Three years have passed since I began these letters. Of the first, and another, I forget which, a few more than a thousand have been sold; and as the result of my begging for money, I have got upwards of two hundred pounds. The number of the simple persons who have thus trusted me is stated at the end of this letter. Had I been a swindler, the British public would delightedly have given me two hundred thousand pounds instead of two hundred, of which I might have returned them, by this time, say, the quarter, in dividends; spent a hundred and fifty thousand pleasantly, myself, at the rate of fifty thousand a year; and announced, in this month’s report, with regret, the failure of my project, owing to the unprecedented state of commercial affairs induced by strikes, unions, and other illegitimate combinations among the workmen.

And the most curious part of the business is that I fancy I should have been a much more happy and agreeable member of society, spending my fifty thousand a year thus, in the way of business, than I have been in giving away my own seven thousand, and painfully adding to it this collection of two hundred, for a piece of work which is to give me a great deal of trouble, and be profitable only to other people.

Happy, or sulky, however, I have got this thing to do; and am only amused, instead of discouraged, by the beautiful reluctance of the present English public to trust an honest person, without being flattered, or promote a useful work, without being bribed.

It may be true that I have not brought my plan rightly before the public yet. “A bad thing will pay, if you put it properly before the public,” wrote a first-rate man of business the other day, to one of my friends. But what the final results of putting bad things properly before the public will be to the exhibitor of them, and the public also, no man of business that I am acquainted with is yet aware.

I mean, therefore, to persist in my own method; and to allow the public to take their time. One of their most curiously mistaken notions is that they can hurry the pace of Time itself, or avert its power. As to these letters of mine, for instance, which all my friends beg me not to write, because no workman will understand them now;—what would have been the use of writing letters only for the men who have been produced by the instructions of Mr. John Stuart Mill? I write to the labourers of England; but not of England in 1870–73. A day will come when we shall have men resolute to do good work, and capable of reading and thinking while they rest; who will not expect to build like Athenians without knowing anything about the first king of Athens, not like Christians without knowing anything about Christ: and then they will find my letters useful, and read them. And to the few readers whom these letters now find, they will become more useful as they go on, for they are a mosaic-work into which I can put a piece here and there as I find glass of the colour I want; what is as yet done being set, indeed, in patches, but not without design.

One chasm I must try to fill to-day, by telling you why it is so grave a heresy (or wilful source of division) to call any book, or collection of books, the ‘Word of God.’

By that Word, or Voice, or Breath, or Spirit, the heavens and earth, and all the host of them, were made; and in it they exist. It is your life; and speaks to you always, so long as you live nobly;—dies out of you as you refuse to obey it; leaves you to hear, and be slain by, the word of an evil spirit, instead of it.

It may come to you in books,—come to you in clouds,—come to you in the voices of men,—come to you in the stillness of deserts. You must be strong in evil, if you have quenched it wholly;—very desolate in this Christian land, if you have never heard it at all. Too certainly, in this Christian land you do hear, and loudly, the contrary of it,—the doctrine or word of devils, speaking lies in hypocrisy; forbidding to marry, recommending women to find some more lucrative occupation than that of nursing the baby; and commanding to abstain from meats, (and drinks,) which God has appointed to be received with thanksgiving. For “everything which God has made is good, and nothing to be refused, if it be sanctified by the Word of God.” And by what else?

If you have been accustomed to hear the clergyman’s letter from which I have just been quoting, as if it were itself the word of God,—you have been accustomed also to hear our bad translation of it go on saying, “If it be sanctified by the Word of God, and prayer.” But there is nothing whatever about prayer in the clergyman’s letter,—nor does he say, If it be sanctified. He says, “For it is sanctified by the Word of God, and the chance that brings it.”1 Which means, that when meat comes in your way when you are hungry, or drink when you are thirsty, and you know in your own conscience that it is good for you to have it, the meat and drink are holy to you.

But if the Word of God in your heart is against it, and you know that you would be better without the extra glass of beer you propose to take, and that your wife would be the better for the price of it, then it is unholy to you: and you can only have the sense of entire comfort and satisfaction, either in having it, or going without it, if you are simply obeying the Word of God about it in your mind, and accepting contentedly the chances for or against it; as probably you have heard of Sir Philip Sidney’s accepting the chance of another soldier’s needing his cup of water more than he, on his last battle-field, and instantly obeying the Word of God coming to him on that occasion. Not that it is intended that the supply of these good creatures of God should be left wholly to chance; but that if we observe the proper laws of God concerning them, and, for instance, instead of forbidding marriage, duly and deeply reverence it, then, in proper time and place, there will be true Fors, or chancing on, or finding of, the youth and maid by each other, such in character as the Providence of Heaven appoints for each: and, similarly, if we duly recognize the laws of God about meats and drinks, there will for every labourer and traveller be such chancing upon meat and drink and other entertainment as shall be sacredly pleasant to him. And there cannot indeed be at present imagined a more sacred function for young Christian men than that of hosts or hospitallers, supplying, to due needs, and with proper maintenance of their own lives, wholesome food and drink to all men: so that as, at least, always at one end of a village there may be a holy church and vicar, so at the other end of the village there may be a holy tavern and tapster, ministering the good creatures of God, so that they may be sanctified by the Word of God and His Providence.

And as the providence of marriage, and the giving to each man the help meet for his life, is now among us destroyed by the wantonness of harlotry, so the providence of the Father who would fill men’s hearts with food and gladness is destroyed among us by prostitution of joyless drink; and the never to be enough damned guilt of men, and governments, gathering pence at the corners of the streets, standing there, pot in hand, crying, ‘Turn in hither; come, eat of my evil bread, and drink of my beer, which I have venomously mingled.’

Against which temptations—though never against the tempters—one sometimes hears one’s foolish clergy timorously inveighing; and telling young idlers that it is wrong to be lustful, and old labourers that it is wrong to be thirsty: but I never heard a clergyman yet, (and during thirty years of the prime of my life I heard one sermon at least every Sunday, so that it is after experience of no fewer than one thousand five hundred sermons, most of them by scholars, and many of them by earnest men,) that I now solemnly state I never heard one preacher deal faithfully with the quarrel between God and Mammon, or explain the need of choice between the service of those two masters. And all vices are indeed summed, and all their forces consummated, in that simple acceptance of the authority of gold instead of the authority of God; and preference of gain, or the increase of gold, to godliness, or the peace of God.

I take then, as I promised, the fourteenth and fifteenth Psalms for examination with respect to this point.

The second verse of the fourteenth declares that of the children of men, there are none that seek God.

The fifth verse of the same Psalm declares that God is in the generation of the righteous. In them, observe; not needing to be sought by them.

From which statements, evangelical persons conclude that there are no righteous persons at all.

Again, the fourth verse of the Psalm declares that all the workers of iniquity eat up God’s people as they eat bread.

Which appears to me a very serious state of things, and to be put an end to, if possible; but evangelical persons conclude thereupon that the workers of iniquity and the Lord’s people are one and the same. Nor have I ever heard in the course of my life any single evangelical clergyman so much as put the practical inquiry, Who is eating, and who is being eaten?

Again, the first verse of the Psalm declares that the fool hath said in his heart there is no God; but the sixth verse declares of the poor that he not only knows there is a God, but finds Him to be a refuge.

Whereupon evangelical persons conclude that the fool and the poor mean the same people; and make all the haste they can to be rich.

Putting them, and their interpretations, out of our way, the Psalm becomes entirely explicit. There have been in all ages children of God and of man: the one born of the Spirit, and obeying it; the other born of the flesh, and obeying it. I don’t know how that entirely unintelligible sentence, “There were they in great fear,” got into our English Psalm; in both the Greek and Latin versions it is, “God hath broken the bones of those that please men.”

And it is here said of the entire body of the children of men, at a particular time, that they had at that time all gone astray beyond hope; that none were left who so much as sought God, much less who were likely to find Him; and that these wretches and vagabonds were eating up God’s own people as they ate bread.

Which has indeed been generally so in all ages; but beyond all recorded history is so in ours. Just and godly people can’t live; and every clever rogue and industrious fool is making his fortune out of them, and producing abominable works of all sorts besides,—material gasometers, furnaces, chemical works, and the like,—with spiritual lies and lasciviousness unheard of till now in Christendom. Which plain and disagreeable meaning of this portion of Scripture you will find pious people universally reject with abhorrence,—the direct word and open face of their Master being, in the present day, always by them, far more than His other enemies, “spitefully entreated, and spitted on.”

Next for the fifteenth Psalm.

It begins by asking God who shall abide in His tabernacle, or movable tavern; and who shall dwell in His holy hill. Note the difference of those two abidings. A tavern, or taberna, is originally a hut made by a traveller, or sticks cut on the spot; then, if he so arrange it as to be portable, it is a tabernacle; so that, generally a portable hut or house, supported by rods or sticks when it is set up, is a tabernacle;—on a large scale, having boards as well as curtains, and capable of much stateliness, but nearly synonymous with a tent, in Latin.

Therefore, the first question is, Who among travelling men will have God to set up his tavern for him when he wants rest?

And the second question is, Who, of travelling men, shall finally dwell, desiring to wander no more, in God’s own house, established above the hills, where all nations flow to it?

You, perhaps, don’t believe that either of these abodes may, or do, exist in reality: nor that God would ever cut down branches for you; or, better still, bid them spring up for a bower; or that He would like to see you in His own house, if you would go there. You prefer the buildings lately put up in rows for you “one brick thick in the walls,”2 in convenient neighbourhood to your pleasant business? Be it so;—then the fifteenth Psalm has nothing to say to you. For those who care to lodge with God, these following are the conditions of character.

They are to walk or deal uprightly with men. They are to work or do justice; or, in sum, do the best they can with their hands. They are to speak the truth to their own hearts, and see they do not persuade themselves they are honest when they ought to know themselves to be knaves; nor persuade themselves they are charitable and kind, when they ought to know themselves to be thieves and murderers. They are not to bite people with their tongues behind their backs, if they dare not rebuke them face to face. They are not to take up, or catch at, subjects of blame; but they are utterly and absolutely to despise vile persons who fear no God, and think the world was begot by mud, and is fed by money; and they are not to defend a guilty man’s cause against an innocent one. Above all, this last verse is written for lawyers, or professed interpreters of justice, who are of all men most villainous, if, knowingly, they take reward against an innocent or rightfully contending person. And on these conditions the promise of God’s presence and strength is finally given. He that doeth thus shall not be moved, or shaken: for him, tabernacle and rock are alike safe: no wind shall overthrow them, nor earthquake rend.

That is the meaning of the fourteenth and fifteenth Psalms; and if you so believe them, and obey them, you will find your account in it. And they are the Word of God to you, so far as you have hearts capable of understanding them, or any other such message brought by His servants. But if your heart is dishonest and rebellious, you may read them for ever with lip-service, and all the while be ‘men-pleasers,’ whose bones are to be broken at the pit’s mouth, and so left incapable of breath, brought by any winds of Heaven. And that is all I have to say to you this year.