Chapter IX: The Man of God

In his formal addresses Dr. Grenfell exemplifies the homely, pithy eloquence that comes from speaking directly “to men’s business and bosoms” out of the fulness of the heart: but those who have heard him in the little, informal, offhand talks he gives among his own people in his own bailiwick appreciate them even more than what he has to say to a congregation of strangers in a great city far from the Labrador.

It must be understood that the quotations that follow are merely extemporaneous, unrevised sentences taken down without the Doctor’s knowledge, and of a nature wholly casual and unpremeditated.

At a service held in the tiny saloon of the _Strathcona_ for the crew and the patients who happened to be with us, the Doctor said:

“We so often think that religion is bound to be dull and solemn and monotonous: we don’t follow the example of Christ who spread light and joy wherever he went. None of us is perfect, but God doesn’t denounce Dr. Grenfell and Will Sims and Albert Ash (naming members of the crew) for their shortcomings. That isn’t his way. He knows us as we are, with all our weaknesses. He loved David—he said that David was a man after his own heart. Yet David was a bad man—he was an adulterer and incidentally a murderer, and he got his people into trouble that lost thousands of their lives. But God loved him in spite of his human frailties, because he did such a lot of good in the world.

“It doesn’t do to take a single text. For instance—we read ‘The world is established so that it cannot be moved,’ but we know that it is all movement: we know that it moves at a pace six times as fast as the fastest aeroplane. But the Church looked at that verse and said that he who denied it was denying the truth. I was reading this morning about Copernicus, who insisted that this world is round. Up to his time men had insisted that it was flat and that you might fall off the edge. Then there was Galileo, who said that it moved: and they put him under the thumbscrews, and when he came out he said, ‘and still it does move.’

“So often Christian people think it’s their duty to forbid and to repress and to bring gloom with a long face where they go. But that wasn’t Christ’s way and it isn’t God’s way. If religious people do these things people begin to suppose that religion is something to destroy the joy of living. But that isn’t what it’s for. It’s to make us kinder to fathers and mothers and sisters and friends, and true to the duty nearest our hand.

“I love to think of David as the master musician who went about scattering good and dispelling the clouds of heaviness. We ought to follow his example. Sometimes we say ‘Oh, they’ve all been so mean to me I’ll take it out on them by being sour and dull and jealous and bitter!’ Here in this crew we get to know one another almost as well as God knows us, and we see one another’s faults. It’s so easy to spy out faults when we’re so close together, day after day. But we should be blind to some things—like Nelson at Copenhagen. You remember when they gave the signal to retreat he put his blind eye to the telescope.

“If God looked for the faults in us, who could stand before Him? None of us is perfect. Let us judge not that we be not judged, and mercifully learn to make allowances. I knew a man who had been the cause of a loss of $20,000 to his employer, through costly litigation that was the result of his mistakes. His master, nevertheless, gave him a second chance, with an even better job. Later I asked him if the man was making good. He replied, ‘He is the best servant I have.’ Even so we ought to learn to be long-suffering with others, as God is lenient until seventy times seven with us.”

In the little church at Flower’s Cove the Doctor spoke on the meaning of the words of Christ in Mark 8, 34, as given in the vernacular version: “If any man wishes to walk in my steps, let him renounce self, take up his cross, and follow me.”

“What is there that a man values more than his life?

“When I was here early in the spring there was a man who was in a serious way. I told him he should come to the hospital at St. Anthony for an operation. He said he must get his traps and his twine ready. Then when I came again in June I saw that he was worse, and I again gave him warning that in six months at most the results might be fatal. Still he said that he could not go. When I came ashore today I learned that he was dead. The twine was ready—but he was gone. That is the way with so many of us. We say we are too busy—we can always give that excuse—and then death finds us, grasping our material possessions, perhaps, but with the great ends of life unwon. Its only a stage that we cross for a brief transit, coming in at this door and going out at that. It won’t do to play our part just as we are making our exit—we must play it while we are in the middle of the stage.

“At Sandwich Bay we followed a stream and the two men on the other side called my attention to the tracks of a bear: and when we came back to the boat the men aboard said they had seen two bears wandering about. The bears were unable to hide their tracks, and even so you and I cannot conceal the traces of our footsteps where we went. Captain Coté at the Greenly Island Light showed us the model of a steamship—made with a motor costing a dollar and a half that ran it in a straight line for an hour. It had no volition of its own. Man is not like that soulless boat: he has a mind of his own. We are surrounded by amazing discoveries: great scientists are ever toiling on the problem of communication with the dead. Men laughed at the alchemists of old: we laugh no longer at the idea of changing one substance into another. We can change water with electricity and change one frog’s egg into twins. We can fly from St. John’s to England in a day. We can see through solid substances—come to St Anthony and I will show it to you with the X-ray apparatus. What fools we are to deny immortality and the resurrection! What are realized values as compared with the spiritual? There was the ship _Royal Charter_ for Australia that went ashore at Moidra in Wales. A sailor wrapped himself in gold and it drowned him. Would you say that he had the gold or that the gold had him?

“The carol of good King Wenceslaus tells us of the blessings that came to the little lad who followed in the footsteps of the king. Even so, better things than any temporal benefits come to us if we walk in the steps of Christ.

“Some of the soldiers of the war returning to this country are not acting as soldiers should. They are importing foreign vices. I have seen lately horrible examples of the suffering of the innocents as a result of their misdeeds. There are more communicable diseases in the present year than we have ever had before on this coast. A man has no right to the title of a soldier who does not walk in Christ’s steps—he has no right to the name, when he pleases self and damns his country and his fellow-men and fellow-women.

“We have among us the deplorable spectacle of many weak sectarian schools—and it is a wicked thing that we do not combine them in strong undenominational ones. So many things cry out for changing. Today I visited a family and found the father had tuberculosis. The mother?—tuberculosis. The children?—tuberculosis. Then I saw a baby whose head was not filled up, whose arms were puny, whose shoulders were constricted. From what? From rickets. The rickets came from bad feeding due to ignorance. I saw another child with the same complaint from the same cause.

“American bank-notes are made of paper that comes from Dalton, Massachusetts. The finest quality of paper is made of rags. They can use old rags and dirty rags—but they cannot use red ones. In explaining the manufacture to children I heard the manager speak of the rags as being ‘willing’ or ‘unwilling.’ The red ones were the ‘unwilling’ ones, and one of the children afterward said she’d rather be a willing rag. We may be poor and sorry objects—we may be rags—but there is something to be made of us if only we are willing rags.

“I came to a paralyzed boy. He said, ‘What can I do, Dr. Grenfell?’ I said, ‘You can smile upon all those who minister to you or come where you are. You can spread the spirit of good cheer even from your bedside.’”

“I was present at Pilley’s Island when a soldier came home who had won the V. C. What a welcome he received! There was a triumphal arch and the town turned out to do honour to its hero. He was the right sort of soldier.”

Norman Duncan wrote a delightful book called “Doctor Luke of the Labrador” which very faithfully mirrors the atmosphere of Dr. Grenfell’s days and doings. But the book is not to be taken as faithful biography _verbatim et literatim_, in the passages relating to the titular hero.

The Doctor has nothing in the open book of his past life for which he needs to make amends; but the hero of “Doctor Luke” has something mysterious to live down, the precise nature of which is not divulged. In many admirable qualities the portrait of “Doctor Luke” is a faithful likeness of Dr. Grenfell, and that is why there is a danger that the reader will think that in all particulars the book man and the real man correspond. “Doctor Luke” goes to the Labrador to flee from his own shadow—a man pursued by bitter memories of what he has done, and by mocking wraiths of sin, their fingers pointed at him. Dr. Grenfell went to the Labrador because the spirit moved him to go to the help of men whose lives were as cold as the ice and as hard as the rock that hemmed them in. He went not as one who sorrows over misspent years but as one who rejoices in the belief that his work has the smile of God upon it. Dr. Grenfell has the spirit of any first-rate missionary—he will not admit that he has elected a life of brain-fag, bodily travail and spiritual torment. His joy in doing and giving is unaffected. When he invites the rest of us to find life beautiful and bountiful he does not pose nor prate. He walks in the steps and in the name of Christ with a child’s humility, a man’s strength, an almost feminine tenderness and never a breath of that maudlin, unctuous sanctimoniousness which always must repel the virile and vertebrate fibre of the Thomas Hughes brand of “muscular Christianity.” Dr. Grenfell likes gospel hymns where some prefer sonatas and concertos, but he likes them when they carry a plain and pointed message from the heart to the heart, and build up a consciousness of our human interdependence: he would not care for them if they merely blew into flame the emotional fire-in-straw that burns itself out uselessly because of the want of substantial fuel.

To the humble millionaire or the haughty workingman his manner is the same. He knows what it means “to walk with kings nor lose the common touch.” Nor is he easily fooled. “Though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.”

“I talked with Mr. A.,” he told me, referring to his visit with a Croesus of New York who to certain ends has given largely, “and I felt somehow that, with all his giving, he had not given himself!”

That is the secret, it seems to me, of Dr. Grenfell’s own cogent power upon other lives—that he goes and does in his own energetic person. He does not stand at a distance issuing commands. He is entirely willing to help anybody, anywhere. He holds back nothing that he can bestow, and he never despairs. His ruddy optimism is a matter of actual daily practice and not of a cloistered philosophy. You never could persuade him that with all the heavy burden that he bears, the myriad interruptions and vexations that occur, he is not having a grand good time. He would be entirely ready to say with Stevenson:

“Glad did I live and gladly die
And I laid me down with a will!”