 Part 2 Chapter 7 of Rubble and Rose Leaves and Things of that Kind. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Maddie Mast of Virginia, USA. Rubble and Rose Leaves by Frank W. Boram. Be Shod with Sandals. Is there anything fresh to be said by way of a charge to a young minister? I confess that until this morning I thought not. But this morning, to my inexpressible delight, I struck a vein that, so far as I know, has never yet been exploited. On these solemn and impressive occasions, we have talked about the minister's scholarship and the minister's spirituality until we have come to feel that we have completely exhausted that line of things. And in the process, we have given the awkward impression that the minister, so far from being made of pretty much the same stuff as the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker, is a kind of biological monstrosity consisting of a very big head and a very big heart, and of nothing else. But this morning I made a discovery. Before delivering a charge to a young minister, I took the precaution to have a good look at him. And I found to my surprise that, in addition to the head and the heart upon which we have always laid such inordinate emphasis, he also possessed a fine pair of legs with a substantial pair of feet at the end of them. Nobody could have supposed, from the careful perusal of all ministerial charges in our literature, that any minister was ever before known to possess these useful appendages, but there they are. I saw them with my own eyes. Perhaps those who delivered the great classical charges only saw the young minister in the pulpit, in which case the limbs which I this morning discovered would naturally be invisible. Like the feet of the seraphim in the prophet's vision they would be modestly concealed, but though hidden they exist and it occurred to me that a few very useful things could be said concerning them. Why should it be considered infada? I should like to know, to talk about people's feet and especially about a minister's feet. The Bible has no hesitation in talking about them. How beautiful upon the mountains, said the prophet, are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth pith, that bringeth good tidings of good, that publisheth salvation, that seeth unto Zion thy God reigneth, and did not the master himself when he ordained his first disciples, delivered to them this striking charge, take no shoes, he said, but be shod with sandals. The African natives thought of living stones' boots as a contrivance for carpeting all the slave-tracks in Africa with leather so that he might walk harmlessly and painlessly along them. And when the Savior tells his first disciples to be shod with sandals, I fancy I see miles and miles of meaning in those arresting words. Be shod with sandals, it is an appeal for ministerial simplicity. There were three classes of people in Palestine. The slaves went barefoot, the grandees wore elaborate shoes, the working classes wore sandals. The sandals were simple, serviceable, and strong. Therefore said the master to his men, be shod with sandals. The line of simplicity is invariably the line of strength. Gibbon has shown us that it is the simplest architecture that has defied both the vandalism of the barbarians and the teeth of time. Macaulay has proved that it is the simplest language that lasts longest. John Bunyan's books threaten to survive all later literature. Why? The style of Bunyan, Macaulay says, is delightful to every reader and is invaluable as a study to every person who wishes to obtain a wide command over the English language. The vocabulary is the vocabulary of the common people. There is not an expression which would puzzle the rudest peasant. Several pages do not contain a single word of more than two syllables. Yet no writer has said more exactly what he meant to say. For magnificence, for pathos, for vehement exhortation, for subtle disquisition, for every purpose of the poet, the orator, and the divine. This homely dialect, the dialect of plain working men, was perfectly sufficient. There is no book in our literature on which we would so readily stake the fame of the old unpolluted English language. No book which shows so well how rich that language is in its own proper wealth and how little it has been improved by all that it has borrowed. It is ever so. The simplest language is the strongest language, and the simplest lives are the strongest lives. In his Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington, Tennyson says that the illustrious Duke was rich in saving common sense, and as the greatest only are in his simplicity sublime. Wherefore, said the Master, avoid the vulgarities of the slave market on the one hand and the stilted effectations of the schools on the other. Let simplicity ally itself with strength, be shod with sandals. It is a great thing for Christ's minister to eschew this vice of extremes. All through the ages the pendulum of ecclesiastical fashion has been swinging between bare feet and golden slippers. From the excessive worship of unholy revelries to which the Roman world was abandoned, the Christians of the first century went to the opposite extremity and courted persecution by their rigid abstinence from and their most severe condemnation of the most legitimate and necessary pleasures. Back again swung the pendulum until the churches became the scenes of voluptuous luxury and extravagance. We read on, and the next chapters of our ecclesiastical histories bring us to the story of the monks and the hermits. We no sooner discover an age of unexampled self-indulgence than we straightway come upon the Puritanism that banned pilgrims' progress as a wanton frivolty and that denounced the fairy queen as a wicked and devilish intention. And so we go on. One day Christ's minister would go barefooted like a slave. The next he must needs effect a pair of golden slippers. There was a time when the church gloried in her poverty. Her emissaries wore no shoes on their feet. They dressed in rags and tatters. They ate the berries of the hedge-row. They drank the waters of the wayside spring. And then, hey presto, the scene is changed. The church gloried in her wealth. All the world paid tribute to the popes. Rome rolled in riches and her proud bishop, innocent the fourth, laughed as he looked upon his countless hordes and boasted that never again need the church lament that of silver and gold she had none. Here is the church going barefooted like a slave. And here is the church mincing in golden slippers. And neither spectacle is an edifying one. The master urges his men to avoid both the bare feet and the golden slippers. Let your moderation be known unto all men. Be shod with sandals. It is the solemn and imperative duty of a Christian minister to conserve both the dignity and the modesty of holy things. A certain offense in the ancient law was to be punished by the deprivation of dignity. Thou shalt loose his shoe from off his foot, and his name shall be called in Israel, the house of him that hath his shoe loosed. Those who have carefully read that graceful and dramatic story unfolded in the Book of Ruth know the bitterness of that reproach. The man whose shoes were publicly removed was like an officer whose stripes were taken from his arm in the sight of the whole regiment. He became an object of derision and contempt. Anyone, Dr. Samuel Cox points out, might laugh at him and call him old bare soul, and his family would be stigmatized as the family of a barefooted vagabond. Be shod with sandals, says the master. Do not expose the church to the contempt of the multitude. Conserve her dignity. Cast not her pearls before swine. Nor is such dignity inconsistent with simplicity. Dr. Johnson, penning from his modest room at Gulf Square that famous letter in which he proudly declined the patronage of the Earl of Chesterfield, makes a much more dignified picture than the gilded aristocrat who tardily fawned to the great man's fame. George Gissing has shown that the solitaries of Port Royal, reading and praying in their poor apartments, cut a much more stately figure in history than his refulgent majesty, King Louise XIV, strutting among the palatial chambers and the spacious gardens of Versailles. When I see the ministers of Christ organizing nail-driving competitions for women and hat-trimming competitions for men in order to replenish a depleted treasury, I remember what Jesus said about the sandals. He pleaded with his men not to expose his church to contempt. It is better to do things modestly and preserve the church's dignity than to swell her funds and make her an object of derision. It is better to wear sandals and be respected than to wear golden slippers and provoke disgust. Modesty and dignity invariably go together. Every man who aspires to Christian ministry should read every word that Charles Dickens ever wrote. In the course of that humanizing process he would then come upon the terrible fourth chapter of The Uncommercial Traveler. It is the most powerful appeal for ministerial modesty in our literature. Can any man read without a shutter that revolting description of evangelistic bluster? And who is he that can read without tenderness that closing appeal of the novelist to preachers? He entreats us to remember the twelve poor men whom Jesus chose and to model our behavior, our language, our style, and our choice of illustration on the inquisit simplicity and charming grace of the New Testament records. But we must sound yet a deeper depth. Be shod with sandals, said the master. Now sandals are easily slipped off and easily slipped on. And why should the minister be ready at a moment's notice to bear his feet? The man who has read his Bible knows. But came to Moses the vision of the burning bush. And the Lord said unto Moses, I am the God of thy father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. Draw not nigh hither, put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground. And when Moses the servant of the Lord died, the vision of the captain of the Lord's host came to Joshua. And Joshua fell on his face to the earth and did worship and said unto him, What saith my Lord unto his servant? And the captain of the Lord's host said unto Joshua, Loose thy shoe from off thy foot, for the place whereon thou standest is holy. And Joshua did so. Be shod with sandals, said the master, so that the moment the vision comes you may be ready adoringly to welcome it. Nothing in the ministry is more important than that the minister should keep in touch with his dreams, with his visions, with his revelations. The tragedy of the ministry is reached when we lace up our elaborate shoes and say goodbye to the place of open vision. We never expect again to behold the glory. The ashes are black on the altar of the soul, the altar on which the sacred fires once blazed. The light has gone out of the eye and the ring of passion has forsaken the voice. Be shod with sandals, said the master to his men. Take no shoes but be shod with sandals. The vision that led you into the ministry may come again and again and again. Be shod with sandals, that you may be ready for the revelation. Yes, ready for the revelation and ready also for the road. For sandals are easily slipped on, and the minister must expect the call of the road at any moment. He must be at home in the silence. He must be ready for the revelation, but he must not become a recluse. That was what Longfellow meant by his legion beautiful. The vision appeared to the monk in his cell and he worshipped in its wondrous presence. Then he remembered the hungry at the Covenant gate. Should he slight his radiant guest, slight his visitant celestial, for a crowd of ragged bestial, beggars at the Covenant gate, would the vision there remain, would the vision come again? A voice within bade him go and feed the hungry in the road outside. Do thy duty that is best, leave unto thy Lord the rest. He went and when he returned he found to his delight that the vision was still there. Through the long hours intervening it had waited his return and he felt his bosom burn comprehending all its meaning. When the blessed vision said, Had thou stayed I must have fled. Be shod with sandals, said the master, so that at a moment's notice you may slip them off to welcome the vision or slip them on to take to the road. The crest of the Baptist Missionary Society is a picture of an ox between a plow and an altar, while underneath the symbols are the words ready for either. The ox is ready for service in the field or for sacrifice in the temple. Christ's minister stands between the glory and the majesty of things divine on the one hand and all the paths and prose of human life on the other. He must be ready at any moment to enter into fellowship with the skies and he must be ready at any moment to hurry forth to see a sick child, to comfort a broken hearted woman or to share the burden of a man whose load is greater than he can bear. Be shod with sandals, so that whether the revelation or the road shall call, you are ready for either. The minister is neither mundane nor monastic. The minister wears sandals that he may keep in touch with two worlds. Let me live in my house by the side of the road where the race of men go by. They are good, they are bad, they are weak, they are strong, wise, foolish, so am I. Let me turn not away from their smiles nor their tears, both parts of an infinite plan. Let me live in my house by the side of the road and be a friend to man. And there in his house by the side of the road the minister will welcome his wondrous visions and will take good care to be shod with sandals. Gernel concludes the first volume of his great work in the Christian armour with six directions for the helping on of this spiritual shoe, but the man who is wise enough to wear sandals stands in no need of any such elaborate instructions. Part 3. Chapter 1 of Rubble and Rose Leaves and Things of That Kind. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Rubble and Rose Leaves by Frank W. Bohem. Part 3. Chapter 1. Tall, bronzed and bearded, Bruce Sinclair was a typical New Zealand farmer. He was born in Fiveshire, it is true, but his parents had emigrated when he was so young that he seemed to belong to the land of his adoption. They had come out on the John McIntyre, one of the first ships to bring settlers to these shores. I never saw the old people. By the time I reached New Zealand, Bruce had laid them to rest in the little God's acre on the crest, and was himself farming on the lands which they had originally settled. The homestead was up among the foothills near Otakia, about nine miles south of Mosgale, and Bruce usually rode over on Sundays. One felt that something was missing if, on going round to the vestry door, Oscar, Bruce's chestnut pony, was not to be seen in the yard. Bruce was quiet and reserved. He seldom spoke unless he was spoken to, but he gave an impression of depth and stability. In his light blue eyes, eyes that seemed paler than they really were by contrast with the sunburned and weather-beaten countenance, there was a subtle suggestion of secret struggle and secret suffering. You somehow felt that the calm of his sturdy personality was the peace that comes when mighty forces have been vanquished and fierce storms stilled. I had heard it whispered that in the early colonial days, the days of his youth, Bruce had chaffed under the restraints of home, and had for some years gone his own way. But except that I fancied that I saw a look of pain in his face when he first directed my attention to the framed portraits of his parents, as they hung on the other side of the fireplace at Otakia, he had given me no hint of anything of the kind. One Sunday morning I missed the chestnut pony. During the week Mrs. Sinclair called at the men's to tell me that Bruce was ill. But don't trouble to come, she said. He couldn't see you even if you did, and it's a long way to come for nothing. I'll let you know when he's able to see you. True to her word, at length she gave me permission. But as it happened, I was just sitting out for a distant part of the colony, a journey of a thousand miles, and it was nearly a month before I was able to turn my face towards the farm at Otakia. But the data which I had so longed looked forward, dawned at last. The dwelling that served Bruce as a homestead was a plain, white box-like little cottage, nestling among the hills about a quarter of a mile back from the road. Seated at the open window, he had seen me enter the big gate at the farm entrance and drive up the track from the road to the door. Bowled, and leaning forward upon two sticks, he came to the doorway to agree me, a wane smile lighting up a countenance that seemed strangely pale. I saw her at a glance that he'd been for real. But there, I'm better now, he said, cheerfully. And shall soon be all right again, sit down. And he pointed to a lounge chair on the veranda. We sat there chatting for a while, and then Mrs. Sinclair brought out the afternoon tea. As soon as the cups had been removed, I rose as if to go. Oh, don't be an hurry, he said. Sit down. I want to tell you what a strange experience I've had. I resumed my seat. You see, he went on. I had a birthday, my 50th, just as my illness was at its worst. I tended having a few very old friends here to celebrate the occasion. But that, of course, was out of the question. The idea had, however, fastened itself so firmly upon my mind that, by my delirium, I thought I was sending out the invitations, he laughed. But I could see that there was a good deal of seriousness behind it. You know how, at times, such things get mixed up in your brain? He went on. Well, my birthday invitations, the other thoughts that had come to me in the early stage of my sickness, got hopelessly confused. I was in great distress because I could only think of three people or I wanted to invite. I wrote out the invitations to the man I used to be, the man I might have been, and the man I shall be. I remember thinking that these were strange people, to ask, and I was surprised that the number was so small. But the odd part is to come. For in the same dream or another, I cannot be sure, I thought that I was welcoming to my guest. I had set the table for the four of us, my three visitors and myself, but to my amazement, twice as many people came as I had invited. I had invited the man I used to be. But two men arrived, each of them claiming to be the person indicated by that description. Exactly the same thing happened in the case of the man I might have been, and again in the case of the man I shall be. I was at first very bewildered and confused by the arrival of so many guests, but excusing myself, I added three chairs to the number of the table, making seven in all. Then, when all was ready, I ushered them in and showed them to their places. And there we sat, the seven of us. One, the man I am at the head of the table. Two, the man I used to be, and the number one. Three, the man I used to be, number two, facing me. Four, the man I might have been, number one. Five, the man I might have been, number two, on my left. Six, the man I shall be, number one. Seven, the man I shall be, number two, on my right. The first thing that struck me as I surveyed the six faces about me was that, although they seemed arranged in pairs, no two of the same name bore much resemblance to each other. The couples were contrast rather than duplicates. Mrs. Sinclair appeared, bringing her husband's medicine. He drank it quickly and continued his story. I can't help laughing as I think of it now, he went on. It seemed so very fantastic and absurd, but it was a grimly serious business at the time. And I was afraid that, considered as a birthday frolic, it was scarcely a success. There I sat at the head of the table, my six selves around me. In each of them I could see something of the features that I regularly behold in the mirror, but in each case, the general impression was either disfigured or idealized. Let me describe them two by two. To begin with, there was the man I used to be, the first of that name. He was my guest and I tried to be civil, but in my heart I could not welcome him. I sat there wondering, you know, how such things happen in dreams, by what strange impulse I had invited him to my table. For truth to tell, I have always dreaded his return. Have you read Grant Allen's story, The Reverend John Creedie? I have it inside there. I will ask Mrs. Sinclair to bring it out before you go and she'll take it with you. I read it a few weeks before my illness and it made a great impression upon me. It is the story of an African boy taken from the hold of slivers on the Gold Coast and carried away to England. He is committed to a Christian home, is most carefully trained and educated and has denied nothing that can add to his culture and refinement. He goes to Oxford, becomes a Bachelor of Arts, is ordained and is designated to return as a missionary to his native land. Before leaving, he marries Miss Ethel Berry, a gently nurtured English lady and admits the good wishes of a great host of admiring friends, the two sail from Southampton for Central Africa. For a while all goes well. They are very happy and very useful, but admits the old environment, the old feelings are stirred. His blood leaps to the sound of the tom-toms, the native feasts and dance have a singular fascination for him. He learns to love once more the native foods and drinks. It is too much for him. His old self masters his new self. He abandons the work, leaves his wife to die, tears up his English clothes and goes back to savagery. And today, so Grant Allen concludes the story today, the old half-caste Portuguese rum dealer at Buta Bun can point out to any English pioneer who comes up the river, which one, among a crowd of dilapidated negroes who like basking in the soft dust outside his hut, was once the Reverend John Creedy, BA of Mac Dylan College, Oxford. This story so recently read may have helped to shape my dream. At any rate, I remember sitting at the head of the table looking into the face of the man I used to be. It is bad enough, I thought to myself, when the old life comes rushing resistently back upon one as it rushed back upon John Creedy, no bolts or bars being strong enough to keep it out. But by what folly had I invited my old self back and seated him at my table. I felt as I gazed into his face as though I had committed the unpardonable sin. And there, sitting beside him was my namesake. You can imagine no more striking contrast for the second edition of The Man I Used to Be appeared to be not only a better man than the other, but a better man than the man I am. I never told you much about the past. One does not make a song of such things. But I can tell you that it was a wonderful experience when nearly 30 years ago, I renounced the old life, entered the kingdom of heaven and joined a Christian church. As I've said, I would not go back to the old life for anything on earth. And yet looking back, I can see that in those early days I had a few fine qualities that are not mine today. I love money more now than I did then. I love comfort more now than I did then. In those days, wayward as I was, I would gladly have given the last coin that I possessed to help a chum. I remember once drawing every penny of my balance at the savings bank to get a comrade out of trouble. I would have faced any discomfort, privation or even death itself in an enterprise in which we fellows were engaged together. I am afraid that I am now too smug to be heroic and too self-centered to be really generous. And strange as it may seem, as I looked across the table at the man I used to be, the second one, I felt heartily ashamed of the man I am. I was reading in a book of George Eliot's that there were only two kinds of religious people, the people who are the better for their religion and the people who are the worse for it. I am not sure I know that on the whole. I am better for my faith, but I know too that before my conversion, I had some good points that I've since lost. I need not describe my other guests in such detail. If the contrast between the two who answered to the name of the man I used to be was great, the contrast between the two who described themselves as the man I might have been was great as still. I was ashamed to admit the first of them to the house and I could see that several of my guests felt extremely uncomfortable in his presence. This is the man that I should have been today had the radiant experience of nearly 30 years ago never visited me. I saw as I gazed into the repulsive face of this guest that, had I continued the career and what shunned till then, I had delighted. The heroic qualities of my waywardness would soon have vanished and the sorrowed elements of that lawless life would have become dominant and supreme. The shivery of those days would in time have died out of my soul, just as it died out of King Arthur's court and the shame and the squalor would have become more pronounced in the years. Even sitting on the veranda, Bruce Sinclair shuddered as he would call this aspect of his dream. The companion picture, the other edition of the man I might have been was, he continued, as different as different could be. It seemed ridiculous that they bore the same name as I looked upon the first of the pair. I felt thankful that I am as I am, but when I turned to the second, that feeling completely forcibly. For I saw as I gazed into that face, the face on my immediate left, that I should have been if, jealousy retaining all the magnanimous and open-hearted qualities in my early days, I had added to them all the graces and eclipses which Christian experience and the membership of the church had made possible to me. But I've done neither the one nor the other. I have lost the high-spirited virtues of my youth and like a man who's been walking around among diamonds, but has been too indolent to pick them up, I've failed to acquire the right devoutedness which these later years should have bought. It seems strange now, but on the very last Sunday morning on which I came to church, you were preaching on the additions of grace, add to your faith virtue and to virtue knowledge. Do you remember? He was saying that the art of life lies in adding virtue to virtue as a mason adds tear to tear or as a tree adds ring to ring. I thought a good deal about it afterwards and it may have woven itself into my dream. At any rate, I locked into the face beside me. I saw the man that I should have been if only I'd added to the generous sentiments of youth the nobler attainments that Christian experience and service offered me. And it was like turning from a masterpiece to a dab when I once more contemplated the man I am. The third pair do not present so strong a contrast. They might easily have passed for brothers, one of whom had enjoyed greater advantages and moved in better society than the other. The first of those who presented himself as the man I shall be, strongly resembled except that he was older, the man I am. The fact is, I suppose that of late years, I've been content to take life, at least on its religious side, pretty much as I found it. I've become complacent, easygoing, readily satisfied, willing to follow the drift. There was a time, 20 years ago or more, when I used to submit myself to periodical examinations. I tested myself, tried to assert whether or not I was growing in grace, felt anxious as to whether the spirit was gaining upon the flesh or the flesh upon the spirit. But of late years, I've taken things less seriously and now that I have time to think about such matters, I can see that I've settled down to a condition that is perilously like stagnation. Going on at the same sluggish rate for a few more years, I cannot expect that I shall at least differ essentially except at age. From the man I am and that, I suppose is why the first of these two scenes in some respects to resemble so closely the man that I see each day in the mirror. The second, the guest on my immediate right, was a much finer man. He too was old, but there was a greater sweetness and a charm about his age that was quite absent from the person of his companion. Indeed, but as the association suggested by circumstance under which we met, I should never recognize myself in him. But he has taught me and I feel that life has been inestimately rich by the lesson, that if I set myself to recapture the better qualities that I've lost and begin diligently to cultivate the graces that I've neglected, I shall yet make something of my life and stand, not altogether confused and ashamed before my Lord at last. I'm not sure, my old friend concluded. I'm not sure that all these occurred to me in the course of my dream. Much of it has probably suggested itself in my subsequent reflections. In time of sickness and of convalescence, a man sees life from a new angle. He's able to do a little stop-taking and I feel that in my case, the operation, perhaps because it was particularly necessary, has been particularly profitable. Mrs. Sinclair came out to ask if he was feeling chilly. The afternoon sun was certainly sinking and I am afraid that I have allowed my friend to tire himself in telling me his tale. He made an excellent recovery, however, and in the years that followed was at church more frequently than ever. And it may have been a fond illusion of my own, but somehow I fancied that. As time went on, he became more and more like that nobler, lovelier, kinder self that he had so graphically described to me. End of Part 3, Chapter 1. Part 3, Chapter 2 of Rubble and Rose Leaves and Things of that Kind. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Lawrence Trask, Mount Vernon, Ohio, interfaceaudio.com. Rubble and Rose Leaves by Frank W. Borham. Chapter 2. I was holiday-making at Lake King. As a matter of fact, Lake King is no lake at all. It used to be, and like the church at Sardis and like so many of us, it bears the name that it once earned but no longer deserves. In former days, a picturesque rampart of sand hummocks, richly draped in native verdure, intervened between the fresh waters of the landlocked lake and the heaving tides of the southern ocean. Then the engineers arrived, and when the engineers take off their coats, no man can tell what is likely to happen next. At Panama, they split a continent in two. At Lake King, they wedded the lake to the ocean. Through the range of sand dunes, they cut a broad deep channel by which the big ships could pass in and out. And as inevitable consequence, Lake King is a lake no longer. But it was not the big ships that interested me. It was the trawlers. I like to see the fishing boats come in from the ocean and liberate their shining spoil at the pens. On the shores of the lake, the fishermen have fenced off a sheet of water, a quarter of an acre or so in area. And into this sheltered reserve, they discharged their daily catch. I never tired of visiting the fish pens. As I looked down into their clear waters, they seemed to be one moving mass of beautiful fish. Never in my life had I seen so congested an aquarium. There were thousands upon thousands, tons upon tons of them. You should row across in the early morning, one of the fishermen was good enough to say. You would see us dragging the pens and filling the boats with the fish that we were about to pack for the market. I took the hint and shall never forget the animated spectacle that I then witnessed. The waters that had previously seemed so tranquil were a seething to malts of commotion. The men were wading up to their thighs, dragging the nets through the crowded pens. Thousands upon thousands of splendid fish were fighting for dear life, excitedly darting and flapping and leaping and diving and splashing in a hopeless attempt to escape the enmeshment of the unfolding toils. Netful after netful was emptied into the boats. In half an hour the boats themselves were filled to the brim with the poor stiffened creatures from which all life and beauty had departed. And do the fish keep good in the pens for an indefinite period? I asked my fisherman friend, the man who had invited me across. Oh, dear no, he replied. That's the trouble. If we could keep them here until the market suited us, we should quickly make our fortunes. But they soon get slack and soft and flabby. The life in the pens isn't a natural one. They haven't to work for their living and they are in no danger of attack. The palings and wire netting that keep them in keep their natural enemies out. In the ocean they have to be active and vigilant and spry. But here they lie at their ease. They move to and fro sluggishly for the mere fun of the thing. And they soon go to pieces in consequence. Away on the doggere bank, the fishermen cherish a tradition which on suitable occasion they recite with infinite relish. It belongs to the heroic age that enfolded land and sea before the day of the steam-trawler had dawned. In those unhurried times the fishing boats spread their tawny sails and to the accompaniment of chanties and choruses such as sailor's love crept slowly out to sea. In sleepy little fishing villages along the English coast you may still see craft of this romantic and historic build. One little hamlet of the sort I often visit in my dreams. Years ago I knew every pebble on its beach. Winds and waves have scooped out a kind of alcove in the massive cliffs. High up, pressing closely against the rugged wall of chalk, stands a cluster of weather-beaten cottages. In front of them the fishing boats are drawn up. Nets are spread out on the beach to dry, coils of rope lie about, and piles of tackle are everywhere. If you are as fortunate as I should like you to be you will see moving to and fro between his cottage and his boat, a tall bronzed figure in a blue jersey and cellester. He is the most popular fisherman in the place. He was born here and, say for two years, of which he does not like to think, has spent all his days on this beach. Just once he wandered. He joined the fleet on the Dogger Bank. He worked on the trawler that raced out and raced round and raced back. He saw the cutters darting to and fro between the fleet and the market. And the more he saw this side of life, the less he liked it. He returned to the quiet little cove among the cliffs. If some day you can catch him in one of his leisure hours and in one of his garrulous moods, he may be beguiled into telling you of the tales, he heard told on the Dogger. For out there where they fish by machinery and use tackle of which the little Hamlet never dreams, the men like to poke fun at the old-fashioned craft on the beach. And when they speak of the old days and the old ways, they remind each other that years ago each fishing boat was fitted with a tank or well, constructed with perforated sides so that the water it contained was part and parcel of the sea through which the boat was sailing. Into these wells, the fish were transferred from the nets immediately upon their arrival from the deep. In this new environment, the graceful creatures gave no evidence of discontent or resentment. They would live indefinitely in their floating homes. But the fishermen found that like the fish in these Australian pens, the fish in the wells waxed limped and listless. They lost their flavor and sweetness. This, according to the tradition, happened to all the fishing boats, save one. One fisherman and one only brought his fish to market in excellent condition. He landed them at Billingsgate as healthy and brisk and firm as though he had caught them ten minutes earlier under London Bridge. The dealers soon learned to distinguish between the fish from his boat and the fish from all the others. His fish brought the highest prices on the market and the happy fisherman rejoiced in his abounding prosperity. His comrades marveled at his success and vainly endeavored to cajole his secret from him. He was not to be drawn. The matter remained an inscrutable mystery until the day of the old fisherman's death. Then, acting upon her father's instructions, his daughter unfolded the secret. Her father, she said, made it a rule to keep a catfish in the well of his boat. The catfish kept the other fish in a ferment of agitation and alarm. They were never at rest. And because a catfish compelled them to live in the well under conditions that were approximately normal, they came to market in as wholesome a state as though they had just been dragged from the deep. I often take myself into a quiet corner and remind myself of my visit to the fishpens or repeat to myself the famous traditions of the catfish. I find myself at times in a rebellious mood. Why is life so troubled, so agitated, so disturbed? If only I could be left alone. Why may I not fold my hands and be quiet? I am hunted up hill and down dale. I am driven from pillar to post. I have to work for my living and irksome necessity. I often have to go out when I would rather stay in and have to stay in when I would rather go out. I am the prey of antagonisms of many kinds. Life is full of irritations, annoyances, mortifications, and disappointments. I am not my own master. Like Paul, I find a law that when I would do good, evil is present with me. The good that I would, I do not. And the evil which I would not, that I do. Paul found it extremely exasperating, and so do I. If only I could live without work and without worry and without any of my present vexations. Why or why must there always be a catfish in my well? A catfish is an animated complement. I do not suppose that the dictionary of oceanography or a cyclopedia of pisca culture would define a catfish precisely in that way. But I prefer my own definition to that of the encyclopedia. It is more brief and it is quite as accurate. A catfish, I repeat, is an animated complement. It is because the fisherman values his fish that he puts the catfish into the well to annoy them. I remember, says Dr. James Stalker. I remember hearing a celebrated naturalist describe a species of jellyfish, which he said lives fixed to a rock from which it never stirs. It does not require to go in search of food because in the decayed tissues of its own organism there grows a kind of seaweed on which it subsists. I thought I had never heard of any creature so comfortable. But the eminent naturalist who was describing it went up to say that it is one of the very lowest forms of animal life and the extreme comfort which it enjoys is the badge of its degraded position. Now this seems to throw a little light on my own discontent. No fisherman would take any pains to preserve such worthless things. When the fisherman drops the hideous catfish into the well it is his way of telling the shiny creatures that are already there of the high esteem in which he holds them. This leads me to Robinson Crusoe. Robinson Crusoe caught a glimpse of this doctrine of the catfish and it dispelled some of his most acute perplexities. The pity of it is that later on when he found himself confronted by the gravest and most baffling bewilderment of all he failed to apply to it the same vital principle. He saw the law at work among his minor difficulties. It did not occur to him that it might also operate among the major ones. A day came on which Crusoe discovered that he was not, as he had fancied, the monarch of all he surveyed. His sovereignty was disputed. Everybody remembers the haunting passage about the footprint on the sand. It happened one day about noon going towards my boat. I was exceedingly surprised with the print of a man's foot on the shore. How it came thither I knew not nor could I in the least imagine. But after innumerable, fluttering thoughts, like a man perfectly confused and out of myself, I came home to my fortification, not feeling, as we say, the ground I trod upon, but terrified to the last degree, looking behind me at every two or three steps, mistaking every bush and tree and fanciing every stump to be a man. Nor is it possible to describe how many various shapes my affrighted imagination represented things to me in, how many wild ideas were found every moment in my fancy, and what strange, unaccountable whimsies came into my thoughts by the way. Now this story of Crusoe and the cannibals is simply the story of the cod and the catfish in another form. The cod would have liked the well all to itself. It is horrified at discovering that it must share it with a catfish. Yet as we have seen, the cod were better for the catfish, and as Crusoe afterwards recognized, the island was enriched by the coming of the cannibals. Robertson Crusoe is essentially a story with a moral, and Crusoe leaves you in no doubt as to the moral. He is most explicit in that regard. For, he tells us, I began to be very well contented with the life I was leading, if only I could have been secured from the dread of the savages. How little he thought that, so far from herding a single hair of his head, the savages would provide him in the person of his man Friday with the most devoted servant and most constant friend that any man could possibly possess. Wherefore, he says, in formulating the moral to be deduced from his sensational experience, wherefore it may not be a miss for all people who shall read this story of mine to learn from it, that very frequently the evil we seek most to shun and which when we are fallen into is the most dreadful to us. It is oftentimes the very means or door of our deliverance by which alone we can be raised again from the affliction into which we have fallen. Now, this was the minor perplexity. The major one came later, and the extraordinary thing is that, confronted by that larger perplexity, Crusoe's own maxim does not seem to have recurred to him. Crusoe has met the cannibals, they have come and gone, and they have left Friday behind them. Crusoe has taught Friday to speak English and is doing his best to store his mind with the highest knowledge of all. One day, so runs his narrative, I had been teaching him that the devil was God's enemy in the hearts of men and used all his malice and skill to defeat the good designs of providence and to ruin the kingdom of Christ and the world. Well, replies Friday in broken English, but you say God is so strong, so great. Is he not much strong, much mighty as the devil? Yes, yes, Friday, I replied. God is stronger than the devil. God is above the devil, and therefore we pray to God to tread him down under our feet and enable us to resist his temptations and quench his fiery darts. But, says he again, if God is much stronger, much mighty as the wicked devil, why God no kill the devil, so make him no more do wicked? I was strangely surprised at this question, and after all, though I was now an old man, yet I could not tell what to say, so I pretended not to hear him. But Friday kept repeating his question in the same broken words. Why God no kill the devil? I therefore diverted the discourse by rising up hastily and sending him for something a long way off. It was the greatest humiliation that Robinson Crusoe sustained during his long sojourn on the island. Why God no kill the devil, asked Friday. It sometimes happens that the best way of answering one question is to ask a few more. Let us try. Why God no kill the devil? Why did the shrewd old fisherman not kill the catfish in the well of his boat? Why did the fish in the pens grow slack and soft and flabby as soon as the palings and wire netting cut them off from the assaults of their natural enemies? In the louver, says Professor William James in his varieties of religious experience. In the louver there is a picture by Guido Rini of St. Michael with his foot on Satan's neck. The richness of the picture is in large part due to the fiend's figure being there. The richness of its allegorical meaning also is due to his being there. The world, that is to say, is all the richer for having a devil in it so long as we keep our foot upon his neck. It is an old story. It is the tree that is buffeted by the wind that develops the strongest roots and the sturdiest fiber. It is in the carcass of the lion with which he fought for his life that Samson finds the honey. I did not learn to preach all at once, says Martin Luther, in a delightful burst of confidence. It was my temptations and my corruptions that best prepared me for my pulpit. The devil has been my best professor of exegetical and experimental divinity. Before that great schoolmaster took me in hand, I was a sucking child and not a grown man. It was my combats with sin and with Satan that made me a true minister of the New Testament. It is always a great grace to me and to my people for me to be able to say to them, I know this text to be true. I know it for certain. Without incessant combat and pain and sweat and blood, no ignorant stripling of a student ever yet became a powerful preacher. That is the lesson I learned at the fishpans. That is the secret that the wise old fisherman of catfish fame bequeathed to his mystified companions. That is what Robinson Crusoe learned in the course of his long and lonely exile. And in the rough and tumble of common life, there is scarcely any lesson of greater value to be learned. End of part three, chapter two, recording by Lawrence Trask, Mount Vernon, Ohio, interfaceaudio.com. Part three, chapter three of Rubble and Rose Leaves and Things of That Kind. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Lawrence Trask, Mount Vernon, Ohio, interfaceaudio.com. Rubble and Rose Leaves by Frank W. Burham. Chapter three. Spread out an endless panorama about us were orange groves, vineyards, sugar plantations and fields in which the pineapple, the banana, the pawpaw, I was motoring among the semi-tropical landscapes of Queensland. We swept past gardens that were gay with scarlet flame trees, brilliant creepers, bright red corals and bogan vias of many gorgeous hues. After several hours spent in this delightful way, the car unexpectedly stopped, and my host and hostess prepared to alight. I peered about me for some explanation of their behavior, but could nowhere discover one. There was no house to be seen nor any sign of civilization or of settlement. My first impulse was to remain in the car with the driver. We're going a little way into the bush, my host explained, addressing me, if you care to come with us, we shall be very pleased. I joined them instantly and we were soon out of sight of the car. We picked our way through the thick undergrowth for about a quarter of a mile, and then emerged upon a little plot, carefully fenced off from the surrounding wilderness. It was a cemetery, only a few feet square, and it contained three graves. It was evidently to the central one that our pilgrimage had been made. My companions stood in silence for a moment beside it and then seated themselves on the grass nearby. In our early days, my host explained, we used to live not very far from here. It was a lonely place and a hard life, and it had joys and sorrows of its own. The greatest of its joys was the birth of Don, our first born, and the greatest of our sorrows was his death. He was only five when we buried him. Yes, added his wife, brushing a tear from her eye, and we buried him with a broken pen knife in his hand. A swag man who had sheltered for the night in one of our outbuildings had given it to him before leaving in the morning and Don thought it the most wonderful thing he had ever possessed. He was working away with it from morning to night. He would not trust it out of his sight. He had it in his hand when a few days afterwards he was taken ill. He clung to it all through his sickness. If he dropped it in his sleep, he asked for it as soon as he awoke. He raved about it in his delirium, and it was firmly clasped in his hand when he died. We had not the heart to take it from him, and so he went down to his grave still holding it. Often since I have thought of that burial in the bush, not merely because the incident was so touching, but because it was so intensely characteristic. A boy's infatuation for his first pocket knife. It may have a rusty handle and a broken blade. The edge may be as jagged as the edge of a saw, and the spring may have vanished with the days of long ago. It makes no difference. With a knife in his hand, a boy feels that he is monarch of all he surveys. With a knife in his hand, he feels himself every inch a man. A boy's first consciousness of power, of dominion, of authority, comes to him on the day on which he grasps his first knife. It is by means of a knife that he carves his way to destiny. Civilization may be said to have dawned on the day on which the first man in the world held in his hand the first knife in the world. It was made of stone, like the knives of all savage and primitive peoples. It came into his possession almost by chance. He was gathering together some huge stones and building for himself a wall. Presently one heavy stone slipped from his hands, fell with a crash upon another and broke. But it was not a clean break. There lay at that first man's feet two large fragments of stone and a multitude of splinters. He picked up the largest of the splinters and found that it had a keen sharp edge. He cut his finger as he stroked it and the blood crimsoned the stone. He dropped it as he would have dropped a snake that had bitten him. But as he nursed his smarting hand, he saw the possibilities that the sharp edged splinter opened to him. He remembered the toil with which he had torn down branches of trees and shaped them to his use. The splinter would simplify his task. He forgot his lacerated finger. He seized another stone, dashed it against its neighbor and by repeating the process soon secured for himself a more shapely splinter, a splinter with which he could cut down the branches less laboriously. He tried it. He laughed as he found that armed with the splinter, he could hack the yielding timber to his will. He was more excited than he had ever been before. Here was the first man with his first knife, the pioneer man with the pioneer knife. For that first man was the father of men of many colors, and that first knife was the father of blades of many kinds. From it sprang the sickle and the scythe, the chisel and the saw, the spade and the tomahawk, the rapier and the dagger, the scalpel and the pognard, the razor and the sword. The joy that the boy feels as he looks lovingly on his first knife is the joy of shaping things. The world about him has suddenly become plastic. It is a block of marble and he is the sculptor. He may make of it what he will. Until he possessed a knife, the hard inanimate substances about him defied him. He was the bird and they were the bars, but now he defies them. The knife makes all the difference. The knife is his scepter. He is a king and all things are subject to him. He may, of course, abuse his power. He probably will. A boy with a knife is very liable to carve his name in the polished walnut of the piano or to cut notches out of the neatly turned legs of the dining room table. From all parts of the world, people go on pilgrimage to Westminster Abbey and at the Abbey they are shown the coronation chair. Seated in it, all our English sovereigns have been crowned and it is encrusted with traditions that go back to the days of the patriarchs. But a boy with a knife feels no reverence for antiquity. On the night of July 5th, 1800, a Westminster schoolboy got locked in the Abbey. He curled up in the coronation chair and made it his resting place until morning. And in the morning he thought of his pocket knife and as the dawn came streaming through the storied eastern windows, he carved deeply into the solid oak of the seat of the chair, the notable inscription. P. Abbott slept in this chair, July 5th, 1800. Thus he buried his blade in one of the noblest of our great historic treasures. It was enough to make the illustrious dead by whom he was everywhere surrounded, turned in their ancient graves. George IV and all his successors have since been crowned in a chair that bears that impertinent record. Yet as the chips flew, the boy felt no compunction. And in his stulled calm, he is the type and representative of all who abuse the authority with which they are invested. He feels, as he wields the knife, that all things are at his mercy. He can shape them to his liking. He forgets that power carries its attendant obligations and that foremost among those obligations is the obligation to restraint. A boy with a knife in his hand is merely a miniature addition of a man with a sword in his hand. And a man with a sword in his hand is often tempted to bury his blade in that which is even more precious than the oak of a coronation chair. Piano frames and table legs are not the only things that cry aloud for protection. The greatest lesson that the world has learned in our time is that the power of the sword involves its possessor in a responsibility that is simply frightful. The blood of brave men, the tears of good women, the hard-earned wealth of nations must never be frivolously or lightheartedly outpoured. From the moment at which, with sparkling eyes, that first man sees that first sharp splinter, the knife has steadily grown upon the imaginations of men. It took a thousand generations to discover its potentialities. Indeed, our own generation is only just beginning to realize the possibilities that it unfolds. Think of the marvels, I had almost said, the miracles of modern surgery. Let nothing share your heart with your knife, said Dr. Ferguson to Barney Boyle in The Doctor of Crow's Nest. The old doctor had just fallen in love with Barney. He liked his books, he liked his temperament, and he liked his hands. You must be a surgeon, Barney. You've got the fingers and the nerves. A surgeon, sir, that's the only thing worth while. The physician can't see further below the skin than anyone else. He guesses and experiments, treats symptoms, tries one drug and then another. But the knife, my boy, the doctor rose and paced the floor in his enthusiasm. The knife, boy, there's no guess in the knife point. The knife lays bare the evil, fights it, eradicates it. The knife at the proper moment saves a man's life. A slight incision, an inch or two long, the removal of the diseased part, a few stitches, and in a couple of weeks, the patients well. Ah, boy, God knows I'd give my life to be a great surgeon, but he didn't give me the fingers. Look at these, and he held up a coarse, heavy hand. I haven't the touch, but you have. You have the nerve and the fingers and the mechanical ingenuity. You can be a great surgeon. You shall have all my time and all my books and all my money, I'll put you through. You must think, dream, sleep, eat, drink, bones and muscles and sinews and nerves. Push everything else aside, he cried, waving his great hands excitedly. And remember, here his voice took a solemn tone. Let nothing share your heart with your knife. Let nothing share your heart with your knife. That is always the knife's appeal. It is a plea for concentration. I was talking to an old gardener the other day. He was pruning his trees. The gleaming blade was in his hand and the path was littered with the wreckage of the branches. He seemed to be working in a shocking havoc and I told him so, he laughed. Oh, their well-meaning things are trees, he exclaimed. They are anxious to do their best for you, but they attempt too much, far too much. Just look at this one and he laughed again. I thought it could cover all these branches with roses and if we left it alone, it would try. But what sort of roses they would be, I should like to know. No, no, no. It is better for them to produce fewer blossoms, but to produce good ones. We mustn't let them attempt too much. Let nothing share your heart with your knife, said old Dr. Ferguson, as he urged Barney to do just one thing and do that one thing well. We mustn't let the rose-trees attempt too much, said the old Gardner, as he lopped off the branches with his pruning knife. That seems to be the lesson the knife is always teaching. I remember going up one bright afternoon to see Gregor Fawcett of Mosgyle. Gregor was passing through a troublesome and trying time. Hard on top of heavy business losses had come the collapse of his health. To my delight, however, I found him in a particularly cheerful mood. I've been reading Boot the Knife, Diakenne, he explained. It's a bonny passage. He took the open Bible from the table beside the bed and pointed me to the fifteenth of John. Every branch in me that beareth not fruit, he cuteth away, and every branch that beareth fruit, he pruneth it that it may bring forth more fruit. He brought me a power of comfort, Gregor explained, for it says, you can, that there are only two sorts of wood on the tree, the dead wood, and the live wood. He cuts away the dead wood from the sake of the live wood that he leaves, and he cuts the live wood that bears fruit so that it may bear still more and still better fruit. Well, I thought all the losses I have had lately. I did again whether the things that have been taken were the dead things or the live things, but it does not matter. If they were dead things, I'm better without them, and if they were live things, they were only cut away because my life is like a tree that bears fruit and that may yet bear more. And in either case, the best remains. The tree is the richer and not the poorer for the pruning. The pruning only shows that the gardener cares. Ah, it's a bonny passage that. And Gregor led the open Bible lovingly on the pillow beside him. "'After you've gone,' he said, "'I shall go over it again.' And from the frequency with which he quoted the words to buffeted spirits in the days that followed, I could see that, on that further inspection, Gregor had kissed the husbandman's knife even more reverently and rapturously than before." End of part three, chapter three, recording by Lawrence Trask, interfaceaudio.com. Part three, chapter four, of rubble and rose leaves and things of that kind. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Charles Conover. Rubble and Rose Leaves by Frank W. Borum. Old photographs. We badly need an asylum for antiquated portraiture. A pleasant inhospitable refuge in which all of our old photographs could be carefully preserved and reverently handled. For lack of such an institution, we are all in difficulties. People come into our lives, we become attached to them and value their friendship. We exchange photographs, and as soon as we have done so, the inevitable happens. The photographs get hopelessly out of date. Friends come and go, we come and go, but the photographs remain. Or if the friends themselves abide, they change. Fashions change. And in a few years, the photographs look singularly archaic, if not positively ridiculous. They go away into a drawer or a box. Once or twice a year, a spring cleaning or other volcanic upheaval reminds us of their existence. We must really sort these out and destroy a lot of them, we say, but we never do it. Everybody knows why. It seems a betrayal of old confidences, an outrage upon sentiment, a heartless sacrilege. There should be an asylum for obsolete portraiture, or, if that is out of the question, we should do with the photographs what Nansen and Johansson the Polar explorers did with their dogs. Neither had the heart to shoot his own, so amid the ice and snow of the far north, they exchanged their canine companions, and each went sadly and silently away and shot the others. Such a course must, however, be regarded as a makeshift and a subterfuge. The asylum is the thing. I am opposed tooth and nail to the destruction of old photographs under any conditions. I spent an hour yesterday, down by the lake, reading some of the love letters that Mozart wrote to his wife nearly two centuries ago. Poor Johann and poor Strandserl. They were so pitifully penniless that when, on bitter winter's morning, a kindly neighbor fought his way through the deep snow to see how the young couple were getting on, he found them dancing alwalts on the bare boards of their narrow room. They could not afford a fire, and this was their device for keeping warm. And now, Johann is away on a business trip. In our time, a husband so situated would send his wife a telegram to say that he had arrived safely, or perhaps buy her a picture postcard of the view from his hotel window. But Mozart wrote the prettiest love letters. My dear wife, he says, if I only had a letter from you, if I were to tell you all that I do with your dear likeness, how you would laugh. For instance, when I take it out of its case, I say, God greet thee, Strandserl. God grant thee thou rascal shuttlecock, pointy nose, knick-knack bit and sup. And when I put it back, I let it slip in very slowly, saying with each little push, now, now, now. And at the last, quickly, good night, little mouse, sleep well. Where is that portrait now? I dread the hazard of conjecture. There was, alas, no asylum to which it could be fondly and reverently entrusted. Photographs, like fashions, are capable of strange revivals. One never knows when crinolines or hobble skirts will reappear. And in the same way, one never knows the moment at which some quaint old photograph will acquire new and absorbing interest. Why, bless me, you exclaim, as you lay down the newspaper. Here's Charlie Brown become famous. You remember Charlie? He was the second son of the Browns who lived opposite us at Kensington. Why, I have a photograph of him, taken when he was a little boy. I'll run and get it. But alas, it has been destroyed, or the regret may be even more poignant. Dear me, you say, poor old Mary Smith is dead. The announcement brings with it as such announcements have a way of doing a rush of reminiscence. A simple old soul was Mary Smith. She was very good to us five and 20 years ago when the children were all small and sicknesses were frequent. Mary always knew exactly what to do. But we moved away, and the years went by. Letter writing was not in Mary's line. With the obituary notice still before us, we talk of Mary and the old days for a while. And then we suddenly remember that when we came away, Mary gave us her photograph. It was a quaint, old-fashioned picture. It had been taken some years earlier, but we were glad to have it, and we put it with the others. We must slip up and get it. But it, too, has vanished. Somehow, Mary living did not seem quite so pathetic and lovable a figure as Mary dead. At some spring cleaning, we must have glanced at the creased and faded portrait, and without pausing to allow memory to do such vivid work as she has done today, we must have tossed it out. We feel horribly ashamed. If only we could recover the old photograph, we would stand it on the mantelpiece and do it single honor. And to think that, in the confusion of cleaning up, we threw it out, perhaps tore it up, perhaps even burned it. We shudder at the thought and half hope that in her new and larger life, Mary, who seems nearer to us now than she did before we read of her passing, does not know that we were guilty of treachery so base. Thus there come into our lives moments when photographs assert their worth and insist on being appraised at their true value. In the stirring chapter in which Sir Ernest Shackleton tells of the loss of his ship among the ice flows, he describes an incident that must have set all his readers thinking. In the grip of the ice, the endurance had been smashed to splinters and the entire party were out on a frozen sea at the mercy of the pitiless elements. Shackleton came to the conclusion that their best chance of eventually sighting land lay in marching to the opposite extremity of the flow. At any rate, it would give them something to do and there is always solace in activity. He thereupon ordered his men to reduce their personal baggage to two pounds weight each. For the next few hours, every man was busy in sorting out his belongings, the treasures that he had saved from the ship. It was a heartbreaking business. Men stole gloomily and silently away and dug little graves in the snow to which they committed books, letters and various knickknacks of sentimental value. And when the final decision had to be made, they threw away their little hordes of golden souvenirs and kept the photographs of their sweethearts and wives. The same perplexity arises sooner or later in relation to the portraits and pictures on our walls. They become obsolete, but we find it difficult to order their removal. I had intended, long before this, devoting an essay to the whole subject of pictures. Why must we smother our walls with pictures? To begin with, the pattern of the paper is often a series of pictures in itself, while the dado and the border simply add to the collection. Then over these, we carefully arrange a multitude of others, paintings, engravings and photographs hang everywhere. Why do we cover the walls in this way? The answer is that we cover the walls in order to cover the walls. The walls represent an imprisonment. The pictures represent an escape. On the wall in front of me, for example, there hangs a watercolor sketch of Pirapiki Gorge, our New Zealand holiday resort. On a winter's night, when the rain is lashing against the windows and the wind shrieking around the house, I glance up at it and by some magic transition I am roaming on a summer's evening over the old familiar hills with my gun in my hand and John Broadbanks by my side. Through the medium of those landscapes, how many tireless excursions have I taken by cops and beach and riverbank without so much as rising from my chair? The photographs hanging here and there around the room transport my mind to other days and other places. The apartment in which I sit may be extremely small, just as the space that I occupy on the summit of a mountain may be extremely small. But occupying that small space upon that lofty eminence I command a view that loses itself in infinity and the lounging in my comfortable chair and this little snuggery of mine, the pictures transform it into an observatory and I am able to survey the entire universe. You do not hang pictures in the cells of a jail. The reason is obvious. You do not wish the prisoners to escape. You think it good that they should feel the stern tyranny of those four uncompromising walls. Conversely, you deck the dining room with pictures because there you do not desire to feel imprisoned. You do not wish the walls to seem tyrannical. As Mr. Sterling Bowen sings, four walls enclose me, yet how calm they are. They hang up pictures that they may forget what walls are for in part. Forget how far they may not run and riotously let their laughter taunt the never-changing stars. In circus cages, wolves and tigers pace. Forever to and fro, they do not rest. But seek so nervously the longed for place. Our picture jungles would not end their quest or pictures of another tiger's face. On four square walls men have their world, their strife, their painted framed endeavors, joys and pain, and two curators known as man and wife, hang up the sunrise, wipe the dust from rain and gaze excitedly on painted life. A picture on the wall is like a window, only more so. A window looks out on the garden or the street. A picture is an opening into infinity. The view from my window is controlled by circumstances. I cannot, for example, live in this Australian home of mine and command from my window a view of Yorkmenster, the bridge of size or the Rocky Mountains. And even if I could, the darkness of each night would enfold the pleasing prospect in its somber and impenetrable veil. But the pictures do for me what windows could never do. By means of the picture, I cut holes in the walls and look out upon any landscape that takes my fancy. And when evening comes, I draw the blinds. Illumin the room from within and the panorama that has so delighted me in the daytime reveals fresh charms and the softer radiance of the lamps. We all owe more to pictures than we have ever begun to suspect. Here is a merry young romp of a schoolboy, of tousled head and swarthy face, loving the open air and hating books like poison. A lady gives him a ponderous volume and he turns away with a sneer. But one day he casually opens it. There is a colored picture. It represents Robinson Caruso and his man Friday in the midst of one of their most exciting adventures. The boy, George Barrow, seized the book, carried it off and never rested until he had read it from cover to cover. It opened his eyes to the possibilities of literature and to his dying day he declared that, but for the colored print, the world would never have heard his name or read a line from his pen. Nor is that all, for it is probable that, in infancy, our minds receive their first bias towards, or away from, sacred things from the pictures of biblical subjects and biblical characters that are then, wisely or unwisely, exposed to our gaze. The face that, in the secret chambers of our hearts, we think of as the face of Jesus is, in all likelihood, the face that we saw in the first picture book that Mother showed us. But I fear that I have wondered. I set out to talk, not so much about pictures as about photographs, photographs in general and old photographs in particular. Have photographs, and especially old photographs, no ethical or spiritual value? Is there a man living who has not, at some time, felt himself rebuked by eyes that look down at him from a frame on the wall? I often feel, in relation to the photographs around the room, as Tennyson felt, in relation to the spirits of those whom he had loved long since and lost a while. It is lovely to think that those who have passed from our sight are not, in reality, far from us. And yet, do we indeed desire the dead should still be near us at our side? Is there no baseness we could hide, no inner vileness that we dread? Shall he, for whose applause I strove, I had such reverence for his blame, see with clear eyes some hidden shame and I be lessened in his love? Who has not been conscious of a similar feeling under the searching glances of the eyes upon the wall? They seem at times to pierce our very souls. Tennyson came at last to the comfortable assurance that the shrinking fear with which he thought of his dead friends was not justified. For, he reflected, those who had gone out of the dusk into the daylight had acquired not only a loftier purity, but a larger charity. I wrung the grave with fears untrue. Shall love be blamed for want of faith? There must be wisdom with great death. The death shall look me through and through. But near us when we climb or fall, ye watch like God the rolling hours, with larger other eyes than ours, to make allowance for us all. It is pleasant to transfer that thought to the photographs around the room. They hang there all day and every day. They hear all that we say and see all that we do. Those quiet eyes seem to read us narrowly. Yet if, on the other hand, they see more in these secret souls of ours to blame, it is possible that on the other, they see more to pity. The judgments that we most dread are the judgments of those who only partly understand. The drunkard shrinks from the eyes of those who see his debauchery, but know nothing of his temptation. There is something wonderfully comforting and strengthening in the clear eyes of those who see, not apart merely, but the whole. Charles Simeon of Cambridge adorned his study wall with a fine picture of Henry Martin. It is very difficult to say which of the two owed most to the other. In the days when he was groping after the light, Henry Martin, then a student, fell under the influence of Mr. Simeon and no other minister helped him so much. But later on, when Henry Martin was illuminating the Orient with the light of the Gospel, his magnetic personality and heroic example exerted a remarkable authority over the ardent mind of the eminent Cambridge scholar. Mr. Simeon began to feel that in some subtle and inexplicable way the portrait on the wall was influencing his whole life. The picture was more than a picture. A wave of reverential admiration swept over him whenever he glanced up at it. He caught himself talking to it and it seemed to speak to him. His biographer says that, Mr. Simeon used to observe of Martin's picture while looking up at it with affectionate earnestness as it hung over his fireplace. There, see that blessed man. What an expression of continence. No one looks at me as he does. He never takes his eyes off me and seems always to be saying, be serious, be an earnest, don't trifle, don't trifle. Then smiling at the picture and gently bowing, he added, and I won't trifle, I won't trifle. His friends always felt that the photograph over the fireplace was one of the most profound and effective influences in the life and work of Charles Simeon. And nobody who treasures a few reproving and inspiring pictures of the kind will have the slightest difficulty in believing it. The photographs upon my wall are never tyrannical. Else why should I prefer them to the cold, imprisoning walls? But they'll never tyrannical. They are always authoritative. They speak not harshly, but firmly. In the nature of the case, these were the faces I revere, the faces of those whom I have enthroned within my heart. Being enthroned, they command. They sometimes say, thou shalt. They sometimes say, thou shalt not. They sometimes suggest. They sometimes prohibit. And now, before I lay down my pen, shall I reveal the circumstance that led me to this train of thought? I am writing at Easter time. On Good Friday, a lady presented me with an exquisitely sad, but unspeakably beautiful picture, a picture of the thorn-crowned face. Where am I to hang it? It will insist, tenderly but firmly, on a suitable and harmonious environment. Henry Drummond used to tell of a Cambridge undergraduate whose sweetheart visited his room. She found its walls covered with pictures of actresses and race horses. She said nothing but, on his birthday, presented him with a picture like this. A year later, she again called on him at Cambridge. The thorn-crowned face hung over the fireplace and the other walls were adorned with charming landscapes and reproductions of famous paintings. He caught her glancing at her gift. It's made a great difference to the room, he said. What's more, it's made a great difference in me. This is a way our pictures have. They insist on ruling everything and everybody. I have no right to enthrone a despot in my home, nor to exalt a thorn-crowned king, unless I am prepared to make him Lord of all. End of Part Three, Chapter Four. Part Three, Chapter Five of Rubble and Rose Leaves and Things of That Kind. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Devorah Allen. Rubble and Rose Leaves by Frank W. Borum. A Box of Blocks. One. We had a birthday at our house today and among the presents was a beautiful box of blocks. Each block represented one of the letters of the alphabet. As I saw them being arranged and rearranged upon the table, I fell a thinking. For the alphabet has, in our time, come to its own. We go through life muttering an interminable and incomprehensible jargon of initials. We tuck initials onto our names, four and aft, and we like to see every one of them in its place. As soon as I open my eyes in the morning, the postman hands me a medley of circulars, postcards and letters. One of them bids me attend the annual meeting of the SPCA. Another reminds me of the monthly committee meeting of the MCM. A third asks me to deliver an address at the PSA. In the afternoon, I rush from an appointment at the YMCA to speak on behalf of the WCTU. And then, having dropped in to pay my insurance premium at the AMP, I take the tram at the GPO and ask the conductor to drop me at the ABC. I have accepted an invitation to a pleasant little function there, an invitation that has clearly marked RSVP, and so on. There is no end to it. Life may be defined as a small amount of activity, entirely surrounded by the letters of the alphabet. Now the alphabet has a symbolism of its own. The man who coined the phrase, as simple as ABC, went mad. He went mad before he coined it. There are, it is true, a few simplicities sprinkled among the intricacies of this old world of ours. But the alphabet is not one of them. I protest that it is most unfair to call the alphabet simple. Nobody likes to be thought simple nowadays. See how frantically we preachers struggle to avoid any suspicion of the kind. Any man living would rather be called a sinner, or even a saint, than a simpleton. Why then affront the alphabet, which, as we have seen, is working a prodigious amount of overtime in our service, by applying to it so very appropriate an epithet? As simple as ABC, indeed. Macaulay's schoolboy may not have been as omniscient as the historian would lead us to believe. But he at least knew that there is nothing simple about the ABC. The alphabet is the hardest lesson that a child is called upon to learn. Latin roots, algebraic equations, and the panza sanorum are mere nothings in comparison. Grown-ups have short memories. They forget the stupendous difficulties that they surmounted in their earliest infancy, and their forgetfulness renders them pitiless and unsympathetic. Few of us recognize the strain in which a child's brain is involved when for the first time he confronts the alphabet. The whole thing is so arbitrary. There is no clue. In his noble essay on the evolution of language, Professor Henry Drummond shows that the alphabet is really a picture gallery. First, he says, there was the onomatopoeic writing, the ideograph, the imitation of the actual object. This is the form we find in the Egyptian hieroglyphic. For a man, a man is drawn. For a camel, a camel. For a hut, a hut. And to save time, the objects were drawn in shorthand. A couple of dashes for the limbs and one across, as in the Chinese for a man. A square in the same language for a field. Two strokes at an obtuse angle, suggesting the roof, for a house. To express further qualities, these abbreviated pictures were next compounded in ingenious ways. A man and a field together conveyed the idea of wealth. A roof and a woman represented home, and so on. And thus, little by little, our letters were evolved. But the pictures have become so truncated, abbreviated, and emasculated in the course of this evolutionary process that a child, though notoriously fond of pictures, sees nothing fascinating in the letters of the alphabet. There is absolutely nothing about the first to suggest the sound A. Nothing about the second to suggest the sound B. The whole thing is so incomprehensible. How can he ever hope to master it? An adult brain, introduced to such a conglomeration for the first time, would reel and stagger. Is it any wonder that these childish cheeks get flushed, or that the curly head turns at times very feverishly upon the pillow? The sequence, too, is as baffling as the symbols. There is every reason why two should come between one and three, and that reason is so obvious that the tiniest taught in the class can appreciate it. But why must B come between A and C? There is no natural advance, as in the case of the numerals. The letter B is not a little more than the letter A, nor a little less than the letter C. Except through the operation of the law of association, which only weaves its spell with the passing of the years, there is nothing about A to suggest B, and nothing about B to suggest C. The combination is a rope of sand. Robert Moffat only realized the insuperable character of this difficulty when he attempted to teach the natives of Betwana Land, the English alphabet. Each of his dusky pupils brought to the task an observation that had been trained in the wilds, a brain that had been developed by the years, and an intelligence that had been matured by experience. They were not babies. Yet the alphabet proved too much for them. Why should A be A? And why should B be B? And why should the one follow the other? Mr. Moffat was on the point of abandoning his educational enterprise as hopeless, when one thick-lipped and woolly-headed genius suggested that he should teach them to sing it. At first blush the notion seemed preposterous. There are some things which, like Magna Charta and minute books, cannot be set to music. Robert Moffat, however, was a Scotsman. The tune most familiar to his childhood came singing itself over and over in his brain. By the most freakish and fantastic conjunction of ideas, it associated itself with the problem that was baffling him. And before that day's sun had set, he had his Betwana pupils roaring the alphabet to the tune of Old Langzine. So A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z. The rhyme and meter fitted perfectly. The natives were so delighted that they strolled about the village shouting the new song at the tops of their voices. And Mr. Moffat declares that daylight was stealing through his bedroom window before the weird unearthly yells at last subsided. I have often wondered whether, in a more civilized environment, any attempt has been made to impress the letters upon the mind in the same way. Two. The symbolism of the alphabet rises to a sudden grandeur, however, when it is enlisted in the service of revelation. Long, long ago, a startled shepherd was ordered to visit the court of the mightiest of earthly potentates and to address him on matters of state in the name of the most high. And the Lord said unto Moses, Come now, therefore, and I will send thee unto Pharaoh, and I will send thee also unto the children of Israel. And Moses said unto God, Behold, when I am come unto them, and shall say, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you, and they shall say, What is his name? What shall I say unto them? And God said unto Moses, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I am hath sent me unto you. I am. I am what? For centuries and centuries that question stood unanswered. That sentence remained incomplete. It was a magnificent fragment. It stood like a monument that the sculptor had never lived to finish. Like a poem that the poet, dying with his music in him, had left with its closing stanzas unsung. But the sculptor of that fragment was not dead. The singer of that song had not perished. For behold, he liveth for ever more. And in the fullness of time, he reappeared and filled in the gap that had so long stood blank. I am. I am what? I am the bread of life. I am the light of the world. I am the door. I am the true vine. I am the good shepherd. I am the way, the truth, and the life. I am the resurrection and the life. And when I come to the end of the Bible, to the last book of all, I find the series supplemented and completed. I am Alpha and Omega. I am A and Z. I am the alphabet. The symbolism of which I have spoken can rise to no greater height than that. What, I wonder, can such symbolism symbolize? I take these birthday blocks that came to our house today and strew the letters on my study floor. So far as any spiritual significance is concerned, they seem as dead as the dry bones in Ezekiel's valley. And yet I am the alphabet. Come, I cry, with the prophet of the captivity. Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain that they may live. And the prayer has scarcely escaped my lips when low. All the letters of the alphabet shine with a wondrous luster and glow with a profound significance. Three, for see, the north wind breathes upon these letters on the floor. And I see it once that they are symbols of the inexhaustibility of Jesus. I am Alpha and Omega. I am the alphabet. I have sometimes stood in one of our great public libraries. I have surveyed with astonishment the serried ranks of English literature. I have looked up, and in tier above tier, gallery above gallery, shelf above shelf, the books climb to the very roof. While looking before me and behind me, they stretched as far as I could see. The catalog containing the bare names of the books ran into several volumes. And yet the whole of this literature consists of these 26 letters on the floor arranged and rearranged in kaleidoscopic variety of juxtaposition, which I ask myself is the greater, the literature, or the alphabet. And I see it once that the alphabet is the greater because it is so inexhaustible. Literature is in its infancy. We shall produce greater poets than Shakespeare, greater novelists than Dickens, greater philosophers, historians, and humorists than any who have yet written. But they will draw upon the alphabet for every letter of every syllable of every word that they write. They may multiply our literature a million, million fold, yet the alphabet will be as far from exhaustion when the last page is finished as it was before the first writer sees to pen. I am the alphabet, he says. He means that he cannot be exhausted, for the love of God is broader than the measure of man's mind, and the heart of the eternal is most wonderfully kind. The ages may draw upon his grace, the men of every nation and kindred and people and tongue, a multitude that no statistician can number may kneel in contrition at his feet. His love is as great as his power and knows neither measure nor end. He is inexhaustible. Four. And when the south wind breathes upon these letters on the floor, I see at once that they are symbols of the indispensability of Jesus. Literature, with all its hoarded wealth, is as inaccessible as the diamonds of the moon until I have mastered the alphabet. The alphabet is the golden key that unlocks to me all its treasures of knowledge, poetry, and romance. I am the alphabet, he says, and he says it three separate times. For the words occur thrice in the apocalypse. In the first case, they refer to the unfolding of the divine revelation. In the second, they refer to the interpretation of historic experience. And in the third, they refer to the unveiled drama of the future. As the disciples discovered on the road to Emmaus, I cannot understand my Bible unless I take him as being the key to it all. I cannot understand the processes of historical development until I have given him the central place. I cannot anticipate with equanimity the unfoldings of the days to come until I have seen the keys of the eternities swinging at his girdle. The alphabet is essentially an individual affair. In order to read a single sentence, I must learn it for myself. My father's intimacy with the alphabet does not help me to enjoy the volumes on my shelves. The alphabet is indispensable to me, and so is he. There is something very pathetic and very instructive about the story that Leigh Richmond tells of the young cottager. The rays of the morning star, Mr. Richmond says, were not so beautiful in my sight as the spiritual luster of this young Christian's character. She was very ill when he visited her for the last time. There was animation in her look. There was more. Something like a foretaste of heaven seemed to be felt and gave an inexpressible character of spiritual beauty even in death. Where is your hope, my child? Mr. Richmond asked in the course of that last conversation. Lifting up her finger, he says, she pointed to heaven and then directed the same finger downward to her own heart, saying successively as she did so. Christ there and Christ here. These words, accompanied by the action, spoke her meaning more solemnly than can easily be conceived. In life and in death, he is our one indispensability. In relation to this world and in relation to the world that is to come, he stands to the soul as the alphabet stands in relation to literature. Five, and when the east wind breeds upon these letters on the floor, I see at once that they are symbols of the invincibility of Jesus. I am A and Z. He is at the beginning, that is to say, and he goes right through to the end. There is nothing in the alphabet before A. There is nothing after Z. However far back your evolutionary interpretation of the universe may place the beginning of things, you will find him there. However remote your interpretation of prophecy may make the end of things, you will find him there. He goes right through. The story of the ages, past, present, and future, may be told in a sentence. Christ first, Christ last, and not between, but Christ. Having begun, he completes. He is the author and the finisher of our faith. He sets his face like a flint. Nothing daunts, deters, or dismayes him. I am confident, Paul says, of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it unto the end. He never halts of H or L or P or X. He goes right through to Z. He never gives up. But the greatest comfort of all comes to me on the wings of the West Wind. For when the West Wind breathes upon these letters on the floor, I see at once that they are symbols of the adaptability of Jesus. The lover takes these twenty-six letters and makes them the vehicle for the expression of his passion. The poet transforms them into a song that shall be sung for centuries. The judge turns them into a sentence of death. In the hands of each, they mold themselves to his necessity. The alphabet is the most fluid, the most accommodating, the most plastic, the most adaptable contrivance on the planet. Just because, in common with every man breathing, I possess a distinctive individuality, I sometimes feel as no man ever felt before, and I express myself in language, such as no man ever used. The beauty of the alphabet is that it adapts itself to my individual need, and that is precisely the beauty of Jesus. I am the alphabet. I may not have sinned more than others, but I have sinned differently. The experiences of others never sound convincing. They do not quite reflect my case. But like the alphabet, he adapts himself to every case. He is the very Savior I need. End of Part 3, Chapter 5.