THE PULPIT.
Before morning it rained hard again; but it cleared at sunrise, and the
first day of the week found the world new-washed. Glaston slept longer
than usual, however, for all the shine, and in the mounting sun looked
dead and deserted. There were no gay shop-windows to reflect his beams,
or fill them with rainbow colors. There were no carriages or carts, and
only, for a few moments, one rider. That was Paul Faber again, on Ruber
now, aglow in the morning. There were no children playing yet about the
streets or lanes; but the cries of some came at intervals from unseen
chambers, as the Sunday soap stung their eyes, or the Sunday comb tore
their matted locks.
As Faber rode out of his stable-yard, Wingfold took his hat from its
peg, to walk through his churchyard. He lived almost in the churchyard,
for, happily, since his marriage the rectory had lost its tenants, and
Mr. Bevis had allowed him to occupy it, in lieu of part of his salary.
It was not yet church-time by hours, but he had a custom of going every
Sunday morning, in the fine weather, quite early, to sit for an hour or
two alone in the pulpit, amidst the absolute solitude and silence of the
great church. It was a door, he said, through which a man who could not
go to Horeb, might enter and find the power that dwells on mountain-tops
and in desert places.
He went slowly through the churchyard, breathing deep breaths of the
delicious spring-morning air. Rain-drops were sparkling all over the
grassy graves, and in the hollows of the stones they had gathered in
pools. The eyes of the death-heads were full of water, as if weeping at
the defeat of their master. Every now and then a soft little wind awoke,
like a throb of the spirit of life, and shook together the scattered
drops upon the trees, and then down came diamond showers on the grass
and daisies of the mounds, and fed the green moss in the letters of the
epitaphs. Over all the sun was shining, as if everywhere and forever
spring was the order of things. And is it not so? Is not the idea of the
creation an eternal spring ever trembling on the verge of summer? It
seemed so to the curate, who was not given to sad, still less to
sentimental moralizing over the graves. From such moods his heart
recoiled. To him they were weak and mawkish, and in him they would have
been treacherous. No grave was to him the place where a friend was
lying; it was but a cenotaph--the place where the Lord had lain.
"Let those possessed with demons haunt the tombs," he said, as he sat
down in the pulpit; "for me, I will turn my back upon them with the
risen Christ. Yes, friend, I hear you! I know what you say! You have
more affection than I? you can not forsake the last resting-place of the
beloved? Well, you may have more feeling than I; there is no gauge by
which I can tell, and if there were, it would be useless: we are as God
made us.--No, I will not say that: I will say rather, I am as God is
making me, and I shall one day be as He has made me. Meantime I know
that He will have me love my enemy tenfold more than now I love my
friend. Thou believest that the malefactor--ah, there was faith now! Of
two men dying together in agony and shame, the one beseeches of the
other the grace of a king! Thou believest, I say--at least thou
professest to believe that the malefactor was that very day with Jesus
in Paradise, and yet thou broodest over thy friend's grave, gathering
thy thoughts about the pitiful garment he left behind him, and letting
himself drift away into the unknown, forsaken of all but thy vaguest,
most shapeless thinkings! Tell me not thou fearest to enter there whence
has issued no revealing. It is God who gives thee thy mirror of
imagination, and if thou keep it clean, it will give thee back no shadow
but of the truth. Never a cry of love went forth from human heart but
it found some heavenly chord to fold it in. Be sure thy friend inhabits
a day not out of harmony with this morning of earthly spring, with this
sunlight, those rain-drops, that sweet wind that flows so softly over
his grave."
It was the first sprouting of a _germon_. He covered it up and left it:
he had something else to talk to his people about this morning.
While he sat thus in the pulpit, his wife was praying for him ere she
rose. She had not learned to love him in the vestibule of society, that
court of the Gentiles, but in the chamber of torture and the clouded
adytum of her own spiritual temple. For there a dark vapor had hid the
deity enthroned, until the words of His servant melted the gloom. Then
she saw that what she had taken for her own innermost chamber of awful
void, was the dwelling-place of the most high, most lovely, only One,
and through its windows she beheld a cosmos dawning out of chaos.
Therefore the wife walked beside the husband in the strength of a common
faith in absolute Good; and not seldom did the fire which the torch of
his prophecy had kindled upon her altar, kindle again that torch, when
some bitter wind of evil words, or mephitis of human perversity, or
thunder-rain of foiled charity, had extinguished it. She loved every
hair upon his head, but loved his well-being infinitely more than his
mortal life. A wrinkle on his forehead would cause her a pang, yet would
she a thousand times rather have seen him dead than known him guilty of
one of many things done openly by not a few of his profession.
And now, as one sometimes wonders what he shall dream to-night, she sat
wondering what new thing, or what old thing fresher and more alive than
the new, would this day flow from his heart into hers. The following is
the substance of what, a few hours after, she did hear from him. His
rector, sitting between Mrs. Bevis and Mrs. Ramshorn, heard it also. The
radiance of truth shone from Wingfold's face as he spoke, and those of
the congregation who turned away from his words were those whose lives
ran counter to the spirit of them. Whatever he uttered grew out of a
whole world of thought, but it grew before them--that is, he always
thought afresh in the presence of the people, and spoke extempore.
"'_Ye can not serve God and mammon_.'
"Who said this? The Lord by whose name ye are called, in whose name
this house was built, and who will at last judge every one of us. And
yet how many of you are, and have been for years, trying your very
hardest to do the thing your Master tells you is impossible! Thou man!
Thou woman! I appeal to thine own conscience whether thou art not
striving to serve God and mammon.
"But stay! am I right?--It can not be. For surely if a man strove hard
to serve God and mammon, he would presently discover the thing was
impossible. It is not easy to serve God, and it is easy to serve mammon;
if one strove to serve God, the hard thing, along with serving mammon,
the easy thing, the incompatibility of the two endeavors must appear.
The fact is there is no strife in you. With ease you serve mammon every
day and hour of your lives, and for God, you do not even ask yourselves
the question whether you are serving Him or no. Yet some of you are at
this very moment indignant that I call you servers of mammon. Those of
you who know that God knows you are His servants, know also that I do
not mean you; therefore, those who are indignant at being called the
servants of mammon, are so because they are indeed such. As I say these
words I do not lift my eyes, not that I am afraid to look you in the
face, as uttering an offensive thing, but that I would have your own
souls your accusers.
"Let us consider for a moment the God you do not serve, and then for a
moment the mammon you do serve. The God you do not serve is the Father
of Lights, the Source of love, the Maker of man and woman, the Head of
the great family, the Father of fatherhood and motherhood; the
Life-giver who would die to preserve His children, but would rather slay
them than they should live the servants of evil; the God who can neither
think nor do nor endure any thing mean or unfair; the God of poetry and
music and every marvel; the God of the mountain tops, and the rivers
that run from the snows of death, to make the earth joyous with life;
the God of the valley and the wheat-field, the God who has set love
betwixt youth and maiden; the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,
the perfect; the God whom Christ knew, with whom Christ was satisfied,
of whom He declared that to know Him was eternal life. The mammon you do
serve is not a mere negation, but a positive Death. His temple is a
darkness, a black hollow, ever hungry, in the heart of man, who tumbles
into it every thing that should make life noble and lovely. To all who
serve him he makes it seem that his alone is the reasonable service.
His wages are death, but he calls them life, and they believe him. I
will tell you some of the marks of his service--a few of the badges of
his household--for he has no visible temple; no man bends the knee to
him; it is only his soul, his manhood, that the worshiper casts in the
dust before him. If a man talks of the main chance, meaning thereby that
of making money, or of number one, meaning thereby self, except indeed
he honestly jest, he is a servant of mammon. If, when thou makest a
bargain, thou thinkest _only_ of thyself and thy gain, though art a
servant of mammon. The eager looks of those that would get money, the
troubled looks of those who have lost it, worst of all the gloating
looks of them that have it, these are sure signs of the service of
mammon. If in the church thou sayest to the rich man, 'Sit here in a
good place,' and to the poor man, 'Stand there,' thou art a
mammon-server. If thou favorest the company of those whom men call
well-to-do, when they are only well-to-eat, well-to-drink, or
well-to-show, and declinest that of the simple and the meek, then in thy
deepest consciousness know that thou servest mammon, not God. If thy
hope of well-being in time to come, rests upon thy houses, or lands, or
business, or money in store, and not upon the living God, be thou
friendly and kind with the overflowings of thy possessions, or a churl
whom no man loves, thou art equally a server of mammon. If the loss of
thy goods would take from thee the joy of thy life; if it would tear thy
heart that the men thou hadst feasted should hold forth to thee the two
fingers instead of the whole hand; nay, if thy thought of to-morrow
makes thee quail before the duty of to-day, if thou broodest over the
evil that is not come, and turnest from the God who is with thee in the
life of the hour, thou servest mammon; he holds thee in his chain; thou
art his ape, whom he leads about the world for the mockery of his
fellow-devils. If with thy word, yea, even with thy judgment, thou
confessest that God is the only good, yet livest as if He had sent thee
into the world to make thyself rich before thou die; if it will add one
feeblest pang to the pains of thy death, to think that thou must leave
thy fair house, thy ancestral trees, thy horses, thy shop, thy books,
behind thee, then art thou a servant of mammon, and far truer to thy
master than he will prove to thee. Ah, slave! the moment the breath is
out of the body, lo, he has already deserted thee! and of all in which
thou didst rejoice, all that gave thee such power over thy fellows,
there is not left so much as a spike of thistle-down for the wind to
waft from thy sight. For all thou hast had, there is nothing to show.
Where is the friendship in which thou mightst have invested thy money,
in place of burying it in the maw of mammon? Troops of the dead might
now be coming to greet thee with love and service, hadst thou made thee
friends with thy money; but, alas! to thee it was not money, but mammon,
for thou didst love it--not for the righteousness and salvation thou by
its means mightst work in the earth, but for the honor it brought thee
among men, for the pleasures and immunities it purchased. Some of you
are saying in your hearts, 'Preach to thyself, and practice thine own
preaching;'--and you say well. And so I mean to do, lest having preached
to others I should be myself a cast-away--drowned with some of you in
the same pond of filth. God has put money in my power through the gift
of one whom you know. I shall endeavor to be a faithful steward of that
which God through her has committed to me in trust. Hear me, friends--to
none of you am I the less a friend that I tell you truths you would hide
from your own souls: money is not mammon; it is God's invention; it is
good and the gift of God. But for money and the need of it, there would
not be half the friendship in the world. It is powerful for good when
divinely used. Give it plenty of air, and it is sweet as the hawthorn;
shut it up, and it cankers and breeds worms. Like all the best gifts of
God, like the air and the water, it must have motion and change and
shakings asunder; like the earth itself, like the heart and mind of man,
it must be broken and turned, not heaped together and neglected. It is
an angel of mercy, whose wings are full of balm and dews and
refreshings; but when you lay hold of him, pluck his pinions, pen him in
a yard, and fall down and worship him--then, with the blessed vengeance
of his master, he deals plague and confusion and terror, to stay the
idolatry. If I misuse or waste or hoard the divine thing, I pray my
Master to see to it--my God to punish me. Any fire rather than be given
over to the mean idol! And now I will make an offer to my townsfolk in
the face of this congregation--that, whoever will, at the end of three
years, bring me his books, to him also will I lay open mine, that he
will see how I have sought to make friends of the mammon of
unrighteousness. Of the mammon-server I expect to be judged according
to the light that is in him, and that light I know to be darkness.
"Friend, be not a slave. Be wary. Look not on the gold when it is yellow
in thy purse. Hoard not. In God's name, spend--spend on. Take heed how
thou spendest, but take heed that thou spend. Be thou as the sun in
heaven; let thy gold be thy rays, thy angels of love and life and
deliverance. Be thou a candle of the Lord to spread His light through
the world. If hitherto, in any fashion of faithlessness, thou hast
radiated darkness into the universe, humble thyself, and arise and
shine.
"But if thou art poor, then look not on thy purse when it is empty. He
who desires more than God wills him to have, is also a servant of
mammon, for he trusts in what God has made, and not in God Himself. He
who laments what God has taken from him, he is a servant of mammon. He
who for care can not pray, is a servant of mammon. There are men in this
town who love and trust their horses more than the God that made them
and their horses too. None the less confidently will they give judgment
on the doctrine of God. But the opinion of no man who does not render
back his soul to the living God and live in Him, is, in religion, worth
the splinter of a straw. Friends, cast your idol into the furnace; melt
your mammon down, coin him up, make God's money of him, and send him
coursing. Make of him cups to carry the gift of God, the water of life,
through the world--in lovely justice to the oppressed, in healthful
labor to them whom no man hath hired, in rest to the weary who have
borne the burden and heat of the day, in joy to the heavy-hearted, in
laughter to the dull-spirited. Let them all be glad with reason, and
merry without revel. Ah! what gifts in music, in drama, in the tale, in
the picture, in the spectacle, in books and models, in flowers and
friendly feasting, what true gifts might not the mammon of
unrighteousness, changed back into the money of God, give to men and
women, bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh! How would you not spend
your money for the Lord, if He needed it at your hand! He does need it;
for he that spends it upon the least of his fellows, spends it upon his
Lord. To hold fast upon God with one hand, and open wide the other to
your neighbor--that is religion; that is the law and the prophets, and
the true way to all better things that are yet to come.--Lord, defend us
from Mammon. Hold Thy temple against his foul invasion. Purify our
money with Thy air, and Thy sun, that it may be our slave, and Thou our
Master. Amen."
The moment his sermon was ended, the curate always set himself to forget
it. This for three reasons: first, he was so dissatisfied with it, that
to think of it was painful--and the more, that many things he might have
said, and many better ways of saying what he had said, would constantly
present themselves. Second, it was useless to brood over what could not
be bettered; and, third, it was hurtful, inasmuch as it prevented the
growth of new, hopeful, invigorating thought, and took from his
strength, and the quality of his following endeavor. A man's labors must
pass like the sunrises and sunsets of the world. The next thing, not the
last, must be his care. When he reached home, he would therefore use
means to this end of diversion, and not unfrequently would write verses.
Here are those he wrote that afternoon.
LET YOUR LIGHT SO SHINE.
Sometimes, O Lord, thou lightest in my head
A lamp that well might Pharos all the lands;
Anon the light will neither burn nor spread
Shrouded in danger gray the beacon stands.
A Pharos? Oh, dull brain! Oh, poor quenched lamp,
Under a bushel, with an earthy smell!
Moldering it lies, in rust and eating damp,
While the slow oil keeps oozing from its cell!
For me it were enough to be a flower
Knowing its root in thee was somewhere hid--
To blossom at the far appointed hour,
And fold in sleep when thou, my Nature, bid.
But hear my brethren crying in the dark!
Light up my lamp that it may shine abroad.
Fain would I cry--See, brothers! sisters, mark!
This is the shining of light's father, God.