The Message Part 24

Arthur Reynolds resumed his seat, and a great Australian singer, a _prima donna_ of world-wide repute, stepped forward very simply and sang as a solo the hymn beginning:

Church of the Living G.o.d, Pillar and ground of truth, Keep the old paths the fathers trod In thy illumined youth.

The prayer had softened all hearts by its simplicity, its humility. The exquisitely rendered hymn attuned all minds to thoughts of ancient, simple piety, and the traditions which guided and inspired our race in the past. When it was ended, and not till then, George Stairs rose from his knees, and stepped forward to where a little temporary extension jutted out beyond the rest of the platform. He stood there with both hands by his side, and a Bible held in one of them. His head inclined a little forward. It was an att.i.tude suggestive rather of submission to that great a.s.sembly, or to some Power above it, than of exhortation.

Watching him as he stood there, I realized what a fine figure of a man George was, how well and surely Canadian life had developed him. His head was ma.s.sive, his hair thick and very fair; his form lithe, tall, full of muscular elasticity.

He stood so, silent, for a full minute, till I began to catch my breath from nervousness. Then he opened the Bible, and:

"May I just read you a few verses from the Bible?" he said.

There was the same directness, the same simple, almost childlike appeal that had touched the people in Reynolds's prayer. He read some verses from the First Book of Samuel. I remember:

"'And did I choose him out of all the tribes of Israel to be my priest, to offer upon mine altar, to burn incense, to wear an ephod before me?

And did I give unto the house of thy father all the offerings made by fire of the children of Israel? Wherefore kick ye at my sacrifice and at mine offering, which I have commanded in my habitation; and honouredst thy sons above me to make yourselves fat with the chiefest of all the offerings of Israel, my people? Wherefore the Lord G.o.d of Israel saith, I said indeed that thy house and the house of thy father should walk before me for ever; but now the Lord saith, be it far from me; for them that honour me I will honour, and them that despise me shall be lightly esteemed. Behold the day is come, that I will cut off thine arm, and the arm of thy father's house, and there shall not be an old man in my house. And thou shalt see an enemy in my habitation, in all the wealth which G.o.d shall give Israel.... And I will raise me up a faithful priest, that shall do according to that which is in mine heart and in my mind....'"

There was a pause, and then the preacher read a pa.s.sage from Judges, ending with the famous war-cry: "The Sword of the Lord and of Gideon."

He looked up then, and, without reference to the Bible in his hand, repeated several verses:

"'And by thy sword thou shalt live, and shalt serve thy brother: and it shall come to pa.s.s when thou shalt have the dominion, that thou shalt break his yoke from off thy neck.'

"'He that hath no sword, let him sell his garment and buy one.'

"'For he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of G.o.d, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil.'

"'And take the helmet of salvation, and the Sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of G.o.d.'

"'Think not that I am come to send peace on earth; I came not to send peace but a sword.' Not the peace of indolence and dishonour; not the fatted peace of mercenary well-being; but a Sword; the Sword of the Lord, the Sword of Duty, which creates, establishes, and safeguards the only true peace--the peace of honourable peoples."

I remember his slow turning of leaves in his Bible, and I remember:

"'Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear G.o.d, and keep His commandments, for this is the whole duty of man--' the whole duty---- Yes, 'but isn't Duty rather an early Victorian sort of business, and a bit out of date, anyhow?' That was what a young countryman of mine--from Dorset, he came--said to me in Calgary, last year. I told him that, according to my reading of history, it had come down a little farther than early Victorian days. I remember I mentioned Rorke's Drift; and he rather liked that. But, of course, I knew what he meant."

It was in this very simple strain, without a gesture, without a trace of dramatic appeal, that George Stairs began to address that great gathering. Much has been said and written of the quality of revelation which was instinct in that first address; of its compelling force, its inspired strength, the convincing directness of it all. And I should be the last to deny to my old friend's address any of the praises lavished upon it by high and low. But what I would say of it is that, even now, sufficient emphasis and import are never attached to the most compelling quality of all in George Stairs's words: their absolutely unaffected simplicity. I think a ten-year-old child could have followed his every word with perfect understanding.

Nowadays we take a fair measure of simplicity for granted. Anything less would condemn a man as a fool or a mountebank. But be it remembered that the key-note and most striking feature of all recent progress has been the advance toward simplicity in all things. At the period of George Stairs's first exposition of the new evangel in the Albert Hall, we were not greatly given to simplicity. It was scarcely noticeable at that time even among tillers of the earth. Not to put too fine a point upon it, we were a tinselled lot of mimes, greatly given to apishness, and shunning naked truth as though it were the plague. Past masters in compromise and self-delusion, we had stripped ourselves of simplicity in every detail of life, and, from the cradle to the grave, seemed willingly to be hedged about with every kind of complexity. We so maltreated our physical palates that they responded only to flavours which would have alarmed a plain-living man; and, metaphorically, the same thing held good in every concern of our lives, until simplicity became non-existent among us, and was forgotten. There were men and women in that Sunday afternoon gathering at the Albert Hall whose very pleasures were a complicated and laborious art, whose pastimes were a strain upon the nervous system, whose leisure was quite an arduous business.

This it was which gave such striking freshness, such compelling strength, to the simple, forthright directness, the unaffected earnestness and modesty of the Message brought us by the Canadian preachers. The most b.u.mptious and self-satisfied c.o.c.kney who ever heard the ringing of Bow Bells, would have found resentment impossible after George Stairs's little account of his leaving Dorset as a boy of twelve, and picking up such education as he had, while learning how to milk cows, bed down horses, split fire-wood, and perform "ch.o.r.es" generally, on a Canadian farm. Even during his theological course, vacations had found him in the harvest field.

"You may guess my diffidence, then," he said, "in lifting up my voice before such a gathering as this, here in the storied heart of the Empire, the city I have reverenced my life long as the centre of the world's intelligence. But there is not a man or woman here to-day who would chide a lad who came home from school with tidings of something he had learned there. That is my case, precisely. I have been to one of our outside schools, from my home here in this beloved island. Home and school alike, they are all part of our family heritage--yours and mine.

I only bring you your own word from another part of our own place. That is my sole claim to stand before you to-day. Yet, when I think of it, it satisfies me; it safeguards me from the effect of misunderstanding or offence, so long as my hearers are of my kin--British."

His description of Canada and the life he had lived there occupied us for no more than ten minutes, at the outside. It has appeared in so many books that I will not attempt to quote that little masterpiece of illumination. But by no means every reproduction of this pa.s.sage adds the simple little statement which divided it from its successor.

"That has been my life. No brilliant qualities are demanded of a man in such a life. The one thing demanded is that he shall do his duty. You remember that pa.s.sage in Ecclesiastes--'The conclusion of the whole matter'?"

And then came the story of Edward Hare. That moved the people deeply.

"My first curacy was in Southern Manitoba. When I was walking from the church to the farmhouse where I lodged, after morning service, one perfect day in June, I pa.s.sed a man called Edward Hare, sitting at the edge of a little bluff, on a rising piece of ground. I had felt drawn toward this man. He was a Londoner, and, in his first two years, had had a tough fight. But he had won through, and now had just succeeded in adding a hundred and sixty acres to his little farm, which was one of the most prosperous in the district.

"'I didn't see you at church this morning, Hare,' I said, after we had chatted a minute or two.

"'No,' said he; 'I wasn't at church. I've been here by this bluff since breakfast, and--Parson!' he said, with sudden emphasis, 'I shall give up the farm. I'm going back Home.'

"Well, of course, I was surprised, and pressed him for reasons. 'Well,'

he said, 'I don't know as I can make much of a show of reasons; but I'm going. Did you notice anything special about the weather, or--or that, this morning, Parson?' I told him I had only noticed that it was a very sweet, clear, happy sort of a morning. 'That's just it, Parson,' he said; 'sweet and clear and clean it is; and I don't believe there's any sweeter, cleaner thing than this morning on my farm--no, not in heaven, Parson,' he said. 'And that's why I'm going back Home to London; to Battersea; that's where I lived before I came here.'

"I waited for him to tell me more, and presently he said: 'You know, Parson, I was never what you might call a drunkard, not even at Home, where drinking's the regular thing. But I used to get through a tidy lot of liquor, one way and another, and most generally two or three pints too many of a Sat.u.r.day night. Then, of a Sunday morning, the job was waiting for the pubs to open. n.o.body in our street ever did much else of a Sunday. I suppose you don't happen to have ever been down the Falcon Road of a Sunday morning, Parson? No? Well, you see, the street's a kind of market all Sat.u.r.day night, up till long after midnight--costers'

barrows with flare-lights, gin-shops full to the door, and all the fun of the fair--all the fun of the fair. Mothers and fathers, lads and sweethearts, babies in prams, and toddlers in blue plush and white wool; you see them all crowding the bars up till midnight, and they see--well, they see Battersea through a kind of a bright gaze. Then comes Sunday, and a dry throat, and waiting for the pubs to open. The streets are all a litter of dirty newspaper and cabbage-stumps, and worse; and the air's kind of sick and stale.'

"At that Hare stopped talking, and looked out over the prairie on that June morning. Presently he went on again: 'Well, Parson, when I came out here this morning--I haven't tasted beer for over three years--I sat down and looked around; and, somehow, I thought I'd never seen anything so fine in all my life; so sweet and clean; the air so bright, like dew; and green--well, look at it, far as your eye can carry! And all this round, away to the bluff there, and the creek this way; it's mine, every foot of it. Well, after a bit, I was looking over there to the church, and what d'ye think I saw, all through the pretty sunlight? I saw the Falcon Road, a pub I know there, and a streak of suns.h.i.+ne running over the wire blinds into the bar, all frowsy and shut in, with the liquor stains over everything. And outside, I saw the pasty-faced crowd waiting to get in, and all the Sunday litter in the road. Parson, I got the smell of it, the sick, stale smell of it, right here--in Paradise; I got the frowsy smell of it, and heard the waily children squabbling, and--I can't tell you any more of what I saw. If you'd ever seen it, you'd know.'

"And there he stopped again, until I moved. Then he said: 'Parson, if you saw a fellow starving on a bit of land over there that wouldn't feed a prairie-chick, and you knew of a free homestead across the creek, where he could raise five and twenty bushels to the acre and live like a man, would you leave him to rot on his bare patch? Not you. That's why I'm going Home--to Battersea.'

"If Hare had been a married man I might have advised him otherwise. But he was married only to the farm he had wrought so well, and it did not seem to me part of my business to come between a man and his duty--as he saw it. That man came Home, and took the cheapest lodging he could get in Battersea. He had sold his farm well. Now he took to street preaching, and what he preached was, not religion, but the prairie.

'Lord sake, young folk!' he used to say to the lads and girls when they turned toward the public-houses. 'Hold on! Wait a minute! I want to tell you something!' And he would tell them what four years' clean work had given him in Canada.

"He got into touch with various emigration agencies. The money he had lasted him, living as he did, for five years. In that time he was the means of sending nine hundred and twenty men and five hundred and forty women and girls to a free and independent life in Canada. Just before his money was exhausted, England's affliction, England's chastis.e.m.e.nt, came upon her like G.o.d's anger in a thunderbolt. Hare had meant to return to Canada to make another start, and earn money enough to return to his work here. Instead of that, my friends, instead of what he called Paradise in Manitoba, G.o.d took him straight into Heaven. He left his body beside the North London entrenchments, where, so one of his comrades told me, he fought like ten men for England, knowing well that, if captured, he would be shot out of hand as a civilian bearing arms.

One may say of Edward Hare, I think, that he saw his duty very clearly--and did it.

"But what of us? What of you, and I, my friends? How do we stand regarding Duty?"

I never heard such questions in my life. He had been speaking smoothly, evenly, calmly, and without gesticulation. With the questions, his body was bent as though for a leap; his hands flung forward. These questions left him like bullets. It was as though that great hall had been in blackest darkness, and with a sudden movement the speaker had switched on ten thousand electric lights. I saw men rise to a half-erect posture. I heard women catch their breath. The air of the place seemed all aquiver.

"My friends, will you please pray with me?"

He leaned forward, an appeal in every line of his figure, addressed confidentially to each soul present. Then his right hand rose:

"Please G.o.d, help me to give my Message! Please G.o.d, open London's heart to hear my Message! Please G.o.d, give me strength to tell it--now! For Christ's sake. Amen!"

One heard a low, emphatic, and far-carrying "Amen!" from the lips of London's Bishop; and I think that, too, meant something to the great congregation of Londoners a.s.sembled there.

Immediately then, it was, while the electric thrill of his questions and the simple prayer still held all his audience at high tension, that George Stairs plunged into the famous declaration of the new evangel of Duty and Simplicity. If any man in the world has learned for himself that prayer is efficacious, that man is the Rev. George Stairs. For it is now universally admitted that such winged words as those of his first great exposition of the doctrine of Duty and simple living, the doctrine which has placed the English-speaking peoples in the forefront of Christendom, had never before thrilled an English audience.

His own words were a perfect example of the invincible virtue of simplicity; his presence there was a glowing evidence of the force of Duty. It is quite certain that the knowledge shown in his flas.h.i.+ng summary of nineteenth-century English history was not knowledge based upon experience. But neither the poets, nor the most learned historians, nor the most erudite of naval experts, has ever given a picture so instantly convincing as the famous pa.s.sage of his oration which showed us, first, the British Fleet on the morning of Trafalgar; then, Nelson going into action; then, the great sailor's dying apotheosis of Duty; and, finally, England's reception of her dead hero's body. The delivery of this much-quoted pa.s.sage was a matter of moments only, but from where I stood I saw streaming eyes in women's faces, and that stiff, unwinking stare on men's faces which indicates tense effort to restrain emotion.

And so, with a fine directness and simplicity of progress, he carried us down through the century to its stormy close, with vivid words of tribute for the st.u.r.dy pioneers of Victorian reform who fought for and built the freest democracy in the world, and gave us the triumphant enlightenment which illumined Victoria's first Jubilee.

"'But isn't Duty a rather early Victorian sort of business, and out of date, anyhow?' said my young countryman in Calgary. To the first half of his question there can be no answer but 'Yes.' To deny it were to slander our fathers most cruelly. But what of the question's second half? Our fathers have no concern with the answering of that. Is Duty 'out of date,' my friends? If so, let us burn our churches. If so, let the bishops resign their bishoprics. If so, let us lower for ever the flag which our fathers made sacred from pole to pole. If so, let Britain admit--as well first as last--that she has retired for ever from her proud place among the nations, and is no more to be accounted a Power in Christendom; for that is no place for a people with whom Duty is out of date.

"'And did I choose him out of all the tribes of Israel to be my priest, to offer upon mine altar?... But now the Lord saith, Be it far from me, for them that honour me I will honour, and them that despise me shall be lightly esteemed. _Behold the days come that I will cut off thine arm!_'"

It was almost unbearable. No one had guessed the man had such a voice.

He had recited that pa.s.sage quietly. Then came the rolling thunder of the: "Behold the days come that I will cut off thine arm!" A woman in the centre of the hall cried aloud, upon a high note. The roar of German artillery in North London never stirred Londoners as this particular sentence of G.o.d's Word stirred them in the Albert Hall.

And then, in a voice keyed down again to calm and tender wisdom, the words of the Scriptural poet stole out over the heads of the perturbed people, stilling their minds once more into the right receptive vein: "'Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear G.o.d and keep His commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.'"