UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 AT LOS ANGELES 
 
 GIFT OF 
 
 luR. CHARLES H. T
 
 OTHER BOOKS BY MR. BOREHAM 
 
 A BUNCH OF EVERLASTINGS 
 A HANDFUL OF STARS 
 A REEL OF RAINBOW 
 FACES IN THE FIRE 
 MOUNTAINS IN THE MIST 
 MUSHROOMS ON THE MOOR 
 THE GOLDEN MILESTONE 
 THE HOME OF THE ECHOES 
 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE HILL 
 THE SILVER SHADOW 
 THE UTTERMOST STAR 
 SHADOWS ON THE WALL
 
 THE LUGGAGE 
 OF LIFE 
 
 BT 
 
 F. W. BOREHAM 
 
 THE ABINGDON PRESS 
 NEW YORK CINCINNATI
 
 Printed in the United States of America 
 
 First American Edition Printed September, 1918 
 
 Reprinted March, August, December, 1919; March, 1920; June, 1921; 
 
 November, 1922
 
 A . 
 
 TO 
 MY WIFE
 
 BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION 
 
 THESE leaves are of Australian growth. It is both 
 unnecessary and impossible to disguise it. The 
 breath of the bush is on them. There were, how- 
 ever, so many who found them good, either for 
 food or for medicine, in these Britains of the South, 
 that it was suggested that the plant might survive 
 the ordeal of transplantation to a northern clime. 
 England is a land of noble hospitalities. And, 
 after all, men are built pretty much the same way 
 all the world over. A thing that is true under these 
 soft southern skies is no less true where northern 
 constellations burn. A word that wakens thought 
 beneath the shadow of the wattle may lead a man 
 to rub his eyes under a spreading English oak. A 
 message that brings back the smile of courage to 
 the bronzed face of a disheartened squatter may re- 
 lieve a bruised spirit in London's central roar. And 
 so I venture ! I only hope that I may take the sob 
 from one throat, or make one song more blithe. 
 FRANK W. BOREHAM. 
 
 Vll
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION vii 
 
 PART I 
 
 I. THE LUGGAGE OF LIFE 3 
 
 II. OUR DESERT ISLANDS , , 10 
 
 III. OUR HIGHWAY ROBBERIES 18 
 
 IV. Two OR THREE' 25 
 
 V. THE CAPTAIN OF THE SHIP . 33 
 
 VI. THE SUPREMACIES OF LIFE. 40 
 
 VII. THE PRUDENTIALITIES OF LIFE.. 46 
 
 VIII. THE FACE AT THE WINDOW 52 
 
 IX. BACK MOVES 61 
 
 X. THE TIRELESS TRUDGE , 70 
 
 XL SUNSET ON THE SEA 78 
 
 PART II 
 
 I. CLEAN BOWLED ! 89 
 
 II. MAD DOGS AND MOSQUITOES 96 
 
 III. ON FALLING IN LOVE 105 
 
 IV. IPECACUANHA 112 
 
 V. SEASIDE LODGINGS 120 
 
 ix
 
 x Contents 
 
 PAGE 
 
 VI. THE CLIFFS OF DOVER , 128 
 
 VII. THE ORGANIST 134 
 
 VIII. THE JACKASS AND THE KANGAROO. 140 
 
 IX. OUR RUBBISH-HEAPS 147 
 
 X. LIFE'S INVISIBLE CONSTABULARY 154 
 
 XI. 'So MANY BEDS IN THE WARD'. 161 
 
 PART III 
 
 I. THE LAW OF THE LANE 171 
 
 II. A TONIC OF BIG THINGS.. ,. . 178 
 
 III. SERMONS AND SANDWICHES , 185 
 
 IV. THE CHALLENGE OF THE HEIGHTS 193 
 
 V. THE FURNITURE-VAN 201 
 
 VI. ON THE WISDOM OF CONDUCTING ONE'S OWN 
 
 FUNERAL , ,. . 209 
 
 VII. OUR BETTER HALVES 216 
 
 VIII. THE CONQUEST OF THE POLES 224 
 
 IX. HAT-PINS AND BUTTON-HOOKS. . . ., 232 
 
 X. THE BROW OF THE HILL 239
 
 PART I
 
 THE LUGGAGE OF LIFE 
 
 LIFE is largely a matter of luggage. So soon as 
 a child can toddle he displays an insatiable 
 passion for carrying things. He is never so happy 
 as when he is loaded. His face beams with delight 
 when his back is burdened to the point of breaking. 
 A few months later he cries for a wooden horse and 
 cart, that he may further gratify his inordinate long- 
 ing for luggage. And, if these appetites be not hu- 
 moured, he will exhaust his unconsecrated energies 
 in pushing the chairs, tugging at tables, and carry- 
 ing the cat. The instinct is there. You can no more 
 deny him his load than you can deny him his lunch. 
 The craving for both is born in him. In his auto- 
 biography, Thomas Guthrie tells how the blood of 
 the Scottish lads in his native village was stirred as 
 the echoes of Waterloo reached that remote hamlet. 
 'Many a time,' he says, 'did we boys tramp a mile 
 or two out of town to meet troops marching to the 
 war, and proud we were to be allowed to carry a 
 soldier's musket, which the poor fellows, burdened 
 with all the heavy accoutrements of those days, and 
 wearied with a twelve-hour march on a hot sum- 
 
 3
 
 4 The Luggage of Life 
 
 mer's day, were glad enough to resign to us.' Here 
 is the same subtle law in operation, Man often loves 
 without knowing that he loves ; and, little as he sus- 
 pects it, he is deeply in love with his load. He groans 
 beneath it, as a man grumbles at the wife of his 
 bosom, but, if it were taken from him, he would be 
 almost as disconsolate as if she were taken from him. 
 When we were boys at school we learned ludicrous 
 lessons about the weight of the air. How we 
 laughed as we listened to the doctrines of Torricelli, 
 and heard that every square inch of surface has to 
 sustain a weight of fifteen pounds ! How we roared 
 in our rollicking scepticism when our school masters 
 assured us that we were each of us being subjected 
 to a fearful atmospheric pressure of no less than 
 fourteen tons ! But Mr. H. G. Wells has drawn for 
 us a picture of men unladen. His heroes Mr. 
 Cavor and Mr. Bedford have found their way to 
 the moon. The fourteen tons of air are no longer 
 on their shoulders. The atmospheric pressure is 
 removed; they have lost their load, and they nearly 
 lose their lives in consequence. They cannot control 
 themselves. They can scarcely keep their feet on 
 the soil. The slightest spring of the foot, and they 
 bound like a ball into mid-air. If they attempt to 
 leap over an obstructing boulder, they soar into space 
 like larks, and land on a distant cliff or alight on an
 
 The Luggage of Life 5 
 
 extinct volcano. Life becomes weird, ungovernable, 
 terrible. They are lost without their load. Which 
 things are symbolic. It is part of the pathos of 
 mortality that we only discover how dearly we love 
 things after we have lost them. We behold with 
 surprise our affections, like torn and bleeding ten- 
 drils, hanging desolate, lamenting mutely the com- 
 monplace object about which they had entwined 
 themselves. So is it with the lading and luggage of 
 life. We never wake up to the delicious luxury of 
 being heavily burdened until our shoulders miss the 
 load that galled them. If we grasped the deepest 
 philosophy of life a little more clearly we might per- 
 haps fall in love with our luggage. The baby in- 
 stinct is perfectly true. Our load is as essential to 
 us as our lunch. Very few people have been actually 
 crushed in this old world of many burdens. And 
 those who have were not the most miserable of men. 
 It will not be at all astonishing if the naturalists of 
 to-morrow assure us that the animal world knows 
 no transport comparable to the fierce and delirious 
 ecstasy of the worm beneath the heel. It would 
 only be a natural, and perfectly logical, advance upon 
 our knowledge of Livingstone's sensations beneath 
 the paw of the lion. At any rate, it is clear that man 
 owes as much to his luggage as a ship owes to her 
 keel. It seems absurd to build her delicately, and
 
 6 The Luggage of Life 
 
 then burden her dreadfully. But the sailor loves the 
 heavy keel and the full freight. It is the light keel 
 and the empty hold that have most reason to dread 
 the storm. Blessed be ballast ! is a beatitude of the 
 forecastle. 
 
 Such is the law of life's luggage. But the New 
 Testament gives us a still loftier and lovelier word : 
 'Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the 
 law of Christ.' And these laws the law of nature 
 and the law of Christ are not conflicting, but con- 
 cordant. The one is the bud, the other is the blos- 
 som. For Christ came, not to remove life's luggage, 
 but to multiply our burdens. It is true, of course, 
 that He said : 'Come unto Me, all ye that labour and 
 are heavy laden,' but He only invited them that 
 He might offer them His yoke and His burden. 
 Here is something worth thinking about. Christ 
 gives rest to the heart by giving burdens to the 
 shoulders. And, as a matter of fact, it is in being 
 burdened that we usually find rest. The Old Testa- 
 ment records the sage words of an old woman 
 in addressing two younger ones: 'The Lord grant/ 
 said Naomi, 'that ye may find rest, each of you, in 
 the house of her husband!' Who ever heard of a 
 woman finding rest in the house of her husband? 
 And yet, and yet ! The restless hearts are not 
 the hearts of wives and of mothers, as many a lonely
 
 The Luggage of Life 7 
 
 woman knows. There is no more crushing load 
 than the load of a loveless life. It is a burden that 
 is often beautifully and graciously borne, but its 
 weight is a very real one. The mother may have a 
 bent form, a furrowed brow, and worn, thin hands ; 
 but her heart found its rest for all that. Naomi was 
 an old woman; she knew the world very well, and 
 her words are worth weighing. Heavy luggage is 
 Christ's strange cure for weary hearts. 
 
 The law of life's luggage the 'law of Christ' 
 has a racial application. It is notorious that a 
 Christian people is not physically more robust than 
 a savage people. Readers of Alfred Russel Wal- 
 lace's Travels on the Amazon will remember that, 
 the farther the intrepid voyager proceeded up the 
 great waterway, the finer became the physique of the 
 natives. And at last, when Dr. Wallace reached a 
 point to which no white man had ever before pene- 
 trated, he discovered men and women any of whom 
 might have posed as models for Grecian sculptors. 
 The reason is obvious. The savage knows nothing 
 of 'the law of Christ.' He will bear no other's 
 burden. The sick must die; the wounded must 
 perish; the feeble must go to the wall. Only the 
 mightiest and most muscular survive and produce 
 another generation. 'The law of Christ' ends all 
 that. The luggage of life must be distributed. The
 
 8 The Luggage of Life 
 
 sick must be nursed ; the wounded must be tended ; 
 the frail must be cherished. These, too, must be 
 permitted to play their part in the shaping of human 
 destiny. They also may love and wed, and become 
 fathers and mothers. The weaknesses of each are 
 taken back into the blood of the race. The frailty 
 of each becomes part of the common heritage. And, 
 in the last result, if our men are not all Apollos, and 
 if our women do not all resemble Venus de Medici, 
 it is largely because we have millions with us who, 
 but for 'the law of Christ/ operating on rational 
 ideals, would have had no existence at all. In a 
 Christian land, under Christian laws, we bear each 
 other's burdens, we carry each other's luggage. It 
 is the law of Christ, the law of the cross, a sacrificial 
 law. The difference between savagery and civiliza- 
 tion is simply this, that we have learned, in our very 
 flesh and blood, to bear each other's burdens and so 
 fulfil the law of Christ. 
 
 We set out with Dr. Guthrie. Let us return to 
 him. He is excellent company. He is describing, 
 with a glow of satisfaction, one of the ragged- 
 schools he established in Edinburgh. 'I remember/ 
 he says, 'going down the High Street early one 
 morning and seeing a number of our children com- 
 ing up. One of them was borne on the shoulders 
 of another, and, on my asking the reason, he said
 
 The Luggage of Life \ 9 
 
 that the little fellow had burned his foot the night 
 before, and he was carrying him to school. That,' 
 said the doctor emphatically, 'would not have hap- 
 pened in any other school in Edinburgh.' It is a 
 parable. It is the law of life's luggage. It is the 
 law of Christ.
 
 II 
 
 OUR DESERT ISLANDS 
 
 IN childhood's golden hours we all of us squandered 
 a vast amount of sympathy upon Robinson Crusoe. 
 And in later years we have caught ourselves shed- 
 ding a silent tear for the sorrows of poor Enoch 
 Arden, imprisoned on his 'beauteous, hateful isle.' 
 In imagination, too, we have paced with the beloved 
 disciple the rugged hills of Patmos. We have even 
 felt a sympathetic pang for Napoleon in his cheer- 
 less exile at St. Helena. And all the while we have 
 clean forgotten that we ourselves are each of us 
 cast upon lonely, sea-girt islands. We are each one 
 of us hopelessly cut off, isolated and insulated. 
 Moreover, unlike the heroes of Defoe and Tenny- 
 son, we shall never sight a sail. Our beacon-fires 
 will never bring down any passing vessel to our 
 relief. It is for ever. At our very birth we were 
 chained, naked, like Andromeda, to our rock in mid- 
 ocean; and no Perseus will ever appear to pity and 
 deliver us. The links of the chain by which we are 
 
 10
 
 Our Desert Islands n 
 
 bound are many and mighty. At one or two of 
 them it may do us good to look more particularly. 
 
 And by far the mightiest of these insulating 
 factors is the mystery of our own individuality. 
 Each several ego is dreadfully alone in the universe. 
 Each separate T is without counterpart in all 
 eternity. In the deepest sense we are each father- 
 less and childless; we have no kith or kin. When 
 God makes a man He breaks the mould. Heaven 
 builds no sister-ships. We may establish relation- 
 ships of friendship and brotherhood with other 
 island dwellers across the intervening seas. We 
 may hear their voices shouted across the foam, and 
 read and return their signals ; but that is all. The 
 most intense sympathy can never bridge the gulf. 
 No man can enter into the soul of his brother man. 
 'I was in the isle,' says John. And he says it for us 
 all. 'In all the chief matters of life/ says Amiel in 
 his Journal, 'we are alone: we dream alone; we 
 suffer alone; we die alone.' 'We are all islands,' 
 says George Eliot in one of her beautiful letters to 
 Mrs. Bray; 'each in his hidden sphere of joy or 
 woe, our hermit spirits dwell and roam apart.' 
 'There is nothing more solemn,' says Dr. Alexander 
 McLaren, 'than that awful loneliness in which each 
 soul of man lives. We stretch out our hands and 
 grasp live hands ; yet there is a universe between the
 
 12 The Luggage of Life 
 
 two that are nearest and most truly one/ And 
 perhaps Matthew Arnold has said the last word 
 when he sings : 
 
 Yes, in the sea of life enisled, 
 With echoing straits between us thrown, 
 
 Dotting the shoreless, watery wild, 
 We mortal millions live alone. 
 
 We have shed our tears over the terrific solitude 
 of Robinson Crusoe and of Enoch Arden; and, in 
 return, Robinson Crusoe and Enoch Arden urge us 
 to weep for ourselves. For their partial and 
 temporary solitude was as nothing compared with 
 the absoluteness and permanence of our own. 
 
 But there are other insulating elements in life. 
 Our very circumstances, being peculiar to ourselves, 
 tend, of course, to cut us off from others. Our con- 
 sciences, too, for there is nothing in the solar system 
 so isolating as a secret, and especially as a guilty 
 secret. A man with a secret feels that it cuts him 
 sheer off from his fellows. A man with a guilty 
 secret feels lonely in the densest crowd. A murderer 
 can never find a mate. Civilization, therefore, tends 
 to isolate us. Savages have but few secrets; they 
 know each other too well. But we make secrets of 
 everything. Our wealth, our poverty, our joys, our 
 sorrows, are our own private affairs. The simplest 
 question becomes an impertinence. To ask your
 
 Our Desert Islands 13 
 
 next-door neighbour the dimensions of his bank 
 balance, the sum of his weekly earnings, or the age 
 of his wife, would stagger him more than a blow 
 with a walking-stick. The conventionalities of 
 civilized etiquette all separate us from each other, 
 and we move in stately and solitary dignity through 
 life to the watchword of 'Mind your own business!' 
 But by far the most tragic contributor to our 
 isolation is our pitiful and pitiless lack of sympathy 
 with each other. We may not altogether understand 
 each other ; and we have our revenge by taking some 
 pains to misunderstand. Let me cull a pair of 
 illustrations from familiar pages of our literature, 
 (i) Robert Louis Stevenson tells a famous story of 
 two maiden sisters in the Edinburgh of long ago. 
 'This pair/ he tells us, 'inhabited a single room. 
 From the facts, it must have been double-bedded; 
 and it may have been of some dimensions ; but, when 
 all is said, it was a single room. Here our two 
 spinsters fell out on some point of controversial 
 divinity belike; but fell out so bitterly that there 
 was never a word spoken between them, black or 
 white, from that day forward. You would have 
 thought that they would separate; but no, whether 
 from lack of means, or the Scottish fear of scandal, 
 they continued to keep house together where they 
 were. A chalk line drawn upon the floor separated
 
 14 The Luggage of Life 
 
 their two domains ; it bisected the doorway and the 
 fireplace, so that each could go out and in, and do 
 her cooking, without violating the territory of the 
 other. So, for years, they co-existed in a hateful 
 silence; their meals, their ablutions, their friendly 
 visitors, exposed to an unfriendly scrutiny; and at 
 night, in the dark watches, each could hear the 
 breathing of her enemy. Never did four walls look 
 down upon an uglier spectacle than these sisters 
 rivalling in unsisterliness.' Here are desert islands 
 for you! (2) In the Romance of Religion, Olive 
 and Herbert Vivian tell a strange story of two 
 nuns. They were Bernardines, and lived side by 
 side for five years in two adjoining cells, and so thin 
 a partition divided them that they could even hear 
 the sound of each other's breathing. All this time 
 they ate at the same table and prayed in the same 
 chapel. At last one of them died, and, according to 
 the rule of the Order, the dead nun was laid in the 
 chapel, her face uncovered, and the Bernardines 
 filed past, throwing holy water upon the remains as 
 they went. When it came to the turn of the next- 
 door neighbour, no sooner did she catch a sight of 
 the dead nun's face than she gave a piercing shriek 
 and fell back in a swoon. She had just recognized 
 her dearest friend in the world, from whom she had 
 parted in anger years before. Each had misunder-
 
 Our Desert Islands 15 
 
 stood the other, and thought the other unaffected 
 by the quarrel. And for five years the two friends 
 had lived side by side, neither having seen the 
 other's face or heard the other's voice. So true are 
 the tragic words of poor Tom Bracken words that 
 have an added pathos for those of us who knew 
 something of the poet himself : 
 
 Not understood. We move along asunder; 
 
 Our paths grow wider as the seasons creep 
 Along the years ; we marvel and we wonder 
 
 Why life is life, and then we fall asleep 
 Not understood. 
 
 Not understood. How many breasts are aching 
 For lack of sympathy. Ah, day by day, 
 
 How many cheerless, lonely hearts are breaking. 
 How many noble spirits pass away 
 Not understood. 
 
 O God ! that men would see a little clearer, 
 Or judge less harshly when they cannot see! 
 
 O God ! that men would draw a little nearer 
 To one another! they'd be nearer Thee, 
 And understood. 
 
 'We are like islands/ says Rudyard Kipling, 'and 
 we shout to each other across seas of misunder- 
 standing.' 
 
 But there is another side to all, and happily a 
 brighter one. Island life has its compensations. 
 'I was in the isle,' says John. But in the very next 
 sentence he adds, 'I was in the Spirit.' Insulations
 
 i6 The Luggage of Life 
 
 have their inspirations. The world is not ruled by 
 its continents. Wide continental areas, like China 
 and Russia, count for little in the world's history. 
 The continents are ruled by the islands, not the 
 islands by the continents. 'The ancient Grecians 
 and Phoenicians/ says Lamartine, 'imbibed some- 
 thing of the perpetual agitation and insubordination 
 of the sea. The spectacle of the ocean renders man 
 more free and impatient of restraint, for he con- 
 stantly beholds the image of liberty in its waves, and 
 his soul imbibes the independence of the element/ 
 With which agrees a great American writer. 'It is 
 this fluid element/ he says, 'that gives fluidity 
 and progress to the institutions and opinions of the 
 race. It is only in the great inland regions of the 
 world in Central Africa and Asia that bigotry 
 and inveterate custom have their seat. In these vast 
 regions that never saw the sea men have lived from 
 age to age without progress or the idea of progress, 
 crushed under despotism and superstition, rooted 
 down like their trees, motionless as their mountains. 
 It was never a Babylon or a Timbuctoo or any city 
 of the inland regions that was forward to change or 
 improvement. It was a Tyre, Queen of the Sea ; a 
 Carthage, sending out her ships beyond the Pillars 
 of Hercules to Britain and the Northern Isles; an 
 Athens, an Alexandria, these were the seats of
 
 Our Desert Islands 17 
 
 thought, of art, of learning, and literal improvement 
 of every sort.' Island life has therefore compensa- 
 tions peculiar to itself. 
 
 All of which is an allegory. Every isolation is a 
 preparation for the conquest of a continent. Think 
 of the isolation of John Milton, represented by his 
 blindness; and think, at the same time, of Paradise 
 Lost. What an island Bedford Jail seemed to 
 Bunyan! And what continents has he won by his 
 Pilgrim's Progress*. John fretted like a caged lion 
 on his rock at Patmos; but his visions there have 
 enriched every time and every clime. We are 
 isolated in the loneliness of our own individuality 
 that each individual may contribute out of his 
 peculiar experience to the wealth of the whole 
 world. There is no charge committed to our care 
 so mysterious and so sacred as the development 
 and diffusion of our own selves. And every other 
 insulating element is designed, not as an exile for 
 the one, but as an enrichment for the whole. The 
 islands are the masters of the continents in this 
 world and in every other. And thus it has come to 
 pass that the dreariest, most desolate, and most 
 awful isolation of which men have ever heard the 
 loneliness and dereliction of the Cross is issuing, 
 and must issue, in the conquest and redemption of 
 the world.
 
 Ill 
 
 OUR HIGHWAY ROBBERIES 
 
 POOR Mr. Little-Faith was violently assaulted and 
 robbed in Deadman's Lane. So Bunyan tells us. 
 But the remarkable thing about the crime was this, 
 that, when he recovered his senses and was able to 
 investigate his loss, he found that his assailants had 
 taken only his spending-money. 'The place where 
 his jewels were, they never ransacked ; so those he 
 kept still.' There is a subtle philosophy about the 
 episode in Deadman's Lane. Prebendary Carlile, 
 the head of the Church Army, tells a delightful 
 story of a Welsh miner who, in the great days of the 
 Revival, avowed himself a disciple of Jesus Christ. 
 He had previously exhibited an amazing facility in 
 the use of expletives of the baser kind. With his 
 changed life, however, it became customary for him 
 to meet the most exasperating treatment with a 
 manly smile and a homespun benediction. His 
 mates, disapproving the revolution in his behaviour, 
 one day stole his dinner. But all they heard their 
 transformed comrade say was: Traise the Lord! 
 
 18
 
 Our Highway Robberies 19 
 
 I've still got my appetite \ They can't take that!' 
 The good collier only emphasized, in his own quaint 
 way, the lofty logic of Deadman's Lane. The truth 
 is embedded in the very essence of Christian teach- 
 ing. The robbers always leave the best behind 
 them ; they cannot help it. The writer of the Epistle 
 to the Hebrews commends his readers for having 
 taken joyfully the spoiling of their goods. And he 
 adds : 'Ye are well aware that ye have in your own 
 selves a more valuable possession, and one which 
 will remain.' Life's spoilers leave the best of the 
 spoil after all. 
 
 The pilgrims to the Celestial City must all of them 
 pass through the eerie shades of Deadman's Lane. 
 And they alone can enter that darksome avenue 
 with a song on their lips who are first assured of the 
 absolute security of their best possessions. In one 
 of the noblest passages of Sesame and Lilies, Ruskin 
 deals with that great saying in the Sermon on the 
 Mount concerning the treasures of the Court, which 
 a moth can destroy; the treasures of the Camp, 
 which rust can defile; and the treasures of the 
 Counting-house, which a thief can despoil. These, 
 then, are the desperadoes of Deadman's Lane the 
 moth and the rust and the thief ! And these are the 
 only things that they can steal the treasures of 
 Place and of Power and of Pelf ! But there must, as
 
 20 The Luggage of Life 
 
 Ruskin argues, be a fourth order of treasure a web 
 made fair in the weaving, by Athena's shuttle (a 
 web that no moth can destroy) ; an armour forged 
 in divine fire by Vulcanian force (an armour that no 
 rust can defile) ; a gold to be mined in the very 
 sun's red heart, where he sets over the Delphian 
 cliffs (a gold that no thief can steal) ; deep-pictured 
 tissue; impenetrable armour; potable gold. Yes; 
 there is, there is! And it was to this fourth order 
 of treasure that Jesus pointed in His great sermon. 
 It was treasure of this fourth order that Mr. Little- 
 Faith safely retained, after his robbery, in 'the place 
 where his jewels were.' These 'the robbers never 
 ransacked ; so these he kept still.' 
 
 Now it so happened that Peter was standing by 
 that day, and heard that great word about the robes 
 of office that moths cannot eat, about the swords of 
 power that rust cannot defile, and about the shining 
 hoard that thieves cannot steal. And long afterwards 
 the three sets of treasures were running in his mind 
 when he himself wrote to scattered and persecuted 
 Christians concerning the inheritance that is incor- 
 ruptible, because no moth can corrupt it, and unde- 
 filable, because no rust can defile it, and unfading, 
 because no thieves can steal it. These are the jewels 
 that the brigands of Deadman's Lane can never 
 touch.
 
 Our Highway Robberies 21 
 
 Oh the night was dark and the night was late, 
 
 And the robbers came to rob him ; 
 And they picked the locks of his palace-gate, 
 
 The robbers that came to rob him 
 They picked the locks of his palace-gate, 
 Seized his jewels and gems of state, 
 His coffers of gold and his priceless plate, 
 
 The robbers that came to rob him. 
 
 But loud laughed he in the morning red ! 
 
 For of what had the robbers robbed him? 
 Ho ! hidden safe as he slept in bed, 
 
 When the robbers came to rob him, 
 They robbed him not of a golden shred 
 Of the radiant dreams in his wise old head 
 'And they're welcome to all things else !' he said, 
 
 When the robbers came to rob him. 
 
 The lines inevitably recall the well-known story 
 of Jeremy Taylor. His house had been pitilessly 
 plundered; all his choicest possessions had been 
 squandered; his family had been turned out of 
 doors. Yet, in face of his sore trial, the good man 
 kneeled down and gave humble and hearty thanks 
 to his God that his enemies had left him 'the sun and 
 the moon, a loving wife, many friends to pity and 
 relieve, the providence of God, all the promises of 
 the gospel, his faith, his hope of heaven, and his 
 charity towards his enemies!' Life's burglars and 
 bandits can make but poor headway against a man 
 of that temper.
 
 22 The Luggage of Life 
 
 But of all those whose pockets have been rifled, 
 and whose houses have been robbed, none have 
 suffered more heavily than Paul. He knew the 
 skill of the robbers better than any of us. Here is 
 his own record : 'In stripes above measure, in prisons 
 more frequent, in deaths oft. Of the Jews five 
 times received I forty stripes save one. Thrice was 
 I beaten with rods, once was I stoned, thrice I suf- 
 fered shipwreck, a night and a day I have been in 
 the deep; in journeyings often, in perils of waters, 
 in perils of robbers, in perils by mine own country- 
 men, in perils by the heathen, in perils in the city, 
 in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in 
 perils among false brethren ; in weariness and pain- 
 fulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in 
 fastings often, in cold and nakedness.' Yes, 'in 
 peril of robbers/ The sea had robbed him once, 
 and the land had robbed him often. He knew what 
 the robbers could steal, and he knew what they could 
 not. 'Whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; 
 whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether 
 there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.' These 
 are life's 'spending-money,' which we may lose by 
 violent hands in Deadman's Lane. But the apostle 
 goes on : 'But now abideth faith, hope, love these 
 three; and the greatest of these is love/ These are 
 the jewels that the robbers cannot ransack.
 
 Our Highway Robberies 23 
 
 I had a friend, 
 
 Whose love no time could end ; 
 That friend didst Thou to Thine own bosom take ; 
 
 For this, my loss, I see no reparation ; 
 
 The earth was once my home a habitation 
 Of sorrow Thou hast made it for this sake. 
 
 I had a love 
 
 (This bitterest did prove) ; 
 
 A mystic light of joy on earth and sky; 
 
 Strange fears and hopes ; a rainbow tear and smile, 
 A transient splendour for a little while ; 
 
 Then sudden darkness ; Lord, Thou knowest why ! 
 
 What have I left? 
 
 Of friend and love bereft; 
 
 Stripped bare of everything I counted dear. 
 What friend have I like that I lost? What call 
 To action? Nay, what love? Lord, I have all, 
 
 And more besides, if only Thou art near ! 
 
 In Florence visitors are shown the doors which 
 Michael Angelo declared to be fit for the gates of 
 Paradise. They are covered with exquisite pictures, 
 and picked out with noble imagery in bronze. But 
 those gates were once gilded, and Dante speaks of 
 them as the 'golden gates.' The centuries have 
 eaten away the gilt, but have been unable to touch 
 one particle of the magnificent work of the immortal 
 master. Let us put on a cheerful courage, there- 
 fore, as we enter Deadman's Lane. The best always 
 abides after the gleam and the gloss have worn off.
 
 24 The Luggage of Life 
 
 Tjhat is for ever and for ever the strong consolation 
 of the Christian gospel. The robbers steal the 
 glitter ; they cannot touch the gold. They take Mr. 
 Little-Faith's spend ing-money ; but his jewels are 
 still his own after the brigands have decamped.
 
 IV 
 TWO OR THREE' 
 
 A BLIND man can always tell when there is a poor 
 congregation. In such a case the minister invariably 
 quotes a certain text: "Where two or three are 
 gathered together in My name, there am I in the 
 midst of them.' But the text is as much out of 
 place as the missing worshippers. We have no right 
 to drag it in drearily, dolefully, dismally, whenever 
 the empty pews are particularly conspicuous. It is 
 not an apology for human absence. It is a trium- 
 phant proclamation of the divine presence. And it 
 raises a most interesting question. Who are the 
 TWO? And who is the possible THIRD.? 
 
 'TWO OR THREE/ 
 
 Who are the TWO ? 
 
 Who can they be but Euodias and Syntyche, 
 those two wrangling sisters in the church at Philippi, 
 
 25
 
 26 The Luggage of Life 
 
 and all their still more quarrelsome daughters in all 
 the churches of the world? Who can they be but 
 Paul and Barnabas, so sharply contending; and 
 all their contentious sons the wide world over? 
 Wherever and whenever two daughters of Euodias 
 and Syntyche poor ruffled creatures who have 
 judged rashly and spoken hastily meet together 
 that they may kiss each other for Christ's dear sake, 
 and 'be of the same mind in the Lord/ 'there/ says 
 their great Master, 'am I in the midst of them/ 
 Wherever and whenever two sons of Paul and 
 Barnabas poor inflamed disciples who have con- 
 tended sharply and divided suddenly meet to- 
 gether that they may love each other for the gospel's 
 sake (until they come once more to love each other 
 for their own) there, says their Lord, am I in the 
 midst of them. It is at such times as it is at the table 
 of the Lord. There is the same real Presence, the 
 same thrill of the heart ; the same 'thoughts that do 
 lie too deep for tears.' He is there, forgiving, and 
 teaching them the high art of forgiveness; forget- 
 ting, and showing them how to forget. 
 
 But the THIRD the possible THIRD? 'Two or 
 three' Who is he? The third, if there be a third, 
 is clearly that blessed one of the Seventh Beatitude : 
 'Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called 
 the children of God/ The possible third is some
 
 'Two or Three' 27 
 
 lovely and gracious spirit who has wept in secret 
 over the pitiful estrangement of poor thin-skinned 
 Euodias and poor quick-tempered Syntyche. And, 
 by her beautiful ministry, she, like an angel of peace, 
 has brought them to this place of the Holy Presence. 
 The possible third is some strong, sane, saintly 
 soul who has grieved over the sharp contentions of 
 Paul and Barnabas, and has tactfully helped them 
 each to a discovery of the other's excellences. 
 Where Euodias and Syntyche and such an angel 
 meet, where Paul and Barnabas and such a Great- 
 heart kneel, we take our shoes from off our feet, for 
 the place whereon we stand is holy ground. It is 
 hallowed by the Presence. 'Where two or three are 
 gathered together in My name, there am I in the 
 midst of them.' 'These words,' says Professor 
 Simon, 'were spoken primarily of those who were 
 assembled for the settlement of quarrels.' So be it. 
 
 II 
 
 Who are the TWO ? 
 
 Who can they be but a husband and a wife? 
 Following upon the excellent example of Paul, 
 Peter addresses himself to all hubsands and to all 
 wives till wedding-bells shall chime no more. But 
 Peter goes just one step beyond Paul, in that he
 
 28 
 
 takes all his husbands and wives into his confidence, 
 and tells them the profound reason for his earnest 
 solicitude on their behalf. 'That your prayers be 
 not hindered/ he says. 'I have so carefully warned 
 and admonished and instructed you as to your atti- 
 tude and behaviour to each other that your prayers 
 be not hindered/ Happy is that bridegroom who, 
 when all the confetti has been thrown, when the 
 chattering, giggling throng is at last excluded, when 
 he finds himself at length alone with his bride, 
 kneels with her, and lays in prayer and adoration the 
 foundation of the new home. 'Except the Lord 
 build the house, they labour in vain that build it.' 
 Wherever and whenever a man and his wife bow in 
 the presence of the Highest, that they may sweeten 
 and strengthen and sanctify their happy union by a 
 common fellowship with God, there, says the 
 strange Guest who blessed the marriage at Cana, 
 there am I in the midst of them. These are the TWO. 
 But the THIRD the possible THIRD? 'Two or 
 three.' Who is he? Let us consult, in our per- 
 plexity, one of the fathers of the Church. Let 
 Clement of Alexandria tell us. 'Who are the two or 
 three gathered together in Christ's name, and in 
 whose midst the Lord is? Is it not husband and 
 wife and child f To be sure. In the days of love's 
 young dream we say that 'two's company, three's
 
 'Two or Three' 29 
 
 none.' But when God sends a little child into a 
 home the early theory stands exploded, and three 
 become company, and two become none for ever 
 after. There is hope for Christianity so long as 
 these three gather in His name, and He is in the 
 midst of them. The family altar is the hub of the 
 spiritual universe. Every husband who does not 
 daily enjoy the benediction of the 'two or three' 
 should straightway read the fragrant life-story of 
 Thomas Boston. And every wife whose domestic 
 drudgeries and social niceties are not glorified by the 
 blessing of the 'two or three' should hasten to the 
 nearest library for the life of Susanna Wesley. And 
 after he has read the tale of Thomas Boston, and 
 after she has read the story of Susanna Wesley, not 
 a word will be said. They will rise and look into 
 each other's faces with a glance of perfect under- 
 standing. And 'a possible third' will be brought in 
 from a cot or from a kitchen, and that home will be- 
 come the gate of heaven. They will meet together, 
 and read together, and pray together on that day 
 and on every day that comes after it. And where 
 those two or three gather together in His name, 
 there He will be in the midst of them. 
 
 That was a great word which fell the other day 
 from the lips of King George V: 'The foundations 
 of national glory,' he said, 'are set in the homes of
 
 30 The Luggage of Life 
 
 the people. They will only remain unshaken while 
 the family life of our nation is strong and simple and 
 pure.' It was right royally spoken. Herein lies 
 life's wealthiest enrichment and finest fortification. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Who are the TWO? 
 
 Who can they be but those torch-bearers and 
 testifiers whom He has sent in pairs to the uttermost 
 ends of the earth ? He sent them forth two by two, 
 and wherever any two of them sit by the wayside, or 
 kneel in the shadow, or, like the men of Emmaus, 
 talk as they walk, there will He be in the midst of 
 them. And so men have paired off ever since Paul 
 and Silas, Mark and Barnabas, Luther and Melanch- 
 thon, Franciscan friars, Dominican monks, Lollard 
 preachers, Salvationist officers, travelling evan- 
 gelists, and a host beside. Nor are the minister and 
 his wife in their manse, or the missionary and his 
 wife at their remote outpost, any exception to the 
 rule. And wherever and whenever His ambassa- 
 dors, persecuted as Paul and Silas were persecuted, 
 meet together in His name, as Paul and Silas in 
 their prison 'prayed and sang praises unto God/ 
 there will He be in the midst of them, as He was 
 most manifestly in the midst of them on that never-
 
 'Two or Three' 31 
 
 to-be-forgotten night at Philippi. It is ever so. 
 This great saying concerning the 'two or three' is 
 the watchword of the faith. It is the pledge that, 
 however isolated the scene, however remote the 
 station, however lonely the toilers, He is always 
 there. 
 
 But the THIRD the possible THIRD? 'Two or 
 three.' Who is he? Who can he be but the first 
 convert? Lydia, for example, that winsome soul 
 who, as the 'Lady of the Decoration' would have 
 said, 'had a beautiful big house, and a beautiful big 
 heart, and took us right into both.' Paul never for- 
 got when he and Silas and Lydia happy three! 
 met together in His name. It was the very joy 
 that is in the presence of the angels overflowing 
 into the hearts of mortal men. There was not a 
 shadow of doubt about it. He was clearly there in 
 the midst of them. Or the jailer, for example. 
 Paul and Silas and their jailer ! What a triad ! But 
 what a night was that! No Christian knows what 
 Christianity really means until he has experienced 
 such days as that day of Lydia' s and such nights as 
 that night with the jailer. Religion catches fire and 
 becomes sensational. The moment when two weary 
 workers kneel with their first convert has all eternity 
 crammed and crowded into it. Ask Robert and 
 Mary Moffat if that is not so. Wherefore let every
 
 32 The Luggage of Life 
 
 minister and his wife, and every missionary and his 
 wife, and every pair of Christian comrades every- 
 where, keep an eye open day and night for the pos- 
 sible Number Three. 'Two or three,' the Master 
 said. Three's company ; two's none !
 
 V 
 THE CAPTAIN OF THE SHIP 
 
 THE unvarnished fact is that even the skipper does 
 not know everything. He sweeps the horizon with 
 his glasses, but there are signs in the sky that elude 
 his wary observation. He may quite easily be 
 beaten at his own game. The seer in the cabin may 
 decipher the language of the clouds more accurately 
 than the bronzed and weather-beaten mariner on 
 the quarter-deck. That was the mistake the cen- 
 turion made. 'The^centurion believed the master of 
 the ship more than those things which were spoken 
 by Paul.' It is a purely nautical matter. The cap- 
 tain of the ship predicts fair weather and urges an 
 early clearance. Paul, the prisoner and passenger, 
 foretold angry seas, and advised remaining in 
 shelter. The centurion believed the captain of the 
 ship. But Paul was right; the captain was wrong; 
 and the ship was lost. Sooner or later, all life re- 
 solves itself into a desperate struggle for human 
 credence between Paul and the captain of the ship. 
 The point is that the captain of the ship is the man 
 33
 
 34 The Luggage of Life 
 
 who might be supposed to know. He is a specialist. 
 And Paul sets over against his nautical erudition the 
 unsatisfying words, 'I perceive.' It is a case of 
 Reason on the one hand and Revelation on the 
 other; and the centurion pins his faith to the vigi- 
 lant captain rather than to the visionary Paul. That 
 is the exact point at which the world has always 
 missed its way. That was the trouble at the very 
 start. Could it be that to eat of the fruit of the tree 
 would be to die? Was it reasonable upon the face 
 of it? And Adam believed the captain of the ship. 
 Later Noah predicted a flood. Where were the phe- 
 nomena to warrant such an alarming forecast? Did 
 it appeal to common sense? And again the insistent 
 voice of Revelation was scouted. Visit the melan- 
 choly sites of Edom and Babylon, of Tyre and 
 Sidon, of Sodom and Gomorrah, of Greece and 
 Rome, and everywhere, on crumbling pillar and 
 broken arch, seeing eyes may discern these signifi- 
 cant words, deeply graven on the ruins that are 
 splendid even in decay: They believed the captain 
 of the ship. These magnificent empire-builders of 
 yesterday scouted the nebulous perceptions of the 
 prophets, and they fell. National shipwreck always 
 comes along that line. 
 
 It is wonderful how little the practical man really 
 knows. A grey-headed old theorist is tapping away
 
 The Captain of the Ship 35 
 
 with his geological hammer among the stones and 
 . strata on the hill-side. As he leaves he remarks 
 casually that there is coal in the mountain. The 
 practical man smiles' incredulously at the poor old 
 fellow as he packs his hammers and glasses and 
 specimens and strolls off home; but, a year or two 
 later, when the hill-side is riddled with shafts, grimy 
 with coal-dust, and black with smoke, the 'practical 
 man' bites his lips in disgust at his failure to take 
 the old dreamer's hint. The meteorologist shuts him- 
 self up in his laboratory among phials and chemicals. 
 Presently he opens his door and gravely predicts a 
 storm. The masters of the craft down at the port 
 smile knowingly and put to sea ; but when their ships 
 are in the pitiless grip of the gale they grimly re- 
 member the forecast. Only the other day Professor 
 Belar, Director of the Larbach Observatory, warned 
 miners of seismic unrest that seemed likely to 
 liberate fire-damp. He was not taken very seri- 
 ously; and within a day or two all Europe stood 
 aghast at the horror of the Lancashire colliery ex- 
 plosion. Paul generally knows what he is talking 
 about. 
 
 It would be an appalling calamity if we were left 
 at the mercy of the captain of the ship. He may 
 be true as steel, and good as gold, but, as in 
 the case under notice, he makes mistakes. Those
 
 56 The Luggage of Life 
 
 who are inclined, like the centurion, to trust the 
 captain of the ship rather than those things that 
 are spoken by Paul will do well to consult a second 
 captain. There are more ships than one, and the 
 opinion of the second captain will diverge from 
 that of the first. Doctors differ. I have recently 
 been reading the biographies of some of our greatest 
 English judges, and few things are more curious 
 than the way in which two distinguished judges, 
 equally able and equally conscientious, will hear 
 the selfsame evidence, and listen to the selfsame 
 speeches, and then arrive at diametrically opposite 
 conclusions. The same phenomenon is common in 
 politics. Great and gifted men, trained to wrestle 
 with the problems of political economy, developing 
 by long experience all the instincts and functions 
 of statesmanship, will divide sharply and oppose 
 each other hotly on the most simple issues. 
 
 Clearly the captain of the ship is unreliable. In a 
 world like this, on which so many worlds depend, it 
 would be the climax of misfortune if the captain of 
 the ship had it all his own way. There are visions, 
 perceptions, revelations. God speaks from without. 
 He speaks plainly, so that wayfaring men may not 
 err. Paul rises and says grandly, 'Sirs, I per- 
 ceive. . . .' And that centurion is foolish indeed 
 who believes the captain of the ship more than
 
 The Captain of the Ship 37 
 
 those things that are spoken by Paul. The dusty 
 and travel-stained pilgrims of eternity would be of 
 all men most miserable if, amidst the babel of many 
 advisers, no clear guidance had reached them from 
 the haven of their desire. Happily, the Lord of 
 the Pilgrims does not leave His Christians and 
 Hopefuls to find the way to the Celestial City as 
 best they may. There are the 'things spoken by 
 Paul.' 
 
 Yet it must be admitted that there is a certain 
 glamour and fascination about the captain of the 
 ship. It is restful to believe him rather than to 
 venture everything upon the verdict of a visionary. 
 In one of the biographies to which we have referred 
 an interesting situation occurs. It is in the Life 
 of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton). At the 
 very climax of his fame as a judge, accustomed 
 every day to weighing conflicting evidence, and 
 deciding between opposing claims, the great judge 
 gave himself to the study of religion, and, as a 
 result, he joined the Roman Church. Newman's 
 Apologia is a similar case. How can these 'con- 
 versions' be explained? The answer is obvious. 
 Considered from the strictly judicial point of view 
 of Hawkins, or from the coldly intellectual stand- 
 point of Newman, their decisions are perfectly 
 intelligible. They simply believed the captain of
 
 38 The Luggage of Life 
 
 the ship. In the Roman Church they find a com- 
 mander, a head, a pope. He speaks plainly, he is 
 invested with the glamour of authority, and his 
 decisions are final; he is the captain of the ship. 
 But there are other voices that do not yield to 
 such icily critical investigation. They are subtle, 
 silent, spiritual. But they satisfy, and lead to safety. 
 'The centurion believed the captain of the ship 
 more than those things which were spoken by Paul.' 
 That is exactly what, moving along purely logical 
 and coldly intellectual lines, Hawkins and Newman 
 would have done. 
 
 But when all is said and done, Paul is right. A 
 leading English minister, the other day, drew aside 
 the veil of squalor and filth, and revealed to an 
 eminent scientist the raw material on which he 
 worked the very refuse and wreckage of society. 
 'Is there any hope for these people?' he asked. 
 The old professor took his time, and answered sagely, 
 'Pathologically speaking, there is none!' Just so. 
 That is the verdict of the captain of the ship. But 
 Paul cries, 'Sirs, I perceive . . . ,' and tells a vastly 
 different tale. And which is right? Ask your 
 ministers; ask your city missionaries; ask General 
 Booth. Or, if you suspect these of bias, consult 
 the works of Professor William James, the eminent 
 psychologist, or Rider Haggard, the eminent
 
 The Captain of the Ship 39 
 
 novelist. Professor James, in his masterpiece, con- 
 fessed that, in ways altogether beyond psychological 
 explanation, the activities of the Church have again 
 and again made bad men good. Spiritual energies 
 have wrought the most amazing moral transforma- 
 tions. And still more recently Rider Haggard raises 
 his hat in reverence before the astonishing phe- 
 nomenon of conversion as he has seen it for himself 
 in his investigations of the work of the Salvation 
 Army. There can be no doubt about it. The un- 
 seen world is the triumphant world. The spiritual 
 is, after all, the sane and the safe. The only way of 
 avoiding shipwreck in Church and in State is clearly 
 to pay good heed to 'the things spoken by Paul/
 
 VI 
 
 THE SUPREMACIES OF LIFE 
 
 LIFE has a wonderful way of tapering majestically 
 to its climax. It narrows itself up towards its su- 
 premacies, like a mountain rising to its snow-capped 
 summit in the skies. Our supreme interests assert 
 themselves invincibly at the last. Our master pas- 
 sions are 'in at the death.' Let us glance at a pair 
 of extraordinarily parallel illustrations. 
 
 Paul is awaiting his last appearance before Nero. 
 The old apostle is caught and caged at last. 
 He is writing his very last letter. He expects, if 
 spared, to spend the winter in a Roman dungeon. 
 'Do your very best,' he says to Timothy, 'to come 
 to me before winter.' 'And/ he adds, 'the cloke 
 that I left at Troas with Carpus, when thou comest, 
 bring with thee, and the books, but especially the 
 parchments' ! 
 
 Under circumstances almost exactly similar Paul's 
 great translator, William Tyndale, was lying in his 
 damp cell at Vilvorde awaiting the fatal stroke 
 
 40
 
 The Supremacies of Life 41 
 
 which set his spirit free a few weeks later. And, 
 as in Paul's case, winter was coming on. 'Bring me/ 
 he writes, 'a warmer cap, something to patch my 
 leggings, a woollen shirt, and, above all, my Hebrew 
 Bible' ! 
 
 Especially the parchments! 
 
 Above all, my Hebrew Bible! 
 
 The emphasis is upon the especially and upon the 
 above all. Paul knows how isolated he will feel in 
 his horrid cellar, and he twice begs his young com- 
 rade to hurry to his side. He knows how cold he 
 will be, and he pleads for his cloke. He knows how 
 lonely will be his incarceration, and he says, 'Bring 
 the books'! Yet he feels that, after all, these do 
 not represent the supremacies of life. It is not on 
 these that he is prepared to make his final stand. 
 'But especially the parchments' ! Much as he 
 yearns for the clasp of Timothy's hand, he is pre- 
 pared, if needs be, to face the stern future alone. 
 Much as he longs for his warm tunic to shelter his 
 aged limbs, he is prepared, if needs be, to sit and 
 shiver the long winter through. Gladly as he would 
 revel in his favourite authors, he is prepared, if 
 needs be, to sit counting the links in his chain and 
 the stones in the wall. But the parchments ! These 
 are life's supreme, essential, indispensable requisites. 
 These represent life's irreducible minimum. 'Espe-
 
 42 The Luggage of Life 
 
 cially the parchments'! 'Above all, my Hebrew 
 Bible' ! These are the supremacies of life. 
 
 The hero of romance erects a pyramid upon its 
 apex. He sets out in life with one or two friends. 
 He soon multiplies the number. He counts them, 
 as the years pass, by the score and by the hundred. 
 And he dies at last in the possession of friendships 
 which can be numbered by the thousand. It is a 
 false note. The thing is untrue to experience. 'The 
 first true gentleman that ever breathed' found His 
 path thronged with friends at the outset. But, as 
 time wore on, they wore off. 'Many of His disciples 
 went back, and walked no more with Him/ Twelve 
 remained, such as they were ; but even that remnant 
 must be sifted, and of the twelve a selection had 
 to be made. And into the chamber of death, and up 
 to the Mount of Transfiguration, and into the Gar- 
 den of Gethsemane 'Jesus taketh with Him Peter 
 and James and John.' The pyramid is narrowing 
 up towards its apex. And when He passes from 
 Gethsemane to Golgotha John alone stands by the 
 cross, and even he had wavered. 'And Jesus said 
 unto John, Son, behold thy mother.' It had tapered 
 sharply to the unit at last. 'Especially John.' 
 
 Sir William Robertson Nicoll has a story of an 
 old Scotsman who lay a-dying. His little room was 
 crowded with friends. Presently a number of them
 
 The Supremacies of Life 43" 
 
 rose and quietly left. There remained his old wife, 
 Jean, and the trusted companions of a long pilgrim- 
 age. As his frame became more feeble and his eye 
 more dim one after another reverently rose, lifted 
 the worn old latch silently, and left the room. At 
 last the old man pressed the withered hand in which 
 his own was clasped, and whispered faintly: 'They 
 will a' gang : you will stay !' And at last he and she 
 were the sole occupants of the little chamber. 
 'Especially Jean/ Which things are an allegory. 
 The pyramid narrows to its apex. Life contracts 
 towards its supremacies. 'Especially the parch- 
 ments'! 'I have hosts of friends,' wrote Lord 
 Macaulay in one of his beautiful letters to his sister, 
 'but not more than half a dozen the news of whose 
 death would spoil my breakfast.' And of that half- 
 dozen he would probably at a later stage have made 
 a selection. Friendship has its supremacies. 
 
 The same is, of course, true of our libraries. Like 
 the apostle, we are all fond of books ; but our book- 
 shelves dwindle in intensity as they grow in ex- 
 tensity. As life goes on we accumulate more and 
 more volumes, but we set more and more store on a 
 few selected classics of the soul. The number of 
 those favourites diminishes as the hair bleaches. 
 We have a score ; a dozen ; and at length three. And 
 if the hair gets very white, we find the three too
 
 44 The Luggage of Life 
 
 many by two. 'Especially the parchments'! Sir 
 H. M. Stanley set out upon his great African ex- 
 ploration with quite a formidable library. One can- 
 not march eighteen hours a day under an equatorial 
 sun, and he gave a prudent thought to the long en- 
 campments, and armed himself with books. But 
 books are often heavy in a literal as well as in a 
 literary sense. And one by one his native servants 
 deserted him (the pyramid towering towards its 
 apex). And, as a consequence, Stanley was com- 
 pelled to leave one treasured set of volumes at this 
 African village, and another at that, until at last he 
 had but two books left Shakespeare and the Bible. 
 And we have no doubt that, had Africa been a still 
 broader continent than it actually is, even Shake- 
 speare would have been abandoned to gratify the 
 curiosity of some astonished Hottentots or pigmies. 
 It all comes back to that pathetic entry in Lockhart's 
 diary at Abbots ford : 'He [Sir Walter Scott] then 
 desired to be wheeled through his rooms in the bath- 
 chair. We moved him leisurely for an hour or more 
 tip and down the hall and the great library. "I have 
 seen much," he kept saying, "but nothing like my 
 ain hoose give me one turn more !" Next morning 
 he desired to be drawn into the library and placed by 
 the central window, that he might look down upon 
 the Tweed. Here he expressed a wish that I should
 
 The Supremacies of Life 45 
 
 read to him. I asked, from what book. He said, 
 "Need you ask? There is but one!" I chose the 
 fourteenth chapter of St. John's Gospel.' He lis- 
 tened with mild devotion, and, when Lockhart had 
 finished reading of the Father's house and the many 
 mansions, he said, "That is a great comfort !' The 
 juxtaposition of phrases is arresting: 'In the great 
 library' 'there is but one book I' The pyramid 
 stood squarely upon its solid foundation, but it 
 towered grandly and tapered finely towards its nar- 
 row but majestic summit. Come/ says Paul the 
 Aged, 'for I am lonely; bring the cloke, for I am 
 old and cold ; bring the books, for my mind is hun- 
 gry; but, oh, if all these fail, send the parchments!' 
 Especially the parchments! Life's supremacies 
 must always conquer and claim their own at the last.
 
 VII 
 THE PRUDENTIALITIES OF LIFE 
 
 BENEATH cloudless Italian skies Paul is painfully 
 but patiently enduring, in a stifling cell, the suffocat- 
 ing fervours of the sultry summer days. And, with 
 the fierce heat at its insufferable maximum, he casts 
 a prudent thought ahead of him, and contemplates 
 the severe rigours of a stern Roman winter. 'Do 
 thy best/ he writes to Timothy, 'to come to me be- 
 fore winter; and the cloke which I left at Troas 
 bring with thee.' Superficial observers have often 
 considered these personal trivialities beneath the 
 dignity of Scripture. The trifling is subjective; it is 
 not objective. It is their criticism that lacks dignity. 
 'Eyes have they, but they see not/ The microscopic 
 is often as eloquent and as revealing as the majestic. 
 Divinity often trembles in a dewdrop. A trifling 
 incident may reflect a tremendous principle. A 
 psychologist would at least discover in the story of 
 Paul and his summer call for his winter cloke a fine 
 instance of the amazing detachment of which the 
 
 46
 
 The Prudentialities of Life 47 
 
 human mind is capable. It is a strange and wonder- 
 ful thing that we are able, amidst summer scenes, to 
 project our thoughts so realistically into the coming 
 cold that we give an involuntary shiver and cast our 
 eyes over our wardrobes. The same power, of 
 course, enables us to project our minds, not merely 
 from our summer cells to our winter wardrobes, 
 but from our own summers to other people's winters. 
 It is by this extraordinary faculty of the mind that 
 we sympathize. My lady, wrapped snugly in rugs 
 and furs, detaches herself from herself, and projects 
 herself into the wretched rags of her sister in the 
 slums. No one can read Charles Dickens without 
 feeling that, even as he sat in his comfortable room 
 and wrote, he endured all the agonies of the poverty 
 which he so passionately portrayed. Mrs. Harriet 
 Beecher Stowe could never have written Uncle 
 Tom's Cabin unless she had first projected herself, 
 in uttermost detachment from herself, into the 
 anguish of Cassy and Eliza. The iron entered into 
 her own soul by this weird and awful power of in- 
 tellectual abandonment. It makes even loftier 
 flights: it explores moral territories. Lovers of 
 Oliver Twist will remember how the pure, sweet 
 girlhood of Rose Maylie came into touch with the 
 soiled soul of poor Nancy, and for one awful mo- 
 ment the mind of Rose projected itself into the sins
 
 48 The Luggage of Life 
 
 and sorrows of Nancy ; and, in the presence of that 
 marvel, Nancy burst into tears. 'O, lady, lady!' 
 she cried, clasping her hands passionately before her 
 face, 'if there were more like you, there would be 
 fewer like me there would, there would!' And, 
 travelling along this road, we should soon come to 
 that culminating example of mental and moral de- 
 tachment by which the redemption of a lost world 
 was effected. From the summer-time of His glory 
 and holiness He detached Himself from Himself 
 emptied Himself and wept with us in the winter of 
 our raggedness and shame. 'He had compassion' ! 
 The ages can know no greater miracle or mystery 
 than that. 
 
 But the purely psychological phenomenon pre- 
 sented by Paul's summer call for his winter cloke has 
 led us a little astray. A wayfaring man will recog- 
 nize it as an illustration of the prudentialities of life. 
 Paul anticipates in summer the demands of winter. 
 Such prudentialities are everywhere. The great 
 mountain heights store up in winter their millions 
 upon millions of tons of snow ; and when early sum- 
 mer suns have dried up the lower springs, and when 
 otherwise the plains would be scorched beneath a 
 pitiless glare, the welcome streams come flowing 
 down from the heights, and the grateful cattle 
 quench their thirst. In the same way, the soft green
 
 The Prudentialities of Life 49 
 
 mosses along the banks of the rivulet saturate them- 
 selves with moisture like sponges, conserving and 
 protecting it, and in the later days of drought, when 
 else the bed of the stream would be dry, they release 
 their precious burthen, and the thirsty bless them. 
 In animate creatures the faculty is, of course, much 
 more pronounced. Everybody knows how ants and 
 beetles make elaborate preparations for days as yet 
 far ahead of them. The mice and the squirrels 
 make hay while the sun shines, and lay up in store 
 against frost and snow. The bee provides her 
 honey when the earth is gay with flowers with the 
 intention of living upon her hoard when no blossoms 
 are to be seen. We remember reading in Parkman's 
 Conspiracy of Pontiac, of the folly of the Algonquin 
 Indian who, 'in the hour of plenty, forgets the sea- 
 son of want,' until, 'stiff and stark, with haggard 
 cheek and shrivelled lip, he lies among the snow- 
 drifts; till, with tooth and claw the famished wild 
 cat strives in vain to pierce the frigid marble of his 
 limbs.' There is a more excellent way. And Paul, 
 following the example of mice and squirrels and 
 bees, thinks of winter cold while as yet he perspires 
 beneath summer suns. The most obvious applica- 
 tion of the principle is, naturally, the most practical 
 one. Those who are too dense to catch our mean- 
 ing had better inquire for an interpretation of it at
 
 50 The Luggage of Life 
 
 a savings bank, a building society, or an insurance 
 office. It is true, of course, that, concerning many 
 things, to-morrow must not obtrude upon to-day; 
 but the future has its certainties, and it would be 
 both impious and absurd to neglect them. Since it 
 is certain that winter must follow summer, it is 
 certain that it is the duty of Paul to arrange for his 
 cloke. A man must provide for his home whilst as 
 yet he is single ; he must make his will whilst in the 
 best of health the applications are simply innum- 
 erable. But the truth has its deeper aspects. In 
 the heyday of spiritual prosperity we must lay up in 
 store against days of darkness and doubt. In 
 the days of opened heavens and answered prayers 
 let us record the experience on the tablets of mem- 
 ory, to feed upon when the heavens are as brass and 
 prayer as a tinkling cymbal. 'When infidel thoughts 
 come knocking at my door/ wrote good old Thomas 
 ! Shepard, 'I send them away with this answer : Why 
 should I question that truth which I have both seen 
 'and known in better days?' There is a world of 
 sagacity and shrewdness there ! 
 
 It was an awful night in Scotland. The snow was 
 deep ; the wind simply shrieked around the little hut 
 in which a good old elder lay dying. His daughter 
 brought the family Bible to his bedside. 
 
 'Father/ she said, 'will I read a chapter to ye ?'
 
 The Prudentialities of Life 51 
 
 But the old man was in sore pain, and only 
 moaned. She opened the book. 
 
 *Na, na, lassie,' he said, 'the storm's up noo; I 
 theekit [thatched] my hoose in the calm weather!' 
 
 We can learn no loftier philosophy than that from 
 the story of Paul's summer call for his winter cloke. 
 We must thatch our houses in the calm weather, and, 
 later on, smile at the storm. Life's truest pru- 
 dentiality lies just there !
 
 VIII 
 THE FACE AT THE WINDOW 
 
 are living in a very wistful world. It is all very 
 well to say that people are irreligious, callous, in- 
 different That is true ; but it is not the whole of the 
 truth. When Mr. H. G. Wells' First Men in the 
 Moon reached their lunar destination the moon 
 seemed to them to be lifeless, derelict, desolate; but 
 when they probed beneath the surface they found 
 it teeming with pulsing life, and furious thought, 
 and industrial activity. And the more deeply they 
 penetrated into its cavernous tunnels and mysterious 
 subways the more populous the place became. 
 Which is, as Mr. Wells very possibly meant it to be, 
 an allegory. It is when we look with superficial 
 eyes upon the world that we are pessimists. When 
 we scratch the surface we begin to behold the truth. 
 One of those noble and graceful Hebrew metaphors 
 which, for sheer literary beauty, have never been 
 surpassed, reflects most perfectly the whole position. 
 'My soul doth wait for the Lord more than they that 
 watch for the morning; I say, more than they that 
 
 52
 
 The Face at the Window 53 
 
 watch for the morning/ The image is one of ex- 
 quisite tenderness and pathos. The night is long 
 and dreary, and the tired watchers press their faces 
 every now and then against the window-pane, eager 
 to discover beyond the rugged ranges some grey 
 glimmer of the coming dawn. The soul of many a 
 man has its eastward aspect. There are great num- 
 bers who dwell in chambers like that in which Chris- 
 tian was lodged in the Palace Beautiful, 'whose 
 window opened toward the sun-rising.' The soul of 
 the psalmist is in the darkness, but his face is to- 
 wards the dawn. We are in grave peril, in our 
 pessimistic moods, of forgetting the face at the 
 window. It is the essential feature in the present 
 situation. There are pilgrims 'asking the way to 
 Zion with their faces thitherward.' 
 
 Let my meaning mirror itself in a pair of illustra- 
 tions. Here are two such faces peering wistfully 
 out from the dark. 
 
 The first is that of Frank T. Bullen. In With 
 Christ at Sea, he says, 'Arriving in Sydney, I soon 
 succeeded in getting a berth as lamp-trimmer in one 
 of the coasting steamers, and for the next twelve 
 months made a pretty complete circuit of the Aus- 
 tralasian colonies, living on the best of everything, 
 earning good wages, learning all manner of things 
 harmful to me, but never by any chance coming
 
 54 The Luggage of Life 
 
 across any one who was Christianly disposed, and 
 feeling myself less and less anxious to seek after 
 God. Often I would stand on deck, when anchored 
 in Sydney Harbour on Sunday morning, and listen 
 to the church bells playing 'Sicilian Mariners,' with 
 a dull ache at my heart, a deep longing for some- 
 thing, I knew not what.' Thus ends the quotation; 
 but the tragic fact is that there were excellent peo- 
 ple, with Bibles and hymn-books, passing along the 
 quay on the way to church, who glanced at the grimy 
 young lamp-trimmer and thought him irreligious, 
 callous, and indifferent! They failed to see the 
 wistful face at the window. 
 
 The other occurs in the memoir of Dr. H. Grattan 
 Guinness. On one of the earliest pages we read: 
 'Never shall I forget one evening, when the ship was 
 anchored in a calm off Lowestoft, near Yarmouth, 
 looking at the sun slowly setting in the west over the 
 peaceful scene, the outline of a church spire rising 
 among trees showing distinctly against the glowing 
 sky. I was longing unutterably to be permitted to 
 dwell in some quiet spot where, out of the reach of 
 evil society and the voice of blasphemy, I might 
 worship God and walk with Him in unhindered 
 fellowship/ 
 
 'Longing unutterably !' 'More than they that watch 
 for the morning.' That is it !
 
 The Face at the Window 55 
 
 The fact is that we are too superficial. We glance 
 at a man and at once tie an imaginary label round 
 his neck. We classify him as a Christian, or as a 
 heretic, or as a sceptic, or as a backslider; and we 
 think that that settles it. But our work of classifi- 
 cation is very much more complicated than we think. 
 We forget that a saint and a sceptic can dwell to- 
 gether in the same skin. Lord, I believe there you 
 have the saint! Help Thou mine unbelief there 
 you have the sceptic! The prophets loved to talk 
 of a time when the wolf should lie down with the 
 lamb; but in many a heart the wolf and the lamb 
 dwell together even now. Great wickedness and 
 great wist fulness often lodge in the self -same heart. 
 The room may be very dark indeed, but the face 
 is at the window looking towards the light. We are 
 slow to learn the lesson that Robert Louis Stevenson 
 tried to teach us in his allegory of Dr. Jekyll and 
 Mr. Hyde. As the years go by we learn to econo- 
 mize our labels. 
 
 Dr. Campbell Morgan was recently asked by an 
 interviewer for his view of the spiritual condition 
 of London. 'On the one hand/ he replied, 'I see 
 evidence of awful indifference, but on the other I 
 see remarkable wistf ulness. I find that, when I get 
 into touch with the most indifferent men, there is 
 a great wist fulness that was absent a few years ago.
 
 56 The Luggage of Life 
 
 The man who then told me that he was an agnostic 
 still says that he is an agnostic, but he adds now 
 that he dearly wishes he could believe as I do.' That 
 testimony is significant. It means that the men who 
 sit in thick darkness are moving towards the window 
 and longing for the dawn. 
 
 Dr. Douglas Adam has told us a striking story of 
 Professor Huxley. 'A friend of mine,' says Dr. 
 Adam, 'was acting on a Royal Commission of which 
 Professor Huxley was a member. One Sunday he 
 and the great scientist were staying in a little coun- 
 try town. "I suppose you are going to church," said 
 Huxley. "Yes," replied the friend. "What if, in- 
 stead, you stayed at home and talked to me of your 
 religion ?" "No," was the reply, "for I am not clever 
 enough to refute your arguments." "But what if 
 you simply told me of your own experience what 
 religion has done for you?" My friend did not go 
 to church that morning. He stayed at home and told 
 Huxley the story of all that Christ had been to him. 
 And presently there were tears in the eyes of the 
 great agnostic as he said, "I would give my right 
 hand if I could believe that!" Huxley's face was 
 at the window, in spite of everything. 
 
 But, of course, the peerless illustration of our 
 point is the infinitely pathetic case of Professor 
 Sidgwick. Has any minister ever read that life-
 
 The Face at the Window 57 
 
 story with dry eyes? If so, we are sorry for his 
 congregation. To enter into the cheerless realm of 
 Sidgwick's scepticism is a more chilling experience 
 than to penetrate polar solitudes. And yet no one 
 can read that throbbing story without seeing a tear- 
 stained face at the window. Long and wistfully 
 the brilliant doctor strained his eyes, looking east- 
 ward, but saw not the roseate flush of the dawn. 
 He felt, through it all, that his doubt was his shame ; 
 and his soul ached for faith. He literally longed 
 for the light 'more than they that watch for the 
 morning; I say, more than they that watch for the 
 morning.' There was unbelief in his brain, but a 
 wonderful wistfulness shone in his yearning eyes. 
 Beneath his intellectual uncertainties he carried a 
 pitifully hungry heart. Others such as Mill and 
 Tyndall, Professor Clifford and Viscount Amberley 
 might, of course, easily be cited to swell this cloud 
 of witnesses ; but there is no need. 
 
 Let us, however, before laying aside the pen, cross 
 the ocean in order to inquire whether this strange 
 and wistful craving is confined to grimy lamp-trim- 
 mers like Frank Bullen, and to brilliant University 
 professors like Henry Sidgwick; or is it to be dis- 
 covered also in the regions beyond? And so soon 
 as we step ashore it becomes manifest that, without 
 an exception, the peoples who sit in darkness have,
 
 $8 The Luggage of Life 
 
 nevertheless, their faces to the window. In every 
 land 'there be many that say, Who will show us any 
 good?' On continents and. on islands blind souls 
 are everywhere groping after the light. It must be 
 so. If, as Principal Iverach argues in his Christian 
 Message, the Founder of Christianity be in very 
 deed the Son of God, it is inconceivable that the hu- 
 man heart can find its home in Mohammedanism or 
 Buddhism. Only recently a great All-India Con- 
 vention of Religions was held at Allahabad. Hin- 
 duism, Islamism, Jainism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, 
 and Theosophy were all strongly represented. But it 
 was agreed, by general consent, that the only mes- 
 sage that 'struck warm' was the witness of the 
 Indian Christians to the love and power of Christ. 
 To that testimony a sympathetic chord of response 
 vibrated in all hearts. And, at the close of the Con- 
 vention, the Hindu secretary exclaimed, 'The one 
 thing we could not have dispensed with was the 
 Christian contribution!' It was like a streak of 
 dawn streaming in upon the tired watchers of the 
 night. 'The Lady of the Decoration' tells us that 
 she saw in Japan 'a wist fulness that I have never 
 seen anywhere else, except in the eyes of a dog.' 
 The letters of our missionaries on every field often 
 remind us of that unforgettable cartoon which ap- 
 peared in Punch in the dark days of 1885. It repre-
 
 The Face at the Window 59 
 
 sented General Gordon on the roof of his palace 
 at Khartoum, shading his eager eyes with his hand 
 and gazing with a look of unutterable wistfulness 
 towards the sandy horizon, watching for that reliev- 
 ing column that ultimately came too late. He waited 
 for their coming more than they that watch for the 
 morning. So do the nations. 
 
 Sudden, before my inward open vision, 
 Millions of faces crowded up to view, 
 
 Sad eyes that said: 'For us is no provision, 
 Give us your Saviour, too! 
 
 'Give us,' they cry, 'your cup of consolation ; 
 
 Never to our outreaching hands 'tis passed; 
 We long for the Desire of every nation, 
 
 And, oh, we die so fast!' 
 
 These are the faces at the window. When little 
 Bilney made his historic confession to Hugh 
 Latimer, which lit that candle in England that has 
 never been put out, an image akin to this haunted 
 his imagination. 'Oh, Father Latimer/ he said, 
 'prithee, hear me: when I read in the Latin Testa- 
 ment of the great Erasmus these strange words 
 "Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners," 
 it was with me as though in the midst of a dark 
 night, day suddenly broke !' That is the daybreak 
 for which the faces watch at the windows of the
 
 60 The Luggage of Life 
 
 world 'more than they that watch for the morning ; 
 I say, more than they that watch for the morning.' 
 The exquisite winsomeness of the Christian evangel 
 and the wondrous wist fulness of a waiting world 
 are the two strong pillars on which we build our 
 serene confidence in the day after to-morrow.
 
 IX 
 
 BACK MOVES 
 
 I WAS enjoying the rare blessedness of an evening 
 free from engagements. I was revelling in the 
 luxury of a glorious arm-chair, a blazing fire, and a 
 fascinating book. The children were seated at the 
 table behind me, absorbed in the desperate hazards 
 of the game that lay between them. The only noise 
 was the rustle of the leaves of my book. But at 
 length the silence was broken. 'You can't do that !' 
 I heard one of the players cry, 'there are no back 
 moves !' I read on; but had not gone far when I 
 came upon this sentence: 'The unseen opponent in 
 the great game of life, while scrupulously fair, will 
 allow no back moves, and makes us pay in full for 
 every blunder.' The words, of course, are Huxley's. 
 I wonder if he is right ! I am not at all sure that he 
 has spoken the last word. 
 
 So many men find their lives entangled, prej- 
 udiced, compromised, that unless you can promise 
 them something in the nature of a back move the 
 most you can offer seems so paltry and small. Go to 
 
 61
 
 62 The Luggage of Life 
 
 an almshouse, for example, and the eld people will 
 remind you that you can't give them their lives over 
 again. Visit a jail, and, in some form or other, the 
 terrible question will present itself in every cell: 
 'Can I begin again at the point at which I went 
 astray?' Talk to a man who is in the grip of the 
 drink fiend. He does not doubt for a moment the 
 willingness of God to forgive. He is even inclined 
 to think it possible that the power of God might be 
 able to keep him from the dreadful snare. But see 
 the stain on his life! He thinks with unspeakable 
 horror of his tarnished name, his humiliated wife, 
 his trembling hand. Have you nothing to say to him 
 about a fresh start, a clean sheet, a back move? If 
 not, you will lose him in spite of everything. 
 
 Now I imagine that most of us have passed 
 through three distinct phases of thought on this sub- 
 ject. I confess that I have. They are three in- 
 evitable stages of development. First of all, there 
 was the period at which we assured men, with the 
 most sublime confidence, that their sins, like a dark 
 cloud, could be blotted from the face of the sky and 
 wiped into oblivion. The ugly stain, we told them, 
 could be perfectly and eternally erased. We 
 boasted, in our fine evangelistic fervour, that a 
 sinner might not only be pardoned, but be justified. 
 For a sinful man to be justified, we elaborately ex-
 
 Back Moves 63 
 
 plained, was for a wicked man to be made as though 
 he had never been wicked at all. Sin is not only 
 forgiven; it is annihilated, cast behind God's back, 
 hurled into the depths of the sea. Salvation, under 
 that first interpretation, was nothing less than a 
 magnificent back move. 
 
 Then came doubts, suspicions, and the second 
 phase. We found it was not all so simple as we 
 thought. The jail-bird is converted; but who will 
 trust him? The old record is so damning! The 
 drunkard kneels in a tempest of tears at the penitent- 
 form; but the bloated face, and the palsied hand, and 
 worse still the awful craving are there still. We 
 recalled John B. Cough's bitter, bitter cry: 'The 
 scars remain!' he lamented, 'scars never to be 
 eradicated, never to be removed in this life. I have 
 been plucked like a brand from the burning; but the 
 scar of the fire is on me !' And George Mac Donald 
 emphasizes, with a very tender but a very telling 
 touch, another aspect of the same problem. The 
 passage occurs in Wilfrid Cumbermede. 'Do you 
 know, Wilfrid, I once shot a little bird for no good, 
 but just to shoot at something. I knew it was 
 wrong, yet I drew the trigger. It dropped, a heap 
 of ruffled feathers. I shall never get that little bird 
 out of my head. And the worst of it is that, to all 
 eternity I can never make any atonement.' 'But
 
 64 The Luggage of Life 
 
 God will forgive you, Charley!' 'What do I care 
 for that/ he rejoined almost fiercely, 'when the little 
 bird cannot forgive me?' Yes, there is just that 
 element in life that makes back moves very difficult. 
 And, unhappily, the wreckage men have wrought 
 is not always confined to a heap of ruffled feathers. 
 What if, whilst Heaven absolves, earth finds it hard 
 to entertain kind thoughts of us? What if, instead 
 of little birds, our own flesh and blood rise up in 
 judgment against us? There is, undoubtedly, a 
 good deal to give pause to our early theology; a 
 good deal to enforce the cheerless philosophy of 
 Omar Khayyam: 
 
 The Moving Finger writes ; and, having writ, 
 Moves on: nor all your piety nor wit 
 
 Shall lure it back to cancel half a line, 
 Nor all your tears wash out a word of it. 
 
 We abode among these sombre thoughts for many 
 years, and fancied that we had reached finality. We 
 pitched our tent in this dismal wilderness and re- 
 garded it as home. We foolishly imagined that this 
 was the last phase, and that there was no more to 
 be said. And when the felon looked eagerly up into 
 our eyes, as he sat in his lonely cell, and asked about 
 the new start, the clean sheet, the back move, we 
 were dumb.
 
 Back Moves 65 
 
 Then came emancipation, and the third phase. 
 And, as usual, the Bible brought it. We were brows- 
 ing among the prophecies ; we came upon Jeremiah's 
 story of the potter. 'Then I went down to the 
 potter's house, and, behold, he wrought a work on 
 the wheels. And the vessel that he made of clay 
 was marred in the hand of the potter: so he made 
 it again another vessel, as seemed good to the potter 
 to make it. Then the word of the Lord came to me 
 saying, O house of Israel, cannot I do with you as 
 this potter? saith the Lord.' He made it again! 
 That is surely as near to a back move as it is possible 
 to get ! I remember hearing the Rev. F. B. Meyer 
 tell of a woman who, on her way to commit suicide, 
 heard the singing in Christ Church, Westminster, 
 and stole into the porch. She was only a poor, 
 soiled, broken bit of London's outcast womanhood. 
 It happened that Mr. Meyer preached on the story 
 of the potter, the vessel marred and remade. 
 There was no further thought of suicide. She was 
 charmed at the prospect of a back move. Surely 
 when Jesus talked to Nicodemus of being 'born 
 again/ He was promising a back move ! 
 
 Then, too, in turning over these ancient proph- 
 ecies, I came to Joel. Everybody knows that the 
 entire prophecy of Joel was suggested by the his- 
 toric and unprecedented plague of locusts which had
 
 66 The Luggage of Life 
 
 just devastated the entire land. The very sun was 
 darkened, the fields and vineyards were a howling 
 wilderness, business in the city was paralysed; 
 even the sacrifices in the Temple were suspended. 
 In the midst of this awful visitation, this fearful 
 scourge, this national calamity, the prophet was 
 commanded to cry : 'Fear not, O land ; be glad and 
 rejoice: for the Lord will do great things. I will 
 restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten.' 
 And the promise, royally given, was royally fulfilled. 
 The sun was once more shining out of a clear sky. 
 The vines were bowing beneath the burden of 
 wealthy and luscious clusters. The hills, with rich, 
 delicious grass for the cattle, were as green as 
 emerald. The valleys laughed and sang with their 
 golden crops of corn. The city was humming with 
 commercial prosperity. And, to crown all, the 
 temple was once again crowded with devout wor- 
 shippers. The years that the locust had eaten were 
 all fully restored. 
 
 Now if only I could go to that felon's cell, to 
 that drunkard's home, and to a hundred other places 
 that occur to me, with a message like that! 'I 
 will restore to you the years that the locust hath 
 eaten!' That would be grand! That would be a 
 gospel of back moves with a vengeance! And may 
 I not? Now let me think!
 
 Back Moves 67 
 
 How was the promise fulfilled? How did the 
 Most High restore the years that the locust had 
 eaten? It is very simple. What the locusts took, 
 they took; and there was no return. But the next 
 year? Why, the next year the hills and valleys of 
 Palestine were such a scene of abundant harvest 
 and prodigal growth that the people were fully 
 compensated for the loss of the previous season. 
 Now, as the children say, we are getting warm ! 
 
 Have we never known a life that, in its later 
 years, displayed a sweetness and a purity and a 
 grace which were the direct outcome of earlier 
 suffering or of earlier sin? Can we not recall the 
 memory of saintly and fruitful lives in which both 
 the sanctity and the fruitfulness were the natural 
 result of hideous memories of former transgres- 
 sion? It was the haunting nightmare of their old 
 sins that drove both Bunyan and Newton to such 
 intense personal piety and to such fervent evangel- 
 istic zeal. We have all known men who, in days 
 gone by, lived in open and notorious shame. Then 
 came the change. Their faith was a pattern to us 
 all in its exquisite and childlike simplicity. The 
 very enormity of their transgressions made religion 
 a revelry to them and the thought of pardon a per- 
 petual luxury. Their faces were radiant. They 
 never referred to their experiences but with stream-
 
 68 The Luggage of Life 
 
 ing eyes and faltering voices. Their testimony was 
 so impressive as to carry conviction to all who heard 
 it. And as we saw how strong men were moved by 
 their utterance we felt that God, in His own wise 
 and wonderful way, was restoring to them the years 
 that the locust had eaten. In the familiar lines of 
 Hezekiah Butterworth there are two significant buts, 
 and we are in danger of noticing only the one : 
 
 But the bird with the broken pinion 
 Never soared so high again. 
 
 This is the first. That is the truth that Huxley saw. 
 But it is not the whole truth. There is another 
 but: 
 
 But the bird with the broken pinion 
 
 Kept another from the snare, 
 And the life that sin had stricken 
 
 Raised another from despair. 
 Each loss has its compensations, 
 
 There is healing for every pain; 
 Though the bird with the broken pinion 
 
 Never soars so high again. 
 
 And, surely, surely, to 'save another from the snare,' 
 or to 'raise another from despair' is the very best of 
 back movesl 'I do not regret the past,' cried the 
 'Lady of the Decoration,' at the close of her story, 
 'for through it the present is. All the loneliness, the
 
 Back Moves 69 
 
 heartaches, and the pains are justified now! I 
 believe that, whilst I have been struggling out here 
 in Japan, God has restored to me the years that the 
 locust had eaten, and that I shall be permitted to 
 return to a new life, a life given back by God!' 
 Who shall say that life has no back moves after 
 that?
 
 X 
 
 THE TIRELESS TRUDGE 
 
 WHILST the fire crackled cheerily between them two 
 friends of mine discussed a knotty point. The ques- 
 tion under debate was, briefly, this: Which is the 
 most trying part of a long journey? One argued 
 for the initial steps on setting out. The weary road, 
 he said, stretches out interminably before you. 
 Every stick and stone seems to be shouting at you to 
 turn back and to take your ease. His friend, on 
 the other side of the hearth, thought quite differ- 
 ently. He contended stoutly for the final stage of 
 the pilgrimage. He vividly pictured the exhausted 
 pedestrian at the end of his journey, scarcely able 
 to drag one blistered and bleeding foot in front of 
 the other. It is certainly rather a fine point; but, 
 after all, it was really not worth discussing, for 
 nothing is more absolutely clear than that they were 
 both wrong. Which, of course, is the usual fate of 
 controversialists. 
 
 Now the worst part of a journey is neither at its 
 beginning nor at its close. There is a certain in- 
 
 70
 
 The Tireless Trudge 71 
 
 describable exhilaration arising from the making of 
 the effort which imparts elasticity to the muscles and 
 courage to the mind, at starting. The road seems 
 to dare and challenge the pilgrim, and he swings off 
 along the taunting trail with a keen relish and a 
 buoyant stride. And, at the other end, the twinkling 
 lights of the city that he seeks help him to forget 
 that he is footsore and choked with the dust of the 
 road. His blood tingles with the triumph of his 
 achievement and the delight of nearing his goal. 
 But there is another stage concerning which neither 
 of my friends had a word to say. What of the 
 intermediate stage? What of the long and lonely 
 tramp? What of the hours through which no 
 applauding voices from behind can encourage and 
 no familiar fingers from before can beckon? This, 
 surely, is the worst part of the way! There is no 
 intellectual stimulant so intoxicating as the forma- 
 tion of a noble purpose, the conception of a sudden 
 resolve, the making of a great decision. And, in the 
 luxurious revelry of that stimulus the prodigal finds 
 it easy to rise from the degradations of the far coun- 
 try and to fling himself with a will along the great 
 Phoenician road. And at the other end! Surely 
 the most overpowering of all human instincts and 
 emotions is that which holds captive every nerve at 
 the dear sight of home! No; neither the first nor
 
 72 The Luggage of Life 
 
 the last steps of that familiar journey were very 
 hard to take. But between the one and the other ! 
 What questionings and forebodings ! What haltings 
 and backward glances! What doubts and fears! 
 Yes, there can be no doubt about it, both my friends 
 were wrong. 
 
 It is the intermediate stage that tests the mettle of 
 the man. It is the long, fatiguing trudge out of 
 sight of both starting-point and destination that 
 puts the heaviest strain on heart and brain. That 
 is precisely what Isaiah meant in the best known and 
 most quoted of all his prophecies. He promises 
 that, on the return from Babylon to Jerusalem, 
 'they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their 
 strength ; they shall mount up with wings as eagles ; 
 they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall 
 walk, and not faint/ Israel is to be released at last 
 from her long captivity. Imagine the departure 
 from Babylon its fond anticipations, its rapturous 
 ecstasies, its delirious transports ! Those first steps 
 of the journey were not trying; they were more 
 like flying. The delighted people walked with 
 winged feet. And the last steps with Jerusalem 
 actually in sight, the pilgrims actually climbing the 
 mountains that surrounded the holy and beautiful 
 city what rush of noble and tender emotions would 
 expel and banish all thought of weariness! But
 
 The Tireless Trudge 73 
 
 Isaiah is thinking of the long, long tramp between 
 the drag across the desert, and the march all void 
 of music. It is with this terrible test in mind that 
 he utters his heartening promise: 'They shall walk 
 and not faint.' They would fly, as on wings of 
 eagles, out of Babylon at the beginning; they would 
 run, forgetful of fatigue, into Jerusalem at the 
 end; but they should walk and not faint. That is 
 life's crowning comfort. The very climax of divine 
 grace is the grace that nerves us for the least 
 romantic stage of the journey. Farewells and wel- 
 comes, departures and arrivals, have adjusting com- 
 pensations peculiar to themselves ; but it is the glory 
 of the gospel that it has something to say to the 
 lonely traveller on the dusty tract. Religion draws 
 nearer when romance deserts. Grace holds on when 
 the gilt wears off. 
 
 Two cases come to mind. I know a man whose 
 whole delight was in his boy a little fellow of six 
 or so. Then, suddenly, like lamps blown out by a 
 sudden gust, the lad's eyes failed him, and he was 
 blind. The father was the recipient of scores of 
 touchingly sympathetic letters. All sorts of people 
 called. Kindly references were made in press and 
 pulpit. The man had no idea until that moment that 
 he had so many friends. All the world seemed to 
 be paying homage to his sorrow. That was the be-
 
 74 The Luggage of Life 
 
 ginning. After many years the boy had been taught 
 to interpret the world again by means of his remain- 
 ing senses. There was nothing he could not do. He 
 earned his own living, and his sightlessness seemed 
 no real hindrance to him. That was the end. But 
 the father told me that the strain of it all came 
 between these two. There came a time when the 
 postman brought no cheering letters. Friends 
 uttered no heartening words. The world had trans- 
 ferred his boy's blindness into the realm of the nor- 
 mal and the commonplace. Nobody noticed. But 
 in the home the little fellow staggered about, and 
 his parents' hearts ached for him. What was to 
 become of him? It was during those intervening 
 years lying between the first crushing blow and the 
 final relief that the real strain came. That was by 
 far the worst stretch of the road. 
 
 I knew a woman. Without a moment's warning 
 she was plunged into widowhood, and left to battle 
 for her five little children and herself. There was 
 an extraordinary outburst of affectionate sympathy 
 on the part of all who knew her. Then came the 
 funeral. After that the world went on its way again 
 as though nothing had happened. That was the 
 beginning. After the years, the battle had been 
 well fought and well won. The children had been 
 clothed, educated, and placed in positions of useful-
 
 The Tireless Trudge 75 
 
 ness and honour. That was the end. But my 
 widowed friend told me that she did not forget 
 when the world forgot. Every morning her grief 
 woke up with her. And every night it followed her 
 to her rest. Every day, as she struggled for her 
 little ones, the haunting question tortured her: 
 What would become of them if sickness or death 
 seized upon her? That was the killing time. That 
 intermediate stretch was the worst part of the 
 desolate way. 
 
 As it is with individuals, so it is with great causes. 
 A crusade is launched amidst vituperation, derision, 
 and execration. And there is enough fight in most 
 of us to lend a certain enjoyment to the very bitter- 
 ness of antagonism. And at last the self -same 
 movement is crowned with triumph. But the real 
 inwardness of the struggle lies midway. William 
 Wilber force used to say that he was less dismayed 
 by the storm that broke upon him when first he 
 pleaded the cause of the slave than by the 'long lull' 
 that followed when the country accepted his prin- 
 ciples, but did nothing to hasten their realization. 
 In America the same thing happened. The war 
 against slavery was undertaken with a light heart. 
 Young men sprang to the front in thousands with 
 the refrain of 'J^lm Brown's body' on their lips. 
 But the real struggle was not then, nor towards the
 
 76 The Luggage of Life 
 
 close, when victory and emancipation were in sight. 
 But who can forget the long agony of disaster that 
 intervened between those two? It was when the 
 nation was trudging tearfully along that blood- 
 marked track that the real suffering took place. 
 The same experience repeats itself in the history of 
 every great reform. Some one has said that every 
 movement has its bow-wow stage, its pooh-pooh 
 stage, and its hear-hear stage. Of those three 
 phases the central one is infinitely the most diffi- 
 cult to negotiate. Between the howl of execration 
 that greets the suggestion of a reform and the shout 
 of applause that announces its final triumph there 
 is a long and tiresome stretch of steep and stony 
 road that is very hard to tread. They are God's 
 heroes who set a stout heart to that stiff brae, and 
 walk and not faint. 
 
 In his Autobiography Mark Rutherford tells of 
 his fierce struggle with the drink fiend. On one 
 never-to-be-forgotten night he resolutely put the 
 glass from him and went to bed having drunk noth- 
 ing but water. 'But,' he continues, 'the struggle 
 was not felt just then. It came later, when the first 
 enthusiasm of a new purpose had faded away.' 
 And, in his Deliverance he applies the same prin- 
 ciple in a more general way. He is telling of the 
 stress of his life as a whole. 'Neither the first
 
 The Tireless Trudge 77 
 
 nor the last/ he says, 'has been the difficult step with 
 me, but rather what lies between. The first is 
 usually helped by the excitement and promise of 
 new beginnings, and the last by the prospect of 
 triumph. But the intermediate path is unassisted 
 by enthusiasm, and it is here we are so likely to 
 faint.' I cannot close more fittingly than by setting 
 those two striking sentences over against each other : 
 'It is here we are so likely to faint/ says Mark 
 Rutherford, speaking of the long and tiresome inter- 
 mediate phase. 'They shall walk and not faint/ 
 says the prophet in reference to precisely the same 
 circumstances and conditions. Wherefore let all 
 those who are feeling the toilsome drudgery of the 
 long and unromantic trail pay good heed to such 
 comfortable words.
 
 XI 
 SUNSET ON THE SEA 
 
 'UNCLE TOM and Eva were seated on a little mossy 
 seat in an arbour at the foot of the garden. It was 
 Sunday evening, and Eva's Bible lay open on her 
 knee. She read : "And I saw a sea of glass, mingled 
 with fire." "Tom," said Eva, suddenly stopping 
 and pointing to the lake, "there 'tis !" "What, Miss 
 Eva?" "Don't you see? there," said the child, 
 pointing to the glassy water, which, as it rose and 
 fell, reflected the golden glow of the sky. "There's 
 a sea of glass, mingled with fire." 
 
 The exegesis of Mrs. Stowe's frail little heroine 
 is probably as near the truth as our best expositors 
 are likely to carry us. I have known what it is to 
 be surrounded by magnificent and mountainous ice- 
 bergs in the Southern Ocean; I have been an awe- 
 stricken admirer of the grandeur of a thunder-storm 
 on the equator ; I have seen the seas in a passion as 
 they responded to a gale off Cape Horn; but I 
 must confess that one of the most splendid and im- 
 pressive spectacles it has ever been my lot to witness 
 was a tropical sunset at sea. The huge and angry 
 
 78
 
 Sunset on the Sea 79 
 
 sun went down like a ball of livid fire. The sky 
 seemed to have broken into flame. The sea was a 
 sea of blood. The very foam on the tips of the 
 waves was tinged with crimson. The outlook from 
 the deck of the vessel was unforgettable the kind of 
 thing to haunt you in your dreams. Everything 
 was weird, awful, unearthly. And as I gazed upon 
 the strange mingling of flood and flame I thought 
 of John. The exiled apostle sat among the beetling 
 cliffs of Patmos after having borne the burden and 
 heat of the toilsome convict day. And at evening 
 he gazed wearily and wistfully westwards towards 
 those teeming centres of civilization into which he 
 had hoped to carry the story of the Cross. And, 
 even as he gazed, the cold Aegean Sea flamed with 
 the glory of an Oriental sunset; and he beheld at his 
 feet 'a sea of glass, mingled with fire.' 
 
 The fact is that the seeming antagonisms of life 
 are not so incongruous as we, in our superficial 
 moments, are apt to suppose. We are in imminent 
 peril of reaching false conclusions through taking it 
 for granted that the other side of truth is always a 
 lie. We forget that fire and water are in greater 
 concord than we assume. Truth consists not in a 
 part, but in the whole; and the separate parts of 
 that whole are often apparently inconsistent. Pro- 
 fessor Henry Drummond has shown us that the
 
 So The Luggage of Life 
 
 'time was when the science of geology was inter- 
 preted exclusively in terms of the action of a single 
 force fire. Then followed the theories of an 
 opposing school, who saw all the earth's formations 
 to be the result of water. Any biology, any soci- 
 ology, any evolution/ adds the professor, 'which 
 is based on a single factor is as untrue as the old 
 geology.' Geologians never approximated to the 
 real truth until they saw 'a sea of glass, mingled 
 with fire.' And from those ancient blunders of 
 the geologians, our theologians, if they be discreet, 
 may still learn much. Knowledge is not the mono- 
 poly of any one of her numerous schools. 
 
 The fact is that Truth is always and everywhere 
 friendly to Truth. It therefore follows, as the night 
 the day, that Truth need never be afraid of Truth. 
 One man may interpret Truth in the terms of a sea 
 of glass; another may interpret Truth in the terms 
 of a flame of fire. A superficial hearer, listening to 
 the two interpretations, will throw up his hands in 
 horror. 'Babel and confusion!' he will cry. 
 'Which is true and which is false?' But a wise 
 man will listen reverently to both preachers, and 
 will see that a sea of glass may quite easily, and 
 quite naturally, be mingled with fire. A few years 
 ago there awoke in Europe a spirit of scientific 
 research. The geologist took his hammer and began
 
 Sunset en the Sea 81 
 
 to search among the strata for truth. The 
 astronomer swept the heavens with his telescope in 
 his quest of truth. The antiquarian and historian 
 went off together to the East with a spade, and 
 began to dig in Palestine, Egypt, Asia Minor, and 
 Assyria for truth. And there were excellent souls 
 in all the churches who cried for mercy. 'Stop!' 
 they cried, 'you will find something among stones or 
 stars that will stagger our faith or shatter our 
 serenity. You will dig up something in some lone 
 Syrian town that will contradict our Bibles!' But 
 Science would not stop. Investigation and scrutiny 
 hastened forward. And with what result? We see 
 now that, whilst Science appeared to our grandsires 
 like a sea of glass, as compared with Revelation, 
 which was like a flame of fire, the two are not 
 contradictory or antagonistic. They harmonize and 
 blend. And we to-day see 'a sea of glass, mingled 
 with fire.' 
 
 It is the glory of the Christian faith that it is im- 
 mense enough to be able to contain within itself 
 aspects and elements that at first sight seem strangely 
 conflicting. I heard a preacher exulting in the 
 tenderness and beauty of God's infinite love. The 
 very same day I heard another speak of the severity 
 and exactness of God's infinite justice. Surely he 
 was speaking of a different God! But no; it is the
 
 82 The Luggage of Life 
 
 same God, but such a God ! There is no conflict nor 
 confusion. We are simply gazing at a sea of glass, 
 mingled with fire. He is 'a just God and a Saviour.' 
 And those who know Him and worship Him are 
 like unto Him. Dean Stanley has a most exquisite 
 passage, in which he extols these diverse qualities in 
 the life of Arnold. He describes the perfect ease 
 and delicacy with which Arnold revelled in the 
 atmosphere of the home. Those who had only seen 
 the stern schoolmaster in the halls of Rugby scarcely 
 recognized him as he romped with the merry chil- 
 dren by the hearth. And those who had only known 
 him in the home, a man so engaging, so winsome, so 
 delightful, listened as to ac strange language when 
 others referred to his strictness and austerity. 'Yet/ 
 says Stanley, 'both were perfectly natural to him; 
 the severity and the playfulness expressing, each in 
 its turn, the earnestness with which he entered into 
 the business of life, and the enjoyment with which 
 he entered into its rest/ In a word, his character, 
 which was perhaps more reverenced than that of 
 any man of his time, was like 'a sea of glass, mingled 
 with fire.' 
 
 The splendour of the sunset on the sea has a very 
 practical application to the testimony and teaching 
 of all the Christian churches. Let us take, by way of 
 illustration, two extreme cases. I repeat that both
 
 Sunset on the Sea 83 
 
 instances are necessarily and happily extreme. A 
 fine church, splendidly upholstered and appointed, 
 but only moderately attended. Its pulpit is regarded 
 as the last word in scholarship and that is as it 
 should be. But it is said to be 'cold.' The ministry 
 is forbidding; the atmosphere lacks cordiality. On 
 the way home the worshippers are arrested by a 
 spectacle so remote from that from which they have 
 just departed that they might almost mistake it for 
 a representation of a different religion. A street 
 preacher screams and yells in a frenzied monotone. 
 His theology is almost brutal; his illustrations are 
 shocking; his gesticulation is terrifying; his 
 grammar causes even the children to smile. But 
 his arresting passion, his grim earnestness, his trans- 
 parent sincerity, his vivid realization of the awful 
 realities of which he speaks these are beyond ques- 
 tion. 
 
 If only the other preacher had caught something 
 of his intensity, and if only he had taken the pains 
 to acquire something of that preacher's erudition, 
 what scenes might have been witnessed both from 
 the cushioned pew and from the corner of the pave- 
 ment! As it is, both are largely ineffective. The 
 one is like the sea deep, but cold. The other is 
 like the sun blazing, but wearying. The seer at 
 Patmos saw that the ideal lies, not in the lowering
 
 84 The Luggage of Life 
 
 of the scholarship of the one, nor in the reduction 
 of the fervour of the other, but in the mingling of 
 the two 'a sea of glass, mingled with fire.' The 
 problem is not one of subtraction, but of addition. 
 It is said that young men sometimes enter theo- 
 logical seminaries overflowing, like volcanoes, with 
 fires of enthusiasm that they can neither hide nor 
 contain. And it is said, too, that they frequently 
 emerge from those colleges like icebergs very im- 
 pressive, but very cold. It is usually their own fault 
 when such moral tragedies occur. At least, it is a 
 thousand shames things should so fall out. The 
 youthful fires ought to be fed and purified by the 
 addition of knowledge. The minister, as he waves 
 farewell to his Alma Mater, should carry with him 
 his youthful ardour absolutely undiminished and 
 unabated, with all his scholastic acquirements as a 
 clear addition. 
 
 Of all the rites and ordinances of Christian wor- 
 ship the same may be said. Our services and 
 assemblies are intended to be seas of glass, mingled 
 with fire. Solemnity must be there, and dignity; 
 but there must be emotion and deep feeling as well. 
 Splendid music must be shot through with spiritual 
 praise. Stately eloquence must be glorified by stir- 
 ring passion. All the externals and ceremonials of 
 worship are in themselves as cold as icicles. The
 
 Sunset on the Sea 85 
 
 most beautiful and impressive ordinances are simply 
 seas of glass till they are mingled with fire. It is 
 only as they are made luminous with intense spirit- 
 ual significance that they reveal their glory to the 
 eyes of men. Nothing is more flat, stale, and un- 
 profitable than an argument concerning the mere 
 technicalities and externals of an ordinance. Yet 
 nothing is more inflaming to all that is best within 
 us than the actual commemoration of these lovely 
 rites. Baptism, apart from the profound spiritual 
 sanctions with which the Scriptures invest it, is a 
 sea of glass. But with the realization of those inner 
 mysteries and experiences, the waters flame and 
 burn. Paul tells us that the same is true of the 
 Lord's Supper. 'He that eateth and drinketh un- 
 worthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself, 
 not discerning the Lord's body' To such a one, 
 that is to say, the elements are dumb; the waters do 
 not glow with fire. He sees the sea, but not the sun. 
 Little Eva and Uncle Tom were, therefore, uncon- 
 sciously embarking on a voyage amidst the eternal 
 verities as they gazed upon the sunlit lake at New 
 Orleans on that beauteous and tranquil Sunday 
 evening. And we shall be permanently enriched if 
 we catch something of the radiant significance of 
 the vision that they saw. Our seas and suns -our 
 floods and flames must mingle.
 
 PART II
 
 CLEAN BOWLED! 
 
 THERE is something wonderfully restful to the eye, 
 and strangely soothing to the mind, about the very 
 environment of a first-class cricket-match. The 
 green and tented field, fanned by the balmy breath 
 of summer and fragrant with the peculiar but pleas- 
 ant odour of the turf; the huge stands, musical 
 with the hum of eager conversation and the ripple 
 of easy laughter; the dash of colour imparted by 
 gay dresses, fluttering flags, and the creamy flannels 
 of the players ; and, last but not least, the immense 
 crowd, garrulous with reminiscences of earlier con- 
 tests and overflowing with geniality and good 
 temper. And then, crowning all, the glorious game 
 itself ! Harold Begbie does well to lilt its praise : 
 
 England has played at many a game, and ever her toy was 
 
 a ball; 
 But the meadow game, with the beautiful name, is king 
 
 and lord of them all. 
 Cricket is king and lord of them all, through the sweet 
 
 green English shires ; 
 And here's to the bat and the ball (How's that?), and the 
 
 heart that never tires. 
 
 89
 
 90 The Luggage of Life 
 
 Nothing is more certain than that a recreation 
 which holds the devoted attachment of a great 
 people must, in the very nature of things, be pre- 
 eminently a matter of morals. In his monumental 
 work, The Rise of the D^utch Republic, John 
 Lothrop Motley says that 'from the amusements of 
 a people may be gathered much that is necessary for 
 a proper estimation of its character.' And he pro- 
 ceeds to demonstrate, with his wonted insight and 
 sagacity, the truth of this general proposition from 
 the experience of that sturdy little people whose 
 most distinguished historian he must for ever 
 remain. Goethe, too, that profound yet practical 
 philosopher, has laid it down 'that men show their 
 character in nothing more clearly than by what they 
 think laughable.' And Macaulay, in paying tribute 
 to Frederick of Rheinsberg, remarks that 'perhaps 
 more light is thrown on his character by what passed 
 during his hours of relaxation than by his battles or 
 his laws.' The evidence of three such witnesses 
 Motley, Goethe, and Macaulay must be regarded 
 as indisputable. One has only to think of the gladi- 
 ators and martyrs who were 'butchered to make a 
 Roman holiday,' and to remind oneself that five 
 thousand horses and twelve hundred bulls are an- 
 nually slaughtered in Spanish bull-rings, to see that 
 Paganism on the one hand, and Popery on the other,
 
 Clean Bowled! 91 
 
 betray their characters in the very recreations of 
 their devotees. From a gladiatorial combat in 
 ancient Rome or a bull-fight in modern Madrid to a 
 test cricket-match in England or Australia is a far, 
 far cry. The question inevitably arises : What has 
 made the difference? There is only one answer 
 possible. It is the Cross I It is not too much to 
 claim that the gospel of Jesus Christ has trans- 
 figured and softened and beautified the very sports 
 and pastimes of those who have come beneath its 
 charm. 
 
 But the thing that has most impressed me, as I 
 have watched these splendid contests, is the startling 
 suddenness with which calamity swoops down upon 
 a player, and imports a new atmosphere into the 
 game. A man may bat most brilliantly for half a 
 day. You watch him hour after hour. He blocks 
 and cuts and pulls and drives with a consistency 
 that becomes almost monotonous. Bowler after 
 bowler is tried, but their task seems hopeless. Then 
 a dog yelps behind you. You turn your head to 
 see what is amiss, and in that fraction of a second 
 there is a click and a cry and a cheer. And as 
 you look hastily back to the field, you see the 
 scattered stumps; and the hero of the hours is setting 
 out from the crease to the pavilion. Before you 
 turned your head you actually saw the bowler com-
 
 92 The Luggage of Life 
 
 mence his delivery. He did not wave his hand and 
 cry, 'This is the ball that is going to do it!' The 
 men in the field gave no signal. The batsman 
 looked as he had looked for hours. There was 
 absolutely nothing to lead you to suspect that the 
 fatal ball was actually leaving the bowler's hands. 
 So suddenly, swiftly, sensationally like a bolt from 
 the blue calamity pounces down upon a man, and 
 there is no place for repentance though he seeks it 
 earnestly with tears. The broken wicket is irrepar- 
 able. He may explain and excuse, but he cannot 
 return. 
 
 I have been reading Mr. Stewart E. White's The 
 Forest. It is a most entrancing description of travel 
 with the Indians among the woods and waterways 
 of North America. And it contains, among other 
 fine things, a splendid chapter on 'Canoeing.' He 
 says, inter alia, that 'in a four-hour run across an 
 open bay you will encounter somewhat over a thou- 
 sand waves, no two of which are exactly alike, and 
 any one of which can swamp you only too easily if 
 it is not correctly met.' Each wave, he tells us, has 
 an individuality of its own. It requires a poise and 
 a balance and a movement quite distinct from those 
 demanded by any other wave. And he adds : Re- 
 member this: be just as careful with the very last 
 wave as you were with the others. Get inside before
 
 Clean Bowled! 93 
 
 you draw that deep breath of relief. That sentence is 
 sage, striking, significant. It seems to matter very 
 little whether you are canoeing in America or 
 cricketing in Australia; the same principle is at 
 work. In the one case, the waves seem all alike; 
 yet each wave has its own peculiar peril, and the 
 Indian who, for one little second, is off his guard 
 finds himself wallowing in the surging torrent. In 
 the other case, the balls seem all alike ; yet each has 
 a trick of its own, and the unhappy batsman who, 
 for one instant, plays mechanically or carelessly is 
 rudely recalled by the hideous rattle of the wrecked 
 wicket behind him. In canoeing and in cricketing 
 disaster leaps upon its astonished victim with such 
 sensational swiftness. 
 
 'In canoeing and in cricketing.' And in every- 
 thing else for that matter. That is a trite and 
 terrible verse of George MacDonald's: 
 
 Alas, how easily things go wrong! 
 A sigh too deep, or a kiss too long; 
 And then conies a mist and a weeping rain, 
 And life is never the same again. 
 
 That is it. Life, for most of us, is wonderfully 
 like the experience of the Australian batsman and 
 the American boatman. It is very strenuous and 
 full of peril. Every nerve is taut. Each wave and
 
 94 The Luggage of Life 
 
 each ball must be negotiated as though all destinies 
 hung trembling on our triumph over that particular 
 wave, our mastery of that particular ball. Most of 
 us can recall pathetic instances of crushing moral 
 disaster. Their very memory casts a heavy gloom 
 over our spirits still. Our idols fell, and we remem- 
 ber the shock and the stagger. 'Who can see worse 
 days,' asks Bacon, 'than he that, yet living, doth fol- 
 low at the funeral of his own reputation?' It is 
 absolutely the last word in human tragedy and sor- 
 row. Yet how fearfully swiftly it all happened !. 
 The thunder-bolt pounced out of a cloudless sky 
 and stupefied us by its appalling suddenness. The 
 morning of that moral shipwreck broke as calmly 
 as any since the world began. The sun shone just 
 as brightly; the birds sang just as blithely; the 
 flowers bloomed just as sweetly; and all the world 
 was fair. It was like the fatal ball and the fatal 
 wave. There was nothing about that day to dis- 
 tinguish it from any other day. Yet that day, in an 
 unwary moment, the gust of temptation did what 
 many storms had failed to do. The hero fell. In 
 giving evidence at the memorable Tay Bridge in- 
 quiry in Scotland, Admiral Dougall attributed the 
 collapse of the great bridge to a sudden pressure of 
 wind from an unaccustomed quarter. 'Even trees,' 
 he added, 'are not able to resist pressure from un-
 
 Clean Bowled! 95 
 
 usual directions. A tree spreads out its roots in the 
 direction of the prevailing wind.' The moral is 
 obvious. 
 
 I find my hand trembling as I write. My peril 
 is so intensely real and so terribly acute. I may 
 bat for hours and pile up the centuries upon the scor- 
 ingboard; and then, in the twinkling of an eye, a 
 ball with a slightly different break may astonish me 
 by compassing my downfall. I may battle for hours 
 with the racing and foam-tipped breakers; and 
 then, as suddenly as a lightning flash, a wave of 
 innocent appearance but of peculiar peril may wreck 
 my frail little craft within sight and sound of home. 
 A gust of temptation from an unusual quarter may 
 work for me such havoc as the sudden squall did for 
 the famous Scottish bridge. Wherefore, says Mr. 
 Stewart E. White, 'Remember this : be just as care- 
 ful with the very last wave as you were with the 
 others. Get inside before you draw that deep breath 
 of relief.' And a still greater and even more experi- 
 enced traveller adds: 'Let him that thinketh he 
 standeth take heed lest he fall.' The logic of the 
 flying bails is irresistible. And it is so wofully easy 
 to be caught in the slips.
 
 II 
 
 MAD DOGS AND MOSQUITOES 
 
 I ENTERED a chemist's shop. The polite apothecary 
 asked me to wait awhile, and, to save my soul from 
 the tedium of staring vacantly at his immense 
 coloured bottles, he very kindly handed me a copy 
 of a magazine. It proved to be the current num- 
 ber of The British Importer. It did not appear 
 promising; it was scarcely in my line; the chances 
 of a thrill seemed remote. I fancied that the 
 coloured bottles might be more exciting, after all. 
 But I suddenly revised my judgment. The word 
 WARNING ! caught my eye. It was at the top of a 
 reproduction of a card issued by the Incorporated 
 Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. It bore the 
 signatures of the Princess Christian, the Earl of 
 Derby, Lord Cromer, and a host of other dis- 
 tinguished individuals. It proclaimed as its object 
 that it aimed at the prevention of Climatic Fever, 
 Malaria, Yellow Fever, Dengue Fever, Coast Fever, 
 Endemical Fever, Remittent Fever, and Bilious Re- 
 
 96
 
 Mad Dogs and Mosquitoes 97 
 
 mittent Fever a truly terrible array. And it laid 
 down, as an indisputable proposition, 
 
 That the Bite of a Mosquito should be dreaded as 
 much as that of a Mad Dog. 
 
 I thanked her Royal Highness, I expressed my 
 obligations to these noble lords and learned doctors 
 for so interesting a statement so concisely phrased, 
 and, laying aside The British Importer, from which 
 I had imported as much as I could carry in one load, 
 I gave myself furiously to think. 
 
 The fact is, of course, that the mad dog has gone 
 out of fashion. He had his vogue, and it was a 
 great one while it lasted. But his day is dead. The 
 turn of the mosquito has come. It is perhaps a 
 little disconcerting and a little humiliating, but it is 
 irresistibly true. And, since it is so resistlessly true, 
 it is better to face the facts. In his magnificent 
 History of the Nineteenth Century Mr. Robert Mc- 
 Kenzie broke the news to us as gently as he could. 
 That great chapter on 'The Redress of Wrongs/ 
 which haunts the ear for ever like a shout of 
 triumph, might have been entitled: 'The Slaughter 
 of the Mad Dogs.' I very respectfully present the 
 suggestion to Mr. McKenzie, with an eye to future 
 editions. In that stately chapter he marshals the
 
 98 The Luggage of Life 
 
 hideous injustices and social tyrannies under which 
 men groaned but a generation or two ago. He re- 
 cites, in glowing language, the glorious story of 
 reform. And when he has told his thrilling tale, 
 and has described the destruction of one monstrous 
 evil after another, he brings his chapter to a con- 
 clusion with a sentence that you learn by heart, 
 simply because you cannot help it. 'The injustice 
 of ages has been cancelled/ he cries triumphantly; 
 'the Hampdens of the future must be contented to 
 occupy themselves mainly with the correction of 
 small and uninteresting evils.' The mad dogs are 
 all slain, that is to say; the reformers of to-morrow 
 must turn their attention, like the Princess and the 
 peers whose proclamation set me scribbling, to the 
 matter of the mosquitoes. 
 
 In his Heretics Mr. G. K. Chesterton scented this 
 truth of the mad dogs and the mosquitoes, but dis- 
 tantly. He describes what he calls the war between 
 the telescope and the microscope. Compared with 
 this, he thinks, the war between Russia and Japan 
 is but a storm in a teacup. In the past we have 
 abandoned ourselves to the worship of bigness. We 
 have strutted about the planet looking for big things, 
 and the natural result is that we have found them 
 all. Now what is to be done? The telescope is of 
 no further use. And it's far too early to go to bed.
 
 Mad Dogs and Mosquitoes 99 
 
 Out with the microscope! Make the stones tell 
 their story. Let the leaf of every tree, and the wing 
 of every fly, and the petal of every flower unfold 
 their lovely tales. A fig for the telescope! Its 
 pleasures are so easily exhausted. Hurrah for the 
 microscope! Its domain is without limit; its future 
 is eternal. There are at least a million million mos- 
 quitoes for every mad dog. Then who cares for 
 mad dogs? Let's get to the mosquitoes! 
 
 Many years ago a singular custom prevailed in 
 addressing children. The good man would look into 
 the eyes of his youthful auditors, and, assuming a 
 melodramatic tone, intended to convey the idea that 
 he was about to impart something sensational, he 
 would say : 'Peradventure, my boys, I am even now 
 addressing some future Columbus or Captain Cook, 
 some Polar explorer or celebrated discoverer !' And 
 in those olden times the argument was very effec- 
 tive ; but it has, of course, been blown to bits since 
 then. The last time it was used, one of the boys 
 asked permission to submit a question. 'What's the 
 good of being a Christopher Columbus/ he asked, 
 'now that you have no more Americas to be dis- 
 covered? What's the good of being a Captain Cook 
 now that we've seen pictures of every rock and reef 
 that pokes its head out of the ocean? What's the 
 good of being a Polar explorer when there are no
 
 ioo The Luggage of Life 
 
 more Poles ?' That is the point. We cannot be ex- 
 pected to supply new Africas for every budding 
 Livingstone, new Mexicos for every prospective 
 Cortes; and the supply of Poles is certainly shock- 
 ingly limited. What then? Shall we put the 
 shutters up? Not at all. 
 
 When Major Leonard Darwin delivered his presi- 
 dential address to the Royal Geographical Society, 
 this matter of mad dogs and mosquitoes was evi- 
 dently at the back of his mind. 'It is true/ he said, 
 'that the South Pole is as yet uncaptured, that the 
 map of Arabia is still largely composed of great 
 blank spaces, and that the bend of the Brahmaputra 
 is drawn by guesswork in our atlases. But it is 
 probable that all these problems will be solved 
 almost immediately. What, then, is there left for 
 the Royal Geographical Society to do? The So- 
 ciety must, then, direct its efforts with more per- 
 sistence than heretofore in the direction of encourag- 
 ing travellers to make detailed and systematic ex- 
 aminations of comparatively small areas.' Bravely 
 said! 'The mad dogs are nearly all slaughtered,' 
 the learned President seems to say. 'Gentlemen of 
 the Royal Geographical Society, let us turn our at- 
 tention to the mosquitoes !' 'The Hampdens of the 
 future must be contented to occupy themselves 
 mainly with the correction of small and uninterest-
 
 Mad Dogs and Mosquitoes 101 
 
 ing evils.' Exit the mad dog! Enter the mos- 
 quito ! 
 
 Wouldst thou be a hero? Wait not then supinely 
 For fields of fine romance that no day brings; 
 
 The finest work oft lies in doing finely 
 A multitude of unromantic things ! 
 
 But we must probe more deeply yet. The greatest 
 word ever spoken about mad dogs and mosquitoes 
 was uttered by Paul. He always seems to have 
 the last word about everything. 'We wrestle/ he 
 says, 'not against flesh and blood, but against spirit- 
 ual wickedness/ Our fiercest fight, he tells us, is 
 not with the coarse sins of the flesh mad dogs 
 but with sins that are as insidious and ubiquitous 
 and invisible as mosquitoes in the night. And, as 
 our Princess and peers have told us, 'the bite of a 
 mosquito is as much to be dreaded as that of a mad 
 dog.' 'If/ says old William Law, 'we would make 
 any real progress in religion, we must not only 
 abhor gross and notorious sins, but we must regu- 
 late the innocent and lawful parts of our behaviour 
 and put the most common and allowed actions of 
 life under the rules of discretion and piety/ That 
 is precisely Paul's point. 
 
 But by this time my reader can think of no one 
 but Thomas Chalmers and his early ministry at Kil-
 
 102 The Luggage of Life 
 
 many. How he thundered at the mad dogs! He 
 preached against adultery and robbery and murder 
 twice every Sabbath. But, as he himself confessed, 
 no good ever came of it. Then came the memorable 
 illness and his wonderful conversion. Every min- 
 ister ought to give his people that great page of 
 Scotland's spiritual history in Chalmers' own beau- 
 tiful but billowy language. And after his conver- 
 sion the mad dogs troubled Chalmers no more. We 
 hear no more about sensuality about what Paul 
 calls 'flesh and blood.' But, instead, we hear a great 
 deal of a multitude of microscopic pests, of which* 
 we heard no single word before. He laments his 
 impetuosity; he deplores his being 'bustled'; he 
 weeps over his coldness. 'Oh my sinful emula- 
 tions!' he cries; 'my ambition of superiority over 
 others ! my lack of meekness ! my want of purity of 
 heart. My heart is overspread with thorns.' Here, 
 too, is a record of a terrific tussle with a mosquito. 
 'Had asked John Bonthorn to supper yesternight/ 
 he says in his diary, 'and told him with emphasis 
 that we supped at nine. He came this night at eight. 
 All forbearance and civility left me, and with my 
 prayers I mixed the darkness of that heart which 
 hateth his brother. This is most truly lamentable, 
 and reveals to me the exceeding nakedness of my 
 heart.'
 
 Mad Dogs and Mosquitoes 103 
 
 Yes, there is no doubt about it. These princes 
 of the holier life Paul, and Law, and Chalmers 
 know what they are talking about. Our real conflict 
 is not with the mad dogs, but with the mosquitoes. 
 
 Hear two witnesses. Professor Momerie asks: 
 'Will you say that the man who has made your 
 home a very hell by his morose and sullen temper is 
 more righteous than the man who has stolen your 
 handkerchief? Why, the misery caused by all the 
 pickpockets in the world to the whole human race 
 is less than that inflicted on your single self by the 
 so-called little sins of your relative's detestable 
 temper.' In his lovely essay on Charles Lamb, the 
 Right Hon. Augustine Birrell, M.P., confesses that 
 the gentle Elia was too fond of gin and water. But 
 he asks if 'an occasional intoxication which hurt no 
 one but himself is to be considered a more damning 
 offence than the pale jealousy, the speckled malice, 
 the boundless self-conceit, the maddening petulance, 
 and the spiteful ill-will of others, who, though they 
 lifted no glass to their lips, broke many hearts by 
 their bitterness and envy? We find it hard to an- 
 swer these questions of the learned professor and 
 the distinguished statesman. But this much is clear : 
 it is all a matter of mad dogs and mosquitoes. 
 
 A young lady asked Charles Dickens to enter his 
 confessions in her album. 'What is your pet aver-
 
 The Luggage of Life 
 
 sion?' one question ran. To which Dickens replied, 
 'Having the calves of my legs gnawed off by a mad 
 dog !' The experience is certainly not alluring ; but, 
 then, how many people have endured it? and how 
 many have been tortured by mosquitoes? Mad 
 dogs have slain their hundreds, but mosquitoes have 
 slain their tens of thousands. For the venom of 
 these tiny creatures is fearfully fatal. As witness 
 the long list of fevers mentioned in the proclama- 
 tion of the Princess and the peers, and attributed by 
 them to the ubiquitous mosquito. Or ask Paul, or 
 Law, or Chalmers, or the man whose face you see 
 daily in the mirror. Wherefore, as the proclama- 
 tion puts it, 'the bite of a mosquito should be 
 dreaded as much as that of a mad dog.' The card 
 bears the title, A warning to wise men. That is 
 very suggestive ; there is no more to be said.
 
 Ill 
 
 ON FALLING IN LOVE 
 
 I AM attracted to my present theme by the merest 
 freak of circumstance. I was shown a most inter- 
 esting letter. As I read that letter I felt as one 
 might feel who is suddenly transported to Mexico 
 or Tibet. Everything was absolutely foreign to 
 me. The language was unfamiliar, and the atmos- 
 phere was one which I had never breathed. As a 
 matter of fact, it was the letter of an accomplished 
 pianist concerning music and musicians. The writer 
 lives, moves, and has her being in a world which, I 
 blush to confess, I have never invaded. A message 
 from Mars could not have possessed greater 
 novelty. But let me hasten to the point. The 
 writer speaks of her acquaintance with a certain 
 eminent pianist whose recitals crowd the most spa- 
 cious auditoriums in Europe with ecstatic admirers. 
 But, our correspondent goes on to say, there is just 
 one thing lacking. This brilliant pianist is a lonely, 
 taciturn man, and a certain coldness and aloofness 
 steal into his play. And then the writer of our 
 letter mentions the name of a lady pianist. That 
 
 105
 
 io6 The Luggage of Life 
 
 name is a household word in musical circles the wide 
 world over; and the writer says that, to her per- 
 sonal knowledge, this illustrious lady one day laid 
 her hand on the shoulder of the brilliant young 
 performer, and said : 'Will you let me tell you, my 
 boy, that your playing lacks one thing. So far you 
 have missed the greatest thing in the world. And, 
 unless you fall in love, there will always be a certain 
 cold perfection about your music. Unless you come 
 to love another human being passionately and un- 
 selfishly, you will never touch human hearts as 
 deeply as you might.' 
 
 Now I have confessed that when I read the letter 
 in the presence of the person to whom it was ad- 
 dressed, I felt myself a pilgrim in a foreign clime, 
 as much abroad as an Esquimaux in Italy. But 
 even an Esquimaux in Italy would at least be inter- 
 ested, would look about and stare if he did not 
 understand. I found myself similarly arrested. 
 Then, becoming sceptical, I turned to the recipient 
 of the letter and asked him if a very liberal dis- 
 count might not reasonably be deducted in con- 
 sideration of the pardonable enthusiasm and ex- 
 cusable exaggeration of so attached a musical 
 devotee? Did not imagination count for some- 
 thing? 'Well/ replied he, 'the singular thing is that 
 the writer of the letter was a pupil of the illustrious
 
 On Falling in Love 107 
 
 lady pianist to whom she refers. One day, at the 
 conclusion of a lesson, the pupil looked up into the 
 face of her teacher and told her that she had a secret 
 to reveal. 'I know you have,' replied the instructor, 
 'although it is no secret.' The girl told of her en- 
 gagement 'Yes/ answered the teacher, 'but it is 
 not quite new ; it is some time ago !' 'That is so, but 
 however did you know ?' 'I noticed the difference in 
 your playing at once, and I have observed the 
 change ever since. I was wondering when you were 
 going to tell me!' 
 
 I am still a stranger in a strange land. The 
 flowers wear strange hues; the birds are of un- 
 familiar plumage and of unaccustomed song; I do 
 not understand the ways of the people; I cannot 
 speak their language; I am all abroad, and hope- 
 lessly lost. But I have been here long enough to 
 satisfy myself that, strange as it all is, the country 
 is a real country. The things at which I marvel 
 are real things. I am not being tricked by a mirage. 
 It is no illusion; I do not dream. 
 
 It is worth thinking about, partly because the 
 same sort of thing is to be met with in other realms 
 than in that of music. It is not merely that love 
 lends to life a new interest, a new rapture, or even 
 a new outlook. Everybody recalls the lines of 
 Tennyson's 'Lover'.:
 
 io8 The Luggage of Life 
 
 Let no one ask me how it came to pass, 
 It seems that I am happy, that for me 
 
 A greener emerald twinkles in the grass, 
 A bluer sapphire melts into the sea. 
 
 But the suggestion in the letter that lies before 
 me goes further than that. It means, if it means 
 anything, that love liberates powers which before 
 were simply latent. An Arctic explorer has re- 
 cently drawn our attention to a most singular phe- 
 nomenon. He tells us that some years ago a party 
 of British sailors landed on an isle in the frozen 
 North, and, by some mischance, set fire to the 
 stunted vegetation that scantily clothed the inhospi- 
 table place. They left it a bare and blackened rock. 
 A few years later another party landed and found 
 it clothed with a forest of silver birch-trees, with 
 stems that glittered in the sunlight and leaves that 
 quivered in the wind. It was a scene of sylvan love- 
 liness. The flames had awakened slumbering seeds 
 which, in the cruel grip of the icy cold, had lain 
 dormant throughout the years. The wilderness had 
 blossomed like the rose. Now the letter suggests 
 that, when the soul of a man is stirred and swept 
 by life's most masterful passion, new and unsus- 
 pected powers spring into activity and fruition. 
 
 Two instances leap to mind. I suppose Scottish 
 literature holds no lovelier gem than the famous
 
 On Falling in Love 109 
 
 letter of Dr. John Brown to Dr. John Cairns. It is 
 printed in Rob and his Friends. In that letter Dr. 
 Brown tells the pathetic story of Dr. Belfrage. Dr. 
 Bel f rage's wife was a lady of great sweetness and 
 delicacy. After less than a year of singular and 
 unbroken happiness, she suddenly died. The doctor 
 was disconsolate, and his grief was intensified by the 
 reflection that there existed no portrait of his lost 
 love. He resolved that there should be one. He 
 had not an idea of painting. He had never touched 
 an easel. He went to the nearest art emporium, 
 procured all the necessary materials, shut himself 
 up in unbroken solitude for fourteen days, and at 
 the end of that time emerged from his seclusion 
 bearing a portrait of his late bride which became the 
 admiration of all who were privileged to behold it. 
 'I do not know of anything,' says Dr. Brown, 'more 
 remarkable in the history of human sorrow and 
 resolve.' 
 
 The other case is, of course, that of Quintin 
 Matsys. He was a Flemish blacksmith. He be- 
 came deeply enamoured of the daughter of a painter ; 
 but the painter had vowed that his daughter should 
 marry none but a distinguished master of his own 
 craft. Matsys laid down his hammer and left the 
 forge; he entered a studio, and seized the brush. 
 And to-day four centuries after his death pil-
 
 no The Luggage of Life 
 
 grims and tourists cross Europe to gaze upon the 
 mystery of his 'Descent from the Cross' in Ant- 
 werp Cathedral, and his 'Two Misers' at Windsor. 
 Ella Wheeler Wilcox, with her usual subtlety and 
 discernment, has sung to us in a similar strain : 
 
 Though critics may bow to art, and I am its own true 
 lover, 
 
 It is not Art, but Heart, which wins the wide world over. 
 
 Though perfect the player's touch, little if any he sways us, 
 
 Unless we feel his heart throb through the music he plays 
 us. 
 
 It is not the artist's skill which into our souls comes steal- 
 ing, 
 
 With a joy that is almost pain, but it is the player's feeling. 
 
 I have thought though I hesitate to say it that 
 all this may explain a mystery otherwise incapable 
 of solution. I speak as to wise men. Many of us 
 are teachers, officers, ministers, and the like. We 
 are frequently confronted with doleful cries and still 
 more doleful facts. Here are articles on 'The 
 Dearth of Conversions/ and here are plaintive 
 papers on 'The Arrested Progress of the Church.' 
 Has my theme nothing to do with it ? I fancy it has. 
 May not the ministry of the preacher, like the 
 music of the player, lack that subtle element of pas- 
 sion that makes just all the difference? I fancy I 
 detect in my own ministry sometimes I will not
 
 On Falling in Love m 
 
 dare to speak of the work of others that very self- 
 same 'coldness and aloofness' which the lack of love 
 explained in the distinguished pianist. 'Though I 
 speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and 
 have not love, I am become as sounding brass and a 
 tinkling cymbal.' It is a very old complaint, but 
 none the less tragic on that account. We take it 
 for granted that we preach Christ because we love 
 Christ ; but is the assumption always safe ? May we 
 not rather cry, with Tennyson's poor fallen queen ? 
 
 Ah, my God, 
 
 What might I not have made of Thy fair world 
 Had I but loved Thy highest creature here? 
 It was my duty to have loved the highest! 
 
 'The more I love Christ/ exclaimed Gustave 
 Dore, 'the better I can paint Him !' Of course ! The 
 most accomplished, the most biblical, the most 
 evangelical ministry may, after all, resemble the 
 playing of our European professor 'an indescrib- 
 able coldness, a strange aloofness' one thing lack- 
 ing. There can be no doubt that Love exercises 
 singular influences and wields potent charms. 'Had 
 I but loved!' cries poor Queen Guinevere in the 
 anguish of her remorse. But no minister or teacher 
 can afford to risk the visitation of that most 
 poignant and pitiful regret.
 
 IV 
 
 IPECACUANHA 
 
 IN his scathing criticism of Bertrand Barere, 
 Macaulay tells us that the subject of his strictures 
 was a man who employed 'phrases in which orators 
 of his class delight, and which, on all men who have 
 the smallest insight into politics, produce an effect 
 very similar to that of ipecacuanha.' I am afraid 
 that, if the expressive condemnation which the his- 
 torian thus sheeted home upon the world of politics 
 were to be aimed in the direction of the Christian 
 Church, she could not, without some equivocation, 
 resist the dread impeachment. There is a classical 
 Scripture example of the same phenomenon. Thou- 
 sands of years ago a tortured soul sat patiently 
 listening to the painful platitudes of his would-be 
 comforters. They endeavoured to propound to him 
 the significance of the afflictions by which he was 
 overwhelmed. And when the last echo of the 
 philosophy of Eliphaz had trembled away into 
 silence, poor Job found himself impressed with 
 
 112
 
 Ipecacuanha 113 
 
 nothing so much as with its utter insipidity. And 
 it was then that he sighed out his immortal question : 
 'Is there any taste in the white of an egg?' The dis- 
 course to which he had listened had 'produced an 
 effect very similar to that of ipecacuanha/ 
 
 But that was in the days when the world was very 
 young and men knew very little. Yet the same 
 thing happens every day. Sir J. R. Seeley says, in 
 Ecce Homo, that the sin which Christ most vigor- 
 ously denounced is the sin to which the modern 
 Church is most prone the sin of insipidity. The 
 pious commonplaces with which we glibly attempt 
 to solace the suffering are often pathetically taste- 
 less. The man whose darling hopes have 'been 
 cruelly shattered is told, with a serene smile and an 
 upward glance, that 'it might have been worse.' 
 The man whose heart is bleeding, and worse than 
 broken, is reminded that 'these things cannot be 
 helped.' We indolently surmise that 'it is all for 
 the best.' Tennyson tells us of the pallid consola- 
 tions which were offered him in that awful hour 
 when the man with whom his soul was knit was 
 snatched away to a premature grave : 
 
 One writes that 'Other friends remain,' 
 
 That 'loss is common to the race' ; 
 
 And common is the commonplace, 
 And vacant chaff well meant for grain.
 
 ii4 The Luggage of Life 
 
 That loss is common does not make 
 
 My own less bitter, rather more; 
 
 Too common ! Never morning wore 
 To evening but some heart did break. 
 
 In other words, the poet asked : Is there any taste 
 in the white of an egg? The comfort was insipid, 
 tasteless; it produced an effect very similar to that 
 of ipecacuanha\ 
 
 Now, quite obviously, here is an evil thing and a 
 bitter. We have no right to play with crushed 
 spirits and breaking hearts. 'A man in distress/ 
 says John Foster, 'has peculiarly a right not to be 
 trifled with by the application of unadapted ex- 
 pedients; since insufficient consolations but mock 
 him, and deceptive consolations betray him.' I re- 
 member very vividly a circumstance of my child- 
 hood. It was my first introduction to the problem 
 of human loss, and it profoundly affected me. I 
 chanced to be standing, on a sunny afternoon, by 
 the gates of the local infirmary. It was visiting day. 
 As I watched the relatives arriving I was struck 
 with the appearance of a big, brawny man from the 
 country. He made no secret of his excitement. He 
 had evidently counted the hours, and had spruced 
 himself up like a village bridegroom for the occa- 
 sion. He approached the porter : 'I've come to see 
 my wife, Martha Jennings,' he said. The porter
 
 Ipecacuanha 115 
 
 consulted a book, and then, with what seemed to be 
 brutal abruptness, replied: 'Martha Jennings is 
 dead!' I saw the bronzed face blanch; I saw the 
 strong man stagger. I watched him as he clung to 
 the iron palings for support, and bowed himself in 
 a passion of weeping. And then, as I stood there, 
 good-natured people, pitying, essayed to comfort 
 him. They rang the changes on the commonplaces. 
 'Other friends remain !' 'Loss is common to the race !* 
 But it was of no use : 'All vacant chaff well meant 
 for grain.' It produced an effect very similar to 
 that of ipecacuanha! I have never entered the 
 chamber of death in all the years of my ministry 
 without recalling the tragedy I witnessed that Sun- 
 day afternoon. 
 
 Now, in the cases before us, what was wrong? 
 This was wrong. In all these platitudes that were 
 tossed to Tennyson and to my friend at the hospital 
 yesterday, and to Job the day before, four vital 
 aspects of suffering were overlooked. 
 
 i. Our commonplaces of comfort are insipid be- 
 cause they ignored the illuminative aspect of 
 anguish. We forget the flood of light that streams 
 from the Cross and that has transfigured tears for 
 ever. Such frigid philosophy as that which we have 
 quoted can be found in Marcus Aurelius, in Plato, 
 and in all the stoical philosophers. And in them it
 
 n6 The Luggage of Life 
 
 is pardonable, even admirable. But from those who 
 live in the light, better things are hoped. Christ 
 has come! And from His disciples the weep- 
 ing sons of sorrow expect, not the stone that would 
 have been flung them by the Platonic school- 
 master, but the bread and wine of the kingdom of 
 heaven. 
 
 2. The insipidity of our consolations often arises 
 from the fact that we ignore the purgatorial aspect 
 of pain. As though the torments of his body were 
 not enough, Eliphaz tortured the soul of Job by tell- 
 ing him that purity and pain were incompatible, and 
 that his suffering was the result of his sin. 'Who 
 ever suffered being innocent?' he stupidly asks. It 
 is the philosophy of the pessimist. It relates all 
 suffering to a black, black past as penal. But the 
 theology of the optimist relates all suffering to a 
 bright, bright future as purgatorial. Poor Eliphaz 
 did not know, but we ought not to forget that a lamb 
 which was ever the emblem of innocence has become 
 also the symbol of suffering. If the doctrine of 
 Eliphaz were sound, the sufferer can only grin and 
 bear it. But it is not sound. And therefore the 
 New Testament selects, as its word for suffering, 
 the great word 'tribulation,' which reminds us of the 
 'tribulum/ the threshing-machine whose work is not 
 to punish the wheat, but to sift it. The fires of God
 
 Ipecacuanha 117 
 
 are never to devour, but ever to refine. It was be- 
 cause Eliphaz failed to remind Job of this that his 
 hearers found the sermon so tedious. It made him 
 cry, as with Hamlet: 
 
 O God ! O God ! 
 How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable ! 
 
 It produced an effect very similar to that of 
 ipecacuanha ! 
 
 3. The insipidity is always manifest when the 
 sacrificial aspect of suffering is ignored. There is a 
 sense in which every sob is a sacrament. The sign 
 of the Cross is stamped on all human anguish. You 
 suffer for my good, and I bear sorrow for yours. 
 Dickens unfolds this wonderful secret in David 
 Copperfield. Mrs. Gummidge is the most self- 
 centred, ill-content, cross-grained woman in Yar- 
 mouth. Then comes the angel of sorrow. All those 
 around her are plunged in the shadow of a terrible 
 calamity. And, in ministering to them, the whole 
 life and character of Mrs. Gummidge was trans- 
 figured. David stood in amazement before the 
 strange and beautiful transformation. 
 
 If none were sick and none were sad, 
 
 What service could we render? 
 I think if we were always glad, 
 
 We scarcely could be tender.
 
 n 8 The Luggage of Life 
 
 Did our beloved never need 
 
 Our patient ministration, 
 Earth would grow cold, and miss, indeed, 
 
 Its sweetest consolation. 
 
 If sorrow never claimed our heart, 
 
 And every wish were granted, 
 Patience would die, and hope depart 
 
 Life would be disenchanted. 
 
 4. And the insipidity of our consolations often 
 arises from their neglect of the positive or possessive 
 aspect of human loss. Whatever has been swept 
 away in the terrible cataclysm, the best always re- 
 mains. In Lord Beaconsfield's great novel he tells 
 how Coningsby, in bemoaning the loss of his fortune, 
 is suddenly reminded that he still possesses his limbs. 
 In The Scapegoat Hall Caine tells how Israel left his 
 little blind and deaf and dumb daughter Naomi, and 
 wandered through the wilderness of this world. 
 And he saw a slave-girl sold in the market-place, 
 and he thanked God that his Naomi was free. And 
 he heard the girl curse her father, and he thanked 
 God for the deep love of poor little Naomi. And he 
 saw a poor little girl that was a lunatic, and he 
 thanked God that Naomi had her reason clear. And 
 then the great deprivations of Naomi seemed swal- 
 lowed up in the treasures that she still possessed. 
 As Mrs. Browning sings :
 
 Ipecacuanha 119 
 
 All are not taken; there are left behind 
 Living Beloveds, tender looks to bring, 
 And make the daylight still a happy thing, 
 
 And tender voices to make soft the wind. 
 
 That is a great sentence of two words that the 
 Mohammedan always engraves on the tombstones 
 of his departed : God remains! Let us but cast these 
 four ingredients into the chalice of comfort that 
 we are preparing for the quivering lips of our weep- 
 ing friends, and, so far from it producing an effect 
 that shall resemble ipecacuanha, it shall seem to them 
 as bracing and invigorating as the new wine of the 
 kingdom of heaven.
 
 I AM writing on a hot Australian summer after- 
 noon. The children are at home from school. The 
 cities are sultry and stifling. The delicious seclu- 
 sion of the fields and the refreshing cool of the sea- 
 side beckon us away. The bush and the beach call 
 loudly. And even the solitudes seem to feel that 
 their time has come. The wilderness blossoms like 
 the rose. Settlements that all through the winter 
 have been dreary desolations of mud and monotony 
 become transformed into fairylands of poetry and 
 romance. The great bush silences are broken by 
 shouts of merriment and peals of laughter. Columns 
 of smoke curl upwards, and bear witness to picnics 
 and camp-fires. Boats dart in and out of every 
 quiet creek and cove. Birds that have twittered and 
 piped on dripping boughs throughout the winter 
 without an audience are frightened hither and 
 thither by a rush of white blouses and straw hats. 
 It is all very refreshing and very delightful. But, 
 
 1 20
 
 Seaside Lodgings 121 
 
 with the return of the holiday season, comes back 
 the old problem of seaside lodgings and holiday 
 accommodation. Which reminds me. 
 
 Lovers of Mark Rutherford and the number in- 
 cludes all who know him will never forget Mary 
 Mardon. She casts her tender spell over every 
 fascinating page. And not least among her charms 
 is her description of her visit, with her father, to 
 the seaside. 'The railway station was in a dis- 
 agreeable part of the town, and when we came out 
 we walked along a dismal row of very plain-looking 
 houses. There were cards in the window with 
 "Lodgings" written on them, and father wanted to 
 go in and ask the terms. I said I did not wish to 
 stay in such a dull street, but father could not afford 
 to pay for a sea-view, and so we went in to inquire. 
 We then found that what we thought were the 
 fronts of the houses were the backs, and that the 
 fronts faced the bay. They had pretty gardens on 
 the other side, and a glorious, sunny prospect over 
 the ocean.' 
 
 So much for Mark Rutherford and Mary Mar- 
 don. I fancy this kind of thing is more common 
 than we often think. The lodgings from which we 
 eventually obtain our loveliest views are frequently 
 rather forbidding than prepossessing. They ban 
 rather than beckon. We dub those dwellings dull
 
 i22 The Luggage of Life 
 
 from whose windows we afterwards catch glimpses 
 of radiant glory. 
 
 For the most obvious application of this homely 
 truth we need not go beyond the delightful charac- 
 ters whom we have already introduced. Turn back 
 a few pages to Mark's first meeting with Mary. 
 Whilst he debated vigorously with her father she 
 sat silently by. He mentally accused her of intel- 
 lectual paucity, of possessing a small mind, and of 
 a stupid inability to discuss important themes. He 
 looked upon her exactly as she had looked upon 
 the repulsive houses by the seaside. But he was as 
 utterly mistaken as was she. It turned out that she 
 was being tortured that evening by a maddening 
 neuralgia. He then penitently reflected that, had 
 such anguish been his, he would have let all the 
 world know of it. And, he says, 'thinking about 
 Mary as I walked home, I perceived that her ability 
 to be quiet, to subdue herself, to resist for a whole 
 evening the temptation to draw attention to herself 
 by telling us what she was enduring, was heroism, 
 and that my contrary tendency was pitiful vanity. 
 I perceived that such virtues as patience and self- 
 denial which, clad in russet dress, I had often 
 passed by unnoticed when I had found them amongst 
 the poor or the humble were more precious and 
 more ennobling to their possessor than poetic yearn-
 
 Seaside Lodgings 123 
 
 ings or the power to propound rhetorically to 
 the world my grievances or agonies.' This experi- 
 ence of Mark Rutherford in relation to Mary 
 Mardon is clearly the precise social counterpart 
 of her own experience in relation to the seaside 
 lodgings. And later on, as every reader knows, she 
 gave to him, as the lodgings gave to her, many 
 a glorious outlook upon the infinite and the 
 sublime. 
 
 All this is, of course, true of the Church. The 
 men of Jerusalem looked up at the spacious and 
 splendid proportions of the Temple. It was a 
 stately pile of quarried stone. That was the outside 
 view. But those who were permitted to stand 
 amidst the awful sanctities of the Most Holy Place 
 saw that, within, all was of finest gold. It is a 
 parable. Readers of Bunyan's immortal allegory 
 must have noticed that the illustrious dreamer took 
 no pains to give an attractive impression of the ex- 
 terior of the Palace Beautiful. But, like the king's 
 daughter, it was 'all glorious within.' And notice 
 this: 'When the morning was up they had 
 Christian to the top of the palace, and bid him 
 look south. And, behold, at a great distance, he 
 saw a most pleasant, mountainous country, beau- 
 tified with woods, vineyards, fruits of all sorts, 
 flowers also, with springs, and fountains, very
 
 124 The Luggage of Life 
 
 delectable to behold. Then he asked the name 
 of the country; they said it was IMMANUEI/S 
 LAND/ 
 
 We have no word to say in disparagement of 
 those who devote their best efforts to the attempt 
 to render the Church attractive and alluring. But 
 we venture to suspect that their most strenuous 
 exertions will never meet with more than a very 
 moderate success. After you have insisted, and 
 rightly insisted, that there should be no oratory 
 to compare with pulpit oratory, and no music that 
 can hold its own beside church music, you have still 
 to admit that, so long as the Church sternly adheres 
 to that spiritual programme for which alone she 
 stands, she will always appear, like Mary Mardon's 
 seaside lodgings, somewhat forbidding and repel- 
 lent. Christian worship is too exquisitely modest 
 for gaudy display. Sin, righteousness, and judge- 
 ment are not themes that lend themselves to merri- 
 ment. There is nothing wildly exciting about a 
 prayer-meeting. Yet, like the seaside lodgings and 
 the Palace Beautiful, the Church has her own pecu- 
 liar and compensating charms. She quickly dis- 
 pels all unhappy illusions caused by superficial im- 
 pressions. To those who enter her portals she offers 
 coigns of vantage from which they may inhale the 
 delicious fragrance of the fairest flowers and enjoy
 
 Seaside Lodgings 125 
 
 a prospect that ravishes the vision and captivates the 
 heart. 
 
 And, after all, it is just that view for which we 
 are all hungry. I have amused myself, since taking 
 Mark Rutherford down from my shelf for the pur- 
 poses of this article, by turning over the pages 
 hastily, and noticing his constant references to star- 
 lit walks. Now he is worried, and that sight of the 
 stars that sense of the infinite 'extinguishes all 
 mean cares/ On another occasion he is oppressed 
 by the conviction that 'there is nothing in him.' 
 He walks beneath the stars and feels that, in a 
 universe of such incomprehensible immensity, there 
 is room for every worm that crawls, and, therefore, 
 a place for him. Again, he is aflame with anger. 
 He walks beneath the stars, and, 'reflecting on the 
 great idea of God, and on all that it involves, his 
 animosities are softened and his heat against his 
 brother is cooled.' We have found at least a dozen 
 such passages in this one book. They are sugges- 
 tive. Mark Rutherford surely means that the in- 
 finite cures everything. He means that, to conquer 
 our besetments, to subdue our passions, to realize 
 our best selves, we need the window open toward 
 Jerusalem, the sunny outlook on the eternal. And 
 he means, too, that to obtain that vision splendid we 
 dare not despise the most uninviting ministries. 'A
 
 i26 The Luggage of Life 
 
 dismal row of plain-looking houses' so they 
 seemed. 'What we thought were the fronts were 
 the backs, and the fronts faced the bay. They had 
 pretty gardens on the other side, and a glorious 
 sunny prospect over the ocean' so they actually 
 -were. 
 
 Somebody has said that God must be very fond 
 of commonplace folk He makes so many of them. 
 Life is full of dingy-looking places and shabby- 
 looking people. But we shall do well to think the 
 thing all over again before, on that ground, we 
 exclude them from our affections and our confidence. 
 As the years come and go we learn that the best 
 and most satisfying springs are those from which, 
 on their discovery, we expected least. Our most 
 treasured friends are not always those with whom 
 we fell in love at first sight. In his wonderful Life 
 of the Bee Maeterlinck tells us at least one thing to 
 which we may do well to take heed. At one time, 
 he says, it was almost impossible to introduce into 
 a hive an alien queen. The myriad toilers would 
 at once assume that she was an enemy, and set about 
 her destruction. But now the apiarist introduces 
 the new queen in an iron cage, with a door skilfully 
 constructed of wax and honey. The bees im- 
 mediately commence to gnaw their way through 
 the door to murder the intruder; but, in the tedious
 
 Seaside Lodgings 127 
 
 process, they are compelled carefully to observe the 
 royal prisoner. And, by the time that the waxen 
 palisade is demolished, they have learned to love 
 her; and they finish up by doing her homage and 
 becoming her devoted slaves. So true is it that the 
 forbidding may eventually become the fascinating; 
 the repulsive may end in the romantic; the prose 
 may kindle into poetry; the sombre shadows may 
 dissolve into radiant reality; the dingy lodgings 
 may open to us dazzling horizons; life's mocking 
 mirages often pass into most satisfying streams. 
 
 If it comes to attractive exteriors and enticing 
 advertisements, theology cannot hold a candle to 
 theatricals, nor prayer-meetings to picture-shows. 
 But they have most radiant outlooks for all that. 
 And have we not somewhere read of One who is 
 spoken of by those who are happy enough to know 
 Him as the fairest among ten thousand and the 
 altogether lovely? Yet, when first they saw Him, 
 He was to them as a root out of a dry ground, hav- 
 ing no beauty that they should desire Him! But 
 I have said enough by this time to show that the 
 experiences of Mark Rutherford and Mary Mardon 
 have warnings of the gravest moment for us all.
 
 VI 
 THE CLIFFS OF DOVER 
 
 MRS. BARCLAY, in The Rosary, says a fine thing 
 about those towering walls of chalk that guard the 
 English coast. She describes her heroine the Hon. 
 Jane Champion returning to England after an 
 absence of two years. 'The white cliffs of Dover/ 
 she says, 'gradually became more solid and distinct, 
 until at length they rose from the sea, a strong 
 white wall, emblem of the undeniable purity of 
 England, the stainless honour and integrity of her 
 throne, her Church, her Parliament, her courts of 
 justice, and her dealings at home and abroad, 
 whether with friend or foe. Strength and White- 
 ness! thought Jane, as she paced the steamer's 
 deck ; and, after a two years' absence, her heart went 
 out to her native land.' 
 
 'Strength and Whiteness' those two are in- 
 separable. 
 
 The principle holds, of course, in the realm to 
 which Mrs. Barclay specially applies it. Nobody 
 who has once read Macaulay's essay on Lord Clive 
 can ever forget the classic and stately sentences in 
 
 128
 
 The Cliffs of Dover 129 
 
 which the historian pays his tribute to British rule 
 in India. He shows that the stability of our govern- 
 ment lies in its justice, its uprightness, its trust- 
 worthiness. "English valour and English intelli- 
 gence,' he says, 'have done less to extend and to 
 preserve our oriental empire than English veracity. 
 All that we could have gained by imitating the 
 doublings, the evasions, the fictions, the perjuries, 
 which have been employed against us is as nothing 
 when compared with what we have gained by being 
 the one Power in India on whose word reliance 
 can be placed. No oath which superstition can 
 devise, no hostage, however precious, inspires a 
 hundredth part of the confidence which is produced 
 by the "Yea, yea" and "Nay, nay" of a British 
 envoy. The greatest advantage which a Govern- 
 ment can possess is to be the one trustworthy Gov- 
 ernment in the midst of Governments which nobody 
 can trust. This advantage we enjoy in Asia.' It 
 would be difficult to subpoena a witness more im- 
 pressive or convincing. 
 
 But there is one most pertinent application of 
 the principle for which, it seems to me, the times 
 are clamorously and insistently calling. In thase 
 lands, and in these days, two truths demand itera- 
 tion and emphasis in relation to all matters of 
 politics and all affairs of State. Let it be said, as
 
 130 The Luggage of Life 
 
 plainly as language can assert it, first of all that the 
 nation needs strong men, and then that the strong 
 men are the white men. That people has fallen on 
 very evil days that finds itself in the grip, and at the 
 mercy, of the professional politician. A pair of 
 instances, both very much to the point, will enforce 
 my meaning. The first is from Sir James Stephen's 
 Essays in Ecclesiastical Biography. The professor 
 points out that William Wilberf orce lived his parlia- 
 mentary life as a contemporary of William Pitt, 
 Edmund Burke, Charles James Fox, and Richard 
 Brinsley Sheridan. Here was a galaxy of brilliance 
 the most polished and powerful orators who ever 
 awoke the classic echoes of St. Stephen's ! Wilber- 
 force's figure conveyed the inevitable impression of 
 insignificance. Yet when he rose to address the 
 Commons the House instantly crowded. Members 
 held their breaths to listen. The little reformer 
 spoke with an authority rarely wielded by the 
 greatest masters. He was heard in a silence, and 
 with a respect, which were never accorded to those 
 illustrious statesmen whose utterances are to this 
 day read in schools and colleges as models of 
 rhetoric. And why? There is only one reason for 
 it. Like Sir Galahad 
 
 His strength was as the strength of ten, 
 Because his heart was pure.
 
 The Clifis of Dover 131 
 
 The second of these companion pictures is from 
 Sir Henry W. Lucy's Sixty Years in the Wilder- 
 ness. In the last chapter of this fascinating book 
 the author draws a striking contrast between John 
 Bright and Benjamin Disraeli. 'Disraeli,' he says, 
 'lacked two qualities, failing which true eloquence 
 is impossible : he was never quite in earnest, and he 
 was not troubled by dominating conviction/ Now 
 for the contrast. 'John Bright, perhaps the finest 
 orator known to the House of Commons in the last 
 half of the nineteenth century, was morally and 
 politically the antithesis of Disraeli. To a public 
 man this atmosphere of acknowledged sincerity and 
 honest conviction is a mighty adjunct of power/ 
 Here, then, in both pictures, we have the conjunc- 
 tion of whiteness and strength; incorruptibility 
 wedded to omnipotence. This marriage was made 
 in heaven. These two God hath joined together. 
 
 I have emphasized the national and political 
 aspect of the truth because the conviction grows 
 upon me that we sadly need the reminder. But 
 I should be exceedingly sorry to leave the impres- 
 sion that the application was by any means exclu- 
 sive. It is just as true of every walk of life and of 
 every department of service. I turn the lantern on 
 my own heart and study and pulpit, and upon those 
 of my brethren. In a recently published work, the
 
 132 The Luggage of Life 
 
 Rev. J. D. Jones, of Bournemouth, says a very 
 gracious thing concerning a ministerial friend of 
 his: 'In print his sermons are almost dull, as they 
 are certainly lacking in literary style. But when 
 you come into his presence, the transparent honesty 
 and obvious saintliness of the man lend to his words 
 compelling and subduing force.' 'I cannot under- 
 stand your minister's power,' said a visitor to a 
 friend of mine who was a member of a Midland 
 church to which a man ministered who was not a 
 great preacher, perhaps, but who was a great saint ; 
 'I cannot understand your minister's power/ he 
 said; 'I do not see very much in him.' 'Ah,' re- 
 plied the host, 'you see, there are thirty years of 
 holy life behind every sermon.' There is no doubt 
 about it. Whiteness is strength. The white men 
 wield the sceptre, and we are all their slaves. 
 
 But the last word has yet to be said. A most 
 interesting play of language occurs in the last book 
 of the Bible: 'I saw a strong angel proclaiming 
 with a loud voice, Who is worthy to open the book 
 and to loose the seals thereof? And no man in 
 heaven, nor in earth, neither under the earth, was 
 able to open the book, neither to look thereon.' It 
 will be noticed that the words worthy and able are 
 treated as though they were interchangeable and 
 synonymous, as indeed they are. The worthy are
 
 The Cliffs of Dover 133 
 
 the able. Whiteness is strength. Might is not 
 always right, but right is always might. God is not 
 always on the side of the big battalions, but the big 
 battalions are always on the side of God. That is 
 why the meek inherit the earth. 'And I beheld, and 
 lo, a Lamb sublimest symbol of innocence, white- 
 ness, meekness and He came and took the book. 
 And they sang a new song, saying, Thou art 
 worthy! . . . Worthy is the Lamb!' And just be- 
 cause He was worthy, it followed, as the night the 
 day, that He was able. 
 
 We have traced this truth from the cliffs of Dover 
 right up to the dizziest pinnacle to which human 
 eyes can peer. From the great white stone to the 
 Great White Throne this thing holds grandly true. 
 Whiteness and strength; innocence and omnip- 
 otence; right and might, they go side by side, and 
 hand in hand, both in the heavens above and on the 
 earth beneath. That was what Mrs. Barclay's 
 heroine saw in symbol as she gazed upon the white 
 walls of old England. And the seer who, from the 
 isle that is called Patmos, beheld the gleaming 
 towers and shining turrets of the Celestial City, 
 saw nothing greater.
 
 VII 
 THE ORGANIST 
 
 THE organist is an ecclesiastical vagabond. He is 
 a nomad and a nondescript. He lives in a kind of 
 No-man's land. In the rationale of our spiritual 
 economy he has never been provided with a home. 
 We have never taken the trouble to place him. We 
 have ministers, and we know why we have them. 
 Deacons and teachers and choirs we have, and their 
 contribution to our worship is well defined and 
 clearly understood. But we allow the organist, as 
 organist, to hover spectrally on the frontiers of our 
 religious domain. We have never made up our 
 minds as to whether he is simply a cog-wheel in 
 the cold mechanism of our church organization or 
 one of the controlling forces of the inner life of the 
 sanctuary. Is he, in a word, one of those reviving, 
 quickening, spiritual factors that are an essential 
 part of our worship and testimony, or is he merely 
 a necessary appendage, a convenient adjunct, 
 an entertaining auxiliary? Is he a member of the 
 family, or merely a distant relative, or, perchance, 
 a nodding acquaintance? We offer him a chair 
 
 134
 
 The Organist 135 
 
 or at any rate a stool on Sundays and at choir 
 practices; then he folds his tent, like the Arab, and 
 silently steals away. We scarcely know where to 
 place him. Is he inside or outside? Is he a partner 
 or a passenger? In fairness to him, and in justice 
 to ourselves, we ought to face the problem. We 
 must classify and locate him. Too long the 
 Church has said to the organist, 'The minister we 
 know, and the choir we know, but who are you !' 
 
 Now, there are very few subjects that have be- 
 trayed their exponents into more obvious confusion 
 of thought than the attempt to define the exact 
 relationship existing between minstrelsy and minis- 
 try. The case for the organist has never yet been 
 satisfactorily stated, either from the purely musical 
 or from the purely ecclesiastical view-point. Here, 
 for example, Charles Santley, in his Reminiscences, 
 tells us that his master, Nava, at the Conservatoire 
 at Milan, used to insist 'that the object of music 
 was to give greater expression and emphasis to the 
 words/ Which, of course, is unadulterated non- 
 sense. It is true enough of certain forms of vocal 
 music, but the sweeping and merciless dictum ruth- 
 lessly excommunicates the blackbird and the thrush, 
 the nightingale and the canary, and at the same time 
 cuts the throat of our unhappy organist. If we 
 subscribe to the daring proposition we condemn the
 
 136 The Luggage of Life 
 
 'Dead March' and the 'Wedding March' as inanities, 
 and all our organist's wordless voluntaries become 
 impertinences of the worst kind. It is clear, there- 
 fore, that, whilst our Milanese master is indisput- 
 ably right in insisting on the clear enunciation of 
 every syllable, when there are syllables to enunciate, 
 he has not spoken the whole truth. He has failed 
 to supply us with a practical theory that will include 
 both the goldfinch and the organist, the two great 
 wordless minstrels in the temples of Nature and 
 Grace. 
 
 Now, if our theologians had read their Bibles as 
 carefully as our organists have read their music, 
 they would most certainly have discovered that the 
 Scriptures have some very fine things to say about 
 the organist. Here, for instance, is quite a cluster 
 of great Old Testament stories which should have 
 helped us to solve our problem long ago. Look at 
 this one : Jehoram, the wicked King of Israel, and 
 Jehoshaphat, the good King of Judea, have for a 
 while joined forces that they might fight side by 
 side against the Moabites. But in the course of the 
 campaign their united armies fall into sore straits, 
 and Jehoshaphat longs to hear some guiding voice. 
 In his perplexity he hungers for fellowship with 
 the skies. His soul ached to speak with God. 'Is 
 there not a prophet ?' he inquired. Elisha is found,
 
 The Organist 137 
 
 and three kings stand before him, and beg him to 
 prophesy. But the lips of the seers are sealed; he 
 has no message ; he is dumb. Then he cried : 'Bring 
 me a minstrel! And it came to pass, when the 
 minstrel played, that the hand of the Lord came 
 upon Elisha, and he prophesied' ! Now, here is a 
 clear-cut case in which the organist was simply in- 
 dispensable to the minister. The prophet could not 
 prophesy without the minstrel. The player was the 
 preacher's inspiration a minister to the minister. 
 The music of the minstrel directly contributed to a 
 magnificent spiritual result. 'When the minstrel 
 played, the hand of the Lord came upon Elisha, and 
 he prophesied.* 
 
 Two other instances of a similar kind will leap 
 to the memory of every reader: (i) When Saul 
 heard the music of the psaltery and the tabret and 
 the pipe and the harp, the Spirit of the Lord came 
 upon him, and he prophesied, and was turned into 
 another man; (2) When David took his harp and 
 played before Saul 'the evil spirit departed from 
 him/ The point is that in each case we recognize the 
 organist. It is instrumental music, pure and simple. 
 There is no question of words, whether clearly or in- 
 distinctly enunciated. And in each case the language 
 admits of no second interpretation; an emphatically 
 spiritual effect was produced. We must be honest,
 
 138 The Luggage of Life 
 
 even though we be theologians; we must be fair, 
 even towards an organist. None of the facts must 
 be blinked. 
 
 Now, we venture to think that a working hypoth- 
 esis can be built upon these facts. Two irresistible 
 conclusions emerge. The first is that the organist 
 is clearly part and parcel of our spiritual economy. 
 Indeed, these three graceful old stories, if they 
 mean anything, seem to show that we need our 
 friend the organist in every department of our reli- 
 gious enterprise. For, in the first two cases, it was 
 through his agency that the Divine Spirit was re- 
 ceived ; and in the third case it was by means of his 
 melodious ministry that the evil spirit was expelled. 
 These are the two great essential functions of the 
 Church in every age to invoke a fresh inrush of 
 spiritual enlightenment and reviving fervour, and 
 to exorcise and expel all that is unrighteous, unholy, 
 and unclean. And if, as these stories plainly show, 
 the organist can help the Church to fulfil these two 
 magnificent missions and to realize this sublime 
 spiritual ideal, then let all pastors and deacons and 
 teachers and singers stand up and say, God bless the 
 organist! 
 
 But, lest our friend of the music-stool should 
 become exalted above measure by the brilliance, as 
 of the seventh heaven, of this Old Testament revela-
 
 The Organist 139 
 
 tion, we hasten to emphasize the second principle 
 that clearly emerges from its beatific splendours. 
 It is manifest that the music of the minstrel is not 
 an end in itself. Just as the work of the minister 
 is not in itself spiritually effective, but is the channel 
 through which the excellency of the divine power 
 may communicate itself, so the harmonies of the 
 organ are but a means of grace. The language is 
 wonderfully exact and explicit: 'When the min- 
 strel played, the hand of the Lord came upon 
 Elisha/ and it was the hand of the Lord that 
 wrought the resultant miracle. We hazard the sug- 
 gestion that if our pastors and officers and mem- 
 bers would spend half an hour in the careful con- 
 templation of these exquisite old records, their eyes 
 would be so illumined that they would detect an 
 aureole encircling the brows of the organist. And 
 if our minstrels would pore over these fragrant 
 pages for a while they would feel the thrill of a 
 new ecstasy in their avocation, and glorify their 
 talents with a fresh consecration. An added sweet- 
 ness and dignity would lurk in those lovely notes 
 that come trilling and shuddering down from the 
 organ. And the gracious ministries of our min- 
 strelsy would anticipate that home of the eternal 
 harmonies in the heart and centre of whose melodies 
 the Lord himself delightedly abides.
 
 VIII 
 THE JACKASS AND THE KANGAROO 
 
 A MINISTERIAL friend of mine was recently travel- 
 ling in the far east of Australia. On his return 
 he penned a most picturesque account of the wilds 
 and wonders of the Queensland bush. And, in the 
 process of his cinematographic description of 
 a glorious motor-ride, he includes this realistic and 
 characteristic touch: 'In the heart of the bush/ he 
 says, 'we came upon a tragedy that must often be 
 enacted amongst the animal dwellers of the great 
 solitude a kangaroo, a mother, unable to resist the 
 pangs and pains thrust upon her by her destiny, lay 
 dead upon the roadside, and above, on a branch of a 
 tree, stood a pair of laughing-jackasses, guffawing 
 their loudest, as if life knew no tragedy and no 
 pain.' 
 
 Here, then, is a painting, skilfully finished, before 
 which we may profitably pause. And the charm 
 of it as of all great pictures is that it is so true 
 to life. The laughing- jackass and the dead kan- 
 garoo ! I always keep up one of my sleeves a micro- 
 
 140
 
 The Jackass and the Kangaroo 141 
 
 scopic a very microscopic naturalist, and an 
 equally microscopic philosopher up the other. I un- 
 rolled my friend's picture to my naturalist. 'Ah, 
 yes/ he said, 'there you have the jackass all over; 
 that's the way of the bird!' I turned to my other 
 sleeve, and showed the picture to the philosopher. 
 'Ah, yes,' he said, 'there you have life in miniature; 
 that's the way of the world !' 
 
 'The way of the bird' and 'the way of the world/ 
 What do these gentlemen mean? Let us probe a 
 little. Now, the jackass has a literature of his own. 
 I suppose the most captivating and convincing 
 description of our bush comedian that has ever been 
 penned is the classical sketch by Frank Buckland. 
 That most genial and most winsome of all British 
 naturalists simply revelled in his study of the jack- 
 ass. And he was particularly amused by the very 
 trait that arrested my friend on his tour. He pil- 
 lories him thus : 'The bird has a custom of laughing 
 in a most exasperating fashion/ he says, 'when a 
 misfortune happens to travellers. Thus, when a 
 wagon loaded with goods breaks down in some deso- 
 late region on a long march, and the owner is at his 
 wits' end to get it right again, a laughing-jackass 
 is sure to appear at the top of a neighbouring tree 
 and laugh in the most aggravating manner at the 
 miserable condition of the traveller, till the woods
 
 142 The Luggage of Life 
 
 resound with his merry "Ha, ha, ha! He, he, he! 
 Ho, ho, ho !" This is very interesting. We are 
 grateful to Mr. Buckland and to my friend for 
 drawing our attention to so curious a phenomenon. 
 But this chapter is not to be understood as a fugitive 
 excursion into natural history. I am attracted to 
 the theme by quite other considerations. For it is 
 surely as clear as noonday that the incident is true 
 to life in the deepest sense. We are for ever and 
 ever discovering, with a shock of surprise, that the 
 laughing-jackass is never far away from the dead 
 kangaroo. At every turn of our pilgrimage we see 
 comedy stand grinning cheek by jowl with tragedy. 
 The world is made up of the most discordant and 
 incongruous juxtapositions. 
 
 Among the treasures in the Sydney Art Gallery 
 is Sir Luke Fildes' famous painting entitled 'The 
 Widower.' On the right-hand side of the picture 
 sits the poor toiler, with his sick child on his knee. 
 One overwhelming bereavement has already over- 
 taken him, and another stares him in the face. His 
 brow is clouded with uttermost sorrow and per- 
 plexity. He looks at his child and seems to say, 'If 
 only she were here !' And on the left-hand side of 
 the picture are the younger children playing on the 
 floor, laughing and crowing in their merriment. 
 They are not old enough to understand; but their
 
 The Jackass and the Kangaroo 143 
 
 delight seems cruelly to mock his despair. Have 
 we not here the story of the laughing- jackass and 
 the dead kangaroo over again? The thing occurs 
 hourly. As the mourners return broken-hearted 
 from the graveside they are tortured by the mad 
 melody of wedding-bells from a neighbouring 
 belfry. Edward FitzGerald somewhere says that 
 there are no lines in our literature so pathetically 
 expressive of the soul's deepest emotions as the 
 familiar song of Robert Burns : 
 
 Ye banks and braes o' bonnie Doon, 
 How can ye bloom so fresh and fair? 
 
 Ye little birds, how can ye sing, 
 And I so weary, full of care? 
 
 Who is there that, passing through some deep 
 valley of weeping, has not been stabbed to the quick 
 by the laughter on the hills? I shall never forget 
 the day on which I left the Homeland. I was about 
 to set sail for lands in which I should be the veriest 
 stranger. I passed, on my way to the ship, through 
 the crowded London streets, every one of which was 
 endeared to me by old associations and enriched by 
 fond memories. "I was accompanied by those who 
 were all the world to me, those who, like myself, 
 were calling up all the reserve powers of the will 
 to nerve them for the wrench of parting. And I
 
 144 The Luggage of Life 
 
 remember how I was mocked by the sounds of the 
 city streets. My soul was in tears ; but who cared ? 
 People were chattering ; crowds were jostling; news- 
 boys were shouting ; all London was sunlit and gay. 
 It seemed as though the old haunts were glad to 
 see me go. The laughter tore and lacerated my 
 spirit. The jackass seems a hideous incongruity in 
 the presence of the dead kangaroo. 
 
 The parable has an obvious application to public 
 affairs. There are enough dead kangaroos lying 
 about the world, in all conscience! Our tragedies 
 are tremendous. At the moment of writing Italy 
 and Turkey are at war. France and Germany are 
 scowling angrily at each other across their frontiers. 
 China is convulsed in the throes of a huge revolu- 
 tion. Spain and Portugal are in a state of seething 
 tumult and disorder. At our own doors the social 
 conditions are full of disquiet and unrest. Strikes 
 and lock-outs are the order of the day. We are not 
 alarmists; we see in all this no cause for panic. 
 The pessimist is completely out of court. But, on 
 the other hand, we do submit that these things call 
 for a certain public seriousness and gravity. The 
 newspapers should cause every decent citizen furi- 
 ously to think. Yet we see small evidence of seri- 
 ous thought ; quite otherwise. The pursuit of pleas- 
 ure and not always of the noblest pleasure was
 
 The Jackass and the Kangaroo 145 
 
 never so deliriously feverish. The woods seem to 
 resound with the untimely giggle of the laughing- 
 jackass; and, with so many tragedies about us, the 
 notes grate harshly on our ears. We venture a 
 pertinent application. If things have become so 
 serious that Australia needs to build battleships and 
 compel all her sons to bear arms, then things have 
 become far too serious for pugilistic orgies and 
 similar carnivals of inanity. There is no doubt 
 about it. The laughing- jackass is quite out of place 
 beside the dead kangaroo. 
 
 We pause reverently for a moment before daring 
 to suggest a still deeper consideration in closing. 
 Perhaps, perhaps this is why our Gospels present to 
 us the sad and stricken face of a Man of Sorrows. 
 The smitten soul, turning aside like a wounded deer 
 from the herd, simply could not endure a gay or 
 mirthful Saviour. I know a lady who dismissed her 
 doctor because she could not bear the levities with 
 which he thought to brighten her. Her nerves 
 winced and squirmed beneath his jokes and chatter. 
 It is a curious fact that there are more suicides in 
 summer than in winter, and more in genial and 
 sunny climes than in sterner temperatures. The rea- 
 son is obvious. The brightness and gaiety of the 
 world mock the bruised and battered spirit and drive 
 it to despair. A tearless Saviour would have re-
 
 146 The Luggage of Life 
 
 pelled the very souls that Jesus came to save ; but 
 One over whose crushed spirit all the waves of grief 
 have surged must be the natural refuge of all peni- 
 tent and contrite hearts so long as time shall last. 
 It is this harmony of the emotions, this subtle and 
 unfathomable wealth of infinite sympathy, that has 
 led millions to sing with choked and trembling 
 voices : 
 
 Rock of Ages, cleft for me, 
 
 Let me hide myself in Thee; 
 
 Let the water and the blood, 
 
 From Thy riven side which flowed, 
 
 Be of sin the double cure, 
 
 Save me from its guilt and power. 
 
 There is a world of tender significance in the in- 
 congruous tragedy which the motor-car passed by 
 the side of the track.
 
 IX 
 OUR RUBBISH-HEAPS 
 
 THE great bush solitudes had taken the place of the 
 bustling streets. He an Australian minister on 
 holiday rested on a fallen tree beside the dusty 
 track. He raised his hat to the loveliness and bathed 
 his brow in the loneliness that pervaded everything. 
 It was with him as when a great steamer stops in 
 mid-ocean to allow her engines to cool. The thud 
 of the propeller, the vibration of the machinery, are 
 felt no longer; the stillness is uncanny. He drew 
 from his breast-pocket his Bible, and, his mind 
 recurring to his own attempts to build the city of 
 God among the haunts of men, he turned to the 
 stately old story of Nehemiah. He read on, un- 
 disturbed by the drowsy hum of insects and the 
 merrier songs of birds, until arrested by Sanballat's 
 question: 'What do these feeble Jews? Will they 
 revive the stones out of the heaps of the rubbish 
 which are burned ?' It was an awakening phrase 
 a revival from a rubbish-heap! He laid the open
 
 148 The Luggage of Life 
 
 Bible on the mossy log beside him and lost himself 
 in contemplation. 
 
 And, even as he pondered, a new object presented 
 itself to his hungry mind. From the depths of the 
 bush on the distant hill-side great wreathing 
 columns of smoke curled skywards, occasionally 
 shot through by fierce flashes of flame. Straining 
 his ears to listen, he caught the crash of falling 
 trees, and thought he could detect the crackle and 
 roar of the fires as the monsters yielded themselves 
 to the devouring element. Straining his eyes to see, 
 he dimly discerned the figures of men moving here 
 and there, superintending the work of demolition 
 and destruction. They were clearing away the 
 maple and the myrtle, the wattle and the gum, to 
 make room for the apple and the apricot, the peach- 
 tree and the pear. And the preacher, as he watched, 
 caught himself echoing Sanballat's question: 'Will 
 they bring a revival out of a rubbish-heap? Will 
 they obtain riches from refuse?' These were com- 
 panion pictures this picture in the Bible and this 
 picture in the bush; and, as he gazed upon them 
 side by side, several clear-cut thoughts emerged. 
 He saw that rubbish-heaps fill a large place in the 
 domestic economy of a world like this. And he 
 saw that an element of such enormous magnitude 
 must be governed by laws. Refuse must have its
 
 Our Rubbish-Heaps 149 
 
 fixed rules. The slag-heap must have its statutes. 
 They have ! 
 
 There is the law of deterioration. From the 
 picture in the Bible and the picture in the bush it 
 becomes clear that all material things, though as 
 sacred as the Temple or as natural as the forest 
 flowers, are on their way to the rubbish-heap. It 
 sounds like a death-knell to the materialist. Materi- 
 alism, unmasked, appears as the religion of the 
 rubbish-heap. It is heavy tidings, too, for the 
 ritualist; for Ritualism stands in perilous relation- 
 ship to the rubbish-heap. 'Now abideth' what? 
 Altars? vestments? crosses? creeds? catechisms? 
 confessions ? 'Now abideth faith, hope, love these 
 three; and the greatest of these is love.' The moth 
 is in our fairest fabrics, and our holiest temples 
 totter to their fall. 'And as some spake of the 
 Temple, how it was adorned with goodly stones 
 and gifts, Jesus said : As for these things which ye 
 behold, the days will come in the which there shall 
 not be left one stone upon another that shall not 
 be cast down.' That is significant. It is well to set 
 our affections on the things for which the rubbish- 
 heap can have no terrors. 
 
 There is the law of occupation. For Nehemiah, 
 in the one picture, and the settler in the other, find 
 the ground not fallow, but occupied. Moss and
 
 150 The Luggage of Life 
 
 lichen cover every stone. Giant trees, twining 
 creepers, shapely ferns, and waving grasses fight for 
 every inch of soil. Rank weeds and spear-like 
 leaves peer out from all the interstices. Every 
 crack and cranny, every corner and crevice, is oc- 
 cupied. Nature abhors a vacuum. Wherever the 
 foot of man has failed to tread, wherever the hand 
 of man has failed to labour, God's innumerable 
 and invisible agriculturists plough and harrow, sow 
 and reap, and produce the bewildering beauties of 
 the bush. Hannibal's military precept of preoccupa- 
 tion dominates the rubbish-heap. The moss and the 
 lichen are on the stones of Jerusalem because no 
 Nehemiah has come to build the city. The wattle 
 and the gum abound on the hill-side simply because 
 no man has planted apricots or pears. Is it not ever 
 so ? The mind becomes a wilderness of foul imagi- 
 nations because clean and wholesome thoughts have 
 not been planted there. The heart becomes, like 
 Jerusalem, a wilderness and a desolation because the 
 kingdom of Christ has never been established there. 
 Evil evolves where good evacuates. 
 
 There is the law of elevation. The question is: 
 What makes rubbish rubbish? The term is obvi- 
 ously not absolute, but relative. A lady's hat is a 
 milliner's dream to-day. To-morrow a new style 
 having come in it is its mistress's despair. What
 
 Our Rubbish-Heaps 151 
 
 has so suddenly changed delight to disgust, and 
 made the fashion of yesterday the folly of to-day? 
 It is the new style. And it is always the new style, 
 whether of dresses or of dreadnoughts, that flings 
 the satisfaction of one day to the slag-heap of the 
 next. What has made the maple and the laurel 
 look like rubbish to the settler? The parrots and 
 the kangaroos see no change to account for his 
 vandalism. The aboriginals did not find it necessary 
 to hack down trees and fire the undergrowth. Why, 
 then, this fury of axe and torch and gunpowder? 
 It is the conception of an orchard that has done it. 
 That is the 'new style.' A man dreams of apples, 
 and he burns the virgin bush. Then, in his orchard 
 he sees the glint of gold ! The soil is auriferous ! 
 The fruit-trees become firewood that he may seize 
 the precious metal. Later on, in peril of a watery 
 grave, he flings his very gold into the ocean that 
 he may save his life. Bush, fruit, gold, each in their 
 turn become rubbish, flung to the slag-heap by the 
 alluring force of a higher attraction. Nor is life 
 itself the last stage. The martyrs cheerfully threw 
 even life away, fascinated by still greater wealth. 
 Had not Paul his rubbish-heap? He counted all 
 things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge 
 of Christ Jesus his Lord, for whom he had suffered 
 the loss of all things, and did count them but dung,
 
 1 52 The Luggage of Life 
 
 that he might win Christ. The rubbish-heap can 
 have no grander word written of it than that. 
 
 There is the law of transformation. God makes 
 His loveliest roses out of rubbish. The charred 
 ashes of yesterday's bush nourish the roots of to- 
 morrow's orchard. If the refuse of the ages had 
 been allowed to accumulate, the world would be un- 
 inhabitable. The air would be heavy with pesti- 
 lence. We bury our rubbish, and it all comes back 
 to us in fruits and flowers. Its resurrection body 
 is divine. 
 
 It is just here that the Church finds her most acute 
 problem. In every community there are crowds of 
 people who have gone to the wall. They feel 
 crushed and beaten. Under our fierce competitive 
 system the iron law of the survival of the fittest 
 has flung them on the social slag-heap, and they 
 know it. They hate the churches, because the 
 churches are old, and they think that if the churches 
 had done their duty, things would not be as they 
 are. They forget that, if the churches had not done 
 their duty, things would be ten thousand times 
 worse than they are. They snatch at every social 
 quackery and political panacea. Now, the Church's 
 mission is to do for this ruined mass what Nehemiah 
 did for the rubbish-heaps of Jerusalem to build 
 out of them the city of God. 'Will they bring a
 
 Our Rubbish-Heaps 153 
 
 revival out of a rubbish-heap?' asks Sanballat. Of 
 course. A rubbish-heap is God's raw material. A 
 revival is His finished product. Let the Church 
 get to work. She alone is equipped for so divine 
 a duty. If she fail, her collapse will be the disaster 
 of the ages. In that melancholy event, this social 
 rubbish-heap will become, like all untrans formed 
 rubbish-heaps, the menace of mankind and the peril 
 of the world. In it all pestilential fever-germs will 
 breed and multiply. Anarchisms and revolutions 
 will fill the air with shrieks and screams. But the 
 Church of Jesus Christ knows how to transform 
 this mass of refuse into a field of roses. Paul 
 understood the magic secret. He looked upon the 
 unbridled lust, the grinding tyranny, and the hide- 
 ous idolatry of the city of the Caesars, and was un- 
 abashed. And he gave his reason. The gospel, he 
 said, is the power of God unto transformation. He 
 saw that the foulest filth of Rome might become the 
 fairest fragrance of the New Jerusalem.
 
 X 
 
 LIFE'S INVISIBLE CONSTABULARY 
 
 TM always a-moving on, sir,' cried poor Jo, wiping 
 away his grimy tears with his arm. 'I've always 
 been a-moving on and a-moving on ever since I was 
 born. Where can I possibly move to, sir, more nor 
 I do move?' 
 
 'My instructions don't go to that/ said the con- 
 stable. 'My instructions are that you are to move 
 on. I've told you so five hundred times.' 
 
 'Well, but really, constable, you know/ observed 
 Mr. Snagsby (to whom poor Jo's appeal had been 
 addressed), 'really that does seem a question. 
 Where, you know?' 
 
 So far Charles Dickens and Bleak House. Mr. 
 Snagsby and poor Jo were indisputably right. It is 
 the easiest thing in the world to keep moving on. 
 *But where, you know ?' For it is the hardest thing 
 in the world so to direct our movements that each 
 change shall represent a real advance, and constitute 
 itself a distinct contribution towards the attainment 
 of an ultimate goal. By a sure instinct we ask each 
 
 154
 
 Life's Invisible Constabulary 155 
 
 other on the street, not 'Are you getting on?' be- 
 cause that matters little, but 'How are you getting 
 on?' because that matters everything. 'Really/ as 
 Mr. Snagsby said, 'that does seem a question 
 where, you know ?' 
 
 Now, movement is the law of life. The police- 
 man told Jo that he must move or be locked up. 
 But the greater constabulary of the solar system 
 are very much more severe. They tell us that we 
 must move or be put to death. 
 
 Drummond's savage is a case in point. Says the 
 amiable Professor: 'When we meet him first he is 
 sitting, we shall suppose, in the sun. Let us also 
 suppose and it requires no imagination to suppose 
 it that he has no wish to do anything else than 
 sit in the sun, and that he is perfectly contented and 
 perfectly happy. Nature around him, visible and 
 invisible, is as still as he is, as inert apparently, as 
 unconcerned. Neither molests the other ; they have 
 no connexion with each other. Yet it is not so. 
 That savage is the victim of a conspiracy. Nature 
 has designs upon him. She wants to move him. 
 How does she set about moving him? By moving 
 herself.' The sun goes down; he must move on or 
 freeze. The time rolls on ; he must move or starve. 
 The roar of the wild beast is heard; he must move 
 or be eaten. He moves!
 
 156 The Luggage of Life 
 
 It could easily be shown that these invisible 
 constables have other and even surer methods of 
 moving us on. They give us work to do, and wreck 
 it for us so soon as we have done it, in order to 
 make us do it all again. We build a house. Be- 
 fore the workmen have removed the scaffolding mil- 
 lions upon millions of invisible hands have set to 
 work to reduce the building to ruins. It is only a 
 question of time, and they will have left it, like 
 Solomon's Temple, with not one stone upon another. 
 They are terribly afraid those unseen constables 
 that we shall loiter and stand still. They tear our 
 work to pieces, and demolish the very homes in 
 which we live, for the sheer sake of compelling us 
 to renew our toils. They overthrow Nineveh and 
 Tyre and Athens and Jerusalem and Rome that we 
 may build London and Paris and Buenos Ayres and 
 Chicago and Melbourne. And they are tearing 
 down these that we may build the New Jerusalem. 
 They are always moving us on. We plough a field. 
 We must harrow and sow it at once, or they will 
 trample it down with their microscopic feet until it 
 needs reploughing. We gaze upon our golden crop. 
 We must reap it immediately or they will drench 
 and destroy it before our very eyes. We garner 
 our harvest. We must plough the field again, or 
 they will sow such a crop of thorns and of thistles
 
 Life's Invisible Constabulary 157 
 
 as will make our backs ache even to look upon them. 
 No street-corner constable was ever so imperative, 
 so merciless, so tyrannical as are these. 'My in- 
 structions/ said the policeman to poor Jo, 'are that 
 you are to move on. I have told you so five hun- 
 dred times.' That is nothing 1 . These other con- 
 stables have told us so five million times. They say 
 it from morning till night. They say it from baby- 
 hood to old age. They said it when the first day 
 dawned, and they will be saying it when the last 
 sun sets. It is 'Move on!' for ever and ever and 
 ever. And, to be doubly certain that we do move, 
 they move us! Whether we like it or not, whether 
 we sleep or wake, they hurl us through space at the 
 dizzy rate of thousands of miles an hour to greet the 
 sunrise ; and in another direction they push us along 
 at the terrific speed of sixty thousand miles an hour 
 towards the summer-time. We are whirling and 
 spinning and rushing and flying from midnight till 
 noonday and noonday till midnight. These fearful 
 forces appal us with their everlasting cry of 'Move 
 on !' Poor Jo's sad plight was a mere circumstance 
 when compared with our own. And there is no 
 Mr. Snagsby to intercede with our constables ! 
 
 The science of life hinges upon turning mere 
 movement into progress. Huxley once found him- 
 self being driven in a hansom cab at a breakneck
 
 158 The Luggage of Life 
 
 speed round and round a certain network of London 
 streets. He had told the hackman to 'drive fast,' 
 but had not instructed him as to his destination ! It 
 does not by any means follow that movement, even 
 the most rapid movement, is necessarily progress. 
 In the Origin of Species Darwin has a good deal to 
 say about 'certain larvae that actually stand higher 
 in the scale of organization than the mature animal 
 into which they are afterwards developed.' Have 
 we not witnessed the same phenomenon ? There is, 
 for example, all the difference imaginable between 
 the Mayflower, as she crossed the Atlantic nearly 
 three centuries ago, and the Mauretania, the pride 
 of yesterday. The Mayflower was the 'larva,' the 
 Mauretania the 'mature animal.' But the May- 
 flower was a house of prayer, a temple of worship, 
 and, on every Atlantic breeze that blew, songs of 
 praise were wafted to the skies. Concerning the 
 maiden voyage of the palatial Mauretania a London 
 paper says that the trip was rendered hideous by the 
 brutal ferocity of gamblers and the horrid de- 
 bauchery of drunkards. 'The smoking-room be- 
 came a veritable Bedlam.' Match-stands, spittoons, 
 glasses, soda-water bottles, trays, and chairs were 
 flying in all directions. On arrival at New York 
 the vessel was met by detectives, who had been 
 warned by Marconigrams from the ship (a device
 
 Life's Invisible Constabulary 159 
 
 of which the Mayflower could not boast and for 
 which she had no such use). These officials 
 straightway conducted the passengers to the Jeffer- 
 son police-court. From the Mayflower to the 
 Mauretania is a big 'move on' ; but, in view of these 
 records, one may be permitted to speculate as to how 
 far the movement has represented a real advance. 
 It sometimes happens, as Darwin says, that the 
 larvae outstrip the mature animal. 
 
 The principle is capable of somewhat incisive 
 individual applications. Ignorance, in the immortal 
 allegory, moved on just as far as did Christian and 
 Hopeful; but at the gates of the Celestial City 
 'the Shining Ones took him and carried him through 
 the air to the door that I saw in the side of the hill 
 and put him in there.' Movement kept pace with 
 the movement of the pilgrims, but Progress made no 
 advance at all. And perhaps the most appealing of 
 all illustrations of this principle is Tom Hood's: 
 
 I remember, I remember, 
 
 The fir-trees dark and high; 
 I used to think their slender tops 
 
 Were close against the sky; 
 It was a childish ignorance, 
 
 But now 'tis little joy 
 To know I'm farther off from heaven 
 
 Than when I was a boy. 
 
 The larvae, that is to say, were in advance of the
 
 160 The Luggage of Life 
 
 mature animal which developed from them. The 
 unseen constabulary of the universe can move us 
 on; but it is not in their power to see that the move- 
 ment shall be progress. They move us on as the 
 wind moves the ships : it is for us to trim our sails 
 to suit our destinies. For there are two great prin- 
 ciples involved in getting on. There is the principle 
 of the propeller, and there is the principle of the 
 rudder. The propeller may make the pace, but only 
 so far as it is checked and directed and controlled 
 by the rudder can we be sure of 'getting there.' It 
 is so fatally easy to move on. 
 
 'But where ?' cries poor Jo. 
 
 'Well, really, constable, you know/ says Mr. 
 Snagsby wistfully, 'really, constable, that does seem 
 a question. Where, you know?' 
 
 Mr. Snagsby is quite right. It is a question in- 
 deed!
 
 XI 
 'SO MANY BEDS IN THE WARD!' 
 
 THAT was little Emmie's trouble : So many beds in 
 the ward! The lines are almost too familiar to 
 need quoting: 
 
 'Yes, and I will,' said Emmie, *but then, if I call to the 
 Lord, 
 
 How should He know that it's me? such a lot of beds in 
 the ward !' 
 
 That was a puzzle for Annie. Again she considered and 
 said: 
 
 'Emmie, you put out your arms, and you leave 'em outside 
 on the bed 
 
 The Lord has so much to see to ! but, Emmie, you tell it 
 Him plain, 
 
 It's the little girl with her arms lying out on the counter- 
 pane.' 
 
 Now here, with an art that is all the more wonder- 
 ful because it is the art that conceals art, Tennyson 
 has stated for us one of the most acute problems of 
 the Christian faith. The Lord has so much to see 
 to! Such a lot of beds in the ward! These are the 
 
 161
 
 162 The Luggage of Life 
 
 ugly thoughts that have come knocking at all our 
 doors at some time or other. Did I say, 'at some 
 time or other' ? I mean at one especial time. These 
 are the ugly thoughts that have entered all our 
 heads just when the time came to pray. We were 
 burdened. We hungered for a sense of the divine 
 sympathy, the divine interest, the divine care. And, 
 as we kneeled, little Emmie's question came dinning 
 itself into our shuddering souls : 'The Lord has so 
 much to see to! Such a lot of beds in the ward!' 
 We rose disillusioned. When we kneeled, the place 
 seemed like a shrine. When we rose, it was only a 
 cupboard. When we kneeled, it seemed as though 
 we were about to hold communion with the very 
 skies. When we rose, the ceiling itself seemed to 
 be grinning at our defeat. It was as though all the 
 lamps of faith had been blown out. It was as 
 though life's dearest companion had wilfully turned 
 his back upon us. It was as though the doors of 
 home had been suddenly slammed in our faces. 'The 
 Lord has so much to see to ! Such a lot of beds in 
 the ward!' 
 
 These reflections have been suggested by a letter 
 which has just reached me. It is from a gentleman 
 who has gained, with marked distinction, two of the 
 highest degrees obtainable on this side of the world. 
 I mention this to show that the problem is not
 
 'So many Beds in the Ward!' 163 
 
 confined to poor little waifs in London hospitals. 
 Here, on the one hand, we have little Emmie; and 
 here, on the other, we have our brilliant university 
 graduate. But in both cases the trouble is the same. 
 'I have given up praying!' my friend tells me. 'It 
 seems so utterly incredible to me that a God who 
 controls all worlds and inhabits all time can have 
 patience to hear me speak to Him about my ex- 
 aminations, and my love-affairs, and my prospects.' 
 Here then, quite clearly, we are face to face with 
 little Emmie's puzzle over again. 'The Lord has 
 so much to see to ! Such a lot of beds in the ward !' 
 Little Emmie stated the case from the standpoint 
 of the child ; the letter states it from the standpoint 
 of the scholar. That is all. 
 
 Let me turn for a moment to current literature. 
 Here on my desk is a London magazine containing 
 an article by Miss Marie Corelli. It is not written 
 in that lady's best vein. I am not sure that it is 
 quite worthy of her. Her whole argument seems to 
 be that the Lord has far too much to see to that 
 there are too many beds in the wards to permit 
 of His taking an individual interest either in a child 
 in a London hospital or in a university graduate in 
 Australia. She refers to the Most High as 'that 
 tremendous Omnipotence to whose intelligent action 
 we owe our very being the Generator of universes
 
 1 64 The Luggage of Life 
 
 the Creator of everything the eyes can see, the 
 ears can hear, or the brain can imagine.' And she 
 scorns the very idea that 'we, the children of one out 
 of a million million vast productive epochs, should 
 be found assuming a certain "swaggering" posture 
 before this ever-present Divine.' 
 
 Here, then, we have the selfsame problem stated 
 in three different ways : first, by a puny little patient 
 in the children's hospital, then by a graduate of an 
 Australian university, and once again by a modern 
 novelist. And each one of us, if we cared and dared, 
 could state it afresh in the throbbing terms of some 
 profound personal experience. A book published 
 some time ago told the story of 'old Mr. Westfield, 
 a preacher of the Independent persuasion in a cer- 
 tain Yorkshire town, who was discoursing one Sun- 
 day with his utmost eloquence on the power of 
 prayer. He suddenly stopped, passed his hands 
 slowly over his head a favourite gesture and 
 said, in dazed tones : "I do not know, my friends, 
 whether you ever tried praying; for my part, I 
 gave it up long ago as a bad job." The poor old 
 gentleman never preached again. They spoke of 
 the strange seizure that he had in the pulpit, and 
 very cheerfully and kindly contributed to the pen- 
 sion which the authorities of the chapel allowed 
 him. I knew him five-and-twenty years ago, a
 
 'So many Beds in the Ward 1 . 165 
 
 gentle old man addicted to botany, who talked of 
 anything but spiritual experiences. I have often 
 wondered with what sudden flash of insight he 
 looked into his own soul that day, and saw himself 
 bowing down silent before an empty shrine.' 
 
 It is a great mystery, a very great mystery. And 
 yet and yet when you come to think of it, it is 
 all wonderfully and exquisitely simple. 'The Lord 
 has so much to see to !' It all turns on that. 'The 
 Lord has so much to see to !' But what if He has? 
 Is it not an almost universal experience that the 
 people who have most to see to are the very people 
 who see to each separate thing most thoroughly? 
 If a piece of work wants doing, we ask the busy 
 man to do it. He will consent without making a 
 fuss, and he will do the work well. 'So many beds 
 in the ward !' And what if there are? The mothers 
 who have most mouths to feed are the best mothers, 
 after all ! We recall the recitation that was so popu- 
 lar some years ago. It told of a father and mother 
 struggling to support a large family. A handsome 
 offer came from a childless home. Would they, who 
 had so many, part with one? Father and mother 
 lit a candle and went from room to room among 
 their slumbering bairns; but they found each as 
 dear as though each were their only child. 'So 
 many beds!' said little Emmie. 'So many beds!'
 
 166 The Luggage of Life 
 
 said the tempter with his bags of gold. But when 
 the many beds were visited the parents shook their 
 heads over each. Not one could be spared. Indeed, 
 the experience of this old world of ours shows con- 
 clusively that those children turn out best who come 
 of large families. Darwin makes a great point of 
 that. So that it is false to fact that a child gets more 
 care if his is the only cot in the house. All experi- 
 ence goes to prove that a child is enriched, and not 
 impoverished, when the parents have 'so much to 
 see to' 'so many beds in the' home! It is fair, 
 therefore, to say that there is not even a prima fade 
 case to be made out for the fear which assailed the 
 faith of our little sick waif, our Master of Arts, 
 and our distinguished authoress. There is abso- 
 lutely nothing in it. Reasoning, as alone we may, 
 from things terrestrial to things celestial, it is clear 
 that the great Father, who has so many children 
 to see to, will take the very best care of each individ- 
 ual child, and will bring up His immense family 
 with the greatest credit to Himself. 
 
 But even if, in spite of all this, the argument be 
 allowed the honour of serious analysis, it is so easy 
 to expose its fallacy! It will be noticed that the 
 real difficulty, in each case, lies in the greatness of 
 God. It seemed incredible to little Emmie, to our 
 Master of Arts, and to Miss Corelli that a God who
 
 'So many Beds in the Ward!' 167 
 
 is 'the Generator of universes and the Creator of 
 everything' can be concerned with the cares of the 
 individual. Now the trouble is, not that they have 
 made God to seem too great, but that they have not 
 made Him great enough. They have belittled Him ! 
 Now, how great is God ? That is the real question ! 
 Is He great to the point of absolute infinity? Is 
 He, or is He not? Now, if God is great to the 
 point of infinity, it follows, beyond all controversy, 
 that there is no stick or stone in all His universes 
 of which He is not perpetually cognizant and con- 
 scious. Or to put it the other way if there is a 
 feather or a straw blowing about the solar system 
 which has, for a fraction of a second, eluded His 
 knowledge or escaped His observation, then, by just 
 so much, His greatness falls short of infinity. If, 
 therefore, I do really believe that God is not only 
 great enough to be 'the Generator of universes and 
 Creator of everything,' but great enough to be in- 
 finite, then I cannot help believing that no sparrow 
 falls to the ground without His notice and that the 
 very hairs of my head are all numbered. This has 
 never been better stated than by Faber^: 
 
 O Majesty unspeakable and dread! 
 
 Wert Thou less mighty than Thou art, 
 Thou wert, O God, too great for our belief, 
 
 Too little for our heart.
 
 i68 The Luggage of Life 
 
 But greatness which is infinite makes room 
 
 For all things in its lap to lie; 
 We should be crushed by a magnificence 
 
 Short of infinity. 
 
 But what is infinite must be a home, 
 
 A shelter for the meanest life, 
 Where it is free to make its greatest growth 
 
 Far from the touch of strife. 
 
 Yes ; there are many whose hearts have ached in 
 sympathy with those of little Emmie, and our 
 Master of Arts, and our eminent novelist. They 
 have known the anguish of the empty shrine. Let 
 them turn their faces in the direction I have tried to 
 indicate. And if they will follow that road they will 
 find that it leads home, and they will rest sweetly 
 when they get there !
 
 PART III
 
 THE LAW OF THE LANE 
 
 WHO that has lived in England has not stored, 
 among his chiefest treasures, his memories of the 
 old English country lane its serpentine folds, its 
 gentle undulations, its over-arching oaks, its de- 
 licious and fragrant hedgerows, its twitter of birds, 
 its hum of insects, and its glimpses of golden butter- 
 cups in the spreading fields beyond ? All these will 
 haunt him till his last sun sets. 
 
 We have heard a great deal since then of the rule 
 of the road; but the lane has a law of its own; and 
 the law of the lane is an infinitely loftier and an 
 infinitely lovelier thing than the rule of the road. 
 And that is saying much, for Mr. G. K. Chesterton, 
 our greatest literary acrobat (notwithstanding his 
 insatiable fondness for standing on his head), says 
 that the indescribable charm of Dickens may be best 
 summed up in one satisfying phrase used by one of 
 his own characters. * "My friend," said Mr. 
 Perker*s clerk to Job Trotter, "you've got the key of 
 
 171
 
 172 The Luggage of Life 
 
 the street" And, says Mr. Chesterton, 'Dickens 
 himself had, in the most sacred and serious sense of 
 the term, the key of the street.' 
 
 Few of us understand the street. Even when we 
 step into it we step into it doubtfully, as into a 
 house or room of strangers. Few of us see through 
 the shining riddle of the street, the strange folk that 
 belong to the street only the street-walker or the 
 street-arab, the nomads, who, generation after 
 generation, have kept their ancient secrets in the full 
 blaze of the sun. Of the street at night many of us 
 know even less. The street at night is a great house 
 locked up. But Dickens had, if ever man had, the 
 key of the street. His earth was the stones of the 
 street; his stars were the lamps of the street; his 
 hero was the man of the street. He could open the 
 inmost door of his house the door that leads into 
 that secret passage which is lined with houses and 
 roofed with stars. 
 
 Yes, the street is a wonderful place a place of 
 mystery and dread. But the lane is more wonder- 
 ful still; for the street conceals, whilst the lane 
 reveals. The street is a place of secrecy; the lane 
 is a palace of song. Even if a man is born who, 
 like Charles Dickens, possesses the key of the street, 
 he can at best but tell us what man is. But he 
 who reads the riddle of the lane knows what God is.
 
 The Law of the Lane 173 
 
 In the lane 'earth is cramm'd with heaven, and 
 every common bush afire with God/ 
 
 Little flower, but if I could understand 
 What you are, root and all, and all in all, 
 I should know what God and man is. 
 
 Charles Kingsley used to say that, whenever he 
 strolled down an English lane, he felt as though 
 everything about him, every leaf, and bud, and 
 flower, were saying something to him, and he was 
 pained and oppressed by the feeling of his own 
 density. 
 
 Yes, compared with the lane, the street is a sordid 
 place. It has its charms, but its charms are for 
 sale. It barters its beauties for gold. It was from 
 the street that Bunyan caught his conception of 
 Vanity Fair. The lane displays its shining wares 
 no less attractively, but offers them without money 
 and without price. Who has ever found quite the 
 same satisfaction in an afternoon's shopping as we 
 found in the old lane long ago? The wild flowers 
 that the lane offered us in the spring-time, when 
 the long winter was past and gone; the tangle of 
 hawthorn and dog-rose and convolvulus that we 
 found there in the summer; the nuts and black- 
 berries of autumn, and the redder berries with which 
 we decked the home in winter, the lane was never
 
 174 The Luggage of Life 
 
 without its treasures. And they were always freely 
 ours. There was no stint in the lane. Is it not 
 Lowell who tells us that 
 
 Bubbles we buy with a whole soul's tasking ; 
 'Tis heaven alone that is given away, 
 'Tis only God may be had for the asking? 
 
 And then, too, the lane was a winding place. 
 When we were young we puzzled over its crazy 
 progress, and stupidly wished that it were straight. 
 Since then we have had to do with the realities of 
 life; and we have learned, by tiresome experience 
 of their monotony, that the last word in art is a 
 graceful curve. We have driven, it may be, along 
 the great prairie roads of the Western world roads 
 that, looking back, seemed to come in an unbending 
 line from the Atlantic, and that, looking forward, 
 seemed to run in one unbending line to the foot- 
 hills of the Rocky Mountains. Or we have made 
 our weary progress along the great undeviating 
 tracks that intersect the vast Australian plains, and 
 that seem to run without a swerve from world's-end 
 to world's-end. We have journeyed along the street 
 which is called Straight, and our hearts have longed 
 the while for the tortuous but romantic folds of the 
 dear old lane at home. And for our tardy prefer- 
 ence there is a reason, psychological, and deeply
 
 The Law of the Lane 175 
 
 based. The road across the prairies, the track across 
 the plains, the street which is called Straight, are 
 untrue to life and experience. They are artificial, 
 unnatural, forced. Life is a lane; it abounds in 
 surprises; it twists and doubles, and curves and 
 folds. We cannot know what is just beyond. We 
 quickly lose sight of our yesterdays. We are kindly 
 compelled to take our to-morrows on trust. As 
 Klingle says : 
 
 God broke our years to hours and days, 
 
 That, hour by hour, and day by day, 
 
 Just going on a little way, 
 We might be able all along to keep quite strong, 
 Should all the weight of life 
 
 Be laid across our shoulders, and the future rife 
 With woe and struggle, meet us face to face 
 At just one place, 
 
 We could not go; 
 
 Our feet would stop, and so 
 God lays a little on us every day. 
 
 That is the law of the lane. 
 
 And the last song that the birds are singing in 
 the old lane is perhaps the blithest of them all. It 
 tells us that life does not lose its romance as the 
 years wear away. It was not until we had left the 
 lane for twenty years that we discovered its beauty. 
 We find far more pleasure in the winding path now 
 than we did when we perspired on sultry summer
 
 176 The Luggage of Life 
 
 afternoons beneath the weight of our baskets of nuts 
 or buckets of blackberries. We were choked with 
 dust and tired to death, and were too close to catch 
 the lane's loveliness in its right perspective. All of 
 which is hugely significant. 
 
 We set out on this ramble in the excellent com- 
 pany of Mr. Chesterton. Let us return to him. 
 'Mrs. Nickleby,' he says, 'stands for a great truth 
 which we must not forget : the truth that experience 
 is not in real life a saddening thing at all. The peo- 
 ple who have had misfortunes are generally the peo- 
 ple who love to talk about them. Experience is 
 really one of the gaieties of old age, one of its dis- 
 sipations. Mere memory becomes a kind of de- 
 bauch. Experience may be disheartening to those 
 who are foolish enough to try to co-ordinate it and 
 to draw deductions from it ; but to those happy souls, 
 like Mrs. Nickleby, to whom relevancy is nothing, 
 the whole of their past life is like an inexhaustible 
 fairyland. Just as we take a rambling walk because 
 we know that a district is beautiful, so they indulge 
 a rambling mind because they know that a whole 
 existence is interesting. A boy does not plunge into 
 his future more romantically and at random than 
 they plunge into their past.' Even the folds and 
 stretches that our tired feet have left behind them 
 become transfigured with exquisite beauty as we
 
 The Law of the Lane 177 
 
 press courageously on and thread the labyrinth of 
 life's long lane. The Present has a lovely way of 
 wreathing an aureole about the brows of the Past. 
 And even though the Present seems nothing but a 
 dreary commonplace, the Future will do as much 
 for her in God's good time. He maketh everything 
 to be beautiful in its time; but it may not be the 
 present time. To-morrow we shall see the glory of 
 to-day. 'You always said my lane would turn,' 
 wrote the 'Lady of the Decoration,' 'and it has 
 turned into a broad road bordered by cherry-blos- 
 soms and wistaria.' It is always so. The birds in 
 the hedges on either hand are singing that we really 
 lose nothing that is behind by pressing bravely to- 
 wards what lies before. All the loveliness of the 
 lane is ours, even though we have nearly reached the 
 end. 
 
 Grow old along with me ! 
 
 The best is yet to be, 
 The last of life, for which the first was made. 
 
 Our times are in His hand, 
 
 Who saith, A whole I planned. 
 Youth shows but half; trust God; see all, nor be afraid.
 
 II 
 
 A TONIC OF BIG THINGS 
 
 IMMENSITY is magnificent medicine. That is one 
 reason if we may let the cat out of the bag 
 why the doctors send us to the seaside. We forget 
 the tiddley-winking in the contemplation of the tre- 
 mendous. We lose life's shallow worries in the 
 vision of unplumbed depths. Those who have read 
 Mrs. Barclay's Rosary will remember that, in the 
 crisis of her life, the heroine, the Hon. Jane Cham- 
 pion, determined to consult her physician, Sir 
 Deryck Brand. And, after having realized the 
 fearful strain to which his poor patient's nerves 
 had been subjected, he exclaimed : 'Here is a pre- 
 scription for you! See a few big things!' He 
 urged her to go out west, and see the stupendous 
 Falls of Niagara, to go out east and see the Great 
 Pyramid. 'Go for the big things/ he said ; 'you will 
 like to remember, when you are bothering about 
 pouring water in and out of tea-cups, "Niagara is 
 flowing still !" ' 
 
 All of which is, of course, very excellent. It is 
 178
 
 A Tonic of Big Things 179 
 
 the word we need. The tendency of life is to drift 
 among small things small anxieties, small pleas- 
 ures, small ideas, and small talk. He is a very wise 
 physician indeed who can prescribe for us a tonic of 
 big things. In the course of that long struggle in 
 his own life which reflects itself in Christian's 
 lengthy pilgrimage to the Cross, John Bunyan 
 enters in his autobiography two records that are 
 worthy of frequent observation. I quote, of course, 
 from Grace Abounding : ' While I was thus afflicted 
 with the fears of my own damnation,' he says, 
 'there were two things would make me wonder. 
 One was, when I saw old people hunting after the 
 things of this life, as if they should live here always ; 
 the other was, when I found professors much dis- 
 tressed and cast down when they met with outward 
 losses. Lord, thought I, what ado is here about such 
 little things as these !' 
 
 That is the point: 'Such little things as these!' 
 We are like the pebbles on the beach. It is not easy 
 to keep among the big ones at the top the big ones 
 that feel the laughing caress of every wave and the 
 lovely radiance of every sunbeam. The tendency 
 is to get shaken down among the small shingle 
 underneath. But we are forgetting the other record 
 from the inner life of Bunyan: 'Upon a day the 
 good providence of God called me to Bedford, to
 
 i So The Luggage of Life 
 
 work at my calling, and in one of the streets of that 
 town I came where there were three or four poor 
 women sitting at a door, in the sun, talking about the 
 things of God. I heard, but understood not, for 
 they were far above, out of my reach. Their talk 
 was about a new birth, the work of God in their 
 hearts ; they talked how God had visited their souls 
 with His love in the Lord Jesus, and with what 
 words and promises they had been refreshed, com- 
 forted, and supported.' 
 
 These two keynotes, the one taken from the first 
 quotation, and the other from the second, are worth 
 repeating. 'Such little things as these!' 'The 
 things of God far above out of my reach/ The 
 soul of the poor tinker was tired of the microscopic 
 and hungry for the majestic. He craved 'a tonic of 
 big things,' and the talk of the four poor women 
 sitting in the sun was like a banquet to his famished 
 spirit. 
 
 The thing has its parallel everywhere. To take 
 one of the most familiar of all our religious classics, 
 it occurs in John Wesley's Journal. We all remem- 
 ber how pitifully weary the great Methodist apostle 
 became of the crowd of small men who buzzed about 
 him with a multitude of small concerns. And we 
 have all felt the glow of his delight when he found 
 some kindred spirit with whom he could freely con-
 
 A Tonic of Big Things 181 
 
 verse on the great themes of the Christian gospel. 
 There are times when we get so tired of the plain; 
 we love to get among the mountains. The soul 
 makes its own pilgrimage among great, rugged, 
 snow-clad ranges, along whose tracks and passes she 
 never loses her way. She loves the peaks that pierce 
 the sky; she enjoys 'the tonic of big things.' 
 
 In Lord Morley's magnum opus he reproduces 
 one of Mr. Gladstone's letters, in which the great 
 statesman tells of a visit to Dr. Chalmers. And by 
 nothing was Mr. Gladstone more impressed than by 
 the utter incapacity of Chalmers to indulge in small 
 talk. He simply lived among mountains. Every- 
 thing about Chalmers was massive, monumental, 
 magnificent. Who that has read it can ever forget 
 his historic utterance before the General Assembly 
 of the Church of Scotland, when he explained his 
 change of views on the subject of ministerial prepa- 
 ration? He explained, first of all, the change that 
 had come over his own spiritual life. 'I was wrong, 
 sir !' he cried, 'strangely blinded that I was ! What, 
 sir, is the object of mathematical science? MAGNI- 
 TUDE, and the proportion of magnitude. But then, 
 sir, I had forgotten two magnitudes I thought not 
 of the littleness of time, I recklessly thought not of 
 the greatness of eternity!' That word 'magnitude' 
 was characteristic of the man. And it profoundly
 
 1 82 The Luggage of Life 
 
 impressed Mr. Gladstone as being characteristic of 
 his conversation. When only tiny themes presented 
 themselves, the doctor was as silent as the Sphinx. 
 'He had nothing to say,' says Mr. Gladstone; 'he 
 was exactly like the Duke of Wellington, who said 
 of himself that he had no small talk. His whole 
 mind was always full of some great subject, and he 
 could not deviate from it.' 'Chalmers never wasted 
 time on small topics/ Dr. Donald Fraser tells us in 
 his biography, 'if he could find a man fit to enter 
 on great matters.' 
 
 In the classical and memorable passage towards 
 the end of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Em- 
 pire, Gibbon describes the triumph of the most 
 majestic masterpieces of Roman architecture. 
 Huns, Goths, and Vandals had done their worst. 
 The city had been sacked again and again ; the hand 
 of the iconoclast had been pitiless. Everything de- 
 structible had been ruthlessly destroyed; yet some 
 things remained. They remained because they were 
 not destructible; and those things were the big 
 things. The fretwork and the fancy work, the deli- 
 cate carvings and dainty ornamentations had fallen 
 before the brutality of the Vandals ; but the tower- 
 ing columns and colossal arches defied alike the teeth 
 of time and the malice of the barbarian. The big 
 things stand. 'Now abideth. . . .' It is ever so.
 
 A Tonic of Big Things 183 
 
 Every preacher knows that it is the great themes 
 that hold the field; and they hold the field simply 
 because the people, tired to death of trifles, need 
 'a tonic of big things/ The preacher of small 
 subjects is doomed. The Canadian Presbyterian 
 commented recently on the farewell services of a 
 minister who was closing a two years' ministry. 
 A venerable member of his congregation, in bidding 
 his pastor a tearful 'good-bye,' remarked: 'Well, 
 sir, I am sorry to see you go. I never had but 
 one objection to you: your preaching was always 
 too horizontal^? That is the worst of small things, 
 however prettily presented. A multitude of grains 
 of sand, however beautiful each separate grain may 
 be in itself, only makes a desert after all ; and there 
 is no blinking the fact that deserts are not popular 
 institutions. People don't like living in deserts ; 
 they like altitudes, magnitudes, infinitudes; they 
 revel in the ruggedness of the ranges. 'I almost 
 envy some of these good people who can stand 
 in the middle of one of their prayers and touch 
 all four sides.' It is the 'Lady of the Decoration* 
 who is speaking; and she goes on: 'They know 
 what they want, and are satisfied when they get it; 
 but I want the moon and the stars and the sun 
 thrown in!' Yes; our poor 'Jmmanity needs 'a 
 tonic of big things.'
 
 1 84 The Luggage of Life 
 
 The preacher must take note. The pulpit is the 
 place for magnificent verities. It is the home of 
 immensities, infinities, eternities. 'We must preach 
 more upon the great texts of the Scriptures/ says 
 Dr. Jowett, 'we must preach on those tremendous 
 passages whose vastnesses almost terrify us as we 
 approach them/ 
 
 Professor Henry Drummond was once sailing 
 along the west coast of Africa. His deck com- 
 panions were four men, no one of whom could 
 understand the other; they spake in divers tongues. 
 But at last one produced a Bible. The second 
 hurried to his cabin and appeared with his; then 
 the third, and then the fourth. By a stroke of 
 genius, the first opened his at the third chapter 
 of John's Gospel, and the great sixteenth verse. 
 The others opened theirs, and pointed with their 
 fingers to the place; and the glow on their faces 
 was an eloquent language in itself. Men can see 
 the mountain-peak over a multitude of intervening 
 obstacles. And no obstacle of race or language, 
 rank or station, can preclude men from the fellow- 
 ship of life's immensities. 'They shall cry unto the 
 Lord, and He shall send them a Saviour, and a great 
 one! Everything in the gospel is 'a tonic of big 
 things/
 
 Ill 
 
 SERMONS AND SANDWICHES 
 
 IT was the church anniversary. On the Sunday 
 there were special sermons, solemn praise, and 
 stately anthems. Everything was inspiring, im- 
 pressive, sublime. On the Monday there were 
 sandwiches, cream puffs, and jam-tarts. The steam- 
 ing urns imparted a genial glow to the spirits of the 
 guests, for waves of laughter rippled and broke 
 through the hum of friendly chatter. I had taken 
 part in the solemn services of the Sunday, and had 
 been asked to speak at the tea-meeting on the 
 Monday. I drew aside to collect my thoughts. 
 But my thoughts politely, but firmly, declined to 
 be collected. They insisted on propounding to me 
 this arresting conundrum tell us, they clamoured, 
 the philosophical connexion between the sermons of 
 yesterday and the sandwiches of to-day. What 
 relation exists between singing and scones? What 
 fellowship hath religion with revelry? Why follow 
 the sacred worship of the Lord's Day with a carnival 
 of confectionery? 
 
 I took my Bible from my pocket, and had not
 
 1 86 The Luggage of Life 
 
 to search far before I came upon a clue. On one 
 of the very earliest pages of the sacred records I 
 lit upon a significant statement. It occurs at a 
 crisis in Hebrew history. It was a time of wealthy 
 revelation and divine illumination. Here it is: 
 'They saw God, and did eat and drink.' There 
 you have revelation and revelry side by side. There 
 you have the secret of all worship and the germ of 
 all tea-meetings. 'They saw God' that is the prin- 
 ciple of the sermon; 'and did eat and drink' that 
 is the principle of the sandwich. What more could 
 I desire? Yet I read on, and, to my amazement, I 
 found these two great principles running side by 
 side, like a pair of white horses perfectly matched, 
 through the entire volume. The sandwich was 
 never far from the sermon. 
 
 In the Old Testament all the stirring seasons 
 of spiritual elevation and national enlightenment 
 were Feasts the Feast of Pentecost, the Feast of 
 Tabernacles, the Feast of Passover, the Feast of 
 Trumpets, the Feast of Dedication, and so on. 
 Revelation blends with revelry. The chapter that 
 tells of Israel's redemption from Egypt by the 
 shedding of blood a classic of revelation tells 
 also, in precise and graphic detail, of the eating of 
 the lamb. The passage that tells how Elijah saw the 
 angel tells also how the angel said, 'Arise and eat !'
 
 Sermons and Sandwiches 187 
 
 'And, behold, a cake baken on the coals, and a cruse 
 of water.' 
 
 The sandwich principle keeps pace with the 
 sermon principle. Revelry goes hand in hand with 
 revelation. The tea-meeting is never far from the 
 special services. But the most revealing element in 
 the ancient economy was its law of sacrifice. The 
 old dispensation crystallized itself in the altar. And 
 here we all sit at the feet of Professor Robertson 
 Smith. He made this theme peculiarly his own. 
 And he fearlessly affirms that we cannot understand 
 that solemn and striking symbol of patriarchal faith 
 unless we grasp the fact that the altar was first of 
 all a table. 'This,' he says, 'is the key to the whole 
 subject of sacrifice, and the basis of all Semitic 
 covenants. When the two parties have eaten of 
 the same victim, and thus become participants in 
 a common life, a living bond of union is established 
 between them, and they are no longer enemies, but 
 brothers/ Here, then, are the two laws the law 
 of the sermon and the law of the sandwich, the 
 principle of revelation and the principle of revelry 
 in closest juxtaposition at the very climax of the 
 old world's illumination. 
 
 Crossing the border-line into the New Testament, 
 the same singular conjunction is everywhere. 'This 
 beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana of Galilee,
 
 1 88 The Luggage of Life 
 
 and manifested forth His glory.' The revelation 
 was a revelry. It was at a marriage feast. Later 
 miracles followed the same line the feeding of four 
 thousand, the feeding of five thousand, and so on. 
 Loaves and fishes the representation of the sand- 
 wich were never far from the most revealing 
 sermons of the Son of Man. And even when, after 
 His resurrection, He deigns to show Himself to His 
 astounded fishermen, He feeds them. 'And they 
 saw a fire of coals, and fish laid thereon, and bread.' 
 Revelation and revelry are together still. And just 
 as the Old Testament reaches its natural climax in 
 the Altar of Sacrifice, so the New Testament reaches 
 its culminating revelation in the Table of the Lord. 
 There 'we see God, and do eat and drink.' The 
 two principles join hand in hand. And even when 
 the Great Revealer spoke of heaven, these two 
 thoughts were always in His mind. Heaven is a 
 place of revelation and of revelry. There the pure 
 in heart see God; and there we sit down at the 
 Marriage Supper of the Lamb. Men often do 
 things, as the swallows do, under the guidance of 
 some sure instinct, yet without detecting, or even 
 desiring, any explanation of their odd behaviour. 
 It is thus that the Church has wedded her revelries 
 to her revelations. She has rightly set the sand- 
 wich over against the sermon. The union is
 
 Sermons and Sandwiches 189 
 
 indissoluble. The solemn service and the social 
 meal are inseparable. These two hath God joined 
 together. 
 
 Now in these two elements I find my bond of 
 brotherhood with the holiest and the lowliest. 
 Among the angels and archangels and all the 
 company of the heavenly host I know not what 
 seraphic spirits may burn. But I know that there 
 is no altitude higher than this to which they can 
 attain they see God! But so do I. Then they 
 and I are brothers. In the splendid revelations of 
 Christian worship we stand allied to the holiest in 
 the height. And in eating and drinking, on the 
 other hand, we are kinned to the lowliest. I watch 
 the birds as they fly. It seems to me that they 
 live in one element, and I in another; we have 
 nothing in common. I watch the rabbit as he 
 shyly peeps from his burrow. How far. removed 
 his life from mine! I watch the trout as they 
 flash and dart in the shades and shallows of the 
 stream. There is no point of fellowship between 
 them and me. But wait! The rabbit sits upon 
 his haunches nibbling at a blade of grass, on which 
 a dewdrop glistens. He eats and drinks! So do 
 I. The bird flutters down from the bough to seize 
 a morsel on the lawn. He eats and drinks! So 
 do I. The fish come darting up the stream to
 
 The Luggage of Life 
 
 devour the gnats that, in trying to escape the 
 birds, have fallen upon the glassy surface. They 
 eat and drink! So do I. If the sermon allies 
 me to angels and to seraphs, the sandwich allies 
 me to all things furry and feathered and finny. 
 .When we were prattlers our nurses used to amuse 
 us with fantastic pictures of lions and storks and 
 ants and dolphins and men all sitting down, cheek 
 by jowl, at the same table. 
 
 Later on we despised the old print as a furious 
 freak of some farcical fancy. But now we know 
 that it was nothing of the kind. It was a severely 
 accurate delineation of the real and sober truth. 
 Indeed, it was less than the truth, for no superhuman 
 guests were there. The universe is a banqueting- 
 table. That sage old friar Francis d'Assisi was 
 within the mark, after all, when he addressed the 
 creatures as Brother Hare, Sister Lark, Brother 
 Wolf, and so on. The sermon element brings me 
 into intimate and fraternal relationship with all the 
 flaming hosts above. The sandwich element brings 
 me into league with the tigers, and the tomtits, 
 and the trout. The special services of anniversary 
 Sunday, and the tea-meeting of the Monday, set 
 forth in harmonious combination the breadth and 
 catholicity of man's holiest and lowliest brother- 
 hoods.
 
 Sermons and Sandwiches 191 
 
 But the instinct of the tea-meeting tells me yet 
 one other thing. I see now that I have misinter- 
 preted the majesty of God. 'It is the pathetic fate 
 of Deity/ says Pascal, 'to be everlastingly misunder- 
 stood.' I had always supposed that the glory of 
 God was embarrassing, bewildering, dazzling! I 
 had thought of it as repelling, terrifying, paralysing! 
 But now I see that it is nothing of the kind. 'They 
 saw God, and did eat and drink.' Even a cat 
 will not eat in a strange house, nor a bird in a 
 strange cage. Eating and drinking are symbols of 
 familiarity. We feel at home. We bring our friends 
 to our tables that they may realize their welcome. 
 My ugly thought of God was a caricature, a parody, 
 an insult. Man was made for God, and only finds 
 his perfect poise in His presence. To see God 
 is to eat and drink to be perfectly, peacefully, 
 reverently, rest fully, delightfully at home. 
 
 ' "I have served God, and feared Him with all 
 my heart," says poor Rufus Webb in Miss Ellen 
 Thorneycroft Fowler's Fuel of Fire. 
 
 ' "That may be, but you have never loved nor 
 trusted Him !" replied the minister. 
 
 'The dying man lay silent for a few minutes, with 
 closed eyes. Then he opened them again, and said : 
 "I wonder if you are right, and I have misjudged 
 Him all these years ?"
 
 i pa The Luggage of Life 
 
 ' "I am sure of it." 
 
 ' "And do you think He will pardon me that also, 
 in addition to my many other sins ?" 
 
 ' "I am sure of it," repeated the vicar, "although 
 it is hard, even for Him, to be misjudged by those 
 whom He loves; there are few things harder." 
 
 It is even so. I heard the solemn pathos of this 
 philosophy jingled out in the clatter of the cups 
 and the spoons at the tea-meeting. 'A glorious high 
 throne is the place of our sanctuary.' It is not re- 
 pelling; it is restful. He who sees God eats and 
 drinks. The sandwiches naturally follow the ser- 
 mons. 'If any man hear My voice I will come in to 
 him, and will sup with him, and he with Me.'
 
 IV 
 THE CHALLENGE OF THE HEIGHTS 
 
 ONE of the world's most intrepid mountaineers, Mr. 
 George D. Abraham, has published a record of his 
 adventures. His experiences have quite a startling 
 significance for life at all points. Much that he says 
 is as bracing as those stinging breezes that hurled 
 the hail in his face as he invaded the snowy solitudes 
 and carved the first path over slippery glaciers. He 
 reminds us, for example, that nobody has yet stood 
 on the roof of the world. The real sky-piercers 
 have never yet been climbed. On almost every con- 
 tinent the loftiest summits wrap their clouds about 
 them and stand defiant and triumphant. They have 
 never felt the proud heel of a conqueror. 
 
 It is good, both for our humiliation and for our 
 inspiration, that we should lay that pregnant record 
 to heart. In days when bewildering inventions and 
 sensational discoveries leap from our newspapers 
 with every plate of porridge, it is as well that we 
 should be made to feel that, after all, we have only 
 been toying with trivialities. Our grandchildren will 
 
 193
 
 i94 The Luggage of Life 
 
 ransack some old chest or drawer, and drag from 
 its seclusion an old illustrated paper of, let us say, 
 the year 1912. They will scream with furious glee 
 as they scan the photographs of the aeroplanes and 
 automobiles which so hugely tickled our own vanity ; 
 and then, as they read the accompanying letter- 
 press, and feel the pulsations of our pride, they will 
 awaken all the echoes with their boisterous shouts 
 of laughter. 
 
 It is very humiliating; and yet, after all, surely 
 it is powerfully invigorating too. Who does not 
 feel that life holds a new meaning for him as he 
 reflects that there are dizzy heights which have 
 stood in naked and awful silence from the founda- 
 tion of the world? Their desolate grandeur is 
 waiting for the pilgrim feet of a pioneer. Who 
 does not experience a thrill as he remembers that 
 it is possible for us to break all the records of the 
 ages and burst upon the vacancies that ache for 
 conquest ? 
 
 Mr. Abraham contends that the first man to 
 ascend Mount Everest will be a greater benefactor 
 of his race than a successful polar explorer. It 
 may be humiliating to be reminded that we have 
 not discovered everything. But it would be simply 
 crushing if we were assured that nothing remained 
 to be discovered. The tang of these icy winds that
 
 The Challenge of the Heights 195 
 
 sweep down these untrodden slopes taunts the im- 
 agination and challenges the enthusiasms of the 
 world. All the greatest heights have yet to be 
 climbed. It is grand ! All the sweetest songs have 
 yet to be sung; all the noblest poems have yet to 
 be penned; all the greatest books have yet to be 
 written; all the finest sermons have yet to be 
 preached; all the truest lives have yet to be lived; 
 all the most heroic exploits have yet to be achieved. 
 The whole wide world, with its restless millions, 
 waits to be conquered. India, China, Africa, South 
 America, spacious continents, crowded countries, 
 cannibal islands and coral reefs, all wait as the 
 peaks wait for the pathfinder for the beautiful 
 feet of those triumphant mountaineers whose coming 
 will precipitate the conquest of the ages. The chal- 
 lenge of the heights is in our ears ; it stirs our blood ; 
 it fires our fancy. It is a day for girding our 
 loins for heroic enterprise. The pinnacles beckon 
 and the topmost crags are calling. We must quit the 
 pine-clad valleys ; we must go. The Golden Age has 
 still to be ushered in. 
 
 Then, again, Mr. Abraham conclusively demon- 
 strates that, on the dizzy Alpine tracks, no man 
 liveth to himself. He insists on the social element 
 in mountaineering. The heights must be scaled, 
 not by individuals, but by parties, and every member
 
 196 The Luggage of Life 
 
 of the party is part and parcel of every other 
 member. No brotherhood could be more real, more 
 practical, more imperative. Sometimes the members 
 of the expedition are roped together; but in any 
 case the tie is there. In negotiating a difficult pass, 
 in clambering up a perilous face, or in attempting 
 a forbidding ascent, it is the weakest member of the 
 expedition whom all other members must consider. 
 His failure would be the failure of all. The golden 
 rule is nowhere so clamant as among the crags of 
 the summit. Every task that presents itself has 
 to be faced with a full recognition of its suitability 
 to the capabilities of each member of the fraternity. 
 The slipping of the feeblest foot might easily 
 jeopardize the lives of all. That is for ever and 
 for ever the lesson of the heights. It is only in 
 life's rarer and more intense atmospheres that we 
 see it so clearly. The murky mists of the valley 
 often obscure the fact that we are, in deed and in 
 truth, members one of another. 
 
 In his great chapter on 'The Evolution of Lan- 
 guage,' Drummond shows that a law like this 
 operates in the animal world. 'One of the earliest 
 devices hit upon,' he says, 'was the principle of 
 co-operation. The deer formed themselves into 
 herds, the monkeys into troops, the birds into flocks, 
 the wolves into packs, the bees into hives, and the
 
 The Challenge of the Heights 197 
 
 ants into colonies/ And the brilliant doctor goes 
 on to show how it works out: 'Here/ he says, 'is 
 a herd of deer, scattered, as they love to be, in a 
 string a quarter of a mile long. Every animal in 
 the herd not only shares the physical strength of 
 all the rest, but their powers of observation.' 
 
 The very beasts of the field are members one of 
 another, and know it. But the finest and most 
 graceful illustration of this social law the strength 
 of the strongest passing as a heritage to the feeblest 
 occurs in The Pilgrim's Progress. ' "Alas !" cried 
 poor Mr. Feeble-mind, "I want a suitable compan- 
 ion; you are all so lusty and strong; but I, as you 
 see, am weak. I choose, therefore, rather to come 
 behind, lest by reason of my many infirmities I 
 should be both a burthen to myself and to you. I 
 am, as I said, a man of a weak and a feeble mind, 
 and shall be offended and made weak at that which 
 others can bear. I shall like no laughing; I shall 
 like no gay attire; I shall like no unprofitable 
 questions. Nay, I am so weak a man as to be 
 offended with that which others have a liberty to 
 do. I do not yet know all the truth ; I am a very 
 ignorant Christian man; sometimes, if I hear some 
 rejoice in the Lord, it troubles me because I cannot 
 do so too. It is with me as it is with a weak man 
 among the strong, or as with a sick man among
 
 198 The Luggage of Life 
 
 the healthy, or as a lamp despised, so that I know 
 not what to do." "But, brother," said Mr. Great- 
 heart, "I have it in commission to comfort the 
 feeble-minded, and to support the weak. You must 
 needs go along with us ; we will wait for you, and 
 we will lend you our help; we will deny ourselves 
 of some things, both opinionated and practical, for 
 your sake; we will not enter into doubtful disputa- 
 tions before you; we will be made all things to 
 you, rather than that you shall be left behind." 
 
 The Pathfinder, the Professor, and the Puritan 
 all agree, therefore, in making it abundantly clear 
 that no man liveth to himself, and no man dieth 
 to himself. 'Wherefore/ says the most sure-footed 
 of all our mountaineers, 'take heed to them that 
 are weak. It is good neither to eat flesh, nor to 
 drink wine, nor anything whereby thy brother 
 stumbleth.' The echo that we have heard comes 
 to us from the Alps and the Himalayas; but the 
 voice that awoke that echo is from a greater height. 
 It spake from Mount Sinai, from Mount Sion, from 
 the eternal altitudes. It is the voice of God. 
 
 A third striking thing our mountaineer has to say. 
 He emphasizes the astonishing fact that the vast 
 majority of Alpine fatalities occur on the easy 
 tracks. The steep and narrow passes, where the 
 brain reels, where the foothold is precarious, and
 
 The Challenge of the Heights 199 
 
 where the poise of the body is difficult, clamour 
 loudly for special care. But the easy tracks have 
 a peril of their own. 'Claudius Clear/ in a sug- 
 gestive article, demonstrated the fact that, although 
 we commonly regard youth as the essential period 
 of moral peril, the most disastrous collapses have 
 been on the part of men and women in middle 
 life. We acquire a certain fatal contempt for 
 temptation which is ultimately our undoing. We 
 have edged our way with trembling caution along 
 the most slender shelves, beside perpendicular cliffs, 
 and above yawning abysses ; and then we fling our- 
 selves with a reckless stride along the broader 
 tracks. We scorn the danger. Are we not noted 
 climbers ministers, officers, teachers, saints of ripe 
 or mellow maturity ? Thinking that we stand fast, 
 we take no heed lest we fall. We become the 
 victims of the easy track at the last. It is cruelly 
 anomalous, but it is tragically true, that many a 
 man's conscience is less sensitive as to the minor 
 moralities of life after twenty years of Christian 
 service than during the first months of his religious 
 experience. He slips now where he stood fast 
 then. He has become too confident to be cautious, 
 and has grown tired of being careful. That way 
 lies disaster. 
 
 We feel very much obliged to Mr. Abraham.
 
 200 The Luggage of Life 
 
 We never expect, in this life, to follow him on his 
 vigorous pilgrimages towards virgin peaks. We 
 can only gaze at his snowy summits admiringly 
 and wistfully. But his adventures read like al- 
 legories; his suggestions sound like sermons. The 
 analogies, however unintentional, are too arresting 
 to be shunned; the parallelisms, however uncon- 
 scious, too striking to be avoided. We have fol- 
 lowed this trusty guide by granite and glacier, midst 
 snow and ice, and have caught a vision of more 
 radiant purity, gleaming on loftier pinnacles, and 
 bathed in the golden glory of a lovelier sunrise. 
 And those beckoning heights have challenged us to 
 press with new vigour towards the triumphs for 
 which all the ages have been struggling, to reach 
 out hands of dearer brotherhood to the comrades 
 who share our pilgrimage, and to exercise a greater 
 vigilance as we tread life's treacherous easy tracks. 
 It is so easy to fail of life's loftiest altitudes; so easy 
 to forget the partner of one's toil and travel; so 
 wofully easy to be overtaken by desolating calamity 
 through a false step on the easy track, after all. 
 After all!
 
 V 
 
 THE FURNITURE-VAN 
 
 I AM writing in April. The month moves on its 
 way amidst a wealthy cluster of associations. It 
 opens with a festival of folly. The Englishman 
 invariably connects its coming with welcome 
 thoughts of the cuckoo and the crocus. In our 
 Australian minds it stands related to the rustle of 
 autumn leaves. It is the month of homeward yearn- 
 ing, too, for all exiles. There be many that say, as 
 Browning said: 
 
 Oh to be in England 
 
 Now that April's there ! 
 
 And whoever wakes in England 
 
 Sees, some morning, unaware, 
 
 That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf 
 
 Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf, 
 
 While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough 
 
 In England now. 
 
 April brings, too, more often than not, the tender 
 pathos of Good Friday, and the exquisite triumph 
 of Easter. But there is one home to which these 
 chastened joys make no appeal, for to the door of 
 the Australian Methodist parsonage April brings 
 only the furniture-van. We have been engaged in 
 
 201
 
 202 The Luggage of Life 
 
 saying sorrowful farewells to ministerial neigh- 
 bours with whom we have worked side by side 
 through pleasant years of comradeship. And now, 
 without any indication that their work is finished, 
 like plants torn up when in full bloom, they must 
 move on. 
 
 It is this that has set us thinking. Indeed, it has 
 set Methodism . thinking. The whole question of 
 ministerial movement is beset by problems that have 
 made wiser heads than ours to ache. It is true, on 
 the one hand, that the itinerary system is being 
 eyed, not without envy, by the statesmen of other 
 churches. Here, for example, in the latest issue of 
 The Church Family Newspaper, is a leading article 
 suggesting the adoption by the Church of England 
 of a modified Methodism. Presbyterian assemblies 
 have long been discussing it, and Baptists and Con- 
 gregationalists have sometimes cast shy but wistful 
 glances in the same direction. And yet and yet, on 
 the other hand, two things are clear. The first is 
 that Methodism itself is coming to regard the system 
 as open to review. I have known large city churches 
 apply for registration as central missions in order 
 that they may stand outside the pale of the 
 itinerary system. And I have known small country 
 churches plead that they might retain their status 
 as home missions rather than be dragged into the
 
 The Furniture-Van 203 
 
 sweep of the system. The second fact is that every 
 minister who has stayed in one place long enough 
 to marry the girls and boys that he kissed when he 
 came, knows that his most regal influence came to 
 him in the years that followed the fifth. It is then 
 that the best work is done. The minister has won 
 a personal, in addition to a merely official authority. 
 His name is graven in the very hearts of his people, 
 and he speaks in their homes with the voice of a 
 king. 
 
 But let me hasten to say that I am writing to 
 challenge no system, and to advocate no system. 
 All these things are in the melting-pot; and the 
 churches will be wise if they watch each other 
 closely, confer with each other frankly, and profit 
 by each other's sagacity and experience. Yet one 
 thing I do most unhesitatingly affirm, and it is for 
 that irresistible affirmation that I am contending 
 now. It is this : a ministerial removal should never be 
 mechanical. It is a crisis of the soul perhaps of 
 many souls. It is a thing to be undertaken only 
 after strong crying and tears. I like to recall the 
 searchings of heart that marked a ministerial resig- 
 nation a century or so ago. Everybody knows the 
 circumstances tinder which poor old John Fawcett 
 wrote 'Blest be the tie that binds.' And, at about 
 the same time, Andrew Fuller spent two years in
 
 204 The Luggage of Life 
 
 most terrible anguish of soul whilst he tried to de- 
 termine whether or not it was his duty to leave his 
 little flock at Soham. 'It seems as if the church 
 and I should break each other's hearts/ he wrote. 
 'I think, after all, if I go from them, it must be 
 in my coffin.' His agony of mind led Dr. Ryland 
 to remark that 'men who fear not God would risk 
 an empire with fewer searchings of heart than it 
 cost Andrew Fuller to leave a little church, hardly 
 containing forty members besides himself and his 
 wife.' 
 
 And, indeed, there is no need to limit the scope 
 of this chapter to manses and parsonages. The same 
 principle holds good of every removal. The ten- 
 dency of young nations is to regard the furniture- 
 van flippantly. A century ago, the removal of an 
 English family from one village to another was 
 regarded as a social tragedy through all the country- 
 side. A man worked for his master because his 
 father had worked for his master's father, and his 
 grandfather for his master's grandfather. And it 
 never occurred to him that some social cataclysm 
 might prevent his grandchildren from serving his 
 master's grandchildren. All that has changed. 
 That day is as dead as the moa and the dodo. The 
 temper of the time has altered. We hail a furniture- 
 van nowadays with almost as light a heart as we hail
 
 The Furniture-Van 205 
 
 a hansom cab. In his Gamekeeper at Home Richard 
 Jefferies, the naturalist, maintains that this very fact 
 has had a good deal to do with the sharp accentua- 
 tion of our industrial troubles. The old intimate 
 and almost sacred relationship between employer 
 and employe, fortified by associations sanctified by 
 several generations, has broken down; and its col- 
 lapse has paved the way for all our modern embroil- 
 ments and agitations. 
 
 Yes, there is no doubt about it, we overwork the 
 furniture-van. Its axles are too hot. Old Daniel 
 Quorm comes to mind. 'I do often see it, friends !' 
 said Dan'l, 'I've watched it for years. Here's a 
 young fellow doin' good in the Sunday school and 
 other ways, promising to be a useful man when we 
 old folks are gone home. But somebody sends down 
 word that he can make half a crown a week more 
 wages in London. That's enough. No prayer about 
 it ; no askin' the Lord what He do see. No thinkin' 
 about the Lord's work. "I must get on," he says, 
 and he says it so pious as if it was one o* the ten 
 commandments but 'tisn't, friends, 'tisn't, 'though 
 you do hear it so often !' 
 
 Over against Daniel Quorm let us set Dr. Alex- 
 ander Whyte. In his lecture on 'Treasure Hid in 
 the Field' the doctor touches on this very matter, 
 and tells of a lovely experience. 'An old office-
 
 206 The Luggage of Life 
 
 bearer of this very congregation,' he says, 'told me, 
 long ago, how he had lately summoned a conference 
 of his whole household in order to make a great 
 family choice and decision. He put it to his wife, 
 and to his sons, and to his daughters, whether he 
 would build a house for them away out of Edin- 
 burgh, with a park and a garden and stables, or 
 whether he would buy a house in the city so as 
 still to be near this church, and so as to let his family 
 continue to sit under Dr. Candlish's ministry. And 
 the eyes of that old elder glistened with joy when he 
 told me that he had determined on a house within 
 reach of the pulpit to which he owed his own soul 
 and the souls of his children. His wife had been in 
 Dr. Candlish's ladies' class. Things like that do not 
 happen every day.' 
 
 Dr. Whyte is right. They do not. We are too 
 fond of the furniture-van. We ought to regard it in 
 the same category as the world and the flesh and the 
 devil. The number of transfers granted to members 
 leaving one church for another would make our 
 grandsires turn in their graves, whilst the multitude 
 of those who are entered as having 'moved away,' 
 one church's loss being no other church's gain, is 
 appalling. They have moved away, that is all. The 
 furniture-van has done its deadly work. Father, 
 mother, lads and lasses have moved away from
 
 The Furniture-Van 207 
 
 church and Sunday school, from societies and 
 classes, from useful services and helpful charities 
 and happy ministries ; they have moved away to 
 what? Church secretaries might often mournfully 
 and truthfully enter in the 'Remarks' column of the 
 church-roll the 'Lay of the Lost Leader' : 
 
 Just for a handful of silver he left us, 
 Just for a riband to stick in his coat! 
 
 Nobody, of course, is so dreamy and unpractical 
 as to suggest that church connexions should never 
 be ruptured in order to secure commercial promotion 
 or industrial preferment. That is not the point. 
 The iniquity is with those who order the furniture- 
 van before such considerations have been duly 
 weighed. If a man sees the beckoning hand, he 
 must go on ; and, so long as he is clear that his move 
 is a move nearer to the realization of life's ultimate 
 purpose, the furniture-van may be as idyllic a vehicle 
 for him as a chariot and horses of fire. 
 
 But there is a 'moving away' that is worse still. 
 Paul assures the Christians at Colossae that their 
 Lord shall present them holy and unblamable and 
 unreprovable if they be not moved away from, the 
 hope of the gospel. That is sorrow's crown of 
 sorrow life's culminating climax of tragedy to 
 be moved away from the hope of the gospel. Wher-
 
 2o8 The Luggage of Life 
 
 ever the furniture-van may take our chairs and 
 tables, our hearts must always abide in the same 
 place. In an age of shifting and of drifting we must 
 make it the loftiest science of life to dwell in the 
 secret place of the Most High and to abide under 
 the shadow of the Almighty. In the immutable 
 Rock of Ages the soul must wisely build her nest. 
 'Be not moved away' ! Surely, if church secretaries 
 are sometimes tempted to inscribe the 'Lay of the 
 Lost Leader* against certain names on the mem- 
 bership roll, it is pardonable to fancy the very 
 angels, from their higher knowledge, writing sadly 
 against other names, 'Moved away moved away 
 from the hope of the gospel/ It is the Dirge of a 
 Lost Soul! 
 
 Mr. Young, of Jedburgh, used to tell a story of 
 old Janet, who, in her lonely hut on the Scottish 
 moor, was dying at last. She breathed heavily and 
 painfully. Her brown old Bible lay open on the 
 counterpane. The minister came just in time. 'And 
 hoo is't wi' ye the noo, Janet ?' he inquired, bending 
 over her wrinkled countenance. Her face was 
 radiant. 'It's a' weel, it's bonnie/ she cried; 'but, 
 mon, I'm a wee confused wi' the flittin' !' Happy 
 are all they who, in that last solemn removal, know 
 no more poignant anguish than the mere flutter and 
 flurry of the process !
 
 VI 
 
 ON THE WISDOM OF CONDUCTING ONE'S 
 OWN FUNERAL 
 
 MARK TWAIN more than once makes merry at the 
 lugubrious and fantastic conception of a man 
 mourning at his own funeral. In these passages 
 the genial humorist is not at his best. He misses 
 the true inwardness of things. There is nothing in 
 actual experience more common and nothing more 
 pathetic than for a man to occupy the position of 
 chief mourner at his own burial. We have often 
 read the touching records of missionaries on the 
 islands, who are compelled to act as grave-diggers 
 and chaplains at the funerals of their own wives and 
 children. And quite recently we heard of a stricken 
 and lonely woman, in an ocean solitude, who was 
 called to nerve herself to perform the same melan- 
 choly offices at the burial of her husband. But life 
 holds an even deeper pathos. It is the tragic experi- 
 ence of every man who rightly reads the riddle of 
 life to preside, perhaps more than once, at his own 
 obsequies. He looks tearfully down upon the plate 
 
 209
 
 2io The Luggage of Life 
 
 upon which his own name and age are inscribed, and 
 says, deliberately and bravely, 'Ashes to ashes, dust 
 to dust.' Lord Dufferin has told us that he owes 
 his very life to a vivid dream in the course of 
 which he seemed to be a mourner at his own funeral. 
 Many a man owes far more than life itself not to 
 a mere dream, but to the actual experience. 
 
 The process occurs, for instance, in the choice of 
 a profession. Here and there a man feels that he 
 must follow a certain line, and that no other is even 
 thinkable. But with most men the trail is not so 
 clearly blazed. A man decides to be a builder, but 
 he feels that he would have made a very respectable 
 banker. Or he resolves on being a minister, but 
 he feels at the same time that he could easily have 
 distinguished himself as a barrister. In such cases, 
 if he be wise, the builder will straightway bury 
 the banker that is in him, and the minister will 
 pronounce the solemn words of committal over the 
 grave of the barrister. The builder who is per- 
 petually hankering after a teller's desk will never 
 build anything better than huts or hovels even for 
 himself. And the minister who is for ever casting 
 envious eyes at a barrister's chambers will never 
 catch the rapture that Christ's true ministers may 
 know. 
 
 That is a great story which Professor Herkless
 
 On Conducting One's own Funeral 211 
 
 tells us in his Life of Francis d'Assisi. On the 
 one hand Francis longed to be a friar and to 
 dedicate himself to poverty and pilgrimage. On 
 the other hand he loved a sweet and noble and 
 gracious woman. He wrestled with his alternatives, 
 and at length, through an agony of tears, he chose 
 the cloak and the cowl. But still the lovely face 
 haunted him by cloister and by shrine. And one 
 radiant moonlit night, when the earth was wrapped 
 in snow, the brethren of the monastery saw him 
 rise at dead of night. He went out into the grounds, 
 and, in the silvery moonlight, fashioned, out of the 
 snow, images of wife and children and servants. 
 He arranged them in a circle, and sat with them, 
 and, giving rein to his fancy, tasted for one delicious 
 hour the ecstasies of hearth and home, the joys 
 of life and love. Then, solemnly rising, he kissed 
 them all a tearful and a final farewell, renounced 
 such raptures for ever, and re-entered the convent. 
 That night Francis the friar buried himself. He 
 read his own funeral service. He had made his 
 choice; and, in order that his life might not be 
 clogged by the haunting images of dead possibilities, 
 the man who had decided to be a friar buried 
 everything except the friar. Indeed, the Roman 
 Church draws the most impressive symbolism of 
 its dedication from this source. Lamartine tells us
 
 212 The Luggage of Life 
 
 of Madame Roland's visit to a French convent. 
 'A novice took the veil during her residence there. 
 Her presentation at the entrance, her white veil, 
 her crown of roses, the sweet and soothing hymns 
 which directed her from earth to heaven, the mortu- 
 ary cloth cast over her youthful and buried beauty 
 and over her palpitating heart, made Madame 
 Roland shudder and overwhelmed her with tears.' 
 
 But there is no need to go beyond the pale 
 of Protestantism for our illustrations. The case 
 of F. W. Robertson of Brighton is very much to 
 the point. The love of arms ran in his very blood. 
 His grandfather, his father, and his brothers were 
 all soldiers. He himself had counted the slow years 
 that must drag by before he could wear the Queen's 
 uniform. But at last the time came, and he found 
 himself, to his intense delight, appointed to the 
 Third Dragoon Guards, and almost simultaneously 
 there came the call to the ministry. Then the 
 struggle in the dark, and, finally, the great decision. 
 Robertson stripped off the brilliant uniform, laid 
 aside his sword, entered the ministry, and from 
 that time forth never looked back. The first 
 service he conducted, he conducted all alone. It 
 was the burial of the soldier in him. And, before 
 burying him, he stripped from the soldier all his 
 military virtues endurance, discipline, courage
 
 and transferred them to the equipment of the min- 
 ister. 
 
 If our years were allotted to us in the generous 
 fashion which some of the patriarchs seem to have 
 enjoyed, a man might find some opportunity for 
 trying his hand at more avocations than one. As 
 it is, however, the time is short. At seventy a man 
 only begins to feel that he knows his work. There is 
 no time for tinkering with many things or for 
 trifling with one. The very brevity of life clamours 
 for concentration and economy. We have all read 
 the affecting and informing and heart-searching 
 correspondence of Dr. Marcus Dods. No man 
 sounded the very depths of life's innermost experi- 
 ences more terribly than did he. He felt called to 
 be a minister. He buried every other inclination 
 and possibility. Then came years of neglect and 
 rejection. No congregation would call him. But, 
 with a courage never excelled on a battle-field, he 
 held on. He looked wistfully at the graves in which 
 he had buried his earlier fancies. But he would 
 allow no resurrection. And at last came recognition 
 and reward. And out of that agonizing experience 
 he wrote on the economy of life, and he deserves to 
 be listened to with bated breath. 'Every man,' the 
 doctor says, 'as he grows into life, finds he must 
 employ such an economy on his own account. He
 
 The Luggage of Life 
 
 is pressed to occupy positions or to engage in work 
 which will prevent him from achieving the purpose 
 for which nature has fitted him. He is offered pro- 
 motion which seems attractive and has its advan- 
 tages ; but he declines it, because it would divert him 
 from his chosen aim. Continually men spoil their 
 life by want of concentration. They are greatly 
 tempted to do so, for the public foolishly concludes 
 that, because a man does one thing well, he can do 
 everything well; and he who has written a good 
 history is straightway asked to sit in Parliament, or 
 the man whose scholarship and piety have been con- 
 spicuous is offered preferment which calls for the 
 exercise of wholly different qualities.' 
 
 The theme might, of course, be amplified infinitely. 
 It is the central thought of the gospel. There are 
 times when men sigh, with the speaker in Tenny- 
 son's Maud : 
 
 Ah, for a man to arise in me, 
 That the man I am may cease to be ! 
 
 And Jesus meets such men on their own ground. 
 He offers a new life. 'Ye must be born again' ! He 
 says. And the birth within me of the man He 
 means me to be necessarily implies the burial within 
 me of the man I have actually been. The vocabu- 
 lary of the death-bed and the grave-side was con- 
 stantly on the lips of Paul. Again and again he told
 
 On Conducting One's own Funeral 215 
 
 the Christians of Europe and of Asia the story of 
 his own death and burial. Almost all his auto- 
 biographical references are obituary notices. He 
 had been crucified with Christ, he would say, and 
 he implored his hearers to reckon themselves as 
 dead and buried too. 
 
 Yes, it is good for the builder to bury the banker 
 that he might have been. It is good for Paul to bury 
 the Saul that he had been. But there is one man 
 within us, whom we are most strongly tempted to 
 bury, to whose funeral we must never, never go. He 
 is the man of our ideal ; the man of our prayers ; 
 the man we fain would be. There are no sadder 
 lines in English poetry than those of William Wat- 
 son: 
 
 So on our souls the visions rise 
 Of that fair life we never led: 
 
 They flash a splendour past our eyes, 
 We start, and they are fled; 
 
 They pass and leave us with blank gaze, 
 
 Resigned to our ignoble days. 
 
 We catch the fair vision of glorious possibilities ; 
 but we shake our heads, like the rich young ruler, 
 and turn away sorrowful. Oh the pity of it! 
 'Resigned to our ignoble days' ! The old world is 
 very weary with weeping over her troubles and 
 her tragedies; but she has never known anything 
 more inexpressibly mournful than that.
 
 VII 
 OUR BETTER HALVES 
 
 MARRIAGE is simply an obvious and outstanding 
 illustration of one of life's cardinal laws. The 
 world is made up of pairs, and, like the sexes, those 
 pairs are supplementary and complementary. I 
 have two eyes. They are not in rivalry; each has 
 its function. It is difficult for my right eye to dis- 
 cern the danger that approaches from the opposite 
 direction. My left eye, therefore, stands sentinel 
 on that side of my face. Each member of my body 
 holds in charge powers that it is under obligation to 
 exercise for the good of all its fellow members. 
 The world is built on that plan. Examine, for proof 
 of it, the list of exports and imports of any nation 
 under the sun. As Cowper sings : 
 
 Wise to promote whatever end He means, 
 God opens fruitful Nature's various scenes ; ; 
 Each climate needs what other climes produce, 
 And offers something to the general use ; 
 No land but listens to the common call, 
 And in return receives supplies from all. 
 216
 
 Our Better Halves 217 
 
 In our silly habit of teaching half-truths, we tell 
 our children that Australia belongs to Britain, that 
 Algeria belongs to France, and that Java belongs to 
 Holland. If we told them the whole truth they 
 would learn that Britain belongs to Germany, and 
 that France belongs to China, and that America be- 
 longs to Japan, and that every nation is an essential 
 and complementary part of every other nation. 
 And if we taught them the whole truth after that 
 liberal fashion, they would grow up to beat their 
 swords into ploughshares and their spears into 
 pruning-hooks. 
 
 In precisely the same way every man holds in 
 sacred charge certain gifts and graces which he is 
 under solemn obligation to use for the general good. 
 My next-door neighbour is my better half; I cannot 
 do without him. 
 
 He is rich where I am poor, 
 
 And he supplies my wants the more 
 
 As his unlikeness fitteth me. 
 
 The best possible illustration is, of course, Com- 
 mander Verney L. Cameron's story of the two 
 lepers he met in Central Africa. One had lost his 
 hands, the other his feet. They established a farm 
 together. The leper who had no hands, and who 
 could not therefore scatter seed, carried his legless 
 brother, who could not else have stirred, upon his
 
 2 1 8 The Luggage of Life 
 
 back; and thus, each supplying the other's lack, 
 they broke their ground, and sowed their seed, and 
 reaped their crop. 
 
 Or go to Scotland. Everybody who has read that 
 wealthiest of all northern biographies will remem- 
 ber the storm scene on the Highland loch. Dr. 
 Norman Macleod was in a small boat with a boat- 
 man, some ladies, and 'a. well-known ministerial 
 brother, who was as conspicuous for his weak and 
 puny appearance as Dr. Macleod was for his 
 gigantic size and strength/ A fearful gale arose. 
 The waves tossed the boat sky-high in their furious 
 sport. The smaller of the two ministers was 
 frightened out of his wits. He suggested that Dr. 
 Macleod should pray for deliverance. The ladies 
 eagerly seconded the devout proposal. But the 
 breathless old boatman would have none of it. He 
 instantly vetoed the scheme. 'Na, na !' he cried ; 'let 
 the wee mannie pray, but the big one maun tak' an 
 oar if ye dinna a' want to be drooned !' The shrewd 
 old Highlander was simply stating, in a crude way 
 of his own, life's great supplementary law. Let us 
 admire this principle of the big minister and the 
 small minister, of the armless leper and the legless 
 leper, each in his proper place, as it reveals itself in 
 other fields. Every great movement furnishes evi- 
 dence of the effective operation of this law.
 
 Our Better Halves 
 
 Those who have studied carefully the story of the 
 Reformation know how the powers of Luther and 
 Melanchthon dovetailed into each other, and how 
 beautifully each supplemented each. Differing from 
 each other as widely as the poles, each seemed to 
 supply precisely what the other lacked ; and neither 
 was quite sure of the wisdom of his own proposal 
 until the sanction of the other had been obtained. 
 
 Macaulay has told us, concerning Charles Fox 
 and Sir James Macintosh, that when Fox went to 
 the desk and wrote, and Macintosh took to the plat- 
 form and spoke, the cause they espoused seemed 
 pitifully impotent; but when Macintosh seized the 
 pen, and Fox mounted the platform, they were 
 simply irresistible. They brought the whole coun- 
 try to their feet. Which, of course, is the story of 
 the big minister and the wee minister over again. 
 The gifts of each exactly supplemented those of the 
 other. Each was the other's better half. And has 
 not Lord Morley made us familiar with the fine 
 record of Cobden and of Bright? 'They were,' he 
 says, 'the complements of each other. Their gifts 
 differed, so that one exactly covered the ground 
 which the other was predisposed to leave compara- 
 tively untouched.' 
 
 The story of the grey friars and the black friars 
 is another case in point The followers of Francis
 
 220 The Luggage of Life 
 
 exactly supplemented those of Dominic, and each 
 order overtook the work which the other left un- 
 done. History teems with similar examples. The 
 law of the better half is as wide in the sweep of its 
 operations as the law of gravitation. 
 
 What ecclesiastical jealousies and theological 
 bitternesses and ministerial heart-burnings would 
 have been saved if even the best and saintliest of 
 men had been swift to recognize the operation of 
 this gracious principle! To say nothing of such 
 shameful controversies as those between Calvinists 
 and Lutherans, let us take as our example, a wordy 
 conflict of but two centuries ago. We ministers 
 read John Wesley's Journal and William Law's 
 Serious Call on Saturday nights; and contact with 
 such flaming enthusiasms makes our own hearts to 
 burn within us as the great day of the week ap- 
 proaches. What piety, what passion, what prayer- 
 fulness we discover! All the chills of the week melt 
 from our spirits as our souls warm themselves be- 
 fore these blazing fires ! But we blush for our own 
 revered spiritual masters when we recall the way in 
 which these giants of the devout life treated each 
 other. And, now that all the dust has settled, what 
 is the truth? The simple fact is that Wesley was 
 the very greatest preacher of his age, and Law was 
 the very greatest religious writer.
 
 Our Better Halves 221 
 
 'We see, now/ says a great writer, 'that William 
 Law without John Wesley, as well as John Wesley 
 without William Law, would have left the religious 
 life and literature of the eighteenth century both 
 weak, one-sided, and unsafe. Could they both have 
 seen it, both were, indispensable John Wesley to 
 complete William Law, and William Law to com- 
 plete John Wesley/ Just so. Could they both have 
 seen it ! But the tragedy of it all is that they could 
 not see it, and did not see it. We shall be wise men 
 if, in sitting at their feet, we profit by the very 
 blindness of our teachers. Each, had he only known 
 it, was the other's better half. 
 
 There come to most of us weak or wicked mo- 
 ments, when we are apt to regard our more brilliant 
 brethren as our enemies. We forget that we are 
 members one of another, and that we need each 
 other. What a story for tears is that which Dr. 
 Alexander Whyte has told us of Thomas Shepard ! 
 It is a tale to be read on our knees. Thomas Shep- 
 ard, as we all know, was an English Puritan, a 
 Pilgrim Father, and the Founder of Harvard. But 
 we did not all know that Thomas Shepard was a 
 poor wretch of like passions with ourselves. He 
 had, it seems, a brilliant ministerial neighbour. And 
 his neighbour's sermons were printed on Saturdays 
 in the New England Gazette. So, for that matter,
 
 222 The Luggage of Life 
 
 were Shepard's. But his neighbour's sermons read 
 well, and were popular. Shepard's read but in- 
 differently, and were despised. And on one memor- 
 able Saturday a particularly brilliant and clever 
 sermon appeared in the Gazette. Everybody read 
 it, everybody talked of it, everybody praised it. And 
 the praise of his neighbour was like fire in the bones 
 and like gravel in the teeth of poor Thomas Shep- 
 ard. It was gall and wormwood to his very soul. 
 That Saturday the spirit of the old Puritan passed 
 through the Garden of Gethsemane. When mid- 
 night came it found him still prostrate before God 
 on the floor of his study. His whole frame was 
 convulsed in an agony of sweat and tears, whilst his 
 brilliant neighbour's clever sermon was still crushed 
 and crumpled between his clasped hands. He 
 wrestled, like Jacob, until the breaking of the day. 
 He prayed until he had torn all bitterness and 
 jealousy and hatred and ill-will out of his heart. 
 And then, with calm and upturned face, he craved 
 a blessing on his neighbour and on his neighbour's 
 clever sermon. Thomas Shepard came to see that 
 he and his neighbour belonged to each other. He 
 was his neighbour's better half. Time has taken 
 good care to vindicate Shepard. He is the friend 
 of all of us, whilst we do not even know his neigh- 
 bour's name. What Saturday nights, I say again,
 
 Our Better Halves 223 
 
 we ministers have with Wesley and with Law! 
 How our hearts burn within us in their excellent 
 company! But what still more glorious Saturday 
 nights we might have had if only John Wesley or 
 William Law or, better still, both of them had 
 spent one Saturday night after the pattern of 
 Thomas Shepard's never-to-be-forgotten Saturday 
 night in New England! If only they, and all like 
 them, had wrestled with their bitterness until the 
 breaking of the day! The daybreak would have 
 revealed to each the noble face of a brother beloved. 
 For we are members one of another.
 
 VIII 
 THE CONQUEST OF THE POLES 
 
 I HAVE just been over the Fram. Captain Amund- 
 sen, with his lieutenants, Messrs. Hassel and Wist- 
 ing both of whom accompanied their chief to the 
 Pole were as courteous and attentive as mortals 
 could possibly be. They showed us all that there was 
 to be seen, told us all that there was to be told, and 
 assisted us in snapping everything that tempted our 
 cameras. Nothing could have been more beautiful 
 than the grace and modesty with which they were 
 receiving, in the form of a perfect stream of con- 
 gratulatory cablegrams, the plaudits of the world. 
 It was good to walk the decks of the sturdy little 
 vessel that holds the extraordinary record of having 
 penetrated to the farthest north with Nansen and to 
 the farthest south with Amundsen. We raise our 
 hats to the heroic achievements of these hardy 
 Norsemen. What memories rush to mind! What 
 tales of dauntless courage and dogged endurance ! 
 Our thoughts quit all their ordinary grooves and 
 224
 
 The Conquest of the Poles 225 
 
 plunge into fresh realms. We seem to leave the 
 solar system far behind us, and to invade a new 
 universe as we lean against these beaten bulwarks 
 and give ourselves to retrospection. And here, at 
 least, there are no more worlds to conquer. Here, 
 at any rate, progress has reached finality. There 
 are no more poles ! None ! It is so very rarely that 
 we can cry Ne plus ultra! that we must enjoy the 
 sensation when we can. Peary and Amundsen 
 hold a distinct monopoly. They are entitled to 
 make the most of it. The magnificent achievement 
 of Captain Amundsen has set us all thinking of 
 Arctic and Antarctic exploits. We have been trans- 
 ported in fancy to those lofty and jagged ranges 
 of mountainous ice that have been the despair of 
 adventurers since exploration began. We have 
 shivered in imagination as we have caught glimpses 
 of innumerable ice-floes and of stretching plains of 
 frozen snow. Of Captain Amundsen's success in 
 the south we know only the bare fact. His book, 
 with graphic detail and description, is a treat with 
 which the future tantalizes us. 
 
 But Amundsen has reminded us of Peary, and 
 we have picked up the Commander's book once 
 more. He tells a great tale. It is good to see that 
 the world cannot withhold its sounding applause 
 from the man who knows exactly where he wants
 
 226 The Luggage of Life 
 
 to go, and who never dreams of resting till he 
 gets there. Peary's book is a classic of excellent 
 leadership. Nansen told us long ago that the 
 obstacles that intervened between civilization and 
 the Pole, terrific as they were, were too frail for 
 the dogged and indomitable determination of Peary. 
 That prediction has been magnificently vindicated. 
 Commander Peary has taught us that the really 
 successful man is the man who knows how to keep 
 on failing. Failure is life's high art. He who 
 knows how to fail well will sweep everything before 
 him. Peary kept on failing till the silver crept into 
 his hair; and then, when well over fifty years of 
 age, on stepping-stones of his dead self, he climbed 
 to higher things. Through what Disraeli would 
 have called 'the hell of failure/ he entered the 
 heaven of his triumph. 
 
 It is ever so. The kingdom of heaven suffereth 
 violence, and the persistent take it by storm. The 
 conqueror is, as Wellington said, the man who never 
 knows when he is beaten. The dust of defeat stings 
 the face of the victor at every step of his onward 
 march. 'The arms of the Republic/ writes Gibbon, 
 'often defeated in battle, were always successful in 
 war.' 'As for Gad/ exclaimed the dying Jacob, 
 'a troop shall overcome him, but he shall overcome 
 at the last/ The Cross is the last word in the grim
 
 The Conquest of the Poles 227 
 
 record of the world's most ghastly failures; it is at 
 the same time the emblem of a victory which shall 
 shame our most radiant dreams. Those whose ears 
 have never heard a paean, and whose brows have 
 never felt the laurel, should ponder well this great 
 romance of Arctic exploration. When God writes 
 Success on any man's life He often begins to spell 
 it with an '.' 
 
 Commander Peary tabulates his difficulties. 
 Speaking generally, these coincided with Amund- 
 sen's, and they were three : ( i ) there was the diffi- 
 culty, sometimes almost insuperable, of conveying 
 heavy baggage over steep, ragged, slippery moun- 
 tains of ice; (2) there was the difficulty presented 
 by the piercing, penetrating, paralysing cold; (3) 
 and there was the difficulty of the dense, depressing 
 darkness the long polar night. In relation to the 
 first of these, however, we must confess that the 
 thought that has haunted us, as we have followed 
 our intrepid voyager, is that, really and truly, these 
 were not the things that deterred, but the things that 
 drove him. Their propelling power was infinitely 
 greater than their repelling power. It is quite cer- 
 tain that if the Poles could have been reached in a 
 sumptuous Pullman car, neither Peary nor Amund- 
 sen would have made the trip. It was the stupend- 
 ous difficulty that lured them on.
 
 228 The Luggage of Life 
 
 
 We make an egregious blunder when we try to 
 
 persuade men that the way to heaven is easy. The 
 statement is false to fact in the first place; and, in 
 the second, there is no responsive chord in human 
 nature which will vibrate to that ignoble note. 
 Hardship has a strange fascination for men. 
 Pizarro knew what he was doing when he traced his 
 line on the sands of Panama, and cried: "Com- 
 rades, on that side of the line are toil, hunger, naked- 
 ness, and drenching storm, desertion, and death ; on 
 this side ease and pleasure. Choose, every man! 
 For my part, I go to the south.' Garibaldi knew 
 what he was doing when he exclaimed : 'Soldiers, 
 what I offer you is fatigue, danger, struggle, and 
 death; the chill of the cold night in the free air; the 
 intolerable heat beneath the blazing sun ; no lodgings, 
 no munitions, no provisions, but forced marches, 
 perilous watch-posts, and the continual struggle 
 with the bayonet against strong batteries. Those 
 who love freedom and their country may follow me.' 
 Men love to be challenged and taunted and 
 dared. Six thousand men eagerly volunteered to 
 join Captain Scott's expedition to the South Pole. 
 Some holding high and remunerative positions 
 craved to be permitted to swab the decks of the 
 Terra Nova. A captain in a crack cavalry regiment, 
 with five clasps on his uniform, a hero of the South
 
 The Conquest of the Poles 229 
 
 African war, counted it an honour to perform the 
 most menial duties at a salary of a shilling a month. 
 Yes, Pizarro and Garibaldi, Peary and Scott knew 
 what they were doing. They were obeying the 
 surest instinct in the genius of leadership; for they 
 were following Him who said : 'If any man will 
 come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up 
 his cross daily, and follow Me; for whosoever shall 
 save his life shall lose it, but whosoever shall lose 
 his life for My sake, the same shall save it.' On 
 the road to Golgotha, the Saviour challenged the 
 daring among men, and the heroes of all the ages 
 have in consequence trooped to His standard. 
 
 But the colossal obstacles have often to be sur- 
 mounted, Peary tells us, in the cruel cold and the 
 dense darkness. And such cold! It is surely an 
 allegory. Many a man feels that the task assigned 
 him would be difficult enough in itself; but, in 
 the chilling and disheartening atmosphere in which 
 he has to perform it, it seems impossible. Bad 
 enough, thought Benaiah, to fight a lion; but a 
 lion in a pit ! And a lion in a pit on a snowy day ! 
 Hard enough to persevere in well-doing when in- 
 spired by sweet whispers of gratitude, and cheered 
 by the warm breath of sympathy. But misunder- 
 stood and unappreciated! There are millions who 
 have discovered, with Peary, that life's heaviest
 
 230 The Luggage of Life 
 
 loads have to be borne in the most nipping and 
 frigid atmosphere. 
 
 And the darkness ! Nobody knows what darkness 
 is, Peary tells us, unless he has experienced an 
 Arctic night. Week after week, with no illuming 
 ray, the blackness seems to soak into one's very 
 soul. But here our explorer is mistaken. There 
 are many who have never been within thousands 
 of miles of the Pole who nevertheless take up every 
 morning their heavy burdens and bear them through 
 an atmosphere more chilling than that of Arctic 
 latitudes, and amidst darkness compared with which 
 an Arctic night is brilliant. For there is no gloom 
 like the petrifying gloom of mystery. The sorrows 
 of all time reached their climax in the Man of 
 Sorrows ; and the anguish of the Christ reached its 
 climax on the cross. And in the awful heart of 
 that anguish there was darkness; and out from 
 the darkness emerged the expression of eternal 
 mystery, 'My God, My God, why hast Thou for- 
 saken me ?' The horror of the ages is concentrated 
 in that fearful 'Why?' And with an unanswered 
 'Why?' upon his dumb lips, many a Christian 
 follows his Lord in the dark. 
 
 I have said that Peary's book is a classic of 
 distinguished leadership. This reminds me of the 
 finest thing in the volume. The explorer makes
 
 The Conquest of the Poles 231 
 
 a noble boast. In the course of his life he has led 
 hundreds of men among Arctic foxes and Polar 
 bears. And, save for shipping accidents that might 
 have happened in any zone, he has brought them 
 all safely back. There could be no more eloquent 
 testimony to his shrewd foresight, his unfailing 
 diligence, and his almost fond unselfishness, than 
 that. Of nothing is he more proud. But Peary's 
 leadership is modelled on a greater. What though 
 at times the burdens of life seem crushing? What 
 though the atmosphere seem paralysing? What 
 though the darkness seem appalling? He leads 
 on. He has felt the darkness and the cold. The 
 responsibility is, after all, in the last resort, upon 
 the leader. And, with unerring wisdom and beau- 
 tiful accuracy of judgment, He picks out the peril- 
 ous path and apportions the difficult tasks to the 
 well-known potentialities of His followers. 'Of 
 those whom Thou hast given Me/ He says, 'I have 
 lost none.' Commander Peary's great book has 
 taught us that the wise leader sets an infinite value 
 on the welfare of his most lowly follower; and that 
 every task is allotted in the light of that lofty esti- 
 mate.
 
 IX 
 HAT-PINS AND BUTTON-HOOKS 
 
 I HAVE been reading a pretty tale of a wee lassie, 
 who, on bounding in from school, exclaimed that she 
 had learned to punctuate. 'Indeed!' exclaimed her 
 mother, 'and how do you do it, Elsie?' 'Well, 
 mamma/ cried the excited little grammarian, 'it's 
 just as easy as easy can be! If you say that a thing 
 is so, you just put a hat-pin after it; but if you are 
 only asking whether it is so or not, you put a button- 
 hook !' 
 
 On thinking it over, we have reached the deliber- 
 ate conclusion that there is a world of sound phil- 
 osophy about the little lassie's explanation. All life 
 resolves itself, sooner or later, into a matter of hat- 
 pins and button-hooks. If we were to hold a kind 
 of mental spring-cleaning, turning out all the 
 drawers of memory and cupboards of thought; if 
 we were to sort out all our notions and ideas, our 
 doctrines and our theories; if we were to overhaul 
 our entire intellectual and moral equipment, we 
 should discover with surprise that the great bulk of 
 
 232
 
 Hat-Pins and Button-Hooks 233 
 
 it all could be sharply divided under these two heads 
 our affirmations and our interrogations; the 
 things of which we are positive, and the things of 
 which we are doubtful ; the matters on which we are 
 dogmatic and the matters on which we are dubious. 
 The soul has a stock-in-trade of its own ; and on its 
 shelves are to be found the goods that it has bought 
 outright and the goods of which it has accepted 
 delivery on probation. We carry these two classes 
 of stores our certainties and our suspicions 
 these and no others. Our cupboards are crammed, 
 that is to say, with hat-pins and with button-hooks. 
 
 It is in these two classes of goods that the churches 
 do their main business. The Church makes great 
 affirmations, and she propounds great interroga- 
 tions. She declares confidently : We know whom we 
 have believed! We know that all things work to- 
 gether for good! We know that, if our earthly 
 house were destroyed, we have a house not made 
 with hands, eternal in the heavens ! She asks great 
 questions too: What shall it profit a man? How 
 shall we escape if we neglect? What shall the end 
 be of those that obey not the gospel? Surely the 
 pulpit is of all places the natural home of stupend- 
 ous affirmation and searching interrogation. 
 
 Oliver Wendell Holmes rushes to the memory at 
 once. ' "I will agree," said Number Seven, "to write
 
 234 The Luggage of Life 
 
 the history of two worlds, this and the next, in such 
 a compact way that you can commit them both to 
 memory in less time than you can learn the answer 
 to the first question in the catechism." He took 
 a blank card from his pocket-book, and wrote : 
 
 ' "Two worlds ! Endless doubt and unrest here 
 below; wondering, admiring, adoring certainty 
 above. Am I not right?" It was conceded that he 
 was right. It conies to this. The story of two 
 worlds can be set forth by a single hat-pin and a 
 single button-hook. 
 
 Hat-pins and button-hooks are both very good in 
 their way, and for their proper purposes. We have 
 heard of hat-pins being used with vicious intent at 
 football matches and in street riots, just as we have 
 heard men speak with certainty where they would 
 have been wiser to have spoken with caution. They 
 were cock-sure; but time has shown that they were 
 wrong. It was an abuse of the hat-pin, that was all. 
 'Have your beliefs/ says an old writer, 'and have 
 your doubts. Believe your beliefs, and doubt your 
 doubts. Never doubt your beliefs, and never believe
 
 Hat-Pins and Button-Hooks 235 
 
 your doubts.' It is a quaint way of saying that 
 the hat-pin and the button-hook must be kept, each 
 in its proper place, and must be used, each for its 
 proper purpose. 
 
 In a magnificent lecture delivered to students 
 not long before his death, Dr. John Watson urged 
 the importance of this very thing. There are certain 
 matters, he contended, on which the preacher can 
 be absolutely positive the facts of Revelation, of 
 the Deity of the Son of God, of Sin, of Redemp- 
 tion, and of the power of the Holy Ghost. Round 
 these splendid facts, he demonstrated, there revolved 
 a thousand theories. Between these things he en- 
 treated the students to distinguish clearly. 'The 
 facts/ he said, 'should be declared in faith with 
 much assurance; the theories should be advanced as 
 contributing light with diffidence.' 
 
 The button-hook, like the hat-pin, is a most useful 
 article in its own way. It is a good thing to ask 
 questions. It was the occupation of the child Jesus 
 in the midst of the doctors. Towards the close of 
 his life Dr. Thomas Guthrie wrote a beautiful letter 
 to his daughter congratulating her on her first ap- 
 proach to the table of the Lord. The letter simply 
 overflows with intense affection and fatherly coun- 
 sel. And it contains this pertinent passage: 'I saw 
 an adage yesterday, in a medical magazine, which is
 
 236 The Luggage of Life 
 
 well worth your remembering and acting on. It is 
 this wise saying of the great Lord Bacon's: WHO 
 ASKS MUCH, LEARNS MUCH. I remember the day 
 when I did not like, by asking, to confess my igno- 
 rance. I have long given up that, and now seize on 
 every opportunity of adding to my stock of knowl- 
 edge. Now don't forget Lord Bacon's wise saying !' 
 
 There are only two men in the whole wide world 
 who can ask questions effectively. There is the 
 man who does not know, and wants to learn; and 
 there is the man who does know, and wants to 
 teach. Of the former, Alexander the Great is the 
 classical illustration; among the latter, Socrates 
 stands supreme. We all remember the great passage 
 in Plutarch, in which the rise of Alexander is largely 
 attributed to his endless facility for asking sagacious 
 questions. When Frank Buckland, the delightful 
 naturalist, was in his fourth year, his mother wrote 
 of him: 'He is always asking questions. If there 
 is anything he cannot understand, he won't go on 
 till it has been explained to him. There is no end 
 to his questions.' And Dr. Culross, in his exquisite 
 monogram of Carey, tells us how the 'sensible lad 
 in the leather apron' attracted the notice of Dr. Scott, 
 the commentator, by his 'modest asking of appro- 
 priate questions.' 
 
 The place of the button-hook is permanent. So
 
 Hat-Pins and Button-Hooks 237 
 
 long as life throbs with mystery the place of the 
 interrogation is assured. The baby asks questions 
 as soon as he can prattle. 
 
 Why, muvver, why 
 
 Was those poor blackbirds all baked in a pie ? 
 And why did the cow jump right over the moon? 
 And why did the dish run away with the spoon? 
 And why must we wait for our wings till we die ? 
 Why, muvver, why? 
 
 And death comes at last, and finds us still asking the 
 old questions : 
 
 Why? 
 
 This is the cry 
 
 That echoes through the wilderness of earth, 
 Through song and sorrow, day of death and birth : 
 
 Why? 
 
 Why? 
 
 It is the high 
 
 Wail of the child with all his life to face ; 
 Man's last dumb question as he reaches space : 
 
 Why? 
 
 The comfort about it all is that the really big 
 things of life are represented by hat-pins, and only 
 the things that can afford to wait by button-hooks. 
 Dr. Dale used to illustrate this by a reference to 
 the pillars beside his pulpit. 'It appears to you/ 
 he would say to the congregation at Carr's Lane,
 
 238 The Luggage of Life 
 
 'that these pillars support this arch above my head. 
 They do nothing of the kind. If you could stand 
 where I stand, you would see that they have been 
 cut through to make room for this rostrum, and 
 they actually hang upon the arch which they seem 
 to support.' In like fashion, our faith seems at 
 times to depend upon the theories and evidences 
 concerning which we ask our questions. In point 
 of fact, it does nothing of the kind. If all our 
 theories and evidences were cut through like the 
 pillars, our faith would still stand securely like the 
 arch. Our certainties infinitely outnumber and 
 outweigh our speculations. We know. The soul 
 plants her feet on a sure refuge of her own. Pro- 
 fessor Forsyth rightly argues that to the individual 
 consciousness there can be no stronger witness than 
 its own experience of the love of God, of the merits 
 of the Saviour's Cross, and of the efficacy of His 
 risen power. These the soul takes into stock, not on 
 approbation, but for ever and for all. She buys 
 these truths and sells them not. The Christian 
 gospel holds for the believer stupendous and satis- 
 fying certainties; and, amidst these affirmations, 
 secure from all interrogations, the heart loves to 
 build its nest
 
 X 
 
 THE BROW OF THE HILL 
 
 THE brow of the hill has a divinity of its own. There 
 is something distinctly spiritual, as well as some- 
 thing distinctly sublime, about a summit. That is 
 why the heathen loved to build their altars there. 
 How often, in the historical books of the Old Testa- 
 ment, we are told that the idolatrous people erected 
 their shrines and raised their images on the high 
 hills about Jerusalem ! How the Aztecs delighted in 
 rearing their strange temples, shaped like pyramids, 
 on the loftiest peaks of Mexico, with the altar on the 
 topmost pinnacle of the temple ! And the same sure 
 instinct has led men to lay their bones to rest on 
 the brow of the hill. They wearily sought its silent 
 and solemn sanctity at the last ! We have all visited, 
 at least in fancy, the resting-place of Robert Louis 
 Stevenson. 'Nothing more picturesque can be im- 
 agined,' his cousin tells us, 'than the narrow ledge 
 that forms the summit of Vaea, a place no wider 
 than a room, and flat as a table. On either side the 
 
 239
 
 240 The Luggage of Life 
 
 land descends precipitously; in front lies the vast 
 ocean with the surf-swept reefs; to the right and 
 left green mountains rise, densely covered with the 
 primaeval forest.' No firearms must be discharged 
 about those slopes. The chiefs insist that the birds 
 must be undisturbed, that they 'may raise about his 
 grave the songs he loved so well.' I saw the other 
 day a striking picture of Cecil Rhodes's lonely grave 
 on the crest of the mighty Matoppos in Africa. 
 Two lions from the valley beneath are standing on 
 the great flat tomb, and seem in harmony with the 
 wild, romantic place. 
 
 But I no longer hold the attention of my readers. 
 Their thoughts have left Robert Louis Stevenson 
 and Cecil Rhodes far behind, and have visited the 
 strange, lone resting-place of Moses among the 
 mountains of Moab. 
 
 That was the grandest funeral 
 
 That ever passed on earth ; 
 But no man heard the trampling, 
 
 Or saw the train go forth. 
 Perchance the bald old eagle 
 
 On grey Beth-peor's height, 
 Out of his rocky eyrie 
 
 Looked on the wondrous sight. 
 
 And Browning has expressed the same fondness 
 for a mountain burial in his 'Grammarian's Funeral.'
 
 The Brow of the Hill 241 
 
 Here's the top peak; the multitude below 
 
 Live, for they can, there : 
 This man decided not to live but know 
 
 Bury this man there? 
 Here here's his place, where meteors shoot, clouds form, 
 
 Lightnings are loosened, 
 Stars come and go! Let joy break with the storm! 
 
 Peace let the dew send ! 
 Lofty designs must close in like effects: 
 
 Loftily lying, 
 Leave him still loftier than the world suspects, 
 
 Living and dying. 
 
 Now I have simply pointed to these altars and 
 monuments that deck the hill-tops of the world in 
 order to prove that there exists, in the very blood 
 of the race, an instinctive reverence for the brow 
 of the hill. We feel that summits are sacred. 
 Why? That is the question. Let us investigate. 
 
 Now, in attempting a solution of this alluring 
 mystery, I must call to my aid two gentlemen 
 of rare insight and of profound scholarship 
 Professor George Adam Smith and Mr. A. C. 
 Benson. In treating of the I2ist Psalm the learned 
 Principal says: 'To the psalmist the mountains 
 spread a threshold for a divine arrival. Up there 
 God Himself may be felt to be afoot. Whether 
 we climb them, or gaze at them, the mountains 
 produce in us that mingling of moral and physical 
 emotion in which the temper of true worship
 
 242 The Luggage of Life 
 
 consists.' So much for the Principal. Now for the 
 schoolmaster. 'It is good,' writes Mr. Benson, in 
 one of his delightful essays, 'it is good for the body 
 to climb the steep slopes and breathe the pure air; 
 it is good for the mind to see the map of the coun- 
 try fairly unrolled before the eye; and it is good 
 for the soul, too, to see the world lie extended at 
 one's feet How difficult it is to analyze the vague 
 and poignant emotions which then and thus arise !' 
 *A hill-top,' remarks another writer, 'is a moral as 
 well as a physical elevation.' 
 
 Now it is as clear as clear can be that the hunger 
 of our hearts for the hills is only a part of the 
 hunger of our hearts for the infinite. The instinct 
 of the far horizon is indelibly engraven in our very 
 nature. Go where you will, visit what city you like, 
 and you will straightway be taken to some noble and 
 commanding eminence to see the view. Surely this 
 phenomenon requires some explanation. Even the 
 most intelligent of the lower animals betray no love 
 for the landscape. They know nothing of the pas- 
 sion of the far horizon. I have often ascended 
 Mount Wellington, at Hobart, and gazed entranced 
 upon the magnificent panorama of land and sea 
 that unrolls itself, in altogether indescribable 
 grandeur, at one's feet. The prospect is almost over- 
 powering. But I have noticed repeatedly that,
 
 The Brow of the Hill 243 
 
 whilst every member of the party turns in ecstasy to 
 admire so glorious a landscape, the horses and dogs 
 man's most intelligent and sagacious companions 
 have deliberately turned their backs upon the mag- 
 nificent landscape, to forage for food on the bushy 
 slopes near by. The different behaviour of the men 
 and the animals is much more than a matter of 
 degree. It is a contrast in kind. It is a direct line 
 of cleavage. It is arresting and inviting. 
 
 In one of his most captivating and suggestive 
 passages, Mark Rutherford, in his Revolution in 
 Tanner's Lane, tells how the boys of the tiny hamlet 
 of Cowfold would, on a holiday, trudge the three 
 dusty miles down the lane from the village to the 
 main coach road, and back again, just for the rapture 
 of reading the wondrous words 'TO LONDON/ 'TO 
 YORK/ on the finger-post at the end of the lane. 
 The romance of the mysterious fingers pointing 
 mutely down the winding road along which the 
 coaches rattled on their way to the great capitals, 
 was 'an opening into infinity/ to use Mark Ruther- 
 ford's words, to the boys of Cowfold. It was the 
 next best thing to a mountain peak. It is so with 
 every boy. The instinct of the far horizon burns 
 within him. He reads Jules Verne and R. M. 
 Ballantyne, Captain Marryat and Captain Mayne 
 Reid, G. A. Henty and Gordon Stables. These are
 
 244 The Luggage of Life 
 
 his classics. He glories in boundless plains and 
 impenetrable jungles; in pathless prairies and endless 
 snows; in trackless deserts and illimitable oceans. 
 He revels in a limitless landscape. His fertile fancy 
 converts every hencoop and dog-kennel into a wig- 
 wam or a kraal, every paddock into a prairie, every 
 terrier into a tiger, and the boys of every neighbour- 
 ing school into a fierce and hostile tribe. He is 
 always on an imaginary hill-top, looking out upon 
 the four corners of the earth. He loathes the 
 intimate and loves the infinite. There is evidently 
 some subtle and mysterious ingredient in his 
 composition that is totally absent in the make-up 
 of your noblest horses and your finest dogs. The 
 passion of the wide horizon, the instinct of the 
 infinite, the spirit of the summit, tingles in his very 
 blood. 
 
 Yet, after all, it must be sorrowfully confessed 
 that the hill-tops never really satisfy. The horizon 
 is always small, the landscape limited. We look out 
 to sea, and we wonder what ships are sailing out 
 there beyond the skyline; we gaze across the 
 land, and we wonder what lies beyond the distant 
 ranges. 
 
 The peak is high, and flushed 
 
 At its highest with sunrise fire; 
 The peak is high and the stars are high, 
 
 But the thought of man is higher.
 
 The Brow of the Hill 245 
 
 Yet be quite sure that the hunger that the high- 
 est peak leaves unsatisfied is no mockery. It is 
 to appease it that the churches live. For there is 
 another hill-top. 'Then said the Shepherds one to 
 another, "Let us here show to the pilgrims the gates 
 of the Celestial City." The pilgrims then lovingly 
 accepted the motion. So they had them to the top 
 of a high hill, called Clear, and gave them their 
 glass to look. And they saw some of the glory of 
 the place. Then they went away and sang this song : 
 
 "Thus by the Shepherds secrets are revealed, 
 
 Which from all other men are kept concealed : 
 Come to the Shepherds then, if you would see 
 Things deep, things hid, and that mysterious be." ' 
 
 Let all the Shepherds of all the flocks take note. 
 The hunger for the hilltop is a very real and a very 
 beautiful thing. It is not satisfied by rearing altars 
 there. It is not appeased by planning, like Steven- 
 son and Rhodes, to lie in stately silence there. 
 There is no mountain-peak among earth's loftiest 
 ranges high enough to gratify the cravings of a 
 single soul. The view is so restricted. Men are 
 hungry for the wealthier vision that is to be seen 
 from the summit of the hill called Clear; and it is 
 for the Shepherds to take these wistful pilgrims 
 there.
 
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