DIVINE SERVICE.
The next day the curate called again on Leopold. But Helen happened to
be otherwise engaged for a few minutes, and Mrs. Ramshorn to be in
the sick-room when the servant brought his name. With her jealousy of
Wingfold’s teaching, she would not have admitted him, but Lingard made
such loud protest when he heard her say “Not at home,” insisting on
seeing him, that she had to give way, and tell the maid to show him
up. She HAD NO NOTION however of leaving him alone in the room with the
invalid: who could tell what absurd and extravagant ideas he might not
put into the boy’s head! He might make him turn monk, or Socinian, or
latter-day-saint, for what she knew! So she sat, blocking up the sole
small window in the youth’s dark dwelling that looked eastward, and
damming back the tide of the dawn from his diseased and tormented soul.
Little conversation was therefore possible. Still the face of his new
friend was a comfort to Leopold, and ere he left him they had managed
to fix an hour for next day, when they would not be thus foiled of their
talk.
That same afternoon, Wingfold took the draper to see Polwarth.
Rachel was lying on the sofa in the parlour--a poor little heap, looking
more like a grave disturbed by efforts at a resurrection, than a form
informed with humanity. But she was cheerful and cordial, receiving Mr.
Drew and accepted his sympathy most kindly.
“We’ll see what God will do for me,” she said in answer to a word
from the curate. Her whole bearing, now as always, was that of one who
perfectly trusted a supreme spirit under whose influences lay even the
rugged material of her deformed dwelling.
Polwarth allowed Wingfold to help him in getting tea, and the
conversation, as will be the case where all are in earnest, quickly
found the right channel.
It is not often in real life that such conversations occur. Generally,
in any talk worth calling conversation, every man has some point to
maintain, and his object is to justify his own thesis and disprove his
neighbour’s. I will allow that he may primarily have adopted his thesis
because of some sign of truth in it, but his mode of supporting it is
generally such as to block up every cranny in his soul at which more
truth might enter. In the present case, unusual as it is for so many as
three truth-loving men to come thus together on the face of this planet,
here were three simply set on uttering truth they had seen, and gaining
sight of truth as yet veiled from them.
I shall attempt only a general impression of the result of their
evening’s intercourse, partly recording the utterances of Polwarth.
“I have been trying hard to follow you, Mr. Polwarth,” said the draper,
after his host had for a while had the talk to himself, “but I cannot
get a hold of your remarks. One moment I think I have got the end of the
clew, and the next find myself all abroad again. Would you tell me what
you mean by divine service, for I think you must use the phrase in some
different sense from what I have been accustomed to?”
“Ah! I ought to remember,” said Polwarth, “that what has grown familiar
to my mind from much solitary thinking, may not at once show itself to
another, when presented in the forms of a foreign individuality. I ought
to have premised that, when I use the phrase, DIVINE SERVICE, I mean
nothing whatever belonging to the church, or its observances. I mean by
it what it ought to mean--the serving of God--the doing of something for
God. Shall I make of the church in my foolish imaginations a temple of
idolatrous worship by supposing that it is for the sake of supplying
some need that God has, or of gratifying some taste in him, that I there
listen to his word, say prayers to him, and sing his praises? Shall I
be such a dull mule in the presence of the living Truth? Or, to use a
homely simile, shall I be as the good boy of the nursery rhyme, who,
seated in his corner of selfish complacency, regards the eating of his
pie as a virtuous action, enjoys the contemplation of it, and thinks
what a pleasant object he thus makes of himself to his parents? Shall I,
to take a step farther, degrade the sanctity of the closet, hallowed
in the words of Jesus, by shutting its door in the vain fancy of there
doing something that God requires of me as a sacred OBSERVANCE? Shall I
foolishly imagine that to put in exercise the highest and loveliest, the
most entrancing privilege of existence, that of pouring forth my
whole heart into the heart of him who is ACCOUNTABLE FOR me, who hath
glorified me with his own image--in my soul, gentlemen, sadly disfigured
as it is in my body!--shall I say that THAT is to do anything for God?
Was I serving my father when I ate the dinner he provided for me? Am I
serving my God when I eat his bread and drink his wine?”
“But,” said Drew, “is not God pleased that a man should pour out his
soul to him?”
“Yes, doubtless; but what would you think of a child who said, ‘I am
very useful to my father, for when I ask him for anything, or tell him I
love him, it gives him--oh, such pleasure!’?”
“I should say he was an unendurable prig. Better he had to be whipped
for stealing!” said the curate.
“There would be more hope of his future,” returned Polwarth. “--Is the
child,” he continued, “who sits by his father’s knee and looks up into
his father’s face, SERVING that father, because the heart of the father
delights to look down upon his child? And shall the moment of my deepest
repose and bliss, the moment when I serve myself with the very life of
the universe, be called a serving of my God? It is communion with God;
he holds it with me, else never could I hold it with him. I am as the
foam-froth upon his infinite ocean, but of the water of the ocean is the
bubble on its waves.”
Not the eyes only, but the whole face of the man, which had grown of a
pure, semi-transparent whiteness, appeared to Wingfold to emit light.
“When my child would serve me,” he went on, “he spies out some need I
have, springs from his seat at my knee, finds that which will meet my
necessity, and is my eager, happy servant, of consequence in his own
eyes inasmuch as he has done something for his father. His seat by my
knee is love, delight, well-being, peace--not service, however pleasing
in my eyes.--‘Why do you seat yourself at my knee, my son?’ ‘To please
you, father.’ ‘Nay then, my son! go from me, and come again when
it shall be to please thyself.’--‘Why do you cling to my chair, my
daughter? ‘Because I want to be near you, father. It makes me so
happy!’ ‘Come nearer still--come to my bosom, my child, and be yet
happier.’--Talk not of public worship as divine service; it is a
mockery. Search the prophets and you will find the observances, fasts
and sacrifices and solemn feasts, of the temple by them regarded with
loathing and scorn, just because by the people they were regarded as
DIVINE SERVICE.”
“But,” said Mr. Drew, while Wingfold turned towards him with some
anxiety lest he should break the mood of the little prophet, “I can’t
help thinking I have you! for how are poor creatures like us--weak,
blundering creatures, sometimes most awkward when best-intentioned--how
are we to minister to a perfect God--perfect in wisdom, strength, and
everything--of whom Paul says that he is not worshipped with men’s
hands as though he needed anything? I cannot help thinking that you are
fighting merely with a word. Certainly, if the phrase ever was used
in that sense, there is no meaning of the kind attached to it now: it
stands merely for the forms of public worship.”
“Were there no such thing as Divine Service in the true sense of the
word, then, indeed it would scarcely be worth while to quarrel with
its misapplication. But I assert that true and genuine service may
be rendered to the living God; and, for the development of the divine
nature in man, it is necessary that he should do something for God. Nor
is it hard to discover how; for God is in every creature that he has
made, and in their needs he is needy, and in all their afflictions he
is afflicted. Therefore Jesus says that whatever is done to one of his
little ones is done to him. And if the soul of a man be the temple
of the Spirit, then is the place of that man’s labour, his shop, his
counting-house, his laboratory, the temple of Jesus Christ, where
the spirit of the man is incarnate in work.--Mr. Drew!”--Here the
gate-keeper stood up, and held out both his hands, palms upward, towards
the draper on the other side of the table.--“Mr. Drew! your shop is
the temple of your service where the Lord Christ, the only image of the
Father is, or ought to be throned; your counter is, or ought to be his
altar; and everything thereon laid, with intent of doing as well as you
can for your neighbour, in the name of THE man Christ Jesus, is a true
sacrifice offered to Him, a service done to the eternal creating Love of
the universe.”
The little prophet’s head as he stood, did not reach the level of the
draper’s as he sat, but at this Drew dropped his head on his hands
upon the table, as if bowed down by a weight of thought and feeling and
worship.
“I say not,” Polwarth went on, “that so doing you will grow a rich man,
but I say that so doing you will be saved from growing too rich, and
that you will be a fellow-worker with God for the salvation of his
world.”
“I must live; I cannot give my goods away!” murmured Mr. Drew,
thinkingly, as one that sought enlightenment.
“That would be to go direct against the order of his world,” said
Polwarth. “No; a harder task is yours, Mr. Drew--to make your business
a gain to you, and at the same time to be not only what is commonly
counted just, but interested in, and careful of, and caring for your
neighbour, as a servant of the God of bounty who giveth to all men
liberally. Your calling is to do the best for your neighbour that you
reasonably can.”
“But who is to fix what is reasonable?” asked Drew.
“The man himself, thinking in the presence of Jesus Christ. There is a
holy moderation which is of God.”
“There won’t be many fortunes--great fortunes--made after that rule, Mr.
Polwarth.”
“Very few.”
“Then do you say that no great fortunes have been righteously made?”
“If RIGHTEOUSLY means AFTER THE FASHION OF JESUS CHRIST.--But I will not
judge: that is for the God-enlightened conscience of the man himself
to do--not for his neighbour’s. Why should I be judged by another man’s
conscience?--But you see, Mr. Drew,--and this is what I was driving
at--that you have it in your power to SERVE God, through the needs of
his children, all the working day, from morning to night, so long as
there is a customer in your shop.”
“I do think you are right, sir,” said the linen-draper. “I had a glimpse
of the same thing the other night myself. And yet it seems as if you
spoke of a purely ideal state--one that could not be realised in this
world.”
“Purely ideal or not, one thing is certain: it will never be reached by
one who is so indifferent to it as to believe it impossible. Whether
it may be reached in this world or not, that is a question of NO
consequence; whether a man has begun to REACH AFTER it, is of the utmost
awfulness of import. And should it be ideal, which I doubt, what else
than the ideal have the followers of the ideal man to do with?”
“Can a man reach anything ideal before he has God dwelling in
him--filling every cranny of his soul?” asked the curate with shining
eyes.
“Nothing, I do most solemnly believe,” answered Polwarth. “It weighs on
me heavily sometimes,” he resumed, after a pause, “to think how far
all but a few are from being able even to entertain the idea of the
indwelling in them of the original power of their life. True, God is in
every man, else how could he live the life he does live? but that
life God keeps alive for the hour when he shall inform the will, the
aspiration, the imagination of the man. When the man throws wide his
door to the Father of his spirit, when his individual being is thus
supplemented--to use a poor miserable word--with the individuality that
originated it, then is the man a whole, healthy, complete existence.
Then indeed, and then only, will he do no wrong, think no wrong, love
perfectly, and be right merry. Then will he scarce think of praying,
because God is in every thought and enters anew with every sensation.
Then will he forgive, and endure, and pour out his soul for the beloved
who yet grope their way in doubt and passion. Then every man will
be dear and precious to him, even the worst, for in him also lies an
unknown yearning after the same peace wherein he rests and loves.”
He sat down suddenly, and a deep silence filled the room.