THE OLD CHURCH.
The awe that dwells in churches fell upon me as I crossed the
threshold--an awe I never fail to feel--heightened in many cases, no
doubt, by the sense of antiquity and of art, but an awe which I
have felt all the same in crossing the threshold of an old Puritan
conventicle, as the place where men worship and have worshipped the God
of their fathers, although for art there was only the science of common
bricklaying, and for beauty staring ugliness. To the involuntary fancy,
the air of petition and of holy need seems to linger in the place, and
the uncovered head acknowledges the sacred symbols of human inspiration
and divine revealing. But this was no ordinary church into which I
followed the gentlewoman who was my guide. As entering I turned my eyes
eastward, a flush of subdued glory invaded them from the chancel, all
the windows of which were of richly stained glass, and the roof of
carved oak lavishly gilded. I had my thoughts about this chancel, and
thence about chancels generally which may appear in another part of my
story. Now I have to do only with the church, not with the cogitations
to which it gave rise. But I will not trouble my reader with even what I
could tell him of the blending and contradicting of styles and modes of
architectural thought in the edifice. Age is to the work of contesting
human hands a wonderful harmoniser of differences. As nature brings into
harmony all fractures of her frame, and even positive intrusions upon
her realm, clothes and discolours them, in the old sense of the word,
so that at length there is no immediate shock at sight of that which in
itself was crude, and is yet coarse, so the various architecture of this
building had been gone over after the builders by the musical hand of
Eld, with wonder of delicate transition and change of key, that one
could almost fancy the music of its exquisite organ had been at
work _informing_ the building, half melting the sutures, wearing the
sharpness, and blending the angles, until in some parts there was
but the gentle flickering of the original conception left, all its
self-assertion vanished under the file of the air and the gnawing of the
worm. True, the hand of the restorer had been busy, but it had wrought
lovingly and gently, and wherein it had erred, the same influences of
nature, though as yet their effects were invisible, were already at
work--of the many making one. I will not trouble my reader, I say, with
any architectural description, which, possibly even more than a detailed
description of natural beauty dissociated from human feeling, would only
weary him, even if it were not unintelligible. When we are reading a
poem, we do not first of all examine the construction and dwell on
the rhymes and rhythms; all that comes after, if we find that the poem
itself is so good that its parts are therefore worth examining, as being
probably good in themselves, and elucidatory of the main work. There
were carvings on the ends of the benches all along the aisle on both
sides, well worth examination, and some of them even of description;
but I shall not linger on these. A word only about the columns: they
supported arches of different fashion on the opposite sides, but they
were themselves similar in matter and construction, both remarkable.
They were of coarse granite of the country, chiselled, but very far
from smooth, not to say polished. Each pillar was a single stone with
chamfered sides.
Walking softly through the ancient house, forgetting in the many
thoughts that arose within me that I had a companion, I came at length
into the tower, the basement of which was open, forming part of the body
of the church. There hung many ropes through holes in a ceiling above,
for bell-ringing was encouraged and indeed practised by my friend
Shepherd. And as I regarded them, I thought within myself how delightful
it would be if in these days as in those of Samuel, the word of God was
precious; so that when it came to the minister of his people--a fresh
vision of his glory, a discovery of his meaning--he might make haste to
the church, and into the tower, lay hold of the rope that hung from the
deepest-toned bell of all, and constrain it by the force of strong arms
to utter its voice of call, “Come hither, come hear, my people, for God
hath spoken;” and from the streets or the lanes would troop the eager
folk; the plough be left in the furrow, the cream in the churn; and the
crowding people bring faces into the church, all with one question upon
them--“What hath the Lord spoken?” But now it would be answer sufficient
to such a call to say, “But what will become of the butter?” or, “An
hour’s ploughing will be lost.” And the clergy--how would they bring
about such a time? They do not even believe that God has a word to his
people through them. They think that his word is petrified for use in
the Bible and Prayer-book; that the wise men of old heard so much of the
word of God, and have so set it down, that there is no need for any more
words of the Lord coming to the prophets of a land; therefore they look
down upon the prophesying--that is, the preaching of the word--make
light of it, the best of them, say these prayers are everything, or all
but everything: _their_ hearts are not set upon hearing what God the
Lord will speak that they may speak it abroad to his people again.
Therefore it is no wonder if the church bells are obedient only to the
clock, are no longer subject to the spirit of the minister, and have
nothing to do in telegraphing between heaven and earth. They make little
of this part of their duty; and no wonder, if what is to be spoken must
remain such as they speak. They put the Church for God, and the prayers
which are the word of man to God, for the word of God to man. But when
the prophets see no vision, how should they have any word to speak?
These thoughts were passing through my mind when my eye fell upon my
guide. She was seated against the south wall of the tower, on a stool, I
thought, or small table. While I was wandering about the church she had
taken her stocking and wires out of her pocket, and was now knitting
busily. How her needles did go! Her eyes never regarded them, however,
but, fixed on the slabs that paved the tower at a yard or two from
her feet, seemed to be gazing far out to sea, for they had an infinite
objectless outlook. To try her, I took for the moment the position of an
accuser.
“So you don’t mind working in church?” I said.
When I spoke she instantly rose, her eyes turned as from the far
sea-waves to my face, and light came out of them. With a smile she
answered--
“The church knows me, sir.”
“But what has that to do with it?”
“I don’t think she minds it. We are told to be diligent in business, you
know, sir.”
“Yes, but it does not say in church and out of church. You could be
diligent somewhere else, couldn’t you?”
As soon as I said this, I began to fear she would think I meant it. But
she only smiled and said, “It won’t hurt she, sir; and my good man, who
does all he can to keep her tidy, is out at toes and heels, and if I
don’t keep he warm he’ll be laid up, and then the church won’t be kep’
nice, sir, till he’s up again.”
I was tempted to go on.
“But you could have sat down outside--there are some nice gravestones
near--and waited till I came out.”
“But what’s the church for, sir? The sun’s werry hot to-day, sir; and
Mr. Shepherd, he say, sir, that the church is like the shadow of a
great rock in a weary land. So, you see, if I was to sit out in the
sun, instead of comin’ in here to the cool o’ the shadow, I wouldn’t be
takin’ the church at her word. It does my heart good to sit in the old
church, sir. There’s a something do seem to come out o’ the old walls
and settle down like the cool o’ the day upon my old heart that’s nearly
tired o’ crying, and would fain keep its eyes dry for the rest o’ the
journey. My old man’s stockin’ won’t hurt the church, sir, and, bein’
a good deed as I suppose it is, it’s none the worse for the place. I
think, if He was to come by wi’ the whip o’ small cords, I wouldn’t be
afeared of his layin’ it upo’ my old back. Do you think he would, sir?”
Thus driven to speak as I thought, I made haste to reply, more delighted
with the result of my experiment than I cared to let her know.
“Indeed I do not. I was only talking. It is but selfish, cheating, or
ill-done work that the church’s Master drives away. All our work ought
to be done in the shadow of the church.”
“I thought you be only having a talk about it, sir,” she said, smiling
her sweet old smile. “Nobody knows what this old church is to me.”
Now the old woman had a good husband, apparently: the sorrows which had
left their mark even upon her smile, must have come from her family, I
thought.
“You have had a family?” I said, interrogatively.
“I’ve had thirteen,” she answered. “Six bys and seven maidens.”
“Why, you are rich!” I returned. “And where are they all?”
“Four maidens be lying in the churchyard, sir; two be married, and one
be down in the mill, there.”
“And your boys?”
“One of them be lyin’ beside his sisters--drownded afore my eyes, sir.
Three o’ them be at sea, and two o’ them in it, sir.”
At sea! I thought. What a wide _where_! As vague to the imagination,
almost, as _in the other world_. How a mother’s thoughts must go roaming
about the waste, like birds that have lost their nest, to find them!
As this thought kept me silent for a few moments, she resumed.
“It be no wonder, be it, sir? that I like to creep into the church with
my knitting. Many’s the stormy night, when my husband couldn’t keep
still, but would be out on the cliffs or on the breakwater, for no good
in life, but just to hear the roar of the waves that he could only see
by the white of them, with the balls o’ foam flying in his face in the
dark--many’s the such a night that I have left the house after he was
gone, with this blessed key in my hand, and crept into the old church
here, and sat down where I’m sittin’ now--leastways where I was sittin’
when your reverence spoke to me--and hearkened to the wind howling
about the place. The church windows never rattle, sir--like the cottage
windows, as I suppose you know, sir. Somehow, I feel safe in the
church.”
“But if you had sons at sea,” said I, again wishing to draw her out, “it
would not be of much good to you to feel safe yourself, so long as they
were in danger.”
“O! yes, it be, sir. What’s the good of feeling safe yourself but it
let you know other people be safe too? It’s when you don’t feel safe
yourself that you feel other people ben’t safe.”
“But,” I said--and such confidence I had from what she had already
uttered, that I was sure the experiment was not a cruel one--“some of
your sons _were_ drowned for all that you say about their safety.”
“Well, sir,” she answered, with a sigh, “I trust they’re none the less
safe for that. It would be a strange thing for an old woman like me,
well-nigh threescore and ten, to suppose that safety lay in not being
drownded. Why, they might ha’ been cast on a desert island, and wasted
to skin an’ bone, and got home again wi’ the loss of half the wits they
set out with. Wouldn’t that ha’ been worse than being drownded right
off? And that wouldn’t ha’ been the worst, either. The church she seem
to tell me all the time, that for all the roaring outside, there be
really no danger after all. What matter if they go to the bottom? What
is the bottom of the sea, sir? You bein’ a clergyman can tell that, sir.
I shouldn’t ha’ known it if I hadn’t had bys o’ my own at sea, sir. But
you can tell, sir, though you ain’t got none there.”
And though she was putting her parson to his catechism, the smile that
returned on her face was as modest as if she had only been listening to
his instruction. I had not long to look for my answer.
“The hollow of his hand,” I said, and said no more.
“I thought you would know it, sir,” she returned, with a little glow of
triumph in her tone. “Well, then, that’s just what the church tells me
when I come in here in the stormy nights. I bring my knitting then too,
sir, for I can knit in the dark as well as in the light almost; and when
they come home, if they do come home, they’re none the worse that I went
to the old church to pray for them. There it goes roaring about them
poor dears, all out there; and their old mother sitting still as a stone
almost in the quiet old church, a caring for them. And then it do come
across me, sir, that God be a sitting in his own house at home, hearing
all the noise and all the roaring in which his children are tossed about
in the world, watching it all, letting it drown some o’ them and take
them back to him, and keeping it from going too far with others of them
that are not quite ready for that same. I have my thoughts, you see,
sir, though I be an old woman; and not nice to look at.”
I had come upon a genius. How nature laughs at our schools sometimes!
Education, so-called, is a fine thing, and might be a better thing; but
there is an education, that of life, which, when seconded by a pure will
to learn, leaves the schools behind, even as the horse of the desert
would leave behind the slow pomposity of the common-fed goose. For life
is God’s school, and they that will listen to the Master there will
learn at God’s speed. For one moment, I am ashamed to say, I was envious
of Shepherd, and repined that, now old Rogers was gone, I had no such
glorious old stained-glass window in my church to let in the eternal
upon my light-thirsty soul. I must say for myself that the feeling
lasted but for a moment, and that no sooner had the shadow of it passed
and the true light shined after it, than I was heartily ashamed of it.
Why should not Shepherd have the old woman as well as I? True, Shepherd
was more of what would now be called a ritualist than I; true, I thought
my doctrine simpler and therefore better than his; but was this any
reason why I should have all the grand people to minister to in my
parish! Recovering myself, I found her last words still in my ears.
“You are very nice to look at,” I said. “You must not find fault with
the work of God, because you would like better to be young and pretty
than to be as you now are. Time and time’s rents and furrows are all his
making and his doing. God makes nothing ugly.”
“Are you quite sure of that, sir?”
I paused. Such a question from such a woman “must give us pause.” And,
as I paused, the thought of certain animals flashed into my mind and I
could not insist that God had never made anything ugly.
“No. I am not sure of it,” I answered. For of all things my soul
recoiled from, any professional pretence of knowing more than I did know
seemed to me the most repugnant to the spirit and mind of the Master,
whose servants we are, or but the servants of mere priestly delusion and
self-seeking. “But if he does,” I went on to say, “it must be that we
may see what it is like, and therefore not like it.”
Then, unwilling all at once to plunge with her into such an abyss as the
question opened, I turned the conversation to an object on which my eyes
had been for some time resting half-unconsciously. It was the sort of
stool or bench on which my guide had been sitting. I now thought it was
some kind of box or chest. It was curiously carved in old oak, very much
like the ends of the benches and book-boards.
“What is that you were sitting on?” I asked. “A chest or what?”
“It be there when we come to this place, and that be nigh fifty years
agone, sir. But what it be, you’ll be better able to tell than I be,
sir.”
“Perhaps a chest for holding the communion-plate in old time,” I said.
“But how should it then come to be banished to the tower?”
“No, sir; it can’t be that. It be some sort of ancient musical piano, I
be thinking.”
I stooped and saw that its lid was shaped like the cover of an organ.
With some difficulty I opened it; and there, to be sure, was a row of
huge keys, fit for the fingers of a Cyclops. I pressed upon them, one
after another, but no sound followed. They were stiff to the touch; and
once down, so they mostly remained until lifted again. I looked if there
was any sign of a bellows, thinking it must have been some primitive
kind of reed-instrument, like what we call a seraphine or harmonium
now-a-days. But there was no hole through which there could have been
any communication with or from a bellows, although there might have been
a small one inside. There were, however, a dozen little round holes in
the fixed part of the top, which might afford some clue to the mystery
of its former life. I could not find any way of reaching the inside of
it, so strongly was it put together; therefore I was left, I thought,
to the efforts of my imagination alone for any hope of discovery with
regard to the instrument, seeing further observation was impossible.
But here I found that I was mistaken in two important conclusions, the
latter of which depended on the former. The first of these was that
it was an instrument: it was only one end of an instrument; therefore,
secondly, there might be room for observation still. But I found this
out by accident, which has had a share in most discoveries, and which,
meaning a something that falls into our hands unlocked for, is so far an
unobjectionable word even to the man who does not believe in chance.
I had for the time given up the question as insoluble, and was gazing
about the place, when, glancing up at the holes in the ceiling through
which the bell-ropes went, I spied two or three thick wires hanging
through the same ceiling close to the wall, and right over the box with
the keys. The vague suspicion of a discovery dawned upon me.
“Have you got the key of the tower?” I asked.
“No, sir. But I’ll run home for it at once,” she answered. And rising,
she went out in haste.
“Run!” thought I, looking after her. “It is a word of the will and the
feeling, not of the body.” But I was mistaken. The dear old creature had
no sooner got outside of the church-yard, within which, I presume, she
felt that she must be decorous, than she did run, and ran well too. I
was on the point of starting after her at full speed, to prevent her
from hurting herself, but reflecting that her own judgment ought to
be as good as mine in such a case, I returned, and sitting down on her
seat, awaited her reappearance, gazing at the ceiling. There I either
saw or imagined I saw signs of openings corresponding in number and
position with those in the lid under me. In about three minutes the old
woman returned, panting but not distressed, with a great crooked old key
in her hand. Why are all the keys of a church so crooked? I did not ask
her that question, though. What I said to her, was--
“You shouldn’t run like that. I am in no hurry.”
“Be you not, sir? I thought, by the way you spoke, you be taken with a
longing to get a-top o’ the tower, and see all about you like. For you
see, sir, fond as I be of the old church, I du feel sometimes as if
she’d smother me; and then nothing will do but I must get at the top
of the old tower. And then, what with the sun, if there be any sun,
and what with the fresh air which there always be up there, sir,--it du
always be fresh up there, sir,” she repeated, “I come back down again
blessing the old church for its tower.”
As she spoke she was toiling up the winding staircase after me, where
there was just room enough for my shoulders to get through by turning
themselves a little across the lie of the steps. They were very high,
but she kept up with me bravely, bearing out her statement that she was
no stranger to them. As I ascended, however, I was not thinking of
her, but of what she had said. Strange to tell, the significance of
the towers or spires of our churches had never been clear to me before.
True, I was quite awake to their significance, at least to that of the
spires, as fingers pointing ever upwards to
“regions mild of calm and serene air,
Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot,
Which men call Earth;”
but I had not thought of their symbolism as lifting one up above the
church itself into a region where no church is wanted because the Lord
God almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it.
Happy church indeed, if it destroys the need of itself by lifting men
up into the eternal kingdom! Would that I and all her servants lived
pervaded with the sense of this her high end, her one high calling! We
need the church towers to remind us that the mephitic airs in the church
below are from the churchyard at its feet, which so many take for the
church, worshipping over the graves and believing in death--or at least
in the material substance over which alone death hath power. Thus the
church, even in her corruption, lifts us out of her corruption, sending
us up her towers and her spires to admonish us that she too lives in the
air of truth: that her form too must pass away, while the truth that is
embodied in her lives beyond forms and customs and prejudices, shining
as the stars for ever and ever. He whom the church does not lift up
above the church is not worthy to be a doorkeeper therein.
Such thoughts passed through me, satisfied me, and left me peaceful, so
that before I had reached the top, I was thanking the Lord--not for his
church-tower, but for his sexton’s wife. The old woman was a jewel. If
her husband was like her, which was too much to expect--if he believed
in her, it would be enough, quite--then indeed the little child, who
answered on being questioned thereanent, as the Scotch would say, that
the three orders of ministers in the church were the parson, clerk, and
sexton, might not be so far wrong in respect of this individual case. So
in the ascent, and the thinking associated therewith, I forgot all about
the special object for which I had requested the key of the tower, and
led the way myself up to the summit, where stepping out of a little
door, which being turned only heavenwards had no pretence for, or claim
upon a curiously crooked key, but opened to the hand laid upon the
latch, I thought of the words of the judicious Hooker, that “the
assembling of the church to learn” was “the receiving of angels
descended from above;” and in such a whimsical turn as our thoughts will
often take when we are not heeding them, I wondered for a moment whether
that was why the upper door was left on the latch, forgetting that that
could not be of much use, if the door in the basement was kept locked
with the crooked key. But the whole suggested something true about my
own heart and that of my fellows, if not about the church: Revelation is
not enough, the open trap-door is not enough, if the door of the heart
is not open likewise.
As soon, however, as I stepped out upon the roof of the tower, I forgot
again all that had thus passed through my mind, swift as a dream. For,
filling the west, lay the ocean beneath, with a dark curtain of storm
hanging in perpendicular lines over part of its horizon, and on the
other side was the peaceful solid land, with its numberless shades of
green, its heights and hollows, its farms and wooded vales--there was
not much wood--its scattered villages and country dwellings, lighted
and shadowed by the sun and the clouds. Beyond lay the blue heights of
Dartmoor. And over all, bathing us as it passed, moved the wind, the
life-bearing spirit of the whole, the servant of the sun. The old woman
stood beside me, silently enjoying my enjoyment, with a still smile that
seemed to say in kindly triumph, “Was I not right about the tower and
the wind that dwells among its pinnacles?” I drank deep of the universal
flood, the outspread peace, the glory of the sun, and the haunting
shadow of the sea that lay beyond like the visual image of the eternal
silence--as it looks to us--that rounds our little earthly life.
There were a good many trees in the church-yard, and as I looked down,
the tops of them in their richest foliage hid all the graves directly
below me, except a single flat stone looking up through an opening in
the leaves, which seemed to have been just made for it to let it see the
top of the tower. Upon the stone a child was seated playing with a few
flowers she had gathered, not once looking up to the gilded vanes that
rose from the four pinnacles at the corners of the tower. I turned
to the eastern side, and looked over upon the church roof. It lay far
below--looking very narrow and small, but long, with the four ridges of
four steep roofs stretching away to the eastern end. It was in excellent
repair, for the parish was almost all in one lord’s possession, and he
was proud of his church: between them he and Mr. Shepherd had made it
beautiful to behold and strong to endure.
When I turned to look again, the little child was gone. Some butterfly
fancy had seized her, and she was away. A little lamb was in her place,
nibbling at the grass that grew on the side of the next mound. And
when I looked seaward there was a sloop, like a white-winged sea-bird,
rounding the end of a high projecting rock from the south, to bear up
the little channel that led to the gates of the harbour canal. Out
of the circling waters it had flown home, not from a long voyage, but
hardly the less welcome therefore to those that waited and looked for
her signal from the barrier rock.
Reentering by the angels’ door to descend the narrow cork-screw stair,
so dark and cool, I caught a glimpse, one turn down, by the feeble light
that came through its chinks after it was shut behind us, of a tiny
maiden-hair fern growing out of the wall. I stopped, and said to the old
woman--
“I have a sick daughter at home, or I wouldn’t rob your tower of this
lovely little thing.”
“Well, sir, what eyes you have! I never saw the thing before. Do take
it home to miss. It’ll do her good to see it. I be main sorry to hear
you’ve got a sick maiden. She ben’t a bedlar, be she, sir?”
I was busy with my knife getting out all the roots I could without
hurting them, and before I had succeeded I had remembered Turner’s using
the word.
“Not quite that,” I answered, “but she can’t even sit up, and must be
carried everywhere.”
“Poor dear! Everyone has their troubles, sir. The sea’s been mine.”
She continued talking and asking kind questions about Connie as we went
down the stair. Not till she opened a little door I had passed without
observing it as we came up, was I reminded of my first object in
ascending the tower. For this door revealed a number of bells hanging
in silent power in the brown twilight of the place. I entered carefully,
for there were only some planks laid upon the joists to keep one’s feet
from going through the ceiling. In a few moments I had satisfied myself
that my conjecture about the keys below was correct. The small iron rods
I had seen from beneath hung down from this place. There were more
of them hanging shorter above, and there was yet enough of a further
mechanism remaining to prove that those keys, by means of the looped and
cranked rods, had been in connection with hammers, one of them indeed
remaining also, which struck the bells, so that a tune could be played
upon them as upon any other keyed instrument. This was the first
contrivance of the kind I had ever seen, though I have heard of it in
other churches since.
“If I could find a clever blacksmith in the neighbourhood, now,” I
said to myself, “I would get this all repaired, so that it should not
interfere with the bell-ringing when the ringers were to be had, and
yet Shepherd could play a psalm tune to his parish at large when he
pleased.” For Shepherd was a very fair musician, and gave a good deal of
time to the organ. “It’s a grand notion, to think of him sitting here in
the gloom, with that great musical instrument towering above him, whence
he sends forth the voice of gladness, almost of song to his people,
while they are mowing the grass, binding the sheaves, or gazing abroad
over the stormy ocean in doubt, anxiety, and fear. ‘There’s the parson
at his bells,’ they would say, and stop and listen; and some phrase
might sink into their hearts, waking some memory, or giving birth to
some hope or faint aspiration. I will see what can be done.” Having
come to this conclusion, I left the abode of the bells, descended to the
church, bade my conductress good morning, saying I would visit her soon
in her own house, and bore home to my child the spoil which, without
kirk-rapine, I had torn from the wall of the sanctuary. By this time the
stormy veil had lifted from the horizon, and the sun was shining in full
power without one darkening cloud.
Ere I left the churchyard I would have a glance at the stone which ever
seemed to lie gazing up at the tower. I soon found it, because it was
the only one in that quarter from which I could see the top of the
tower. It recorded the life and death of an aged pair who had been
married fifty years, concluding with the couplet--
“A long time this may seem to be, But it did not seem long to we.”
The whole story of a human life lay in that last verse. True, it was
not good grammar; but they had got through fifty years of wedded life
probably without any knowledge of grammar to harmonise or to shorten
them, and I daresay, had they been acquainted with the lesson he had
put into their dumb mouths, they would have been aware of no ground of
quarrel with the poetic stone-cutter, who most likely had thrown the
verses in when he made his claim for the stone and the cutting. Having
learnt this one by heart, I went about looking for anything more in
the shape of sepulchral flora that might interest or amuse my crippled
darling; nor had I searched long before I found one, the sole but
triumphant recommendation of which was the thorough “puzzle-headedness”
of its construction. I quite reckoned on seeing Connie trying to make
it out, looking as bewildered over its excellent grammar, as the poet
of the other ought to have looked over his rhymes, ere he gave in to the
use of the nominative after a preposition.
“If you could view the heavenly shore,
Where heart’s content you hope to find,
You would not murmur were you gone before,
But grieve that you are left behind.”