True Manliness

I hope I may have been able to indicate to you, however imperfectly, the line of thought which will enable each of you for yourselves to follow out and realize, more or less, the power and manliness of the character of Christ implied in this patient waiting in obscurity and doubt through the years when most men are at full stretch – waiting for the call which shall convince him that the voice within has not been a lying voice – and meantime making himself all that God meant him to be, without haste and without misgiving.

LIX

In Christ, after the discipline of long-waiting years, there was no ambition, no self-delusion. He had measured the way, and counted the cost, of lifting his own people and the world out of bondage to visible things and false gods, and bringing them to the only Father of their spirits, into the true kingdom of their God. He must, indeed, have been well enough aware how infinitely more fit for the task he himself was than any of his own brethren in the flesh, with whom he was living day by day, or of the men of Nazareth with whom he had been brought up. But he knew also that the same voice which had been speaking to him, the same wisdom which had been training him, must have been speaking to and training other humble and brave souls, wherever there were open hearts and ears, in the whole Jewish nation. As the humblest and most guileless of men, he could not have assumed that no other Israelite had been able to render that perfect obedience of which he was himself conscious. And so he may well have hurried to the Jordan in the hope of finding there, in this prophet of the wilderness, “Him who should come,” the Messiah, the great deliverer – and of enlisting under his banner, and rendering him true and loyal service, in the belief that, after all, he himself might only be intended to aid and hold up the hands of a greater than himself. For we must remember that Christ could not have heard before he came to Bethabara that John had disclaimed the great title. It was not till the very day before his own arrival that the Baptist had told the questioners from Jerusalem, “I am not he.”

But if any such thought had crossed his mind, or hope filled his heart, on the way to the Baptist, it was soon dispelled, and he, left again in his own loneliness, now more clearly than ever before, face to face with the task, before which even the Son of God, appointed to it before the world was, might well quail, as it confronted him in his frail human body. For John recognizes him, singles him out at once, proclaims to the bystanders, “This is he! Behold the Lamb of God! This is he who shall baptize with the fire of God’s own Spirit. Here is the deliverer whom all our prophets have foretold.” And by a mysterious outward sign, as well as by the witness in his own heart and conscience, Christ is at once assured of the truth of the Baptist’s words – that it is indeed he himself and no other, and that his time has surely come.

That he now thoroughly realized the fact for the first time, and was startled and severely tried by the confirmation of what he must have felt for years to be probable, is not only what we should look for from our own experiences, but seems the true inference from the gospel narratives. For, although as soon as the full truth breaks upon him he accepts the mission and work to which God is calling him, and speaks with authority to the Baptist, “Suffer it to be so now,” yet the immediate effect of the call is to drive him away into the wilderness, there in the deepest solitude to think over once again, and for the last time to wrestle with and master the tremendous disclosure.

LX

In following the life of Christ so far as we have any materials, we have found one main characteristic to be patience – a resolute waiting on God’s mind. I have asked you to test, in every way you can, whether this kind of patience does not constitute the highest ideal we can form of human conduct, is not in fact the noblest type of true manliness. Pursue the same method as to the isolated section of that life, the temptation, which I readily admit has much in it that we cannot understand. But take the story simply as you find it (which is the only honest method, unless you pass it by altogether, which would be cowardly) and see whether you can detect any weakness, any flaw in the perfect manliness of Christ under the strain of which it speaks – whether he does not here also realize for us the most perfect type of manliness in times of solitary and critical trial. Spare no pains, suppress no doubt, only be honest with the story, and with your own conscience.

There is scarcely any life of first-rate importance to the world in which we do not find a crisis corresponding to this, but the nearest parallel must be sought amongst those men, the greatest of all kind, who have founded or recast one of the great religions of the world. Of these (if we except the greatest of all, Moses) Mohammed is the only one of whose call we know enough to speak. Whatever we may think of him and the religion he founded, we shall all probably admit that he was at any rate a man of the rarest courage. In his case too it is only at the end of long and solitary vigils in the desert that the vision comes which seals him for his work. The silver roll is unfolded before his eyes, and he who holds it bids him read therein the decree of God, and tells him, “Thou art the prophet of God, and I his angel.”

He is unmanned by the vision, and flies trembling to his wife, whose brave and loving counsel, and those of his friends and first disciples, scarcely keep him from despair and suicide.

I would not press the parallel further than to remark that Christ came out of the temptation with no human aid, having trod the wine-press alone, serene and resolute from that moment for the work to which God had called him.

LXI

The strongest and most generous natures are always fondest of those who lean on them.

LXII

How utterly inadequate must be any knowledge of a human being which does not get beneath the surface? How difficult to do so to any good purpose! For that “inner,” or “eternal,” or “religious” life (call it which you will, they all mean the same thing) is so entirely a matter between each human soul and God, is at best so feebly and imperfectly expressed by the outer life.

There are none of us but must be living two lives – and the sooner we come to recognize the fact clearly the better for us – the one life in the outward material world, in contact with the things which we can see, and taste, and handle, which are always changing and passing away; the other in the invisible, in contact with the unseen; with that which does not change or pass away – which is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever. The former life you must share with others, with your family, your friends, with everyone you meet in business or pleasure. The latter you must live alone, in the solitude of your own inmost being, if you can find no spirit there communing with yours – in the presence of, and in communion with, the Father of your spirit, if you are willing to recognize that presence. The one life will no doubt always be the visible expression of the other; just as the body is the garment in which the real man is clothed for his sojourn in time. But the expression is often little more than a shadow, unsatisfying, misleading. One of our greatest English poets has written:

“The one remains, the many change and pass,Heaven’s light forever shines, earth’s shadows fly.Time, like a dome of many-colored glass,Stains the bright radiance of eternity,Until death tramples it to fragments.”

And so you and I are living now under the dome of many-colored glass, and shall live as long as we remain in these bodies, a temporal and an eternal life – “the next world,” which too many of our teachers speak of as a place which we shall first enter after death, being in fact “next” only in the truest sense of the word; namely, that it is nearest to us now. The dome of time can do nothing more (if we even allow it to do that) than partially to conceal from us the light which is always there, beneath, around, above us.

“The outer life of the devout man,” it has been well said, “should be thoroughly attractive to others. He would be simple, honest, straightforward, unpretending, gentle, kindly; – his conversation cheerful and sensible; he would be ready to share in all blameless mirth, indulgent to all save sin.”

LXIII

In a noisy and confused time like ours, it does seem to me that most of us have need to be reminded of, and will be the better for bearing in mind, the reserve of strength and power which lies quietly at the nation’s call, outside the whirl and din of public and fashionable life, and entirely ignored in the columns of the daily press. There are thousands of Englishmen of high culture, high courage, high principle, who are living their own quiet lives in every corner of the kingdom, from John o’ Groat’s to the Land’s-End, bringing up their families in the love of God and their neighbor, and keeping the atmosphere around them clean, and pure, and strong, by their example – men who would come to the front, and might be relied on, in any serious national crisis.

One is too apt to fancy, from the photographs of the nation’s life which one gets day by day, that the old ship has lost the ballast which has stood her in such good stead for a thousand years, and is rolling more and more helplessly, in a gale which shows no sign of abating, for her or any other national vessel, until at last she must roll over and founder. But it is not so. England is in less stress, and in better trim, than she has been in many a stiffer gale.

The real fact is, that nations, and the families of which nations are composed, make no parade or fuss over that part of their affairs which is going right. National life depends on home life, and foreign critics are inclined to take the chronicles of our Divorce Court as a test by which to judge the standard of our home-life, like the old gentleman who always spelt through the police reports to see “what people were about.” An acquaintance, however, with any average English neighborhood, or any dozen English families taken at random, ought to be sufficient to re-assure the faint-hearted, and to satisfy them that (to use the good old formula) the Lord has much work yet for the nation to do, and the national manliness and godliness left to do it all, notwithstanding superficial appearances.

LXIV

If the angel Gabriel were to come down from heaven, and head a successful rise against the most abominable and unrighteous vested interest which this poor world groans under, he would most certainly lose his character for many years, probably for centuries, not only with upholders of said vested interest, but with the respectable mass of the people whom he had delivered. They wouldn’t ask him to dinner, or let their names appear with his in the papers; they would be very careful how they spoke of him in the Palaver, or at their clubs. What can we expect, then, when we have only poor, gallant, blundering men like Kossuth, Garibaldi, Mazzini, and righteous causes do not always triumph in their hands; men who have holes enough in their armor, God knows, easy to be hit by respectabilities sitting in their lounging-chairs, and having large balances at their bankers?

But you who only want to have your heads set straight to take the right side, bear in mind that majorities, especially respectable ones, are nine times out of ten in the wrong; and that if you see a man or boy striving earnestly on the weak side, however wrong-headed or blundering he may be, you are not to go and join the cry against him. If you can’t join him and help him, and make him wiser, at any rate remember that he has found something in the world which he will fight and suffer for, which is just what you have got to do for yourselves; and so think and speak of him tenderly.

LXV

If you have not already felt it, you will assuredly feel, that your lot is cast in a world which longs for nothing so much as to succeed in shaking off all belief in anything which cannot be tested by the senses, and gauged and measured by the intellect, as the trappings of a worn-out superstition. Men have been trying, so runs the new gospel, to live by faith, and not by sight, ever since there is any record at all of their lives; and so they have had to manufacture for themselves the faiths they were to live by. What is called the life of the soul or spirit, and the life of the understanding, have been in conflict all this time, and the one has always been gaining on the other. Stronghold after stronghold has fallen till it is clear almost to demonstration that there will soon be no place left for that which was once deemed all-powerful. The spiritual life can no longer be led honestly. Man has no knowledge of the invisible on which he can build. Let him own the truth and turn to that upon which he can build safely – the world of matter, his knowledge of which is always growing; and be content with the things he can see and taste and handle. Those who are telling you still in this time that your life can and ought to be lived in daily communion with the unseen – that so only you can loyally control the visible – are either wilfully deceiving you or are dreamers and visionaries.

So the high priests of the new gospel teach, and their teaching echoes through our literature, and colors the life of the streets and markets in a thousand ways; and a mammon-ridden generation, longing to be rid of what they hope are only certain old and clumsy superstitions – which they try to believe injurious to others, and are quite sure make them uneasy in their own efforts to eat, drink, and be merry – applauds as openly as it dare, and hopes soon to see the millennium of the flesh-pots publicly declared and recognized.

Against which, wherever you may encounter them, that you may be ready and able to stand fast, is the hope and prayer of many anxious hearts; in a time, charged on every side with signs of the passing away of old things, such as have not been seen above the horizon in Christendom since Luther nailed his protest on the church-door of a German village.

LXVI

The gospel of work is a true gospel, though not the only one, or the highest, and has been preached in our day by great teachers. Listen, for instance, to the ring of it in the rugged and incisive words of one of our strongest poets:

“That low man seeks a little thing to do,Sees it and does it.This high man, with a great thing to pursue,Dies ere he knows it.That low man goes on adding one to one,His hundreds soon hit.This high man aiming at a million,Misses a unit.”

This sounds like a deliberate attack on the idealist, a direct preference of low to high aims and standards, of the seen to the unseen. It is in reality only a wholesome warning against aiming at any ideal by wrong methods, though the use of the words “low” and “high” is no doubt likely to mislead. The true idealist has no quarrel with the lesson of these lines; indeed, he would be glad to see them written on one of the door-posts of every great school, if only they were ballasted on the other by George Herbert’s quaint and deeper wisdom:

“Pitch thy behavior low, thy projects high,So shalt thou humble and magnanimous be.Sink not in spirit: who aimeth at the skyShoots higher much than he that means a tree.”

Both sayings are true, and worth carrying in your minds as part of their permanent furniture, and you will find that they will live there very peaceably side by side.

LXVII

The consciousness of the darkness in one and around one brings the longing for light. And then the light dawns; through mist and fog, perhaps, but enough to pick one’s way by.

LXVIII

It is a strange, blind sort of world we are in, with lots of blind alleys, down which we go blundering in the fog after some seedy gaslight, which we take for the sun till we run against the wall at the end, and find out that the light is a gaslight, and that there’s no thoroughfare. But for all that, one does get on. You get to know the sun’s light better and better, and to keep out of the blind alleys; and I am surer and surer every day that there’s always sunlight enough for every honest fellow, and a good sound road under his feet, if he will only step out on it.

LXIX

We all have to learn, in one way or another, that neither men nor boys get second chances in this world. We all get new chances till the end of our lives, but not second chances in the same set of circumstances; and the great difference between one person and another is, how he takes hold of and uses his first chance, and how he takes his fall if it is scored against him.

LXX

You will all find, if you haven’t found it out already, that a time comes in every human friendship when you must go down into the depths of yourself, and lay bare what is there to your friend, and wait in fear for his answer. A few moments may do it; and it may be that you never do it but once. But done it must be, if the friendship is to be worth the name. You must find out what is there, at the very root and bottom of one another’s hearts; and if you are at one there, nothing on earth can, or at least ought, to sunder you.

LXXI

It is only through our mysterious human relationships – through the love and tenderness and purity of mothers and sisters and wives – through the strength and courage and wisdom of fathers and brothers and teachers – that we can come to the knowledge of Him in whom alone the love, and the tenderness, and the purity, and the strength, and the courage, and the wisdom of all these dwell for ever and ever in perfect fulness.

LXXII

Almost nightly, for years, Tom and Arthur, and by degrees East occasionally, and sometimes one, sometimes another of their friends, read a chapter of the Bible together, and talked it over afterwards. Tom was at first utterly astonished, and almost shocked, at the sort of way in which Arthur read the book and talked about the men and women whose lives are there told. The first night they happened to fall on the chapters about the famine in Egypt, and Arthur began talking about Joseph as if he were a living statesman; just as he might have talked about Lord Grey and the Reform Bill; only that they were much more living realities to him. The book was to him, Tom saw, the most vivid and delightful history of real people, who might do right or wrong, just like any one who was walking about Rugby – the doctor, or the masters, or the sixth-form boys. But the atmosphere soon passed off, the scales seemed to drop from his eyes, and the book became at once and forever to him the great human and divine book, and the men and women, whom he had looked upon as something quite different from himself, became his friends and counsellors.

Arthur, Tom, and East were together one night, and read the story of Naaman coming to Elisha to be cured of his leprosy. When the chapter was finished, Tom shut his Bible with a slap.

“I can’t stand that fellow Naaman,” said he, “after what he’d seen and felt, going back again and bowing himself down in the house of Rimmon, because his effeminate scoundrel of a master did it. I wonder Elisha took the trouble to heal him. How he must have despised him.”

“Yes, there you go off as usual, with a shell on your head,” struck in East, who always took the opposite side to Tom: half from love of argument, half from conviction. “How do you know he didn’t think better of it? how do you know his master was a scoundrel? His letter don’t look like it, and the book don’t say so.”

“I don’t care,” rejoined Tom; “why did Naaman talk about bowing down, then, if he didn’t mean to do it? He wasn’t likely to get more in earnest when he got back to Court, and away from the Prophet.”

“Well, but, Tom,” said Arthur, “look what Elisha says to him, ‘Go in peace.’ He wouldn’t have said that if Naaman had been in the wrong.”

“I don’t see that that means more than saying, ‘You’re not the man I took you for.’”

“No, no, that won’t do at all,” said East; “read the words fairly, and take men as you find them. I like Naaman, and think he was a very fine fellow.”

“I don’t,” said Tom, positively.

“Well, I think East is right,” said Arthur; “I can’t see but what it’s right to do the best you can, though it mayn’t be the best absolutely. Every man isn’t born to be a martyr.”

“Of course, of course,” said East; “but he’s on one of his pet hobbies. How often have I told you, Tom, that you must drive a nail where it’ll go?”

“And how often have I told you,” rejoined Tom, “that it’ll always go where you want, if you only stick to it and hit hard enough? I hate half-measures and compromises.”

“Yes, he’s a whole-hog man, is Tom. Must have the whole animal, hair and teeth, claws and tail,” laughed East. “Sooner have no bread any day than half a loaf.”

“I don’t know,” said Arthur, “it’s rather puzzling; but ain’t most right things got by proper compromises, I mean where the principle isn’t given up?”

“That’s not the point,” said Tom; “I don’t object to a compromise, where you don’t give up your principle.”

“Not you,” said East laughingly. “I know him of old, Arthur, and you’ll find him out some day. There isn’t such a reasonable fellow in the world to hear him talk. He never wants anything but what’s right and fair; only when you come to settle what’s right and fair, it’s everything that he wants, and nothing that you want. Give me the Brown compromise when I’m on his side.”

“Now, Harry,” said Tom, “no more chaff – I’m serious. Look here – this is what makes my blood tingle;” and he turned over the pages of his Bible and read: “Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego answered and said to the king, ‘O Nebuchadnezzar, we are not careful to answer thee in this matter. If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning, fiery furnace, and He will deliver us out of thine hand, O king. But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up.’” He read the last verse twice, emphasizing the nots, and dwelling on them as if they gave him actual pleasure and were hard to part with.

They were silent a minute, and then Arthur said, “Yes, that’s a glorious story, but it don’t prove your point, Tom, I think. There are times when there is only one way, and that the highest, and then the men are found to stand in the breach.”

“There’s always a highest way, and it’s always the right one,” said Tom. “How many times has the Doctor told us that in his sermons in the last year I should like to know!”

“Well, you ain’t going to convince us – is he Arthur? No Brown compromise to-night,” said East, looking at his watch. “But it’s past eight, and we must go to first lesson.”

So they took down their books and fell to work; but Arthur didn’t forget, and thought long and often over the conversation.

LXXIII

“Tom,” said Arthur, “I’ve had such strange thoughts about death lately. I’ve never told a soul of them, not even my mother. Sometimes, I think they’re wrong, but, do you know I don’t think in my heart I could be sorry at the death of any of my friends.”

Tom was taken quite aback.

“What in the world is the young un after now?” thought he; “I’ve swallowed a good many of his crotchets, but this altogether beats me. He can’t be quite right in his head.”

He didn’t want to say a word, and shifted about uneasily in the dark; however, Arthur seemed to be waiting for an answer, so at last he said, “I don’t think I quite see what you mean, Geordie. One’s told so often to think about death, that I’ve tried it on sometimes, especially this last week. But we won’t talk of it now. I’d better go – you’re getting tired, and I shall do you harm.”

“No, no, indeed – I ain’t Tom; you must stop till nine, there’s only twenty minutes. I’ve settled you must stop till nine. And oh! do let me talk to you – I must talk to you. I see it’s just as I feared. You think I’m half-mad – don’t you now?”

“Well, I did think it odd what you said, Geordie, as you ask me.”