 Part 2 Chapter 9 of The Luggant of Life 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 April 6,090, California, United States of America. The Luggant of Life by Frank W. Borum. Part 2 Chapter 9 The Great Bush Solitudes had taken the place of the bustling streets. He, an Australian minister on holiday, rested on a fallen tree beside the dusty track. He raised his hat to the loveliness and bathed his brow in the loneliness that pervaded everything. It was with him as when a great steamer stops in mid-ocean to allow her engines to cool. The thud of the propeller, the vibration of the machinery, are felt no longer. The stillness is uncanny. He drew from his breast pocket his Bible, and, his mind recurring to his own attempts to build the city of God among the haunts of men, he turned to the stately old story of Namaia. He read on, undisturbed by the drowsy hum of insects and the merrier song of birds, until arrested by Sambole's question, what do these feeble Jews? Will they revive the stones out of the heaps of the rubbish which are burned? It was an awakening phrase, a revival from a rubbish heap. He laid the open Bible on the mossy log beside him, and lost himself in contemplation. And, even as he pondered, a new object presented itself to his hungry mind. From the depths of the bush, on the distant hillside, great-reading columns of smoke curled skywards, occasionally shot through by fierce flashes of flame. Straining his ears to listen, he cocked the crash of falling trees, and thought he could detect the crackle and roar of the fires as the monsters yielded themselves to the devouring element. Seeing his eyes to see, he dimly discerned the figures of men, moving here and there, superintending the work of demolition and destruction. They were clearing away the maple and the myrtle, the wattle and the gum, to make room for the apple and the apricot, the peach tree and the pear. And the preacher, as he watched, caught himself echoing Sambole's question. Will they bring a revival out of a rubbish heap? Will they obtain riches from refuse? These were companion pictures, this picture in the Bible, and this picture in the bush, and, as he gazed upon them side by side, several clear-cut thoughts emerged. He saw the rubbish heaps fill a large place in the domestic economy of a world like this, and he saw that an element of such enormous magnitude must be governed by laws. Refuse must have its fixed rules. The slack heap must have its statuettes. They have. There is the law of deterioration. From the picture in the Bible and the picture in the bush it becomes clear that all material things, though as sacred as the temple or as natural as the forest flowers, are on their way to the rubbish heap. It sounds like a death knell to the materialist. Materialism, unmasked, appears as the religion of the rubbish heap. It is heavy tidings, too, for the ritualist. For ritualism stands in perilous relationship to the rubbish heap. Now, abideth what, altars, vestments, crosses, creeds, catechisms, confessions? Now abideth faith, hope, love, these three, and the greatest of these is love. The moth is in our fairest fabrics and our holiest temples, tottered to their fall. And as some spake of the temple, how it was adorned with goodly stones and gifts, Jesus said, as for these things which ye behold, the days will come in, the which there shall not be left one stone upon another that shall not be cast down. That is significant. It is well to set our affections on the things for which the rubbish heap can have no terrors. There is the law of occupation. For Nahemia, in the one picture and the settler in the other, find the ground not fallow but occupied. Moss and lichen cover every stone. Giant trees, twining creepers, shapely ferns, and waving grasses fight for every inch of soil. Brink weeds and spear-like leaves peer out from all the interstices. Every crack and cranny, every corner and crevice is occupied. Nature abhors a vacuum. Wherever the foot of man has failed to tread, wherever the hand of man has failed to labor, God's innumerable and invisible, agriculturist, plough, and hiero, sow and reap, and produce the bewildering beauties of the bush. Hannibal's military precept of preoccupation dominates the rubbish heap. The moss and the lichen are on the stones of Jerusalem, because no Nahemia has come to build the city. The wattle and the gum abound on the hillside simply because no man has planted apricots or pears. Is it not ever so? The mind becomes a wilderness of foul imaginations, because clean and wholesome thoughts have not been planted there. The heart becomes, like Jerusalem, a wilderness and a desolation, because the kingdom of Christ has never been established there. Evil evolves where good evacuates. There is the law of elevation. The question is, what makes rubbish rubbish? The term is obviously not absolute, but relative. A lady's hat is a milliner's dream today. Tomorrow a new style having come in, it is its mistress's despair. What has so suddenly changed delight to disgust, and made the fashion of yesterday the folly of today? It is the new style, and it is always the new style, whether of dresses or of dreadnoughts, that flings the satisfaction of one day to the slag heap of the next. What has made the maple and the laurel look like rubbish to the settler? The parrots and the kangaroos see no change to account for his vandalism. The Aboriginals did not find it necessary to hack down trees and fire the undergrowth. Why then, the spheria, accent, torch, and gut-powder? It is the conception of an orchard that has done it. That is the new style. A man dreams of apples and he burns the virgin bush. Then in his orchard he sees the glint of gold. The soil is oriferous. The fruit trees become firewood that he may seize the precious metal. Later on, in peril of a watery grave, he flings his very gold into the ocean that he may save his life. Bush, fruit, gold, each in their turn become rubbish, slung to the slag heap by the alluring force of a higher attraction. Nor is life itself the last stage. The martyrs cheerfully threw even life away, fascinated by still greater wealth. Had not Paul his rubbish heap, he counted all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus his Lord, for whom he had suffered the loss of all things, and it count them but done, that he might win Christ. The rubbish heap can have no grander word written of it than that. There is the law of transformation. God makes his loveliest roses out of rubbish. The charred ashes of yesterday's bush nourish the roots of tomorrow's orchard. If the refuse of the ages had been allowed to accumulate, the world would be uninhabitable. The air would be heavy with pestilence. We bury our rubbish and it all comes back to us in fruits and flowers. Its resurrection body is divine. It is just here that the church finds her most acute problem. In every community there are crowds of people who have gone to the wall. They feel crushed and beaten. Under our fierce competitive system the iron law of the survival of the fittest has flung them on the social slaggy and they know it. They hate the churches because the churches are old and they think that if the churches had done their duty things would not be as they are. They forget that if the churches had not done their duty things would be ten thousand times worse than they are. They snatch at every social quackery and political panacea. Now the church's mission is to do for this ruined mass what Nehemiah did for the rubbish sheeps of Jerusalem to build, out of them the city of God. Will they bring a revival out of a rubbish heap? asks Sanbale. Of course a rubbish heap is God's raw material. A revival is his finished product. Let the church get to work. She alone is equipped for so divine a duty. If she fail her collapse will be the disaster of the ages. In that melancholy event this social rubbish heap will become, like all, untransformed rubbish heaps, the menace of mankind and the peril of the world. In it all, pestilential fever germs will breed and multiply. Anarchisms and revolutions will fill the air with shrieks and screams, but the church abuses Christ who knows how to transform this mass of repuse into a field of roses. Paul understood the magic secret. He looked upon the unbridled lust, the grinding tyranny, and the hideous idolatry of the city of the Caesars, and was unabashed, and he gave his reason. The Gospel, he said, is the power of God unto transformation. He saw that the foulest filth of Rome might become the fairest fragrance of the new Jerusalem. End of Part 2, Chapter 9 I'm always moving on, sir, cried poor Joe, wiping away his grimy tears with his arm. I've always been a moving on, and a moving on, ever since I was born. Where can I possibly move to, sir, more nor I do move? My instructions don't go to that, said the Constable. My instructions are that you are to move on. I've told you so five hundred times. Well, but really, Constable, you know, observed Mr. Snacksby to whom poor Joe's appeal had been addressed. Really, that does seem a question. Where, you know, so far Charles Dickens and Bleakhouse? Mr. Snacksby and poor Joe were indisputably right. It is the easiest thing in the world to keep moving on. But where, you know? For it is the hardest thing in the world, so to direct our movements, that each change shall represent a real advance, and constitute itself a distinct contribution towards the attainment of an ultimate goal. By a sure instinct, we ask each other on the street, not, are you getting on? Because that matters little. But how are you getting on? Because that matters everything. Really, as Mr. Snacksby said, that does seem a question. Where, you know? Now movement is the law of life. The policeman told Joe that he must move or be locked up. But the greater constabulary of the solar system are very much more severe. They tell us that we must move or be put to death. Drummond Savage is a case in point, says the amiable professor. When we meet him first he is sitting. We shall suppose in the sun. Let us also suppose, and it requires no imagination to suppose it, that he has no wish to do anything else than sit in the sun, and that he is perfectly contented and perfectly happy. Nature around him, visible and invisible, is as still as he is, as inert apparently as unconcerned. Neither molest the other. They have no connection with each other. Yet it is not so. That Savage is the victim of a conspiracy. She wants to move him. How does she set about moving him? By moving herself. The sun goes down. He must move on or freeze. The time rolls on. He must move or starve. The roar of the wild beast is heard. He must move or be eaten. He moves. He could easily be shown that these invisible constables have other and even sure methods of moving us on. They give us work to do, and wreck it for us as soon as we have done it, in order to make us do it all again. We build a house. Before the workmen have removed the scaffolding, millions upon millions of invisible hands have set to work to reduce the building to ruins. It is only a question of time and they will have left it, like Solomon's temple, with not one stone upon another. They are terribly afraid those unseen constables that we shall loiter and stand still. They tear our work to pieces and demolish the very homes in which we live, for the sheer sake of compelling us to renew our toils. They overthrow Ninway and Tyre and Athens and Jerusalem and Rome that we may build London and Paris and Buenos Aires and Chicago and Melbourne. And they are tearing down these that we may build the new Jerusalem. They are always moving us on. We plow a field. We must harrow and sow it at once, or they will trample it down with their microscopic feet until it needs replowing. We gaze upon our golden crop. We must reap it immediately, or they will drench and destroy it before our very eyes. We garner our harvest. We must plow the field again, or they will sow such a crop of thorns and thistles as will make our backs ache even to look upon them. No street corner constable was ever so imperative, so merciless, so tyrannical as are these. My instructions, said the policeman to poor Joe, are that you are to move on. I've told you so 500 times. That is nothing. These other constables have told us so five million times. They say it from morning till night. They say it from babyhood to old age. They say it when the first day dawned, and they will be saying it when the last sun sets. It is move on forever and ever and ever. And to be doubly certain that we do move, they move us. Whether we like it or not, whether we sleep or wake, they hurl us through space at the dizzying rate of thousands of miles an hour to greet the sunrise. And in another direction, they push us along at the terrific speed of 60,000 miles an hour towards the summertime. We are whirling and spinning and rushing and flying from midnight till noonday and noonday till midnight. These fearful forces appall us with their everlasting cry of move on. Poor Joe's sad plight was a mere circumstance when compared with our own, and there is no Mr. Snagsby to intercede with our constables. The science of life hinges upon turning mere movement into progress. Huxley once found himself being driven in a handsome cab at a breakneck speed round and round a certain network of London streets. He had told the Hackman to drive fast, but he had not instructed him as to his destination. It does not by any means follow that movement, even the most rapid movement, is necessarily progress. In the origin of species, Darwin has a good deal to say about certain larvae that actually stand higher in the scale of organization than the mature animal into which they are afterwards developed. Have we not witnessed the same phenomenon? There is, for example, all the difference imaginable between the Mayflower, as she crossed the Atlantic nearly three centuries ago, and the Mauritania, the pride of yesterday. The Mayflower was the larva, the Mauritania, the mature animal. But the Mayflower was a house of prayer, a temple of worship, and on every Atlantic breeze that blew, songs of praise were wafted to the skies. Concerning the maiden voyage of the palatial Mauritania, a London paper says that the trip was rendered hideous by the brutal ferocity of gamblers and the horrid debauchery of drunkards. The smoking room became a veritable bedlam. Match stands, spittoons, glasses, soda water bottles, trays, and chairs were flying in all directions. On arrival at New York, the vessel was met by detectives who had been warned by marconograms from the ship, a device of which the Mayflower could not boast and for which she had no such use. These officials straightway conducted the passengers to the Jefferson Police Court. From the Mayflower to the Mauritania is a big move on, but in view of these records, one may be permitted to speculate as to how far the movement has represented a real advance. It sometimes happens, as Darwin says, that the larvae outstrip the mature animal. The principal is capable of somewhat incisive individual applications. Ignorance in the immortal allegory moved on just as far as did Christian and hopeful, but at the gates of the celestial city, the shining ones took him and carried him through the air to the door that I saw on the side of the hill and put him in there. Movement kept pace with the movement of the pilgrims, but progress made no advance at all. And perhaps the most appealing of all illustrations of this principal is Tom Hood. I remember, I remember, the fir trees dark and high. I used to think their tender tops were close against the sky. It was a childish ignorance, but now tis little joy to know I'm farther off from heaven than when I was a boy. The larvae, that is to say, were in advance of the mature animal which developed from them. The unseen constabulary of the universe can move us on, but it is not in their power to see that the movement shall be progress. They move us on as the wind moves the ships. It is for us to trim our sails to suit our destinies, for there are two great principles involved in getting on. There is the principle of the propeller, and there is the principle of the rudder. The propeller may make the pace, but only so far as it is checked and directed and controlled by the rudder can we be sure of getting there. It is so fatally easy to move on. But where, cries poor Joe? Well, really constable, you know, says Mr. Snagsby wistfully. Really, constable, that does seem a question. Where, you know? Mr. Snagsby is quite right. It is a question indeed. End of Part 2, Chapter 10 Part 2, Chapter 11 of The Luggage of Life. 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 Jennifer Painter The Luggage of Life by Frank W. Borum Part 2, Chapter 11 So many beds in the ward That was little Emmy's trouble. So many beds in the ward. The lines are almost too familiar to need quoting. Yes, and I will, said Emmy. But then, if I call to the Lord, how should he know that it's me? Such a lot of beds in the ward? That was a puzzle for Annie. Again, she considered and said, Emmy, you put out your arms and you leave them outside on the bed. The Lord has so much to see too, but Emmy, you tell him it plain. It's the little girl with her arms lying out on the counterpane. Now here, with an art that is all the more wonderful because it is the art that conceals art, Tennyson has stated for us one of the most acute problems of the Christian faith. The Lord has so much to see too, such a lot of beds in the ward. These are the ugly thoughts that have come knocking at all our doors at some time or other. Did I say at some time or other? I mean at one a special time. These are the ugly thoughts that have entered all our heads just when the time came to pray. We were burdened. We hungered for a sense of the divine sympathy, the divine interest, the divine care. And as we kneeled, little Emmy's question came dinning itself into our shuddering souls. The Lord has so much to see too, such a lot of beds in the ward. We rose disillusioned. When we kneeled, the place seemed like a shrine. When we rose, it was only a cupboard. When we kneeled, it seemed as though we were about to hold communion with the very skies. When we rose, the ceiling itself seemed to be grinning at our defeat. It was as though all the lamps of faith had been blown out. It was as though life's dearest companion had willfully turned his back upon us. It was as though the doors of home had been suddenly slammed in our faces. The Lord has so much to see too, such a lot of beds in the ward. These reflections have been suggested by a letter which has just reached me. It is from a gentleman who has gained, with marked distinction, two of the highest degrees obtainable on this side of the world. I mention this to show that the problem is not confined to poor little waves in London hospitals. Here on the one hand we have little Emmy, and here on the other we have our brilliant university graduate. But in both cases, the trouble is the same. I have given up praying, my friend tells me. It seems so utterly incredible to me that a God who controls all worlds and inhabits all time can have patience to hear me speak to him about my examinations and my love affairs and my prospects. Here then, quite clearly, we are face to face with little Emmy's puzzle over again. The Lord has so much to see too, such a lot of beds in the ward. Little Emmy stated the case from the standpoint of the child. The letter states it from the standpoint of the scholar. That is all. Let me turn for a moment to current literature. Here on my desk is a London magazine containing an article by Miss Marie Corelli. It is not written in that lady's best vein. I am not sure that it is quite worthy of her. Her whole argument seems to be that the Lord has far too much to see too. That there are too many beds in the wards to permit of his taking an individual interest either in a child in a London hospital or in a university graduate in Australia. She refers to the most high as that tremendous omnipotence to whose intelligent action we owe our own very being, the generator of universes, the creator of everything the eyes can see, the ears can hear or the brain can imagine. And she scorns the very idea that we, the children of one out of a million, million vast productive epochs, should be found assuming a certain swaggering posture before this ever-present divine. Here then we have the self-same problem stated in three different ways. First by a puny little patient in the children's hospital, then by a graduate of an Australian university, and once again by a modern novelist. And each one of us, if we cared and dared, could state it afresh in the throbbing terms of some profound personal experience. A book published some time ago told the story of old Mr Westfield, a preacher of the independent persuasion in a certain Yorkshire town, who was discoursing one Sunday with his utmost eloquence on the power of prayer. He suddenly stopped, passed his hands slowly over his head, a favourite gesture, and said in dazed tones, I do not know my friends whether you ever tried praying. For my part, I gave it up long ago as a bad job. The poor old gentleman never preached again. They spoke of the strange seizure that he had had in the pulpit, and very cheerfully and kindly contributed to the pension, which the authorities of the chapel allowed him. I knew him five and 20 years ago, a gentle old man addicted to botany who talked of anything but spiritual experiences. I have often wondered with what sudden flash of insight he looked into his own soul that day and saw himself bowing down silent before an empty shrine. It is a great mystery, a very great mystery, and yet, and yet, when you come to think of it, it is all wonderfully and exquisitely simple. The Lord has so much to see to. It all turns on that. The Lord has so much to see to. But what if he has? Is it not an almost universal experience that the people who have most to see to are the very people who see to each separate thing most thoroughly? If a piece of work wants doing, we ask the busy man correction. We ask the busy man to do it. He will consent without making a fuss, and he will do the work well. So many beds in the ward. And what if there are? The mothers who have most mouths to feed are the best mothers, after all. We recall the recitation that was so popular some years ago. It's told of a father and mother struggling to support a large family. A handsome offer came from a childless home. Would they, who had so many, part with one, father and mother lit a candle, and went from room to room among their slumbering bands. But they found each as dear as though each were their only child. So many beds, said little Emmy. So many beds, said the tempter with his bags of gold. But when the many beds were visited, the parents shook their heads over each. Not one could be spared. Indeed, the experience of this old world of ours shows conclusively that those children turn out best who come of large families. Darwin makes a great point of that. So that it is forced to fact that a child gets more care if his is the only cot in the house. All experience goes to prove that a child is enriched and not impoverished when the parents have so much to see to, so many beds in the home. It is fair therefore to say that there is not even a prima facie case to be made out for the fear which has sailed the faith of our sick little wife, our master of arts, and our distinguished authors. There is absolutely nothing in it. Reasoning, as alone we may, from things terrestrial to things celestial, it is clear that the great father, who has so many children to see to, will take the very best care of each individual child and will bring up his immense family with the greatest credit to himself. But even if, in spite of all this, the argument be allowed the honor of serious analysis, it is so easy to expose its fallacy, it will be noticed that the real difficulty, in each case, lies in the greatness of God. It seemed incredible to little Emmy, to our master of arts, and to Miss Corelli, that a God who is the generator of universes and the creator of everything can be concerned with the cares of the individual. Now the trouble is not that they have made God to seem too great, but that they have not made him great enough they have belittled him. Now how great is God? That is the real question. Is he great to the point of absolute infinity? Is he? Or is he not? Now if God is great to the point of infinity, it follows, beyond all controversy, that there is no stick or stone in all his universes of which he is not perpetually cognizant and conscious. Or, to put it the other way, if there is a feather or a straw blowing about the solar system which has, for a fraction of a second, eluded his knowledge or escaped his observation, then by just so much his greatness falls short of infinity. If, therefore, I do really believe that God is not only great enough to be the generator of universes and creator of everything, but great enough to be infinite, then I cannot help believing that no sparrow falls to the ground without his notice, and that the very hairs of my head are all numbered. This has never been better stated than by favour. O Majesty unspeakable and dread, work thou less mighty than thou art, thou work, O God, too great for our belief, too little for our heart. But greatness which is infinite makes room for all things in its lap to lie. We should be crushed by a magnificence short of infinity. But what is infinite must be a home, a shelter for the meanest life, where it is free to make its greatest growth far from the touch of strife. Yes, there are many whose hearts have ached in sympathy with those of little Emmy and our master of arts and our eminent novelist. They have known the anguish of the empty shrine. Let them turn their faces in the direction I have tried to indicate, and if they will follow that road, they will find that it leads home, and they will rest sweetly when they get there. End of Part 2, Chapter 11. Part 3, Chapter 1 of the Luggage of Life. 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 Larry Wilson. The Luggage of Life by Frank W. Borum. Part 3, Chapter 1. The Law of the Lane. Who that has lived in England has not stored among his chiefest treasures his memories of the old English country lane. Its serpentine folds, its gentle undulations, its overarching oaks, its delicious and fragrant hedge-rows, his twitter of birds, its hum of insects, and its glimpses of golden butter-cups in the spreading fields beyond. All these will haunt him till his last sun sets. We have heard a great deal since of the rule of the road, but the lane has a law of its own, and the law of the lane is an infinitely loftier and infinitely lovelier thing than the rule of the road. And that is saying much for Mr. G. K. Chesterton, our greatest literary acrobat, notwithstanding his insatiable fondness for standing on his head, says that the indescribable charm of Dickens may be best summed up in one satisfying phrase used by one of his own characters. My friend, said Mr. Perker's clerk to Job Trotter, you've got the key of the street. And says Mr. Chesterton, Dickens himself had in the most sacred and serious sense of the term the key of the street. Few of us understand the street. Even when we step into it, we step into it doubtfully as into a house or room of strangers. Few of us see through the shining riddle of the street, the strange folk that belong to the street only, the street walker, or the street Arab, the nomads who, generation after generation, had kept their ancient secrets in the full blaze of the sun. Of the street at night many of us know even less. The street at night is a great house locked up. But Dickens had, if ever man had, the key of the street. His earth was the stones of the street. His stars were the lamps of the street. His hero was the man of the street. He could open the inmost door of his house, the door that leads into that secret passage which is lined with houses and roofed with stars. Yes, the street is a wonderful place, a place of mystery and dread. But the lane is more wonderful still. For the street conceals whilst the lane reveals. The street is a place of secrecy. The lane is a palace of song. Even if a man is born who, like Charles Dickens, possesses the key of the street he can at best but tell us what man is. But he who reads the riddle of the lane knows what God is. In the lane earth is crammed with heaven and every common bush a fire with God. Little flower, but if I could understand what you are, routine all and all in all, I should know what God and man is. Charles Kingsley used to say that whenever he strolled down an English lane he felt as though everything about him, every leaf and bud and flower were saying something to him, and he was pained and oppressed by the feeling of his own density. Yes, compared with the lane the street is a sordid place. It has its charms, but its charms are for sale. It barters its beauties for gold. It was from the street that Bunyan caught his conception of vanity fair. The lane displays its shiny wares no less attractively, but offers them without money and without price. Who has ever found quite the same satisfaction in an afternoon shopping as we found in the old lane long ago? The wild flowers that the lane offered us in the springtime, when the long winter was past and gone, the tangle of Hawthorne and Dogrose and Convolvulus that we found there in the summer, the nuts and blackberries of autumn, and the redder berries with which we decked the home in winter. The lane was never without its treasures, and they were always freely ours. There was no stint in the lane. Is it not Lowell who tells us that? Bubbles we buy with a whole soul's tasking. To his heaven alone that is given away, to his only God may be had for the asking. And then too the lane was a winding place. When we were young we puzzled over its crazy progress, and stupidly wished that it were straight. Since then we have had to do with the realities of life, and we have learned by tiresome experience of their monotony that the last word in art is a graceful cure. We have driven, it may be, along the great prairie roads of the western world. Roads that, looking back, seem to come in an unbending line from the Atlantic, and that, looking forward, seem to run in one unbending line to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Or we have made our weary progress along the great undiviating tracks that intersect the vast Australian plains, and that seem to run without a swerve from world's end to world's end. And we have journeyed along the street which is called Straight, and our hearts have longed the while for the tortuous but romantic folds of the dear old lane at home. And for our tardy preference there is a reason, psychological and deeply based. The road across the prairies, the track across the plains, the street which is called Straight, are untrue to life and experience. They are artificial, unnatural, forced. Life is a lane, it abounds in surprises, it twists and doubles and curves and folds. We cannot know what is just beyond. We quickly lose sight of our yesterdays. We are kindly compelled to take our tomorrows on trust, as Klingel says. God broke our years to hours and days, that hour by hour and day by day, just going on a little way, we might be able all along to keep quite strong, should all the weight of life, be laid across our shoulders, and the future rife with woe and struggle meet us face to face. At just one place we could not go, our feet would stop and so God lays a little on us every day. That is the law of the lane. And the last song that the birds are singing in the old lane is perhaps the blithest of them all. It tells us that life does not lose its romance as the years wear away. It was not until we had left the lane for twenty years that we discovered its beauty. We find far more pleasure in the winding path now than we did when we perspired on sultry summer afternoons beneath the weight of our baskets of nuts or buckets of blackberries. We were choked with dust and tired to death, and were too close to catch the lane's loveliness in its right perspective, all of which is hugely significant. We set out on this ramble in the excellent company of Mr. Chesterton. Let us return to him. Mrs. Nickelby, he says, stands for a great truth which we must not forget, the truth that experience is not in real life a saddening thing at all. The people who have had misfortunes are generally the people who love to talk about them. Experience is really one of the gayities of old age, one of its dissipations. Mere memory becomes a kind of debauch. Experience may be disheartening to those who are foolish enough to try to coordinate it and to draw deductions from it, but to those happy souls like Mrs. Nickelby, to whom relevancy is nothing, the whole of their past life is like an inexhaustible fairyland. Just as we take a rambling walk because we know that a district is beautiful, so they indulge a rambling mind because they know that a whole existence is interesting. A boy does not plunge into his future more romantically and at random than they plunge into their past. Even the folds and stretches that our tired feet have left behind them become transfigured with exquisite beauty as we press courageously on and thread the labyrinth of life's long lane. The present has a lovely way of reading an aerial about the brows of the past, and even though the present seems nothing but a dreary commonplace, the future will do as much for her in God's good time. He maketh everything to be beautiful in its time, but it may not be the present time. Tomorrow we shall see the glory of today. You always said my lane would turn, wrote the lady of decoration, and it has turned into a broad road burdened by cherry blossoms and wisteria. It is always so. The birds and the hedges on either hand are singing that we really lose nothing that is behind by pressing bravely towards what lies before. All the loveliness of the lane is ours, even though we have nearly reached the end. Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be. The last of life for which the first was made, our times are in his hand, who saith a whole I planned. Youth shows but half. Trust God, see all, nor be afraid. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. We forget the tiddly winking in the contemplation of the tremendous. We lose life's shallow worries in the vision of unplumbed depths. Those who have read Mrs. Barclays' Rosary will remember that in the crisis of her life the heroine, the Hon. Jane Champion, determined to consult her physician, Sir Derek Brand, and after having realized the fearful strain to which his poor patient's nerves had been subjected, he exclaimed, Here is a prescription for you. See a few big things. He urged her to go out west and see the stupendous falls of Niagara, to go out east and see the Great Pyramid. Go for the big things, he said. You will like to remember, when you are bothering about pouring water in and out of teacups, Niagara is blowing still. All of which is, of course, very excellent. It is the word we need. The tendency of life is to drift among small things, small anxieties, small pleasures, small ideas, and small talk. He is a very wise physician, indeed, who can prescribe for us a tonic of big things. In the course of that long struggle in his own life, which reflects itself in Christian's lengthy pilgrimage to the cross, John Bunyan enters in his autobiography two records that are worthy of frequent observation. I quote, of course, from Grace Abounding. While I was thus afflicted with the fears of my own damnation, he says, there were two things would make me wonder. One was, when I saw old people hunting after the things of this life, as if they should live here always. The other was, when I found professors much distressed and cast down, when they met with outward losses. Lord, thought I, what to do is hear about such little things as these. That is the point. Such little things as these. We are like the pebbles on the beach. It is not easy to keep among the big ones at the top, the big ones that feel the laughing caresses of every wave and the lovely radiance of every sunbeam. The tendency is to get shaken down among the small shingle underneath. But we are forgetting the other record from the inner life of Bunyan. Upon a day, the good providence of God called me to Bedford to work at my calling. And in one of the streets of that town, I came where there were three or four poor women sitting at a door in the sun talking about the things of God. I heard, but understood not, for they were far above out of my reach. Their talk was about a new birth, the work of God in their hearts. They talked how God had visited their souls with his love in the Lord Jesus and with what words and promises they had been refreshed, comforted, and supported. These two keynotes, the one taken from the first quotation and the other from the second, are worth repeating. Such little things as these, the things of God far above out of my reach. The soul of the poor tinker was tired of the microscopic and hungry for the majestic. He craved a tonic of big things and the talk of the four poor women sitting in the sun was like a banquet to his famished spirit. The thing has its parallel everywhere. To take one of the most familiar of all our religious classics, it occurs in John Wesley's journal. We all remember how pitifully weary the great Methodist apostle became of the crowd of small men who buzzed about him with a multitude of small concerns. And we have all felt the glow of his delight when we found some kindred spirit with whom he could freely converse on the great themes of the Christian gospel. There are times when we get so tired of the plain, we love to get among the mountains. The soul makes its own pilgrimage among great rugged snow cloud ranges along whose tracks and passes she never loses her way. She loves the peaks that pierce the sky. She enjoys the tonic of big things. In Lord Morley's magnum opus, he reproduces one of Mr. Gladstone's letters in which the great statesman tells of a visit to Dr. Chalmers. And by nothing was Mr. Gladstone more impressed than by the utter incapacity of Chalmers to indulge in small talk. He simply lived among mountains. Everything about Chalmers was massive, monumental, magnificent. Who that has read it can ever forget his historic utterance before the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland when he explained his change of views on the subject of ministerial preparation. He explained, first of all, the change that had come over his own spiritual life. I was wrong, sir, he cried, strangely blinded that I was. What, sir, is the object of mathematical science, magnitude and the proportion of magnitude? But then, sir, I had forgotten two magnitudes. I thought not of the littleness of time. I recklessly thought not of the greatness of eternity. That word, magnitude, was characteristic of the man. And it profoundly impressed Mr. Gladstone as being characteristic of his conversation. When only tiny themes presented themselves, the Doctor was as silent as the Sphinx. He had nothing to say, says Mr. Gladstone. He was exactly like the Duke of Wellington who said of himself that he had no small talk. His whole mind was always full of some great subject, and he could not deviate from it. Chalmers never wasted time on small topics, Dr. Donald Fraser tells us in his biography, if he could find a man fit to enter on great matters. In a classical and memorable passage towards the end of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, Gibbon describes the triumph of the most majestic masterpieces of Roman architecture. Huns, Goths and Vandals had done their worst. The city had been sacked again and again. The hand of the Akana-class had been pitiless. Everything destructible had been ruthlessly destroyed. Yet some things remained. They remained because they were not destructible. And those things were the big things. The fretwork and the fancy work, the delicate carvings and dainty ornamentations had fallen before the brutality of the Vandals. But the towering columns and colossal arches defied alike the teeth of thyme and the malice of the barbarian. The big things stand. Now abideth, it is ever so. Every preacher knows that it is the great things that hold field, and they hold the field simply because the people, tired to death of tribals, need a tonic of big things. The preacher of small subjects is doomed. The Canadian Presbyterian commented recently on the farewell services of a minister who was closing a two years ministry. A venerable member of his congregation, invitting his pastor a tearful goodbye, remarked, Well, sir, I am sorry to see you go. I never had but one objection to you. Your preaching was always too horizontal. That is the worst of small things, however prettily presented. A multitude of grains of sand, however beautiful each separate grain may be in itself, only makes a desert, after all. And there is no blinking the fact that deserts are not popular institutions. People don't like living in deserts. They like altitudes, magnitudes, infinitudes. They revel in the ruggedness of the ranges. I almost envy some of these good people who can stand in the middle of one of their prayers and touch all four sides. It is the lady of the decoration who is speaking, and she goes on. They know what they want and are satisfied when they get it. But I want the moon and the stars and the sun thrown in. Yes, our poor humanity needs a tonic of big things. The preacher must take note. The pulpit is the place for magnificent verities. It is the home of immensities, infinities, eternities. We must preach more upon the great texts of the scriptures, says Dr. Jowett. We must preach on those tremendous passages whose vastnesses almost terrify us as we approach them. Professor Henry Drummond was one sailing along the west coast of Africa. His deck companions were four men, no one of whom could understand the other. They spake in diverse tongues. But at last one produced a Bible. The second hurried to his cabin and appeared with his, then the third and then the fourth. By a stroke of genius, the first opened his and the third chapter of John's Gospel and the great 16th verse. The others opened theirs and pointed with their fingers to the place and the glow on their faces was an eloquent language in itself. Men can see the mountain peak over a multitude of intervening obstacles and no obstacle of race or language, rank or station, can preclude men from the fellowship of life's immensities. They shall cry unto the Lord and he shall send them a Savior and a great one. Everything in the Gospel is a tonic of big things. It was the church anniversary. On the Sunday there were special sermons, solemn praise, and stately anthems. Everything was inspiring, impressive, sublime. On the Monday there were sandwiches, cream puffs, and jam tarts. The steaming urns imparted a genial glow to the spirits of the guests, for waves of laughter rippled and broke through the hum of friendly chatter. I had taken part in the solemn services of the Sunday and had been asked to speak at the tea meeting on the Monday. I drew aside to collect my thoughts, but my thoughts politely but firmly declined to be collected. They insisted on propounding to me this arresting conundrum. Tell us, they clamored, the philosophical connection between the sermons of yesterday and the sandwiches of today. What relation exists between singing and scones? What fellowship hath religion with revelry? Why follow the sacred worship of the Lord's Day with a carnival, a confectionary? I took my Bible from my pocket and had not to search far before I came upon a clue. On one of the very earliest pages of the sacred records I lit upon a significant statement. It occurs at the crisis in Hebrew history. It was a time of wealthy revelation and divine illumination. Here it is. They saw God and did eat and drink. There you have revelation and revelry side by side. There you have the secret of all worship and the germ of all tea meetings. They saw God, that is the principle of the sermon, and did eat and drink, that is the principle of the sandwich. What more could I desire? Yet I read on, and to my amazement I found these two great principles running side by side like a pair of white horses perfectly matched through the entire volume. The sandwich was never far from the sermon. In the Old Testament all the stirring seasons of spiritual elevation and national enlightenment were feasts. The feast of Pentecost, the feast of Tabernacles, the feast of Passover, the feast of Trumpets, the feast of dedication, and so on. Revelation blends with revelry. The chapter that tells of Israel's redemption from Egypt by the shedding of blood, a classic of revelation, tells us also in precise and graphic detail of the eating of the lamb. The passage that tells how Elijah saw the angel also tells how the angel said, arise and eat. And behold the cake bacon on the coals and a cruise of water. The sandwich principle keeps pace with the sermon principle. Revelry goes hand in hand with revelation. The tea meeting is never far from the special services. But the most revealing element in the ancient economy was its law of sacrifice. The old dispensation crystallized itself in the altar. And here we all sit at the feet of Professor Robertson Smith. He made this theme peculiarly his own. And he fearlessly affirms that we cannot understand that solemn and striking symbol of patriarchal faith unless we grasp the fact that the altar was first of all a table. This, he says, is the key to the whole subject of sacrifice and the basis of all Semitic covenants. When the two parties have eaten of the same victim and thus become participants in a common life, a living bond of union is established between them and they are no longer enemies but brothers. Here then are the two laws, the law of the sermon and the law of the sandwich, the principle of revelation and the principle of revelry. In closest juxtaposition to the very climax of the old world's illumination. Crossing the borderline into the New Testament the same singular conjunction is everywhere. This beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana of Galilee and manifested forth his glory. The revelation was revelry. It was at a marriage feast. Later miracles followed the same line. The feeding of four thousand, the feeding of five thousand, and so on. Loaves and fishes and representation of the sandwiches were never far from the most revealing sermons of the Son of Man. And even when after his resurrection he deigns to show himself to his astounded fishermen, he feeds them. And they saw a fire of coals and fish laid thereon and bread. Revelation and revelry are together still. And just as the Old Testament reaches its natural climax in the altar of sacrifice, so the New Testament reaches its culminating revelation in the table of the Lord. There we see God and do eat and drink. The two principles join hand and hand. And even when the great revealer spoke of heaven, these two thoughts were always in his mind. Heaven is a place of revelation and revelry. There the pure and heart-sea God. And there we sit down at the married supper of the Lamb. Men often do things, as the swallows do, under the guidance of some sure instinct, yet without detecting or even desiring any explanation of their odd behavior. It is thus that the church has wedded her revelries to her revelations. She has rightly set the sandwich over against the sermon. The union is indissoluble. The solemn service and the social meal are inseparable. These two hath God joined together. Now in these two elements I find my bond of brotherhood and the holiest of the lowliest. Among the angels and archangels and all the company of the heavenly host I know not what seraphic spirits may burn, but I know that there is no altitude higher than this to which they can attain. They see God. But so do I. Then they and I are brothers. In the splendid revelations of Christian worship we stand allied to the holiest in the height. And in the eating and drinking on the other hand we are kind to the lowliest. I watch the birds as they fly. It seems to me that they live in one element and I in another. We have nothing in common. I watch the rabbit as he slightly peeps from his burrow. How far removed his life from mine. I watch the trout as they flash and dart in the shades and shallows of the stream. There is no point of fellowship between them and me. But wait! The rabbit sits upon his haunches, nibbling at a blade of grass on which a dew drop glistens. He eats and drinks. So do I. The bird flutters down from the bow to seize a morsel on the lawn. He eats and drinks. So do I. The fish come darting up the stream to devour the gnats that in trying to escape the birds have fallen upon the glassy surface. They eat and drink. So do I. If the sermon allies me to angels and to seraphs, the sandwich allies me to all things furry and feathered and finny. When we were prattlers our nurses used to amuse us with fantastic pictures of lions and storks and ants and dolphins and men all sitting down cheek by jaw at the same table. Later on we despised the old print as a furious freak of some farcical fancy. But now we know that it was nothing of the kind. It was a severely accurate delineation of the real and sober truth. Indeed it was less than the truth. For no superhuman guests were there. The universe is a banqueting table. That sage old friar Francis de Sissy was within the mark after all when he addressed the creatures as brother hair, sister lark, brother wolf, and so on. The sermon element brings me into intimate and fraternal relationship with all the flaming hosts above. The sandwich element brings me into league with the tigers and the tomp tits and the trout. The special services of anniversary Sunday and the tea meeting of the Monday set forth in harmonious combination the breadth and catholicity of man's holiest and loliest brotherhoods. But the instinct of the tea meeting tells me yet one other thing. I see now that I have misinterpreted the majesty of God. It is the pathetic fate of deity, says Pascal, to be everlastingly misunderstood. I had always supposed that the glory of God was embarrassing, bewildering, dazzling. I had thought of it as repelling, terrifying, paralyzing. But now I see that it is nothing of the kind. They saw God, and did eat and drink. Even a cat will not eat in a strange house, nor a bird in a strange cage, eating and drinking are symbols of familiarity. We feel at home. We bring our friends to our tables that they may realize their welcome. My ugly thought of God was a caricature, a parody, an insult. Man was made for God, and only finds his perfect poise in his presence. To see God is to eat and drink, to be perfectly peaceful, reverently, restfully, delightfully at home. I have served God and feared him with all my heart, says poor Rufus Webb, in Miss Ellen Thornicroft Fowler's Fuel of Fire. That may be that you have never loved, nor trusted him, replied the minister. The dying man lay silent for a few minutes, with closed eyes. Then he opened them again and said, I wonder if you are right. And I have misjudged him all these years. I am sure of it. And do you think he will pardon me that, also in addition to my many other sins? I am very sure of it, repeated the vicar. Although it is hard even for him to be misjudged by those whom he loves, there are few things harder. It is even so. I heard the solemn pathos of this philosophy jingled out in the clatter of the cups and the spoons at the tea-me-team. A glorious high throne is the place of our sanctuary. It is not repelling. It is restful. He who sees God eats and drinks. The sandwiches naturally follow the sermons. If any man hear my voice, I will come to him and will sup with him, and he with me. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. One of the world's most intrepid mountaineers, Mr. George D. Abraham, has published a record of his adventures. His experiences have quite a startling significance for a life at all points, much that he says is as bracing as those stinging breezes that hurled the hail in his face as he invaded the snowy solitudes and carved the first path over slippery glaciers. He reminds us, for example, that nobody has yet stood on the roof of the world. The real sky piercers have never yet been climbed. On almost every continent the loftiest summits wrap their clouds about them and stand defiant and triumphant. They have never felt the proud heel of a conqueror. It is good, both for our humiliation and for our inspiration, that we should lay that pregnant record to heart in days when bewildering inventions and sensational discoveries leap from our newspapers with every plate of porridge. It is as well that we should be made to feel that. After all, we have only been toying with trivialities. Our grandchildren will ransack some old chest or drawer and drag from its occlusion an old illustrated paper of, let us say, the year 1912. They will scream with furious glee as they scan the photographs of the aeroplanes and automobiles which so hugely tickled our own vanity, and then as they read the accompanying letterpress and feel the pulsations of our pride, they will awaken all the echoes with their boisterous shouts of laughter. It is very humiliating, and yet, after all, surely it is powerfully invigorating too. Who does not feel that life holds a new meaning for him as he reflects that there are dizzy heights which have stood in naked and awful silence from the foundation of the world? Their desolate grandeur is waiting for the pilgrim feet of a pioneer, who does not experience a thrill as he remembers that it is possible for us to break all the records of the ages and burst upon the vacancies that ache for conquest? Mr. Abraham contends that the first man to ascend Mount Everest will be a greater benefactor of his race than a successful polar explorer. It may be humiliating to be reminded that we have not discovered everything, but it would be simply crushing if we were assured that nothing remained to be discovered. The tang of these icy winds that sweep down these untrodden slopes taunts the imagination and challenges the enthousiasms of the world. All the greatest heights have yet to be climbed. It is grand. All the sweetest songs have yet to be sung. All the noblest poems have yet to be penned. All the greatest books have yet to be written. All the finest sermons have yet to be preached. All the truest lives have yet to be lived. All the most heroic exploits have yet to be achieved. The whole wide world, with its restless millions, waits to be conquered. India, China, Africa, South America, spacious continents, crowded countries, cannibal islands, and coral reefs all wait. As the peaks wait for the pathfinder, for the beautiful feet of those triumphant mountaineers whose coming will precipitate the conquest of the ages. The challenge of the heights is in our ears. It stirs our blood. It fires our fancy. It is a day for girding our loins for heroic enterprise. The pinnacles beckon and the topmost crags are calling. We must quit the pine-clad valleys. We must go. The golden age has still to be ushered in. Then again Mr. Abraham conclusively demonstrates that, on the dizzy alpine tracks, no man liveth to himself. He insists on the social element in mountaineering. The heights must be scaled, not by individuals, but by parties, and every member of the party is part and parcel of every other member. No brotherhood could be more real, more practical, more imperative. Sometimes the members of the expedition are wrote together. But in any case the tie is there. In negotiating a difficult pass, in clambering of the perilous face, or in attempting a forbidding ascent, it is the weakest member of the expedition whom all other members must consider. His failure would be the failure of all. The golden rule is nowhere so clamant as among the crags of the summit. Every task that presents itself has to be faced with a full recognition of its suitability, to the capabilities of each member of the fraternity. The slipping of the feeblest foot might easily jeopardize the lives of all. That is forever and forever the lesson of the heights. It is only in life's braver and more intense atmospheres that we see it so clearly. The murky mists of the valley often obscure the fact that we are, indeed and in truth, members one of another. In his great chapter on The Evolution of Language, Dremmen shows that a law like this operates in the animal world. One of the earliest devices hit upon, he says, was the principle of cooperation. The deer formed themselves into herds, the monkeys into troops, the birds into flocks, the wolves into packs, the bees into hives, and the ants into colonies. And the brilliant doctor goes on to show how it works out. Here, he says, is a herd of deer scattered as they love to be in a string a quarter of a mile long. Every animal in the herd not only shares the physical strength of all the rest, but their powers of observation. The very beasts of the field are members one of another and know it. But the finest and most graceful illustration of this social law, the strength of the strongest passing as a heritage to the feeblest, occurs in The Pilgrim's Progress. Alas! cried poor Mr. Feeble-minded, I want a suitable companion. You are also lusty and strong, but I, as you see, am weak. I choose, therefore, rather to come behind. Lest by reason of my infirmities, I should be both a birtherin to myself and to you. I am, as I said, a man of a weak and feeble mind, and shall be offended and made weak if that which others can bear. I shall like no laughing. I shall like no gay attire. I shall like no unprofitable questions. Nay, I am so weak a man as to be offended with that which others have a liberty to do. I do not yet know all the truth. I am a very ignorant Christian man. Sometimes, if I hear some rejoice in the Lord, it troubles me, because I cannot do so, too. It is with me as it is with a weak man among the strong, or as with a sick man among the healthy, or as a lamp despised, so that I know not what to do. But brother, said Mr. Great-Heart, I have it in commission to comfort the feeble-minded and to support the weak. You must needs go along with us. We will wait for you, and we will lend you our help. We will deny ourselves of some things, both opinionated and practical, for your sake. We will not enter into doubtful disputations before you. We will be made all things to you, rather than that you shall be left behind. The Pathfinder, the Professor, and the Puritan all agree. Therefore, in making it abundantly clear that no man liveth to himself, and no man dyeth to himself. Wherefore, says the most sure-footed of all our mountaineers, take he to them that are weak. It is good neither to eat flesh nor to drink wine, nor anything whereby thy brother stubbleeth. The echo that we have heard comes to us from the Alps and the Himalayas, but the voice that awoke that echo is from a greater height. It speaks from Mount Sinai, from Mount Sion, from the eternal altitudes. It is the voice of God. A third striking thing our mountaineer has to say, he emphasizes the astonishing fact that the vast majority of the alpine fatalities occur on the easy tracks. The steep and narrow passes where the brain reels, where the foothold is precarious, and where the voice of the body is difficult, clamor loudly for special care. But the easy tracks have a peril of their own. Claudia is clear. In a suggestive article demonstrated the fact that, although we commonly regard youth as the essential period of moral peril, the most disastrous collapses have been on the part of men and women in middle life. We acquire a certain fatal contempt for temptation, which is ultimately our undoing. We have edged our way with trembling caution along the most slender shelves, besides perpendicular cliffs and above yawning abysses, and then we fling ourselves with a reckless stride along the broader tracks. We scorn the danger. Are we not noted climbers, ministers, officers, teachers, saints of ripe or mellow maturity? Thinking that we stand fast, we take no heed lest we fall. We become the victims of the easy track at the last. It is cruelly anomalous, but it is tragically true that many a man's conscience is less sensitive as to the minor moralities of life after twenty years of Christian service than during the first months of his religious experience. He slips now where he stood fast then. He has become too confident to be cautious and has grown tired of being careful. That way lies disaster. We feel very much obliged to Mr. Abraham. We never expect in this life to follow him on his vigorous pilgrimages towards Virgin Peaks. We can only gaze at his snowy summits admiringly and wistfully. But his adventures read like allegories. His suggestions sound like sermons. The analogies, however unintentional, are too arresting to be shunned. The paralysms, however unconscious, too striking to be avoided. We have followed this trusty guide by granite and glacier, midst snow and ice, and have caught a vision of more radiant purity gleaming on loftier pinnacles and bathed in the golden glory of a lovelier sunrise. And those beckoning heights have challenged us to press with new vigor towards the triumphs for which all the ages have been struggling to reach out hands of dear brotherhood to the comrades who share our pilgrimage and to exercise a greater vigilance as we tread life's treacherous easy tracks. It is so easy to fail of life's loftiest altitudes, so easy to forget the partner of one's toil and travel, so woefully easy to be overtaken by desolating calamity through a false step on the easy track after all, after all. Please visit LibriVox.org. I am writing in April. The month moves on its way amidst a wealthy cluster of associations. It opens with a festival of folly. The Englishman invariably connects its coming with welcome thoughts of the cuckoo and the crocus. In our Australian minds, it stands related to the rustle of autumn leaves. It is the month of homeward yearning, too, for all exiles. There be many that say, as Browning said, Oh, to be in England, now that April's there. And whoever wakes in England sees, some morning, unaware, that the lowest boughs in the brushwood sheaf round the elm-tree bowl are in tiny leaf, while the chaffinch sings on the orchard bow in England, now. April brings, too, more often than not, the tender pathos of Good Friday and the exquisite triumph of Easter. But there is one home to which these chasen joys make no appeal. For to the door of the Australian Methodist parsonage, April brings only the furniture van. We have been engaged in saying sorrowful farewells to ministerial neighbors with whom we have worked side by side through pleasant years of comradeship. And now, without any indication that their work is finished, like plants torn up when in full bloom, they must move on. It is this that has set us thinking. Indeed, it has set methodism thinking. The whole question of ministerial movement is beset by problems that have made wiser heads than ours to ache. It is true, on the one hand, that the itinerary system is being eyed not without envy by the statesmen of other churches. Here, for example, in the latest issue of the Church Family newspaper is a leading article suggesting the adoption by the Church of England of a modified methodism. Presbyterian assemblies have long been discussing it, and Baptists and Congregationalists have sometimes cast shy but wistful glances in the same direction. And yet, on the other hand, two things are clear. The first is that methodism itself is coming to regard the system as open to review. I have known large city churches apply for registration as central missions, in order that they may stand outside the pale of the itinerary system. And I have known small country churches plead that they might retain their status as home missions, rather than be dragged into the sweep of the system. The second fact is that every minister who has stayed in one place long enough to marry the boys and girls that he kissed when he came knows that his most regal influence came to him in the years that followed the fifth. It is then that the best work is done. The minister has won a personal in addition to a merely official authority. His name is Graven in the very hearts of his people, and he speaks in their homes with the voice of a king. But let me hasten to say that I am writing to challenge no system and to advocate no system. All these things are in the melting pot, and the churches will be wise if they watch each other closely, confer with each other frankly, and profit by each other's sagacity and experience. Yet one thing I do most unhesitatingly affirm, and it is for that irresistible affirmation that I am contending now. It is this. A ministerial removal should never be mechanical. It is a crisis of the soul, perhaps of many souls. It is a thing to be undertaken only after strong crying and tears. I like to recall the searchings of heart that marked a ministerial resignation a century or so ago. Everybody knows the circumstances under which poor old John Fawcett wrote, blessed be the tie that binds. And at about the same time Andrew Fuller spent two years in most terrible anguish of soul whilst he tried to determine whether or not it was his duty to leave his little flock at Soham. It seems as if the church and I should break each other's hearts, he wrote. I think after all, if I go from them, it must be in my coffin. His agony of mind led Dr. Rylan to remark that, quote, men who fear not God would risk an empire with fewer searchings of heart than it cost Andrew Fuller to leave a little church, hardly containing 40 members besides himself and his wife, end quote. And indeed there is no need to limit the scope of this chapter to manses and parsonages. The same principle holds good of every removal. The tendency of young nations is to regard the furniture van flippantly. A century ago, the removal of an English family from one village to another was regarded as a social tragedy through all the countryside. A man worked for his master because his father had worked for his master's father and his grandfather for his master's grandfather. And it never occurred to him that some social cataclysm might prevent his grandchildren from serving his master's grandchildren. All that has changed. That day is as dead as the Moa and the Dodo. The temper of the time has altered. We hail a furniture van nowadays, with almost as light a heart as we hail a handsome cab. In his Gamekeeper at Home, Richard Jeffries, the naturalist, maintains that this very fact has had a good deal to do with the sharp accentuation of our industrial troubles. The old intimate and almost sacred relationship between employer and employee, fortified by associations sanctified by several generations, has broken down. And its collapse has paved the way for all our modern embroilments and agitations. Yes, there is no doubt about it. We overwork the furniture van. Its axles are too hot. Old Daniel Korm comes to mind. I do often see it, friends, said Daniel. I've watched it for years. Here's a young fellow doing good in the Sunday school in other ways, promising to be a useful man when we old folks are gone home. But somebody sends downward that he can make half a crown a week more wages in London. That's enough. No prayer about it. No asking the Lord what he do see. No thinking about the Lord's work. I must get on, he says. And he says it's so pious as if it was one of the Ten Commandments. But tisn't, friends. Tisn't, though you do hear it so often. Over against Daniel Korm, let us set Dr. Alexander White. In his lecture on Treasure Hit in the Field, the doctor touches on this very matter and tells of a lovely experience. An old office bearer of this very congregation, he says, told me long ago how he had lately summoned a conference of his whole household in order to make a great family choice and decision. He put it to his wife and to his sons and to his daughters, whether he would build a house for them away out of Edinburgh, with a park and a garden and stables, or whether he would buy a house in the city, so as still to be near this church, and so as to let his family continue to sit under Dr. Candlish's ministry. And the eyes of that old elder glistened with joy when he told me that he had determined on a house within reach of the pulpit, to which he owed his own soul and the souls of his children. His wife had been in Dr. Candlish's ladies' class. Things like that do not happen every day. Dr. White is right. They do not. We are too fond of the furniture van. We ought to regard it in the same category as the world and the flesh and the devil. The number of transfers granted to members leaving one church for another would make our grandsires turn in their graves, whilst the multitude of those who are entered as having moved away, one church's loss being no other church's gain, is appalling. They have moved away, that is all. The furniture van has done its deadly work. Father, mother, lads and lasses have moved away from church and Sunday school, from societies and classes, from useful services and helpful charities and happy ministries. They have moved away to what? Church secretaries might often mournfully and truthfully enter in the remarks column of the church role the lay of the lost leader, just for a handful of silver he left us, just for a ribbon to stick in his coat. Nobody of course is so dreamy and unpractical as to suggest that church connections should never be ruptured in order to secure commercial promotion or industrial preferment. That is not the point. The iniquity is with those who order the furniture van before such considerations have been duly weighed. If a man sees the beckoning hand he must go on, and so long as he is clear that his move is a move nearer to the realization of life's ultimate purpose, the furniture van may be as idyllic a vehicle for him as a chariot and horses of fire. But there is a moving away that is worse still. Paul assures the Christians at Colossae that their Lord shall present them holy and unblameable and unreprovable if they be not moved away from the hope of the gospel. That is sorrow's crown of sorrow, life's culminating climax of tragedy to be moved away from the hope of the gospel. Wherever the furniture van may take our chairs and tables our hearts must always abide in the same place. In an age of shifting and of drifting we must make it the loftiest science of life to dwell in the secret place of the most high and to abide under the shadow of the Almighty. In the immutable rock of ages the soul must wisely build her nest. Be not moved away. Surely if church secretaries are sometimes tempted to inscribe the lay of the lost leader against certain names on the membership rule it is pardonable to fancy the very angels from their higher knowledge writing sadly against other names moved away. Moved away from the hope of the gospel. It is the dirge of a lost soul. Mr. Young of Jedbra used to tell a story of old Janet who in her lonely hut on the Scottish moor was dying at last. She breathed heavily and painfully. Her brown old Bible lay open on the counter pain. The minister came just in time. And who is it with you then old Janet he inquired bending over her wrinkled countenance. Her face was radiant. It's all whale it's Bonnie she cried but man I'm a wee confused with the flitten. Happy are all they who in that last solemn removal know no more poignant anguish than the mere flutter and flurry of the process. End of Part 3 Chapter 5 Part 3 Chapter 6 of The Logit of Life 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 April 690 California United States of America. The Logit of Life by Frank W. Borum. On the wisdom of conducting one's own funeral. Mark Twain more than once makes merry at the lugubrious and fantastic conception of a man mourning at his own funeral. In these passages the genial humorist is not at his best. He misses the true inwardness of things. There is nothing in actual experience more common and nothing more pathetic than for a man to occupy the position of chief mourner at his own burial. We have often read the touching records of missionaries on the islands, who are compelled to act as grave diggers and chaplains at the funerals of their own wives and children. And quite recently we heard of a stricken and lonely woman in an ocean solitude, who was called to nerve herself to perform the same melancholy offices at the burial of her husband. But life holds an even deeper path. It is the tragic experience of every man who rightly reads the riddle of life to preside. Perhaps more than once at his own obsequies. He looks tearfully down upon the plate, upon which his own name and age are inscribed, and says deliberately and bravely, Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Lord Durferin has told us that he owes his very life to a vivid dream in the course of which he seemed to be a mourner at his own funeral. Many a man owes far more than life itself, not to a mere dream, but to the actual experience. The process occurs, for instance, in the choice of a profession. Here and there a man feels that he must follow a certain line, and that no other is even thinkable. But with the most men the trail is not so clearly blazed. A man decides to be a builder, but he feels that he would have made a very respectable banker. Or he resolves on being a minister, but he feels at the same time that he couldn't easily have distinguished himself as a barrister. In such cases, if he be wise, the builder will straight away bury the banker that is in him, and the minister will pronounce the solemn words of committal over the grave of the barrister. The builder who is perpetually hankering after a teller's desk will never build anything better than huts or huddles, even for himself, and the minister who is forever casting envious eyes at a barrister's chambers will never catch the rapture that Christ's true ministers may know. That is a great story which Professor Herkles tells us in his life of Francis De Cici. On the one hand, Francis longed to be a friar, and to dedicate himself to poverty and pilgrimage. On the other hand he loved a sweet and noble and gracious woman. He wrestled with his alternatives and at length. Through an agony of tears he chose the cloak and the cowl. But still the lovely face haunted him by cloister and by shrine. And one radiant moonlit night, when the earth was wrapped in snow, the brethren of the monastery saw him rise at dead of night. He went out into the grounds and, in the silvery moonlight, fashion, out of the snow images of his wife and children and servants. He arranged them in a circle and sat with them, and, giving rain to his fancy, teased it for one delicious hour the ecstasies of heart and home, the joys of life and love. Then, solemnly rising, he kissed them all, a tearful and a final farewell, renounced such rations for ever, and reinterred the convent. That night Francis the friar buried himself. He read his own funeral service. He had made his choice, and, in order that his life might not be clogged by the haunting images of dead possibilities, the man who had decided to be a friar buried everything except the friar. Indeed, the Roman Church draws the most impressive symbolism of its dedication from this source. La Martin tells us of Madam Rowland's visit to a French convent. A novice took the veil during her residence there, her presentation at the entrance, her white veil, her crown of roses, the sweet and soothing hymns which directed her from earth to heaven, the mortuary cloth cast over her youthful and buried beauty, and over her palpitating heart, made Madam Rowland shudder and overwhelmed her with tears. But there's no need to go beyond the pale of Protestantism for illustrations. The case of F. W. Robertson of Brighton is very much to the point. The love of arms ran in his very blood. His grandfather, his father, and his brothers were all soldiers. He himself had counted the slow years that must drag by before he could wear the queen's uniform. But at last the time came, and he found himself, to his intense delight, appointed to the third Dragoon guards, and, almost simultaneously, there came the call to the ministry. Then the struggle in the dark, and, finally, the great decision. Robertson stripped off the brilliant uniform, laid aside his sword, entered the ministry, and, from that time forth, never looked back. The first service he conducted, he conducted all alone. It was the burial of the soldier in him. And, before burying him, he stripped from the soldier all his military virtues, endurance, discipline, courage, and transfer them to the equipment of the minister. If our years were allotted to us in the generous fashion, which some of the patriarchs seem to have enjoyed, a man might find some opportunity for trying his hand at more applications than one. As it is, however, the time is short. At seventy a man only begins to feel that he knows his work. There is no time for tinkering with many things, or for trifling with one. The very brevity of life clamors for concentration and economy. We have all read the effecting, and informing, and heart-searching correspondence of Dr. Marcus Dodds. No man sounded the very depths of life's innermost experiences more terribly than did he. He felt called to be a minister. He buried every other inclination and possibility. Then came years of neglect and rejection. No congregation would call him. But, with a courage never excelled on a battlefield, he held on. He looked wistfully at the graves in which he had buried his earlier fancies. But he would allow no resurrection. And at last came recognition and reward. An out of that agonizing experience he wrote on the economy of life. And he deserves to be listened to with bated breath. Every man, the doctor says, as he grows into life, finds he must employ such an economy on his own account. He is pressed to occupy positions, or to engage in work, which will prevent him from achieving the purpose for which the nature has fitted him. He is offered promotion, which seems attractive, and has its advantages. But he declines it, because it would divert him from his chosen aim. Continually men spoil their life by want of concentration. They are greatly tempted to do so, for the public foolishly concludes that, because a man does one thing well, he can do everything well. An he who has written a good history is straight away asked to sit in Parliament. Or the man whose scholarship and piety have been conspicuous is offered preformant, which calls for the exercise of wholly different qualities. The theme might, of course, be amplified infinitely. It is the central thought of the Gospel. There are times when men sigh, with the speaker in Tennyson's mod, offer a man to arise in me, that the man I am may cease to be. And Jesus meets such men on their own ground. He offers a new life. He must be born again, he says, and the birth within me of the man he means me to be necessarily implies the burial within me of the man I have actually been. The vocabulary of the deathbed and the graveside was constantly on the lips of Paul. Again and again he told the Christians of Europe and of Asia the story of his own death and burial, almost all his autobiographical references are obituary notices. He had been crucified with Christ, he would say, and he implored his hearers to reckon themselves as dead and buried too. Yes, it is good for the builder to bury the banker that he might have been. It is good for Paul to bury the soul that he had been. But there is one man with Tennyson, whom we are most strongly tempted to bury, to whose funeral we must never, never go. He is the man of our ideal, the man of our prayers, the man we fain would be. There are no sadder lines in English poetry than those of William Watson. So on our souls the visions rise. Of that fair life we never led. They flash a splendor past our eyes. We start, and they are fled. They pass and leave us with blank gaze, resigned to our ignoble days. We catch the fair vision of glorious possibilities, but we shake our heads like the rich young ruler and turn away sorrowful. Oh, the pity of it, resigned to our ignoble days. The old world is very weary with weeping over her troubles and her tragedies. But she has never known anything more expressively mournful than that. End of Part 3 Chapter 6 Part 3 Chapter 7 of The Lugitive Life. 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 April 6090, California, United States of America. The Lugitive Life by Frank W. Borham. Part 3 Chapter 7 Our Better Haves. Marriage is simply an obvious and outstanding illustration of one of life's cardinal laws. The world is made up of pairs and, like the sexes, those pairs are supplementary and complementary. I have two eyes. They are not in rivalry. Each has its function. It is difficult for my right eye to discern the danger that approaches from the opposite direction. My left eye, therefore, stands sentinel on that side of my face. Each member of my body holds in charge, powers that it is under obligation to exercise for the good of all its fellow members. The world is built on that plan. Examine for proof of it the list of exports and imports of any nation under the sun, as Cowper sings. Wise to promote whatever end he means, God opens fruitful natures various scenes. Each climate needs what other climes produce and offers something to the general use. No land but listens to the common call and in return receives supplies from all. In our silly habit of teaching half truths, we tell our children that Australia belongs to Britain, that Algeria belongs to France, and that Java belongs to Holland. If we told them the whole truth, they would learn that Britain belongs to Germany, and that France belongs to China, and that America belongs to Japan, and that every nation is an essential and complementary part of every other nation. And if we taught them the whole truth after that liberal fashion, they would grow up to beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks. In precisely the same way every man holds in sacred charge certain gifts and graces which he is under solemn obligation to use for the general good. My next door neighbor is my better half. I cannot do without him. He is rich where I am poor, and he supplies my wants the more, as his unlikeness fits with me. The best possible illustration is, of course, Commander Verney L. Cameron's story of the two lepers he met in Central Africa. One had lost his hands, the other his feet. They established a farm together, the leper who had no hands, and who could not therefore scatter seed, carried his legless brother, who could not have stirred upon his back, and thus, each supplying the other's lack, they broke their ground, and sowed their seed, and reaped their crop, or go to Scotland. Everybody who has read that wealthiest of all northern biographies will remember the storm scene on the Highland Lock. Dr. Norman McLeod was in a small boat with a boatman. Some ladies, and a well-known ministerial brother, who was as conspicuous for his weak impunity appearance as Dr. McLeod, was for his gigantic size and strength. A fearful gala rose. The waves tossed the boat sky high in their furious sport. The smaller of the two ministers was frightened out of his wits. He suggested that Dr. McLeod should pray for deliverance. The ladies eagerly seconded the devout proposal. But the breathless old boatman would have none of it. He instantly vetoed the scheme. Nah, nah, he cried. Let the wee man he pray. But the big one won't take nor, if he didn't, he won't to be doomed. The shrew old Highlander was simply stating in a crude way of his own, life's great supplementary law. Let us admire the principle of the big minister and the small minister, of the armless leper and the legless leper, each in his proper place as it reveals itself in other fields. Every great movement furnishes evidence of the effective operation of this law. Those who have studied carefully the story of the Reformation know how the powers of Luther and Melchthon dovetailed into each other and how beautifully each supplemented each. Differing from each other as widely as the Poles, each seemed to supply precisely what the other lacked, and neither was quite sure of the wisdom of his own proposal, until the sanction of the other had been obtained. Macaulay has told us, concerning Charles Fox and Sir James Macintosh, that when Fox went to the desk and wrote, then Macintosh took to the platform and spoke. The cause they espoused seemed pitifully impotent. But when Macintosh seized the pin and Fox mounted the platform, they were simply irresistible. They brought the whole country to their feet, which, of course, is the story of the big minister and the wee minister over again. The gifts of each exactly supplemented those of the other. Each was the other's better half. And has not Lord Morley made us familiar with the fine record of Cobdon and of Bright? They were, he says, the compliments of each other. Their gifts differed so that one exactly covered the ground, which the other was predisposed to leave comparatively untouched. The story of the Grey Friars and the Black Friars is another case in point. The followers of Francis exactly supplemented those of Dominic, and each order overtook the work which the other left undone. History teams with similar examples. The law of the better half is as wide in the sweep of its operations as the law of gravitation. What ecclesiastical jealousies and theological bitternesses and ministerial heart-burnings would have been saved if even the best and saintliest of men had been swift to recognize the operation of this greatest principle. To say nothing of such shameful controversies as those between Calvinists and Lutherans, let us take, as our example, a wordy conflict of but two centuries ago. We ministers read John Wesley's journal and William Law's serious call on Saturday nights, and contact with such flaming enthusiasm makes our own hearts to burn within us as the great day of the week approaches. What piety, what passion, what prayerfulness we discover. All the chills of the week melt from our spirits as our souls warm themselves before these blazing fires. But we blush for our own reverent spiritual masters when we recall the way in which these giants of the devout life treated each other. And now that all the dust has settled, what is the truth? The simple fact is that Wesley was the very greatest preacher of his age, and law was the very greatest religious writer. We see now, says a great writer, that William Law without John Wesley, as well as John Wesley without William Law, would have left the religious life and literature of the 18th century, both weak, one-sided and unsafe. Could they both have seen it? Both were indispensable, John Wesley, to complete William Law, and William Law to complete John Wesley. Just so. Could they both have seen it? But the tragedy of it all is that they could not see it and did not see it. We shall be wise men if, in sitting at their feet, we profit by the very blindness of our teachers. Each had he only known it was the other's better half. There come to most of us weakened or wicked moments, when we are apt to regard our more brilliant brethren as our enemies. We are members one of another, and that we need each other. What a story for tears is that which Dr. Alexander White has told us of Thomas Shepard. It is a tale to be read on our knees. Thomas Shepard, as we all know, was an English Puritan, a pilgrim father, and the founder of Harvard. But we did not all know that Thomas Shepard was a poor wretch of, like, passions with ourselves. He had, it seems, a brilliant ministerial neighbor, and his neighbor's sermons were printed on Saturdays in the New England Gazette. So, for that matter, were Shepards. But his neighbor's sermons read well and were popular. Shepards read but indifferently and were despised. And on one memorable Saturday a particularly brilliant and clever sermon appeared in the Gazette. Everybody read it, everybody talked of it, everybody praised it, and the praise of his neighbor was like fire in the bones, and like gravel in the teeth of poor Thomas Shepard. It was gall in warm wood to his very soul. That Saturday the spirit of the old Puritan passed through the garden of Gethelsamine, when midnight came it found him, still prostrate. Before God on the floor of his study, his whole frame was convulsed in an agony of sweat and tears. Walsed his brilliant neighbor's clever sermon was still crushed and crumpled between his class tans. He wrestled, like Jacob, until the breaking of the day. He prayed until he had torn all bitterness and jealousy and hatred and ill will out of his heart. And then, with calm and upturned face, he craved a blessing on his neighbor and on his neighbor's clever sermon. Thomas Shepard came to see that he and his neighbor belonged to each other. He was his neighbor's better half. Time had taken good care to vindicate Shepard. He is the friend of all of us, whilst we do not even know his neighbor's name. What Saturday nights I say again we ministers have with Wesley and with Law. How our hearts burn within us in their excellent company. But what still more glorious Saturday nights we might have had if only John Wesley or William Law or better, still, both of them, had spent one Saturday night after, the pattern of Thomas Shepard's, never to be forgotten, Saturday night in New England, if only they, and all like them, had wrestled with their bitterness until the breaking of the day. The daybreak would have revealed to each the noble face of a brother be loved, for we are members one of another.