Chapter 7

When those three tremendous words next confronted Rodney Steele, they were worked, not in silk, but in stone! In a lower flat, in the same building in Harley Street, there dwelt a Bishop's widow. Rodney got to know her, to like her, and, at last, to confide in her. One afternoon they were discussing the novel that all London was reading, _The Great Divide_. It was from his own pen, but he did not tell her so. Mrs. Bellamy--the widow--confessed that, in spite of its brilliance, she did not like it. It betrayed bitterness, a loss of ideals, a disbelief in love; it was not uplifting.

'It is life,' Rodney replied. 'Life tends to make a man lose faith in love.'

But Mrs. Bellamy would not hear of it.

'May I tell you,' she asked, 'the Bishop's way of meeting all difficulties, sorrows and perplexities?'

'Do tell me,' said Rodney.

'He met them with three little words, each of one syllable. Yet that sentence holds the truth of greatest import to our poor world; and its right understanding readjusts our entire outlook upon life, and should affect all our dealings with our fellow men: GOD IS LOVE. In our first home--a country parish in Surrey--three precious children were born to us--Griselda, Irene and little Launcelot. Scarlet fever and diphtheria broke out in the village, a terrible epidemic, causing grief and anxiety in many homes. We were almost worn out with helping our poor people--nursing, consoling, encouraging. Then, just as the epidemic appeared to be abating, it reached our own home. Our darlings were stricken suddenly. Mr. Steele, we lost all three in a fortnight! My little Lancy was the last to go. When he died in my arms I felt I could bear no more.

'My husband led me out into the garden. It was a soft, sweet, summer night. He took me in his arms and stood long in silence, looking up to the quiet stars, while I sobbed upon his breast. At last he said, "My wife, there is one rope to which we must cling steadfastly, in order to keep our heads above water amid these overwhelming waves of sorrow. It has three golden strands. It will not fail us. GOD--IS--LOVE."

'The nursery was empty. There was no more patter of little feet; no children's merry voices shouted about the house. The three little graves in the churchyard bore the names Griselda, Irene and Launcelot; and on each we put the text, spelt out by the initials of our darlings' names: GOD IS LOVE. And in our own heart-life we experienced the great calm and peace of a faith which had come through the deepest depths of sorrow. We were sustained by the certainty of the love of God.'

Rodney Steele was deeply touched and impressed. Here was one who had known sorrow and had been sweetened by it. In her there was no trace of bitterness.

'I don't know,' he said to himself, as he came away, 'I don't know as to the truth of the Bishop's text; but, anyway, the Bishop's widow is love. She lives what she believes, and that certainly makes a belief worth having.'

'_God is love!_'--he had seen it worked in silk.

'_God is love_'--he had seen it inscribed three times in stone.

'_God is love!_'--he had seen it translated into actual life.

'_God is love!_'--he was almost persuaded to believe it.

IV

_God is----!_

It is the oldest question in the universe, and the greatest. It has been asked a million million times, and it would not have been altogether strange had we never discovered an answer. In Mr. H. G. Wells' story of the men who invaded the moon, he describes a conversation between the travelers and the Grand Lunar. The Grand Lunar asks them many questions about the earth which they are unable to answer. 'What?' he exclaims, 'knowing so little of _the earth_, do you attempt to explore _the moon_?' We men know little enough of _ourselves_: it would have been no cause for astonishment had we been unable to define _God_. Men lost themselves for ages in guess-work. They looked round about them; they saw how grandly a million worlds revolve, and they noticed how exquisitely the mighty forces of the earth are governed. Then they made their guess.

'_God is Power_,' they said, '_God is Power!_'

Then, peering a little more deeply into the heart of things, they saw that all these terrific forces are not only controlled, but harnessed to high ends. All things are working--they are working together--they are working together for good! And thereupon men made their second guess.

'_God is Wisdom_,' they said, '_God is Wisdom!_'

Then, observing things still more closely, men began to see great ethical principles underlying the laws of the universe. In the long run, evil suffers, and, in the long run, right is rewarded.

'_God is Justice_,' they said, '_God is Justice!_'

And so men made their guesses, and, as they guessed, they built. They erected temples, now to the God of Power, then to the God of Wisdom, and again to the God of Justice. They had yet to learn that they were worshiping the part and not the whole; they were worshiping the rays and not the Light Itself.

Then Jesus came, and men understood. By His words and His deeds, by His life and His death, He revealed the whole truth. God is Power and Wisdom and Justice--but He is more. In a European churchyard there stands a monument erected by a poet to his wife. It bears the inscription:

She was----, But words are wanting to say what! Think what a wife should be And she was that!

_God is----!_ _God is--what?_

He is----, But words are wanting to say what! Think what a God should be And He is that!

Jesus filled in the age-long blank; He filled it in, not in cold language, but in warm life. Many attempts have been made to translate His definition from the terms of life into the terms of language. Only once have those attempts been even approximately successful. The words on the perforated bookmarker represent the best answer that human speech has ever given to the question.

_God is----_

_God is--what?_

_GOD--IS--LOVE!_

V

Rodney Steele met again the girl--ripened now into the full glory of womanhood--from whom he had been so cruelly separated. He felt that it was too late to right the earlier wrong; and, in any case, his life was too embittered to offer her now. But he rejoiced in her friendship, and, one day, opened his heart to her.

'Madge,' he said, 'I am furious with Fate. Life is chaos. Shall I tell you of what it reminds me? When I was last in Florence I was invited to the dress rehearsal of "Figli Di Re." I took my seat in the stalls of the huge empty opera house. The members of the orchestra were all in their places. Pandemonium reigned! Each man was playing little snatches of the score before him, all in the same key, but with no attempt at time, tune or order. The piping of the flute, the sighing of the fiddle, the grunt of the double bass, the clear call of the cornet, the bray of the trombones, all went on together. The confused hubbub of sound was indescribable. Suddenly a slim, alert figure leaped upon the estrade and struck the desk sharply with a baton. It was the maestro! There was instant silence. He looked to the right; looked to the left; raised his baton; and lo! full, rich, sweet, melodious, blending in perfect harmony, sounded the opening chords of the overture!'

Rodney likened the jangling discords to the confusion of his own life. There was in his soul a disappointed love, an implacable hate, and a medley of other discords.

'You are waiting for the Maestro, Roddie!' said Madge. 'His baton will reduce chaos to order with _a measure of three beats_.'

'Three beats?'

'Yes; three almighty beats: GOD--IS--LOVE!'

He shook his head.

'I left off pricking texts when I was five, and gave up painting when I was nine.'

'It is not what you do to the texts, Rodney; it is what the texts do to you!'

He left her, and, soon after, left London.

VI

Yes, he left her, and he left London; but he could not leave the text. It confronted him once more. He had taken refuge in a little fishing village on the East Coast. Up on the cliffs, among the corn-fields, flecked with their crimson poppies, he came upon a quaint old church. He stepped inside. In the porch was a painting of an old ruin--ivy-covered, useless and desolate--standing out, jagged and roofless, against a purple sky. The picture bore a striking inscription:

The ruins of my soul repair And make my heart a house of prayer.

'_The ruins of my soul!_' Rodney thought of the discord within.

'_Make my heart a house of prayer!_' Rodney thought of the maestro.

He passed out into the little graveyard on the very edge of the cliff. He was amused at the quaint epitaphs. Then one tombstone, lying flat upon the ground, a tombstone which, in large capitals, called upon the reader to 'Prepare to meet thy God,' startled him. Again he thought of the clashing discords of his soul.

'Then, suddenly,' says Mrs. Barclay, 'the inspired Word did that which It--and It alone--can do. It gripped Rodney and brought him face to face with realities--past, present and future--in his own inner life. At once, the Bishop's motto came into his mind; the three words his gentle mother used to draw that her little boy might paint them stood out clearly as the answer to all vague and restless questionings: GOD IS LOVE!'

'_God is Love!_'

'_Prepare to Meet thy God!_'

How could he, with his old hate in his heart, stand in the presence of a God of Love?

Standing there bareheaded, with one foot on the prone tombstone, Rodney grappled with the passion that he had cherished through the years, and thus took his first step along the path of preparation.

'I forgive the woman who came between us,' he said aloud. 'My God, I forgive her--as I hope to be forgiven!'

'As soon as a man comes to understand that _GOD IS LOVE_,' said Dr. Chalmers, 'he is infallibly converted.' That being so, Rodney Steele was infallibly converted that day, and that day he entered into peace.

VII

When Robert Louis Stevenson settled at Samoa, the islands were ablaze with tumult and strife. And, during those years of bitterness, Stevenson did his utmost to bring the painful struggle to an end. He visited the chiefs in prison, lavished his kindnesses upon the islanders, and made himself the friend of all. In the course of time the natives became devotedly attached to the frail and delicate foreigner who looked as though the first gust of wind would blow him away. His health required that he should live away on the hill-top, and they pitied him as he painfully toiled up the stony slope. To show their affection for him, they built a road right up to his house, in order to make the steep ascent more easy. And they called that road Ala Loto Alofa--_The Road to the Loving Heart_. They felt, as they toiled at their labor of gratitude, that they were not only conferring a boon on the white man, but that they were making a beaten path from their own doors to the heart that loved them all.

_God is Love_; and it is the glory of the everlasting Gospel that it points the road by which the Father's wayward sons--in whichever of the far countries they may have wandered--may find a way back to the Father's house, and home to the Loving Heart.

XI

THOMAS HUXLEY'S TEXT

I

She was a sermon-taster and was extremely sensitive to any kind of heresy. It is in his _Life of Donald John Martin_, a Presbyterian minister, that the Rev. Norman C. Macfarlane places her notable achievement on permanent record. He describes her as 'a stern lady who was provokingly evangelical.' There came to the pulpit one Sabbath a minister whose soundness she doubted. He gave out as his text the words: '_What doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?_' '_Weel, weel_,' this excellent woman exclaimed, as she turned to her friend beside her, '_weel, weel, if there's one text in a' the Buik waur than anither, yon man is sure to tak' it!_'

II

She thought that text the _worst_ in the Bible. Huxley thought it the _best_. Huxley was, as everybody knows, the Prince of Agnostics. We need not stop to ask why. Nobody who has read the story of John Stuart Mill's boyhood will wonder that Mill was a skeptic. And nobody who has read the story of Thomas Huxley's boyhood will wonder at his becoming an agnostic. As Edward Clodd, his biographer, says, 'his boyhood was a cheerless time. Reversing Matthew Arnold's sunnier memories:

No rigorous teachers seized his youth, And purged its faith and tried its fire, Shewed him the high, white star of truth, There bade him gaze, and there aspire.

'He told Charles Kingsley that he was "kicked into the world, a boy without guide or training, or with worse than none"; he "had two years of a pandemonium of a school, and, after that, neither help nor sympathy in any intellectual direction till he reached manhood."' And, even then, as those familiar with his biography know, he had little enough.

What would Huxley have been, I wonder, if the sympathy for which he hungered had been extended to him? If, instead of badgering him with arguments and entangling him in controversy, Mr. Gladstone and Bishop Wilberforce and others had honestly attempted to see things through his spectacles! Huxley was said to be as cold as ice and as inflexible as steel; but I doubt it. In his life-story I find two incidents--one belonging to his early manhood and one belonging to his age--which tell a very different tale.

The _first_ is connected with the birth of his boy. It is the last night of the Old Year, and he is waiting to hear that he is a father. He spends the anxious hour in framing a resolution. In his diary he pledges himself 'to smite all humbugs, however big; to give a nobler tone to science; to set an example of abstinence from petty personal controversies and of toleration for everything but lying; to be indifferent as to whether the work is recognized as mine or not, so long as it is done. It is half-past ten at night. Waiting for my child. I seem to fancy it the pledge that all these things shall be.' And the next entry runs:

'_New Year's Day, 1859._ Born five minutes before twelve. Thank God!'

Mark that '_Thank God!_' and then note what follows. A year or two later, when the child is snatched from him, he makes this entry and then closes the journal for ever. He has no heart to keep a diary afterwards.

'Our Noel, our firstborn, after being for nearly four years our delight and our joy, was carried off by scarlet fever in forty-eight hours. This day week he and I had a great romp together. On Friday his restless head, with its bright blue eyes and tangled golden hair, tossed all day upon the pillow. On Saturday night I carried his cold, still body here into my study. Here, too, on Sunday night, came his mother and I to that holy leavetaking. My boy is gone; but in a higher and better sense than was in my mind when, four years ago, I wrote what stands above, I feel that my fancy has been fulfilled. I say heartily and without bitterness--Amen, so let it be!'

'_Thank God!_' exclaims our great Agnostic when the child is born.

'_Amen!_' he says, submissively, when the little one is buried.

This is the _first_ of the two incidents. The _second_--which is no less pathetic--is recorded by Dr. Douglas Adam. 'A friend of mine,' the doctor says, 'was acting on a Royal Commission of which Professor Huxley was a member, and one Sunday they were staying together in a little country town. "I suppose you are going to church," said Huxley. "Yes," replied my friend. "What if, instead, you stayed at home and talked to me of religion?" "No," was the reply, "for I am not clever enough to refute your arguments." "But what if you simply told me 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!_"'

This, if you please, is the man who was supposed to be as cold as ice and as inflexible as steel! This is the man for whom the Christians of his time had nothing better than harsh judgments, freezing sarcasms and windy arguments! How little we know of each other! How slow we are to understand!

III

But the text! It was in the course of his famous--and furious--controversy with Mr. Gladstone that Huxley paid his homage to the text. He was pleading for a better understanding between Religion and Science.

'The antagonism between the two,' he said, 'appears to me to be purely fictitious. It is fabricated, on the one hand, by short-sighted religious people, and, on the other hand, by short-sighted scientific people.' And he declared that, whatever differences may arise between the _exponents_ of Nature and the _exponents_ of the Bible, there can never be any real antagonism between Science and Religion themselves. 'In the eighth century before Christ,' he goes on to say, 'in the eighth century before Christ, in the heart of a world of idolatrous polytheists, the Hebrew prophets put forth a conception of religion which appears to me to be as wonderful an inspiration of genius as the art of Pheidias or the science of Aristotle. "_What doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God?_" If any so-called religion takes away from this great saying of Micah, I think it wantonly mutilates, while if it adds thereto, I think it obscures, the perfect ideal of religion.'

And it was on the ground of their common admiration for this text--the _worst_ text in the world, the _best_ text in the world--that Mr. Gladstone and Professor Huxley reached some kind of agreement. Not to be outdone by his antagonist, Mr. Gladstone raised his hat to the text.

'I will not dispute,' he says, 'that in these words is contained the true ideal of discipline and attainment. Still, I cannot help being struck with an impression that Mr. Huxley appears to cite these terms of Micah as if they reduced the work of religion from a difficult to an easy program. But look at them again. Examine them well. They are, in truth, in Cowper's words:

Higher than the heights above, Deeper than the depths beneath.

_Do justly_, that is to say, extinguish self; _love mercy_, cut utterly away all the pride and wrath and all the cupidity that make this fair world a wilderness; _walk humbly with thy God_, take his will and set it in the place where thine own was wont to rule. Pluck down the tyrant from his place; set up the true Master on His lawful throne.' In the text--the _worst_ text in the Bible; the _best_ text in the Bible--Mr. Gladstone and Professor Huxley find a trysting-place. We may therefore leave the argument at that point.

IV

The words with which Huxley fell in love were addressed by the prophet to a desperate man--and that man a king--who was prepared to pay any price and make any sacrifice if only, by so doing, he might win for himself the favor of the Most High. '_Wherewith shall I come before the Lord and bow myself before the high God?' he cries. 'Shall I come before Him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams or with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?_'

'_My firstborn!_'--we have just witnessed a father's anguish on the death of his firstborn. But Balak, King of Moab, is prepared to lead his firstborn to the sacrificial altar if, by so doing, he can secure the favor of the Highest.

And the answer of the prophet is that the love of God is not for sale. And, if it _were_ for sale, it could not be purchased by an act of immolation in which heaven could find no pleasure at all. F. D. Maurice points out, in one of his letters to R. H. Hutton, that the world has cherished two ideas of sacrifice. When a man discovers that his life is out of harmony with the divine Will, he may make a sacrifice by which he brings his conduct into line with the heavenly ideal. That is the one view. The other is Balak's. Balak hopes, by offering his child upon the altar, to bring the divine pleasure into line with his unaltered life. 'All light is in the one idea of sacrifice,' says Maurice, 'and all darkness in the other. The idea of sacrifice, not as an act of obedience to the divine will, but as a means of changing that will, is the germ of every dark superstition.'

Heaven is not to be bought, the prophet told the king. '_He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of thee but to do justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God?_'

_Equity! Charity! Piety!_

_Do something! Love something! Be something!_

_Do justly! Love mercy! Walk humbly with thy God!_

These, and these alone, are the offerings in which heaven finds delight.

V

I cannot help feeling sorry for the lady in the Scottish church. She thinks that Balaam's brave reply to Balak is the worst text in the Bible. And she is not alone. For, in his _Literature and Dogma_, Matthew Arnold shows that she is the representative of a numerous and powerful class. 'In our railway stations are hung up,' Matthew Arnold says, 'sheets of Bible texts to catch the eye of the passer-by. And very profitable admonitions to him they generally are. One, particularly, we have all seen. It asks the prophet Micah's question: _Wherewith shall I come before the Lord and bow myself before the high God?_ And it answers that question with one short quotation from the New Testament: _With the precious blood of Christ._' Matthew Arnold maintains that this is not honest. By casting aside the prophet's answer, and substituting another, the people who arranged the placard ally themselves with the lady in the Scottish church. They evidently think Balaam's reply to Balak _the worst text in the Bible_. But is it? Is it good, is it fair, is it honest to strike out the real answer and to insert in its place an adopted one? I wish to ask the lady in the Scottish church--and the people who prepared the placard--two pertinent questions.

My _first_ question is this. Is the deleted text--the worst text in the Bible--true? That is extremely important. _Does_ God require that man should do justly, love mercy and walk humbly with Himself? Is it not a fact that heaven _does_ insist on equity and charity and piety? Can there, indeed, be any true religion without these things? Do they not represent the irreducible minimum? If this be so, is it not as well for that Scottish minister to preach on that terrible text, after all? And, if this be so, would not the original answer to the question be the best answer for the placard?