“Father Mathew, inspired with more saintly fervour——”
“Who knows how far he might carry the divine light to which so many hearts are awakening in secret? This first Christianity, it was but 'the false dawn.' Yes, we may think so.”
Here there was a pause for a few moments, and then I put in a word to the effect that it would be difficult to commend a gospel of content to Poverty.
“But,” said Vernet, "it will be addressed more to the rich and well-to-do, as you call them, bidding them be content with enough. Not forbidding them to strive for more than enough—that would never do. The good of mankind demands that all its energies should be maintained, but not that its energies should be meanly employed in grubbing for the luxury that is no enjoyment but only a show, or that palls as soon as it is once enjoyed, and then is no more felt as luxury than the labourer's second pair of boots or the mechanic's third shirt a week. For the men of thousands per annum the Gospel of Content would be the wise, wise, wise old injunction to plain living and high thinking, only with one addition both beautiful and wise: kind thinking, and the high and the kind thinking made good in deed. And it would work, this gospel; we may be sure of it already. For luxury has became common; it is being found out. Where there was one person at the beginning of the century who had daily experience of its fatiguing disappointments, now there are fifty. Like everything else, it loses distinction by coming abundantly into all sorts of hands; and meanwhile other and nobler kinds of distinction have multiplied and have gained acknowledgment. And from losing distinction—this you must have observed—luxury is becoming vulgar; and I don't know why the time should be so very far off when it will be accounted shameful. Certain it is that year by year a greater number of minds, and such as mostly determine the currents of social sentiment, think luxury low; without going deeper than the mere look of it, perhaps. These are hopeful signs. Here is good encouragement to stand out and preach a gospel of content which would be an education in simplicity, dignity, happiness, and yet more an education of heart and spirit. For nothing that a man can do in this world works so powerfully for his own spiritual good as the habit of sacrifice to kindness. It is so like a miracle that it is, I am sure, the one way—the one way appointed by the laws of our spiritual growth.
“Yes, and what about preaching the gospel of content to Poverty? Well, there we must be careful to discriminate—careful to disentangle poverty from some other things which are the same thing in the common idea. Say but this, that there must be no content with squalor, none with any sort of uncleanness, and poverty takes its own separate place and its own unsmirched aspect. An honourable poverty, clear of squalor, any man should be able to endure with a tranquil mind. To attain to that tranquillity is to attain to nobleness; and persistence in it, though effort fail and desert go quite without reward, ennobles. Contentment in poverty does not mean crouching to it or under it. Contentment is not cowardice, but fortitude. There is no truer assertion of manliness, and none with more grace and sweetness. Before it can have an established place in the breast of any man, envy must depart from it—envy, jealousy, greed, readiness to take half-honest gains, a horde of small ignoble sentiments not only disturbing but poisonous to the ground they grow in. Ah, believe me! if a man had eloquence enough, fire enough, and that command of sympathy that your Gordon seems to have had (not to speak of a man like Mahomet or to touch on more sacred names), he might do wonders for mankind in a single generation by preaching to rich and poor the several doctrines of the Gospel of Content. A curse on the mean strivings, stealings, and hoardings that survive from our animal ancestry, and another curse (by your permission) on the gaudy vanities that we have set up for objects in life since we became reasoning creatures.”
* * * * *
In effect, here the conversation ended. More was said, but nothing worth recalling. Drifting back to less serious talk, we gossiped till midnight, and then parted with the heartiest desire (I speak for myself) of meeting soon again. But on our way back to town Vernet recurred for a moment to the subject of his discourse, saying:
“I don't make out exactly what you think now of the prospect we were talking of.”
My answer pleased him. “I incline to think,” said I, “what I have long thought: that if there is any such future for us, and I believe there is, we of the older European nations will be nowhere when it comes. In existence—yes, perhaps; but gone down. You see we are becoming greybeards already; while you in Russia are boys, with every mark of boyhood on you. You, you are a new race—the only new race in the world; and it is plain that you swarm with ideas of precisely the kind that, when you come to maturity, may re-invigorate the world. But first, who knows what deadly wars?”
He pressed his hand upon my knee in a way that spoke a great deal. We parted, and two months afterwards the Vernet whose real name ended in “ieff” was “happed in lead.”