This eBook is a reproduction produced by the National Library of New Zealand from source material that we believe has no known copyright. Additional physical and digital editions are available from the National Library of New Zealand.
EPUB ISBN: 978-0-908328-99-4
PDF ISBN: 978-0-908331-95-6
The original publication details are as follows:
Title: Memories and hopes
Author: Waddell, Rutherford
Edition: 1st ed.
Published: N.Z. Bible and Book Society, Wellington, N.Z., 1929
Memories and scopes
Mnde and Printed in NVw Zealand by
WHITCOMBE & TOMBS LIMITED.
Auckland. Christchurch, Dunedin. Wellington. 5.7..
oe, Sydney and London.
OTHER PUBLICATIONS BY DR. WADDELL
INCLUDE
THE VOYAGE OF LIFE.
THE FIDDLES OF GOD.—2nd Edition.
BEHOLD THE LAMB OF GOD.
THE BUILDING OF THE SHIP.
AT THE TURN OF THE YEAR.
KILLED IN ACTION.
UNTIL THE DAY DAWN.
OLD CHRISTMASES.
MY PATHWAY TO CHRIST.
THE ROMANCE OF GOD.
THE DYNAMIC OF SERVICE.
IN THE DOLDRUMS—
Cheerio for the Discouraged
Of these all are out of print except:
The Voyage of Life.
In the Doldrums.
My Pathway to Christ.
The Fiddles of God.
The Dynamic of Service.
The Romance of God.
SOME PRESS NOTICES
Over 30,000 of Dr. WaddeU's publications have been sold.
"He has Lamb's love of books and humanity and the true Essayist's art of browsing about a subject in an enlightening way."— Auckland Star.
"The high thoughts, the pure English and the splendid literary style of this author." — Otago Witness.
“The student of these essays will be interested in many things, and, first of all, by the wonderful range of reading manifest in the writing. No narrow-minded theologian is here, but a man who is sensitive to every wind and who keeps open wide the eyes of his soul.” —Otago Daily Times.
“It is the work of a helpful optimist and a scholar.”— Wellington Evening Post.
Memories and Hopes
“Our finest hope is finest memory”
BY RUTHERFORD WADDELL
M.A., D.D.
FBIST EDITION
N.Z. BOOK DEPOT
(N.Z. BIBLE AND BOOK SOCIETY)
80 WILLIS ST.
48 PRINCES ST.
49-51 ESK ST.
WELLINGTON.
DUNEDIN.
INVERCARGILL.
7
Foreword
the articles included in this book, "The —' Parable of a Xmas Stocking” was published some time ago in the "Lyttelton Times” (Christchurch), and the substance of "Literature and Life” and "Beelzebub the God of Flies” appeared in the Dunedin "Evening Star.” I gratefully acknowledge the permission of the Editors of these journals to have them reproduced here. None of the remaining ones have ever been published before. The sermon entitled "After Fifty Years,” was preached on the occasion of my jubilee in connection with St. Andrew’s Church, Dunedin. At the request of many it is included in this volume.
RUTHERFORD WADDELL
"Dreamthorpe,”
Broad Bay, Dunedin.
Contents
The Parable of a Xmas Stocking 9-21
Literature and Life 22-38
Man, as the Poem of God 39-58
Beelzebub the God of Flies 59-70
Possibilities and Prospects of N.Z. Literature 71-98
God as a Bed-maker 99-114
After Fifty Years 115-135
15
The Parable of a Xmas Stocking
I.
We are coming within sight and sound of the festivities of Christmas. The mode of its observance varies with the country. We in this Dominion will have no Yule log "sparkling keen with frost" (at least, we hope not), as in northern lands. And the plum pudding, with its blue blazes, seems out of place on a midsummer day. But there is one thing that will be common to Christmas celebrations everywhere—the stocking. All children will be getting it ready for the gifts that Santa Claus is going to bring. There will be wee stockings and big stockings, long stockings and short stockings, elaborate ones for the rich and ordinary ones for the poor, etc.
Oh! the stockings, the thousands of stockings
That hang up so long and so slim,
Awaiting a grand transformation
So they bulge from the toe to the brim.
The stocking part of Christmas originated, we believe, in Belgium. Claus is the Flemish and Dutch contraction for Nicolas, a celebrated
16
The Parable of a Xmas Stocking
Bishop, who flourished in the fourth century, notable for his charities. In old pictures one sees the representation of his gifts to a poor nobleman who could not find dowries for his three daughters. One night a bag of gold was thrown in through his window. The nobleman used it as a dowry for his eldest daughter. The two younger were provided for in a similar way. But on the third visit the nobleman, who had been on the look out, managed to catch hold of his benefactor, and found he was Saint Nicolas. So grew up the custom of Santa Claus and his gifts.
Now, every fact is rooted in some truth. Every visible thing is a symbol of something invisible; every natural event has a supernatural background. Take, for instance, a page of writing. In its outward aspect it is nothing but a series of up and down strokes, black lines on a sheet of white paper. But these strokes are all loaded with invisibles. From behind them there may gleam the soul of a Shakespeare; out of them may flash wit treasured there for three thousand years. So is it with everything we see about us. Water, air, soil, bread, light, darkness, and the thousand and one things and events of Nature and life. We
The Parable of a Xmas Stocking
17
have never exhausted them when we have recorded the mere facts. Every fact leans back on some truth, just as every truth involves a duty, and vice versa; every visible thing on some thought of mind or soul. And those who can best detect these and their significance are the supreme and treasured names of their own and after times. There are those to whom a primrose on the river’s bank is just a primrose and nothing more. But such are at a low grade of mentality. Higher up we have those who detect resemblances and differences between it and other flowers, and who can interpret its genesis and growth. Higher still we have those who can see in all visible things types and symbols of what we are or fail to be, prophecies and parables of the deeper mysteries of life and of its relations to the unseen and eternal. It is these last who sit in the seats of the Immortals. To them is given imagination—that supremest of gifts; which is, as one who possessed it aptly says, like great beauty in a woman, a crown of glory or a slaying sword. ’ Now, this is what we want to discover in the Christmas stocking. This is how we wish to interpret it. It seems to us full of beautiful symbolism, having a wonderful and farreaching significance for children of all ages.
18
The Parable of a Xmas Stocking
Is it not a parable of life on the largest scale? When we arrive here what is the world but a vast Christmas stocking filled full of all delightful and disappointing things? This Christmas stocking has an immense variety of gifts for children of every age. Many boys and girls will, no doubt, find in their Christmas stocking this year all they were expecting and not a few things they were not expecting. As they fossick their way down through the mysterious recesses of their stocking they will be discovering ever new surprises, surprises at what was there, and probably also at what was not there. And is not this what we grown-up children find in the world outside us? Think, for instance, of the size of the stocking. Astronomers work out the width of our universe as 5,860,713,600,000,000,000 miles. And even this is not the absolute extent of space, but a "star system occupying only a part of the whole —an island in the vast sea of expanse.” How much there is beyond this island God only knows. And the contents of this stocking, their nature, their variety, their use, their beauty, their wonder! Science has been helping us to investigate these contents since ever it began. Every now and again it thought it had come to the limit of the stocking’s gifts, only to discover ever new and greater wonders
The Parable of a Xmas Stocking
19
as it went on. Why, it has yet fathomed even the atom. Some years ago it imagined it had done so. But one of our own New Zealand boys, whom we were honouring the other day, has opened up amazingly new possibilities. And still there is more to follow. A French scientist calculates that the energy stored up in a coin about the size of a sixpence would drive an average-sized goods train four and a half times round the globe! Professor Soddy, of Oxford, tells us that if we could release the forces stored up in the heavier atoms of matter we could "transform deserts, thaw the frozen Poles,” and make the whole world "one smiling garden of Eden.” But the opposite possibility is not so comfortable a one. It has been suggested by Sir Ernest Rutherford. He says that we might some day discover a force that would liberate the locked up energy in those atoms about us, construct a detonator capable of sending a wave of atomic disintegration through the earth and decompose the whole round globe into helion, argon and other gases, literally leaving not one stone upon another. But the atom is only one of the immense surprises stored up in this world stocking. There are multitudes more. Here, for instance, is beauty. In what endless forms it streams in upon us. It is omnipresent, in-
20
The Parable of a Xmas Stocking
exhaustible, and free as the air. And it is constantly changing its forms, and rearranging its colours. You can’t open your eyes without its offering itself to you in strange and wondrous ways. Says the man who has taught us more, perhaps, than any other to see it and love it —John Ruskin —"while the winds of departing spring scatter the white hawthorn blossoms like drifted snow, and summer dims on the parched meadows the drooping of the cowslip gold, far above among the mountains the silver lichen spot rest star-like on the stone, and the gathering orange stain upon the edge of yonder western peak reflects the sunsets of a thousand years.” So we may well say Amen! to the poet.
The world is so full of all beautiful things,
I am sure we should each be as happy as kings.
Yes, it is a wonderful Christmas stocking that is provided for us children of all ages. The poet, the scientist, the philosopher have been teaching us for ages how to discover its contents, and the half has not yet been told.
Amazing as is the world outside us, it is nothing to the one within us. Here is a Christmas stock-
The Parable of a Xmas Slocking
21
ing that contains the biggest surprises of all. For instance, think of what goes on every moment in the body—the dissolving of the food, its transport of the blood, the force pump of the heart, the capture of oxygen in the lungs, the using of oxygen to keep the vital fires burning, the filtering out of waste, the thrills that pass along the live wires or cell nerves, and the hurry of the now up-stirring and again down-questing chemical messengers which might have been called hermones (after Hermes, the messenger of the gods) instead of "hormones." Then, again, what is this ego that diagnoses all these ongoings of the body? Schopenhauer, the German philosopher, walking one day in the Royal gardens in Berlin was challenged by a policeman, who asked him who he was. Schopenhauer replied, "I don't know. I will be greatly obliged if you can tell me." The policeman arrested him as a lunatic. But he was no lunatic. Do any of us know who we are?
What is this something I call myself? Where is it inside me? Where has it come from? Whither is it going? What is it capable of doing? What is the worth of its interpretation of the world-stocking outside it? Are there any such things as colour, beauty, matter, etc.? Or are they the mere creations of the mind? Subtract
22
The Parable of a Xmas Stocking
the mind and would they still be there as we see them? Between the little opening slit of the eye, whence the light comes in, and the bit of grey substance that we call brain stuff, more wondrous work is done at every moment than that achieved by all the machinery of this world. And it is done with such deftness and ease that we are not conscious of it. How is it done? There is nothing more astonishing than the ever new combinations and developments of the hidden forces within and behind this screen of flesh we call the body.
What am I Life? a thing of watery salt
Held in cohesion by unresting cells
Which work they know not why, which never halt,
Myself unwitting where their master dwells?
I do not bid them, yet they toil and spin
A world which uses me as I use them.
Yes, the Christmas stocking of life, of this I, myself, is the most amazing and the most inexhaustible of all.
But to go back again to the child. The day comes, sooner or later, when it discovers its dolls are only sawdust and Santa a myth. It is a somewhat pathetic and often a disastrous discovery. A little girl begged her mother not to make remarks
The Parable of a Xmas Stocking
23
about the doll in the doll’s presence, as she had been trying all her life to keep the dolly from knowing it was not alive. So there begins disillusionment, which is always a perilous experience. But disillusionment is not necessarily deception. The dolls are found to be cunning concoctions of sawdust and cotton, and Santa Claus, who put them and all the other things in the stocking, is discovered to have no existence. It is an eerie discovery. But what then? They are not, therefore, unreal and meaningless. The disillusioned children learn that the true Santa is their father and mother, and that the gifts in the stocking are the expressions of their thought and love for them. And may we not think it is the same, we older children, with the great mysterious stocking of life and the world? Is not the child’s Christmas stocking, with its gifts and disillusionments, and then its discovery of the realities which they symbolise, a parable for us who are grown up? We, too, find in our stockings of later life much that seems unreal, much that disappoints and even deceives. We pull out of them as we did in our childhood days, much that is good and surprising, but often not a little that darkens, depresses, disheartens, and we are tempted to think that the
o
24
The Parable of a Xmas Stocking
whole business is a fiction and a fraud; and as Shelley says, that
in this world.
Of error, ignorance and strife,
Nothing is, but all things seem,
And we the shadows of the dream.
But that is to mistake the symbol for the truth it symbolises, and to think that when the symbol is dissolved, there is nothing behind it. Always the work of progress is to be developing the capacity to do without the things that at any given stage were needful, but which, at this further evolution of life, are needful no longer. They are needful no longer because we have got the realities for which they stood. We drop the things of childhood, its plays and joys and toys, because we have become men and women and assimilated the realities to which these things pointed forward. Thus, Santa Claus and his gifts are no longer thought of in matured years because we have penetrated directly to the parental and other thought and love that provided them. So it may be put, that "all the material and spiritual advances in life are advances from some symbol to reality and that the abandoned interests and occupations which strew the path by which we have travelled
The Parable of a Xmas Stocking
25
forward are the symbols which we have cast away easily because we had grasped the realities for which they stood.”
It would be well if we older ones as we pull our gifts of various sorts out of the great stocking of Life could believe, and act as if we believed, that behind them all was personal solicitude for our welfare, that they are, in fact, in terms of religion, the expression of the love and wisdom of that Eternal Father, of Whom earthly ones are meant to be prophetic. We are tempted to doubt this because sometimes what we get out of our stocking is not what we expected, that, in fact, many of its gifts are dark, disappointing, useless. A little boy was very anxious to possess a bicycle. He besought his parents to buy him one. They in their wisdom thought it would not be safe for him because he was too young to manage it properly. They were pious folks, so they suggested that he should pray to God and see what would be the result. He did. He offered his petition for a day or two. Then one afternoon when he returned from school (he had just begun to go) and inquired as usual if the bicycle had come, his mother told him to go up and look in his bedroom.
26
The Parable of a Xmas Stocking
They did not want to imperil his faith in the goodness of God, so they resolved to compromise and give him what, in their judgment, was the safer thing for him: a tricycle. So when he went up to his bedroom and saw it, he was horribly disappointed. He looked at it for a moment and then said dejectedly: "Oh, God! I thought you would have known the difference between a bicycle and a tricycle!” And so of us older boys and girls. If our desires or prayers are denied to us let us not doubt that a Higher Wisdom knows what suits us best. Let us not be like another boy of whom I heard. He also wanted something. I forget just what, but he said he would pray to God for a week for it, and if God did not give it to him he would worship idols. A resolve with a very human touch, and as a recent writer quaintly put it, "Every man hath his long stocking of life, with its presents stuffed in one upon the other. Take life as it cometh, for there is no other way in which it can be taken. Thou canst not take out life’s blessing from the further end, nor hast thou wit enough or strength enough to rip them out of the middle. Take them patiently out of the top and enjoy them one by one. And if there be those that seem not joyful even of them do thou make
The Parable of a Xmas Stocking
21
the best; for these have their value in the long stocking of Life’s diversified experiences.” This is the surest way to that we are all wishing for one another.— (A Happy Xmas.)
2a
Literature and Life
11.
A Plea for the Study of English Literature.
Naturally life comes first. What it is in itself no one knows. It keeps its secret. It is the great Sphinx of Time, the mystery of the universe. And yet it is the source from which everything proceeds as well as the goal to which all things tend. Life, and life more abundantly, is the law that governs its advance. Science takes us back to the making of worlds. Storms blow, fires burn, earthquakes heave, glaciers grind—for what? To get the earth ready for life. Life is the goal of all these long prehistoric ages. And then life arrives. It grows on the soil; it creeps in the slime; it walks on the earth; it flies in the air. And ever the struggle goes on. Age after age some secret irresistible force whips life onward and upward. As Emerson puts it:
Striving to be man, the worm
Mounts through all the spire of form.
And, man reached, the same process repeats itself.
The generations come and go. They are born and
28
Literature and Life
29
grow and dream and work and fight and sleep and die. They pass in endless procession, appearing for a few years and then joining the great stream of things moving to oblivion.
And it is no different at this hour. All this striving and perspiring, this rushing and hurrying hither and thither; all these crowded cities and hovels and houses and circuses and picture shows and palaces and players —all at bottom mean just one thing. They are the creation of life. They are meant to minister to life. What does the merchant want money for? To buy property. And what does he want property for? To make more money? No; to make more life. What does the student want books for? To enlarge and enrich life. What drives men to drink and gamble? The passion for more life. What is it the child dreams about? Life. What is it the old man mourns the loss of and yearns again to possess? It is life. Here is Richard Jefferies, poor, brave, storm-beaten, sorrow-laden man —here is what he writes: "I touched the surf with my hand, I opened my life to the wind. I prayed aloud in the roar of the waves: 'Give me a life like to the sea, the sun, the earth, the air. Give me fullness of physical life, mind equal and beyond this fullness. Give me greatness and perfection of
30
Literature and Life
soul. Give me my irrepressible desire which surges in me like a tide. Give it to me with the force of the sea.’ ” Who has not known somewhat similar yearnings for a fuller life, though they may not have been able to put it into words or even understand what exactly it was that was striving within them? Yes, it is true.
And to this universal cry for life, and life more abundantly, many responses are made: work and wealth and pleasure and travel and art and science. We want to put in a word for literature, for English literature. We want to lift a voice—a voice, perhaps, in the wilderness; nevertheless, a voice for literature as one of the chief ministering angels of life. We must first define our term. What do we mean by literature and what by life? We can only offer within our space the briefest suggestions. In its broadest sense literature is the science of letters. It is the written thoughts and feelings of human fives. But that definition is much too wide for the purpose. Matthew Arnold suggests a convenient classification. He says that literature may be divided into two branches: the literature of intelligence and the literature of genius. This practically comes to the same thing as De Quincey’s division of books into those of
Literature and Life
31
knowledge and those of power. Under the literature of intelligence Arnold would include history, biography, philosophy, etc. Under the second, poetry. Now, if we add to poetry romance we will have the only species of literature with which we propose at present to deal. We confine ourselves within these limits because the literature of romance and poetry has the greatest influence upon life. Let us try to see how.
As we have already said, we do not know what life is in itself—in its essence. But we know something about it. We know how it is fed and aroused and inspired. We know that while we live by bread we do not live by bread only. We five, as a poet puts it, "by admiration, hope, and love.” That is to say, our real life—the life that lifts us above emigrating rats and free-loving baboons —takes its rise and finds its inspiration in our emotions, our sentiments, our imagination. Does someone object and affirm that reason is primary in its influence on life? Is it said: "The Mind’s the measure of the man”? We have no desire to belittle the mind or reason. Herbert Spencer was not a man to do this. And it is Herbert Spencer who tells us that "it is never the knowledge which is the moving agent in conduct; but it is always the feeling which goes along with
32
Literature and Life
that knowledge or is excited by it.” Those who have read the impressive books of Benjamin Kidd will remember how he deals exhaustively with this point. He says that when we come to understand the problem of evolution "nothing can be more obvious than that the moving force behind it is not intellect, and that the development as a whole is not in any sense an intellectual development.” And if we may fortify ourselves by yet one more authority, we have Stopford Brooke, who says: "We are proud of our understanding; but after all it is quite the least part of our nature, and does the least true and the least beautiful work. We will not believe that, and therefore we do nothing but blunder in life and philosophy and religion and politics and art and in the management of men.” Thus emotions, sentiments, imagination do really lie at the basis of life. They are the raw material —or perhaps we should say its dynamic. They are being manufactured into thought and action every hour as the mulberry leaves are converted into satin by the weaving worm. It follows, therefore, inevitably that what feeds this part of our nature—what stirs, arouses, colours, and inspires the emotion and the imagination —are incomparably the greatest factors in the creation and inspiration of life.
Literature and Life
33
Now, we submit that the species of literature with which we are dealing in this article —poetry and romance —are of such a character. Consider first how they popularise truth. The world, says Emerson, stands on ideas. "As cloud in cloud, as snow on snow, as the bird in the air, so do the nations of men and their institutions rest on thought.” Very good. But think how poetry and romance have made thought current coin. The ideas of philosophy, the slow reasoned conclusions of abstract thinkers remain locked up in the books known only to the few. Along come the storyteller and the poet, and they transmute them into the drama or song or novel; and so they are filtered down into the lower layers of life and become the possession of the masses. Thus was it, as Tennyson reminds us, with the highest of all truths —the truth and wisdom of the Eternal. Reason with its loftiest powers had failed to achieve it or make it a power in life. Only when it became embodied in a tale did it "enter in at lowly doors.” And so of the achievements of reason in other departments. The strongest and most forceful influence of life is companionship. Tyndall said that his "greatest discovery was Michael Faraday”—the man rather than his ideas. It is this that tells on character.
34
Literature and Life
Now, there is no other study to equal literature for this purpose. There are three kinds of life with which it brings us into contact.
There is, first of all, the actual life. Critics tell us that this should be the ultimate aim of study. Behind thought is the thinker, behind truth is life; and not till we have penetrated back to this do we reach the real vitalising power of literature. The eminent French critic, Taine, in his introduction to his "English Literature” says: "All the work of a writer —his thoughts, his ideas, his truth, his technique—all these are but avenues through which to approach himself; and the closer we can come to him the more influential his work for us, for it will be life touching life.” But it may be said that biographies are best for this purpose. They are not, because the materials for such are frequently meagre. Moreover, no man delivers himself in his fulness except through his work. Here, as Taine says, when the "work is rich we see the psychology of a soul, frequently of an age, more often of a race. In this respect a great poem, a fine novel ... is more instructive than a heap of histories and historians.” And that brings us to the second kind of companionship which animates and arouses life.
Literature and Life
35
The poet and romancist create for us an imaginary world. They people thought and memory with a crowd of ideal existences. The authors themselves have told us how real these are to them. Dickens, e.g., says that he was haunted everywhere he went by his characters. Little Nell often moved him to tears. And these ideal creations act with a similar power upon the readers. And here we may pause for a moment to say a word about realism and idealism in art. Broadly speaking, the realist insists on a return to Nature and to facts. He lifts the veil from everything. Art has no morals. It is morally indifferent. Most novel readers are unconscious realists. How often we hear people say about a book: "Oh, it is absurd, impossible. That never happened. It is not true to Nature or to fact.” Here is how one of the great masters of this school, Zola, states the creed: "The novelist is not a moralist, but an anatomist who contents himself with telling what he finds in the human corpse. The formula of the naturalistic method is the same as that of the sciences, particularly physiology. It is a searching inquest into the vital and organic facts of individual and social life in all their manifestations.” There is much to be said for this theory of the art of fiction. It contains a truth.
36
Literature and Life
But too often it gives us books that justify Lowell’s sharp criticism: "On the title page you might inscribe the ancient signboard words, 'Entertainment here for man and beast.’ ” Oliver Wendell Holmes’s caustic words have lost nothing of their force with the lapse of years: "The additions made by realism to the territory of literature consist of malarious, ill-smelling patches of soil which had previously been left to reptiles and vermin.” Realism does well in reminding us that accurate observation is a primary essential of both poetry and romance. Perhaps we may indicate the difference between these two forms of Art by that between the photographer and the painter. The former reproduces you just as you are at a particular instant. But it is obvious that literal accuracy is really inaccuracy, for no one delivers himself —his whole self —at any given moment. What we call personality is an exceedingly complex thing. It is the painter’s function to select, distil, analyse, and capture it, and Ills excellence consists in the skill with which he can do this. As Tennyson puts it:
As when a painter pouring on a face
Divinely through all hindrances finds the man
Behind it, and so paints him that his face,
Literature and Life
37
The shape and colour of a mind and life,
Lives for his children ever after at
His best and fullest.
That is the difference between realism and idealism relative to poetry and romance. The realist is the photographer, the idealist the painter, and the comparative transitoriness of the work of the one and the permanence of the other is indicative of the merits of each. Perhaps no one has suggested a better defence of idealism in fiction than George Macdonald in "Sir Gibbie”—a real work of genius. Macdonald supposes someone objecting that Sir Gibbie is unreal, untrue to life. He admits the fact. But he says that what is wanted to-day is not that type of life of which people see most, but that which is the best and rarest. Love, for example, is the commonest of facts. Well, what we should ask from the literary workman is not that he present us with the ordinary everyday form of it, but with ideally perfect forms of it. That which ought to be shown is "the common good in an uncommonly developed form, and this not because of its rarity, but because it is truer to humanity ... It is the noble, not the failure from the noble, that is the true human.” But we return to our main problem.
32
Literature and Life
We must not suppose, as many do, that the ideal world and ideal personages o£ the poet and the romancist are less real than the ones we can talk to and touch. There is an existence wholly independent of the senses. There is a companionship that is possible quite irrespective of time or space, and it is the proper function of the poet and the romancist to bring us into vital contact with this goodlier company. By their powers of sympathy and imagination they can detach the gross and material elements and set their creations moving in a world of thought and feeling. They do for us what the fire does for the coal and the wood upon the hearth. As we watch the work of the fire, what visions and dreams build themselves in the lambent flames! So the poet and the romancist go through life. They take the dead past and the living present; they pass them through the alembic of their own feelings and imagination, and they come forth rare and beautiful existences. They take Nature, for example, and it shrinks and expands. The dust, the stars, the seas, the suns, the soil, the stones lose their hard materiality. They become ductile and fluid. They pulse with thought and passion and stored residues of memory and hope. They take man, humanity, and do with it likewise. They select, distil, and construct.
Literature and Life
39
They lift him out of his time, liberate him from the imprisoning surroundings of his age, show him to us not as the man in the street, but the man of eternity —ideal, indeed, yet we recognise him as bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. And these ideal creations are real—in fact, the only real. People ask that we be practical. Very good. What does practical mean? A thing or a man is practical only when each fulfils the purpose of its creation. If that principle were rigorously applied all round, what a vast host of so-called "practical” things and people would become the most unpractical conceivable! We say these ideal creations, when they are true, are the most real of all. Have not the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan as real an existence as any historic personage? Do not serious men, as Lowell points out, discuss Hamlet as they would Cromwell or Lincoln? Does Alaric hold existence by any other or stronger tenure than Bunyan’s Pilgrim or the Don Quixote of Cervantes? "Is not the history which is luminous because of an indwelling and perennial truth to nature, because of that light which never was on sea or land, really more true in the highest sense than many a weary chronicle of names and dates and places in which an Amurath to an Amurath succeeds.”
3
40
Literature and Life
Think of the enrichment which such an ideal companionship gives to life. If the power and breadth of life depend on the quality of its friendship, as they certainly do, where else will you find such a golden company? Look at them as they move up and down the pages of Chaucer and Shakespeare and Spencer and Bunyan and Thackeray and Eliot and Browning and Tennyson, and scores of others. Is it not as natural and as noble a culture to know Imogen and Cordelia, Romola or Adam Bede, Pampilia and Guinevere, as to know the coprolites of an extinct brute, or the spawn of frogs, or the latest formula for sheep dip? Science has its own peculiar glory, but no scientific study can compare in its humanising influences with that which brings us into vital relation with such ideal companionships as these. How eagerly many people struggle to get into what is called "good society.” What society offers such golden opportunities as the one to which we have referred? Here you may make acquaintance with the purest and the noblest. You may walk arm in arm with the fairest forms that ever trod on earth. They who acquaint themselves with this world come into touch with a grander life than could be given by any territorial possession. They link themselves to an ancestry more august than any
Literature and Life
41
race of kings. They are richer in all that ministers to real character than any material gains that merchant prince or mitred prelate could ever accumulate. This is the companionship "in which it is ennobling to excel, though it may give us no passport to the assemblies of fashion and supply no key to the slang of frivolity.” Hence comes the value of this literature to life. We sometimes wonder at the craze for novel reading, and deplore it. But what at bottom does it mean? It is simply the starved imagination, the insulted emotions taking their revenge. The strain and stress of a material age tend to curb and cramp the ideal and emotional life. But Nature revolts. We do not live by bread only or chiefly. The child, as Emerson reminds us, asks for a story, and is thankful for the poorest. "The man asks for a novel—i.e., asks for a few hours to be a poet and to paint things as they ought to be. The very dunces must crowd the theatres and the picture shows.” We must have symbols, romances, something to break the hard crust and ring of the seen and temporal. Some swing and surge as an outlet for the emotions and the passions and the idealisms of life, otherwise it loses its snap and vigour, and sinks to the lowest level. Hence the value of this ideal companionship which this literature offers.
42
Literature and Life
Now this talk about idealism and the companionship which it provides leads on to the suggestion of a third form which lies behind, and informs all that is best in the others. One hardly knows how to name it. All great writers confess that their best thoughts are given to them. "I love my poems,” says a poet, "not because they are mine, but because they are not mine.” You find it away back in the unknown Hebrew poet who gave us the hundred and thirty-ninth Psalm. You come down the ages, and you find it again in the most modern of poets. Here is Kipling’s confession of it:
If there be good in that I wrought,
Thy hand compelled it, Master, Thine;
When I have failed to meet Thy thought,
I know through Thee the blame was mine. . . .
Who, lest all thought of Eden fail,
Bring’st Eden to the craftsman’s brain,
Godlike to muse o’er his own trade,
And manlike stand with God again.
That is a third kind of companionship which this literature opens before us. We may give what name we please to this ideal, spiritual, allencompassing, and all-pervasive life. We may call it, if we like, with Tennyson, "The nameless with
Literature and Life
43
a hundred names." But the fact is it is there. We cannot escape it. And it is because the best English literature is so steeped in it that it has become the literature of life and liberty. It draws its ethics mainly from Biblical sources. The Jewish and the Christian ethics reach the highwater mark of man's thought in the sphere of morality. And English literature is saturated with their teaching and spirit. So it is the literature of Freedom and Progress. As Wordsworth sings:
We must be free or die who speak the tongue
That Shakespeare spake, the faith and
morals hold
That Milton held.
This feature of our literature, it has been pointed out, opens up for it avenues into the world's future. Certain great arteries of life run directly into it. The healthy heart of the world is beating in sympathy with it to an extent not true in the same degree of any other literature, dead or living. If they all perished their leading ideas could be reproduced from English literature. No one, therefore, can thoroughly and sympathetically master it without assimilating at the same time all that is best in the thought of Greece or Palestine or Rome. Once at a dinner of the Royal Academy the discussion turned on Titian. This and the
u
44
Literature and Life
other fact was dwelt upon. At last Carlyle interrupted characteristically. "Here I sit,” he says, "a man made in the image of God, who knows nothing about Titian and who cares nothing about Titian—and that’s another fact.” Thackeray, who was quietly sipping his claret, paused, bowed gravely to his fellow-guest, and said: "Pardon me, that is not a fact about Titian. It is a fact —a very lamentable fact —-about Thomas Carlyle.” The effort made to mask an unpardonable ignorance regarding English language and literature under the guise of indifference or superiority is common enough, but it is utterly unworthy of us and of the heritage bequeathed to us.
And when one thinks of the richness of this heritage and its beneficent possibilities and then of the meagre extent to which we avail ourselves of them, one can but say with Ruskin, "I do not wonder at what men suffer. I wonder at what they lose.”
Man, as the Poem of God
111
Some time ago that very original thinker, Dr. Orchard, pointed out that the conception of God as Creator has very largely ceased to interest or satisfy the modern mind. There were various reasons for this. One was it seemed to define God in terms of force, and we are anxious to conceive God in purely spiritual terms. Tolstoi, in his hatred of Force, dismissed creatorship as a pagan notion. A second reason was that the industrial revolution of our time separated all but the lower classes from productive work, and so the idea of a Creator lost its appeal to multitudes. But the New Testament gives us another idea of man’s relation to God. Man is called by St. Paul "the poem of God.” For the commentators say that is the correct translation of the word "workmanship” used by St. Paul in the phrase "for we are His workmanship!” It is a beautiful and suggestive thought, and opens up richer and more far-reaching suggestions than creatorship. Let us think of some of these.
45
46
Man, as the Poem of God
We are His poem. What are the chief characteristics of a poem? Many definitions of a poem have been given. Perhaps the latest and briefest and best is that of Dean Inge. He says, "For some three thousand years poetry has been understood to be the rhythmical creation of beauty.” What a poem the universe is in this respect! What law and order and harmony are in it. Science has slowly been revealing this to us from atoms to suns, "The whole visible universe,” says Dr. Fitchett, "is built in terms of mathematics. Crystal is but a bit of concrete geometry. The law of numbers runs through the colours in the rainbow, and the pistils of a flower. The elements and the atoms move in rhythm according to the exactest laws. The distribution of the stars represent numerical harmonies. Colour and music are built on numbers.” But law and order are not necessarily poetical; they are the orderly expression of thought. But the differentia of a poet is not primarily to express thought, but to express it in a musical way.
As Sir William Watson reminds us —
"Forget not, brother singer, that though prose
Can never be too truthful, nor too wise,
Song is not truth nor wisdom, but the rose
Upon truth's lips, the light in wisdom's eyes."
Thus you may have a poetic thinker like Ruskin or
Man, as the Poem of God
47
Carlyle, but they are not poets in the same sense as Tennyson or Bums. Why? What is the difference? It is presentment —expression. It is the expression of thoughts in a rhythmical, harmonious, musical order. We have hints of this even in Nature. The universe is full of sounds, toned and differenced and capable of playing on the whole keyboard of human feelings. We can hear only a very small part of these. Our ears are not sensitive enough to catch the finest and most delicate of them. Every substance in nature has its own special sound. It gives this out when struck at the proper angle, and with a proper instrument. The organist does not communicate music to the pipes in the organ, they give up at his touch that which was latently in them. So of all other substances. From the very beginning of time they were all endowed with distinctive sounds. Every now and again man was discovering these and utilising them and so constructing musical instruments. He found, for instance, that for a violin not only a certain quality of wood, but a certain kind of wood and a certain quality in that wood could give him the sound that he desired. Like the human throat the very wood is gifted
48
Man, as the Poem of God
with vibrations answering to the sentiments of the human souls. So of all other substances —water, air, the sea, wind, etc.
Man has sought to evoke, interpret, combine and harmonise these sounds. An explorer who has been engaged for some years in desert exploration with a view to a possible reclamation of sandy wastes tells us that he heard "the song of the desert.” According to scientific theory it is due to grains of sand contracting after sunset and rubbing together. I read an article some time ago describing an effort to catch and interpret the musical notes of a brook. And why not? "What are the wild waves saying”? asks the song, and who can tell? But everybody feels the mystery and music and rhythm of the ocean. Go into a pinewood on a winter night and listen to the wind among the trees.
I crave him grace of summer boughs,
If such an outcast be,
Who never heard that fleshless chant
Rise solemn in the tree.
As if some caravan of sound
On deserts in the sky
Had broken rank
Then knit and past
In seamless company.
Man, as the Poem of God
49
Rightly understood, pondered, interpreted, Carlyle is correct in saying almost all things "are melodious naturally, utter themselves in song. See deep enough and you see musically.” The heart of nature being everywhere music if you can only reach it. The universe is thus a poem of God, that is, an expression of order rhythm, harmony, music.
But this is true in a special sense of man. Man is the crown of creation. He is not merely a poem, but the poem of God. It is through man that the music of the universe is evolved and interpreted. Carlyle says that the heart of nature is music. It might be, perhaps, more accurate to say that we only find in nature the materials of music and its laws. Man only can create music, nothing is perfect until in some way it touches or passes through man. Wonderful is the design of the creation in this respect as it is unfolded in the evolution of music. Go back as far as you will —back to the prehistoric ages- —when there was not ear to hear, still even then we found this sound capacity latent in all things. By and by man arrives, and his ear catches the harmony that his skill evokes, and behind the ear the soul ready to praise God in the sound and harmonies so prepared from the beginning. Read the old story of Jubal:
50
Man, as the Poem of God
"the father of all such as handle the harp and organ”; read it in the prosaic narrative of Genesis, or its imaginative setting in George Eliot’s poem "The Legend of Jubal.” Jubal was a nomad. He lived in the open air, he heard the wind whistling in the reeds by the riverside and murmuring sweet melodies among the trees overhead. When he drew his bow the twanging of the bow-string was melodious to his ear. He found the world full of music, full of harps and organs. He did this because there was a musical soul within him. No idea can be formed from without unless there is that within which responds. And so the progress has gone on developing through the ages, leading up from the elements of sound in material things till it becomes spiritual in man, and man loses himself in God, the Supreme Poet and Musician of the universe.
But then we know what happened. There came a jar in the music. The melody turned here into a scream, there a sob, yonder a jangle. Why? How did this come about? We shall get at it this way. How is a poem produced? One cannot say I will make a poem as one would make a house or a boat. How then? Ask the poets themselves. "Writing poetry” says one of them, "is like wading into the sea. You are chilled and reluctant and
Man, as the Poem of God
51
tempted to turn back, while you stand hesitating a great wave rolls in and bears you out, you know not how nor whither.” So the poets do not plan out their best thoughts. Nobody does any more than the poets. They are given to them. "I love my poems” says one of them, "not because they are mine, but because they are not mine.” Where do they come from? "Poetry,” says Shelley, "redeems from decay the visiting of the divinity in man.” That is it. And man the poem of God is produced in the same way. His music, his rhythm and his harmony depended on his obedience to God. We know what happened. He declined this. He became self-willed. He said he would make his own music, and we know the result. Here for instance is the body. It is composed of myriads of cells, each one having its own function, but realising this only in co-operation or subordination with all the others. When this is observed then there is rhythm, harmony, health. When this order is disturbed, when one cell sets up for itself, acts independently of the others — this breaks up the harmony; then diseases begin. So cancers and tumors are formed in the body, and sickness of every kind supervenes. And so is it in the inner shrine of the soul. Man’s spiritual nature is related to God. It is organised to move
52
Man, as the Poem of God
in harmony with his will. Obedience is the expression of this harmony, and the condition of its existence. Disobedience is the break up of this harmony. It is the spiritual cells becoming disorderly and so destroying the rhythm of life.
It’s the little rift within the lute,
That, by and by will make the music mute,
And, ever winding, slowly silence all.
11.
And now we are at the next point. Christ has come out from God to restore this original harmony and to make it possible again for man to become the poem of God. Christ himself sketches the whole origin and issue of the problem in His immortal parable of the Prodigal Son. In the first act we see life in the union and harmony of the home all moving naturally, and sweetly, and rhythmically. Then we see one of the sons becoming discontented, wanting to take life in his own hands, and become independent. Then the disruption of the unity and harmony of the home begins. For a while there is music of another sort —then life running down towards the animal and the swine—hard and hungry life in "the far land” where there are plenty of prosperous citizens but no God. Then when the worst has come to the
Man, as the Poem of God
53
worst the call of home sweet home sounds in his forlorn heart; and he comes back and —they "heard music and dancing.” They heard it when he came back and found himself in unison again with his Father, who was God. That’s the whole story, and to bring us all back to that relationship, to fill the life with music and dancing, is the aim and purpose of God in Christ. No one else is equal to the task. When the players came in with the recorder to try to worm his secrets out of Hamlet, he takes one of the flutes in his hand and, asks Guilderstern to play on it. Guilderstern says he can’t. Hamlet presses him and tells him it is "as easy as lying”; but Guilderstern still protests that he has not the skill to do it. And Hamlet replies "Why look you now how unworthy a thing you make of me. You would seem to know my stops. You would pluck out the heart of my mystery. You would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass, and there is much music, excellent voice in this little organ yet cannot you make it speak? S’blood. Do you think I am easier to be played upon than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will though you can flout me you cannot play upon me.” No, there is only one who is capable of bringing music out of the whole key-board of man’s nature.
54
Man, as the Poem of God
Christ is man’s master musician, and when man yields himself absolutely to Him life falls into poetry and music. Why do I say that? Because history says it, because human experience through the ages says it. Professor James tells us the test of truth is that it works, and he builds upon that his philosophy of Pragmatism. Thus judged Christ proves himself the restorer of music and harmony to human nature. Who would ever have heard through the ages the names of John or Peter or Paul had they not yielded themselves to Him. Who is it that has filled the centuries with song, but the men and women who have let Christ play on the whole key-board of their souls? That is what the world needs to-day. What a Babel it is! —Harsh, wild, chaotic as of rats in a cage.
And rich grow the toiling nations,
And red grow the battle spears,
And weary with desolations
Roll onwards the laden years.
And what is the matter with it? Christ’s beloved disciple, St. John indicates it in that weird mysterious book the Revelation. In the early part of the drama of the book, what a jumble and clang and clatter! Thunder, hail, earthquakes, blood, fire, beasts, angels, trumpets, markets, merchandise, souls of men. These are the materials in the first
Man, as the Poem of God
55
act of the drama. Then we turn over to the final act and we see a city foursquare coming down from heaven like the one that Gareth’s followers saw —in Tennyson’s Idyll—"Built to music, therefore never built at all, and therefore built forever.” What has happened in the interval?
The marriage of the Lamb. What does that mean? What is marriage? Ideally it is union of two wills, the blending of two lives in one, and the marriage of the Lamb is the union of the human and the divine will becoming one in Christ; and Christ, mark, not merely as King, as Master, or Lord, or Ideal, but Christ in his sacrificial aspect — The Christ of the cross that taketh away the sins of the world. When that Christ is set in the centre of Life, then we will hear music and dancing and the sound of harpers harping with their harps. But we have not attained that yet. We see, however, how musical harmony, in its higher forms, "is full of the spirit of discipline and obedience; how its perfection depends absolutely on the proper relation of the weaker and dependent notes to the stronger and dominant ones; how one cannot do without the other, and that other in its proper place; we begin to realise the Divine idea of the world’s perfect music, when all its conditions, its play of interests, its animal passions, intellectual
4
Man, as the Poem of God
56
conceptions, spiritual emotions shall work easily into each other under recognised law, and unite in harmony to one great end. Our age is not the time for this concert. It is a time of tuning the instruments and of learning the notes. But the score is already written, and the great Artist moves steadily, if slowly, to the final result.”
111.
Now I want to indicate some of the tests or characteristics of the poem of God.
(l)We may expect to meet His poems in ordinary commonplace persons. The mark of the great poet is his ability to discover material for his songs everywhere and especially in the lowliest and most unnoted things. Like Burns who found his inspiration in a dog, a daisy, a mouse, so God finds his poems among the commonest lives. Rembrandt makes his finest pictures out of wrinkled old women and bloated men. It has been well said of our supreme Divine Musician that He has gathered to Himself all down the ages an "evergrowing succession of men and women who trace all that they are to Him, and who shine as the jewels of His crown. He has created them from material the world had rejected, and given up as hopeless. He has minted gold from common ore, found the
Man, as the Poem of God
51
pearl beneath the crusted shell, the diamond in the fire, the opal in the flint, and cut a flashing jewel from a way-side stone. While other artists have painted men and created characters in fiction, He has made living men, and hung the gallery of history with speaking portraits.”
(2) We may expect that they will not all be of the same type. Poetry has its different forms, sonnet, lyric, dramatic, tragic, humorous, blank verse and even free verse. And so God’s poems will manifest various varieties. There are fives that will ring with song like a lyric; there are fives that will draw there music out of pain and tragedy; there are others full of mirth and humour. His poems are as infinitely various as the nature of man under the handling of God. (3) God’s poems would be characterised by spontaneity.
I do but sing because I must,
And pipe but as the linnet sings.
The fife that is a divine poem will appear not as something dry, legal, formal. Compare Christ with the Scribes and the Pharisees. What a difference! Both believed in God, in religion and in its commandments, but in the former they were like the gifts tacked on to a Christmas tree —no natural or vital connection with the tree. In Christ and His fife they blossomed out of it naturally
58
Man, as the Poem of God
and spontaneously. This is what is lacking in most professedly Christian lives. They are like what Charles Reade says of one of his characters, "Meadows never spoke of his mother, paid her a small allowance with the regularity and coldness of clockwork.” That is how many people discharge their duties both to God and to man. But not so with those who are the poem of God. They will perform their duties joyously, naturally, spontaneously—
As woodland nooks send violets up,
And paint them blue.
(4) If a man is a poem of God there will be a certain mystery about him. There is something about all true poetry that evades analysis. A certain great artist was asked by a friend to go to see the pictures of another. He was anxious to praise it, if he could; looking at it he said, "Yes, good subject, correct drawing, fine perspective, but,” snapping his fingers, "hang it, it wants 'that’ ” and wanting "that” it wants what would make it a true picture. And so of the life that is a poem of God. There will be something mysterious about its origin being and destiny. Christ’s own test of it was "the wind bloweth where it listeth and thou hearest the sound thereof but canst not tell whence it cometh or
Man, as the Poem of God
59
whither it goeth,” so of the life that is the poem of God. It will have a certain inexplicableness about it. There are lives that have no mystery about them. You can quite easily account for them by natural reason. But there are others that you cannot. Principal Shairp in his "Studies in Poetry,” referring to Cardinal Newman in his Oxford days says that a mysterious veneration by degrees gathered round him. "In Oriel Lane light-hearted undergraduates would drop their voices and whisper 'There’s Newman!’ when, head thrust forward, and gaze fixed as though on some vision seen only by himself, with swift, noiseless step he glided by. Awe fell on them for a moment, almost as if it had been some apparition that had passed. To the outer world he was a mystery. It was this mysteriousness which, beyond all his gifts of head and heart, so strangely fascinated and overawed, —that something about him which made it impossible to reckon his course and take his bearings, that soul-hunger and quenchless yearning which nothing short of the eternal could satisfy.” And so it is, in a more or less degree, of those who are the poems of God. The difference between them and those who are not is as real as between the growth of a rose and the gaucherie of a robot.
4a
54
Man, as the Poem of God
(5) If a man is a poem of God then life will have a music, a rhythm and harmony about it. As I have already said the characteristic of poetry is not thought, but the presentment of it in musical form; so of the life that is a poem of God. Everyone may not recognise this harmony. Some are not poetical. Says Audrey to Touchstone, "I do not know what poetical is." It is a trying ordeal to read poetry to the Audreys and the Touchstones, but we must not be disheartened if the music of a life that is a poem of God does not catch on to everyone. The greatest and divinest Poem that God ever sung or set to music on this earth was sneered at, mocked, scourged, spat upon and crucified.
(6) If man is a poem of God it confers immortality. We all want to live long. We all like to think that we will be remembered after we are gone. Think of the immortality of song. Empires, kings, customs, philosophies, theologies alter and disappear.
The seasons change, the winds they shift and veer;
The grass of yesteryear
Is dead; the birds depart, the groves decay;
Empires dissolve and peoples disappear;
Song passes not away.
Captains and conquerors leave a little dust,
Man, as the Poem of God
61
And kings a dubious legend of their reign;
The swords of Caesars, they are less than rust:
The poet doth remain.
And that is even more true of those who are the poems of God. Think of Christ and His disciples. It is the greatest marvel of history how He has survived through the ages. Other men live by what they write or do, but Christ never wrote a word about himself or asked anybody else to do it. He just committed his words to the air as if it were commissioned to perpetuate them. His life was simple. He took no part in politics or government, in literature or art. He was hounded out of existence and died as a criminal; yet He has contrived to shape the whole course of history. He laid the foundations of all stable governments and has been the inspirer of science and art. And His disciples, we know what they were before He laid His spell upon them. They were dull ignorant men. Had they never crossed His path, they would have lived out their unknown lives among the stupid villages of Palestine, and their names would never have been heard of again. And so it has been with the men and women who have been His disciples since. The nearer they have come to
62
Man, as the Poem of God
His likeness, and the larger they have shared His spirit the more certain they are even of an earthly immortality.
(7) If man is a poem of God then he is an interpreter, a revealer. Every true poet is that. So of him or her who is a poem of God. They speak out for us what we feel, but could not utter or understand. They do this first, for God. Every poem creates an interest in the poet. Think of the magnitude of the interest that Shakespeare’s dramas and sonnets have stirred in the life and personality of Shakespeare himself. Then second they are interpreters of man also. Emerson says that the great majority of us are "minors who have not come into possession of their own, or mutes who cannot report their feelings and emotions and thoughts that are within them.” As we read great poems we say, "Yes, that’s just what I have felt only I couldn’t express it.” The great function of the poet is to do this for us. We recall Oliver Wendell Holmes’ poem "The Silent Singer.”
A few can touch the magic strings,
And noisy fame is proud to win them,
Alas! for those who never sing.
And die with all their music in them.
Nay, grieve not for the dead alone,
Whose voice hath told their life’s sad story,
Man, as the Poem of God
63
Weep for the voiceless who have known
The cross, without the crown of glory.
So the spiritual life wants to be interpreted and revealed within multitudes. The great majority are silent poets. They have feelings, sins, sorrows, visions, dreams and desires that they don’t know the meaning of. It is the function of those who are the poems of God to interpret these by lip and life, to find meanings in them, and draw music out of them. Sir William Watson in his great poem on Wordsworth’s Grave, said that men turned to Wordsworth and found not blast and blaze, tumult of tottering heaven, but peace on earth.
Not peace that grows by Lethe, scentless flower,
There in white langours to decline and cease;
But peace whose names are also rapture, power,
Clear sight, and love; for these are parts of peace.
It is a great and glorious thing thus to interpret the world and its mystery to bewildered men and women. And how much the world needs it! Think of the jangles and discords in the industrial sphere between employers and employed. Each glaring at the other and suspicious of every move. Or see it on a larger scale between the nations. What is the meaning of these trained and disciplined hosts of men with their war-like music and
Man, as the Poem of God
64
their glittering arms and evolutions? From the outside it is beautiful and harmonious, but what is the real significance of it all? It is war — fratricide. These disciplined hosts at the word of command march and there’s an end of all the harmony. What follows is "chaos let loose. Hours of hideous uproar, a welter of blood, in which bodies, torn by shot and shell, are broken from the human image into hideous, ghastly shapes of ruin; in which minds lose their sanity and turn into hells of raging passion.” And why all this? Because men forget that they are meant to be poems of God, and lend themselves to be poems of the devil. They refuse to let themselves be played upon by the supreme Poet, the Prince of Peace, but it is cornin’ yet for a’ that. The day draws on when, instead of surrendering themselves to be the instruments of demons, they will use the will and wealth now devoted to destroying each other, against the common enemy of all, against evil and wrong, sins and sorrows, ignorance and disease, poverty and pain. Blessed prerogative thus to liberate the songs hidden in other souls, to bring harmony and hallelujahs into lives which at present stand,
Like one with full strung music in his heart
Whose fingers stray upon a shattered lute.
Beelzebub the God of Flies
IV.
A Dunghill Deity is the quaint and arresting title which an old writer gives to the God of Flies. There seems to have been such a deity. Reference is made to him in the history of Israel. A certain King, Ahaziah by name, is on record as having sent an embassy to Beelzebub, a Philistine god, at Ekron. This God was worshipped as the God of Flies. We shall find our way to it by a preliminary glance at the fly and his significance.
Let us recall some facts about him from his origin in filth to his end in corruption. He believes in keeping the cradles full, and he acts up to his faith. If we give a single fly six months at the business he can manage to produce a progeny of 10,000,000,000,000. That is a tidy little family, and ought to be capable of much. So it is. How does this family employ itself? It is born in filth —in dung heaps, and the like —it becomes an active distributor of it. The fly is cunningly
65
66
Beelzebub the God of Flies
constructed for the purpose. His body and legs have a coating of hair to which the filth clings. So also his feet and claws. These are constantly becoming clogged with adhering substances from the excreta in which he revels. This is the "joke” that he is periodically working off and chuckling over when you see him smoothing down his back and rubbing his hands and his head in glee. But it is no joke for other people. What is the nature of this stuff of which he is trying to clear himself? He swallows the germs of typhoid fever in millions in the filth on which he breeds and feeds. And not only typhoid fever, but cholera, diarrhoea, and possibly also tuberculosis, anthrax, diphtheria, smallpox, and swine fever. Nice visitor this to households! All the fatal things he swallows he brings with him wherever he goes. Not long since a New York fly was experimented upon and was found to be carrying in his mouth and on his legs over 100,000 fecal bacteria. We need not be surprised, then, when we are told that an American scientist calculates that the common house fly reduces the average of life by two years. And that means in a generation 4,000,000, and a money loss of £4,000,000,000! We stand aghast at the slaughter of the war. But here is a contemptible little enemy that is killing men and
Beeizebub the God of Flies
67
women and children off at the rate of 125,000 a year in the continent of America only. It is frightful to ponder that the flies which come into our houses have just arrived with these poisondealing germs from the filth and garbage heaps outside our doors.
Watch him as he stands thus industriously wiping his feet. He is getting rid of disease germs, rubbing them on the sugar that you are going to eat, leaving the poison for you to swallow. You cannot get disease unless you swallow the germs, and you do not swallow these unless they get on the food you eat, or in the liquids you drink, or on the glasses or cups from which you drink. Milk is an ideal culture for the bacilli which they distribute, and a few germs washed from the body of a fly may develop into millions within a few hours. When Moses ordered up the plagues of flies we do not wonder to be told "the land was corrupted because of them.”
It probably begins to dawn upon us now v/hy the Eastern people had a God of Flies. They did not know all the scientific facts about them that we have just set out. But they knew the flies themselves. That was enough. Our boys in
68
Beelzebub the God of Flies
Gallipoli found the fly a more fearsome foe than the Turk. And even in the trenches "in Flanders field” it was an intolerable pest. But one has to go to Egypt or Eastern countries to realise the full significance of the terror. A traveller in Palestine tells that while he was encamped in the neighbourhood of the Jordan south of Hebron the east wind brought up the flies in such numbers that both man and beast were in danger of being choked by them. They get into the eyes, ears, nose and mouth. "My servant and I were spotted all over like lepers with the eruptions caused by their bites.” It is curious that, notwithstanding the frightful discomforts which Eastern people must suffer from these pests, no reference is made to such discomforts by the Biblical writers.
The reason may be that suggested by a correspondent in the newspaper subsequent to the appearance of this article. He thought the explanation of the omission was to be found in the Bth Chapter of Exodus, where it is stated that when the plagues of frogs and lice failed to induce Pharoah to let the Children of Israel go Moses is told by the Lord that He will send swarms of flies upon the Egyptians. Then the narrative proceeds, "And I will sever in that day the land of Goshen, in which My people dwell, that no swarms of flies
Beelzebub the Cod of Flies
69
shall be there.” It would thus appear that they were to be freed from the pests by the Divine Power which rescued them from the Egyptian bondage. But this, like so much else, was made conditional upon their obedience and was, therefore, never obtained.
But be that as it may, it is to the heathen nations we must turn to find a fly deity to whom supplication can be made. We can understand now why such a god would naturally be created. Among pagan peoples it is the powerfully painful things that bring them to their knees. It is the elements, or beings, that threaten most harm that must especially and primarily be appeased. So they worship the destructive and death-dealing forces of Nature. Fear and suffering create their deities; so we find that the Philistine had "A God of Flies.” His name —Beelzebub —bothers the commentators. They do not know its origin. It reappears in the New Testament; but there it is used to denote the "Prince of the Devils.” Those who have known the fly torments in the East will perhaps not be disposed to dispute the application of it to them. There is a Jewish legend to the effect that a man was recognised as a prophet when
70
Beelzebub the God of Flies
the flies would not enter his mouth! Perhaps that is the reason why the prophets—the true prophets —are few.
And the mention of the prophets may suggest to us a curious reference which one of the greatest of them has to this subject. Isaiah takes in hand that royal degenerate, Ahaz, who has been called the Judas of the Old Testament. The prophet tells him of the disasters which would overtake him unless he changed his character and policy.
"And it shall come to pass in that day that the Lord shall hiss (or whistle, as Moffatt more correctly translates the word) for the fly that is in the uttermost part of the rivers of Egypt, and for the bee that is in the land of Assyria."
And he goes on to tell him that these two great rivals would meet in Judah, and would overrun and ruin the country. History vindicated the prophet. The Assyrian came, and we know the result. It is a very bold imagery to represent the Divine Being as "whistling" for the fly. It is not the first time that the literal fly has been the avenger of evil in His hands. There is the old story of Pharaoh. Nor is he the last on whom the fly has executed retribution both materially and
Beelzebub the God of Flies
71
morally. It is astonishing, as someone has said, how greatness has been reduced to nothingness by insignificant things. Grasshoppers have destroyed empires. Hornets were too strong for the Hivite and the Hittite. The splendour of a Herod was smeared with worms, and snowflakes crushed Napoleon.
There is a very real sense, indeed, in which this old prophecy about whistling for the fly may be seen going into fulfilment to-day, and perhaps we need not go far afield to find it. Ruskin, whose foible seems to have been omniscience, has a remarkable reference to the fly. In "The Queen of the Air” he says the common house fly is the perfect type of two things—courage and absolute unfettered liberty. Long ago the former had been indicated by Homer. In the fight between Menelaus and Hector, he represents the former praying Athena for strength and courage. For the latter Athena gave him not the courage of the lion, or the bull, but the fly. And Ruskin goes on to show how apt and adaptable was the gift. But it is not with that point we are concerned just now. It is with this fly as the type of unfettered liberty. Ruskin points out that the fly is the perfect type of irresponsible liberty, of audacious freedom. He
5
72
Beelzebub the God of Flies
is irreverent to a degree. He is devoid of courtesy. He does not care whether it is a king or a clown he teases and torments.
In every step of his swift, mechanical march and in every pause of his resolute observation there is one and the same expression of perfect egotism; perfect independence, and self-confi-dence, and conviction of the world's having been made only for flies.
Strike at him with the palm of your hand, he alights unconcerned in a moment on the back of your hand, or the edge of your eyelid or the tip of your nose. Nothing is sacred to him. He investigates your mouth and nostrils with the same assurance that he does a lump of filth. You cannot terrify him, or persuade him, or govern him. He has no work to do, only enjoy himself wherever and however he likes. He is under no tyrannous instinct to labour like the bee or the bird, the spider or the ant. All these are slaves comparatively—vulgar, business people.
"But your fly, free in the air, free in the chamber —a black incarnation of caprice—wandering, investigating, flitting, flirting, feasting at his will, with rich variety of choice in the feast, from the heaped sweets in the grocer’s window to those of the butcher’s backyard, and from the galled place
Beelzebub the God of Flies
73
on your cab horse's back to the brown spot in the road, from which, as the hoof disturbs him, he rises with angry republican buzzes." What freedom is like his?
We think we need not travel back into history to get nations cursed with characters like these. There is a liberty which is great and noble, and well worth the price that has been paid for it. But it is a liberty that moves within the leashes of the law. It is a liberty that does not claim to do what it likes when what it likes may mean the disruption of a nation. It is a liberty that regards certain principles as eternally binding and sacred, and that counts obedience, and not anarchy, as the highest virtue in life. Is modern Democracy not in danger of mistaking license for liberty, irresponsible action for freedom? Is there no sign of growth of character within it, possessing elements much akin to that of the fly, thus so graphically portrayed by Ruskin? We may or we may not believe the old saying, "the Lord shall whistle for the fly." But we can hardly doubt, whatever the cause, the fly has come. In that inordinate love of pleasure, of doing what one likes, and when one likes, of holding nothing sacred, of treating irreverently and
74
Beelzebub the God of Flies
flippantly all that was true and tried in the age of others, gracious among the living, great among the dead, and marvellous in the powers that cannot die —we have evidence as disquieting as it is indisputable of the fly plague in its worst and most destructive form. And it may be to our civilisation, if we do not take care, what the Assyrian was to the nation of Israel. That is the worship of the dunghill diety, whose origin is egoism, and whose end is extinction.
The dismaying feature of our time is the increasing growth of lawlessness everywhere. We already have anarchy in the home. The break up of home life and parental authority is manifest on all sides. Swarms of young people are issuing from under the parental roof claiming their independence and refusing obedience to any will other than their own sense of right which is, in the main, self-pleasing. Already we are threatened with anarchy in the State. The teachings of certain social and political philosophers are filtering down and leavening the masses, getting at their springs of action without even passing through their minds. Says a prominent representative of this school of philosophers to which we have referred, "The origin of law is the desire of the ruling classes to give permanence to customs passed by themselves
Beelzebub the God of Flies
75
for their own advantages. . . our laws are simply the legacy of baron and priest and the first duty of the revolutionist will be to make a bonfire of all existing laws as of all titles to property.” We are coming within sight of what I once saw inscribed in an arch round the platform from which William Morris, the poet, was addressing a handful of Communists in an upper room in London. "NO MASTER HIGH OR LOW.” Religion which supplies the only eternal sanction for moral laws has lost its hold upon the masses. We have "emptied Heaven of his God and Tophet of its terror.” We have evacuated conscience of the Divine. We have reduced Duty to a choice not between right and wrong, but between pleasure and pain. We have "bottled the Creator in a Leyden Jar,” and been teaching that our little life is rounded on sleep, and dust and ashes all that is. And then we wonder that we have increasing crowds showing the fly character—irresponsible, independent, perfect egotism, fearlessly flouting every law, except the law of its own enjoyment. It may well be, therefore, that, unless we take care, this fly character which we are developing may be to modern civilisation what the Assyrian was to the nation of Israel! We may let Ruskin say our final word. "The first
5a
76
Beelzebub the God of Flies
point we have all to determine is not how free we are, but what kind of creatures we are. It is of small importance to any of us whether we get liberty; but of the greatest that we deserve it. Whether we can win it fate must determine; but that we will be worthy of it, we may ourselves determine; and the sorrowfullest fate all we can suffer, is to have it without deserving.” For that will make an end both of it and us.
The Possibilities and Prospects of N.Z. Literature
V.
To treat this subject adequately a man must be something of a prophet. lam neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet yet the fore-telling power which the popular mind associates with a prophet is not a thing of chance, or a lucky guess. It is in fact not so much foresight as insight. It is the ability to detect the secret eternal principles that govern the issue of things. To forecast the future of literature in this country would require a great deal of this power. Ido not pretend to have it, but I do think there are great unchanging laws regulating the relation of nature and man, that even an average person may discern, and so get a rough outline of what literature may be. Readers of Taine’s great work "The History of English Literature” will remember that he reduces the condition of determining the future of a people to three —Race, Epoch and Surroundings. He says that if these three elemental conditions can be discovered and computed one may deduce from them as from a formula the specialities of any
77
78
Possibilities and Prospects of N.Z. Literature
given civilisation and he builds up his history of English literature on this basis. Some may be inclined to agree with Amiel when he says "Taine always produces a disagreeable impression upon me as though it were a creaking of pulleys and a clicking of machinery.” It can hardly be denied that there is a kind of mechanicalness in Taine’s work, yet the conditions he lays down do give us, in the main, the direction in which we are to look for those great dominating forces that create and colour literature. So we shall use them or some of them as a working hypothesis to help us in our forecast of the prospects and possibilities of literature in this Dominion.
Take for instance first of all surroundings or environment, by this I mean climate, soil and scenery. It is hardly necessary to emphasise how great an influence this exercises on the life and literature of a people. They create and colour it, they give it inspiration and momentum. Montesquie was perhaps the first to draw attention to this. Buckle, in his narrow but wonderfully informing "History of Civilisation,” traced it out in large detail in the history of various nations. Since then every scientific historian in estimating the forces that account for diversity in character and thought are obliged to class amongst the most
Possibilities and Prospects of N-Z- Literature
79
potent of these climate, soil and scenery. Consider for a little in detail each of these factors. Take first, soil. The soil of a country is related to the history of a country in this way: Wealth depends upon it. Without wealth and what wealth brings, time, ease, money, art and thought, and its expression in language, which is literature, are impossible. Where there is a niggard land men and women must be constantly toiling to get food, and where there is unremitting labour neither art nor literature can be developed. This explains why it is that the central and northern Asiatic regions have never produced either. Their constant fight for food has left the inhabitants no leisure for thought. But as you descend towards the tropics and food gets easier of acquirement, a great literature has grown up. India is an example of this. So are the Arabs; they illustrate it both negatively and positively. In their own country they have always been a rude and uncultivated people. This was undoubtedly due, if not altogether, at least, in large measure, to the sterility of the soil. But in the seventh century they conquered Persia, in the eighth the better part of Spain, in the ninth the Punjab and eventually the whole of India. "Scarcely were they established in these fresh settlements when their character
80
Possibilities and Prospects of N-Z- Literature
seemed to undergo a great change. These roving savages now for the first time were able to accumulate wealth and so they began to make progress in the arts of civilisation. From being a race of wandering shepherds, in their new abodes they became the founders of mighty empires; they built cities, endowed schools, collected libraries and the traces of their power are still a source of wonder at Cordova, at Bagdad and Delhi.” And so it might be shown of almost every other nation that without a fertile soil, unless there be such a compensating element as the sea, to which I shall refer after a little, it has never developed a great or, indeed, any sort of a literature.
Now it is hardly necessary to show that New Zealand in this respect is happily situated. It has one of the richest and most prolific soils in the world; and a peculiar feature of it is that, owing to climatic conditions, it is also the most varied. Its products range from the tropical and subtropical to the temperate and even the frigid zones. Almost every possible variety of food can be obtained from the land of New Zealand. In the matter of variety as well as fertility it differs from most countries. In the soil of our country, there-
Possibilities and Prospects of N-Z- Literature
81
fore, we have the possibilities of immense wealth, and hence one of the conditions of literature and art.
But along with the soil we must associate climate. You may have a favourable soil but if you have not sufficient sun or rain it counts for little. On the other hand you may have sun or rain but if that on which they fall are rocks or sand or clay the result is the same. When the climate runs into extremes it affects the character of the inhabitants. High temperatures may produce food easily. But where food comes without much effort character deteriorates, the nature becomes languid or voluptuous, usually both. On the other hand where the cold is intense and men have to withdraw from work for long periods of time, as in the far northern latitudes, irregular habits are formed and mind as well as body grow numb and unfruitful. The highest civilisation requires a temperate climate and where there is allied with this a fruitful soil you have the two essential conditions of great wealth.
Now in both these respects New Zealand is remarkable, indeed we might almost say unique. Not only is its soil among the most fertile in the world, but its climate is admirably adapted to
82
Possibilities and Prospects of N.Z■ Literature
develop its soil to the highest degree. Many hard things are said of our climate. We are told for instance that we have no weather here—only samples of weather.
Well let us look at some facts. London is seven degrees colder than the North Island and four degrees colder than the South Island. In regard to the variations between the temperature the difference between the warmest and coldest month in New Zealand is only seventeen degrees, while in Rome it is twenty-seven, in Milan it is thirty-eight, in Jersey twenty-two. The mean annual temperature in New Zealand is about fifty-four degrees.
11.
Now all this has a very pertinent bearing upon our subject. In the first place we live in the most favourable range of the temperate zone, the most favourable, I mean for the production of character as well as wealth. The climate is not too warm to cause us to relax our energies as in most of the Australian colonies. Food does not come too easy to permit us to do away with the necessity of work. It is of such a range as to develop a strenuous and adventurous spirit. Its variability will tend to produce a somewhat different type of
Possibilities and Prospects of N.Z. • Literature
83
character from that of the Briton of the north. In the latter it has been said that the uniform and steady course of Nature has given to the Englishman his calm, his patient energy, his sure command of himself. Where there are sudden changes, where the uniformity of climate is broken into by rapid and frequent variations there will tend to develop a resourcefulness and adaptability which the Old Country inhabitants do not possess. The mind will be quickened and the nature made more eager, more inventive and more nervous by the soft and changeful climate and this will manifest itself in the literature of the future. Another result of our climate will be, especially in the South Island, the preservation of home. Home is a word of the temperate zones. You do not find it in tropical countries. You find houses to sleep in, but not that institution which stirs the heart of the Briton when he hears the old music of "Home Sweet Home.” Where there are no such homes, character loses its strength and flexibility. General Booth was offered land for his oversea colonies in a certain country. He said "No; your summer is too long, your winters too short, your climate too soft.” He was right; and so he declined the offer. Think of the influence of English and Scotch homes on
84
Possibilities and Prospects of N.Z■ Literature
British literature, and how thin and impoverished it becomes if you subtract that factor from it. Well, New Zealand in this respect is most favourably circumstanced. Compare it for instance with Australia; compare its centres of population with Adelaide, Brisbane or Sydney. Here it is summer the greater part of the year. As an Irishman put it "It’s summer in winter.” Life can be lived out of doors, and is so lived. The homes which winter creates are not found there, and so existence is largely divided between business and pleasure. Men run into business to get a living and out of it again as quickly as possible in order to be happy. The heat relaxes energy. Everyone knows that serious study is almost impossible when the sun stands at 70 or 80 degrees for months. Richard Jefferies says: "I can never read in summer out of doors. Human thoughts and imaginings written down are pale and feeble in bright summer light.” And so the race in such a climate will tend to become voluptuous, pleasure-loving, easy-going. Its literature will be largely a literature light and airy, witty and cynical. New Zealand with its longer winter and its realer homes, will produce
Possibilities and Prospects of N.Z. Literature
85
a stronger race physically, intellectually and ethically. In these respects its climate gives it the possibilities that should make it the dominant race in the Southern Hemisphere.
What I am saying finds illustration in another point connected with climate. Pericles, in his famous speech, connects the intellectual qualities of his countrymen with what he calls "the most pellucid air of Attica.” There is no doubt that the atmosphere of a land has a powerful influence in colouring the thoughts of its inhabitants. Take, for instance, Australian poetry. There is hardly a native song in which the note of sadness and world-weariness is not struck again and again. There is no doubt that one of the most potent causes of this is the atmosphere. Ever so many writers have noticed this. We have all felt, I suppose, the experience which Amiel records in his fascinating journal. He asks "Do you know anything of that feeling of sadness and disquietude peculiar to the depth of summer, something that will not let the heart rest in the midst of the fulness that surrounds us?” And so that is one of the great reasons why the literature of a country that is bathed nearly all the year in sunshine is coloured with melancholy, disquietude or despair. Now in New Zealand our climate will
86
Possibilities and Prospects of N.Z■ Literature
not produce literature of that character. It has not the months of high insistent sunshine that pours itself fiercely down on the cities and vast lonely spaces of the Australian continent. It has indeed its sunshine, and, in the northern island at least, the atmosphere is clear, and the temperature high; but as we come south it changes, and these changes break up the monotonous brilliancy which depresses the spirit. They do more. Ruskin reminds us that a great school of landscape art cannot be produced in climates that are intensely bright and brilliant. It requires for its perfection the shifting clouds, and the purple haze and the glamour of trailing mists; and New Zealand is specially rich in these things. Of their immense value as a factor in literature and specially in art. I must refer you to Ruskin’s "Modern Painters” if you would have an adequate idea of all that they imply.
111.
Before I pass from the influence of climate in the sphere of literature, I want to notice one other point. It is obvious that the soil of a country is much more under the power of man than the climate. He can do little in the matter of weather. Storms, rain, heat, cold, these are outside his
Possibilities and Prospects of N.Z• Literature
87
control. But not so the soil. It can be made fertile by man’s labours. He has only to link them to the seasons in due order, and the fruits come naturally, almost necessarily. Now New Zealand is peculiar in both these respects. As a rule the course of both soil and climate proceeds naturally with scarcely an abnormal break from year to year. If man does his duty, he is comparatively sure of a return for his labour. Now the tendency of this is to produce a secular spirit, that is, a spirit which feels itself independent of any power or being outside the natural order of things. If we compare ourselves in this, say with Palestine, we see better the significance of our position. In Palestine, as Principal Sir G. Adam Smith has pointed out in his book "The Historical Geography of the Holy Land,” there is no inevitableness. "Man’s efforts are often mocked by powers quite unexpected and quite beyond his control. Drought, famine, pestilence, plague and other things may break in at any moment and scatter his hopes to the wind. Thus man is driven to go outside the forces which he himself can operate. So the great thinkers of Israel were forced to bring in a Providence into the natural order.” Our settled order is in a sense our peril.
6
Possibilities and Prospects of N.Z■ Literature
88
It tends to create a Hard and undivine method of interpreting life and things. The evil effect of this upon literature I shall have to point out later on.
IV.
Another characteristic of New Zealand which has an immense influence on the literature of a people is that it is an island. Islands have always had an immense influence on the civilisation of the world. They have usually "a milder temperature, a softer vegetation, a richer soil, and a damper air than continents.” They break up humanity into sections. Massed in multitudes man is corrupt. Crowded on the vast plains of the East life grew stagnant and rotted away. The part that islands have played in the evolution of humanity has never yet been fully investigated. How much does the world owe to the "isles of Greece where grew the arts of war and peace”? How much to Patmos, Cyprus, lona, Malta, Lindisfarne and the isles from which we ourselves have sprung? It was on islands, as Dr. Macmillan says, "upon which events began which transformed the world.” And amongst the influence of islands not the least is the sea. New Zealand’s island conformation is like that of Britain in this. No country
Possibilities and Prospects of N.Z• Literature
89
in the South Seas has such a length and variety of coastline as this Dominion. Now the sea influence on literature is very remarkable. How much of our English literature has been created and coloured by the sea? Read, for instance, Mrs. Sharp’s "Sea Music.” There are over two hundred pages into which she collects from English poets a sea anthology, and she has by no means exhausted the subject, and you would be astonished at the extent to which it has moulded our literature. We belong to a race born and bred on the sea. The salt tang of its water is in our blood. I have said that no country that has not a fertile soil can ever produce a great literature. There is one exception to that —Scandinavia. Scandinavia has in the main a niggard land, yet the Scandinavian romantic literature is among the richest in the world. The reason is that Scandinavia has a vast seaboard. Driven off from the inhospitable soil and sombre forests to find a living, the Scandinavians found it on the sea, and so there sprang up a rich poetic literature that has sent its influence pulsing down through the centuries. The sea keeps alive the sense of mystery, of the vast and illimitable. It is this fluid element that gives fluidity to the institutions and opinions of the race. It is only in the great inland regions
90
Possibilities and Prospects of N.Z. Literature
of the world —in central Africa and Asia —that bigotory and inveterate custom have their seat. In these vast regions that never saw the sea, as some one has pointed out, men have lived from age to age without progress or the idea of progress, crushed under despotism and superstition, rooted down like their trees, motionless as their mountains. It was never a Babylon nor a Timbuctoo or any city of the inland regions that was forward to change or improvement. It was Tyre, queen of the sea, a Carthage sending out her ships beyond the pillars of Hercules to Britain and the northern isles, and Athens and Alexandria. These were the seats of art and thought and learning and liberal improvement of every sort. So, too, it was the Italian commercial cities that broke up the dark ages and gave the modern nations that impetus which set them forward in the career of art and literature and liberty. Hence one of the great prospects of New Zealand literature lies here. New Zealand may count amongst its richest assets, that it is a blue cinctured isle, and that round it roll ceaselessly the moving waters at their priest-like task of pure ablution. Its position in this respect in Australasia is quite unique. It stretches through ten degrees of latitude, and its breadth is so
Possibilities and Prospects of N.Z■ Literature
91
narrow that even in its remotest parts its children are never far away from the murmurs and scents of the infinite sea. And so more than any other country of the Southern Hemisphere the Maorilander will have very close to him and his children the wondrous voice of these mighty waters whose steel-bright arm has moved through the centuries like a sweeping scimitar guarding his old Northern home, and whose weird mysterious music, sobs and soars through all the life and literature of the great race from which he sprung. I would have liked to institute a comparison between New Zealand and the two great homes of Art, Italy and Greece. There are many points in common between them, but space will not permit it.
V.
Before I pass from the surroundings of the race there is one other point to which I would like to refer. I have dealt with these surroundings in soil, climate situation; the fourth point is scenery. That might fitly have a whole article to itself. I will content myself with a reference to only one aspect of it. Its great lack is memories. It has no human background. As I have written elsewhere Wakatipu and Wanaka have no Lady of the Lake, no story of "beauty and anguish
6a
92
Possibilities and Prospects of N-Z- Literature
walking hand in hand to death." Manipouri or Te Anau has no Lousanne or Ferney, no Rydal Mount or Rotha stream that " have been the abode of men that unto them bequeathed a name."
The mountains and valleys are vacant of all those heroic records that weave their deathless memories round the Highlands of Scotland or the Alpine passes of Switzerland. Nor have the woods and rivers here any of those histories or legends that give such charm to those of older lands. The Clutha, the Waiau and the Waitaki may have much to attract us, but they have no Coblentz or Ehrenbreitstein on their banks, no Byron or Scott or Wordsworth has yet immortalised them in song. But, perhaps, this comparative absence of memories and human background from our scenery may have its compensations. It may help to lead us to concentrate our thought more and more on what is after all the real subject and inspiration of all great literature, namely the plain "you and me" who are living to-day. It is possible that the Past may overshadow the Present. It has sometimes led old writers to spend their energies over romances, legends and myths that are no help whatever to the life of to-day. Science indeed has swept away these crowds of super-
Possibilities and Prospects of N.Z.. Literature
93
natural and superstitious fancies, fairies, gnomes, ghosts, witches, that have done duty for so long in novels and poetry. Not even the genius of Shakespeare or Scott can keep them alive in this age. What then? Is there nothing left to us? We must not imagine that with the disappearance of these things the great materials that make the substance of literature have gone. They have only changed their form. "I look for ghosts,” says Wordsworth, "but none will force their way to me.” "Ghosts,” says Carlyle, "there are nigh a thousand million of them walking the earth openly at noonday. Some half hundred have vanished from it. Some half hundred have arrived in it ere the watch ticks once.” And so we have in these thousand million ghosts walking the earth at noonday the true and unchanging field for literature. The surroundings of man, soil, climate, sea, air nature —these are great; but they are not the greatest. It is man himself who is that. It is man himself who uses all these as the artist uses his colours, and therefore it is man himself who must ever be the great subject of the greatest literature.
And this man how little he alters. "We wrestle with the old sins,” says George Eliot, "but more decorously, that is all.” We call things by new
94
Possibilities and Prospects of N.Z■ Literature
names, but they are the same old problems with which our fathers dealt. The great river of human life rolls ever to the infinite sea. The particles are constantly changing and passing away but the river is one and continuous. And, so we in this Dominion have just the same human materials to deal with that Shakespeare had or Tennyson or Dickens or Barrie. If we have only the eyes to see them, the characters which move up and down the pages of these writers are living here next door to us all. And so it is good in trying to forecast the possibility of a New Zealand literature to remember that man is the constant factor, and the genius of the future will be the writer that can depict the plain you and me on the background of our surroundings in lines of truth and power. "I ask not,” writes Emerson, "for the great, the remote, the romantic, what is Greek art or Provencal minstrely. Give me insight into to-day, and you may have the antique and the future worlds. What would we really know the meaning of —the meal in the firkin, the milk in the pan, the ballad in the street, the news of the boat, the glance of the eye and form and gait of the body? Show me the ultimate reason of such matters. Show me the sublime presence of the highest spiritual cause lurking, as it always
Possibilities and Prospects of N.Z. • Literature
95
does lurk, in these suburbs and extremities of nature. Let me see every trifle bristling with a polarity that ranges it instantly on an eternal law, and the ship, the plough and the ledger refer to the same cause by which the light undulates and poets sing” —show us these, let us see these, and the new cycle of literature will shame the old.
IV.
And that leads me to the two final thoughts on which I wish to put emphasis. The first of these is the character of our educational system. The bearing of this upon the prospects of literature is so obvious that I need hardly dwell upon it. Up to recently its great defect was that it left no room for specialisation. It proceeded upon the assumption that children were like rows of empty buckets of equal sizes, that they were capable of being filled with equal amounts of ’ologies, and that it was the business of the teacher to perform this office for them. That, of course, was absurd. lam glad to say, however, that we have shaken ourselves free from this idea of mechanical uniformity which was threatening to throttle our best hopes relative to our educational system. But whatever excuse there might have been to retain this old mechanical
96
Possibilities and Prospects of N.Z■ Literature
method in our primary schools there was absolutely none for its continuance in our colleges. What sense could there be in compelling a student to continue grinding for years at a subject which he hated, and which would be no earthly use to him in his after life? There is a second criticism which I offer on education and our educational systems from the standpoint of this essay. They do not do as much as they ought to foster the faculty of observation. Centuries ago John Milton wrote, "I should not them be a persuader to them of studying much there, after two or three years they will have laid their grounds, but to ride out in companies with prudent and safe guides to all quarters of the land, learning and observing all places of strength, all commodities of building for towns and cottages, harbours and ports for trade. These ways will try all their peculiar gifts of nature and if there are any peculiar excellencies in them it would fetch them out.” We have not outgrown the need of Milton’s principle. There is only too good reason to fear that the observing power of our young people is falling into decay. The loss is immense and irreparable. It must seriously affect the future of literature in this country. Observation is the raw material upon which imagination works, and, if it is spoilt,
Possibilities and Prospects of N.Z■ Literature
97
imagination has nothing to act upon. This observing power is the characteristic of all our great writers. They have eyes for everything. Nature and man imprinted themselves upon them down to the minutest details. Let anyone read, say, the books of Richard Jefferies or of John Burroughs and he will discover the wonder of the every-day world which seems so dull to most of us. Or open the writings of Carlyle, for instance, and one is struck with the same thing in regard to human nature. His friend, Irving, once said of him that few have such eyes. Read his Reminiscences, his Biographies, his French Revolution, and you are perpetually marvelling at his observing powers. With a few swift touches he etches the portrait for you, etches it often, it must be confessed, with a dash of vitriol, yet vivid, piercing, unforgettable. For instance, he describes De Quincey as "a pretty little creature, full of wire-drawn ingenuities and bankrupt pride. One of the smallest man figures I ever saw, like a pair of tongs and hardly above four feet in all, and when he sat you would have taken him, by candlelight, for the beautifullest little child, blue-eyed and sparkling-faced, had there not been something which said eccovi! this child has been in hell.” Of Macaulay, whom he
98
Possibilities and Prospects of N.Z■ Literature
met at breakfast, he writes, "a very good natured man, cased in official mail of proof, stood my impatient fire explosions, merely hissing a little steam and continued his Niagara. A great thickset, low-browed, grizzled little man of fifty. All that was in him gone to the tongue,” and so on. The fact is that it is impossible to estimate the value of the observing faculty in literature or recompense a nature that has lost it; and that is what our educational system or educationists should take note of.
V.
And I come to my last point. It was indeed the point on which I intended to be most elaborate and now I must say least about it. The prospects and possibilities of literature here or anywhere else depend in the last resort on the quality of the life. We have seen that New Zealand, in all that pertains to what may be called the body of literature —soil, climate, scenery, sea, occupies quite an unique position. But these are only the raw materials. They are the colours and paint of the artist. But everything depends on the life that uses them. And so the future of literature in this Dominion depends ultimately on the character of those who are to be its citizens. And in
Possibilities and Prospects of N.Z. Literature
99
the character the highest elements are the moral and spiritual. This has been the distinctive feature of English literature. It has been more than artistic or sesthetic. The strong emphasis of the strongest writers have been put on the ethical in life, and the future of literature here can only be forecast by determining the growth of character in this direction. This growth is not so manifest as we could desire. The life into which we are seeking to pour knowledge is not full enough and rich enough to assimilate it and turn it to the highest ends. The question which a great American writer asks regarding his own country may be fitly enough asked regarding ours: "Is not scholarship being wasted by being poured into natures that have no vitality to receive it? Are not our colleges too rich in pedants the failure of whose career lies here. Their manhood or womanhood is dead or only half alive, and so the learning has found no real welcome or digest, and lies in them crude, hard, unsoftened, unsweetened into wisdom. What our colleges need to-day is not more learning for our men and women, but more men and women for our learning.” And so it is not in more education but in more life to receive the education that our hope for a New Zealand literature must ultimately lie. And that
100
Possibilities and Prospects of N-Z- Literature
life must put emphasis, as I have said, on the moral and spiritual. It is to the evolution of this in the national character that we must look for a great national literature to arise, and one great reason for that is this: we have discovered that in every sphere law rules from atoms to universe, but law implies a law-giver. Science is bringing us more and more to express nature not in terms of matter but in terms of force, that is, in terms of will and intelligence and spiritual life. Up till recently we have been taking nature asunder, studying it as dead phenomena, their order and their laws. And so it has come about that for our students the world has lost much of its mystery and it awe. This may account for the decay of the faculty of wonder so noticeable amongst our young people. Nothing surprises them. They are little old men and women who have largely lost the capacity for wonder, and, if so, it is fatal both to the appreciation and the production of literature. "The man who cannot wonder,” says Carlyle, "who does not habitually wonder and worship were he the president of innumerable royal societies, and carried all philosophies and epitomes of laboratories and observatories in his single head is but a pair of spectacles behind which there are no eyes. Let those who
Possibilities and Prospects of N.Z■ Literature
101
have eyes look through them, then he may be useful.” There is a traditional saying of our Lord’s, not recorded in the Gospels, to the effect that "he that wonders shall rule.” History is a remarkable commentary upon that aphorism. That is the peril that besets us here. And it has been largely increased by reason of the scientific conception of nature prevalent a generation ago. But science appears lately about to give us back what it threatened to take away. The new conception of nature and the universe in terms of will, and life, and spirit and intelligence gives a new wonder and mystery to even the very atoms of matter. The literature of the future in this Dominion or elsewhere must lie in the power to interpret the world of men and things in the light of this all persuasive Spirit in "Whom we live and move and have our being.” To do that implies fellowship with Him, and fellowship with Him implies similarity of character. If we are to read Shakespeare intelligently we can do it best only when we have something of the spirit of Shakespeare. If we are to discover and reveal the great underlying laws that rule in the universe of men and things we shall do it best by companionship with the LawGiver. And so along this line we get back again to the supremacy of the moral in character.
102
Possibilities and Prospects of N.Z■ Literature
"Beauty,” says Emerson, "will not come at the call of a legislator, nor will it repeat in England or America its history in Greece. It will come as always unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men. It is in vain we look for genius to reiterate its merits in the old arts. It is its instinct to find beauty and holiness in new and necessary facts, in the field and roadside, in the shop and mill proceeding from a religious mart. It will raise to a divine use, the railroad, the insurance office, the joint stock company, our commerce the galvanic battery, the retort, things in which we seek now only an economic use.” To accept these facts and the like, to see in them the divine light and Life illuminating all as the sun illuminates the cloud that crosses its disc —this will be the function of the literature of the future. And if we are only true to our destiny no country in the world, certainly none in this Southern Hemisphere, offers more literary possibilities and prospects than this Dominion in which a beneficent Providence has cast our lot.
Note. —The Rev. James Burns, M.A., has been supplying in Knox Church, Dunedin, for some nine months. Mr. Burns is a very scholarly and
Possibilities and Prospects of N.Z. Literature
103
cultured gentleman—among his other accomplishments he is an authority on Art, and his lectures on it while in Dunedin have been crowded. I asked him if he would be good enough to read the MSS. of "The Possibilities and Prospects of a New Zealand Literature,” and make any comments that he might desire. He very kindly consented. He wrote me as follows:—
Dear Dr. Waddell, —
Very many thanks for sending me your MS. I have read it carefully and with much pleasure. You have made out a strong and convincing argument, and have stated it with clearness and cogency. Of course there is always the incalculable in human life, the exceptions which refuse to be stratified —the wilderness blossoming as the rose, and the root out of the dry ground. What I discern as the chief danger which is tending to limit self-expression in New Zealand is imitation. Everywhere I find people boasting of the likeness here to things in England, and while that is natural from the side of affection, it is fatal in the realm of creation. I find this stultifying local art, for instance. Artists paint New Zealand landscape with an English bias. That condemns one to the sterility of the hybrid, and there is the same danger —even greater, perhaps—in literature. New
7
Possibilities and Prospects of N.Z■ Literature
104
Zealand —l hope that Ido not appear presumptive —has still to find its own soul, and make its own contribution to the wealth of the world both in national character and genius. No doubt this will come in time, but it is not too soon to have this danger pointed out, and an effort established to free the rising generation from the trammels of the past.”
Yours sincerely,
JAMES BURNS.
This criticism, coming from such a widely read, much travelled man of the world, in the best sense of that term, is very noteworthy.
God as a Bed-maker
VI.
There is a strikingly suggestive statement by an old Hebrew poet in the Forty-first Psalm, "Thou makest all his bed in his sickness.” These are very bold words; and they are very homely. They bid us think of God as what? A maker of beds! It is a wonderfully audacious, but it is also a wonderfully suggestive metaphor. We have had sermons on every possible aspect and activity of God, but has anybody ever read or heard a sermon on God as a maker of beds? Yet if we follow the thought out it goes deep and far. Anyone who has ever been ill knows how refreshing it is to get the bed made, and to get it well made, for it is not everyone can make a bed. You might think it a very simple business till you have tried it, and then, well, it is not so simple as it seems. For a bed is not made by the hand merely, it is made by the heart. Why there are some hands that could not set even a pillow comfortably for you if they tried ever so, and there are others who seem to do it almost without trying. A turn up here, a tap there, a pat yonder and —there you are, as
105
106
God as a Bed-maker
cosy as a bug in a rug. Bed-making is both a science and an art, and it takes love as well as skill to do it properly. But where then does God come in in the business? Where? Everywhere. He is behind it all. God is often obscured from us through the agents He employs, through the secondary causes that do His will. We need to take care that we do not lose the Giver in His gifts. The fruit you had on your table this morning at breakfast, the bread and butter you ate, the fire that burned on your hearth, the blue of the sky, the blush of the flowers. How various these all are? Yet they are not all from various sources. They all have the same origin. They are all subtle transformations of sunbeams. The sun is the source of the whole. It is the sunlight in them that gives vitality to them. So it is with Life’s blessings. God is behind them all as the sun is behind the sunbeam, and men and women in succouring and gladdening one another are but the executive of God, they are but the hands and feet and voice of God distributing thus Himself and His blessings. As Miss Evelyn Underhill puts it in her lovely little poem "Immanence”:
I come in the little things,
Saith the Lord:
God as a Bed-maker
107
My Starry wings
I do forsake,
Love's highway of humility to take:
Meekly I fit my stature to your need.
In beggar's part
About your gates I shall not cease to plead—
As man, to speak with man —
Till by such art
I shall achieve My Immemorial Plan,
Pass the low lintel of the human heart.
And so it is not mysticism but plain truth to say
Thou makest all his bed in his sickness.
***** But there is a far deeper and far profounder sense in which this may be affirmed. I have already said that we do not sleep on a palliasse or a pillow, we sleep on thought, on hope, on love and sympathy, on memory, on expectation. A great dramatist says "uneasy lies the head that wears the crown." Though crowned heads can have cushions in abundance, and the most comfortable beds that skill can construct, yet sleep "that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care" cannot be induced to come. Why? Because the fountains of sleep are within us and not without us. When we are free from care, when the conscience is
7a
108
God as a Bed-maker
unstained and the heart unwrung then "weariness can snore upon the flint,” and the thought of God as a bed-maker is both unknown and unneeded. A boy was going to bed one night. His mother said to him, "Tommy you have forgotten something.” "No,” he said, "I have not.” "Oh!” she said, but lam sure you have.” He replied, "No, I am sure I have not. I am not going to say my prayers to-night, and I am not going to say them to-morrow night, and I am not going to say them the night after, and, if everything goes well, I am not a-going to say them never again no more.” There is a lot of human nature about boys; and this boy is father to the man. When all goes right with us and we are strong and well and prosperous we can do without prayer and do without God. But God cannot do without us any more than we can do without Him —when we are come to our senses. And what brings us to our senses? God takes us aside, hides us in the shadow of His hand, constrains us to lie down in bed and be quiet, says to us, "Think, think.” As Victor Hugo puts it in "Les Miserables,” a man "is compelled to repeat to himself things he desires to be silent about, and to listen to what he does not wish to hear, yielding to that mysterious power which says to him, think. One can no
God as a Bed-maker
109
more prevent the mind from returning to an idea than the sea from returning to a shore. With the sailor this is called the tide; with the guilty it is called remorse. God upheaves the soul as well as the ocean.” Memory begins to work and sends us to do business in deep waters, and the deepest of these waters is the sea of the past and out of that past there rises the vision of error, wrongdoing, sin. It’s a troubling vision. It sits heavy on the soul. Sins and sin, sins as acts, and behind these, sin as a state of nature, how they stain through all the wan and wasted years, like the crimson blotches we see in the autumn days eating as a cancer into the face of the summer’s dead. If a man cannot lay the ghost of the past that haunts every sick bed there will be no rest for him. And yet it is not in man’s power to do that. Here we come to the last limit of human help. It may go far with us but it stops when challenged with the sins and guilt of the past. In one of his poems Will Carleton tells a touching incident. It was an old settlers’ reunion. The oldest pioneer was asked to relate his story. He spoke of the hardships, goodfellowships, ups and downs of the early days. Then he said "I remember coming home one night late from work, hungry, tired. Supper was wrong and other things. I went out
110
God as a Bed-maker
to milk; the cows had wandered away. In a rage I said to my wife 'Why did not you keep the animals in view and drive them in—you have nothing else to do'? That speech wasn't gone half a minute before I saw the cold black poison in it"; and he would have given all he had and more to have gotten it safely back. Then he told how he and she had gone out in search of the cattle. During his absence she returned, put a little note on the table, said she was sincerely sorry, said she hears the cow bells.
So piece out with love the strength I seem to lack, And, if you can, have a kind word for me when I come back.
That night a big storm spilt into the valley, she made a mis-step and fell into the ravine, managed to crawl home and died on the doorstep—that doorstep of which he had said when he put it in "When she crosses it, it would be not a log cabin, but the ante-room of heaven." He was out all night in the storm calling her name. He came back and found her dead on the doorstep. He said "It is amazing how a man will be a fool in the way in which he speaks to people whom he loves." Then the old settler paused, seemed to forget for a moment the audience about him was away back at the other end of his fifty years, and his frail bodv
God as a Bed-maker
111
was all of a-tremble as he cried out "here I am what everybody would call well-to-do, but oh! this night I'd give it all
'lf somehow I, through fifty years, could reach And kill and bury that half-minute speech.' "
***** Of course he would, but he couldn't. There are some things you cannot wipe off the slate once you write them there, for they are not written on a slate at all. They are written with an iron pen and graved in the rock forever. Now it is that we come to realise that it is God that must make the bed for us or we are lost; and He does it. It is here and now also that we come to realise the value of Christ's work. It may have lain outside our experiences before, but it enters them now with a wondrous power. Christianity has been called "the religion for midnight." The soul has its midnights as well as Nature, and the deepest of these midnights is that which swirls up out of our past, out of its selfishness, its lovelessness, its sins, its guilt, its remorse. But if Christ brings us to God, the morning breaks; and that is just what He does. For the soul that takes Him on trust that past becomes as if it had never been. It is an amazing thought. Were it not down in black and white,
112
God as a Bed-maker
were it not sealed by the blood of the Son of God and verified by the experiences of multitudes it would be unbelievable; for neither human science nor human philosophy give any hint of it. If these speak at all it is of the inexorableness of the past; it is of the impossibility, in the natural order of things, of forgiveness or the blotting out of sin:
Blood for blood and blow for blow,
Thou must reap as thou didst sow,
Age to age with hoary wisdom
Preaches thus to men.
Sin, they tell us, is an organic part of ourselves. Just as the scar in the flesh never disappears so the scar on the soul is immortal. Moreover our sins are deposited in the memory of the universe. "The earth has registered the passionate step —the air has vibrated to the profane word—the sun has taken the imprint of the flash of rage in the eye — the atmosphere has become an immense gramophone ready to whisper and reproduce every word and deed that we have ever done. 'He shall call to the heavens above and to the earth beneath that He may judge His people.' " And, more permanent than all, our lives lie within the very thought and being of God. The earth shall be burned up and the heavens rolled together as a scroll, but we and the eternal God remain. He cannot forget us
God as a Bed-maker
113
though we may, for a brief time, forget Him. But He holds us in perpetual remembrance and will make us conscious of that sometime. How then can sin ever be forgotten or forgiven? Well, the Bible, and the Bible only, says it can be both. Over and over again it affirms that. Take a concordance and look up the words forget and forgive. "Thou shalt forget the shame of thy youth,” "I will forgive their iniquity and I will remember their sin no more,” "I, even I, that blotteth out their transgressions will not remember thy sin.” Blotted out, taken away, forgotten, cast into the sea of forgetfulness, remembered no more, so the words run on and over, repeating themselves in every form and metaphor. Does it seem incredible that God should forget, that we should forget? Does it seem immoral that we should have our past made as if it were a clean slate? On what ground does God forgive us? Is it on the ground of our repentance? But how is repentance possible? To repent truly and adequately we would need to know sin truly and adequately. But that is just what we cannot do, for we are sinners and the children of a sinful race; and sin blunts the sensibility, destroys our power of knowing it. Moreover, as I have said it spreads out far beyond us, becomes part of the universe staining it to all
God as a Bed-maker
114
eternity. Repentance indeed there must be, but it is not the ground of forgiveness, it is the fruit of it. Is our forgiveness then out of the goodness of God’s heart, out of His Mercy? But would that satisfy us ? Would that still our own conscience? George Macdonald suggests an answer in Wilfred Cumbermede "Do you know, Wilfred, I once shot a little bird —for no good reason, but just to shoot at something. I knew it was wrong, yet I drew the trigger. It dropped, a heap of ruffled feathers; I shall never get that little bird out of my head. And the worst of it is that, to all eternity, I can never make any atonement.” "But God will forgive you, Charley!” "What do I care for that,” he rejoined almost fiercely "when the little bird cannot forgive me?” But suppose it is not a little bird, but a human soul that we have injured or destroyed. Suppose we have wronged another, stained the life, or broken the heart. Would it be enough if the injured person should say to us, "Well, never mind, I forgive. I won’t think of it, it will never come between us.” Would that be enough? No, you would be a sneak and a poltroon if you could forgive and forget yourself. The very generosity of our friend’s forgiveness would be our deepest shame. And how then in our
God as a Bed-maker
115
relation to God? Even if God did forget and forgive our sins out of pure good nature, would that quiet the conscience? Should we feel any ease unless there were some adequate atonement, or some reparation made on our side? No, we would not. To say that God can forgive and, therefore, He will without any atonement, but simply out of mere benevolence or goodwill would be to say that God can forget law and right and His pure holy self-respect not to speak of our own holy self-respect. God does not forgive our sin by a mere motion of the hand, or an act of His omnipotence; He has found a holier, a sublimer, a more incredible way of staining our sins in their crimson guilt, and then washing out the stain by blood. It is the way of the Cross. His forgiveness and forgetfulness of sins take issue there. In the Cross, in Christ the sin of the believer is confessed and atoned for as it could be in no other way; for Christ is no third party standing as it were between God and man. He is humanity offering in its name that confession of sin which it was unable to make, and without which forgiveness, both its own and God’s was impossible. And He is also God providing the atonement which God’s holiness as well as man’s own sense of guilt and right demands. In view of all this there remains no
116
God as a Bed-maker
more sacrifice for sin, there remains no more need that God should charge our sins a second time against us, nor that we should continue to be bound down by their guilt. What God does He does forever. Once in Christ we are in Him for everything. God looks on us and takes us to Himself as we are in the Saviour which He has provided. "There is, therefore, now no condemnation of them who are in Christ Jesus."
Say nothing of pardon, the darkness has gone,
Shall pardon be asked by the night of the sun?
No word of the past, of the future no fear
’Tis enough my beloved, to know thou art here.
So God brings home His exiles through Christ. This is the gospel of the grace of God. This was the truth that so amazed the New Testament writers. They cannot find word to express their astonishment at it. The commonplaces of joy and thankfulness stammer on the lips with the sudden shame of their own ineptitude. "Oh the depth of the riches, both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God. How unsearchable are His judgments and His ways past finding out. Our pardon and justification in Christ—that is the pillow that supplies the only rest for the uneasy conscience and the sick soul. How many have laid their heads upon it and have found not peace merely, but
God as a Bed-maker
117
rapture! " It has let loose the floodgates of song for twenty centuries and more. Only God in Christ can make the bed on which we can lie down untroubled by the ghosts of the past, and unhaunted by its shame and sin.
But there is more than that —More than the past. The present is here and the future is to come. The present, it emerges out of the past. Our sins of yesterday make the complications of to-day. The bills come in and will have to be paid. That is all true, but it is not all the truth. "What has happened," says Sir Robertson Nicol, "is that you and God meeting at the Cross have become friends." He is yours and you are His in Christ. And what then? Well then you are not alone for the rest. Once in Christ you are in Him for everything; for pardon, for power, for peace, and for victory in the present; for He is nothing outside us that He is not one day to be within us. You may have to meet the evil results of past misdoings, but you do not meet them by yourself. God and you together face them, and "if God be for us who can be against us?"
Art thou afraid His power shall fail
When comes the evil day?
118
Cod as a Bed-maker
Or can an all creating arm
Grow feeble or decay?
That for the day —for the present. And for to-morrow and the future? Shadows, many no doubt, and last and deepest of all "the shadow feared of man." "She was running a race with a shadow," writes George Meredith, of "Diana of the Crossways." "It ran in a shroud." We are all running that race. Comes the day when the trite common-place we must all die changes into the acute conscious "I must die, and that soon." And Death grips us and his fingers are relentless. It is the day when the doctor says he can do no more and goes away, and slippered feet will move silently about the room, and a strange hush will pervade the house, and the doors shall be shut in the streets, and the sunlight shall fall on the sick bed, but dull unnoticed there, "for they that look out of the windows are darkened. The cistern wheel moves discordant on its axis, the golden bowl is breaking, life like a spent steed is panting towards the goal." A strange weird lonely day is that. We have come to the last boundary line that divided the seen from the unseen. The old familiar things are growing dim and unreal to us. There is a "fluttering of weak hands upon the quilt where the trembling fingers pluck aimlessly
God as a Bed-maker
119
at the invisible blossoms of death." The mind wanders away into those dim vast spaces where we have so often gazed in wonder and awe —the invisible unplumbed, countless worlds wheeling above us and below. We are dismayed perhaps. Where are we going? Who shall receive us? What is our place or home? —there where time and space have become mere phantoms of the mind. And we feel so poor, so helpless, so forlorn as we confront that awful silence.
Just like a child in ocean's arms
We strive against the stream,
Each moment further from the shore
Where Life's young fountains gleam,
Each moment fainter wax the fields,
And wider rolls the sea.
The mist grows dark, the sun goes down
Day breaks and where are we?
"Let not your heart be troubled ye believe in God believe also in me in my Father's House are many mansions, I go to prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you unto myself that where lam there shall ye be also. Thou makest all His bed in His sickness." Here again in the last great crises of life this only can be the pillow for the aching head; for those to whom it has been Christ to live He is with them at the end. He wraps
8
God as a Bed-maker
120
them in a warm mist of dreams, dreams that are supreme realities. It matters not though the couch be poor or mean or hard. What bed could be that if God be its maker? We recall old Uncle Tom, in Mrs. Beecher Stowe’s great story. He had been flogged almost to a pulp, and then kicked out to die in an old garret on a heap of straw. Some friends crept in to see him. Their hearts sickened. Their voices trembled, the ears of the dying man caught it. He moved his head, gently smiled and said:
Jesus can make a dying bed
Feel soft as downy pillows are,
Yes! that is so. "I die,” said one of the old Puritans, "resting on covenants, and promises and blood.” That is the only pillow for the dying head. There is no other that will enable it to he softly and securely in the last mortal agony. To all such the old promise is fulfilled "when thou passest through the waters I will be with thee, and the rivers they shall not overflow thee.” And so the faithful, humbly yet fearlessly, take His preferred hand and go forth with Him.
On to the bound of the waste
On to the City of God.
After Fifty Years
VII.
I have had some difficulty in selecting a suitable subject on which to speak this evening. This one laid hold on me. It is in the second letter of John: "Every one that presseth forward is advanced and abideth not in the doctrine of Christ hath not God," or, as he says in the first letter, "hath not even the Father." "He that abideth in the doctrine hath both the Father and the Son."
What was it led St. John to write these words, to write, in fact, these three letters of his? Summed up in one word it was Gnosticism. What was Gnosticism? It was a mixture of Jewish mysticism, Oriental thought, Platonic philosophy and Christianity. It is impossible to give a detailed statement of its tenets here. For our purpose it will be enough to say, that its problem was the age long one —how to account for evil. God is the absolute Holy, the absolute Good, yet there is evil in the Creation. How did it get in? Gnosticism was led to postulate a series of emanations from God Himself. The
121
122
After Fifty Years
first of these had a little less of His divinity, the second a little less than the first, and so on down a descending series till at last contact with matter is made and creation ensues. What were the consequences of this teaching? First, theologically, it removed God far away beyond any direct approach of men. Access to Him was only to be had by means of these emanations, or aeons, or angels, that formed the connecting link between man and God. Second, it did away with the Incarnation; Christianity taught the real humanity of Christ, that He was God manifest in the flesh. Gnosticism got rid of this difficulty by asserting that the divine spirit that dwelt in Christ was not very God, that it was only one of the many emanations from the supreme Deity, that even this emanation only descended on Him at His baptism and left Him at His crucifixion. Hence Gnosticism denied that Christ was the Eternal Word of God under the limitations of flesh and time. With that denial went also His atoning death on the cross, His Resurrection and Ascension. These were the theological implication of this creed. But when your theology goes wrong your ethics will not long remain right, so the ethics of Gnosticism branched out into two main directions.
After Fifty Years
123
[a] Since the flesh or matter was the source of all evil then it must be curbed and crucified. Everything that pampered it must be cut off. Hence many retired from the world altogether, lived as ascetics and hermits, not washing even the body or the face.
( b) At the other extreme there were those who said since it is the spirit alone that can sin we can do what we like with the body. So they gave themselves up to all manner of licentiousness.
Now there is nothing more surprising than the recrudescence of old evils. We wrestle with the old sins only more decorously. The devil may be a good tactician but he is a poor general. He has new baits but never improves on the old traps. And so our age to-day is face to face with practically the same problems that beset the Christian Church in Ephesus in the days of St. John and St. Paul. We see some of them incarnated in a system which teaches that the highest type of holiness is ascetism, retiring from the world, refusing marriage and home life, and like Gnosticism, interposing a series of intermediaries between the soul and God. And so, on the one hand, between the sleepless activities of those who hold these doctrines, and on the other the ignorance and indifference of Protestantism evangelical
8a
After Fifty Years
124
Christianity is in danger of being ground to powder. It looks as if before long the battle of the Reformation will have to be fought over again.
At the opposite extreme from these is a philosophy which maintains that the body has its rights. Years ago Emerson asked "Has Christianity saddled and bridled us?" The answer of this school of philosophy is that it has. It refuses to be saddled and bridled. It asserts that the sensual part of it is as real as the mental and should be allowed full liberty. It repudiates the morality of Christianity and claims freedom for men and women to live out their full lives of the senses equally with the soul just as their nature dictates. And this philosophy has its novelists and its poets who are making its doctrines current coin for the masses. Then again we have our friend the Spiritualists and the Theosophists who are essentially the lineal descendants of the Gnostics of St. John's day. They discrown Christ. They say He is not the Eternal Word of God but only one of the many leaders and teachers sent forth from time to time to educate the world into the knowledge of Deity. There is just enough of truth in their doctrine to float their errors and make them dangerous. Dr. Stanley Jones, in his "Christ at the Round Table," says
After Fifty Years
125
that, "while theosophy has a great deal to its credit in India, it has set back real progress for decades. What India needs (and it is just as true for us here), most desperately is for the windows to be thrown open. But theosophy, instead, is spraying perfumed words and misty occult phrases into a poisoned atmosphere making it doubly poisonous.” Thus we see how in this age we are face to face with essentially the same errors and evils that were rampant in Ephesus and all the World of the days both of St. John and St. Paul.
What does St. John say about these heresies? How does he meet them? He meets them first of all by asserting what he calls "the doctrine of Christ.” What is the doctrine of Christ? It is not the doctrine about Christ. It is the doctrine that Christ brought and taught about Himself. What was that doctrine? Volumes have been written on it. Time will permit me to do little more than mention one or two of its cardinal features.
First, Christ, as St. John puts it, is the Eternal Word of God. That is to say He reveals to us in time the essential Deity. "No man hath seen God at any time the only begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father He hath declared Him.” God never thought anything or did
126
After Fifty Years
anything except through Christ. Christ is the Creator of the universe. It lives in and by Him. "All things were made through Him and without Him was not anything made that was made.” He is the fountain-head of every subtle force in Nature, so that science interpreting its laws, and poetry singing its beauty are but revealing His thought and presence there. It is He also Who conducts the march of human history. As Professor Strong, in his "Christ and Creation” puts it, "He is the author, subject and end of the Old Testament revelation. The New Testament is simply His emergence from behind the scenes where He has been invisibly managing the drama of human history to take visible part in the play, to become the leading actor in it, and to bring it to its denouement.” The appearance of the incarnate crucified, risen, ascended but everpresent Christ gives us not only the interpretation of the material universe but also the key to human history and human destiny. And so it may be rightly and truly said that as long as philosophers and scientists refuse to acknowledge this, "the humblest Christian who does knows more of the real secret and cause of the universe than they do.”
After Fifty Years
127
11.
So here we come to the parting of the ways. Christianity has a philosophy but it is not a philosophy; it is first and last a gospel. And it is a gospel because its sublime central Figure is "God manifest in the flesh.” This is a stupendous truth. It staggers the reason and yet to reject it is more staggering still. For look at some of the implications that it would involve.
(a) It is a universal law of nature that "the elevation of an animal or man is measured by the degree by which sacrificial love for others controls them.” If this law extends to God, then the Cross is the natural and logical sequence of it. If it does not, then man is higher than God and must reserve his honours and worship for those who most fully fulfil this law. So we lose the assurance that God is sacrificial love.
( b ) If Christ were only one of ourselves growing out of a sinful human stock instead of arriving here from the Eternal, then the further we recede from Him the dimmer He grows. If He is only a man who died nineteen centuries ago, then He becomes the Christ of the historic student and not the Saviour of the sinner. Thus we lose ultimately even Christ Himself.
128
After Fifty Years
(c) Further, if He be only one of ourselves, what becomes of the Fatherhood of God? St. John says it also goes. Christ’s Cross then becomes a martyrdom instead of a manifestation of the love that is eternal. It is a ghastly tragedy of delusion and not the assurance that a Father is there, and thus, taking on Himself the sorrows and sins of His blind and bewildered children. We have then no sure guarantee that righteousness and love sit on the throne of the universe and will one day be Lord of all.
( d) Further, St. John says that if we abandon the "doctrine of Christ,” it practically means the loss of God also, that is, the loss of God save as perhaps a dim abstract first Cause —an abstraction which has hardly as much influence on a man’s conduct as a belief in ghosts. The late Archbishop of Ireland, in his "Commentary on the Epistles of St. John,” illustrates what I mean by reference to a writer to whom, in literary and ethical things, I am under the deepest obligation, "George Eliot.” The story of her religious development is told in her biography. She began her religious life as an ardent evangelical Christian. In later years, after her father’s death, she went to live with a family who were practically atheists. Under their influence, aided by the translation of
After Fifty Years
129
Strauss’s "Life of Jesus,” which she had undertaken, she came to Strauss’s conclusion that there was no historic basis for the gospels. They were mostly legends and myths. But the Christ ideal she thought would still survive to influence the world. She could not stop there, however. She ultimately came to the conclusion that the idea of a personal God was but the creation of man’s own mind under the stress of sorrows, dreams and fears. But, as in the case of Christ, the ideal would still remain as an inspiration of man just as the parable of the Good Samaritan remains a truth, though not a historic fact. But once Christ and God are thus resolved into the stuff of which dreams are made, no basis is left for a future life. We are immortal only in the good or evil influence we communicate to those who come after us. That is "The Choir Invisible” of which she sings, whose music is to be the gladness of the world. Thus she verifies the truth of St. John: "Whosoever progresseth, advanceth beyond the doctrine of Christ hath not God.” But she is only one of a multitude who in these days hold similar views. They are woven up into a very widespread and subtle philosophy and are being made current coin for the masses in magazine articles and by great and popular novelists. Their method is "to
130
After Fifty Years
separate the sentiments of admiration which the history inspires from the history itself, to sever the ideas of the faith from the facts of the faith, and then to present the ideas thus surviving as at once the refutation of the facts and a substitute for them.”
A substitute for them! Yes, they may be for a time; but listen to me, a substitute is not an equivalent. Your electric light here may be a substitute for the sun, but an equivalent? No fear. Ask Byrd and his daring explorers in the Antarctic regions who to-day are watching the sun slowly disappearing from their sky and they will tell you that the electric light is even a poor substitute, but as an equivalent it is ridiculous. Why, it owes its own very existence to the sun.
(e) One other thing may be mentioned if Christ and the God He manifests are lost, what becomes of the world’s progress? What guarantee have we that we are not headed for the pit? We hear much now-a-days about progress, about advanced thought, about the great future that lies before the human race. Real progress demands for its beneficent success a starting point and a goal. Science is hunting among monkeys or groping in the slime to find a starting point of life and man. It is quite within its rights in so doing.
After Fifty Years
131
I’ve no objection to that at all, except that it does not put the starting point far enough back. The Bible says that the starting point of life was in life, not in matter, or in monkeys, but in the thought of the God Whom Jesus finally reveals. And its goal is a return to Him transfigured into His life and likeness. We hear little of this kind of evolution in the talk of the science of to-day; yet apart from such a faith civilisation is but assembling the materials of its own destruction. We are told of the wonderful mechanical advances. To be sure applied science can give us many great and good things. But it can also give us bullets and bombs, battleships and poison gases, that can wipe out centuries of civilisation in twenty-four hours.
As I look out from my balcony across the Bay I see here and there houses hiding themselves in the hollows and heights of the hillside. Foreshortened in the distance each house looks so small you fancy you could cover it with your thumb. And within these houses are little mites of beings that are called men and women and children. So insignificant are they that I cannot distinguish them at this short distance with the naked eye. Then at night I look up to the sky with its myriads of wheeling worlds —worlds so far off that light
After Fifty Years
132
travelling at eleven million miles a minute has not reached us yet though it has been travelling for tens of thousands of years; worlds also so vast in size that this little globe of ours compared with them is not as big as a pin head. And then I think of the long generations that have preceded ours and have drifted away on the great stream of things emptying itself into oblivion. And in a few years we too, you and I, shall join that vast procession of the forgotten dead. What has become of them all? What will become of us? Is there any end worthy of all the pain and toil and devotion of these vast myriads who come and go on this tiny earth of ours? Is there any sure and suitable goal towards which progress is moving over the dying generations with leaden feet? And, if there be, are those only who arrive there last to share its blessedness and rejoice in its glories? Is there to be no compensation for those silent generations whose dead bodies have paved the way for progress to march to its triumph? and even for those who attain that far off golden age what will it all matter in the end? For does not science assure us that one day this earth of ours is to be a burnt-out cinder like the moon, and all its living freight buried in a grave over which never breaks an Easter dawn? Is history thus,
After Fifty Years
133
as Principal Forsyth puts it, to be like a lucifer match whose brief end grows quick and warm and luminous with life only, however, to flicker out swiftly into the primeval dark? Apart from the revelation of God in Christ there are no sure answers to this question. Thus we see the tremendous issues at stake in the solution of this problem. Thus we understand the immense reasonableness of St. John’s warning "take care, watch yourselves.” Thus we realise something of the imperative need of his urging: "little children abide in Him.”
111.
"Abide” —that is the key-word of all St. John’s writing. He uses it twenty-three times in these three letters and thirty-five times in his gospel. He learnt it from his Master, Christ. Abide! What is it to abide? Well, negatively, it is at any rate not to go flirting about with every new doctrine and every new fancy religion that comes around, offering its magic pills for earthquakes. Positively, Christ likens it to a branch of a tree as in His parable of the vine. Obviously that union does not narrow the branch’s life. On the contrary, it secures it, it vitalises it, it enriches it, it empowers it. The branch vitally joined in the
134
After Fifty Years
tree reaches out and gathers sustenance from every thing that comes in its way —the dawn, and the dew, the sunshine and the shadow, the storms of winter and the summer sun —it takes hold of them all and transforms them into food and strength and beauty. And so the life that abides in Christ is not a stereotyped, static, stunted thing for, observe, it is not the abiding in catechisms or creeds. It is the abiding in a person, and this Person at once the man of Nazareth and the Lord of the universe, the Christ of the Cross and the King of Glory. Catechism and creeds remain the same; they do not change from age to age. But union with a life such as this has the guarantee of endless growth. Like the branch in the tree it can reach out and turn everything that comes its way into wealth and power for itself —joys and sorrows, ups and downs, loss and gain, new thought and old thought, scientific progress and philosophic discoveries —all can be made to feed the life abiding in Christ. It can gather riches out of them all, and it will have skill to detect the false or transmute into good and gain.
How is this abiding secured? Here are two lovers; their lives are as one; they abide in each other. Why? Because of their love for each other. Love creates, colours, controls and con-
After Fifty Years
135
tinues the abiding. And here is Christ, "abide in me,” He says. Love must be prior to the abiding; and it is kindled at the Cross. As you sang a little ago:
Inscribed upon the Cross we see,
In flaming letters "God is Love,”
He brings us mercy from above.
He bears our sins upon the tree,
But the love of gratitude is not the loftiest or the most lasting sort of love. Christ must be loved not merely for what He has done but for what He is in Himself. The love of the Cross must complete itself in the love of the character: so the abiding will have root and fruit.
And what next? I may put it in a little poem of Alice Meynell’s of which I was reminded in a friend’s letter last week:
Home, home from the horizon far and clear,
Hither the soft winds sweep,
Flocks of the memory of the day draw near
The dove-cote doors of sleep.
Oh! which are they that come through sweetest light
Of all these homing birds?
Which with the straightest and the sweetest light?
Your words to me, your words.
e
136
After Fifty Years
That's it. "If you love me keep my commandments." "If ye abide in me and my words abide in you." You know how lovers read their loveletters, ponder them, turn their words over and over in their minds, and march to the music of them. So the lovers of Christ abide in His words and His word in them. But you say "we have only got a few of them, and they don't meet the needs of this new time." Of course, and why? Because He never intended to be away. Plato long ago complained about the unsatisfactoriness of written words. He said that if you went to ask them anything they just look at you stiff and silent from the page. "They always need their father to help them out." Well, that is just what we have in Christ's words. Their Father is always present. He is present not only to illuminate the words of the past but to give us the needful ones for the present hour. "Lo, lam with you all the days." Here is the difference between what Principal Forsyth calls a dead and a living faith. A living faith is not a faith in prepositions or creeds or doctrines; nor even in an historic Christ who once lived and died on this earth. It is faith
After Fifty Years
137
in this same Christ now on the throne of the universe, but ever present in and with His people, establishing through them His kingdom and leading all things on to the hush of Eternity and the triumph of God.
Science has its finalities —its axioms without obedience to which it cannot progress. So has religion. And religious finality is the historic Christ, but also the living ever-present Christ alike for this age and all the ages that are to come. Take care, watch that you fail not in His abiding, that you lose not what you have gained.
Abide. It was Christ's farewell words to His disciples the last night He was with them. He was a young man for
Not a golden hair was grey
Upon his crucifixion day.
Abide. It was St. John's farewell words to his beloved converts. He is now an old man. He has made trial of life and faith, and this is his final word to them: "Abide in Him." May I appropriate it as mine to you? It is fifty years to-day since I preached my first sermon here as your minister. This may probably be my last to you. How briefer and better can I give its message to you?
After Fifty Years
138
Youth embarks with a thousand sails on the ocean waves;
Age draws silently home in the one little boat that saves.
I can think of no fitter message for you and myself than these words of my text. Almost the last poem that ever Tennyson wrote is entitled "God and the Universe." He contemplates the universe with its deeps and heights, with its rush of suns and systems and he wonders what in the world, amid all these, will be the fate of his tiny speck of being. Then taking his faith and courage in both hands he says:
Spirit nearing yon dark portal at the limit of the human state,
Fear not thou the hidden purpose of that Power which alone is great.
Nor the myriad worlds his shadow, nor the silent Opener of the gate.
What is it dispels that fear? Its faith in Him who in an earlier poem he calls "strong Son of God, Immortal Love." Apart from this assurance life would be a tragedy and death an inexplicable doom. There is a story told of Carlyle. Once in France he was passing what one often sees there
After Fifty Years
139
—a wayside crucifix. He stopped, gazed for a moment at the thorned-crowned figure upon it, then said with a touch of pity in his voice, "Aye, poor fellow, your day’s up now.” If it is, woe-be-tide us all. Ah! but it is not so. His day is just beginning, and the reason for this may be found in a later saying of the old Chelsea sage. Years pass, sorrows overwhelm him; his wife died and the sun went out of his heavens. He is an old man waiting in the gloom for "the silent opener” of the gate. Someone quoted to him the familiar words, "let not your heart be troubled; ye believe in God believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many mansions, if it were not so I would have told you. Igo to prepare a place for you.” Carlyle said, "Aye, if you were God you had a right to say that, but if you are only man what do you know more than the rest of us?” Yes that’s it. But the Christian faith is that He who spake these words spake them out of the very heart of God —a last message of courage and comfort, for His believers as life draws to its close and they confront the silent opener of the gate.
140
After Fifty Years
Fifty years ago at the evening service here I preached from St. Paul’s words "be not thou therefore ashamed of the testimony of Jesus but be thou partakers of the afflictions of the gospel according to the power of God.”
So wrote the old apostle from his Roman prison to his young disciple and preacher. They were among his last words. And St. John says that one of the consequences of our abiding in Christ is that we "shall have boldness and not be ashamed before Him and His coming." He means, says Dr. Rendell Harris that "when we see Him again, as we all hope to do, we shall not need to be introduced as those who have forgotten one another, or have made a faint impression upon one another. We shall meet as those who never parted and so shall we ever be with the Lord." And so if this indeed is to be my last message to you let it be in the words of my text. In this age of drift of progression, of so-called advanced thought, take care that you lose not what you have gained. "He that goeth forward and abideth not in the doctrine of Christ hath not God. He that abideth in the
After Fifty Years
141
doctrine hath both the Father and the Son.” That is the only possession that will give you the victory which overcometh the world and will be with you after
The stars are old
And the sun is cold
And the leaves of the judgment book unfold.
Permanent link to this item
https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/books/ALMA1929-9917503883502836-Memories-and-hopes
Bibliographic details
APA: Waddell, Rutherford. (1929). Memories and hopes. N.Z. Bible and Book Society.
Chicago: Waddell, Rutherford. Memories and hopes. Wellington, N.Z.: N.Z. Bible and Book Society, 1929.
MLA: Waddell, Rutherford. Memories and hopes. N.Z. Bible and Book Society, 1929.
Word Count
28,733
Memories and hopes Waddell, Rutherford, N.Z. Bible and Book Society, Wellington, N.Z., 1929
Using This Item
Out of copyright (New Zealand)
To the best of the National Library of New Zealand’s knowledge, under New Zealand law, copyright in this book has expired.
You can copy this item, share it, and post it on a blog or website. It can be modified, remixed and built upon. It can be used commercially. If reproducing this item, it is helpful to include the source.
For further information please refer to the Copyright guide.
Log in