How strange it is that what is often the latest reward of the toiler
after holiness, the extreme solace of the outwearied saint, should be
too often made the first irksome article of a childish creed! To tell
a child that it is a duty to love God better than father or mother,
sisters and brothers, better than play, or stories, or food, or toys,
what a monstrous thing is that! It is one of the things that make
religion into a dreary and darkling shadow, that haunts the path of the
innocent. The child's love is all for tangible, audible, and visible
things. Love for him means kind words and smiling looks, ready comfort
and lavished kisses; the child does not even love things for being
beautiful, but for being what they ARE--curious, characteristic,
interesting. He loves the odd frowsy smell of the shut-up attic, the
bright ugly ornaments of the chimney-piece, the dirt of the street. He
has no sense of critical taste. Besides, words mean so little to him, or
even bear quaint, fantastic associations, which no one can divine, and
which he himself is unable to express; he has no notion of an abstract,
essential, spiritual thing, apart from what is actual to his senses. And
then into this little concrete mind, so full of small definite images,
so faltering and frail, is thrust this vast, remote notion--that he is
bound to love something hidden and terrible, something that looks at
him from the blank sky when he is alone among the garden beds, something
which haunts empty rooms and the dark brake of the woodland. Moreover,
a child, with its preternatural sensitiveness to pain, its bewildered
terror of punishment, learns, side by side with this, that the God Whom
he is to love thus tenderly is the God Who lays about Him so fiercely
in the Old Testament, slaying the innocent with the guilty, merciless,
harsh, inflicting the irreparable stroke of death, where a man would
be concerned with desiring amendment more than vengeance. The simple
questions with which the man Friday poses Robinson Crusoe, and to which
he receives so ponderous an answer, are the questions which naturally
arise in the mind of any thoughtful child. Why, if God be so kind and
loving, does He not make an end of evil at once? Yet, because such
questions are unanswerable by the wisest, the child is, for the
convenience of his education, made to feel that he is wicked if he
questions what he is taught. How many children will persevere in the
innocent scepticism which is so natural and so desirable, under a sense
of disapproval? One of my own earliest experiences in the ugly path of
religious gloom was that I recognised quite clearly to myself that I did
not love God at all. I did not know Him, I had no reason to think
Him kind; He was angry with me, I gathered, if I was ill-tempered or
untruthful. I was well enough aware by childish instinct that my mother
did not cease to love me when I was naughty, but I could not tell about
God. And yet I knew that, with His terrible power of knowing everything,
He was well aware that I did not love Him. It was best to forget about
Him as much as possible, for it spoiled one's pleasure to think about
it. All the little amusements and idle businesses that were so dear to
me, He probably disapproved of them all, and was only satisfied when I
was safe at my lessons or immured in church. Sunday was the sort of day
He liked, and how I detested it!--the toys put away, little ugly books
about the Holy Land to read, an air of deep dreariness about it all.
Thus does religion become a weariness from the outset.
How slowly, and after what strange experience, by what infinite delay of
deduction, does the love of God dawn upon the soul! Even then how faint
and subtle an essence it is! In deep anxiety, under unbearable strain,
in the grip of a dilemma of which either issue seems intolerable, in
weariness of life, in hours of flagging vitality, the mighty tide begins
to flow strongly and tranquilly into the soul. One did not make oneself;
one did not make one's sorrows, even when they arose from one's own
weakness and perversity. There was a meaning, a significance about it
all; one was indeed on pilgrimage; and then comes the running to the
Father's knee, and the casting oneself in utter broken weakness upon the
one Heart that understands perfectly and utterly, and which does, which
must, desire the best and truest. "Give me courage, hope, confidence,"
says the desolate soul.
"I can endure Thy bitterest decrees,
If CERTAIN of Thy Love."
How would one amend all this if one had the power? Alas! it could only
be by silencing all stupid and clumsy people, all rigid parents, all
diplomatic priests, all the horrible natures who lick their lips with
a fierce zest over the pains that befall the men with whom they do not
agree. I would teach a child, in defiance even of reason, that God is
the one Power that loves and understands him through thick and thin;
that He punishes with anguish and sorrow; that He exults in forgiveness
and mercy; that He rejoices in innocent happiness; that He loves
courage, and brightness, and kindness, and cheerful self-sacrifice; that
things mean, and vile, and impure, and cruel, are things that He does
not love to punish, but sad and soiling stains that He beholds with
shame and tears. This, it seems to me, is the Gospel teaching about God,
impossible only because of the hardness of our hearts. But if it were
possible, a child might grow to feel about sin, not that it was a
horrible and unpardonable failure, a thing to afflict oneself drearily
about, but that it was rather a thing which, when once spurned, however
humiliating, could minister to progress, in a way in which untroubled
happiness could not operate--to be forgotten, perhaps, but certainly to
be forgiven; a privilege rather than a hindrance, a gate rather than a
barrier; a shadow upon the path, out of which one would pass, with such
speed as one might, into the blitheness of the free air and the warm
sun. I remember a terrible lecture which I heard as a little bewildered
boy at school, anxious to do right, terrified of oppression, and
coldness, and evil alike; given by a worthy Evangelical clergyman, with
large spectacles, and a hollow voice, and a great relish for spiritual
terrors. The subject was "the exceeding sinfulness of sin," a
proposition which I now see to be as true as if one lectured on the
exceeding carnality of flesh. But the lecture spoke of the horrible
and filthy corruption of the human heart, its determined delight in
wallowing in evil, its desperate wickedness. I believed it, dully and
hopelessly, as a boy believes what is told him by a voluble elderly
person of obvious respectability. But what a detestable theory of life,
what an ugly picture of Divine incompetence!
Of course there are abundance of facts in the world which look
like anything but love;--the ruthless and merciless punishment of
carelessness and ignorance, the dark laws of heredity, the wastefulness
and cruelty of disease, the dismal acquiescence of stupid, healthy,
virtuous persons, without sympathy or imagination, in the hardships
which they were strong enough to bear unscathed. One of the prime
terrors of religion is the thought of the heavy-handed, unintelligent,
tiresome men who would make it a monopoly if they could, and bear
it triumphantly away from the hands of modest, humble, quiet, and
tender-hearted people, chiding them as nebulous optimists.
Who are the people in this short life of ours whom one remembers with
deep and abiding gratitude? Not those who have rebuked, and punished,
and satirised, and humiliated us, striking down the stricken, and
flattening the prostrate--but the people who have been patient with us,
and kind, who have believed in us, and comforted us, and welcomed us,
and forgiven us everything; who have given us largely of their love, who
have lent without requiring payment, who have given us emotional rather
than prudential reasons, who have cared for us, not as a duty but by
some divine instinct, who have made endless excuses for us, believing
that the true self was there and would emerge, who have pardoned our
misdeeds and forgotten our meannesses.
This is what I would believe of God--that He is not our censorious and
severe critic, but our champion and lover, not loving us in spite of
what we are, but because of what we are; Who in the days of our strength
rejoices in our joy, and does not wish to overshadow it, like the
conscientious human mentor, with considerations that we must yet be
withered like grass; and Who, when the youthful ebullience dies away,
and the spring grows weak, and we wonder why the zest has died out of
simple pleasures, out of agreeable noise and stir, is still with us,
reminding us that the wisdom we are painfully and surely gaining is a
deeper and more lasting quality than even the hot impulses of youth.
Once in my life have I conceived what might have been, if I had had the
skill to paint it, an immortal picture. It was thus. I was attending a
Christmas morning service in a big parish church. I was in a pew facing
east; close to me, in a transept, in a pew facing sideways, there sat a
little old woman, who had hurried in just before the service began. She
was a widow, living, I afterwards learnt, in an almshouse hard by.
She was old and feeble, very poor, and her life had been a series of
calamities, relieved upon a background of the hardest and humblest
drudgery. She had lost her husband years ago by a painful and terrible
illness. She had lost her children one by one; she was alone in the
world, save for a few distant and indifferent relatives. To get into the
almshouse had been for her a stroke of incredible and inconceivable good
fortune. She had a single room, with a tiny kitchen off it. She had
very little to say for herself; she could hardly read. No one took any
particular interest in her; but she was a kindly, gallant, unselfish old
soul, always ready to bear a hand, full of gratitude for the kindnesses
she had received--and God alone knows how few they had been.
She had a small, ugly, homely face, withered and gnarled hands; and she
was dressed that day in a little old bonnet of unheard-of age, and in
dingy, frowsy black clothes, shiny and creased, that came out of their
box perhaps half-a-dozen times a year.
But this morning she was in a festal mood. She had tidied up her little
room; she was going to have a bit of meat for dinner, given her by a
neighbour. She had been sent a Christmas card that morning, and had
pored over it with delight. She liked the stir and company of the
church, and the cheerful air of the holly-berries. She held her book up
before her, though I do not suppose she was even at the right page. She
kept up a little faint cracked singing in her thin old voice; but when
they came to the hymn "Hark, the herald angels sing," which she had
always known from childhood, she lifted up her head and sang more
courageously:
"Join the triumph of the skies!
With the angelic host proclaim,
Christ is born in Bethlehem!"
It was then that I had my vision. I do not know why, but at the sight of
the wrinkled face and the sound of the plaintive uplifted voice, singing
such words, a sudden mist of tears came over my eyes. Then I saw that
close behind the old dame there stood a very young and beautiful man. I
could see the fresh curling hair thrown back from the clear brow. He was
clothed in a dim robe, of an opalescent hue and misty texture, and his
hands were clasped together. It seemed that he sang too; but his eyes
were bent upon the old woman with a look, half of tender amusement, and
half of unutterable lovingness. The angelic host! This was one of that
bright company indeed, going about the Father's business, bringing a
joyful peace into the hearts of those among whom he moved. And of all
the worshippers in that crowded church he had singled out the humblest
and simplest for his friend and sister. I saw no more that day, for
the lines of that presence faded out upon the air in the gleams of the
frosty sunshine that came and went among the pillars. But if I could
have painted the scene, the pure, untroubled face so close to the old
worn features, the robes of light side by side with the dingy human
vesture, it would be a picture that no living eye that had rested on it
should forget.
Alas, that one cannot live in moments of inspiration like these! As
life goes on, and as we begin perhaps to grow a little nearer to God by
faith, we are confronted in our own lives, or in the life of one very
near us, by some intolerable and shameful catastrophe. A careless sin
makes havoc of a life, and shadows a home with shame; or some generous
or unselfish nature, useful, beneficent, urgently needed, is struck down
with a painful and hopeless malady. This too, we say to ourselves, must
come from God; He might have prevented it if He had so willed. What are
we to make of it? How are we to translate into terms of love what seems
like an act of tyrannous indifference, or deliberate cruelty? Then, I
think, it is well to remind ourselves that we can never know exactly the
conditions of any other human soul. How little we know of our own! How
little we could explain our case to another, even if we were utterly
sincere! The weaknesses of our nature are often, very tenderly I would
believe, hidden from us; we think ourselves sensitive and weak, when
in reality we are armed with a stubborn breastplate of complacency
and pride; or we think ourselves strong, only because the blows of
circumstance have been spared us. The more one knows of the most
afflicted lives, the more often the conviction flashes across us that
the affliction is not a wanton outrage, but a delicately adjusted
treatment. I remember once that a friend of mine had sent him a rare
plant, which was set in a big flower-pot, close to a fountain-basin.
It never throve; it lived indeed, putting out in the spring a delicate
stunted foliage, though my friend, who was a careful gardener, could
never divine what ailed it. He was away for a few weeks, and the day
after he was gone, the flower-pot was broken by a careless garden-boy,
who wheeled a barrow roughly past it; the plant, earth and all, fell
into the water; the boy removed the broken pieces of the pot, and seeing
that the plant had sunk to the bottom of the little pool, never troubled
his head to fish it out. When my friend returned, he noticed one day in
the fountain a new and luxuriant growth of some unknown plant. He made
careful inquiries and found out what had happened. It then came out that
the plant was in reality a water-plant, and that it had pined away in
the stifling air for want of nourishment, perhaps dimly longing for the
fresh bed of the pool.
Even so has it been, times without number, with some starving and
thirsty soul, that has gone on feebly trying to live a maimed life, shut
up in itself, ailing, feeble. There has descended upon it what looks
at first sight like a calamity, some affliction unaccountable and
irreparable; and then it proves that this was the one thing needed; that
sorrow has brought out some latent unselfishness, or suffering energised
some unused faculty of strength and patience.
But even if it is not so, if we cannot trace in our own lives or the
lives of others the beneficent influence of suffering, we can always
take refuge in one thought. We can see that the one mighty and
transforming power on earth is the power of love; we see people
make sacrifices, not momentary sacrifices, but lifelong patient
renunciations, for the sake of one whom they love; we see a great and
passionate affection touch into being a whole range of unsuspected
powers; we see men and women utterly unconscious of pain and weariness,
utterly unaware that they are acting without a thought of self, if they
can but soothe the pain of one dear to them, or win a smile from beloved
lips; it is not that the selfishness, the indolence, is not there, but
it is all borne away upon a mighty stream, as the river-wrack spins upon
the rising flood.
If then this marvellous, this amazing power of love can cause men to
make, with joy and gladness, sacrifices of which in their loveless
days they would have deemed themselves and confessed themselves wholly
incapable, can we not feel with confidence that the power, which lies
thus deepest in the heart of the world, lies also deepest in the heart
of God, of Whom the world is but a faint reflection? It cannot be
otherwise. We may sadly ponder, indeed, why the love that has been, or
that might have been, the strength of weary lives should be withdrawn
or sternly withheld, but we need not be afraid, if we have one generous
impulse for another, if we ever put aside a delight that may please or
attract us, for the sake of one who expects or would value any smallest
service--and there are few who cannot feel this--we need not then, I
say, doubt that the love which we desire, and which we have somehow
missed or lost, is there waiting for us, ours all the time, if we but
knew it.
And even if we miss the sweet influence of love in our lives, is there
any one who has not, in solitude and dreariness, looked back upon
the time when he was surrounded by love and opportunities of love, in
childhood or in youth, with a bitter regret that he did not make more of
it when it was so near to him, that he was so blind and selfish, that he
was not a little more tender, a little more kind? I will speak frankly
for myself and say that the memories which hurt me most, when I stumble
upon them, are those of the small occasions when I showed myself
perverse and hard; when eyes, long since closed, looked at me with
a pathetic expectancy; when I warded off the loving impulse by some
jealous sense of my own rights, some peevish anger at a fancied
injustice; when I stifled the smile and withheld the hand, and turned
away in silence, glad, in that poisonous moment, to feel that I could at
all events inflict that pain in base requital. One may know that it is
all forgiven, one may be sure that the misunderstanding has faded in the
light of the other dawn, but still the cold base shadow, the thought of
one's perverse cruelty, strikes a gloom upon the mind.
But with God, when one once begins to draw near to Him, one need have no
such poignant regrets or overshadowing memories; one may say to Him in
one's heart, as simply as a child, that He knows what one has been and
is, what one might have been and what one desires to be; and one may
cast oneself at His feet in the overwhelming hope that He will make of
oneself what He would have one to be.
In the parable of the Prodigal Son, it is not the poor wretch himself,
whose miserable motive for returning is plainly indicated--that instead
of pining in cold and hunger he may be warmed and clothed--who is the
hero of the story; still less is it the hard and virtuous elder son. The
hero of the tale is the patient, tolerant, loving father, who had acted,
as a censorious critic might say, foolishly and culpably, in supplying
the dissolute boy with resources, and taking him back without a word of
just reproach. A sad lack of moral discipline, no doubt! If he had kept
the boy in fear and godliness, if he had tied him down to honest work,
the disaster need never have happened. Yet the old man, who went so
often at sundown, we may think, to the crest of the hill, from which he
could see the long road winding over the plain to the far-off city, the
road by which he had seen his son depart, light-heartedly and full
of fierce joyful impulses, and along which he was to see the dejected
figure, so familiar, so sadly marred, stumbling home--he is the
master-spirit of the sweet and comforting scene. His heart is full of
utter gladness, for the lost is found. He smiles upon the servants; he
bids the household rejoice; he can hardly, in his simple joy of heart,
believe that the froward elder brother is vexed and displeased; and his
words of entreaty that the brother, too, will enter into the spirit of
the hour, are some of the most pathetic and beautiful ever framed in
human speech: "Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine;
it was meet that we should make merry, and be glad: for this thy brother
was dead, and is alive again, and was lost, and is found."
And this is, after all, the way in which God deals with us. He gives us
our portion to spend as we choose; He holds nothing back; and when we
have wasted it and brought misery upon ourselves, and return to Him,
even for the worst of reasons, He has not a word of rebuke or caution;
He is simply and utterly filled with joy and love. There are a thousand
texts that would discourage us, would bid us believe that God deals
hardly with us, but it is men that deal hardly with us, it is we
that deal hardly with ourselves. This story, which is surely the most
beautiful story in the world, gives us the deliberate thought of the
Saviour, the essence of His teaching; and we may fling aside the bitter
warnings of jealous minds, and cast ourselves upon the supreme hope
that, if only we will return, we are dealt with even more joyfully than
if we had never wandered at all.
And then perhaps at last, when we have peeped again and again, through
loss and suffering, at the dark background of life; when we have seen
the dreariest corner of the lonely road, where the path grows steep and
miry, and the light is veiled by scudding cloud and dripping rain, there
begins to dawn upon us the sense of a beautiful and holy patience, the
thought that these grey ashes of life, in which the glowing cinders
sink, which once were bright with leaping flame, are not the end--that
the flame and glow are there, although momently dispersed. They have
done their work; one is warmed and enlivened; one can sit still, feeding
one's fancy on the lapsing embers, just as one saw pictures in the
fire as an eager child long ago. That high-hearted excitement and that
curiosity have faded. Life is very different from what we expected, more
wholesome, more marvellous, more brief, more inconclusive; but there is
an intenser, if quieter and more patient, curiosity to wait and see what
God is doing for us; and the orange stain and green glow of the sunset,
though colder and less jocund, is yet a far more mysterious, tender,
and beautiful thing than the steady glow of the noonday sun, when the
shining flies darted hither and thither, and the roses sent out their
rich fragrance. There is fragrance still, the fragrance of the evening
flowers, where the western windows look across the misty fields to the
thickening shadows of the tall trees. But there is something that speaks
in the gathering gloom, in the darkening sky with its flush of crimson
fire, that did not speak in the sun-warmed garden and the dancing
leaves; and what speaks is the mysterious love of God, a thing sweeter
and more remote than the urgent bliss of the fiery noon, full of
delicate mysteries and appealing echoes. We have learnt that the
darkness is no darkness with Him; and the soul which beat her wings
so passionately in the brighter light of the hot morning, now at last
begins to dream of whither she is bound, and the dear shade where she
will fold her weary wing.
How often has the soul in her dreariness cried out, "One effort more!"
But that is done with for ever. She is patient now; she believes at
last; she labours no longer at the oar, but she is borne upon the moving
tide; she is on her way to the deep Heart of God.