey, of Sheffield, that parents and children, husbands

and wives, brothers and sisters, reciprocally complain of each other’s

deficiency of affection, and think it hard that the tie of relationship

should not secure invariable kindness and indestructible love: expecting

some secret influence of blood, some physical sympathy, some natural

attraction, to retain the affection of their relatives, without any

solicitude on their part to cherish or confirm it; and forgetting that

man is so constituted as to love only what in some way or other, directly

or indirectly, immediately or remotely, gives him pleasure,—that even

natural affection is the result of pleasurable associations in his mind,

or at least may be overcome by associations of an opposite character,

and that the sure way to make themselves beloved is to display amiable

qualities to those whose regard they wish to obtain.[37] Crabbe has a

terse couplet on—

... “those

Who are called friends because they are not foes;”

meaning by friends, kinsfolk; but such as, though not more than kin, are

less than kind. Dr. Croly’s hero, Marston, soldier and statesman, on

receiving, in his isolation, three letters from three proved friends,

yet comparative strangers, describes himself as feeling, “while holding

their letters in my hand, and almost pressing them to my heart, how much

more strongly friendship may bind us than the ties of cold and negligent

relationship.” So Mr. Thackeray is bitter on what it is to have sham

friends and no sympathy; ties of kindred which bind one, as it were, to

the corpse of friendship, and oblige one to bear through life the weight

and the embraces of this lifeless, cold connection.

Noteworthy among the avowals of Sir Thomas Browne, in his “Religio

Medici,” is this: “I confess I do not observe that order that the schools

ordain our affections,—to love our parents, wives, children, and then

our friends; for, excepting the injunctions of religion, I do not find

in myself such a necessary and indissoluble sympathy to all those of my

blood. I hope I do not break the fifth commandment, if I conceive I may

love my friend before the nearest of my blood, even those to whom I owe

the principles of life.” The father and the son may, as Montaigne says,

be of quite contrary humours, and brothers be without any sympathy with

brothers. So Feltham asserts it to be likeness which makes the true

love-knot of friendship. When we find another of our own disposition,

what is it, he asks, but the same soul in a divided body? “We are then

intermutually transposed into each other; and nature, which makes us

love ourselves, makes us for the same reason love those who are like us;

hence a friend is a more sacred name than a brother.” What avails it, he

further asks, to have bodies of the same original, when the souls within

them differ?

The autobiographer in a modern work of fiction, having occasion to

acknowledge, after being thrust amongst strangers to sicken, and all

but die, that among strangers he received as much sympathy and kindness

as he should have done among his own people, and in his father’s

house,—characterizes this sort of confession as one which people are apt

to make as a reflection upon their relations, “whereas it disgraces only

themselves.” It is a case of rare misfortune, he contends, when we are

not loved by our nearest of kin, in proportion as we desire and deserve

to excite affection. Nevertheless, there is a too ample _consensus_ of

authorities whose testimony affirms, and confirms, the often slight and

slender tenure of mere family ties, as such. “None of your family parties

for me,” quoth one of Justice Haliburton’s shrewd spokesmen; “connections

at best are poor friends, and commonly bitter enemies. If you want

nothing, go to them, and you are sure to get it; if you are in want of

any assistance, go to a stranger friend you have _made for yourself_, and

that’s the boy that has a heart and a hand for you.” The Earl of Dudley,

Bishop Copleston’s correspondent, in one of his always interesting

letters to that prelate, adverting to the death of an uncle who had never

taken the smallest interest in him, or showed him the smallest kindness,

makes the avowal: “And, though I flatter myself that there is no person

more capable of returning affection than myself, yet I fairly own that

I am wholly unable to bestow it quite gratuitously even upon a near

relation.” Richardson harps on this note again and again in his history

of Clarissa. How much more binding and tender, that young lady writes—and

the writing comes of bitter experience—are the ties of pure friendship

and the union of like minds, than the ties of nature! And her chief

correspondent, in commenting on the terms of a kinsman’s assurance, that

he will not see Clarissa “imposed on either by friend or foe,”—interposes

the verbal amendment: “By _relation_ or foe, should he not have said? For

a friend will not impose upon a friend.” Elsewhere the same writer has

to put the home-question: “Would you side with a false brother against a

true friend? A brother may not be a friend; but a friend will be always a

brother.”

It was one of the aphorisms—or call them paradoxes—of M. de Stendhal

(Henri Beyle) that our next of kin are our natural enemies when we enter

the world; the simple matter of fact being, as an Edinburgh reviewer

alleges, that his own character, tendencies, and aspirations had been

invariably opposed to the plans, wishes, and modes of thinking of his

family. Mr. Froude has depicted in Edward Fowler a young man who in his

dealings with every one except with his own family, was frank, generous,

and unselfish; and whose affections, naturally very strong, finding

themselves forced out of their proper channel, poured themselves out on

any one that happened to attract him. A few kind words from his father,

now and then, implying real sympathy and inviting confidence, might,

we are given to understand, have averted in this case, as in so many

others, a bitter result of estrangement and desolation. Perhaps, as Mr.

Disraeli somewhere intimates, with all their anxiety and opportunities

for observation, the parent and tutor are rarely skilful in discovering

the character of their child or charge. “Custom blunts the fineness

of psychological study: those with whom we have lived long and early,

are apt to blend our essential and our accidental qualities in one

bewildering association.” Strange, exclaims Hamilton Aïde, how little we

often know of those who are next us in the battle-ranks through this long

march of life! Our daily familiar life, as George Eliot has remarked,

is but a hiding of ourselves from each other behind a screen of trivial

words and deeds; and those who sit with us at the same hearth are often

the farthest off from the deep human soul within us, full of unspoken

evil and unacted good. “Strangers yet,” as Lord Houghton has it:—

“After childhood’s winning ways,

After care, and blame, and praise,

Counsel asked, and wisdom given,

After mutual prayers to heaven,

Child and parent scarce regret

When they part—are strangers yet.”

Or as Chauncy Hare Townshend expresses the same relative truth, too

absolutely true:—

“Kindred are oft but kin by name,

Our thoughts they never knew.”

_MANY YEARS TO ENJOY LIFE: THIS NIGHT TO DIE._

ST. LUKE xii. 19, 20.

The rich man was getting richer to his heart’s content. So plentiful was

the produce of his land, that he must needs enlarge his premises. There

was not room enough in his barns for those golden harvests; the barns

must be pulled down, and greater ones built, wherein to bestow all his

fruits and his goods. Happy man he accounted himself that day; happy in

a prosperous present, happier still in a promising future. A future of

happiness not less prolonged than assured. So he would say to his soul

that day, “Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine

ease, eat, drink, and be merry.” That day he said it. Fool! that night

his soul was required of him.

Woe was denounced by one of old on another of the Dives family, who said,

“I will build me a wide house, and large chambers,” and who cut him out

windows, and ceiled his house with cedar, and painted it with vermilion.

“Shalt thou reign because thou closest thyself in cedar?” Man’s sanguine

and sure “I will”—how little of the future tense there sometimes is about

it after all!

“Tu secanda marmora

Locas sub ipsum funus; et sepulchri

Immemor, struis domos.”

In Homer we see from his tall ship the king of men descend, there fondly

thinking the gods conclude his toil, where, in fact, awaits him murder

most foul and most unnatural. In Homeric figure—

“So, whilst he feeds luxurious in the stall,

The sovereign of the herd is doomed to fall.”

Bitterly the shade of Atrides repeats his tragic story to Odysseus,

telling how, “Alas! he hoped, the toils of war o’ercome, to meet soft

quiet and repose at home. Delusive hope!” for at home the hand was

already upraised to smite him.

The Turkish prince, Alp Arslan, dying of Joseph’s dagger-stroke,

bequeathed an admonition to the pride of kings, which Gibbon has

preserved. “Yesterday, as from an eminence I beheld the numbers, the

discipline, and the spirit of my armies; the earth seemed to tremble

under my feet; and I said in my heart, ‘Surely thou art the king of the

world, the greatest and most invincible of warriors.’ These armies are no

longer mine; and in the confidence of my personal strength, I now fall by

the hand of an assassin.” The inscription on his tomb invited those who

had seen the glory of Alp Arslan exalted to the heavens, to meditate on

its present burial in the dust.

Michelet moralises with trenchant irony on the fate which overtook our

Henry V. on French soil. It is to the “Dance of Death” he refers in the

exclamation, “What sport for death, what a malicious pastime to have

brought the victorious Harry within a month’s reach of the crown of

France! After a life of unremitting toil for that end, he wanted but one

little month added to his existence to be the survivor of Charles VI....

No! not a month, not a day more was to be his.”

Splendid was that festival at Cæsarea at which Herod Agrippa, in the

pomp and pride of power, entered the theatre in a robe of silver, which

glittered, says the historian, with the morning rays of the sun, so as to

dazzle the eyes of the assembly, and excite general admiration. Some of

his flatterers set up the shout, “A present god!” Agrippa did not repress

the impious adulation which spread through the theatre. At that moment he

looked up, and saw an owl perched over his head on a rope, and Agrippa

had been forewarned that when next he saw that bird, “at the height of

his fortune,” he would die within five days. The fatal omen, according

to Josephus, pierced the heart of the king, who, with deep melancholy,

exclaimed, “Your god will soon suffer the common lot of mortality.” He

was immediately struck, in the language of the sacred volume, by an

angel. Seized with violent pains, he was carried to his palace, lingered

five days in extreme agony, being “eaten of worms,” and so died.

Fielding forcibly presents a certain sanguine projector, lusty and

strong, in the heyday of middle age, who reckons confidently on becoming

heir to the estate of a senior of immense wealth, and has all his plans

elaborately prepared for his disposal of the same. Nothing is wanting to

enable him to enter upon the immediate execution of these plans, but the

death of the elder man, in calculating which he has studied every book

extant that treats of the value of lives, reversions, etc.; from all

which he has satisfied himself, that as he has every day a chance of this

happening, so has he more an even chance of its happening before long.

“But while the captain was one day busied in deep contemplations of this

kind, one of the most unlucky, as well as most unseasonable, accidents

happened to him. The utmost malice of fortune could, indeed, have

contrived nothing so cruel, so _mal-à-propos_, so absolutely destructive

to all his schemes.” It was, that just at the very instant when his heart

was exulting in meditations on the happiness which would accrue to him

by the other’s death, he himself was cut off by an apoplexy. As Léontine

complains in “Heraclius,”—

“Et lorsque le hasard me flatte avec excès,

Tout mon dessein avorte au milieu du succès.”

It was just when Kleber was beginning to reap the fruits of his

intrepidity and discretion, that he was cut off by the obscure assassin,

Souliman. One is reminded of Thomson on the massacre of the bees,—

“At evening snatched,

Beneath the cloud of guilt-concealing night,

And fixed o’er sulphur; while not dreaming ill,

The happy people in their waxen cells,

Sat tending public cares, and planning schemes

Of temperance, for winter poor,” etc.

A tory historian, recording the close of the parliamentary session in

July 1827, takes occasion to observe that Mr. Canning now saw every wish

of his heart gratified, having raised himself to the highest position

in the State, and being looked up to in every part of the world as the

protector of the oppressed and the advocate of freedom. In the prime of

life, “his sway in Parliament was unbounded, and he might hope for a

long career of fame, fortune, and usefulness.” _Vanitas vanitatum!_ The

hand of fate was already upon him, and he was to be suddenly snatched

from the scene of his glory, at the very moment when he seemed to have

attained the summit of earthly felicity. Even, however, when death is not

concerned, as in his memorable case, in the sudden and final collapse of

a great career, and the abrupt extinction of exuberant promise, how often

is Cowper’s picture realized, where—

“Runs the mountainous and craggy ridge

That tempts ambition. On the summit, see,

The seals of office glitter in his eyes;

He climbs, he pants, he grasps them. At his heels,

Close at his heels, a demagogue ascends,

And with a dexterous jerk soon twists him down,

And wins them, but to lose them in his turn.”

The picture is, in some sort, and for moral uses, a pendent to that by

another poet, of those who are pushing hard up hill the cumbrous load of

life; just as they trust to gain the farthest steep, and put an end to

strife,—

“Down thunders back the stone with mighty sweep,

And hurls their labours to the valley deep,

For ever vain.”

But this is diverging farther and farther from the direct import of our

theme. More to the purpose is the same poet’s description of Celadon

assuring his betrothed of perfect safety, and triumphantly asserting

her absolute immunity from the perils of the storm, and as exultingly

inferring his own, from his relationship to her; when,—

“From his void embrace,

Mysterious heaven! that moment to the ground,

A blackened corse, was struck the beauteous maid.”

Some innocents, as Cleopatra has it, escape not the thunderbolt.

Innocence, as well as iniquity, may know something of that breach ready

to fall, swelling out in a high wall, whose breaking cometh suddenly at

an instant.

The loving friends of Charlotte Brontè, after her marriage, are described

by one among them as catching occasional glimpses of brightness, and

pleasant peaceful murmurs of sound, telling to them who stood outside,

of the gladness within; and they said among themselves, “After a long

and a hard struggle—after many cares and bitter sorrows—she is tasting

happiness now.” Remembering her trials, they were glad in the idea that

God had seen fit to wipe away the tears from her eyes. “But God’s ways

are not as our ways,” Mrs. Gaskell adds. Just as Currer Bell’s happiness

seemed beginning, and her goodness ripening, came fever, delirium, death.

Mrs. Gaskell’s own career was similarly cut short, just when she was

finishing, but ere yet she had finished, the completest and ablest of her

works; just when public recognition of her merits was growing earnest as

well as general. It is the old, old story. For what, as the old ballad

says,—

“is this worldys bliss,

That changeth as the moon!

My summer’s day in lusty May

Is darked before the noon.”

_GREAT BABYLON BUILT: A BUILDER’S BOAST._

DANIEL iv. 29-33.

Walking in the palace of his kingdom of Babylon—that Babylon of which the

foundations, indeed, had been laid ages ago, but which he had so enlarged

and adorned as to make it one of the world’s wonders—Nebuchadnezzar the

king, elate with pride at the pomp of architectural results, flushed with

the triumph of enterprises so costly, and achievements so manifest to the

eye, gave utterance, in complacent soliloquy perhaps, to the exultant

sense of being a master builder indeed, and of seeing his power reflected

in so gorgeous a form. The king spake and said, “Is not this great

Babylon, that I have built for the house of the kingdom, by the might of

my power, and for the honour of my majesty?”

While the word was in the king’s mouth, there fell a voice from heaven,

saying, “O king Nebuchadnezzar, to thee it is spoken: The kingdom is

departed from thee.” And the sequel we know. How that same hour was the

thing fulfilled upon Nebuchadnezzar, and he was driven from men, and did

eat grass as oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven, till

his hairs were grown like eagles’ feathers, and his nails like birds’

claws,—is it not written in the book of the prophecies of Daniel, whose

name was Belteshazzar, and whom the king made ruler over the whole

province of that same Babylon the Great?

The royal builder’s boast was on the instant reproved by a degradation

literally brutal in its extremity. While the word of complacent

self-glorification was in the king’s mouth, the sentence of bestial doom

went forth against him. Just when he was resting on his laurels, a taint

overtook them. Just when he rejoiced in asserting himself a king of

kings, commenced the working of a curse which levelled him with grazing

flocks and herds.

The lesson is for all time, and for all sorts and conditions of men.

Verifications of it—varying, of course, in kind, and still more in

degree—are rife in records historical and biographical, and in the

unrecorded experiences, the moving accidents, of everyday life. Just when

a man is apt to set up his rest, the fiat goes forth against him which

shatters to its base the structure he has reared. The house he has just

finished building tumbles to pieces like a house of cards. The castle in

whose defences, at last completed, he felt so secure, dislimns like a

castle in the air.

“... The engineer

Who lays the last stone of his sea-built tower,

It cost him years and years of toil to raise,—

And, smiling at it, tells the wind and waves

To roar and whistle now—but, in a night,

Beholds the tempest sporting in its place—

May look aghast.”

Belshazzar the king made a great feast to a thousand of his lords, and

drank wine before the thousand, and displayed the golden vessels which

his father Nebuchadnezzar had taken out of the temple at Jerusalem,

and was jubilant with the excitement of revelry, and joyously confident

in the stability of his realm; when, in the same hour, there came forth

fingers of a man’s hand, and wrote over against the plaster of the wall

of the king’s palace; and what they wrote was, that God had numbered his

kingdom, and finished it. And in that night was Belshazzar the king of

the Chaldeans slain.

A noble chamber had Pope John XXI. built for himself in the palace of

Viterbo; and by the falling in of the roof he so admired, he was crushed

to death. “John XXI.,” writes Dean Milman, “was contemplating with too

great pride the work of his own hands, and burst out into laughter; at

that instant the avenging roof came down on his head.” The catastrophe

was held at the time to be a special judgment on a reprobate pontiff.

Nebuchadnezzar’s boast, and worse than Nebuchadnezzar’s doom. The mention

of Babylon the Great will serve, with some, to eke out a parallel.

The historian of Mexico tells us of Montezuma, while exacting from his

people the homage of an adulation worthy of an oriental despot, and the

profuse expenditure of whose court was a standing marvel, that “while the

empire seemed towering in its most palmy and prosperous state, the canker

had eaten deepest into its heart.” Ruin was at hand. The hour was come,

and the man; and that man was Hernando Cortès.

Significantly opens a fifth act—for a fifth act is the last—of Ben

Jonson’s “Sejanus,” with the joyous exultations of that prosperous

upstart, in the confidence of power: “Swell, swell, my joys,” he

exclaims,—

“I did not live till now; this my first hour;

Wherein I see my thoughts reached by my power.

...

My roof receives me not; ’tis air I tread;

And, at each step, I feel my advanced head

Knock out a star in heaven!”

and so forth, with other hyperboles of frantic arrogance. His soliloquy

is interrupted by messengers of ill news. Destruction dogs his path; and

very soon the magniloquent braggart has to subdue his tone, and his cue

is then to upbraid the higher powers whom alone he recognises:—

“If you will, Destinies, that after all,

I faint now ere I touch my period,

You are but cruel.”

Of constant recurrence among the commonplaces of biography are such

“buts,” inopportune and inevitable, as Cicero’s biographer prefixes

to a critical paragraph: “But while all things were proceeding very

prosperously in his favour, and nothing seemed wanting to crown his

success, ... all his hopes and fortunes were blasted at once, by an

unhappy rencounter with his old enemy Clodius.”

There is a popular historical fiction in which we see the Cardinal

Alberoni musing on the greatness he has achieved for Spain and for

himself, only to find himself overtaken by ruin and disgrace. The rope

which he has twisted so carefully, proves to be of sand. In another we

see a successful adventurer at the culminating point of his success.

There seems nothing wanting to him in “that supreme moment,” as the

phrase goes. He is in “a tumult of gratified ambition and selfish joy.”

“This glory and grandeur” repay a thousand-fold his patient endeavours

and strenuous schemings. But at this very moment a dark shadow overlays

the sunshine on his pathway; and we look on a changed countenance—“no

longer full of triumph and pleasure, but ghastly pale” at a sudden but

very present and very pressing sense of impending disaster. _Fortuna

vitrea est, tum cum splendet frangitur._

At the opening of the twelfth century all was prosperity with the Emperor

Henry IV.; his turbulent and agitated life seemed, in the words of Dean

Milman, “as if it would close in an august and peaceful end.” But, as an

after page in the history of Latin Christianity is prompt to prove, this

most secure and splendid period in the life of Henry was one calm and

brilliant hour of evening before a night of utter gloom.

Columbus had just welcomed tranquillity in exchange for the troubles and

dangers of his island, when intelligence arrived of the discovery of a

large tract of country rich in mines. He now anticipated the prosperous

prosecution of his favourite enterprise, and was exultant at the turn

of the tide. “How illusive were his hopes!” exclaims his biographer.

“At this moment events were maturing which were to overwhelm him with

distress, strip him of his honour, and render him comparatively a wreck

for the remainder of his days.” Who, the chronicler of the conquest of

Granada may well ask, who can tell when to rejoice in this fluctuating

world? “Every wave of prosperity has its reacting surge, and we are often

overwhelmed by the very billow on which we thought to be wafted into the

haven of our hopes.” _Et subito casu, quæ valuere, ruunt._

Olivarez was requested by his royal master to resign, just at the moment

when the death of Richelieu (1643) opened to him an almost royal road, it

might seem, to success.

“O momentary grace of mortal men,

Which we more hunt for than the grace of God!

Who builds his hope in air of your fair looks,

Lives like a drunken sailor on a mast,

Ready, with every nod, to tumble down

Into the fatal bowels of the deep.”

Such is the state of man, as Shakspeare’s Hastings feels it. And this

is the state of man, as Shakspeare’s Wolsey finds it: to-day he puts

forth the tender leaves of hope, to-morrow blossoms, and next day comes

a frost, a killing frost, and,—when he thinks, good easy man, full

surely his goodness is a ripening,—nips his root, and then he falls.

Shakspeare’s Belarius again, will furnish us with another text, of

practical application:—

“... Then was I as a tree,

Whose boughs did bend with fruit: but in one night,

A storm, or robbery, call it what you will,

Shook down my yellow hangings, nay, my leaves,

And left me bare to weather.”

And as with the pride and pomp and circumstance of life, so with life

itself. Typical for all time is the fate of Lycidas:—

“Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise

(That last infirmity of noble mind)

To scorn delights, and live laborious days;

But the fair guerdon when we hope to find,

And think to burst out into sudden blaze,

Comes the blind fury with the abhorrèd shears,

And slits the thin-spun life.”

_INVOCATION AND INACTION._

EXODUS xiv. 15.

With the Red Sea close before them, and with Pharaoh and his host close

behind them, what were the children of Israel to do? Was it for this

that Moses had brought them out of the house of bondage, which yet had

its fleshpots and creature comforts after all? What were they to do?

They lifted up their eyes, and saw the sea in front, and the enemy in

the rear; and then they lifted up their voice in querulous fear and

expostulation. Should they go back? Then Moses lifted up his voice, and

bade them stand still, and they should see a great deliverance. But the

will of God was not that they should either go back, or stand still and

merely look on. For “the Lord said unto Moses, Wherefore criest thou unto

me? speak unto the children of Israel that they go forward.” Invocation

may be excellent in itself, but, as a concomitant, inaction mars it. A

hallowed thing is prayer; but to pray and sit still, when the need is to

go forward and push on, is the sign or stigma of feeble folk.

* * * * *

When Nelson told the King of Naples, in plain terms, that he had his

choice—either to advance, trusting to God for His blessing on a just

cause, and prepared to die sword in hand; or to remain quiet, and be

kicked out of his kingdom; the king made answer that he would go on, and

trust in God and Nelson. Of the same stuff as Nelson, but his superiors

in moral character and in practical recognition of Him that is Holy,

Holy, Holy, as well as Lord God Almighty, were those early English

navigators, characterized by a modern pen as “indomitable God-fearing

men, whose life was one great liturgy.” “The ice was strong, but God

was stronger,” says one of Frobisher’s men, after grinding a night and

a day among the icebergs; not waiting for God to come down and split

them, but toiling through the long hours, himself and the rest fending

off the vessel with poles and planks, with death glaring at them out of

the rocks, and so saving themselves and it. We read in Turell’s Life of

Dr. Benjamin Colman, “that reverend father in our New England Israel,”

as Mr. Lowell calls him, that when the vessel in which he had taken

passage for England was attacked by a French privateer, he “fought like

a philosopher and a Christian, ... and prayed all the while he charged

and fired.” His the practice was, if not on his lips the maxim, to pray

to God and keep his powder dry. It is expressly noted of the Maid of

Orleans, in the _Procès_ on record, that while she rather evaded the

question of resorting to miraculous aids and appliances, and of affecting

supernatural power, she “used the Gallic proverb, _Ayde-toi, Dieu te

aydera_.”

“In daily toil, in deadly fight,

God’s chosen found their time to pray;

And still He loves the brave and strong,

Who scorn to starve, and strive with wrong,

To mend it, if they may.”

Forcible is the portrait drawn in a recent work of fiction, of a man now

steeped in moral degradation, who had once tried to be honest, and prayed

to God to prosper his honesty; but then he only tried to do right in a

spasmodic, fitful kind of way, and expected his prayers to be granted

as soon as uttered, and was indignant with a Providence that seemed

regardless of his entreaties.

Bentley is held to have happily ridiculed the helpless Chorus of Greek

tragedy, who, when a deed of violence was to be acted, instead of

interfering to prevent the atrocity to which the perpetrator had made

them privy, could only, by the rules of the theatre, exhaust their sorrow

and surprise in dithyrambics. He burlesqued this characteristic by

introducing into “The Wishes” a Chorus after the manner of the ancient

Greeks, who are informed by one of the _dramatis personæ_, that a madman

with a firebrand has just entered the vaults beneath the place which they

occupy, and which contain a magazine of gunpowder. The Chorus, instead

of stirring from the dangerous vicinity, immediately commence a long

complaint of the hardship of their fate, exclaiming pathetically, “O

unhappy madman—or rather unhappy we, the victims of this madman’s fury—or

thrice, thrice unhappy the friends of the madman, who did not secure him,

and restrain him from the perpetration of such deeds of frenzy—or three

and four times hapless the keeper of the magazine, who forgot the keys in

the door,” etc., etc.

The cry of Charles and his Paladins at Arles, “Help us, oh blessed martyr

St. Trophimus!” is thus disposed of by Torfrid, Hereward’s forefather,

in the story of the Wake, “What use in crying to St. Trophimus? A tough

arm is worth a score of martyrs here,” in the thick of the fight for dear

life.

When Lord Rea, in 1630, as recorded in a well-known passage from

Rushworth, uttered the pious conventionalism or devout platitude, “Well,

God mend all!” his companion, Sir David Ramsay, impatiently exclaimed,

“Nay,” with an undevout expletive, “Nay, Donald, we must help him to mend

it!” One is reminded of what Mr. Froude says of the Protestant leaders

in Scotland, during the autumn of 1559, when the Queen Regent returned

to Holyrood, once more absolutely victorious: “Notwithstanding all their

talk about God, it had come to this. God had as much interest in them

as they had themselves courage, energy, capacity, understanding, and

perseverance—so much precisely, and not more.” Or again of that homely

thrust in the “Biglow Papers,” where one of the interlocutors, on a

critical occasion, avowing a wish to know where and when to strike, is

thus answered by his plain-spoken mate:—

“‘Strike soon,’ sez he, ‘or you’ll be deadly ailin’,—

Folks thet’s afear’d to fail are sure o’ failin’;

God hates your sneakin’ creturs thet believe

He’ll settle things they run away an’ leave.’”

There is something to be said—indeed in our present sense there is more

to be said, for the farmer than for the clergyman in the story of the

latter congratulating the former on the state of his crops, and finding

him not free from apprehensions, in regard of former bad years—“My

friend,” urged the rector, “trust in Providence.” “Providence! Yes, yes,”

replied the other; “that’s all very well: but give me the doong cart.”

Dr. John Brown relates with zest how one of his faculty was attending

a poor woman in labour—a desperate case, that required a cool head and

a firm will, while the good man, “for he _was_ good,” had neither of

these,—and losing his presence of mind, gave up the poor woman as lost,

and retired into the next room to pray for her. “Another doctor, who

perhaps wanted what the first one had, and certainly had what he wanted,

brains and courage, meanwhile arrived, and called out, ‘Where is Dr. ⸺?’

‘Oh, he has gone into the next room to pray.’ ‘Pray! Tell him to come

here this instant, and help me; he can work and pray too;’” and by the

new-comer’s, the _snell_ working doctor’s, assistance the woman’s life

was saved.

Sir Robert Peel, in his reply to certain suggestions offered by

Lord Kenyon in reference to the potato-disease, coupled with the

recommendation of a “special public acknowledgment of our dependence on

God’s mercy in our present distressed state,” was mildly sarcastic on the

seeming inconsistency of making such an acknowledgment, while at the same

time leaving “in full operation the restraints which man has imposed on

the import of provisions.”

Not likely to be soon forgotten, on either side the Tweed, is Lord

Palmerston’s reply as Home Secretary, to the Presbytery of Edinburgh,

touching the national attitude pending a visitation of Asiatic cholera.

He advised them that it was better to cleanse than to fast. Let them

see to purifying the foul wynds and overcrowded flats tenanted by the

poor, and so get rid of “those causes and sources of contagion which, if

allowed to remain, will infallibly breed pestilence, and be fruitful in

death, in spite of all the prayers and fastings of a united, but inactive

nation.” To apply what a north country bishop says in Shakspeare:—

“The means that Heaven yields must be embraced,

And not neglected; else, if Heaven would,

And we will not, Heaven’s offer we refuse;

The proffered means of succour and redress.”

A recent apologist for the captain of a lost steamship submitted that the

destruction of that fine vessel was what is called in the old-fashioned

language of a charter-party, “the act of God.” Less partial critics, on

the other hand, affirmed it to be the act of the folly and madness of

man,—the term quoted belonging to an age when they who go down to the sea

in ships had not learned the irreverent practice of imputing to the Deity

the direct consequences of human rashness. “Let us, if we can, amend

this folly; or, if we will persist in it, let us at least take the blame

upon ourselves.” They that go down to the sea in ships have, however,

in all ages, though not so much one people as another (English for

instance as Italians), been prone to waste in wailing outcries to patron

saints the energy that, in peril of wreck, they might have expended to

better purpose. The “Colloquies” of Erasmus give a lively sample of this

run-to-waste invocation. The last of the heroes of La Vendée, Charette,

while still a youth, sailed from Brest in a cutter which lost its mast,

and was in imminent jeopardy of going down; the sailors, on their knees,

were praying to the Virgin, and had entirely given up all notion of

exertion, “till Charette, by killing one, succeeded in bringing the

others to a sense of their duty, and thereby saved the vessel.” Lord

Broughton describes a scene of the kind, in a Turkish ship of war: the

Greeks on board called on all the saints, the Mussulmans on Allah; the

captain burst into tears and ran below deck, telling his passengers to

call on God: he rung his hands, and wept aloud, and being asked what

he could do, said he could do nothing. “Could he get back to the main

land?” “If God chooses,” was his answer. “Could he make Corfu?” “If

God chooses.” One thinks of the testy old patrician’s rejoinder in

“Coriolanus” to the tribune’s exclaimer, “The gods be good unto us!” “No;

in such a case the gods will not be good unto us.” In Scott’s tale of

the Crusaders, “I will vow a golden candlestick to the Holy Sepulchre—a

shrine of silver to our Lady of Engaddi—a pall, worth one hundred bezants

to Saint Thomas of Orthez,” cries the Queen in extremity.—“Up, up,

madam,” says Edith; “call on the saints an you list, but be your own

best saint.” In “Ivanhoe,” again, when the Grand Master forbodes the

contingent extinction of his order (the Templars), “Now may God avert

such a calamity!” says the Preceptor. “Amen!” rejoins the Grand Master,

with solemnity, “but we must deserve His aid.”

It is all in keeping with the practical character of the man, the

prayer which on one critical occasion Benvenuto Cellini records his

offering: “Almighty God, favour my cause, for Thou knowest it is a just

one, and that I am not on my part wanting in my utmost efforts to make

it succeed.” On another he tells us how he “told Lionardo, who was

incessantly crying out, ‘Jesus, Jesus!’ that Jesus would assist him, if

he strove to help himself.” Elsewhere again Cellini emphatically asserts

his systematic habit of “always exerting his utmost efforts to extricate”

himself from difficulty, as well as of devoutly recommending himself to

God, by whom alone those efforts could achieve success, and who so often

had delivered him when the best of these had clearly and entirely failed.

Saintly as well as Saint Francis of Sales bids his brethren, “En toutes

vos affaires, appuyez-vous totalement sur la providence de Dieu, par

laquelle seule tous vos desseins doivent réussir; travaillez néanmoins de

votre côté tout doucement pour co-opérer avec icelle.” The counsel is at

one, _au fond_, with that of the heathen stoic in the old play:—

“I am plain, fathers. Here you look about

One at another, doubting what to do,

With faces, as you trusted to the gods,

That still have saved you; and they can do it: but

They are not wishings, or base womanish prayers,

Can draw their aids; but vigilance, counsel, action;

Which they will be ashamed to forsake.

’Tis sloth they hate, and cowardice.”

_CO-OPERANT UNITS._

EPHESIANS iv. 16.

The universal Church is designated by the apostle a body, which whole

body is fitly joined together and compacted by that which every joint

supplieth, according to the effectual working in the measure of every

part. And every part in its measure, and according to its imparted power.

Very little are some of the joints and fibres; but every little helps.

Who shall despise the whole of small things? But for the accumulated

atoms, the aggregated littles, where were the body?

“Let me not deem that I was made in vain,

Or that my Being was an accident,

Which Fate, in working its sublime intent,

Not wished to be, to hinder would not deign.

_Each drop uncounted in a storm of rain_

_Hath its own mission_, and is duly sent

To its own leaf or blade, not idly spent

’Mid myriad dimples on the shipless main.

The very shadow of an insect’s wing,

For which the violet cared not while it stayed,

Yet felt the lighter for its vanishing,

Proved that the sun was shining by its shade:

Then can a drop of the eternal spring,

Shadow of living lights, in vain be made?”[38]

As the author of “Felix Holt” says, we see human heroism broken into

units, and are apt to imagine, this unit did little—might as well not

have been. But in this way we might break up a great army into units;

in this way we might break the sunlight into fragments, and think that

this and the other might be cheaply parted with. “Let us rather raise a

monument to the soldiers whose brave hearts only kept the ranks unbroken,

and met death—a monument to the faithful who were not famous, and who

are precious as the continuity of the sunbeams is precious, though some

of them fall unseen and on barrenness.” Suppose but a solution of that

continuity; the sequel is, darkness that may be felt.

There is a latter-day apologue of a gimlet that grew exceedingly

discontented with its vocation, envying all the other tools in the

carpenter’s basket, and thinking scorn of its own mean duty of

perpetually boring and picking holes everywhere. “The saw and the axe had

grand work to do; and the plane got praise always; so did the chisel for

its carving; and the happy hammer was always ringing merrily upon the

clenching nail.” But for _it_, a wretched, poking, paltry, gimlet, its

work was hidden away, and very little seemed its recognised use. But the

gimlet is assured, on the best authority, that nothing could compensate

for its absence, and is therefore bidden be content, nay happy; for

though its work seems mean and secret, it is indispensable. To its good

offices, the workman is said to look chiefly for coherence without

splitting; and to its quiet influences, the neatness, the solidity, the

comfort of his structure may greatly be ascribed. The apologue has, of

course, its practical application. “Are there not many pining gimlets

in society, ambitious of the honour given to the greater-seeming tools

of our Architect, but unconscious that in His hands they are quite as

useful? The loving little child, the gentle woman, the patience of many

a moral martyr, the diligence of many a duteous drudge, though their

works may be unseen and their virtues operate in obscurity, yet are these

main helpers to the very joints and bands of our body corporate, the

quiet home influences whereby the great edifice, Society, is so nicely

wainscoted and floored without split-boards.”

To recognise one’s being entrusted with but one talent, after all, and

not with five or with ten, as one’s vanity had previously taken for

granted, has even been hailed as, in some sort, a soothing sensation.

When one of us who has been led by native vanity or senseless flattery,

says Dr. Holmes, to think himself or herself possessed of talent,

arrives at the full and final conclusion that he or she is really dull,

it is one of the most tranquillizing and blessed convictions that can

enter a mortal’s mind: “All our failures, our short-comings, our

strange disappointments in the effect of our efforts, are lifted from

our bruised shoulders, and fall, like Christian’s pack, at the feet of

that Omnipotence which has seen fit to deny us the pleasant gifts of

high intelligence,—with which one look may overflow us in some wider

sphere of being.” That the one talent be employed, is the one thing

needful. So feels the girl in one of Charlotte Brontè’s tales, whose

exclamation is, “Mother, the Lord who gave each of us our talents will

come home some day, and will demand from all an account. The tea-pot,

the old stocking-foot, the linen rag, the willow-pattern tureen, will

yield up their barren deposit in many a house: suffer your daughters, at

least, to put their money to the exchangers, that they may be enabled

at the Master’s coming to pay His own with usury.” A man is accepted

according to that he hath, not condemned in respect of what he never

had. Whatsoever his hand findeth to do, that is what a man is to do with

his might, to do with a will,—be it to govern a nation, or to dust a

warehouse. To apply a passage in Ben Jonson’s “Catiline,”

“They are no less part of the commonwealth

That do obey, than those that do command.”

John Newton said that if two angels came down from heaven to execute

a Divine command, and one was appointed to conduct an empire, and the

other to sweep a street in it, they would feel no inclination to change

employments. So again, the same robust divine affirmed that a Christian

should never plead spirituality for being a sloven; “if he be but a

shoe-cleaner, he should be the best in the parish.” As the old servant

tells Ruth, in Mrs. Gaskell’s story, “There’s a right and a wrong way

of setting about everything—and to my thinking, the right way is to

take a thing up heartily, if it is only making a bed. Why, dear ah me!

making a bed may be done after a Christian fashion, I take it, or else

what’s to come of such as me in heaven, who’ve had little enough time on

earth for clapping ourselves down on our knees for set prayers?” This

quaint speaker had laid to heart the lesson once for all enforced upon

her, to do her duty in that state of life to which it had pleased God to

call her; her station was that of a servant, and, looked at aright, as

honourable as a king’s: she was to help and serve others in one way, just

as a king is in another. Her parting counsel to Ruth runs thus: “Just try

for a day to think of all the odd jobs as to be done well and truly in

God’s sight, not just slurred over any how, and you’ll go through them

twice as cheerfully,” besides doing them more efficiently. John Brown,

of Haddington, being waited on by a lad of excitable temperament, who

informed him of his desire to become a preacher, and whom the shrewd

pastor saw to be as weak in intellect as he was strong in conceit,

advised him to continue in his present vocation. The young man said,

“But I wish to preach and glorify God.” The old commentator replied,

“My young friend, a man may glorify God making broom besoms; stick to

your trade, and glorify God by your life and conversation.” As it was

said of Bossuet, in the seventeenth century, that he could not walk,

or sit down, or even pluck a currant, without your recognising in him

the great bishop (so asserts a modern French divine, not of Bossuet’s

church), just so the workman and the domestic servant who are animated

by their Master’s spirit, distinguish themselves among their fellows

by a certain air of nobility; under their blouse or their livery may

be seen to shine the signal light of their _aristocratie spirituelle_,

the image of the Most High Himself. However mean their employment,

they go about it with neither disgust nor indifference; but with an

intelligent interest, because, in the sight of God, and indeed in their

own eyes, their occupation is on a level with that of king or emperor.

What constitutes the difference between man and man, is not, urges M.

Colani, the wielding a sceptre or plying a needle, but the being loyal

to the trust, be it great or small, committed to us. This, he contends,

is the only true point of view from which men and women should regard

their occupations,—they should consider themselves as _collaborateurs

du Tout-Puissant_. If their work seem the reverse of noble, let them

ennoble it by this thought, in Wordsworth’s phrase,—

“And with the lofty sanctify the low.”

A Christian nursemaid is pictured, forgetting the thousand _désagréments_

of her humble functions, and reminding herself that in reality she is

in charge of souls, as much as pastor or preacher is, and this _grande

conviction_ suffices to save her from servile dejection. So, again, the

artisan and day labourer may be sustained by the Spirit from on high,

and taught to magnify their calling, in a deep and a wide sense, because

it is what they are called to, and because they respond to the call, in

the spirit of it. They are toilers co-operant to an end; and the end,

the result, is with God. “They also serve who only stand and wait.” But

the whole sonnet of Milton’s which closes with that grand line, is too

germane to the matter, and too largely suggestive in its main issue,

to be omitted here; the sonnet which the blind poet wrote touching his

blindness:—

“When I consider how my light is spent,

Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,

And that one talent which is death to hide,

Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent

To serve therewith my Maker, and present

My true account, lest He, returning, chide;

‘Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?’

I fondly ask: but Patience, to prevent

That murmur, soon replies, ‘God doth not need

Either man’s work, or His own gifts; who best

Bear his mild yoke, they serve Him best; His state

Is kingly; thousands at His bidding speed,

And post o’er land and ocean without rest;

They also serve who only stand and wait.”

_SUBORDINATE, NOT SUPERFLUOUS; OR, DEPRECIATED MEMBERSHIP._