Giant Hours with Poet Preachers

by William L. Stidger

II. CONVERSION

It is an old-fashioned Methodist conversion of which he tells, which links itself up with the New Testament gospel of the regeneration of a human soul in such a fascinating way that it gives those of us who preach this gospel an impelling, modern, dramatic putting of the old, old story, that will thrill our congregations and grip the hearts of men who know not the Christ.

1. Conviction of Sin

Saul Kane was an amateur prizefighter. He and his friend Bill have a fight in the opening lines of the tale, and Saul wins. This victory is followed by the usual debauch, which lasts until all the drunken crowd are asleep on the floor of the "Lion." No Russian novelist, nor a Dostoievesky, nor another, ever dared such realism as Masefield has given us in his picture of this night's sin. He makes sin all that it is—black and hideous:

"From three long hours of gin and smokes,
And two girls' breath and fifteen blokes,
A warmish night and windows shut
The room stank like a fox's gut.
The heat, and smell, and drinking deep
Began to stun the gang to sleep."

The Everlasting Mercy and the Widow in the Bye Street.

But this was too much for Saul Kane. He had still enough decency left to be ashamed. He wanted air. He went to a window and threw it open:

"I opened window wide and leaned
Out of that pigsty of the fiend,
And felt a cool wind go like grace
About the sleeping market-place.
The clock struck three, and sweetly, slowly,
The bells chimed, Holy, Holy, Holy;
And in a second's pause there fell
The cold note of the chapel bell,
And then a cock crew flapping wings,
And summat made me think of things!"

The Everlasting Mercy and the Widow in the Bye Street.

There it is: sin, and conviction of sin. Perhaps he thought of another man who had virtually betrayed the Christ, and the cock crew and made that other "think o' things."

Then came the reaction from that conviction; the battle against that same conviction that he must give up sin and surrender to the Christ; and a terrific battle it is, and a terrific description of that battle Masefield gives us, lightninglike in its vividness until there comes the little woman of God, Miss Bourne (a deaconess, if you please), who has always known the better man in Saul, who has followed him with her Christly love like "The Hound of Heaven." And how tenderly, yet how insistently, how pleadingly she speaks:

"'Saul Kane,' she said, 'when next you drink,
Do me the gentleness to think
That every drop of drink accursed
Makes Christ within you die of thirst;
That every dirty word you say
Is one more flint upon His way,
Another thorn about His head,
Another mock by where He tread;
Another nail another cross;
All that you are is that Christ's loss.'"

The Everlasting Mercy and the Widow in the Bye Street.

These searching words were beyond defeat. They went home to his already convicted heart and mind like arrows. They hurt. They cut. They awakened. They called. They pierced. They pounded with giant fists. They lashed like spiked whips. They burned like a soul on fire. They clamored, and they whispered like a mother's love, and at last his heart opened:

2. Forgiveness

"I know the very words I said,
They bayed like bloodhounds in my head.
'The water's going out to sea
And there's a great moon calling me;
But there's a great sun calls the moon,
And all God's bells will carol soon
For joy and glory, and delight
Of some one coming home to-night.'"

The Everlasting Mercy and the Widow in the Bye Street.

And then came the consciousness that he was "done with sin" forever:

"I knew that I had done with sin,
I knew that Christ had given me birth
To brother all the souls on earth,"

The Everlasting Mercy and the Widow in the Bye Street.

which was followed by two "glories"—the "Glory of the Lighted Mind" and the "Glory of the Lighted Soul." I think that perhaps in our preaching on conversion we make too little of the regeneration of the "mind." Masefield does not miss one whit of a complete regeneration.

3. The Joy of Conversion

"O glory of the lighted mind.
How dead I'd been, how dumb, how blind!
The station brook to my new eyes
Was babbling out of Paradise,
The waters rushing from the rain
Were singing, 'Christ has risen again!'"

The Everlasting Mercy and the Widow in the Bye Street.

And then the soul glory:

"O glory of the lighted Soul.
The dawn came up on Bradlow Knoll,
The dawn with glittering on the grasses,
The dawn which pass and never passes."

The Everlasting Mercy and the Widow in the Bye Street.

But that wasn't all. Masefield knows that the other self must be completely eradicated, so he makes Saul Kane change his environment entirely. He goes to the country. He plows, and as he plows he learns the lesson of the soil and cries:

"O Jesus, drive the coulter deep
To plow my living man from sleep."

The Everlasting Mercy and the Widow in the Bye Street.

And more word from Christ as he plowed:

"I knew that Christ was there with Callow,
That Christ was standing there with me,
That Christ had taught me what to be,
That I should plow and as I plowed
My Saviour Christ would sing aloud,
And as I drove the clods apart
Christ would be plowing in my heart,
Through rest-harrow and bitter roots,
Through all my bad life's rotten fruits."

The Everlasting Mercy and the Widow in the Bye Street.

And so it is, that beginning with his poems of youth, John Masefield starts out with a sympathetic social consciousness, but nothing more apparently. He brothers with the outcast and frankly prefers it. Then comes the great regenerating influence in his life, which we surely find in his expression of faith that the soul is immortal, and finally that upheaval which we call conversion with all of its incident steps from conviction of sin to repentance; and then to the consciousness of forgiveness; to the lighted mind and the lighted soul; and then to the uprooting of evil and the planting of good in the soil of his life. And so through Saul Kane we see John Masefield and have an explanation of that subtle yet revolutionary change in his life and his poetry, pregnant with illustrations that, to quote another English poet, Noyes, "Would make the dead arise!"