CHAPTER II. MY FIRST SUNDAY AT MARSHMALLOWS.
CHAPTER III. MY FIRST MONDAY AT MARSHMALLOWS.
CHAPTER IV. THE COFFIN.
CHAPTER V. VISITORS FROM THE HALL.
CHAPTER VI. OLDCASTLE HALL.
CHAPTER VII. THE BISHOP’S BASIN.
CHAPTER VIII. WHAT I PREACHED.
CHAPTER IX. THE ORGANIST.
CHAPTER X. MY CHRISTMAS PARTY.
CHAPTER XI. SERMON ON GOD AND MAMMON.
CHAPTER XII. THE AVENUE.
CHAPTER XIII. YOUNG WEIR.
CHAPTER XIV. MY PUPIL.
CHAPTER XV. DR DUNCAN’S STORY.
CHAPTER XVI. THE ORGAN.
CHAPTER XVII. THE CHURCH-RATE.
CHAPTER XVIII. JUDY’S NEWS.
CHAPTER XIX. THE INVALID.
CHAPTER XX. MOOD AND WILL.
CHAPTER XXI. THE DEVIL IN THOMAS WEIR.
CHAPTER XXII. THE DEVIL IN CATHERINE WEIR.
CHAPTER XXIII. THE DEVIL IN THE VICAR.
CHAPTER XXIV. AN ANGEL UNAWARES.
CHAPTER XXV. TWO PARISHIONERS.
CHAPTER XXVI. SATAN CAST OUT.
CHAPTER XXVII. THE MAN AND THE CHILD.
CHAPTER XXVIII. OLD MRS TOMKINS.
CHAPTER XXIX. CALM AND STORM.
CHAPTER XXX. A SERMON TO MYSELF.
CHAPTER XXXI. A COUNCIL OF FRIENDS.
CHAPTER XXXII. THE NEXT THING.
CHAPTER XXXIII. OLD ROGERS’S THANKSGIVING.
CHAPTER XXXIV. TOM’S STORY.
CHAPTER I.
DESPONDENCY AND CONSOLATION.
Before I begin to tell you some of the things I have seen and heard, in
both of which I have had to take a share, now from the compulsion of my
office, now from the leading of my own heart, and now from that destiny
which, including both, so often throws the man who supposed himself a
mere on-looker, into the very vortex of events—that destiny which took
form to the old pagans as a gray mist high beyond the heads of their
gods, but to us is known as an infinite love, revealed in the mystery
of man—I say before I begin, it is fitting that, in the absence of a
common friend to do that office for me, I should introduce myself to
your acquaintance, and I hope coming friendship. Nor can there be any
impropriety in my telling you about myself, seeing I remain concealed
behind my own words. You can never look me in the eyes, though you may
look me in the soul. You may find me out, find my faults, my vanities,
my sins, but you will not SEE me, at least in this world. To you I am
but a voice of revealing, not a form of vision; therefore I am bold
behind the mask, to speak to you heart to heart; bold, I say, just so
much the more that I do not speak to you face to face. And when we meet
in heaven—well, there I know there is no hiding; there, there is no
reason for hiding anything; there, the whole desire will be alternate
revelation and vision.
I am now getting old—faster and faster. I cannot help my gray hairs,
nor the wrinkles that gather so slowly yet ruthlessly; no, nor the
quaver that will come in my voice, not the sense of being feeble in the
knees, even when I walk only across the floor of my study. But I have
not got used to age yet. I do not FEEL one atom older than I did at
three-and-twenty. Nay, to tell all the truth, I feel a good deal
younger.—For then I only felt that a man had to take up his cross;
whereas now I feel that a man has to follow Him; and that makes an
unspeakable difference.—When my voice quavers, I feel that it is mine
and not mine; that it just belongs to me like my watch, which does not
go well-now, though it went well thirty years ago—not more than a
minute out in a month. And when I feel my knees shake, I think of them
with a kind of pity, as I used to think of an old mare of my father’s
of which I was very fond when I was a lad, and which bore me across
many a field and over many a fence, but which at last came to have the
same weakness in her knees that I have in mine; and she knew it too,
and took care of them, and so of herself, in a wise equine fashion.
These things are not me—or _I_, if the grammarians like it better, (I
always feel a strife between doing as the scholar does and doing as
other people do;) they are not me, I say; I HAVE them—and, please God,
shall soon have better. For it is not a pleasant thing for a young man,
or a young woman either, I venture to say, to have an old voice, and a
wrinkled face, and weak knees, and gray hair, or no hair at all. And if
any moral Philistine, as our queer German brothers over the Northern
fish-pond would call him, say that this is all rubbish, for that we ARE
old, I would answer: “Of all children how can the children of God be
old?”
So little do I give in to calling this outside of me, ME, that I should
not mind presenting a minute description of my own person such as would
at once clear me from any suspicion of vanity in so introducing myself.
Not that my honesty would result in the least from indifference to the
external—but from comparative indifference to the transitional; not to
the transitional in itself, which is of eternal significance and
result, but to the particular form of imperfection which it may have
reached at any individual moment of its infinite progression towards
the complete. For no sooner have I spoken the word NOW, than that NOW
is dead and another is dying; nay, in such a regard, there is no
NOW—only a past of which we know a little, and a future of which we
know far less and far more. But I will not speak at all of this body of
my earthly tabernacle, for it is on the whole more pleasant to forget
all about it. And besides, I do not want to set any of my readers to
whom I would have the pleasure of speaking far more openly and
cordially than if they were seated on the other side of my
writing-table—I do not want to set them wondering whether the vicar be
this vicar or that vicar; or indeed to run the risk of giving the
offence I might give, if I were anything else than “a wandering voice.”
I did not feel as I feel now when first I came to this parish. For, as
I have said, I am now getting old very fast. True, I was thirty when I
was made a vicar, an age at which a man might be expected to be
beginning to grow wise; but even then I had much yet to learn.
I well remember the first evening on which I wandered out from the
vicarage to take a look about me—to find out, in short, where I was,
and what aspect the sky and earth here presented. Strangely enough, I
had never been here before; for the presentation had been made me while
I was abroad.—I was depressed. It was depressing weather. Grave doubts
as to whether I was in my place in the church, would keep rising and
floating about, like rain-clouds within me. Not that I doubted about
the church; I only doubted about myself. “Were my motives pure?” “What
were my motives?” And, to tell the truth, I did not know what my
motives were, and therefore I could not answer about the purity of
them. Perhaps seeing we are in this world in order to become pure, it
would be expecting too much of any young man that he should be
absolutely certain that he was pure in anything. But the question
followed very naturally: “Had I then any right to be in the Church—to
be eating her bread and drinking her wine without knowing whether I was
fit to do her work?” To which the only answer I could find was, “The
Church is part of God’s world. He makes men to work; and work of some
sort must be done by every honest man. Somehow or other, I hardly know
how, I find myself in the Church. I do not know that I am fitter for
any other work. I see no other work to do. There is work here which I
can do after some fashion. With God’s help I will try to do it well.”
This resolution brought me some relief, but still I was depressed. It
was depressing weather.—I may as well say that I was not married then,
and that I firmly believed I never should be married—not from any
ambition taking the form of self-denial; nor yet from any notion that
God takes pleasure in being a hard master; but there was a lady—Well, I
WILL be honest, as I would be.—I had been refused a few months before,
which I think was the best thing ever happened to me except one. That
one, of course, was when I was accepted. But this is not much to the
purpose now. Only it was depressing weather.
For is it not depressing when the rain is falling, and the steam of it
is rising? when the river is crawling along muddily, and the horses
stand stock-still in the meadows with their spines in a straight line
from the ears to where they fail utterly in the tails? I should only
put on goloshes now, and think of the days when I despised damp. Ah! it
was mental waterproof that I needed then; for let me despise damp as
much as I would, I could neither keep it out of my mind, nor help
suffering the spiritual rheumatism which it occasioned. Now, the damp
never gets farther than my goloshes and my Macintosh. And for that
worst kind of rheumatism—I never feel it now.
But I had begun to tell you about that first evening.—I had arrived at
the vicarage the night before, and it had rained all day, and was still
raining, though not so much. I took my umbrella and went out.
For as I wanted to do my work well (everything taking far more the
shape of work to me, then, and duty, than it does now—though, even now,
I must confess things have occasionally to be done by the clergyman
because there is no one else to do them, and hardly from other motive
than a sense of duty,—a man not being able to shirk work because it may
happen to be dirty)—I say, as I wanted to do my work well, or rather,
perhaps, because I dreaded drudgery as much as any poor fellow who
comes to the treadmill in consequence—I wanted to interest myself in
it; and therefore I would go and fall in love, first of all, if I
could, with the country round about. And my first step beyond my own
gate was up to the ankles, in mud.
Therewith, curiously enough, arose the distracting thought how I could
possibly preach TWO good sermons a Sunday to the same people, when one
of the sermons was in the afternoon instead of the evening, to which
latter I had been accustomed in the large town in which I had formerly
officiated as curate in a proprietary chapel. I, who had declaimed
indignantly against excitement from without, who had been inclined to
exalt the intellect at the expense even of the heart, began to fear
that there must be something in the darkness, and the gas-lights, and
the crowd of faces, to account for a man’s being able to preach a
better sermon, and for servant girls preferring to go out in the
evening. Alas! I had now to preach, as I might judge with all
probability beforehand, to a company of rustics, of thought yet slower
than of speech, unaccustomed in fact to THINK at all, and that in the
sleepiest, deadest part of the day, when I could hardly think myself,
and when, if the weather should be at all warm, I could not expect many
of them to be awake. And what good might I look for as the result of my
labour? How could I hope in these men and women to kindle that fire
which, in the old days of the outpouring of the Spirit, made men live
with the sense of the kingdom of heaven about them, and the expectation
of something glorious at hand just outside that invisible door which
lay between the worlds?
I have learned since, that perhaps I overrated the spirituality of
those times, and underrated, not being myself spiritual enough to see
all about me, the spirituality of these times. I think I have learned
since, that the parson of a parish must be content to keep the upper
windows of his mind open to the holy winds and the pure lights of
heaven; and the side windows of tone, of speech, of behaviour open to
the earth, to let forth upon his fellow-men the tenderness and truth
which those upper influences bring forth in any region exposed to their
operation. Believing in his Master, such a servant shall not make
haste; shall feel no feverous desire to behold the work of his hands;
shall be content to be as his Master, who waiteth long for the fruits
of His earth.
But surely I am getting older than I thought; for I keep wandering away
from my subject, which is this, my first walk in my new cure. My excuse
is, that I want my reader to understand something of the state of my
mind, and the depression under which I was labouring. He will perceive
that I desired to do some work worth calling by the name of work, and
that I did not see how to get hold of a beginning.
I had not gone far from my own gate before the rain ceased, though it
was still gloomy enough for any amount to follow. I drew down my
umbrella, and began to look about me. The stream on my left was so
swollen that I could see its brown in patches through the green of the
meadows along its banks. A little in front of me, the road, rising
quickly, took a sharp turn to pass along an old stone bridge that
spanned the water with a single fine arch, somewhat pointed; and
through the arch I could see the river stretching away up through the
meadows, its banks bordered with pollards. Now, pollards always made me
miserable. In the first place, they look ill-used; in the next place,
they look tame; in the third place, they look very ugly. I had not
learned then to honour them on the ground that they yield not a jot to
the adversity of their circumstances; that, if they must be pollards,
they still will be trees; and what they may not do with grace, they
will yet do with bounty; that, in short, their life bursts forth,
despite of all that is done to repress and destroy their individuality.
When you have once learned to honour anything, love is not very far
off; at least that has always been my experience. But, as I have said,
I had not yet learned to honour pollards, and therefore they made me
more miserable than I was already.
When, having followed the road, I stood at last on the bridge, and,
looking up and down the river through the misty air, saw two long rows
of these pollards diminishing till they vanished in both directions,
the sight of them took from me all power of enjoying the water beneath
me, the green fields around me, or even the old-world beauty of the
little bridge upon which I stood, although all sorts of bridges have
been from very infancy a delight to me. For I am one of those who never
get rid of their infantile predilections, and to have once enjoyed
making a mud bridge, was to enjoy all bridges for ever.
I saw a man in a white smock-frock coming along the road beyond, but I
turned my back to the road, leaned my arms on the parapet of the
bridge, and stood gazing where I saw no visions, namely, at those very
poplars. I heard the man’s footsteps coming up the crown of the arch,
but I would not turn to greet him. I was in a selfish humour if ever I
was; for surely if ever one man ought to greet another, it was upon
such a comfortless afternoon. The footsteps stopped behind me, and I
heard a voice:—
“I beg yer pardon, sir; but be you the new vicar?”
I turned instantly and answered, “I am. Do you want me?”
“I wanted to see yer face, sir, that was all, if ye’ll not take it
amiss.”
Before me stood a tall old man with his hat in his hand, clothed as I
have said, in a white smock-frock. He smoothed his short gray hair with
his curved palm down over his forehead as he stood. His face was of a
red brown, from much exposure to the weather. There was a certain look
of roughness, without hardness, in it, which spoke of endurance rather
than resistance, although he could evidently set his face as a flint.
His features were large and a little coarse, but the smile that parted
his lips when he spoke, shone in his gray eyes as well, and lighted up
a countenance in which a man might trust.
“I wanted to see yer face, sir, if you’ll not take it amiss.”
“Certainly not,” I answered, pleased with the man’s address, as he
stood square before me, looking as modest as fearless. “The sight of a
man’s face is what everybody has a right to; but, for all that, I
should like to know why you want to see my face.”
“Why, sir, you be the new vicar. You kindly told me so when I axed
you.”
“Well, then, you’ll see my face on Sunday in church—that is, if you
happen to be there.”
For, although some might think it the more dignified way, I could not
take it as a matter of course that he would be at church. A man might
have better reasons for staying away from church than I had for going,
even though I was the parson, and it was my business. Some clergymen
separate between themselves and their office to a degree which I cannot
understand. To assert the dignities of my office seems to me very like
exalting myself; and when I have had a twinge of conscience about it,
as has happened more than once, I have then found comfort in these two
texts: “The Son of man came not to be ministered unto but to minister;”
and “It is enough that the servant should be as his master.” Neither
have I ever been able to see the very great difference between right
and wrong in a clergyman, and right and wrong in another man. All that
I can pretend to have yet discovered comes to this: that what is right
in another man is right in a clergyman; and what is wrong in another
man is much worse in a clergyman. Here, however, is one more proof of
approaching age. I do not mean the opinion, but the digression.
“Well, then,” I said, “you’ll see my face in church on Sunday, if you
happen to be there.”
“Yes, sir; but you see, sir, on the bridge here, the parson is the
parson like, and I’m Old Rogers; and I looks in his face, and he looks
in mine, and I says to myself, ‘This is my parson.’ But o’ Sundays he’s
nobody’s parson; he’s got his work to do, and it mun be done, and
there’s an end on’t.”
That there was a real idea in the old man’s mind was considerably
clearer than the logic by which he tried to bring it out.
“Did you know parson that’s gone, sir?” he went on.
“No,” I answered.
“Oh, sir! he wur a good parson. Many’s the time he come and sit at my
son’s bedside—him that’s dead and gone, sir—for a long hour, on a
Saturday night, too. And then when I see him up in the desk the next
mornin’, I’d say to myself, ‘Old Rogers, that’s the same man as sat by
your son’s bedside last night. Think o’ that, Old Rogers!’ But,
somehow, I never did feel right sure o’ that same. He didn’t seem to
have the same cut, somehow; and he didn’t talk a bit the same. And when
he spoke to me after sermon, in the church-yard, I was always of a mind
to go into the church again and look up to the pulpit to see if he war
really out ov it; for this warn’t the same man, you see. But you’ll
know all about it better than I can tell you, sir. Only I always liked
parson better out o’ the pulpit, and that’s how I come to want to make
you look at me, sir, instead o’ the water down there, afore I see you
in the church to-morrow mornin’.”
The old man laughed a kindly laugh; but he had set me thinking, and I
did not know what to say to him all at once. So after a short pause, he
resumed—
“You’ll be thinking me a queer kind of a man, sir, to speak to my
betters before my betters speaks to me. But mayhap you don’t know what
a parson is to us poor folk that has ne’er a friend more larned than
theirselves but the parson. And besides, sir, I’m an old salt,—an old
man-o’-war’s man,—and I’ve been all round the world, sir; and I ha’
been in all sorts o’ company, pirates and all, sir; and I aint a bit
frightened of a parson. No; I love a parson, sir. And I’ll tell you for
why, sir. He’s got a good telescope, and he gits to the masthead, and
he looks out. And he sings out, ‘Land ahead!’ or ‘Breakers ahead!’ and
gives directions accordin’. Only I can’t always make out what he says.
But when he shuts up his spyglass, and comes down the riggin’, and
talks to us like one man to another, then I don’t know what I should do
without the parson. Good evenin’ to you, sir, and welcome to
Marshmallows.”
The pollards did not look half so dreary. The river began to glimmer a
little; and the old bridge had become an interesting old bridge. The
country altogether was rather nice than otherwise. I had found a friend
already!—that is, a man to whom I might possibly be of some use; and
that was the most precious friend I could think of in my present
situation and mood. I had learned something from him too; and I
resolved to try all I could to be the same man in the pulpit that I was
out of it. Some may be inclined to say that I had better have formed
the resolution to be the same man out of the pulpit that I was in it.
But the one will go quite right with the other. Out of the pulpit I
would be the same man I was in it—seeing and feeling the realities of
the unseen; and in the pulpit I would be the same man I was out of
it—taking facts as they are, and dealing with things as they show
themselves in the world.
One other occurrence before I went home that evening, and I shall close
the chapter. I hope I shall not write another so dull as this. I dare
not promise, though; for this is a new kind of work to me.
Before I left the bridge,—while, in fact, I was contemplating the
pollards with an eye, if not of favour, yet of diminished dismay,—the
sun, which, for anything I knew of his whereabouts, either from
knowledge of the country, aspect of the evening, or state of my own
feelings, might have been down for an hour or two, burst his cloudy
bands, and blazed out as if he had just risen from the dead, instead of
being just about to sink into the grave. Do not tell me that my figure
is untrue, for that the sun never sinks into the grave, else I will
retort that it is just as true of the sun as of a man; for that no man
sinks into the grave. He only disappears. Life IS a constant sunrise,
which death cannot interrupt, any more than the night can swallow up
the sun. “God is not the God of the dead, but of the living; for all
live unto him.”
Well, the sun shone out gloriously. The whole sweep of the gloomy river
answered him in gladness; the wet leaves of the pollards quivered and
glanced; the meadows offered up their perfect green, fresh and clear
out of the trouble of the rain; and away in the distance, upon a rising
ground covered with trees, glittered a weathercock. What if I found
afterwards that it was only on the roof of a stable? It shone, and that
was enough. And when the sun had gone below the horizon, and the fields
and the river were dusky once more, there it glittered still over the
darkening earth, a symbol of that faith which is “the evidence of
things not seen,” and it made my heart swell as at a chant from the
prophet Isaiah. What matter then whether it hung over a stable-roof or
a church-tower?
I stood up and wandered a little farther—off the bridge, and along the
road. I had not gone far before I passed a house, out of which came a
young woman leading a little boy. They came after me, the boy gazing at
the red and gold and green of the sunset sky. As they passed me, the
child said—
“Auntie, I think I should like to be a painter.”
“Why?” returned his companion.
“Because, then,” answered the child, “I could help God to paint the
sky.”
What his aunt replied I do not know; for they were presently beyond my
hearing. But I went on answering him myself all the way home. Did God
care to paint the sky of an evening, that a few of His children might
see it, and get just a hope, just an aspiration, out of its passing
green, and gold, and purple, and red? and should I think my day’s
labour lost, if it wrought no visible salvation in the earth?
But was the child’s aspiration in vain? Could I tell him God did not
want his help to paint the sky? True, he could mount no scaffold
against the infinite of the glowing west. But might he not with his
little palette and brush, when the time came, show his brothers and
sisters what he had seen there, and make them see it too? Might he not
thus come, after long trying, to help God to paint this glory of vapour
and light inside the minds of His children? Ah! if any man’s work is
not WITH God, its results shall be burned, ruthlessly burned, because
poor and bad.
“So, for my part,” I said to myself, as I walked home, “if I can put
one touch of a rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman of my
cure, I shall feel that I have worked with God. He is in no haste; and
if I do what I may in earnest, I need not mourn if I work no great work
on the earth. Let God make His sunsets: I will mottle my little fading
cloud. To help the growth of a thought that struggles towards the
light; to brush with gentle hand the earth-stain from the white of one
snowdrop—such be my ambition! So shall I scale the rocks in front, not
leave my name carved upon those behind me.”
People talk about special providences. I believe in the providences,
but not in the specialty. I do not believe that God lets the thread of
my affairs go for six days, and on the seventh evening takes it up for
a moment. The so-called special providences are no exception to the
rule—they are common to all men at all moments. But it is a fact that
God’s care is more evident in some instances of it than in others to
the dim and often bewildered vision of humanity. Upon such instances
men seize and call them providences. It is well that they can; but it
would be gloriously better if they could believe that the whole matter
is one grand providence.
I was one of such men at the time, and could not fail to see what I
called a special providence in this, that on my first attempt to find
where I stood in the scheme of Providence, and while I was discouraged
with regard to the work before me, I should fall in with these two—an
old man whom I could help, and a child who could help me; the one
opening an outlet for my labour and my love, and the other reminding me
of the highest source of the most humbling comfort,—that in all my work
I might be a fellow-worker with God.