I was motoring among the semi-tropical landscapes of Queensland. We swept past gardens that were gay with scarlet flame trees, brilliant creepers, bright-red corals, and bougainvilleas of many gorgeous hues. Spread out in endless panorama about us were orange groves, vineyards, sugar plantations, and fields in which the pineapple, the banana, the paw-paw, the mango, and the breadfruit luxuriated. And then we burst into the bush, which only differed from the bush to which I was more accustomed in that it was sprinkled with enormous anthills and dotted with green clumps of prickly pear.
After several hours spent in this delightful way, the car unexpectedly stopped, and my host and hostess prepared to alight. I peered about me for some explanation of their behavior, but could nowhere discover one. There was no house to be seen nor any sign of civilization or of settlement. My first impulse was to remain in the car with the driver.
'We are going a little way into the bush,' my host explained, addressing me; 'if you care to come with us, we shall be very pleased.'
I joined them instantly, and we were soon out of sight of the car. We picked our way through the thick undergrowth for about a quarter of a mile, then emerged upon a little plot carefully fenced off from the surrounding wilderness. It was a cemetery only a few feet square; and it contained three graves! It was evidently to the central one that our pilgrimage had been made. My companions stood in silence for a moment beside it, and then seated themselves on the grass near by.
'In our early days,' my host explained, 'we used to live not very far from here. It was a lonely place and a hard life; and it had joys and sorrows of its own. The greatest of its joys was the birth of Don, our firstborn; and the greatest of our sorrows was his death. He was only five when we buried him.'
'Yes,' added his wife, brushing a tear from her eye, 'and we buried him with a broken penknife in his hand. A swagman who had sheltered for the night in one of the out-buildings had given it to him before leaving in the morning, and Don thought it the most wonderful thing he had ever possessed. He was working away with it from morning to night. He would not trust it out of his sight. He had it in his hand when, a few days afterwards, he was taken ill. He clung to it all through his sickness. If he dropped it in his sleep, he asked for it as soon as he woke. He raved about it in his delirium. And it was firmly clasped inhis hand when he died. We had not the heart to take it from him, and so he went down to his grave still holding it.'
Often since I have thought of that burial in the bush, not merely because the incident was so touching, but because it was so intensely characteristic. A boy's infatuation for his first pocket knife! It may have a rusty handle and a broken blade; the edge may be as jagged as the edge of a saw and the spring may have vanished with the days of long ago; it makes no difference. With a knife in his hand a boy feels that he is monarch of all he surveys. With a knife in his hand he feels himself every inch a man. A boy's first consciousness of power, of dominion, of authority comes to him on the day on which he grasps his first knife. It is by means of a knife that he carves his way to destiny.
Civilization may be said to have dawned on the day on which the first man in the world held in his hand the first knife in the world. It was made of stone, like the knives of all savage and primitive peoples. It came into his possession almost by chance. He was gathering together some huge stones, and building for himself a wall. Presently one heavy stone slipped from his hands, fell with a crash upon another, and broke. But it was not a clean break. There lay at that first man's feet two large fragments of stone and a multitude of splinters. He picked up the largest of the splinters and found that it had a keen, sharp edge. He cuthis finger as he stroked it, and the blood crimsoned the stone. He dropped it as he would have dropped a snake that had bitten him. But, as he nursed his smarting hand, he saw the possibilities that the sharp-edged splinter opened to him. He remembered the toil with which he had torn down branches of trees and shaped them to his use. The splinter would simplify his task. He forgot his lacerated finger. He seized another stone, dashed it against its neighbor, and, by repeating the process, soon secured for himself a more shapely splinter—a splinter with which he could cut down the branches less laboriously. He tried it. He laughed as he found that, armed with the splinter, he could hack the yielding timber to his will. He was more excited than he had ever been before. Here was the first man with his first knife—the pioneer man with the pioneer knife! For that first man was the father of men of many colors, and that first knife was the father of blades of many kinds. From it sprang the sickle and the scythe, the chisel and the saw, the spade and the tomahawk, the rapier and the dagger, the scalpel and the poniard, the razor and the sword.
The joy that the boy feels as he looks lovingly on his first knife is the joy of shaping things. The world about him has suddenly become plastic. It is a block of marble and he is the sculptor. He may make of it what he will. Until he possessed a knife, the hard inanimate substances about himdefied him. He was the bird and they were the bars. But nowhedefiesthem. The knife makes all the difference. The knife is his sceptre. He is a king and all things are subject to him.
He may, of course, abuse his power. He probably will. A boy with a knife is very liable to carve his name in the polished walnut of the piano or to cut notches out of the neatly-turned legs of the dining-room table. From all parts of the world people go on pilgrimage to Westminster Abbey. And, at the Abbey, they are shown the Coronation Chair. Seated in it, all our English sovereigns have been crowned, and it is encrusted with traditions that go back to the days of the patriarchs. But a boy with a knife feels no reverence for antiquity. On the night of July 5, 1800, a Westminster schoolboy got locked in the Abbey. He curled himself up in the Coronation Chair and made it his resting-place until morning. And, in the morning, he thought of his pocket-knife. And, as the dawn came streaming through the storied eastern windows, he carved deeply into the solid oak of the seat of the chair, the notable inscription:P. Abbot slept in this chair, July 5, 1800.Thus he buried his blade in one of the noblest of our great historic treasures. It was enough to make the illustrious dead, by whom he was everywhere surrounded, turn in their ancient graves. George the Fourth and all his successors have since been crowned in a Chair that bears that impertinent record! Yet, as the chipsflew, the boy felt no compunction. And, in his stolid calm, he is the type and representative of all who abuse the authority with which they are invested. He feels, as he wields the knife, that all things are at his mercy; he can shape them to his liking. He forgets that power carries its attendant obligations, and that, foremost among those obligations, is the obligation to restraint. A boy with a knife in his hand is merely a miniature edition of a man with a sword in his hand. And a man with a sword in his hand is often tempted to bury his blade in that which is even more precious than the oak of a Coronation Chair. Piano-frames and table-legs are not the only things that cry aloud for protection. The greatest lesson that the world has learned in our time is that the power of the sword involves its possessor in a responsibility that is simply frightful. The blood of brave men, the tears of good women, and the hard-earned wealth of nations must never be frivolously or lightheartedly outpoured.
From the moment at which, with sparkling eyes, that first man seized that first sharp splinter, the knife has steadily grown upon the imaginations of men. It took a thousand generations to discover its potentialities. Indeed, our own generation is only just beginning to realize the possibilities that it unfolds. Think of the marvels—I had almost said the miracles—of modern surgery.
'Let nothing share your heart with your knife!'said Dr. Ferguson to Barney Boyle, inThe Doctor of Crow's Nest. The old doctor had just fallen in love with Barney. He liked his looks, he liked his temperament, and he liked his hands.
'You must be a surgeon, Barney! You've got the fingers and the nerves! A surgeon, sir! That's the only thing worth while. The physician can't see further below the skin than any one else. He guesses and experiments, treats symptoms; tries one drug and then another. But the knife, my boy!' The doctor rose and paced the floor in his enthusiasm. 'The knife, boy! There's no guess in the knifepoint. The knife lays bare the evil, fights it, eradicates it! The knife at the proper moment saves a man's life. A slight incision an inch or two long, the removal of the diseased part, a few stitches, and, in a couple of weeks, the patient's well! Ah, boy, God knows I'd give my life to be a great surgeon. But he didn't give me the fingers. Look at these!' and he held up a coarse, heavy hand. 'I haven't the touch. But you have! You have the nerve and the fingers and the mechanical ingenuity; you can be a great surgeon. You shall have all my time and all my books and all my money; I'll put you through! You must think, dream, sleep, eat, drink bones and muscles and sinews and nerves! Push everything else aside!' he cried, waving his great hands excitedly. 'And remember!'—here his voice took a solemn tone—'let nothing share your heart with your knife!'
Let nothing share your heart with your knife! That is always the knife's appeal. It is a plea for concentration. I was talking to an old gardener the other day. He was pruning his trees. The gleaming blade was in his hand and the path was littered with the wreckage of the branches. He seemed to be working a shocking havoc, and I told him so. He laughed.
'Oh, they're well-meaning things, are trees!' he exclaimed. 'They are anxious to do their best for you, but they attempt too much, far too much. Just look at this one!' and he laughed again. 'It thought it could cover all these branches with roses; and, if we left it alone, it would try. But what sort of roses would they be, I should like to know? No, no, no; it is better for them to produce fewer blossoms but to produce good ones. We mustn't let them attempt too much!'
'Let nothing share your heart with your knife!' said old Dr. Ferguson, as he urged Barney to do just one thing and to do that one thing well.
'We mustn't let the rose-trees attempt too much,' said the old gardener, as he lopped off the branches with his pruning-knife.
That seems to be the lesson that the knife is always teaching. I remember going one bright afternoon to see Gregor Fawcett of Mosgiel. Gregor was passing through a troublous and trying time. Hard on top of heavy business losses had come the collapse of his health. To my delight,however, I found him in a particularly cheerful mood.
'I've been reading aboot the knife, d'ye ken?' he explained. 'It's a bonny passage!' He took the open Bible from the table beside the bed and pointed me to the fifteenth of John. 'Every branch in Me that beareth not fruit, he cutteth away; and every branch that beareth fruit, he pruneth it that it may bring forth more fruit.'
'It brought me a power o' comfort,' Gregor explained. 'For it says, ye ken, that there are only two sorts o' wood on the tree—thedeadwood and thelivewood. He cuts away thedeadwood for the sake of the live wood that he leaves; and he cuts thelivewood that bears fruit so that it may bear still more and still better fruit. Well, I thocht o' all the losses I've had lately. I dinna ken whether the things that have been taken weredeadthings orlivethings, but it doesna matter. If they weredeadthings, I'm better without them. And, if they werelivethings, they were only cut away because my life is like a tree that bears fruit and that may yet bear more. And, in either case, the best remains. The tree is the richer and not the poorer for the pruning. The pruning only shows that the gardener cares. Ay, it's a bonny passage that!' and Gregor laid the open Bible lovingly on the pillow beside him. 'After you've gone,' he said, 'I shall go over it again!'
And, from the frequency with which he quotedthe words to buffeted spirits in the days that followed, I could see that, on that further inspection, Gregor had kissed the husbandman's knife even more reverently and rapturously than before.
We badly need an Asylum for Antiquated Portraiture—a pleasant and hospitable refuge in which all our old photographs could be carefully preserved and reverently handled. For lack of such an institution we are all in difficulties. People come into our lives; we become attached to them and value their friendship; we exchange photographs; and, as soon as we have done so, the inevitable happens. The photographs get hopelessly out of date. Friends come and go; we come and go; but the photographs remain. Or, if the friends themselves abide, they change; fashions change; and, in a few years, the photographs look singularly archaic if not positively ridiculous. They go away into a drawer or a box. Once or twice a year a spring-cleaning or other volcanic upheaval reminds us of their existence. 'We must really sort these out and destroy a lot of them!' we say; but we never do it. Everybody knows why. It seems a betrayal of old confidences, an outrage upon sentiment, a heartless sacrilege. There should be an asylum for obsolete portraiture, or, if that is out of the question, we should do with the photographs what Nansen and Johansen, the Polar explorers, did with their dogs.Neither had the heart to shoot his own; so, amid the ice and snow of the far north, they exchanged their canine companions, and each went sadly and silently away and shot the other's!
Such a course must, however, be regarded as a makeshift and a subterfuge. The asylum is the thing. I am opposed, tooth and nail, to the destruction of old photographs under any conditions. I spent an hour yesterday afternoon down by the lake reading some of the love-letters that Mozart wrote to his wife nearly two centuries ago. Poor Johann and poor Stanzerl! They were so pitifully penniless that when, one bitter winter's morning, a kindly neighbor fought his way through the deep snow to see how the young couple were getting on, he found them dancing a waltz on the bare boards of their narrow room. They could not afford a fire, and this was their device for keeping warm. And now Johann is away on a business trip. In our time a husband so situated would send his wife a telegram to say that he had arrived safely, or, perhaps, buy her a picture-postcard of the view from his hotel window. But Mozart wrote the prettiest love-letters. 'Dear little wife,' he says, 'if I only had a letter from you! If I were to tell you all that I do with your dear likeness, how you would laugh! For instance, when I take it out of its case, I say "God greet thee, Stanzerl, God greet thee, thou rascal, shuttlecock, pointy-nose, nicknack, bit and sup!" And, when I put it back,I let it slip in very slowly, saying, with each little push, "Now—now—now!" and at the last, quickly—"Good-night, little mouse, sleep well!"' Where is that portrait now? I dread to hazard a conjecture! There was, alas, no asylum to which it could be fondly and reverently entrusted. Photographs, like fashions, are capable of strange revivals. One never knows when crinolines or hobble skirts will reappear; and in the same way, one never knows the moment at which some quaint old faded photograph will acquire new and absorbing interest.
'Why, bless me,' you exclaim, as you lay down the newspaper, 'here's Charlie Brown become famous! You remember Charlie; he was the second son of the Browns who lived opposite us at Kensington! Why, I have a photograph of him, taken when he was a little boy; I'll run and get it!' But alas, it has been destroyed. Or the regret may be even more poignant.
'Dear me,' you say, 'poor old Mary Smith is dead!' The announcement brings with it, as such announcements have a way of doing, a rush of reminiscence. A simple old soul was Mary Smith. She was very good to us, five and twenty years ago, when the children were all small and sicknesses were frequent. Mary always knew exactly what to do. But we moved away, and the years went by. Letter-writing was not in Mary's line. With the obituary notice still before us, we talk of Mary and the old days for awhile, and then we suddenlyremember that, when we came away, Mary gave us her photograph. It was a quaint, old-fashioned picture; it had been taken some years earlier; but we were glad to have it, and we put it with the others. We must slip up and get it! But it, too, has vanished! Somehow, Marylivingdid not seem quite so pathetic and lovable a figure as Marydead. At some spring-cleaning we must have glanced at the creased and faded portrait, and, without pausing to allow memory to do such vivid work as she has done to-day, we must have tossed it out. We feel horribly ashamed. If only we could recover the old photograph we would stand it on the mantelpiece and do it signal honor. And to think that, in the confusion of cleaning-up, we threw it out, perhaps tore it up, perhaps even burned it. We shudder at the thought, and half hope that, in her new and larger life, Mary—who seems nearer to us now than she did before we read of her passing—does not know that we were guilty of treachery so base.
Thus there come into our lives moments when photographs assert their worth and insist on being appraised at their true value. In the stirring chapter in which Sir Ernest Shackleton tells of the loss of his ship among the ice-floes, he describes an incident that must have set all his readers thinking. In the grip of the ice, theEndurancehad been smashed to splinters; and the entire party were out on a frozen sea at the mercy of the pitiless elements.Shackleton came to the conclusion that their best chance of eventually sighting land lay in marching to the opposite extremity of the floe; at any rate, it would give them something to do, and there is always solace in activity. He thereupon ordered his men to reduce their personal baggage to two pounds weight each. For the next few hours every man was busy in sorting out his belongings—the treasures that he had saved from the ship. It was a heart-breaking business. Men stole gloomily and silently away and dug little graves in the snow, to which they committed books, letters, and various nicknacks of sentimental value. And, when the final decisions had to be made, they threw away their little hoards of golden sovereigns and kept the photographs of their sweethearts and wives!
The same perplexity arises, sooner or later, in relation to the portraits and pictures on our walls. They become obsolete; but we find it difficult to order their removal. I had intended, long before this, devoting an essay to the whole subject ofPictures. Why must we smother our walls with pictures? To begin with, the pattern of the paper is often a series of pictures in itself, while the dado and the border simply add to the collection. Then, over these, we carefully arrange a multitude of others. Paintings, engravings, and photographs hang everywhere. Why do we cover the walls in this way? The answer is that we cover the walls inorder to cover the walls. The walls represent an imprisonment; the pictures represent an escape. On the wall in front of me, for example, there hangs a water-color sketch of Piripiki Gorge, our New Zealand holiday resort. On a winter's night, when the rain is lashing against the windows and the wind shrieking round the house, I glance up at it, and, by some magic transition, I am roaming on a summer's evening over the old familiar hills with my gun in my hand and John Broadbanks by my side. Through the medium of those landscapes, how many tireless excursions have I taken, by copse and beach and riverbank, without so much as rising from my chair? The photographs hanging here and there around the room transport my mind to other days and other places. The apartment in which I sit may be extremely small, just as the space that I occupy on the summit of a mountain may be extremely small. But, occupying that small space upon that lofty eminence, I command a view that loses itself in infinity; and, lounging in my comfortable chair in this little snuggery of mine, the pictures transform it into an observatory, and I am able to survey the entire universe. You do not hang pictures in the cells of a jail; the reason is obvious; you do not wish the prisoners to escape; you think it good that they should feel the stern tyranny of those four uncompromising walls. Conversely, you deck the dining-room with pictures because, there, you donotdesire to feel imprisoned;you donotwish the walls to seem tyrannical. As Mr. Stirling Bowen sings:
Four walls enclose men, yet how calm they are!They hang up pictures that they may forgetWhat walls are for in part, forget how farThey may not run and riotously letTheir laughter taunt the never-changing stars.In circus cages wolves and tigers paceFor ever to and fro. They do not rest,But seek so nervously the longed-for place.Our picture-jungles would not end their quest,Or pictures of another tiger's face.On four square walls men have their world, their strife,Their painted, framed endeavors, joys and pain;And two curators known as man and wifeHang up the sunrise, wipe the dust from rain,And gaze excitedly on painted life.
Four walls enclose men, yet how calm they are!They hang up pictures that they may forgetWhat walls are for in part, forget how farThey may not run and riotously letTheir laughter taunt the never-changing stars.In circus cages wolves and tigers paceFor ever to and fro. They do not rest,But seek so nervously the longed-for place.Our picture-jungles would not end their quest,Or pictures of another tiger's face.On four square walls men have their world, their strife,Their painted, framed endeavors, joys and pain;And two curators known as man and wifeHang up the sunrise, wipe the dust from rain,And gaze excitedly on painted life.
Four walls enclose men, yet how calm they are!
They hang up pictures that they may forget
What walls are for in part, forget how far
They may not run and riotously let
Their laughter taunt the never-changing stars.
In circus cages wolves and tigers pace
For ever to and fro. They do not rest,
But seek so nervously the longed-for place.
Our picture-jungles would not end their quest,
Or pictures of another tiger's face.
On four square walls men have their world, their strife,
Their painted, framed endeavors, joys and pain;
And two curators known as man and wife
Hang up the sunrise, wipe the dust from rain,
And gaze excitedly on painted life.
A picture on the wall is like a window—only more so! A window looks out on the garden or the street; a picture is an opening into infinity. The view from my window is controlled by circumstances. I cannot, for example, live in this Australian home of mine and command, from my window, a view of York Minster, the Bridge of Sighs, or the Rocky Mountains. And, even if I could, the darkness of each night would enfold the pleasing prospect in its sombre and impenetrable veil. But the pictures do for me what windows could never do. By means of the pictures I cut holes in the walls and look out upon any landscape that takes myfancy. And, when evening comes, I draw the blinds, illumine the room from within, and the panorama that has so delighted me in the day-time reveals fresh charms in the softer radiance of the lamps.
We all owe more to pictures than we have ever yet begun to suspect. Here is a merry young romp of a schoolboy, of tousle-head and swarthy face; loving the open-air and hating books like poison. A lady gives him a ponderous volume, and he turns away with a sneer. But one day he casually opens it. There is a colored picture. It represents Robinson Crusoe and his man Friday in the midst of one of their most exciting adventures. The boy—George Borrow—seized the book, carried it off, and never rested until he had read it from cover to cover. It opened his eyes to the possibilities of literature; and, to his dying day, he declared that, but for that colored print, the world would never have heard his name or read a line from his pen. Nor is this all. For it is probable that, in infancy, our minds receive their first bias towards—or away from—sacred things from the pictures of biblical subjects and biblical characters that are then, wisely or unwisely, exposed to our gaze. The Face that, in the secret chambers of our hearts, we think of as the Face of Jesus is, in all likelihood, the Face that we saw in the first picture-book that mother showed us.
But I fear that I have wandered. I set out totalk, not so much about pictures, as about photographs—photographs in general and old photographs in particular. Have photographs—and especially old photographs—no ethical or spiritual value? Is there a man living who has not, at some time, felt himself rebuked by eyes that looked down at him from a frame on the wall? I often feel, in relation to the photographs around the room, as Tennyson felt in relation to the spirits of those whom he had loved long since and lost awhile. It is lovely to think that those who have passed from our sight are not, in reality, far from us. And yet—
Do we indeed desire the deadShould still be near us at our side?Is there no baseness we would hide?No inner vileness that we dread?Shall he for whose applause I strove,I had such reverence for his blame,See with clear eye some hidden shameAnd I be lessen'd in his love?
Do we indeed desire the deadShould still be near us at our side?Is there no baseness we would hide?No inner vileness that we dread?Shall he for whose applause I strove,I had such reverence for his blame,See with clear eye some hidden shameAnd I be lessen'd in his love?
Do we indeed desire the dead
Should still be near us at our side?
Is there no baseness we would hide?
No inner vileness that we dread?
Shall he for whose applause I strove,
I had such reverence for his blame,
See with clear eye some hidden shame
And I be lessen'd in his love?
Who has not been conscious of a similar feeling under the searching glances of the eyes upon the wall? They seem at times to pierce our very souls. Tennyson came at last to the comfortable assurance that the shrinking fear with which he thought of his dead friends was not justified. For, he reflected, those who have gone out of the dusk into the daylight have acquired, not only a loftier purity, but a larger charity.
I wrong the grave with fears untrue:Shall love be blamed for want of faith?There must be wisdom with great Death:The dead shall look me thro' and thro'.Be near us when we climb or fall:Ye watch, like God, the rolling hoursWith larger other eyes than ours,To make allowance for us all.
I wrong the grave with fears untrue:Shall love be blamed for want of faith?There must be wisdom with great Death:The dead shall look me thro' and thro'.Be near us when we climb or fall:Ye watch, like God, the rolling hoursWith larger other eyes than ours,To make allowance for us all.
I wrong the grave with fears untrue:
Shall love be blamed for want of faith?
There must be wisdom with great Death:
The dead shall look me thro' and thro'.
Be near us when we climb or fall:
Ye watch, like God, the rolling hours
With larger other eyes than ours,
To make allowance for us all.
It is pleasant to transfer that thought to the photographs around the room. They hang there all day and every day; they hear all that we say and see all that we do; those quiet eyes seem to read us narrowly. Yet if, on the one hand, they see more in these secret souls of ours toblame, it is possible that, on the other, they see more topity. The judgements that we most dread are the judgements of those who only partly understand. The drunkard shrinks from the eyes of those who see his debauchery but know nothing of his temptation. There is something wonderfully comforting and strengthening in the clear eyes of those who see, not a part merely, but the whole.
Charles Simeon, of Cambridge, adorned his study wall with a fine picture of Henry Martyn. It is very difficult to say which of the two owed most to the other. In the days when he was groping after the light, Henry Martyn—then a student—fell under the influence of Mr. Simeon, and no other minister helped him so much. But, later on, when Henry Martyn was illumining the Orient with thelight of the gospel, his magnetic personality and heroic example exerted a remarkable authority over the ardent mind of the eminent Cambridge scholar. Mr. Simeon began to feel that, in some subtle and inexplicable way, the portrait on the wall was influencing his whole life. The picture was more than a picture. A wave of reverential admiration swept over him whenever he glanced up at it. He caught himself talking to it, and it seemed to speak to him. His biographer says that 'Mr. Simeon used to observe of Martyn's picture, while looking up at it with affectionate earnestness, as it hung over his fireplace: "There! see that blessed man! What an expression of countenance! No one looks at me as he does! He never takes his eyes off me, and seems always to be saying:Be serious! Be in earnest! Don't trifle! don't trifle!" Then smiling at the picture and gently bowing, he added: "And I won't trifle; I won't trifle!"' His friends always felt that the photograph over the fireplace was one of the most profound and effective influences in the life and work of Charles Simeon; and nobody who treasures a few reproving and inspiring pictures of the kind will have the slightest difficulty in believing it.
The photographs upon my wall are never tyrannical; else why should I prefer them to the cold, imprisoning walls? But, though never tyrannical, they are always authoritative. They speak, not harshly, but firmly. In the nature of the case, theseare the faces I revere—the faces of those whom I have enthroned within my heart. Being enthroned, they command. They sometimes sayThou shalt: they sometimes sayThou shalt not. They sometimes suggest; they sometimes prohibit.
And now, before I lay down my pen, shall I reveal the circumstance that led me to this train of thought? I am writing at Easter-time. On Good Friday a lady presented me with an exquisitely sad but unspeakably beautiful picture—a picture of the Thorn-crowned Face. Where am I to hang it? It will insist, tenderly but firmly, on a suitable and harmonious environment. Henry Drummond used to tell of a Cambridge undergraduate whose sweetheart visited his room. She found its walls covered with pictures of actresses and racehorses. She said nothing, but, on his birthday, presented him with a picture like this. A year later she again called on him at Cambridge. The Thorn-crowned Face hung over the fireplace; and the other walls were adorned with charming landscapes and reproductions of famous paintings. He caught her glancing at her gift.
'It's made a great difference to the room,' he said; 'what's more, it's made a great differencein me!'
That is a way our pictures have. They insist on ruling everything and everybody. I have no right to enthrone a despot in my home; nor to exalt a Thorn-crowned King unless I am prepared to make Him Lord of all.
We had a birthday at our house to-day, and among the presents was a beautiful box of blocks. Each block represented one of the letters of the alphabet. As I saw them being arranged and rearranged upon the table, I fell a-thinking. For the alphabet has, in our time, come to its own. We go through life muttering an interminable and incomprehensible jargon of initials. We tack initials on to our names—fore and aft—and we like to see every one of them in its place. As soon as I open my eyes in the morning, the postman hands me a medley of circulars, postcards and letters. One of them bids me attend the annual meeting of the S.P.C.A.; another reminds me of the monthly committee meeting of the M.C.M.; a third asks me to deliver an address at the P.S.A. In the afternoon I rush from an appointment at the Y.M.C.A. to speak on behalf of the W.C.T.U.; and then, having dropped in to pay my insurance premium at the A.M.P., I take the tram at the G.P.O., and ask the conductor to drop me at the A.B.C. I have accepted an invitation to a pleasant little function there—an invitation that is clearly marked R.S.V.P. And so on.There is no end to it. Life may be defined as a small amount of activity entirely surrounded by the letters of the alphabet.
Now the alphabet has a symbolism of its own. The man who coined the phrase 'as simple as A.B.C.' went mad; he went mad before he coined it. There are, it is true, a few simplicities sprinkled among the intricacies of this old world of ours; but the alphabet is not one of them. I protest that it is most unfair to call the alphabet simple. Nobody likes to be thought simple nowadays; see how frantically we preachers struggle to avoid any suspicion of the kind! Any man living would rather be called a sinner—or even a saint—than a simpleton. Why, then, affront the alphabet, which, as we have seen, is working a prodigious amount of overtime in our service, by applying to it so very opprobrious an epithet?
'As simple as A.B.C.,' indeed! Macaulay's schoolboy may not have been as omniscient as the historian would lead us to believe, but he at least knew that there is nothing simple about the A.B.C. The alphabet is the hardest lesson that a child is called upon to learn. Latin roots, algebraic equations, and thePons Asinorumare mere nothings in comparison. Grown-ups have short memories. They forget the stupendous difficulties that they surmounted in their earliest infancy; and their forgetfulness renders them pitiless and unsympathetic. Few of us recognize the strain in which a child'sbrain is involved when, for the first time, he confronts the alphabet. The whole thing is so arbitrary; there is no clue. In his noble essay onThe Evolution of Language, Professor Henry Drummond shows that the alphabet is really a picture-gallery. 'First,' he says, 'there was the onomatopoetic writing, the ideograph, the imitation of the actual object. This is the form we find in the Egyptian hieroglyphic. For a man a man is drawn, for a camel a camel, for a hut a hut. Then, to save time, the objects were drawn in shorthand—a couple of dashes for the limbs and one across, as in the Chinese, for a man; a square in the same language for a field; two strokes at an obtuse angle, suggesting the roof, for a house. To express further qualities, these abbreviated pictures were next compounded in ingenious ways. A man and a field together conveyed the idea of wealth; a roof and a woman represented home; and so on. And thus, little by little, our letters were evolved. But the pictures have become so truncated, abbreviated and emasculated, in the course of this evolutionary process, that a child, though notoriously fond of pictures, sees nothing fascinating in the letters of the alphabet. There is absolutely nothing about the first to suggest the sound A; nothing about the second to suggest the sound B. The whole thing is so incomprehensible; how can he ever hope to master it? An adult brain, introduced to such a conglomeration for the first time, would reel andstagger; is it any wonder that these childish cheeks get flushed or that the curly head turns at times very feverishly upon the pillow?
The sequence, too, is as baffling as the symbols. There is every reason whytwoshould come betweenoneandthree; and that reason is so obvious that the tiniest tot in the class can appreciate it. But why must B come between A and C? There is no natural advance, as in the case of the numerals. The letter B is not a little more than the letter A, nor a little less than the letter C. Except through the operation of the law of association, which only weaves its spell with the passing of the years, there is nothing about A to suggest B, and nothing about B to suggest C. The combination is a rope of sand. Robert Moffat only realized the insuperable character of this difficulty when he attempted to teach the natives of Bechuanaland the English alphabet. Each of his dusky pupils brought to the task an observation that had been trained in the wilds, a brain that had been developed by the years, and an intelligence that had been matured by experience. They were not babies. Yet the alphabet proved too much for them. Why should A be A? and why should B be B? and why should the one follow the other? Mr. Moffat was on the point of abandoning his educational enterprise as hopeless, when one thick-lipped and woolly-headed genius suggested that he should teach them to sing it! At first blush the notion seemed preposterous. There are somethings which, like Magna Charta and minute-books, cannot be set to music. Robert Moffat, however, was a Scotsman. The tune most familiar to his childhood came singing itself over and over in his brain; by the most freakish and fantastic conjunction of ideas it associated itself with the problem that was baffling him; and, before that day's sun had set, he had his Bechuana pupils roaring the alphabet to the tune ofAuld Lang Syne!
So A B CD E F GH I J K L MN O P QR S T UV W X Y Z.
So A B CD E F GH I J K L MN O P QR S T UV W X Y Z.
So A B C
D E F G
H I J K L M
N O P Q
R S T U
V W X Y Z.
The rhyme and metre fitted perfectly. The natives were so delighted that they strolled about the village shouting the new song at the tops of their voices; and Mr. Moffat declares that daylight was stealing through his bedroom window before the weird unearthly yells at last subsided. I have often wondered whether, in a more civilized environment, any attempt has been made to impress the letters upon the mind in the same way.
The symbolism of the alphabet rises to a sudden grandeur, however, when it is enlisted in the service of revelation. Long, long ago a startled shepherdwas ordered to visit the court of the mightiest of earthly potentates, and to address him on matters of state in the name of the Most High. 'And the Lord said unto Moses, Come now, therefore, and I will send thee unto Pharaoh, and I will send thee also unto the children of Israel. And Moses said unto God, Behold, when I am come unto them and shall say, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you, and they shall say What is His name? what shall I say unto them? And God said unto Moses, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you!'
'I am——!'
'I am—what?'
For centuries and centuries that question stood unanswered; that sentence remained incomplete. It was a magnificent fragment. It stood like a monument that the sculptor had never lived to finish; like a poem that the poet, dying with his music in him, had left with its closing stanzas unsung. But the sculptor ofthatfragment was not dead; the singer ofthatsong had not perished. For, behold, He liveth for evermore! And, in the fullness of time, He reappeared and filled in the gap that had so long stood blank.
'I am——!'
'I am—what?'
'I am—the Bread of Life!' 'I am—the Light of the World!' 'I am—the Door!' 'I am—the True Vine!' 'I am—the Good Shepherd!' 'I am—theWay, the Truth, and the Life!' 'I am—the Resurrection and the Life!'
And when I come to the end of the Bible, to the last book of all, I find the series supplemented and completed.
'I am—Alpha and Omega!' 'I am—A and Z!' 'I am—the Alphabet!' The symbolism of which I have spoken can rise to no greater height than that. What, I wonder, can such symbolism symbolize? I take these birthday blocks that came to our house to-day and strew the letters on my study floor. So far as any spiritual significance is concerned, they seem as dead as the dry bones in Ezekiel's Valley. And yet—'I am the Alphabet!' 'Come,' I cry, with the prophet of the captivity, 'come from theFour Winds, O Breath, and breathe upon these slain that they may live!' And the prayer has scarcely escaped my lips when lo, all the letters of the alphabet shine with a wondrous lustre and glow with a profound significance.
For see, theNorth Windbreathes upon these letters on the floor, and I see at once that they are symbols of the 'Inexhaustibility of Jesus!' 'I am Alpha and Omega!' 'I am the Alphabet!' I have sometimes stood in one of our great public libraries. I have surveyed with astonishment the serried ranks of English literature. I have looked up, and, in tier above tier, gallery above gallery, shelfabove shelf, the books climbed to the very roof, while, looking before me and behind me, they stretched as far as I could see. The catalogue containing the bare names of the books ran into several volumes. And yet the whole of this literature consists of these twenty-six letters on the floor arranged and rearranged in kaleidoscopic variety of juxtaposition. Which, I ask myself, is the greater—the literature or the alphabet? And I see at once that the alphabet is the greater because it is so inexhaustible. Literature is in its infancy. We shall produce greater poets than Shakespeare, greater novelists than Dickens, greater philosophers, historians and humorists than any who have yet written. But they will draw upon the alphabet for every letter of every syllable of every word that they write. They may multiply our literature a million-million-fold; yet the alphabet will be as far from exhaustion when the last page is finished as it was before the first writer seized a pen.
'I am—the Alphabet!' He says. He means that He cannot be exhausted.
For the love of God is broaderThan the measure of Man's mind;And the heart of the EternalIs most wonderfully kind.
For the love of God is broaderThan the measure of Man's mind;And the heart of the EternalIs most wonderfully kind.
For the love of God is broader
Than the measure of Man's mind;
And the heart of the Eternal
Is most wonderfully kind.
The ages may draw upon His grace; the men of every nation and kindred and people and tongue—a multitude that no statistician can number—maykneel in contrition at His feet; His love is as great as His power and knows neither measure nor end. He is inexhaustible.
And when theSouth Windbreathes upon these letters on the floor, I see at once that they are symbols of theIndispensability of Jesus. Literature, with all its hoarded wealth, is as inaccessible as the diamonds of the moon until I have mastered the alphabet. The alphabet is the golden key that unlocks to me all its treasures of knowledge, poetry and romance.
'I am—the Alphabet!' He says; and He says it three separate times. For the words occur thrice in the Apocalypse. In thefirstcase they refer to the unfolding of the divine revelation; in thesecondthey refer to the interpretation of historic experience; and in thethirdthey refer to the unveiled drama of the future. As the disciples discovered on the road to Emmaus, I cannot understand my Bible unless I take Him as being the key to it all; I cannot understand the processes of historical development until I have given Him the central place; I cannot anticipate with equanimity the unfoldings of the days to come until I have seen the keys of the eternities swinging at His girdle.
The alphabet is, essentially, an individual affair. In order to read a single sentence, I must learn itfor myself. My father's intimacy with the alphabetdoes not help me to enjoy the volumes on my shelves. The alphabet is indispensableto me; and so is He! There is something very pathetic and very instructive about the story that Legh Richmond tells ofThe Young Cottager. 'The rays of the morning star,' Mr. Richmond says, 'were not so beautiful in my sight as the spiritual lustre of this young Christian's character.' She was very ill when he visited her for the last time. 'There was animation in her look—there was more—something like a foretaste of heaven seemed to be felt, and gave an inexpressible character of spiritual beauty even in death.'
'Where is your hope, my child?' Mr. Richmond asked, in the course of that last conversation.
'Lifting up her finger,' he says, 'she pointed to heaven, and then directed the same finger downward to her own heart, saying successively as she did so, "Christ there!" and "Christ here!" These words, accompanied by the action, spoke her meaning more solemnly than can easily be conceived.'
In life and in death He is our one indispensability. In relation to this world, and in relation to the world that is to come, He stands to the soul as the alphabet stands in relation to literature.
And when the East Wind breathes upon these letters on the floor, I see at once that they are symbols of theInvincibility of Jesus. 'I am—A and Z!' He is at the beginning, that is to say,and He goes right through to the end. There is nothing in the alphabet before A; there is nothing after Z. However far back your evolutionary interpretation of the universe may place the beginning of things, you will find Him there. However remote your interpretation of prophecy may make the end of things, you will find Him there. He goes right through. The story of the ages—past, present and future—may be told in a sentence: 'Christ first, Christ last, and nought between but Christ.' Having begun, He completes. He is the Author and Finisher of our faith. He sets His face like a flint. Nothing daunts, deters, or dismays Him. 'I am confident,' Paul says, 'of this very thing, that He which hath begun a good work in you will perform it unto the end.' He never halts at H or L or P or X; he goes right through to Z. He never gives up.
But the greatest comfort of all comes to me on the Wings of theWestWind. For, when the West Wind breathes upon these letters on the floor, I see at once that they are symbols of theAdaptability of Jesus. The lover takes these twenty-six letters and makes them the vehicle for the expression of his passion; the poet transforms them into a song that shall be sung for centuries; the judge turns them into a sentence of death. In the hands of each they mold themselves to his necessity. The alphabet is the most fluid, the most accommodating,the most plastic, the most adaptable contrivance on the planet. Just because, in common with every man breathing, I possess a distinctive individuality, I sometimes feel as no man ever felt before, and I express myself in language such as no man ever used. And the beauty of the alphabet is that it adapts itself to my individual need. And that is precisely the beauty of Jesus. 'I am—the Alphabet!' I may not have sinned more than others; but I have sinned differently. The experiences of others never sound convincing; they do not quite reflect my case. But, like the alphabet, He adapts Himself toeverycase. He is the very Saviour I need.