The following letter is an interesting and somewhat pathetic example of religious madness; not a little, however, connected with mismanagement of money. The writer has passed great part of his life in a conscientious endeavour to teach what my correspondent Mr. Lyttel would, I think, consider “salutary truth”; but his intense egotism and absence of imaginative power hindered him from perceiving that many other people were doing the same, and meeting with the same disappointments. Gradually he himself occupied the entire centre of his horizon; and he appoints himself to “judge the United States in particular, and the world in general.”
The introductory clause of the letter refers somewhat indignantly to a representation I had irreverently made to him that a prophet should rather manifest his divine mission by providing himself miraculously with meat and drink, than by lodging in widows’ houses without in anywise multiplying their meal for them; and then leaving other people to pay his bill.
“So long as you deliberately refuse to help in any way a man who (you have every reason to know) possesses more of the righteousness of God than yourself, (when you have ample means to do so,) how can you be said to ‘do the will of your Father which is in Heaven’? or how can you expect to receive understanding to ‘know of the doctrine’ of the Saviour, (or of my doctrine,) ‘whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself’? If you possessed a genuine ‘faith,’ you would exercise humanity towards such a man as myself, and leave the result with God; and not presumptuously decide that it was ‘wrong’ to relieve ‘a righteous man’ in distress, lest [[112]]you should encourage him in delusions which you choose to suppose him to be labouring under.
“People seem to suppose that it is the Saviour who will judge the world, if any one does. He distinctly declares that He will not. ‘If any one hear my words, and believe not, I judge him not; for I came not to judge the world, but to save the world. He that rejecteth me, and receiveth not my words, hath one that judgeth him: the word that I have spoken, the same shall judge him in the last day.’ [John xii. 47, 48]. I represent that ‘WORD’ which the Saviour spoke, and I have already judged, and condemned, this country, and the United States, in particular; and Christendom, and the World in general. I have for twenty years been a preacher of ‘the Righteousness of God’ to this generation (as Noah was for a hundred years to his generation), and I have proved by actual experiment that none among the men of this generation can be induced to ‘enter the kingdom of heaven’ until the predicted ‘time of trouble, such as was not since there was a nation,’ comes suddenly, and compels those who are ready to enter the kingdom of God, to do so at once; and I know not how soon after I leave this country the ‘trouble’ will come; perhaps immediately, perhaps in about a year’s time; but come it must; and the sooner it comes, the sooner it will be over, I suppose.
“Yours faithfully.”
The following specimen of the kind of letters which the “judge of the United States in particular, and the World in general,” leaves the people favoured by his judgment to send to his friends, may as well supplement his own letter:—
“Mr. (J. of U.S. in p. and the W. in g.)’s name will, I trust, excuse me to you for writing; but my house entirely failed me, and I, with my child, are now really in great want. I write [[113]]trusting that, after your former kindness to me, you will feel disposed to send me a little assistance.
“I would not have written, but I am seriously in need.
“Please address to me,” etc.
Whether, however, the judge of the world in general errs most in expecting me to pay the necessary twopences to his hosts, or the world in general itself, in expecting me to pay necessary twopences to its old servants when it has no more need of them, may be perhaps questionable. Here is a paragraph cut out of an application for an hospital vote, which I received the other day:—
Mr. A., aged seventy-one, has been a subscriber to the Pension Fund forty-five years, the Almshouse Fund eighteen years, and the Orphan Fund four years. He is now, in consequence of his advanced age, and the infirmities attendant on a dislocated shoulder, asthma, and failing sight, incapable of earning sufficient for a subsistence for himself and wife, who is afflicted with chronic rheumatic gout. He was apprenticed to Mr. B., and has worked for Mr. C. D. forty years, and his earnings at present are very small.
Next, here is a piece of a letter disclosing another curious form of modern distress, in which the masters and mistresses become dependent for timely aid on their servants. This is at least as old, however, as Miss Edgeworth’s time; I think the custom is referred to at the toilette of Miss Georgiana Falconer in ‘Patronage.’
“Every day makes me bitterly believe more and more what you say about the wickedness of working by fire and steam, and the harm and insidious sapping of true life that comes from large mills and all that is connected with them. One of my servants told my sister to-day (with an apology) that her mother [[114]]had told her in her letter to ask me if I would sell her my children’s old clothes, etc.—that indeed many ladies did—her mother had often bought things. Oh! it made me feel horrible. We try to buy strong clothes, and mend them to the last, and then sometimes give them away; but selling clothes to poor people seems to me dreadful. I never thought ladies and gentlemen would sell their clothes even to shops—till we came to live here, and happened to know of its being done. It surely must be wrong and bad, or I should not feel something in me speaking so strongly against it, as mean and unholy.”
A piece of country gossip on bees and birds, with a humiliating passage about my own Coniston country, may refresh us a little after dwelling on these serious topics:—