True Manliness. Thomas Smart Hughes

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СКАЧАТЬ opportunities neglected; by the loathing coming back to us, time after time, for our every untrue, or mean thought, word, or deed; by every longing after truth, and righteousness, and purity, which stirs our sluggish souls. By all these things, and in a thousand other ways, we feel it, we know it.

      Let us, then, own this and give ourselves up to his guidance. At first it will be hard work; our will and spirits will be like a lump of ice in a man’s hand, which yields but slowly to the warm pressure. But do not despair; throw yourselves on his guidance, and he will guide you, he will hide you under his wings, you shall be safe under his feathers, his faithfulness and truth shall be your shield and buckler.

      The ice will melt into water, and the water will lie there in the hollow of the hand, moving at the slightest motion, obeying every impulse which is given to it.

      My brethren, the Spirit of God which is in every one of us—the spirit of truth and love unchangeable—will take possession of our spirits, if we will but let him, and turn our whole lives into the lives of children of God, and joint-heirs of heaven with his Son.

XXVII.

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      “As the world was plastic and fluid in the hands of God, so it is ever to so much of his attributes as we bring to it,” may be a startling saying of Mr. Emerson’s, but is one which commends itself to our experience and reason, if we only consult them honestly. Let us take the most obvious examples of this law. Look at the relations of man to the brute creation. One of us shall have no difficulty in making friends of beasts and birds, while another excites their dread and hate, so that even dogs will scarcely come near him. There is no need to go back to the traditions of the hermits in the Thebaid, or St. Francis of Assisi, for instances of the former class. We all know the story of Cowper and his three hares, from his exquisite letters and poem, and most of you must have read, or heard of the terms on which Waterton lived with the birds and beasts in his Yorkshire home, and of Thoreau, unable to get rid of wild squirrels and birds who would come and live with him, or from a boat, taking fish which lay quietly in his hand till he chose to put them back again into the stream. But I suppose there is scarcely one of us who has not himself seen such instances again and again, persons of whom the old words seemed literally true, “At destruction and famine thou shalt laugh; neither shalt thou be afraid of the beasts of the earth. For thou shalt be in league with the stones of the field, and the beasts of the field shall be at peace with thee.”

      I remember myself several such; a boy who was friends even with rats, stoats, and snakes, and generally had one or other of them in his pockets; a groom upon whose shoulders the pigeons used to settle, and nestle against his cheeks, whenever he went out into the stable-yard or field. Is there any reasonable way of accounting for this? Only one, I think, which is, that those who have this power over, and attraction for, animals, have always felt toward them and treated them as their Maker intended—have unconsciously, perhaps, but still faithfully, followed God’s mind in their dealings with his creatures, and so have stood in true relations to them all, and have found the beasts of the field at peace with them.

      In the same way the stones of the field are in league with the geologist, the trees and flowers with the botanist, the component parts of earth and air with the chemist, just in so far as each, consciously or unconsciously, follows God’s methods with them—each part of his creation yielding up its secrets and its treasures to the open mind of the humble and patient, who is also at bottom always the most courageous learner.

XXVIII.

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      What is true of each of us beyond all question—what every man who walks with open eyes and open heart knows to be true of himself—must be true also of Christ. And so, though we may reject the stories of the clay birds, which he modeled as a child, taking wing and bursting into song round him, (as on a par with St. Francis’ address to his sisters, the swallows, at Alvia, or the flocks in the marshes of Venice, who thereupon kept silence from their twitterings and songs till his sermon was finished), we cannot doubt that in proportion as Christ was more perfectly in sympathy with God’s creation than any mediæval saint, or modern naturalist, or man of science, he had more power than they with all created things from his earliest youth. Nor could it be otherwise with the hearts and wills of men. Over these we know that, from that time to this, he has exercised a supreme sway, infinitely more wonderful than that over birds and beasts, because of man’s power of resistance to the will Christ came to teach and to do, which exists, so far as we can see, in no other part of creation.

      I think, then, it is impossible to resist the conclusion that he must have had all these powers from his childhood, that they must have been growing stronger from day to day, and he, at the same time, more and more conscious of possessing them, not to use on any impulse of curiosity or self-will, but only as the voice within prompted. And it seems the most convincing testimony to his perfect sonship, manifested in perfect obedience, that he should never have tested his powers during those thirty years as he did at once and with perfect confidence as soon as the call came. Had he done so his ministry must have commenced sooner; that is to say, before the method was matured by which he was to reconstruct, and lift into a new atmosphere and on to a higher plane, the faith and life of his own nation and of the whole world. For it is impossible to suppose that the works which he did, and the words he spoke, at thirty—which at once threw all Galilee and Judea into a ferment of hope and joy and doubt and anger—should have passed unnoticed had they been wrought and spoken when he was twenty. Here, as in all else, he waited for God’s mind: and so, when the time for action came, worked with the power of God. And this waiting and preparation must have been the supreme trial of his faith. The holding this position must have been, in those early years, the holding of the very centre of the citadel in man’s soul, (as Bunyan so quaintly terms it), against which the assaults of the tempter must have been delivered again and again while the garrison was in training for the victorious march out into the open field of the great world, carrying forth the standard which shall never go back.

      And while it may be readily admitted that Christ wielded a dominion over all created things, as well as over man, which no other human being has ever approached, it seems to me to be going quite beyond what can be proved, or even fairly assumed, to speak of his miracles as supernatural, in the sense that no man has ever done, or can ever do, the like. The evidence is surely all the other way, and seems rather to indicate that if we could only have lived up to the standard which we acknowledge in our inmost hearts to be the true one—could only have obeyed every motion and warning of the voice of God speaking in our hearts from the day when we first became conscious of and could hear it—if, in other words, our wills had from the first been disciplined, like the will of Christ, so as to be in perfect accord with the will of God—I see no reason to doubt that we, too, should have gained the power and the courage to show signs, or, if you please, to work miracles, as Christ and his Apostles worked them.

XXIX.

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      Christ’s whole life on earth was the assertion and example of true manliness—the setting forth in living act and word what man is meant to be, and how he should carry himself in this world of God’s—one long campaign, in which “the temptation” stands out as the first great battle and victory. The story has depths in it which we can never fathom, but also clear, sharp lessons which he who runs may read, and no man can master too thoroughly. We must follow him reverently into the wilderness, where he flies from the crowds who are pressing to the Baptist, and who to-morrow will be thronging around him, if he goes СКАЧАТЬ