Part 17

To pardon those absurdities in ourselves which we cannot suffer in others, is neither better nor worse, says Dean Swift, than to be more willing to be fools ourselves than to have others so. The proverbs of all nations show all nations to be alive to the ridiculous in this respect. The kiln calls the oven, burnt house, says one. In Italy, the pan says to the pot, Keep off, or you’ll smutch me. In Spain, the raven bawls hoarsely to the crow, Get out, blackamoor! (_Quítate allá, negro!_) In Germany, one ass nicknames another, Long-ears. And Dr. Trench is rather taken with a certain originality in the Catalan version of the proverb: “Death said to the man with his throat cut, ‘How ugly you look!’” They should be fair, hints Juvenal, who venture to deride the disproportioned leg or sooty hide, _Loripedem rectus derideat, Æthiopem albus_. Yet, as the Ettrick shepherd once sang in his native Doric:—

“There’s some wi’ big scars on their face, Point out a prin scart on a frien’; And some, black as sweeps wi’ disgrace, Cry out, the whole warld’s unclean.”

Molière’s Chrysale twits her sister Bélise, who is a _femme savante_, with snapping up everybody short who makes a slip with the tongue, while herself liable to graver censure for slips of conduct:—

“Le moindre solécisme en parlant vous irrite; Mais vous en faites, vous, d’étranges en conduite.”

Sappho, again, in Mademoiselle de Scudéry’s portentous romance—once the rage of readers in France, despite its plurality of volumes, as “Clarissa” was in England, a century later—ridicules the _bizarre_ orthography of the fine-ladyism of the day, while amused at the fact that the fine ladies in question, who perpetrated such gross errors in writing, and who lost every particle of wit the moment they took up a pen, would yet make game for days together of some poor foreigner who happened to use one term for another. As if it were less a matter of mirth or marvel for a _grande dame_, claiming to be a woman of wit, too, and a power in society, to commit a thousand blunders in writing her native language, than for a raw foreigner to make a few slips in speaking it.

We every day and every hour, observes Montaigne, say things of another that we might more properly say of ourselves, could we but revert our observation to our own concerns as well as extend it to others. And the old essayist has his fling at not a few authors of the day who, in this manner, prejudiced their own cause by running headlong upon those they attacked, and darting those shafts against their enemies that might, with much greater propriety and effect, be hurled back at themselves.

A stanza in the most elaborate of Shakspeare’s poems that are not plays—for are not all his plays poems?—runs into this eloquence of remonstrant appeal:—

“Think but how vile a spectacle it were To view thy present trespass in another. Men’s faults do seldom to themselves appear; Their own transgressions partially they smother: This guilt would seem death-worthy in thy brother. O, how are they wrapped in with infamies, That from their own misdeeds askance their eyes!”

It is of their common friend Breuning that Beethoven writes to Ferdinand Ries,—“He certainly possesses many admirable qualities, but he thinks himself quite faultless, whereas the very defects that he discovers in others are those which he possesses himself to the highest degree.” One of the most natural and truthfully, as well as forcibly, drawn characters in Mrs. Inchbald’s “Simple Story,”—Sandford,—a man of understanding, of learning, and a complete casuist, yet all whose faults were committed for the want of knowing better, is described as constantly reproving faults in others, and most assuredly too good a man not to have corrected and amended his own, had they been known to him; but known to him they were not. He had been, we are told, for so long a time the spiritual superior or preceptor of all with whom he lived, and so busied with instructing others, that he had not once recollected that he needed instruction himself; and in such awe did his habitual severity keep all about him, that although he had numerous friends, not one of them told him of his failing. “Was there not then some reason for him to suppose he _had_ no faults? His enemies, indeed, hinted that he had; but enemies he never hearkened to; and thus, with all his good sense, he wanted the sense to follow the rule, ‘Believe what your enemies say of you rather than what is said by your friends.’” He had yet to learn, and to learn by heart, the wide and practical import of the prayer—

“Teach me to love and to forgive, Exact my own defects to scan, What others are to feel, and know myself a Man.”

Well may the demoniac guide of Don Cleofas, in Le Sage’s symbolical fiction, say, and well does he say, “J’admire messieurs les hommes; leurs propres défauts leur paraissent des minuties, au lieu qu’ils regardent ceux d’autrui avec un microscope.” To their own faults more than a little blind, to those of others they are not a little unkind.

Gay begins his fable of the Turkey and the Ant with the smoothly-turned truism, that

“In other men we faults can spy, And blame the mote that dims their eye; Each little speck and error find; To our own stronger errors blind.”

One of the most classical masters of modern English, whether in verse or prose, was employing the same metre—of fatal facility, as it is called—when he closed his address to a brother bard in a strain that must also close this chapter of instances:

“We, who surround a common table, And imitate the fashionable, Wear each two eye-glasses: _this_ lens Shows us our faults, _that_ other men’s. We do not care how dim may be _This_ by whose aid our own we see; But, ever anxiously alert That all may have their whole desert, We would melt down the stars and sun In our heart’s furnace, to make one Through which th’ enlightened world might spy A mote upon a brother’s eye.”

_STRANGERS AND PILGRIMS._

1 PETER ii. 11.

Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, to the strangers scattered throughout Asia Minor, addressed the urgent appeal that _as_ strangers—strangers and pilgrims—they should abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul.

Consider what you are, he seems to say, as his words are paraphrased by the greatest of all commentators on his first epistle: “If you were citizens of this world, then you might drive the same trade” with the men of this world, “and follow the same lusts; but seeing you are chosen and called out of this world, and invested into a new society, made free of another city, and are therefore here but travellers passing through to your own country, it is very reasonable that there be this difference betwixt you and the world, that while they live at home your carriage be such as fits strangers, not glutting yourselves with their pleasures, nor surfeiting upon their delicious fruits, as some unwary travellers do abroad; but as wise strangers living warily and soberly, and still minding most of all your journey homewards, suspecting dangers and snares in your way, and so walking with a holy fear, as the Hebrew word for a stranger imports.”

The topic is one upon which Archbishop Leighton ever writes feelingly. As again in his comment on the psalmist’s profession of being a stranger with God, and a sojourner as all his fathers were, the same devout expositor observes that he who looks on himself as a stranger, and is sensible of the darkness round about him in this wilderness, will often put up that request with David, “I am a stranger in the earth: hide not Thy commandments from me.” What, Leighton asks, is the joy of our life, but the thoughts of that other life, our home before us? “And certainly he that lives much in these thoughts, set him where you will here, he is not much pleased nor displeased; but if His Father call him home, that word gives him his heart’s desire.”

Once again, in the sixth of his lectures on the immortality of the soul, Leighton expatiates on the fact that this is not our rest, that we have no place of residence here below: “it is the region of fleas and gnats; and while we search for happiness among these mean and perishing things, we are not only sure to be disappointed, but also not to escape those miseries which, in great numbers, continually beset us; so that we may apply to ourselves the saying of the famous artist confined in the island of Crete, and truly say,—

“‘Nec tellus nostræ, nec patet unda fugæ, Restat iter cœli, cœlo tentabimus ire.’”

(“The earth and the sea are shut up against us, and neither of them can favour our escape; the way to heaven is alone open, and this way we will strive to go.”)

Incidentally, it adds to the interest of every such passage in Leighton’s writings to remember a noteworthy circumstance respecting his death. He had been used to say that if he were to choose a place to die in it should be an inn—for that would look so like a pilgrim’s going home, to whom this world was all as an inn. It was his opinion, also, as we read in the memoir of him by Aikman, that “the officious tenderness and care of friends was an entanglement to a dying man, and that the unconcerned attendance of those who could be procured in such a place would give less disturbance.” He had his wish. At the Bell Inn, Warwick Lane, Robert Leighton, in his seventy-fourth year, stranger and pilgrim, drew his last breath.

“An inn receives me, where, unknown, I solitary sit me down; Many I hear, and some I see— I nought to them, they nought to me.

Thus, in those regions of the dead, A pilgrim’s wandering life I lead; And still at every step declare I’ve no abiding city here.

...

The world is like an inn; for there Men call and storm and drink and swear; While undisturbed the Christian waits, And reads and writes and meditates.

Though in the dark ofttimes I stray, The Lord shall light me on my way; And to the city of the sun Conduct me, when my journey’s done.

There by these eyes shall He be seen, Who sojourned for me at an inn; On Sion’s hill I those shall hail From whom I parted in the vale.”

Of him who walks by faith and not by sight, who places eternity by the side of time, and so regards the one as a mere path or stepping-stone to the other, it is well said by Dr. Chalmers that he actually moves through life in the spirit of a traveller, feels his home to be heaven, and all his dearest hopes and interests to be laid up there; “walking therefore over the world with a more light and unencumbered step than other men, just because all its adversities to him are but the crosses of a rapid journey, and all its joys but the shifting scenery of the land through which he is travelling, and visions of passing loveliness.”

As in the pilgrim’s song of a contemporary clerical poet:

“My rest is in heaven; my rest is not here: Then why should I murmur when trials are near? Be hushed, my dark spirit! the worst that can come But shortens thy journey, and hastens thee home.

...

A scrip on my back, and a staff in my hand, I march on in haste through an enemy’s land: The road may be rough, but it cannot be long; And I’ll smooth it with hope, and I’ll cheer it with song.”

The second of Bishop Beveridge’s Resolutions comprises this utterance,—after the expression of a longing that he could be ever on the mount, taking a view of the land of Canaan, for then what dreams and shadows would all things here below appear to be,—“Well! by the grace of God, I am resolved no longer to tie myself to sense and sight, the sordid and trifling affairs of this life, but always to walk as one of the other world; to behave myself in all places, and at all times, as one already possessed of my inheritance and an inhabitant of the New Jerusalem;—by faith assuring myself I have but a few more days to live below, a little more work to do, and be admitted to a nearer vision and fruition of God, and see Him face to face.” And thus, although at present here in the flesh, the believer’s resolve is to look upon himself as more really an inhabitant of heaven than abiding (for here we have no continuing city) upon earth.

In the words of _l’exilé_ of Lamennais, “La patrie n’est point ici-bas; l’homme vainement l’y cherche; ce qu’il prend pour elle n’est qu’un gite d’une nuit.” Happy they, exclaims Pascal in his _Pensées_, whose tears are shed, not at the evanescence of all things earthly and perishable, but when they remember Sion—_dans le souvenir de leur chère patrie_—the heavenly Jerusalem, after which they sigh continually in the weariness of their exile. But as Schiller’s Thekla replies to Neubrunn’s comment on “the journey’s weary length,”—

“The pilgrim, travelling to a distant shrine Of hope and healing, does not count the leagues.”

John Foster describes the Israelite indeed, who is a pilgrim indeed, as resembling a person whose eye, while he is conversing with you about an object or a succession of objects, should glance every moment towards some great obstacle appearing on the distant horizon. “He seems to talk to his friends in somewhat of the manner of expression with which you can imagine that Elijah spoke, if he remarked to his companion any circumstance in the journey from Bethel to Jericho, and from Jericho to the Jordan; a manner betraying the sublime anticipation which was pressing on his thoughts.” To other pilgrims the vision of the land that is very far off may be, as Professor Maurice puts it, not so clear as they wish; but it is more clear than their vision of anything which lies about them; and without it all would be shadow and darkness. “There, in that state, must lie all that they dream of and hope for.” “There only they must live, or have no life.” “When they pray ‘Thy kingdom come,’ they ask that the Great Shepherd will lead them and their brethren out of a land of pits, a thirsty wilderness, a valley of the shadow of death, to a peaceable habitation and a sure dwelling-place.” There is a bleak desert, in the words of one who wrote sacred songs, though himself no sacred poet,—

... “where daylight grows weary Of wasting its smiles on a desert so dreary— What may that desert be? ’Tis life, cheerless life, where the few joys that come Are lost like that daylight, for ’tis not their home.

There is a lone pilgrim, before whose faint eyes The water he pants for but sparkles and flies— Who may that pilgrim be? ’Tis man, hapless man, through this life tempted on By fair shining hopes, that in shining are gone.”

In that essay of John Foster’s, from which a citation has already been made, the essayist protests against the care so many popular writers seem to take to guard against the inroad of ideas pertaining to another life—as much care as the inhabitants of Holland take against the irruption of the sea; and their writings, he adds, do really form a kind of moral dyke against the invasion from the other world. “They do not instruct a man to act, to enjoy, and to suffer, as a being that may by to-morrow have finally abandoned this orb; everything is done to beguile the feeling of his being ‘a stranger and a pilgrim on the earth.’” They fail to recognise the _c’est vrai_ of the Christian lyrist’s avowal, the—

“_’Tis true_, we are but strangers And sojourners below; And countless snares and dangers Surround the path we go:

Though painful and distressing, Yet there’s a rest above; And onward still we’re pressing, To reach that land of love.”

The object of such a pilgrim is progress—or, rather, progress is the means to an end; and the end is not yet, is not here, but will surely come, and come quickly, and will not tarry. There is a wicket gate towards which they are making progress, and it is the portal of a city that hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God. They who professedly sojourn here as in a strange country, who obey the call to go out into a place which they shall after receive for an inheritance; who confess, and act on the confession, that they are strangers and pilgrims on the earth; they that say and do such things declare plainly that they seek a country, a better country—that is, a heavenly.

Chaucer’s “old style” conveys a meaning the world can never be too old to learn:

“Here is no home, here is but wyldyrnesse. Forth, pilgrime! forth, best out of thy stalle! Look up on hye, and thonke God of alle; Weyve thy lust, and let thy goste thee lede,[18] And trouthe shall thee delyver, it is no drede.”

We are strangers and sojourners before God, as were all our fathers. By faith it was that Abraham sojourned in the land of promise, as in a strange country, dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise; in tabernacles, that bespeak the stranger and pilgrim upon earth; not in houses built to endure. For he confessed, and denied not, but confessed that here he had no continuing city. True, a citizen he was of no mean city. But it was not of the earth, earthy. For he looked for a city which hath foundations, more everlasting than the hills. Meanwhile, God’s statutes were his songs in the house of his pilgrimage.

The Bird of God is Wordsworth’s epithet for that “resplendent wanderer” called by Eastern islanders the Bird of Heaven, and by us of the West, Bird of Paradise; and, as usual with the serenely meditative bard of Rydal, there is moral, nay, religious teaching in the symbolism of his strain:—

“The Bird of God! whose blessed will She seems performing as she flies Over the earth and through the skies, In never-wearied search of Paradise— Region that crowns her beauty with the name She bears for us—for us how blest, How happy at all seasons, could like aim Uphold our spirits urged to kindred flight On wings that fear no glance of God’s pure sight, No tempest from His breath, their promised rest Seeking with indefatigable quest Above a world that deems itself most wise When most enslaved by gross realities!”

An appalling pestilence raged in Carthage, and so gave deadly emphasis to the exhortations of St. Cyprian, when he, a good shepherd, sought to lead the sheep of his flock to green pastures and still waters of comfort; reminding them, as he stood between the living and the dead, while as yet the plague was stayed not, that they had renounced the world, and were abiding here as strangers and pilgrims only. “Let us,” he besought them, “embrace that time which gives to each one his home, which, delivering us from this world, and loosing us from worldly snares, restores us to paradise and the kingdom.” Who, he asks, that is placed in a foreign land, would not hasten to return to his own country? Who that saileth towards his own, would not eagerly desire a prosperous wind to bring him swiftly to the embrace of those he loves? “Our country we believe to be paradise: the patriarchs we esteem our parents. Why, then, do we not speed and run, that we may behold our country and salute our parents?”

Salutary though the sentiment be, however, it admits of one-sided exaggeration. There are good people who, for instance, exalt and expatiate upon the death of godly infants, as though to quit this earth of ours at the very earliest date were the most blessed of privileges. The idea of man being sent into the world for any definite purpose never seems, it has been justly said, to enter the minds of these good people. “With them life is but an irksome omnibus-journey—the shorter the better—and to be got over by each without any regard to the comfort or requirements of his fellow-travellers.” Only in part are these strictures on “the shorter the better” applicable, if at all, to the theme and expression of Mrs. Browning’s sonnet:—

“I think we are too ready with complaint In this fair world of God’s. Had we no hope Indeed beyond the zenith and the slope Of yon grey blank of sky, we might grow faint To muse upon eternity’s constraint Round our aspirant souls. But since the scope Must widen early, is it well to droop For a few days consumed in loss and taint? O pusillanimous heart! be comforted, And, like a cheerful traveller, take the road, Singing beside the hedge. What if the bread Be bitter in thine inn, and thou unshod To meet the flints?—At least it may be said, ‘Because the way is _short_, I thank thee, God!’”

Addison devotes a paragraph in one of his _Spectators_ to the fact of men being in Scripture called strangers and sojourners upon earth, and life a pilgrimage. And he refers to several heathen as well as Christian authors, who under the same kind of metaphor have represented the world as an inn, which was only designed to furnish us with accommodation in this our passage. It is therefore very absurd, urges our moral essayist, to think of setting up our rest before we come to our journey’s end; and not rather to take care of the reception we shall there meet with, than to fix our thoughts on the little conveniences and advantages which we enjoy one above another in the way to it.

“The Illusiveness of Life” is the title of a sermon on the patriarchs as sojourners in a strange country, by the late F. W. Robertson, of Brighton; who with characteristic force and insight explains the deception of life’s promise, and the meaning of that deception. He shows how our natural anticipations deceive us—every human life being a fresh one, bright with hopes that will never be realized. With our affections, he goes on to say, it is still worse, because they promise more. “Men’s affections are but the tabernacles of Canaan—the tents of a night—not permanent habitations, even for this life.” Where, he asks, are the charms of character, the perfection and the purity and the truthfulness which seemed so resplendent in our friend? They were only the shape of our own conceptions—our creative shaping intellect projected its own fantasies on him; and hence we outgrow our early friendships—outgrow the intensity of all: we dwell in tents; we never find a home, even in the land of promise, any more than Abraham did. “Life is an unenjoyable Canaan, with nothing real or substantial in it.” But there is another beside the sentimental way, trite enough, of considering this aspect of life—as a bubble, a dream, a delusion, a phantasm, and that other is the way of faith. “The ancient saints felt as keenly as any moralist could feel the brokenness of life’s promises: they confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims here; they said that they had here no continuing city; but they did not mournfully moralize on this; they said it cheerfully, and rejoiced that it was so.” Strangers—the very term implies a distant home. Pilgrims—the law of whose pilgrimage is to make progress. Forgetting the things behind; rating at their true worth the things around; earnestly pressing forward to the things before. Keble’s devout lyric on the escape to Zoar is pitched in this key:—

“Sweet is the smile of home; the mutual look When hearts are of each other sure; Sweet all the joys that crowd the household nook, The haunt of all affections pure; Yet in the world even these abide, and we Above the world our calling boast: Once gain the mountain-top, and thou art free: Till then, who rest, presume; who turn to look, are lost.”

_THE FALSITY OF THE FAMILIAR FRIEND._

PSALM xli. 9.