Part 6

How many spots in life are there which will bear comparison with the beginning of a college boy’s second term at Oxford? So far as external circumstances are concerned, it seems hard to know what a man could find to ask for at that period of his life, if a fairy godmother were to alight in his rooms and offer him the usual three wishes. In our second term we are no longer freshmen, and begin to feel ourselves at home, while both “smalls” and “greats” are sufficiently distant to be altogether ignored =if= we are that way inclined, or to be looked forward to with confidence that the game is in our own hands if we are reading men. Our financial position—unless we have exercised rare ingenuity in involving ourselves—is all that heart can desire; we have ample allowances paid in quarterly to the university bankers without thought or trouble of ours, and our credit is at its zenith. It is a part of our recognized duty to repay the hospitality we have received as freshmen; and all men will be sure to come to our first parties, to see how we do the thing; it will be our own fault if we do not keep them in future. We have not had time to injure our characters to any material extent with the authorities of our own college, or of the university. Our spirits are never likely to be higher, or our digestions better. These, and many other comforts and advantages, environ the fortunate youth returning to Oxford after his first vacation; thrice fortunate, however, if it is Easter term to which he is returning; for that Easter term, with the four days’ vacation, and little Trinity term at the head of it, is surely the cream of the Oxford year. Then, even in this our stern Northern climate, the sun is beginning to have power, the days have lengthened out, great-coats are unnecessary at morning chapel, and the miseries of numbed hands and shivering skins no longer accompany every pull on the river and canter on Bullingdon. In Christ-church meadows and the college gardens the birds are making sweet music in the tall elms. You may almost hear the thick grass growing, and the buds on tree and shrub are changing from brown, red, or purple, to emerald green under your eyes; the glorious old city is putting on her best looks and bursting out into laughter and song. In a few weeks the races begin, and Cowley marsh will be alive with white tents and joyous cricketers. A quick ear, on the towing-path by the Gut, may feast at one time on those three sweet sounds, the thud, thud of the eight-oar, the crack of the rifles at the Weirs, and the click of the bat on the Magdalen ground. And then Commemoration rises in the background, with its clouds of fair visitors, and visions of excursions to Woodstock and Nuneham in the summer days—of windows open on to the old quadrangles in the long still evenings, through which silver laughter and strains of sweet music, not made by man, steal out and puzzle the old celibate jackdaws, peering down from the battlements with heads on one side. To crown all, long vacation, beginning with the run to Henley regatta, or up to town to see the match with Cambridge at Lord’s, and taste some of the sweets of the season before starting on some pleasure tour or reading-party, or dropping back into the quiet pleasures of English country life! Surely the lot of young Englishmen who frequent our universities is cast in pleasant places. The country has a right to expect something from those for whom she finds such a life as this in the years when enjoyment is keenest.

L.

In all the wide range of accepted British maxims there is none, take it for all in all, more thoroughly abominable than the one as to the sowing of wild oats. Look at it on what side you will, and you can make nothing but a devil’s maxim of it. What a man—be he young, old, or middle-aged—sows, _that_, and nothing else shall he reap. The one only thing to do with wild oats is to put them carefully into the hottest part of the fire, and get them burnt to dust, every seed of them. If you sow them, no matter in what ground, up they will come, with long, tough roots like couch-grass, and luxuriant stalks and leaves as sure as there is a sun in heaven—a crop which it makes one’s heart cold to think of. The devil, too, whose special crop they are, will see that they thrive, and you, and nobody else will have to reap them; and no common reaping will get them out of the soil, which must be dug down deep again and again. Well for you if, with all your care, you can make the ground sweet again by your dying day. “Boys will be boys,” is not much better, but that has a true side to it; but this encouragement to the sowing of wild oats is simply devilish, for it means that a young man is to give way to the temptations and follow the lusts of his age. What are we to do with the wild oats of manhood and old age—with ambition, over-reaching, the false weights, hardness, suspicion, avarice—if the wild oats of youth are to be sown and not burnt? What possible distinction can we draw between them? If we may sow the one, why not the other?

LI.

Man of all ages is a selfish animal, and unreasonable in his selfishness. It takes every one of us in turn many a shrewd fall, in our wrestlings with the world to convince us that we are not to have everything our own way. We are conscious in our inmost souls that man is the rightful lord of creation; and, starting from this eternal principle, and ignoring, each man-child of us in turn, the qualifying truth that it is to man in general, including women, and not to one man in particular, that the earth has been given, we set about asserting our kingships each in his own way, and proclaiming ourselves kings from our own little ant-hills of thrones. And then come the struggles and the down-fallings, and some of us learn our lesson, and some learn it not. But what lesson? That we have been dreaming in the golden hours when the vision of a kingdom rose before us? That there is in short, no kingdom at all, or that, if there be, we are no heirs of it?

No—I take it that, while we make nothing better than that out of our lesson, we shall go on spelling at it and stumbling over it, through all the days of our life, till we make our last stumble, and take our final header out of this riddle of a world, which we once dreamed we were to rule over, exclaiming “_vanitas vanitatum_” to the end. But man’s spirit will never be satisfied without a kingdom, and was never intended to be satisfied so; and a wiser than Solomon tells us, day by day, that our kingdom is about us here, and that we may rise up and pass in when we will at the shining gates which he holds open, for that it is His, and we are joint heirs of it with Him.

LII.

The world is clear and bright, and ever becoming clearer and brighter to the humble, and true, and pure of heart—to every man and woman who will live in it as the children of the Maker and Lord of it, their Father. To them, and to them alone, is that world, old and new, given, and all that is in it, fully and freely to enjoy. All others but these are occupying where they have no title; “they are sowing much, but bringing in little; they eat, but have not enough; they drink but are not filled with drink; they clothe themselves, but there is none warm; and he of them who earneth wages earneth wages to put them into a bag with holes.” But these have the world and all things for a rightful and rich inheritance; for they hold them as dear children of Him in whose hand it and they are lying, and no power in earth or hell shall pluck them out of their Father’s hand.

LIII.

The great Danish invasion of England in the ninth century is one of those facts which meet us at every turn in the life of the world, raising again and again the deepest of all questions. At first sight it stands out simply as the triumph of brute force, cruelty, and anarchy, over civilization and order. It was eminently successful, for the greater part of the kingdom remained subject to the invaders. In its progress all such civilization as had taken root in the land was for the time trodden out; whole districts were depopulated; lands thrown out of cultivation; churches, abbeys, monasteries, the houses of nobles and peasants, razed to the ground; libraries (such as then existed) and works of art ruthlessly burnt and destroyed. It threw back all Alfred’s reforms for eight years. To the poor East Anglian or West Saxon, churl or monk, who had been living his quiet life there, honestly, and in the fear of God, according to his lights—to him hiding away in the swamps of the forest, amongst the swine, running wild now for lack of herdsmen, and thinking bitterly of the sack of his home, and murder of his brethren, or of his wife and children by red-handed Pagans, the heavens would indeed seem to be shut, and the earth delivered over to the powers of darkness. Would it not seem so to us if we were in like case? Have we any faith which would stand such a strain as that?

Who shall say for himself that he has? And yet what Christian does not know, in his heart of hearts, that there is such a faith for himself and for the world—the faith which must have carried Alfred through those fearful years, and strengthened him to build up a new and better England out of the ruins the Danes left behind them? For, hard as it must be to keep alive any belief or hope during a time when all around us is reeling, and the powers of evil seem to be let loose on the earth, when we look back upon these “days of the Lord” there is no truth which stands out more clearly on the face of history than this, that they all and each have been working towards order and life, that “the messengers of death have been messengers of resurrection.”

LIV.

When the corn and wine and oil, the silver and the gold, have become the main object of worship—that which men or nations do above all things desire—sham work of all kinds, and short cuts, by what we call financing and the like will be the means by which they will attempt to gain them.

When that state comes, men who love their country will welcome Danish invasions, civil wars, potato diseases, cotton famines, Fenian agitations, whatever calamity may be needed to awake the higher life again, and bid the nation arise and live.

That such visitations do come at such times as a matter of fact is as clear as that in certain states of the atmosphere we have thunder-storms. The thunder-storm comes with perfect certainty, and as a part of a natural and fixed order. We are all agreed upon that now. We all believe, I suppose, that there is an order—that there are laws which govern the physical world, asserting themselves as much in storm and earthquake as in the succession of night and day, of seed-time and harvest. We who are Christians believe that order and those laws to proceed from God, to be expressions of His will. Do we not also believe that men are under a divine order as much as natural things? that there is a law of righteousness founded on the will of God, as sure and abiding as the law of gravitation? that this law of righteousness, this divine order, under which human beings are living on this earth, must and does assert and vindicate itself through and by the acts and lives of men, as surely as the divine order in nature asserts itself through the agency of the invisible power in earth and sea and air?

Surely Christianity, whatever else it teaches, at any rate assures us of this. And when we have made this faith our own, when we believe it, and not merely believe that we believe it, we have in our hand the clue to all human history. Mysteries in abundance will always remain. We may not be able to trace the workings of the law of righteousness in the confusions and bewilderments of our own day, or through the darkness and mist which shrouds so much of the life of other times and other races. But we know that it is there, and that it has its ground in a righteous will, which was the same a thousand years ago as it is to-day, which every man and nation can get to know; and just in so far as they know and obey which, will they be founding families, institutions, states, which will abide.

If we want to test this truth in the most practical manner, we have only to take any question which has troubled, or is troubling, statesmen and rulers, and nations, in our own day. The slavery question is among the greatest of these. In the divine order, that institution was not recognized, there was no place at all set apart for it; on the contrary, He on whose will that order rests had said that he came to break every yoke. And so slavery would give our kindred in America no rest, just as it would give England no rest in the first thirty years of the century. The nation, desiring to go on living its life, making money, subduing a continent,

“Pitching new states as old-world men pitch tents,”

tried every plan for getting rid of the “irrepressible negro” question, except the only one recognized in the divine order—that of making him free. The ablest and most moderate men, the Websters and Clays, thought and spoke and worked to keep it on its legs. Missouri compromises were agreed to, “Mason and Dixon’s lines” laid down, joint committees of both houses—at last even a “crisis committee,” as it was called—invented plan after plan to get it finally out of the way by any means except the only one which the eternal law, the law of righteousness, prescribed. But he whose will must be done on earth was no party to Missouri compromises, and Mason and Dixon’s line was not laid down on his map of North America. And there never were wanting men who could recognize His will, and denounce every compromise, every endeavor to set it aside, or escape from it, as a “covenant with death and hell.” Despised and persecuted men—Garrisons and John Browns—were raised up to fight this battle, with tongue and pen and life’s blood, the weak things of this world to confound the mighty; men who could look bravely in the face the whole power and strength of their nation in the faith of the old prophet: “Associate yourselves and ye shall be broken in pieces; gather yourselves together and ye shall come to nought, for God is with us.” And at last the thunder-storm broke, and when it cleared away the law of righteousness had asserted itself once again, and the nation was delivered.

And so it has been, and is, and will be to the end of time with all nations. We have all our “irrepressible” questions of one kind or another, more or less urgent, rising up again and again to torment and baffle us, refusing to give us any peace until they have been settled in accordance with the law of righteousness, which is the will of God. No clever handling of them will put them to rest. Such work will not last. If we have wisdom and faith enough amongst us to ascertain and do that will, we may settle them for ourselves in clear skies. If not, the clouds will gather, the atmosphere grow heavy, and the storm break in due course, and they will be settled for us in ways which we least expect or desire, for it is “the Lord’s controversy.”

In due course, perhaps! but what if this due course means lifetimes, centuries? Alas! this is indeed the cry which has been going up from the poor earth these thousands of years:

“The priests and the rulers are swift to wrong, And the mills of God are slow to grind.”

How long, O Lord, how long? The precise times and seasons man shall never know on this earth. These the Lord has kept in his own power. But courage, my brother! Can we not see, the blindest of us, that the mills are working swiftly, at least in our day? This is no age in which shams or untruths, whether old or new, are likely to have a quiet time or a long life of it. In all departments of human affairs—religious, political, social—we are travelling fast, in England and elsewhere, and under the hand and guidance, be sure, of Him who made the world, and is able and willing to take care of it. Only let us quit ourselves like men, trusting to Him to put down whatsoever loveth or maketh a lie, and in his own time to establish the new earth in which shall dwell righteousness.

LV.

In these days when our wise generation, weighed down with wealth and its handmaid vices on the one hand, and exhilarated by some tiny steps it has managed to make on the threshold of physical knowledge of various kinds on the other, would seem to be bent on ignoring its Creator and God altogether—or at least of utterly denying that he has revealed, or is revealing himself, unless it be through the laws of nature—one of the commonest demurrers to Christianity has been, that it is no faith for fighters, for the men who have had to do the roughest and hardest work for the world. I fear that some sections of Christians have been too ready to allow this demurrer, and fall back on the Quaker doctrines; admitting thereby that such “Gospel of the kingdom of heaven” as they can for their part heartily believe in, and live up to, is after all only a poor cash-gospel, and cannot bear the dust and dirt, the glare and horror of battle-fields. Those of us who hold that man was sent into this earth for the express purpose of fighting—of uncompromising and unending fighting with body, intellect, spirit, against whomsoever and whatsoever causeth or maketh a lie, and therefore, alas! too often against his brother-man—would, of course, have to give up Christianity if this were true; nay, if they did not believe that precisely the contrary of this is true, that Christ can call them as plainly in the drum beating to battle, as in the bell calling to prayer, can and will be as surely with them in the shock of angry hosts as in the gathering before the altar. But without entering further into the great controversy here, I would ask readers fairly and calmly to consider whether all the greatest fighting that has been done in the world has not been done by men who believed, and showed by their lives that they believed, they had a direct call from God to do it, and that He was present with them in their work. And further (as I cheerfully own that this test would tell as much in favor of Mahommet as of Cromwell, Gustavus Adolphus, John Brown) whether, on the whole, Christian nations have not proved stronger in battle than any others? I would not press the point unfairly, or overlook such facts as the rooting out of the British by the West Saxons when the latter were Pagans; all I maintain is, that faith in the constant presence of God in and around them has been the support of those who have shown the strongest hearts, the least love of ease and life, the least fear of death and pain.

LVI.

Supposing the whole Bible, every trace of Christendom to disappear to-morrow, we should each of us be conscious of a presence, which we are quite sure is not ourself, in the deepest recesses of our own heart, communing with us there and calling us to take up our two-fold birthright as man—the mastery over visible things, and above all the mastery over our own bodies, actions, thoughts—and the power, always growing, of a mysterious communion with the invisible.

LVII.

“Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way? Even by ruling himself after Thy word.” The question of questions this, at the most critical time in his life for every child of Adam who ever grew to manhood on the face of our planet; and so far as human experience has yet gone, the answer of answers. Other answers have been, indeed, forthcoming at all times, and never surely in greater number or stranger guise than at the present time: “Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way?” Even by ruling himself in the faith “that human life will become more beautiful and more noble in the future than in the past.” This will be found enough “to stimulate the forces of the will, and purify the soul from base passion” urge, with a zeal and ability of which every Christian must desire to speak with deep respect, more than one school of our nineteenth century moralists.

“Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way?” Even by ruling himself on the faith “that it is probable that God exists, and that death is not the end of life;” or again, “that this is the only world of which we have any knowledge at all.” Either of these creeds, says the philosopher of the clubs, if held distinctly as a dogma and consistently acted on, will be found “capable of producing results on an astonishing scale.” So one would think, but scarcely in the direction of personal holiness, or energy. Meantime, the answer of the Hebrew psalmist, three thousand years old, or thereabouts, has gone straight to the heart of many generations, and I take it will scarcely care to make way for any solution likely to occur to modern science or philosophy. Yes, he who has the word of the living God to rule himself by—who can fall back on the strength of Him who has had the victory over the world, the flesh and the devil—may even in this strange disjointed time of ours carry his manhood pure and unsullied through the death-grips to which he must come with “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life.” He who will take the world, the flesh, and the devil by the throat in his own strength, will find them shrewd wrestlers. Well for him if he escape with the stain of the falls which he is too sure to get, and can rise up still a man, though beaten and shamed, to meet the same foes in new shapes in his later years. New shapes, and ever more vile, as the years run on: “Three sorts of men my soul hateth,” says the son of Sirach, “a poor man that is proud, a rich man that is a liar, and an old adulterer that doateth.”

We may believe the Gospel history to be a fable, but who amongst us can deny the fact that each son of man has to go forth into the wilderness—for us “the wilderness of the wide world in an atheistic century”—and there do battle with the tempter as soon as the whisper has come in his ear: “Thou too art a man; eat freely. All these things will I give thee.”

LVIII.

“How is it that ye sought me? Wist ye not that I must be in my Father’s courts, about his business?”

Full of this new question and great wonder, Christ went home to the village in Galilee with his parents, and was subject to them; and the curtain falls for us on his boyhood and youth and early manhood. But as nothing but what is most important, and necessary for understanding all of his life which we need for our own growth into his likeness, is told in these simple gospel narratives, it would seem that this vivid light is thrown on that first visit to Jerusalem because it was the crisis in our Lord’s early life which bears most directly on his work for our race. If so, we must, I think, allow that the question, once fairly presented to the boy’s mind, would never again have left it. Day by day it would have been coming back with increasing insistency, gathering power and weight. And as he submitted it day by day to the God whom prophet and Psalmist had taught every child of the nation to look upon as “about his path and about his bed, and knowing every thought of his heart,” the consciousness must have gained strength and power. As the habit of self-surrender and simple obedience to the voice within grew more perfect, and more a part of his very being, the call must have sounded more and more clearly.

And, as he was in all things tempted like as we are, again and again must his human nature have shrunk back and tried every way of escape from this task, the call to which was haunting him; while every succeeding month and year of life must have disclosed to him more and more of its peril and its hopelessness, as well as of its majesty.