The Seaboard Parish Part 30

"I confess," I answered, "that there has been much indifference on that point. I could, however, mention to you many and grand exceptions. Still there is, even in some of the best in the church, a great amount of disbelief in the efficacy of preaching. And I allow that a great deal of what is called preaching, partakes of its nature only in the remotest degree. But, while I hold a strong opinion of its value--that is, where it is genuine--I venture just to suggest that the nature of the preaching to which the body you belong to has resorted, has had something to do, by way of a reaction, in driving the church to the other extreme."

"How do you mean that, sir?"

"You try to work upon people's feelings without reference to their judgment. Anyone who can preach what you call rousing sermons is considered a grand preacher amongst you, and there is a great danger of his being led thereby to talk more nonsense than sense. And then when the excitement goes off, there is no seed left in the soil to grow in peace, and they are always craving after more excitement."

"Well, there is the preacher to rouse them up again."

"And the consequence is that they continue like children--the good ones, I mean--and have hardly a chance of making a calm, deliberate choice of that which is good; while those who have been only excited and nothing more, are hardened and seared by the recurrence of such feeling as is neither aroused by truth nor followed by action."

"You daren't talk like that if you knew the kind of people in this country that the Methodists, as you call them, have got a hold of. They tell me it was like h.e.l.l itself down in those mines before Wesley come among them."

"I should be a fool or a bigot to doubt that the Wesleyans have done incalculable good in the country. And that not alone to the people who never went to church. The whole Church of England is under obligations to Methodism such as no words can overstate."

"I wonder you can say such things against them, then."

"Now there you show the evil of thinking too much about the party you belong to. It makes a man touchy; and then he fancies when another is merely, it may be, a.n.a.lysing a difference, or insisting strongly on some great truth, that he is talking against his party."

"But you said, sir, that our clergy don't care about moving our judgments, only our feelings. Now I know preachers amongst us of whom that would be anything but true."

"Of course there must be. But there is what I say--your party-feeling makes you touchy. A man can't always be saying in the press of utterance, '_Of course there are exceptions_.' That is understood. I confess I do not know much about your clergy, for I have not had the opportunity. But I do know this, that some of the best and most liberal people I have ever known have belonged to your community."

"They do gather a deal of money for good purposes."

"Yes. But that was not what I meant by _liberal_. It is far easier to give money than to be generous in judgment. I meant by _liberal_, able to see the good and true in people that differ from you--glad to be roused to the reception of truth in G.o.d's name from whatever quarter it may come, and not readily finding offence where a remark may have chanced to be too sweeping or unguarded. But I see that I ought to be more careful, for I have made you, who certainly are not one of the quarrelsome people I have been speaking of, misunderstand me."

"I beg your pardon, sir. I was hasty. But I do think I am more ready to lose my temper since--"

Here he stopped. A fit of coughing came on, and, to my concern, was followed by what I saw plainly could be the result only of a rupture in the lungs. I insisted on his dropping his work and coming home with me, where I made him rest the remainder of the day and all Sunday, sending word to his mother that I could not let him go home. When we left on the Monday morning, we took him with us in the carriage hired for the journey, and set him down at his mother's, apparently no worse than usual.

CHAPTER VII.

AT THE FARM.

Leaving the younger members of the family at home with the servants, we set out for a farmhouse, some twenty miles off, which Turner had discovered for us. Connie had stood the journey down so well, and was now so much stronger, that we had no anxiety about her so far as regarded the travelling. Through deep lanes with many cottages, and here and there a very ugly little chapel, over steep hills, up which Turner and Wynnie and I walked, and along sterile moors we drove, stopping at roadside inns, and often besides to raise Connie and let her look about upon the extended prospect, so that it was drawing towards evening before we arrived at our destination. On the way Turner had warned us that we were not to expect a beautiful country, although the place was within reach of much that was remarkable. Therefore we were not surprised when we drew up at the door of a bare-looking, shelterless house, with scarcely a tree in sight, and a stretch of undulating fields on every side.

"A dreary place in winter, Turner," I said, after we had seen Connie comfortably deposited in the nice white-curtained parlour, smelling of dried roses even in the height of the fresh ones, and had strolled out while our tea--dinner was being got ready for us.

"Not a doubt of it; but just the place I wanted for Miss Connie," he replied. "We are high above the sea, and the air is very bracing, and not, at this season, too cold. A month later I should not on any account have brought her here."

"I think even now there is a certain freshness in the wind that calls up a kind of will in the nerves to meet it."

"That is precisely what I wanted for you all. You observe there is no rasp in its touch, however. There are regions in this island of ours where even in the hottest day in summer you would frequently discover a certain unfriendly edge in the air, that would set you wondering whether the seasons had not changed since you were a boy, and used to lie on the gra.s.s half the idle day."

"I often do wonder whether it may not be so, but I always come to the conclusion that even this is but an example of the involuntary tendency of the mind of man towards the ideal. He forgets all that comes between and divides the hints of perfection scattered here and there along the scope of his experience. I especially remember one summer day in my childhood, which has coloured all my ideas of summer and bliss and fulfilment of content. It is made up of only mossy gra.s.s, and the scent of the earth and wild flowers, and hot sun, and perfect sky--deep and blue, and traversed by blinding white clouds. I could not have been more than five or six, I think, from the kind of dress I wore, the very pearl b.u.t.tons of which, encircled on their face with a ring of half-spherical hollows, have their undeniable relation in my memory to the heavens and the earth, to the march of the glorious clouds, and the tender scent of the rooted flowers; and, indeed, when I think of it, must, by the delight they gave me, have opened my mind the more to the enjoyment of the eternal paradise around me. What a thing it is to please a child!"

"I know what you mean perfectly," answered Turner. "It is as I get older that I understand what Wordsworth says about childhood. It is indeed a mercy that we were not born grown men, with what we consider our wits about us. They are blinding things those wits we gather. I fancy that the single thread by which G.o.d sometimes keeps hold of a man is such an impression of his childhood as that of which you have been speaking."

"I do not doubt it; for conscience is so near in all those memories to which you refer. The whole surrounding of them is so at variance with sin! A sense of purity, not in himself, for the child is not feeling that he is pure, is all about him; and when afterwards the condition returns upon him,--returns when he is conscious of so much that is evil and so much that is unsatisfied in him,--it brings with it a longing after the high clear air of moral well-being."

"Do you think, then, that it is only by a.s.sociation that nature thus impresses us? that she has no power of meaning these things?"

"Not at all. No doubt there is something in the recollection of the a.s.sociations of childhood to strengthen the power of nature upon us; but the power is in nature herself, else it would be but a poor weak thing to what it is. There _is_ purity and state in that sky. There _is_ a peace now in this wide still earth--not so very beautiful, you own--and in that overhanging blue, which my heart cries out that it needs and cannot be well till it gains--gains in the truth, gains in G.o.d, who is the power of truth, the living and causing truth. There is indeed a rest that remaineth, a rest pictured out even here this night, to rouse my dull heart to desire it and follow after it, a rest that consists in thinking the thoughts of Him who is the Peace because the Unity, in being filled with that spirit which now pictures itself forth in this repose of the heavens and the earth."

"True," said Turner, after a pause. "I must think more about such things. The science the present day is going wild about will not give us that rest."

"No; but that rest will do much to give you that science. A man with this repose in his heart will do more by far, other capabilities being equal, to find out the laws that govern things. For all law is living rest."

"What you have been saying," resumed Turner, after another pause, "reminds me much of one of Wordsworth's poems. I do not mean the famous ode."

"You mean the 'Ninth Evening Voluntary,' I know--one of his finest and truest and deepest poems. It begins, 'Had this effulgence disappeared.'"

"Yes, that is the one I mean. I shall read it again when I go home.

But you don't agree with Wordsworth, do you, about our having had an existence previous to this?"

He gave a little laugh as he asked the question.

"Not in the least. But an opinion held by such men as Plato, Origen, and Wordsworth, is not to be laughed at, Mr. Turner. It cannot be in its nature absurd. I might have mentioned Sh.e.l.ley as holding it, too, had his opinion been worth anything."

"Then you don't think much of Sh.e.l.ley?"

"I think his _feeling_ most valuable; his _opinion_ nearly worthless."

"Well, perhaps I had no business to laugh, at it; but--"

"Do not suppose for a moment that I even lean to it. I dislike it. It would make me unhappy to think there was the least of sound argument for it. But I respect the men who have held it, and know there must be _something_ good in it, else they could not have held it."

"Are you able then to sympathise with that ode of Wordsworth's? Does it not depend for all its worth on the admission of this theory?"

"Not in the least. Is it necessary to admit that we must have had a conscious life before this life to find meaning in the words,--

'But trailing clouds of glory do we come From G.o.d who is our home'?

Is not all the good in us his image? Imperfect and sinful as we are, is not all the foundation of our being his image? Is not the sin all ours, and the life in us all G.o.d's? We cannot be the creatures of G.o.d without partaking of his nature. Every motion of our conscience, every admiration of what is pure and n.o.ble, is a sign and a result of this.

Is not every self-accusation a proof of the presence of his spirit? That comes not of ourselves--that is not without him. These are the clouds of glory we come trailing from him. All feelings of beauty and peace and loveliness and right and goodness, we trail with us from our home. G.o.d is the only home of the human soul. To interpret in this manner what Wordsworth says, will enable us to enter into perfect sympathy with all that grandest of his poems. I do not say this is what he meant; but I think it includes what he meant by being greater and wider than what he meant. Nor am I guilty of presumption in saying so, for surely the idea that we are born of G.o.d is a greater idea than that we have lived with him a life before this life. But Wordsworth is not the first among our religious poets to give us at least what is valuable in the notion. I came upon a volume amongst my friend Shepherd's books, with which I had made no acquaintance before--Henry Vaughan's poems. I brought it with me, for it has finer lines, I almost think, than any in George Herbert, though not so fine poems by any means as his best. When we go into the house I will read one of them to you."

"Thank you," said Turner. "I wish I could have such talk once a week.

The shades of the prison-house, you know, Mr. Walton, are always trying to close about us, and shut out the vision of the glories we have come from, as Wordsworth says."

"A man," I answered, "who ministers to the miserable necessities of his fellows has even more need than another to believe in the light and the gladness--else a poor Job's comforter will he be. _I_ don't want to be treated like a musical snuff-box."