If some suspicious reader thinks that I am overestimating the danger of wearing ready-made clothes, I need only remind him that even such gigantic humans as James Chalmers, of New Guinea, and Robert Louis Stevenson feared that ready-made clothes might yet stand between the Church and her conquest of the world. Some of the missionaries insisted in clothing the natives of New Guinea in the garb of Old England, but Chalmers protested, and protested vigorously. 'I am opposed to it,' he exclaimed. 'My experience is that clothing natives is nearly as bad as introducing spirits among them. Wherever clothing has been introduced, the natives are disappearing before various diseases, especially consumption, and I am fully convinced that the same will happen in New Guinea. Our civilization, whatever it is, is unfitted for them in their present state, and no attempt should be made to force it upon them.'
With this, Robert Louis Stevenson most cordially concurred. Nobody who knows him will suspect Stevenson of any lack of gallantry, but he always eyed the arrival of the missionary's wife with a certain amount of apprehension. 'The married missionary,' says Stevenson, 'may offer to the native what he is much in want of—a higher picture of domestic life; but the woman at the missionary's elbow tends to keep him in touch with Europe, and out of touch with Polynesia, and threatens to perpetuate, and even to ingrain, parochial decencies far best forgotten. The mind of the lady missionary tends to be continually busied about dress. She can be taught with extreme difficulty to think any costume decent but that to which she grew accustomed on Clapham Common; and to gratify her prejudice, the native is put to useless expense, his mind is tainted with the morbidities of Europe, and his health is set in danger.' We remember the pride with which poor John Williams, the martyr missionary of Erromanga, viewed the introduction of bonnets among the women of Raratonga; but it was not the greatest of his triumphs after all. The bonnets have vanished long ago, but the fragrant influence of John Williams abides perpetually. We sometimes forget that our immaculate tweed trousers and our dainty skirts and blouses are no essential part of the Christian gospel. As a matter of fact, that gospel was first revealed to a people who knew nothing of such trappings. We do not necessarily hasten the millennium by introducing among untutored races a carnival of ready-made clothes.
And it is just as certain that you do not bring the soul nearer to its highest goal by forcing on it a fashion for which it is totally unsuited. And here I come back to Drummond. During his last illness at Tunbridge Wells, he remarked that, at the age of twelve, he made a conscientious study of Bonar's God's Way of Peace. 'I fear,' he said, 'that the book did me more harm than good. I tried to force my inner experience into the mould represented by that book, and it was impossible.' In one of Moody's after-meetings in London, Drummond was dealing with a young girl who was earnestly seeking the Saviour. At last he startled her by exclaiming, 'You must give up reading James's Anxious Enquirer.' She wondered how he had guessed that she had been reading it; but he had detected from her conversation that she was making his own earlier mistake. She was trying to think as John Angell James thought, to weep as he wept, and to find her way to faith precisely as he found his. Drummond told her to read nothing but the New Testament, and, he said later on, 'A fortnight of that put her right!'
There lies the whole secret. Our souls no more resemble each other than our bodies; they are not made in a mould and turned out by the million. No two are exactly alike. Ready-made clothes will never exactly fit. Bonar and James, Bunyan and Law, Doddridge and Wesley, Müller and Spurgeon, may help me amazingly. They may help me by showing me how they—each for himself—found their way into the presence of the Eternal and, like Christian at the Palace Beautiful, were robed and armed for pilgrimage. But if they lead me to suppose that I must experience their sensations, enjoy their elations, pass through their depressions, struggle and laugh and weep and sing just as they did, they have done me serious damage. They have led me away from those secret chambers in which the King adorns the soul in beautiful and comely garments, and they have left me a mere wearer of ready-made clothes.
III
THE HIDDEN GOLD
I was enjoying the very modest but very satisfying pleasures of a ride in a tramcar when the following adventure befell me. It was a bright, sunny winter's day; the scenery on either hand was extremely delightful; and I was cogitating upon the circumstance that so much felicity could be obtained in return for so small an expenditure. But my admiration of mountain and river and bush was suddenly and rudely interrupted. A lady fellow passenger reported that, since entering the car, three sovereigns had been extracted from her purse. That she had them when she stepped into the car she knew for certain, for she remembered seeing them when she opened the purse to pay her fare. She had taken out the two pennies, inserted the ticket in their place, and returned the purse to her handbag, which had been lying on the seat beside her. The inspector had now boarded the car; she had opened her purse to take out the ticket, and, lo, the gold had gone! It was a most embarrassing situation. I was ruefully speculating as to how I should again face my congregation after being shadowed by such a dark suspicion. When, as abruptly as it had arisen, the mystery happily cleared. With the most profuse apologies, the lady explained that it was her birthday; her daughter had that morning presented her with a new purse; the compartments of this receptacle were more elaborate and ingenious than she had noticed; and she had found the sovereigns reposing in a division of the purse which had eluded her previous observation. There was no more to be said. We wished the poor beflustered soul many happy returns of the day; she left the car at the next corner; and I once more abandoned myself to the charms of the landscape.
Now, this sort of thing is very common. We are continually fancying that we have been robbed of the precious things we still possess. The old lady who searches everywhere for the spectacles that adorn her temples; the clerk who ransacks the office for the pen behind his ear; and the boy who charges his brother with the theft of the pen-knife that lurks in the mysterious depths of his own fearful and wonderful pocket—these are each of them typical of much.
I happened the other evening to saunter into a room in which a certain debating society was holding its weekly meeting. The paper out of which the discussion arose had been read before my arrival. But I gathered from the remarks of the speakers that it had dealt with a scientific subject, and that questions of antiquity, geology, and evolution were involved. After the fashion of debating societies, the entire universe was promptly subjected to a complete overhaul. If the truth must be told, I am afraid that I must confess to having forgotten the eloquent contentions of the different speakers; but out of the hurly-burly of that wordy conflict one utterance comes back to me. It appealed to me at the time as being very curious, very pathetic, and very striking. It made upon my mind an indelible impression. A tall young fellow rose, and, in the shortest speech of the debate, imparted to the discussion the only touch of real feeling by which it was illumined. I do not know what it was that had struck so deep a chord in his soul and set it all vibrating. It is wonderful how some stray sound or sight or scent will sometimes summon to the mind a rush of sacred memories. After a preliminary platitude or two, this speaker suddenly referred to the connexion between science and faith. His eyes flashed with manifest feeling; his whole being took on the tone of a man in deadly earnest; his voice quivered with emotion. In one vivid sentence he graphically described his aged grandfather as the old man donned his spectacles and devoutly read—his faith unclouded by any shadow of doubt—his morning chapter from the well-worn, large-type Bible. And then, with a ring of such genuine passion that it sounded to me like the cry of a creature in pain, he exclaimed, 'And, gentlemen, I would give both my hands, and give them cheerfully, if I could believe as my old grandfather believed!' He immediately sat down. One or two members coughed. I could see from the faces of the others that they all felt that the debate was getting out of bounds. The world was wide, and the solar system fairly extensive; but this speaker had wandered beyond the remotest frontiers of the universe. And yet to me the utterance to which they had just listened was the speech of the evening, the one speech to be remembered: 'Gentlemen, I would give both my hands, and give them cheerfully, if I could believe as my grandfather believed!'
Now this was very pathetic, this pair of eager eyes suddenly turned inward; this discovery of an empty soul; this comparison with his grandfather's golden hoard; and this pitiful confession of abject poverty. I felt sorry for him, just as I felt sorry for the lady in the tramcar. The lady in the tramcar looked into a purse that she thought to be empty, and suffered all the agony of a great loss. The young fellow in the debating society looked into the recesses of his own spirit, and cried out that there was nothing there. And it was all a mistake—in both cases. The sovereigns were in the purse after all. And faith was in the apparently empty soul after all. But neither of the victims knew that they possessed what they lamented. They were both exactly like the old lady with the spectacles on her temples, like the clerk with his pen behind his ear, like the boy with the penknife in his pocket. In the case of the lady in the car the similitude is clear enough. I aspire to show that the analogy applies just as surely to the young fellow and his faith. And to that end let me raise a cloud of questions as a dog might start a covey of birds.