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Title: The manliness of Christ
Author: Thomas Hughes
Release date: July 6, 2026 [eBook #79039]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Macmillan and Co., 1879
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST ***
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE
MANLINESS OF CHRIST
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE
Manliness of Christ
BY
THOMAS HUGHES, Q.C.
AUTHOR OF
‘TOM BROWN’S SCHOOLDAYS,’ ETC.
London
MACMILLAN AND CO.
AND NEW YORK
1894
All rights reserved
------------------------------------------------------------------------
First Edition. Crown 8vo. 1879.
Reprinted 1880.
Second Edition. Fcap. 8vo. 1894.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
DEDICATORY PREFACE
WHEN this book was first published I was Principal of the Working Men’s
College in London, and had in my mind the students there, who came as a
rule from poorer homes, and had grown up under different surroundings
and influences from those in and under which I had myself been brought
up at Rugby and Oxford. It is now twelve years since I have retired from
the principalship of the W. M. C., and, except occasional visits at
Christmas to attend the anniversary meetings of the Old Students’ Club,
my direct connection with the College has practically ceased, though my
interest in its special work is as strong as ever. On the other hand, in
the last few years my direct connection with Rugby has been revived in
an unexpected manner. At the request of Dr. Percival I have delivered
“Layman’s Sunday evening addresses,” to the School in the course which
he, wisely in my opinion, established three years since. Judging by my
own case, it is a very healthy, and rather pathetic, experience for an
old man to be thus brought back into touch with that far-away time in
his own life,
“When all the world was young, lads,
And all the trees were green.”
At any rate it has been so with me, and has revived a wish I had long
entertained, in a fitful sort of way, of drawing somewhat closer the
bonds which connect the beginning and end of a long life, now that the
end is so well in sight. That wish came upon me again when, at the
request of the school, I agreed to print the first address of 1891, and
more strongly when the same request was renewed as to those of 1892 and
1894, and with it the question whether I might not put them in some less
ephemeral shape than that of pamphlets of ten pages, printed by the
School bookseller. While I was correcting the proofs of my last address
an unexpected offer came from Messrs. Macmillan for a new edition of
_The Manliness of Christ_, which has been for some time out of print.
This offer seemed to give me just the opportunity I was in search of. In
all human likelihood this is the last book I shall ever publish, and on
reading it again I cannot but think that the three addresses now added
are in harmony with, and fit well enough into, the text and argument of
the book. Of this at any rate I am sure, that no better specimen of true
Christian manliness has appeared in my day than that of my old
schoolfellow William Cotton Oswell. So these three addresses have been
added, and they give me some excuse for gratifying my wish, and
dedicating this enlarged edition of the book to my young schoolfellows
of this last decade of the century and the students of the Working Men’s
College. If, as I hope, it should lead to some alliance or connection
between the school and the Working Men’s College, and should incline
Rugby boys who settle in London, either as professional or business men,
to join the College and take part in its educational work, I believe
that both School and College will benefit. There remains one point upon
which I feel bound to say a few words, and which I have had to
reconsider carefully before consenting to the republication of this
book. On reading the _Second Charge of the Bishop of Oxford_, published
last year, I found that he insists strongly on the omniscience of Christ
being of the essence of His human personality, and that He did not
divest Himself of His almightiness or all-knowledge on becoming man. My
respect—I may say my reverence for Bishop Stubbs both as a theologian
and a man, is so deep that I hesitated before allowing a book of mine to
go forth again which assumes the opposite view; viz. that He did so
divest Himself, and that when He became man He became man in all things
like as we are, which of course excludes omniscience. After the best
consideration I could give, I found that I could not abandon my old
belief, in the face of Christ’s own sayings, and above all of that last
cry on the cross of “Eloi Eloi lama sabachthani.” However, the Bishop
says truly in this same charge, “the Church has lived patiently for 1900
years without having other mysteries solved or explained,” and I venture
to think that this of Christ’s omniscience while in the flesh is one of
those as to which it can safely be left for each of us to hold the faith
which best approves itself to his own conscience.
THOMAS HUGHES.
1894.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTORY
PAGE
The Motive of the Book 1
PART I
The Holy Land, A.D. 30—The 9
Battle-Field of the Great
Captain
PART II
The Tests of Manliness 20
PART III
Christ’s Boyhood 42
PART IV
The Call of Christ 73
PART V
Christ’s Ministry, Act I. 92
PART VI
Christ’s Ministry, Act II. 113
PART VII
Christ’s Ministry, Act III. 131
PART VIII
The Last Act 150
CONCLUSION
An Address delivered at Clifton 163
College, Sunday Evening,
October 1879
An Address delivered at Rugby 189
School, February 1891
An Address delivered at Rugby 209
School, June 1892
William Cotton Oswell, 1894 231
------------------------------------------------------------------------
INTRODUCTORY
THE MOTIVE OF THE BOOK
SOME time ago, when I was considering what method it would be best to
adopt in Sunday afternoon readings with a small class in the Working
Men’s College, I received a communication which helped me to come to a
decision. It came in the form of a proposal for a new association, to be
called “The Christian Guild.” The promoters were persons living in our
northern towns, some of which had lately gained a bad reputation for
savage assaults and crimes of violence. My correspondents believed that
some organised effort ought to be made to meet this evil, and that there
was nothing in existence which would serve their purpose. The Young
Men’s Christian Associations had increased of late indeed in numbers,
but had failed to reach the class which most needed Christian
influences. There was a widespread feeling, they said, that these
associations—valuable as they allowed them to be in many ways—did not
cultivate individual manliness in their members, and that this defect
was closely connected with their open profession of Christianity. They
had separated their members too much from the ordinary habits and life
of young men; and had set before them a wrong standard, which taught,
not that they were to live in the world and subdue it to their Master,
but were to withdraw from it as much as possible.
Therefore they would found their new “Christian Guild” on quite other
principles. They aimed, indeed, at something like a revival of the
muscular Christianity of twenty-five years ago, organised for missionary
work in the great northern towns. The members of the Guild must be first
of all Christians, but selected as far as possible for some act of
physical courage or prowess. It was proposed that the medal of the Royal
Humane Society, or the championship of a town or district in running,
wrestling, rowing, or other athletic exercise, should qualify at once
for membership. These first members were to form the root, as it were,
out of which branches of the Guild were to grow—one, they hoped, in
every great centre of population. Each branch, if properly supported,
might attract the most vigorous and energetic young men of its district,
and so by degrees give a higher tone to the sports and occupations which
absorb the spare time and energies of young Englishmen.
I did not see my way to joining any such movement, which indeed never
seemed at all hopeful to me: nor do I know whether anything more has
been done in the matter. But the proposal set me thinking on the state
of things amongst us which “The Christian Guild” was intended to meet. I
was obliged to admit that my own experience, now stretching over a
quarter of a century in London, agreed to some extent with that of my
northern correspondents. Here too this same feeling exists, or it may be
this same prejudice, as to “Young Men’s Christian Associations” amongst
the class from which their members are for the most part taken. Their
tone and influence are said to lack manliness, and the want of manliness
is attributed to their avowed profession of Christianity. If you pursue
the inquiry, you will often come upon a distinct belief that this
weakness is inherent in our English religion; that our Christianity does
appeal and must appeal habitually and mainly to men’s fears—to that in
them which is timid and shrinking, rather than to that which is
courageous and outspoken. This strange delusion is often alleged as the
cause of the want of power and attraction in these associations.
I do not myself at all share this opinion as to the Young Men’s
Christian Associations, for, so far as I have had the means of judging,
they seem to me, especially in the last few years, to have been doing
excellent service, though they work in a narrow groove. But whether this
be so or not, is a matter of comparative indifference, and the
controversy may safely be left to settle itself. But the underlying
belief in the rising generation that Christianity is really responsible
for this supposed weakness in its disciples, is one which ought not to
be so treated. The conscience of every man recognises courage as the
foundation of manliness, and manliness as the perfection of human
character; and if Christianity runs counter to conscience in this
matter, or indeed in any other, Christianity will go to the wall.
But does it? On the contrary, is not perfection of character—“Be ye
perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect,” perfection to be reached
by moral effort in the faithful following of our Lord’s life on
earth—the final aim which the Christian religion sets before individual
men—and constant contact and conflict with evil of all kinds the
necessary condition of that moral effort, and the means adopted by our
Master, in the world in which we live, and for which He died? In that
strife then, the first requisite is courage or manfulness, gained
through conflict with evil—for without such conflict there can be no
perfection of character, the end for which Christ says we were sent into
this world. But was Christ’s own character perfect in this respect—not
only in charity, meekness, purity, long-suffering, but in courage? If
not, can He be anything more than the highest and best of men, even if
He were that; can He be the Son of God in any sense except that in which
all men are sons?
This was the question which was forced on me at the time by the
proposals of “The Christian Guild,” and it gave me the hint I was in
search of as to the method of our Sunday readings. We followed it up as
well as we could through the events recorded in the gospels, applying
the test at every stage of the drama. The results are collected in the
following papers.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PART I
THE HOLY LAND A.D. 30—THE BATTLE FIELD OF THE GREAT CAPTAIN
“Phœnicia and Palestine were sometimes annexed to and
sometimes separated from the jurisdiction of Syria. The
former was a narrow and rocky coast; the latter was a
territory scarcely superior to Wales in fertility or extent!
Yet Phœnicia and Palestine will ever live in the memory of
mankind, since America as well as Europe has received
letters from the one and religion from the other.”—GIBBON,
Chap. i.
IN order to approach our subject with any chance of making the central
figure clear to ourselves, and getting out of the atmosphere of
unreality in which our ordinary religious training is too apt to leave
us, we must make an effort to understand the condition and the
surroundings of life in Palestine when our Lord appeared in it as a
leader and teacher.
Take first the southern portion, the scene of the opening and closing
days of His ministry, and of periodical visits during those three years.
While He was still a boy under ten years of age, the Romans had deposed
Herod Archelaus, and had annexed Judæa, which was from thenceforth ruled
as a province of the empire by a Roman procurator. The rebellion of
Judas of Gamala, which followed shortly afterwards, was a fierce protest
of the Jews against the imperial taxation and the yoke of Rome. It was
suppressed in the stern Roman fashion, and from that time till the
commencement of Christ’s public ministry, Jerusalem and the surrounding
country were on the verge of revolt, a constant source of anxiety to the
Roman procurators, and held down with difficulty by the heavy hand of
the legions which garrisoned them.
All that was best and worst in the Jewish character and history combined
to render the Roman yoke intolerably galling to the nation. The peculiar
position of Jerusalem—a sort of Mecca to the tribes acknowledging the
Mosaic law—made Syria the most dangerous of all the Roman provinces. To
that city enormous crowds of pilgrims, of the most stiff-necked and
fanatical of all races, flocked three times at least in every year,
bringing with them offerings and tribute for the Temple and its
guardians, on a scale which must have made the hierarchy at Jerusalem
formidable even to the world’s master, by their mere command of wealth.
But this would be the least of the causes of anxiety to the Roman
governor, as he spent year after year face to face with these terrible
leaders of a terrible people.
These high priests and rulers of the Jews were indeed quite another kind
of adversaries from the leaders, secular or religious, of any of those
conquered countries, which the Romans were wont to treat with
contemptuous toleration. They still represented living traditions of the
glory and sanctity of their nation, and of Jerusalem, and exercised
still a power over that nation which the most resolute and ruthless of
Roman procurators did not care wantonly to brave.
At the same time the yoke of high priest and scribe and pharisee was
even heavier on the necks of their own people than that of the Roman.
They had built up a huge superstructure of traditions and ceremonies
round the law of Moses, which they held up to the people as more sacred
and binding than the law itself. This superstructure was their special
charge. This was, according to them, the great national inheritance, the
most valuable portion of the covenant which God had made with their
fathers. To them, as leaders of their nation—a select, priestly, and
learned caste—this precious inheritance had been committed. Outside that
caste, the dim multitude, “the people which knoweth not the law,” were
despised while they obeyed, accursed as soon as they showed any sign of
disobedience. Such being the state of Judæa, it would not be easy to
name in all history a less hopeful place for the reforming mission of a
young carpenter, a stranger from a despised province, one entirely
outside the ruling caste, though of the royal race, and who had no
position whatever in any rabbinical school.
In Galilee the surroundings were slightly different, but scarcely more
promising. Herod Antipas, the weakest of that tyrant family, the seducer
of his brother’s wife, the fawner on Cæsar, the spendthrift oppressor of
the people of his tetrarchy, still ruled in name over the country, but
with Roman garrisons in the cities and strongholds. Face to face with
him, and exercising an _imperium in imperio_ throughout Galilee, was the
same priestly caste, though far less formidable to the civil power, and
to the people, than in the southern province. Along the western coast of
the Sea of Galilee, the chief scene of our Lord’s northern ministry, lay
a network of towns densely inhabited, and containing a large admixture
of Gentile traders. This infusion of foreign blood, the want of any such
religious centre at Jerusalem, and the contempt with which the southern
Jews regarded their provincial brethren of Galilee, had no doubt
loosened to some extent the yoke of the priests and scribes and lawyers
in that province. But even here their traditionary power over the masses
of the people was very great, and the consequences of defying their
authority as penal, though the penalty might be neither so swift nor so
certain, as in Jerusalem itself. Such was the society into which Christ
came.
It is not easy to find a parallel case in the modern world, but perhaps
the nearest exists in a portion of our own empire. The condition of
parts of India in our day resembles in some respects that of Palestine
in the year A.D. 30. In the Mahratta country, princes, not of the native
dynasty, but the descendants of foreign courtiers (like the Idumæan
Herods), are reigning. British residents at their courts, hated and
feared, but practically all-powerful as Roman procurators, answer to the
officers and garrisons of Rome in Palestine. The people are in bondage
to a priestly caste scarcely less heavy than that which weighed on the
Judæan and Galilean peasantry. If the Mahrattas were Mohammedans, and
Mecca were situate in the territory of Scindiah or Holkar; if the
influence of twelve centuries of Christian training could be wiped out
of the English character, and the stubborn and fierce nature of the Jew
substituted for that of the Mahratta; a village reformer amongst them,
whose preaching outraged the Brahmins, threatened the dynasties, and
disturbed the English residents, would start under somewhat similar
conditions to those which surrounded Christ when He commenced His
ministry.
In one respect, and one only, the time seemed propitious. The mind and
heart of the nation were full of the expectation of a coming Messiah—a
King who should break every yoke from off the necks of His people, and
should rule over the nations, sitting on the throne of David. The
intensity of this expectation had, in the opening days of His ministry,
drawn crowds into the wilderness beyond Jordan from all parts of Judæa
and Galilee, at the summons of a preacher who had caught up the last
cadence of the song of their last great prophet, and was proclaiming
that both the deliverance and the kingdom which they were looking for
were at hand. In those crowds who flocked to hear John the Baptist there
were doubtless some even amongst the priests and scribes, and many
amongst the poor Jewish and Galilean peasantry, who felt that there was
a heavier yoke upon them than that of Rome or of Herod Antipas. But the
record of the next three years shows too clearly that even these were
wholly unprepared for any other than a kingdom of this world, and a
temporal throne to be set up in the holy city.
And so, from the first, Christ had to contend not only against the whole
of the established powers of Palestine, but against the highest
aspirations of the best of His countrymen. These very Messianic hopes,
in fact, proved the greatest stumbling-block in His path. Those who
entertained them most vividly had the greatest difficulty in accepting
the carpenter’s son as the promised Deliverer. A few days only before
the end He had sorrowfully to warn the most intimate and loving of His
companions and disciples, “Ye know not what spirit ye are of.”
We must endeavour to keep these external conditions and surroundings of
the life of a Galilean peasant in the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius
Cæsar in our minds, if we really wish honestly to understand and
appreciate the work done by one of them in those three short years, or
the character of the doer of it.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PART II
THE TESTS OF MANLINESS
“Obvius in palatio Julius Atticus speculator, cruentum
gladium ostentans, occisum a se Othonem, exclamavit; et
Galba, ‘Commilito,’ inquit, ‘quis jussit?’ insigni animo ad
coercendam militarem licentiam, minantibus intrepidus,
adversus blandientes incorruptus.”—Tacit. Hist., lib. i.
cap. xxxv.
ONE other precaution we must take at the outset of our inquiry, and that
is, to settle for ourselves, without diverging into useless
metaphysics—what we mean by “manliness, manfulness, courage.” My friends
of “The Christian Guild” seemed to assume that these words all have the
same meaning, and denote the same qualities. Now, is this so? I think
not, if we take the common use of the words. “Manliness and manfulness”
are synonymous, but they embrace more than we ordinarily mean by the
word “courage”; for instance, tenderness, and thoughtfulness for others.
They include that courage, which lies at the root of all manliness, but
is, in fact, only its lowest or rudest form. Indeed, we must admit that
it is not exclusively a human quality at all, but one which we share
with other animals, and which some of them—for instance, the bull-dog
and weasel—exhibit with a certainty and a thoroughness which is very
rare amongst mankind.
In what, then, does courage, in this ordinary sense of the word,
consist? First, in persistency, or the determination to have one’s own
way, coupled with contempt for safety and ease, and readiness to risk
pain or death in getting one’s own way. This is, let us readily admit, a
valuable, even a noble quality, but an animal quality rather than a
human or manly one, and obviously not that quality of which the
promoters of the Christian Guild were in search. For I fear we cannot
deny that this kind of courage is by no means incompatible with those
savage or brutal habits of violence which the Guild was specially
designed to put down and root out amongst our people. What they desired
to cultivate was obviously, not animal, but manly courage; and the fact
that we are driven to use these epithets “animal” and “manly” to make
our meaning clear, shows, I think, the necessity of insisting on this
distinction and keeping it well in mind.
We should note, also, that the tests of the Guild were, with one
exception, not really adapted as tests even of animal courage, much less
of manliness. For they proposed that the possession of the Royal Humane
Society’s medal, or the badge of excellence in athletic games, should be
the qualification for the first members. Now the possession of the medal
does amount to _primâ facie_ evidence, not only of animal courage but of
manliness; for it can only be won by an act involving not only
persistency and contempt of pain and danger, but self-sacrifice for the
welfare of another. But proficiency in athletic games has no such
meaning, and is not necessarily a test even of animal courage, but only
of muscular power and physical training. Even in those games which, to
some extent, do afford a test of the persistency, and contempt for
discomfort or pain, which constitute animal courage—such as rowing,
boxing, and wrestling—it is of necessity a most unsatisfactory one. For
instance, Nelson—as courageous an Englishman as ever lived, who attacked
a Polar bear with a handspike when he was a boy of fourteen, and told
his captain, when he was scolded for it, that he did not know Mr.
Fear—with his slight frame and weak constitution, could never have won a
boat race, and in a match would have been hopelessly astern of any one
of the crew of his own barge; and the highest courage which ever
animated a human body would not enable the owner of it, if he were
himself untrained, to stand for five minutes against a trained wrestler
or boxer.
Athleticism is a good thing if kept in its place, but it has come to be
very much over-praised and over-valued amongst us, as I think these
proposals of the Christian Guild for the attainment of their most
admirable and needful aim tend to show clearly enough, if proof were
needed. We may say, then, I think, without doubt, that its promoters
were not on the right scent, or likely to get what they were in search
of by the methods they proposed to use. For after getting their Society
of Athletes it might quite possibly turn out to be composed of persons
deficient in real manliness.
While, however, keeping this conclusion well in mind, we need not at all
depreciate athleticism, which has in it much that is useful to society,
and is indeed admirable enough in its own way. But as the next step in
our inquiry, let us bear well in mind that athleticism is not what we
mean here. True manliness is as likely to be found in a weak as in a
strong body. Other things being equal, we may perhaps admit (though I
should hesitate to do so), that a man with a highly trained and
developed body will be more courageous than a weak man. But we must take
this caution with us, that a great athlete may be a brute or a coward,
while a truly manly man can be neither.
Having got thus far, and satisfied ourselves what is not of the essence
of manliness, though often assumed to be so (as by the promoters of the
Christian Guild), let us see if we cannot get on another step, and
ascertain what is of that essence. And here it may be useful to take a
few well-known instances of courageous deeds, and examine them; because
if we can find out any common quality in them we shall have lighted on
something which is of the essence of, or inseparable from, that
manliness which includes courage—that manliness of which we are in
search.
I will take two or three at hazard from a book in which they abound, and
which was a great favourite here some years ago, as I hope it is still,
I mean Napier’s _Peninsular War_. At the end of the storming of Badajoz,
after speaking of the officers, Napier goes on, “Who shall describe the
springing valour of that Portuguese grenadier who was killed the
foremost man at Santa Maria? or the martial fury of that desperate
rifleman, who, in his resolution to win, thrust himself beneath the
chained sword blades, and then suffered the enemy to dash his head in
pieces with the ends of their muskets?” Again, at the Coa, “a north of
Ireland man named Stewart, but jocularly called ‘the Boy’ because of his
youth, nineteen, and of his gigantic stature and strength, who had
fought bravely and displayed great intelligence beyond the river, was
one of the last men who came down to the bridge, but he would not pass.
Turning round, he regarded the French with a grim look, and spoke aloud
as follows: ‘So this is the end of our brag. This is our first battle,
and we retreat! The boy Stewart will not live to hear that said.’ Then
striding forward in his giant might he fell furiously on the nearest
enemies with the bayonet, refused the quarter they seemed desirous of
granting, and died fighting in the midst of them.”
“Still more touching, more noble, more heroic, was the death of Sergeant
Robert McQuade. During McLeod’s rush, this man, also from the north of
Ireland, saw two men level their muskets on rests against a high gap in
a bank, awaiting the uprise of an enemy. The present Adjutant-General
Brown, then a lad of sixteen, attempted to ascend at the fatal spot.
McQuade, himself only twenty-four years of age, pulled him back, saying,
in a calm decided tone, ‘You are too young, sir, to be killed,’ and then
offering his own person to the fire, fell dead pierced with both balls.”
And, speaking of the British soldier generally, he says in his preface,
“What they were their successors now are. Witness the wreck of the
_Birkenhead_, where four hundred men, at the call of their heroic
officers, Captains Wright and Girardot, calmly and without a murmur
accepted death in a horrible form rather than endanger the women and
children saved in the boats. The records of the world furnish no
parallel to this self-devotion.” Let us add to these, two very recent
examples of which we have all been reading in the last few months: the
poor colliers who worked day and night at Pont-y-pridd, with their lives
in their hands, to rescue their buried comrades; and the gambler in St.
Louis who went straight from the gaming-table into the fire, to the
rescue of women and children, and died of the hurts after his third
return from the flames.
Looking, then, at these several cases, we find in each that resolution
in the actors to have their way, contempt for ease, and readiness to
risk pain or death, which we noted as the special characteristics of
animal courage, which we share with the bull-dog and weasel.
So far all of them are alike. Can we get any further? Not much, if we
take the case of the rifleman who thrust his head under the sword-blades
and allowed his brains to be knocked out sooner than draw it back, or
that of “the boy Stewart.” These are intense assertions of individual
will and force—avowals of the rough hard-handed man that he has that in
him which enables him to defy pain and danger and death—this and little
or nothing more; and no doubt a very valuable and admirable thing as it
stands.
But we feel, I think, at once that there _is_ something more in the act
of Sergeant McQuade, and of the miners in Pont-y-pridd—something higher
and more admirable. And it is not a mere question of degree, of more or
less, in the quality of animal courage. The rifleman and “the boy
Stewart” were each of them persistent to death, and no man can be more.
The acts were, then, equally courageous, so far as persistency and scorn
of danger and death are concerned. We must look elsewhere for the
difference, for that which touches us more deeply in the case of
Sergeant McQuade than in that of “the boy Stewart,” and can only find it
in the motive. At least it seems to me that the worth of the last lies
mainly in the sublimity of self-assertion, of the other in the sublimity
of self-sacrifice.
And this holds good again in the case of the _Birkenhead_. Captain
Wright gave the word for the men to fall in on deck by companies,
knowing that the sea below them was full of sharks, and that the ship
could not possibly float till the boats came back; and the men fell in,
knowing this also, and stood at attention without uttering a word, till
she heeled over and went down under them. And Napier, with all his
delight in physical force and prowess, and his intense appreciation of
the qualities which shine most brightly in the fiery action of battle,
gives the palm to these when he writes, “The records of the world
furnish no parallel to this self-devotion.” He was no mean judge in such
a case; and, if he is right, as I think he is, do we not get another
side-light on our inquiry, and find that the highest temper of physical
courage is not to be found, or perfected, in action but in repose? All
physical effort relieves the strain, and makes it easier to persist unto
death, under the stimulus and excitement of the shock of battle, or of
violent exertion of any kind, than when the effort has to be made with
grounded arms. In other words, may we not say that in the face of danger
self-restraint is after all the highest form of self-assertion, and a
characteristic of manliness as distinguished from courage?
But we have only been looking hitherto at one small side of a great
subject, at the courage which is tested in times of terror, on the
battle-field, in the sinking ship, the poisoned mine, the blazing house.
Such testing times come to few, and to these not often in their lives.
But, on the other hand, the daily life of every one of us teems with
occasions which will try the temper of our courage as searchingly,
though not as terribly, as battle-field, or fire, or wreck. For we are
born into a state of war; with falsehood, and disease, and wrong, and
misery in a thousand forms, lying all around us, and the voice within
calling on us to take our stand as men in the eternal battle against
these.
And in this life-long fight, to be waged by every one of us
single-handed against a host of foes, the last requisite for a good
fight, the last proof and test of our courage and manfulness, must be
loyalty to truth—the most rare and difficult of all human qualities. For
such loyalty, as it grows in perfection, asks ever more and more of us,
and sets before us a standard of manliness always rising higher and
higher.
And this is the great lesson which we shall learn from Christ’s life,
the more earnestly and faithfully we study it. “For this end was I born,
and for this cause came I into the world, to bear witness to the truth.”
To bear this witness against avowed and open enemies is comparatively
easy. But to bear it against those we love, against those whose judgment
and opinions we respect, in defence or furtherance of that which
approves itself as true to our own inmost conscience, this is the last
and abiding test of courage and of manliness. How natural, nay, how
inevitable it is that we should fall into the habit of appreciating and
judging things mainly by the standards in common use amongst those we
respect and love. But these very standards are apt to break down with us
when we are brought face to face with some question which takes us ever
so little out of ourselves and our usual moods. At such times we are
driven to admit in our hearts that we, and those we respect and love,
have been looking at and judging things, not truthfully, and therefore
not courageously and manfully, but conventionally. And then comes one of
the most searching of all trials of courage and manliness, when a man or
woman is called to stand by what approves itself to their consciences as
true, and to protest for it through evil report and good report, against
all discouragement and opposition from those they love or respect. The
sense of antagonism instead of rest, of distrust and alienation instead
of approval and sympathy, which such times bring, is a test which tries
the very heart and reins, and it is one which meets us at all ages, and
in all conditions of life. Emerson’s hero is the man who, “taking both
reputation and life in his hand, will with perfect urbanity dare the
gibbet and the mob, by the absolute truth of his speech and rectitude of
his behaviour.” And, even in our peaceful and prosperous England,
absolute truth of speech and rectitude of behaviour will not fail to
bring their fiery trials, if also in the end their exceeding great
rewards.
We may note too that in testing manliness as distinguished from courage,
we shall have to reckon sooner or later with the idea of duty. Nelson’s
column stands in the most conspicuous site in all London, and stands
there with all men’s approval, not because of his daring courage. Lord
Peterborough in a former generation, Lord Dundonald in the last, were at
least as eminent for reckless and successful daring. But it is because
the idea of devotion to duty is inseparably connected with Nelson’s name
in the minds of Englishmen, that he has been lifted high above all his
compeers in England’s capital.
In the throes of one of the terrible revolutions of the worst days of
imperial Rome,—when probably the cruellest mob, and most licentious
soldiery, of all time were raging round the palace of the Cæsars, and
the chances of an hour would decide whether Galba or Otho should rule
the world, the alternative being a violent death,—an officer of the
guard, one Julius Atticus, rushed into Galba’s presence with a bloody
sword, boasting that he had slain his rival, Otho. “My comrade, by whose
order?” was his only greeting from the old Pagan chief. And the story
has come down through eighteen centuries, in the terse strong sentences
of the great historian prefixed to this chapter, a test for all times.
Comrade, who ordered thee? whose will art thou doing? It is the question
which has to be asked of every fighting man, in whatever part of the
great battle-field he comes to the front, and determines the manliness
of soldier, statesman, parson, of every strong man, and suffering woman.
“Three roots bear up Dominion: Knowledge, Will,—
These twain are strong, but stronger yet the third,—
Obedience,—’tis the great tap-root that still,
Knit round the rock of Duty, is not stirred,
Though Heaven-loosed tempests spend their utmost skill.”[1]
I think that the more thoroughly we sift and search out this question,
the more surely we shall come to this as the conclusion of the whole
matter. Tenacity of will, or wilfulness, lies at the root of all
courage, but courage can only rise into true manliness when the will is
surrendered; and the more absolute the surrender of the will, the more
perfect will be the temper of our courage and the strength of our
manliness.
“Strong Son of God, immortal Love,”
our laureate has pleaded, in the moment of his highest inspiration,
“Our wills are ours, to make them thine.”
And that strong Son of God to whom this cry has gone up in our day, and
in all days, has left us the secret of His strength in the words, “I am
come to do the will of my Father and your Father.”
-----
Footnote 1:
“The Washers of the Shroud.”—J. R. LOWELL.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PART III
CHRIST’S BOYHOOD
“So close is glory to our dust,
So near is God to man;
When duty whispers low, Thou must,
The youth replies, I can.”—EMERSON.
ONE great difficulty meets the student of our Lord’s life and character,
from whatever side, and with whatever purpose, he may approach it. The
whole authentic record of that life, up to the time of His baptism, when
He was already thirty years old, is comprised in half-a-dozen sentences.
All that we know is the story of His visit to Jerusalem at the age of
twelve, when He was lost in the crush of the great feast, and His
parents turned back to look for Him: “And it came to pass, that after
three days they found Him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the
doctors, both hearing them, and asking them questions. And all that
heard Him were astonished at His understanding and answers. And when
they saw Him, they were amazed: and His mother said unto Him, Son, why
hast thou thus dealt with us? behold, thy father and I have sought thee
sorrowing. And He said unto them, How is it that ye sought me? wist ye
not that I must be about my Father’s business? And they understood not
the saying which He spake unto them. And He went down to Nazareth, and
was subject unto them.”
The silence of the evangelists as to all other details of His youth and
early manhood, except this one short incident, which belongs rather to
His public than to His private life, is intended no doubt to fix our
attention on the former, as that which most concerns us. At the same
time it is impossible for those who will follow, as best they may,
Christ’s steps and teaching, setting before themselves that highest
outcome and aim of it all, “Be ye perfect, as your Father in heaven is
perfect,” not to turn often in thought to those early years of His in
which the weapons must have been forged, and the character formed and
matured, for the mighty war.
And it cannot be denied that, to such seekers, this short Temple story
is in many ways baffling, even discouraging. There is something at first
sight, wilful indeed, possibly courageous, but not manly, in a boy of
twelve staying behind his parents in a strange city, without their
knowledge or consent; something thoughtless, almost ungracious, in the
words of reply to Mary’s “thy father and I have sought thee
sorrowing”—“How is it that ye sought me? wist ye not that I must be
about my Father’s business?” (or “in my Father’s courts,” as the words
are more truly translated).
The clue to this apparent divergence from the perfect manly life is
given with rare insight and beauty in Mr. Holman Hunt’s great picture.
At any rate the face and attitude of the boy there seemed for the first
time to make clear to me the meaning of the recorded incident, and to
cast a flood of light on those eighteen years of preparation which yet
remained before He should be ready for His public work. The real meaning
and scope of that work, in all its terrible majesty, and suffering, and
grandeur, have just begun to dawn on the boy’s mind. The first sight of
Jerusalem, and of the Temple, has stirred new and strange thoughts
within Him. The replies of the doctors to His eager questionings have
lighted up the consciousness, which must have been dimly working in Him
already, that He was not altogether like those around Him—the children
with whom He was accustomed to play, the parents at whose knees He had
been brought up.
Many of us must have seen, all must have read of, instances of a call to
their spirits being clearly recognised by very young children, and
colouring and moulding their whole after-lives. We can scarcely say how
early this awakening of a consciousness of what he is, of what he is
meant to do, has come to this or that young child, but no one will
question that it does so come in many instances long before the age of
twelve. And so I think we may safely assume that when Christ came up for
the first time to the feast which commemorated the great deliverance of
His nation, the boy was already conscious of a voice within, calling Him
to devote Himself to the work to which the God of His fathers had in
like manner called in their turn, Moses, and Samuel, and David, and
Elijah, and Judas Maccabæus, and all that grand roll of patriot
prophets, and kings, and warriors, with whose names and doings He would
be already familiar. Amidst all the pomp of the great festival He found
the chosen people weighed down by a sterner and more degrading bondage
than had befallen them in all their long annals. And all that He heard
and saw in the holy city, amongst the crowds of worshippers, and the
rabbis teaching in the Temple courts—the first view of the holy hill of
Sion, the joy of the whole earth—the strange contrast of the eager
traffic, the gross Mammon-worship, the huge slaughtering of beasts with
all the brutal accompaniments, with that universal longing and
expectation in those multitudes for the Messiah who should lead and work
out the final deliverance and triumph of the people of God in that
generation—must have stirred new questionings within Him, questionings
whether that voice which He had been already hearing in His own heart
was not only _a_ call, such as might come to any Hebrew boy, but _the_
call—whether amongst all that vast assembly He was not the one upon whom
the supreme task must be laid, who must be the deliverer of this people,
so certainly and eagerly looked for.
To the young spirit before whose inward eye such a vision is opening,
all human ties would shrink back, and be for the moment forgotten. And,
when recalled suddenly by the words of His mother, the half-conscious
dreamy answer, “How is it that ye sought me? wist ye not that I must be
in my Father’s courts, about His business?” loses all its apparent
wilfulness and abruptness.
And so, full of this new question and great wonder, He went home to the
village in Galilee with His parents, and was subject to them; and the
curtain falls for us on His boyhood, and youth, and early manhood. But
as nothing but what is most important, and necessary for understanding
all of His life which we need for our own growth into His likeness, is
told in these simple gospel narratives, it would seem that this vivid
light is thrown on that first visit to Jerusalem because it was the
crisis in our Lord’s early life which bears most directly on His work
for our race. If so, we must I think allow that the question once fairly
presented to the boy’s mind would never again have left it. Day by day
it would have been coming back with increasing insistency, gathering
power and weight. And as He submitted it day by day to the God whom
prophet and psalmist had taught every child of the nation to look upon
as “about his path and about his bed, and knowing every thought of his
heart,” the consciousness must have gained strength and power. As the
habit of self-surrender, and simple obedience to the voice within, grew
more perfect, and more a part of His very being, the call must have
sounded more and more clearly.
And, as He was in all things tempted like as we are, again and again
must His human nature have shrunk back, and tried every way of escape
from this task, the call to which was haunting Him; while every
succeeding month and year of life must have disclosed to Him more and
more of its peril and its hopelessness, as well as of its majesty.
We have, then, to picture to ourselves this struggle and discipline
going on for eighteen years—the call sounding continually in His ears,
and the boy, the youth, the strong man, each in turn solicited by the
special temptations of His age, and rising clear above them through the
strength of perfect obedience, the strength which comes from the daily
fulfilment of daily duties—that “strength in the Lord” which St. Paul
holds up to us as possible for every human being. Think over this long
probation, and satisfy yourselves, whether it is easy, whether it is
possible, to form any higher ideal of perfect manliness.
And, without any morbid curiosity, and I think with profit, we may
follow out the thoughts which this long period of quiet suggests. We
know from the evangelists only this, that He remained in obscurity in a
retired village of Galilee, and subject to His reputed father and
mother. That He also remained in great seclusion while living the simple
peasant life of Nazareth, we may infer from the surprise, not unmixed
with anger and alarm, of His own family, when, after His baptism, He
began His public career amongst them. And yet, on that day when He rose
to speak in the synagogue, it is clear that the act was one which
commended itself in the first instance to His family and neighbours. The
eyes of all present were at once fixed on Him, as on one who might be
expected to stand in the scribe’s place, from whom they might learn
something, a Man who had a right to speak.
Indeed, it is impossible to suppose that He could have lived in their
midst from childhood to full manhood without attracting the attention,
and stirring many questionings in the minds, of all those with whom He
was brought into contact. The stories in the Apocryphal Gospels of the
exercise of miraculous powers by Christ as a child and boy may be wholly
disregarded; but we may be sure that such a life as His, though lived in
the utmost possible seclusion, must have impressed every one with whom
He came in contact, from the scribe who taught the scriptures in
Nazareth to the children who sat by his side to learn, or met Him by
chance in the vineyards or on the hill-sides. That He was diligent in
using such means for study as were within His reach, if it needed proof,
would appear from His perfect familiarity with the laws and history of
His country at the opening of His ministry. And the mysterious story of
the crisis immediately following His baptism, in which He wrestled, as
it were, face to face with the tempter and betrayer of mankind,
indicates to us the nature of the daily battle which He must have been
waging, from His earliest infancy, or at any rate ever since His first
visit to Jerusalem. No one can suppose for a moment that the trial came
on Him for the first time after the great prophet to whom all the nation
were flocking had owned Him as the coming Christ. That recognition
removed, indeed, the last doubt from His mind, and gave Him the signal
for which He had been patiently waiting, that the time was come and He
must set forth from His retirement. But the assurance that the call
would come at some time must have been growing on Him in all those
years, and so when it does come He is perfectly prepared.
In His first public discourse in the synagogue of Nazareth we find Him
at once announcing the fulfilment of the hopes which all around Him were
cherishing. He proclaims, without any preface or hesitation, with the
most perfect directness and confidence, the full Gospel of the Kingdom
of Heaven. “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand.”
He takes for the text of His first discourse the passage in Isaiah: “The
Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the
Gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to
preach deliverance to the captive, the recovery of sight to the blind,
to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year
of the Lord,” and proceeds to expound how “this day is this scripture
fulfilled in your ears.” And within the next few days He delivers His
Sermon on the Mount, of which we have the full record, and in which we
find the meaning, and character, and principles of the kingdom, laid
down once and for all. Mark, that there is no hesitation, no ambiguity,
no doubt, as to who He is, or what message He has to deliver. “I have
not come to destroy, but to fulfil, the law which my Father and your
Father has given you, and which you have misunderstood. This which I am
now unfolding to you, is the meaning of that law, this is the will of my
Father who is in heaven.”
Thus He springs at once, as it were, full-armed into the arena; and it
is this thorough mastery of His own meaning and position from the
first—this thorough insight into what He has to do, and the means by
which it is to be done—upon which we should fix our thoughts if we want
to understand, or to get any notion at all of, what must have been the
training of those eighteen years.
How had this perfect insight and confidence been reached? “This young
peasant, preaching from a boat or on a hill-side, sweeps aside at once
the traditions of our most learned doctors, telling us that this, which
we and our fathers have been taught, is not what the God of Israel
intended in these Commandments of His; but that He, this young Man, can
tell us what God did really intend. He assumes to speak to us as one
having authority. Who gave Him this authority?” These we know are the
kind of questionings with which Christ was met at once, and over and
over again. And they are most natural and necessary questionings, and
must have occurred to Himself again and again, and been answered by Him
to Himself, before He could have stood up to proclaim with the tone of
absolute authority His good news to the village congregations in
Galilee, or the crowds on the Mount or by the lake.
Who gave Thee this authority? We can only reverentially and at a
distance picture to ourselves the discipline and struggles by which the
answer was reached, which enabled Him to go out without the slightest
faltering or misgiving, and deliver His full and astounding message, the
moment the sign came that the time had come, and that it was indeed
Himself and no other to whom the task was entrusted.
But the lines of that discipline, which in a measure is also the
discipline of every one of us, are clearly enough indicated for us in
the story of the temptation.
In every subtle form this question must have been meeting the maturing
Christ day after day. Art thou indeed the Son of God who is said to be
coming to redeem this enslaved and degraded people, and with and besides
them all the kingdoms of the world? Even if these prophets have not been
dreaming and doting, art not Thou at least dreaming and doting? At any
rate, if that is your claim put it to some test. Satisfy yourself, and
show us, while satisfying yourself, some proof of your title which we
too can recognise. Here are all these material visible things, which, if
your claim be true, must be subject to you. Show us your power over some
of them—the meanest if you will, the common food which keeps men alive.
There are spiritual invisible forces too, which are supposed to be the
ministers of God, and should therefore be under the control of His
Son—give us some sign that you can guide or govern the least of them.
Why pause or delay? Is the burthen growing lighter on this people? Is
the Roman getting year by year less insolent, the publican less
fraudulent and exacting, the Pharisees and rulers less godless, the
people, your own kin amongst them, less degraded and less brutal? You
are a grown man, with the full powers of a man at any rate. Why are you
idling here when your Father’s work (if God be your Father) lies
broadcast on every side, and no man standing forth to “the help of the
Lord against the mighty,” as our old seers used to rave?
I hope I may have been able to indicate to you, however imperfectly, the
line of thought which will enable each of you for yourselves to follow
out and realise, more or less, the power and manliness of the character
of Christ implied in this patient waiting in obscurity and doubt through
the years when most men are at full stretch—waiting for the call which
shall convince Him that the voice within has not been a lying voice—and
meantime making Himself all that God meant Him to be, without haste and
without misgiving.
In the time of preparation for the battle of life this is the true
touchstone. Haste and distrust are the sure signs of weakness, if not of
cowardice. Just in so far as they prevail in any life, even in the most
heroic, the man fails, and his work will have to be done over again. In
Christ’s life up to the age of thirty there is not the slightest trace
of such weakness, or cowardice. From all that we are told, and from all
we can infer, He made no haste, and gave way to no doubt, waiting for
God’s mind, and patiently preparing Himself for whatever His work might
be. And so His work from the first was perfect, and through His whole
public life He never faltered or wavered, never had to withdraw or
modify a word once spoken. And thus He stands, and will stand to the end
of time, the true model of the courage and manliness of boyhood, and
youth, and early manhood.
Before passing on to the public life of Christ, there is one point which
has been raised, and upon which perhaps a few words should be said,
although it does not directly bear upon our inquiry. I refer to the
supernatural power which all Christians hold to have dwelt in Him, and
to have been freely exercised within certain limits during His public
career. Was He always conscious of it? And, if so, did He exercise it
before His call and baptism? Here we get not the slightest direct help
from the Gospel narratives, and (as has been already said) no reliance
whatever can be placed on the apocryphal stories of His boyhood. We are
therefore left to our own judgment and reason, and there must always be
differences between the conclusions at which one man and another will
arrive, however honestly each may search for the truth.
To me, however, one or two matters seem to be clear enough. The first
is, that He had only the same means as the rest of us of becoming
conscious of his relationship to God. For, if this were not so, He is no
example for us, He was not “tempted like as we are.” Now the great
difference between one man and another depends upon how these means are
used; and, so far as they are used according to the mind and will of
God, we gain mastery over ourselves and our surroundings. “As the world
was plastic and fluid in the hands of God, so it is ever to so much of
His attributes as we bring to it,” may be a startling saying of Mr.
Emerson’s, but is one which commends itself to our experience and
reason, if we only consult them honestly. Let us take the most obvious
example of this law. Look at the relations of man to the brute creation.
One of us shall have no difficulty in making friends of beasts and
birds, while another excites their dread and hate, so that even dogs
will scarcely come near him. There is no need to go back to the
traditions of the hermits in the Thebaid, or St. Francis of Assisi, for
instances of the former class. We all know the story of Cowper and his
three hares from his exquisite letters and poem, and most of you must
have read, or heard of, the terms on which Waterton lived with the birds
and beasts in his Yorkshire home: and of Thoreau, unable to get rid of
wild squirrels and birds who would come and live with him, or from a
boat taking up fish, which lay quietly in his hand till he chose to put
them back again into the stream. But I suppose there is scarcely one of
us who has not himself seen such instances again and again, persons of
whom the old words seemed literally true, “At destruction and famine
thou shalt laugh; neither shalt thou be afraid of the beasts of the
earth. For thou shalt be in league with the stones of the field, and the
beasts of the field shall be at peace with thee.”
I remember myself several such: a boy who was friend even with rats,
stoats, and snakes, and generally had one or other of them in his
pockets; a groom upon whose shoulders the pigeons used to settle, and
nestle against his cheeks, whenever he went out into the stable-yard or
field. Is there any reasonable way of accounting for this? Only one, I
think, which is, that those who have this power over, and attraction
for, animals, have always felt towards them, and treated them, as their
Maker intended—have unconsciously perhaps, but still faithfully,
followed God’s mind in their dealings with His creatures, and so have
stood in true relations to them all, and have found the beasts of the
field at peace with them.
In the same way the stones of the field are in league with the
geologist, the trees and flowers with the botanist, the component parts
of earth and air with the chemist, just in so far as each, consciously
or unconsciously, follows God’s methods with them—each part of His
creation yielding up its secrets and its treasures to the open mind of
the humble and patient, who is also at bottom always the most
courageous, learner.
And what is true of each of us beyond all question—what every man who
walks with open eyes, and open heart, knows to be true of himself—must
be true also of Christ. And so, though we may reject the stories of the
clay birds, which He modelled as a child, taking wing and bursting into
song round Him (as on a par with St. Francis’s address to his sisters
the swallows at Alvia, or the flocks in the Marshes of Venice, who
thereupon kept silence from their twitterings and songs till his sermon
was finished), we cannot doubt that in proportion as Christ was more
perfectly in sympathy with God’s creation than any mediæval saint, or
modern naturalist, or man of science, He had more power than they with
all created things from His earliest youth. Nor could it be otherwise
with the hearts and wills of men. Over these we know that, from that
time to this, He has exercised a supreme sway, infinitely more wonderful
than that over birds and beasts, because of man’s power of resistance to
the will Christ came to teach and to do, which exists, so far as we can
see, in no other part of creation.
I think, then, it is impossible to resist the conclusion that He must
have had all these powers from His childhood, that they must have been
growing stronger from day to day, and He, at the same time, more and
more conscious of possessing them; not to use on any impulse of
curiosity or self-will, but only as the voice within prompted. And it
seems the most convincing testimony to His perfect sonship, manifested
in perfect obedience, that He should never have tested His powers during
those thirty years as He did at once and with perfect confidence as soon
as the call came. Had He done so His ministry must have commenced
sooner; that is to say, before the method was matured by which He was to
reconstruct, and lift into a new atmosphere, and on to a higher plane,
the faith and life of His own nation and of the whole world. For it is
impossible to suppose that the works which He did, and the words He
spoke, at thirty—which at once threw all Galilee and Judæa into a
ferment of hope and joy, and doubt and anger—should have passed
unnoticed had they been wrought and spoken when He was twenty. Here, as
in all else, He waited for God’s mind: and so, when the time for action
came, worked with the power of God. And this waiting and preparation
must have been the supreme trial of His faith. The holding this position
must have been in those early years the holding of the very centre of
the citadel of Man’s Soul (as Bunyan so quaintly terms it), against
which the assaults of the tempter must have been delivered again and
again while the garrison was in training for the victorious march out
into the open field of the great world, carrying forth the standard
which shall never go back.
And while it may be readily admitted that Christ wielded a dominion over
all created things as well as over man, which no other human being has
ever approached, it seems to me to be going quite beyond what can be
proved, or even fairly assumed, to speak of His miracles as
supernatural, in the sense that no man has ever done, or can ever do,
the like. The evidence is surely all the other way, and seems rather to
indicate, that if we could only have lived up to the standard which we
acknowledge in our inmost hearts to be the true one—could only have
obeyed every motion and warning of the voice of God speaking in our
hearts, from the day when we first became conscious of, and could hear
it—if, in other words, our wills had from the first been disciplined,
like the will of Christ, so as to be in perfect accord with the will of
God—I see no reason to doubt that we too should have gained the power
and the courage to show signs, or, if you please, to work miracles, as
Christ and His apostles worked them.
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PART IV
THE CALL OF CHRIST
“Sound, thou trumpet of God! come forth, great cause, to array us!
King and leader, appear! thy soldiers sorrowing seek thee.”—A. CLOUGH.
AT last the good news for which they had been longing comes to the
expecting nation. A voice is heard in the lonely tracts beyond
Jordan—the route along which the caravans of pilgrims from Galilee
passed so often, to and from the feasts at Jerusalem—proclaiming that
the kingdom of heaven is at hand. The news is soon carried to the
capital, and from Jerusalem and all Judæa, and all the region round
about Jordan, the people go out to hear it; and, when they have heard
it, are baptized in crowds, eagerly claiming each for himself a place in
this kingdom. It gathers strength till it moves rulers and priests,
council and Sanhedrim, as well as the people who know not the law; and
presently priests and Levites are sent out from Jerusalem to test
messenger and message, and ask, “Who art thou? What kingdom is this thou
art proclaiming without our sanction?” It spreads northward also, and
the despised Galileans, from lake-shore and half-pagan cities, flock
down to hear it for themselves, and the simplest and bravest souls
amongst them, such as Andrew and Simon Peter, to attach themselves to
the preacher. From the highways and lake cities it pierces the Galilean
valleys, and comes to the ears of Jesus, in the carpenter’s cottage at
Nazareth.
He, too, is moved by the call, and starts for the Jordan, filled, we may
be sure, with the hope that the time for action has come at last, that
the God of Israel is again about to send deliverance to His people. May
we not also fairly conjecture that, on His way to Bethabara, to claim
His place in the national confession and uprising, He must have had
moments of rejoicing that the chief part in the great drama seemed
likely after all to be laid on another? As a rule, the more thoroughly
disciplined and fit a man may be for any really great work, the more
conscious will he be of his own unfitness for it, the more distrustful
of himself, the more anxious not to thrust himself forward. It is only
the zeal of the half-instructed when the hour of a great deliverance has
come at last—of those who have had a glimpse of the glory of the goal,
but have never known or counted the perils of the path which leads to
it—which is ready with the prompt response, “Yes—we _can_ drink of the
cup; we _can_ be baptized with the baptism.”
But in Christ, after the discipline of those long waiting years, there
was no ambition, no self-delusion. He had measured the way, and counted
the cost, of lifting His own people and the world out of bondage to
visible things and false gods, and bringing them to the only Father of
their spirits, into the true kingdom of their God. He must, indeed, have
been well enough aware how infinitely more fit for the task He Himself
was than any of His own brethren in the flesh, with whom He was living
day by day; or of the men of Nazareth with whom He had been brought up.
But He knew also that the same voice which had been speaking to Him, the
same wisdom which had been training Him, must have been speaking to and
training other humble and brave souls, wherever there were open hearts
and ears, in the whole Jewish nation. As the humblest and most guileless
of men He could not have assumed that no other Israelite had been able
to render that perfect obedience of which He was Himself conscious. And
so He may well have hurried to the Jordan in the hope of finding there,
in this prophet of the wilderness, “him who should come,” the Messiah,
the great deliverer—and of enlisting under his banner, and rendering him
true and loyal service, in the belief that, after all, He Himself might
only be intended to aid, and hold up the hands of, a greater than
Himself. For, we must remember that Christ could not have heard before
He came to Bethabara that John had disclaimed the great title. It was
not till the very day before His own arrival that the Baptist had told
the questioners from Jerusalem, “I am not He.”
But if any such thought had crossed His mind, or hope filled His heart,
on the way to the Baptist, it was soon dispelled, and He, left again in
His own loneliness, now more clearly than ever before, face to face with
the task before which even the Son of God appointed to it before the
world was, might well quail, as it confronted Him in His frail human
body. For John recognises Him, singles Him out at once, proclaims to the
bystanders, “This is He! Behold the Lamb of God! This is He who shall
baptize with the fire of God’s own Spirit. Here is the Deliverer whom
all our prophets have foretold.” And by a mysterious outward sign, as
well as by the witness in His own heart and conscience, Christ is at
once assured of the truth of the Baptist’s words—that it is indeed He
Himself and no other, and that His time has surely come at last.
That He now thoroughly realised the fact for the first time, and was
startled and severely tried by the confirmation of what He must have
felt for years to be probable, is not only what we should look for from
our own experiences, but seems the true inference from the Gospel
narratives. For, although as soon as the full truth breaks upon Him He
accepts the mission and work to which God is calling Him, and speaks
with authority to the Baptist, “Suffer it to be so now,” yet the
immediate effect of the call is to drive Him away into the wilderness,
there in the deepest solitude to think over once again, and for the last
time to wrestle with, and master, the tremendous disclosure. And the
story of the temptation which immediately follows—so full of mystery and
difficulty in many ways—is invaluable for the light which it casts, not
only on this crisis of His life, but before and after—on the history of
the world’s redemption, and the method by which that redemption is to be
accomplished, the part which each individual man and woman is called to
play in it.
For Christ’s whole life on earth was the assertion and example of true
manliness—the setting forth in living act and word what man is meant to
be, and how he should carry himself in this world of God’s—one long
campaign, in which “the temptation” stands out as the first great battle
and victory. The story has depths in it which we can never fathom, but
also clear sharp lessons which he who runs may read, and no man can
master too thoroughly. We must follow Him reverently into the
wilderness, where He flies from the crowds who are pressing to the
Baptist, and who to-morrow will be thronging round Him, if He goes back
amongst them, after what the Baptist has said about Him to-day.
Day after day in the wilderness the struggle goes on in His heart. He is
faint from insufficient food in those solitudes, and with bodily
weakness the doubts grow in strength and persistence, and the tempter is
always at His side, soliciting Him to end them once for all, by one act
of self-assertion. All those questionings and misgivings as to His
origin and mission, which we have pictured to ourselves as haunting Him
ever since His first visit to Jerusalem, are now, as it were, focused.
There are mocking voices whispering again, as of old, but more
scornfully and keenly, in His ear, “Are you really the Messiah, the Son
of God, so long looked for? What more proof have you to go upon than you
have had for these thirty years, during which you have been living as a
poor peasant in a Galilean village? The word of this wild man of the
wilderness? He is your own cousin, and a powerful preacher, no doubt,
but a wayward, wilful man, clad and fed like a madman, who has been
nursing mad fancies from his boyhood, away from the holy city, the
centre of national life and learning. This sign of a descending dove,
and a voice which no one has heard but yourself? Such signs come to
many—are never wanting when men are ready to deceive themselves—and each
man’s fancy gives them a different meaning. But the words, and the sign,
and the voice, you say only meet a conviction which has been growing
these thirty years in your own heart and conscience? Well, then, at
least for the sake of others if not for your own sake, put this
conviction to the proof, here, at once, and make sure yourself, before
you go forth and deceive poor men, your brethren, to their ruin. You are
famishing here in the wilderness. This, at least, cannot be what God
intends for His Son, who is to redeem the world. Exercise some control
over the meanest part of your Father’s kingdom. Command these stones to
become bread, and see whether they will obey you. Cast yourself down
from this height. If you are what you think, your Father’s angels will
bear you up. Then, after they have borne you up, you may go on with some
reasonable assurance that your claim is not a mere delusion, and that
you will not be leading these poor men whom you call your brethren to
misery and destruction.”
And when neither long fasting and weakness, nor natural doubt, distrust,
impatience, nor the most subtle suggestions of the tempter, can move His
simple trust in His Father, or wring from Him one act of self-assertion,
the enemy changes front, and the assault comes from another quarter.
“You may be right,” the voices seem now to be saying; “you may not be
deceived, or dreaming, when you claim to be the Son of God, sent to
redeem this fair world, which is now spread out before you in all its
glory. That may be your origin, and that your work. But, living as you
have done till now in a remote corner of a despised province, you have
no experience or knowledge of the methods or powers which sway men, and
establish and maintain these kingdoms of the world, the glory of which
you are beholding. These methods and powers have been in use in your
Father’s world, if it be His, ever since man has known good from evil.
You have only to say the word, and you may use and control these methods
and powers as you please. By their aid you may possibly ‘see of the
travail of your soul and be satisfied’; without them you will redeem
nothing but perhaps a man here and there—without them you will postpone
instead of hastening the coming of your Father’s kingdom, to the sorrow
and ruin of many generations, and will die a foiled and lonely man,
crushed by the very forces you have refused to use for your Father’s
service. If they were wholly evil, wholly unfit for the fulfilment of
any purpose of His, would He have left them in command of His world till
this day? It is only through them that the world can be subdued. Your
time is short, and you have already wasted much of it, standing
shivering on the brink, and letting the years slip by in that cottage at
Nazareth. The wisest of your ancestors acknowledged and used them, and
spread his kingdom from the river to the Great Sea. Why should you
reject them?”
This, very roughly and inadequately stated, is some shadow of the utmost
part or skirt, as it were, of the trial crisis, lasting forty days,
through which Christ passed from His private to His public career. For
forty days the struggle lasted before He could finally realise and
accept His mission with all that it implied. At the end of that time He
has fairly mastered and beaten down every doubt as to His call, every
tempting suggestion to assert Himself, or to accept or use any aid in
establishing His Father’s kingdom which does not clearly bear His
Father’s stamp and seal on the face of it. In the strength of this
victory He returns from the desert, to take up the burthen which has
been laid on Him, and to set up God’s kingdom in the world by the
methods which He has learnt of God Himself—and by no other.
Thus in following the life of Christ up to this point, so far as we have
any materials, we have found its main characteristic to be patience—a
resolute waiting on God’s mind. I have asked you to test in every way
you can, whether this kind of patience does not constitute the highest
ideal we can form of human conduct, is not in fact the noblest type of
true manliness? Pursue the same method as to this isolated section of
that life, the temptation, which I readily admit has much in it that we
cannot understand. But take the story simply as you find it (which is
the only honest method unless you pass it by altogether which would be
cowardly), and see whether you can detect any weakness, any flaw, in the
perfect manliness of Christ under the strain of which it speaks—whether
He does not here also realise for us the most perfect type of manliness
in times of solitary and critical trial. Spare no pains, suppress no
doubt, only be honest with the story, and with your own consciences.
There is scarcely any life of first-rate importance to the world in
which we do not find a crisis corresponding to this, but the nearest
parallel must be sought amongst those men, the greatest of their kind,
who have founded or recast one of the great religions of the world. Of
these (if we except the greatest of all, Moses) Mohammed is the only one
of whose call we know enough to speak. Whatever we may think of him, and
the religion he founded, we shall all probably admit that he was at any
rate a man of the rarest courage. In his case too, it is only at the end
of long and solitary vigils in the desert that the vision comes which
seals him for his work. The silver roll is unfolded before his eyes, and
he who holds it bids him read therein the decrees of God, and tells him,
“Thou art the prophet of God, and I his angel.”
He is unmanned by the vision, and flies trembling to his wife, whose
brave and loving counsel, and those of his friends and first disciples,
scarcely keep him from despair and suicide.
I would not press the parallel further than to remark, that Christ came
out of the temptation with no human aid, having trod the wine-press
alone, serene and resolute from that moment for the work to which God
had called Him.
It remains to follow His life in action, and to scrutinise its special
characteristics there. And again I would ask you to sift every step
thoroughly for yourselves, and see whether it will not bear the supreme
crucial test, from first to last. Apply that test therefore without
scruple or limitation in respect of this special quality of manliness,
from which we started on our inquiry. I have admitted, and admit again,
frankly and at once, that if the life will not stand the test
throughout, in every separate action and detail, the Christian
hypothesis breaks down. For we may make allowances for the noblest and
bravest men, for Moses and Elijah and St. Paul, for Socrates and Luther
and Mohammed, and every other great prophet, but we can make none for
the perfect Son of man and Son of God. His life must stand the test
under all circumstances, and at every moment, or the ground breaks
through under our feet, and God has not revealed Himself in man to men,
or redeemed the world by the methods in which Christendom has believed
for nineteen hundred years.
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PART V
CHRIST’S MINISTRY. ACT I
“This perfect man, by merit called my Son,
To earn salvation for the sons of men.”
MILTON, Paradise Regained, Book I.
IT will be necessary for our purpose to follow in outline the events of
our Lord’s ministry as a consecutive narrative. If I do so without
calling your attention to the endless difficulties and questions which
have been fairly raised as to the occurrence and sequence of many or
those events, it is not because I wish to ignore them myself, or to lead
you away from the examination of them. In our time, which is, perhaps,
before all things an age of criticism, much has been done towards the
creation of a science of history, and therefore of a science of
religion, which is the highest part of history. We have discovered, or
at any rate have done much to perfect, the use of new and searching
methods of investigation, and have applied, and are applying, these to
every department of human knowledge and human life.
It was not to be expected, or indeed to be wished, that the new
criticism should pause before that history, or the books containing it,
which our forefathers held too sacred to be looked upon or treated as
ordinary history. It has not paused, and—while respecting our fathers’
reverent feeling for the books which have done so much for our nation,
and for the world—we may rejoice that it has not; and that friend and
foe in this generation have been alike busy in turning all the light
which recent research has placed within their reach upon the story of
our Lord’s ministry, and the gospel narratives in which it is contained.
We English were in danger of idolatry in this matter—of putting the Book
in the place of Him of whom it testifies—and it is well for us that we
have been shaken, however roughly, out of a habit which fostered
unreality in the very centre of our lives. We were inclined to claim for
Christ’s religion, and for its evidences, immunities which neither He
nor His apostles ever claimed. That position has been abandoned, and the
best representatives of every school of religious thought amongst us (so
far as I am aware) now challenge the freest inquiry, and lend their own
aid in carrying it on. And amongst the first, and not least formidable,
difficulties which have met Christian writers has been that of
harmonising the writings of the four evangelists so as to make the
several narratives fit into one continuous whole.
Whether it is possible that this can ever be done completely, in the
absence of the discovery of new evidence, which there is no reason to
look for, seems to be very doubtful. At any rate it has not been
accomplished hitherto. But the general outline comes out clearly enough,
and this is all we need in order to pursue our own particular inquiry
satisfactorily.
Turning, then, to the point at which we have arrived, we shall find
ourselves at once met by questions of detail as to our Lord’s return
from the wilderness after His temptation. Whether He returned to the
scene of John’s baptism, on the Jordan, and remained there for some
days, or went straight back into Galilee from the desert; whether He
commenced His active ministry at once, or even yet postponed it until
John had been put in prison—are questions about which there is as yet no
general concurrence of opinion.
You may each of you judge for yourselves of the difficulties by
comparing the passages in the four Gospels which relate to this period.
Taking this warning with us, we need trouble no further about the
harmonies. Indeed, for our purpose, they are of very little consequence,
for, take the narrative how we will, it divides itself beyond all
question into several distinct and clearly marked periods. The first of
these is that between the temptation and the formal opening of Christ’s
ministry in Galilee, (marked by His first great discourse at Nazareth),
the abandonment of His home, and the selection of the five first
apostles for special and continuous service. This first period extends
at most over a few months, or more probably weeks, beginning a few days
before the feast of the Passover, and ending in the early summer; at the
time, not (so far as I am aware) exactly ascertained, when Herod Antipas
seized John the Baptist and put him in prison. We must run through it
shortly, noting the principal events, and then applying our test to such
of them as seem to come within the scope of our inquiry.
The temptation over, Christ appears to have returned by Bethabara on His
way to His Galilean home. The crowds were still pressing to John’s
baptism, and a group of the most earnest amongst them had already
gathered round the Baptist, and were attaching themselves to his person,
as the sons of the prophets round Elisha, the apostles round Christ
Himself, the companions of Medina round Mohammed.
To two of these disciples John points out Christ as that Son of God, of
whom he was sent to bear record. They follow Him, spend a few hours of
the afternoon with Him, and recognise Him as the Messiah. One of them,
Andrew, brings his brother Simon Peter to Christ. He Himself calls
Philip, who in his turn brings his friend Nathanael. With these five
Christ starts for His home in Galilee.
These earliest followers, we may note, are almost certainly of the
twelve apostles. As to Andrew, Simon Peter, and Philip, who are
expressly named, there is no question; and there is good reason to
believe that the companion of Andrew, whose name is not given, was John,
the son of Zebedee, and that Nathanael was the apostle Bartholomew,
whose name is constantly coupled in the Gospels with that of Philip.
Nathanael was of Cana of Galilee, of what trade we do not know; the
other four were of Bethsaida, a suburb of Capernaum, fishermen on the
Sea of Galilee.
They accompany Christ to Cana, Nathanael’s home, where they meet
Christ’s mother, and are present at the marriage feast, at which His
first miracle is wrought. From thence they follow Him to Capernaum, and
some of them go on with Him to Jerusalem to the Passover, at which He
drives out the cattle-dealers from the outer court of the Temple, and
overthrows the tables of the money-changers.
This act fixes the attention of all Jerusalem upon Him, and brings Him
at once under the notice of the Sanhedrim. One of its members, a
Pharisee, seeks an interview with Him by night. He commits Himself
neither to the mob, nor to the nobleman. After the feast He remains for
some time in the northern part of Judæa, where His fame attracts
followers, whom His disciples baptize. He then passes through Samaria,
still attended by his followers, stopping some days in the city of that
name, and preaching there. They then go into Galilee, and, while the
disciples, apparently, separate for the time to their own homes and
pursuits, He returns to Nazareth, to begin His formal ministry amongst
those who had known Him from His childhood. They turn upon Him in the
middle of His first discourse, and attempt to murder Him. He leaves His
old home for the neighbouring village of Cana, where He is found by the
ruler whose son is sick at Capernaum. He heals the child, and follows
the father to that city, where He hears of the imprisonment of the
Baptist, and at once enters on the second stage of His public career.
And now, following the narrative step by step so far, see if you can
find any trace in it of a failure of courage, even for a moment. In the
first place you will find, generally, that there is no wavering or
hesitation at any point. The time for these is past, and, the call once
recognised and accepted, there is no shrinking, or looking round, or
going back. The strain and burthen of a great message of deliverance to
men has again and again found the weak places in the faith and courage
of the most devoted and heroic of those to whom it has been entrusted.
Moses pleads under its pressure that another may be sent in his place,
asking despairingly, “Why hast thou sent me?” Elijah prays for death.
Mohammed passes years of despondency and hesitation under the sneers of
those who scoff, “There goeth the son of Abdallah, who hath his converse
with God!” Such shrinkings and doubtings enlist our sympathy, make us
feel the tie of a common humanity which binds us to such men. But no
one, I suppose, will maintain that perfect manliness would not suppress,
at any rate the open expression of, any such feelings. The man who has
to lead a great revolution should keep all misgivings to himself, and
the weight of them so kept must often prove the sorest part of his
burthen.
But let us pass on to the particular events of this period. As to many
of them the question of whether they are courageous or not, perhaps,
does not arise, except in so far as it arises on every act in our lives,
each of which may, and indeed must, be done either manfully with perfect
directness, or unmanfully with more or less adroitness. The man whose
“yea is yea and his nay nay,” is, we all confess, the most courageous,
whether or no he may be the most successful, in daily life. And He who
gave the precept has left us the most perfect example of how to live up
to it. And this quality you will find shines out at once in these early
conversations with Nathanael, Nicodemus, and the woman of Samaria, as
much as in the discourses of His later years.
Before considering them we may glance at the purification of the Temple,
an act which at any rate should satisfy those who think courage best
proved by physical daring. At this time, we must remember, He had no
following, such as the crowd that swept after Him on Palm Sunday, three
years later, into the Temple courts. But, leaving the act to speak for
itself, look at the rare courage of the speech by which that act is
justified when it is challenged. He, not even a Levite, a mere peasant
from a despised province, had presumed to exercise authority in the very
Temple precincts! Jerusalem was full of worse idolatries, but the
idolatry of the Temple buildings was, perhaps, the strongest. The Jews
seem to have regarded them as Christians have sometimes regarded the
visible Church, or the Bible—as an object of worship; to have thought
that if they perished God Himself would perish. And so Christ’s answer
goes straight to the root of their idolatry. His words were not
understood by the crowd, or even by His own disciples, in their full
meaning—that His body, and the body of every man, is the true temple of
God. But they understood enough of them to see that He had no
superstition about these splendid buildings of theirs, and was trying to
lift all of them above local and national prejudices. Those who would
not be lifted brooded over them till their day of vengeance came.
But there were those on whom the daring acts and words of Christ were
already taking hold. Many of those who had come up to the Passover
believed in Him, some even amongst the rulers. One of these we hear more
of at once.
Nicodemus, we must remember, was a leading member of the Sanhedrim, a
representative of that section of the rulers, who, like the rest of the
nation, were expecting a deliverer, a king who should prevail against
the Cæsar. They had sent to the Baptist, and had heard of his testimony
to this young Galilean, who had now come to Jerusalem, and was showing
signs of a power which they could not but acknowledge. For, had He not
cleansed the Temple, which they had never been able to do; but,
notwithstanding their pretended reverence for it, had allowed to be
turned into a shambles and an exchange? They saw that a part of the
people were ready to gather to Him, but that He had refused to commit
Himself to them. This, then, the best of them must have felt, was no
mere leader of a low, fierce, popular party or faction. Nicodemus at any
rate was evidently inclined to doubt whether He might not prove to be
the king they were looking for, as the Baptist had declared. The doubt
must be solved, and he would see for himself.
And so he comes to Christ, and hears directly from Him, that He has
indeed come to set up a kingdom, but that it is no visible kingdom like
the Cæsar’s, but a kingdom over men’s spirits; one which rulers as well
as peasants must become new men before they can enter—that a light has
come into the world, and “he that doeth truth cometh to that light.”
From beginning to end there is no word to catch this ruler, or those he
represented; no balancing of phrases or playing with plausible religious
shibboleths, with which Nicodemus would be familiar, and which might
please, and, perchance, reconcile, this well-disposed ruler, and the
powerful persons he represented. There is, depend upon it, no severer
test of manliness than our behaviour to powerful persons, whose aid
would advance the cause we have at heart. We know from the later records
that the interview of that night, and the strange words he had heard
then, made a deep impression on this ruler. His manliness, however,
breaks down for the present. He shrinks back and disappears, leaving the
strange young peasant to go on His way.
The same splendid directness and incisiveness characterise His teaching
at Samaria. There, again, He attacks at once the most cherished local
traditions, showing that the place of worship matters nothing, the
object of worship everything. That object is a Father of men’s spirits,
who wills that all men shall know and worship Him, but who can only be
worshipped in spirit and in truth. He, the peasant who is talking to
them, is Himself the Messiah, who has come from the Father of them and
Him, to give them this spirit of truth in their own hearts.
The Jews at Jerusalem had been clamouring round Him for signs of His
claim to speak such words, and in the next few days His own people would
be crying out for His blood when they heard them. These Samaritans make
no such demand, but hear and recognise the message and the messenger.
The seed is sown, and He passes on, never to return, so far as we know,
and garner the harvest; deliberately preferring the hard, priest-ridden
lake cities of the Jews as the centre of His ministry. He will leave
ripe fields for others to reap. This decision, interpret it as we will,
is that of no soft or timid reformer. Take this test again and compare
Christ’s choice of His first field for work with that of any other great
leader of men.
This first period fitly closes with the scene of Nazareth. Here He
returns, while the reports of His doings at the feast at Jerusalem are
fresh in the minds of His family and fellow-townsmen. They are excited
and divided as to Him and His doings. A thousand reasons would occur for
speaking soft things, at such a moment, for accommodating His teaching,
here at any rate, to the wants and tastes of His hearers, so as to keep
a safe and friendly asylum at Nazareth, amongst the scenes and people He
had loved from childhood. It is clear that some of His family, if not
His mother herself, were already seriously alarmed and displeased. They
disliked what they had heard of His teaching at Jerusalem and on His way
home, which they felt must bring Him to ruin, in which they might be
involved. He must have seen and conversed with them in His own home
before that scene in the synagogue, and have had then to endure the
bitter pain of alienating those whom He loved and respected, and had
reason to love and respect, but who could not for the time rise out of
the conventional, respectable, way of looking at things.
To stand by what our conscience witnesses for as truth, through evil and
good report, even against all opposition of those we love, and whose
judgment we look up to and should ordinarily prefer to follow; to cut
ourselves deliberately off from their love and sympathy and respect; is
surely, I repeat, one of the most severe trials to which we can be put.
A man has need to feel at such times that the Spirit of the Lord is upon
him in some measure, as it was upon Christ when he rose in the synagogue
of Nazareth, and, selecting the passage of Isaiah which speaks most
directly of the Messiah, claimed that title for Himself and told them
that to-day this prophecy was fulfilled in Him.
The fierce, hard, Jewish spirit is at once roused to fury. They would
kill Him then and there, and so settle His claims, once for all. He
passes through them, and away from the quiet home where He had been
brought up—alone it would seem, so far as man could make Him so, and
homeless for the remainder of His life. Yet not alone, for His Father is
with Him; nor homeless, for He has the only home of which man can be
sure, home of His own heart shared with the Spirit of God.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PART VI
CHRIST’S MINISTRY. ACT II
“What is it that ye came to note?
A young man preaching from a boat.”
A. CLOUGH.
THE second period of our Lord’s ministry is one, in the main, of joyful
progress and triumph, in which the test of true manliness must be more
subtle than when the surroundings are hostile. It consists, I think, at
such times in the careful watchfulness not to give wrong impressions,
not to mislead those who are touched by enthusiasm, conscious of new
life, grateful to Him who has kindled that life in them.
It is then that the temptation to be all things to all men in a wrong
sense,—to adapt and accommodate teaching and life to a lower standard in
order to maintain a hold upon the masses of average men and women, who
have been moved by the words of lips touched by fire from the altar of
God,—has generally proved too much for the best and strongest of the
world’s great reformers. It is scarcely necessary to labour this point,
which would, I think, be sorrowfully admitted by those who have studied
most lovingly and carefully the lives of such men for instance as
Savonarola, or Wesley. If you will refer to a recent and valuable work
on the life of a greater than either of these, Mr. Bosworth Smith’s
_Mohammed and Mohammedanism_, you will find there perhaps the best
illustration which I can give you of this sad experience.
When Mohammed returns from Medina, sweeping at last all enemies out of
his path, as the prophet of a new faith, and the leader of an awakened
and repentant people, his biographer pauses to notice the lowering of
the standard, both in his life and teaching. Power, he pleads, brings
with it new temptations, and new failures. The more thoroughly a man is
carried away by his inspiration, and convinced of the truth and goodness
of his cause and his message, the more likely is he to forget the means
in the end, and to allow the end to justify whatever means seem to lead
to its triumph. He must maintain as he can, and by any means, his power
over the motley mass of followers that his mission has gathered round
him, and will be apt to aim rather at what will hold them than at what
will satisfy the highest promptings of his own conscience.
We may allow the plea in such cases, though with sorrow and humiliation.
But the more minutely we examine the life of Christ, the more we shall
feel that, here again, there is no place for it. We shall be impressed
with the entire absence of any such bending to expediency, or forgetting
the means in the end. He never for one moment accommodates His life or
teaching to any standard but the highest: never lowers or relaxes that
standard by a shade or a hair’s breadth, to make the road easy to rich
or powerful questioners, or to uphold the spirit of His poorer followers
when they are startled and uneasy, as they begin half blindly to
recognise what spirit they are of. This unbending truthfulness is, then,
what we have chiefly to look for in this period of triumphant progress
and success, questioning each act and word in turn whether there is any
swerving in it from the highest ideal.
It is not easy to mark off distinctly the time over which it extends,
but it seems to me to commence with His return to Capernaum, after the
healing of the centurion’s son, when He hears of the imprisonment of
John, and to end with the estrangement of many of His followers at His
teaching as to the bread of life, and the nearly contemporaneous and
final and open rupture with, and defiance of, the chief priests and
scribes and Pharisees, when they change from suspicious and watchful
critics into open and avowed enemies, baffled for the moment, but
dogging His footsteps and thirsting for His blood.
It is upon His relations with these scribes and Pharisees more
particularly that we must keep our attention fixed, as it is here, if
anywhere, that we may look for a failure of nerve and truthfulness, and
therefore of manliness.
We must gather our connected view of this period from all the
narratives, and shall find the beginning most clearly indicated in St.
Matthew, in the last part of the 4th chapter, where He recalls to His
side Peter and Andrew and the sons of Zebedee—who appear to have left
Him for the moment and to have returned to their boats and nets at
Bethsaida—and opens His ministry in the lake cities by the Sermon on the
Mount. For the end we must go to the 11th chapter of St. Luke, where, in
the house of a Pharisee, He speaks the words which madden Pharisees and
lawyers into urging Him vehemently to speak of many things, and watching
for the words which will enable them to entangle, and, as they think, to
destroy Him.
First, then, as to the main facts so far as they are necessary for our
purposes. We may note that our Lord accepts at once the imprisonment of
the Baptist as the final summons to Himself. Gathering, therefore, a few
of John’s disciples round Him, and welcoming the restless inquiring
crowds who had been roused by the voice crying in the wilderness, He
stands forward at once to proclaim and explain the nature of that new
kingdom of God, which has now to be set up in the world. Standing forth
alone, on the open hill-side, the young Galilean peasant gives forth the
great proclamation, which by one effort lifted mankind on to that new
and higher ground on which it has been painfully struggling ever since,
but on the whole with sure though slow success, to plant itself and
maintain sure foothold.
In all history there is no parallel to it. It stands there, a miracle or
sign of God’s reign in this world, far more wonderful than any of
Christ’s miracles of healing. Unbelievers have been sneering at and
ridiculing it, and Christian doctors paring and explaining it away, ever
since. But there it stands, as strong and fresh as ever, the calm
declaration and witness of what mankind is intended by God to become on
this earth of His.
As a question of courageous utterance (with which we are here mainly
concerned), I would only ask you to read it through once more, bearing
in mind who the preacher was—a peasant, already repudiated by His own
neighbours and kinsfolk, and suspected by the national rulers and
teachers; and who were the hearers—a motley crowd of Jewish peasants and
fishermen, Romish legionaries, traders from Damascus, Tyre, and Sidon,
and the distant isles of Greece, with a large sprinkling of publicans,
scribes, Pharisees and lawyers.
The immediate result of the sermon was to bow the hearts of this crowd
for the time, so that He was able to choose followers from amongst them,
much as He would. He takes fishermen and peasants, selecting only two at
most from any rank above the lowest, and one of these from a class more
hated and despised by the Jews than the poorest peasant, the publicans.
It is plain that He might at first have called apostles from amongst the
upper classes had He desired it—as a teacher with any want of courage
would surely have done. But the only scribe who offers himself is
rejected.
The calling of the apostles is followed by a succession of discourses
and miracles, which move the people more and more, until, after that of
the loaves, the popular enthusiasm rises to the point it had so often
reached in the case of other preachers and leaders of this strange
people. They are ready to take Him by force and make Him a king.
The apostles apparently encourage this enthusiasm, for which He
constrains them into a ship, and sends them away before Him. After
rejoining them and rebuking their want of understanding and faith, He
returns with them to the multitudes, and at once speaks of Himself as
the bread from heaven, in the discourse which offends many of His
disciples, who from this time go back and walk no more with Him. The
brief season of triumphant progress is drawing to an end, during which
He could rejoice in spirit in contemplating the human harvest which He
and His disciples seem to be already successfully garnering.
But, even while the prospect was fairest, while the people were surging
round Him in the first enthusiasm of their new faith, there had been
ominous signs of that antagonism of the rulers which was to end on
Calvary, and we have now to glance at the relations of Christ with them
during this same period.
This antagonism was of gradual growth. In the first instance many of the
scribes and Pharisees seem to have followed Him, more for the purpose of
hearing and watching, than in a spirit of direct hostility. In the
Sermon on the Mount He only once alludes to them directly, when He tells
His hearers that unless their righteousness exceeds that of the scribes
and Pharisees, there can be no place for them in this kingdom of which
He is now proclaiming the laws. It does not appear however at first that
they were alienated by what was then said, for soon afterwards we find
Pharisees and doctors of the law from Jerusalem “and every town of
Galilee and Judæa” sitting by while He teaches, “and the power of the
Lord was present to heal them.”
Now, however, they are aroused and startled by Christ’s address to the
palsied man—“Thy sins are forgiven thee.” The cure of the man silences
them for the moment. They are filled with fear, and glorify God, saying,
“We have seen strange things to-day.” But Christ’s next act again rouses
their jealousy afresh. He has not called any of them to His side; that,
probably, they would have deemed presumption. They are waiting and
watching; thinking, doubtless, that their presence gives a sanction and
respectability to the young teacher, which He, and the crowds who come
to hear and be healed, will in due course learn to appreciate. Meantime
it might restrain Him and them from rash acts and words, which would
ruin a national movement that might possibly be hereafter guided to the
advantage of Israel.
But now, while the great men are thus balancing, and probably admiring
themselves for their liberality, Christ singles out Levi the publican,
calls him as an apostle, and goes to his house to feast with a large
company of other publicans. The great people remonstrate angrily. Such
an act outrages all their notions of the orthodox conduct of a prophet.
Christ replies simply, that He has come to call sinners, not the
righteous, to repentance.
A few days later an even more serious question is raised between them.
On a Sabbath day His disciples pluck and eat the corn, and Christ
justifies them. On the next Sabbath, while they are watching Him, He
heals a man, with the obvious purpose of trying them, and claims to be
Lord of the Sabbath, as He had claimed power to forgive sins. They begin
to be filled with madness, and commune what they can do to Him.
Still, however, the breach is not final. They have not abandoned the
hope of using the young preacher and prophet for their purposes. So
Simon, one of their number, invites Him to his house, and, though
neglecting the usual courtesies of an entertainer (as out of place in
the case of a peasant), is evidently not treacherous in the invitation.
He might well flatter himself on his freedom from class prejudices, and
feel that such condescension would have a good effect on his guest, and
might lead Him in good time to rely on and consult persons moving in the
upper ranks of Jewish society as to His future course.
The story of the woman, a sinner, who gets into the room and anoints
Christ’s feet, and the use which He makes of the incident—to bring home
to Simon’s mind, with the most exquisite temper and courtesy, but with
the most faithful firmness, his shortcomings as a host, and his want of
true insight as a man—are amongst the finest illustrations we have of
His method with the great and powerful of His nation. Before leaving the
house He once more reasserts His power to forgive sins.
We must now follow Him to Jerusalem, to which He goes up to one of the
feasts, and, at the headquarters of the scribes and Pharisees,
deliberately raises afresh, at headquarters, the burning questions which
He had left rankling in the minds of the provincial hierarchy. He heals
the impotent man at the pool of Bethesda on the Sabbath day, and sends
him through the streets carrying his bed. Challenged to defend Himself
(probably before the Sanhedrim), He claims, more explicitly than ever
before, that God is His Father, and has given Him not only power to do
mighty works, but “authority to execute judgment”; that their own
scriptures testify of Him, as He who can give them life if they will
come to Him for it. Upon which they, naturally enough, seek to slay Him;
but He gets back unscathed to Galilee, and then follows the scene which
I have referred to as the end of this period of His ministry.
The Pharisees are now dogging his footsteps wherever He goes, but even
yet have not given up the hope of coming to some terms with One whom
they cannot help acknowledging to wield a power over the people which
has slipped away from themselves. Influenced possibly by a discourse in
which He upbraids the people as an evil generation, without specially
alluding, as was so often His custom, to the people’s leaders and
teachers as those upon whom the chief guilt rested, they again invite
Him into their own circle. But now the time is past for the kindly
courtesy of the feast in Simon’s house. The usual means of washing
before meat are there, but He rejects them. They express a well-bred
astonishment, and then follows that scathing denunciation of their
hypocrisies and tyrannies, of their “inward parts full of ravening
wickedness,” which makes the breach final and irrevocable between the
Son of man and the rulers of Israel.
Thenceforth Christ has more and more to “tread the wine-press alone,”
surrounded by bewildered followers, and powerful enemies resolved on His
destruction, and unscrupulous as to the means by which it must be
compassed.
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PART VII
CHRIST’S MINISTRY. ACT III
“By the light of burning martyr-fires Christ’s bleeding feet I track,
Toiling up new Calvaries ever with the cross that turns not back.”
LOWELL.
WE have now reached the critical point, the third act in the world’s
greatest drama. All chance of the speedy triumph of the kingdom of God,
humanly speaking, in this lake country of Galilee—the battle-field
chosen by Himself, where His mightiest works had been done and His
mightiest words spoken—the district from which His chosen companions
came, and in which clamorous crowds had been ready to declare Him
king—is now over. The conviction that this is so, that He is a baffled
leader, in hourly danger of His life, has forced itself on Christ.
Before entering that battle-field, face to face with the tempter in the
wilderness, He had deliberately rejected all aid from the powers and
kingdoms of this world, and now, for the moment, the powers of this
world have proved too strong for Him.
The rulers of that people—Pharisee, Sadducee, and Herodian, scribe and
lawyer—were now marshalled against Him in one compact phalanx,
throughout all the coasts of Galilee, as well as in Judæa.
His disciples, rough, most of them peasants, full of patriotism but with
small power of insight or self-control, were melting away from a leader
who, while He refused them active service under a patriot chief at open
war with Cæsar and his legions, bewildered them by assuming titles and
talking to them in language which they could not understand. They were
longing for one who would rally them against the Roman oppressor, and
give them a chance at any rate of winning their own land again, purged
of the heathen and free from tribute. Such an one would be worth
following to the death. But what could they make of this “Son of man,”
who would prove His title to that name by giving His body and pouring
out His blood for the life of man—of this “Son of God,” who spoke of
redeeming mankind and exalting mankind to God’s right hand, instead of
exalting the Jew to the head of mankind?
In the face of such a state of things, to remain in Capernaum or the
neighbouring towns and villages, would have been to court death, there,
and at once. The truly courageous man, you may remind me, is not turned
from his path by the fear of death, which is the supreme test and
touchstone of his courage. True;—nor was Christ so turned, even for a
moment.
Whatever may have been His hopes in the earlier part of His career, by
this time He had no longer a thought that mankind could be redeemed
without His own perfect and absolute sacrifice and humiliation. The cup
would indeed have to be drunk to the dregs, but not here, nor now. This
must be done at Jerusalem, the centre of the national life and the seat
of the Roman Government. It must be done during the Passover, the
national commemoration of sacrifice and deliverance. And so He
withdraws, with a handful of disciples, and even they still wayward,
half-hearted, doubting, from the constant stress of a battle which has
turned against Him. From this time He keeps away from the great centres
of population, except when, on two occasions—at the Feast of Tabernacles
and the Feast of the Dedication—He flashes for a day on Jerusalem, and
then disappears again into some haunt of outlaws, or of wild beasts.
This portion of His life comprises something less than the last twelve
months: from the summer of the second year of His ministry till the eve
of the last Passover, at Easter, in the third year.
In glancing at the main facts of this period, as we have done in the
former ones, we have to note chiefly His intercourse with the twelve
apostles, and His preparation of them for the end of His own career and
the beginning of theirs; His conduct at Jerusalem during those two
autumnal and winter feasts; and the occasions when He again comes into
collision with the rulers and Pharisees, both at these feasts and in the
intervals between them.
The keynote of it, in spite of certain short and beautiful interludes,
appears to me to be a sense of loneliness and oppression, caused by the
feeling that He has work to do, and words to speak, which those for whom
they are to be done and spoken, and whom they are, first of all men, to
bless, will either misunderstand or abhor. Here is all the visible
result of His labour, and of His travail, and the enemy is gathering
strength every day.
This becomes clear, I think, at once, when, in the first days after His
quitting the lake shores, He asks His disciples the question, “Whom do
the world, and whom do ye, say that I am?” He is answered by Peter in
the well-known burst of enthusiasm, that, though the people only look on
Him as a prophet, such as Elijah or Jeremiah, His own chosen followers
see in Him “the Christ, the Son of the living God.”
It is this particular moment which He selects for telling them
distinctly, that Christ will _not_ triumph as they regard triumphing,
that He will fall into the power of His enemies, and be humbled and
slain by them. At once the proof comes of how little even the best of
His own most intimate friends had caught the spirit of His teaching or
of His kingdom. The announcement of His humiliation and death, which
none but the most truthful and courageous of men would have made at such
a moment, leaves them almost as much bewildered as the crowds in the
lake cities had been a few days before.
Their hearts are faithful and simple, and upon them, as Peter has
testified, the truth has flashed once for all, that there can be no
other Saviour of men than this Man with whom they are living. Still, by
what means and to what end the salvation shall come, they are scarcely
less ignorant than the people who had been in vain seeking from Him a
sign such as they desired. His own elect “understood not His saying, and
it was hid from them, that they perceived it not.” Rather, indeed, they
go straight from that teaching to dispute amongst themselves who of them
shall be the greatest in that kingdom which they understand so little.
And so their Master has to begin again at the beginning of His teaching,
and, placing a little child amongst them, to declare that not of such
men as they deem themselves, but of such as this child, is the kingdom
of heaven.
The episode of the Transfiguration follows; and immediately after it, as
though purposely to warn even the three chosen friends who had been
present against new delusions, He repeats again the teaching as to His
death and humiliation. And He reiterates it whenever any exhibition of
power or wisdom seems likely to encourage the frame of mind in the
twelve generally which had lately brought the great rebuke on Peter. How
slowly it did its work, even with the foremost disciples, there are but
too many proofs.
Amongst His kinsfolk and the people generally, His mission, thanks to
the cabals of the rulers and elders, had come by this time to be looked
upon with deep distrust and impatience. “How long dost Thou make us to
doubt? Go up to this coming feast, and there prove your title before
those who know how to judge in such matters,” is the querulous cry of
the former as the Feast of Tabernacles approaches. He does not go up
publicly with the caravan, which would have been at this time needlessly
to incur danger, but, when the feast is half over, suddenly appears in
the Temple. There He again openly affronts the rulers by justifying His
former acts, and teaching and proclaiming, that He who has sent Him is
true, and is their God.
It is evidently on account of this new proof of daring that the people
now again begin to rally round Him. “Behold, He speaketh boldly. Do our
rulers know that this is Christ?” is the talk which fills the air, and
induces the scribes and Pharisees, for the first time, to attempt His
arrest by their officers.
The officers return without Him, and their masters are, for the moment,
powerless before the simple word of Him who, as their own servants
testify, “speaks as never man spake.” But if they cannot arrest and
execute, they may entangle Him further, and prepare for their day, which
is surely and swiftly coming. So they bring to Him the woman taken in
adultery, and draw from Him the discourse in which He tells them that
the truth will make them free—the truth which He has come to tell them,
but which they will not hear, because they are of their father the
devil. He ends with asserting His claim to the name which every Jew held
sacred, “before Abraham was, I am.” The narrative of the 7th and 8th
chapters of St. John, which record these scenes at the Feast of
Tabernacles, has, I believe, done more to make men courageous and truly
manly, than all the stirring accounts of bold deeds which ever were
written elsewhere.
The report of what had happened at the Feast of Tabernacles seems to
have rekindled for a moment the fitful zeal of the people of Galilee.
Christ does not, however, avail Himself of this reaction until the time
comes for another return to Jerusalem to the Feast of Dedication, when,
probably in the month of November, or early in December, He returns once
more to Capernaum, to prepare for His last journey. The Pharisees,
impotent themselves for the moment, now hurry to warn Him that Herod is
seeking to kill Him; but He passes on His way with perfect indifference.
The crowds seem, as of old, inclined to gather round Him again. He
selects seventy from amongst them, and sends them on to prepare His
route, following Himself, and, this time, it being His last pilgrimage,
with the multitude.
And now, again, in the first days of this progress, the most trusted of
the apostles show how little, even yet, they understand their Lord, or
their own work. When they see their Master once more at the head of a
throng of followers, the old spirit comes back on them as strongly as
ever, and they are anxious to call down fire from Heaven to consume
those who will not receive Him. His rebuke and warning, yet again, pass
by them, and get no hold on them.
Rather, the incidents of the journey impress them more and more with the
belief that, at last, the kingdom is coming with power. At length, at
some point in the progress, they are amazed, and as they follow are
afraid. Once more Christ takes them aside, and endeavours to dispel
their dreams, repeating to them, in painful detail, what will happen to
Himself at Jerusalem at the end of this journey: that He will be
betrayed, delivered to the Gentiles, mocked, scourged, spat upon,
crucified. In spite of this warning, and while it is yet ringing in
their ears, we find James and John asking for the places of honour in
the kingdom of their own imaginations!
At the feast he is met by the Pharisees and scribes in a somewhat
different temper from that which they had shown at the end of His last
visit. For He is once again at the head of a vast and eager multitude.
They know that some, even of their own number, are inclined to believe
in Him. They appeal to Him, passionately, to say who He is. He replies
by referring to His former teaching about His Father, whom they claimed
as their God, adding, “I and my Father are one.”
Such a reply He well knew could only have one result. He was alone; and
in the ears of those who surrounded Him He was speaking blasphemy, which
could only be expiated by instant death. Yet He neither hesitates nor
temporises, but, when they seize stones to inflict the penalty, meets
them with a bearing so calm and manly, that they can no more cast the
first stone at Him than they could three months before at the woman
taken in adultery.
He leaves Jerusalem once more after the feast, going across Jordan with
His apostles to the country where John came preaching and baptizing, and
remains there preaching to those who come to Him until the news of
Lazarus’s death takes Him for a few days to Bethany. After the raising
of His friend He returns to Peræa again, and leaves it only when the
great caravan is passing by on its way to the Passover, in the early
spring. He joins the caravan with His disciples, passing with it through
Jericho, the city of priests, and selecting there the publican Zacchæus
as His host,—a last lesson, by example, of the kind of material which
will be used in building up His kingdom.
On the first day of the feast He rides into Jerusalem in apparent
triumph, the city mob joining the pilgrim mob in greeting Him with loud
Hosannas. Once more He cleanses the Temple, and rouses the covetousness
of the money-changers into active alliance with the bigotry of the
priests, and the wild anger and jealousy of the rulers, to sweep this
terrible Galilean revolutionist from the face of the earth, before He
shall ruin them all.
For two days He continues to meet them in the Temple and public resorts
of the city, shaming, confuting, and denouncing them; and widening hour
by hour that breach which was already gaping wide between the nation and
city and their true Lord and King. The last scene in the Temple,
recorded in John, brings the long struggle to a close.
The more carefully you study this long wrestle with the blind leaders of
a doomed nation, which has now come to an end, the more you will
recognise the perfect truthfulness, and therefore the perfect courage,
which marks Christ’s conduct of it. From beginning to end there is no
word or act which can mislead friend or foe. The strife, though for life
and death, has left no trace or stain on His manhood. Fresh from the
last and final conflict in the Temple court, He can pause on the side of
Olivet to weep over the city, the sight of which can still wring from
Him the pathetic yearnings of a soul purified from all taint of
bitterness.
It is this most tender and sensitive of the sons of men—with fibres
answering to every touch and breath of human sympathy or human hate—who
has borne with absolutely unshaken steadfastness the distrust and anger
of kinsfolk, the ingratitude of converts, the blindness of disciples,
the fitful and purblind worship, and hatred, and fear, of the nation of
the Jews. So far, we can estimate to some extent the burthen and the
strain, and realise the strength and beauty, of the spirit which could
bear it all. Beyond and behind lie depths into which we can but glance.
For in those last hours of His life on earth the question was to be
decided whether we men have in deed and in truth a brotherhood, in a Son
of Man, the head of humanity, who has united mankind to their Father,
and can enable them to know Him.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PART VIII
THE LAST ACT
“Thou seemest human and divine,
The highest, holiest manhood, Thou!”
TENNYSON.
WE have reached the last stage, which is also the most critical one, of
our inquiry. It is upon the accounts which we have of Christ’s Agony
that the scornful denials of his manliness mainly rest. How, it is
asked, can you Christians recognise as perfect man, as the head and
representative of humanity, one who showed such signs of physical fear
and weakness as Christ, by your own confession, showed in the garden of
Gethsemane? Even without going to the roll of saints and martyrs,
hundreds of men and women can be named who have looked a cruel death in
the face without flinching, and endured tortures at least as painful as
His with a constancy which was wanting in Him.
It was, indeed, a speech of this kind, in which the death of the
Abolitionist leader, John Brown, was contrasted with that of Christ, as
one so far superior in manliness that it ought to be enough of itself to
shame Christians out of their superstition, which confirmed me in
proposing this inquiry to you, as the most necessary and useful one we
could engage in.
Now I freely admit that there is no recorded end of a life that I know
of more entirely brave and manly than this one of Captain John Brown, of
which we know every minutest detail, as it happened in the full glare of
our modern life not twenty years ago. About that I think there would
scarcely be disagreement anywhere. The very men who allowed him to lie
in his bloody clothes till the day of his execution, and then hanged
him, recognised this. “You are a game man, Captain Brown,” the southern
sheriff said in the waggon. “Yes,” he answered, “I was so brought up. It
was one of my mother’s lessons. From infancy I have not suffered from
physical fear. I have suffered a thousand times more from bashfulness”;
and then he kissed a negro child in its mother’s arms, and walked
cheerfully on to the scaffold, thankful that he was “allowed to die for
a cause, and not merely to pay the debt of nature, as all must.”
There is no simpler or nobler record in the Book of Martyrs, and in
passing I would only remind you, that he at least was ready to
acknowledge from whence came his strength. “Christ, the great Captain of
liberty as well as of salvation,” he wrote just before his death, “saw
fit to take from me the sword of steel after I had carried it for a
time. But He has put another in my hand, the sword of the Spirit, and I
pray God to make me a faithful soldier wherever He may send me.” And to
a friend who left him with the words, “If you can be true to yourself to
the end how glad we shall be,” he answered, “I cannot say, but I do not
think I shall deny my Lord and Master, Jesus Christ.” The old
Abolitionist would have been as amazed as any man at such a comparison
as we are dealing with, and would have reminded us that, so far from
treading the wine-press alone, he was upheld by the sympathy and
enthusiasm of all of his own nation, and of the world outside his own
nation, for whom he cared.
No such support had Christ. He knew too well that even the strongest of
the little band which came with Him to the garden would deny Him before
the light dawned over Olivet. And that sense of utter loneliness it was,
more probably than all the rest of the burthen which He was carrying,
that wrung from Him the prayer of agony, recalled almost before it was
uttered, that the cup might pass from Him, and caused the sweat as it
were great drops of blood to fall from His brow as He knelt and prayed.
How the tradition of that agony and bloody sweat has come to us is hard
to say, as the nearest witnesses were asleep; but no Christian doubts
that it is a true one, or that the passion of human weakness which then
passed over His soul was a genuine shrinking from the unutterable
anguish which was weighing it down to the dust.
But even admitting frankly all that is recorded of the agony and bloody
sweat, such admission can only enhance the sublime courage of all that
follows. It is his action when the danger comes, not when he is in
solitary preparation for it, which marks the man of courage.
Let us just glance at this action. As Judas with his torchmen draws near
He gathers Himself together, rouses His sleepy followers, and meets His
enemy in the gate. There could have been no quailing in the glance
before which the armed crowd of priests’ retainers went backward and
fell to the ground.
Follow Him through that long night: to the Sanhedrim chamber, where He
Himself furnishes the evidence which the chief priest sought for in vain
while He was silent—to the court of the palace, where He bore the
ribaldry and dastard tortures and insults of the low Jewish crowd till
morning, turning in the midst of them with the reminding look to Peter,
which sent His last friend, broken down by the consciousness of his own
cowardice, weeping into the night—to the judgment-seat of Pilate, and
the scourgings of the Roman soldiers—to Herod’s hall and the insults of
the base Galilean court—back again to the judgment-seat of the
representative of the divine Tiberius, and so to the final brutalities
in the prætorium while the cross is preparing, and the blood which is
dripping from the crown of thorns on His brow, mingles with that which
flows from the wounds of His scourgings—and find, if you can, one
momentary sign of terror or of weakness.
In all the world’s annals there is nothing which approaches, in the
sublimity of its courage, that last conversation between the peasant
prisoner, by this time a mass of filth and blood, and the Roman
procurator, before Pilate led Him forth for the last time, and pleaded
scornfully with His nation for the life of their King. The canon from
which we started must guide us to the end. There must be no flaw or spot
on Christ’s courage, any more than on His wisdom, and tenderness, and
sympathy. And for the last time I repeat, the more unflinchingly we
apply the test, the more clear and sure will the response come back to
us.
We have been told recently, by more than one of those who profess to
have weighed and measured Christianity and found it wanting, that
religion must rest on reason, based on phenomena of this visible
tangible world in which we are living.
Be it so. There is no need for a Christian to object. He can meet this
challenge as well as any other. We need never be careful about choosing
our own battle-field. Looking, then, at that world as we see it,
labouring heavily along in our own time—as we hear of it through the
records of the ages—I must repeat that there is no phenomenon in it
comparable for a moment to this of Christ’s life and work. The more we
canvass and sift and weigh and balance the materials, the more clearly
and grandly does His figure rise before us, as the true Head of
humanity, the perfect Ideal not only of wisdom and tenderness and love,
but of courage also, because He was and is the simple Truth of God—the
expression, at last, in flesh and blood, of what He who created us means
each one of our race to be.
* * * * *
We have now finished our endeavour to look at the life of Christ from
one point of view, and in special connection with one human quality. I
trust it may prove to be only the first step for many of you in a study
which will last your lives. At any rate it is one which the reverence
which is felt by every member of this College for our founder ought to
commend to us above all others.
He, as you all know, was never weary of impressing on us, term after
term, year after year, that the aim of this place is to make good
citizens, and that this can only be done by keeping vividly before
ourselves, in all our work here, that common humanity which binds us all
together by the ties of family, of neighbourhood, of country. What that
common humanity means and implies, he taught us, can only be understood
by reference to a Son of man, and Son of God, in whom we have all a
common interest, through whom we have all a common spiritual
relationship to His and our Father.
To bring this home to us all, as the central truth of our own lives, as
the master-key of the confusions and perplexities in our own hearts, and
in the world around us, was the crowning work of his life, and I trust
we have been true to his principle and his method in our attempt to
realise the life of this Son of Man, and Son of God, on this earth,
which is so mysteriously at strife with the will of its Creator and
Redeemer.
Into the heart of the mystery of that strife the wisest and best of us
cannot penetrate, but the wayfaring man cannot help seeing that it is
precisely around this life of the Son of Man, and Son of God, that the
fiercest controversies of our time are raging. Is it not also becoming
clearer every day that they will continue to rage more and more
fiercely—that there can be no rest or peace possible for mankind—until
all things are subdued to Him, and brought into harmony with His life?
It is to this work that all Churches and Sects, Catholic and Protestant,
that all the leading nations of the world, known collectively as
Christendom, are pledged: and the time for redeeming that pledge is
running out rapidly, as the distress and perplexity, the threatening
disruption and anarchy, of Christendom too clearly show. It is to this
work too that you and I, every man and woman of us, are also called; and
if we would go about it with any hope and courage, it can only be by
keeping the life of Christ vividly before us day by day, and turning to
it as to a fountain in the desert, as to the shadow of a great rock in a
weary land.
From behind the shadow the still small voice—more awful than tempest or
earthquake—more sure and persistent than day and night—is always
sounding, full of hope and strength to the weariest of us all, “Be of
good cheer, I have overcome the world.”
πορεύου καὶ σὺ ποίει ὁμοίως.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONCLUSION[2]
AN ADDRESS DELIVERED AT CLIFTON COLLEGE, SUNDAY EVENING, OCTOBER 1879.
“They crowd upon us in this shade,
The youth who own the coming years—
Be never God or land betrayed
By any son our Harvard rears!”
THE REV. R. LOWELL.
WHAT is it in such societies as yours that gives them so strong a hold
on, so unique an attraction for, those who have been for years engaged
in the rough work of life? That the fact is so I think no one will deny,
explain it how they will. I at least cannot remember to have met with
any man who will not own that a visit to one of our great schools moves
and touches him on a side of his nature which for the most part lies
quiet, almost dormant, but which he feels it is good for him should be
stirred. He may go back to his work without an effort to explain to
himself why these unwonted sensations have visited him, but not without
a consciousness that he has had a change of air which has done him
good—that he has been in a bracing atmosphere, like that at the top of
some high mountain pass, where the morning sun strikes earlier and more
brightly than in the valleys where his daily task must be done.
To him who cares to pursue the inquiry, I think the conviction will
come, that to a stranger there is something at once inspiring and
pathetic in such societies as this, standing apart as they do from, and
yet so intimately connected with, the great outside world.
Inspiring, because he finds himself once again amongst those before whom
the golden gates of active life are about to open, for good or evil—each
one of whom holds in his hands the keys of those gates, the keys of
light or of darkness, amongst whom faith is strong, hope bright, and
ideals, untainted as yet by the world’s slow stain, still count for a
great power.
Pathetic, because he knows but too well how hard the path is to find,
how steep to climb, on the further side of those golden gates—how often
in the journey since he himself passed out from under them, his own
faith and hope have burned dimly, and his ideal has faded away as he
toiled on, or sat by the wayside, looking wistfully after it; till in
the dust and jar, the heat and strain of the mighty highway, he has been
again and again tempted to doubt whether it was indeed anything more
than a phantom exhalation, which had taken shape in the glorious morning
light, only to vanish when the work-day sun had risen fairly above the
horizon, and dispersed the coloured mists.
He may well be pardoned if, at such times, the remembrance of the actual
world in which he is living, and of the generation which moved into line
on the great battle-field when he himself shouldered musket and
knapsack, and passed into action out of the golden gates, should for a
moment or two bring the pathetic side of the picture into strongest
relief. “Where are they now who represented genius, valour,
self-sacrifice, the invisible heavenly world, to these? Are they dead?
Has the high ideal died out of them? Will it be better with the new
generation?”[3]
Such thoughts, such doubts, will force themselves at times on us all, to
be met as best we may. Happy the man who is able, not at all times and
in all places, but on the whole, to hold them resolutely at arm’s
length, and to follow straight on, though often wearily and painfully,
in the tracks of the divine visitor who stood by his side in his youth,
though sadly conscious of weary lengths of way, of gulfs and chasms,
which since those days have come to stretch and yawn between him and his
ideal—of the difference between the man God meant him to be—of the
manhood he thought he saw so clearly in those early days—and the man he
and the world have together managed to make of himself.
I say, happy is that man. I had almost said that no other than he is
happy in any true or noble sense, even in this hard materialist
nineteenth century, when the faith that the weak must to the wall, that
the strong alone are to survive, prevails as it never did before—which
on the surface seems specially to be organised for the destruction of
ideals and the quenching of enthusiasms. I feel deeply the
responsibility of making _any_ assertion on so moot a point to such an
audience in such a place as this; nevertheless, even in our materialist
age I must urge you all, as you would do good work in the world, to take
your stand resolutely and once for all, at school and all your lives
through, on the side of the idealists.
In doing so I trust and believe I shall not be running counter to the
teaching you are accustomed to hear in this place. I know that I
_should_ be running counter to it if anything I may say were to give the
least encouragement to dreaminess or dawdling. Let me say then at once
and emphatically, that nothing can be farther from my wish, or thought.
The only idealism I plead for is not only compatible with sustained and
vigorous work: it cannot be maintained without it.
The gospel of work is a true gospel, though not the only one, or the
highest, and has been preached in our day by great teachers. And I do
not deny that the advice I have just been giving you may seem at first
sight to conflict with the work-gospel. Listen, for instance, to the
ring of it in the rugged and incisive words of one of our strongest
poets.
“That low man seeks a little thing to do,
Sees it and does it.
This high man, with a great thing to pursue,
Dies ere he knows it.
That low man goes on adding one to one,
His hundreds soon hit.
This high man aiming at a million,
Misses an unit.”
This sounds like a deliberate attack on the idealist, a direct
preference of low to high aims and standards, of the seen to the unseen.
It is in reality only a wholesome warning against aiming at any ideal by
wrong methods, though the use of the words “low” and “high” is no doubt
likely to mislead. The true idealist has no quarrel with the lesson of
these lines; indeed he would be glad to see them written on one of the
door-posts of every great school, if only they were ballasted on the
other by George Herbert’s quaint and deeper wisdom,
“Pitch thy behaviour low, thy projects high,
So shalt thou humble and magnanimous be.
Sink not in spirit: who aimeth at the sky,
Shoots higher much than he that means a tree.”
Both sayings are true, and worth carrying in your minds as part of their
permanent furniture, and you will find that they will live there very
peaceably side by side.
There is in truth no real antagonism between them. The seeming paradox,
like so many others, disappears in the working world. In the stress of
the great battle of life it will trouble no soldier who keeps a single
eye in his head, and a sound heart in his bosom. For he who has the
clearest and intensest vision of what is at issue in that battle, and
who quits himself in it most manfully, will be the first to acknowledge
that for him there has been no approach to victory except by the
faithful doing day by day of the work which lay at his own threshold.
On the other hand the universal experience of mankind—the dreary
confession of those who have merely sought a “low thing,” and “gone on
adding one to one,” making that the aim and object of their lives—unite
in warning us that on these lines no true victory can be had, either for
the man himself or for the cause he was sent into the world to maintain.
No, there is no victory possible for boy or man without humility and
magnanimity; and no humility or magnanimity possible without an ideal. I
have been pleading with you boys to take sides with the idealists at
once and through life. I have told you unless you do so you can neither
be truly humble nor truly magnanimous. You may reply, “Well, that advice
may be good or bad, we cannot tell, until you tell us _how_ we are to
side with them, and what you mean by an idealist.” Such a reply would be
only reasonable, and I will try to answer the demand it makes, or at any
rate to give you a few hints which will enable you to work out the
question for yourselves.
There is not one amongst you all, I care not how young he may be, who
has not heard or felt the call in his own heart, to put aside all evil
habits, and to live a brave, simple, truthful life in this school. It
may have come to you while listening in chapel or elsewhere to religious
teaching, or in the play fields or dormitories; when you have been alone
or in company, at work or at play; but that it has come, at some time,
in some place, there is not a boy in this chapel who will deny. It is no
modern, no Christian, experience this. The choice of Hercules, and
numberless other Pagan stories, the witness of nearly all histories and
all literatures, attest that it is an experience common to all our race.
It is of it that the poet is thinking in those fine lines of Emerson
which are written up in the Hall of Marlborough College:—
“So close is glory to our dust,
So near is God to man,
When duty whispers low, ‘Thou must,’
The youth replies, ‘I can.’”
It does not wait for the reasoning powers to be developed, but comes
right in upon the boy himself, appealing to him to listen and follow.
It is this whisper, this call, which is the ground of what I have, for
want of a better name, been speaking of as idealism. Just in so far as
the boy listens to and welcomes it, he is becoming an idealist—one who
is rising out of himself, and into direct contact and communion with
spiritual influences, which, even when he shrinks from them, and tries
to put them aside, he feels and knows to be as real (and will live I
hope to acknowledge to be more real) than all influences coming to him
from the outside world—one who is bent on bringing himself and the world
into obedience to these spiritual influences. If he turns to meet the
call and answers ever so feebly and hesitatingly, it becomes clearer and
stronger. He will feel next, that just in so far as he is loyal to it he
is becoming loyal to his brethren: that he must not only build his own
life up in conformity with its teaching, must not only find or cut his
own way straight to what is fair and true and noble, but must help on
those who are around him and will come after him, and make the path
easier and plainer for them also.
I have indicated in outline, in a few sentences, a process which takes a
lifetime to work out. You all know too, alas! even those who have
already listened most earnestly to the voice, and followed most
faithfully, how many influences there are about you and within you which
stand across the first steps in the path, and bar your progress; which
are for ever dwarfing and distorting the ideal you are painfully
struggling after, and appealing to the cowardice, and laziness, and
impurity, which are in every one of us, to thwart obedience to the call.
But here, as elsewhere, it is the first step which costs, and tells. He
who has once taken that, consciously and resolutely, has gained a
vantage ground for all his life. That first step, remember, ought to be
taken by English boys at our English schools.
And here let me turn aside for a moment to note for you what seems to
me, looking from outside, the ideal for which you English boys should
just now be specially striving. The strength and weakness of the nation
of which you are a part will always be reflected powerfully in these
miniature Englands, and there is a national weakness which is alarming
all thoughtful Englishmen at this time. Our race on both sides of the
Atlantic has, for generations, got and spent money faster than any
other, and this spendthrift habit has had a baleful effect on English
life. It has made it more and more feverish and unsatisfying. The
standard of expenditure has been increasing by leaps and bounds, and
demoralising trade, society, every industry and every profession, until
a false ideal has established itself, and the aim of life is too
commonly to get, not to be, while men are valued more and more for what
they have, not for what they are.
The reaction has, I trust, set in. A period of depression, such as has
not been known for half a century, has come, happily in time to show us
how unreal and transitory is all such material prosperity, that a
nation’s life cannot stand any more than a man’s in the things which it
possesses. But the reign of Mammon will be hard to put down, and all
wholesome influences which can be brought to bear upon that evil
stronghold will be sorely needed.
Amongst these none should be more potent than that of our great schools.
It is probably too late for the present generation of grown men to
restore a sounder tone, and set up a higher ideal. Those by whom it must
be done, if it be done at all, are now growing up in such schools as
this. There can be, I fear, no question that the outside world has been
reflected in our schools. I hear on all sides stories of increased
expenditure of all kinds. There must be fancy dresses for all games, and
boys are made to feel uncomfortable who do not conform to the fashion,
or who practise such useful and often necessary economies as wearing old
clothes or travelling third-class. You know whether such things are true
here. If they are, they are sapping true manliness, and tainting our
national life at its roots. But the stain, I believe, has not sunk so
deep, and the reaction may be swifter and deeper than elsewhere in
societies bound together in so close an intimacy as must exist in such
schools as this.
In no other portions of English society can public opinion be modified
so swiftly and so radically as in a public school. One generation of
brave boys may do it, and a school generation is only a short four or
five years. I say then deliberately, that no man can gauge the value in
English life, at this present critical time, of a steady stream of young
men, flowing into all professions and all industries from our public
schools, who have learnt resolutely to use those words so hard to speak
in a society such as ours, “I can’t afford”; who have been trained to
have few wants and to serve these themselves, so that they may have
always something to spare, of power and of means, to help others; who
are “careless of the comfits and cushions of life,” and content to leave
them to the valets of all ranks. Many of us have hopes, from all we hear
and know of this and other such schools, that such a stream of free and
helpful young men may be looked for. Will you, boys, and above all you
elder boys, who can give a tone to the standards and ideals of to-day
here, which may last for many years, see that, so far at any rate as
Clifton is concerned, such hopes shall not be disappointed?
And take my word for it, while you will be doing a great work for your
country, and restoring an ideal which has all but faded out, you will be
taking the surest road to all such success as becomes honest men to
achieve, in whatever walk of life you may choose for yourselves. The
outlook is by no means cheerful even for those who have learnt to live
simply, and to estimate “comfits and cushions” at their true value,
either in England or elsewhere. The following of false ideals has, I
fear, thrown heavy odds for many years to come against the chances in
our modern life of those who will not bow down to them.
It is more than thirty years since the wisest of American writers, and
one of the best of American gentlemen, speaking to the young men of New
England, made much the same sad confession as I am making to you to-day.
“The young man,” he says, “on entering life finds the way to lucrative
employment blocked by abuses. The ways of trade are grown selfish to the
borders of theft, and supple to the borders (if not beyond the borders)
of fraud. The employments of commerce are not intrinsically unfit for a
man, or less genial to his faculties; but these are now in their general
course so vitiated by derelictions and abuses, at which all connive,
that it requires more vigour and resources than can be expected of every
young man to right himself in them. Has he genius and virtue? the less
does he find them fit for him to grow in, and if he would thrive in them
he must sacrifice all the brilliant dreams of boyhood and youth; he must
forget the prayers of his childhood, and must take on him the harness of
routine and obsequiousness.... I do not charge the merchant or
manufacturer. The sins of our trade belong to no class, to no
individual. One plucks, one distributes, one eats. Everybody partakes,
everybody confesses—with cap and knee volunteers his confession, yet
none feels himself accountable. He did not create the abuse, he cannot
alter it.... It happens, therefore, that all such ingenuous souls as
feel in themselves the irrepressible strivings of a noble aim, who by
the law of their nature must act simply, find these ways of trade unfit
for them, and they come forth from it. Such cases are becoming more
common every day. But by coming out of trade you have not cleared
yourselves—the trail of the serpent reaches into all the lucrative
professions and practices of men. Each has its own wrongs. Each finds a
very intelligent conscience a disqualification for success.” And so
further on he adds—“Considerations of this kind have turned the
attention of many philanthropists and intelligent persons to the claims
of manual labour as part of the education of every young man. If the
accumulated wealth of the past generation is thus tainted—no matter how
much of it is offered to us—we must begin to consider if it were not the
nobler part to renounce it, and to put ourselves into primary relations
with the soil and nature, and, abstaining from whatever is dishonest and
unclean, to take each of us bravely his part with his own hands in the
manual labour of the world.”
It is a sad confession that our modern society has come to such a pass,
but one which I fear holds as true for England as for America. That it
will continue so, no one who has faith in a righteous government of the
world can believe. There seem to me signs on all sides that it is coming
to an end, and that a new industrial world is already forming under the
wreck of the old. But the time of change must be one of sore trial, and
your generation will have to bear the strain of it. In such a time as
this they only will be able to help their country in her need who have
learnt in early life the great lessons of simplicity and self-denial,
and I don’t hesitate to say, that the worst education which teaches
simplicity and self-denial is better than the best which teaches all
else but this.
The first aim then for your time and your generation should be, to
foster, each in yourselves, and each in your school, a simple and
self-denying life—your ideal to be a true and useful one must have these
two characteristics before all others. Of course purity, courage,
truthfulness are as absolutely necessary as ever, without them there can
be no ideal at all. But as each age and each country has its own special
needs and weaknesses, so the best mind of its youth should be bent on
serving where the need is sorest, and bringing strength to the weak
places. There will be always crowds ready to fall in with the dapper
pliant ways which lead most readily to success in every community.
Society has been said to be “always and everywhere in conspiracy against
the true manhood of every one of its members”; and the saying, though
bitter, contains a sad truth. So the faithful idealist will have to
learn, without arrogance and with perfect good temper, to treat society
as a child, and never to allow it to dictate. So treated, society will
surely come round to those who have a high ideal before them, and
therefore firm ground under their feet.
“Coy Hebe flies from those that woo,
And shuns the hand would seize upon her;
Live thou thy life, and she will sue,
To pour for thee the cup of honour.”
Let me say a word or two more on this business of success. Is it not,
after all, the test of true and faithful work? Must it not be the
touchstone of the humble and magnanimous, as well as of the
self-asserting and ambitious? Undoubtedly; but here again we have to
note that what passes with society for success, and is so labelled by
public opinion, may well be, as often as not actually is, a bad kind of
failure.
Public opinion in our day has for instance been jubilant over the
success of those who have started in life penniless, and have made large
fortunes. Indeed this particular class of self-made men is the one which
we have been of late invited to honour. Before doing so, however, we
shall have to ask with some care, and bearing in mind Emerson’s
warnings, by what methods the fortune has been made. The rapid
accumulation of national wealth in England can scarcely be called a
success by any one who studies the methods by which it has been made,
and its effects on the national character. It may be otherwise with this
or that millionaire, but each case must be judged on its own merits.
I remember hearing, years ago, of an old merchant who on his death-bed
divided the results of long years of labour, some few hundreds in all,
amongst his sons. “It is little enough, my boys,” were almost his last
words, “but there isn’t a dirty shilling in the whole of it.” He had
been a successful man too, though not in the “self-made” sense. For his
ideal had been, not to make money, but to keep clean hands. And he had
been faithful to it.
In reading the stories of these last persons whom the English nation is
invited to honour, I am generally struck with the predominance of the
personal element. The key-note seems generally some resolve taken in
early youth connected with their own temporal advancement. This one will
be Lord Mayor; this other Prime Minister; a third determines to own a
fine estate near the place of his birth; a fourth to become head of the
business in which he started as an errand-boy. They did indeed achieve
their ends, were faithful to the idea they had set before themselves as
boys; but I doubt if we can put them anywhere but in the lower school of
idealists. For the predominant motive being self-assertion, their
idealism seems never to have got past the personal stage, which at best
is but a poor business as compared with the true thing. Try the case by
a test every one of you can apply directly and easily. One boy here
resolves—I will win this scholarship; I will be head of the school; I
will be captain of the eleven; and does it. Another resolves—this school
shall be purer in tone, simpler in habits, braver and stronger in
temper, for my presence here; does his best, but doubts after all
whether he has succeeded. I need not say that the latter is the best
idealist; but which is the most successful Clifton boy?
I must bring these remarks to an end, and yet have only been able to
touch, and that very lightly, the fringe of a great subject. I am sure
many of you have felt this; and I shall be surprised if some amongst you
are not already listening to me with a shade of jealousy in your minds,
which might formulate itself somehow perhaps thus:—“Is this talk about
idealism quite straightforward? Haven’t we heard all this
before?—Self-denial, simplicity of life, courage, and the rest, are they
not the first fruits of Christianity as we have been taught it? And we
have been told, too, that this call of which you have been talking is
the voice of Christ’s spirit speaking to ours. Can any good come of
swaddling these truths in other clothes which will scarcely fit them
better, or make them more easy, or more acceptable?”
To which I am glad to reply from my heart—Truly; so it is. _Rem acu
tetigisti._ Christ is, indeed, the great idealist. “Be ye perfect, as
your Father in heaven is perfect,” is the ideal He sets before us—the
only one which is permanent and all-sufficing. His own spirit communing
with ours _is_ that call which comes to every human being. But my object
has been to get you to-night to look at the facts of your own
experience—and, as I have said already, the youngest has _some_
experience in these deep matters—without connecting them for the moment
with any form of religion.
Supposing the whole Bible, every trace of Christendom, to disappear
to-morrow, the same thing would, nevertheless, be occurring to you, and
me, and every man. We should each of us still be conscious of a
presence, which we are quite sure is not ourself, in the deepest
recesses of our own heart, communing with us there and calling us to
take up our twofold birthright as man—the mastery over visible things,
and above all the mastery over our own bodies, actions, thoughts—and the
power, always growing, of this mysterious communion with the invisible.
It is therefore that I have abstained from the use of religious
phraseology, believing that, apart altogether from the Christian
revelation, the idealist will and must always remain nearest to the
invisible world, and therefore most powerful in this visible one.
I think this method is worth using now and then, because no doubt the
popular verdict of this time is against idealism. If you have not
already felt it, you will assuredly feel as soon as you leave these
walls, that your lot is cast in a world which longs for nothing so much
as to succeed in shaking off all belief in anything which cannot be
tested by the senses, and gauged and measured by the intellect, as the
trappings of a worn-out superstition.
Men have been trying, so runs the new gospel, to live by faith, and not
by sight, ever since there is any record at all of their lives; and so
they have had to manufacture for themselves the faiths they were to live
by. What is called the life of the soul or spirit, and the life of the
understanding, have been in conflict all this time, and the one has
always been gaining on the other. Stronghold after stronghold has
fallen, till it is clear almost to demonstration that there will soon be
no place left for that which was once deemed all-powerful. The spiritual
life can no longer be led honestly. Man has no knowledge of the
invisible upon which he can build. Let him own the truth and turn to
that upon which he _can_ build safely—the world of matter, his knowledge
of which is always growing; and be content with the things he can see
and taste and handle. Those who are telling you still in this time that
your life can and ought to be lived in daily communion with the
unseen—that so only you can loyally control the visible—are either
wilfully deceiving you, or are dreamers and visionaries.
So the high priests of the new gospel teach, and their teaching echoes
through our literature, and colours the life of the streets and markets
in a thousand ways; and a Mammon-ridden generation longing to be rid of
what they hope are only certain old and clumsy superstitions—which they
_try_ to believe injurious to others, and are quite sure make them
uneasy in their own efforts to eat, drink, and be merry—applauds as
openly as it dare, and hopes soon to see the millennium of the
flesh-pots publicly declared and recognised.
Against which, wherever you may encounter them, that you young
Englishmen may be ready and able to stand fast, is the hope and prayer
of many anxious hearts; in a time, charged on every side with signs of
the passing away of old things, such as have not been seen above the
horizon in Christendom since Luther nailed his protest on the church
door of a German village.
-----
Footnote 2:
Printed by request. T. H.
Footnote 3:
Emerson.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
DELIVERED ON 8TH FEBRUARY 1891, IN THE COURSE OF LAYMEN’S SUNDAY
EVENING ADDRESSES AT RUGBY.
JUST fifty years ago, in February 1841, I was a Rugby boy, sitting where
you sit now. That half-year was my last at school. It was Dr. Arnold’s
last year. He died in June 1842. I had been at the school for eight
years, and had gone through it from the third to the sixth, in the
School House. It had been a notable eight years in Rugby’s history.
Stanley and Vaughan were sixth form boys in their last year when I was a
new boy. I was Clough’s study fag. Matthew Arnold, the present Dean of
Westminster, and Franklin Lushington were my contemporaries. Theodore
Walrond was head of the school when I left, with Conington next, or next
but one, to him. I need not name a score of others
“fortemque Gyan, fortemque Cleanthum”
who have done good work for England in Church and State, in India and
the Colonies, in this eventful half-century. I only name those who occur
to me as the typical Rugbeians of those years. You can fill up the list
yourselves if you like from the school register. You will find it a
noteworthy roll-call.
When I was a new boy, Christmas 1833, the tide of religious and
political bigotry, which would surely have drowned a weaker man, was in
full flood against our headmaster. He was forbidden to preach the sermon
on the installation of Arthur Stanley’s father to the Bishopric of
Norwich. Many of his oldest and dearest Oxford friends were openly
alienated from him, and bitterly opposed to his teaching. Even those who
remained staunch were seriously alarmed at many of the doings and
sayings of this new type of headmaster.
When I left, the tide had turned. Even the (so-called) religious
newspapers were silenced. He had been made Queen’s Chaplain, and, what
he valued most, Professor of Modern History at his old university. In my
undergraduate year I attended his inaugural lecture and his first course
on Modern History, and witnessed the noble amends which Oxford then made
to one whom she now recognised as amongst her noblest and most attached
sons.
You may well believe then what a power Rugby has been in my life, and so
far as I can judge, in the life of most of my schoolfellows. For, though
there may be exceptions to the rule, it is undoubtedly true, that the
years from ten till eighteen or nineteen are those in which the seed is
sown and the bent given which determine the after-life of men. I passed
all those years under the spell of this place and Arnold, and for half a
century have never ceased to thank God for it.
My first duty then to-day is to confess this in the fullest and frankest
words. So far I have felt my course clear, but no further. From
circumstances to which I need not refer, my connection with Rugby has
been less close than with other schools. When my own boys were old
enough, I had to look round and choose the school which answered best to
the Rugby of my day. Happily for me—happily too for England—my choice
was ample. Three of my old schoolfellows were headmasters,—Vaughan of
Harrow, Bradley of Marlborough (where Bishop Cotton, my old private
tutor here, had preceded him), Bradby of Haileybury (in succession to
Arthur Butler, another distinguished Rugbeian). So my eldest son went to
Marlborough, and the younger ones to Haileybury, and I have thus seen
more of these daughters, as I may call them, of the old Rugby, than of
my own old school.
For attendance at Rugby dinners and flying visits on Speech days and
other special occasions, however pleasant, are not enough to keep one in
touch with the place—to know how far the old lines have been kept, the
old traditions cherished—what are the new tendencies and temptations
which have arisen as the years rolled by. And yet without such knowledge
how could I hope to respond to any good purpose to the desire of your
headmaster that I should deliver this address? A question which I own I
found it difficult to answer to my own satisfaction; but in such cases
one has no right to rely on one’s own judgment. Obedience to the man at
the helm is the only true rule; and so in deference to his wish I am
here to-night to do my best to justify his choice.
After thinking the matter over with some care, I resolved that I cannot
do better than give you my view of what it was that the average boy
carried away from our Rugby of half a century ago which stood him in the
best stead—was of the highest value to him in after-life. By the average
boy I mean, one who entered into the life and caught some of the spirit
of the place, without distinguishing himself as a scholar, or coming
under the direct personal teaching and influence of the man of genius
who was our headmaster. Indirectly, no boy could help being more or less
under that influence, for the air of the whole place was full of it.
I have been in some doubt as to what to put first, and am by no means
sure that the few who are left of my old schoolfellows would agree with
me; but, speaking for myself, I think this was our most marked
characteristic, the feeling that in school and close we were in training
for a big fight—were in fact already engaged in it—a fight which would
last all our lives, and try all our powers, physical, intellectual, and
moral, to the utmost. I need not say that this fight was the world-old
one of good with evil, of light and truth against darkness and lies, of
Christ against the devil.
Of course all education worthy of the name teaches this lesson
indirectly, but to have it vividly and directly brought home to us, as
it was here fifty years ago, was a boon beyond price. I have always
thought that it was his recognition of this in the Rugby boys of that
time which drew that well-known testimony from Dr. Moberly, then an
Oxford tutor, afterwards headmaster of Winchester, and one of the
greatest educators of our time,—“Arnold’s pupils,” he wrote, “brought up
to Oxford a quite different character from what we knew elsewhere. They
were thoughtful, manly-minded, conscious of duty and obligation when
they first came up; and we looked on him as exercising an influence for
good which (for how many years I know not) had been absolutely unknown
to our public schools.” But this testimony I believe could never have
been given had Arnold’s teaching stopped here. What gave, I think, the
character Dr. Moberly recognised to Rugby boys, was, not the mere
conviction that we were soldiers in a war, but that we were soldiers who
were absolutely sure to win if only we were true to our Captain,—that He
was actually present with every one of us, and would surely give the
battle to our hands if we would loyally surrender our wills to Him. Let
me express what I want to say in the noble words of Arnold’s most famous
pupil. You all, I hope, know A. Stanley’s hymn for Ascension Day. One
verse runs:
“He is gone, towards their goal
World and Church must onward roll.
Far behind we leave the past,
Forwards are our glances cast.
Still His words before us range
Through the ages as they change;
Wheresoe’er the Truth shall lead
He will give whate’er we need.”
The youngest boy here, we were taught in no faltering speech, has an
utterly trustworthy guide in his own heart and conscience, if he will
only listen to Him and trust Him—if he will only follow the Truth and go
forward boldly. “It is a lying spirit,” was one of Arnold’s most
emphatic sayings, “that says, ‘Look backwards.’”
There was an inspiring ring in such teaching as this; and for my part,
with half-a-century’s experience behind me, I hold it to-day to be
simply and absolutely true, in spite of oft-repeated criticisms as to
Arnold’s methods in teaching and ruling. It is written of the most
self-willed of American Presidents:
“He couldn’t see but jest one side;
Ef his ’twas God’s, and that was plenty:
And so his ‘forrard’ multiplied
An army’s fighting power by twenty.”
And I have heard the words applied to Arnold. His habit of ignoring the
other side of questions, it has been urged, combined with his
masterfulness of character, when brought to bear on young minds,
exercised an influence on them, which, though undoubtedly powerful, was
by no means free from serious drawbacks; and often had the effect of
making his pupils dogmatists, or of weakening their hold on truth in
after years, when they came to know the difficulties which surround all
the serious problems of our complicated and rudderless time.
Were that criticism true it would be undoubtedly damaging; but, is it
true? In preparing this address I once more read through his lectures on
Modern History and Stanley’s Life, and rose from them with my own old
memories and belief confirmed, that never was there a teacher who took
more conscientious pains to understand himself, and make his pupils see
all sides of, the political and social problems which met them in their
reading. But, while scrupulously fair in weighing both sides, there was
no faltering or counting the cost in his own verdicts—no “patting the
devil on the back and calling him poor mistaken angel.” And I am
inclined to think (though by no means sure at this distance of time that
it is not a mere afterthought) that this vigour and directness may have
made some of his pupils, though not those who had profited most by his
teaching, more ready to take sides, and more sure of their own
judgments, than young men on entering life ought to be. In my own case,
at any rate—the only one in which a man can really speak with
confidence—I think on looking back I can detect a readiness to take
sides before I had qualified myself to judge which was right and which
wrong. And perhaps this was more or less characteristic of a good many
Rugbeians of that day, of whom it might be said in the words of Hosea
Biglow—
“Nothin’ from Adam’s fall to Huldy’s bonnet
That we warn’t full cocked with our judgment on it.”
But we paid for our haste. For one of the results of this characteristic
was that old Rugby friends of that time were apt to find themselves,
both at the universities and in active life, not only in opposite camps,
but in sharp antagonism. There were burning questions then as now which
divided men sharply, such as the Tractarian movement and the People’s
Charter; and like Home Rule to-day were of a kind which tried
friendships to the breaking-point. If you boys know A. Clough’s poems as
you ought, you must remember those lines in which this pathetic side of
the after-life of many of Arnold’s pupils, as it had been of his own
life, is touched so vividly and tenderly:—
“Qua cursum ventus.
As ships, becalmed at eve, that lay
With canvas drooping, side by side,
Two towers of sail at dawn of day
Are scarce long leagues apart descried;
When fell the night, upsprung the breeze,
And all the darkling hours they plied,
Nor dreamt but each the self-same seas
By each was cleaving, side by side:
E’en so—but why the tale reveal
Of those, whom year by year unchanged,
Brief absence joined anew to feel,
Astounded, soul from soul estranged?
At dead of night their sails were filled,
And onward each rejoicing steered—
Ah, neither blame, for neither willed,
Or wist, what first with dawn appeared!
To veer, how vain! On, onward strain,
Brave barks! In light, in darkness too,
Through winds and tides one compass guides—
To that, and your own selves, be true.
But O blithe breeze; and O great seas,
Though ne’er, that earliest parting past,
On your wide plain they join again,
Together lead them home at last.
One port, methought, alike they sought,
One purpose hold where’er they fare,—
O bounding breeze, O rushing seas!
At last, at last, unite them there!”
So far I have been able to speak with confidence, but I cannot do so on
the next point. For I cannot be sure now whether it was while at school
or after I had left, though I am quite sure it was from Arnold’s
teaching, that I learnt the invaluable lesson in early life, that there
are subjects—such as the origin of evil, and the co-existence of man’s
free will and God’s omnipotence and omniscience—which lie beyond the
range of the human intellect; and before which, if we are in a healthy
moral state, we shall be content to sit down patiently and quietly,
without attempting to solve problems which lie at depths which no lead
or line of man’s invention can ever sound. Let me enforce this lesson in
his own words—“It should always be remembered that there are
difficulties in the way of all religion which can never be solved by
human powers. Intellectually, we can point out the greater difficulties
of Atheism and Scepticism. Practically, they yield to faith sought in
God’s way by doing His will.” “Living thus by faith, a man finds that
his course is one of perfect light: the moral result is so certain that
he is sure he has truth on his side.”
I have tried to indicate the main lines of the education we got here
fifty years ago (apart, of course, from our school studies). It was
undoubtedly before all things training for a big fight—or rather for
_the_ big fight to which we had all been pledged at our baptism,
“manfully to fight under Christ’s banner against sin, the world, and the
devil, and to continue His faithful soldiers and servants unto our
life’s end.”
And has not this, my young schoolfellows, been the aim of all education
in England worthy of the name since Alfred, a thousand years ago, caused
to be written up on the walls of his schools,
“With all thy might
Stand by the right,
And be thou strong
Against the wrong.”
It was probably brought more vividly before Rugby boys in Arnold’s time
than has often been the case in our schools, as he was himself so
essentially a fighting man—“one,” to use his own words, “whose spirit of
pugnacity would rejoice in fighting out this battle in a saw-pit.” But
the more you think of it, and the longer you live, the more firmly will
you get to hold the truth, that you _must_ be fighting men if you would
keep your self-respect, or do any stroke of work worth doing in this
tough old world. If you learn here to make pleasure or comfort or
success your aim, or to turn aside to any siren call from the steady
summons of duty, depend upon it, even if you attain them, you will find
long before you reach my age, that they have turned into ashes in your
mouth, and are like Dead Sea apples, fair to look on, but only fit for
the dust-heap.
There will always be plenty of men in all times, especially in old and
rich countries, who take no side on great questions, having enough work
and enjoyment to satisfy all their own wants, like Isaak Walton and his
friends in our great civil war. Of them Arnold said, “I know not how the
peaceableness of such persons can be either admirable or amiable”;
contrasting them with Lord Falkland and others, who left the popular
side when it was triumphing, and joined the opposite ranks without
changing their principles or becoming renegades. Such men, he taught us,
are amongst the noblest characters in history; but they change their
sides not to conquer but to die—uncheered by sympathy, and therefore the
purest of martyrs. These were the models he set before Rugby boys in my
time, and lived up to himself. Our spokesman of that time, the most
typical poet that Rugby has bred, sang of such—
“So thou but strive, thou soon shalt see
Defeat itself is victory.”
Or, if that saying seem to you mere paradox, take this expansion of it
in one of the noblest of his later poems—
“Say not the struggle nought availeth,
The labour and the wounds are vain,
The enemy faints not, nor faileth,
And as things have been they remain.
If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;
It may be, in yon smoke concealed,
Your comrades chase e’en now the fliers,
And, but for you, possess the field.
For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.
And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light,
In front, the sun climbs slow, how slowly,
But westward, look, the land is bright.”
Well, my boys, I can fancy that by this time some of you are thinking
that I might as well turn to the Rugby of to-day, if I have anything to
say about it, instead of dwelling all the time on the old Rugby of
half-a-century ago. And so I will turn, for the few minutes that are
left to me, to the present and the future. But after all, the times
differ much less, in this place at any rate, than would appear
superficially. It is still the old fight you are training for as we
were, and must be fought under the old banner and with the old weapons.
No doubt some of the old pitfalls have been filled up, and new ones
opened by the enemy, who is always alert and on the watch for the
laggards and the half-hearted. And, judging from my general
experience—for as I have confessed already my special experience here is
scarcely more than that of a stranger—I think that one of the sides on
which the attack presses more than of old lies in the temptation and
tendency to careless expense; and to a taking it for granted that the
world is to be made easy for you; that you have all a sort of
prescriptive right to enjoyments and advantages: or, as the Americans
say, “to a good time,” without any special effort or vigilance of your
own. Depend upon it, all such notions are lies, and come from the father
of lies. The more you train yourselves here to do everything for
yourselves—even in your games—to look for no good thing for which you
have not strenuously striven yourselves—the better and happier men will
you be in after-life. Happy is the man, has been most truly said, who
can help himself, for he shall be waited upon. The most pitiable man in
these, or indeed in any, times, is he who has only learned to ring a
bell. And as to carelessness in expense, no doubt England is immensely
richer than it was fifty years ago, and so probably you come mostly from
richer homes than we did. But for all that, I am quite sure that there
must be many boys here who are only kept here by friends to whom the
cost is a serious consideration. To all such I would say that there is
no discipline of more value than to learn to say frankly and positively,
and to act on the words, “I can’t afford it.”
And now my time is up, and I have only to wish our noble old school and
you of this generation who belong to it, God’s speed.
It is allowed to few men to revisit their old boyish haunts, and revive
old school memories, after fifty years, and to come in touch with one
company of that great host in whose hands the future of our England
rests for good or ill, who are even now buckling on the armour which we
are laying down.
If ever one of you should chance to come back here in 1940 to speak to
the Rugby boys who will then be sitting on those benches, he will know
how pathetic an experience it is: he will be able to appreciate the
solemn but yet hopeful thoughts which crowd on me to-night—solemn
indeed, but yet full of hope. For I will never believe that the living
faith which was breathed into this school fifty years ago will ever be
allowed to fade out while the world stands: the faith which made the
Rugby of my time a missionary school, from which the whole higher
education of England drew a new inspiration, and a new life: the faith,
once more to quote Arnold’s own words, “which is the opposite of all
idolatry, the doctrine of the person of Christ, not His church, not His
sacraments, not His teaching: not even the truths about Him, or the
virtues He most enforced, but Himself—the only object which bars
fanaticism and idolatry on the one hand and gives life and power to all
morality on the other.”
Keep Him alive in your hearts, my boys, and go forward bravely, you
“Who stand before us in this shade,
The youth who own the coming years:
Be never God or land betrayed
By any son our Rugby rears.”[4]
-----
Footnote 4:
It is not “Rugby” but “Harvard” in the original, which is taken from
the Commemoration hymn written by the Rev. J. R. Lowell.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
AN ADDRESS DELIVERED ON 12TH JUNE 1892, THE ANNIVERSARY OF DR.
ARNOLD’S DEATH.
WE are gathered here on this great Christian festival to keep what I
may, with our preacher of this afternoon, call our second founder’s day.
I am sure that every good Rugbeian is proud of Queen Elizabeth’s sturdy
and loyal grocer, who bore testimony to his “gracious lady and mistress”
before Bishop Bonner and the other commissioners of her sister, at the
risk of being burnt as a heretic in Smithfield. Lawrence Sheriff’s day,
20th October, will never be forgotten or neglected in this place. But,
as the United States do wisely and well to recognise Abraham Lincoln as
the second father and founder of their Republic, so may we rightly
honour Thomas Arnold as the second father and founder of Rugby School,
and set apart this 12th of June, the day on which he passed away here
fifty years ago, as one to be kept sacred to his memory.
This Saint’s day then I hope and believe will be kept while Rugby
stands, for in so keeping it we are carrying out his own wish, that the
English Church might learn in the new time to restore, amongst other
practices she has abandoned, “Commemorations of holy men of all times
and all countries.”
This 12th of June is then the 50th anniversary of the death of our
second founder, who was taken in the fulness of his strength, and in the
hour of his triumph, when his long battle was really won, and his old
university, and his country, were vying with one another to honour the
man, who it was at last recognised had raised the true standard of
education again in England, and had inspired it with a soul and a
purpose which it had wanted since Elizabeth’s day.
I am here to-night to tell you what I can from my own experience of this
great life’s work. First, however, let me give it you in the words of
his poet son, from the lines on Rugby Chapel, which I hope are well
known to most of you:
“O strong soul, by what shore
Tarriest thou now? For that force,
Surely, has not been left vain!
Somewhere, surely, afar,
In the sounding labour-house vast
Of being, is practised that strength,
Zealous, beneficent, firm!
Yes, in some far-shining sphere,
Conscious or not of the past,
Still thou performest the word
Of the Spirit in whom thou dost live—
Prompt, unwearied, as here!
Still thou upraisest with zeal
The humble good from the ground,
Sternly repressest the bad!
Still, like a trumpet, dost rouse
Those who with half-open eyes
Tread the border-land dim,
’Twixt vice and virtue; reviv’st,
Succourest!—this was thy work,
This was thy life upon earth.”
And surely such is the work still of such as he, the born leaders of
men; and in the darkest hour, again and again will such as they come to
our minds when our need is sorest.
“Beacons of hope, ye appear!
Languor is not in your heart,
Weakness is not in your word,
Weariness not on your brow.
Ye alight in our van! at your voice,
Panic, despair, flee away.
Ye move through the ranks, recall
The stragglers, refresh the outworn,
Praise, reinspire the brave!
Order, courage, return.
Eyes rekindling, and prayers,
Follow your steps as ye go.
Ye fill up the gaps in our files,
Strengthen the wavering line,
Stablish, continue our march,
On, to the bound of the waste,
On, to the City of God.”
Such prosaic details of personal experience as I can give you, my boys,
will fall flat enough after a trumpet call like this; but they are what
I am come here to give you, and I will try to give them as simply and
truthfully as I can.
Nearly forty years ago, when I first came across, in Stanley’s _Life of
Arnold_, a passage in one of his letters to a friend as to the treatment
of unpromising pupils, describing it as “very often like kicking a
football up hill,” the truth as well as the humour of the saying came
home to me very vividly—“You kick it onwards,” he says, “twenty yards,
and it rolls back nineteen: still you have gained one yard, and thus in
a good many kicks you make some progress.”
Now I don’t believe that any boy had more reason than I to be thankful
for this kicking-up process, and for the Doctor’s patient use of it. As
long as you didn’t roll back _more_ than the nineteen yards he stuck to
you, and used whatever germ he could detect of intellectual activity in
you to rouse you, and hinder the fatal rolling back over the twentieth
yard of the descent.
I will illustrate this by my own case. I went up to Rugby at ten from a
preparatory school for Winchester, where a different grammar from the
Rugby one was in use, and we were taught a different pronunciation of
Greek. Partly owing to discouragement at first from this cause, but more
to my inaptitude for languages and excessive fondness for games, I soon
lost any real interest in the form work, and only did just enough to get
my yearly remove. On the other hand I was fond of reading history and
current literature, and knew more of both than most of my form-fellows.
So for three years I was kicked slowly up the school hill, in no small
danger all the time of rolling back over the twentieth yard, and so
ending my school career. However, I managed to arrive safely in the
Shell, though I fear with the character of a boy who took little
interest in his work, and never did more than he could help.
In those days the Doctor used to come round once a month and examine
each form in some book they had been reading, an ordeal which all but
the brightest and best boys looked forward to with no little uneasiness.
I was very low in the Shell when he came round to examine us in the
first book of Horace’s Odes, and towards the end of the terrible hour
asked the head of the form, who was construing the 11th Ode, what made
the Romans so especially grateful to Augustus in his dealings with the
Parthians. He and some other boys made shots, but the Doctor shook his
head, and the question came slowly down past some thirty boys to me,
when I timidly ventured “the recovery of the eagles and standards taken
from Crassus.” “Quite right! Go up!” the Doctor said, evidently pleased;
and I marched up for the first time to the top of my form. My stay in
that exalted region was short, but from that time I felt his manner to
me changed. He may have noticed, too, that I had taken a volume of Sir
W. Raleigh’s _History of the World_ out of the school library, and found
out that I was familiar with Scott’s poetry and novels. At any rate,
from that time I used to fancy he always gave me an easy piece to
construe, and instead of horrid questions on grammar and scholarship,
would ask for some illustration of the passage from an English classic.
I will give the last instance I remember of this method in the Doctor’s
teaching. It was in my last half at school when I had reached the lower
bench of the sixth. We were reading the second book of Aristotle’s
_Rhetorica_, and had come to the chapter on old men, whom that
disagreeable philosopher describes as μικρόψυχοι—“small-souled”—caring
about nothing great, but only what tends to the ease of their own lives.
“Do you remember a striking illustration of this in one of Scott’s
novels?” the Doctor asked the head of the school, Theodore Walrond.—No
answer, and the question came all round the form,—when it came to me he
paused for several seconds and seemed disappointed (so at least I
thought) when he had to pass on. I shall remember the pang of
self-reproach which shot through me to the last day of my life. No one
answered, so he referred us to the end of the Abbot, where in her flight
after the defeat of Langside, Queen Mary with her small band of devoted
followers pause at the convent garden on the Border, where the old monk
is digging. He leans on his spade watching them, as they ride off, and
mutters, “I could pity this poor Queen and these men. But what are these
things to a man of fourscore? and it’s a fine dropping morning for the
young kale wort.”
As I have just told you, I shall always remember the sore feeling at
having disappointed him whom of all men I most wished to please, when
that question passed me. But this after all was only an intellectual
failure. I wish I could stop here, but as I have come to make a clean
breast to you my young schoolfellows, I have a further confession to
make which I hope may be of use as a warning to some of you. I was
captain of Big-Side in my last year, which, as you all know, involves
the practical control of the Cricket and Football Funds. Now there was a
custom in those days to have a School House supper on the last day
before the Christmas holidays, the cost of which was paid out of the
Big-Side fund. The Doctor’s leave had to be asked, but it was looked
upon as a matter of course, and so, great and sore was the surprise and
indignation, when on the eve of the Christmas holidays 1841, a message
came from the Doctor that there was to be no house supper. There can be
no doubt he was perfectly in the right, as “Big-Side fund” belonged to
the whole school, and it was a misappropriation of trust funds to spend
any part of it for the benefit of a single house. But this objection I
don’t think occurred to any one, and the indignant athletes determined,
as there could be no house supper, there should be a smaller one of
select men for which no leave should be asked. The necessary funds could
not have been reached except with my consent, and this I gave without
thought, as I rather sympathised with the rebels; and I not only let
them have the money but went to the supper. As old Thomas would of
course give out no beer, several bottles of wine and spirits were
smuggled into the house, with the result that some half-dozen of the
wilder spirits got uproariously drunk, and besides destroying some of
the Library books, made a serious row in the bed-rooms and damaged some
of the furniture. I went off by an early train next morning, but was so
thoroughly ashamed that I wrote, on reaching home, to the Doctor to tell
him I had been at the party. I transcribe a part of his answer from the
old yellow sheet which I have kept religiously from that day.
“FOX HOWE, Dec. 18, 1840.
“MY DEAR HUGHES—I did not know nor should I probably ever
have known of your share in the business of Friday last had
it not been for your own letter. Officially, therefore, I do
not know it now—for of course it would be utterly out of the
question to use your own letter as evidence against you. The
matter therefore being set at rest so far as any public
notice of your conduct is concerned, I have the less
difficulty in writing to you fully and plainly, not as
master of Rugby school, but as an old acquaintance of your
father’s, and as a man who feels very sincerely interested
about yourself. I cannot deny that your letter gave me a
very great and unexpected shock; for I had no notion that
you or any one else in the sixth form was concerned with the
party. I have been so accustomed on these points to feel
confidence in the sixth form, that I really am apt to have
no suspicion whatever of them in such matters; and I am
quite sure that if I am obliged to resign this confidence
the school must speedily go to ruin. Farther, I think that
according to my school recollections, good and steady
fellows at Winchester would have taken no part in such a
business, and it would grieve me very much to think that at
Rugby such characters could not equally be depended
upon—that companionship or any other motives might lead into
mischief those on whom I ought to be able to rely.”
I will not quote further from this and another later letter; but, though
no eye but mine has seen them till to-day, I felt that I could not
honestly speak to you to-night without alluding to this matter. Perhaps
some of you may have noticed in the anonymous dedication of _Tom Brown’s
Schooldays_ to Mrs. Arnold, the words “who owes more than he can ever
acknowledge or repay to her and her’s.” You will now perhaps understand
them. It may also, perhaps, encourage some one here or there to take
heart again, on seeing how a moral breakdown in early life, if wisely
handled by a master like Arnold, may become a source of strength in
later years.
These few memories of Arnold as headmaster may fitly close with his
parting words to a favourite pupil, “Whatever profession you choose
doesn’t much matter if you follow steadily our great common profession,
Christ’s service.” I believe that our loyalty to his memory in this
place would be as genuine if his work had begun and ended here, as our
great Headmaster and second founder; but a crowd of the foremost of
living Englishmen would not be going to meet in the Jerusalem Chamber
to-morrow, to arrange for a worthy memorial to him in the Abbey, fifty
years after his death, if he had not been a great benefactor to England
outside these walls.
Let me in conclusion, then, glance shortly at his work for the nation.
As an historian I believe there is not one of the brilliant group of
writers of history in the last half-century but would acknowledge their
debt to his example and his method; but I am not an expert, and so will
say no more on this point. To some extent, however, I can speak as an
expert as to the movement which has revolutionised the social and
industrial life of England in the last fifty years; and with the
exceptions, perhaps, of Mr. Maurice’s and Lord Shaftesbury’s, I know of
no name which can be put before Dr. Arnold’s amongst those who, in the
first rank, have helped to tide our country over the dangerous time of
that crisis, which came to a head in Europe in 1848, and is still trying
and proving every nation in Christendom.
After watching for years the condition into which the Corn Laws on the
one hand, and the orthodox dogma of the Economists of that day (of
salvation by _laissez-faire_—or by buying in the cheapest and selling in
the dearest markets)—he was convinced in 1831, to put it in his own
words, that a time was at hand “when the devil will fight his best in
good earnest.” In the October of that year he wrote to a friend, after
describing his field of wholesome and happy labour in his family and the
school, “but my sense of the evils of the times, and to what prospects I
am bringing up my children, is overwhelmingly bitter. All in the moral
and physical world appears so exactly to announce the coming of the
“great day of the Lord,” _i.e._ a period of fearful visitation to
terminate the existing state of things—whether to terminate the whole
existence of the human race neither man nor angel knows—that no
entireness of private happiness can possibly close my mind against the
sense of it.”
And so, as he could not close his eyes to the danger but was haunted by
it, he set to work to combat “the two great opposite forms of human
wickedness”—priestcraft and Benthamism—or, as he called them, “white and
red Jacobinism”—and went into the fight with all the thoroughness and
independence which made him such a power in whatever he undertook. He
could find no place in which he could speak out in the Press, and so
started a weekly journal of his own, _The Englishman’s Register_,
without any illusion as to its prospects. “Every selfish motive,” he
writes, “would deter me from the _Register_: it will be a pecuniary
loss, it will bring me no credit, but much trouble and probably abuse,
and some of my dearest friends look on it not only coldly, but with
aversion. But I _do_ think it a most solemn duty to make the attempt.”
He put his nephew, Mr. Ward, in as editor, writing the principal leaders
himself and giving a general supervision. “The difficulty of the
undertaking,” he soon found, “is indeed most serious. All the Tories
turn from me as a Liberal, whilst the strong Reformers think me timid
and half corrupt.” And again, “If I had two necks I should think I had a
good chance of being hanged by both sides, as I think I shall by the one
that gets the better if it comes to a fight; there is not a man in
England who is less a party man than I am, for in fact no party would
own me.” A year later he writes, “_Experto crede_, it is expensive work
to push an infant journal up hill.”
The life of the _Register_ was short, but it did good work, and by
introducing him to the _Sheffield Courant_ gave him the opening he
wanted for the future. He was, I think, scarcely prepared for the flood
of angry and scurrilous abuse and ridicule which the _Register_ drew on
him (notably from Theodore Hook in the _John Bull_), but he was
splendidly indifferent to it all. “It is an immense blessing,” was his
answer to indignant friends, “to be perfectly callous to ridicule, or,
which comes to the same thing, to be thoroughly conscious that what we
have in us of noble and delicate is not ridiculous to any but fools, and
that, if fools will laugh, wise men will do well to let them.” And
again, “I have lived for many years in entire indifference to the
opinion of people, unless I have reason to think them good and wise; and
I wish my friends would share this indifference as far as I am
concerned.”
It would be out of place here to go into any detail as to these
political writings, or to do more than glance at his long struggle on
the council of the London University for the necessity of maintaining a
Christian character in national education. With astonishing patience he
tried again and again to find a common ground with his colleagues, and
only left them when convinced that it was hopeless, thereby drawing on
himself more suspicion and attacks from quite a different quarter.
“Better go on as we are than set up national education on any but a
Christian basis,” was his final decision; for “the moment you enter on
moral subjects—history or philosophy—you must be Christian or
Antichristian.” And again, “What is the impartiality talked of? That a
man shall be neither a Christian, nor yet not a Christian? The fact is,
that religious veneration is inconsistent with what is called
impartiality, which means that you see some good and some evil on both
sides, and so identify yourselves with neither, and can judge of both.
That is true of all persons and things human; not of what is divine. If
Christ was no more than Socrates, I can speak of Him impartially: can
judge Him: but if I believe in Him, I am not His judge, but His servant
and creature. He claims the devotion of my whole nature, for He is
identical with goodness, wisdom, holiness.”
And thus I come naturally to the last part of our subject, the influence
of Arnold on the spiritual or religious life of England. In his last
years the time of a great revival had come, which would cast that life,
as it were, in a new mould—into what mould was the vital question. The
decisive crisis was in its most acute phase when he passed away fifty
years ago. How well I remember it, for I was at its very centre from
1842 to 1845, at Oriel, Arnold’s own college, and that of the foremost
men in the Tractarian movement—of Newman, Keble, and Hurrell Froude, of
Pusey, and Marriott, and Church—when Tract Ninety was dividing Oxford
common-rooms into hostile camps, and its author was spending the last
sad years at Littlemore before leaving the church of his fathers, and
dragging with or after him some of the brightest and best of my
contemporaries. It was a time of sore rebuke and distress to our church,
and to none of its sons sorer than to Arnold, scores of whose pupils
were in residence.
At Oxford in those years, Bishop Cotton, my last tutor here, had given
me, when I left school, the volume of _Sermons on Christian Life_,
published in 1841, and I had read the famous introduction again and
again in the Christmas holidays before I went up to Oriel. The pathos of
that appeal came right home to me, and I think, even if my reason and
conscience had remained unconvinced, I could not have resisted it. “Mr.
Newman’s system,” he wrote, “is now at its flood; it is daily making
converts; it is daily swelled by many of those who neither love it nor
understand it, but who hope to make it serve their purpose, or like to
swim with the stream. A strong profession therefore of an opposite faith
at the present moment must expect to meet with little favour; nor indeed
have I any hope of turning the tide, which will flow for its appointed
season, and its ebb does not seem to be at hand. But whilst the
hurricane rages, those exposed to it may well encourage one another to
hold fast their own foundations against it; and many are exposed to it
in whose welfare I naturally have the deepest interest, and in whom old
impressions may be supposed to have still so much force that I may claim
for them, at least, a patient hearing.” But far from remaining
unconvinced, both my reason and conscience went frankly and cordially
with him when he urged, “Christ’s church is absolutely without a human
earthly priesthood, for it has the eternal priesthood of Christ which
leaves no place for any other; there is no priesthood without mediation,
and we have one mediator, the man Christ Jesus. Do we want the priest
for sacrifice? Nay, there is no place for him at all; for our one
atoning sacrifice has been once offered, and by its virtue we are
enabled to offer daily our spiritual sacrifices of ourselves, which no
other man can offer for us. Do we want him for intercession? Nay, there
is one who ever liveth to make intercession for us, through whom we have
access to the Father, and for whose sake Paul, Apollos and Peter, and
things present and things to come, are ours already.”
And so I and many others passed through that time unscathed, and all the
more easily because he had also taught us that all there is of good, or
noble, or self-denying, in this system is altogether independent of the
doctrine of the priesthood—that there are many good practices in the
Romish Church which it would be most desirable to restore among
ourselves, such as “daily church services, frequent communions,
memorials of our Christian calling continually presented to our notice,
in crosses and wayside oratories, commemorations of holy men of all
times and all countries; the doctrine of the communion of saints
practically taught; religious orders, especially of women, of different
kinds, and under different rules, delivered only from the snare and sin
of perpetual vows.” So he pleaded in 1841. Half a century has gone by
since those words were written. The movement which was to remould the
Church, and human society through the Church, is still with us; several
of the good practices which Arnold approved have established themselves
already, the rest seem to be on the way. But how stands the crucial
question of the priesthood? Is the Church Arnold loved so well and
served so faithfully destined to lose all truly courageous faith, and to
teach her children cowardly to crave for some man, as liable to sin as
themselves, to stand between them and Christ, who has redeemed them, and
bidden them to come straight to Him? Upon the answer which your
generation will give to that question depends, I believe, more than upon
anything else, the future of England. May it be that for which Arnold
pleaded half a century ago, and which the brave old Poet Laureate has
voiced for us of this generation who are passing away, in his latest
words,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
WILLIAM COTTON OSWELL
AN ADDRESS DELIVERED AT RUGBY SCHOOL ON 24TH JUNE 1894
I HOPE you boys in this last decade of the century are as great
hero-worshippers as we were in the fourth. Speech-day, 1834, was the
first I was at, as I had come as a new boy in February of that year,
just sixty years ago. It was held at Easter then, in the middle of the
long half-year, which lasted for five months with only a break of three
days. That year, 1834, was a famous one for Rugby. At Oxford, Arthur
Stanley had got a Balliol, and at Cambridge, Dean Vaughan a Trinity
scholarship, while still sixth-form boys, and the reputation of the
school was going up by leaps and bounds at the universities and in the
country. But though we small boys were proud in a way of Stanley and
Vaughan, of Clough and Burbidge, and other scholars and poets, we looked
on them more as providential providers of extra half-holidays than with
the enthusiasm of hero-worship. This we reserved for the kings of the
Close, round whom clustered legends of personal encounters with drovers
at the monthly cattle-fairs (which were then held in High Street, and
came right up to the school gates, tempting curious yokels to trespass
on the sacred precincts), or the navvies who were laying down the first
line of the London and North-Western Railway, or the gamekeepers of a
neighbouring squire with whom the school was in a state of open war over
the right of fishing in the Avon.
I did not myself share this rather indiscriminate enthusiasm; for the
kings of the Close were, as a rule, a rough and hard set of taskmasters,
who fagged us for whole afternoons, and were much too ready with the
cane. But for this very reason I had all the more to bestow on the one
who, to my boyish imagination, stood out from the rest as Hector from
the ruck of the Trojan princes; and this hero was William Cotton Oswell,
whose portrait took its honoured place yesterday on the walls of our
Rugby Valhalla. It was not from any personal knowledge of or contact
with him, for we were at different boarding-houses and at opposite ends
of the school; and I doubt whether he ever spoke to me in his life,
though I often shared his kindly nod and smile when we met in the Close
or quadrangle. It was the rare mixture of kindliness and gentleness with
marvellous strength, activity, and fearlessness, which made him _facile
princeps_ among his contemporaries. I don’t believe he ever struck a
small boy here, or even spoke to one, in anger.
And so there was no drawback to the enthusiasm with which one watched
him leading a charge at football, or bowling in a Big-Side match, or
jumping two or three pegs higher on the gallows than any other boy. He
cleared eighteen feet nine inches of water in Clifton brook, which
means, as you know, at least twenty-one feet from take-off to landing.
No doubt his good looks added to the fascination. You can see from the
portrait what a noble face his must have been even in boyhood, and his
figure was quite as striking. He stood six feet in his stockings when he
left school at eighteen, but did not look his height from the perfection
of his figure; broad in shoulder, thin in flank, and so well developed
that he was called “the Muscleman.” I must not dwell on that time, so
will give you one instance only of his early prowess in athletics. I
don’t know what the record has been in late years, but in my time Parr
was the only man who was ever known to have thrown a cricket-ball a
hundred yards both ways. No record was kept here, but this I saw Oswell
do. From a group of boys at a wicket on Little-Side ground, as it then
was, he threw a cricket-ball, over as I believe, or at any rate through,
the great elms (which were then standing in a close row at right angles
to the school buildings) into the Doctor’s garden, for there it was
picked up. Measure it how you will, that throw must have been
considerably over a hundred yards.
He left a great blank in the school life in 1836. We heard he had gone
to Haileybury for a year on his way to India, where he had got an
appointment as writer. In those days there was no telegraph, no cheap
post, no overland passage, and no penny papers to spread every scrap of
news, true or false, over the whole kingdom. No one thought of a
pleasure trip to India for a month or two in the winter to look up
friends or young relations, for the voyage round the Cape even in the
Company’s finest ships took from three to four months. The two worlds
were wide apart, and the young subaltern or civilian was lucky who
managed to get a run home once in ten years. So a curtain fell between
Oswell and his old schoolfellows, which was not lifted, for me at any
rate, for more than a generation. Now and again, at long intervals,
thinking over schooldays, his figure would rise up as attractive as
ever, and I would wonder what had become of him, and that no heroic
rumour of him had floated back from the other side of the world.
You may fancy, then, the shock of joy which I felt when the lift came at
last. I, like every one else, had rushed to get Livingstone’s first book
on South Africa, and was deep in the second chapter, in which he details
the drought at his station, the threats of the Boers, and the rumours of
a lake and rivers and a rich country to the north that had determined
him to attempt the crossing of the Kalahari desert which lay between,
when I came on this passage: “I communicated my intention to an African
traveller, Colonel Steele, and he made it known to another gentleman, a
Mr. Oswell. He undertook to defray the entire expense of guides, and
fully executed his generous intention.” Surely, thought I, that must be
“the Muscleman,” or “handsome Oswell,” as we used sometimes to call him;
that’s just what he would have done. I was not long in doubt; it was my
boyhood’s hero sure enough. “Oswell was one of Arnold’s Rugby boys,”
Livingstone wrote; “one could see his training in always doing what was
brave, and true, and right.” Now let us see how it was that he managed
to turn up in Africa at this critical moment.
In India he spent ten years, rising rapidly to the post of collector and
judge. His station was thirty miles from the nearest English doctor, so
he added the study of medicine to his regular work. This was heavy
enough, but did not hinder him from joining any young Englishman who
came to hunt. In one of these hunts he saved the life of the then Lord
Gifford, shooting a tiger which his lordship, who was short-sighted, had
not noticed, and which was in the act of springing. On another of these
excursions the party encamped on ground full of malaria, and were struck
with jungle fever, of which several died. Oswell, thanks to his splendid
constitution, struggled through, after being insensible for several
days. No sooner had he recovered consciousness than he set to work on a
pile of his district papers—complaints from villages, reports of
gang-robberies, etc.—with a wet towel round his head. He cleared his
table at the cost of a dangerous relapse, the effects of which he could
not shake off; so he was sent to the Cape on sick-leave, those who saw
him embark doubting if he would ever reach the Cape alive.
Once landed, however, the dry warm air revived him, and in a few months
he was away to the north, exploring and elephant-shooting, in which
pursuits he came across Dr. Moffat, the great missionary Livingstone’s
father-in-law, and Captain Steele, the hunter of big game, who directed
him to Livingstone’s station, Kolabeng, two hundred miles to the north
on the borders of the Kalahari desert. He had with him a brother
sportsman, Mr. Murray, and they at once joined eagerly in Livingstone’s
project to attempt to cross the Kalahari desert. “Mr. Oswell,” to repeat
his words, “at once undertook to defray the whole cost of guides, and
fully executed his generous intention.” They started on the 1st of June
1849, and reached Lake Ngami in two months, on the 1st of August, the
first white men who had ever seen it. The story of their journey has
been told both by Livingstone in his first book, and by Oswell in the
chapter he wrote for the Badminton volume on _Big Game Shooting_,
published after his death in 1893. I know no reading of more absorbing
interest, but you should all read it for yourselves. And when you are
reading, remember that the whole of Central Africa was a blank then on
our school atlases, while every lake and river and mountain range is now
laid down, right away to the Red Sea, the South Atlantic, and the
Mediterranean. Here I can only give you the estimate that Livingstone
formed of his companion before they got back to Kolabeng. “When my men
wished to flatter me,” he wrote, “they would say, ‘If you were not a
missionary you would be just like Oswell; you would not hunt with dogs.’
They declare he is the greatest hunter that ever came into the country.”
His method was to get within twenty or thirty yards of his game—lion,
elephant, or rhinoceros—whereas most men fired at fifty or sixty. Of
course this doubled the danger while it made surer work, and his
marvellous escapes were frequent. One I will content myself with on this
journey, an encounter with a rhinoceros, which he killed at last, but
which had tossed him and torn the scalp of his head almost off. Murray
went to look for him, and told Livingstone, “I found that beggar Oswell
sitting under a bush and holding on his head.” He had in fact adjusted
his scalp, and the blood was streaming through his fingers. Let me here
cite another witness or two as to his character as a hunter. Mr. Horace
Waller, of the Oxford Mission, writes: “Livingstone, who knew no fear
himself, spoke of Oswell’s desperate courage in hunting as quite
wonderful; not but what he suffered from it to the day of his death, the
result of an engagement with a rhinoceros. Oswell would, for instance,
ride up alongside of a hyæna, and, unloosing his stirrup leather while
at full gallop, brain the beast with the heavy stirrup.” Again, Sir
Samuel Baker says: “His extreme gentleness, utter recklessness of
danger, and complete unselfishness, made him friends everywhere, but
attracted the native mind to a degree of adoration. He was the Nimrod of
South Africa, without a rival and without an enemy, the greatest hunter
ever known in modern times, the truest friend and most thorough example
of an English gentleman.”
In April 1851 Livingstone started again from Kolabeng, this time with
his wife and children, on the invitation of Sebituane, the great chief
of the Makololo, who offered him a settlement wherever he might choose.
Oswell was again with him, and went ahead of the waggons to dig wells
and provide water; but even with this precaution the party, which
included Mrs. Livingstone and the children, were at one point four days
without it, and nearly perishing. Leaving Mrs. Livingstone and the
children as the guests of Sebituane, Livingstone and Oswell explored
north and east, and discovered the Zambesi River, and the great Victoria
Falls from which it becomes navigable for ships to the Indian Ocean. For
this he was voted the gold medal of the French Geographical Society. On
their return Sebituane was attacked by inflammation of the lungs, and
died in a few days. His death altered all Livingstone’s plans, and
probably the subsequent history of the continent; for now Livingstone
resolved to send his family home, and return alone the next year to find
a way either to the west or east coast. He had already drawn his whole
salary for 1852 and half that for 1853, and so would have been quite
unable to start on the career which opened Africa and gained him a tomb
in Westminster Abbey, but for Oswell; but _he_ proved the friend who
“sticketh closer than a brother.” He accompanied them to Cape Town, and
in Livingstone’s words “made all comfortable,” giving the children who
were in rags a new outfit which cost £200, and enabling Livingstone to
start once more for the north. He answered all remonstrances by
laughingly protesting that it all came from ivory, and that the Doctor
and his wife had as good a right as he to the money drawn from the
preserves on their estates.
Before leaving his African career I must give shortly a characteristic
story which was told incidentally by him in “South Africa Fifty Years
ago,” and unconsciously, as though he were quite unaware of what I
cannot but call its beauty and pathos. It is of his relations with an
Africander who bore the (to us rather comic) name of John Thomas, one of
the men he hired at the Cape to accompany him and Livingstone on their
first expedition. The contract was that these men should be bound to go
as far as the Lake Ngami, but no farther. When therefore Oswell and
Livingstone determined to go on to the north, they called the men
together and told them they need not go any farther, but could choose
between waiting for their return or accompanying them. At first the men
hesitated, and seemed likely to refuse to go farther, when Bono Johnny
(as he was called by this time) jumped up, and in Dutch, which he spoke
when excited, said, “What you eat I can eat, where you sleep I can
sleep, where you go I will go; I will come with you.” The others paused
for a moment or two, and then chorused, “We will go.” “Do you think
after that,” Oswell writes, “it was much matter to us whether our
brother was black or white?” Johnny stayed with him through four years,
at the end of which Oswell wrote of him, “as a grand specimen of
manhood, good nature, faithfulness, and cheerful endurance I have never
met his equal, white or black.” Johnny at the last moment begged his
master to take him over to see England, which he did, and got him a
temporary place as coachman to his brother, a country parson. A few
weeks later Oswell met Johnny in the village with the cook on one arm
and the lady’s maid on the other, and found that they were going on with
his education, which Oswell had begun in the bush, the cook undertaking
his reading and the lady’s maid his writing. At the end of six months
Johnny had to return to Africa, and Oswell lost sight of him. It was
eighteen months before they met again. Oswell, who had volunteered on
the outbreak of the war with Russia, was carrying secret service money
for Government in the East, and came across the camp of the Sixtieth
Rifles. He was talking to an officer from horseback, when he felt a hand
laid on his off stirrup, and looking round found Johnny there, who had
become messman to the regiment and was in high favour. He jumped down,
and they had a long African talk, and from that time till Johnny’s death
Oswell kept his eye on him, and got him at last a place as butler to a
friend in England, where, as everywhere else, he made himself
indispensable by cheerful and faithful service. There Johnny was struck
by a fatal illness, and died in a few hours. “I heard of his illness,”
Oswell writes, “too late to see him on earth; but I trust master and man
may yet meet as brothers in heaven.”
The modesty and self-depreciation of his character were strong to the
end. Looking back at his relations with Livingstone, he writes in “South
Africa Fifty Years ago”: “He could talk to the Kaffir ears and hearts,
we only to their stomachs; but I would fain believe his grand work was
made a little smoother by our guns.” I should rather think it was. Thus,
when a tribe in Livingstone’s district was on the point of starvation
from the long drought, and the people reduced to mere walking skeletons,
he and Murray took more than six hundred men, women, and children with
them, fed them for several months till they were “all fat and shining,”
and sent them back with a store of dried meat enough to last for months,
without one missing, sick, or feeble.
How one wishes that England were still represented by Oswells in South
and Central Africa! Happily Rugby again has sent one such in Mr. Selous,
who has sustained the high type set by Oswell in early days. But I much
question whether the ordinary type of African sportsman of to-day will
benefit Africa, or raise the native enthusiasm or admiration for
Englishmen. A few days ago I was reading a review of the last book
published by two of them on African sport. They would seem to have taken
with them a staff of trained servants, and horses and donkeys loaded
with supplies sufficient to have made the adventure at any rate quite
comfortable. Small blame to them for that, you will say, if they could
afford it; and I agree. But what shall we say as to their method of
shooting lions? It seems to have been, to tether an unfortunate donkey
in a clearing, and leave him there for hours till a lion sprang on the
poor shuddering jackass and had taken a good suck at his blood, and then
to shoot him from a neighbouring place of safety. Well, we will say at
any rate that Oswell would probably have as soon thought of tethering
his black brother Bono Johnny for bait to a lion as a poor jackass.
To go back to our story. After sending off Mrs. Livingstone and the
children, Oswell followed to England for family reasons, and was at home
when the Crimean War broke out a year later. He at once volunteered, as
I have already told you, went out to Constantinople, and was employed by
Lord Raglan to carry despatches and secret service money to Sir Lintorn
Simmons at Shumla, and on other missions. On the fall of Sebastopol he
returned to England, and at once, without waiting for the shower of
titles and decorations which came when peace was made, the old longing
for wandering and adventure being still strong, sailed for South
America, in November 1855. On board the mail-steamer he met his future
wife, who was going out to her sister, Lady Lees, the wife of the Chief
Justice of the Bahamas. After wandering through Chili, the West Indies,
and the United States, he came home, renewed his acquaintance with Miss
Agnes Rivaz, who had also returned, and they were married. From that
time he settled down to the quiet life of an English country gentleman,
built himself a house at Groombridge, near Tunbridge Wells, which he
filled with his African trophies, and found a sphere for his energy in
his parish and neighbourhood. Every neighbour who needed him became his
special care. To the poor he was not a mere benefactor, but each man’s
and woman’s and child’s personal friend. His Indian experience here came
into play. Every little ailment or accident was a certain summons to
“the Master,” as he was generally called; and if remonstrated with he
would smile and say, “there was something in being able to send for a
doctor whom they had not to pay.” He was an enthusiastic gardener, and
the whole neighbourhood was stocked with plants and flowers from
Hillside. His great strength remained to the end. One day calling at an
old friend’s he found him very ill, and his wife and son consulting how
he could be moved. In a moment he was in Oswell’s arms, carried and
placed gently in the place they had prepared for him. The Paris
Geographical Society, as has been said, had sent him their gold medal,
and he was made a Fellow of the English Society; but, writes Francis
Galton, another African explorer and admirer of Oswell, “he was too shy
and modest, and could not be induced to take that prominent share in
those stirring times of the Geographical Society which was his right,
and which he was often urged to take.” In the same way, though an
excellent recounter to friends of his exploring and sporting
experiences, he steadily resisted the offers of publishers and the
persuasion of friends to take the public into his confidence in print.
It was only in the last year of his life that he was induced to put pen
to paper as to his hunting and exploring work. Happily the editor of the
Badminton Library persuaded him to write in the volume on _Big Game
Shooting_. The result was the chapters on “South Africa Fifty Years ago”
in that volume, which in my judgment stand quite foremost in our
sporting literature. Read them, and, while the interest is absorbing,
you will not find a trace of that delight in and relish for mere
slaughter which is so offensive in most books of sport. Here is a short
characteristic quotation, which will give you the mood in which the
mighty hunter looked back on his own exploits. “I am sorry now for all
the fine old beasts I have killed: but I was young then; there was
excitement in the work; I had large numbers of men to feed, and every
animal _except three elephants_ was eaten by man, and so put to good
use.[5] I filled their stomachs, and thus in some mysterious way, as
they assured me, made their hearts white.”
On the other hand, the zest for the old desert life of his early manhood
comes back even as he writes: “There is a fascination to me in the
remembrance of the free life, the self-dependence, the feeling as you
lay under your kaross that you were looking at the stars from a point on
the earth whence no other European eye had ever seen them; these are
with me still, and were I not a married man, with children and
grandchildren, I believe I should head back to Africa again and end my
days in the open air. Take the word of one who has tried both; there is
a charm in the wild life; the ever-increasing never-satisfied needs of
the tame my soul cannot away with.”
I could call a dozen well-known witnesses to confirm everything I have
said as to the charm of a character to which Lamartine’s saying, “Rien
n’est si doux que ce qui est fort,” applies more truly than to any one I
can remember. I will cite one only whose testimony will, I know, be of
special interest here, as it comes from an intimate friend of Oswell,
but not a Rugbeian, Lord Rendel. “He carried, as well as deepened, the
stamp of Rugby at its best; fearless of soul and body, yet tender,
kindly, gay; wise with a large experience, but utterly unworldly, I
would, as an Etonian, give all the mere gentlemen Eton could breed for a
handful of such men as Oswell. Manliness without coarseness, polish
without complacency, nobility without caste! May Rugby keep the mould,
and multiply the type!” Amen!
-----
Footnote 5:
These three elephants, which he regrets were not eaten by man, were
shot by him away from camp in order to send the valuable ivory to an
Englishman who was shooting in the neighbourhood, to buy a supply of
lead, Oswell having run short, and the nearest store at which he could
buy being fourteen hundred miles away to the south. Mr. Webb, of
Newstead Abbey, the sportsman in question, sent the ivory back to
Oswell with a liberal gift of bars of lead, and they became intimate
friends.
Printed by R. & R. CLARK, Edinburgh.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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VAUGHAN. Large Paper Edition. 8vo. 10s. 6d. net.
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