The Silent Isle by Arthur Christopher Benson (books to read this summer txt) 📕

the matter. Besides, I cannot honestly trace in my own case the beneficial results of the process. These rubs only make me resolve that in the future I will not have anything to do with such matters at all. It is true that I shall not keep my resolution; but that does not mend matters appreciably.

Moreover, instead of giving me a wholesome sense of hopefulness and confidence, it only makes me feel acutely the dreary and sordid elements which seem inextricably intermingled with life, which might otherwise be calm, serene, and beautiful. I do not see that any of the people concerned are the better for any of the incidents which have occurred--indeed, I think that they are all the worse for them. It is not encouraging or inspiring to have the meanness and pettiness of human nature brought before one, and to feel conscious of one's own weakness and feebleness as well. Some sorrows and losses purge, brace, and strengthen. Such trials as these stain, perplex, enfeeble.

The immediate result of it all is that the work which I can do and desire to do, and which, if anything, I seem to have been sent into the world to do, is delayed and hindered. No good can come out of the things which I am going to spend the hours in trying to mend. Neither will any of the people concerned profit by my example in the matter, because they will only have their confidence in my judgment and amiability diminished.

And so I walk, as I say, along the sandy lanes, with the fresh air and the still sunlight all about me, kept by my own unquiet heart from the peace that seems to be all about me within the reach of my hand. The sense of God's compassion for his feeble creatures does not help me; how can he compassionate the littleness for which he is himself responsible? It is at such moments that God seems remote, careless, indifferent, occupied in his own designs; strong in his ineffable strength, leaving the frail and sensitive creatures whom he has made, to whom he has given hopes and dreams too large for their feeble nerves and brains, to stumble onwards over vale and hill without a comforting smile or a sustaining hand. Would that I could feel otherwise! He gives us the power of framing an ideal of hopefulness, peace, sweetness, and strength; and then he mocks at our attempts to reach them. I do not ask to see every step of the road plainly; I only long to know that we are going forwards, and not backwards, I must submit, I know; but I cannot believe that he only demands a tame and sullen submission; rather he must desire that I should face him bravely and fearlessly, in hope and confidence, as a loving and beloved son.


V


How often in sermons we are exhorted to effort! How rarely are we told precisely how to begin! How glibly it is taken for granted that we are all equally capable of it. Yet energy itself is a quality, a gift of temperament. The man who, like Sir Richard Grenville, says "Fight on," when there is nothing left to fight with or to fight for, except that indefinable thing honour, or the man who, like Sir Andrew Barton, says:


"I'll but lie down and bleed awhile,
And then I'll rise and fight again;"--


they are people of heroic temper, and cannot be called a common species. "Do the next thing," says the old motto. But what if the next thing is one of many, none of them very important, and if at the same time one has a good book to read, a warm fire to sit by, an amusing friend to talk to? "He who of such delights can judge, and spare to interpose them oft, is not unwise," says Milton. Most of us have a certain amount of necessary work to do in the world, and it can by no means be regarded as established that we are also bound to do unnecessary work. Supposing that one's heart is overflowing with mercy, compassion, and charity, there are probably a hundred channels in which the stream can flow; but that is only because a good many hearts have no such abounding springs of love; and thus there is room for the philanthropist; but if all men were patient, laborious, and affectionate, the philanthropist's gifts would find comparatively little scope for their exercise; there might even be a queue of benevolent people waiting for admission to any house where there was sickness or bereavement. Moreover, all sufferers do not want to be cheered; they often prefer to be left alone; and to be the compulsory recipient of the charity you do not require is an additional burden. A person who is always hungering and thirsting to exercise a higher influence upon others is apt to be an unmitigated bore. The thing must be given if it is required, not poured over people's heads, as Aristophanes says, with a ladle. To be ready to help is a finer quality than to insist on helping, because, after all, if life is a discipline, the aim is that we have to find the way out of our troubles, not that we should be lugged and hauled through them, "bumped into paths of peace," as Dickens says. Just as justice requires to be tempered by mercy, so energy requires to be tempered by inaction. But the difficulty is for the indolent, the dreamy, the fastidious, the loafer, the vagabond. Energy is to a large extent a question of climate and temperament. What of the dwellers in a rich and fertile country, where a very little work will produce the means of livelihood, and where the temperature does not require elaborate houses, carefully warmed, or abundance of conventional clothing? A dweller in Galilee at the time of the Christian era, a dweller in Athens at the time of Socrates--it was possible for each of these to live simply and comfortably without any great expenditure of labour; does morality require that one should work harder than one need for luxuries that one does not want? Neither our Lord nor Socrates seems to have thought so. Our Lord himself went about teaching and doing good; but there is no evidence that he began his work before he was thirty, and he interposed long spaces of reflection and solitude. If the Gospel of work were to be paramount, he would have filled his days with feverish energy; but from the beginning to the end there is abundance of texts and incidents which show that he thought excessive industry rather a snare than otherwise. He spoke very sternly of the bad effect of riches. He told his disciples not to labour for perishable things, not to indulge anxiety about food and raiment, but to live like birds and flowers; he rebuked a bustling, hospitable woman--he praised one who preferred to sit and hear him talk. His whole attitude was to encourage reflection rather than philanthropy, to invite people to think and converse about moral principles rather than to fling themselves into mundane activities. There is far more justification in the Gospel for a life of kindly and simple leisure than there is for what may be called a busy and successful career. The Christian is taught rather to love God and to be interested in his neighbour than to love respectability and to make a fortune. Indeed, to make a fortune on Christian lines is a thing which requires a somewhat sophistical defence.

And thus the old theory of accepting salvation rather than working for it is based not so much upon the theory that in the presence of absolute and infinite perfection there is little difference between the life of the entirely virtuous and the entirely vicious man, as upon the fact that if one's limitations of circumstance and heredity are the gift of God, one's salvation must be his gift also. We do not know to what extent our power of choice and our freedom of action is limited; it is quite obvious that it is to a certain extent limited by causes over which we have no control, and it is therefore best to trust God entirely in the matter, and to acquit him of injustice, if we can, though it must be a hard matter for the innocent child who is the victim of his ancestor's propensities to believe that the best has been done for him that it was possible to do.

And thus the question of effort is not a simple one, though it may be said roughly that as every one's ideal is at all events somewhat higher than his practice, it is a plain duty to make one's practice conform a little closer to one's ideal.

Sometimes one is bewildered by the sight of men who seem to have all the material for a good and useful and happy life ready to hand, but who yet attempt the wrong things, or are pushed into attempting them, by not taking the measure of their powers. Of course, there is a great nobleness about people who ardently undertake the impossible; but what can one make of the people, and they are very numerous, who have not the ardent quality in their souls? Is it possible to become ardent even if one does not happen to admire the quality? I fear not. But what ought to be possible for every one is to arrive at a sort of harmony of life, to have definite things that they want to do, definite regions in which they desire to advance. The people whom it is hard to fit into any scheme of benevolent creation are the vague, insignificant, drifting people, whose only rooted tendency is to do whatever is suggested to them. One who like myself has been a schoolmaster knows that the danger of school life is not that the wicked are numerous, but the weak; the boys who have little imagination, little prudence, and who cannot summon up an instinctive motive to protect them against yielding to any temptation that may fall in their way. These are the people who get so little sympathy and encouragement. Their stronger companions use them and despise them, treating them as a convenient audience, as the Greek heroes in the Iliad treated the feeble, sheep-like soldiers, who ran hither and thither on the field of battle, well-meaning, ineffective, "strengthless heads." The brisk and virtuous master bullies them, calls them bolsters and puddings, loafers and ne'er-do-weels. What wonder if they do not easily discern their place in the scheme of things! Indeed, if it were not for tender fathers and mothers who believe in them and encourage them, their lot would be intolerable. How is such a boy to make an effort? His work wearies and puzzles him--it does not seem to lead him anywhere; he has no gift for games; he is neither amusing nor attractive; he gets no credit for anything, and indeed he deserves none; he ought really to be in a kind of moral sanatorium, guarded, guided, encouraged by wise and faithful and compassionate pastors. The worst feature of school life is that if it fortifies characters with some vigour about them, it implies that others must inevitably go under and be turned out moral and mental failures. It is the way of the world, says the philosopher, rough justice! It may be justice, but it is certainly rough; and I look forward to the time when we educators of the present generation will be considered incredibly hard-hearted, unconscientious, immoral, for acquiescing so contentedly in the ruthless sacrifice of the weak to the culture of the strong.

Ought we then, it may be asked, to decide