IX.—THE SORROWFUL QUEEN.
There was some perturbation in the C. L. S. Circle about “reading novels,” what time “Hypatia” was on the list. If the objectionable element in such reading is its improbability and contrariety to reason, those who are still opposed to it are warned not to read the life and adventures of Margaret of Anjou, some time queen of King Henry VI. It is not alone that her adventures were strange and her character remarkable, when truthfully described; she was the subject of romance writers of willful and, it is to be feared, malicious natures, only they called themselves “historians,” “chroniclers.” Their writings therefore are more objectionable than straight fiction, because they deliberately pervert truth and ask us to believe it. The best we can do with all the accounts of the Wars of the Roses is to weigh one story against another, and select that which pleases our reason or fancy better—just as a purchaser of novels does.
Margaret was born of “poor but proud,” royal parents, and was, at the age of fourteen, celebrated all over Europe for beauty, accomplishments, courage, et cetera. I fancy she would have been a good, average “American girl” of the present day, so you can fancy the sensation she created at the court of her uncle, the King of France, and afterward at that of her husband. She was a fascinator. The Earl of Suffolk lost his judgment about her when he went to negotiate the marriage, and he made so bad a bargain that he lost his head for it afterward; it was cut off in a mysterious manner in a skiff in the middle of the Channel. It was a sorry match for Margaret, after all. Her husband was grandson of the insane Charles VI. of France. When the hereditary taint did not show in Henry and he had lucid intervals, he was a weak man indeed; spending most of his time counting his beads and meditating; a good, simple-hearted man, just the one who ought not to have been the husband of Margaret of Anjou and King of England at that troublous time.
For, from the time when Henry, a babe of nine months, came, or was brought, to the throne, he had been the victim and alternate tool of the most selfish and unscrupulous noblemen in England arrayed in hostile factions. Into this den Margaret was brought at the age of fifteen, and before two years had passed she had become, to all intents, ruler of England. Henry from that time was as much counted out of the dark games of state-craft and priest-craft that cursed England as if he had been a holy relic. Intrigue, assassination, foreign aggression, and even servile insurrection under Jack Cade were brought to bear on her in vain. The people of England hated her because she was a foreigner, and visited on her all the sins of her court, the imperfections of her husband, their own miseries at home and their shame abroad for the loss of all the winnings of Henry V., Edward III., and the Black Prince. There was no real ruler, and the evil seeds of the usurpation of Henry IV. had ripened in a fearful crop of lawlessness and violence, high and low. There was “a man on horseback” to take advantage of all this evil conjunction of Margaret’s stars,—Edward, Duke of York, to-wit: He first plotted, then struck for the throne. The issue between Lancaster and York was made up, and the red rose and the white became symbols of blood and pale death.
It was while this ill-omened issue was crystallizing into action, that Margaret’s only child was born, and even this usual solvent of kingly troubles proved the culmination of her misfortunes and of England’s woes. The birth of the successor changed the issue from a quarrel of York with the court to a deadly enmity of York against Margaret and her son: they were one more block in his path. When the child was born (1453) his father had been for weeks in an idiotic daze—one of the fits he was subject to—not able to move or speak, or hear, or perceive anything; and the boy was some months old before his father could be made to know of his existence. Even this distressing affliction was made to tell against her, for, says an old letter writer, the “noble mother sustained not a little slander and obloquy of the common people, saying that he was not the natural son of King Henry, but changed in the cradle.” The poor mother repeatedly tried to vindicate her honor and strengthen the perilous position of her son by getting the father to recognize him. A letter of that day pathetically says:
“The Duke of Buckingham took the prince in his arms, and presented him to the king in goodly wise, beseeching the king to bless him: and the king gave no manner answer. Nathless, the duke abode still with the prince by the king: and when he could no manner answer have, the queen came in and took the prince in her arms, and presented him in like form as the duke had done, desiring that he should bless it. But all their labor was in vain, for they departed thence without any answer or countenance, saving only that once he looked upon the prince and cast down his eyes again, without any more.”
Is there a more touching tableau in all the pages of romance than this? Picture the young mother, with the discredited babe in her arms, watching, heart-sick, day after day and week after week, for the first flicker of the light of returning reason on that vacant countenance. But no sign of intelligence did the imbecile king give for over a year, and meantime York had himself appointed “protector” of the young prince, and all the barons stood by their castles in “armed neutrality,” waiting to see if the Lord’s anointed would not die and leave the crown to be wrestled for. Better for them, better for England, far better for Margaret, had he never wakened from his trance. When he did, York set his army in motion, and the War of the Roses was begun.
Battles, with alternating victories, supplemented by summary executions by the victors, followed each other. At length King Henry was taken prisoner and forced to a compromise, by which he was to reign for life and Edward of York was to succeed him. This treaty, which dishonored Margaret and disinherited her son, changed her. From that hour the mother became a lioness in defense of her young.
The mother’s struggles in her son’s cause during the succeeding sixteen years contain volumes of romance. The alternations of defeat and victory, of hope and despair, of triumph and exile in caves and woods, of intrigue with Lancastrian haters of the house of York, and of negotiations with foreign powers, sometimes fruitless, sometimes successful—at all times the highest exhibitions of diplomacy of the time—all seem, at this distance, to be strangely out of place in sober history.
The first battle of St. Albans, 1455, was followed by the Love Day when “all was forgiven,” as the advertisements say, and the best haters were paired off and marched to St. Paul’s to hear the grand Te Deum over the peace; the queen led by the Duke of York, Somerset and Salisbury, Warwick and Exeter, after the manner of the “Massachusetts and South Carolina” procession at the Peace Conference during the civil disturbance in our own country. This lasted a short time, and then came the battle of Bloreheath, where Henry for once showed a spirit “so knightly, manly and comfortwise that the lords and people took great joy,” deserted the Yorkists and compelled Warwick to flee the country. But before the middle of that summer (1460) Warwick and Edward were back with an army. The queen was beaten at Northampton; wondering King Henry was taken prisoner, and a few days later placidly attended with his captors a service of thanksgiving for his wife’s defeat and his deliverance from his friends. It was now that the treaty was made disfranchising his own son. As for Margaret and the prince, they fled to Wales, where she was waylaid and robbed of her jewels, and escaped while her baggage was being rifled; thence crossing Menai Straits in a skiff, they reached Scotland.
Now occurred a tragic episode in keeping with all this strange, eventful history. King James of Scotland undertook to create a diversion in Margaret’s favor by besieging the border city of Roxburgh. One of the weapons of the besiegers was a rude cannon of that day, made of bars of iron heavily hooped like a barrel, and keyed with oaken wedges. King James wanted to “touch off” this dreadful “bombard” himself; it burst, a wedge struck him and he fell dead; and Margaret lost another ally. But the castle was taken, for the widowed Scottish queen came into camp leading the heir, a boy of eight years, the eldest of a family of seven children; her exhortations incited the assault that carried the castle. And then this widowed queen hastened to comfort and aid the worse than widowed queen who had fled to her realm. In eight days thereafter Margaret had 18,000 brave North-of-England men around her, and on the last day but one of the year 1460 she fought and defeated York at Wakefield. Thus within six months from the day when her fortunes seemed irretrievably ruined, and her husband and kingdom alike lost to her, she had the bleeding head of her antagonist, the Duke of York, stuck up over the gate of his own city of York. So it is said: but so it is contradicted. Here comes in the contemporary romancing. In this scene Shakspere’s genius has blackened the name of Margaret of Anjou, as it did that of another French heroine of this epoch, Jeanne d’Arc; he was English enough to always hate the French, and especially French heroines.
Margaret marched toward London, and encountered the King-Maker, who had come out as far as St. Albans with the captive royal imbecile at the head of his forces. Warwick was beaten and Henry fell a captive into his wife’s hands. There was a touching family re-union on the battlefield, and the king knighted his son, who, though only seven years old, had acted as much like a “lion’s whelp” as the Black Prince had done at Cressy.
But there was another boy in the field, the young duke of York, aged nineteen, to take up his father’s work and avenge his father’s death. This boy threw himself into London, closed it against Margaret, cut off her supplies, and just fifteen days after the victory of Wakefield it was responded to by cries of “Long live King Edward!” which hailed young York’s accession to the throne as Edward IV. The fatal battle of Touton followed the same month—a remarkable tragedy by itself. It was fought in the midst of a furious snow storm, which blinded the Lancastrian archers. Here Warwick is pictured as redeeming the day by dismounting and stabbing his horse, to demonstrate the impossibility of retreat to his retainers; drawing his sword and kissing the cross on its hilt he cried: “I live or die here. Let those who will turn back, and God receive the souls of all who fall with me.” The battle lasted all day; the slaughter of the defeated Lancastrians all the next day—for Edward had proclaimed no quarter. Such was the spirit that had now infected both sides in this fratricidal strife.
First to Scotland, and then to France, Margaret and her precious charge went, imploring aid. But chivalry was now on its last legs. However, she did get a small force from Louis of France, on promising to give up to him Calais when she should regain England, and with this she landed in Northumberland in October, 1462; but the elements again fought against her; a sudden storm shipwrecked the expedition and the royal party barely escaped in a small boat to Berwick, Scotland. Months of suffering, wandering and hiding followed. A single herring makes a meal for the royal family! She is set upon by a band of robbers in a wood and makes her escape while they are fighting over her jewels; she is lost in the forest, into whose depths she has fled blindly, and is suddenly stopped by another robber, sword in hand, to whom Margaret resolutely says, “My friend, protect the son of your king!” The supposed robber is a Lancastrian noble in hiding like herself and he shelters the royal guests for some days in a secret cave, where he has his retreat. Again they are arrested with a faithful knight and put on board a small vessel, to be conveyed to England; but the knight, his servant and the prince rise en route and overcome their captors, and they make their way to Flanders. Meantime, King Henry, who has become separated from them, and for months wanders and hides like them, is betrayed by a monk into Edward’s hands and conveyed to the Tower, every indignity being heaped upon him (1465). He never after emerged alive, save once—when Warwick, in revolt, drove Edward IV. out of the kingdom and paraded London with the poor captive, hailing him Henry VI. restored.
A complete history of this most varied and tragic period would include all the ups and downs of Edward IV.; the glory, decline and fall of Warwick, “the Last of the Barons,” and a volume of stormy, bloody incidents. This crisis is the dividing ridge between the areas of mediævalism and of modern times. Feudalism disappeared and the commercial system took its place. The fittest survived, the weaker system went down and buried poor Margaret’s fortunes in the debris. Her figure and Warwick’s, strangely enough, together stand relieved in the lurid lights that accompany the crash.
That closing scene was the most strange and tragic of all. “The King-Maker” has quarreled with the king whom he made Edward IV., and under the sting of that licentious prince’s plot to corrupt the virtue of Warwick’s favorite daughter, Anne Neville (afterward wife of Richard III.), the father has hastened to France and offered to Margaret the King-Maker’s sword to make the young Edward of Lancaster king of England. After long delays, again buffeted by conspiring waves, Warwick, Margaret, and Edward (now a soldierly youth of eighteen), land in England, but separately. Her ill-fortune follows her to the last, and their divided forces are cut off in detail by Henry’s army. The battle of Barnet, where “the Last of the Barons” falls, is lost because of a fog in which his troops destroy each other by mistake. Then in a few days Margaret is hemmed in with her little army against the river Severn, and the last act of the tragedy is enacted at Tewksbury. When all is lost, the woman in the heroic queen asserts itself in a swoon, and her son is captured fighting fiercely to cover the escape of the mother who had fought so fiercely and so many times to cover his. The young prince is brought bound into King Henry’s tent, and the contending cousins stand face to face—the representatives of the expiring Past and the living Future.
“What brings you to England?” sternly demands the king.
“I came to seek my father’s crown and mine own inheritance,” replies the undaunted representative of the older England.
For answer the king strikes the manacled youth in the face with his steel gauntlet. Yes, there can be no mistaking it. Chivalry is dead! The Duke of Clarence and the Duke of Gloucester draw and bravely cut down the prisoner, and the last hope of Lancaster’s royal line is dead upon the ground. Richard II. is avenged, and one more tragedy is added to the fearful chronicle of royal crimes.
One day in May, 1471, the pale, meek face of Henry VI. looked down from a grated window in the tower upon a street pageant which his wife graced as a captive in the train of the victorious Edward IV. Then a few days later that same face, just as calm but paler, was exhibited in St. Paul’s. The Yorkists said he died of grief. The Tudor historians placed his death, with the invented hump, on the back of Richard III., and the genius of Shakspere riveted them there and a fearful load of other sins on top of them. So closed the usurping line of Lancaster at the hands of the usurpers of York.
Margaret was soon ransomed by the king of France, and returned to her father in Anjou. Miss Strickland says: “Margaret had lost her beauty with excessive weeping: a dry leprosy transformed this princess, who had been the fairest in the world, into a spectacle of horror.” She died in 1483, aged fifty-one years, into which had been compressed an age of tragedy and sorrow. Three hundred years later, another unhappy sovereign, Maria Louisa, Napoleon’s empress, possessed Margaret’s breviary, in which there was a sentence in Margaret’s hand that told the moral of her life:
“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”
END OF “PICTURES FROM ENGLISH HISTORY.”
[SUNDAY READINGS.]
SELECTED BY THE REV. J. H. VINCENT, D.D.
[June 3.]
RELIGION IN COMMON LIFE.[K]
PART I.
By JOHN CAIRD, D.D.[L]
To combine business with religion, to keep up a spirit of serious piety amid the stir and distraction of a busy and active life—this is one of the most difficult parts of a Christian’s trial in this world. It is comparatively easy to be religious in the church—to collect our thoughts, and compose our feelings, and enter, with an appearance of propriety and decorum, into the offices of religious worship, amid the quietude of the Sabbath, and within the still and sacred precincts of the house of prayer. But to be religious in the world—to be pious, and holy, and earnest-minded in the counting-room, the manufactory, the market-place, the field, the farm—to carry out our good and solemn thoughts and feelings into the throng and thoroughfare of daily life—this is the great difficulty of our Christian calling. No man not lost to all moral influence can help feeling his worldly passions calmed, and some measure of seriousness stealing over his mind, when engaged in the performance of the more awful and sacred rites of religion; but the atmosphere of the social circle, the exchange, the street, the city’s throng, amid coarse work and cankering cares and toils, is a very different atmosphere from that of a communion-table. Passing from the one to the other has often seemed as if the sudden transition from a tropical to a polar climate—from balmy warmth and sunshine to murky mist and freezing cold. And it appears sometimes as difficult to maintain the strength and steadfastness of religious principle and feeling, when we go forth from the church into the world, as it would be to preserve an exotic alive in the open air in winter, or to keep the lamp that burns steadily within doors from being blown out if you take it abroad unsheltered from the wind.
So great, so all but insuperable, has this difficulty ever appeared to men, that it is but few who set themselves honestly and resolutely to the effort to overcome it. The great majority, by various shifts or expedients, evade the hard task of being good and holy, at once in the church and in the world.
In ancient times, for instance, it was, as we all know, the not uncommon expedient among devout persons—men deeply impressed with the thought of an eternal world, and the necessity of preparing for it, but distracted by the effort to attend to the duties of religion amid the business and temptations of secular life—to fly the world altogether, and, abandoning society and all social claims, to betake themselves to some hermit solitude, some quiet and cloistered retreat, where, as they fondly deemed, “the world forgetting, by the world forgot,” their work would become worship, and life be uninterruptedly devoted to the cultivation of religion in the soul. In our own day the more common device, where religion and the world conflict, is not that of the superstitious recluse, but one even much less safe and venial. Keen for this world, yet not willing to lose all hold on the next—eager for the advantages of time, yet not prepared to abandon all religion and stand by the consequences, there is a very numerous class who attempt to compromise the matter—to treat religion and the world like two creditors whose claims can not both be liquidated—by compounding with each for a share—though in this case a most disproportionate share—of their time and thought. “Everything in its own place!” is the tacit reflection of such men. “Prayers, sermons, holy reading”—they will scarcely venture to add, “God”—“are for Sundays; but week-days are for the sober business, the real, practical affairs of life. Enough if we give the Sunday to our religious duties; we can not always be praying and reading the Bible.”
Now, you will observe that the idea of religion which is set forth in the text, as elsewhere in Scripture, is quite different from any of these notions. The text speaks as if the most diligent attention to our worldly business were not by any means incompatible with spirituality of mind and serious devotion to the service of God. It seems to imply that religion is not so much a duty, as a something that has to do with all duties—not a tax to be paid periodically and got rid of at other times, but a ceaseless, all-pervading, inexhaustible tribute to him, who is not only the object of religious worship, but the end of our very life and being. It suggests to us the idea that piety is not for Sundays only, but for all days; that spirituality of mind is not appropriate to one set of actions and an impertinence and intrusion with reference to others, but like the act of breathing, like the circulation of the blood, like the silent growth of the stature, a process that may be going on simultaneously with all our actions—when we are busiest as when we are idlest; in the church, in the world, in solitude, in society; in our grief and in our gladness; in our toil and in our rest; sleeping, waking; by day, by night—amid all the engagements and exigences of life. For you perceive that in one breath—as duties not only not incompatible, but necessarily and inseparably blended with each other—the text exhorts us to be at once “not slothful in business,” and “fervent in spirit, serving the Lord.” I shall now attempt to prove and illustrate the idea thus suggested to us—the compatibility of religion with the business of common life.
We have, then, Scripture authority for asserting that it is not impossible to live a life of fervent piety amid the most engrossing pursuits and engagements of the world. We are to make good this conception of life—that the hardest-wrought man of trade, or commerce, or handicraft, who spends his days “‘mid dusky lane or wrangling marl,” may yet be the most holy and spiritually-minded. We need not quit the world and abandon its busy pursuits in order to live near to God—
“We need not bid, for cloistered cell,
Our neighbor and our work farewell:
The trivial round, the common task,
May furnish all we ought to ask—
Room to deny ourselves, a road
To bring us, daily, nearer God.”
It is true indeed that, if in no other way could we prepare for an eternal world than by retiring from the business and cares of this world, so momentous are the interests involved in religion, that no wise man should hesitate to submit to the sacrifice. Life here is but a span. Life hereafter is forever. A lifetime of solitude, hardship, penury, were all too slight a price to pay, if need be, for an eternity of bliss: and the results of our most incessant toil and application to the world’s business, could they secure for us the highest prizes of earthly ambition, would be purchased at a tremendous cost, if they stole away from us the only time in which we could prepare to meet our God—if they left us at last rich, gay, honored, possessed of every thing the world holds dear, but to face an eternity undone.
But the very impossibility of such a sacrifice proves that no such sacrifice is demanded. He who rules the world is no arbitrary tyrant prescribing impracticable labors. In the material world there are no conflicting laws; and no more, we may rest assured, are there established in the moral world, any two laws, one or the other of which must needs be disobeyed. Now one thing is certain, that there is in the moral world a law of labor. Secular work, in all cases a duty, is, in most cases, a necessity. God might have made us independent of work. He might have nourished us like “the fowls of the air and the lilies of the field,” which “toil not, neither do they spin.” He might have rained down our daily food, like the manna of old, from heaven, or caused nature to yield it in unsolicited profusion to all, and so set us free to a life of devotion. But, forasmuch as he has not done so—forasmuch as he has so constituted us that without work we can not eat, that if men ceased for a single day to labor, the machinery of life would come to a stand, and arrest be laid on science, civilization, and progress—on every thing that is conducive to the welfare of man in the present life—we may safely conclude that religion, which is also good for man, which is indeed, the supreme good of man, is not inconsistent with hard work.
And that this is so—that this blending of religion with the work of common life is not impossible, you will readily perceive, if you consider for a moment what, according to the right and proper notion of it, Religion is. What do we mean by “Religion?”
Religion may be viewed in two aspects. It is a Science, and it is an Art; in other words, a system of doctrines to be believed, and a system of duties to be done. View it in either light, and the point we are insisting on may, without difficulty, be made good. View it as a science—as truth to be understood and believed. If religious truth were, like many kinds of secular truth, hard, intricate, abstruse, demanding for its study, not only the highest order of intellect, but all the resources of education, books, learned leisure, then indeed to most men, the blending of religion with the necessary avocations of life would be an impossibility. In that case it would be sufficient excuse for irreligion to plead, “My lot in life is inevitably one of incessant care and toil, of busy, anxious thought, and wearing work. Inextricably involved, every day and hour as I am, in the world’s business, how is it possible for me to devote myself to this high and abstract science?” If religion were thus, like the higher mathematics or metaphysics, a science based on the most recondite and elaborate reasonings, capable of being mastered only by the acutest minds, after years of study and laborious investigation, then might it well be urged by many an unlettered man of toil, “I am no scholar—I have no head to comprehend these hard dogmas and doctrines.”
But the gospel is no such system of high and abstract truth. The salvation it offers is not the prize of a lofty intellect, but of a lowly heart. The mirror in which its grand truths are reflected is not a mind of calm and philosophic abstraction, but a heart of earnest purity. Its light shines best and fullest, not on a life undisturbed by business, but on a soul unstained by sin. The religion of Christ, while it affords scope for the loftiest intellect in the contemplation and development of its glorious truths, is yet, in the exquisite simplicity of its essential facts and principles, patent to the simplest mind. Rude, untutored, toil-worn you may be, but if you have wit enough to guide you in the commonest round of daily toil, you have wit enough to learn to be saved. The truth as it is in Jesus, while, in one view of it, so profound that the highest archangel’s intellect may be lost in the contemplation of its mysterious depths, is yet, in another, so simple that the lisping babe at a mother’s knee may learn its meaning.
Again: view religion as an Art, and in this light, too, its compatibility with a busy and active life in the world, it will not be difficult to perceive. For religion as an art differs from secular arts in this respect, that it may be practiced simultaneously with other arts—with all other work and occupation in which we may be engaged. A man can not be studying architecture and law at the same time. The medical practitioner can not be engaged with his patients, and at the same time planning houses or building bridges—practicing, in other words, both medicine and engineering at one and the same moment. The practice of one secular art excludes for the time the practice of other secular arts. But not so with the art of religion. This is the universal art, the common, all-embracing profession. It belongs to no one set of functionaries, to no special class of men. Statesman, soldier, lawyer, physician, poet, painter, tradesman, farmer—men of every craft and calling in life—may, while in the actual discharge of the duties of their varied avocations, be yet, at the same moment, discharging the duties of a higher and nobler vocation—practicing the art of a Christian. Secular arts, in most cases, demand of him who would attain to eminence in any one of them, an almost exclusive devotion of time and thought, and toil. The most versatile genius can seldom be master of more than one art; and for the great majority the only calling must be that by which they can earn their daily bread. Demand of the poor tradesman or peasant, whose every hour is absorbed in the struggle to earn a competency for himself and his family, that he shall be also a thorough proficient in the art of the physician, or lawyer, or sculptor, and you demand an impossibility. If religion were an art such as these, few indeed could learn it. The two admonitions, “Be diligent in business,” and “Be fervent in spirit, serving the Lord,” would be reciprocally destructive.
But religion is no such art, for it is the art of being, and of doing good; to be an adept in it, is to become just, truthful, sincere, self-denied, gentle, forbearing, pure in word and thought and deed. And the school for learning this art is not the closet, but the world—not some hallowed spot where religion is taught, and proficients, when duly trained, are sent forth into the world—but the world itself—the coarse, profane, common world, with its cares and temptations, its rivalries and competitions, its hourly, ever-recurring trials of temper and character. This is, therefore, an art which all can practice, and for which every profession and calling, the busiest and most absorbing, afford scope and discipline. When a child is learning to write, it matters not of what words the copy set to him is composed, the thing desired being that whatever he writes, he learn to write well. When a man is learning to be Christian, it matters not what his particular work in life may be; the work he does is but the copy-line set to him; the main thing to be considered is that he learn to live well. The form is nothing, the execution is everything. It is true, indeed, that prayer, holy reading, meditation, the solemnities and services of the church are necessary to religion, and that these can be practiced only apart from the work of secular life. But it is to be remembered that all such holy exercises do not terminate in themselves. They are but steps in the ladder of heaven, good only as they help us to climb. They are the irrigation and enriching of the spiritual soil—worse than useless if the crop be not more abundant. They are, in short, but means to an end—good, only in so far as they help us to be good and do good—to glorify God and do good to man; and that end can perhaps be best attained by him whose life is a busy one, whose avocations bear him daily into contact with his fellows, into the intercourse of society, into the heart of the world.
Away, then, with the notion that ministers and devotees may be religious, but that a religious and holy life is impracticable in the rough and busy world! Nay rather, believe me, that is the proper scene, the peculiar and appropriate field for religion—the place in which to prove that piety is not a dream of Sundays and solitary hours; that it can bear the light of day; that it can wear well amid the rough jostlings, the hard struggles, the coarse contacts of common life—the place, in one word, to prove how possible it is for a man to be at once not “slothful in business,” and “fervent in spirit, serving the Lord.”
[June 10.]
RELIGION IN COMMON LIFE.
PART II.
Another consideration which I shall adduce in support of the assertion that it is not impossible to blend religion with the business of common life, is this: that religion consists not so much in doing spiritual or sacred acts, as in doing secular acts from a sacred or spiritual motive.
There is a very common tendency in our minds to classify actions according to their outward form, rather than according to the spirit or motive which pervades them. Literature is sometimes arbitrarily divided into “sacred” and “profane” literature, history into “sacred” and “profane” history—in which classification the term “profane” is applied, not to what is bad or unholy, but to every thing that is not technically sacred or religious—to all literature that does not treat of religious doctrines and duties, and to all history save Church history. And we are very apt to apply the same principle to actions. Thus, in many pious minds there is a tendency to regard all the actions of common life as so much—an unfortunate necessity—lost to religion. Prayer, the reading of the Bible and devotional books, public worship—and buying, selling, digging, sowing, bartering, money-making, are separated into two distinct, and almost hostile, categories. The religious heart and sympathies are thrown entirely into the former, and the latter are barely tolerated as a bondage incident to our fallen state, but almost of necessity tending to turn aside the heart from God.
But what God hath cleansed, why should we call common or unclean? The tendency in question, though founded on right feeling, is surely a mistaken one. For it is to be remembered that moral qualities reside not in actions, but in the agent who performs them, and that it is the spirit or motive from which we do any work that constitutes it base or noble, worldly or spiritual, secular or sacred. The actions of an automaton may be outwardly the same as those of a moral agent, but who attributes to them goodness or badness? A musical instrument may discuss sacred melodies better than the holiest lips can sing them, but who thinks of commending it for its piety? It is the same with actions as with places. Just as no spot or scene on earth is in itself more or less holy than another; but the presence of a holy heart may hallow—of a base one, desecrate—any place where it dwells; so with actions. Many actions, materially great and noble, may yet, because of the spirit that prompts and pervades them, be really ignoble and mean; and, on the other hand, many actions, externally mean and lowly, may, because of the state of his heart who does them, be truly exalted and honorable. It is possible to fill the highest station on earth, and go through the actions pertaining to it in a spirit that degrades all its dignities, and renders all its high and courtly doings essentially vulgar and mean. And it is no mere sentimentality to say, that there may dwell in a lowly mechanic’s or household servant’s breast a spirit that dignifies the coarsest toils and “renders drudgery divine.” Herod of old was a slave, though he sat upon a throne; but who will say that the work of the carpenter’s shop at Nazareth was not noble and kingly work indeed?
And as the mind constitutes high or low, so secular or spiritual. A life spent amid holy things may be intensely secular; a life, the most of which is passed in the thick and throng of the world, may be holy and divine. A minister, for instance, preaching, praying, ever speaking holy words and performing sacred acts, may all the while be doing actions no more holy than those of a printer who prints Bibles, or of the bookseller who sells them; for, in both cases alike, the whole affair may be nothing more than a trade. Nay, the comparison tells worse than the former, for the secular trade is innocent and commendable, but the trade which traffics and tampers with holy things is, beneath all its mock solemnity, “earthly, sensual, devilish.” So, to adduce one other example, the public worship of God is holy work: no man can be living a holy life who neglects it. But the public worship of God may be—and with multitudes who frequent our churches is—degraded into work most worldly, most unholy, most distasteful to the great Object of our homage. He “to whom all hearts be open, all desires known,” discerns how many of you have come hither to-day from the earnest desire to hold communion with the Father of spirits, to open your hearts to him, to unburden yourselves in his loving presence, of the cares and crosses that have been pressing hard upon you through the past week, and by common prayer and praise, and the hearing of his holy Word, to gain fresh incentive and energy for the prosecution of his work in the world; and how many, on the other hand, from no better motive, perhaps, than curiosity or old habit, or regard to decency and respectability, or the mere desire to get rid of yourselves and pass a vacant hour that would hang heavy on your hands. And who can doubt that, where such motives as these prevail, to the piercing, unerring inspection of him whom outwardly we seem to reverence, not the market place, the exchange, the counting-room, is a place more intensely secular—not the most reckless and riotous festivity, a scene of more unhallowed levity, than is presented by the house of prayer?
But, on the other hand, carry holy principles with you into the world, and the world will become hallowed by their presence. A Christlike spirit will Christianize everything it touches. A meek heart, in which the altar-fire of love to God is burning, will lay hold of the commonest, rudest things of life, and transmute them, like coarse fuel at the touch of fire, into a pure and holy flame. Religion in the soul will make all the work and toil of life—its gains and losses, friendships, rivalries, competitions, its manifold incidents and events—the means of religious advancement. Marble or coarse clay, it matters not much which of these the artist works, the touch of genius transforms the coarser material into beauty, and lends to the finer a value it never had before. Lofty or lowly, rude or refined as life’s work to us may be, it will become to a holy mind only the material for an infinitely nobler than all the creations of genius—the image of God in the soul. To spiritualize what is material, to Christianize what is secular—this is the noble achievement of Christian principle. If you are a sincere Christian it will be your great desire, by God’s grace, to make every gift, talent, occupation of life, every word you speak, every action you do, subservient to Christian motive.
As a last illustration of the possibility of blending religion with the business of common life, let me call your attention to what may be described as the mind’s power of acting on latent principles.
In order to live a religious life in the world, every action must be governed by religious motives. But in making this assertion, it is not, by any means, implied that in all the familiar actions of our daily life religion must form a direct and conscious object of thought. To be always thinking of God, and Christ, and eternity, amid our worldly work; and however busy, eager, interested we may be in the special business before us, to have religious ideas, doctrines, beliefs, present to the mind—this is simply impossible. The mind can no more consciously think of heaven and earth at the same moment than the body can be in heaven and earth at the same moment. Moreover, there are few kinds of work in the world that, to be well done, must not be done heartily; many that require, in order to excellence, the whole condensed force and energy of the highest mind.
But though it be true that we can not, in our worldly work, be always consciously thinking of religion, yet it is also true that, unconsciously, insensibly, we may be acting under its ever-present control. As there are laws and powers in the natural world, of which, without thinking of them, we are ever availing ourselves—as I do not think of gravitation when, by its aid, I lift my arm, or of atmospheric laws when, by means of them, I breathe, so in the routine of daily work, though comparatively seldom do I think of them, I may yet be constantly swayed by the motives, sustained by the principles, living, breathing, acting in the invisible atmosphere of true religion. There are undercurrents in the ocean which act independently of the movements of the waters on the surface; far down too in its hidden depths there is a region where, even though the storm be raging on the upper waves, perpetual calmness and stillness reign. So there may be an undercurrent beneath the surface movements of your life—there may dwell in the secret depths of your being the abiding peace of God, the repose of a holy mind, even though, all the while, the restless stir and commotion of worldly business may mark your outer history.
And, in order to see this, it is to be remembered, that many of the thoughts and motives that most powerfully impel and govern us in the common actions of life, are latent thoughts and motives. Have you not often experienced that curious law—a law, perhaps, contrived by God, with an express view to this its highest application—by which a secret thought or feeling may lie brooding in your mind, quite apart from the particular work in which you happen to be employed? Have you never, for instance, while reading aloud, carried along with you in your reading the secret impression of the presence of the listener—an impression that kept pace with all the mind’s activity in the special work of reading; nay, have you not sometimes felt the mind, while prosecuting without interruption the work of reading, yet at the same time carrying on some other train of reflection apart altogether from that suggested by the book? Here is obviously a particular “business” in which you were “diligent,” yet another and different thought to which the “spirit” turned.
If the thought of an earthly auditory—of human minds and hearts that shall respond to his thoughts and words—can intertwine itself with all the activities of a man’s mind, and flash back inspiration on his soul, at least as potent and as penetrating may the thought be, of him, the great Lord of heaven and earth, who not only sees and knows us now, but before whose awful presence, in the last great congregation, we shall stand forth to recount and answer for our every thought and deed.
Or, to take but one other example, have we not all felt that the thought of anticipated happiness may blend itself with the work of our busiest hours? The laborer’s evening release from toil—the schoolboy’s coming holiday, or the hard-wrought business-man’s approaching season of relaxation—the expected return of a long-absent and much loved friend—is not the thought of these, or similar joyous events, one which often intermingles with, without interrupting, our common work? When a father goes forth to his “labor till the evening,” perhaps often, very often, in the thick of his toils, the thought of home may start up to cheer him. The smile that is to welcome him, as he crosses his lowly threshold when the work of the day is over, the glad faces, and merry voices, and sweet caresses of little ones, as they shall gather round him in the quiet evening hours—the thought of all this may dwell, a latent joy, a hidden motive, deep down in his heart of hearts, come rushing in a sweet solace at every pause of exertion, and act like a secret oil to smooth the wheels of labor. And so, in the other cases I have named, even when our outward activities are the most strenuous, even when every energy of mind and body is full strung for work, the anticipation of coming happiness may never be absent from our minds. The heart has a secret treasury, where our hopes and joys are often garnered—too precious to be parted with even for a moment.
And why may not the highest of all hopes and joys possess the same all-pervading influence? Have we, if our religion be real, no anticipation of happiness in the glorious future? Is there no “rest that remaineth for the people of God,” no home and loving heart awaiting us when the toils of our hurried day of life are ended? What is earthly rest or relaxation, what that release from toil after which we so often sigh, but the faint shadow of the saint’s everlasting rest—the repose of eternal purity—the calm of a spirit in which, not the tension of labor only, but the strain of the moral strife with sin, has ceased—the rest of the soul in God! What visions of earthly bliss can ever—if our Christian faith be not a form—compare with “the glory soon to be revealed;” what joy of earthly reunion with the rapture of the hour when the heavens shall yield our absent Lord to our embrace, to be parted from us no more forever! And if all this be not a dream and a fancy, but most sober truth, what is there to except this joyful hope from that law to which, in all other deep joys, our minds are subject? Why may we not, in this case too, think often, amid our worldly work, of the home to which we are going, of the true and loving heart that beats for us, and of the sweet and joyous welcome that awaits us there? And, even when we make them not, of set purpose, the subject of our thoughts, is there not enough of grandeur in the objects of a believer’s hope to pervade his spirit at all times with a calm and reverential joy? Do not think all this strange, fanatical, impossible. If it do seem so, it can only be because your heart is in the earthly hopes, but not in the higher and holier hopes—because love to Christ is still to you but a name—because you can give more ardor of thought to the anticipation of a coming holiday than to the hope of heaven and glory everlasting. No, my friends! the strange thing is, not that amid the world’s work we should be able to think of our home, but that we should ever be able to forget it; and the stranger, sadder still, that while the little day of life is passing—morning, noontide, evening—each stage more rapid than the last, while to many the shadows are already fast lengthening, and the declining sun warns them that “the night is at hand, wherein no man can work,” there should be those among us whose whole thoughts are absorbed in the business of the world, and to whom the reflection never occurs that soon they must go out into eternity—without a friend—without a home!