Strenuously St. Paul insists on the importance of not overlooking
the feebler members of the body—be it physical, politic, or
ecclesiastical,—and of upholding their rights to due consideration, on
the mere score of membership. Subordinate they may be, but superfluous
they are not. The body would not be a body without them. “Nay, much more,
those members of the body, which seem to be more feeble, are necessary.”
“Now ye are the body of Christ, and members in particular.” If all were
one member, where were the body? But now are they many members, but one
body. And one member differeth from another in honour; yet, without the
seeming minor and meaner ones, for all the abundant honour of the greater
ones, where were the body?
* * * * *
Human society, it has been said, is a vast and intricate machine,
composed of innumerable wheels and pulleys:—every one has his special
handle to grind at; some with great and obvious effects, others with
little or no assignable result; but if the object ultimately produced
by the combined efforts of all is in itself a good one, it is not to
be denied that whatever is essential to its production is good also.
Human society is thus regarded as a body corporate, made up of different
members, each of which has its own special function: one class tilling
the ground, another combining and distributing its produce, a third
making, and a fourth executing laws, and so on, through every class of
society. “If all these functions are properly discharged, the whole
body corporate is in a healthy condition; and thence it follows that
whoever contributes to the full and proper discharge of any one of these
functions, is contributing to the general good of the whole body; so that
a person occupied in them is doing good in the strictest sense of the
words.” An able discourser on social subjects, arguing against a current
crotchet, utterly denies that a girl in a respectable family does not
earn the honourable title of a worker, though she be only employed in
assisting in house-keeping and at the family work-table, just as fairly
and as completely as if she walked to a solicitor’s office for an eight
hours’ daily task of copying briefs and making out bills of costs.
“They work in spirit who for service wait.”
Frederick Robertson glowingly expatiates on the glory of womanhood, as
surely one which, if woman rightly comprehended her place on earth, might
enable her to accept its apparent humiliation unrepiningly; the glory,
as he defines it, of unsensualizing coarse and common things, sensual
things, the objects of mere sense, meat and drink and household cares,
elevating them by the spirit in which she ministers them, into something
transfigured and sublime. “The humblest mother of a poor family, who is
cumbered with much serving, or watching over a hospitality which she is
too poor to delegate to others, or toiling for love’s sake in household
work, needs no emancipation in God’s sight. It is the prerogative and the
glory of her womanhood to consecrate the meanest things by a ministry
which is not for self.” What hundreds and thousands of female invalids
have felt, and almost in the same words said, with Lucy Aikin, when
enfeebled with age and other ailments, “The thought which sits heavy
on my mind is that of my own inutility. Alas! what important end of
existence do I fulfil? To whom is it of any real consequence whether or
not I continue to fill a place in the world? I hope that involuntary
uselessness will not be imputed, and that we may say, ‘They also serve
who only stand and wait.’” A fellow-worker of the same sex, but made of
sterner stuff, in the dedication of a book written in illness, tells her
friend, “You know, as well as I, how withering would be the sense of
our own nothingness, if we tried to take comfort from our own dignity
and usefulness.” And she goes on to say how ridiculous, if it were not
shocking, would be any complacency on the ground of having followed the
instincts of her nature to work, while work was possible,—the issues of
such divinely appointed instrumentality being wholly brought out and
directed by Him who framed and actuated her. To apply the words of Aurora
Leigh:—
... “Though we fail indeed,—
You, I, a score of such weak-workers,—He
Fails never. If He cannot work by us,
He will work over us. Does He want a man,
Much less a woman, think you? Every time
The star winks there, so many souls are born,
Who all shall work too. Let our own be calm:
We should be ashamed to sit beneath those stars,
Impatient that we’re nothing.”
So Mrs. Browning. And pitched in the self-same key is this stanza of her
husband’s:—
“All service ranks the same with God:
If now, as formerly He trod
Paradise, His presence fills
Our earth, each only as God wills
Can work—God’s puppets, best and worst,
Are we; there is no last nor first.”
Wordsworth is eloquently suggestive in those prefatory lines of his,
which weave a moral and infer a solace, from the fact, that the stars
pre-eminent in magnitude, and they that from the zenith dart their beams,
are yet of no diviner origin, no purer essence, than the one he watched
from Rydal Mount, burning like an untended watch-fire on the ridge of
some dark hill-top; or than those which seem
“Humbly to hang, like twinkling winter lamps,
Among the branches of the leafless trees;
All are the undying offspring of one Sire.
Then, to the measure of the light vouchsafed,
Shine, poet, in thy place, and be content.”
If we weave a yard of tape in all humility, says Emerson, and as well
as we can, long hereafter we shall see that it was “no cotton tape at
all, but some galaxy which we braided, and that the threads were Time
and Nature.” Without number, as Archdeacon Hare puts it, are the sutlers
and pioneers, the engineers and artisans, who attend the march of
intellect; many of them busied in building and fitting up and painting
and emblazoning the chariot; others in lessening the friction of the
wheels; while others move forward in detachments, and level the way
it is to pass over, and cut down the obstacles which would impede its
progress. And these too, he proceeds to say, “have their reward. If so be
they labour diligently in their calling, not only will they enjoy that
calm contentment which diligence in the lowliest task never fails to win;
not only will the sweat of their brows be sweet, and the sweetener of
the rest that follows; but, when the victory is at last achieved, they
come in for a share of the glory; even as the meanest soldier who fought
at Marathon or at Leipsic became a sharer in the glory of those saving
days.” Remember, with Owen Meredith,—
“Remember, every man God made
Is different: has some deed to do,
Some work to work. Be undismay’d
Though thine be humble: do it too.”
An elder teacher would qualify the Remember by a Do not forget, that “it
matters infinitely less what we _do_ than what we _are_.” If we cannot
pursue a trade or a science—says a memorable voice from a sick-room,—if
we cannot keep house, or help the state, or write books, or earn our own
bread or that of others, we can do the work to which all this is only
subsidiary; “we can cherish a sweet and holy temper; we can vindicate
the supremacy of mind over body; we can, in defiance of our liabilities,
minister pleasure and hope to the gayest who come prepared to receive
pain from the spectacle of our pain; we can, here as well as in heaven’s
courts hereafter, reveal the angel growing into its immortal aspect,
which is the highest achievement we could propose to ourselves, or that
grace from above, could propose to us, if we had a free choice of all
possible conditions of human life.”
To all those possible conditions, so manifold in their potentialities,
the doctrine applies. The membership is a constant quantity. _Nil me
officit unquam_, says Horace, _Ditior hic, aut est quia doctior; est
locus uni Cuique suus_. And we have Shakspeare’s word for it, that nought
so vile upon the earth doth live, but to the earth some special good doth
give; and though he is speaking of stones and the like, are there not
sermons in stones, as well as good in everything?
Holy George Herbert shall furnish us with a versicle to the purpose. As
ever, he is looking upwards when he says,—
“Indeed the world’s Thy book
Where all things have their leaf assign’d:
Yet a meek look
Hath interlined.
Thy board is full, yet humble guests
Find nests.”
But more pertinent, and less quaintly obscure, is that stanza from
another little lyric of his, in which the Country Parson exalts the
exalting power of a simple trust in God and devotion to His service:
“A servant with this clause
Makes drudgery divine:
Who sweeps a room, as for Thy laws,
Makes that and the action fine.”
_THE WRATH-DISPELLING POWER OF A SOFT ANSWER._
PROVERBS xv. 1.
While it is the effect, if not the end and aim, of grievous words to
stir up anger,—“a soft answer turneth away wrath.” Though “the wrath of
a king is as messengers of death, a wise man will pacify it.” “By long
forbearing is a prince persuaded, and a soft tongue breaketh the bone.”
When the men of Ephraim, enraged at Gideon’s failing to invoke their aid
when he went to fight with the Midianites, chided with him sharply, his
soft answer was of instant avail to turn away their wrath. What had he
done now in comparison of them? the champion deferentially exclaimed; and
what was he able to do in comparison of them? Was not the mere gleaning
of the grapes of Ephraim better than the entire vintage of Abi-ezer?
“Then their anger was abated toward him, when he had said that.” What
threatened to be a very bone of contention,—well, so soft a tongue as
that of Jerubbaal, who is Gideon, breaketh the bone.
Discussing Lord Aberdeen’s settlement of the vexed question of the right
of search, in 1843, the historian of Europe observes that never was
there a truer maxim than that it requires the consent of two persons to
make a quarrel; a soft word, a seasonable explanation, often turns aside
wrath, and sometimes prevents the most serious wars that threaten to
devastate the world. Æsop Smith says he never knew a downright quarrel
yet, where two people were not in the wrong; “drop your battledore, and
the shuttlecock will fall. ‘A soft answer turneth away wrath.’ No doubt
it does, in nine cases out of ten,”—but not quite always, this authority
affirms; there being some unreasonable quarrellers, who will batter
the peacemaker when he drops his battledore. But as a rule, and on the
authority of an older and still more widely recognised maker of proverbs,
the mere fact of yielding pacifieth great offences.
The historian of the conquest of Peru tells us how Gasca was assailed by
reproaches and invectives which, however, had no power to disturb his
equanimity; he patiently listened, and replied to all in the mild tone of
expostulation best calculated to turn away wrath. “By this victory over
himself,” says Garcilasso, “he acquired more real glory, than by all his
victories over his foes.” As Spenser has it,—
“Words well-disposed
Have secret power t’ appease inflamèd rage.”
Sir Matthew Hale’s celebrated letter of advice includes this counsel,—if
a person be passionate, and give you ill language, rather to pity him
than be moved to anger. We shall find, the pious judge asserts, that
silence, or very gentle words, are the most exquisite revenge for
reproaches; they will either cure the distemper in the angry man, and
make him sorry for his passion, or they will be a severe reproof and
punishment to him. “But at any rate,” adds Sir Matthew, “they will
preserve your innocence, give you the deserved reputation of wisdom and
moderation, and keep up the serenity and composure of your mind. Passion
and anger make a man unfit for everything that becomes him as a man or as
a Christian.”
The fact is, maintains the author of “The Gentle Life,” all hard words
are a mistake: most of our quarrels arise from a total misunderstanding
of each other; and at any rate, hard words will not mend the matter.
One might as well, he says, try to mend glass windows by pelting them
with stones. Soft words, on the other hand, fall like a healing balm on
the hearts of all. “Such power,” in the words of one who loved to be
written, if not to write himself, Leontius, “such power has the least
shadow of a pleasant speech, to do away an ill-feeling of the moment, in
the complacency it produces, both in the giver and receiver.” To apply,
again, a passage from Spenser, descriptive of a damsel’s success in
deterring two doughty knights from mortal encounter, so effective was her
speech to
... “calm the sea of their tempestuous spite:
Such power have pleasing words! Such is the might
Of courteous clemency in gentle heart!”
We are all of us fond of gentle words, once more to quote an _ex titulo_
authority on all that concerns gentle living; and he denies the truth
of the common rough proverb, “Soft words butter no parsnips,” which is
shown to be, after all, an apologetic proverb, meaning that the hearer
is tickled with the politeness, albeit real satisfaction is not yet
made. “Soft words do butter parsnips; and many an oily fellow, whose
talent, industry, and conscientiousness are small, owes his position and
advancement in life to the soft words which drop continually from his
mouth.” The soft answer that avails to dispel wrath, comes of practised
patience; and when patience has its perfect work, it works miracles, as
detailed by that fine old forgotten poet, Decker:—
“It is the greatest enemy to law
That can be, for it doth embrace all wrongs,
And so chains up lawyers and women’s tongues;
...
And last of all, to end a household strife,
It is the honey ’gainst a waspish wife.”
This reminds us of a passage in “The Gordian Knot,” where the gentle
laying of a husband’s hand in an irritated wife’s, or _vice versâ_, is
recommended (by example) as a good plan to adopt in conjugal discussions
when differences arise. The tongue, says our author, is very proud,
abominably proud and sulky, and often refuses to say what the heart
desires should be said; but the fingers know their duty, and are ready
to convey an apologetic or forgiving pressure, which, he makes bold to
assert, “will stop ninety-nine quarrels out of a hundred, if the parties
love one another.”
The greatest, widest, deepest of all observers of human nature puts into
the mouth of one of the sagest of kings this counsel to a younger son, in
respect to his bearing towards the elder:—
... “Blunt not his love; ...
For he is gracious, if he be observed;[39]
Yet notwithstanding, being incensed, he’s flint:
As humorous as winter, and as sudden
As flaws[40] congealed in the spring of day.
His temper, therefore, must be well observed:
Chide him for faults, and do it reverently,
When you perceive his blood inclined to mirth:
But being moody, give him line and scope;
Till that his passions, like a whale on ground,
Confound themselves with working.”
In a later one, again, of his noble series of English history
plays—indeed the latest—Shakspeare makes a ducal politician, astute in
practical psychology as well as in politics, utter this apophthegm, of
his own coinage:—
“Anger is like
A full-hot horse, who being allowed his way,
Self-mettle tires him.”
_A TWICE-TOLD TALE OF YEARS._
ECCLESIASTES vi. 6.
The preacher, whose text was Vanity of vanities, all is vanity, pictures
in one section of his homily a man who has lived many years, “so that
the days of his years be many,” but whose soul is not filled with good,
but aches rather with a gnawing sense of emptiness, so that his many
years, gloomy as they have been, are all too few. “Yea, though he live a
thousand years twice told, yet hath he seen no good: do not all go to one
place?” What more tedious than such a twice-told tale of years? Yet, to
look back upon, how fleet their transit, how imperceptible their lapse,
how petty the sum of them! That tale is soon told, even if told twice.
The days of our life are threescore years and ten, and though men be so
strong that they come to fourscore years, yet is their strength then but
labour and sorrow; nor do the fourscore seem longer to the retrospective
reviewer than do to the sexagenarian his sixty years, or to the
septuagenarian his threescore and ten. The most popular of contemporary
authors describes a man of seventy-eight, of whom a loveless,
sad-hearted questioner asks whether his seventy-eight years would not be
seventy-eight heavy curses, if he could say to himself, as the questioner
can, “I have secured to myself the love and attachment, the gratitude or
respect, of no human creature; I have won myself a tender place in no
regard; I have done nothing good or serviceable to be remembered by.” The
Royal Preacher would apply context as well as text to such a retrospect,
with an “I say, that an untimely birth is better than he. For he cometh
in with vanity, and departeth in darkness, and his name shall be covered
with darkness. Moreover he hath not seen the sun, nor known anything:
this hath more rest than the other. Yea, though he live a thousand years
twice told, yet hath he seen no good.”
The same questioner, already cited, asks the same old man if his
childhood seems far off,—if the days when he sat at his mother’s knee
seem days of very long ago? To which the experience of threescore and
eighteen years gives this reply: “Twenty years back, yes: at this time
of my life, no. For, as I draw closer and closer to the end, I travel
in the circle, nearer and nearer to the beginning.” But he is not one
to feel and say with the French cynic, “Mais enfin la vie se passe, et
mourir après s’être amusé ou s’être ennuyé dix ou vingt ans, c’est la
même chose.” He has not so learned life, and the meaning of life, and its
purpose, and its end.
Infinite is the swiftness of time, says Seneca, as seen by those who
are looking back at time past. _Infinita est velocitas temporis, quæ
magis apparet respicientibus._ Looked forward to, it is another matter
altogether. As Cowper has it, when retracing the windings of his way
through many years,—
“Short as in retrospect the journey seems,
It seemed not always short; the rugged path,
And prospect oft so dreary and forlorn,
Moved many a sigh at its disheartening length.”
But as Cowper elsewhere draws the contrast, in the Latin motto he wrote
for the king’s clock,—
“Quæ lenta accedit, quam velox præterit hora!”
(Slow comes the hour; its passing speed how great!—so Hayley Englished
the line.) “Since this new epoch in my life,” writes Schleiermacher on a
certain occasion, “time seems to fly twice as quickly as before, and I
can quite fancy that when Jatte and I are grown old and grey, we shall
still feel as if only a few days had gone by.” Moore was in his sixtieth
year when Lord John Russell talked with him of the speed with which time
seems to fly; and Moore records in his Diary the question he put, “If you
find it so now, what will you say of it when you are as old as I am?”
The “peculiar melancholy” of the answer given is emphasised in the same
journal.
Another retrospective reviewer pictures our race as struggling ever
onward, toiling up towards some air-built goal never to be attained—while
the past crumbles instantly away behind our steps, like the staircase of
the Epicurean, as we advance in our progress; and every step, which was
of such magnitude when we passed it, is forgotten in the “collectiveness
of retrospection,” insomuch that at times a passing thought would compass
the events of years.
Few and evil the patriarch declares the days of the years of his
pilgrimage to have been, when, in answer to Pharaoh’s “How old art
thou?” the answer is, A hundred and thirty years. Man that is born of a
woman is of few days, said another patriarch, and full of trouble. His
days are swifter than a post, they flee away, they see no good. They
are passed away as the swift ships; they are swifter than a weaver’s
shuttle. _Festinat enim decurrere velox Flosculus angustæ miseræque
brevissima vitæ Portio._ And thus in Juvenal’s pregnant phrase, _obrepit
non intellecta senectus_. Or, as with the ageing subject of the Three
Warnings,—
“Old Time whose haste no mortal spares,
Uncalled, unheeded, unawares,
Brought him on his eightieth year.”
We bring our years to an end, as it were a tale that is told.
In one of his letters to his old friend Mrs. Hughes, Southey commences
a paragraph with the truism, “The last twenty years, to you and me, are
but as yesterday;” and he adds, that if we could but bring ourselves
to feel, as truly as we know, that the next twenty years are but as
to-morrow, that feeling, with a trust in God’s mercy, would be sufficient
consolation under all sorrows. Half a year later we find him writing
to her in the same strain: “It seems but as yesterday when I look back
twenty, thirty, forty, and even more years; the end, therefore, of my
mortal term would seem but as to-morrow if it were rightly looked on to.
A little while, and we shall be young again, beyond all power of time
and change, with those whom we love, and to continue with them for ever
and ever.” Madame de Sévigné utters her pure French hélas! over the like
retrospect of twenty years: “Hélas! est-il possible qu’il y ait vingt-un
ans? il me esembleque ce fut l’année passée; mais je juge, par le peu que
m’a duré ce temps, ce que me paraîtront les années qui viendront encore.”
Home, straight home to every heart comes the homely moral of the bard
addressing the busy, curious, thirsty fly he freely welcomed to his cup,
and whose little life he compared with his longer yet little own:—
“Both alike are mine and thine,
Hastening quick to their decline:
Thine’s a summer, mine no more,
Though repeated to threescore;
Threescore summers, when they’re gone,
Will appear as short as one.”
If for threescore we read fourscore, it would not mar the metre, or the
rhyme or reason.
Man is never so deluded as when he dreams of his own duration, says
Cowper; and he goes on to cite Jacob’s retrospective reviewal of years
elapsed: “The answer of the old patriarch to Pharaoh may be adapted by
every man at the close of the longest life. ‘Few and evil have been the
days of the years of my pilgrimage.’ Whether we look back from fifty or
from twice fifty, the past equally appears a dream; and we can only be
said truly to have lived while we have been profitably employed.” And as
the sovereign lady of French letter-writers has her Hélas! so one of the
princes among English letter-writers has his Alas! to utter on this trite
topic, “Alas, then, making the necessary deductions, how short is life!”
Though the life be made up of a thousand years twice told, the tale is
told so soon, and the teller seems to himself but as a dreamer, and his
little life is rounded with a sleep; like as a dream when one awaketh.
The good emperor Marcus Antoninus, one of those whom a broad
churchmanship is free and fain to recognise as Seekers after God, is
taken to intimate that the difference between a so-called long and a
short life is insignificant, in regard of Eternity, when he indites this
aphorism, among his Meditations: “When frankincense is thrown upon the
altar, one grain usually falls before another; but then the distance of
time is of no moment.” The moments, so to speak, of difference, are not
momentous. Do not all go to one place?
But in the issue, all depends on the using. Happy the few and evil years
of a patriarch, if a patriarch indeed, of a pilgrim going home. Be they
few and evil in one sense, or in another very many,—
“They will appear like moments when he soars
Beyond those sunbreaks.”