|
|
|
Prev
| Next
| Contents
CHAPTER XXVII: THE PREACHER
The sermon Mr Graham heard at the chapel that Sunday morning in
Kentish Town was not of an elevating, therefore not of a strengthening
description. The pulpit was at that time in offer to the highest
bidder--in orthodoxy, that is, combined with popular talent.
The first object of the chapel's existence--I do not say in the
minds of those who built it, for it was an old place, but certainly
in the minds of those who now directed its affairs--was not to
save its present congregation, but to gather a larger--ultimately
that they might be saved, let us hope, but primarily that the
drain upon the purses of those who were responsible for its rent
and other outlays, might be lessened. Mr Masquar, therefore, to
whom the post was a desirable one, had been mainly anxious that
morning to prove his orthodoxy, and so commend his services. Not
that in those days one heard so much of the dangers of heterodoxy:
that monster was as yet but growling far off in the jungles of Germany;
but certain whispers had been abroad concerning the preacher which
he thought desirable to hush, especially as they were founded in
truth. He had tested the power of heterodoxy to attract attention,
but having found that the attention it did attract was not of a kind
favourable to his wishes, had so skilfully remodelled his theories
that, although to his former friends he declared them in substance
unaltered, it was impossible any longer to distinguish them from
the most uncompromising orthodoxy; and his sermon of that morning
had tended neither to the love of God, the love of man, nor
a hungering after righteousness--its aim being to disprove the
reported heterodoxy of Jacob Masquar.
As they walked home, Mrs Marshal, addressing her husband in a tone
of conjugal disapproval, said, with more force than delicacy,
"The pulpit is not the place to give a man to wash his dirty linen
in."
"Well, you see, my love," answered her husband in a tone of apology,
"people won't submit to be told their duty by mere students, and
just at present there seems nobody else to be had. There's none
in the market but old stagers and young colts--eh, Fred? But Mr
Masquar is at least a man of experience."
"Of more than enough, perhaps," suggested his wife. "And the young
ones must have their chance, else how are they to learn? You should
have given the principal a hint. It is a most desirable thing that
Frederick should preach a little oftener."
"They have it in turn, and it wouldn't do to favour one more than
another."
"He could hand his guinea, or whatever they gave him, to the one
whose turn it ought to have been, and that would set it all right."
At this point the silk mercer, fearing that the dominie, as he
called him, was silently disapproving, and willing therefore to
change the subject, turned to him and said,
"Why shouldn't you give us a sermon, Graham?"
The schoolmaster laughed.
"Did you never hear," he said, "how I fell like Dagon on the
threshold of the church, and have lain there ever since."
"What has that to do with it?" returned his friend, sorry that
his forgetfulness should have caused a painful recollection. "That
is ages ago, when you were little more than a boy. Seriously," he
added, chiefly to cover his little indiscretion, "will you preach
for us the Sunday after next?"
Deacons generally ask a man to preach for them.
"No," said Mr Graham.
But even as he said it, a something began to move in his heart--
a something half of jealousy for God, half of pity for poor souls
buffeted by such winds as had that morning been roaring, chaff
laden, about the church, while the grain fell all to the bottom of
the pulpit. Something burned in him: was it the word that was as
a fire in his bones, or was it a mere lust of talk? He thought for
a moment.
"Have you any gatherings between Sundays?" he asked.
"Yes; every Wednesday evening," replied Mr Marshal. "And if you won't
preach on Sunday, we shall announce tonight that next Wednesday a
clergyman of the Church of Scotland will address the prayer meeting."
He was glad to get out of it so, for he was uneasy about his
friend, both as to his nerve, which might fail him, and his Scotch
oddities, which would not.
"That would be hardly true," said Mr Graham, "seeing I never got
beyond a licence."
"Nobody here knows the difference between a licentiate and a placed
minister; and if they did they would not care a straw. So we'll
just say clergyman."
"But I won't have it announced in any terms. Leave that alone, and
I will try to speak at the prayer meeting."
"It won't be in the least worth your while except we announce it.
You won't have a soul to hear you but the pew openers, the woman
that cleans the chapel, Mrs Marshal's washerwoman, and the old
greengrocer we buy our vegetables from. We must really announce
it."
"Then I won't do it. Just tell me--what would our Lord have
said to Peter or John if they had told Him that they had been to
synagogue and had been asked to speak, but had declined because
there were only the pew openers, the chapel cleaner, a washerwoman,
and a greengrocer present?"
"I said it only for your sake, Graham; you needn't take me up so
sharply."
"And ra-a-ther irreverently--don't you think--excuse me, sir?"
said Mrs Marshal very softly. But the very softness had a kind of
jellyfish sting in it.
"I think," rejoined the schoolmaster, indirectly replying, "we
must be. careful to show our reverence in a manner pleasing to our
Lord. Now I cannot discover that he cares for any reverences but
the shaping of our ways after his; and if you will show me a single
instance of respect of persons in our Lord, I will press my petition
no farther to be allowed to speak a word to your pew openers,
washerwoman, and greengrocer."
His entertainers were silent--the gentleman in the consciousness
of deserved rebuke, the lady in offence.
Just then the latter bethought herself that their guest, belonging
to the Scotch Church, was, if no Episcopalian, yet no dissenter,
and that seemed to clear up to her the spirit of his disapproval.
"By all means, Mr Marshal," she said, "let your friend speak on
the Wednesday evening. It would not be to his advantage to have it
said that he occupied a dissenting pulpit. It will not be nearly
such an exertion either; and if he is unaccustomed to speak to
large congregations, he will find himself more comfortable with
our usual week evening one."
"I have never attempted to speak in public but once," rejoined Mr
Graham, "and then I failed."
"Ah! that accounts for it," said his friend's wife and the simplicity
of his confession, while it proved him a simpleton, mollified her.
Thus it came that he spent the days between Sunday and Thursday in
their house, and so made the acquaintance of young Marshal.
When his mother perceived their growing intimacy, she warned her
son that their visitor belonged to an unscriptural and worldly
community, and that notwithstanding his apparent guilelessness--
deficiency indeed--he might yet use cunning arguments to draw him
aside from the faith of his fathers. But the youth replied that,
although in the firmness of his own position as a Congregationalist,
he had tried to get the Scotchman into a conversation upon church
government, he had failed; the man smiled queerly and said nothing.
But when a question of New Testament criticism arose, he came awake
at once, and his little blue eyes gleamed like glowworms.
"Take care, Frederick," said his mother. "The Scriptures are not
to be treated like common books and subjected to human criticism."
"We must find out what they mean, I suppose, mother," said the
youth.
"You're to take just the plain meaning that he that runneth
may read," answered his mother.--"More than that no one has any
business with. You've got to save your own soul first, and then the
souls of your neighbours if they will let you; and for that reason
you must cultivate, not a spirit of criticism, but the talents
that attract people to the hearing of the Word. You have got a fine
voice, and it will improve with judicious use. Your father is now
on the outlook for a teacher of elocution to instruct you how to
make the best of it, and speak with power on God's behalf"
When the afternoon of Wednesday began to draw towards the evening,
there came on a mist, not a London fog, but a low wet cloud, which
kept slowly condensing into rain; and as the hour of meeting drew
nigh with the darkness, it grew worse. Mrs Marshal had forgotten
all about the meeting and the schoolmaster: her husband was late,
and she wanted her dinner. At twenty minutes past six, she came
upon her guest in the hall, kneeling on the doormat, first on one
knee, then on the other, turning up the feet of his trousers.
"Why, Mr Graham," she said kindly, as he rose and proceeded to look
for his cotton umbrella, easily discernible in the stand among the
silk ones of the house, "you're never going out on a night like
this?"
"I am going to the prayer meeting, ma'am," he said.
"Nonsense! You'll be wet to the skin before you get half way."
"I promised, you may remember, ma'am, to talk a little to them."
"You only said so to my husband. You may be very glad, seeing it has
turned out so wet, that I would not allow him to have it announced
from the pulpit. There is not the slightest occasion for your going.
Besides, you have not had your dinner."
"That's not of the slightest consequence, ma'am. A bit of bread
and cheese before I go to bed is all I need to sustain nature, and
fit me for understanding my proposition in Euclid. I have been in
the habit, for the last few years, of reading one every night before
I go to bed."
"We dissenters consider a chapter of the Bible the best thing to
read before going to bed," said the lady, with a sustained voice.
"I keep that for the noontide of my perceptions--for mental high
water," said the schoolmaster, "Euclid is good enough after supper.
Not that I deny myself a small portion of the Word," he added with
a smile, as he proceeded to open the door--" when I feel very
hungry for it."
"There is no one expecting you," persisted the lady, who could ill
endure not to have her own way, even when she did not care for the
matter concerned. "Who will be the wiser or the worse if you stay
at home?"
"My dear lady," returned the schoolmaster, "when I have on good
grounds made up my mind to a thing, I always feel as if I had
promised God to do it; and indeed it amounts to the same thing very
nearly. Such a resolve then is not to be unmade except on equally
good grounds with those upon which it was made. Having resolved
to try whether I could not draw a little water of refreshment for
souls which if not thirsting are but fainting the more, shall I
allow a few drops of rain to prevent me?"
"Pray don't let me persuade you against your will," said his hostess,
with a stately bend of her neck over her shoulder, as she turned
into the drawing room.
Her guest went out into the rain, asking himself by what theory of
the will his hostess could justify such a phrase---too simple to
see that she had only thrown it out, as the cuttlefish its ink, to
cover her retreat.
But the weather had got a little into his brain: into his soul it
was seldom allowed to intrude. He felt depressed and feeble and
dull. But at the first corner he turned, he met a little breath
of wind. It blew the rain in his face, and revived him a little,
reminding him at the same time that he had not yet opened his
umbrella. As he put it up he laughed.
"Here I am," he said to himself, "lance in hand, spurring to meet
my dragon!"
Once when he used a similar expression, Malcolm had asked him what
he meant by his dragon; "I mean," replied the schoolmaster, "that
huge slug, The Commonplace. It is the wearifulest dragon to fight
in the whole miscreation. Wound it as you may, the jelly mass of
the monster closes, and the dull one is himself again--feeding
all the time so cunningly that scarce one of the victims whom he
has swallowed suspects that he is but pabulum slowly digesting in
the belly of the monster."
If the schoolmaster's dragon, spread abroad as he lies, a vague
dilution, everywhere throughout human haunts, has yet any headquarters,
where else can they be than in such places as that to which he was
now making his way to fight him? What can be fuller of the wearisome,
depressing, beauty blasting commonplace than a dissenting chapel in
London, on the night of the weekly prayer meeting, and that night
a drizzly one? The few lights fill the lower part with a dull,
yellow, steamy glare, while the vast galleries, possessed by an
ugly twilight, yawn above like the dreary openings of a disconsolate
eternity. The pulpit rises into the dim damp air, covered with
brown holland, reminding one of desertion and charwomen, if not
of a chamber of death and spiritual undertakers, who have shrouded
and coffined the truth. Gaping, empty, unsightly, the place is
the very skull of the monster himself--the fittest place of all
wherein to encounter the great slug, and deal him one of those
death blows which every sunrise, every repentance, every childbirth,
every true love deals him. Every hour he receives the blow that
kills, but he takes long to die, for every hour he is right carefully
fed and cherished by a whole army of purveyors, including every
trade and profession, but officered chiefly by divines and men of
science.
When the dominie entered, all was still, and every light had
a nimbus of illuminated vapour. There were hardly more than three
present beyond the number Mr Marshal had given him to expect; and
their faces, some grim, some grimy, most of them troubled, and
none blissful, seemed the nervous ganglions of the monster whose
faintly gelatinous bulk filled the place. He seated himself in
a pew near the pulpit, communed with his own heart and was still.
Presently the ministering deacon, a humbler one in the worldly sense
than Mr Marshal, for he kept a small ironmongery shop in the next
street to the chapel, entered, twirling the wet from his umbrella
as he came along one of the passages intersecting the pews. Stepping
up into the desk which cowered humbly at the foot of the pulpit,
he stood erect, and cast his eyes around the small assembly.
Discovering there no one that could lead in singing, he chose out
and read one of the monster's favourite hymns, in which never a
sparkle of thought or a glow of worship gave reason wherefore the
holy words should have been carpentered together. Then he prayed
aloud, and then first the monster found tongue, voice, articulation.
If this was worship, surely it was the monster's own worship of
itself! No God were better than one to whom such were fitting words
of prayer. What passed in the man's soul, God forbid I should judge:
I speak but of the words that reached the ears of men.
And over all the vast of London lay the monster, filling it like
the night--not in churches and chapels only--in almost all
theatres, and most houses--most of all in rich houses: everywhere
he had a foot, a tail, a tentacle or two--everywhere suckers that
drew the life blood from the sickening and somnolent soul.
When the deacon, a little brown man, about five-and-thirty, had
ended his prayer, he read another hymn of the same sort--one of
such as form the bulk of most collections, and then looked meaningly
at Mr Graham, whom he had seen in the chapel on Sunday with his
brother deacon, and therefore judged one of consequence, who had
come to the meeting with an object, and ought to be propitiated:
he had intended speaking himself. After having thus for a moment
regarded him,
"Would you favour us with a word of exhortation, sir?" he said, in
a stage-like whisper.
Now the monster had by this time insinuated a hair-like sucker into
the heart of the schoolmaster, and was busy. But at the word, as
the Red Cross Knight when he heard Orgoglio in the wood staggered
to meet him, he rose at once, and although his umbrella slipped
and fell with a loud discomposing clatter, calmly approached the
reading desk. To look at his outer man, this knight of the truth
might have been the very high priest of the monster which, while
he was sitting there, had been twisting his slimy, semi-electric,
benumbing tendrils around his heart. His business was nevertheless
to fight him, though to fight him in his own heart and that of
other people at one and the same moment, he might well find hard
work. And the loathly worm had this advantage over the knight, that
it was the first time he had stood up to speak in public since his
failure thirty years ago. That hour again for a moment overshadowed
his spirit. It was a wavy harvest morning in a village of the north.
A golden wind was blowing, and little white clouds flying aloft in
the sunny blue. The church was full of well known faces, upturned,
listening, expectant, critical. The hour vanished in a slow mist
of abject misery and shame. But had he not learned to rejoice over
all dead hopes, and write Te Deums on their coffin lids? And now he
stood in dim light, in the vapour from damp garments, in dinginess
and ugliness, with a sense of spiritual squalor and destitution in
his very soul. He had tried to pray his own prayer while the deacon
prayed his; but there had come to him no reviving--no message
for this handful of dull souls--there were nine of them in all
--and his own soul crouched hard and dull within his bosom. How
to give them one deeper breath? How to make them know they were
alive? Whence was his aid to come?
His aid was nearer than he knew. There were no hills to which he
could lift his eyes, but help may hide in the valley as well as
come down from the mountain, and he found his under the coal scuttle
bonnet of the woman that swept out and dusted the chapel. She was
no interesting young widow. A life of labour and vanished children
lay behind as well as before her. She was sixty years of age, seamed
with the smallpox, and in every seam the dust and smoke of London
had left a stain. She had a troubled eye, and a gaze that seemed
to ask of the universe why it had given birth to her. But it was
only her face that asked the question; her mind was too busy with
the ever recurring enigma, which, answered this week, was still an
enigma for the next--how she was to pay her rent--too busy to
have any other question to ask. Or would she not rather have gone
to sleep altogether, under the dreary fascination of the slug monster,
had she not had a severe landlady, who would be paid punctually,
or turn her out? Anyhow, every time and all the time she sat in
the chapel, she was brooding over ways and means, calculating pence
and shillings--the day's charing she had promised her, and the
chances of more--mingling faint regrets over past indulgences
--the extra half pint of beer she drank on Saturday--the bit
of cheese she bought on Monday. Of this face of care, revealing
a spirit which Satan had bound, the schoolmaster caught sight,--
caught from its commonness, its grimness, its defeature, inspiration
and uplifting, for there he beheld the oppressed, down trodden,
mire fouled humanity which the man in whom he believed had loved
because it was his father's humanity divided into brothers, and
had died straining to lift back to the bosom of that Father. Oh
tale of horror and dreary monstrosity, if it be such indeed as the
bulk of its priests on the one hand, and its enemies on the other
represent it! Oh story of splendrous fate, of infinite resurrection
and uplifting, of sun and breeze, of organ blasts and exultation,
for the heart of every man and woman, whatsoever the bitterness
of its care or the weight of its care, if it be such as the Book
itself has held it from age to age!
It was the mere humanity of the woman, I say, and nothing in her
individuality of what is commonly called the interesting, that
ministered to the breaking of the schoolmaster's trance. "Oh ye of
little faith!" were the first words that flew from his lips--he
knew not whether uttered concerning himself or the charwoman the
more; and at once he fell to speaking of him who said the words,
and of the people that came to him and heard him gladly;--how
this one, whom he described, must have felt, Oh, if that be true!
how that one, whom also he described, must have said, Now he means
me! and so laid bare the secrets of many hearts, until he had
concluded all in the misery of being without a helper in the world,
a prey to fear and selfishness and dismay. Then he told them how
the Lord pledged himself for all their needs--meat and drink and
clothes for the body, and God and love and truth for the soul, if
only they would put them in the right order and seek the best first.
Next he spoke a parable to them--of a house and a father and his
children. The children would not do what their father told them,
and therefore began to keep out of his sight. After a while they
began to say to each other that he must have gone out, it was so
long since they had seen him--only they never went to look. And
again after a time some of them began to say to each other that they
did not believe they had ever had any father. But there were some
who dared not say that--who thought they had a father somewhere
in the house, and yet crept about in misery, sometimes hungry and
often cold, fancying he was not friendly to them, when all the time
it was they who were not friendly to him, and said to themselves
he would not give them anything. They never went to knock at his
door, or call to know if he were inside and would speak to them.
And all the time there he was sitting sorrowful, listening and
listening for some little hand to come knocking, and some little
voice to come gently calling through the keyhole; for sorely did
he long to take them to his bosom and give them everything. Only
if he did that without their coming to him, they would not care
for his love or him, would only care for the things he gave them,
and soon would come to hate their brothers and sisters, and turn
their own souls into hells, and the earth into a charnel of murder.
Ere he ended he was pleading with the charwoman to seek her father
in his own room, tell him her troubles, do what he told her, and
fear nothing. And while he spoke, lo! the dragon slug had vanished;
the ugly chapel was no longer the den of the hideous monster; it
was but the dusky bottom of a glory shaft, adown which gazed the
stars of the coming resurrection.
"The whole trouble is that we won't let God help us," said the
preacher, and sat down.
A prayer from the greengrocer followed, in which he did seem to
be feeling after God a little; and then the ironmonger pronounced
the benediction, and all went--among the rest, Frederick Marshal,
who had followed the schoolmaster, and now walked back with him
to his father's, where he was to spend one night more.
Prev
| Next
| Contents
|
|
|