Chapter XIV: Part 14

A noble chamber had Pope John XXI. built for himself in the palace of Viterbo; and by the falling in of the roof he so admired, he was crushed to death. “John XXI.,” writes Dean Milman, “was contemplating with too great pride the work of his own hands, and burst out into laughter; at that instant the avenging roof came down on his head.” The catastrophe was held at the time to be a special judgment on a reprobate pontiff. Nebuchadnezzar’s boast, and worse than Nebuchadnezzar’s doom. The mention of Babylon the Great will serve, with some, to eke out a parallel.

The historian of Mexico tells us of Montezuma, while exacting from his people the homage of an adulation worthy of an oriental despot, and the profuse expenditure of whose court was a standing marvel, that “while the empire seemed towering in its most palmy and prosperous state, the canker had eaten deepest into its heart.” Ruin was at hand. The hour was come, and the man; and that man was Hernando Cortès.

Significantly opens a fifth act—for a fifth act is the last—of Ben Jonson’s “Sejanus,” with the joyous exultations of that prosperous upstart, in the confidence of power: “Swell, swell, my joys,” he exclaims,—

“I did not live till now; this my first hour;
Wherein I see my thoughts reached by my power.
...
My roof receives me not; ’tis air I tread;
And, at each step, I feel my advanced head
Knock out a star in heaven!”

and so forth, with other hyperboles of frantic arrogance. His soliloquy is interrupted by messengers of ill news. Destruction dogs his path; and very soon the magniloquent braggart has to subdue his tone, and his cue is then to upbraid the higher powers whom alone he recognises:—

“If you will, Destinies, that after all,
I faint now ere I touch my period,
You are but cruel.”

Of constant recurrence among the commonplaces of biography are such “buts,” inopportune and inevitable, as Cicero’s biographer prefixes to a critical paragraph: “But while all things were proceeding very prosperously in his favour, and nothing seemed wanting to crown his success, ... all his hopes and fortunes were blasted at once, by an unhappy rencounter with his old enemy Clodius.”

There is a popular historical fiction in which we see the Cardinal Alberoni musing on the greatness he has achieved for Spain and for himself, only to find himself overtaken by ruin and disgrace. The rope which he has twisted so carefully, proves to be of sand. In another we see a successful adventurer at the culminating point of his success. There seems nothing wanting to him in “that supreme moment,” as the phrase goes. He is in “a tumult of gratified ambition and selfish joy.” “This glory and grandeur” repay a thousand-fold his patient endeavours and strenuous schemings. But at this very moment a dark shadow overlays the sunshine on his pathway; and we look on a changed countenance—“no longer full of triumph and pleasure, but ghastly pale” at a sudden but very present and very pressing sense of impending disaster. _Fortuna vitrea est, tum cum splendet frangitur._

At the opening of the twelfth century all was prosperity with the Emperor Henry IV.; his turbulent and agitated life seemed, in the words of Dean Milman, “as if it would close in an august and peaceful end.” But, as an after page in the history of Latin Christianity is prompt to prove, this most secure and splendid period in the life of Henry was one calm and brilliant hour of evening before a night of utter gloom.

Columbus had just welcomed tranquillity in exchange for the troubles and dangers of his island, when intelligence arrived of the discovery of a large tract of country rich in mines. He now anticipated the prosperous prosecution of his favourite enterprise, and was exultant at the turn of the tide. “How illusive were his hopes!” exclaims his biographer. “At this moment events were maturing which were to overwhelm him with distress, strip him of his honour, and render him comparatively a wreck for the remainder of his days.” Who, the chronicler of the conquest of Granada may well ask, who can tell when to rejoice in this fluctuating world? “Every wave of prosperity has its reacting surge, and we are often overwhelmed by the very billow on which we thought to be wafted into the haven of our hopes.” _Et subito casu, quæ valuere, ruunt._

Olivarez was requested by his royal master to resign, just at the moment when the death of Richelieu (1643) opened to him an almost royal road, it might seem, to success.

“O momentary grace of mortal men,
Which we more hunt for than the grace of God!
Who builds his hope in air of your fair looks,
Lives like a drunken sailor on a mast,
Ready, with every nod, to tumble down
Into the fatal bowels of the deep.”

Such is the state of man, as Shakspeare’s Hastings feels it. And this is the state of man, as Shakspeare’s Wolsey finds it: to-day he puts forth the tender leaves of hope, to-morrow blossoms, and next day comes a frost, a killing frost, and,—when he thinks, good easy man, full surely his goodness is a ripening,—nips his root, and then he falls. Shakspeare’s Belarius again, will furnish us with another text, of practical application:—

“... Then was I as a tree,
Whose boughs did bend with fruit: but in one night,
A storm, or robbery, call it what you will,
Shook down my yellow hangings, nay, my leaves,
And left me bare to weather.”

And as with the pride and pomp and circumstance of life, so with life itself. Typical for all time is the fate of Lycidas:—

“Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise
(That last infirmity of noble mind)
To scorn delights, and live laborious days;
But the fair guerdon when we hope to find,
And think to burst out into sudden blaze,
Comes the blind fury with the abhorrèd shears,
And slits the thin-spun life.”

_INVOCATION AND INACTION._

EXODUS xiv. 15.

With the Red Sea close before them, and with Pharaoh and his host close behind them, what were the children of Israel to do? Was it for this that Moses had brought them out of the house of bondage, which yet had its fleshpots and creature comforts after all? What were they to do? They lifted up their eyes, and saw the sea in front, and the enemy in the rear; and then they lifted up their voice in querulous fear and expostulation. Should they go back? Then Moses lifted up his voice, and bade them stand still, and they should see a great deliverance. But the will of God was not that they should either go back, or stand still and merely look on. For “the Lord said unto Moses, Wherefore criest thou unto me? speak unto the children of Israel that they go forward.” Invocation may be excellent in itself, but, as a concomitant, inaction mars it. A hallowed thing is prayer; but to pray and sit still, when the need is to go forward and push on, is the sign or stigma of feeble folk.

* * * * *

When Nelson told the King of Naples, in plain terms, that he had his choice—either to advance, trusting to God for His blessing on a just cause, and prepared to die sword in hand; or to remain quiet, and be kicked out of his kingdom; the king made answer that he would go on, and trust in God and Nelson. Of the same stuff as Nelson, but his superiors in moral character and in practical recognition of Him that is Holy, Holy, Holy, as well as Lord God Almighty, were those early English navigators, characterized by a modern pen as “indomitable God-fearing men, whose life was one great liturgy.” “The ice was strong, but God was stronger,” says one of Frobisher’s men, after grinding a night and a day among the icebergs; not waiting for God to come down and split them, but toiling through the long hours, himself and the rest fending off the vessel with poles and planks, with death glaring at them out of the rocks, and so saving themselves and it. We read in Turell’s Life of Dr. Benjamin Colman, “that reverend father in our New England Israel,” as Mr. Lowell calls him, that when the vessel in which he had taken passage for England was attacked by a French privateer, he “fought like a philosopher and a Christian, ... and prayed all the while he charged and fired.” His the practice was, if not on his lips the maxim, to pray to God and keep his powder dry. It is expressly noted of the Maid of Orleans, in the _Procès_ on record, that while she rather evaded the question of resorting to miraculous aids and appliances, and of affecting supernatural power, she “used the Gallic proverb, _Ayde-toi, Dieu te aydera_.”

“In daily toil, in deadly fight,
God’s chosen found their time to pray;
And still He loves the brave and strong,
Who scorn to starve, and strive with wrong,
To mend it, if they may.”

Forcible is the portrait drawn in a recent work of fiction, of a man now steeped in moral degradation, who had once tried to be honest, and prayed to God to prosper his honesty; but then he only tried to do right in a spasmodic, fitful kind of way, and expected his prayers to be granted as soon as uttered, and was indignant with a Providence that seemed regardless of his entreaties.

Bentley is held to have happily ridiculed the helpless Chorus of Greek tragedy, who, when a deed of violence was to be acted, instead of interfering to prevent the atrocity to which the perpetrator had made them privy, could only, by the rules of the theatre, exhaust their sorrow and surprise in dithyrambics. He burlesqued this characteristic by introducing into “The Wishes” a Chorus after the manner of the ancient Greeks, who are informed by one of the _dramatis personæ_, that a madman with a firebrand has just entered the vaults beneath the place which they occupy, and which contain a magazine of gunpowder. The Chorus, instead of stirring from the dangerous vicinity, immediately commence a long complaint of the hardship of their fate, exclaiming pathetically, “O unhappy madman—or rather unhappy we, the victims of this madman’s fury—or thrice, thrice unhappy the friends of the madman, who did not secure him, and restrain him from the perpetration of such deeds of frenzy—or three and four times hapless the keeper of the magazine, who forgot the keys in the door,” etc., etc.

The cry of Charles and his Paladins at Arles, “Help us, oh blessed martyr St. Trophimus!” is thus disposed of by Torfrid, Hereward’s forefather, in the story of the Wake, “What use in crying to St. Trophimus? A tough arm is worth a score of martyrs here,” in the thick of the fight for dear life.

When Lord Rea, in 1630, as recorded in a well-known passage from Rushworth, uttered the pious conventionalism or devout platitude, “Well, God mend all!” his companion, Sir David Ramsay, impatiently exclaimed, “Nay,” with an undevout expletive, “Nay, Donald, we must help him to mend it!” One is reminded of what Mr. Froude says of the Protestant leaders in Scotland, during the autumn of 1559, when the Queen Regent returned to Holyrood, once more absolutely victorious: “Notwithstanding all their talk about God, it had come to this. God had as much interest in them as they had themselves courage, energy, capacity, understanding, and perseverance—so much precisely, and not more.” Or again of that homely thrust in the “Biglow Papers,” where one of the interlocutors, on a critical occasion, avowing a wish to know where and when to strike, is thus answered by his plain-spoken mate:—

“‘Strike soon,’ sez he, ‘or you’ll be deadly ailin’,—
Folks thet’s afear’d to fail are sure o’ failin’;
God hates your sneakin’ creturs thet believe
He’ll settle things they run away an’ leave.’”

There is something to be said—indeed in our present sense there is more to be said, for the farmer than for the clergyman in the story of the latter congratulating the former on the state of his crops, and finding him not free from apprehensions, in regard of former bad years—“My friend,” urged the rector, “trust in Providence.” “Providence! Yes, yes,” replied the other; “that’s all very well: but give me the doong cart.” Dr. John Brown relates with zest how one of his faculty was attending a poor woman in labour—a desperate case, that required a cool head and a firm will, while the good man, “for he _was_ good,” had neither of these,—and losing his presence of mind, gave up the poor woman as lost, and retired into the next room to pray for her. “Another doctor, who perhaps wanted what the first one had, and certainly had what he wanted, brains and courage, meanwhile arrived, and called out, ‘Where is Dr. ⸺?’ ‘Oh, he has gone into the next room to pray.’ ‘Pray! Tell him to come here this instant, and help me; he can work and pray too;’” and by the new-comer’s, the _snell_ working doctor’s, assistance the woman’s life was saved.

Sir Robert Peel, in his reply to certain suggestions offered by Lord Kenyon in reference to the potato-disease, coupled with the recommendation of a “special public acknowledgment of our dependence on God’s mercy in our present distressed state,” was mildly sarcastic on the seeming inconsistency of making such an acknowledgment, while at the same time leaving “in full operation the restraints which man has imposed on the import of provisions.”

Not likely to be soon forgotten, on either side the Tweed, is Lord Palmerston’s reply as Home Secretary, to the Presbytery of Edinburgh, touching the national attitude pending a visitation of Asiatic cholera. He advised them that it was better to cleanse than to fast. Let them see to purifying the foul wynds and overcrowded flats tenanted by the poor, and so get rid of “those causes and sources of contagion which, if allowed to remain, will infallibly breed pestilence, and be fruitful in death, in spite of all the prayers and fastings of a united, but inactive nation.” To apply what a north country bishop says in Shakspeare:—

“The means that Heaven yields must be embraced,
And not neglected; else, if Heaven would,
And we will not, Heaven’s offer we refuse;
The proffered means of succour and redress.”

A recent apologist for the captain of a lost steamship submitted that the destruction of that fine vessel was what is called in the old-fashioned language of a charter-party, “the act of God.” Less partial critics, on the other hand, affirmed it to be the act of the folly and madness of man,—the term quoted belonging to an age when they who go down to the sea in ships had not learned the irreverent practice of imputing to the Deity the direct consequences of human rashness. “Let us, if we can, amend this folly; or, if we will persist in it, let us at least take the blame upon ourselves.” They that go down to the sea in ships have, however, in all ages, though not so much one people as another (English for instance as Italians), been prone to waste in wailing outcries to patron saints the energy that, in peril of wreck, they might have expended to better purpose. The “Colloquies” of Erasmus give a lively sample of this run-to-waste invocation. The last of the heroes of La Vendée, Charette, while still a youth, sailed from Brest in a cutter which lost its mast, and was in imminent jeopardy of going down; the sailors, on their knees, were praying to the Virgin, and had entirely given up all notion of exertion, “till Charette, by killing one, succeeded in bringing the others to a sense of their duty, and thereby saved the vessel.” Lord Broughton describes a scene of the kind, in a Turkish ship of war: the Greeks on board called on all the saints, the Mussulmans on Allah; the captain burst into tears and ran below deck, telling his passengers to call on God: he rung his hands, and wept aloud, and being asked what he could do, said he could do nothing. “Could he get back to the main land?” “If God chooses,” was his answer. “Could he make Corfu?” “If God chooses.” One thinks of the testy old patrician’s rejoinder in “Coriolanus” to the tribune’s exclaimer, “The gods be good unto us!” “No; in such a case the gods will not be good unto us.” In Scott’s tale of the Crusaders, “I will vow a golden candlestick to the Holy Sepulchre—a shrine of silver to our Lady of Engaddi—a pall, worth one hundred bezants to Saint Thomas of Orthez,” cries the Queen in extremity.—“Up, up, madam,” says Edith; “call on the saints an you list, but be your own best saint.” In “Ivanhoe,” again, when the Grand Master forbodes the contingent extinction of his order (the Templars), “Now may God avert such a calamity!” says the Preceptor. “Amen!” rejoins the Grand Master, with solemnity, “but we must deserve His aid.”

It is all in keeping with the practical character of the man, the prayer which on one critical occasion Benvenuto Cellini records his offering: “Almighty God, favour my cause, for Thou knowest it is a just one, and that I am not on my part wanting in my utmost efforts to make it succeed.” On another he tells us how he “told Lionardo, who was incessantly crying out, ‘Jesus, Jesus!’ that Jesus would assist him, if he strove to help himself.” Elsewhere again Cellini emphatically asserts his systematic habit of “always exerting his utmost efforts to extricate” himself from difficulty, as well as of devoutly recommending himself to God, by whom alone those efforts could achieve success, and who so often had delivered him when the best of these had clearly and entirely failed.

Saintly as well as Saint Francis of Sales bids his brethren, “En toutes vos affaires, appuyez-vous totalement sur la providence de Dieu, par laquelle seule tous vos desseins doivent réussir; travaillez néanmoins de votre côté tout doucement pour co-opérer avec icelle.” The counsel is at one, _au fond_, with that of the heathen stoic in the old play:—

“I am plain, fathers. Here you look about
One at another, doubting what to do,
With faces, as you trusted to the gods,
That still have saved you; and they can do it: but
They are not wishings, or base womanish prayers,
Can draw their aids; but vigilance, counsel, action;
Which they will be ashamed to forsake.
’Tis sloth they hate, and cowardice.”

_CO-OPERANT UNITS._

EPHESIANS iv. 16.

The universal Church is designated by the apostle a body, which whole body is fitly joined together and compacted by that which every joint supplieth, according to the effectual working in the measure of every part. And every part in its measure, and according to its imparted power. Very little are some of the joints and fibres; but every little helps. Who shall despise the whole of small things? But for the accumulated atoms, the aggregated littles, where were the body?

“Let me not deem that I was made in vain,
Or that my Being was an accident,
Which Fate, in working its sublime intent,
Not wished to be, to hinder would not deign.
_Each drop uncounted in a storm of rain_
_Hath its own mission_, and is duly sent
To its own leaf or blade, not idly spent
’Mid myriad dimples on the shipless main.
The very shadow of an insect’s wing,
For which the violet cared not while it stayed,
Yet felt the lighter for its vanishing,
Proved that the sun was shining by its shade:
Then can a drop of the eternal spring,
Shadow of living lights, in vain be made?”[38]

As the author of “Felix Holt” says, we see human heroism broken into units, and are apt to imagine, this unit did little—might as well not have been. But in this way we might break up a great army into units; in this way we might break the sunlight into fragments, and think that this and the other might be cheaply parted with. “Let us rather raise a monument to the soldiers whose brave hearts only kept the ranks unbroken, and met death—a monument to the faithful who were not famous, and who are precious as the continuity of the sunbeams is precious, though some of them fall unseen and on barrenness.” Suppose but a solution of that continuity; the sequel is, darkness that may be felt.

There is a latter-day apologue of a gimlet that grew exceedingly discontented with its vocation, envying all the other tools in the carpenter’s basket, and thinking scorn of its own mean duty of perpetually boring and picking holes everywhere. “The saw and the axe had grand work to do; and the plane got praise always; so did the chisel for its carving; and the happy hammer was always ringing merrily upon the clenching nail.” But for _it_, a wretched, poking, paltry, gimlet, its work was hidden away, and very little seemed its recognised use. But the gimlet is assured, on the best authority, that nothing could compensate for its absence, and is therefore bidden be content, nay happy; for though its work seems mean and secret, it is indispensable. To its good offices, the workman is said to look chiefly for coherence without splitting; and to its quiet influences, the neatness, the solidity, the comfort of his structure may greatly be ascribed. The apologue has, of course, its practical application. “Are there not many pining gimlets in society, ambitious of the honour given to the greater-seeming tools of our Architect, but unconscious that in His hands they are quite as useful? The loving little child, the gentle woman, the patience of many a moral martyr, the diligence of many a duteous drudge, though their works may be unseen and their virtues operate in obscurity, yet are these main helpers to the very joints and bands of our body corporate, the quiet home influences whereby the great edifice, Society, is so nicely wainscoted and floored without split-boards.”

To recognise one’s being entrusted with but one talent, after all, and not with five or with ten, as one’s vanity had previously taken for granted, has even been hailed as, in some sort, a soothing sensation. When one of us who has been led by native vanity or senseless flattery, says Dr. Holmes, to think himself or herself possessed of talent, arrives at the full and final conclusion that he or she is really dull, it is one of the most tranquillizing and blessed convictions that can enter a mortal’s mind: “All our failures, our short-comings, our strange disappointments in the effect of our efforts, are lifted from our bruised shoulders, and fall, like Christian’s pack, at the feet of that Omnipotence which has seen fit to deny us the pleasant gifts of high intelligence,—with which one look may overflow us in some wider sphere of being.” That the one talent be employed, is the one thing needful. So feels the girl in one of Charlotte Brontè’s tales, whose exclamation is, “Mother, the Lord who gave each of us our talents will come home some day, and will demand from all an account. The tea-pot, the old stocking-foot, the linen rag, the willow-pattern tureen, will yield up their barren deposit in many a house: suffer your daughters, at least, to put their money to the exchangers, that they may be enabled at the Master’s coming to pay His own with usury.” A man is accepted according to that he hath, not condemned in respect of what he never had. Whatsoever his hand findeth to do, that is what a man is to do with his might, to do with a will,—be it to govern a nation, or to dust a warehouse. To apply a passage in Ben Jonson’s “Catiline,”

“They are no less part of the commonwealth
That do obey, than those that do command.”

John Newton said that if two angels came down from heaven to execute a Divine command, and one was appointed to conduct an empire, and the other to sweep a street in it, they would feel no inclination to change employments. So again, the same robust divine affirmed that a Christian should never plead spirituality for being a sloven; “if he be but a shoe-cleaner, he should be the best in the parish.” As the old servant tells Ruth, in Mrs. Gaskell’s story, “There’s a right and a wrong way of setting about everything—and to my thinking, the right way is to take a thing up heartily, if it is only making a bed. Why, dear ah me! making a bed may be done after a Christian fashion, I take it, or else what’s to come of such as me in heaven, who’ve had little enough time on earth for clapping ourselves down on our knees for set prayers?” This quaint speaker had laid to heart the lesson once for all enforced upon her, to do her duty in that state of life to which it had pleased God to call her; her station was that of a servant, and, looked at aright, as honourable as a king’s: she was to help and serve others in one way, just as a king is in another. Her parting counsel to Ruth runs thus: “Just try for a day to think of all the odd jobs as to be done well and truly in God’s sight, not just slurred over any how, and you’ll go through them twice as cheerfully,” besides doing them more efficiently. John Brown, of Haddington, being waited on by a lad of excitable temperament, who informed him of his desire to become a preacher, and whom the shrewd pastor saw to be as weak in intellect as he was strong in conceit, advised him to continue in his present vocation. The young man said, “But I wish to preach and glorify God.” The old commentator replied, “My young friend, a man may glorify God making broom besoms; stick to your trade, and glorify God by your life and conversation.” As it was said of Bossuet, in the seventeenth century, that he could not walk, or sit down, or even pluck a currant, without your recognising in him the great bishop (so asserts a modern French divine, not of Bossuet’s church), just so the workman and the domestic servant who are animated by their Master’s spirit, distinguish themselves among their fellows by a certain air of nobility; under their blouse or their livery may be seen to shine the signal light of their _aristocratie spirituelle_, the image of the Most High Himself. However mean their employment, they go about it with neither disgust nor indifference; but with an intelligent interest, because, in the sight of God, and indeed in their own eyes, their occupation is on a level with that of king or emperor. What constitutes the difference between man and man, is not, urges M. Colani, the wielding a sceptre or plying a needle, but the being loyal to the trust, be it great or small, committed to us. This, he contends, is the only true point of view from which men and women should regard their occupations,—they should consider themselves as _collaborateurs du Tout-Puissant_. If their work seem the reverse of noble, let them ennoble it by this thought, in Wordsworth’s phrase,—

“And with the lofty sanctify the low.”

A Christian nursemaid is pictured, forgetting the thousand _désagréments_ of her humble functions, and reminding herself that in reality she is in charge of souls, as much as pastor or preacher is, and this _grande conviction_ suffices to save her from servile dejection. So, again, the artisan and day labourer may be sustained by the Spirit from on high, and taught to magnify their calling, in a deep and a wide sense, because it is what they are called to, and because they respond to the call, in the spirit of it. They are toilers co-operant to an end; and the end, the result, is with God. “They also serve who only stand and wait.” But the whole sonnet of Milton’s which closes with that grand line, is too germane to the matter, and too largely suggestive in its main issue, to be omitted here; the sonnet which the blind poet wrote touching his blindness:—

“When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide,
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest He, returning, chide;
‘Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?’
I fondly ask: but Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, ‘God doth not need
Either man’s work, or His own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve Him best; His state
Is kingly; thousands at His bidding speed,
And post o’er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait.”

_SUBORDINATE, NOT SUPERFLUOUS; OR, DEPRECIATED MEMBERSHIP._

1 CORINTHIANS xii. 22.

Strenuously St. Paul insists on the importance of not overlooking the feebler members of the body—be it physical, politic, or ecclesiastical,—and of upholding their rights to due consideration, on the mere score of membership. Subordinate they may be, but superfluous they are not. The body would not be a body without them. “Nay, much more, those members of the body, which seem to be more feeble, are necessary.” “Now ye are the body of Christ, and members in particular.” If all were one member, where were the body? But now are they many members, but one body. And one member differeth from another in honour; yet, without the seeming minor and meaner ones, for all the abundant honour of the greater ones, where were the body?

* * * * *

Human society, it has been said, is a vast and intricate machine, composed of innumerable wheels and pulleys:—every one has his special handle to grind at; some with great and obvious effects, others with little or no assignable result; but if the object ultimately produced by the combined efforts of all is in itself a good one, it is not to be denied that whatever is essential to its production is good also. Human society is thus regarded as a body corporate, made up of different members, each of which has its own special function: one class tilling the ground, another combining and distributing its produce, a third making, and a fourth executing laws, and so on, through every class of society. “If all these functions are properly discharged, the whole body corporate is in a healthy condition; and thence it follows that whoever contributes to the full and proper discharge of any one of these functions, is contributing to the general good of the whole body; so that a person occupied in them is doing good in the strictest sense of the words.” An able discourser on social subjects, arguing against a current crotchet, utterly denies that a girl in a respectable family does not earn the honourable title of a worker, though she be only employed in assisting in house-keeping and at the family work-table, just as fairly and as completely as if she walked to a solicitor’s office for an eight hours’ daily task of copying briefs and making out bills of costs.

“They work in spirit who for service wait.”

Frederick Robertson glowingly expatiates on the glory of womanhood, as surely one which, if woman rightly comprehended her place on earth, might enable her to accept its apparent humiliation unrepiningly; the glory, as he defines it, of unsensualizing coarse and common things, sensual things, the objects of mere sense, meat and drink and household cares, elevating them by the spirit in which she ministers them, into something transfigured and sublime. “The humblest mother of a poor family, who is cumbered with much serving, or watching over a hospitality which she is too poor to delegate to others, or toiling for love’s sake in household work, needs no emancipation in God’s sight. It is the prerogative and the glory of her womanhood to consecrate the meanest things by a ministry which is not for self.” What hundreds and thousands of female invalids have felt, and almost in the same words said, with Lucy Aikin, when enfeebled with age and other ailments, “The thought which sits heavy on my mind is that of my own inutility. Alas! what important end of existence do I fulfil? To whom is it of any real consequence whether or not I continue to fill a place in the world? I hope that involuntary uselessness will not be imputed, and that we may say, ‘They also serve who only stand and wait.’” A fellow-worker of the same sex, but made of sterner stuff, in the dedication of a book written in illness, tells her friend, “You know, as well as I, how withering would be the sense of our own nothingness, if we tried to take comfort from our own dignity and usefulness.” And she goes on to say how ridiculous, if it were not shocking, would be any complacency on the ground of having followed the instincts of her nature to work, while work was possible,—the issues of such divinely appointed instrumentality being wholly brought out and directed by Him who framed and actuated her. To apply the words of Aurora Leigh:—

... “Though we fail indeed,—
You, I, a score of such weak-workers,—He
Fails never. If He cannot work by us,
He will work over us. Does He want a man,
Much less a woman, think you? Every time
The star winks there, so many souls are born,
Who all shall work too. Let our own be calm:
We should be ashamed to sit beneath those stars,
Impatient that we’re nothing.”

So Mrs. Browning. And pitched in the self-same key is this stanza of her husband’s:—

“All service ranks the same with God:
If now, as formerly He trod
Paradise, His presence fills
Our earth, each only as God wills
Can work—God’s puppets, best and worst,
Are we; there is no last nor first.”

Wordsworth is eloquently suggestive in those prefatory lines of his, which weave a moral and infer a solace, from the fact, that the stars pre-eminent in magnitude, and they that from the zenith dart their beams, are yet of no diviner origin, no purer essence, than the one he watched from Rydal Mount, burning like an untended watch-fire on the ridge of some dark hill-top; or than those which seem

“Humbly to hang, like twinkling winter lamps,
Among the branches of the leafless trees;
All are the undying offspring of one Sire.
Then, to the measure of the light vouchsafed,
Shine, poet, in thy place, and be content.”

If we weave a yard of tape in all humility, says Emerson, and as well as we can, long hereafter we shall see that it was “no cotton tape at all, but some galaxy which we braided, and that the threads were Time and Nature.” Without number, as Archdeacon Hare puts it, are the sutlers and pioneers, the engineers and artisans, who attend the march of intellect; many of them busied in building and fitting up and painting and emblazoning the chariot; others in lessening the friction of the wheels; while others move forward in detachments, and level the way it is to pass over, and cut down the obstacles which would impede its progress. And these too, he proceeds to say, “have their reward. If so be they labour diligently in their calling, not only will they enjoy that calm contentment which diligence in the lowliest task never fails to win; not only will the sweat of their brows be sweet, and the sweetener of the rest that follows; but, when the victory is at last achieved, they come in for a share of the glory; even as the meanest soldier who fought at Marathon or at Leipsic became a sharer in the glory of those saving days.” Remember, with Owen Meredith,—

“Remember, every man God made
Is different: has some deed to do,
Some work to work. Be undismay’d
Though thine be humble: do it too.”

An elder teacher would qualify the Remember by a Do not forget, that “it matters infinitely less what we _do_ than what we _are_.” If we cannot pursue a trade or a science—says a memorable voice from a sick-room,—if we cannot keep house, or help the state, or write books, or earn our own bread or that of others, we can do the work to which all this is only subsidiary; “we can cherish a sweet and holy temper; we can vindicate the supremacy of mind over body; we can, in defiance of our liabilities, minister pleasure and hope to the gayest who come prepared to receive pain from the spectacle of our pain; we can, here as well as in heaven’s courts hereafter, reveal the angel growing into its immortal aspect, which is the highest achievement we could propose to ourselves, or that grace from above, could propose to us, if we had a free choice of all possible conditions of human life.”

To all those possible conditions, so manifold in their potentialities, the doctrine applies. The membership is a constant quantity. _Nil me officit unquam_, says Horace, _Ditior hic, aut est quia doctior; est locus uni Cuique suus_. And we have Shakspeare’s word for it, that nought so vile upon the earth doth live, but to the earth some special good doth give; and though he is speaking of stones and the like, are there not sermons in stones, as well as good in everything?

Holy George Herbert shall furnish us with a versicle to the purpose. As ever, he is looking upwards when he says,—

“Indeed the world’s Thy book
Where all things have their leaf assign’d:
Yet a meek look
Hath interlined.
Thy board is full, yet humble guests
Find nests.”

But more pertinent, and less quaintly obscure, is that stanza from another little lyric of his, in which the Country Parson exalts the exalting power of a simple trust in God and devotion to His service:

“A servant with this clause
Makes drudgery divine:
Who sweeps a room, as for Thy laws,
Makes that and the action fine.”

_THE WRATH-DISPELLING POWER OF A SOFT ANSWER._

PROVERBS xv. 1.

While it is the effect, if not the end and aim, of grievous words to stir up anger,—“a soft answer turneth away wrath.” Though “the wrath of a king is as messengers of death, a wise man will pacify it.” “By long forbearing is a prince persuaded, and a soft tongue breaketh the bone.”

When the men of Ephraim, enraged at Gideon’s failing to invoke their aid when he went to fight with the Midianites, chided with him sharply, his soft answer was of instant avail to turn away their wrath. What had he done now in comparison of them? the champion deferentially exclaimed; and what was he able to do in comparison of them? Was not the mere gleaning of the grapes of Ephraim better than the entire vintage of Abi-ezer? “Then their anger was abated toward him, when he had said that.” What threatened to be a very bone of contention,—well, so soft a tongue as that of Jerubbaal, who is Gideon, breaketh the bone.

Discussing Lord Aberdeen’s settlement of the vexed question of the right of search, in 1843, the historian of Europe observes that never was there a truer maxim than that it requires the consent of two persons to make a quarrel; a soft word, a seasonable explanation, often turns aside wrath, and sometimes prevents the most serious wars that threaten to devastate the world. Æsop Smith says he never knew a downright quarrel yet, where two people were not in the wrong; “drop your battledore, and the shuttlecock will fall. ‘A soft answer turneth away wrath.’ No doubt it does, in nine cases out of ten,”—but not quite always, this authority affirms; there being some unreasonable quarrellers, who will batter the peacemaker when he drops his battledore. But as a rule, and on the authority of an older and still more widely recognised maker of proverbs, the mere fact of yielding pacifieth great offences.

The historian of the conquest of Peru tells us how Gasca was assailed by reproaches and invectives which, however, had no power to disturb his equanimity; he patiently listened, and replied to all in the mild tone of expostulation best calculated to turn away wrath. “By this victory over himself,” says Garcilasso, “he acquired more real glory, than by all his victories over his foes.” As Spenser has it,—

“Words well-disposed
Have secret power t’ appease inflamèd rage.”

Sir Matthew Hale’s celebrated letter of advice includes this counsel,—if a person be passionate, and give you ill language, rather to pity him than be moved to anger. We shall find, the pious judge asserts, that silence, or very gentle words, are the most exquisite revenge for reproaches; they will either cure the distemper in the angry man, and make him sorry for his passion, or they will be a severe reproof and punishment to him. “But at any rate,” adds Sir Matthew, “they will preserve your innocence, give you the deserved reputation of wisdom and moderation, and keep up the serenity and composure of your mind. Passion and anger make a man unfit for everything that becomes him as a man or as a Christian.”

The fact is, maintains the author of “The Gentle Life,” all hard words are a mistake: most of our quarrels arise from a total misunderstanding of each other; and at any rate, hard words will not mend the matter. One might as well, he says, try to mend glass windows by pelting them with stones. Soft words, on the other hand, fall like a healing balm on the hearts of all. “Such power,” in the words of one who loved to be written, if not to write himself, Leontius, “such power has the least shadow of a pleasant speech, to do away an ill-feeling of the moment, in the complacency it produces, both in the giver and receiver.” To apply, again, a passage from Spenser, descriptive of a damsel’s success in deterring two doughty knights from mortal encounter, so effective was her speech to

... “calm the sea of their tempestuous spite:
Such power have pleasing words! Such is the might
Of courteous clemency in gentle heart!”

We are all of us fond of gentle words, once more to quote an _ex titulo_ authority on all that concerns gentle living; and he denies the truth of the common rough proverb, “Soft words butter no parsnips,” which is shown to be, after all, an apologetic proverb, meaning that the hearer is tickled with the politeness, albeit real satisfaction is not yet made. “Soft words do butter parsnips; and many an oily fellow, whose talent, industry, and conscientiousness are small, owes his position and advancement in life to the soft words which drop continually from his mouth.” The soft answer that avails to dispel wrath, comes of practised patience; and when patience has its perfect work, it works miracles, as detailed by that fine old forgotten poet, Decker:—

“It is the greatest enemy to law
That can be, for it doth embrace all wrongs,
And so chains up lawyers and women’s tongues;
...
And last of all, to end a household strife,
It is the honey ’gainst a waspish wife.”

This reminds us of a passage in “The Gordian Knot,” where the gentle laying of a husband’s hand in an irritated wife’s, or _vice versâ_, is recommended (by example) as a good plan to adopt in conjugal discussions when differences arise. The tongue, says our author, is very proud, abominably proud and sulky, and often refuses to say what the heart desires should be said; but the fingers know their duty, and are ready to convey an apologetic or forgiving pressure, which, he makes bold to assert, “will stop ninety-nine quarrels out of a hundred, if the parties love one another.”

The greatest, widest, deepest of all observers of human nature puts into the mouth of one of the sagest of kings this counsel to a younger son, in respect to his bearing towards the elder:—

... “Blunt not his love; ...
For he is gracious, if he be observed;[39]
Yet notwithstanding, being incensed, he’s flint:
As humorous as winter, and as sudden
As flaws[40] congealed in the spring of day.
His temper, therefore, must be well observed:
Chide him for faults, and do it reverently,
When you perceive his blood inclined to mirth:
But being moody, give him line and scope;
Till that his passions, like a whale on ground,
Confound themselves with working.”

In a later one, again, of his noble series of English history plays—indeed the latest—Shakspeare makes a ducal politician, astute in practical psychology as well as in politics, utter this apophthegm, of his own coinage:—

“Anger is like
A full-hot horse, who being allowed his way,
Self-mettle tires him.”

_A TWICE-TOLD TALE OF YEARS._

ECCLESIASTES vi. 6.

The preacher, whose text was Vanity of vanities, all is vanity, pictures in one section of his homily a man who has lived many years, “so that the days of his years be many,” but whose soul is not filled with good, but aches rather with a gnawing sense of emptiness, so that his many years, gloomy as they have been, are all too few. “Yea, though he live a thousand years twice told, yet hath he seen no good: do not all go to one place?” What more tedious than such a twice-told tale of years? Yet, to look back upon, how fleet their transit, how imperceptible their lapse, how petty the sum of them! That tale is soon told, even if told twice.

The days of our life are threescore years and ten, and though men be so strong that they come to fourscore years, yet is their strength then but labour and sorrow; nor do the fourscore seem longer to the retrospective reviewer than do to the sexagenarian his sixty years, or to the septuagenarian his threescore and ten. The most popular of contemporary authors describes a man of seventy-eight, of whom a loveless, sad-hearted questioner asks whether his seventy-eight years would not be seventy-eight heavy curses, if he could say to himself, as the questioner can, “I have secured to myself the love and attachment, the gratitude or respect, of no human creature; I have won myself a tender place in no regard; I have done nothing good or serviceable to be remembered by.” The Royal Preacher would apply context as well as text to such a retrospect, with an “I say, that an untimely birth is better than he. For he cometh in with vanity, and departeth in darkness, and his name shall be covered with darkness. Moreover he hath not seen the sun, nor known anything: this hath more rest than the other. Yea, though he live a thousand years twice told, yet hath he seen no good.”

The same questioner, already cited, asks the same old man if his childhood seems far off,—if the days when he sat at his mother’s knee seem days of very long ago? To which the experience of threescore and eighteen years gives this reply: “Twenty years back, yes: at this time of my life, no. For, as I draw closer and closer to the end, I travel in the circle, nearer and nearer to the beginning.” But he is not one to feel and say with the French cynic, “Mais enfin la vie se passe, et mourir après s’être amusé ou s’être ennuyé dix ou vingt ans, c’est la même chose.” He has not so learned life, and the meaning of life, and its purpose, and its end.

Infinite is the swiftness of time, says Seneca, as seen by those who are looking back at time past. _Infinita est velocitas temporis, quæ magis apparet respicientibus._ Looked forward to, it is another matter altogether. As Cowper has it, when retracing the windings of his way through many years,—

“Short as in retrospect the journey seems,
It seemed not always short; the rugged path,
And prospect oft so dreary and forlorn,
Moved many a sigh at its disheartening length.”

But as Cowper elsewhere draws the contrast, in the Latin motto he wrote for the king’s clock,—

“Quæ lenta accedit, quam velox præterit hora!”

(Slow comes the hour; its passing speed how great!—so Hayley Englished the line.) “Since this new epoch in my life,” writes Schleiermacher on a certain occasion, “time seems to fly twice as quickly as before, and I can quite fancy that when Jatte and I are grown old and grey, we shall still feel as if only a few days had gone by.” Moore was in his sixtieth year when Lord John Russell talked with him of the speed with which time seems to fly; and Moore records in his Diary the question he put, “If you find it so now, what will you say of it when you are as old as I am?” The “peculiar melancholy” of the answer given is emphasised in the same journal.

Another retrospective reviewer pictures our race as struggling ever onward, toiling up towards some air-built goal never to be attained—while the past crumbles instantly away behind our steps, like the staircase of the Epicurean, as we advance in our progress; and every step, which was of such magnitude when we passed it, is forgotten in the “collectiveness of retrospection,” insomuch that at times a passing thought would compass the events of years.

Few and evil the patriarch declares the days of the years of his pilgrimage to have been, when, in answer to Pharaoh’s “How old art thou?” the answer is, A hundred and thirty years. Man that is born of a woman is of few days, said another patriarch, and full of trouble. His days are swifter than a post, they flee away, they see no good. They are passed away as the swift ships; they are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle. _Festinat enim decurrere velox Flosculus angustæ miseræque brevissima vitæ Portio._ And thus in Juvenal’s pregnant phrase, _obrepit non intellecta senectus_. Or, as with the ageing subject of the Three Warnings,—

“Old Time whose haste no mortal spares,
Uncalled, unheeded, unawares,
Brought him on his eightieth year.”

We bring our years to an end, as it were a tale that is told.

In one of his letters to his old friend Mrs. Hughes, Southey commences a paragraph with the truism, “The last twenty years, to you and me, are but as yesterday;” and he adds, that if we could but bring ourselves to feel, as truly as we know, that the next twenty years are but as to-morrow, that feeling, with a trust in God’s mercy, would be sufficient consolation under all sorrows. Half a year later we find him writing to her in the same strain: “It seems but as yesterday when I look back twenty, thirty, forty, and even more years; the end, therefore, of my mortal term would seem but as to-morrow if it were rightly looked on to. A little while, and we shall be young again, beyond all power of time and change, with those whom we love, and to continue with them for ever and ever.” Madame de Sévigné utters her pure French hélas! over the like retrospect of twenty years: “Hélas! est-il possible qu’il y ait vingt-un ans? il me esembleque ce fut l’année passée; mais je juge, par le peu que m’a duré ce temps, ce que me paraîtront les années qui viendront encore.” Home, straight home to every heart comes the homely moral of the bard addressing the busy, curious, thirsty fly he freely welcomed to his cup, and whose little life he compared with his longer yet little own:—

“Both alike are mine and thine,
Hastening quick to their decline:
Thine’s a summer, mine no more,
Though repeated to threescore;
Threescore summers, when they’re gone,
Will appear as short as one.”

If for threescore we read fourscore, it would not mar the metre, or the rhyme or reason.

Man is never so deluded as when he dreams of his own duration, says Cowper; and he goes on to cite Jacob’s retrospective reviewal of years elapsed: “The answer of the old patriarch to Pharaoh may be adapted by every man at the close of the longest life. ‘Few and evil have been the days of the years of my pilgrimage.’ Whether we look back from fifty or from twice fifty, the past equally appears a dream; and we can only be said truly to have lived while we have been profitably employed.” And as the sovereign lady of French letter-writers has her Hélas! so one of the princes among English letter-writers has his Alas! to utter on this trite topic, “Alas, then, making the necessary deductions, how short is life!” Though the life be made up of a thousand years twice told, the tale is told so soon, and the teller seems to himself but as a dreamer, and his little life is rounded with a sleep; like as a dream when one awaketh.