Part 2

But already at those lines he will be looking back—back on a beginning he did not see. The breaking of Easter day was hidden from all but the moon, as none but the moon saw the Son of Man rise from the dead. So on this most blessed night there is no watching but the watching of the moon. The faithful have kept a sorrowful watch in Gethsemane, as a few months ago they kept a joyful watch at Bethlehem, but this night is too blessed, too solemn for human vigil. All we can do is to salute it as it drops over the earth, to greet it as we should greet a joyful daybreak—

“The night is come—O night verily blessed!”

Then we disperse and leave that night to its own mysteries.

The moon is high in the sky, her flooding whiteness of light has wiped out nearly all the stars. On the earth she calls colours into being, strange, ghostly colours. She sails across the heavens like a ship, and to-night she seems to bear with her the wonder of all past lore: she is the ship of the dead to which the Egyptians looked up, she is the goddess who wooed Endymion, she is the Mystery of Mysteries in some far-off Hindu temple. Ship, queen and goddess, mystery of mysteries, she is by virtue of that night when she rode the Paschal heavens and saw what was hidden from all human eyes.

That night was nearing its close, and already the scents of morning were in the air. The flowers and the shrubs in the garden of Joseph of Arimathea breathed into the spring moonlight perfumes like the Song of Solomon. In the clear light of the Paschal moon, that great moon of the feast, their colours were flung into the flooding whiteness, the crimson of the lilies, the flame of the flowering thorn. The garden breathed the breath of spring and the breath of morning, as the moon dipped slowly towards the rim of the earth. She was like the great white lamp of fire that Enoch saw burning in the kingdom of the Son of Man. Already with her whiteness another whiteness was mingling, the whiteness of dawn spreading over the vault of the sky. She lay upon the rim of the earth and her beams flowed straight as a river through the trees of Joseph of Arimathea’s garden. Then the Wonder happened. In the whiteness of her beams stood a Man—very still in Joseph of Arimathea’s garden. He seemed part of the peace and tranquility of the night, and yet in his stillness flowed the festival flood of Spring—budding, joy, warmth, light and life.

For a moment the moon’s rays held him, then a strange kindling flush crept into them, as they mingled with other rays—they warmed, they reddened ... and the sun came over the edge of the world and looked into the face of the moon. Between them stood the Risen Lord of both—and across the world the sun and moon gave each other the first Easter Salutation—

“The Peace of the Lord be always with you!” “And with thy spirit!”

So even to this time that night is watched by the moon, and we, like the disciples, do not see the Son of Man arise, but know him afterwards in the breaking of bread. In the liturgy of the Mass itself, we do not see the fraction of the Host into the chalice which shows his rising, though our attention is ceremonially called to the solemn moment when the Altar becomes both Bethlehem and Calvary. We know when he takes upon himself the veils of our humiliation, we know when his sacrifice stands lifted to the Father, but of the moment when the Altar is Joseph of Arimathea’s garden, when the broken body and the poured out blood attain the re-union which is their resurrection, we know nothing till we hear the Easter greeting—“The peace of the Lord be always with you.” It is the priest alone who looks over the Altar as on that first night the moon alone looked over the Altar of the world and saw the Sun of Righteousness arise.

* * * * *

“A festival of the returning Spring”—“the god dies to symbolise the apparent death of Nature in Winter, then rises again at the Spring Equinox.” “Tammuz—Gilgamesh—Orpheus—Osiris—Jesus.” Thus the student of comparative religion flings the solemnities of our redemption into the same heap as the nature cults of heathendom. We are inclined to resent this treatment, to deny its justice—but can we? Do we really need to? Why should we be ashamed that in some far back time our father Hammurabi, or our father Tutankhamen, as well as our father Abraham, rejoiced to see our day, and he saw it and was glad?

The devout pagan, whether of the valley of the Euphrates or of the Nile, was wiser than many a learned man to-day who sees in the story of the suffering and triumphant God no more than the story of the withering and flowering field. Those pious heathen of old looked out on the rice fields drowned in the winter floods, they saw the floods recede and a cleansed and refertilised earth emerge from the waters, but their eyes were not so dim as to see only an earthly tragedy and its overthrow—they saw their god suffering in the drowned field, victorious in its resurrection. They could not see the woes of earth apart from the woes of heaven, and as their allegory of food and drink purged itself through the ages into an allegory of sin and redemption, so that under countless rites countless redeemers pointed to the Redeemer of all, that great shape of human thought was made which should be the chalice waiting to receive the wine of divine revelation.

For the great truths of our faith were born in the same manner as all the other wonderful births of earth, all those miraculous virgin births which find their historical ground in the Incarnation ... “by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary”—earth prepared by the Divine Spirit to receive the New Life of heaven. As Christ redeemed human nature, so Christianity redeemed human thought. As for untold thousands of years the physical processes of the earth were preparing him a body for his love, so for thousands of years the mental processes of the human race were preparing him a body for his truth. We have grown accustomed to the idea that Christianity baptised into itself the best of Judaism, but we have yet to accept the undoubted fact that it also baptised into itself the best of paganism. We are like the pious Christianised Jew of the first century who could not understand that the Gospel was also for the Greek. We talk as in reproach of the “Muddy waters of Mithras,” not thinking that by virtue of Cana even these waters can be made wine.... When St. John saw the heavenly Jerusalem he said that “all the kings of the earth shall bring their glory into it,” and among those kings ride Mithras, Tammuz, Osiris, Orpheus, Dionysius ... riding to Joseph of Arimathea’s garden, to lay their glory at the Empty Tomb.

May _Month of Mary_

At last the Spring has moved further than beauty. She has about her some of the richness of Summer. The earth has lost the faintly wistful air that she wore in March and April, the air of expectancy, as of one waiting the fulfilment of a promise. That promise is already realised—in the rich leaves that have clothed the trees, removing that earlier suggestion of austerity in their outline—in the first springing corn—in the first hard, small apples that appear in the orchards while the fallen blossom is still on the ground—in the shagginess of the hedges and the warm heaviness of the air, where scents are no longer fugitive, but lie thick and drowsy. The air too is full of wings—the wings of birds and insects, alert with their spring business; it is full of sounds as well as of movements and of scents—hummings and dronings and buzzings and trillings, the utterance of innumerable small voices. The air teems, the earth teems, though as yet Summer has not come, and over the hedges and fields lies the virginal white of the hawthorn and daisies. Mingled with the richness of Summer is still the white beauty of Spring, the expectancy of Spring, the freshness and coolness of Spring.

* * * * *

For many years the religions of the world had dreamed of a woman born of the foam of the sea. To the Greeks, Aphrodite had walked delicately over the waves, to the Hindu, Maya was born of the churning of the ocean. The dream was one of beauty and illusion—of beauty which in the throes of man’s imagination became lust and illusion which became peril. The religions of the world dreamed too of a woman who symbolised the teeming earth, the earth which brings forth her children, rejoices in them, loses them, seeks them and finds them again. Proserpine, Ceres, Isis, all stand as images of the fruitful earth in her joys and distresses. It has been made a reproach of Christianity that she has collected and preserved these dreams in the figure of Mary, Virgin and Mother. Mary, we are told has incorporated in her story the legends of Aphrodite, Maya, Ceres and Isis. Her very name is the name of the bitter, salt-tasting sea—her sorrows for her son untimely slain are the sorrows of Ceres who sought her daughter at the throne of Pluto, and of Isis who sought her son in the floods of the Underworld. They are all, first, in a dim legend, the sea whence life mysteriously came, and then in later myth the earth-mother living through the adventure of seed-time and harvest, Spring, Summer and Winter. Mary is the inheritor of them all, both earth and sea—the toiling mother of the year, and the far-off, virgin source of life.

Christianity would not be what it professes, the religion of the world and perfect harvest of the Golden Bough, if it did not fulfil the religious dreams of mankind, the myths, legends and allegories of a world growing slowly lighter. Since our Lord is the embodiment of the world’s dreams of a triumphant sun-god, slain, buried, and mightily risen, so our Lady is the embodiment of the world’s dreams of a woman wonderful in her child-bearing and herself wonderfully born. The two strains of sea-daughter and earth-mother meet in her. Her beauty is the beauty of Aphrodite before men’s hearts corrupted it, of the virginal, white sea-foam—her fertility is the fertility of Proserpine, lady of the harvest, her sorrows are the sorrows of Ceres, that far-off Mater Dolorosa who suffered in her child.

She is the meeting-place of Spring and Summer, both Virgin and Mother. She stands before us as the Maiden, sweet, youthful and lovely—all the purity of the world is in her mouth and in her eyes. Yet her virginity is not sterile—she is not only virgin but mother. She is the palace of life—on her arm is throned the New Life come in the eternal child.

As Virgin and Mother, Mary fulfils the world’s dreams of womanhood—dreams more tarnished and groping than any, perhaps, since the world was astray in strange paths of thought as it sought to realise a perfect woman. For the world had conceived its ideal of a perfect woman as a paradox—the paradox of virginity and motherhood. Some such ideal would seem to lie, perversely, at the bottom of sensual and terrible cults, corrupted almost past recognition in their development, but none the less traceable in their origins. In other cases the two strands of the paradox are divided, and we have the age-long and universal reverence for virginity surviving and flourishing in the midst of cults based on the worship of fertility and the processes of generation.

Mary is both Virgin and Mother. Therefore she is perfect and complete. Virginity alone lacks something—Motherhood alone has lost something. In Mary alone there is neither loss nor lack, so she is able to stand at the meeting-place of two worlds. Behind her lies the old Covenant that made her—the age-long processes of nature, the agonies of the earth-mother, the gropings and dreams of the mind of man, and finally, as the stream narrows, the austere ways of Israel—the “ethical Monotheism” which was to mould her conduct and belief so as to fit her for the guidance of the Holy and True—the endless complication, the sanctified hygiene of the Mosaic law, preparing a noble body for her who was to give a body to her Maker. Is it fanciful to believe that the Mosaic law—all that long elaboration of washings and cleansings and self-denials, of regulated food and regulated marriage—had no other object than to prepare a fit physical vehicle for Incarnate God? ... “a body hast thou prepared me.”

Before her lies the new covenant of grace—the assumption of nature into supernature, the taking up of the manhood into God. The old testament has done its work, but it can do no more—there must be a change, a new process must be set working in the world—and once more there is a miraculous birth—of Mary—Mare. There she stands, at the meeting-place of the worlds, both virgin and mother—purity without sterility, experience without corruption. Herself both Spring and Summer she is the heart and essence of Eternal May.

June _Month of the Sacred Heart_

The trees are all covered now—they are thick with their summer leafage. The outline of the hedge is blurred, and the hedge trees no longer stand out spindled against the sky, but have become rich shapes of green. The meadow trees cast wide shadows, in which the cattle sleep, and the waters of the stream are dark with the reflected grey-green of the willows. But the thickest shades are in the woods. The interlacing boughs of the oaks, the denseness of the undergrowth of chestnut and hazel, have woven a tent above a hidden place of secrets and shadows. The woods have a secret heart—dense, green and living; the sunlight filters only in stray drops down into the spurge, while the moss round the trunks of the trees is still damp, though outside in the meadow the sun has long ago drunk up the dew. There is a refuge in the secret places, in the secret heart, of the woods—away from the dust that whirls in the baking lane and has parched the hedgerow, from the sun that glares down on the grass and up from the ponds, from the activity of the fields where the haymakers are at their work. The woods know neither dust nor heat nor toil, and keep their secret places cool and green.

* * * * *

“He came, a man, to a deep heart, even to a secret heart, hiding his Godhead from human view....” So St. Augustine the Bishop quotes the Vulgate in the Lesson from his works which is read at the Office of Tenebrae for Holy Saturday. “He came”—God came, even the eternal Word and Son—“a man”—in our complete human nature, in our flesh—“to a deep heart”—even to the participation of our human emotions, our joys, our sorrows, our fears, our indignations, which have their symbol in the human heart.

It is possible that many people who call themselves orthodox have little conception of our Lord’s humanity beyond the flesh. They believe indeed that he lived, suffered and died in a human body, but limit their conception of a body to flesh, bone and muscle. They ignore the fact that all psychological processes are also bodily, and imagine, somehow, that our Lord’s psychological processes appertained purely to his Godhead and were distinct in some mysterious fashion from the human nature he assumed. Thus we have our modern Docetists, who reduce the Incarnation to an appearance only, since the body is no more than an appearance, without the human mind which moves it. Our Lord assumed the entire man—the inward man of the emotions as well as the outward man of the flesh.

The Eternal, we are told in the theological definition, has attributes but no passions. It is not true to speak of the Most High God as feeling anger or grief or pleasure. Nevertheless by virtue of his condescension we can speak so of the Incarnate Son. For the Christ who humbled himself to our flesh humbled himself also to our emotions. Therefore we are told of him that “he was wroth,” that “he was moved to compassion,” that “he rejoiced in spirit,” that “he was in agony.” All these emotional conditions were a limiting of the Divine Nature, just as was the assuming of the mechanism of the human body. They were part of the lowliness to which the Son of God stooped when he made himself of no reputation.

Here we have one of the great contrasts between good and evil. God limits himself in his creation. He limits himself by the laws of the visible universe, just as the Word was limited by the human nature he assumed. God is continually bowing and humbling himself towards us. The Evil One, on the other hand, exalts himself by means of the material Universe. He has no power except it be given him. We can picture him as keeping himself in power and life through the created universe—drawing his life and strength and activity from that which draws its life and strength and activity from God.... Evil moves and grows in the emotional heart of man, entering by means of his primitive inheritance—the instincts on which his character is built, and which have become channels of evil instead of good owing to the first bad consent of his will. It flows into and corrupts the emotions into which these instincts grow, so that it can be said of the heart of man that it is “desperately wicked.”

But the New Life offers redemption to the human heart—offers us a New Heart with the rest of the New Creation, offers us, in fact, his own Heart as a substitute for ours. “I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh, and I will give you a heart of flesh”—even his own Sacred Heart, the human nature of will and emotion which he took of Mary. By that tender stooping of the Infinite to our human joys and sorrows, all our psychological processes are redeemed—poor distressed Psyche too enters the kingdom of God.

“He came a man to a deep heart, even to a human heart, hiding his Godhead from human view.”

But April and Easter have already told us that he did not merely stoop to our humanity—he stooped to raise it. He became one with us “not by the conversion of the Manhood into flesh, but by the taking of the manhood into God.” When he ascended into the heavens, into all the gold and glory of the eternal summer sun, he ascended in our human nature, in our complete nature of emotion and will as well as in out flesh. Our human nature lives in the heaven of heavens, perfect, redeemed—but human in a sense to which our impeded humanity has never yet attained. Only perfect God could become perfect man.

“On the highest throne of the heavens I beheld a man sitting....” He is there, with all our sorrows and our joys, our fears, our indignations. His sympathy for us is not one merely of divine understanding but of divine experience—not in some distant point of history, but now, eternally—since upon the throne of God dwells all the longing, desire, striving, love and anguish of mankind, the human heart which he has redeemed and made his Sacred Heart.

“O, Sacred Heart, our home lies deep in thee” ... all the pain, the fear, the grief, the rapture, the wonder of my human heart, all those emotional stresses that I only half understand and which sometimes threaten to engulf me, all these I can bring home to that Deep Heart, to that Sacred Heart, since for my sake, O passionless Word, you stooped to know the shadows of human emotion, to know joy and sorrow, wrath and compassion, and, stooping, raised them with yourself to your high throne.

July _Month of the Precious Blood_

July comes as the climax of the year, when the months have reached their solstice with the sun. The earth’s conversion is complete—she is born anew in the woods where the trees are heavy and dark with their full summer leafage, in the hedgerow where the honeysuckle hangs thick trails over the already thick briar-rose, in the fields where the hay is cut, and where the corn stands sunburnt and nearly ready for harvest.

Along the side of the Down the poppies grow in a scarlet streak—like blood. They splash the growing corn, and they flower too in the chalky aridity of the quarry outside the field. They are the brave pennons of July—gay and blood-red, the colour of life pulsing and triumphant, the colour of the field’s salvation and the earth’s victory.

* * * * *

James Weller “got salvation,” and in the year 1842 was published at Robertsbridge in Sussex, a little book called “The Wonders of Free Grace.” It is the story of Weller’s short life—packed into many halting, ungrammatical sentences, between dull brown covers, the colour of the lanes he trod. Yet if things were to appear in their hidden reality that book would be seen printed and bound in poppy scarlet, for it is written in blood—the heart’s blood of the “little man of Kent” and the Precious Blood which redeemed that heart and made it new.

“I was born in sin.” There is something Pauline in the opening phrase, which, however, means no more than that his parents were “very ignorant of the power of godliness.” They were poor simple people, the father a farm labourer earning a lean, uncertain living on the farms round Headcorn.

Little James was a puny child, terrified with dreams. A frail constitution and a hard life worked an excitable mind to the edge of religious mania, though in those days he had learned none of the jargon of damnation which Calvinism was to teach him later—he was a child of the Church, which provided for his physical as well as for his spiritual needs, since his family seem to have “come on the Parish” at a very early date.

When his father died they were left quite destitute, and the rigorous old Poor Law “put out” the wretched James to work on various farms. The spiritual history of those years reads like the blacker parts of “Grace Abounding”—he was convinced that he had committed the Sin against the Holy Ghost. Many times he felt urged to take his own life, and he seems to have been unable to pass a pond or brook or well without contemplating in it release from the existence which was fast becoming unbearable. But he lived on, alternating frightful impulses towards suicide and dreams of a devouring hell, with hopes of release, of discovery and union—sometimes coming to him through the ministrations of the various sects in which he sought relief, sometimes in the pages (opened with ritual casualness) of that Book which, however, often scattered its comfort with trumpet-blasts of judgment.

Very different from the straining carefulness of his spiritual life was the extremely haphazard way in which he managed his worldly affairs. He drifted from farm to farm with his inefficient labour—many a hearty Kentish kick and curse must have followed him as he roamed head-in-air, soul-in-hell, through the tasks of his day. He was always ill, always poor, and yet at the age of twenty-one he married in Frittenden church a girl as penniless as himself. Then a painful internal complaint began to afflict him. He grew unable for all but the lightest farm work, and soon became so ill that he had to go into the infirmary at Maidstone. Here he fell under the influence of a pious Baptist lady, who visited him on behalf of the “Benefit Society for the Sick,” and to her he owed his deliverance from his “legal struggles,” since she taught him the doctrines of Election and of Uncovenanted Grace. But there was a bad time to be lived through first. His agonies of soul increased, the _sortes biblicæ_ yielded only blasts of damnation, and then the day came when “I clearly saw the justice of God in my eternal overthrow, and actually bade adieu to the world with an Amen to my own destruction.” Immediately upon this surrender followed Illumination—“a sweet glowing, a brilliant light like the shining of silver. I sprang up and sang and wept and cried aloud for joy.”