Victory out of Ruin

by Norman Maclean

CHAPTER IX

NO ROOM

There is an old Gaelic proverb that says: 'Where there is heart-room there also is house-room.' There was room enough in that mean inn for the farmers with their pouches filled with money for the tax, for the soldiers that swaggered with the pride of empire, for the village-talebearers with their rude jests; but for a poor woman in the hour of her need there was no room. She was shut out because there was not found in that inn any with heart big enough to make room for her. What was she anyway?—a mere chattel; and what her child?—already there were too many children; and the only course to adopt was to let most of them die! And so at its dawn we can see what a mighty change Christianity has made in the world. Though the mother and the Child were shut out of the inn and consigned to the asses' stall, yet because of that mother and Child womanhood is to-day honoured and childhood most precious. To-day, in whatever land on which the shadow of the Cross has fallen, there is heart-room and house-room for mother and child.

I

As one reads the old beautiful story, this foot-note that explains how the Founder of Christianity was born in a stable because 'there was no room for them in the inn' stirs the mind with a wistful poignancy. The book slips down on the knees and the imagination awakes. The essence of nineteen centuries of Christian history is here. The web of all the centuries is woven after the one pattern. Shut out at His birth, His fate has been the same ever since. He came with the message of humanity's renewal. He proclaimed the most revolutionary doctrine ever preached to men—that the pariahs of humanity, publicans, sinners, slaves, those ignorant of the law and therefore accursed, were all the sons of God; and that only one law was requisite, that men should love one another with a love that gleamed red with sacrificial blood. But what have men done with this evangel? They have shut it out! It was too beautiful for their gross hearts and their self-clouded eyes. It was also very difficult. It required the changed heart and the transfigured life. And that has always been most difficult—to transmute the self-centred into the God-centred and all it means. So men set themselves to circumvent that demand for the surrendered heart—and they offered the surrendered brain. That is quite easy. They formulated logical propositions setting forth that thus and thus God acted, and they said—'Believe this and be saved, or disbelieve and be damned!' Christianity that came into the world as spirit and life became mere intellectual gymnastics! And with the name of the Lord of Love on their lips Christians cheerfully burnt each other because their definitions differed.... What an amazing fate to overtake the most beautiful thing that ever was seen on the earth! ... A Borgia sits on the throne of St. Peter; Calvin burns Servetus; the Jesuit exterminates his opponents; the Covenanter proclaims that he prefers to die than to live and see 'this intolerable toleration'; and all the time the Lord Jesus Christ is shut out. Not wholly shut out, however, for He has in every age found a shelter and a welcome in the stables and the sheds, among the ragged, the mean, and the outcasts of humanity.

II

It is not only in the great organisations that bear His name that there has often been found no room for the Christ; but still less has there been found room for Him in the social order. This great revolutionary identifies Himself so closely with humanity, that He declares that whosoever receives a little child and loves it receives and loves Him. How then do we deal with the Founder of Christianity as He comes to us in the form of a little child, saying, 'Receive Me'? ... This is the way we deal with Him. Every five minutes of the day a baby dies somewhere in the United Kingdom. There are districts in great cities where two hundred out of one thousand perish in the first year of life. A third of the possible population die in the years of childhood. The horrors of war are small compared to the horrors of peace, to which we have become so inured that we scarce notice them. We have taken the sunshine and the fresh air and the starlight from millions of our fellow citizens and shut them up in barracks and surrounded them with forces of degeneration, and have provided them a narcotic for their misery, so that womanhood becomes degraded and childhood pines and dies. Still, after nineteen centuries, Jesus Christ is shut out from the social order we have laboriously created. And we celebrate Christmas Day without so much as a sense of incongruity between our beliefs and our actions.

II

One of the weirdest symptoms of decay in our day is the way the whole social system seems to have conspired to shut out the child. In the last years property-owners had one condition that was unaltered: they would not let their houses to tenants with children. 'How many children and how old are they?' was the deciding question that always shut the door. The coming of a baby was often the signal that brought an ejectment warrant. The penalty for bringing a child into the world was being thrown into the street. The men who filled the inn at Bethlehem with mirth nineteen centuries ago have had a mighty multitude who shared their spirit. Rents have been to them more to be desired than babies.

Here is an advertisement that appeared in the Daily Chronicle of 29th May 1917: 'Chapel-keepers, man and wife (no children), for large Congregational church, Central London; must be total abstainers ... 5 rooms, coal and light provided.—Write ———, hon. secretary, ... E.C. 4.' I forbear giving the name of the Christian church that provides five rooms for its 'keeper' and slams the door in the face of the child. (The curious can find it in the files.) Even in this day, when the child is so precious to the race, one can see unblushing advertisements for gardeners and lodge-keepers with the clause 'no children.' That the children of this world should act so is deplorable; but that the children of the light should have 'five rooms,' and in them all no place for a cradle—that suggests doom. Think of that congregation hailing, with songs of rapture, the coming of the Child; the preacher getting dewy over the callousness of the inn in Bethlehem—and their own servants forbidden a child! ... It was something like that which caused a prophet of old to exclaim—'Judgment begins in the House of God.'

IV

At this Christmastide what we need most is to make room for the Child. People are ever ready to make room for that which they recognise to be precious. The most precious thing on earth is goodness. Give any mother her choice of her son being rich and a rogue, or poor and good; she will choose poverty. There is no power that builds up men and women in unselfishness and goodness but the power that is radiated from Him whose life on earth began in a manger. We must, if need be, cast away our costliest treasures that we may make room.... In very truth He cannot now be shut out altogether. No contumely will drive Him hence. It is different now from the day when a woman groped her way in agony to the asses and the stall. Different now, for He comes in through the closed doors. That is how the world has not been able to destroy Christianity; and that is how the Child conquers at the last.