THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS: SHAME

Evening Star, Issue 19550, 7 May 1927, Page 2

THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS: SHAME

Adversity brings strange bedfellows, 'good, bad, and indifferent. The Pil-grim's-passage through the Valley of Humiliation gave him a valued friend— Faithful. He, too, had been through the valley. They compared notes of their experiences. Faithful’s were different from Christian’s. The enemies he encountered were not of the wild, weird type which bese’- the Pilgrim They were of the much more commonplace, everyday sort. Ho knew nothing of Apollypn or of the sightless fiends and infernal things that beset the Pilgrim. His, as we say, are of a more homely sort, such as are peculiar to the average man and woman. Mention is made of four of them —Wanton, Adam the First, Discontent, and Shame. Long after Groatheart described these as “four of as dreadful villains as any man could meet on the road.’’ They are on the road still. In one form or another, we have all to encounter them. We have already written of the first of them—Waaton. Time will not allow us to refer to the second and third. But w© cannot omit the fourth one—Shame.

Shame was the last of the tempters that Faithful encountered. After that “ I had sunshine all the way through.” Shame still haunts the highways of life. In his work on ‘The Criminal’ Havelock Ellis says that inability to blush has always been a mark of the criminal, as it is also of the idiot and the insane. Rnt it is a function, and a very curious one, of the average person. Shame reminds us that evil is good perverted. Covetousness, e.g., is love turned the wrong way; hate is passion misdirected; blasphemy is worship that has lost the sense of the Divine, and so on. Shame k essentially a noble attribute. It is a sort of conscience to scare us from evil and meanness. The Shame which Faithful encounters is the same attribute cut loose from its proper moorings and become “procuress to the lords of hell." A writer tells that he heard the master of a naok of otter hounds relating sonic* fif his adventures. Amongst other things the latter said he had onc«> taken the hounds to hunt for otter just below Morpeth ■ (England). Trustworthy witnesses declared they had heard several otters there the night before, but the enterprise was futile because the sev/age that poured into the river made the scent imnossible. The cunning and eager hounds were baffled That was no reflection upon them. And so of Shame. It is a noble quality of the nature, but it is often thrown out of its proper use by some and unworthy motive. Its powers for good are neutralised by the atmosphere which it is often made to breathe. It blushes at things which it should welcome. and welcomes things that if it were doing its duty would cause it to go crimson in their presence. It was this false Shame that Faithful met in the Valley of Humiliation. He haunts it still. Let us see what he has to urge, and how he can he unmasked and rendered harmless. * * * * In his argument with Faithful he told him that ho thought “ religion was a pitiful'low, sneaky sort of business, and a tender conscience an unmanly thing.” This has quite a modern sound about it. With many young men and women there is a shamefaced dislike to be associated tvith a church or what passes for religion. They think it is womanish or namby-pamby, unmanly. How has it come about that what should be a glory has become a shaine? Largely because the types of it have not been attractive A boy asked his mother who would go to heaven. “Would father go?” ’‘Yes.” “Then I don’t want to go; father is so disagreeable.” That is the sort of thing that keeps many young folks from religion, Very often those who are leaders in church courts are men whose professed celestial intimacies do not improve their domestic manners. Their tempers rasp, their tongues blister, there is an atmosphere about them that chills like a winter nor’-easter. It is not the least significant note in the immortal parable that what drew the Prodigal towards home was the memory of the servants, their content, their joyousness in their Master’s work. It is often the opposite of this in professing Christians that makes prodigals and keeps them such. All the same it must not be forgotten that, though this may be excuse, it, is no justification for Shame’s complaint about it. We are not released from responsibility in regard to it because of its unworthy representatives, any more than we should decline a good sovereign to-day because we picked up a spurious one yesterday. The pupil’s duty in his writing lesson is to copy the headline, not the erroneous ones which he, or others, may have written below it. In this matter the imperfect specimens of Christianity are not to dictate our duty to the supreme Man, of which these otners are only puppet show copies. If His be not a character as brave and beautiful as ever trod the earth, then one knows not where else to find one. He is not only this Himself, but He is the Creator of it in others. Make all deductions you choose, and it will still remain true that for all that constitutes beauty and bravery Christian biography is unique. Empty history of all that men and women have been and done under the inspiration of Christian motives, and the residuum is thin and slender. * * * * Shame has another insinuation about religion. He says it is a denial of liberty. That, too, has a very modern ring about it. In a sense Shame is right. It is a denial of liberty, of the liberty to do what we like. But that is not liberty; that is license. We hear sometimes, but less than we used to do, about freethought. There is no such thing. Thought is limited - in every direction. It goes less free with every advance in knowledge. One may be free to think , that Mars ; is not' inhabited, hut a discovery torinorrow may prove that it.- is, and freethought is no longer possible in that particular. It is limited by the fact.- All Nature’s laws are in a sens© the denial of freethought. We cannot think as we will about gravitation or gases. If we do we siiall probably be crushed or poisoned. Our liberty is really secured, not by freedom here, but by. obedience. So in the religious sphere.. It, too, has its laws and princffiles. We must accommodate ourselves to these. But this does not destroy liberty any more than it does in regard to Nature. Here is the Magna Charta of religious fr.ee;thought: Whatsoever things arc true, honorable, pure, just, lovely, of good report, if there be any virtue, any

praise, think on these things.” That ought to be liberty enough for the most ardent freethinker. There is a story of Sir Robert Peel. When a young man he was one of the guests at a select dinner party in the West End of London. After the ladies retired the conversation took a turn it would not have done had they remained. After a time Peel, with a flush in his checks, rose and left the room, ordered his carriage, and drove away. Asked .afterwards why, he said “ his conscience would not let him remain longer where such talk went on.” That was manliness. Freedom of thought might have suggested stay and hear it out. But there was a higher freedom—the. freedom of purity, of an unsoiled soul—and he obeyed that. It is a fine illustration both of the manliness which can face the gibes of a ,false-shame and the liberty that is liberty indeed. And such, opportunities are plentiful enough, not at fashionable dinner parties only, but in workshops, offices, training camps, and sports grounds. Young fellows who would charge the cannon’s mouth without flinching would blush and stammer or be silent rather , than confess allegiance to a freedom ■ that is limited by whatsoever things are true, pure, lovely, of good report, “ The cruellest lies,” writes Stevenson,, and he was writing with a pen dipped in his own experience, “ are often told in silence.” A man may have sat in a room for hours and not opened his teeth, and yet come out of that room a disloyal friend or a vile calumniator. “ And how many loves have perished because from pride or spite or diffidence, or that unmanly shame which withholds a man from daring to betray emotion? A lover, at the critical point of the relation, has but hung his head and held his tongue.” * * * * Stevenson’s indictment is only too true. False shame is doing its deadly work still among stragglers in the valleys of life. Ambitious young men and young women win promotions and praise and kudos by timidity, silence, and dissertations in the sphere of religion for which, if soldiers were guilty of it in a war,they would be shot.

We have not space to deal with tho other insinuations with which this false shame seeks to seduce Faithful in the Valley of Humiliation, such as, e.g., none of the great in intellect or natural science or social condition were believers in religion. We seem to-have heard echoes of that ages ago. “ Have any of the rulers or the Pharisees believed in Him P ” “Not many wise men after the flesh, not many noble, not many mighty are called.” So that need not disconcert us much. Nevertheless, it is perhaps truer to-day than ever before that the better intellects of the time are tending towards tho spiritual interpretation of life and phenomena. But the all-important thing is how to turn the edge of Shame’s sword. For we are all more or less threatened by it. When the Pilgrim asked Faithful how he did it, the latter, replied that at. first he did not well know what, to say. Then it occurred to him: “This Shame tells-me what men are; but ho tells me nothing about what God or the word of God is.” Men. and their opinions are no. doubt to be considered. But they do not exhaust the categories of being.- There is a spiritual world, which is ultimate in its judgments: And this false shame must be made to measure itself up against that. It seems monstrous that shame shonld .be possible in presence of - an Infinite Love that enfolds the life. That rightly conceived unmasks this false shame and shakes it off. “Itis a case of the rivalry and the conflict of the seen with the unseen, the. present with the future, the human with the divine. Every day we are accustomed between man and man to find it a great privilege and delight to bear reproach out of loyal affection to those we love. Let but love find in the eternal region images equally clear and sweet, and the same loyalty will gain an easy victory over Shame. It is hut another instance of the victory of Faith.”