PART I (continued 2)

But once again the Church found out that her affections were being played with. There is no more virtue in Having-Nothing than in Doing-Nothing. They are both good-for-nothing. It may be that some of us would be better men if we had less money; but then, others of us would be better men if we had more. It may be that, here and there, you may find a Silas Marner who has been saved by sudden poverty from miserly greed and hardening self-absorption. But, for one such case, it would be easy to point to hundreds of men who have been driven by poverty from the ways of honour, and to hundreds of women who have been forced by poverty from the paths of virtue. It all comes back to this: there is nothing in Nothing. Doing-Nothing and Having-Nothing are deceivers—the pair of them; and the Church must not be beguiled by their blandishments. Work and money are both good things. Even William Law saw that. His Serious Call has often almost made a monk of me, but a sudden flash of common sense always breaks from the page just in time. ‘There are two things,’ he says in his fine chapter on ‘The Wise and Pious Use of an Estate,’ ‘there are two things which, of all others, most want to be under a strict rule, and which are the greatest blessings both to ourselves and others, when they are rightly used. These two things are our time and our money. These talents are the continual means and opportunities of doing good.’ Beware, that is to say, of Doing-Nothing, of Having-Nothing, and of the whole family of Nothings. It is not for nothing that Nature abhors them.

And now it suddenly comes home to me that I am playing on the very verge of a tremendous truth. There is nothing in Nothing. Let me remember that when next I am at death-grips with temptation! Cupid is said to have complained to Jupiter that he could never seize the Muses because he could never find them idle. And I suppose that our everyday remark that ‘Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do’ has its origin in the same idea. John Locke, the great philosopher, used to say that, in the hour of temptation, he preferred any company rather than his own. If possible, he sought the companionship of children. Anything rather than Nothing. It reminds us of Hannibal. The great Carthaginian led his troops up the Alpine passes, but he found that the heights were strongly held by the Romans. Attack was out of the question. Hannibal watched closely one night, however, and discovered that, under cover of darkness, the enemy withdrew for the night to the warmer valley on the opposite slope. Next night, therefore, Hannibal led his troops to the heights, and, when the Roman general approached in the morning, he found that the tables had been turned upon him. There is always peril in vacancy. The uncultivated garden brings forth weeds. The unoccupied mind becomes the devil’s playground. The vacant soul is a lost soul. There is nothing in Nothing.

But for the greatest illustration of my present theme I must betake me to Mark Rutherford. The incident occurred at the most sunless and joyless stage of Mark’s career. From all his wretchedness he sought relief in Nothing. He kept his own company, wandered about the fields, abandoned himself to moods, and lost himself in vague and insoluble problems. But one day a strange thing happened. ‘I was walking along under the south side of a hill, which was a great place for butterflies, when I saw a man, apparently about fifty years old, coming along with a butterfly net.’ They soon chummed up. ‘He told me that he had come seven miles that morning to that spot, because he knew that it was haunted by one particular species of butterfly; and, as it was a still, bright day, he hoped to find a specimen.’ At first Mark Rutherford felt a kind of contempt for a man who could give himself up to so childish a pastime. But, later on, he heard his story. Years before he had married a delicate girl, of whom he was devotedly fond. She died in childbirth, leaving him completely broken. And, by some inscrutable mystery of fate, the child grew up to be a cripple, horribly deformed, inexpressibly hideous, as ugly as an ape, as lustful as a satyr, and as ferocious as a tiger! The son, after many years, died in a mad-house; and the horror of it all nearly consigned his poor father to a similar asylum. ‘During those dark days,’ he told Mark Rutherford, ‘I went on gazing gloomily into dark emptiness, till all life became nothing for me.’ Gazing into emptiness, mark you! Then there swept across this aching void of nothingness a beautiful butterfly! It caught his fancy, interested him, filled the gap, and saved his reason from uttermost collapse. He began collecting butterflies. He was no longer gazing into emptiness. And the moral of the incident is stated in a single sentence. ‘Men should not be too curious in analysing and condemning any means which Nature devises to save them from themselves, whether it be coins, old books, curiosities, fossils, or butterflies.’

‘Any means which Nature devises.’ We are back to Nature again.

‘Nature abhors a vacuum’; it was at that point that we set out.

I see now that Nature is right, after all. I can never be saved by Nothing. The abstract will never satisfy me. I want something; aye, more, I want Some One; and until I find Him my restless soul calls down all the echoing corridors of Nothingness, ‘Oh that I knew where I might find Him!’

VIII THE ANGEL AND THE IRON GATE

It is of no use arguing against an iron gate. There it stands—chained and padlocked, barred and bolted—right across your path, and you can neither coax nor cow it into yielding. So was it with Peter on the night of his miraculous escape from prison. ‘Herod,’ we are told, ‘killed James with the sword, and, because he saw that it pleased the Jews, he proceeded to take Peter also.’ There he lay, ‘sleeping between two soldiers, bound with chains, whilst the keepers before the door kept the prison.’ He expected that his next visitor would be the headsman; and whilst he waited for the executioner, there came an angel! This sort of thing happens fairly often. They are sitting round the fire, and the lady in the arm-chair is talking of her sailor-son.

‘Ah!’ she says, ‘I haven’t heard of him for over a year now, and I begin to think that I shall never hear again.’

There is a sharp ring at the bell. She starts.

‘Something tells me,’ she continues, ‘that this is a message to say that the ship is lost, and that I shall never see my boy again.’

Even whilst she speaks the door is opened, and her last syllable is scarcely uttered before she is folded in the sailor’s arms.

The principle holds true to the very end. It is a sick-room, and the pale wan face of the patient looks very weary.

‘Oh, how I dread death!’ she says; ‘I cannot bear to think that I must die.’

An hour later the door of the unseen opens to her, and there stands on the threshold, not Death, but Life Everlasting!

Peter very, very often waits for the executioner, and welcomes an angel.

I

During the next few moments Peter scarcely knew whether he was in the body or out of the body. Was he alive or was he dead? Was he waking or was he dreaming? ‘He wist not that it was true which was done by the angel, but thought he saw a vision.’ He walked like a man with his head in the clouds. Doors were opening; chains were falling; he seemed to be living in a land of enchantment, a world of magic. But the iron gate put an end to all illusion. ‘They came to the iron gate,’ and, as I said a moment ago, an iron gate is a very difficult thing to argue with. The iron gate represents the return to reality. After our most radiant spiritual experiences we come abruptly to the humdrum and the commonplace. It was Mary’s Sunday evening out. Mary, you must know, is a housemaid in a big boarding establishment, and her life is by no means an easy one. But Mary is also a member of the Church. On Sunday she was in her favourite seat. Perhaps it was that she was specially hungry for some uplifting word, or perhaps it was that the message was peculiarly suitable to her condition; but, be that as it may, the service that night seemed to carry poor Mary to the very gate of heaven. The Communion Service that followed completed her ecstasy, and Mary seemed scarcely to touch the pavement with her feet as she hurried home. She fell asleep crooning to herself the hymn with which the service closed:

She knew nothing more until, in the chilly dark of the morning, the alarum clock screamed at her to jump up, clean the cold front steps, dust the great silent rooms, and light the copper-fire. ‘And she came to the iron gate.’ There come points in life at which poetry merges into the severest prose; romance yields to reality; the miracle of the open prison is succeeded by the menace of the iron gate.

II

As long as Peter had an iron gate before him, he had an angel beside him. It was not until the iron gate had been safely negotiated that ‘forthwith the angel departed from him.’ Mary made a mistake when she fancied that she had left all the glory behind her. The angel is with us more often than we think. A devout Jew, in bidding you farewell, will always use a plural pronoun. And if you ask for whom, besides yourself, his blessing is intended, he will reply that it is for you and for the angel over your shoulder. We are too fond of fancying that the angel is only with us when the chains are miraculously falling from off our feet, and when the doors are miraculously opening before our faces. We are too slow to believe that the angel is still by our side when we emerge into the night and come to the iron gate. It is a very ancient heathen superstition. ‘There came a man of God, and spake unto the king of Israel, and said, Thus saith the Lord, because the Syrians have said, “The Lord is God of the hills, but He is not God of the valleys,” therefore will I deliver all this great multitude into thine hand, and ye shall know that I am the Lord.’ We are always assuming that He is the God of the mountaintops, and that He leaves us to thread the darksome valleys alone; and our assumption is a cruel and unjust one. As long as Peter had an iron gate before him, he had an angel beside him.

III

The converse, however, is equally true. As long as Peter had an angel beside him, he had an iron gate ahead of him. Angels do not walk by our sides for fun. ‘Are they not all ministering spirits, sent forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation?’ If there is an angel by my side, depend upon it, there is work that only an angel can do in front of me. Mary’s radiant experience that Sunday evening was directly and intimately related with the brazen yell of the alarum clock on Monday morning. It was not intended as a mere temporary elevation of the spirit, but as an assurance of a gracious presence—a presence that should never be withdrawn as long as a need existed. It is part of the infinite pathos of life that we misinterpret our visions. Jacob beheld his staircase leading from earth to heaven, with angels ascending and descending upon it. And straightway, as he prepared to leave, he began to say good-bye to the angels! ‘Surely,’ he exclaimed, ‘the Lord is in this place! How dreadful is this place! This is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven! And he called the name of that place Bethel!’ And thus he missed the whole meaning of the beatific vision. The vision was to warn him of the perils that awaited him, and to assure him that ‘behold, I am with thee in all places whither thou goest.’

‘All places!’ said the Vision.

‘This place! this place! This Place!’ said Jacob.

And so he journeyed on towards his iron gate, pitifully ignorant of the meaning of the golden dream. Life’s ecstasies are warnings, premonitions, danger-signals. Even in the experience of the Holiest, the open heavens and the voice from the excellent glory immediately preceded the grim struggle with the tempter in the wilderness. Paul had his vision; he saw the Man of Macedonia; and he followed the gleam—to bonds, stripes, and imprisonment. Bunyan knew what he was doing when he placed the Palace Beautiful, with all its sweet hospitalities and delightful ministries, immediately before that dark Valley of Humiliation in which Christian struggled with Apollyon. When we hear angels’ voices speaking, when we find our fetters falling, when we see our jail doors opening, be very sure that outside, outside, there is a dark night and an iron gate!

IV

But there is always this about it. Although the radiant vision is a premonition of the coming struggle, it is also an augury concerning that struggle. Opening doors are an earnest of opening gates. It is inconceivable that I shall be miraculously delivered from my dungeon, with its guards and its chains, and then be baulked by an iron gate out there in the blackness of the night. It is inconceivable that here, at the Communion Service, God should draw so near to the spirit of this young housemaid, and then leave her to face alone the drudgery of Monday morning. If Mary is half as wise as I take her to be, she will answer the scream of the clock with a song. She went to bed singing; why not get up singing? She crooned to herself on retiring the hymn that had followed her from the Communion Table. Let her sing in the morning quite another tune:

The voice of the angel, the falling of fetters, and the opening of doors are all designed to brace us for the dark night and the iron gate.

V

‘The iron gate opened to them.’ Of course it did. Who could suppose that the prison doors had been opened by angel’s hands, only that the prisoner might be caught like a rat in a trap outside? ‘The iron gate opened to them of its own accord.’ It did look like it. During my twelve years at Mosgiel, I often went through the great woollen factory. The machines were marvellous—simply marvellous. As you watched the needles slip in and out, or stood beside the loom and saw the pattern grow, it really looked as though the things were bewitched. They seemed to be doing it all ‘of their own accord.’ But one day the manager said, ‘Would you care to see the power-house?’ And he took me away from the busy looms to another building altogether, and there I saw the huge engines that drove everything. Neither looms nor needles really work ‘of their own accord.’ Nor do iron gates. A few minutes after the gates had opened, and the angel had vanished, Peter ‘came to the house of Mary, the mother of Mark, where many were gathered together praying.’ And then Peter understood by what power the iron gates had opened, just as I understood, when I saw the engine-room, how the great looms worked.

The prayer-meeting may not be artistic. For the matter of that I saw very little in the power-room of the factory that appealed to the sense of the aesthetic within me; but when angels visit prisons, and iron gates swing open of their own accord, there must be a driving-force at work somewhere. And Peter only discovered it when he suddenly broke in upon a midnight prayer-meeting.

IX SHORT CUTS

We dearly love a short cut. Even in childhood we resolved the discovery of short cuts into a kind of juvenile science. There was the gap in the hedge, or the low part of the wall, by which we could pass, by means of a squeeze or a clamber, into the romantic territory of our next-door neighbour. With what fine scorn we inwardly derided the ridiculous behaviour of our parents when, in visiting that selfsame neighbour, they marched with solemn mien out through the front gate, along the public highway and in through the front gate of the house next door! It took them five mortal minutes to reach a spot that, by a stoop or a bound, we could have reached in as many seconds! Then there was the dusty track through the bush to the jetty; and the footpath across the fields to the church. And with what wild excitement we hailed a short cut to school! When some adventurous spirit discovered that, by going up a certain right-of-way, and climbing a certain fence, we could approach the school playground from a new and undreamed-of direction, our transports knew no bounds. It was not the lazy gratification of having invented a labour-saving device; it was the stately joy of the explorer. Half the romance of life was bound up with those short cuts. The trysts of courtship were kept at the stiles by which those surreptitious footways were intersected. The most delightful walks we ever enjoyed were the strolls along those uncharted by-paths. It may have been for the sake of brevity and a smart passage that they were first brought into existence; yet it was not to their brevity, in the last resort, that they owed their peculiar charm. The gap through the hedge; the clamber over the wall; the track through the bush to the jetty; the footpath across the fields to the church; and the right-of-way by which we took the school in the rear—these appealed to a certain deep human instinct that asserted itself within us; and, dissemblers as we were, we just made-believe that we pursued these courses in order to conserve our energies and to save our time.

And thus we got into the habit. Whether it was a good habit or a bad habit depends largely upon the realm to which we applied it. In my own case, it worked disastrously—at least at times. Since I left school, for instance, I have always been considered good at figures. Generally speaking, you have but to state your problem, and I can furnish you with the solution. In business—commercial and ecclesiastical—this faculty has served me in excellent stead. But at school it was of very little use to me. And I find it of very little use when I undertake to coach my children in anticipation of approaching examinations. For at school the teacher not only propounded the problem, and received my answer; he went another step. He asked me how I had arrived at that conclusion; and at that stage of the ordeal I invariably collapsed. He was there to teach me the rules; and I had as much contempt for the rules as I had for the route by which my grave and reverend parents made their way to our neighbour’s door. I was content to squeeze through the gap or to jump over the wall. The teacher was there to show me the road to the jetty; I scorned the road, and approached the jetty by the track through the bush. I could see no sense in either roads or rules if you could reach your destination more expeditiously without them. But, to pass abruptly from the microscopic to the magnificent, history furnishes me with a quite dramatic and most convincing demonstration of my point. In his Up From Slavery, Mr. Booker Washington illustrates this tendency again and again. The slaves were freed. But it is one thing to be free, and quite another thing to be worthy of the rights of freemen. With one voice the black people cried out for education. ‘This experience of a whole race going to school for the first time presents,’ says Mr. Washington, ‘one of the most interesting studies that has ever occurred in connexion with the development of any race.’ But many of the people were advanced in years. To begin at the beginning and attain to knowledge gradually seemed a tedious process. It was like the round-about path from our front door to that of our next-door neighbour. The black people woke up late to the consciousness of their racial possibilities; and, like most people who wake up late, they spent the morning of their freedom in a desperate hurry. Here is a young coloured man, ‘sitting down in a one-room cabin, with grease on his clothing, filth all around him, and weeds in the yard and garden, engaged in studying a French grammar!’ On another occasion, Mr. Washington ‘had to take a student who had been studying cube-root and banking and discount and explain to him that the wisest thing for him to do first was thoroughly to master the multiplication-table!’ There is much more to the same effect. The black race made a frantic effort to run before it had learned to walk. ‘I felt,’ says Mr. Booker Washington, ‘that the conditions were a good deal like those of an old coloured man, during the days of slavery, who wanted to learn how to play on the guitar. In his desire to take guitar lessons he applied to one of his young masters to teach him; but the young man, not having much faith in the ability of the slave to master the guitar, sought to discourage him by saying, “Uncle Jake, I will give you guitar lessons; but, Jake, I will have to charge you three dollars for the first lesson, two dollars for the second lesson, and one dollar for the third lesson. But I will charge you only twenty-five cents for the last lesson.” To which Uncle Jake answered, “All right, boss, I hires you on dem terms. But, boss, I wants yer to be sure an’ give me dat las’ lesson first!”’ Here we have the imposing spectacle, not by any means destitute of pathos, of an entire race seeking to reach its destiny by a short cut.

But it is a mistake. For that ebullition of juvenile depravity which disfigured my school-days I do now repent in dust and ashes. I was wrong; there can be no doubt about that. There is a place in this world for rules and roads as well as for gaps and tracks. I know now that my parents were right in approaching our neighbour’s door by way of the public thoroughfare. Life has taught me, among other things, that short cuts have their perils. It is the old story of the Gordian knot over again. The Phrygians, as everybody knows, were in grave perplexity, and consulted the oracle. The oracle assured them that all their troubles would cease as soon as they chose for their king the first man they met driving in his chariot to the temple of Jupiter. Leaving the sacred building, they set out along the road and soon met Gordius, whom they accordingly elected king. Gordius drove on to the temple, to return thanks for his elevation, and to consecrate his chariot to the service of the gods. When the chariot stood in the temple courts it was observed that the pole was fastened to the yoke by a knot of bark so artfully contrived that the ends could not be seen. The oracle then declared that whosoever should untie this Gordian knot should be ruler over Asia. Alexander the Great approached, but, finding himself unable to untie the knot, he drew his sword and cut it. And the ancients said that it was because he had cut the knot instead of untying it that his dominion was so transitory and so brief. I fancy that, if we look into it a little, we shall find that half our troubles arise from our bad habit of cutting the knots that we ought to patiently untie.

Take our politics, by way of example. It is much more easy to sit back in our chairs and pour the vials of our criticism on the powers-that-be than to make any sensible contribution to the well-being of the State. A case in point occurs in Mark Rutherford’s Clara Hopgood. Baruch and Dennis are discussing those old social problems that men have discussed since first this world began. Dennis was enlarging upon the inequalities and iniquities of social and industrial life, when Baruch broke in with the pertinent and practical question: ‘But what would you do for them?’

‘Ah, that beats me!’ replied Dennis. ‘I would hang somebody, but I don’t know who it ought to be!’

Precisely! To cut the knot with a sword is so easy—and so ineffective; to untie it is so difficult—and so rich in consequence. The politics that consist of sentencing to summary execution statesmen from whom we differ are within the intellectual reach of most of us; and in that particular brand of politics, therefore, most of us occasionally indulge. But the politics that consist in really grappling with the knotty problems, with a view to discovering some means of ameliorating human misery, provide us with a much more formidable task. Who has intellect sufficiently clear, and fingers sufficiently deft, to essay the untying of the Gordian knot? The empire of the world awaits the coming of that patient and persistent man.

Or look at another example. I often feel that very little of the oratory expended on Protestant platforms really touches the mark. It gets nowhere. The real question at issue is most pitifully begged. It may, of course, be diplomatic to keep people well informed concerning the social evils that thrive in Roman Catholic countries. It may, perhaps, be permissible to emphasize the abuses that exist within the pale of the Roman Catholic Church. But a devout and intelligent Roman Catholic, listening to such an utterance, would, after making a reasonable allowance for rhetorical exaggeration admit the truth of all that had been said, and go home to weep, and, perhaps, to pray over it. Many of those who have passed over from Protestant communions to the Roman Catholic Church have travelled very widely and observed very closely. They are not ignorant. Newman sobbed over the seamy side of Romanism before he made the plunge. ‘I have never disguised,’ he wrote, ‘that there are actual circumstances in the Church of Rome which pain me much; we do not look toward Rome as believing that its communion is infallible.’ Then, with his eyes wide open to all the facts on which our orators dilate so luridly, he took the fatal step. And again he wrote, ‘There is a divine life among us, clearly manifested, in spite of all our disorders, which is as great a note of the Church as any can be.’

Now what was that divine note? Everything hinges upon that. And unless our Protestant speakers are prepared to face that issue they may as well remain by their own firesides, lounge in their cosiest chairs, wear their warmest slippers, and enjoy the latest novels. It is only at this point that sincere and groping minds can be helpfully influenced. The whole question is one of Authority. We dearly love a lord. There is no escaping that fundamental fact. Every day Protestant sheep stray into Roman Catholic pastures because there they can actually see the shepherd and actually feel his crook. The Roman Church, with its hoary traditions, its encrusted ritual, and its antique associations, crystallizes itself into a single voice. It possesses an enthroned incarnation. It has a Pope. Romanism is like a pine-tree. It towers to a pinnacle. All its branches converge upon the topmost bough. Protestantism is like a palm. Its summit consists of a great cluster of graceful fronds, but no one is uppermost. Romanism is the adoration of the topmost twig. In the person of the highest official, confused ears catch the accent of authority for which they hunger. Here they find the music of majesty. And they nestle their aching heads in the lap of a Church that will sternly command their trustfulness and firmly insist upon implicit obedience. Thereafter they need think no more. ‘In the midst of our difficulties,’ wrote Newman, ‘I have one ground of hope, just one stay, but, as I think, a sufficient one. It serves me in the stead of all arguments whatever; it hardens me against criticism; it supports me if I begin to despond; and to it I ever come round. It is the decision of the Holy See; Saint Peter has spoken.’ Here the weary brain finds rest. Here is the Gordian knot, so trying to the fingers, cut swiftly with a sword. Here is the discovery of a short cut that may save the tired feet many a long and dreary trudge.

The temptation meets us at every turn. And it is because that temptation is so general that it figures so prominently in the Temptation in the wilderness. He was tempted in all points like as we are; and therefore He was tempted to take short cuts. This is the essence of that weird and terrible story. It is notable that all the three things that Jesus was tempted to acquire were good things, things to be desired, things that He was destined to possess. But the whole point of the record is that He was tempted to make His way to the bread and the angels and the kingdoms by means of short cuts. Now this is vastly significant. It is significant because, when you come to think of it, nearly all the things that we are tempted to acquire are good things. The temptation consists in the suggestion that we should possess ourselves of those good things prematurely or illicitly. We are urged to make short cuts to our legitimate goal. Jesus was tempted to cut the Gordian knot, and to thus obtain an immediate but fleeting hold on the objects of His just desire. He rejected the proposal. He preferred patiently to untie the knot, and thus to make Himself king of all kingdoms for ever and for ever.

Of the perils attending short cuts John Bunyan is our chief expositor. Wherever a dangerous but alluring footpath breaks off from the high-road, a statue of Mr. Worldly Wiseman ought to be erected. For it was Mr. Worldly Wiseman that first got the poor pilgrim into such sore trouble. Mr. Worldly Wiseman knew a short cut to the Celestial City. Christian took that short cut—the footpath over the hills and through the village of Morality—and dearly did he pay for his folly. And yet it is difficult to blame him. Poor Christian was heavily burdened, and every inch that could be saved was a consideration. Evangelist had clearly directed him, it is true; but then, if Mr. Worldly Wiseman knew a short cut, why not take it? ‘Let him who has no such burden as this poor pilgrim had cast the first stone at Christian; I cannot,’ says Dr. Alexander Whyte. ‘If one who looked like a gentleman came to me to-night and told me how I could on the spot get to a peace of conscience never to be lost again, and how I could get a heart to-night that would never any more plague and pollute me, I should be mightily tempted to forget what all my former teachers had told me, and try this new gospel.’ Exactly! The temptation to cut the Gordian knot is very alluring. The advice to get-rich-quick, or to get-good-quick, or to get-there-quick, is very acceptable. But by his story of the short cut, and the anguish that followed, Bunyan has taught us that the longest way round is often the shortest way home. There is sound sense in the song that bids us ‘take time to be holy.’ The short cut that avoids the wicket-gate and the Cross is merely a blind lane from which we shall return sooner or later with blistered feet and broken hearts.