PART I

I THE BABY AMONG THE BOMBSHELLS

Everything depends on keeping up the supply of bombshells. It will be a sad day for us all when there are no more bombs to burst, no more shocks to be sustained, no more sensations to be experienced, no more thrills to be enjoyed. Fancy being condemned to reside in a world that is bankrupt of astonishments, a world that no longer has it in its power to startle you, a world that has nothing up its sleeve! It would be like occupying a seat at a conjuring entertainment at which the conjurer had exhausted all his tricks, but did not like to tell you so! When I was a small boy I used to be mildly amused by the antics of a performing bear that occasionally visited our locality. A sickly-looking foreigner led the poor brute by a string. Its claws were cut, and its teeth drawn. By dint of a few kicks and cuffs it was persuaded to dance a melancholy kind of jig, and then shamble round with a basket in search of a few half-pence. I remember distinctly that, as I watched the unhappy creature’s dismal performance, I tried to imagine what the animal would have looked like had no cruel captor removed him from his native lair. The mental contrast was a very painful one. Yet it was not half so painful as the contrast between the world as it is and a world that had run out of bombshells. A world that could no longer surprise us would be a world with its claws cut and its teeth drawn. Half the fun of waking up in the morning is the feeling that you have come upon a day that is brand new, a day that the world has never seen before, a day that is certain to do things that no other day has ever done. Half the pleasure of welcoming a new-born baby is the absolute certainty that here you have a packet of amazing surprises. An individuality is here; a thing that never was before; you cannot argue from any other child to this one; the only thing that you can predict with confidence about this child is that it will do things that were never done, or never done in the same way, since this old world of ours began. Here is novelty, originality, an infinity of bewildering possibility. Each mother thinks that there never was a baby like her baby; and most certainly there never was. As long as the stock of days keeps up, and as long as the supply of babies does not peter out, there will be no lack of bombshells. I visited the other day the ruins of an old prison. I saw among other things the dark cells in which, in the bad old days, prisoners languished in solitary confinement. Charles Reade and other writers have told us how, in those black holes, convicts adopted all kinds of ingenious expedients to secure themselves against losing their reason in the desolate darkness. They tossed buttons about and groped after them; they tore up their clothes and counted the pieces; they did a thousand other things, and went mad in spite of all their pains. Now what is this horror of the darkness? Let us analyse it. Wherein does it differ from blindness? Why did insanity overtake these solitary men? The horror of the darkness was not fear. A child dreads the dark because he thinks that wolves and hobgoblins infest it. But these men had no such terrors. The thing that unbalanced them was the maddening monotony of the darkness. Nothing happened. In the light something happens every second. A thousand impressions are made upon the mind in the course of every minute. Each sensation, though it be of no more importance than the buzz of a fly at the window-pane, the flutter of a paper to the floor, or the sound of a footfall on the street, represents a surprise. It is a mental jolt. It transfers the attention from one object to an entirely different one. We pass in less than a second from the buzz of the fly to the flutter of the paper, and again from the flutter of the paper to the sound of the footfall. Any man who could count the separate objects that occupied his attention in the course of a single moment would be astonished at their variety and multiplicity. But in the dark cell there are no sensations. The eye cannot see; the ear cannot hear. Not one of the senses is appealed to. The mind is accustomed to flit from sensation to sensation like a butterfly flitting from flower to flower, but infinitely faster. But in this dark cell it languishes like a captive butterfly in a cardboard box. If you hold me under water I shall die, because my lungs can no longer do the work they have always been accustomed to do. In the dark cell the mind finds itself in the same predicament. It is drowned in inky air. The mind lives on sensations; but here there are no sensations. And if the world gets shorn of its surprise-power, it will become a maddening place to live in. We only exist by being continually startled. We are kept alive by the everlasting bursting of bombshells.

I am not so much concerned, however, with the ability of the world to afford us a continuous series of thrills as with my own capacity to be surprised. The tendency is to lose the power of astonishment. I am told that, in battle, the moment in which a man finds himself for the first time under fire is a truly terrifying experience. But after awhile the new-comer settles down to it, and, with shells bursting all around him, he goes about his tasks as calmly as on parade. This idiosyncrasy of ours may be a very fine thing under such circumstances, but under other conditions it has the gravest elements of danger. As I sit here writing, a baby crawls upon the floor. It is good fun watching him. He plays with the paper band that fell from a packet of envelopes. He puts it round his wrist like a bracelet. He tears it, and lo, the bracelet of a moment ago is a long ribbon of coloured paper. He is astounded. His wide-open eyes are a picture. The telephone rings. He looks up with approval. Anything that rings or rattles is very much to his taste. I go over to his new-found toy, and begin talking to it. He is dumbfounded. My altercation with the telephone completely bewilders him. Whilst I am thus occupied, he moves towards my vacant chair. He tries to pull himself up by it, but pulls it over on to himself. The savagery of the thing appals him; he never dreamed of an attack from such a source. In what a world of wonder is he living! Bombs are bursting all around him all day long. A baby’s life must be a thrillingly sensational affair.

But the pity of it is that he will grow out of it. He may be surrounded with the most amazing contrivances on every hand, but the wonder of it will make little or no appeal to him. He will be like the soldier in the trenches who no longer notices the roar and crash of the shells. When Livingstone set out for England in 1856, he determined to take with him Sekwebu, the leader of his African escort. But when the party reached Mauritius, the poor African was so bewildered by the steamers and other marvels of civilization that he went mad, threw himself into the sea, and was seen no more. I only wish that an artist had sketched the scene upon which poor Sekwebu gazed so nervously as he stood on the deck of the Frolic that day sixty years ago. I suspect that the ‘marvels of civilization’ that so terrified him would appear to us to be very ramshackle and antiquated affairs. We lie back in our sumptuous motor-cars and yawn whilst surrounded on every hand with astonishments compared with which the things that Sekwebu saw are not worthy to be compared. That is the tragic feature of the thing. In the midst of marvels we tend to become blasé. It is not that we are occupying a seat at a conjuring entertainment at which the conjurer has exhausted all his tricks, and does not like to tell you so. On the contrary, it is like occupying a seat at a conjuring entertainment and falling fast asleep just as the performer is getting to his most baffling and masterly achievements. I like to watch this baby of mine among his bombshells. The least thing electrifies him. What a sensational world this would be if I could only contrive to retain unspoiled that childish capacity for wonder!

I shall be told that it is the baby’s ignorance that makes him so susceptible to sensation. It is nothing of the kind. Ignorance does not create wonder; it destroys it. I walked along a track through the bush one day in company with two men. One was a naturalist; the other was an ignoramus. Twenty times at least the naturalist swooped down upon some curious grass, some novel fern, or some rare orchid. The walk that morning was, to his knowing eyes, as sensational as a hair-raising film at a cinematograph. But to my other companion it was absolutely uneventful, and the only thing at which he wondered was the enthusiasm of our common friend. When Alfred Russel Wallace was gathering in South America his historic collection of botanical and zoological specimens, the natives of the Amazon Valley thought him mad. He paid them handsomely to catch creatures for which they could discover no use at all. To him the great forests of Bolivia and Brazil were alive with sensation. They fascinated and enthralled him. But the black men could not understand it. They saw no reason for his rapture. Yet his wonder was not the outcome of ignorance; it was the outcome of knowledge. Depend upon it, the more I learn, the more sensational the world will become. If I can only become wise enough I may recapture the glorious amazements of the baby among his bombshells.

Now let me come to a very practical application. Half the art of life lies in possessing effective explosives and in knowing how to use them. In the best of his books, Jack London tells us that the secret of White Fang’s success in fighting other dogs was his power of surprise. ‘When dogs fight there are usually preliminaries—snarlings and bristlings, and stiff-legged struttings. But White Fang omitted these. He gave no warning of his intention. He rushed in and snapped and slashed on the instant, without notice, before his foe could prepare to meet him. Thus he exhibited the value of surprise. A dog taken off its guard, its shoulder slashed open, or its ear ripped in ribbons before it knew what was happening, was a dog half whipped.’ Here is the strategy of surprise in the wild. Has it nothing to teach me? I think it has. I remember going for a walk one evening in New Zealand, many years ago, with a minister whose name was at one time famous throughout the world. I was just beginning then, and was hungry for ideas. I shall never forget that, towards the close of our conversation, my companion stopped, looked me full in the face, and exclaimed with tremendous emphasis, ‘Keep up your surprise-power, my dear fellow; the pulpit must never, never lose its power of startling people!’ I have very often since recalled that memorable walk; and the farther I leave the episode across the years behind me the more the truth of that fine saying gains upon my heart.

Let me suggest a really great question. Is it enough for a preacher to preach the truth? In a place where I was quite unknown, I turned into a church one day and enjoyed the rare luxury of hearing another man preach. But, much as I appreciated the experience, I found, when I came out, that the preacher had started a rather curious line of thought. He was a very gracious man; it was a genuine pleasure to have seen and heard him. And yet there seemed to be a something lacking. The sermon was absolutely without surprise. Every sentence was splendidly true, and yet not a single sentence startled me. There was no sting in it. I seemed to have heard it all over and over and over again; I could even see what was coming. Surely it is the preacher’s duty to give the truth such a setting, and present it in such a way, that the oldest truths will appear newer than the latest sensations. He must arouse me from my torpor; he must compel me to open my eyes and pull myself together; he must make me sit up and think. ‘Keep up your surprise-power, my dear fellow,’ said my companion that evening in the bush, speaking out of his long and rich experience.

‘The pulpit,’ he said, ‘must never, never lose its power of startling people!’ The preacher, that is to say, must keep up his stock of explosives. The Bishop of London declared the other day that the Church is suffering from too much ‘dearly beloved brethren.’ She would be better judiciously to mix it with a few bombshells.

And yet, after all, I suppose it was largely my own fault that the sermon of which I have spoken seemed to me to be so ineffective. There are tremendous astonishments in the Christian evangel which, however baldly stated, should fire my sluggish soul with wonder, and fill it with amazement. The fact that I listened so blandly shows that I have become blasé. I am like the soldier in the trenches who no longer notices the bursting shells about him. I am like the auditor who occupies a seat at the conjuring entertainment, but has fallen asleep just as the thing is getting sensational.

In one of his latest books, Harold Begbie gives us a fine picture of John Wyclif reading from his own translation of the Bible to those who had never before listened to those stately and wonderful cadences. The hearers look at each other with wide-open eyes, and are almost incredulous in their astonishment. Every sentence is a sensation. They can scarcely believe their ears. They are like the baby on the floor. The simplicities startle them. If only I can renew the romance of my childhood, and recapture that early sense of wonder, the world will suddenly become as marvellous as the prince’s palace in the fairy stories, and the ministry of the Church will become life’s most sensational sensation.

II STRAWBERRIES AND CREAM

Strawberries are delicious, as every one knows. ‘It may be,’ says Dr. Boteler, a quaint old English writer, ‘it may be that God could make a better berry than a strawberry, but most certainly He never did.’ Yes, strawberries are delicious; but I am not going to write about strawberries. Cream is also very nice, very nice indeed; but nothing shall induce me to write about cream. I have promised myself a chapter, neither on strawberries nor on cream, but on strawberries and cream. The distinction, as I shall endeavour to show, is a vitally important one. Now the theme was suggested on this wise. I was walking through the city this afternoon, when I met a gentleman from whom, only this morning, I received an important letter. We shook hands, and were just plunging into the subject-matter of his letter when a tall policeman reminded us of the illegality of loitering on the pavement. Yet it was too hot to walk about.

‘Come in here,’ my companion suggested, pointing to a café near by, ‘and have a cup of afternoon tea.’

‘No, thank you,’ I replied, ‘I had a cup not long ago.’

‘Well, strawberries and cream, then?’

The temptation was too strong for me; he had touched a vulnerable point; and I succumbed. The afternoon was very oppressive; the restaurant looked invitingly cool; a quiet corner among the ferns seemed to beckon us; and the strawberries and cream, daintily served, soon completed our felicity.

Strawberries and cream! It is an odd conjunction when you come to think of it. The gardener goes off to his well-kept beds and brings back a big basket, lined with cabbage leaves, and filled to the brim with fine fresh strawberries. The maid slips off to the dairy and returns with a jug of rich and foamy cream. To what different realms they belong! The gardener lives, moves, and has his being in one world; the milkmaid spends her life in quite another. The cream belongs to the animal kingdom; the strawberries to the vegetable kingdom. But here, on these pretty little plates in the fern-grot are the gardener’s world and the milkmaid’s world beautifully blended. Here, on the table before us, are the animal and the vegetable kingdom perfectly supplementing and completing each other. It is another phase of the wonder which suggested the nursery rhyme:

Empires confront each other within the compass of a plum-pudding; continents salute each other in a tea-cup; the great subdivisions of the universe greet each other in a plate of strawberries and cream. What ententes, and rapprochements, and international conferences take place every day among the plates and dishes that adorn our tables!

It is a thousand pities that we have no authentic record of the discoverer of strawberries and cream. For ages the world enjoyed its strawberries, and for ages the world enjoyed its cream. But strawberries and cream was an unheard-of mixture. Then there dawned one of the great days of this planet’s little story, a day that ought to have been carefully recorded and annually commemorated. History, as it is written, betrays a sad lack of perspective. It has no true sense of proportion. There came a fateful day on which some audacious dietetic adventurer took the cream that had been brought from his dairy, poured it on the strawberries that had been plucked from his garden, and discovered with delight that the whole was greater than the sum of all its parts. Yet of that memorable day the historian takes no notice. With the amours of kings, the intrigues of courts, and the squabbles of statesmen he has filled countless pages; yet only in very rare instances have these things contributed to the sum of human happiness anything comparable to the pleasures afforded by strawberries and cream. We have never done justice to the intellectual prowess of the men who first tried some of the mixtures that are to us a matter of course. Salt and potatoes, for example. I heard the other day of a little girl who defined salt as ‘that which makes potatoes very nasty if you have none of it with them.’ It is not a bad definition. But, surely, something is due to the memory of the man who discovered that the insipidity might be removed, and the potato be made a staple article of diet, by the simple addition of a pinch of salt! Then, too, there are the men who found out that horseradish is the thing to eat with roast beef; that apple sauce lends an added charm to a joint of pork; that red currant jelly enhances the flavour of jugged hare; that mint sauce blends beautifully with lamb; that boiled mutton is all the better for caper sauce; and that butter is the natural corollary of bread. ‘The man of superior intellect,’ says Tennyson, in vindication of his weakness for boiled beef and new potatoes, ‘knows what is good to eat.’ And George Gissing in a reference to these selfsame new potatoes, adds a corroborative word. ‘Our cook,’ he says, ‘when dressing these new potatoes, puts into the saucepan a sprig of mint. This is genius. Not otherwise could the flavour of the vegetable be so perfectly, yet so delicately, emphasized. The mint is there, and we know it; yet our palate knows only the young potato.’ There have been thousands of statues erected to the memory of men who have done far less to promote the happiness of mankind than did any of these. Every great invention is preceded by thousands and thousands of fruitless attempts. Think of the nauseous conglomerations that must have been tried and tasted, not without a shudder, before these happy combinations were at length launched upon the world. Think of the jeers of derision that greeted the first announcement of these preposterous concoctions! Imagine the guffaws when a man told his companions that he had been eating red currant jelly with jugged hare! Imagine the nameless dietetic atrocities that that ingenious epicure must have perpetrated before he hit upon his ultimate triumph! I have not the initiative to attempt it. I lack the splendid daring of the pioneer. In a thousand years’ time men will smack their lips over all kinds of mixtures of which I should shudder to hear. I am content to go on eating this by itself and that by itself, just as for ages men were content to eat strawberries by themselves and cream by itself, never dreaming that this thing and that thing as much belong to each other as do strawberries and cream.

Now this genius for mixing things is one of the hall-marks of our humanity. Strawberry leaves are part of the crest of a duchess; but strawberries and cream might be regarded as a suitable crest for the race. Man is an animal, but he is more than an animal; and he proves his superiority by mixing things. His poorer relatives of the brute creation never do it. They eat strawberries, and they are fond of cream; but it would never have occurred to any one of them to mix the strawberries with the cream. An animal, even the most intelligent and domesticated animal, will eat one thing and then he will eat another thing; but the idea of mixing the first thing with the second thing before eating either never enters into his comprehension.

The strawberries and cream represent, therefore, in a pleasant and attractive way, our human genius for mixing things. There is nothing surprising about it. Indeed, it is eminently fitting and characteristic. For we are ourselves such extraordinary medlies. Let any man think his way back across the ages, and mark the ingredients that have woven themselves into his make-up, and he will not be surprised at the extraordinary miscellany of passions that he sometimes discovers within the recesses of his own soul. ‘I remember,’ Rudyard Kipling makes the Thames to say:

Men of the island caves mixed their blood with men of the great continental forests. It was an extraordinary agglomeration.

Is it any wonder that sometimes I feel, mingling with the emotions inspired by a recent communion service, the savagery of some long-forgotten caveman ancestor? Civilization is so very young, and barbarism was so very old, that it is not surprising that I occasionally hark back involuntarily to the days to which my blood was most accustomed. I am an odd mixture considered from any point of view. ‘There are very few human actions,’ says Mark Rutherford, ‘of which it can be said that this or that, taken by itself, produced them. With our inborn tendency to abstract, to separate mentally the concrete into factors which do not exist separately, we are always disposed to assign causes which are too simple. Nothing in nature is propelled or impeded by one force acting alone. There is no such thing, save in the brain of the mathematician. I see no reason why even motives diametrically opposite should not unite in one resulting deed.’ Of course not! It is my duty, that is to say, to take myself to pieces as little as possible. It does not really matter how much of my present temperament I got from the communion service, and how much I got from the caveman with the club in his hand. Here I am, a present entity, with the caveman, the tribesman, the Roman, and the Dane all mixed up together in me; and it is my business, instead of taking the complex mechanism to pieces, to make it, as a united and harmonious whole, do the work for which I have been sent into the world. I am not to talk one moment of the strawberries on my plate, and then, in the next breath, to speak of the cream. It is not so much a matter of strawberries and cream as of strawberriesandcream.

There is, I fancy, a good deal in that. We are too fond of taking the cream from the strawberries, and the strawberries from the cream. I have on my plate here, not two things, but one thing; and that one thing is strawberriesandcream. One of the oldest and one of the silliest mistakes that men have made is their everlasting inclination to divide strawberries-and-cream into strawberries and cream. Think of the toothless chatter concerning the sexes. Have men or women done most for the world? Is the husband or is the wife most essential to the home? It will be quite time enough to attempt to answer such ridiculous questions when the waitresses at the restaurants begin to ask us whether we will have strawberries or cream! In the beginning, we are told, God created man in His own image, male and female created He them. It is not so much a matter of male and female: it is maleandfemale, just as it is strawberriesandcream. The thing takes other forms. Which do you prefer—summer or winter? As though we should appreciate summer if we never had a winter, or winter if we never had a summer! Is song or speech the most effective evangelistic agency? As though there would be anything to sing about if the gospel had never been preached! Or anything worth preaching if the gospel had never set anybody singing! It is so very ridiculous to try to separate the strawberries from the cream. Miss Rosaline Masson, in commenting upon Wordsworth’s beautiful sonnet on Westminster Bridge, says that it is the outcome of Dorothy Wordsworth’s divine power of perception and her brother’s divine power of expression. But who would dare to take the sonnet to pieces and say how much is Dorothy’s, and how much is William’s? It is Dorothy’s and William’s. It is strawberries and cream.

I always feel extremely sorry for the man who tries to move a vote of thanks at the close of a pleasant and successful function. Not for worlds could I be persuaded to attempt it. It is a most difficult and complicated business, and I should collapse utterly. It consists in taking the whole performance to pieces and allocating the praise. So much for the decorators; so much for the singers; so much for the elocutionists; so much for the speakers; so much for the chairman; so much for the pianist; so much for the secretary; and so on. To me it would be like furnishing a statistical table on leaving the restaurant showing how much of my enjoyment I owed to the strawberries and how much to the cream. Dissection is not in my line. I only know that I thoroughly enjoyed the strawberriesandcream.

In selecting strawberries and cream as emblems of the mixed things of life, I fancy that my choice is a particularly happy one. That cream must be mixed with other foods goes without saying; and in Shakespeare’s most notable reference to strawberries it is the same peculiarity that seems to have impressed him. He has a very pleasing allusion to the facility with which the strawberry mixes with other things. The passage occurs at the beginning of King Henry the Fifth. The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Ely are discussing the new king. They are astonished at the change which has overtaken him since his accession. As a prince he was wild and dissolute, and broke his father’s heart. But, as soon as he became king, he instantly sent for his boon-companions, told them that he intended by God’s good grace to live an entirely new life, and begged them to follow his example. As the Archbishop of Canterbury puts it:

To which the Bishop of Ely replies:

It is a suggestive passage, considered from any point of view We live mixed lives in a mixed world, and we do not come upon the strawberries by themselves or all at once. We may find strawberries to-morrow where we can discover nothing but stinging-nettles to-day ‘Madcap Harry’ was not the only son whose life at first yielded nothing but nettles that stung and lacerated his father’s soul, and yet afterwards produced strawberries that were the delight, not only of the Church, but of the world at large.

III THE CONQUEST OF THE CRAGS

I was strolling one still evening along a lonely New Zealand shore, when I made a grim discovery that has often set me thinking. I had been walking along the wet and crinkled sands, the tide being out, and had amused myself with the shells and the seaweed that had been left lying about by the receding waters. There is always a peculiar charm about such a stroll. It holds such infinite possibilities. One seems to be exploiting the surprise-packet of the universe. Jane Barlow, in her Bogland Studies, makes one of her characters say:

Absorbed in so delightful an occupation the passage of time escaped my attention, until suddenly I noticed that twilight was rapidly falling, and I thought of my return. Before retracing my steps, however, I sat down for a moment’s rest among the sand-dunes. The possibility of making a discovery among those arid mounds did not occur to me. But, as I sat absent-mindedly poking the soft sand with my stick, I suddenly struck something hard. I proceeded to dig it out, and found a couple of human skulls. They adorn the top shelf of my book-case before me at this moment. They always look down upon me as I write. I often catch myself leaning back in my chair, staring up at them, and trying to read their secret. Who were they, I wonder, these two bony companions of mine? Two Maoris finishing, among the lonely dunes, their last fierce fatal feud? Two travellers, hopelessly lost, who threw themselves down here to die? A couple of sailors, whose ship had struck the cruel reefs out yonder, and whose bodies were tossed up here by the pitiless waves? A pair of lovers trapped by the treacherous tide? I cannot tell. What a tantalizing mystery they seem to hold, as they grin down at me from this high shelf of mine! It is part of the ghostly sense of mystery that always haunts the sea and its tragedies. On the land, when disaster occurs, all the wreckage is left to tell its own tale; but on the ocean Fate instantly obliterates all her tracks. The magnificent vessel lurches over, plunges with a roar into the deep, and the waves close over the frightful ruin. Compared with the silence of the sea, the Sphinx is voluble. The deep, dark, icy ocean-bed guards its secrets, and guards them well.

Sometimes, however, it is more easy to read the riddle. Here in Tasmania, within easy reach of this quiet study of mine, there is a battle-field that I love to visit. It extends for miles and miles, and the whole place is strewn with the wreckage that tells of the titanic conflict. I do not mean that the place is littered with dead men’s bones. It was a far finer and a far fiercer fight than men could have waged, and it lasted longer than any war recorded in the annals of history. It is the battle-field on which the land fought the sea. It is a rocky and precipitous coast. Sometimes I like to walk along the top of the cliff, and look down upon the pile of massive boulders that lie tumbled in picturesque and bewildering confusion about the beach below. Or, at low tide, I like to make my way among those monstrous piles of broken rock that lie, higgledy-piggledy, all along the shore. What a fight it was, day and night, summer and winter, year in and year out, age after age! Occasionally the attack slackened down, and the rippling waters merely lapped softly against the rocks. But there was no real truce. The sea was only gathering up its forces in secret for the majestic assault that was to come. Then the great breakers came rushing in, like regiments of cavalry in full career, and each huge wave hurled itself upon the crags with such fury that the spray dashed up sky high.

It was a titanic struggle, and the waters won. That is the extraordinary thing—the waters won. The water seems so soft, so yielding, so fluid, and the rocks seem so impregnable, so adamantine, so immutable. Yet the waters always win. The land makes no impression on the sea; but the sea grinds the land to powder. I know that the sea is often spoken of as the natural emblem of all that is fickle and changeful; but it is a pure illusion. There are, of course superficial variations of tone and tint and temper; but, as compared with the kaleidoscopic changes that overtake the land, the ocean is eternally and everywhere the same. It, and not the rocks, is the symbol of immutability. ‘Look at the sea!’ exclaims Max Pemberton, in Red Morn. ‘How I love it! I like to think that those great rolling waves will go leaping by a thousand years from now. There is never any change about the sea. You never come back to it and say, “How it’s changed!” or “Who’s been building here?” or “Where’s the old place I loved?” No; it is always the same. I suppose if one stood here for a million years the sea would not be different. You’re quite sure of it, and it never disappoints you.’ The land, on the contrary, is for ever changing. Man is always working his transformations, and Nature is toiling to the same end.

‘When the Romans came to England,’ says Frank Buckland, the naturalist, ‘Julius Caesar probably looked upon an outline of cliff very different from that which holds our gaze to-day. First there comes a sun-crack along the edge of the cliff; the rain-water gets into the crack; then comes the frost. The rain-water in freezing expands, and by degrees wedges off a great slice of chalk cliff; down this tumbles into the water; and Neptune sets his great waves to work to tidy up the mess.’ No man can know the veriest rudiments of geology without recognizing that it is the land, and not the sea, that is constantly changing. We may visit some historic battle-field to-day, and, finding it a network of bustling streets and crowded alleys, may hopelessly fail to repeople the scene with the battalions that wheeled and charged, wavered and rallied, there in the brave days of old. But when, from the deck of a steamer, I surveyed the blue and tossing waters off Cape Trafalgar, I knew that I was gazing upon the scene just as it presented itself to the eye of Nelson on the day of his immortal victory and glorious death more than a century ago.

Now, beneath this triumph of the ocean—the triumph that leaves the land in fragments whilst the sea itself sustains no injury—there lies a deeper significance than at first appears. Job saw it. No elusive secret, lurking in the universe around him, escaped his restless eye. ‘The waters wear the stones!’ he cried, and it was a shout of victory that rose from his heart when he said it. ‘The waters wear the stones,’ he exclaimed, ‘and Thou washest away the things which grow out of the dust of the earth.’ It is the death-knell of the material. It is the triumph of the eternal. A little child looks upon the great granite cliffs, and it seems impossible that the lapping waves can ever pound them to pieces. But they do. And in the same way, Job says, man seems so impregnable, and the world so mighty, that it appears a thing incredible that God can finally prevail. But He shall. The quiet waters conquer the frowning cliffs at length. The walls of Jericho fall down. This is the victory that overcometh the world.

And so here on this battle-field where the land and the sea fought for mastery, I find Job sitting, and he interprets for me the paean that the waves are singing. It is the laughter of their triumph. ‘The waters wear away the stones.’ That was the heartening message that gave to Spain one of her very greatest teachers. St. Isidore of Seville was only a boy at the time. He found his lessons hard to learn. Study was a drudgery, and he was tempted to give up. The huge obstacles against which he, like the waves at the base of the cliff, was beating out his life seemed adamantine. So he ran away from school. But in the heat of the day he sat down to rest beside a little spring that trickled over a rock. He noticed that the water fell in drops, and only one drop at a time; yet those drops had worn away a large stone. It reminded him of the tasks he had forsaken, and he returned to his desk. Diligent application overcame his dullness, and made him one of the first scholars of his time. He never forgot the drops of water, dripping, dripping, dripping on the rock that they were conquering. ‘Those drops of water,’ says his biographer, ‘gave to Spain a brilliant historian, and to the Church a famous doctor.’

It is always the gentle things of life that conquer us. ‘The moving waters’—to quote Keats’ beautiful phrase—

wear down the towering cliffs along the coast. It is Aesop’s fable of the North Wind and the sun over again. The North Wind, with its violence and bluster, only makes the traveller button his coat the tighter. It is the genial warmth of the sun that makes him take it off. It is always by gentleness that the adamantine world is mastered. That is one of life’s most lovely secrets. We are not ruled as much as we think by parliaments and commandments and enactments. The proportion of our lives that is governed by such things is very small. But the proportion that is dominated by gentler and more winsome forces is very great. The voices that sway us with a regal authority are soft and tender voices, the voices of those whose genial goodness compels us to love them. The imperial tones to which we capitulate unconditionally are very rarely stern official tones. Who does not remember how, in The Rosary, the Hon. Jane Champion asks Garth Dalmain why he does not marry? And Garth tells her of old Margery, his childhood’s friend and nurse, now his housekeeper and general mender and tender—old Margery, with her black satin apron, lawn kerchief, and lavender ribbons. ‘No doubt, Miss Champion, it will seem absurd to you that I should sit here on the duchess’s lawn and confess that I have been held back from proposing marriage to the women I most admired because of what would have been my old nurse’s opinion of them.’ Yet so it invariably is. Our servants are often our masters. Life’s loftiest authorities never derive their sanctions from rank, office, or station. The soul has enthronements and coronations of its own. A little child often leads it. A Carpenter becomes its king. Out of Nazareth comes the Conqueror of the World. The pure and cleansing waters wear down the giant crags at the last.

But with purity and gentleness must go patience. The lapping waters do not reduce the rocky strata at a blow. It is always by means of patience that the finest conquests are won. Who that has read Jack London’s Call of the Wild will ever forget the great fight at the end of the book between Buck, the dog hero, and the huge bull-moose? ‘Three hundredweight more than half a ton he weighed, the old bull; he had lived a long, strong life, full of fight and struggle, and at the end he faced death at the teeth of a creature whose head did not reach beyond his great knuckled knees!’ How was it done? ‘There is a patience in the wild,’ Jack London says, ‘a patience dogged, tireless, persistent as life itself’; and it was by means of this patience that Buck brought down his stately antlered prey. ‘Night and day, Buck never left him, never gave him a moment’s rest, never permitted him to browse on the leaves of the trees or the shoots of the young birch or willow. Nor did he give the old bull one single opportunity to slake his burning thirst in the slender, trickling streams they crossed.’ For four days Buck hung pitilessly at the huge beast’s heels, and at the end of the fourth day he pulled the bull-moose down. Buck looked so little, but he wore the monarch out. The waters seem so feeble, but they beat the rocks to powder. It is thus that the foolish things of this world always confound the wise; the weak things conquer the mighty; and the things that are not bring to naught the things that are.

IV LINOLEUM

True love is never utilitarian. I am well aware that, in novels and in plays, the fair heroine considerately falls in love with the brave man who, at a critical moment, saves her from a watery grave or from the lurid horrors of a burning building. It is very good of the lady in the novel. I admire the gratitude which prompts her romantic affection, and, nine times out of ten, my judgement cordially approves her taste. I know, too, that, in fiction, the sick or wounded hero invariably falls desperately in love with the devoted nurse whose patient and untiring attention ensures his recovery. It is very good of the hero. Again I say, I admire his gratitude and almost invariably endorse his choice. But it must be distinctly understood that this sort of thing is strictly confined to novels and theatricals. In real life, men and women do not fall in love out of gratitude. As a matter of fact, I am much more likely to fall in love with somebody for whom I have done something than with somebody who has done something for me.

I was talking the other day with a nurse in a children’s hospital. It is a heartbreaking business, she told me. ‘You get into the way of nursing them, and comforting them, and playing with them, and mothering them, until you feel that they belong to you. And then, just as you have come to love the little thing as though he were your own, out he goes. And he always goes out with his father or his mother, clapping his hands for very joy at the excitement of going home, and you are left with a big lump in your throat, and perhaps a tear in your eye, at the thought that you will never see him again!’ Clearly, therefore, we do not fall in love as a matter of gratitude. The people who cling to us and depend upon us are much more likely to win our hearts than the people who have placed us under an obligation to them. If, instead of telling us that the heroine fell in love with the man who had saved her from drowning, the novelist had told us that the man who risked his life by plunging into the river fell in love with the white and upturned face as he laid it gently on the bank; or if, instead of telling us that the patient fell in love with the nurse, he had told us that the nurse fell in love with the patient upon whom she had lavished such beautiful devotion, he would have been much more true to nature and to real life. It is indisputable, of course, that, the rescuer having fallen in love with the rescued, she may soon discover his secret, and, since love begets love, reciprocate his affection. It is equally true that, the nurse having conceived so tender a passion for her patient, he may soon read the meaning of the light in her eye and of the tone in her voice, and feel towards her as she first felt towards him. But that is quite another matter, and is beside our point at present. Just now, I am only concerned with challenging the novelist’s unwarrantable assumption that we fall in love out of gratitude. We do nothing of the kind. Love, I repeat, is never utilitarian. We may fall hopelessly in love with a thing that is of very little use to us; and we may feel no sentimental attractions at all towards a thing that is almost indispensable. If any man dares to dispute these conclusions, I shall simply produce a roll of linoleum in support of my arguments, and he will be promptly crushed beneath the weight of argument that the linoleum will furnish.

The linoleum is the most conspicuous feature of the domestic establishment. It is impertinent, self-assertive, and loud. If you visit a house in which there is a linoleum, the thing rushes at you, and you see it even before the front door has been opened. Every minister who spends his afternoons in knocking at people’s doors knows exactly what I mean. The very sound of the knock tells you a good deal. Such sounds are of three kinds. There is the echoing and reverberating knock that tells you of bare boards; there is the dead and sombre thud that tells of linoleum on the floor; and there is the softened and muffled tap that tells of a hall well carpeted. And so I say that the linoleum—if there be one—rushes at you, and you seem to see it even before the door has been opened. Perhaps it is this immodesty on its part that prevents your liking it. It is always with the coy, shy, modest things that we fall in love most readily.

But however that may be, the fact remains. Since this queer old world of ours began, men and women have fallen in love with all sorts of strange things; but there is no record of any man or woman yet having really fallen in love with a roll of linoleum. Of everything else about the house you get very fond. I can understand a man shedding tears when his arm-chair has to go to the sale-room or the scrap-heap. Robert Louis Stevenson once told the story of his favourite chair until he moved his schoolboy audience to tears! And everybody knows how Dickens makes you laugh and cry at the drollery and pathos with which, in all his books, he invests chairs, tables, clocks, pictures, and every other article of furniture. I fancy I should feel life to be less worth living if I were deprived of some of the household odds and ends with which all my felicity seems to be mysteriously associated. But I cannot conceive of myself as yielding to even a momentary sensation of tenderness over the sale, destruction, or exchange of any of the linoleums. I feel perfectly certain that neither Stevenson nor Dickens would ever have felt an atom of sentiment concerning linoleum. Yet why? Few things about the house are more serviceable. I could point offhand to a hundred things no one of which has earned its right to a place in the home one-hundredth part as nobly as has the linoleum. Yet I am very fond of each of those hundred things, whilst I am not at all fond of the linoleum. I appreciate it, but I do not love it. So there it is! Said I not truly that love is never utilitarian? We grow fond of things because we grow fond of things; we never grow fond of things simply because they are of use to us.

But we cannot in decency let the matter rest at that. There must be some reason for the failure of the linoleum to stir my affections. Why does it alone, among my household goods and chattels, kindle no warmth within my soul? The linoleum is both pretty and useful; what more can I want? Many things pretty, but not useful, have swept me off my feet. Many things useful, but not pretty, have captivated my heart. And more than once things neither pretty nor useful have completely enslaved me. Yet here is the linoleum, both pretty and useful, and I feel for it no fondness whatsoever; I remain as cold as ice, and as hard as adamant. Why is it? To begin with, I fancy the pattern has something to do with it. I do not now refer to any particular pattern; but to all the linoleum patterns that were ever designed. Those endless squares and circles and diamonds and stars! Could anything be more repelling? Here, for instance, on the linoleum, I find a star. I know at once that if I look I shall see hundreds of similar stars. They will all be in perfectly straight lines, not one a quarter of an inch out of its place. They will all be mathematically equidistant; they will be of exactly the same size, of identically the same colour, and their angles will all point in precisely the same direction. If the stars in the firmament above us were arranged on the same principle, they would drive us mad. The beauty of it is that, there, one star differeth from another star in glory. But on the linoleum they do nothing of the sort.

Or perhaps the pattern is a floral one. It thinks to coax me into a feeling that I am in the garden among the roses, the rhododendrons, or the chrysanthemums. But it is a hopeless failure. Whoever saw roses, rhododendrons, or chrysanthemums, all of exactly the same size, of precisely the same colour, and hanging in rows at mathematically identical levels? The beauty of the garden is that having looked at this rose, I am the more eager to see that one; having admired this chrysanthemum, I am the more curious to mark the variety presented by the next. No two are precisely the same. And because this infinite diversity is the essential charm both of the heavens above and of the earth beneath, I am shocked and repelled by the monotony of the pattern on the linoleum. In the old days it was customary to plaster the walls, even of sick-rooms, with papers of patterns equally pronounced, and many a poor patient was tortured almost to death by the glaring geometrical abominations. The doctor said that the sufferer was to be kept perfectly quiet; yet the pattern on the wall is allowed to scream at him and shout at him from night until morning, and from morning until night. He has counted those awful stars or roses, perpendicularly, horizontally, diagonally, from right to left, from left to right, from top to bottom, and from bottom to top, until the hideous monstrosities are reproduced in frightful duplicate upon the fevered tissues of his throbbing brain. He may close his eyes, but he sees them still. It was a form of torture worthy of an inquisitor-general. The pattern on the linoleum is happily not quite so bad. When we are ill we do not see it; and when we are well we may to some extent avoid it. Not altogether; for even if we do not look at it, we have an uncanny feeling that it is there. Between the hearthrug and the table I catch sight of the bright flaunting head of a scarlet poppy, or of the tossing petals of a huge chrysanthemum, and my imagination instantly flashes to my mind the horrible impression of tantalizing rows of exactly similar blossoms running off with mathematical precision in every conceivable direction.

For some reason or other we instinctively recoil from these monotonous regularities. I once heard a friend observe that the average woman would rather marry a man whose life was painfully irregular than a man whose life was painfully regular. It may have been an over-statement of the case; but there is something in it. We fall in love with good people, and we fall in love with bad people; but with the man who is ‘too proper,’ and the woman who is ‘too straight-laced,’ we very, very rarely fall in love. It is the problem of Tennyson’s ‘Maud.’ As a girl Maud was irregular—and lovable.

But later on Maud was regular—and as unattractive as linoleum.

Shall I be told that this is high doctrine, and hard to bear, this doctrine of the lovableness of irregularity? I think not. Towering above all our biographies, as snowclad heights tower above dusty little molehills, there stands the life-story of One who, alone among the sons of men, was altogether good. It is the most charming and the most varied life-story that has ever been written since this little world began. Its lovely deeds and graceful speech, its tender pathos and its awful tragedy, have won the hearts of men all over the world, and all down the ages. But find monotony there if you can! It is like a sky full of stars or a field of fairest flowers. The life that repels, as the linoleum repels, by the very severity of its regularity, has something wrong with it somewhere.

If I have outraged the sensibilities of any well-meaning champion of a geometrical and mathematical and linoleum-like regularity, let me hasten to conciliate him! I know that even regularity—the regularity of the linoleum pattern—may have its advantages. Dr. George MacDonald, in Robert Falconer, says that ‘there is a well-authenticated story of a notorious convict who was reformed by entering, in one of the colonies, a church where the matting along the aisle was of the same pattern as that in the church to which he had gone with his mother as a boy.’ Bravo! It is pleasant, extremely pleasant, to find that even monotony has its compensations. Let me but get to know my ‘too proper’ and ‘straight-laced’ friends a little better, and I shall doubtless discover even there a few redeeming features.

But, for all that, the linoleum is cold; and we do not fall in love with cold things. A volcano is a much more dangerous affair than an iceberg; but it is much more easy to fall in love with the things that make you shudder than with the things that make you shiver. That was the trouble with Maud, she was so chilly and chilling; her ‘cold and clear-cut face, faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null!’ And that is precisely the trouble with every system of religion, morality, or philosophy—save one—that has ever been presented to the minds of men. Plato and Aristotle and Marcus Aurelius were splendid, simply splendid; but they were frigid, frigid as Maud, and their counsels of perfection could never have enchained my heart. Buddha, Confucius, Mohammed—the stars of the East—were wonderful, but oh, so cold! I turn from these icy regularities to the lovely life I have already mentioned. And, to use Whittier’s expressive word, it is ‘warm.’

‘Warm’ ... ‘love’ ... here are words that touch my soul to tears. ‘We love Him because He first loved us.’ The monotony and frigidity of the linoleum have given way to the beauty and the brightness of flowery fields all bathed in summer sunshine.

V THE EDITOR

I approach my present theme with considerable diffidence, for reasons obvious and for reasons obscure. For one thing, I was for some years an editor myself, and I cannot satisfy myself that the experiment was even a moderate success. Everything went splendidly, so far as I was concerned, as long as I wrote everything myself; but I was terribly pestered by other people. They worried me year in and year out, morning, noon, and night. They would insist on sending me manuscripts that I had neither the grace to accept nor the courage to decline. They wrote the most learned treatises, the most pathetic stories, and the most affecting little sonnets. The latter, they explained, were for Poet’s Corner. They actually deluged me with letters, intended for publication, dealing with all sorts of subjects in which I took not the slightest glimmer of interest. They sometimes even presumed, in some carping or captious way, to criticize or review things that I had myself written—as though such things were open to question! At other times they wrote to applaud the sentiments I had expressed—as though I needed their corroboration! They were an awful nuisance. The stupid thing was only a monthly, and how they imagined that there would be any room for their contributions, by the time I had been a whole month writing, passes my comprehension. Then came the awakening, and it was a rude one. I suddenly realized that I was a fraud, a delusion, and a snare. I was not an editor at all. I was simply masquerading, playing a great game of bluff and make-believe. As a matter of fact, I was nothing more than an objectionably garrulous contributor who had gained possession of the editor’s sanctum, usurped the editor’s authority, and commandeered the editor’s chair. I felt so ashamed of myself that I precipitately fled, and, although I have several times since been invited to assume editorial responsibilities, I have shown my profound respect for journalism by politely but firmly declining. It does not at all follow that, because a man can make a few bricks, he can therefore build a mansion. A chemist may be very clever at making up prescriptions, but that does not prove his ability to prescribe.

During the years to which I have referred, that paper really had no editor. An editor would have done three things. He would have written a few wise words himself. He would have pitilessly repressed my unconscionable volubility. And he would have given the public the benefit of some of those carefully prepared contributions which I, with savage satisfaction, hurled into the waste-paper basket. It would have been a good thing for the paper if the editorials had been so few and so brief that people could have been reasonably expected to read them. They would then have attached to them the gravity and authority that such contributions should normally carry. And it would have been good for the world in general, and for me in particular, if liberal quantities of my manuscript had been substitutionally sacrificed in redemption of some of those rolls of paper, whose destruction I now deplore, which I consigned to limbo with so light a heart. Since then I have had a fairly wide experience of editors, and the years have increased my respect. ‘O Lord,’ an up-country suppliant once exclaimed at the week-night prayer-meeting, ‘O Lord, the more I sees of other people the more I likes myself!’ I do not quite share the good man’s feeling, at any rate so far as editors are concerned. The more I have seen of the ways of other editors the less am I pleased with the memory of my own attempt. The way in which these other editors have treated my own manuscript makes me blush for very shame as I remember my editorial intolerance of such packages. Very occasionally an editor has found it necessary to delete some portion of my contribution, and, nine times out of ten, I have admired the perspicacity which detected the excrescence and strengthened the whole by removing the part. I say nine times out of ten; but I hint at the tenth case in no spirit of resentment or bitterness. I am young yet, and the years may easily teach me that, even in the instances that still seem doubtful to me, I am under a deep and lasting obligation to the editorial surgery.

The editor is the emblem of all those potent, elusive, invisible forces that control our human destinies. We are clearly living in an edited world. We may not always agree with the editor; it would be passing strange if we did. We may see lots of things admitted that we, had we been editor, would have vigorously excluded. The venom of the cobra, the cruelty of the wolf, the anguish of a sickly babe, and the flaunting shame of the street corner; had I been editor I should have ruthlessly suppressed all these contributions. But my earlier experience of editorship haunts my memory to warn me. I was too fond of rejecting things in those days. I was too much attached to the waste-paper basket. And I have been sorry for it ever since. And perhaps when I have lived a few aeons longer, and have had experience of more worlds than one, I shall feel ashamed of my present inclination to doubt the editor’s wisdom. Knowing as little as I know, I should certainly have rejected these contributions with scorn and impatience. The fangs of the viper, the teeth of the crocodile, and all things hideous and hateful, I should have intolerantly excluded. And, some ages later, with the experience of a few millenniums and the knowledge of many worlds to guide me, I should have lamented my folly, even as I now deplore my old editorial exclusiveness.

And, on the other hand, we sometimes catch a glimpse of the editor’s waste-paper basket, and the revelation is an astounding one. The waste of the world is terrific. And among these rejected manuscripts I see some most exquisitely beautiful things. The other day, not far from here, a snake bit a little girl and killed her. Now here was a curious freak of editorship! On the editor’s table there lay two manuscripts. There was the snake—a loathsome, scaly brute, with wicked little eyes and venomous fangs, a thing that made your flesh creep to look at it. And there was the little girl, a sweet little thing with curly hair and soft blue eyes, a thing that you could not see without loving. Had I been there, I should have tried to kill the snake and save the child. That is to say, I should have accepted the child-manuscript, and rejected the snake-manuscript. But the editor does exactly the opposite. The snake-manuscript is accepted; the horrid thing glides through the bush at this moment as a recognized part of the scheme of the universe. The child-manuscript is rejected; it is thrown away; have we not seen it, like a crumpled poem, in the editor’s waste-paper basket? How differently I should have acted had I been editor! And then, when I afterwards reviewed my editorship, as I to-day review that other editorship of mine, I should have seen that I was wrong. And that reflection makes me very thankful that I am not the editor. We shall yet come to see, in spite of all present appearances to the contrary, that the editor adopted the kindest, wisest, best course with each of the manuscripts presented. We shall see

Everybody feels at liberty to criticize the Editor; but, depend upon it, when all the information is before us that is before Him, we shall see that our paltry judgement was very blind. And we shall recognize with profound admiration that we have been living in a most skilfully edited world.

For, after all, that is the point. The Editor knows so much more than I do. He has eyes and ears in the ends of the earth. His sanctum seems so remote from everything, and yet it is an observatory from which He beholds all the drama of the world’s great throbbing life. When I was a boy I was very fond of a contrivance that was called a camera-obscura. I usually found it among the attractions of a seaside town. You paid a penny, entered a room, and sat down beside a round white table. The operator followed, and closed the door. The place was then in total darkness; you could not see your hand before you. It seemed incredible that in this black hole one could get a clearer view of all that was happening in the neighbourhood than was possible out in the sunlight. Yet, as soon as the lens above you was opened, the whole scene appeared like a moving coloured photograph on the white table. The waves breaking on the beach; the people strolling on the promenade; everything was faithfully depicted there. Not a dog could wag his tail but there, in the darkness, you saw him do it. An observer who watched you enter, and saw the door close after you, could be certain that now, for awhile, you were cut off from everything. And yet, as a fact, you only went into the darkness that you might see the whole scene in the more perfect perspective. What is this but the editor’s sanctum? He enters it and, to all appearances, he leaves the world behind him as he does so. But it is a mere illusion. He enters it that he may see the whole world more clearly from its quiet seclusion.

In the same way, when I look round upon the world, and see the things that are allowed to happen, the Editor seems fearfully aloof. He seems to have gone into His heaven and closed the door behind Him. ‘Clouds and darkness are round about Him,’ says the psalmist. And if clouds and darkness are round about Him, is it any wonder that His vision is obscure? If clouds and darkness are round about Him, is it any wonder that He acts so strangely? If clouds and darkness are round about Him, is it any wonder that He rejects the child-manuscript and accepts the snake-manuscript? And yet, and yet; what if the darkness that envelops Him be the darkness of the camera-obscura? The psalmist declares that it is just because clouds and darkness are round about Him that righteousness and judgement are the habitation of His throne. It is a darkness that obscures Him from me without in the slightest degree concealing me from Him.

So there the editor sits in his seclusion. Nobody is so unobtrusive. You may read your paper, day after day, year in and year out, without even discovering the editor’s name. You would not recognize him if you met him on the street. He may be young or old, tall or short, stout or slim, dark or fair, shabby or genteel—you have no idea. There is something strangely mysterious about the elusive individuality of that potent personage who every day draws so near to you, and yet of whom you know so little. One of these days I shall be invited to preach a special sermon to editors, and, in view of so dazzling an opportunity, I have already selected my text. I shall speak of that Ideal Servant of Humanity of whom the prophet tells. ‘He shall not scream, nor be loud, nor advertise Himself,’ Isaiah says, ‘but He shall never break a bruised reed nor quench a smouldering wick.’ That would make a great theme for a sermon to editors. There He is, so mysterious and yet so mighty; so remote and yet so omniscient; so invisible and yet so eloquent; so slow to obtrude Himself and yet so swift to discern any flickering spark of genius in others. He shall not advertise Himself nor quench a single smouldering wick.

There are two great moments in the history of a manuscript. The first is the moment of its preparation; the second is the moment of its appearance. And in between the two comes the editor’s censorship and revision. I said just now that I had noticed that editorial emendations are almost invariably distinct improvements. The article as it appears is better than the article as it left my hands. Now let me think. I spoke a moment ago of the child-manuscript and the snake-manuscript; but what about myself? Am not I too a manuscript, and shall I not also fall into the Editor’s hands? What about all the blots, and the smudges, and the erasures, and the alterations? Will they all be seen when I appear, when I appear? The Editor sees to that. The Editor will take care that none of the smudges on this poor manuscript shall be seen when I appear. ‘For we know,’ says one of the Editor’s most intimate friends, ‘we know that when we appear we shall be like Him—without spot or wrinkle or any such thing!’ It is a great thing to know that, before I appear, I shall undergo the Editor’s revision.

Charlie was very excited. His father was a sailor. The ship was homeward bound, and dad would soon be home. Thinking so intently and exclusively of his father’s coming, Charlie determined to carve out a ship of his own. He took a block of wood, and set to work. But the wood was hard, and the knife was blunt, and Charlie’s fingers were very small.

‘Dad may be here when you wake up in the morning, Charlie!’ his mother said to him one night.

That night Charlie took his ship and his knife to bed with him. When his father came at midnight Charlie was fast asleep, the blistered hand on the counterpane not far from the knife and the ship. The father took the ship, and, with his own strong hand, and his own sharp knife, it was soon a trim and shapely vessel. Charlie awoke with the lark next morning, and, proudly seizing his ship, he ran to greet his father; and it is difficult to say which of the two was the more proud of it. It is an infinite comfort to know that, however blotted and blurred this poor manuscript may be when I lay down my pen at night, the Editor will see to it that I have nothing to be ashamed of when I appear in the morning.

VI THE PEACEMAKER

Things had come to a pretty pass up at Corinth, when Paul felt it incumbent upon him to write to the members of the Church, imploring them to be reconciled to God. ‘Now then,’ Paul said to those recalcitrant believers, ‘now then, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us, we pray you, in Christ’s stead, be ye reconciled to God.’ I used to wonder what he can possibly have meant; but now I think I understand.

I

Claudius was wealthy. He dwelt in a beautiful house on the top of a hill, on the eastern side of the city of Corinth. From his spacious balconies he looked down upon the blue, blue waters of the Adriatic as they lapped caressingly the sands of the bay on the one side, and on the spreading sapphire of the island-studded Aegean gleaming most charmingly upon the other. Away in the distance he commanded a magnificent prospect, and could clearly make out the towers and domes of Athens as they pierced the sky on the far horizon. The Acropolis could be seen distinctly. It was a delightful home, delightfully situated. Claudius was a member of the Church; but he was not very happy about it. Claudius had prospered amazingly of late years, and his prosperity had involved him in commercial and social entanglements from which it would be very difficult now to escape. The life that Claudius had set before himself in the early days of his spiritual experience seemed to him later on like a beautiful dream. That is to say, it seemed to him like a dream when he thought about it; but he did not think about it more often than he could help. Claudius knew perfectly well that the life of which he used to dream was worth some sacrifice; and he knew that he was really the poorer, and not the richer, for having abandoned that radiant ideal. He occasionally attended the assembly of worshippers, it is true; but he derived small satisfaction from the exercise. It seemed like exposing his poor withered, emaciated soul to the limelight; and he saw with a start how starved and famished it had become. And so the inner experience of poor Claudius became a perpetual battle-ground. At times the old dream seemed within an ace of being victorious. He was more than half inclined to break away from all his later entanglements, and to renew the ardour of his youthful aspirations. But he had scarcely reached this devout determination when the glamour of his later life once more began to dazzle him. Alluring invitations, temptingly phrased, poured in upon him. It is horrid to be discourteous! How could he bring himself to offend people from whom he had received nothing but kindness? Surely a man owes something to the proprieties of life! And so the fight went on. But in the depths of his secret soul Claudius knew that that fight was a fight between Claudius on the one hand and God on the other. He knew, too, that in that stern conflict Claudius was altogether wrong, and God was altogether right. And he knew that, if he persisted in the unequal struggle, nothing but shame and humiliation awaited him. Claudius knew it, and Paul knew it. Paul knew it, and proffered his good offices as mediator. ‘Now then,’ he wrote, with Claudius in his eye, ‘now then, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us, we pray you, in Christ’s stead, be ye reconciled to God.’ And the words brought to the heart of poor Claudius just such a surge of vehement emotion as a lover feels at the prospect of once more embracing the beloved form with which he had so angrily and hastily parted.

II

Polonius and Phebe were in a very different case. Polonius dwelt close to the city in order to be near his work, and his windows commanded no view of any kind. He was not a slave, but sometimes he said bitterly that the slaves were as happy as he. The world had gone hardly with Polonius. The stars in their courses seemed to be fighting against him. He had tried hard to be brave, but circumstances sometimes conspire against courage. Polonius, in spite of the most commendable endeavours, was poor; yet if poverty had been his only misfortune he could have borne it with a smile. But, in addition to poverty, troubles came thick and fast upon him. Like Claudius, he was a member of the church at Corinth; and it was in connexion with his labours of love for the sanctuary that he had first met Phebe. She was young and fair in those days, and her loveliness was glorified by her devotion. But his love for her had fallen upon her tender spirit like a malediction. It was as though his fondness for his sweet young wife had woven a malignant spell about her early womanhood. He would have died a thousand deaths to make her happy; yet since first they linked their lives they had known nothing but incessant struggle and ceaseless grief. Phebe herself had been ill again and again. Four little children had stolen like sunbeams into their home; only, like sunbeams, to vanish again, and give place to tempests of tears. Then came a long blank; and they fancied they were doomed to spend the rest of their sad lives childlessly. But, at length, to their unspeakable delight, their little home once more resounded with the shout of baby merriment and the patter of baby footsteps. It was as if the four children who had perished had bequeathed to this new treasure all the affection that they had excited in the breasts of their poor parents. And then, after seven happy years, it too faded and died. Polonius and Phebe were broken-hearted. Never again, they said, would they go to the assembly at Corinth. How could they believe in the love of God after this? And so their hearts grew hard, and their souls were soured, and all sweetness departed from their spirits.

There is a story very like this in our own literature. In the old house at Kettering, Andrew Fuller was lying ill in one room, whilst his only surviving daughter—a child of six—lay at the point of death in the next. He tried hard to reconcile himself and his poor wife to the impending calamity. But their spirits revolted. The thought that, after having buried first one child and then another, this one too might be snatched from them was more than they could bear. But, ‘on Tuesday, May 30,’ says Fuller in his diary, ‘on Tuesday, May 30, as I lay ill in bed in another room, I heard a whispering. I inquired, and all were silent! All were silent!—but all is well. I feel reconciled to God.’ That is a fine saying. ‘I feel reconciled to God.’ But poor Polonius and Phebe could as yet enter no such brave words in their domestic record. ‘Wherefore,’ writes Paul, with a thought, perhaps, of Polonius and Phebe, ‘wherefore we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us, we pray you, in Christ’s stead, be ye reconciled to God.’ And when Polonius and Phebe heard that touching appeal they resolved no longer to kick against the pricks. ‘Renew my will,’ they prayed, anticipating the language of a later hymn:

And, like Andrew Fuller and his wife at Kettering, Polonius and his wife at Corinth were able to say, ‘I feel reconciled to God.’

III

To the south of Corinth, just where the great main road begins to ascend the ridge of the mountains, lived Julia. Julia was a widow, comfortably circumstanced. Her husband had died years before, leaving her with the charge of their one young son. And as the days had gone by, and time had sprinkled strands of silver into Julia’s hair, she had built her hopes more and more upon the future of her boy. Julia’s husband had died before either he or she had so much as heard the name of Jesus. But after his death Paul came over from Athens to Corinth in the course of that first memorable visit to Europe, and Julia had been among his earliest converts. After her conversion Julia often thought of her husband, and was ill at ease. But, like a wise woman, she determined to work for the things that remained rather than to weep over those that were lost to her. And so she devoted all her love, and all her thought, and all her energy, and all her time to her little son. When Paul’s first letter to the Christians at Corinth was read to the church, she caught a phrase about being ‘baptized for the dead.’ She did not quite know what Paul meant by the words; but at any rate she would try to instil into the heart of her boy the lovely faith that she felt certain her husband would cheerfully have embraced. And wonderfully she succeeded. The boy listened with eyes wide open to the tender stories that Julia told him, and his heart acknowledged their profound significance. At the same age at which Jesus went with Mary to the Temple, and was found in the midst of the doctors, young Amplius went with Julia up to the church at Corinth, and was found in the midst of the deacons.

From the very first the soul of Amplius prospered. He was like those trees of which the psalmist sings which, ‘planted in the courts of the Lord, flourish in the house of our God.’ From the time of his baptism and reception into the sacred fellowship, the child Amplius grew, like the child Jesus, and waxed strong in spirit, filled with wisdom, and the grace of God was upon him. Then, after about six years of happy Christian experience, Amplius confided a wonderful secret to Julia. He told her that he had resolved, with her consent, to devote himself to the sacred office of the ministry. And at that word the soul of Julia died within her. She knew what those early preachers and teachers had suffered. She knew of the martyrdom of all those first apostles. She had heard that even Paul himself had been ‘in journeyings often, in perils of rivers and in perils of robbers, in perils by his own countrymen and in perils of the heathen, in perils of the city and in perils of the desert, in perils of the sea and in perils among false brethren.’ And Julia’s heart failed her as she thought of Amplius faced by such dangers. Moreover, Julia had other plans for Amplius. She had fondly dreamed of him as holding a great place in the city of Corinth. When she had seen rulers and governors performing exalted functions on State occasions, she had said within herself, ‘Some day, perhaps, Amplius will wear those robes,’ or ‘Some day, perhaps, Amplius will make that speech.’ And now all such dreams were rudely shattered. Her son would fain be a minister, an outcast, perhaps even a martyr. And at that thought the soul of Julia rebelled, and she began to fight against God.

There is a case like this, also, in our own literature. Grey Hazelrigg was the only child of Lady Hazelrigg, of Carlton Hall. Her ladyship intended her son for the army, but he failed to pass the tests. She then sent him to Cambridge University. There he came under deep religious influences. He began, as opportunities presented themselves, to preach the gospel. His efforts met with immediate acceptance, and he wrote to his astonished mother to say that he desired to become a minister of the old Strict Baptist Communion! The request struck Carlton Hall like a thunderbolt, and the spirit of Lady Hazelrigg rose in instant revolt. But Grey prayed in secret, and preached in public, and pleaded with his mother whenever a suitable opportunity occurred. Then came an experience of which, the Rev. W. Y. Fullerton says, he spoke with sparkling eyes seventy years afterwards. He was on a journey when his mind was suddenly and strangely arrested by the words of Jeremiah, ‘Verily, it shall be well with Thy remnant.’ He took it to refer to Lady Hazelrigg’s opposition to his call; and, surely enough, ‘the very next letter that he received from his mother bore the joyful tidings that she was, as she herself phrased it, reconciled to God.’ Mr. Grey Hazelrigg lived to be nearly a hundred, and his work, both as a writer and a preacher, will be remembered in England with thankfulness for many a day to come. There can be no doubt, therefore, that, in those earlier days, Lady Hazelrigg was fighting against God. And there can be no doubt, either, that, in those early days, Julia was fighting against God. And therefore Paul wrote as he did, perhaps with Julia specially in mind. ‘Now then,’ he said, ‘we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us, we pray you, in Christ’s stead, be ye reconciled to God.’ And, like Lady Hazelrigg, Julia made her peace with God, and her son adorned the Christian ministry for many a long day.

IV

‘Be ye reconciled to God’—Paul the Peacemaker wrote to the Christians at Corinth. It is vastly important. We so easily drift away from early attachments and early friendships; and even the divine friendship is not immune from this cruel and heartless treatment. We drift away from it, and must needs be reconciled. ‘Be ye reconciled to God,’ says Paul the Peacemaker ‘for unless you yourselves are reconciled to God, how can you reconcile to God those who are without?’ How can I reconcile hearts that are alienated if, between either of those hearts and mine, there exists some embarrassing estrangement? ‘Be ye reconciled to God,’ said Paul the Peacemaker to the church at Corinth, for he knew that the Church’s ministry of reconciliation would stand stultified and useless so long as the Church herself was out of touch with her Lord.

VII NOTHING

Nature, they say, abhors a vacuum. For the life of me, I do not know why. But then, for the matter of that, I do not know why I myself love many of the things that I love, and loathe many of the things that I abhor. Nature, however, is not usually capricious. Some deep policy generally prompts her strange behaviour. I must go into this matter a little more carefully. First of all, what is a vacuum? What is Nothing?

I was at a prize distribution not long ago, and as I came out into the street I came upon a little chap crying as though his heart would break. He was quite alone. His parents had not thought it worth their while to accompany him to the function, and thus show their interest in his school life. Perhaps it was owing to the same lack of sympathy on their part that he was among the few boys who were bearing home no prize.

‘Hullo, sonny,’ I exclaimed,‘what’s the matter?’

‘Oh, nothing!’ he replied, between his sobs.

‘Then what on earth are you crying for?’

‘Oh, nothing!’ he repeated.

I respected his delicacy, and probed no farther into the cause of his discomfiture, but I had collected further evidence of my contention that there is more in Nothing than you would suppose. Nor had I gone far before still further corroboration greeted me. For, at the top of the street, I came upon a group of lads in the centre of which was a boy with a very handsome prize. I paused and admired it.

‘And what was this for?’ I asked.

‘Oh, nothing!’ he answered, with a blush.

‘But, my dear fellow, you must have done something to deserve it!’

‘Oh, it was nothing!’ he reiterated, and it was from his companions that I obtained the information that I sought. But here again it was made clear to me that there is a good deal in Nothing. Nothing is worth thinking about. It is a huge mistake to take things at their face value. Nothing may sometimes represent a modest contrivance for hiding everything; and we must not allow ourselves to be deceived.

An old tradition assures us that, on the sudden death of one of Frederick the Great’s chaplains, a certain candidate showed himself most eager for the vacant post. The king told him to proceed to the royal chapel and to preach an impromptu sermon on a text that he would find in the pulpit on arrival. When the critical moment arrived, the preacher opened the sealed packet, and found it—blank! Not a word or pen-mark appeared! With a calm smile the clergyman cast his eyes over the congregation, and then said, ‘Brethren, here is Nothing. Blessed is he whom Nothing can annoy, whom Nothing can make afraid or swerve from his duty. We read that God from Nothing made all things. And yet look at the stupendous majesty of His infinite creation! And does not Job tell us that Nothing is the foundation of everything? “He hangeth the world upon Nothing,” the patriarch declares.’ The candidate then proceeded to elaborate the wonder and majesty of that creation that emanated from Nothing, and depended on Nothing. I need scarcely add that Frederick bestowed upon so ingenious a preacher the vacant chaplaincy. And in the years that followed he became one of the monarch’s most intimate friends and most trusted advisers.

We must not, however, fly to the opposite extreme, and make too much of Nothing. For the odd thing is that, twice at least in her strange and chequered history, the Church has fallen in love with members of the Nothing family, and, after the fashion of lovers, has completely lost her head over them. On the first occasion she became deeply enamoured of Doing Nothing, and on the second occasion she went crazy over Having-Nothing. I must tell of these amorous exploits one at a time. The adoration of Doing-Nothing had a great vogue at one stage of the Church’s history. Who that has once read the thirty-seventh chapter of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall—the chapter on ‘The Origin, Progress, and Effects of the Monastic Life’—will ever cease to be haunted by the weird, fantastic spectacle therein presented? Men suddenly took it into their heads that the only way of serving God was by doing nothing. They swarmed out into the deserts, and lived solitary lives. They took vows of perpetual silence, and ceased to speak; they ate only the most disgusting food; they lived the lives of wild beasts. ‘Even sleep, the last refuge of the unhappy, was rigorously measured; the vacant hours rolled heavily on, without business and without pleasure; and, before the close of each day, the tedious progress of the sun was repeatedly accursed.’ Here was an amazing phenomenon. It was, of course, only a passing fancy, the merest piece of coquetry on the Church’s part. It is unthinkable that she thought seriously of Doing-Nothing, and of settling down with him for the rest of her natural life. The glamour of this casual flirtation soon wore off. The Church discovered to her mortification that there was nothing in Nothing. Saint Anthony, of Alexandria, who felt that the life of the city was too full of incitement to frivolity and pleasure, fled to the desert, to escape from these temptations. He became a hermit. But he gave it up, and returned to Alexandria. The abominable imaginations that haunted his mind in the solitude were far more loathsome and degrading than anything he had experienced in the busy city. Fra Angelico, who also fell in love with Doing-Nothing, says that he heard the flapping of the wings of unclean things about his lonely cell. And Francis Xavier has told us of the seven terrible days that he spent in the tomb of Thomas at Malabar. ‘All around me,’ he says, ‘malignant devils prowled incessantly, and wrestled with me with invisible but obscene hands.’ It is the old story, there is nothing in Nothing; and he who falls in love with any member of that family will live to regret the adventure. I remember being greatly impressed by a sentence or two in Nansen’s Farthest North. He is describing the maddening monotony of the interminable Arctic night. ‘Ah!’ he exclaims suddenly, ‘life’s peace is said to be found by holy men in the desert. Here indeed is desert enough; but peace!—of that I know nothing. I suppose it is the holiness that is lacking.’ The explorer was simply discovering that there is nothing in Nothing but what you yourself take into it.

One would have supposed that, after this heart-breaking affair with Doing-Nothing, the Church would have been on her guard against all members of the Nothing family. But no! she was deceived a second time—in this instance by the wiles of Having-Nothing. I allude, of course, to the story of the Mendicant Orders. We all know how Francis d’Assisi fell in love with Poverty. One day, to the consternation of his friends, they received a letter from the gay young soldier, telling them of his intention to lead an entirely new life. ‘I am thinking of taking a wife more beautiful, more rich, more pure than you could ever imagine.’ The wife was the Lady Poverty; and Giotto, in a fresco at Assisi, has represented Francis placing the ring on the finger of his bride. The feminine figure is crowned with roses, but she is arrayed in rags, and her feet are bruised with stones and torn with briars. Francis borrowed the tattered and filthy garments of a beggar, and sought alms at the street corners that he might enter into the secret of poverty; and then he and Dominic founded those orders of mendicant monks which became one of the most potent missionary forces of the Middle Ages.