In a noisy and confused time like ours, it does seem to me that most
of us have need to be reminded of, and will be the better for bearing
in mind, the reserve of strength and power which lies quietly at the
nation’s call, outside the whirl and din of public and fashionable
life, and entirely ignored in the columns of the daily press. There are
thousands of Englishmen of high culture, high courage, high principle,
who are living their own quiet lives in every corner of the kingdom,
from John o’ Groat’s to the Land’s-End, bringing up their families in
the love of God and their neighbor, and keeping the atmosphere around
them clean, and pure, and strong, by their example—men who would come
to the front, and might be relied on, in any serious national crisis.
One is too apt to fancy, from the photographs of the nation’s life
which one gets day by day, that the old ship has lost the ballast which
has stood her in such good stead for a thousand years, and is rolling
more and more helplessly, in a gale which shows no sign of abating, for
her or any other national vessel, until at last she must roll over and
founder. But it is not so. England is in less stress, and in better
trim, than she has been in many a stiffer gale.
The real fact is, that nations, and the families of which nations
are composed, make no parade or fuss over that part of their affairs
which is going right. National life depends on home life, and foreign
critics are inclined to take the chronicles of our Divorce Court as
a test by which to judge the standard of our home-life, like the old
gentleman who always spelt through the police reports to see “what
people were about.” An acquaintance, however, with any average English
neighborhood, or any dozen English families taken at random, ought to
be sufficient to re-assure the faint-hearted, and to satisfy them that
(to use the good old formula) the Lord has much work yet for the nation
to do, and the national manliness and godliness left to do it all,
notwithstanding superficial appearances.