THE HARVEST.
It was some time before we got the bells to work to our mind, but at
last we succeeded. The worst of it was to get the cranks, which at
first required strong pressure on the keys, to work easily enough. But
neither Joe nor his cousin spared any pains to perfect the attempt,
and, as I say, at length we succeeded. I took Wynnie down to the
instrument and made her try whether she could not do something, and she
succeeded in making the old tower discourse loudly and eloquently.
By this time the thanksgiving for the harvest was at hand: on the
morning of that first of all would I summon the folk to their prayers
with the sound of the full peal. And I wrote a little hymn of praise to
the God of the harvest, modelling it to one of the oldest tunes in that
part of the country, and I had it printed on slips of paper and laid
plentifully on the benches. What with the calling of the bells, like
voices in the highway, and the solemn meditation of the organ within to
bear aloft the thoughts of those who heard, and came to the prayer and
thanksgiving in common, and the message which God had given me to utter
to them, I hoped that we should indeed keep holiday.
Wynnie summoned the parish with the hundredth psalm pealed from aloft,
dropping from the airy regions of the tower on village and hamlet and
cottage, calling aloud--for who could dissociate the words from the
music, though the words are in the Scotch psalms?--written none the
less by an Englishman, however English wits may amuse themselves with
laughing at their quaintness--calling aloud,
"All people that on earth do dwell
Sing to the Lord with cheerful voice;
Him serve with mirth, his praise forth tell--
Come ye before him and rejoice."
Then we sang the psalm before the communion service, making bold in the
name of the Lord to serve him with _mirth_ as in the old version, and
not with the _fear_ with which some editor, weak in faith, has presumed
to alter the line. Then before the sermon we sang the hymn I had
prepared--a proceeding justifiable by many an example in the history of
the church while she was not only able to number singers amongst her
clergy, but those singers were capable of influencing the whole heart
and judgment of the nation with their songs. Ethelwyn played the organ.
The song I had prepared was this:
"We praise the Life of All;
From buried seeds so small
Who makes the ordered ranks of autumn stand;
Who stores the corn
In rick and barn
To feed the winter of the land.
We praise the Life of Light!
Who from the brooding night
Draws out the morning holy, calm, and grand;
Veils up the moon,
Sends out the sun,
To glad the face of all the land.
We praise the Life of Work,
Who from sleep's lonely dark
Leads forth his children to arise and stand,
Then go their way,
The live-long day,
To trust and labour in the land.
We praise the Life of Good,
Who breaks sin's lazy mood,
Toilsomely ploughing up the fruitless sand.
The furrowed waste
They leave, and haste
Home, home, to till their Father's land.
We praise the Life of Life,
Who in this soil of strife
Casts us at birth, like seed from sower's hand;
To die and so
Like corn to grow
A golden harvest in his land."
After we had sung this hymn, the meaning of which is far better than
the versification, I preached from the words of St. Paul, "If by any
means I might attain unto the resurrection of the dead. Not as though I
had already attained, either were already perfect." And this is
something like what I said to them:
"The world, my friends, is full of resurrections, and it is not always
of the same resurrection that St. Paul speaks. Every night that folds
us up in darkness is a death; and those of you that have been out early
and have seen the first of the dawn, will know it--the day rises out of
the night like a being that has burst its tomb and escaped into life.
That you may feel that the sunrise is a resurrection--the word
resurrection just means a rising again--I will read you a little
description of it from a sermon by a great writer and great preacher
called Jeremy Taylor. Listen. 'But as when the sun approaching towards
the gates of the morning, he first opens a little eye of heaven and
sends away the spirits of darkness, and gives light to a cock, and
calls up the lark to matins, and by and by gilds the fringes of a
cloud, and peeps over the eastern hills, thrusting out his golden horns
like those which decked the brows of Moses, when he was forced to wear
a veil, because himself had seen the face of God; and still, while a
man tells the story, the sun gets up higher, till he shows a fair face
and a full light, and then he shines one whole day, under a cloud
often, and sometimes weeping great and little showers, and sets
quickly; so is a man's reason and his life.' Is not this a resurrection
of the day out of the night? Or hear how Milton makes his Adam and Eve
praise God in the morning,--
'Ye mists and exhalations that now rise
From hill or streaming lake, dusky or gray,
Till the sun paint your fleecy skirts with gold,
In honour to the world's great Author rise,
Whether to deck with clouds the uncoloured sky,
Or wet the thirsty earth with falling showers,
Rising or falling still advance his praise.'
But it is yet more of a resurrection to you. Think of your own
condition through the night and in the morning. You die, as it were,
every night. The death of darkness comes down over the earth; but a
deeper death, the death of sleep, descends on you. A power overshadows
you; your eyelids close, you cannot keep them open if you would; your
limbs lie moveless; the day is gone; your whole life is gone; you have
forgotten everything; an evil man might come and do with your goods as
he pleased; you are helpless. But the God of the Resurrection is awake
all the time, watching his sleeping men and women, even as a mother who
watches her sleeping baby, only with larger eyes and more full of love
than hers; and so, you know not how, all at once you know that you are
what you are; that there is a world that wants you outside of you, and
a God that wants you inside of you; you rise from the death of sleep,
not by your own power, for you knew nothing about it; God put his hand
over your eyes, and you were dead; he lifted his hand and breathed
light on you and you rose from the dead, thanked the God who raised you
up, and went forth to do your work. From darkness to light; from
blindness to seeing; from knowing nothing to looking abroad on the
mighty world; from helpless submission to willing obedience,--is not
this a resurrection indeed? That St. Paul saw it to be such may be
shown from his using the two things with the same meaning when he says,
'Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall
give thee light.' No doubt he meant a great deal more. No man who
understands what he is speaking about can well mean only one thing at a
time.
"But to return to the resurrections we see around us in nature. Look at
the death that falls upon the world in winter. And look how it revives
when the sun draws near enough in the spring to wile the life in it
once more out of its grave. See how the pale, meek snowdrops come up
with their bowed heads, as if full of the memory of the fierce winds
they encountered last spring, and yet ready in the strength of their
weakness to encounter them again. Up comes the crocus, bringing its
gold safe from the dark of its colourless grave into the light of its
parent gold. Primroses, and anemones, and blue-bells, and a thousand
other children of the spring, hear the resurrection-trumpet of the wind
from the west and south, obey, and leave their graves behind to breathe
the air of the sweet heavens. Up and up they come till the year is
glorious with the rose and the lily, till the trees are not only
clothed upon with new garments of loveliest green, but the fruit-tree
bringeth forth its fruit, and the little children of men are made glad
with apples, and cherries, and hazel-nuts. The earth laughs out in
green and gold. The sky shares in the grand resurrection. The garments
of its mourning, wherewith it made men sad, its clouds of snow and hail
and stormy vapours, are swept away, have sunk indeed to the earth, and
are now humbly feeding the roots of the flowers whose dead stalks they
beat upon all the winter long. Instead, the sky has put on the garments
of praise. Her blue, coloured after the sapphire-floor on which stands
the throne of him who is the Resurrection and the Life, is dashed and
glorified with the pure white of sailing clouds, and at morning and
evening prayer, puts on colours in which the human heart drowns itself
with delight--green and gold and purple and rose. Even the icebergs
floating about in the lonely summer seas of the north are flashing all
the glories of the rainbow. But, indeed, is not this whole world itself
a monument of the Resurrection? The earth was without form and void.
The wind of God moved on the face of the waters, and up arose this fair
world. Darkness was on the face of the deep: God said, 'Let there be
light,' and there was light.
"In the animal world as well, you behold the goings of the
Resurrection. Plainest of all, look at the story of the butterfly--so
plain that the pagan Greeks called it and the soul by one name--Psyche.
Psyche meant with them a butterfly or the soul, either. Look how the
creeping thing, ugly to our eyes, so that we can hardly handle it
without a shudder, finding itself growing sick with age, straightway
falls a spinning and weaving at its own shroud, coffin, and grave, all
in one--to prepare, in fact, for its resurrection; for it is for the
sake of the resurrection that death exists. Patiently it spins its
strength, but not its life, away, folds itself up decently, that its
body may rest in quiet till the new body is formed within it; and at
length when the appointed hour has arrived, out of the body of this
crawling thing breaks forth the winged splendour of the butterfly--not
the same body--a new one built out of the ruins of the old--even as St.
Paul tells us that it is not the same body _we_ have in the
resurrection, but a nobler body like ourselves, with all the imperfect
and evil thing taken away. No more creeping for the butterfly; wings of
splendour now. Neither yet has it lost the feet wherewith to alight on
all that is lovely and sweet. Think of it--up from the toilsome journey
over the low ground, exposed to the foot of every passer-by, destroying
the lovely leaves upon which it fed, and the fruit which they should
shelter, up to the path at will through the air, and a gathering of
food which hurts not the source of it, a food which is but as a tribute
from the loveliness of the flowers to the yet higher loveliness of the
flower-angel: is not this a resurrection? Its children too shall pass
through the same process, to wing the air of a summer noon, and rejoice
in the ethereal and the pure.
"To return yet again from the human thoughts suggested by the symbol of
the butterfly"--
Here let me pause for a moment--and there was a corresponding pause,
though but momentary, in the sermon as I spoke it--to mention a
curious, and to me at the moment an interesting fact. At this point of
my address, I caught sight of a white butterfly, a belated one,
flitting about the church. Absorbed for a moment, my eye wandered after
it. It was near the bench where my own people sat, and, for one flash
of thought, I longed that the butterfly would alight on my Wynnie, for
I was more anxious about her resurrection at the time than about
anything else. But the butterfly would not. And then I told myself that
God would, and that the butterfly was only the symbol of a grand truth,
and of no private interpretation, to make which of it was both
selfishness and superstition. But all this passed in a flash, and I
resumed my discourse.
--"I come now naturally to speak of what we commonly call the
Resurrection. Some say: 'How can the same dust be raised again, when it
may be scattered to the winds of heaven?' It is a question I hardly
care to answer. The mere difficulty can in reason stand for nothing
with God; but the apparent worthlessness of the supposition renders the
question uninteresting to me. What is of import is, that I should stand
clothed upon, with a body which is _my_ body because it serves my ends,
justifies my consciousness of identity by being, in all that was good
in it, like that which I had before, while now it is tenfold capable of
expressing the thoughts and feelings that move within me. How can I
care whether the atoms that form a certain inch of bone should be the
same as those which formed that bone when I died? All my life-time I
never felt or thought of the existence of such a bone! On the other
hand, I object to having the same worn muscles, the same shrivelled
skin with which I may happen to die. Why give me the same body as that?
Why not rather my youthful body, which was strong, and facile, and
capable? The matter in the muscle of my arm at death would not serve to
make half the muscle I had when young. But I thank God that St. Paul
says it will _not_ be the same body. That body dies--up springs another
body. I suspect myself that those are right who say that this body
being the seed, the moment it dies in the soil of this world, that
moment is the resurrection of the new body. The life in it rises out of
it in a new body. This is not after it is put in the mere earth; for it
is dead then, and the germ of life gone out of it. If a seed rots, no
new body comes of it. The seed dies into a new life, and so does man.
Dying and rotting are two very different things.--But I am not sure by
any means. As I say, the whole question is rather uninteresting to me.
What do I care about my old clothes after I have done with them? What
is it to me to know what becomes of an old coat or an old pulpit gown?
I have no such clinging to the flesh. It seems to me that people
believe their bodies to be themselves, and are therefore very anxious
about them--and no wonder then. Enough for me that I shall have eyes to
see my friends, a face that they shall know me by, and a mouth to
praise God withal. I leave the matter with one remark, that I am well
content to rise as Jesus rose, however that was. For me the will of God
is so good that I would rather have his will done than my own choice
given me.
"But I now come to the last, because infinitely the most important part
of my subject--the resurrection for the sake of which all the other
resurrections exist--the resurrection unto Life. This is the one of
which St. Paul speaks in my text. This is the one I am most
anxious--indeed, the only one I am anxious to set forth, and impress
upon you.
"Think, then, of all the deaths you know; the death of the night, when
the sun is gone, when friend says not a word to friend, but both lie
drowned and parted in the sea of sleep; the death of the year, when
winter lies heavy on the graves of the children of summer, when the
leafless trees moan in the blasts from the ocean, when the beasts even
look dull and oppressed, when the children go about shivering with
cold, when the poor and improvident are miserable with suffering or
think of such a death of disease as befalls us at times, when the man
who says, 'Would God it were morning!' changes but his word, and not
his tune, when the morning comes, crying, 'Would God it were evening!'
when what life is left is known to us only by suffering, and hope is
amongst the things that were once and are no more--think of all these,
think of them all together, and you will have but the dimmest, faintest
picture of the death from which the resurrection of which I have now to
speak, is the rising. I shrink from the attempt, knowing how weak words
are to set forth _the_ death, set forth _the_ resurrection. Were I to
sit down to yonder organ, and crash out the most horrible dissonances
that ever took shape in sound, I should give you but a weak figure of
this death; were I capable of drawing from many a row of pipes an
exhalation of dulcet symphonies and voices sweet, such as Milton
himself could have invaded our ears withal, I could give you but a
faint figure of this resurrection. Nevertheless, I must try what I can
do in my own way.
"If into the face of the dead body, lying on the bed, waiting for its
burial, the soul of the man should begin to dawn again, drawing near
from afar to look out once more at those eyes, to smile once again
through those lips, the change on that face would be indeed great and
wondrous, but nothing for marvel or greatness to that which passes on
the countenance, the very outward bodily face of the man who wakes from
his sleep, arises from the dead and receives light from Christ. Too
often indeed, the reposeful look on the face of the dead body would be
troubled, would vanish away at the revisiting of the restless ghost;
but when a man's own right true mind, which God made in him, is
restored to him again, and he wakes from the death of sin, then comes
the repose without the death. It may take long for the new spirit to
complete the visible change, but it begins at once, and will be
perfected. The bloated look of self-indulgence passes away like the
leprosy of Naaman, the cheek grows pure, the lips return to the smile
of hope instead of the grin of greed, and the eyes that made innocence
shrink and shudder with their yellow leer grow childlike and sweet and
faithful. The mammon-eyes, hitherto fixed on the earth, are lifted to
meet their kind; the lips that mumbled over figures and sums of gold
learn to say words of grace and tenderness. The truculent, repellent,
self-satisfied face begins to look thoughtful and doubtful, as if
searching for some treasure of whose whereabouts it had no certain
sign. The face anxious, wrinkled, peering, troubled, on whose lines you
read the dread of hunger, poverty, and nakedness, thaws into a smile;
the eyes reflect in courage the light of the Father's care, the back
grows erect under its burden with the assurance that the hairs of its
head are all numbered. But the face can with all its changes set but
dimly forth the rising from the dead which passes within. The heart,
which cared but for itself, becomes aware of surrounding thousands like
itself, in the love and care of which it feels a dawning blessedness
undreamt of before. From selfishness to love--is not this a rising from
the dead? The man whose ambition declares that his way in the world
would be to subject everything to his desires, to bring every human
care, affection, power, and aspiration to his feet--such a world it
would be, and such a king it would have, if individual ambition might
work its will! if a man's opinion of himself could be made out in the
world, degrading, compelling, oppressing, doing everything for his own
glory!--and such a glory!--but a pang of light strikes this man to the
heart; an arrow of truth, feathered with suffering and loss and dismay,
finds out--the open joint in his armour, I was going to say--no, finds
out the joint in the coffin where his heart lies festering in a death
so dead that itself calls it life. He trembles, he awakes, he rises
from the dead. No more he seeks the slavery of all: where can he find
whom to serve? how can he become if but a threshold in the temple of
Christ, where all serve all, and no man thinks first of himself? He to
whom the mass of his fellows, as he massed them, was common and
unclean, bows before every human sign of the presence of the making
God. The sun, which was to him but a candle with which to search after
his own ends, wealth, power, place, praise--the world, which was but
the cavern where he thus searched--are now full of the mystery of
loveliness, full of the truth of which sun and wind and land and sea
are symbols and signs. From a withered old age of unbelief, the dim
eyes of which refuse the glory of things a passage to the heart, he is
raised up a child full of admiration, wonder, and gladness. Everything
is glorious to him; he can believe, and therefore he sees. It is from
the grave into the sunshine, from the night into the morning, from
death into life. To come out of the ugly into the beautiful; out of the
mean and selfish into the noble and loving; out of the paltry into the
great; out of the false into the true; out of the filthy into the
clean; out of the commonplace into the glorious; out of the corruption
of disease into the fine vigour and gracious movements of health; in a
word, out of evil into good--is not this a resurrection indeed--_the_
resurrection of all, the resurrection of Life? God grant that with St.
Paul we may attain to this resurrection of the dead.
"This rising from the dead is often a long and a painful process. Even
after he had preached the gospel to the Gentiles, and suffered much for
the sake of his Master, Paul sees the resurrection of the dead towering
grandly before him, not yet climbed, not yet attained unto--a
mountainous splendour and marvel, still shining aloft in the air of
existence, still, thank God, to be attained, but ever growing in height
and beauty as, forgetting those things that are behind, he presses
towards the mark, if by any means he may attain to the resurrection of
the dead. Every blessed moment in which a man bethinks himself that he
has been forgetting his high calling, and sends up to the Father a
prayer for aid; every time a man resolves that what he has been doing
he will do no more; every time that the love of God, or the feeling of
the truth, rouses a man to look first up at the light, then down at the
skirts of his own garments--that moment a divine resurrection is
wrought in the earth. Yea, every time that a man passes from resentment
to forgiveness, from cruelty to compassion, from hardness to
tenderness, from indifference to carefulness, from selfishness to
honesty, from honesty to generosity, from generosity to love,--a
resurrection, the bursting of a fresh bud of life out of the grave of
evil, gladdens the eye of the Father watching his children. Awake,
then, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ will give
thee light. As the harvest rises from the wintry earth, so rise thou up
from the trials of this world a full ear in the harvest of Him who
sowed thee in the soil that thou mightest rise above it. As the summer
rises from the winter, so rise thou from the cares of eating and
drinking and clothing into the fearless sunshine of confidence in the
Father. As the morning rises out of the night, so rise thou from the
darkness of ignorance to do the will of God in the daylight; and as a
man feels that he is himself when he wakes from the troubled and
grotesque visions of the night into the glory of the sunrise, even so
wilt thou feel that then first thou knowest what thy life, the gladness
of thy being, is. As from painful tossing in disease, rise into the
health of well-being. As from the awful embrace of thy own dead body,
burst forth in thy spiritual body. Arise thou, responsive to the
indwelling will of the Father, even as thy body will respond to thy
indwelling soul.
'White wings are crossing;
Glad waves are tossing;
The earth flames out in crimson and green:
Spring is appearing,
Summer is nearing--
Where hast thou been?
Down in some cavern,
Death's sleepy tavern,
Housing, carousing with spectres of night?
The trumpet is pealing
Sunshine and healing--
Spring to the light.'"
With this quotation from a friend's poem, I closed my sermon, oppressed
with a sense of failure; for ever the marvel of simple awaking, the
mere type of the resurrection eluded all my efforts to fix it in words.
I had to comfort myself with the thought that God is so strong that he
can work even with our failures.
END OF VOL. II.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Seaboard Parish Vol. 2, by George MacDonald