“Come, come, my good patient, let me examine your arm, now I have recovered my breath a little. It will be a kindness to get you back to your work in the pit, if this is the manner you talk when out of it. We shall have the rector coming to call you to account for flat blasphemy.”
“Is it blasphemy to complain that Christ’s church is not tended as Christ would have it? Is it blasphemy to point out how it is that he has not due honour? Is it——”
“No, no,” said Mr. Severn. “Mr. Milford knows, as few out of his profession can know, where dwells blasphemy, and where piety: in how few places the one; under how many roofs the other. He sees men under the severest trial,—that of varied suffering; and if the natural language of complaint sometimes meets his ear, he will tell you how much oftener looks of patience and words of resignation are to be found in the sick chamber. He knows that if you sometimes say what he may think unwise, you have not, in your suffering, given vent to that which is irreligious.”
Mr. Milford was ready to testify to his patient’s Christian bearing under his late trial. When he spoke of blasphemy, it was only in the sense in which he often heard it used about those who speak against the church.
“One would think,” said Mr. Severn, “that if any were jealous for the church, it should be myself, to whom the church is my all, in every sense. Yet I declare that what we are wont to call blasphemy is much seldomer any irreverence to God than discontent with man’s doings. As soon as any of man’s established ways of honouring God are found to be faulty, the cry of blasphemy is raised against the fault-finder, though the glory of God may be his aim as well as his plea. It was once blasphemy to blame the Pope. It is now blasphemy to hint that poor curates might be better used. This sort of blasphemy may now, however, be found in every other house within these realms; while the real blasphemy is rare, very rare. Milford, how many blasphemers have you met with among your patients? I, for my part, never saw one,—out of the gin-shop. Within it, two legged creatures are no longer men, however they may still use their tongues to bless or curse at haphazard.”
Mr. Milford tried to recollect. He could remember only two instances;—one of a man in the extremity of pain, suddenly blinded by a horrible accident in the pit. This was no case, as sanity was lost for the time; but it made the beholder’s blood run cold so that no other such instance could ever occur without his remembering it, he was sure. The other was also a case of agony,—of the agony of disappointed hope. A very poor man, with a sick wife, had been promised work, and the promise was broken. He reviled heaven and earth when he saw his wife sinking from want. But at the first moment of her revival he repented, and the last of his sorrows to be got over, was remorse for his impiety.
“You would find it less easy to reckon the cases of piety you meet with, in and out of the pale of the church.”
“There are so many degrees of piety, one hardly likes to say that any body is wholly without. It is my lot to be much with sufferers; and while there are some aged folks, and strong men laid low, who give themselves much to psalms and prayers, it is rare to meet with parents who do not tell their children that it is God’s hand which is upon them for good, or with children who do not more or less strive to lie still under their sickness, ‘like a dumb lamb before the shearer,’ as their parents say.—There is one such, sir, one of those patient little ones,—as you can testify, for I know you have held him in your arms for many a half hour.”
“What! little Tim? I have often wondered what is passing in that poor child’s mind, when he has lain breathing his feverish breath on my bosom. Other children, while thus lying still from feebleness, turn their eyes from the clock to the kitten, and from the flickering fire to follow their mothers’ or sisters’ doings about the house. This child’s eyes roll in vain, but not the less patiently does he watch his pain away. I often wonder what is working in his little mind.”
“The thought of my pony will work in his mind the next time he is ill, I fancy,” observed Milford. “Do but see how he pats him, and feels out the mane, while his mother lifts him up?”