Frank Boreham

[207]
I
A BOX OF TIN SOLDIERS

No philosophy is worth its salt unless it can make a boy forget that he has the toothache; and the philosophy which I am about to introduce has triumphantly survived that exacting ordeal. That Jack had the toothache everybody knew. The expression of his anguish resounded dismally through the neighbourhood; the evidence of it was visible in his swollen and distorted countenance. Poor Jack! All the standard cures—old-fashioned and new-fangled—had been tried in vain; all but one. It was that one that at last relieved the pain, and it is of that one that I now write. It happened that Jack was within a week of his birthday. His parents, who are busy people, might easily have overlooked that interesting circumstance had not Jack chanced to allude to it at every opportune and inopportune moment during the previous month or so. Indeed, to guard against accidents, Jack had enlivened the conversation at the breakfast-table morning by morning with really ingenious conjectures as to the presents by which his personal friends might conceivably accompany their congratulations. His [208] expressions of disappointment in certain supposititious cases, and of unbounded delight in others, was quite affecting.

Now Jack’s father is afflicted by a wholesome dread of shopping. If a purchase must needs be made, Jack’s mother has to make it. But Jack’s mother labours under one severe disability. As Jack himself often tells her—and certainly he ought to know—she doesn’t understand boys. The difficulty is therefore surmounted on this wise. Jack’s mother visits the emporium; carefully avoids all those goods and chattels of which she has heard her son speak with such withering disdain; selects eight or ten of the articles that he has chanced to mention in tones of undisguised approval; orders these to be sent on approval at an hour at which Jack will be sure to be at school; and leaves to her husband the responsibility of making the final decision. Now this unwieldy parcel was still lying under the bed in the spare room on that fateful morning when Jack became smitten with toothache. Every other nostrum having failed, the mind of Jack’s mother strangely turned to the toys beneath the bed. A woman’s mind is an odd piece of mechanism, and works in strange ways. No doctor under the sun would dream of prescribing a box of tin soldiers as a remedy for toothache; yet the mind of Jack’s mother fastened upon that box of tin [209] soldiers. It was just as cheap as some of the other remedies to which they had so desperately resorted; and it could not possibly be less efficacious. And there would still be plenty of toys to choose from for the birthday present. Out came the box of soldiers, and off went Jack in greatest glee. Half an hour later his mother found him in the back garden. He had dug a trench two inches deep, piling up the earth in protective heaps in front of it. All along the trench stood the little tin soldiers heroically defying the armies of the universe. And the toothache was ancient history!

Jack managed to get his little tin soldiers into a tiny two-inch trench; but, as a matter of serious fact, those diminutive warriors have occupied a really great place in the story of this little world. Bagehot somewhere draws a pathetic picture of crowds of potential authors who, having the time, the desire, and the ability to write, are yet unable for the life of them to think of anything to write about. Let one of these unfortunates bend his unconsecrated energies to the writing of a book on the influence of toys in the making of men. Only the other day an antiquarian, digging away in the neighbourhood of the Pyramids, came upon an old toy-chest. Here were dolls, and soldiers, and wooden animals, and, indeed, all the playthings that make up the stock-in-trade of a modern nursery. [210] It is pleasant to think of those small Egyptians in the days of the Pharaohs amusing themselves with the selfsame toys that beguiled our own childhood. It is pleasant to think of the place of the toy-chest in the history of the world from that remote time down to our own.

But I must not be deflected into a discussion of the whole tremendous subject of toys. I must stick to these little tin soldiers. And these small metallic warriors cut a really brave figure in our history. Some of the happiest days in Robert Louis Stevenson’s happy life were the days that he spent as a boy in his grandfather’s manse at Colinton. ‘That was my golden age!’ he used to say. He never forgot the rickety old phaeton that drove into Edinburgh to fetch him; the lovely scenery on either side of the winding country road; or the excited welcome that always awaited him when he drove up to the manse door. But most vividly of all he remembered the box of tin soldiers; the marshalling of huge armies on the great mahogany table; the play of strategy; the furious combat; and the final glorious victory. The old gentleman sat back in his spacious arm-chair, cracking his nuts and sipping his wine, whilst his imaginative little grandson in his velvet suit controlled the movements of armies and the fates of empires. The love of those little tin soldiers never forsook him. Later on, at Davos, [211] an exile from home, fighting bravely against that terrible malady that had marked him as its prey, it was to the little tin soldiers that he turned for comfort. ‘The tin soldiers most took his fancy,’ says Mr. Lloyd Osbourne, ‘and the war game was constantly improved and elaborated, until, from a few hours, a war took weeks to play, and the critical operations in the attic monopolized half our thoughts. On the floor a map was roughly drawn in chalks of different colours, with mountains, rivers, towns, bridges, and roads in two colours. The mimic battalions marched and countermarched, changed by measured evolutions from column formation into line, with cavalry screens in front and massed supports behind in the most approved military fashion of to-day. It was war in miniature, even to the making and destruction of bridges; the entrenching of camps; good and bad weather, with corresponding influence on the roads; siege and horse artillery, proportionately slow, as compared with the speed of unimpeded foot, and proportionately expensive in the upkeep; and an exacting commissariat added the last touch of verisimilitude.’ Those little tin soldiers marched up and down the whole of Robert Louis Stevenson’s life. They were with him in boyhood at Colinton; they were with him in maturity at Davos; and they were in at the death. For, in the familiar house at Vailima, the house on the [212] top of the hill, the house from which his gentle spirit passed away, there was one room dedicated to the little tin soldiers. The great coloured map monopolized the floor, and the tiny regiments marched or halted at their frail commander’s will.

One could multiply examples almost endlessly. We need not have followed Robert Louis Stevenson half-way round the world. We might have visited Ireland and seen Mr. Parnell’s box of toys. Everybody knows the story of his victory over his sister. Fanny commanded one division of tin soldiers on the nursery floor; Charles led the opposing force. Each general was possessed of a popgun, and swept the serried lines of the enemy with this terrible weapon. For several days the war continued without apparent advantage being gained by either side. But one day everything was changed. Strange as it may seem, Fanny’s soldiers fell by the score and by the hundred, while those commanded by her brother refused to waver even when palpably hit. This went on until Fanny’s army was utterly annihilated. But Charles confessed, an hour later, that, before opening fire that morning, he had taken the precaution to glue the feet of his soldiers to the nursery floor! Did somebody discover in those war games at Colinton, Davos, and Vailima a reflection, as in a mirror, of the adventurous spirit of Robert Louis Stevenson? Or, even more clearly, [213] did somebody see, in that famous fight on the nursery floor at Avondale, a forecast of the great Irish leader’s passionate fondness for outwitting his antagonists and overwhelming his bewildered foe?

Then let us glance at one other picture, and we shall see what we shall see! We are in Russia now. It is at the close of the seventeenth century. Yonder is a boy of whom the world will one day talk till its tongue is tired. They will call him Peter the Great. See, he gathers together all the boys of the neighbourhood and plays with them. Plays—but at what? ‘He plays soldiers, of course,’ says Waliszewski, ‘and, naturally, he was in command. Behold him, then, at the head of a regiment! Out of this childish play rose that mighty creation, the Russian army. Yes,’ our Russian author goes on to exclaim, ‘yes, this double point of departure—the pseudo-naval games on the lake of Pereislavl, and the pseudo-military games on the Preobrajenskoie drill-ground—led to the double goal—the Conquest of the Baltic and the Battle of Poltava!’ Yes, to these, and to how much else? When Jack cures his toothache with a box of soldiers, who knows what world-shaking evolutions are afoot?

And now the time has come to make a serious investigation. Why is Jack—taking Jack now as the federal head and natural representative of Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Stewart Parnell, [214] Peter the Great, and all the boys who ever were, are, or will be—why is Jack so inordinately fond of a box of soldiers? By what magic have those tiny tin campaigners the power to exorcise the agonies of toothache? Now look; the answer is simple, and it is twofold. The small metallic warriors appeal to the innate love of Conquest and to the innate love of Command. And in that innate love of Conquest is summed up all Jack’s future relationship to his foes. And in that innate love of Command is summed up all his future relationship to his friends. For long, long ago, in the babyhood of the world, God spoke to man for the first time. And in that very first sentence, God said, ‘Subdue the earth and have dominion!’ ‘Subdue!’—that is Conquest; ‘have dominion!’—that is Command. And since the first man heard those martial words, ‘Subdue and have dominion!’ the passions of the conqueror and the commander have tingled in the blood of the race. They have been awakened in Jack by the box of soldiers. He feels that he is born to fight, born to struggle, born to overcome, born to triumph, born to command. And that fighting instinct will never really desert him. It will follow him, as it followed Stevenson, from infancy to death. He may put it to evil uses. He may fight the wrong people, or fight the wrong things. But that only shows how vital a business is his training. A naval [215] officer has to spend half his time familiarizing himself with the appearance of all our British battleships, in all lights and at all angles, so that he may never be misled, amidst the confusion of battle, into opening fire upon his comrades. As Jack looks up to us from his little two-inch trenches, his innocent eyes seem to appeal eloquently for similar tuition.

‘Teach me what those forces are that I have to conquer,’ he seems to say, ‘then teach me what forces I have to command, and I will spend all my days in the Holy War.’

And, depend upon it, if we can show Jack how to bend to his will all the mysterious forces at his disposal, and to recognize at a glance all the alien forces that are ranged against him, we shall see him one day among the conquerors who, with songs of victory on their lips and with palms in their hands, share the rapture of the world’s last triumph.

It seems an odd mixture at first glance; but it isn’t mine. Mr. Wilkie Collins is responsible for the amazing hotch-potch. ‘What do you say,’ he asks in The Moonstone, ‘what do you say when our county member, growing hot, at cheese and salad time, about the spread of democracy in England, burst out as follows: “If we once lose our ancient safeguards, Mr. Blake, I beg to ask you, what have we got left?” And what do you say to Mr. Franklin answering, from the Italian point of view, “We have got three things left, sir—Love, Music, and Salad”’? I confess that, when first I came upon this curious conglomeration, I thought that Mr. Franklin meant Love, Music, and Salad to stand for a mere incomprehensible confusion, a meaningless jumble. I examined the sentence a second time, however, and began to suspect that there was at least some method in his madness. And now that I scrutinize it still more closely, I feel ashamed of my first hasty judgement. I can see that Love, Music, and Salad are the fundamental elements of [217] the solar system; and, as Mr. Franklin suggests, so long as they are left to us we can afford to smile at any political convulsions that may chance to overtake us.

Love, Music, and Salad are the three biggest things in life. Mr. Franklin has not only outlined the situation with extraordinary precision, but he has placed these three basic factors in their exact scientific order. Love comes first. Indeed, we only come because Love calls for us. We find it waiting with outstretched arms on arrival. It smothers our babyhood with kisses, and hedges our infancy about with its ceaseless ministry of doting affection. Love is the beginning of everything; I need not labour that point. Where there is no love there is neither music nor salad, nor anything else worth writing about.

Mr. Franklin was indisputably right in putting Love first, and immediately adding Music. You cannot imagine Love without Music. I am hoping that one of these days one of our philosophers will give us a book on the language that does not need learning. There is room for a really fine volume on that captivating theme. Henry Drummond has a most fascinating and characteristic essay on The Evolution of Language; but from my present standpoint it is sadly disappointing. From first to last Drummond works on the assumption that [218] human language is a thing of imitation and acquisition. The foundation of it all, he tells us, is in the forest. Man heard the howl of the dog, the neigh of the horse, the bleat of the lamb, the stamp of the goat; and he deliberately copied these sounds. He noticed, too, that each animal has sounds specially adapted for particular occasions. One monkey, we are told, utters at least six different sounds to express its feelings; and Darwin discovered four or five modulations in the bark of the dog. ‘There is the bark of eagerness, as in the chase; that of anger, as well as growling; the yelp or howl of despair, as when shut up; the baying at night; the bark of joy, as when starting on a walk with his master; and the very distinct one of demand or supplication, as when wishing for a door or window to be opened.’ Drummond appears to assume that primitive man listened to these sounds and copied them, much as a child speaks of the bow-wow, the moo-moo, the quack-quack, the tick-tick, and the puff-puff. But in all this we leave out of our reckoning one vital factor. The most expressive language that we ever speak is the language that we never learned. As Darwin himself points out, there are certain simple and vivid feelings which we express, and express with the utmost clearness, but without any kind of reference to our higher intelligence. ‘Our cries of pain, fear, surprise, [219] anger, together with their appropriate actions, and the murmur of a mother to her beloved child, are more expressive than any words.’

Is not this a confession of the fact that the soul, in its greatest moments, speaks a language, not of imitation or of acquisition, but one that it brought with it, a language of its own? The language that we learn varies according to nationality. The speech of a Chinaman is an incomprehensible jargon to a Briton; the utterance of a Frenchman is a mere riot of sound to a Hindu. The language that we learn is affected even by dialects, so that a man in one English county finds it by no means easy to interpret the speech of a visitor from another. It is even affected by rank and position; the speech of the plough-boy is one thing, the speech of the courtier is quite another. So confusing is the language that we learn! But let a man speak in the language that needs no learning; and all the world will understand him. The cry of a child in pain is the same in Iceland as in India, in Hobart as in Timbuctoo! The soft and wordless crooning of a mother as she lulls her babe to rest; the scream of a man in mortal anguish; the sudden outburst of uncontrollable laughter; the sigh of regret; the titter of amusement; and the piteous cry of a broken heart,—these know neither nationality nor rank nor station. They are the same in castle as in [220] cottage; in Tasmania as in Thibet; in the world’s first morning as in the world’s last night. The most expressive language, the only language in which the soul itself ever really speaks, is a language without alphabet or grammar. It needs neither to be learned nor taught, for all men speak it, and all men understand.

Was that, consciously or subconsciously, at the back of Mr. Franklin’s mind when he put Music next to Love? Certain it is that, in that unwritten language which is greater than all speech, Music is the natural expression of Love. Why is there music in the grove and the forest? It is because love is there. The birds never sing so sweetly as during the mating season. For awhile the male bird hovers about the person of his desired bride, and pours out an incessant torrent of song in the fond hope of one day winning her; and when his purpose is achieved, he goes on singing for very joy that she is his. And afterwards he ‘gallantly perches near the little home, pouring forth his joy and pride, sweetly singing to his mate as she sits within the nest, patiently hatching her brood.’ Both in men and women it is at the approach of the love-making age that the voice suddenly develops, and it is when the deepest chords in the soul are first struck that the richest and fullest notes can be sung.

Music, then, is the natural concomitant of Love. [221] That is why most of our songs are love-songs. If a man is in love he can no more help singing than a bird can help flying. You cannot love anything without singing about it. Men love God; that is why we have hymn-books. Men love women; that is why we have ballads. Men love their country; that is why we have national anthems and patriotic airs.

But the stroke of genius in Mr. Franklin lay in the addition of the Salad. If he had contented himself with Love and Music, he would have uttered a truth, and a great truth; but it would have been a commonplace truth. As it is, he lifts the whole thing into the realm of brilliance—and reality. For, after all, of what earthly use are Love and Music unless they lead to Salad? When to Love and Music Mr. Franklin shrewdly added Salad, he put himself in line with the greatest philosophers of all time. Bishop Butler told us years ago that if we allow emotions which are designed to lead to action to become excited, and no action follows, the very excitation of that emotion without its appropriate response leaves the heart much harder than it was before. And, more recently, our brilliant Harvard Professor, Dr. William James, has warned us that it is a very damaging thing for the mind to receive an impression without giving that impression an adequate and commensurate expression. If you go to a [222] concert, he says, and hear a lovely song that deeply moves you, you ought to pay some poor person’s tram fare on the way home. It is a natural as well as a psychological law. The earth, for example, receives the impression represented by the fall of autumn leaves, the descent of sap from the bough, and the widespread decay of wintry desolation. But she hastens to give expression to this impression by all the wealth and plenitude of her glorious spring array.

The New Testament gives us a great story which exactly illustrates my point. It is a very graceful and tender record, full of Love and Music, but containing also something more than Love and Music. For when Dorcas died all the widows stood weeping in the chamber of death, showing the coats that Dorcas had made while she was yet with them. Dorcas was a Jewess. At one time she had been taught to regard the name of Jesus as a thing to be abhorred and accursed. But later on a wonderful experience befell her. Could she ever forget the day on which, amidst a whirl of spiritual bewilderment and a tempest of spiritual emotion, she had discovered, in the very Messiah whom once she had despised, her Saviour and her Lord? It was a day never to be forgotten, a day full of Love and Music. How could she produce an expression adequate to that wonderful impression? Not in words; for [223] she was not gifted with speech. Yet an expression must be found. It would have been a fatal thing for the delicate soul of Dorcas if so turgid a flood of feeling had found no apt and natural outlet. And in that crisis she thought of her needle. She expressed her love for the Lord in the occupation most familiar to her. It was a kind of storage of energy. Dorcas wove her love for her Lord into every stitch, and a tender thought into every stitch, and a fervent prayer into every stitch. And that spiritual storage escaped through warm coats and neat garments into the hearts and homes of these widows and poor folk along the coast, and they learned the depth and tenderness of the divine love from the deft finger-tips of Dorcas.

Salad is the natural and fitting outcome of Love and Music. I have already confessed that when first I came upon the triune conjunction I thought it rather an incongruous medley, a strange hotch-potch, an ill-assorted company. That is the worst of judging things in a hurry. The eye does the work of the brain, and does it badly. It is a common failing of ours. Look at the torrent of toothless jokes that have been directed at the contrast between the romance of courtship and the domestic realities that follow. The former, according to the traditional estimate, consists of billing and cooing, of fervent protestations and radiant dreams, of romantic [224] loveliness and honeyed phrases. The latter, according to the same traditional view, consists of struggle and anxiety, of drudgery and menial toil, of broken nights with tiresome children, of nerve-racking anxiety and an endless sequence of troubles. He who looks at life in this way makes precisely the same mistake that I myself made when I first saw Mr. Franklin’s Love, Music, and Salad, and thought it a higgledy-piggledy hotch-potch. It is nothing of the kind. Love naturally leads to Music; and Love and Music naturally lead to Salad. Courtship leads to the cradle and the kitchen, it is true; but both cradle and kitchen are glorified and consecrated by the courtship that has gone before. Our English homes, take them for all in all, are the loveliest things in the world.

The merry homes of England!

Around their hearths by night,

What gladsome looks of household love

Meet in the ruddy light!

There woman’s voice flows forth in song,

Or childhood’s tale is told;

Or lips move tunefully along

Some glorious page of old.

Here is a picture of Love, Music, and Salad in perfect combination. And what a secret lies behind it! The fact is that the heathen world has nothing at all corresponding to our English sweethearting. [225] Men and women are thrown into each other’s arms by barter, by compact, by conquest, and in a thousand ways. In one land a man buys his bride; in another he fights as the brutes do for the mate of his fancy; in yet another he takes her without seeing her, it was so ordained. Only in a land that has felt the spell of the influence of Jesus would sweethearting, as we know it, be possible. The pure and charming freedom of social intercourse; the liberty to yield to the mystic magnetism that draws the one to the other, and the other to the one; the coy approach; the shy exchanges; the arm-in-arm walks, and the heart-to-heart talks; the growing admiration; the deepening passion; culminating at last in the fond formality of the engagement and the rapture of ultimate union; in what land, unsweetened by the power of the gospel, would such a procedure be possible? And the consequence is that our homes stand in such striking contrast to the homes of heathen peoples. ‘There are no homes in Asia!’ Mr. W.H. Seward, the American statesman, exclaimed sadly, fifty years ago. It is scarcely true now, for Christ is gaining on Asia every day; and the missionaries confess that the greatest propagating power that the gospel possesses is the gracious though silent witness of the Christian homes. Human life is robbed of all animalism and baseness when true [226] love enters. And there is no true love apart from the highest love of all.

Salad may seem a prosaic thing to follow on the heels of Love and Music; but the salad that has been prepared by fingers that one thinks it heaven to kiss is tinged and tinctured with the flavour of romance. All through life, Love makes life’s Music. All through life, Love and Music lead to Salad. And, all through life, Love and Music glorify the Salad to which they lead. They transmute it by this magic into such a dish as many a king has sighed for all his days, but sighed in vain.

I was strolling with some friends up a lovely avenue in the bush this afternoon, when a quite unexpected experience befell us. On either side of the narrow track the tall trees jostled each other at such close quarters that, when we looked up, only a ribbon of sky could be seen above our heads. The tree-tops almost arched over us. Straight before us was a hill surmounted by a number of gigantic blue-gums, only one or two of which were visible in the limited section of the landscape which the foliage about us permitted us to survey. As we sauntered leisurely along the leafy path, thinking of anything but the objects immediately surrounding us, we were suddenly startled by a loud and ominous creaking and straining. Looking hastily up, we saw one of the giant trees falling, and describing in its fall an enormous arc against the clear sky ahead of us. What a crash as the toppling monster strikes the tree-tops among which it falls! What a thud as the huge thing hits the ground! What a roar as it rolls over the hill, bearing down all lesser growths before it! Our first impression was that the tree had [228] been reduced by natural forces; but we soon discovered that it had been deliberately destroyed! The men were already at work upon a second magnificent fellow; and we waited until he too was prostrate.

Nothing in the solar system suggests such a mixture of emotion as the felling of a great tree. In a way, it is pleasant and exhilarating, or why was Mr. Gladstone so fond of the exercise? And why were we so eager to stay until the second tree was down? Richard Jefferies, who hated to destroy things, and often could not bring himself to pull the trigger of his gun, nevertheless felt the fascination of the axe. ‘Much as I admired the timber about the Chace,’ he says, ‘I could not help sometimes wishing to have a chop at it. The pleasure of felling trees is never lost. In youth, in manhood, so long as the arm can wield the axe, the enjoyment is equally keen. As the heavy tool passes over the shoulder, the impetus of the swinging motion lightens the weight, and something like a thrill passes through the sinews. Why is it so pleasant to strike? What secret instinct is it that makes the delivery of a blow with axe or hammer so exhilarating?’ What indeed! For certainly a wild delight makes the heart beat faster, and sends the blood bounding through the veins, as one sees the axes flash, the chips fly, the gash grow deeper, and [229] notices at last the first slow movement of the glorious tree.

And yet I confess that, mixed with this pungent sense of pleasure, there was a still deeper emotion. The thing seems so irreparable. It is easy enough to destroy these monarchs of the bush, but who can restore them to their former grandeur? It must have been this sense of sadness that led Beaconsfield—Gladstone’s famous protagonist—to ordain in his will that none of his beloved trees at Hughenden should ever be cut down. How long had these trees stood here, these two giants that had been in a few moments reduced to humiliating horizontality? I cannot tell. They must have been here when all these hills and valleys were peopled only by the aboriginals. They saw the black man prowl about the bush. From the hill here, overlooking the bay, they must have seen Captain Cook’s ships cast anchor down the stream. They watched the coming of the white men; they saw the convict ships arrive with their dismal freight of human wretchedness; they witnessed the swift and tragic extermination of the native race; they beheld a nation spring into being at their feet! Did the great trees know that, as the white men exterminated the black men, so the white men would exterminate them? Did they feel that the coming of those strange vessels up the bay sealed [230] their own doom? Before the new-comers could build their homes, or lay out their farms, or plant their orchards, they must make war on the trees with fire and axe. Homes and nations can only be built by sacrifice, and the trees are the innocent victims.

I suppose that the sadness arises partly from the fact that the forest is Man’s oldest and most faithful friend, and one towards whom he is inclined to turn with ever-increasing reverence and affection as the years go by. With the advance of the years we all turn wistfully back to the things that charmed our infancy, and the race obeys that selfsame primal law. Almost every nation on the face of the earth traces its history back to the forest primaeval. From the forest we sprang; and by the forest we were originally sustained. And even when at length the primitive race issued from those leafy recesses and devoted itself to agriculture and to commerce, men still regarded their ancient fastnesses as the storehouse from which they drew everything that was essential to their progress and development. Man found the forest his warehouse, his factory, his armoury, his all. With logs that he felled in the bush he built his first primitive home; out of branches that he tore from the trees he fashioned his first implements and tools; and when the tranquillity that brooded over his pastoral simplicity [231] was broken by the shout of discord and the noise of tumult, it was to those selfsame woods that he rushed for his first crude weapons of defence. Architecture, agriculture, invention, and military ingenuity have each of them made enormous strides since then; but it was in the bush that each of these potent makers of our destiny was born. And did not John Smeaton confess that he borrowed from the graceful curve of the oak as it rises from the ground the main idea that characterized the construction of the Eddystone lighthouse? Whenever the architect, the farmer, the inventor, or the soldier desires to visit the scenes amidst which his craft spent its earliest infancy, it will be to the forest primaeval that he will turn his steps. Of medicine, too, the same may be said; for, in those long and leisured days of sylvan quiet, men learned the secrets of the bark and discovered the healing virtues that slept in the swaying leaves; and straightway the forest became a pharmacy. When, exhausted by his labour, or enervated by unaccustomed conditions, his health failed him, Man resorted for his first drugs and tonics to his ancient home among the trees. Indeed, he still returns to the forest to be nursed and tended in his hour of sickness.

Those who have read Gene Stratton Porter’s Harvester know what wonders lurk in the woods. The Harvester lived away in the forest, and from [232] bark and gum and sap and leaf he collected the tonics and anodynes and stimulants that he sold to the chemists in the great cities. And after awhile every tree that he felled seemed to him such a wealthy store of healing virtue that, when he began to think of his dream-girl and his future home, he could scarcely bring himself to build his cabin out of logs that were so overflowing with medicinal properties. He was in love, and all the tumultuous emotions awakened by that great experience were surging through his veins; and yet it seemed to him an act of sacrilege to cut chairs and tables out of such sacred things as trees! He apologetically explained the delicacy of the situation to each oak and ash before lifting his axe against it.

‘You know how I hate to kill you!’ he said to the first one he felled. ‘But it must be legitimate, you know, for a man to take enough trees to build a home. And no other house is possible for a creature of the woods but a cabin, is it? The birds use the material they find here; and surely I have a right to do the same. Nothing else would serve, at least for me. I was born and reared here, and I’ve always loved you!’

But for all that, he felt, as the fragrant chips flew in all directions, just as a man might feel who killed a pet lamb for the table; and the Harvester could scarcely reconcile himself to his iconoclastic work. [233] In Medicine Woods he had learned the awful sanctity of the forest, the forest that was the home and nurse and mother of us all, and it seemed to him a dreadful thing to slay a tree. Frazer tells us in his Golden Bough that the Ojibwa Indians very rarely cut down green or living trees; they fancy that it puts the poor things to such pain. And some of their medicine men aver that, with their mysterious powers of hearing, they have heard the wailing and the screaming of the trees beneath the axe. Mr. Adams, too, in his Israel’s Ideal, has reminded us that, in Eastern Africa, the destruction of the cocoanut-tree is regarded as a form of matricide, since that tree gives men life and nourishment as a mother does her child. The early Greek philosophers, Aristotle and Plutarch, watching the rustling of the leaves and the swaying of the graceful branches, came to the conclusion that trees are sentient things possessed of living souls. And, in his Tales for Children, Tolstoy makes as pathetic a scene out of the death of a great tree as many a novelist makes out of the death of a gallant hero.

Now it must have been out of this strange feeling—this dim consciousness of a sacredness that haunted the leafy solitudes—that Man came to regard the forest with superstitious gratitude and veneration. The bush represented to him the source of all his supplies, the reservoir that met all his demands, [234] the means of all healing, and the very fountain of life. And so he plunged into the depths of the forest and erected his temples there; in its shady groves he reared his solemn altars; in its leafy glades he built his shrines; and the imagery of the forest wove itself into the vocabulary of his devotion. The representation of a sacred tree occurs repeatedly, carved upon the stony ruins of Egyptian, Assyrian, and Phoenician temples, and Herodotus more than once remarks upon the frequency of tree-worship among the ancient peoples. Pliny, too, marvelled at the reverence which the Druids felt for the oak, and, in a scarcely less degree, for the holly, the ash, and the birch. And what stirring passages those are in which George Borrow describes the weird rites and dark symbolism of the gipsies as they worshipped at dead of night in the fearsome recesses of the pine forests of Spain!

It is really not surprising that this haunting sense of sanctity in the woods should lead Man to worship there. Even Emerson felt that—

The Gods talk in the breath of the woods,

They talk in the shaken pine.

And the Harvester himself found the forest to be instinct with moral and spiritual potencies. ‘You not only discover miracles and marvels in the woods,’ he said, ‘but you get the greatest lessons taught [235] in all the world ground into you early and alone—courage, caution, and patience.’ Here, then, we have the trees as teachers and preachers, and many a man has learned the deepest lessons of his life at the feet of these shrewd and silent philosophers. What about Brother Lawrence, whose Practice of the Presence of God has become one of the Church’s classics? ‘The first time I saw Brother Lawrence,’ writes his friend, ‘was upon August 3, 1666. He told me that God had done him a singular favour in his conversion at the age of eighteen. It happened in this way. One winter morning, seeing a tree stripped of its leaves, and considering that within a little time the leaves would be renewed, and that after that the flowers and fruit would appear, he received a high view of the providence and power of God, which has never since been effaced from his soul.’ What God could do for the leafless tree, he thought, He could also do for him.

Milton tells us that the forest, which has played so large a part in the development of this world, will flourish also in the next.

In heaven the trees

Of life ambrosial fruitage bear, and vines

Yield nectar.

And, having all this in mind, is it not pleasant to notice that the very last chapter of the Bible tells [236] of the tree that waves by the side of the river of life? There is something sacramental about trees. George Gissing says that Odysseus cutting down the olive in order to build for himself a home is a picture of man performing a supreme act of piety. ‘Through all the ages,’ he says, ‘that picture must retain its profound significance.’ The trees of Medicine Woods yielded up their life to the Harvester’s axe, that he and his dream-girl might dwell in security and bliss. And, on a green hill far away without a city wall, another tree was cut down years ago, that it might represent to all men everywhere the means of grace and the hope of glory. And even more than all the other trees, the leaves of that tree are for the healing of the nations.

We were sitting round the fire last night when a boy came rushing up the street shouting, ‘The latest war news.’ I went to the door, bought a paper, and settled down again to read it. All at once the word ‘siege’ caught my eye, and, after glancing over the cablegram to which it referred, I lay back in the chair and allowed my mind to roam among the romantic recollections that the great word had suggested. I thought of the Siege of Lucknow in the East, of the Siege of Mexico in the West, and of the Siege of Londonderry midway between. Who that has once read the thrilling narratives of these famous exploits can resist the temptation occasionally to set his fancy free to revisit the scenes of those tremendous struggles? My reverie was rudely interrupted.

‘Run along, Wroxie, dear, it’s past bedtime!’ a maternal voice from the opposite chair suddenly expostulated.

‘But, mother, I must do my Scripture-lesson, and I’ve nearly finished!’[238]
‘What have you to do, Wroxie?’ I inquired, appointing myself arbitrator on the instant.

‘I have to learn these eight verses of the hundred and nineteenth Psalm!’

‘Well, read them aloud to us, and then run off to bed!’ I commanded.

She read. I am afraid I had no ears for any of the later verses. For among the very first words that she read were these: ‘I rejoice at Thy Word as one that findeth great spoil.’ I had read those familiar words hundreds of times, but it was like passing a closed door. But to-night my memories of the great historic sieges supplied me with the key. ‘As one that findeth great spoil’ ... ‘findeth great spoil’ ... ‘great spoil.’ That one word ‘spoil’ supplied me with the magic key. I applied it; the door flew open; and I saw that in the text which I had never seen before. The lesson came to an end; the girlish tones subsided; the reader kissed me good-night, and scampered off to bed, her mother leaving the room in her company; and I was left once more to my own imaginings.

But my fancy flew in quite a fresh direction. The text had done for my imprisoned mind what Noah did for the imprisoned dove. It had opened a window of escape, and I was at liberty to go where I had never been before. ‘Spoil!’—at the sound of that magic word the doors of truth swung open as [239] the great door of the robbers’ dungeon in The Forty Thieves yielded to the sound of ‘Open, Sesame!’ A landscape may be mirrored in a dewdrop; and here, in this arresting phrase, I suddenly discovered all the picturesque colour and stirring movement of a great siege. I saw the bastions and the drawbridges; the fortified walls and the frowning ramparts; the lofty parapets and the stately towers. I watched the fierce assault of the besiegers and the tumultuous sally of the garrison. I heard the clash and din of strife. I marked the long, grim struggle against impending starvation. And then, at last, I saw the white flag flown. The proud city has fallen; the garrison has surrendered; the gates are thrown open to the investing forces; and the conqueror rides triumphantly in to seize his splendid prize! His followers fall eagerly upon their booty, and grasp with greedy hands at every glint of treasure that presents itself to their rapacious eyes. Spoil; spoil; Spoil! ‘I rejoice at Thy Word as one that findeth great spoil!’

I

Now the most notable point about this metaphor is that the city only yields up its treasure after long resistance. The besieger does not find the city waiting with open gates to welcome him. It slams [240] those gates in his face; bars, bolts, and barricades them; and settles down to keep him at bay as long as possible. The stubbornness of its brave resistance lends an added sweetness to the final triumph of its conqueror; but, whilst it lasts, that resistance is very baffling and vexatious. All the best things in life follow the same strange law. See how the soil resists the farmer! It stiffens itself against his approach, so that only in the sweat of his brow can he plough and harrow it. It garrisons itself with swarms of insect pests, so that his attempts to subjugate it shall be rendered as ineffective and unfruitful as possible. It extends eager hospitality to every noxious seed that falls upon its surface. It encourages all the farmer’s enemies, and fights against all his allies. Labour makes the harvest sweeter, it is true; but whilst it is in progress it is none the less exhausting. It is only by breaking down the obstinate resistance of the unwilling soil that the farmer achieves the golden triumph of harvest-time. The miner passes through the same trying experience. The earth has nothing to gain by holding her gold and her diamonds, her copper and her coal, in such a tight clutch. Yet she makes the work of the miner a desperate and dangerous business. He takes his life in his hand as he descends the shaft. The peril and the toil add a greater value to the booty, I confess; but the work of the [241] dark mine is none the less trying on that account. He who would grasp the treasures that lie buried in the bowels of the earth must first break down the most determined and dogged resistance. And the treasures of the mind also follow this curious law. There is no royal road to learning. Knowledge resists the intruder. It presents an exterior that is altogether revolting, and only the brave persist in the attack. The text-books of the schools are rarely set to music; they do not tingle with romance. They look as dry as dust, and they are often even more arid than they look. I remember that, in my college days, the student who sat next to me on the old familiar benches suddenly died. He was brilliant; I was not. And when I heard that he had gone, the first thought that occurred to me was a peculiar one. Had all his knowledge perished with him? I asked myself. I thought of the problems that he had mastered, but with which I was still grappling. Could he not have bequeathed to me the fruits of his patient and hard-won victories? No; it could not be. The city must be patiently besieged and gallantly stormed before it will surrender. The coveted diploma may be all the sweeter afterwards as a result of so long and persistent a struggle; but that fact does not at the time relieve the tedium or lessen the intolerable drudgery. Knowledge seems so good and so desirable a thing; yet it resists the [242] aspiring student with such pitiless and unsympathetic pertinacity.

Even love behaves in the same way. The lady keeps her lover at arm’s length. She would rather die than not be his, but she must guard her modesty at all hazards. She must not make herself too cheap. She assumes a frigidity that is in hopeless conflict with the warmth of her real sentiments. Her apparent indifference and repeated rebuffs nearly drive her poor wooer to distraction. Her kisses are all the sweeter later on when she is delightfully and avowedly his own; but whilst the siege of her affections lasts the torment almost wrecks his reason. It is really no hypocrisy on her part. It is the recognition of a true instinct. All the best things resist us, and their resistance has to be overcome. And the psalmist declares that even the divine Word treated him in the selfsame way. It did not entice, allure, fascinate; that is usually the policy of evil things. No; it repelled, resisted, dared him! And it was not until he had conquered that hostility that he entered into his triumph. It was in the carcase of the fierce lion he had previously destroyed that Samson found the honey that was so sweet to his taste. We generally find our spoil in the cities that slammed their great gates in our faces.

[243]
II

But the city capitulates for all that. It may hold out stubbornly, and for long, but it always yields at the last. It was so ordained. The soil was meant to resist the farmer; but it was also meant to yield to the farmer at length, and to furnish him with his proud and delightful prize. The minerals are hidden so cleverly, and buried so deeply, not that they may successfully elude the vigilance and skill of the heroic miner, but in order that he may justly prize the precious metals when they fall at last into his hands. The student’s tedious struggle after knowledge is made so painful a process, not to deter or defeat him, but so that, side by side with the acquisition of learning, he may develop those faculties of brain and intellect which can alone qualify him to wield with wisdom the erudition that he is now so laboriously amassing. The lady treats her poor lover with such seeming disdain, not by any means to dishearten him, but that she may make quite sure that his ardour is no mere passing whim, but a deep and enduring attachment. In each case capitulation is agreed upon if only the besieger is sufficiently gallant and persistent. The best things, and even the holiest things, ‘hold us off that they may draw us on’—to use Tennyson’s expressive phrase.[244]
To cite a single example, what a wonder-story is that of the Syro-Phoenician woman! The Master conceals Himself from her; treats her anguish with apparent indifference; preserves a frigid silence in face of her passionate entreaty; and offers exasperating rebuffs in reply to her desperate arguments! But did He design to destroy her faith? Let us see! Like a gallant besieger, she sat down before the city with indomitable courage and patience. Beaten back at one gate, she instantly stormed another. Resisted at one redoubt, she mustered all her forces in the effort to reduce a second. And at last ‘Jesus answered and said unto her, O woman, great is thy faith; be it unto thee even as thou wilt!’ The capitulation was a predetermined policy; but the courage and pertinacity of the besieger must be tested to the utmost before the gates can be finally thrown open.

III

And then the victors fly upon the spoil! The repelling Word yields, and is found to contain wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. ‘I rejoice at Thy Word as one that findeth great spoil.’ Spoil! We have all felt the thrill of those tremendous pages in which Gibbon describes the sack of Rome by the all-victorious Goths. We seem to have witnessed [245] with our own eyes the glittering wealth of the queenly city poured at the feet of the rapacious conqueror. Or, in Prescott’s stately stories, we have watched the fabulous hoards of Montezuma, and the heaped-up gold of Atahuallpa, piled at the feet of Cortes and Pizarro. Or if, forsaking the shining spoils of the Goths in Europe and the gleaming argosies which the Spaniards brought from the West, we turn to a later date and an Eastern clime, we instinctively recall the glowing periods of Macaulay in his story of the conquests of Clive. After his amazing victory at Plassey, ‘the treasury of Bengal was thrown open to him. There were piled up, after the usage of Indian princes, immense masses of coin. Clive walked between heaps of gold and silver, crowned with rubies and diamonds, and was at liberty to help himself. He accepted between two and three hundred thousand pounds.’ He was afterwards accused of greed. He replied by describing the countless wealth by which he was that day surrounded. Vaults piled with gold and with jewels were at his mercy. ‘To this day,’ he exclaimed, ‘I stand astonished at my own moderation!’

Here, then, is the magic key that opens to us the secret in the psalmist’s mind. ‘I rejoice at Thy Word as one that findeth great spoil.’ The besiegers pour into the city. Every house is ransacked. In the most unlikely places the citizens have concealed [246] their treasures, and in the most unlikely places, therefore, the invaders come upon their spoils. Out from queer old drawers and cupboards, out of strange old cracks and crannies, the precious hoard is torn. As the besiegers rush from house to house you hear the shout and the laughter with which another and yet another find is greeted. So was it with his conquest of the Word, the psalmist tells us. At first it resisted and repelled him. But afterwards its gates were opened to his challenge. He entered the city and began his search for spoil. And, lo, from out of every promise and precept, out of every innocent-looking clause or insignificant phrase, the treasures of truth came pouring, until he found himself possessed at length of a wealth compared with which the pomp of princes is the badge of beggary.

‘“What course of lectures are you attending now, ma’am?” said Martin Chuzzlewit’s friend, turning again to Mrs. Jefferson Brick.

‘“The Philosophy of the Soul, on Wednesdays,” replied Mrs. Brick.

‘“And on Mondays?”

‘“The Philosophy of Crime.”

‘“On Fridays?”

‘“The Philosophy of Vegetables.”

‘“You have forgotten Thursdays; the Philosophy of Government, my dear,” observed a third lady.

‘“No,” said Mrs. Brick, “that’s Tuesdays.”

‘“So it is!” cried the lady. “The Philosophy of Matter on Thursdays, of course.”

‘“You see, Mr. Chuzzlewit, our ladies are fully employed,” observed his friend.’

They were indeed; but for the life of me I cannot understand why, amidst so many philosophies, the Philosophy of Fancy-work was so cruelly ignored. I should have thought it quite as suitable and profitable a study for Mrs. Jefferson Brick and her [248] lady friends as some of the subjects to which they paid their attention.

‘Whatever are you making now, dear?’ asked a devoted husband of his spouse the other evening.

‘Why, an antimacassar, George, to be sure; can’t you see?’

‘And what on earth is the good of an antimacassar, I should like to know?’

‘Stupid man!’

Stupid man, indeed! But there it is! And for the crass stupidity of their husbands, Mrs. Jefferson Brick and her philosophical friends have only themselves to blame. If they had included the Philosophy of Fancy-work in their syllabus of lectures, they might have acquired such a grasp of a great and vital subject that they would have been able to convince their husbands that there is nothing in the house quite so useful as an antimacassar. The pots and the pans, the chairs and the tables, are nowhere in comparison. The antimacassar is the one indispensable article in the establishment. Let no man attempt to deride or belittle it.

As it is, however, Mrs. Jefferson Brick and her friends have never really studied the Philosophy of Fancy-work, and have never therefore been in a position to enlighten the darkened minds of their benighted husbands. As an inevitable consequence, [249] those husbands continue to regard the busy needles as an amiable frailty pertaining to the sex of their better halves. In writing thus, I am thinking of the better-tempered husbands. Husbands of the other variety regard fancy-work as an unmitigated nuisance. Mark Rutherford has familiarized us with a husband who so regarded his wife’s delicate traceries and ornamentations. I refer, of course, to Catherine Furze. We all remember Mrs. Furze’s parlour at Eastthorpe. ‘There was a sofa in the room, but it was horse-hair with high ends both alike, not comfortable, which were covered with curious complications called antimacassars, that slipped off directly they were touched, so that anybody who leaned upon them was engaged continually in warfare with them, picking them up from the floor or spreading them out again. There was also an easy chair, but it was not easy, for it matched the sofa in horse-hair, and was so ingeniously contrived that, directly a person placed himself in it, it gently shot him forwards. Furthermore, it had special antimacassars, which were a work of art, and Mrs. Furze had warned Mr. Furze off them. “He would ruin them,” she said, “if he put his head upon them.” So a Windsor chair with a high back was always carried by Mr. Furze into the parlour after dinner, together with a common kitchen chair, and on these he took his Sunday nap.’ [250] The reader is made to feel that, on these interesting occasions, Mr. Furze wished his wife and her antimacassars at the bottom of the deep blue sea; and one rather admires his self-restraint in not explicitly saying so. Mr. Furze is the natural representative of all those husbands who see no rhyme or reason in fancy-work. If only Mrs. Jefferson Brick had included that phase of philosophy on her programme, and had passed on the illumination to some member of the sterner sex! But let us indulge in no futile regrets.

That there is a Philosophy of Fancy-work goes without saying. To begin with, think of the relief to the overstrung nerves and the over-wrought emotions, at the close of a trying day, in being able to sit down in a cosy chair, and, when the eyes are too tired for reading, to finger away at the needles, and get on with the antimacassar. Our grandmothers went in for antimacassars instead of neurasthenia. ‘It is astonishing,’ exclaimed the ‘Lady of the Decoration,’ ‘how much bad temper one can knit into a garment!’ An earlier generation of wonderfully wise women made that discovery, and worked all their discontents, and all their evil tempers, and all their quivering nervousness into antimacassars. On the whole it is cheaper than working them into drugs and doctors’ bills, and [251] drugs and doctors’ bills are certainly no more ornamental.

In his essay on Tedium, Claudius Clear deals with that particular form of tedium that arises from leaden hours. And he thinks that in this respect women have an immense advantage over men. Men have to wait for things, and they find the experience intolerable. But a woman turns to her fancy-work, and is amused at her husband’s uncontrollable impatience. The antimacassar, he believes, gives just enough occupation to the fingers to make absolute tedium impossible. The war has led to a remarkable revival of knitting and of fancy-work. My present theme was suggested to me on Saturday. I took my wife for a little excursion; she took her knitting, and we saw ladies working everywhere. Two were busy in the tram; we came upon one sitting in a secluded spot in the bush, her deft needles chasing each other merrily. And on the river steamer eleven ladies out of fifteen had their fancy-work with them. I could not help thinking that, in not a few of these cases, the workers must derive as much comfort from the occupation as the wearers will eventually derive from the garments. Many a woman has woven all her worries into her fancy-work, and has felt the greatest relief in consequence. One such worker has borne witness to the consolation afforded her by her needles.

We must, however, be perfectly honest; and to deal honestly with our subject we must not ignore the classical example, even though that example may not prove particularly attractive. The classical example is, of course, Madame Defarge. Madame Defarge was the wife of Jacques Defarge, who kept the famous wine-shop in A Tale of Two Cities. When first we are introduced to the wine-shopkeeper and his wife, three customers are entering the shop. They pull off their hats to Madame Defarge. ‘She acknowledged their homage by bending her head, and giving them a quick look. Then she glanced in a casual manner round the wine-shop, [253] took up her knitting with great apparent calmness and repose of spirit, and became absorbed in it.’ Everybody who is familiar with the story knows that here we have the stroke of the artist. Madame Defarge, be it noted, took up her knitting with apparent calmness and repose of spirit, and became absorbed in it. As a matter of fact, Madame Defarge was absorbed, not in the knitting, but in the conversation; and all that she heard with her ears was knitted into the garment in her hands. The knitting was a tell-tale register.

‘“Are you sure,” asked one of the wine-shopkeeper’s accomplices one day, “are you sure that no embarrassment can arise from our manner of keeping the register? Without doubt it is safe, for no one beyond ourselves can decipher it; but shall we always be able to decipher it—or, I ought to say, will she?”

‘“Man,” returned Defarge, drawing himself up, “if Madame, my wife, undertook to keep the register in her memory alone, she would not lose a word of it—not a syllable of it. Knitted, in her own stitches, and her own symbols, it will always be as plain to her as the sun. Confide in Madame Defarge. It would be easier for the weakest poltroon that lives to erase himself from existence than to erase one letter of his name or crimes from the knitted register of Madame Defarge.”’[254]
Oh those tell-tale needles! Up and down, to and fro, in and out they flashed and darted, Madame seeming all the time so preoccupied and inattentive! Yet into those innocent stitches there went the guilty secrets; and when the secrets were revealed the lives and deaths of men hung in the balance! Here, then, is a philosophy of fancy-work that will carry us a very long way. The stitches are always a matter of life and of death, however innocent or trivial they may seem. Whether I do a row of stitches, or drive a row of nails, or write a row of words, I am a little older when I fasten the last stitch, or drive the last nail, or write the last word, than I was when I began. And what does that mean? It means that I have deliberately taken a fragment of my life and have woven it into my work. That is the terrific sanctity of the commonest toil. It is instinct with life. ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friend,’ and whenever I drive a nail, or write a syllable, or weave a stitch for another, I have laid down just so much of my life for his sake.

But when we begin to exploit the possibilities of a Philosophy of Fancy-work, we shall find our feet wandering into some very green pastures and beside some very still waters. Fancy-work will lead us to think about friendship, than which few themes are more attractive. For the loveliest idyll of friendship [255] is told in the phraseology of fancy-work. ‘And it came to pass that the soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David.’ Knitting, knitting, knitting; up and down, to and fro, in and out, see the needles flash and dart! Every moment that I spend with my friend is a weaving of his life into mine, and of my life into his; and pity me, men and angels, if I entangle the strands of my life with a fabric that mars the pattern of my own! And pity me still more if the inferior texture of my life impairs the perfection and beauty of my friend’s! Into the sacred domain of our sweetest friendships, therefore, has this unpromising matter of fancy-work conveyed us. But it must take us higher still. For ‘there is a Friend that sticketh closer than a brother,’ and the web of my life will look strangely incomplete at the last unless the fabric of my soul be found knit and interwoven with the fair and radiant colours of His.

There seems to be very little in a pair of boots—except, perhaps, a pair of feet—until a great crisis arises; and in a great crisis all things assume new values. When the war broke out, and empires found themselves face to face with destiny, the nations asked themselves anxiously how they were off for boots. When millions of men began to march, boots seemed to be the only thing that mattered. The manhood of the world rose in its wrath, reached for its boots, buckled on its sword, and set out for the front. And at the front, if Mr. Kipling is to be believed, it is all a matter of boots.

A soldier sees enough pairs of boots in a ten-mile march to last him half a lifetime.

Yet, after all, are not these the most amiable things beneath the stars, the things that we treat with derision and contempt in days of calm, but for which we grope with feverish anxiety when the storm breaks upon us? They go on, year after year, bearing the obloquy of our toothless little jests; they go on, year after year, serving us none the less faithfully because we deem them almost too mundane for mention; and then, when they suddenly turn out to be a matter of life and death to us, they serve us still, with never a word of reproach for our past ingratitude. If the world [258] has a spark of chivalry left in it, it will offer a most abject apology to its boots.

It would do a man a world of good, before putting on his boots, to have a good look at them. Let him set them in the middle of the hearthrug, the shining toes turned carefully towards him, and then let him lean forward in his arm-chair, elbows on knees and head on hands, and let him fasten on those boots of his a contrite and respectful gaze. And looking at his boots thus attentively and carefully he will see what he has never seen before. He will see that a pair of boots is one of the master achievements of civilization. A pair of boots is one of the wonders of the world, a most cunning and ingenious contrivance. Dan Crawford, in Thinking Black, tells us that nothing about Livingstone’s equipment impressed the African mind so profoundly as the boots he wore. ‘Even to this remote day,’ Mr. Crawford says, ‘all around Lake Mweru they sing a “Livingstone” song to commemorate that great “path-borer,” the good Doctor being such a federal head of his race that he is known far and near as Ingeresa, or “The Englishman.” And this is his memorial song:

[259] That is to say, revelling in paradox as the negro does, he seized on the facetious fact that this wandering Livingstone, albeit he travelled so far, had no toes—that is to say, had boots, if you please!’ Later on, Mr. Crawford remarks again that the barefooted native never ceases to wonder at the white man’s boots. To him they are a marvel and a portent, for, instead of thinking of the boot as merely covering the foot that wears it, his idea is that those few inches of shoe carpet the whole forest with leather. He puts on his boots, and, by doing so, he spreads a gigantic runner of linoleum across the whole continent of Africa. Here is a philosophical way of looking at a pair of boots! It has made my own boots look differently ever since I read it. Why, these boots on the hearthrug, looking so reproachfully up at me, are millions of times bigger than they seem! They look to my poor distorted vision like a few inches of leather; but as a matter of fact they represent hundreds of miles of leathern matting. They make a runner paving the path from my quiet study to the front doors of all my people’s homes; they render comfortable and attractive all the highways and byways along which duty calls me. Looked at through a pair of African eyes, these British boots assume marvellous proportions. They are touched by magic and are wondrously transformed. From being [260] contemptible, they now appear positively continental. I am surprised that the subject has never appealed to me before.

Now this African way of looking at a pair of boots promises us a key to a phrase in the New Testament that has always seemed to me like a locked casket. John Bunyan tells us that when the sisters of the Palace Beautiful led Christian to the armoury he saw such a bewildering abundance of boots as surely no other man ever beheld before or since! They were shoes that would never wear out; and there were enough of them, he says, to harness out as many men for the service of their Lord as there be stars in the heaven for multitude. Bunyan’s prodigious stock of shoes is, of course, an allusion to Paul’s exhortation to the Ephesian Christians concerning the armour with which he would have them to be clad. ‘Take unto you the whole armour of God ... and your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace.’

Whenever we get into difficulties concerning this heavenly panoply, we turn to good old William Gurnall. Master Gurnall beat out these six verses of Paul’s into a ponderous work of fourteen hundred pages, bound in two massive volumes. One hundred and fifty of these pages deal with the footgear recommended by the apostle; and Master Gurnall gives us, among other treasures, ‘six directions for [261] the helping on of this spiritual shoe.’ But we must not be betrayed into a digression on the matter of shoe-horns and kindred contrivances. Shoemaker, stick to thy last! Let us keep to this matter of boots. Can good Master Gurnall, with all his hundred and fifty closely printed pages on the subject, help us to understand what Paul and Bunyan meant? What is it to have your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace? What are the shoes that never wear out? Now the striking thing is that Master Gurnall looks at the matter very much as the Africans do. He turns upon himself a perfect fusillade of questions. What is meant by the gospel? What is meant by peace? Why is peace attributed to the gospel? What do the feet here mentioned import? What grace is intended by that ‘preparation of the gospel of peace’ which is here compared to a shoe and fitted to these feet? And so on. And in answering his own questions, and especially this last one, good Master Gurnall comes to the conclusion that the spiritual shoe which he would fain help us to put on is ‘a gracious, heavenly, and excellent spirit.’ And his hundred and fifty crowded pages on the matter of footwear give us clearly to understand that the man who puts on this beautiful spirit will be able to walk without weariness the stoniest roads, and to climb without exhaustion the steepest hills. He shall tread upon the lion and [262] adder; the young lion and the dragon shall he trample under feet. In slimy bogs and on slippery paths his foot shall never slide; and in the day when he wrestles with principalities and powers, and with the rulers of the darkness of this world, his foothold shall be firm and secure. ‘Thy shoes shall be iron and brass, and as thy days so shall thy strength be.’ Master Gurnall’s teaching is therefore perfectly plain. He looks at this divine footwear much as the Africans looked at Livingstone’s boots. The man whose feet are shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace has carpeted for himself all the rough roads that lie before him. The man who knows how to wear this ‘gracious, heavenly, and excellent spirit’ has done for himself what Sir Walter Raleigh did for Queen Elizabeth. He has already protected his feet against all the miry places of the path ahead of him. If good Master Gurnall’s ‘six directions for the helping on of this spiritual shoe’ will really assist us to be thus securely shod, then his hundred and fifty pages will yet prove more precious than gold-leaf.

Bunyan speaks of the amazing exhibition of footgear that Christian beheld in the armoury as ‘shoes that will not wear out.’ I wish I could be quite sure that Christian was not mistaken. John Bunyan has so often been my teacher and counsellor on all the highest and weightiest matters that it is painful [263] to have to doubt him at any point. The boots may have looked as though they would never wear out; but, as all mothers know, that is a way that boots have. In the shoemaker’s hands they always look as though they would stand the wear and tear of ages; but put them on a boy’s feet and see what they will look like in a month’s time! I am really afraid that Christian was deceived in this particular. Paul says nothing about the everlasting wear of which the shoes are capable; and the sisters of the Palace Beautiful seem to have said nothing about it. I fancy Christian jumped too hastily to this conclusion, misled by the excellent appearance and sturdy make of the boots before him. My experience is that the shoes do wear out. The most ‘gracious, heavenly, and excellent spirit’ must be kept in repair. I know of no virtue, however attractive, and of no grace, however beautiful, that will not wear thin unless it is constantly attended to. My good friend, Master Gurnall, for all his hundred and fifty pages does not touch upon this point; but I venture to advise my readers that they will be wise to accept Christian’s so confident declaration with a certain amount of caution. The statement that ‘these shoes will not wear out’ savours rather too much of the spirit of advertisement; and we have learned from painful experience that the language of an advertisement is not always to be interpreted literally.[264]
One other thing these boots of mine seem to say to me as they look mutely up at me from the centre of the hearthrug. Have they no history, these shoes of mine? Whence came they? And at this point we suddenly invade the realm of tragedy. The voice of Abel’s blood cried to God from the ground; and the voice of blood calls to me from my very boots. Was it a seal cruelly done to death upon a northern icefloe, or a kangaroo shot down in the very flush of life as it bounded through the Australian bush, or a kid looking up at its slaughterer with terrified, pitiful eyes? What was it that gave up the life so dear to it that I might be softly and comfortably shod? And so every step that I take is a step that has been made possible to me by the shedding of innocent blood. All the highways and byways that I tread have been sanctified by sacrifice. The very boots on the hearthrug are whispering something about redemption. And most certainly this is true of the shoes of which the apostle wrote, the shoes that the pilgrims saw at the Palace Beautiful, the shoes that trudge their weary way through Master Gurnall’s hundred and fifty packed pages. These shoes could never have been placed at our disposal apart from the shedding of most sacred blood. My feet may be shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace; but, if so, it is only because the sacrifice unspeakable has already been made.

It is an infinite comfort to us ordinary pulpiteers to know that even an Archbishop may sometimes have a bad time! And, on the occasion of which I write, the poor prelate must have had a very bad time indeed. For—tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Askelon!—none of his hearers knew what he had been talking about! They could make neither head nor tail of it! ‘I have not been able to find one man yet who could discover what it was about,’ wrote one of his auditors to a friend. It is certainly most humiliating when our congregations go home and pen such letters for posterity to chuckle over. And yet the ability of the preacher at this particular service, and the intelligence of his hearers, are alike beyond question. For the preacher was the famous Richard Chenevix Trench, D.D., Professor of Theology at King’s College, Dean of Westminster, and afterwards Archbishop of Dublin. The sermon was preached in the classical atmosphere of Cambridge University, principally to students and undergraduates. The theme was the Incarnation—‘The Word was made flesh.’ And the [266] young fellow who wrote the plaintive epistle from which I have quoted was Alfred Ainger, afterwards a distinguished litterateur and Master of the Temple. He could make nothing of it. ‘The sermon, I am sorry to say, was universally disappointing. I have not been able to find one man yet who could discover what it was about. It is needless to say I could not. He chose, too, one of the grandest and deepest texts in the New Testament. He talked a great deal about St. Augustine, but any more I cannot tell you.’

Now Christmas will again come knocking at our doors, and many of us will find ourselves preaching on this selfsame theme. And we have a wholesome horror of sending our hearers home in the same fearful perplexity. ‘What on earth was the minister talking about?’ All the cards and the carols, the fun and the frolic, the pastimes and the picnics will be turned into dust and ashes, into gall and wormwood, into vanity and vexation of spirit to the poor preacher who suspects that his Christmas congregation returned home in such a mood. His Christmas dinner will almost choke him. There will be no merry Christmas for him!

But let no minister be terrified or intimidated by the Archbishop’s unhappy experience. His ‘bad time’ may help us to enjoy a good one. We must take his text, and wrestle with it bravely. It is the ideal Christmas greeting. There is certainly depth [267] and mystery; but there is humanness and tenderness as well.

‘The Word was made flesh.’ Words are wonderful things, to say nothing of ‘the Word’—whatever that may prove to be. This selfsame Archbishop Trench, whose sermon at Cambridge proved such a universal disappointment, has written a marvellous book On the Study of Words. Here are seven masterly chapters to show that words are fossil poetry, and petrified history, and embalmed romance, and that all the ages have left the record of their tears and their laughter, of their virtues and their vices, of their passion and their pain, in the words that they have coined. ‘When I feel inclined to read poetry,’ says Oliver Wendell Holmes, ‘I take down my dictionary! The poetry of words is quite as beautiful as that of sentences. The author may arrange the gems effectively, but their shape and lustre have been given by the attrition of age. Bring me the finest simile from the whole range of imaginative writing, and I will show you a single word which conveys a more profound, a more accurate, and a more elegant analogy.’ Words, then, are jewel-cases, treasure-chests, strong-rooms; they are repositories in which the archives of the ages are preserved.

‘The Word was made flesh.’ We never grasp the Word until it is. Let me illustrate my meaning. [268] Here is a bonny little fellow of six, with sunny face and a glorious shock of golden hair. His father hands him his first spelling-book, with the alphabet on the front page, and little two-letter monosyllables following. But what can he make of even such small words? He will never learn the A.B.C. in that way. But give him a teacher. Make the word flesh, and he will soon have it all off by heart!

Five years pass away. The lad is in the full swing of his school-days now. But to-night, as he pores over his books, the once sunny face is clouded, and the wavy hair covers an aching head.

‘Time for bed, sonny!’ says mother at length.

‘But, mother, I haven’t done my home lessons, and I can’t.’

‘What is it all about, my boy?’ she asks, as she draws her chair nearer to his, and, putting her arm round his shoulder, reads the tiresome problem.

And then they talk it over together. And, somehow, under the magic of her interest, it seems fairly simple after all. In her sympathetic voice, and fond glance, and tender touch, the word becomes flesh, and he grasps its meaning.

Five more years pass away. He is sixteen, and a perfect book-worm. Looking up from the story he is reading, he exclaims impatiently:

‘I can’t think why they want to work these silly love-stories into all these books. A fellow can’t pick [269] up a decent book but there’s a love-story running through it. It’s horrid!’ He has come upon the greatest word in the language; but it has no meaning for him!

But five years later he understands! He has been captivated by a pure and radiant face, by a charming and graceful form, by lovely eyes that answer to his own. That great word love has been made flesh to him, and it simply gleams with meaning. And so, all through the years, as life goes on, he finds the great key-words expounded to him through infinite processes of incarnation. ‘Ideas,’ says George Eliot, ‘are often poor ghosts; our sun-filled eyes cannot discern them; they pass athwart us in their vapour and cannot make themselves felt. But sometimes they are made flesh; they breathe upon us with warm breath, they touch us with soft responsive hand, they look at us with sad sincere eyes, and speak to us in appealing tones; they are clothed in a living human soul, with all its conflicts, its faith, and its love. Then their presence is a power, then they shake us like a passion, and we are drawn after them with gentle compulsion, as flame is drawn to flame.’

And if this be so with other words, how could the greatest, grandest, holiest word of all have been expressed except in the very selfsame way? ‘The Word was made flesh.’ There was no other way of [270] saying God intelligibly. I should never, never, never have understood mere abstract definitions of so august a term. And so—‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God, and the Word was made flesh.’ I can grasp that great word now. Bethlehem and Olivet, Galilee and Calvary, have made it wonderfully plain. The word God would have frightened me if it had never been expressed in the terms of ‘a Face like my face’—as Browning puts it—and a heart that beats in sympathy with my own. And so Tennyson says:

And thus the most awful, the most terrible, and the most incomprehensible word that human lips could frame has become the most winsome and charming in the whole vocabulary. God is Jesus, and Jesus is God! ‘The Word was made flesh.’

The same principle dominates all religious experience and enterprise. Generally speaking, you cannot make a man a Christian by giving him a [271] Bible or posting him a tract. The New Testament lays it down quite clearly that the Christian man must accompany the Christian message. The Word must be presented in its proper human setting. Our missionaries all over the planet tell of the resistless influence exerted by gracious Christian homes, and by holy Christian lives, in winning idolators from superstition. I was reading only this morning a touching instance of a young Japanese who trudged hundreds of miles to inquire after the secret of ‘the beautiful life’—as he called it—which he had seen exemplified in some Christian missionaries. The Word, made flesh, is thus pronounced with an accent and an eloquence which are simply irresistible.

‘I said, and I repeat,’ says Mr. Edwin Hodder, in his biography of Sir George Burns, the founder of the Cunard Steamship Company, ‘I said, and I repeat, that if the Bible were blotted out of existence, if there were no prayer-book, no catechism, and no creed, if there were no visible Church at all, I could not fail to believe in the doctrines of Christianity while the living epistle of Sir George Burns’ life remained in my memory.’ That was Whittier’s argument:

We have reached a very practical aspect now of the message that the Christmas bells will soon be ringing. The thoughts of men are only intelligibly communicable by means of words; and the words of men only become pregnant with passion and with power when they are made flesh. And, in the same way, the thoughts of God to men are only eloquent when they are so expressed. Revelation became sublimely rhetorical at Bethlehem, and we can only perpetuate its eloquence through the agency of lives transfigured.