I
Once, possibly, upon the world, man did not know of God; he had not
looked to the blank horizon and spoken to the Someone beyond. He had
all the need to speak, all the oppression in his soul, all the sorrow
and longing pent up in him and the tears unshed, but knew no means of
relief, did not even conceive of any one beyond himself. He had no
great Father, as we have. A strange, unhappy life he lived upon
the world, uncomforted, unfriended. He looked at the stars and
comprehended them not; and at the graves, and they said nought. He
walked alone under heaven's wide hollowness.
We of later days have God as a heritage, or if we did find Him of
ourselves, the road was made easy for us. But some one far away back
in human life found God first, and said to Him the first prayer; some
hard, untutored savage found out the gentlest and loveliest fact in
our religion. A savage came upon the pearl and understood it and fell
down in joy. A man one day named God and emptied his heart to Him in
prayer. And he told the discovery to his brothers, and men all began
to pray. The world lost half its heaviness at once. Men learned that
their prayers were nearly all the same, that God heard the same story
from thousands and hundreds of thousands of hearts. Thus men came
nearer to one another, and knew themselves one in the presence of God,
and they prayed together and formed churches. Man, the homeless one,
had advanced a step towards his home, for he began to live partly in
the beyond.
I am reminded of this by the joy which accompanies the personal
discovery of some new rite which brings us into relation with the
unseen.
Following that hypothetical first man, how many real first men there
have been, each discovering new things about God and the beyond,
giving mankind new letters in the Sanscrit, and each discovery
accompanied by joy and relief.
The conception of life as part of a journey to the heavenly city
was, I think, one of these discoveries; and its rite was the church
procession to the altar. In symbolic act man learned to make the
journey beyond the blank horizon. He enlarged the church procession
to the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and he enlarged the pilgrimage to
Jerusalem to the pilgrimage of life itself. In the understanding of
life as a pilgrimage, the wanderer and seeker has the world for his
church.
We are all on the road to the City of Jerusalem. Those who are
consciously on the road may call themselves pilgrims; they have a life
of glory in the heart as well as of toiling by the way. They are in a
certain definite perspective, and they see all things that happen
to them in the light of the pilgrimage. I for my part, directly I
definitely set out for Jerusalem, on the very first day, at the sight
of the first stranger who crossed my path, exclaimed to myself, "I
meet him on the way to Jerusalem; that makes a difference, does it
not?"
But not only does the goal of the pilgrimage lend a new significance
to the present and the future; it also lights up the past. It makes
every idlest step of worth. It makes us so understanding of the past
that we would not alter one jot or tittle in it. Our whole life is
transfigured. Every deed of our hands, every thought of our minds and
word of our lips, every deed of others or of Nature seen, every word
of man or sound of Nature heard, is made into one glowing garment--the
story of our life-pilgrimage _via_ the present moment to the Heavenly
City.
I started on my pilgrimage long ago, so long ago I can hardly tell
when. As Jeremy the pilgrim said of Mikhail: "He wished to go when he
was a little boy; that means, he began to go then, for whenever you
begin to wish you begin the pilgrimage. After that, no matter where
you are, you are sure to be on the way." It is a stage in the
awakening of consciousness, that wishing to go; the next stage is
intending to go, and the next, deciding to go and setting out--but
independently of these wishes and intentions and decisions, we were
really on the road, and going all the while. By our true wishes we
divine our destiny.
Yes, even long ago I wished, and to-day I am still on the way, though
I have actually pilgrimaged to Jerusalem in Palestine. My pilgrimage
was a pilgrimage within a pilgrimage. It was the drawing of a picture
on earth of a journey in heaven. As a day is to a year, and as a year
to man's life, so is man's life to that which we do not know, the
course of our life beyond Time's blank horizon. If I have often
stopped to tell of a little day, or a little hour in the day, it
is because I sought there a picture of Eternity, of the whole
significance of the pilgrimage.
I suppose I did not know that when I first left England to go to
Russia I was turning my face toward Jerusalem. Yet it was so. For I
should never have gone direct from London to the Holy Land. If I had
attempted such a journey I should probably have failed to reach the
great Shrine, for it is only a certain sort of people travelling in a
certain sort of way who find admittance easily. By the Russian peasant
I was enabled to go. It is strange to think that even when I was
journeying northward to Archangel I was winding my way Jerusalem-ward
in the sacred labyrinth. And I could not have gone straight southward
with the pilgrims without wandering in contrary directions first of
all, for it was necessary to come into sympathy and union with the
peasant soul. There is a peasant deep down in my soul, or a peasant
soul deep down in me, as well as an exterior, sensitive, cultured
soul. I had to discover that peasant, to realise myself as one of the
poor in spirit to whom is the kingdom.
Christ preached His gospel to the peasant. His is a peasant's gospel,
it seems to me, such a gospel as the peasants of Russia would take to
themselves to-day if Jesus came preaching to them in the way He did to
the common _people_ of the Jews. The cultured would disdain it, until
a new St. Paul interpreted it for them in terms that they could
understand, so giving it a "vogue". Both the peasants and the cultured
would be Christians, but with this difference, that in one case the
seed would be growing on the surface, and in the other from the
depths. The peasant, of course, has no _surface_; he is the good black
earth all ready for the seed.
There is a way for the cultured: it is to discover the peasant down
beneath their culture, the original elemental soil down under the
artificial surface, and to allow the sweetness and richness of
that soil to give expression on that surface. True culture is thus
achieved; that which is not only on the surface but of the depths.
Thereby might every one discover not only the peasant but the pilgrim
soul within; each man living on the world might realise himself as on
the way to Jerusalem. Such realisation would be the redemption of
the present culture of the West. For workers of every kind--not only
artists, musicians, novelists, but the handicraftsmen, the shapers of
useful things, of churches and houses and laws, even the labourers in
the road and the garden--would be living in the strength of a promise
and the light of a vision.
* * * * *
The pilgrimage was a carrying of the cross, but it was also a happy
wayfaring. It was a hard journey but not comfortless. Many of the
pilgrims walked thousands of miles in Russia before finally embarking
on the pilgrim boat. They walked solitarily, not in great bands, and
they were poor. From village to village, from the Far North, Central
Russia and the East, they tramped their way to Odessa and Batoum, and
they depended all the way on other men's hospitality. As Jeremy said,
"They had no money: instead of which they found other men's charity."
They lived night by night in hundreds of peasant homes, and prayed day
by day in hundreds of little churches. Not only did they find their
daily bread "for the love of God," but in many cases they were
furnished even to Jerusalem itself with passage money for the boat
journey, and bread to keep the body alive.
Such pilgrims often were illiterate, and it was astonishing how they
remembered all the folk they had to pray for at Jerusalem; for
every poor peasant who could not leave his native village, but gave
threepence or four-pence to the wanderer, asked to be remembered in
the land "where God walked". Perhaps there were aids to remembrance.
Many people in the villages, wanting to be sure that their prayers and
wants would be remembered, wrote their names on slips of paper and
thrust them into the pilgrim's hand. Thus in the hostelry at Jerusalem
an old wanderer came to me one morning with a sheaf of dirty papers on
which were written names, and I read them out for him aloud, thus:--
Maria for health.
Katerina for health.
Rheumatic Gregory for health.
Ivan for the peace of soul of his mother.
For the peace of soul of Prascovia.
And so on; and I sorted them into separate bundles--those who wished
prayers for health, and those who wanted peace of soul to the dead.
I, for my part, have walked many a thousand versts from village to
village, and have been glad to live the peasant-pilgrim's life.
Tramping was hard for me also, as also far from comfortless. I saw
sights which amply repaid me, if I wanted repayment, for every verst I
tramped. Often, and shamefully, have I looked back and sighed for the
town that I had left--its friends, its comforts and its pleasures; but
I also found other men's hospitality and the warmth of the stranger's
love. Very sweet it was to sit in the strange man's home, to play with
his children on the floor, to eat and drink with him, to be blessed by
him and by his wife, and sleep at last under the cottage ikons. And
though peasants knew the way was hard, "How fortunate you are!" they
said. I was more fortunate than they knew, for, being the voice of
those who were without voice, I had a life by the way in communion
with every common sight and sound. I lived in communion with sunny and
rainy days, with the form of mountain and valley, with the cornfield
and the forest and the meadow. Not only was man hospitable to the
tramp, but Nature also. The stars spoke of my pilgrimage, the sea
murmured to me; wild fruit was my food. I slept with the bare world as
my house, the sky as my roof, and God as host.
I saw strange happenings in obscure little villages. Wherever I went
I saw little pictures, and not only great pageants; I knelt in little
wooden churches as well as in the great cathedrals. And I brought all
that I met and all that I had experienced to Jerusalem, so that when
the chorus of thanksgiving went up in the monastery on the day when we
arrived, all my world was singing in it.
Sometimes I met pilgrims, especially at monasteries, and sometimes
sojourned with one along the road, but it was not until we reached
the pilgrim-boat that we found ourselves many and together. For the
greater part of the pilgrim life is necessarily in solitude. A great
number of pilgrims starting together and marching along the road is
almost unthinkable. The true desire to start takes one by oneself.
The pilgrim life is born like a river, far away apart, up in the
mountains. It is only when it is reaching its goal that it joins
itself to others. When we reached the port of embarkation we were a
great band of pilgrims, but the paths by which we had come together
were many and diverse, ramifying all over Russia.
We thought, but for the haunting fear of storms, that when we reached
the boat the arduous part of our journey would have been accomplished.
We should cease our plodding over earth, and should rest on the sea
in the sun. We would sing hymns together. Hymns are, of course,
principally designed for pilgrims, for man as a pilgrim, who needs to
console himself with music on the road. We would talk among ourselves
of our life on the way; the days would go past in pleasant converse
and the nights in happy slumber. But that was a mistake. The sea
journey was worse than any of our tramping; it was the very crown of
our suffering.
There were 560 of us packed into the holds of that hulk, the
_Lazarus_, on which we sailed, and there were besides, many Turks,
Arabs, and Syrians; of cattle, two score cows and a show bull with two
mouths; of beasts, a cage of apes; and, as if to complete pandemonium
in storm, there lay bound in his bed on the open deck a raving madman.
We were a fortnight on the sea, wandering irrelevantly from port to
port of the Levant, discharging a cargo of sugar; and all the while
the poor beggar-pilgrims lived on the crusts of which they had
sackfuls collected in Russia, crusts of black bread all gone green
with mould. I looked at the piles of them heaped on the deck to air in
pleasant weather, and was amazed that men could live simply on decay.
We had two storms, in one of which our masts were broken down and we
were told we should go to the bottom. The peasants rolled over one
another in the hold like corpses, and clutched at one another like
madmen. In despair some offered all their money, all that they had, to
a priest as a votive offering to St. Nicholas, that the storm might
abate. The state of the ship I should not dare to depict--the filth,
the stench, the vermin. For nearly a thousand passengers there
were three lavatories without bolts! Fitly was the boat named
_Lazarus_--Lazarus all sores. What the poor simple peasant men and
women suffered none can tell. They had not the thought to take care
of themselves as I had, and indeed they would have scorned to save
themselves. "It is necessary to suffer," they said.
It was a hard and terrible way, and yet on the last day of the voyage,
in the sight of the Holy Land, our hearts all leapt within us with
grateful joy. We felt it was worth it, every whit. When I think of
this journey as of that of Christian in the _Pilgrims Progress_, I
call this ship and the journey on it the Valley of the Shadow of
Death, full of foul pits and hobgoblins; something which must be
passed through if Jerusalem is to be attained; the dread gulf which
lies between earthly and heavenly life. It was necessary to pass
through it, and what was on the other side was infinitely worth the
struggle. There is a story in Dostoievsky of a Russian free-thinker
whose penance beyond this world was to walk a quadrillion versts. When
he finished this walk and saw the Heavenly City at the end of it he
fell down and cried out, "It is worth it, every inch; not only would I
walk a quadrillion of versts, but a quadrillion of quadrillions raised
to the quadrillionth power."