CHAPTER V: SOME OF NATURE'S SACRAMENTS

THE life of words is like in some ways to the life of men; the soul changes within them, though the form remains the same. Yet while language is still living it may regain something of its old power beneath the poet's healing fingers, and now and again a master of words will recall for us some dying form of speech. A writer of power is needed, surely to win us back the older and wiser use of the word sacrament as a spiritual symbol, the revelation of the unseen through the visible, the unfolding of the unknown through the known. "The image of the world," wrote Bacon, [22] "is a message of the Divine wisdom and power"; to many a mystic it has been more even than this, and nature has been full of sacraments bringing life from things not seen.

The story is told of the old Calabrian Abbot, Joachim da Fiore, that as he was saying vespers in some little church among the mountains, the glory of the setting sun caught his eye through the open [p.86 ] door of the nave. Suddenly realizing how much more beautiful was the great temple of the sunlit sky than the painted stone walls of his little building made with hands, he led his congregation out into the open air, and with nature's ritual around them they went on praying, gazing upon the picture of that evening landscape and the wonder of the sunset above. Though he was the adopted father of many admirable heretics, and for long a suspect himself, Blessed Joachim did not offend thus more than once, as far as we know, against the laws of ritual. But many another saint must have been tempted to do as he did. It is, indeed, easy for us to understand how in the old days every high place had its altar, and how again and again in later times solitude upon a mountain has seemed to give the most congenial atmosphere for prayer. Unconsciously, and quite apart from our beliefs, we instinctively turn in physical weariness, and often in other troubles, to the calm rest of nature. However much at times we may ponder her sterner side, and search in vain to explain to ourselves the mysteries of death and pain with which she confronts us constantly, it is not these things of which she speaks to man, when he goes to her sad and weary, like a tired child to his nurse. A feeling of quietness, beneath which lies strength, the dim apprehension of law, inexplicable indeed, but majestic and even beautiful, and above all that indefinable sense of peace which comes to us sometimes when we [p.87] are in the presence of that which is immeasurably greater than ourselves, all this may nature bring to us, when we go to her alone with our troubles. The old stoics must have sometimes felt this, though to the Roman mind at least wild nature did not usually possess the attractive power it has for us. One cannot but feel that when Marcus Aurelius cries to the Universe "that which is harmonious to thee, is to me too," he is conscious of something of this feeling in which our petty cares and troubles sink into nothingness amid the waters of the great ocean of universal life; though he arrived at the sense of this rather by inward meditation than by the contemplation of nature without him. And whatever the philosophers may have felt, one has no doubt of the poets. Propertius, alone in the Umbrian highlands by the sources of the Tiber, and Catullus, listening to the ripple of the waves of Garda, were able for a moment to rise above the pain and fire of passion into a calmer air; and yet the Roman poets have no such sense of the overwhelming majesty and order of nature as came to the Hebrew Psalmists.

The Roman had still in dim recesses of his consciousness the feelings of an earlier age, for which every wild wood was peopled with mysterious powers; nature was full of unknown agencies whose workings man could but dimly perceive, and the ancient rites of his religion were the charms by which he held at bay the strange potencies of evil that surrounded him. The [p.88] Hebrew poet looked on nature even in her sterner aspects with the eyes of faith; hailstorm and thunder, and the very sea his people thought of with such dread, brought revelations to him of the Divine power controlling all; and because of this sense of unity, the mystery and wonder of the starry sky seemed to his inward ear vocal with harmonies. In some ways there has come to us in the last two centuries fuller knowledge of that reign of law which formed a part of the religious consciousness of the poets of ancient Israel. Science speaks to us of the insignificance of man beside the illimitable greatness of the universe of which he is ever striving to gain some knowledge, and trains us to revere the majesty of laws which he can only imperfectly apprehend. Yet it is well known how sadly one great leader of modern science regretted that in his old age he was no longer able to know the feeling of the beauty and majesty of the Alpine landscape which had so often helped him in the past, because, as it seemed to him, the habit of scientific analysis had taken from him that simpler sense of the earlier years, the direct consciousness of a beauty he could not explain. So true it is that the child's eyes and the childlike spirit only find the entrance into the Kingdom of Heaven, which is hid to the wise. One must not suppose, indeed, that the closing of this one door into the unseen means that others, too, are shut, or else the lot of the city-dweller would be even worse than it is. Dr. Johnson, kindliest and best [p.89] of townsmen, though he said that to see one green field was to see all green fields, was yet keenly sensitive to many of the lesser sacraments of man's social life; and those who read his prayers and meditations know that the invisible realities were to him no mere object of intellectual belief, but the atmosphere of his inmost thought. Yet it is a thing to be regretted that the habit of scientific research and the ordinary course of town life do too often so mould our faculties as to impede that vision which the contemplation of Nature still brings to the simple heart. The student's loss has its compensations, and may even involve in it an element of the noblest sacrifice; but this cannot be said of the man whose whole life is wrapped up in the making of money and in the pleasures and concerns of conventional urban society. Such men are robbing not only themselves and their families of the things which make life worth living, but a far wider circle; for they are helping to keep in being a civilization which deprives thousands of city children of ever knowing what the sacraments of nature mean. The majority of Londoners have never seen the sun rise, save over smoking chimneys; they have never been able to watch the full moon sailing across the clear blue of a cloudless night; never known a morning filled with the joyous exhilaration of sunlight only dimmed by the mist of the vanishing dew. Still less do such town-dwellers understand of the lonely silence of the night in the [p.90] open country, in which men may feel themselves back again amid the childhood of the race. True, the amber haze of day in London and the flicker of the gas lamps in the streets at night have a beauty of their own; but it is dearly bought if the price must be, at least for the greater part of our poorer men and women, and for almost all the children, so heavy a one as this. The civilization which shuts out from its gaze the vision of the stars may well grow blind to greater mysteries; if men will not listen to the music of the spheres, how should they hear the angel's song?