Chapter VIII: Part 8

So again he makes Capulet cry out, at the loss of his daughter Juliet, “O thou untaught! what manners is in this, to press before thy father to a grave!” Writing to a kinsman on the birth of a son, Burke gives utterance to the wish, “May he live to be the staff of your age, and to close your eyes in peace; instead of, like me, reversing the order of nature, and having the melancholy office to close _his_.” And to his “dear little niece,” Mary, he thus writes after the birth of her son (Thomas Haviland Burke): “May you see your son a support to your old age; ... and at a very long day may _he_ close _your_ eyes, not as I have done those of your admirable cousin.” His progeny may never be his posterity, muses Sir Thomas Browne, in his meditations on man: “he may go out of the world less related than he came into it; and considering the frequent mortality in friends and relations, in such a term of time, he may pass away divers years in sorrow and black habits, and leave none to mourn for himself; orbity may be his inheritance.”

Bitterly Mohammed bewailed the death of his four sons by Kadijah, who died in their infancy; and especially that of one by Maria the Egyptian; for not only was this fatal to his hopes of founding an hereditary religious dynasty, but it affected his claims to pre-eminent favour with God. “Al-as Ebn Wayel, who was so cruel and so daring as to insult him on the loss of his favourite boy, ... was accursed of heaven, and a special Sura (the 108th) was revealed to console the Prophet.” Bitterly Saint Stephen, the first king of Hungary, bewailed the loss of his promising son Emeric—the first of a series of shocks that hastened his own end. Like the desolate sire in Scott’s poem who

... “beheld aghast,
With Wilfrid all his projects pass,
All turn’d and centred on his son,
On Wilfrid all—and he was gone.
‘And I am childless now,’ he said.”

Réné of Anjou, in surviving his male offspring, was the last representative of his race. Southey observes that _Pauli in domo præter se nemo superest_, is a reflection passing melancholy in the speech of Paulus Æmilius; and applying it to his own emphatically good physician, he says, that the speedy extinction of his family in his own person was often in the Doctor’s mind, and that he would sometimes touch upon it, to dear friends, in moods of autumnal feeling.

Michelet’s record of the death of Charles le Bel, who leaving only a daughter, was succeeded by a cousin, closes with the reminder, “All that fine family of princes who had sat near their father at the council of Vienne, was extinct. In the popular belief, the curse of Boniface had taken effect.” So with Alexander III. of Scotland, whose eldest son died soon after his marriage, leaving no issue, and whose second son died while a boy; other bereavements followed, and the king came to feel in fact as the patriarch felt by anticipation, that to be bereaved of one’s children, was bereavement indeed. King James V., in like manner the survivor of both his sons, died a broken-hearted man.

Laelio Torelli, the Florentine statesman and man of letters, survived all his children. Shakspeare lost his only son some twenty years before his own decease. Vincentio Scamozzi, the architect, who died the same year as Shakspeare, caused no little talk at the time, by the very singular will he left, betokening a most extraordinary solicitude for the perpetuation of his name, as he had the grief of outliving his offspring. Sir Francis Vere’s three sons and two daughters all died before him. It was accounted a signal calamity in the career of that true nobleman, the Duke of Ormond, that he outlived “the noble-minded Ossory,” worthy son of such a sire.

“The feeble wrap the athletic in his shroud; and weeping fathers build their children’s tomb.” Young’s is that truism; and Pope’s is the cognate query, “Say, was it virtue, more though Heaven ne’er gave, lamented Digby, sunk thee to the grave?

“Tell me, if virtue made the son expire,
Why, full of days and honours, lives the sire?”

Passing in his Meditations from single persons to families, Marcus Antoninus refers to that of the Pompeys, for one instance, as wholly extinct. “This man was the last of his house,” he says, is not an uncommon inscription upon a monument. As with Homer’s Phænops, in feeble age, who lost his joy and hope in young Xanthus and Thoön:

“Vast was his wealth, and these the only heirs
Of all his labours, and a life of cares.
Cold death o’ertakes them in their blooming years,
And leaves the father unavailing tears.
To strangers now descends his heapy store,
The race forgotten, and the name no more.”

Who on his staff is this? we ask with Ossian; who is this whose head is white with age, whose eyes are red with tears, who quakes at every step? “It is thy father, O Morar!” dead and gone Morar: “the father of no son but thee.... Weep, thou father of Morar; weep, but thy son heareth thee not. Deep is the sleep of the dead—low their pillow of dust.” This flies sure to the old man’s heart, says Schiller’s Illo of the elder Piccolomini,

... “He has his whole life long
Fretted and toil’d to raise his ancient house
From a count’s title to the name of prince;
And now must seek a grave for his only son.”

Peter the Great, whether guilty or not of putting to death his elder son, Alexis, was inconsolable for the loss of the only remaining one. It was the fate of Queen Anne to lose, at twelve years of age, the hopeful young prince who alone survived of all her very many children.

Samuel Richardson was the saddened survivor of all his five sons and a daughter. The celebrated Dutch philosopher and mathematician, ’Sgravesande, who, by the way, was born within the same year with Richardson, lost his two sons within eight days of each other, and is honoured for the Christian resignation with which he bore the sharp trial. Sir John Vanbrugh lost his only son at the battle of Tournay. Bishop Warburton died not long after his only son, who was carried off by a decline in the springtide of life. It is of a distinguished Swiss littérateur, who died in his prime, that Sainte-Beuve somewhere says _que sa destinée tranchée avant l’heure a pourtant été complète, si un père octogénaire ne lui survivait_.

“I ought to have gone before him: I wonder he went so young,”

wails the aged mother in Mr. Tennyson’s poem, all whose children have gone before her, she is so old.

The gathering sorrows which clouded the latter years of Bishop Percy, “after a life in the main prosperous and happy,” commenced with the loss of an only son.

Lord Kenyon died in 1802, “sorrow-stricken by the loss of his eldest son, after having accumulated a fortune of £300,000.” Lord Stowell lost his son, aged forty-two, about two months only before he too fell on death. Sprengel, the very learned German physician, never recovered the stroke of his son’s loss. Cuvier’s four children all died before him. “Write ye this man childless:” many a man of genius has felt his heart sink and his strength fail under that blighting sentence. In his sixty-seventh year we find Moore writing, “The last of our five children is now gone, and we are left desolate and alone. Not a single relative have I now left in the world.” How Mr. Hallam was successively bereaved of sons so rich in promise, if not in performance, is too well known.

There is a seeming affectation of literary paternity in what Chateaubriand writes of the death of Byron,—as though it were Terah and Haran, with a difference. “I preceded him in life; he preceded me in death. He was summoned before his time. My number came before his, and yet his was drawn first from the urn. It was Childe Harold who ought to have remained.”

_THE MOTE AND THE BEAM._

ST. MATTHEW vii. 5.

As easy is it to discern the mote in a brother’s eye as to discern the face of the sky. Hypocrite is the term by which the facile discerner in either case is divinely stigmatised; in the one instance, because with all his discernment he cannot read the signs of the times; in the other, because with all his insight and microscopic nicety of perception, and exceptionally developed faculty of vision, he yet considers not the beam that is in his own eye.

With our Lord’s words concerning the mote and the beam, Archbishop Trench bids us compare the Chinese proverb, “Sweep away the snow from thine own door, and heed not the frost upon thy neighbour’s tiles.” The Greek and Latin classics are not wanting in various readings of the same theme. Demosthenes meant much the same thing when he said that we must beware of austerely scrutinizing the actions of others, unless first we are conscious of having acquitted ourselves aright: “οὐ γὰρ ἐστι πικρῶς ἐξετάσαι τι πέπρακται τοῖς ἀλλοῖς, ἀν μὴ παῤ ὑμῶν ἀυτῶν πρῶτον ὑπάρξη τὰ δέοντα.” “Man is blind to his own faults, but keen-sighted to perceive those of others,” is a Latin adage: “Vitiis suis pervidendis cæcus est homo, in alienis perspicax.” “Is it never your way to look at yourself when you are abusing another?” is a question in Plautus: “Non soles respicere te, cum dicas injuste alteri?” Cicero pronounces it to be of the nature of folly to see the faults of others, and to forget one’s own: “Proprium est stultitiæ aliorum vitia cernere, oblivisci suorum.” Horace shrewdly submits that the man who is desirous that his friends should not take offence at his own protuberances, will “ignore” that friend’s warts:

“Qui, ne tuberibus propriis offendat amicum,
Postulat, ignoscat verrucis illius.”

And at least as pointed and piquant is the passage beginning,

“Quum tua pervideas oculis male lippus inunctis,
Cur in amicorum vitiis tam cernis acutum,” etc.

The query Plautus puts, “How is it that no man tries to search into himself, but each fixes his eyes on the wallet of the one who goes before him?” is in allusion to the fable of Jupiter having loaded men with a couple of wallets; the one, filled with our own vices, being slung at our backs,

“Propriis repletam vitiis post tergum dedit;”

the other, heavy with our neighbour’s faults, hung in front,

“Alienis ante pectus suspendit gravem.”

To pardon those absurdities in ourselves which we cannot suffer in others, is neither better nor worse, says Dean Swift, than to be more willing to be fools ourselves than to have others so. The proverbs of all nations show all nations to be alive to the ridiculous in this respect. The kiln calls the oven, burnt house, says one. In Italy, the pan says to the pot, Keep off, or you’ll smutch me. In Spain, the raven bawls hoarsely to the crow, Get out, blackamoor! (_Quítate allá, negro!_) In Germany, one ass nicknames another, Long-ears. And Dr. Trench is rather taken with a certain originality in the Catalan version of the proverb: “Death said to the man with his throat cut, ‘How ugly you look!’” They should be fair, hints Juvenal, who venture to deride the disproportioned leg or sooty hide, _Loripedem rectus derideat, Æthiopem albus_. Yet, as the Ettrick shepherd once sang in his native Doric:—

“There’s some wi’ big scars on their face,
Point out a prin scart on a frien’;
And some, black as sweeps wi’ disgrace,
Cry out, the whole warld’s unclean.”

Molière’s Chrysale twits her sister Bélise, who is a _femme savante_, with snapping up everybody short who makes a slip with the tongue, while herself liable to graver censure for slips of conduct:—

“Le moindre solécisme en parlant vous irrite;
Mais vous en faites, vous, d’étranges en conduite.”

Sappho, again, in Mademoiselle de Scudéry’s portentous romance—once the rage of readers in France, despite its plurality of volumes, as “Clarissa” was in England, a century later—ridicules the _bizarre_ orthography of the fine-ladyism of the day, while amused at the fact that the fine ladies in question, who perpetrated such gross errors in writing, and who lost every particle of wit the moment they took up a pen, would yet make game for days together of some poor foreigner who happened to use one term for another. As if it were less a matter of mirth or marvel for a _grande dame_, claiming to be a woman of wit, too, and a power in society, to commit a thousand blunders in writing her native language, than for a raw foreigner to make a few slips in speaking it.

We every day and every hour, observes Montaigne, say things of another that we might more properly say of ourselves, could we but revert our observation to our own concerns as well as extend it to others. And the old essayist has his fling at not a few authors of the day who, in this manner, prejudiced their own cause by running headlong upon those they attacked, and darting those shafts against their enemies that might, with much greater propriety and effect, be hurled back at themselves.

A stanza in the most elaborate of Shakspeare’s poems that are not plays—for are not all his plays poems?—runs into this eloquence of remonstrant appeal:—

“Think but how vile a spectacle it were
To view thy present trespass in another.
Men’s faults do seldom to themselves appear;
Their own transgressions partially they smother:
This guilt would seem death-worthy in thy brother.
O, how are they wrapped in with infamies,
That from their own misdeeds askance their eyes!”

It is of their common friend Breuning that Beethoven writes to Ferdinand Ries,—“He certainly possesses many admirable qualities, but he thinks himself quite faultless, whereas the very defects that he discovers in others are those which he possesses himself to the highest degree.” One of the most natural and truthfully, as well as forcibly, drawn characters in Mrs. Inchbald’s “Simple Story,”—Sandford,—a man of understanding, of learning, and a complete casuist, yet all whose faults were committed for the want of knowing better, is described as constantly reproving faults in others, and most assuredly too good a man not to have corrected and amended his own, had they been known to him; but known to him they were not. He had been, we are told, for so long a time the spiritual superior or preceptor of all with whom he lived, and so busied with instructing others, that he had not once recollected that he needed instruction himself; and in such awe did his habitual severity keep all about him, that although he had numerous friends, not one of them told him of his failing. “Was there not then some reason for him to suppose he _had_ no faults? His enemies, indeed, hinted that he had; but enemies he never hearkened to; and thus, with all his good sense, he wanted the sense to follow the rule, ‘Believe what your enemies say of you rather than what is said by your friends.’” He had yet to learn, and to learn by heart, the wide and practical import of the prayer—

“Teach me to love and to forgive,
Exact my own defects to scan,
What others are to feel, and know myself a Man.”

Well may the demoniac guide of Don Cleofas, in Le Sage’s symbolical fiction, say, and well does he say, “J’admire messieurs les hommes; leurs propres défauts leur paraissent des minuties, au lieu qu’ils regardent ceux d’autrui avec un microscope.” To their own faults more than a little blind, to those of others they are not a little unkind.

Gay begins his fable of the Turkey and the Ant with the smoothly-turned truism, that

“In other men we faults can spy,
And blame the mote that dims their eye;
Each little speck and error find;
To our own stronger errors blind.”

One of the most classical masters of modern English, whether in verse or prose, was employing the same metre—of fatal facility, as it is called—when he closed his address to a brother bard in a strain that must also close this chapter of instances:

“We, who surround a common table,
And imitate the fashionable,
Wear each two eye-glasses: _this_ lens
Shows us our faults, _that_ other men’s.
We do not care how dim may be
_This_ by whose aid our own we see;
But, ever anxiously alert
That all may have their whole desert,
We would melt down the stars and sun
In our heart’s furnace, to make one
Through which th’ enlightened world might spy
A mote upon a brother’s eye.”

_STRANGERS AND PILGRIMS._

1 PETER ii. 11.

Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, to the strangers scattered throughout Asia Minor, addressed the urgent appeal that _as_ strangers—strangers and pilgrims—they should abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul.

Consider what you are, he seems to say, as his words are paraphrased by the greatest of all commentators on his first epistle: “If you were citizens of this world, then you might drive the same trade” with the men of this world, “and follow the same lusts; but seeing you are chosen and called out of this world, and invested into a new society, made free of another city, and are therefore here but travellers passing through to your own country, it is very reasonable that there be this difference betwixt you and the world, that while they live at home your carriage be such as fits strangers, not glutting yourselves with their pleasures, nor surfeiting upon their delicious fruits, as some unwary travellers do abroad; but as wise strangers living warily and soberly, and still minding most of all your journey homewards, suspecting dangers and snares in your way, and so walking with a holy fear, as the Hebrew word for a stranger imports.”

The topic is one upon which Archbishop Leighton ever writes feelingly. As again in his comment on the psalmist’s profession of being a stranger with God, and a sojourner as all his fathers were, the same devout expositor observes that he who looks on himself as a stranger, and is sensible of the darkness round about him in this wilderness, will often put up that request with David, “I am a stranger in the earth: hide not Thy commandments from me.” What, Leighton asks, is the joy of our life, but the thoughts of that other life, our home before us? “And certainly he that lives much in these thoughts, set him where you will here, he is not much pleased nor displeased; but if His Father call him home, that word gives him his heart’s desire.”

Once again, in the sixth of his lectures on the immortality of the soul, Leighton expatiates on the fact that this is not our rest, that we have no place of residence here below: “it is the region of fleas and gnats; and while we search for happiness among these mean and perishing things, we are not only sure to be disappointed, but also not to escape those miseries which, in great numbers, continually beset us; so that we may apply to ourselves the saying of the famous artist confined in the island of Crete, and truly say,—

“‘Nec tellus nostræ, nec patet unda fugæ,
Restat iter cœli, cœlo tentabimus ire.’”

(“The earth and the sea are shut up against us, and neither of them can favour our escape; the way to heaven is alone open, and this way we will strive to go.”)

Incidentally, it adds to the interest of every such passage in Leighton’s writings to remember a noteworthy circumstance respecting his death. He had been used to say that if he were to choose a place to die in it should be an inn—for that would look so like a pilgrim’s going home, to whom this world was all as an inn. It was his opinion, also, as we read in the memoir of him by Aikman, that “the officious tenderness and care of friends was an entanglement to a dying man, and that the unconcerned attendance of those who could be procured in such a place would give less disturbance.” He had his wish. At the Bell Inn, Warwick Lane, Robert Leighton, in his seventy-fourth year, stranger and pilgrim, drew his last breath.

“An inn receives me, where, unknown,
I solitary sit me down;
Many I hear, and some I see—
I nought to them, they nought to me.

Thus, in those regions of the dead,
A pilgrim’s wandering life I lead;
And still at every step declare
I’ve no abiding city here.

...

The world is like an inn; for there
Men call and storm and drink and swear;
While undisturbed the Christian waits,
And reads and writes and meditates.

Though in the dark ofttimes I stray,
The Lord shall light me on my way;
And to the city of the sun
Conduct me, when my journey’s done.

There by these eyes shall He be seen,
Who sojourned for me at an inn;
On Sion’s hill I those shall hail
From whom I parted in the vale.”

Of him who walks by faith and not by sight, who places eternity by the side of time, and so regards the one as a mere path or stepping-stone to the other, it is well said by Dr. Chalmers that he actually moves through life in the spirit of a traveller, feels his home to be heaven, and all his dearest hopes and interests to be laid up there; “walking therefore over the world with a more light and unencumbered step than other men, just because all its adversities to him are but the crosses of a rapid journey, and all its joys but the shifting scenery of the land through which he is travelling, and visions of passing loveliness.”

As in the pilgrim’s song of a contemporary clerical poet:

“My rest is in heaven; my rest is not here:
Then why should I murmur when trials are near?
Be hushed, my dark spirit! the worst that can come
But shortens thy journey, and hastens thee home.

...

A scrip on my back, and a staff in my hand,
I march on in haste through an enemy’s land:
The road may be rough, but it cannot be long;
And I’ll smooth it with hope, and I’ll cheer it with song.”

The second of Bishop Beveridge’s Resolutions comprises this utterance,—after the expression of a longing that he could be ever on the mount, taking a view of the land of Canaan, for then what dreams and shadows would all things here below appear to be,—“Well! by the grace of God, I am resolved no longer to tie myself to sense and sight, the sordid and trifling affairs of this life, but always to walk as one of the other world; to behave myself in all places, and at all times, as one already possessed of my inheritance and an inhabitant of the New Jerusalem;—by faith assuring myself I have but a few more days to live below, a little more work to do, and be admitted to a nearer vision and fruition of God, and see Him face to face.” And thus, although at present here in the flesh, the believer’s resolve is to look upon himself as more really an inhabitant of heaven than abiding (for here we have no continuing city) upon earth.

In the words of _l’exilé_ of Lamennais, “La patrie n’est point ici-bas; l’homme vainement l’y cherche; ce qu’il prend pour elle n’est qu’un gite d’une nuit.” Happy they, exclaims Pascal in his _Pensées_, whose tears are shed, not at the evanescence of all things earthly and perishable, but when they remember Sion—_dans le souvenir de leur chère patrie_—the heavenly Jerusalem, after which they sigh continually in the weariness of their exile. But as Schiller’s Thekla replies to Neubrunn’s comment on “the journey’s weary length,”—

“The pilgrim, travelling to a distant shrine
Of hope and healing, does not count the leagues.”

John Foster describes the Israelite indeed, who is a pilgrim indeed, as resembling a person whose eye, while he is conversing with you about an object or a succession of objects, should glance every moment towards some great obstacle appearing on the distant horizon. “He seems to talk to his friends in somewhat of the manner of expression with which you can imagine that Elijah spoke, if he remarked to his companion any circumstance in the journey from Bethel to Jericho, and from Jericho to the Jordan; a manner betraying the sublime anticipation which was pressing on his thoughts.” To other pilgrims the vision of the land that is very far off may be, as Professor Maurice puts it, not so clear as they wish; but it is more clear than their vision of anything which lies about them; and without it all would be shadow and darkness. “There, in that state, must lie all that they dream of and hope for.” “There only they must live, or have no life.” “When they pray ‘Thy kingdom come,’ they ask that the Great Shepherd will lead them and their brethren out of a land of pits, a thirsty wilderness, a valley of the shadow of death, to a peaceable habitation and a sure dwelling-place.” There is a bleak desert, in the words of one who wrote sacred songs, though himself no sacred poet,—

... “where daylight grows weary
Of wasting its smiles on a desert so dreary—
What may that desert be?
’Tis life, cheerless life, where the few joys that come
Are lost like that daylight, for ’tis not their home.

There is a lone pilgrim, before whose faint eyes
The water he pants for but sparkles and flies—
Who may that pilgrim be?
’Tis man, hapless man, through this life tempted on
By fair shining hopes, that in shining are gone.”

In that essay of John Foster’s, from which a citation has already been made, the essayist protests against the care so many popular writers seem to take to guard against the inroad of ideas pertaining to another life—as much care as the inhabitants of Holland take against the irruption of the sea; and their writings, he adds, do really form a kind of moral dyke against the invasion from the other world. “They do not instruct a man to act, to enjoy, and to suffer, as a being that may by to-morrow have finally abandoned this orb; everything is done to beguile the feeling of his being ‘a stranger and a pilgrim on the earth.’” They fail to recognise the _c’est vrai_ of the Christian lyrist’s avowal, the—

“_’Tis true_, we are but strangers
And sojourners below;
And countless snares and dangers
Surround the path we go:

Though painful and distressing,
Yet there’s a rest above;
And onward still we’re pressing,
To reach that land of love.”

The object of such a pilgrim is progress—or, rather, progress is the means to an end; and the end is not yet, is not here, but will surely come, and come quickly, and will not tarry. There is a wicket gate towards which they are making progress, and it is the portal of a city that hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God. They who professedly sojourn here as in a strange country, who obey the call to go out into a place which they shall after receive for an inheritance; who confess, and act on the confession, that they are strangers and pilgrims on the earth; they that say and do such things declare plainly that they seek a country, a better country—that is, a heavenly.

Chaucer’s “old style” conveys a meaning the world can never be too old to learn:

“Here is no home, here is but wyldyrnesse.
Forth, pilgrime! forth, best out of thy stalle!
Look up on hye, and thonke God of alle;
Weyve thy lust, and let thy goste thee lede,[18]
And trouthe shall thee delyver, it is no drede.”

We are strangers and sojourners before God, as were all our fathers. By faith it was that Abraham sojourned in the land of promise, as in a strange country, dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise; in tabernacles, that bespeak the stranger and pilgrim upon earth; not in houses built to endure. For he confessed, and denied not, but confessed that here he had no continuing city. True, a citizen he was of no mean city. But it was not of the earth, earthy. For he looked for a city which hath foundations, more everlasting than the hills. Meanwhile, God’s statutes were his songs in the house of his pilgrimage.

The Bird of God is Wordsworth’s epithet for that “resplendent wanderer” called by Eastern islanders the Bird of Heaven, and by us of the West, Bird of Paradise; and, as usual with the serenely meditative bard of Rydal, there is moral, nay, religious teaching in the symbolism of his strain:—

“The Bird of God! whose blessed will
She seems performing as she flies
Over the earth and through the skies,
In never-wearied search of Paradise—
Region that crowns her beauty with the name
She bears for us—for us how blest,
How happy at all seasons, could like aim
Uphold our spirits urged to kindred flight
On wings that fear no glance of God’s pure sight,
No tempest from His breath, their promised rest
Seeking with indefatigable quest
Above a world that deems itself most wise
When most enslaved by gross realities!”

An appalling pestilence raged in Carthage, and so gave deadly emphasis to the exhortations of St. Cyprian, when he, a good shepherd, sought to lead the sheep of his flock to green pastures and still waters of comfort; reminding them, as he stood between the living and the dead, while as yet the plague was stayed not, that they had renounced the world, and were abiding here as strangers and pilgrims only. “Let us,” he besought them, “embrace that time which gives to each one his home, which, delivering us from this world, and loosing us from worldly snares, restores us to paradise and the kingdom.” Who, he asks, that is placed in a foreign land, would not hasten to return to his own country? Who that saileth towards his own, would not eagerly desire a prosperous wind to bring him swiftly to the embrace of those he loves? “Our country we believe to be paradise: the patriarchs we esteem our parents. Why, then, do we not speed and run, that we may behold our country and salute our parents?”

Salutary though the sentiment be, however, it admits of one-sided exaggeration. There are good people who, for instance, exalt and expatiate upon the death of godly infants, as though to quit this earth of ours at the very earliest date were the most blessed of privileges. The idea of man being sent into the world for any definite purpose never seems, it has been justly said, to enter the minds of these good people. “With them life is but an irksome omnibus-journey—the shorter the better—and to be got over by each without any regard to the comfort or requirements of his fellow-travellers.” Only in part are these strictures on “the shorter the better” applicable, if at all, to the theme and expression of Mrs. Browning’s sonnet:—

“I think we are too ready with complaint
In this fair world of God’s. Had we no hope
Indeed beyond the zenith and the slope
Of yon grey blank of sky, we might grow faint
To muse upon eternity’s constraint
Round our aspirant souls. But since the scope
Must widen early, is it well to droop
For a few days consumed in loss and taint?
O pusillanimous heart! be comforted,
And, like a cheerful traveller, take the road,
Singing beside the hedge. What if the bread
Be bitter in thine inn, and thou unshod
To meet the flints?—At least it may be said,
‘Because the way is _short_, I thank thee, God!’”

Addison devotes a paragraph in one of his _Spectators_ to the fact of men being in Scripture called strangers and sojourners upon earth, and life a pilgrimage. And he refers to several heathen as well as Christian authors, who under the same kind of metaphor have represented the world as an inn, which was only designed to furnish us with accommodation in this our passage. It is therefore very absurd, urges our moral essayist, to think of setting up our rest before we come to our journey’s end; and not rather to take care of the reception we shall there meet with, than to fix our thoughts on the little conveniences and advantages which we enjoy one above another in the way to it.

“The Illusiveness of Life” is the title of a sermon on the patriarchs as sojourners in a strange country, by the late F. W. Robertson, of Brighton; who with characteristic force and insight explains the deception of life’s promise, and the meaning of that deception. He shows how our natural anticipations deceive us—every human life being a fresh one, bright with hopes that will never be realized. With our affections, he goes on to say, it is still worse, because they promise more. “Men’s affections are but the tabernacles of Canaan—the tents of a night—not permanent habitations, even for this life.” Where, he asks, are the charms of character, the perfection and the purity and the truthfulness which seemed so resplendent in our friend? They were only the shape of our own conceptions—our creative shaping intellect projected its own fantasies on him; and hence we outgrow our early friendships—outgrow the intensity of all: we dwell in tents; we never find a home, even in the land of promise, any more than Abraham did. “Life is an unenjoyable Canaan, with nothing real or substantial in it.” But there is another beside the sentimental way, trite enough, of considering this aspect of life—as a bubble, a dream, a delusion, a phantasm, and that other is the way of faith. “The ancient saints felt as keenly as any moralist could feel the brokenness of life’s promises: they confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims here; they said that they had here no continuing city; but they did not mournfully moralize on this; they said it cheerfully, and rejoiced that it was so.” Strangers—the very term implies a distant home. Pilgrims—the law of whose pilgrimage is to make progress. Forgetting the things behind; rating at their true worth the things around; earnestly pressing forward to the things before. Keble’s devout lyric on the escape to Zoar is pitched in this key:—

“Sweet is the smile of home; the mutual look
When hearts are of each other sure;
Sweet all the joys that crowd the household nook,
The haunt of all affections pure;
Yet in the world even these abide, and we
Above the world our calling boast:
Once gain the mountain-top, and thou art free:
Till then, who rest, presume; who turn to look, are lost.”

_THE FALSITY OF THE FAMILIAR FRIEND._

PSALM xli. 9.

The psalmist’s enemies were speaking evil of him: when should he die, and his name perish? All that hated him were whispering together against him, and devising hurt. But this he could bear, on the part of declared foes. What he could not bear was that his own familiar friend, in whom he trusted, and who ate of his bread, should have lifted up his heel against him.

Hengstenberg remarks that in Judas the expression, “Which did eat of my bread,” receives its full, its frightful verification, in the fact of his participating in the Last Supper—to say nothing of habitually sharing in previous and everyday meals.

Even a comparatively slight wound may be severe when dealt by a friend. Dr. Colani thinks that never could the Son of man have felt so acutely the pain caused by opposition and non-recognition as when He received the message from John the Baptist, inquiring into the credentials of His Divine mission. That the rulers of the people, that one of the twelve, that those of His own kin, should doubt or dispute His mission, was hard enough to bear, but perhaps easy to foresee. But when he who had baptized Him, who had, so to speak, revealed Him to Himself,—when His “spiritual father” took his stand among the doubters, “Jesus must have felt a heartrending surprise, a veritable consternation:” for the Baptist was not a reed shaken with the wind, and yet, if the Divine hand rested on that support, what but a reed was it, to pierce, even while it gave way?

The _Et tu, Brute!_ of dying Cæsar is a large utterance, hardly more deep in reproachful pathos than wide of application. The bitterness of its import, varying in intensity, has sufficed to choke bad men and good and indifferent,—as a pang more sharp than all. What stung Jugurtha to the heart was the treachery of his confidential agent, Bomilcar, who intrigued to betray him to the Romans. What Cicero professes to have felt most keenly, during the Clodian troubles, was the perfidious conduct to him of that Serranus to whom, when consul, he had been so kind; nor was it the least bitter drop in the cup he had to drain at the last, that the leader of the band who took his life was one whose life Cicero had once saved, as counsel for the defence. Antony in the tragedy is naturally made to brood most resentfully on the being betrayed by one on whose bosom he had “slept secure of injured faith.” He can forgive a foe, but not a friend:

“Treason is there in its most horrid shape,
Where trust is greatest.”

Herod the Great felt the pang when that dark and horrible secret, as Milman calls it, came to light, that Antipater, the beloved son, for whom he had imbrued his hands in the blood of his own children—Antipater, the heir of his kingdom—was “clearly proved to have conspired with Pheroras (B.C. 5) to poison his old and doting father, and thus to secure and accelerate his own succession.” Michelet’s narrative of the decline and death of the Emperor Frederick II. comprises this record: “Finally his chancellor, his dearest friend, Peter de Vineâ, attempted to poison him. After this last blow it only remained for him to veil his face, like Cæsar on the ides of March.” And familiar to us all is the story of our Henry II., sick and bedridden, inquiring the names of the supporters of his rebellious son Richard. He was for declaring John, the youngest of his sons, and as he thought the most attached to him, heir to all his continental dominions. But on hearing the name of his beloved John, highest on the list of Richard’s adherents, Henry was seized with a sort of convulsive agitation, sat up in bed, and gazing around with searching and haggard look, exclaimed, “Can it be true that John, my heart, the son of my choice, on whom I doted more than on all the rest, and my love for whom has brought on me all my woes, has fallen from me?” Assured that so it was, “Well then,” sighed Henry, falling back on his bed, and turning his face to the wall, “henceforward let all go on as it may; I no longer care for myself nor for the world.” And in this connection may be mentioned the dying exclamation of Henry’s murdered chancellor. “What is this, Reginald?” cried Becket to Fitzurse, when the latter made up to him, bared sword in hand: “I have loaded you with favours, and _you_ come to me armed, and in the church?” The last stroke that broke down the aged Pope Boniface VIII., bowed with the weight of eighty-six years, was the defection of his favourite and favoured nephew. One may apply to such defections the upbraidal in a latter-day poem on Old Pictures in Florence:

“Giotto, how, with that soul of yours,
Could you play me false who loved you so?
Some slight if a certain heart endures,
It feels, I would have your fellows know.
Well—I perceive not why I should care
To break a silence that suits them best;
But the thing grows somewhat hard to bear
When I find a Giotto join the rest.”

Most painful to Luther, in his last moments, was the controversy forced upon him by the defection of so dear a friend as Agricola, the leader of the Antinomians. He had long before that expressed his “astoundment” at the secession of Œcolampadius and Regius, and other intimate associates. “Why should I fret and fume against the papists?” he wrote in 1531: “all they have done against me has been in fair, open war; we are declared enemies, and act as such. They who hurt me are my own dear children. My brothers, _fraterculi mei, aurei amiculi mei_.... I thought I had gone through, had exhausted all the adversities the evil one could inflict; but it was not so. My Absalom, the child of my heart, had not deserted his father, had not poured out ignominy upon David; my Judas, the traitor who delivered up his master, had not sold me: he has done so now.”

If Mary Stuart had any quarter to which, in her disastrous condition, she might look for love and favour, it was, says the most popular of historians of Scotland, her brother Murray. _His_ kindness and compassion she deserved, after loading him with favours, as well as pardoning him considerable offences. But his acceptance of the regency broke all remaining ties of tenderness betwixt him and his sister. Scott is not romancing when, in an historical romance, he describes her reception of the news. “The queen gave a sort of shriek, and clapping her hands together, exclaimed, ‘Comes the arrow out of his quiver?—out of my brother’s bow?’” When Elizabeth appointed commissioners to inquire into Mary’s case, the Regent Murray appeared before them, “in the odious character of the accuser of his sister, benefactress, and sovereign.” To adopt the sentiment of the most sententious of stage moralists, When ingratitude barbs the dart of injury, the wound has double danger in it.

What touched Cortez most nearly, at the time of the expulsion from Mexico, was to find the name of his trusted friend, his _intimado_, his _privado_, the secretary Duero, at the head of the paper of remonstrance presented by his disaffected soldiers. We find Louis XVI., on the eve of his execution, inquiring with calm curiosity, and as though not personally affected, how certain members of the convention whom he knew had voted at his trial. Told that his cousin of Orleans had voted for his death, “Ah!” he exclaimed to Malesherbes, “that affects me more than all the rest.” It was, remarks Lamartine, the comment of Cæsar when he recognised the face of Brutus amongst his murderers; he alone roused him to speak.

So spake the captain of Plymouth, but with more of anger in his sorrow, in the New England hexameters devoted by Longfellow to Miles Standish, when he charged John Alder with having supplanted, defrauded, betrayed him:—

“Yours is the greater treason, for yours is a treason to friendship!
You, who lived under my roof, whom I cherished and loved as a brother;
You, who have fed at my board and drunk of my cup, to whose keeping
I have entrusted my honour, my thoughts the most sacred and secret,—
You too, Brutus! ah, woe to the name of friendship hereafter!”

It was the revolt of his beloved son Conrad which crushed to the earth the emperor Henry IV. What Dean Milman calls “the almost fatal effect” of his conduct on his father, can only be ascribed to profound affection, deeply, cruelly, wantonly wounded. “The revolt of Conrad seemed to crush the aged Emperor to the earth. He had borne all the vicissitudes of his earlier life with unbroken courage, he had risen from his humiliation at Canosa with refreshed energy; he now abandoned himself to despair, threw off the robes and insignia of royalty, and was hardly prevented by his friends from falling on his own sword.”—There is a spice of the _et tu Brute_ bitterness in Becket’s exclamation to John of Poitiers, when even that most ardent of his admirers followed him to Etampes, and implored him to yield. “And you too,” cried the primate, in a pang of wrath, “will you strangle us”—_ut quid nos et vos strangulatis_?—The great Emperor Frederick II. reproached Pope Gregory IX., in the height of their contest, as having been, while in the lower orders of the Church, his familiar friend; but that no sooner had he reached the height of his ambition than he threw off all gratitude, and became his determined foe.—When Queen Elizabeth broke out on a party of the peers for urging her whither she would not, Norfolk she as good as called traitor and conspirator, and Pembroke she said talked like a foolish soldier; but to Leicester it was that she exclaimed, “You, my lord, you! If all the world forsook me I thought that you would be true!”—Charles I.’s celebrated letter to Prince Rupert after the loss of Bristol, depriving him of his command, begins with assuring him that the surrender, in such a manner, and by his trusted, no longer trusty nephew, of that most important city, was the greatest trial of his constancy that had yet befallen him: “For what is to be done, after one that is so near me as you are, both in blood and friendship, submits himself to so mean an action (I give it the easiest term)? such—I have so much to say, that I will say no more of it.” The tone is that of the duke in Mr. Browning’s _Colombe’s Birthday_:

“Ah, the first bitterness is over now!
Bitter I may have felt it to confront
The truth, and ascertain those natures’ value
I had so counted on—that was a pang.”

Corneille, in his historical tragedy of _Cinna_, treats in a like strain the effect upon Augustus of the discovered conspiracy:

“Quoi! mes plus chers amis! quoi! Cinna! quoi! Maxime!
Les deux que j’honorais d’une si haute estime,
A qui j’ouvrais mon cœur, et dont j’avais fait choix
Pours les plus importants et plus nobles emplois!
Après qu’entre leurs mains j’ai remis mon empire,
Pour m’arracher le jour l’un et l’autre conspire!”

But a later scene proves that Augustus is not even yet aware of all the accomplices; and the conviction of Æmilie as one of them, wrings from him, as Brutus from the elder Cæsar, the upbraiding cry, _Et toi, ma fille, aussi!_

One touching incident marks the horror of the murder of the Czar Paul in 1801. The dress of Ouvaroff, one of the conspirators, is said to have caused him to be mistaken by the Emperor for his son Constantine; and, according to Bignon, the last words which the unhappy monarch uttered were, “And you too, my Constantine!”

Very worthless objects have sometimes been very undeservedly Et-tu-Brutefied. The first Lord Holland, when forsaken by the selfish friends, as they have justly been described, with whom he had jobbed and made merry and laughed at principle, had yet retained enough belief in the social virtues to be made seriously unhappy by the conduct of his worthless companions, particularly by that of Rigby, the most worthless of them all;

“White-liver’d Grenville and self-loving Gower
Shall never cause one peevish moment more; ...
Slight was the pain they gave, and short its date;
I found I could not both despise and hate;
But, Rigby, what did I for thee endure?”

A man as pious as Henry Fox was otherwise, has declared that he knew few things which so darken one’s views of the moral government of God, as the experience of baseness and treachery in persons who have won our confidence; that it tempts one to question the reality of human virtue, to suspect the hollowness of all appearance of truth and piety, whence there is but a step to calling in question the moral purpose for which we are placed on earth. Hawthorne somewhere intimates that the young and pure are not apt to find out how actually sin is in the world, until that miserable truth is brought home to them by the guiltiness of some trusted friend. “Trust ye not in a friend,”—but ah, the pity of it, for him who has to take up with these words of the Morasthite,—“A man’s enemies are the men of his own house.”—How many variations on this general theme might be played from Shakespeare’s plays! Sir Valentine, for instance, denouncing the falsity of that other, so-called, but so far mis-called, Gentleman of Verona:

... “Now I dare not say
I have one friend alive; thou wouldst disprove me.
Who should be trusted now, when one’s right hand
Is perjured to the bosom? Proteus,
I am sorry I must never trust thee more,
But count the world a stranger for thy sake.
The private wound is deepest: O time most curst!
’Mongst all foes that a friend should be the worst!”

Polixenes, again, argues touching the breach of amity between him and Leontes, that revenge is like to be all the more bitter for the cordiality of past confidence. Then, too, the implication of Lord Scroop, of Masham, in the conspiracy with Grey and Cambridge against Henry V.,—

“Nay, but the man that was his bedfellow,
Whom he hath cloy’d and graced with princely favours,—
That he should, for a foreign purse, so sell
His sovereign’s life to death and treachery!”

Henry reminds Scroop that he bore the key of all his counsels, and knew the very bottom of his soul; and he wept for _him_,—“for this revolt of thine, methinks, is like another fall of man.”—A later king of England, Edward IV., is made to despair when he sees his brother Clarence among the supporters of the foe: “Yea, brother of Clarence, art thou here too? Nay, then, I see that Edward needs must down.”—And once again, there is the _Et tu Brute_ cue from which we started, thus set forth in all its suggestive force by Shakespeare’s Antony:

“For Brutus, as you know, was Cæsar’s angel:
Judge, O you gods, how dearly Cæsar loved him!
This was the most unkindest cut of all:
For when the noble Cæsar saw _him_ stab,
Ingratitude, more strong than traitor’s arms,
Quite vanquish’d him: then burst his mighty heart.”

But as we recur to this, as the first among these secular annotations on a Scripture text, so we recur to Scripture, in conclusion, for a pathetic parallel, also from the Book of Psalms: “For it was not an enemy that reproached me; then I could have borne it; neither was it he that hated me that did magnify himself against me: then I would have hid myself from him. But it was thou, a man mine equal, my guide, and mine acquaintance. We took sweet counsel together, and walked unto the house of God in company.” The companionship past intensifies the cruelty present. Without so recent and vivid a remembrance of sweet counsel together, and companionship hallowed by the sanctuary itself, the present cruelty could have been borne; but with them it hardly can.

“_JUDGE NOT._”

ST. MATTHEW vii. 1.

A stringent motive is adduced to enforce the strenuous monition, “Judge not,”—and it is, “that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged; and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.” There is one Lawgiver, who is able to save and to destroy; even He who hath committed all judgment unto the Son: who art thou that judgest another?

* * * * *

Appalled were all who gazed on the last struggles of Cardinal Beaufort, rendered hideous by the tortures of agonizing remorse. Hope had he none. Despair was impersonated in the frenzied contortions of that dying man. King and peers stood beside the death-bed, awe-stricken and shocked. The king prayed for the cardinal, that the Eternal mover of the heavens might “look with a gentle eye upon this wretch:

O beat away the busy meddling fiend
That lays strong siege upon this wretch’s soul,
And from his bosom purge this black despair.”

See, says a less gentle observer, Warwick, how the pangs of death do make him grin. Royal Henry, on devouter thoughts intent, bids “peace to his soul,” in parting, “if God’s pleasure be.” And then the monarch solemnly, urgently, importunes the moribund cardinal to give some token, ere he quite depart, that Despair has not made him all her own: “Lord cardinal, if thou think’st on heaven’s bliss, hold up thy hand, make signal of thy hope.” But the cardinal—dies, and makes no sign. The appeal is fruitless: no hand is held up; no signal of hope displayed. The baffled prince, cut to the heart, can but exclaim, “He dies, and makes no sign: O God, forgive him!” Warwick again interposes a harsher voice, “So bad a death argues a monstrous life,” he is sure. But his sovereign hushes his damning criticism with a right royal veto:—

“FORBEAR TO JUDGE, _for we are sinners all_.
...
Close up his eyes, and draw the curtain close;
And let us all to meditation.”