“It is Snale’s. He is a contemptible cur and yet it is not his fault. He has heard sermons about all sorts of supernatural subjects for thirty years, and he has never once been warned against meanness, so of course he supposes that supernatural subjects are everything and meanness is nothing. But I will not detain you any longer now, for you are busy. Good-night, sir.”
This was rather abrupt and disappointing. However, I was much absorbed in the morrow, and passed on.
Although I despised Snale, his letter was the beginning of a great trouble to me. I had now been preaching for many months, and had met with no response whatever. Occasionally a stranger or two visited the chapel, and with what eager eyes did I not watch for them on the next Sunday, but none of them came twice. It was amazing to me that I could pour out myself as I did—poor although I knew that self to be—and yet make so little impression. Not one man or woman seemed any different because of anything I had said or done, and not a soul kindled at any word of mine, no matter with what earnestness it might be charged. How I groaned over my incapacity to stir in my people any participation in my thoughts or care for them!
Looking at the history of those days now from a distance of years, everything assumes its proper proportion. I was at work, it is true, amongst those who were exceptionally hard and worldly, but I was seeking amongst men (to put it in orthodox language) what I ought to have sought with God alone. In other, and perhaps plainer phrase, I was expecting from men a sympathy which proceeds from the Invisible only. Sometimes, indeed, it manifests itself in the long-postponed justice of time, but more frequently it is nothing more and nothing less than a consciousness of approval by the Unseen, a peace unspeakable, which is bestowed on us when self is suppressed.
I did not know then how little one man can change another, and what immense and persistent efforts are necessary—efforts which seldom succeed except in childhood—to accomplish anything but the most superficial alteration of character. Stories are told of sudden conversions, and of course if a poor simple creature can be brought to believe that hell-fire awaits him as the certain penalty of his misdeeds, he will cease to do them; but this is no real conversion, for essentially he remains pretty much the same kind of being that he was before.
I remember while this mood was on me, that I was much struck with the absolute loneliness of Jesus, and with His horror of that death upon the cross. He was young and full of enthusiastic hope, but when He died He had found hardly anything but misunderstanding. He had written nothing, so that He could not expect that His life would live after Him. Nevertheless His confidence in His own errand had risen so high, that He had not hesitated to proclaim Himself the Messiah: not the Messiah the Jews were expecting, but still the Messiah. I dreamed over His walks by the lake, over the deeper solitude of His last visit to Jerusalem, and over the gloom of that awful Friday afternoon.
The hold which He has upon us is easily explained, apart from the dignity of His recorded sayings and the purity of His life. There is no Saviour for us like the hero who has passed triumphantly through the distress which troubles us. Salvation is the spectacle of a victory by another over foes like our own. The story of Jesus is the story of the poor and forgotten. He is not the Saviour for the rich and prosperous, for they want no Saviour. The healthy, active, and well-to-do need Him not, and require nothing more than is given by their own health and prosperity. But every one who has walked in sadness because his destiny has not fitted his aspirations; every one who, having no opportunity to lift himself out of his little narrow town or village circle of acquaintances, has thirsted for something beyond what they could give him; everybody who, with nothing but a dull, daily round of mechanical routine before him, would welcome death, if it were martyrdom for a cause; every humblest creature, in the obscurity of great cities or remote hamlets, who silently does his or her duty without recognition—all these turn to Jesus, and find themselves in Him. He died, faithful to the end, with infinitely higher hopes, purposes, and capacity than mine, and with almost no promise of anything to come of them.
Something of this kind I preached one Sunday, more as a relief to myself than for any other reason. Mardon was there, and with him a girl whom I had not seen before. My sight is rather short, and I could not very well tell what she was like. After the service was over he waited for me, and said he had done so to ask me if I would pay him a visit on Monday evening. I promised to do so, and accordingly went.
I found him living in a small brick-built cottage near the outskirts of the town, the rental of which I should suppose would be about seven or eight pounds a year. There was a patch of ground in front and a little garden behind—a kind of narrow strip about fifty feet long, separated from the other little strips by iron hurdles. Mardon had tried to keep his garden in order, and had succeeded, but his neighbour was disorderly, and had allowed weeds to grow, blacking bottles and old tin cans to accumulate, so that whatever pleasure Mardon’s labours might have afforded was somewhat spoiled.
He himself came to the door when I knocked, and I was shown into a kind of sitting-room with a round table in the middle and furnished with Windsor chairs, two arm-chairs of the same kind standing on either side the fireplace. Against the window was a smaller table with a green baize tablecloth, and about half-a-dozen plants stood on the window-sill, serving as a screen. In the recess on one side of the fireplace was a cupboard, upon the top of which stood a tea-caddy, a workbox, some tumblers, and a decanter full of water; the other side being filled with a bookcase and books. There were two or three pictures on the walls; one was a portrait of Voltaire, another of Lord Bacon, and a third was Albert Dürer’s St. Jerome. This latter was an heirloom, and greatly prized I could perceive, as it was hung in the place of honour over the mantelpiece.