I have no intent of doing so: quite the reverse of that. But I feel the separation between me and the people round me, so bitterly, in the world of my own which they cannot enter; and I see their entrance to it now barred so absolutely by their own resolves, (they having deliberately and self-congratulatingly chosen for themselves the Manchester Cotton Mill instead of the Titian,) that it becomes every hour more urged upon [[193]]me that I shall have to leave,—not father and mother, for they have left me; nor children, nor lands, for I have none,—but at least this spiritual land and fair domain of human art and natural peace,—because I am a man of unclean lips, and dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips, and therefore am undone, because mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Hosts.
I say it, and boldly. Who else is there of you who can stand with me, and say the same? It is an age of progress, you tell me. Is your progress chiefly in this, that you cannot see the King, the Lord of Hosts, but only Baal, instead of Him?
“The Sun is God,” said Turner, a few weeks before he died with the setting rays of it on his face.
He meant it, as Zoroaster meant it; and was a Sun-worshipper of the old breed. But the unheard-of foulness of your modern faith in Baal is its being faith without worship. The Sun is—not God,—you say. Not by any manner of means. A gigantic railroad accident, perhaps,—a coruscant δινος,—put on the throne of God like a limelight; and able to serve you, eventually, much better than ever God did.
I repeat my challenge. You,—Te Deum-singing princes, colonels, bishops, choristers, and what else,—do any of you know what Te means? or what Deum? or what Laudamus? Have any of your eyes seen the King, or His Sabaoth? Will any of you say, with your hearts, ‘Heaven and earth are full of His glory; [[194]]and in His name we will set up our banners, and do good work, whether we live or die’?
You, in especial, Squires of England, whose fathers were England’s bravest and best,—by how much better and braver you are than your fathers, in this Age of Progress, I challenge you: Have any of your eyes seen the King? Are any of your hands ready for His work, and for His weapons,—even though they should chance to be pruning-hooks instead of spears?
Who am I, that should challenge you—do you ask? My mother was a sailor’s daughter, so please you; one of my aunts was a baker’s wife—the other, a tanner’s; and I don’t know much more about my family, except that there used to be a greengrocer of the name in a small shop near the Crystal Palace. Something of my early and vulgar life, if it interests you, I will tell in next Fors: in this one, it is indeed my business, poor gipsy herald as I am, to bring you such challenge, though you shall hunt and hang me for it.
Squires, are you, and not Workmen, nor Labourers, do you answer next?
Yet, I have certainly sometimes seen engraved over your family vaults, and especially on the more modern tablets, those comfortful words, “Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord.” But I observe that you are usually content, with the help of the village stone-mason, to say only this concerning your dead; and that you but rarely venture to add the “yea” of the Spirit, [[195]]“that they may rest from their Labours, and their Works do follow them.” Nay, I am not even sure that many of you clearly apprehend the meaning of such followers and following; nor, in the most pathetic funeral sermons, have I heard the matter made strictly intelligible to your hope. For indeed, though you have always graciously considered your church no less essential a part of your establishment than your stable, you have only been solicitous that there should be no broken-winded steeds in the one, without collateral endeavour to find clerks for the other in whom the breath of the Spirit should be unbroken also.
As yet it is a text which, seeing how often we would fain take the comfort of it, surely invites explanation. The implied difference between those who die in the Lord, and die—otherwise; the essential distinction between the labour from which these blessed ones rest, and the work which in some mysterious way follows them; and the doubt—which must sometimes surely occur painfully to a sick or bereaved squire—whether the labours of his race are always severe enough to make rest sweet, or the works of his race always distinguished enough to make their following superb,—ought, it seems to me, to cause the verse to glow on your (lately, I observe, more artistic) tombstones, like the letters on Belshazzar’s wall; and with the more lurid and alarming light, that this “following” of the works is distinctly connected, in the parallel passage of [[196]]Timothy, with “judgment” upon the works; and that the kinds of them which can securely front such judgment, are there said to be, in some cases, “manifest beforehand,” and, in no case, ultimately obscure.