Chapter VI: Part II: I—odd Volumes (2)

In my old Mosgiel days, I was often invited to address evening meetings in Dunedin. The trouble lay in the return. A train left Dunedin at twenty past nine and there was no other until twenty past ten, or, on some nights, twenty past eleven. It was sometimes difficult to leave a meeting in time to catch the first of these trains, yet, if I stayed for a later one, it meant a midnight arrival at the manse and a woeful sense of weariness next morning. On the particular night of which I am now thinking, I missed the early train. There was no other until twenty past eleven. I sat on the railway platform, feeling very sorry for myself. When at length the train started, I found myself sharing with one companion a long compartment, with doors at either extremity and seats along the sides, capable of accommodating fifty people. He sat at one end and I at the other. I expect that I looked to him as woebegone and disconsolate as he looked to me. The train rumbled on through the night. The light was too dim to permit of reading; the jolting was too great to permit of sleeping; and I was just about to record a solemn vow never to speak in town again when a curious line of thought captivated me. I could not read; I could not sleep; but I could talk! And here, in the far corner of the compartment, was another belated unfortunate who could neither read nor sleep and who might like to beguile the time with conversation! And then it occurred to me not only that I _could_ do it but that I _should_ do it. We had been thrown together for an hour in this strange way at dead of night; we should probably never meet again until the Day of Judgement; what right had I to let him go as though our tracks had never crossed at all? Was the great message that, on Sundays, I delivered to my Mosgiel people, intended exclusively for them, and was it only to be delivered on Sundays? I felt that my Sunday congregation was a gilt-edged security; but here was a chance for a rash speculation!

The train stopped at Burnside. I stepped out on to the station and walked up and down for a moment inhaling the fresh mountain air. I wanted to have all my wits about me and to be at my best. The engine whistled, and, on returning to the compartment, I was careful to re-enter it by the door near which my companion was sitting, and I took the seat immediately opposite to him. I then saw that he was quite a young fellow, probably a farmer's son. We soon struck up a pleasant conversation, and then, having created an atmosphere, I expressed the hope that we were fellow-travellers on life's greater journey.

'It's strange that you should ask me that,' he said, 'I've been thinking a lot about such things lately.'

We became so engrossed in our conversation that the train had been standing a minute or so at Mosgiel before we realized that we had reached the end of our journey. I found that our ways took us in diametrically opposite directions. He had a long walk ahead of him.

'Well,' I said, in taking farewell of him, 'you may see your way to a decision as you walk along the road. If so, remember that you need no one to help you. Lift up your heart to the Saviour; He will understand!'

We parted with a warm handclasp. Long before I reached the manse I was biting my lips at having omitted to take his name and address. However, like Achmed Ali, I had cast my bread upon the waters.

Five years passed. One Monday morning I was seated in the train for Dunedin. The compartment was nearly full. Between Abbotsford and Burnside the door at one end of the carriage opened, and a tall, dark man came through, handing each passenger a neat little pamphlet. He gave me a copy of _Safety, Certainty, and Enjoyment_. I looked up to thank him, and, as our eyes met, he recognized me.

'Why,' he exclaimed, 'you're the very man!'

I made room for him to sit beside me. I told him that his face seemed familiar, although I could not remember where we had met before.

'Why,' he said, 'don't you remember that night in the train? You told me, if I saw my way to a decision, to lift up my heart to the Saviour on the road. And I did. I've felt sorry ever since that I didn't ask who you were, so that I could come and tell you. But, as the light came to me in a railway train, I have always tried to do as much good as possible when I have had occasion to travel. I can't _speak_ to people as you spoke to me; but I always bring a packet of booklets with me.'

I recalled the inward struggle that preceded my approach that night. I remembered bracing myself on the Burnside station for the ordeal. It seemed at the time a very rash and risky speculation.

But here was my harvest! I have invested most of my time and energy in gilt-edged securities, and, on the whole, I have no reason to be dissatisfied with the return that they have yielded me. But I have seldom obtained from my gilt-edged securities so handsome a profit as that unpromising venture ultimately brought to me.

IV

The only way to keep a thing is to throw it away. The only way to hold your money is to invest it. The only way to ensure remembering a poem is to keep repeating it to others. If you hear a good story and attempt to keep it for your own delectation, you will forget it in a week. Laugh over it with every man you meet and it will ripple in your soul for years.

It sometimes happens, when I have finished one of these screeds of mine, that I feel a fatherly solicitude concerning it. You sometimes grow fond of a thing, not because you cherish an inflated conception of its value, but because through sheer familiarity, it has become a part of you. So I look at these white sheets over which I have been bending for days and into which I have poured all my soul. I feel anxious about them. Yet it is absurd to keep them. If I store them away I shall soon forget their contents and my labor will all be lost. But the printer is six hundred miles away. I think of all the hands through which they must pass on their way from me to him. I register them at the Post Office, but still I think of all the risks. These white sheets of mine are such frail and flimsy things; an accident, a fire, and where then would they be? But one happy morning I see my screed in print! I feel that I have it at last! It is beyond the reach of fire or accident. If _this_ house is burned down, I can obtain a copy in _that_ one! I feel that nothing now can rob me of the child I brought into being. It is scattered broadcast, and, having been scattered broadcast, is at last my very, very own!

The only way to keep a thing is to throw it away. Achmed Ali knows that. He looks fondly at the grain in the basket but he knows that he cannot keep it in the barn. 'Seeds which mildew in the garner, scattered, fill with gold the plain.' And so he casts some of it on the land—his gilt-edged security—and gets it back with interest; and he casts the rest upon the water—his risky speculation—and gets it back many times multiplied.

V—SATURDAY

Saturday is the name, not so much of a day, as of a specific phase of human experience. And it is a great phase. We all catch ourselves at odd moments living over again some of the unforgettable Saturdays of long ago. In actual fact, a man may be lounging in an armchair beside his winter fire or sprawling on the lawn on a drowsy summer afternoon. But, under such conditions, the actual fact is soon relegated to oblivion. A far-away look comes into his eyes, a wayward smile flits over his face, and, giving rein to his fancy, he sees landscapes on which his gaze has not rested for many a long year. He roams at will among the golden Saturdays of auld lang syne. He feels afresh the mighty thrill that swept his soul when, after a long heroic struggle, his side won that famous match upon a certain village green; he lives again through the fierce excitement of a paper-chase that led the hare and hounds over the great green hills and down through the dark pine forest in the valley; he enjoys once more the birds'-nesting expedition in the winding lane; and he sees, as vividly as he saw them at the time, the shining trophies that rewarded his fishing excursions to the millponds and trout-streams of the outlying countryside. In those far-off days, Saturday was the wild romance of the week.

I remember being told by my first schoolmaster that Saturday was named after Saturn, and that Saturn was the planet that had rings all round it. From that hour, by a singular confusion of ideas, I always thought of Saturday as the day that had the rings round it. I somehow associated the day with the lady of the nursery rhyme who has rings on her fingers and bells on her toes, and who, therefore, has music wherever she goes. I liked to think that Saturday moved among the other days of the week in such melodious pomp and splendor. The notion intensified the zest with which I welcomed the great day. For Saturday was great; it was great in its coming and great in its going. It began gloriously and it ended gloriously. I do not mean that it ended as it began. By no means. There is one glory of the sun and another glory of the moon. The glory of Saturday's dawn was one glory; the glory of Saturday's dusk was another glory. Saturday began like a Red Indian shouting his war-whoop as he takes to the trail; it ended like a monk who, in the stillness of his cloister, chants his evening hymn.

It takes a boy a minute or two, on waking, to assure himself that it is really Saturday. He is not quite sure of himself; the notion seems too good to be true. He sits bolt upright; rubs his eyes; and stares about him for some confirmation of the joyous suspicion that is bringing the blood to his cheeks in excitement. Is it really Saturday? He distrusts—and not without cause—the confused sensations of those waking moments. He made a mistake once before; he fancied that it was Saturday; made all his plans accordingly; and discovered to his disgust a few minutes later that it was only Friday after all. That Friday, at any rate, was a most unlucky day! But Saturday! With what tingling exhilaration and boisterous delight the conviction that it was Saturday fastened upon us! Saturday was our day! We raced out after breakfast like so many colts turned loose upon the heath. We tossed up our caps for the sheer joy of it. Whatever the ordeals of the week had been, we forgave all our tyrants and tormentors on Saturday morning. And in that gracious and benignant absolution we experienced a foretaste of the saintliness with which the great day wore to its close.

For Saturday, however spent, reached its climax in a consciousness of virtue so complete and so serene and so beatific as to be almost unearthly. Such a delicious content seldom falls within the experience of mortals. Saturday night was bath-night; and few sensations in life are more delectable than the angelic self-satisfaction that overtakes the average boy after having been subjected to the magic discipline of hot water and clean sheets. The outward change is wonderful; but the inward transformation exceeds it by far. He feels good; looks good; smells good; _is_ good. A boy after a bath is at peace with all the world. The week may have gone hardly with him. Parents and teachers may have shown a vexatious incapacity to see things from a boy's standpoint; the proprietors of orchards and gardens may have exhibited—perhaps even on Saturday afternoon—a singular inflexibility in their interpretation of the laws relating to property; the world as a whole may have behaved in a manner wofully inconsiderate and unjust. But on Saturday night, under the softening influence of a hot bath and a clean bed, a boy finds it in his heart to forgive everything and everybody. A vast charity wells up in his soul. As he lays his damp head on his snowy pillow, he revokes all his harsh judgements and cancels all his stern resolves. He will not run away from home after all! Instead of abandoning his unfeeling seniors to their hatred, malice and uncharitableness, he will treat them with magnanimity and tolerance; he will give them another chance. It is possible—appearances to the contrary notwithstanding—that they do not mean to be unsympathetic. They simply do not understand. Thinking thus the young saint falls asleep in the odor of sanctity—and soap! The more wayward and troublesome he has been in the daytime, the more angelic will he appear under these new conditions. Watching him as he slumbers, one of the Saturnian rings seems to encompass his brow like a halo. Saturday has come to an end!

Now, this saintly young savage of ours will learn, as the years go by, that life itself has its Saturday phase. Dr. Chalmers used to say that our allotted span of three score years and ten divides itself into seven decades corresponding with the seven days of the week. The seventh—the stretch of life that opens out before a man on his _sixtieth_ birthday—is, the doctor used to say, a Sabbatic period. In it, he should shake himself free, as far as possible, from the toil and moil of life, and give himself to the cultivation of a quiet and restful spirit. That being so, it follows that the sixth period—the period that opens out before a man on his _fiftieth_ birthday—is the Saturday of life. It is a great time, every way. Like the Saturday of the old days, and like the Saturday of riper years, it has characteristics peculiarly its own. On his fiftieth birthday, if Mr. J. W. Robertson Scott is to be believed, a man enters the gates of a new world. It is not of necessity a better world or a worse one; it is simply a different one. We seldom enter upon a new experience without finding that the change has involved us in a few drawbacks and deprivations, as well as in some distinct benefits and advantages. The step that a man takes on his fiftieth birthday is no exception to this rule. Mr. Robertson Scott caught sight of the gates of the new era some time before he actually reached them. 'In the tram, one evening, about six months ago, a schoolboy rose and offered me his seat,' he tells us. The incident startled him. A man who is still in the forties does not expect to receive such courtesies. He consoled himself, however, with the assumption that the attentive schoolboy was probably a boy scout who had suddenly realized that the day was closing in without his having done the good deed prescribed for each twenty-four hours of the life of the perfect Baden-Powellite. Four months later, however, the same thing happened again; and then, shortly after, came the fiftieth birthday! Clearly it was Saturday morning!

Now, the striking thing about Mr. Robertson Scott's experience is the fact that his attainment of his jubilee appealed to him, not as an end, but as a beginning. It was not so much a premonition of senility and decay as the entrance upon a fresh phase of life. When Horace Walpole wrote to Thomas Gray in 1766, urging him to write more poetry, Gray replied that when a man has turned fifty—as he had just done—there is nothing for it but to think of finishing. He voiced the feeling of the period. In the eighteenth century, a man of fifty was classified among the veterans. A hundred years later, a very different conviction held the field. Tolstoy tells us that his fiftieth year was the year of his greatest awakening and enlightenment; and, in _The Poet at the Breakfast Table_, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes makes the old master witness to something of a similar kind. His friends are anxious to know how and when he acquired his wealth of wisdom; and he is able to reply with remarkable precision: 'It was on the morning of my fiftieth birthday that the solution of life's great problem came to me. It took me just fifty years to find my place in the Eternal Order of Things.' Such testimonies go a long way towards vindicating Mr. Robertson Scott's assumption that the fiftieth birthday marks rather a new beginning than a sad, regretful close. The fiftieth birthday is Saturday morning; and who, on Saturday morning, feels that the week is over?

On the contrary, Saturday morning is, to most people, more insistent than any other morning in its demands upon their energies. Walk up the street on a Saturday afternoon, and you will see your neighbors garbed and employed as they are never garbed or employed on any other day. On Saturday we weed the garden, mow the lawn and effect the week's repairs. On Saturday we attend to a multitude of minor matters for which we have had no time during the week. On Saturday we clear up. And on Saturday night we are tired. It by no means follows, therefore, that, because a man's fiftieth birthday is his Saturday morning, his week's work is done. It is indisputable, of course, that a man of fifty has left the greater part of life behind him; he may be pardoned if he pauses at times to take long and wistful glances along the road that he has trodden; it will not be considered strange if, on very slight provocation, he drops into a rapture of reminiscence. There is a subtle stage in the development of fruit at which, having attained its full size, it ripens rapidly. A man enters upon that stage on his fiftieth birthday. A shrewd observer has said that, like peaches and pears, we grow sweet for awhile before we begin to decay. The Saturday of life is sweetening time. We become less harsh in our criticisms, less overbearing in our opinions, more considerate towards our contemporaries and more sympathetic towards our juniors. The week's work is by no means finished. Much remains to be done. But it will be done in a new spirit—a Saturday spirit. And if the man of fifty be spared to enjoy octogenarian honors, he will smile as he recalls the immaturity and unripeness of life's first five decades. It is a poor week that has no Saturday and no Sunday in it. To have finished at fifty, an old man will tell you, would have meant missing the best.

It has often struck me as an impressive coincidence that it was when Dr. Johnson was approaching his fiftieth birthday—life's Saturday morning—that he discovered a significance in Saturday that, until then, had eluded him. He felt, as we all feel on Saturdays, that the time had come to clear up, to put things in their places and to overtake neglected tasks. And this is the entry he makes in his Journal:

'Having lived, not without an habitual reverence for the Sabbath, yet without that attention to its religious duties which Christianity requires: I resolve henceforth—_First_, to rise early on Sabbath morning, and, in order to that, to go to sleep early on Saturday night. _Second_, to use some more than ordinary devotion as soon as I rise. _Third_, to examine into the tenor of my life, and particularly the last week, and to mark my advances in religion, or my recessions from it. _Fourth_, to read the Scriptures methodically, with such helps as are at hand. _Fifth_, to go to church twice. _Sixth_, to read books of divinity, either speculative or practical. _Seventh_, to instruct my family. _Eighth_, to wear off by meditation any worldly soil contracted in the week.'

The significance of this heroic record lies in the resolve that Saturday, so far from unfitting him for Sunday, shall lead up to it as a stately avenue leads up to a noble entrance-hall. 'I resolve to go to sleep early on Saturday night.' Exactly a hundred years after the great doctor had inscribed this famous entry on the pages of his Journal, Charlotte Elliott wrote her well-known hymn in praise of Saturday:

Before the Majesty of heaven
To-morrow we appear;
No honor half so great is given
Throughout man's sojourn here.

The altar must be cleansed to-day,
Meet for the offered lamb;
The wood in order we must lay,
And wait to-morrow's flame.

I have heard scores of sermons on _The Proper Observance of Sunday_; and, somehow, I have never been impressed by their utility. One of these days some pulpit genius will preach on _The Proper Observance of Saturday_, and then, quite conceivably, the new day will dawn.

As I lay down my pen, a pair of experiences rush back upon my mind. The one befell me at sea, the other on land.

1. In the course of a voyage from New Zealand to England it became necessary—in order to harmonize the clocks and calendars on board with the clocks and calendars ashore—to take in an extra day. We awoke one morning and it was Saturday; we awoke next morning and it was Saturday again! That second Saturday was the strangest day that I have ever spent. I never realized the extent to which Saturday leads up to Sunday as I realized it that day.

2. I once numbered among my intimate friends a Jewish rabbi. I found his society extremely delightful and wonderfully instructive. He often took me to his synagogue, showed me its treasures, and initiated me into its mysteries. It was all very beautiful and very suggestive. But I invariably came away feeling dissatisfied and disappointed. I had been gazing upon the emblems and symbols of a Saturday faith. Like that weird Saturday on board the _Tongariro_, it was a Saturday that led to a Saturday, a Saturday that ushered in nothing holier or sweeter than itself.

Saturn with all his rings is grand; but the Sun is grander still! It is from the Sun that Saturn derives his brightness and his glory. Ask Saturn the secret of his splendor, and it is to the Sun that he unhesitatingly points. As it is with these mighty orbs themselves, so is it with the days that bear their names. As Samuel Johnson and Charlotte Elliott knew so well, it is the glory of Saturday to prepare the way for Sunday. Saturday belongs to the Order of St. John the Baptist. John was the greatest of all the sons of men, yet it was his mission to clear the path for the coming of a greater. The old world's Saturday-Sabbath, commemorating a completed Creation, led up to the new world's Sunday-Sabbath, commemorating a completed Redemption. The oracles and mysteries that I saw in the synagogue, the emblems and expressions of a Saturday faith, were sublime. But their sublimity lay in the fact that they pointed men to, and prepared men for, a Sunday faith, a faith that gathers about a wondrous Cross and an empty tomb, a faith from which that Saturday faith, like Saturn bathed in sunlight, derives alike its lustre and its fame.

VI—THE CHIMES

It was Christmas Eve—an Australian Christmas Eve. To an Englishman it must always seem a weird, uncanny hotch-potch. He never grows accustomed to the scorching Christmases that come to him beneath the Southern Cross. Southey once declared that, however long a man lives, the first twenty years of his life will always represent the biggest half of it. That is indisputably so. The thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts. The first twenty years of life fasten upon our hearts sentiments and traditions that will dominate all our days. I spent my first twenty Christmases in the old land. I have spent far more than twenty in the new. Yet, whenever I find old Father Christmas wiping the perspiration from his brow as he wanders among the roses and strawberries of our fierce Australian mid-summer, I feel secretly sorry for him. He looks as jolly as ever, yet he gives you the impression of having lost his way. He seems to be casting about him for snowflakes and icicles.

But, as I was saying, it was Christmas Eve—an Australian Christmas Eve. The day had been sultry and trying. After tea I sauntered off across the fields to a spot among the fir-trees, at which I can always rely upon meeting a few grey squirrels, an old brown 'possum, and some other friends of mine. I had scarcely taken my seat on a grassy knoll, overlooking a belt of bush, when the laughing-jackasses broke into a wild, unearthly chorus in the wooded valley below. And then, a few minutes later, the cool evening air was flooded with a torrent of harmony that transported me across the years and across the seas. The squirrels, the 'possum, and the kookaburras were left leagues and leagues behind. From a lofty steeple that crowned a distant crest there floated over hill and hollow the pealing and the chiming of the bells.

The magic that slept in the lute of the Pied Piper was as nothing compared with the magic of the bells. Beneath the witchery of their music, time and space shrivel into nothingness and are no more. We are wafted to old familiar places; we see the old familiar faces; we enter into fellowship with lands far off and ages long departed. Frank Bullen heard our Australian bells. He was only a sailor-boy at the time. 'Often,' he says, 'I would stand on deck when my ship was anchored in Sydney Harbor on Sunday morning, and listen to the church bells playing "Sicilian Mariners" with a dull ache at my heart, a deep longing for something, I knew not what.' The bells, according to their wont, were annihilating time and space. Beneath the enchantment of their minstrelsy he sped, as on angels' wings, away from the realities of his rough and roving sea-life, into the quiet haven of a tender past. He was back in his old seat in a little chapel in Harrow Road. Every Englishman overseas will understand.

The bells throw bridges across the yawning chasms of space, and link up hearts that stand severed by the tyrannies of time. In his _Golden Legend_, Longfellow describes Prince Henry and Elsie standing in the twilight on the terrace of the old castle of Vautsberg on the Rhine. Suddenly they catch the strains of distant bells. Elsie asks what bells they are. The Prince replies:

They are the bells of Geisenheim,
That, with their melancholy chime,
Ring out the curfew of the sun.

And then he adds:

Dear Elsie, many years ago
Those same soft bells at eventide
Rang in the ears of Charlemagne,
As, seated at Fastrada's side,
At Ingelheim, in all his pride,
He heard their sound with secret pain.

And so, through the melodious medium of the bells, the royal lovers on the terrace cross the long centuries that intervene and enter into fellowship with those other royal lovers of an earlier time.

I remember, many years ago, spending a few days at a beautiful country home in Hampshire. My hostess was a little old lady—_very_ little and _very_ old. I can see her now with her prim little cap, her golden earrings, and her silver ringlets. It was summer-time, and one evening she invited me to accompany her on a walk across the deer-park. She was a happy little body, and that evening she was specially vivacious. Her conversation was punctuated with pretty ripples of silvery laughter. She was too proud to confess to feeling tired; but when we reached a stile with a step to it on the brow of a hill, she took a seat upon the step—to drink in, as she was careful to explain, the beauty of the view. I perched myself upon the stile itself and watched with interest the antics of a fine stag among some oak-trees not far away. Then, all at once, the bells from the village behind us rang out blithely. For a while I listened in silence, and then turned to my companion to ask a question. On glancing down at her face, however, I was astonished to notice tears upon her cheek. What could be the matter with my gay little friend? I immediately transferred my attention to the stag, who was by this time ambling away across the park, but she knew that I had seen the tear-drops. On our way back to the house she explained.

'My mother died,' she said, 'while I was on my honeymoon in Italy. I was only a girl, and she was not much more. She was only twenty when I was born, and I was only eighteen on my wedding day. I never dreamed, when I left England, that I should never see her again. On the eve of my wedding she came up to me, put her arm round me, and led me away to spend one more hour alone with her. We sauntered off to the stile on which you and I rested this evening; and as we sat there, hand in hand, the bells pealed out just as they did to-night. And, as I listened to them just now, her face, her form, her voice, her words—the very _feeling_ of that other evening more than sixty years ago—came back upon me more vividly than they have ever done before. I could almost fancy that I was a girl again. My marriage, my children, my travels, and my long widowhood seemed all a dream. It was the bells that took me back again!'

I wonder if it was! I wonder if the great iron bells that hung in the dusty old belfry of that English hamlet knew anything of the sweet and sacred secrets that my little old friend kept locked up in that gentle heart of hers! I wonder if the bells of Geisenheim knew anything of the loves of Charlemagne and Fastrada, of Elsie and Prince Henry! I wonder if the bells that drove the squirrels from my mind that summer evening knew anything of the Christmas thoughts and Christmas memories with which they flooded my soul! I wonder!

And, in my wonderment, I find myself in excellent company. For here is little Paul Dombey! He has only a few days to live, although, to-day, he is slightly better and able to get about the house a little. And, in moving about the house, he finds a workman mending the great clock in the hall, and Paul sees an opportunity of asking a few questions. Indeed, Dickens says that he asked, not a few, but a long string of them. 'He asked the man a multitude of questions about chimes and clocks; as, whether people watched up in the lonely church steeples by night to make them strike, and how the bells were rung when people died, and whether those were different bells from wedding bells, or only _sounded_ different in the fancies of the living.' In this last question, Paul gets very near to our own. Do the bells say the things they seem to say, or do they only _seem_ to say those things? Did the bells of Geisenheim speak of love to the lovers on the castle terrace? Did the bells of that Hampshire village speak to the little old lady in the deer-park concerning the days of auld lang syne—her happy girlhood and her mother's face? Did the bells of that Australian steeple speak of the old-fashioned English Christmases as their delicious music fell on my delighted ears that summer night?

Of course not! The bells take us as they find us and set us to music; that is all! Paul Dombey, who died young, half suspected it; and Trotty Veck of _The Chimes_, who lived to be old, proved it from experience, and proved it up to the hilt. When things were going badly with Trotty and Richard and Meg, and the magistrate said that people like them should be 'put down' with the utmost rigor of the law, the chimes, when they suddenly pealed out, made the air ring with the refrain 'Put 'em down; Put 'em down; Facts and Figures; Facts and Figures! Put 'em down! Put 'em down!!' 'If,' says Dickens, 'the chimes said anything, they said this; and they said it until Trotty's brain fairly reeled.' Later on in the story, we have the same chimes, and the same people listening to them. But this time all is going well: Meg and Richard are to be married on the morrow: and Trotty is at the height of his felicity. 'Just then the bells, the old familiar bells, his own dear constant, steady friends—the chimes—began to ring. When had they ever rung like that before? They chimed out so lustily, so merrily, so happily, so gaily, that he leapt to his feet and broke the spell that bound him.' And, a few minutes later, Trotty and Richard and Meg were dancing with delight to the gay, glad music of the bells!

When they themselves were sad, the chimes seemed mournful; when they were glad, the chimes seemed blithe. 'Are they different bells?' asked little Paul Dombey, 'or do they only _sound_ different?' Paul was getting very near to the heart of a great truth; and, if only Trotty Veck and he could have talked things over together, they might have given us a philosophy of bells that would have immeasurably enriched our thought.

The chimes are among the things to which distance lends enchantment. The bells, as my little old lady and I heard them from the deer-park, were sweeter than the same bells heard in the churchyard under the belfry. In his _Cheapside to Arcady_, Mr. Arthur Scammell suggests that the music of the bells awakens the echoes of all the infinites and all the eternities. He finds himself up in the belltower. 'After the last stroke of the bell ceases to be heard down in the church,' he says, 'the sound is continued up here in a long diminuendo; and how long will it be before that vibrant hum is completely extinguished? All through the night, the air about the bells may still be throbbing with faint echoes and reverberations; and, if an hour or a night, why not a year or a century? May not even the sound of the first ringing of these old bells yet lisp against the walls and roof in infinitesimal vibrations? The tower may be alive with the thin ghosts of all the joyous and mournful notes that have endeared and embittered the sound of bells to hundreds of human hearts.' And if, following the same line of argument, the music of the bells falls so sweetly on my ear as I sit upon my grassy knoll two miles away from the steeple, who is to say that twenty miles away, a thousand miles away, the air is not trilling and trembling with their delicious melodies? It may be only because my perceptive faculties are so gross, my ears so heavy, that I do not, in this Australian pleasance of mine, catch the chimes of Big Ben and the echoes of Bow Bells. And if Mr. Scammell's philosophy be true of bells, why not of other sounds? As I ponder his striking suggestion, I find it more easy to understand that great saying that _whatsoever ye have spoken in darkness shall be heard in the light, and that which ye have whispered in the ear shall be shouted from the housetops_.

The deeds we do, the words we say,
Into still air they seem to fleet;
We count them past,
But they shall last
To the Great Judgment Day,
And we shall meet!

The bells are not only _heard_ at a distance, they are _better heard_ at a distance. It is possible to get so near to them as to miss the music. In his autobiography, James Nasmyth tells us of a visit he paid to the tower of St. Giles, Edinburgh. He had often been charmed by the chimes, and longed to get nearer to them. But the experience brought a rude disillusionment. 'The frantic movements of the musician as he rushed wildly from one key to another, often widely apart, gave me the idea that the man was mad, while the banging of his mallets completely drowned the music of the chimes.' It is possible to get too near to things. You do not see the grandeur of a mountain as you recline upon its slopes. The disciples were too near to Jesus; that explains some of the most poignant tragedies of the New Testament. A minister, through constant association with the sublimities of divine truth, may lose the vision of their eternal grandeur. And, unless things in the manse are very carefully managed, the members of a minister's family may easily suffer through being too near to things. They do not see the mountain in its grand perspective. The banging of the mallets drowns the music of the bells.

One beautiful June evening, years ago, I was walking along the banks of the Thames. It was Saturday night; I had undertaken to preach at Twickenham on the Sunday. All at once I was arrested by the pealing of the bells. Strangers stopped each other to inquire why the belfries had become vocal at that strange hour. We learned later that the bells were proclaiming the birth of an heir to the British throne. A prince had been born at White Lodge, just across the river! Well might the bells peal that night!

Well, too, may the bells peal on Christmas Eve! I like to think that, over the birth of _that_ babe, born in Bethlehem, and cradled in a manger, more bells have been rung than over all the princes since the world began. The Chinese cherish a lovely legend concerning the great bell at Pekin. The Emperor, they say, sent for Kuan-Yin, the caster of the bells, and described the bell that he desired. It was to be larger than any bell ever made, and its tone more beautiful. Its music was to be heard a hundred miles away. Great honors were to be heaped upon the bell-maker if he succeeded; a cruel death was to follow his failure. Kuan-Yin set to work; he mixed the costliest metals; he labored night and day; and at last he finished the bell. He tested it, and was disappointed. He tried again, and was again mortified. He was at his wits' end. Then Ko-ai, his beautiful daughter, consulted an astrologer. The oracle assured her that, if the blood of a fair virgin mingled with the molten metals, the music would ravish the ears of every listener. Ko-ai returned to the foundry; and, when the glowing metal poured white-hot from the furnace, she plunged into the shining bath before her. The music of the great bell, the Easterns say, is the music of her sacrifice. It is only an Oriental myth; but it strangely helps me to interpret to my heart the solemn sweetness that I recognize in all these Christmas chimes.

VII—'BE SHOD WITH SANDALS'

Is there anything fresh to be said by way of a charge to a young minister? I confess that, until this morning, I thought not. But this morning, to my inexpressible delight, I struck a vein that, so far as I know, has never yet been exploited. On these solemn and impressive occasions, we have talked about the minister's _scholarship_ and the minister's _spirituality_ until we have come to feel that we have completely exhausted that line of things. And in the process we have given the awkward impression that the minister, so far from being made of pretty much the same stuff as the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick-maker, is a kind of biological monstrosity consisting of a very big head and a very big heart—and of _nothing else_!

But this morning I made a discovery. Before delivering a charge to a young minister, I took the precaution to have a good look at him. And I found to my surprise that, in addition to the head and the heart upon which we have always laid such inordinate emphasis, he also possesses a fine pair of legs with a substantial pair of feet at the end of them! Nobody could have supposed from the most careful perusal of all the ministerial charges in our literature, that any minister was ever before known to possess these useful appendages; but there they are! I saw them with my own eyes! Perhaps those who delivered the great classical charges only saw the young minister in the pulpit, in which case the limbs which I this morning discovered would naturally be invisible. Like the feet of the seraphim in the prophet's vision, they would be modestly concealed. But, though hidden, they exist; and it occurred to me that a few very useful things could be said concerning them. Why should it be considered _infra dig._, I should like to know, to talk about people's feet, and especially about a minister's feet? The Bible has no hesitation in talking about them. 'How beautiful upon the mountains,' said the prophet, 'are _the feet_ of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace; that bringeth good tidings of good, that publisheth salvation; that saith unto Zion, Thy God reigneth.' And did not the Master Himself, when He ordained His first disciples, deliver to them this striking charge? '_Take no shoes_,' He said, '_but be shod with sandals!_' The African natives thought of Livingstone's boots as a contrivance for carpeting all the slave-tracks of Africa with leather, so that he might walk harmlessly and painlessly along them; and when the Saviour tells His first disciples to be shod with sandals I fancy I see miles and miles of meaning in those arresting words.

'_Be shod with sandals!_' It is an appeal for ministerial simplicity. There were three classes of people in Palestine. The slaves went barefoot; the grandees wore elaborate shoes; the working classes wore sandals. The sandals were simple, serviceable, and strong. Therefore, said the Master to His men, '_be shod with sandals!_' The line of simplicity is invariably the line of strength. Gibbon has shown us that it is the simplest architecture that has defied both the vandalism of the barbarians and the teeth of time. Macaulay has proved that it is the simplest language that lasts longest. John Bunyan's books threaten to survive all later literature. Why? 'The style of Bunyan,' Macaulay says, 'is delightful to every reader, and is invaluable as a study to every person who wishes to obtain a wide command over the English language. The vocabulary is the vocabulary of the common people. There is not an expression which would puzzle the rudest peasant. Several pages do not contain a single word of more than two syllables. Yet no writer has said more exactly what he meant to say. For magnificence; for pathos; for vehement exhortation; for subtle disquisition; for every purpose of the poet, the orator and the divine; this homely dialect, the dialect of plain working men, was perfectly sufficient. There is no book in our literature on which we would so readily stake the fame of the old unpolluted English language, no book which shows so well how rich that language is in its own proper wealth, and how little it has been improved by all that it has borrowed.' It is ever so. The simplest language is the strongest language, and the simplest lives are the strongest lives. In his 'Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington,' Tennyson says that the illustrious Duke was rich in saving commonsense.

And as the greatest only are
In his simplicity sublime.

Wherefore, said the Master, avoid the vulgarities of the slave market on the one hand, and the stilted affectations of the schools on the other. Let simplicity ally itself with strength. '_Be shod with sandals!_'

It is a great thing for Christ's minister to eschew this vice of extremes. All through the ages the pendulum of ecclesiastical fashion has been swinging between bare feet and golden slippers. From the excessive worship of unholy revelries, to which the Roman world was abandoned, the Christians of the first century went to the opposite extremity, and courted persecution by their rigid abstinence from, and their severe condemnation of, the most legitimate and necessary pleasures. Back again swung the pendulum, until the churches became the scenes of voluptuous luxury and extravagance. We read on, and the next chapters of our ecclesiastical histories bring us to the story of the monks and the hermits. We no sooner discover an age of unexampled self-indulgence, than we straightway come upon the Puritanism that banned _Pilgrim's Progress_ as a wanton frivolity, and that denounced the _Fairy Queen_ as a wicked and devilish invention! And so we go on. One day Christ's minister would go bare-footed like a slave; the next he must needs affect a pair of golden slippers. There was a time when the Church gloried in her poverty; her emissaries wore no shoes on their feet; they dressed in rags and tatters; they ate the berries of the hedgerow; they drank the waters of the wayside spring. And then, hey presto, the scene is changed. The Church gloried in her wealth. All the world paid tribute to the Popes. Rome rolled in riches; and her proud bishop, Innocent the Fourth, laughed as he looked upon his countless hoards and boasted that never again need the Church lament that of silver and gold she had none! Here is the Church going barefooted like a slave; and here is the Church mincing in golden slippers; and neither spectacle is an edifying one. The Master urges His men to avoid both the bare feet and the golden slippers. Let your moderation be known unto all men. _Be shod with sandals!_

It is the solemn and imperative duty of a Christian minister to conserve both the dignity and the modesty of holy things. A certain offence in the ancient law was to be punished by the deprivation of dignity. '_Thou shalt loose his shoe from off his foot, and his name shall be called in Israel, the house of him that hath his shoe loosed._' Those who have carefully read that graceful and dramatic story unfolded in the Book of Ruth know the bitterness of that reproach. The man whose shoes were publicly removed was like an officer whose stripes are taken from his arm in the sight of the whole regiment. He became an object of derision and contempt. Anyone, Dr. Samuel Cox points out, might laugh at him and call him 'Old Baresole,' and his family would be stigmatized as the family of a barefooted vagabond. _Be shod with sandals!_ says the Master. Do not expose the Church to the contempt of the multitude! Conserve her dignity! Cast not her pearls before swine! Nor is such dignity inconsistent with simplicity. Dr. Johnson penning from his modest room at Gough Square, that famous letter in which he proudly declined the patronage of the Earl of Chesterfield, makes a much more dignified picture than the gilded aristocrat who tardily fawned to the great man's fame. And George Gissing has shown that the solitaries of Port Royal, reading and praying in their poor apartments, cut a much more stately figure in history than his refulgent Majesty, King Louis the Fourteenth, strutting among the palatial chambers and the spacious gardens of Versailles. When I see the ministers of Christ organizing nail-driving competitions for women, and hat-trimming competitions for men, in order to replenish a depleted treasury, I remember what Jesus said about the sandals. He pleaded with His men not to expose His Church to contempt. It is better to do things modestly and preserve the Church's dignity than to swell her funds and make her an object of derision. It is better to wear sandals and be respected than to wear golden slippers and provoke disgust.

Modesty and dignity invariably go together. Every man who aspires to the Christian ministry should read every word that Charles Dickens ever wrote. In the course of that humanizing process he will then come upon that terrible fourth chapter of _The Uncommercial Traveller_. It is the most powerful appeal for ministerial modesty in our literature. Can any man read without a shudder that revolting description of evangelistic bluster? And who is he that can read without tenderness that closing appeal of the novelist to preachers? He entreats us to remember the twelve poor men whom Jesus chose, and to model our behavior, our language, our style, and our choice of illustration on the exquisite simplicity and charming grace of the New Testament records.

But we must sound yet a deeper depth. '_Be shod with sandals!_' said the Master. Now sandals are easily slipped _off_ and easily slipped _on_. And why should the minister be ready, at a moment's notice, to bare his feet? The man who has read his Bible knows. There came to Moses the Vision of the Burning Bush. 'And the Lord said unto Moses, I am the God of thy father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. Draw not nigh hither; _put off thy shoes_ from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.' And when Moses the servant of the Lord died, the Vision of the Captain of the Lord's Host came to Joshua. 'And Joshua fell on his face to the earth, and did worship, and said unto him, What saith my Lord unto his servant? And the captain of the Lord's host said unto Joshua, _Loose thy shoe_ from off thy foot; for the place whereon thou standest is holy. And Joshua did so.' '_Be shod with sandals_,' said the Master, so that, the moment the vision comes, you may be ready adoringly to welcome it. Nothing in the ministry is more important than that the minister should keep in touch with his dreams, with his visions, with his revelations. The tragedy of the ministry is reached when we lace up our elaborate shoes and say good-bye to the place of open vision. We never expect again to behold the glory. The ashes are black on the altar of the soul, the altar on which the sacred fires once blazed. The light has gone out of the eye and the ring of passion has forsaken the voice. '_Be shod with sandals!_' said the Master to His men. 'Take no shoes, but be shod with sandals.' The vision that led you into the ministry may come again and again and again. _Be shod with sandals_ that you may be ready for the revelation!

Yes, ready for the _Revelation_ and ready, also, for the _Road_! For sandals are easily _slipped on_. And the minister must expect the call of the road at any moment. He must be at home in the silence; he must be ready for the revelation, but he must not become a recluse. That was what Longfellow meant by his _Legend Beautiful_. The vision appeared to the monk in his cell, and he worshipped in its wondrous presence. Then he remembered the hungry at the convent gate.

Should he slight his radiant guest,
Slight his visitant celestial,
For a crowd of ragged, bestial
Beggars at the convent gate?
Would the Vision there remain?
Would the Vision come again?

A voice within bade him go and feed the hungry in the road outside,

Do thy duty; that is best
Leave unto thy Lord the rest.

He went; and when he returned he found to his delight that the Vision was still there.

Through the long hours intervening,
It had waited his return,
And he felt his bosom burn,
Comprehending all the meaning,
When the blessed Vision said:
'Hads't thou stayed, I must have fled!'