LETTER LIII.

Brantwood, Good Friday, 1875.

I am ashamed to go on with my own history to-day; for though, as already seen, I was not wholly unacquainted with the practice of fasting, at times of the year when it was not customary with Papists, our Lent became to us a kind of moonlight Christmas, and season of reflected and soft festivity. For our strictly Protestant habits of mind rendering us independent of absolution, on Shrove Tuesday we were chiefly occupied in the preparation of pancakes,—my nurse being dominant on that day over the cook in all things, her especially nutritive art of browning, and fine legerdemain in turning, pancakes, being recognised as inimitable. The interest of Ash-Wednesday was mainly—whether the bits of egg should be large or small in the egg-sauce;—nor do I recollect having any ideas connected with the day’s name, until I was puzzled by the French of it when I fell in love with a Roman Catholic French girl, as hereafter to be related:—only, by the way, let me note, as I chance now to remember, two others of my [118]main occupations of an exciting character in Hunter Street: watching, namely, the dustmen clear out the ash-hole, and the coalmen fill the coal-cellar through the hole in the pavement, which soon became to me, when surrounded by its cone of débris, a sublime representation of the crater of a volcanic mountain. Of these imaginative delights I have no room to speak in this Fors; nor of the debates which used to be held for the two or three days preceding Good Friday, whether the hot-cross-buns should be plain, or have carraway seeds in them. For, my nurse not being here to provide any such dainties for me, and the black-plague wind which has now darkened the spring for five years,1 veiling all the hills with sullen cloud, I am neither in a cheerful nor a religious state of mind; and am too much in the temper of the disciples who forsook Him, and fled, to be able to do justice to the childish innocence of belief, which, in my mother, was too constant to need resuscitation, or take new colour, from fast or festival.

Yet it is only by her help, to-day, that I am able to do a piece of work required of me by the letter printed in the second article of this month’s correspondence. It is from a man of great worth, conscientiousness, and kindliness; but is yet so perfectly expressive of the irreverence, and incapacity of admiration, which [119]maintain and, in great part, constitute, the modern liberal temper, that it makes me feel, more than anything I ever yet met with in human words, how much I owe to my mother for having so exercised me in the Scriptures as to make me grasp them in what my correspondent would call their ‘concrete whole’; and above all, taught me to reverence them, as transcending all thought, and ordaining all conduct.

This she effected, not by her own sayings or personal authority; but simply by compelling me to read the book thoroughly, for myself. As soon as I was able to read with fluency, she began a course of Bible work with me, which never ceased till I went to Oxford. She read alternate verses with me, watching, at first, every intonation of my voice, and correcting the false ones, till she made me understand the verse, if within my reach, rightly, and energetically. It might be beyond me altogether; that she did not care about; but she made sure that as soon as I got hold of it at all, I should get hold of it by the right end.

In this way she began with the first verse of Genesis and went straight through to the last verse of the Apocalypse; hard names, numbers, Levitical law, and all; and began again at Genesis the next day; if a name was hard, the better the exercise in pronunciation,—if a chapter was tiresome, the better lesson in patience,—if loathsome, the better lesson in faith that there was some use in its being so outspoken. After [120]our chapters, (from two to three a day, according to their length, the first thing after breakfast, and no interruption from servants allowed,—none from visitors, who either joined in the reading or had to stay upstairs,—and none from any visitings or excursions, except real travelling,) I had to learn a few verses by heart, or repeat, to make sure I had not lost, something of what was already known; and, with the chapters above enumerated, (Letter XLII.2), I had to learn the whole body of the fine old Scottish paraphrases, which are good, melodious, and forceful verse; and to which, together with the Bible itself, I owe the first cultivation of my ear in sound.

It is strange that of all the pieces of the Bible which my mother thus taught me, that which cost me most to learn, and which was, to my child’s mind, chiefly repulsive—the 119th Psalm—has now become of all the most precious to me, in its overflowing and glorious passion of love for the Law of God: “Oh, how love I Thy law! it is my meditation all the day; I have refrained my feet from every evil way, that I might keep Thy word”;—as opposed to the ever-echoing words of the modern money-loving fool: “Oh, how hate I thy law! it is my abomination all the day; my feet are swift in running to mischief, and I have done all the [121]things I ought not to have done, and left undone all I ought to have done; have mercy upon me, miserable sinner,—and grant that I, worthily lamenting my sins and acknowledging my wretchedness, may obtain of Thee, the God of all mercy, perfect remission and forgiveness,—and give me my long purse here and my eternal Paradise there, all together, for Christ’s sake, to whom, with Thee and the Holy Ghost, be all honour and glory,” etc. And the letter of my liberal correspondent, pointing out, in the defence of usury (of which he imagines himself acquainted with the history!) how the Son of David hit his father in the exactly weak place, puts it in my mind at once to state some principles respecting the use of the Bible as a code of law, which are vital to the action of the St. George’s Company in obedience to it.

All the teaching of God, and of the nature He formed round Man, is not only mysterious, but, if received with any warp of mind, deceptive, and intentionally deceptive. The distinct and repeated assertions of this in the conduct and words of Christ are the most wonderful things, it seems to me, and the most terrible, in all the recorded action of the wisdom of Heaven. “To you” (His disciples) “it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom,—but to others, in parables, that, hearing, they might not understand.” Now this is written not for the twelve only, but for all disciples of Christ in all ages,—of whom the sign is one and unmistakable: “They have forsaken all that they [122]have”; while those who “say they are Jews and are not, but do lie,” or who say they are Christians and are not, but do lie, try to compromise with Christ,—to give Him a part, and keep back a part;—this being the Lie of lies, the Ananias lie, visited always with spiritual death.3

There is a curious chapter on almsgiving, by Miss Yonge, in one of the late numbers of the “Monthly Packet”, (a good magazine, though, on the whole, and full of nice writing,) which announces to her disciples, that “at least the tenth of their income is God’s part.” Now, in the name of the Devil, and of Baal to back him,—are nine parts, then, of all we have—our own? or theirs? The tithe may, indeed, be set aside for some special purpose—for the maintenance of a priesthood—or as by the St. George’s Company, for distant labour, or any other purpose out of their own immediate range of action. But to the Charity or Alms of men—to Love, and to the God of Love, all their substance is due—and all their strength—and all their time. That is the first commandment: Thou shalt love the Lord with all thy strength and soul. Yea, says the false disciple—but not with all my money. And of these it is written, after that thirty-third verse of Luke xiv.: “Salt is good; but if the salt have lost his savour, it is neither fit for the land nor the dunghill. He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.” [123]

Now in Holbein’s great sermon against wealth, the engraving, in the Dance of Death, of the miser and beggar, he chose for his text the verse: “He that stoppeth his ears at the cry of the poor, he also shall cry himself, and shall not be heard.” And he shows that the ear is thus deafened by being filled with a murmuring of its own: and how the ear thus becomes only as a twisted shell, with the sound of the far-away ocean of Hell in it for ever, he teaches us, in the figure of the fiend which I engraved for you in the seventh of these letters,4 abortive, fingerless, contemptible, mechanical, incapable;—blowing the winds of death out of its small machine: Behold, this is your God, you modern Israel, which has brought you up out of the land of Egypt in which your fathers toiled for bread with their not abortive hands; and set your feet in the large room, of Usury, and in the broad road to Death!

Now the moment that the Mammon devil gets his bellows put in men’s ears,—however innocent they may be, however free from actual stain of avarice, they become literally deaf to the teaching of true and noble men. My correspondent imagines himself to have read Shakespeare and Goethe;—he cannot understand a sentence of them, or he would have known the meaning of the Merchant of Venice,5 and of the vision of Plutus, [124]and speech of Mephistopheles on the Emperor’s paper-money6 in the second part of Faust, and of the continual under-current of similar teaching in it, from its opening in the mountain sunrise, presently commented on by the Astrologer, under the prompting of Mephistopheles,—“the Sun itself is pure Gold,”—to the ditch-and-grave-digging scene of its close. He cannot read Xenophon, nor Lucian,—nor Plato, nor Horace, nor [125]Pope,—nor Homer, nor Chaucer—nor Moses, nor David. All these are mere voices of the Night to him; the bought bellows-blower of the “Times” is the only piper who is in tune to his ear.

And the woe of it is that all the curse comes on him merely as one of the unhappy modern mob, infected by the rest; for he is himself thoroughly honest, simple-hearted, and upright: only mischance made him take up literature as a means of life; and so brought him necessarily into all the elements of modern insolent thought: and now, though David and Solomon, Noah, Daniel, and Job, altogether say one thing, and the correspondent of the “Times” another, it is David, Solomon, and Daniel who are Narrs to him.

Now the Parables of the New Testament are so constructed that to men in this insolent temper, they are necessarily misleading. It is very awful that it should be so; but that is the fact. Why prayer should be taught by the story of the unjust judge; use of present opportunity by that of the unjust steward; and use of the gifts of God by that of the hard man who reaped where he had not sown,—there is no human creature wise enough to know;—but there are the traps set; and every slack judge, cheating servant, and gnawing usurer may, if he will, approve himself in these.

“Thou knewest that I was a hard man.” Yes—and if God were also a hard God, and reaped where He had not sown—the conclusion would be true that earthly [126]usury was right. But which of God’s gifts to us are not His own?

The meaning of the parable, heard with ears unbesotted, is this:—“You, among hard and unjust men, yet suffer their claim to the return of what they never gave; you suffer them to reap, where they have not strawed.—But to me, the Just Lord of your life—whose is the breath in your nostrils, whose the fire in your blood, who gave you light and thought, and the fruit of earth and the dew of heaven,—to me, of all this gift, will you return no fruit but only the dust of your bodies, and the wreck of your souls?”

Nevertheless, the Parables have still their living use, as well as their danger; but the Psalter has become practically dead; and the form of repeating it in the daily service only deadens the phrases of it by familiarity. I have occasion to-day, before going on with any work for Agnes, to dwell on another piece of this writing of the father of Christ,—which, read in its full meaning, will be as new to us as the first-heard song of a foreign land.

I will print it first in the Latin, and in the letters and form in which it was read by our Christian sires. [127]

The Eight Psalm. Thirteenth Century Text.7

Domine dominus noster q̄m admirabile est nomen tuum in universa terra. Quoniam elevata est magnificentia tua super celos. Ex ore infantium t̄ lactentium p̄fecisti laudem p̄pter inimicos tuos ut destruas inimicū t̄ ultorem. Quoniam videbo celos tuos opera digitor. tuor. lunam t̄ stellas que tu fundasti Quid est h̥̊ quod memor es ejus, aū filius h̥ōis quia visitas eum. Minuisti eum paulominus; ab angelis, gloria t̄ honore coronasti eum t̄ cstituisti eum super opera manuum tuar. Om̄ia subjecisti sub pedibs ejus, oves t̄ boves univ̄sas, insuper t̄ pecora campi. Volucres celi t̄ pisces maris q̄ p̄ambulant semitas maris. Domine dominus noster quam admirabile est nomen tuum in univ̄sa terra.

[128]

I translate literally; the Septuagint confirming the Vulgate in the differences from our common rendering, several of which are important.

“1. Oh Lord, our own Lord, how admirable is thy Name in all the earth!

2. Because thy magnificence is set above the heavens.

3. Out of the mouth of children and sucklings thou hast perfected praise, because of thine enemies, that thou mightest scatter the enemy and avenger.

4. Since I see thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast founded,

5. What is man that thou rememberest him, or the son of man, that thou lookest on him?

6. Thou hast lessened him a little from the angels; thou hast crowned him with glory and honour, and hast set him over all the works of thy hands.

7. Thou hast put all things under his feet; sheep, and all oxen—and the flocks of the plain.

8. The birds of the heaven and the fish of the sea, and all that walk in the paths of the sea.

9. Oh Lord, our own Lord, how admirable is thy Name in all the earth!”

Note in Verses 1 and 9.—Domine, Dominus noster; our own Lord; Κύριε, ὁ Κύριος ἡμῶν; claiming thus the Fatherhood. The ‘Lord our Governour’ of the Prayer Book entirely loses the meaning. How admirable is Thy [129]Name! θαυμαστον, ‘wonderful,’ as in Isaiah, “His name shall be called Wonderful, the Counsellor.” Again our translation ‘excellent’ loses the meaning.

Verse 2.—Thy magnificence. Literally, ‘thy greatness in working’ (Gk. μεγαλοπρέπεια—splendour in aspect), distinguished from mere ‘glory’ or greatness in fame.

Verse 3.—Sidney has it:

“From sucklings hath thy honour sprung,

Thy force hath flowed from babies’ tongue.”

The meaning of this difficult verse is given by implication in Matt. xxi. 16. And again, that verse, like all the other great teachings of Christ, is open to a terrific misinterpretation;—namely, the popular evangelical one, that children should be teachers and preachers,—(“cheering mother, cheering father, from the Bible true”). The lovely meaning of the words of Christ, which this vile error hides, is that children, remaining children, and uttering, out of their own hearts, such things as their Maker puts there, are pure in sight, and perfect in praise.8

Verse 4.—The moon and the stars which thou hast founded—‘fundasti’—ἐθεμελίωσας. It is much more than ‘ordained’: the idea of stable placing in space being the main one in David’s mind. And it remains to this day [130]the wonder of wonders in all wise men’s minds. The earth swings round the sun,—yes, but what holds the sun? The sun swings round something else. Be it so,—then, what else?

Sidney:—

“When I upon the heavens do look,

Which all from thee their essence took,

When moon and stars my thought beholdeth,

Whose life no life but of thee holdeth.”

Verse 5.—That thou lookest on him; ἐπισκέπτῃ αυτον, ‘art a bishop to him.’ The Greek word is the same in the verse “I was sick and ye visited me.”

Verse 6.—Thou hast lessened him;—perhaps better, thou hast made him but by a little, less, than the angels: ἠλάττωσας αὐτὸν βραχύ τι. The inferiority is not of present position merely, but of scale in being.

Verse 7.—Sheep, and all oxen, and the flocks of the plain: κτήνη τοῦ πεδίον. Beasts for service in the plain, traversing great spaces,—camel and horse. ‘Pecora,’ in Vulgate, includes all ‘pecunia,’ or property in animals.

Verse 8.—In the Greek, “that walk the paths of the seas” is only an added description of fish, but the meaning of it is without doubt to give an expanded sense—a generalization of fish, so as to include the whale, seal, tortoise, and their like. Neither whales nor seals, however, from what I hear of modern fishing, are [131]likely to walk the paths of the sea much longer; and Sidney’s verse becomes mere satire:—

“The bird, free burgesse of the aire,

The fish, of sea the native heire,

And what things els of waters traceth

The unworn pathes, his rule embraceth.

Oh Lord, that rul’st our mortal lyne,

How through the world thy name doth shine!”

These being, as far as I can trace them, the literal meanings of each verse, the entire purport of the psalm is that the Name, or knowledge, of God was admirable to David, and the power and kingship of God recognizable to him, through the power and kingship of man, His vicegerent on the earth, as the angels are in heavenly places. And that final purport of the psalm is evermore infallibly true,—namely, that when men rule the earth rightly, and feel the power of their own souls over it, and its creatures, as a beneficent and authoritative one, they recognise the power of higher spirits also; and the Name of God becomes ‘hallowed’ to them, admirable and wonderful; but if they abuse the earth and its creatures, and become mere contentious brutes upon it, instead of order-commanding kings, the Name of God ceases to be admirable to them, and His power to be felt; and gradually, license and ignorance prevailing together, even what memories of law or Deity remain to them become intolerable; and in the exact [132]contrary to David’s—“My soul thirsteth for God, for the Living God; when shall I come and appear before God?”—you have the consummated desire and conclusive utterance of the modern republican:

“S’il y avait un Dieu, il faudrait le fusiller.”

Now, whatever chemical or anatomical facts may appear to our present scientific intelligences, inconsistent with the Life of God, the historical fact is that no happiness nor power has ever been attained by human creatures unless in that thirst for the presence of a Divine King; and that nothing but weakness, misery, and death have ever resulted from the desire to destroy their King, and to have thieves and murderers released to them instead. Also this fact is historically certain,—that the Life of God is not to be discovered by reasoning, but by obeying; that on doing what is plainly ordered, the wisdom and presence of the Orderer become manifest; that only so His way can be known on earth, and His saving health among all nations; and that on disobedience always follows darkness, the forerunner of death.

And now for corollary on the eighth Psalm, read the first and second of Hebrews, and to the twelfth verse of the third, slowly; fitting the verse of the psalm—“lunam et stellas quæ tu fundasti,” with “Thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundations of the earth”; and then noting how the subjection which is merely of the lower creature, in the psalm, becomes the subjection of [133]all things, and at last of death itself, in the victory foretold to those who are faithful to their Captain, made perfect through sufferings; their Faith, observe, consisting primarily in closer and more constant obedience than the Mosaic law required,—“For if the word spoken by angels was stedfast, and every transgression and disobedience received its just recompence of reward, how shall we escape, if we neglect so great salvation?” The full argument is: “Moses, with but a little salvation, saved you from earthly bondage, and brought you to an earthly land of life; Christ, with a great salvation, saves you from soul bondage, and brings you to an eternal land of life; but, if he who despised the little salvation, and its lax law, (left lax because of the hardness of your hearts,) died without mercy, how shall we escape, if now, with hearts of flesh, we despise so great salvation, refuse the Eternal Land of Promise, and break the stricter and relaxless law of Christian desert-pilgrimage?” And if these threatenings and promises still remain obscure to us, it is only because we have resolutely refused to obey the orders which were not obscure, and quenched the Spirit which was already given. How far the world around us may be yet beyond our control, only because a curse has been brought upon it by our sloth and infidelity, none of us can tell; still less may we dare either to praise or accuse our Master, for the state of the creation over which He appointed us kings, and in which we have [134]chosen to live as swine. One thing we know, or may know, if we will,—that the heart and conscience of man are divine; that in his perception of evil, in his recognition of good, he is himself a God manifest in the flesh; that his joy in love, his agony in anger, his indignation at injustice, his glory in self-sacrifice, are all eternal, indisputable proofs of his unity with a great Spiritual Head; that in these, and not merely in his more availing form, or manifold instinct, he is king over the lower animate world; that, so far as he denies or forfeits these, he dishonours the Name of his Father, and makes it unholy and unadmirable in the earth; that so far as he confesses, and rules by, these, he hallows and makes admirable the Name of his Father, and receives, in his sonship, fulness of power with Him, whose are the kingdom, the power, and the glory, world without end.

And now we may go back to our bees’ nests, and to our school-benches, in peace; able to assure our little Agnes, and the like of her, that, whatever hornets and locusts and serpents may have been made for, this at least is true,—that we may set, and are commanded to set, an eternal difference between ourselves and them, by neither carrying daggers at our sides, nor poison in our mouths: and that the choice for us is stern, between being kings over all these creatures, by innocence to which they cannot be exalted, or more weak, miserable and detestable than they, in resolute guilt to which they cannot fall. [135]

Of their instincts, I believe we have rather held too high than too low estimate, because we have not enough recognized or respected our own. We do not differ from the lower creatures by not possessing instinct, but by possessing will and conscience, to order our innate impulses to the best ends.

The great lines of Pope on this matter, however often quoted fragmentarily, are I think scarcely ever understood in their conclusion.9 Let us, for once, read them to their end:—

“See him, from Nature, rising slow to Art,

To copy instinct then was reason’s part.

Thus then to man the voice of Nature spake:

Go,—from the creatures thy instructions take,

Learn from the birds what food the thickets yield,

Learn from the beasts the physic of the field,

Thy arts of building from the bee receive,

Learn of the mole to plough, the worm to weave.

Here too all forms of social union find,

And hence let reason, late, instruct mankind.

Here subterranean works and cities see,

There, towns aerial on the waving tree;

Learn each small people’s genius, policies,

The ants’ republic, and the realm of bees: [136]

How those in common all their wealth bestow,

And anarchy without confusion know;

And these for ever, though a monarch reign,

Their separate cells and properties maintain.

Mark what unvaried laws preserve each state—

Laws wise as nature, and as fixed as fate;

In vain thy reason finer webs shall draw,

Entangle justice in her net of law,

And right, too rigid, harden into wrong—

Still for the strong too weak, the weak, too strong.

Yet go, and thus o’er all the creatures sway,

Thus let the wiser make the rest obey,

And for those arts mere instinct could afford

Be crowned as monarchs, or as gods ador’d.”

There is a trace, in this last couplet, of the irony, and chastising enforcement of humiliation, which generally characterize the ‘Essay on Man’; but, though it takes this colour, the command thus supposed to be uttered by the voice of Nature, is intended to be wholly earnest. “In the arts of which I set you example in the unassisted instinct of lower animals, I assist you by the added gifts of will and reason: be therefore, knowingly, in the deeds of Justice, kings under the Lord of Justice, while in the works of your hands, you remain happy labourers under His guidance

Who taught the nations of the field and wood

To shun their poison, and to choose their food, [137]

Prescient, the tides or tempests to withstand,

Build on the wave, or arch beneath the sand.”

Nor has ever any great work been accomplished by human creatures, in which instinct was not the principal mental agent, or in which the methods of design could be defined by rule, or apprehended by reason. It is therefore that agency through mechanism destroys the powers of art, and sentiments of religion, together.

And it will be found ultimately by all nations, as it was found long ago by those who have been leaders in human force and intellect, that the initial virtue of the race consists in the acknowledgment of their own lowly nature and submission to the laws of higher being. “Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return,” is the first truth we have to learn of ourselves; and to till the earth out of which we were taken, our first duty: in that labour, and in the relations which it establishes between us and the lower animals, are founded the conditions of our highest faculties and felicities: and without that labour, neither reason, art, nor peace, are possible to man.

But in that labour, accepting bodily death, appointed to us in common with the lower creatures, in noble humility; and kindling day by day the spiritual life, granted to us beyond that of the lower creatures, in noble pride, all wisdom, peace, and unselfish hope and love, may be reached, on earth, as in heaven, and our lives indeed be but a little lessened from those of the angels.

As I am finishing this Fors, I note in the journals [138]accounts of new insect-plague on the vine; and the sunshine on my own hills this morning (7th April), still impure, is yet the first which I have seen spread from the daybreak upon them through all the spring; so dark it has been with blight of storm,—so redolent of disease and distress; of which, and its possible causes, my friends seek as the only wise judgment, that of the journals aforesaid. Here, on the other hand, are a few verses10 of the traditional wisdom of that king whose political institutions were so total a failure, (according to my supremely sagacious correspondent,) which nevertheless appear to me to reach the roots of these, and of many other hitherto hidden things.

“His heart is ashes, his hope is more vile than earth, and his life of less value than clay.

Forasmuch as he knew not his Maker, and him that inspired into him an active soul, and breathed in him a living spirit.

But they counted our life a pastime, and our time here a market for gain; for, say they, we must be getting every way, though it be by evil means.11 Yea, they worshipped those beasts also that are most hateful; (for being compared together, some are worse than others,12 neither are they beautiful in respect of beasts,) [139]but they went without the praise of God, and his blessing.

Therefore by the like were they punished worthily, and by the multitude of beasts tormented.

And in this thou madest thine enemies confess, that it is thou who deliverest them from all evil.

But thy sons not the very teeth of venomous dragons overcame: for thy mercy was ever by them, and healed them.

For thou hast power of life and death: thou leadest to the gates of hell, and bringest up again.

For the ungodly, that denied to know thee, were scourged by the strength of thine arm: with strange rains, hails, and showers, were they persecuted, that they could not avoid, for through fire were they consumed.

Instead whereof thou feddest thine own people with angels’ food, and didst send them, from heaven, bread prepared without their labour, able to content every man’s delight, and agreeing to every taste.

For thy sustenance declared thy sweetness unto thy children, and serving to the appetite of the eater, tempered itself to every man’s liking.

For the creature that serveth thee, who art the Maker, increaseth his strength against the unrighteous for their [140]punishment, and abateth his strength for the benefit of such as put their trust in thee.

Therefore even then was it altered into all fashions, and was obedient to thy grace, that nourisheth all things, according to the desire of them that had need:

That thy children, O Lord, whom thou lovest, might know that it is not the growing of fruits that nourisheth man: but that it is thy word, which preserveth them that put their trust in thee.

For that which was not destroyed of the fire, being warmed with a little sunbeam, soon melted away:

That it might be known, that we must prevent the sun to give thee thanks, and at the dayspring pray unto thee.” [141]