Rubble and Roseleaves, and Things of That Kind

by Frank Boreham

And wait to-morrow's flame.

I have heard scores of sermons on The Proper Observance of Sunday; and, somehow, I have never been impressed by their utility. One of these days some pulpit genius will preach on The Proper Observance of Saturday, and then, quite conceivably, the new day will dawn.

As I lay down my pen, a pair of experiences rush back upon my mind. The one befell me at sea, the other on land.

1. In the course of a voyage from New Zealand to England it became necessary—in order to harmonize the clocks and calendars on board with the clocks and calendars ashore—to take in an extra day. We awoke one morning and it was Saturday; we awoke next morning and it was Saturday again! That second Saturday was the strangest day that I have ever spent. I never realized the extent to which Saturday leads up to Sunday as I realized it that day.

2. I once numbered among my intimate friends a Jewish rabbi. I found his society extremely delightful and wonderfully instructive. He often took me to his synagogue, showed me its treasures, and initiated me into its mysteries. It was all very beautiful and very suggestive. But I invariably came away feeling dissatisfied and disappointed. I had been gazing upon the emblems and symbols of a Saturday faith. Like that weird Saturday on board the Tongariro, it was a Saturday that led to a Saturday, a Saturday that ushered in nothing holier or sweeter than itself.

Saturn with all his rings is grand; but the Sun is grander still! It is from the Sun that Saturn derives his brightness and his glory. Ask Saturn the secret of his splendor, and it is to the Sun that he unhesitatingly points. As it is with these mighty orbs themselves, so is it with the days that bear their names. As Samuel Johnson and Charlotte Elliott knew so well, it is the glory of Saturday to prepare the way for Sunday. Saturday belongs to the Order of St. John the Baptist. John was the greatest of all the sons of men, yet it was his mission to clear the path for the coming of a greater. The old world's Saturday-Sabbath, commemorating a completed Creation, led up to the new world's Sunday-Sabbath, commemorating a completed Redemption. The oracles and mysteries that I saw in the synagogue, the emblems and expressions of a Saturday faith, were sublime. But their sublimity lay in the fact that they pointed men to, and prepared men for, a Sunday faith, a faith that gathers about a wondrous Cross and an empty tomb, a faith from which that Saturday faith, like Saturn bathed in sunlight, derives alike its lustre and its fame.

VI—THE CHIMES

It was Christmas Eve—an Australian Christmas Eve. To an Englishman it must always seem a weird, uncanny hotch-potch. He never grows accustomed to the scorching Christmases that come to him beneath the Southern Cross. Southey once declared that, however long a man lives, the first twenty years of his life will always represent the biggest half of it. That is indisputably so. The thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts. The first twenty years of life fasten upon our hearts sentiments and traditions that will dominate all our days. I spent my first twenty Christmases in the old land. I have spent far more than twenty in the new. Yet, whenever I find old Father Christmas wiping the perspiration from his brow as he wanders among the roses and strawberries of our fierce Australian mid-summer, I feel secretly sorry for him. He looks as jolly as ever, yet he gives you the impression of having lost his way. He seems to be casting about him for snowflakes and icicles.

But, as I was saying, it was Christmas Eve—an Australian Christmas Eve. The day had been sultry and trying. After tea I sauntered off across the fields to a spot among the fir-trees, at which I can always rely upon meeting a few grey squirrels, an old brown 'possum, and some other friends of mine. I had scarcely taken my seat on a grassy knoll, overlooking a belt of bush, when the laughing-jackasses broke into a wild, unearthly chorus in the wooded valley below. And then, a few minutes later, the cool evening air was flooded with a torrent of harmony that transported me across the years and across the seas. The squirrels, the 'possum, and the kookaburras were left leagues and leagues behind. From a lofty steeple that crowned a distant crest there floated over hill and hollow the pealing and the chiming of the bells.

The magic that slept in the lute of the Pied Piper was as nothing compared with the magic of the bells. Beneath the witchery of their music, time and space shrivel into nothingness and are no more. We are wafted to old familiar places; we see the old familiar faces; we enter into fellowship with lands far off and ages long departed. Frank Bullen heard our Australian bells. He was only a sailor-boy at the time. 'Often,' he says, 'I would stand on deck when my ship was anchored in Sydney Harbor on Sunday morning, and listen to the church bells playing "Sicilian Mariners" with a dull ache at my heart, a deep longing for something, I knew not what.' The bells, according to their wont, were annihilating time and space. Beneath the enchantment of their minstrelsy he sped, as on angels' wings, away from the realities of his rough and roving sea-life, into the quiet haven of a tender past. He was back in his old seat in a little chapel in Harrow Road. Every Englishman overseas will understand.