The Honest Sceptic––This is, roughly, the position of the honest sceptic, who would, if he could believe heartily in General Booth’s scheme, and by consequence, in the convertibility of the entire race. To improve the circumstances, even of millions is only a question of the magnitude of the measures taken, the wisdom of the administration. But human nature itself, depraved human nature, is, to him the impossible quantity. Can the leopard change his spots?
THE LAW AGAINST US––HEREDITY.
The Essential Miracle––The recorded miracles serve as pegs for the discussion; the essential miracle is the utter and immediate renovation of a human being. Upon this possibility the saving of the world must hang; and this many cannot receive, not because they are stiff-necked and perverse, but because it is dead against natural law as they know it. Proofs? Cases without end? The whole history of the Christian Church in evidence? Yes; but the history of the Church is a chequered one; and for individual cases, we do not doubt the veracity of the details; only, nobody knows the whole truth; some preparation in the past, some motive in the present inadvertently kept out of sight, may alter the bearing of any such case.
The Question of the Age––Is it possible that a man can emerge altogether out of his old self and become a new creature, with new aims, new thoughts, even new habits? That such renovation is possible is the old contention of Christianity. Here, and not on the ground of the inspiration of the sacred text, must the battle be fought out. The answer to the one urgent question of the age, What think ye of Christ? depends upon the power of the idea of Christ to attract and compel attention, and of the indwelling of Christ to vivify and elevate a single debased and torpid human soul.
Many of us believe exultingly that the ‘all power’ which is given into the hands of our Master includes the power of upright standing, strength, and beauty, for every bruised human reed. That this is so, we have evidence in plenty, beginning with ourselves. But many others of us, and those not the less noble, consider, with Robert Elsmere [Ward’s novel about a man who lost his faith], that ‘miracles do not happen.’
Can Character be Changed?––Everything turns on the condition the originator wisely puts first. There is the crux. Given money enough, land enough, men enough, fully equip and officer this teeming horde of incapables, and some sort of mechanical drill may be got through somehow. But, ‘when a man’s own character and defects constitute the reasons for his fall, that character must be changed and that conduct altered if any permanent beneficial results are to be obtained.’ The drunkard must be made sober; the criminal, honest; the impure, clean. Can this be done? is the crucial question.
Cui Bono?––Now and then is a gleam of hope, now and then a soul and body snatched into safety; but the hardest workers are glad of the noise of the wheels to keep the eternal Cui bono? out of their ears. There is so much to be done, and so little means of doing it. But this scheme––what with the amplitude of its provisions, what with the organisation and regimentation it promises, the strong and righteous government, the moral compulsion to well-doing––considering these, and the enormous staff of workers already prepared to carry it out, the dreariest pessimist amongst us concedes that General Booth’s scheme may be worth trying. ‘But,’ he says, ‘but––
DO WE BELIEVE IN CONVERSION?’
The ‘Idol of Size.’––The first flush of enthusiasm subsided, we ask, Are we not, after all, led away by what Coleridge calls the ‘Idol of Size’?
Wherein does this scheme differ from ten thousand others, except in the colossal scale on which the experiment is to be tried? And perhaps we should concede at the outset that this hope of deliverance is ‘the same, only more so,’ as is being already worked out effectually in many an otherwise sunless corner of the great vineyard. Indeed, the great project has its great risks––risks which the quieter work escapes. All the same, there are aspects in which the remedy, because of its vastness and inclusiveness, is new.
Hitherto we have helped the wretched in impossible circumstances, not out of them. Our help has been as a drop in the bucket, reaching to hundreds or thousands only of the lost millions. Even so, we cannot keep it up; we give to-day, and withhold to-morrow; worse than all, our very giving is an injury, reducing the power and the inclination for self-help. Or, do we start some small amateur industry by way of making our people independent? This pet industry may sometimes be a transparent mask for almsgiving, and an encroachment upon regular industries and the rights of other workers.
We, too, Love our Brother––Whether or no the scheme commends itself to us for its fitness, seasonableness, and promise, one thing it assuredly did: it revealed us to ourselves, and that in an agreeable light. It discovered to us that we, too, love our brother; that we, too, yearn over ‘the bruised’ with something, however little, of the tenderness of Christ. The brotherhood of man is no fancy bred in the brain; and we have loved our brother all the time––the sick, the poor, the captive, and the sinner, too; but the fearful, and unbelieving, and slothful amongst us––that is, the most of us––have turned away our eyes from beholding evils for which we saw no help. But when a promise of deliverance was offered, more adequate, conceivably, than any heretofore proposed, why, the solidarity of humanity asserts itself; our brother who is bruised is not merely near and dear; he is our very self, and whoso will ease and revive him is our deliverer too.
The Attitude of Parents toward Social Questions
A Moral Crisis––The economic aspects of the great philanthropic scheme [Issue of Darkest England] which brought timely relief to the national conscience before the setting in of the hard winter of 1891, are, perhaps, outside our province; but it has educational aspects which we are, in some measure, bound to discuss. In the first place, the children in many homes hear ‘I do not believe that’ it is possible for the leopard to change his spots. General Booth’s scheme brought this issue before us with startling directness; and what the children hear said to-day at the table and by the fireside about all such philanthropic efforts will probably influence for their lives their attitude towards all philanthropic and all missionary endeavour. Not only so, but we ourselves, who stand in some measure in loco parentis to the distressed in mind, body, or estate, are compelled to examine our own position. How far do we give, and work, for the ease of our own conscience, and how far do we believe in the possibility of the instant and utter restoration of the morally degraded, questions which, to-day, force themselves upon us. We must be ready with a yea or a nay; we must take sides, for or against such possibilities as should exalt philanthropic effort into a burning passion. The fact is, that great scheme forced a sort of moral crisis upon us whose effects are continually in evidence.
[William Booth’s book ‘In Darkest England and the Way Out‘ urged people to give money to help the unemployed start their own communities as a way out of poverty.]
Our Gentle Forefathers––Old English Riddles––The History of the Early English Literature takes us into other pleasant places. Here are two or three specimens of the riddles of the old bards, and in riddle and saga we get most vivid pictures of the life and thoughts, the ways and words of the forefathers whom we are too ready to think of as ‘rude,’ but who are here portrayed to us as gentle, mild, and large of soul; men and women whom we, their posterity, may well delight to honour.
I. Here is Cynewulf’s Riddle of the Sword.
’I'm a wondrous wight for warstrife shapen;
By my Lord beloved, lovelily adorned:
Many coloured is my corslet, and a clasping wire
Glitters round the gem of death which my wielder gave to me:
He who whiles doth urge me, wide-wanderer that I am,
With him to conquest.
Then I carry treasure,
Cold above the garths, through the glittering day;
I of smiths the handiwork! Often do I quell
Breathing men with battle edges! Me bedecks a king
With his hoard and silver; honours me in hall,
Doth withhold no word of praise! Of my ways he boasts
’Fore the many heroes, where the mead they drink.
In restraint he lulls me, then he lets me loose again,
Far and wide to rush along; me the weary with wayfarings,
Cursed of all weapons.’
Riddle xxi.
II. The helmet speaks:––
”Wretchedness I bear;
Wheresoe’er he carries me, he who clasps the spear!
On me, still upstanding, smite the streams (of rain);
Hail, the hard grain (helms me), and the hoar-frost covers me
And the (flying) snow (in flakes) falls all over me.”
Riddle lxxix., 6-10.
It is unnecessary to say a word about the literary value and importance of Mr. Stopford Brooke’s great work. ‘There is nothing like leather,’ and to parents all things present themselves as they may tell on education. Here is a very treasure-trove.
Action of the Poem––’The action of the poem now begins with the voyage of Beowulf to the Danish coast. The hero has heard that Hrothgar, the chief of the Danes, is tormented by Grendel, a man-devouring monster. If Hrothgar’s warriors sleep in Heorot––the great hall he has built––they are seized, torn to pieces, and devoured. “I will deliver the king,” thought Beowulf, when he heard the tale from the roving seamen. Over the swan road I will seek Hrothgar; he has need of men.’ His comrades urged him to the adventure, and fifteen of them were willing to fight it out with him. Among the rest was a sea-crafty man who knew the ocean-paths. Their ship lay drawn up on the beach, under the high cliff. Then––
’There the well-geared heroes
Stepped upon the stem, while the stream of ocean
Whirled the sea against the sand. To the ship, to its breast.
Bright and carved things of cost carried then the heroes
And the armour well-arrayed. So the men outpushed,
On desired adventure, their tight ocean wood
Swiftly went above the waves, with a wind well-fitted,
Likest to a fowl, the Floater, foam around its neck,
Till about the same time, on the second day,
The up-curvéd prow had come on so far,
That at last the seamen saw the land ahead;
Shining sea-cliffs, soaring headlands,
Broad sea-nesses. So the Sailor of the Sea
Reached the sea-way’s end.’
Beowulf, I. 211
‘This was the voyage, ending in a fiord with two high sea-capes at its entrance. The same kind of scenery belongs to the land whence they had set out. When Beowulf returns over the sea the boat groans as it is pushed forth. It is heavily laden; the hollow, under the single mast with the single sail, holds eight horses, swords and treasure and rich armours. The sail is hoisted, the wind drives the foam-throated bark over the waves, until they see the Geats’ Cliffs––the well-known sea-nesses. The keel is pressed up by the wind on the sand, and the “harbour-guard who had looked forth afar o’er the sea with longing for their return”––one of the many human touches of the poem––”fastens the wide-bosomed ship with anchoring chains to the strand, lest the violence of the waves should sweep away the winsome boat.” . . . At the end of the bay into which Beowulf sails is a low shore, on which he drives his ship, stem on. Planks are pushed out on either side of the prow; the Weder folk slipped down on the shore, tied up their sea-wood; their battle sarks clanged on them as they moved. Then they thanked the gods that the war-paths had been easy to them . . . On the ridge of the hill above the landing-place the ward of the coast of the Scyldings sat on his horse, and saw the strangers bear their bright shields over the bulwarks of the ship to the shore. He rode down, wondering, to the sea, and shook mightily in his hands his heavy spear, and called to the men––
’Who are ye of men, having arms in hand,
Covered with your coats of mail. Who your keel afoaming
O’er the ocean street thus have urged along.
Hither on the high sea!’
* * * * *
’Never saw I greater
Earl upon this earth than is one of you;
Hero in his harness. He is no home-stayer,
’Less his looks belie him, lovely with his weapons.
Noble is his air!’
Beowulf, II. 237-247.
‘Beowulf replies that he is Hrothgar’s friend, and comes to free him from “Grendel, the secret foe on the dark nights.” He pities Hrothgar, old and good. Yet, as he speaks, the Teutonic sense of the inevitable Wyrd passes by in his mind, and he knows not if Hrothgar can ever escape sorrow. “If ever,” he says, “sorrow should cease from him, release ever come, and the welter of care become cooler.” The coastguard shows them the path, and promises to watch over their ship. The ground rises from the shore, and they pass on to the hilly ridge, behind which lies Heorot.’