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LONDON: BRADBURY, EVANS, AND CO., PRINTERS,
WHITEFRIARS.
no dramatic interest in it. Neither do I care to give my name. Those who know JOSHUA will know who I am well enough; and if I have said anything wrong they can come forward and challenge me. And for the rest it does not signify. I have written merely for truth's sake and love's; and with this I leave my dear friend's memory to the verdict of all honest hearts.
an "Arthurian legend," if I may call it so, that could not be verified; for naturally down about Tintagel everything has to do with King Arthur--even the choughs. Joshua sometimes spoke of it, but not from pride; there never was a man freer from that failing than he; rather from the belief he had in what a learned man would call hereditary transmission, but as we say, just "in the blood," and a kind of idea that dawned on him, quite of late years, that there would be a revival of national glories, national names and leaders, under new aspects but from the ancient sources. And if so, might he not count for something, direct descendant as he believed he was of the hero whose Castle had been one of his earliest playgrounds, and on whose Quoit he had spent many an hour of way-side dream-
ing? It was a fancy; a harmless one; so let it pass for just as much as it was worth.
There was nothing very remarkable about Joshua's childhood. He was
always a quiet, thoughtful boy, and from his earliest years noticeably
pious. His parents came of the Friends' stock; not of a strict kind
themselves, for they joined in the Church services; but the fact is just an
indication of the kind of influences which helped to mould him in early
youth. He had a habit of asking why, and of reasoning out a principle, from
quite a little lad; which displeased people; so that he did not get all the
credit from the schoolmaster and the clergyman to which his diligence and
good conduct entitled him. They thought him troublesome, and some said he
was self-conceited; which he never was; but
the more he was in earnest the more he offended them.
He was never well looked on by the Vicar since a famous scene that took
place in the church one Sunday after afternoon catechism. He was then about
fourteen years of age, and I have heard say he was a beautiful boy, with a
face almost like a young woman's for purity and spirituality. He was so
beautiful that some ladies and gentlemen staying at the Vicarage noticed
him during church time, and said he looked like a boy-saint. But he knew
nothing about himself. I question if he knew whether his hair was black
like mine, or, as it was, a bright brown like ripe nuts in the sunshine.
After catechism was over he stood out before the rest, just in his rough
country clothes as he vas, and said very respectfully to the
Vicar, Mr. Grand:* "If you please sir, I would like to ask you a few questions."
"Certainly, my lad, what have you to say?" said Mr. Grand
rather shortly. He did not seem over well pleased at the boy's addressing
him; but he could not well refuse to hear him because of the ladies and
gentlemen with him, and especially Mr. Freeman, a very good old man who
thought well of everybody, and let everybody do pretty much as they
liked.
"If we say, sir, that Jesus Christ was God," said Joshua,
"surely all that He said and did must be the real right? There cannot
be a better way than His?"
___________________* I do not mind giving this
name of the clergyman, because it was not his own; only one that we lads
gave him behind backs, as it were; else I do not intend to give the names
of any living actors in this history. The scene I am now describing was
told me by Joshua's mother, who wrote it down as soon, as she got
home.
Page 6
"Surely not, my lad," Mr. Grand made answer; "what
else have you been taught all your life? what else have you been saying in
your catechism just now?"
"And His apostles and disciples, they showed the way too?"
said Joshua.
"And they showed the way too, as you say; and if you come up to
half they taught you'll do well, Joshua."
The Vicar laughed a little laugh as he said this; but it was a laugh,
Joshua's mother said, that seemed to mean the same thing as a
"scat"--our Cornish word for a blow--only the boy didn't seem
to see it.
"Yes; but, sir, it is not of myself I am thinking, it is of the
world," said Joshua. "If we are Christians, why don't we live
as Christians?"
"Ah indeed! why don't we!" said Mr.
Grand. "Because of the wickedness of the human heart; because of the world, the flesh, and the devil!"
"Then, sir, if you feel this, why don't you and all the clergy
live like the apostles, and give what you have to the poor?" cried
Joshua, clasping his hands and making a step forward, the tears in his
eyes. "Why, when you read that verse, 'Whoso hath this world's
good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his compassion from
him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?' do you live in a fine
house, and have grand dinners, and let Peggy Bray nearly starve in that old
mud hut of hers, and widow Tregellis there, with her six children, and no
fire or clothing for them? I can't make it out, sir ! Christ was GOD; and
we are Christians; yet we won't do as He ordered,
though you tell us it is a sin that can never be forgiven if we dispute what the Bible says."
"And so it is," said Mr. Grand sternly. "Who has been
putting these bad thoughts in to your head?"
"No one sir. I have been thinking for myself. Michael, out by
Lion's Den, is called an infidel; he calls himself one; and you preached
last Sunday that no infidel can be saved; but Michael helped Peggy and her
base child when the Orphan Fund people took away her pension, because, as
you yourself told her, she was a bad woman, and it was encouraging
wickedness; and he worked early and late for widow Tregellis and her
children, and shared with them all he had, going short for them many a
time. And I can't help thinking, sir, that Christ,
who forgave all manner of sinners, would have helped Peggy with her base child, and that Michael, being an infidel and such a good man, is something like that second son in the Parable who said he would not do his Lord's will when he was ordered, but who went all the same--"
"And that your Vicar is like the first?" interrupted Mr.
Grand angrily.
"Well, yes, sir, if you please," said Joshua quite modestly
but very fervently.
There was a great stir among the ladies and gentlemen when Joshua said
this; and some laughed a little, under their breath because it was in
church, and others lifted up their eyebrows, and said, "What an
extraordinary boy!" and whispered together; but Mr. Grand was very
angry, and said in a severe tone--
"These sinners are beyond the knowledge of an ignorant lad like
you, Joshua; and I advise you, before you turn questioner and reformer, to
learn a little humility and respect for your betters. I consider you have
done a very impertinent thing to-day, and I shall mark you for
it!"
"I did not wish to be impertinent, sir," said Joshua
eagerly; "I want only to know the right of things from you, and to do
as God has commanded, and Christ has shown us the way. And as you are our
clergyman, and this is the House of God, I thought it the best plan to ask.
I want only to know the truth; and I cannot make it out!"
"Hold your tongue, sir!" said Mr. Grand. "God has
commanded you to obey your pastors and masters and all that are in
authority over you; so let us have no more of this folly. Believe as you are taught, and do as you are told, and don't set yourself up as an independent thinker in matters you understand no more than the ass you drive. Go back to your place, sir, and another time think twice before you speak to your superiors."
"I meant no harm. I meant only the truth and to hear the things of
God," repeated Joshua sadly, as he took his seat among his
companions; who tittered.
When they all went out of church Mr. Grand was heard to say to Mr.
Freeman: "You will see, Freeman, that boy will go to the bad; he will
turn out a pestilent fellow, a freethinker and a democrat. Oh, I know the
breed, with their cant about truth and the right! He richly deserved a
flogging to-day
if ever boy did; to dare to take me to task in my own church!"
But Mr. Freeman said gently; "I don't think he meant it for
insolence. I think the lad was in earnest, though of course he should not
have spoken as he did."
"Earnest or not, he must be taught better manners for the
future," said Mr. Grand.
And so it was that Joshua was not well looked on by the clergyman, who
was his enemy, as one may say, ever after.
All this made a great talk at the time, and there are many who remember
the whole thing at this present day; as any one would find if they were to
ask down at Trevalga; but all that Joshua was ever heard to say of it was:
"I thought only of what was right in the sight of God; I never
thought of man at all."
He did not however, repeat the experiment of asking inconvenient
questions of his social superiors in public; but it was noticed that after
this he became more and more thoughtful, and more and more under the
influence of a higher principle than lads of his age are usually troubled
with. And though always tender to his parents and respectful to the
schoolmaster and minister, and the like of that, yet he was less guided by
what might be called expediency in his conduct, and more than ever a
stickler for the uncompromising truth, and the life as lived by Jesus
Christ. He was not uncomfortable to live with, his mother said; quite the
contrary; no one ever saw him out of temper, and no one ever knew him do a
bad thing; but he somehow forced his parents to be always up to the mark,
and
even the neighbours were ashamed to talk loosely or say what they shouldn't before a lad whose whole thought, whose sole endeavour was, "how to realise Christ."
"Mother," he once said, as he and Mrs. Davidson stood by the
cottage door together, "I mean when I grow up to live as our Lord and
Saviour lived when He was on the earth. For though he is God in Heaven he
was only man here; and what He did we too can do with His help and the Holy
Spirit's."
"He is our example, lad," said his mother reverently.
"But I doubt lest you fall by over boldness."
"Then, if imitation is over bold, His life was a delusion, and He
is not our example at all," said Joshua. "Which is a saying of
the devil."
flashing through the air, the voice of the waves as they beat up against Long Island subdued to a tender murmur that seemed to have a mystery somehow in it, and the young carpenter reading to us of Christ, and praying for the power to be like unto Him in life and heart; praying with an earnestness, a realization, a very passion of entreaty--nay, I have never heard or seen aught like it since, in church or chapel either!
And then he himself was so unlike other boys. He was so upright, so
steadfast! No one ever knew Joshua tell the shadow of a lie, or go back
from his word, or play at pretence. And he had such an odd way of coming
right home to us. He seemed to have felt all that we felt, and to have
thought all our thoughts. Young as he was, he was our leader even then. We
all looked
for great things from him. I should be laughed at if I said how high our expectations reached.
The youths that Joshua go together as his friends were as
well-conditioned a set of lads as you could wish to see; sober,
industrious, chaste. They were never in any trouble, and no one could say
they had ever heard one of them give back a bad word, whatever the
provocation, or say a loose one; but the clergy of their several parishes
scouted them, and stood at no evil to say of them. For they were not
church-goers; and that is always an offence to the clergy of country
parishes, who treat even the best of the Dissenters as little better than
rogues, taking it partly as a personal affront and partly as a moral sin if
their parishioners find greater comfort for their poor souls
else-
where than under them. However, for the matter of that, the lads were of no denomination; and though they prayed much and often, it was neither at church nor chapel; it was at their own houses or in the fields.
Their aim was to be thorough and like Christ. They denounced the sin of
luxury among professing Christians, and spared no one, lay or clerical: so
did Christ, they said. They set their faces against the priestly class
altogether, and maintained that Christ as High Priest needed no subordinate
or go-between, and that the modern parson was only the ancient Pharisee,
whom Christ was never weary of denouncing. They were anti-Sabbatarians too,
as He had been, and held the doctrine of freedom in Christ throughout. They
believe implicitly every word of the Gospels, which they stood by as
fuller of the Divine Life than the Epistles; and they thought that the Example left the world was the one thing to follow and the one pattern to imitate. Joshua's great hope and desire, confessed among us, was to bring back the world to the simplicity and broad humanity of Christ's acted life; and as a believer in the divinity of that life, he could not understand how it had been let drop. His one central point was the same now as that which had formerly troubled him--and Mr. Grand; namely, how, if Christ was God, and His life given to us as our example, do we not follow it literally, in simple exactness, and as we find it set before us in the Gospels? And he believed that God would strengthen his hands, not only to enable him to realise this in his own person, but also to evangelise society, and bring it over to the
Truth along with him. He was waiting for a Sign; and he believed it would be given him.
He was but a young man at this time, remember; enthusiastic, with little
or no scientific knowledge and with much of the logic of fanaticism; unable
to judge between the possible and the impossible, and putting the direct
interposition of God above the natural law. Wherefore, he accepted the text
about faith removing mountains as literally true, and possible to be done.
Given the faith, the mountain would move. And one evening he went down into
the Rocky Valley, earnest to try conclusions with God's promise, and sure
of proving it true. He had fasted all day, and he had prayed all day; not
necessarily kneeling and repeating set forms, but in the whole attitude of
his mind;
and in the twilight when work was over he went down with three of us, myself and two others, a certain that the truth of the Word would be made manifest, and that he could remove rocks by FAITH.
He prayed to God to grant us this manifestation--to redeem His promise.
He was full of faith: not a shadow of doubt chilled or slacked him. As he
stood there in the softening twilight, with his arms raised above his head
and his face turned up to the sky, his countenance glowed as Moses' of old.
He seemed inspired, transported beyond himself, beyond humanity. He
commanded the stone to move in God's name, and because Christ had promised:
and we knelt beside him, not so much trembling as exalted, feeling in the
very presence of the Divine, and that He would do unto us
according to His word. But the rock stood still; and a stonecchat went and perched on it.
Another time he took up a viper in his hand, quoting the psalm,
"They shall take up serpents." But the beast stung him, and he
was ill for days after. So, when he ate a handful of the berries of the
black briony, and all but died of the poison. Yet he had handled the viper
and eaten the berries in faith as simple and sincere as when he had
commanded the stone in the Rocky Valley to move.
When the doctor was called in, and Joshua told him, boylike, what he had
done and why and in what spirit, he shook his head gravely, and told his
mother he was mad and had better be looked after.
"No, no, not mad, sir, because I believe
the Bible, and have determined to lead a life after Christ's word and example," said Joshua.
"Tut! rubbish!" said the doctor. "What you've got to
do, my lad, is to plane your wood smooth and make your joists firm. All
this religious folly of yours has no sense in it. I tell you it will upset
your brain, and that you are mad now, and will be madder if you don't pull
up in time."
"So Festus said to St. Paul, sir; but he was not mad, nor am
I."
"But what do you want to do, jackass?" said the doctor with
a good-humoured kind of impatience. "What's amiss with your poor
foolish head that you can't take things easy?"
"I want to find out which is true, sir,"
answered Joshua: "the Bible which ordains certain ways of life; or the Christian world which disobeys them. If Christ was God, there is but one way for us all. He could not have left us an imperfect example to be mended here and there as we think best for the convenience of society. He is God or man; for, as things are, it is not God and man--Christ and Christians; and I want to know which is the truth."
"Take my advice," said the doctor kindly; "put all
these thoughts out of your head as quickly as you can. Get some work to do
in a new part of the country, fall in love with some nice girl, and marry
as soon as you can make a home for her. Give over reading the Bible for a
time, and look up some pleasant stories and books of travel, and the like;
and leave off
eating poison-berries and handling vipers. That's the only life for you, depend upon it; and though I am no theologian, I venture to say, that working honestly in that state of life to which it has pleased God to call you, going to church, kneeling out of beershops, and living like your respectable neighbours, is a far better kind of thing than all this high-flown religion you are hankering after. Depend upon it, our best religion is to do our duty, and to leave the care of our souls to those whose business it is to look after them."
"Thank you, sir; you mean kindly," said Joshua. "But
God has given me other thoughts, and I must obey them if I would not sin
against the Holy Ghost."
And the doctor said afterwards to Mr. Grand, that he was quite touched
at the lad's
sweetness and wrong-headedness combined, and would have given much to have been able to send him there and then to a lunatic asylum, where he might have been taken care of for a time and put to rights.
The failure of these trials of faith perplexed us all, and profoundly
afflicted Joshua. Not many men have gone through greater spiritual anguish,
I should suppose, than he did at this time. It was like the sudden
darkening of the sun to him, and the doubt of himself which it brought was
nearer madness than his simple faith had been. He passed through a bad
time; when his soul went down into the Valley of the Shadow, if ever man's
did! But in time he came out into the light again. He knew his own
sincerity, and his entire acceptance
of the Word of God and of the Divinity of Christ; and he could not think that God had met his prayer with a rebuff. God, who knew the heart, would he felt sure have accepted his endeavour, had that endeavour been within the scope of His plan for humanity. It was the first struggle between Faith and Law, Revelation and Nature, through which every inquiring mind has to pass; and it was a bitter one.
He said nothing of these thoughts for many weeks. He was not a youth who
jumped to conclusions, but rather one who pondered well, and who let his
thoughts ripen; but at last he spoke one evening, when we were gathered
together as usual, after work.
"Friends," he said, "it seems to me--
indeed, I think we must all see it now--that His Word is not to be accepted literally, and not to be acted on in all its details. The laws of Nature are supreme, and even faith cannot change them. Can it be," he then said solemnly, "that much of that Word is a parable?--that Christ was truly as he says of Himself, the corner stone, but not the whole building?--and that we have to carry on the work in His spirit, but in our own way, and not merely to try and repeat His acts?"
I do not think we were prepared for such a speech. We looked at one
another uneasily, even the dimmest of us seeing something of the
conclusions to which such a principle would lead us, and forecasting the
rudderless wandering of souls that would ensue. But Joshua would say no
more.
He bade us good-night soon after, and it was long before we renewed the subject. We all felt that he had broken dangerous ground; for had we not set out with the determination to realise Christ in our lives, founded on our conviction of the literalness, the absolute uncompromising truth of every word in the Gospels?--a truth not to be explained away, or paraphrased in any manner of worldly wisdom or expediency; but to be accepted crude, naked, entire as it is set down? It was one thing, or the other--Christ or society, the Bible or the world. It could not be both; but once admit the right of choice, of criticism, and where was then our standard? Yet again, what could we make of that text about faith, when we had proved it for ourselves and found it wanting? And if wrong in
ever so small a matter, was not our theory of absolute infallibility at an end? But if absolute infallibility was at an end, was not that making Christ a mere temporary teacher, local and for the day--not universal and for all time; and God a bit by bit worker? And if so, and even Gospel revelation is not final, where then exists the absolute necessity of acceptance? Yet, if we came to this conclusion--sorrowfullest of all!--we must relinquish all anchorage everywhere, and do our best to piece together a theory of life for ourselves, glad if any of the broken fragments of faith might still serve us.
But we were far off, as yet, from any such conclusions; and the Christ
life, and the Gospel narrative, and the need laid on us all to follow in
the Master's steps, and be-
lieve as He taught, and do as He did, were still the cardinal points of Joshua's creed, and the object of his endeavour: and, with him, of ours.
no farther advanced; nor was even Camelford in those days. And then Camelford is full five miles away, across a wild whisht country that does not invite much night walking. To be sure there are the cliffs and the sea, the waterfall up at Knighton's Kieve, the rocks and the old ruins at Tintagel--King Arthur's Castle--which fill the imagination. But imagination does very well for extreme youth, as looking back does for old age: a man coming to his prime wants action.
An opening however came in time, and Joshua had an offer to go up to
London to follow his trade at a large house in the City; which he accepted;
and got me a job as well, that I might be alongside of him. For we were
like brothers; he, the elder, the better, the leader; and I, the younger,
the led. And
neither was afraid of work; or, let me add, afraid for our work. We were skilled in our trade so far as we could be without first-rate teaching, having made it a point of duty and honour both, that we should never give folks occasion to talk of us as babbling saunterers, who took to the Bible because they could not manage the plane and the saw.
A few days before he went, Joshua happened to be coming out of his
father's workshop just as Mr. Grand was passing, driving the neat
pair-horse phaeton he had lately bought.
"Well, Joshua, and how are you doing?" said the parson,
pulling up.
I dare say he was a good man when he was at home, but Mr. Grand was not
fit to be a parish priest--at all events, not of such a place as Trevalga.
He might have made
a fine general officer, or a dignitary in a field where he had nothing to do with the poor; but among a lot of half-starving, uneducated creatures, such as you find in a by-kind of coast hamlet in Cornwall, he was worse than useless. He had no love for the poor, and no pity: he always called them "the common people," and spoke of them disdainfully, as if they were different creatures from gentry. I question if he allowed us the same kind of souls; and I do know that he denied equality of condition after death, and quoted the text of "many mansions" in proof of his theory of exclusion. He was a man of good family himself, and his wife was the daughter of a bishop; he was rich too, and looked to be made dean or bishop himself by time. So you see, Trevalga was only a stopping-place with him, where he
just put off the time the best way he could till he saw his way to better things; and didn't care a rush for any one in the place.
However, he drew up at seeing Joshua, and asked him how he was; and then
said: "And why have you not been to church lately, my man?" as
if Joshua had been in the habit of going, and had failed only of late. This
was Mr. Grand's way. He never knew anything about his people. That gave
them to think, you see, that he held himself too high to notice what such
poor wretches might be about. God forgive me if I misjudge him!
"Well, sir," said Joshua, "I don't go to church, you
know."
"No? have you joined the chapel then? Is that your latest fad,
Joshua?"
"No, sir; neither church nor chapel," answered Joshua.
"What! a new light on your own account, hey?" and he laughed
as if he mocked him.
"No sir, only a seeker."
"The old paths not good enough for you?--the light that has
lightened the Gentiles these eighteen hundred years and more not pure
enough for an unwashed Cornish lad, planing wood at a carpenter's bench and
not able to speak two consecutive words of good English?"
"I must answer for my conscience to God, sir," said
Joshua.
"And your clergyman, appointed by God and the State to be your
guide, what of him? Has he no authority in his own parish?" cried Mr.
Grand warmly. "Does
it never strike you, my fine fellow, that in thinking for yourself, as you call it, you are flying in the face both of Divine ordinances and the laws of man, and that you are entering on the sin of schism on the one hand, and of rebellion on the other?"
"Look here, sir," said Joshua with earnestness, but quite
respectfully; "if I speak plainly, I mean it for no offence; but my
heart burns within me and I must speak out. I deny your appointment as a
God-given leader of souls. The Church is but the old priesthood as it
existed in the days of our Lord, and is, as much as that was, the blind
leading the blind. There are good and kind gentlemen among you, but not
Christians according to Christ. I see no sacrifice of the world, no
brotherhood with the poor--"
"The poor!" interrupted Mr. Grand disdainfully; "what
would you have, you young fool? The poor have the laws of their country to
protect them, and the Gospel preached to them for their
salvation."
"Yes, and in preaching that--that is, in giving two full services
on Sundays, and reading the marriage-service and the burial-service and the
like of that when you are wanted--you discharge your conscience of all
other obligations towards them, and think you have done enough. You never
seem to remember that when Christ preached the Gospel to the poor it was to
make them equal with the rich. Why, sir, the poor of our day are the lepers
of Christ's; and who among you, Christian priests, consorts with them? Who
ranks the man above his station, or the soul above the man?"
"Now, we have come to it!" cried Mr. Grand. "I thought
I should touch the secret spring at last! And you would like us to
associate with you as equals?--Is that it, Joshua? Gentlemen and common men
hob-and-nob together, and no distinctions made? You to ride in our
carriages, and perhaps marry our daughters?"
He had his little girl of six or so in the phaeton with him; a pretty
little maid that used to go about dressed in blue velvet and a white
feather in her hat.
"That's just it, sir. You are gentlemen, as you say, but not the
followers of Christ. If you were, you would have no carriages to ride in,
and your daughters would be what Martha and Mary and Lydia and Dorcas were,
women of no station, bent only on serving God and the saints, and their
title
to ladyhood founded on their degrees of goodness."
"Going in for socialism, Joshua?" said Mr. Grand, continuing
his bantering tone. "A little radicalism, a little methodism, and a
great deal of self-assurance--that seems to me to be about where you
are!"
"Going in for no isms at all, sir," said Joshua. "Only
for the truth as it is in Christ!"
"Shall I tell you what would be the very thing for you?"
said Mr. Grand quite quietly.
"Yes, sir; what?" asked Joshua eagerly.
"This whip across your shoulders!--and, by George, if I were not a
clergyman I would lay it there, with a will!" cried the parson, half
rising from his seat.
No one had ever seen Joshua angry since
he had grown up. His temper was proverbially sweet, and his self-control was a marvel. But this time he lost both. It was not so much as a man, because of the insult to himself; he would have borne that meekly enough; but it was the feeling that the Sacred Thing had been mocked in him which drove him into sudden anger: an anger so violent and so sudden as to take the clergyman fairly aback.
"God shall smite thee, thou whited wall!" he cried with
vehemence. "Is this your boasted leadership of souls?--this your
learned solving of difficulties?--this your fatherly guidance of your
flock? 'Feed my lambs'--with what? with stones for bread--with
insult for sincerity--with the gentleman's disdain for the poor thought of
the artisan--with class insolence for spiritual
diffi-
culties! Of a surety, Christ has to come again to repeat the work which you priests and churches have destroyed and made of no effect, and to strip you of your ill-used power. You are the gentleman, sir, and I am only a poor carpenter's son; but I stand against you now--man against man--soul against soul--and I spurn you with a deeper and more solemn scorn than you have spurned me!" He lifted his hand as he said this, with a strange and passionate gesture, then turned himself about and went in; and Mr. Grand drove off more his ill-wisher than before; as perhaps was only natural. And yet he rightly deserved all he had got.
This was one of the stories that got bruited abroad to Joshua's
discredit. Some said he had struck the parson--some that he
had been monstrously and unjustifiably impertinent; and the tale got bandied about as a kind of dramatic scarecrow--a kind of logical warning to young men given to think for themselves, as to what would become of them if they shook themselves free of authority. "You'll be as bad as Joshua to Parson Grand," was a phrase I myself heard more than once. But here is the story just as it happened; and I put it to my readers--was Joshua so very much to blame, all things considered--motives, feelings, spiritual disappointment, and that inner dignity of Man which overpowers all social differences when the fit moment comes? I can only say that never, to the last, could he be got to see that he had done wrong, and never, to the last, could I say it or see it either.
"No," he used to say, "some kinds of
anger are righteous; and this was of them."
But Mr. Grand made old Davidson, Joshua's father, suffer for his son;
for he took away his own custom from him, and did him what harm in the
neighbourhood a gentleman's ill-word can do a working man. It was a bad
thing for the old man. The Trevalga schools were being built, and St.
Juliot's church was under repair, and Davidson, as the best workman
thereabouts, would have been sure to have been head man at both jobs. But
Mr. Grand, he put his spoke in that wheel; and one day when I took courage
to speak and plead, all I got was a recommendation to mind my own business,
and not interfere where I was not wanted. And then as if in
consideration--a kind of condescending consideration--for
my being a "canter," Mr. Grand wound up with saying that I must see he was justified according to the law of God.
When I challenged him hotly, I daresay intemperately, I daresay even
impertinently, for his proof--for you see I was but a poor uneducated
artisan, and he was a gentleman and a scholar--he laughed, and said he did
not argue with carpenters' lads; and when I answered back, he ordered me
out of the house, saying I was as pestilent a fellow as my friend;--I
replying angrily that I did not think the pestilence rested with Joshua.
Which ended the interview; not without loss of temper and dignity on both
sides, and no good done to anyone.
The night before we left for London Joshua had a kind of vision or
waking dream, which he told me as we were on our
way to Launceston, walking up the hill from Boscastle, while the omnibus toiled after us. He was on the cliff by Long Island, when suddenly he seemed to be caught away to a wide plain, where many men were gathered. In the centre of the plain was a hill, like Brown Willy out there by Camelford, and on this hill sat two kingly figures who ruled over the swarming multitudes below. They sat together hand in hand, and he saw that they were in some mysterious manner inseparable. The one was dressed as a high priest, and was Ecclesiastical Christianity; the other as a king, and was Society; and both were stern, forbidding, and oppressive. The only persons to whom they showed favour were the well-dressed and the subservient--rich people dressed in gold and jewels, and
the poor and undistinguished who were submissive and conforming; who accepted all that the high priest taught without questioning the truth of any part, and who obeyed what the king ordained without even so much as a wish to resist. These were called Believing Christians and Respectable Members of Society; and, in consideration of their obedience, both the high priest and the king smiled on them, and spoke them fair. Yet they were scarcely friendly to their adherents. The one surrounded them with the most monstrous shapes of demons cast by magic lanterns and in every way unreal, of which they were in continual fear--GOD, whom yet they labelled "Our Father," and the "God of Love," the most terrible looking demon of all; and the more they were afraid, and the more
cruel they believed Our Father to be, the more Ecclesiastical Christianity was content. The other bound them round and round with chains and swathing bands, till they were scarcely able to move or breathe. And when they submitted to the stifling torture with a good grace--some of them even drawing the links tighter, and buckling up the thongs more home of their own accord, and all declaring the pattern of each particular bandage to have been sent down direct from heaven, and in no wise invented as an experiment by Society--then the king smiled on them kindly, and praised them with many flattering words; and the poor atrophied wretches were quite content with the barren honour of their reward.
At the feet of these two rulers lay three figures cruelly bound and
tortured. They
were Truth, bearing in her arms her young child Science, Freedom, and Humanity. All three were stretched on racks made in the form of a cross, which gave in the eyes of the multitude a kind of symbolic sanction to their torture. The two rulers were for ever trying to gag them, so that they should not speak; but they could not quite succeed; and every now and then they uttered words, loud and clear as the sound of a silver trumpet, that stirred the multitude below, and set men running hither and thither, some shaking themselves free of the bonds in which both Christianity and Society had bound them. And when they spoke, the high priest and the king and their worshippers, all the well-dressed little kings and poorer conformists, buffeted them; and would have killed them if they could.
Ill-treated as they were however, each tortured being had a small knot
of adherents. Round Truth, bearing her young child, Science, gathered men
of imposing aspect--men of authority, of large brains, of temperate nature,
of clear and candid thought. There were some among them of such
unquestionable grandeur, that even the mob of Believing Christians and
Respectable Members of Society paid them a certain cold, deprecatory
reverence as they passed; while Ecclesiastical Christianity tried to
reconcile their statements with his own creed, hiding his magic lantern
painted with demons and that all-devouring hell with which he terrified the
multitudes, when he spoke to them saying, "See, there is no such
great difference between us after all! I do not contradict you. Say what
you will about the
sun, and the age of the earth, the relations of the universe, and the gradual evolution of man, nothing that you advance disturbs me. I only supplement you, and add the divine grace of spiritual truth, which is beyond your analysis. You are right and I am right; let us be friends and brothers."
Society was less concerned about these philosophers. They were for the
most part swathed in his bands tight enough; some for
pre-occupation with other matters, some for expediency, some for dread of
the unknown, and some for conviction; and, for the rest, he let his
twin-brother, the high priest, fight his battles as he best could.
Round the prostrate form of Freedom, scarred, gashed, bleeding,
fettered, stood only a few. Even the men of science were
afraid of this huge giant, this son of the old gods, whose might no one had been able to calculate should he once arise in his strength. All, save his own few lovers, chiefly of the poorest class, looked on him with dread, and prophesied evil days for the world should he ever get free of his bonds and the symbolic constraint of the cross. But his small band of lovers, themselves either martyrs or victims, worked incessantly at his deliverance; every now and then getting one link loosened here and another there, knowing that in time he would with their help shake himself free of all his chains, and stand up before the world, the great-hearted leader, the glad possession of every man and woman that breathes.
The third figure was the most deeply oppressed. The face was hidden, but
it was
a lovely form, vilely clad in disfiguring garments, and bespattered with dirt that had been flung at it by the high priest and Society in concert. On its nailed hands hung the weeping and the miserable; and no one was rejected or bidden back. The most miserable sinner that crawled--the thief, the murderer, the harlot--it gathered them all around it; its own bound hands doing their checked best to free them from their stains. Pleasure and pain and sin and virtue all rested equally on its large breast, and to all it gave full sympathy and understanding. It condemned no one; only it refused obedience to the high priest and the king. As the dreamer looked, it slowly turned its face to the sky: and Joshua recognised in the soiled and vilified face of Humanity--the face of Christ.
Suddenly standing side by side with the magnificently attired pontiff,
this Ecclesiastical Christianity, oppressor of Truth, slanderer of
Humanity, tyrant of Freedom, ruler of the churches, and through them of the
consciences of men; side by side too, with his twin-brother Society, his
fellow-tyrant and oppressor, was a man coarsely clad in rude garments, a
man of uncultured speech, of unconventional manners, but of a noble aspect,
whose face was the face of an enthusiast who believed in himself, and in
whose self-reliance were his sole credentials. His companions were the same
as those who had gathered round the crucified form of Humanity. All the
poor and the miserable, the leprous, the sinners, the outcast, and those
"sinless Cains" of history, those men who had lived to do good
to their generation, and who had been stoned and crucified and blasphemed and cursed as their reward--they were all clustered closely round him. He had nothing to do with that regal Society, that mitred Christianity. He loudly proclaimed his antagonism to both, and drew to him only such as they spurned and rejected.
He pointed to the high priest: "Look," he said to Joshua,
"what they have made of me; of an unskilled artisan, no schoolman
even of his day, and a vagrant preacher living by charity, they have made a
king; of a man, a god; of a preacher of universal tolerance, the head of a
persecuting religion; of a life, a dogma; of an example, a church. Here am
I, Jesus the Nazarene, the son of Joseph and Mary, as I lived on earth;
poor, unlearned, a plebeian, and a socialist, at war
with the gentlemen and ladies of my society, the enemy of forms, of creeds, of the priestly class of respectabilities; and there you see my modern travesty, this jewelled, ornate, exclusive Ecclesiastical Christianity, who is the ancient Pharisee revived. To you, and to such as you, is given the task of bringing men back to the creed that I preached. And if in securing the essence of the creed you forget the Founder, and call my doctrine by another name than mine, so be it. The world wants the thing, not the label; and Christ-likeness, not Ecclesiastical Christianity, is the best Saviour of men."
As he said this the whole vision seemed to fade away, and the voice of
Peggy Bray, whining and drunk, with Mr. Grand's deep tones of angry
disgust, broke the quiet
evening stillness, and brought Joshua back to the realities of life.
"Something seemed to bid me," he said, when he told me the
story: "I ran off over the down as fast as I could, and caught Peggy
on the Tintagel Road. She was drunk, dirty, and crying. I took her by the
hand. 'Peggy, woman,' I said, 'dry your eyes, and come
along with me.' I spoke so sudden, I startled her, and so a little
sobered her. Then I took her by the arm and led her to mother's cottage.
'Here, mother,' I said; 'here is a bit of Christ-work for
you to do. Take this poor creature, in her dirt and vileness as she is, and
cleanse her. You believe and know that God's love did that for the world:
we are less pure than Christ, but we hold ourselves too fine to follow His
example in that! Love her,
mother; she is your sister--and maybe your love can heal her.' Poor mother! she didn't like the task. She cried over it, and said that I put a burden on her she could not bear; but I held to my point," said Joshua, with a glowing face; "and she yielded. Peggy stayed in our house for over a month, and mother was ill-called for her work. Not that she much cared, I fancy. I don't know, however, whether she did or not; she never said much. And though Peggy broke out again and went to the bad as before, yet a month's experience of loving-kindness and cleanly living was something. At all events, it was practical Christianity; and if it did Peggy herself little or no good permanently, it was the right thing to do, and mother was so far benefited."
most souls, and God was abandoned because man had betrayed them. Some of the better class among them had become Unitarians; which gave them the most religion with the least dogma of all the sects that go by the name of Christian; and some had transferred their whole passion and life of thought and intellectual energy to science, finding that consolation in nature which they could not get from revelation. But very few were what is called religious men: that is, men believing in the Bible, going to church on Sundays, and reverencing the clergy as men placed over them by a higher power to guide their souls as they would.
The immense gulf existing between the church and the workmen also
surprised the Cornish lad. At home, though the cottagers and the clergy
stood as wide as the poles
apart, socially and intellectually, yet there was some kind of mutual knowledge and intercourse; which, if it meant little for human wants and less for spiritual needs, still was intercourse and knowledge. In London there was none; or so little in proportion to the work to be done, it seemed almost as good as none. The parish priest, save in some chiefly ritualistic exceptions, scarcely exists, and his place is supplied by all sorts of lieutenants, both authorised and irregular; by Bible women, the City missionaries, Baptists, Roman Catholics, and the thousand and one odd, obscure sectaries of whom no one in good society ever heard the names--anything rather than the fashionable preacher who has invested all his store of godliness in his sermons, or the beneficed clergyman who thinks his East-end
income dearly bought at the price of his East-end residence.
As he grew however, to understand the inner relations of life in the
metropolis, he ceased to wonder at the wide-spread indifferentism of the
working men; and he came further to understand how religion, like other
things, had followed that class antagonism felt by the artisan, to which
the exclusiveness of caste cherished by the rich had given birth.
Christianity represents to the poor, not Christ tender to the sinful,
visiting the leprous, the brother of publicans, at whose feet sat the
harlots and were comforted, but the bishop in his palace and the parson in
his grand house, the gentleman taking sides with God against the poor and
oppressed, as an elder brother in the courts of heaven kicking the younger
out of doors. It is in
fact, he used to say, antagonism not love; Cain not Christ.
His religious experiences followed the natural course of such a mind as
his, at once so earnest and so logical. Attracted by the self-sacrificing
lives of so many of the Ritualist party, he threw himself with ardour into
the congregation of a noted City priest whose name I do not feel justified
in giving, as I have not asked his consent. If, however, he should read
these pages he will remember Joshua Davidson well enough. The Superior, as
he was called, took to him greatly, and Joshua felt all the charm of close
intercourse with a cultivated mind. It was the first time this great good
had been granted him, and it was like a new life to him. At one time I
thought he would have abandoned the independent line he had
chosen and would have gone over to the High Church party; but I do not think now that he was ever very near. For, fascinated as he was with the earnestness and culture of the Superior and his colleagues, they failed to hold him mainly because of the largeness of their assertions, the smallness of their proofs, and the feeling he had that more lay behind their position than they acknowledged, and that they used their adherents as tools. Added to which, their devotion to the Church rather than to Christianity at large, the absorption of the human example of Christ in His mystical character, the deification of the man as He lived, as if He had walked about like a God with a halo round His head, and was not a real man of the people of his time--of lowly birth, of confessed scientific ignorance, in antagonism to all the wealth and
culture, and class-refinement and political economy of His day, fighting the cause of the poor against the rich, of the outcast against the aristocrats, just as any earnest democrat, any single-hearted communist, might be doing at the present day--all this repelled him from close union; and all this made him feel that, great and good as the men themselves are, in the High Church movement was not his Shekinah. Then again, their elaborate system of symbolism seemed to him puerile; a playing with spiritual toys that had less reality than ingenuity; and their central creed of sacrifice rather than commemoration in the Eucharist, backed by their assumption of a priesthood possessing unproved and mysterious powers, failed to convince him.
"You have captivated my heart," he one
day said to the Superior--"you charm my tastes--you delight my imagination; but you have not mastered my reason. Fairly reasoned out I do not think your position is tenable. You are Roman Catholics under another name; irregulars claiming to be received on the footing of the acknowledged Body Guard; you are infallible yet eclectic, and I cannot concede infallibility to eclecticism."
"But have you no reverence for the virtues of obedience and
humility?" asked the Superior. "Cannot you quell that
questioning spirit of yours for the sake of the Church's honour, and to
maintain a close front? Who can hope to do anything as an isolated unit
against a host? Is not the whole secret of strength in
organisation?"
"But I cannot become part of a system
for expediency!" said Joshua mournfully. "Some men may, but it is not given to me to be able to stifle my own individual conscience for any considerations of party strength. I have got it to do--to find out if practical Christianity is possible in the world, and to learn why, being Christians, we are not of Christ. I know I should get something of the kind in such institutions as St. Vincent de Paul and the like, but I should have there so much in excess of the simple faith I love, that I cannot join them. I must go on my way alone."
"And you will fail," said the Superior. "No one man
can succeed in such a search as yours. Guided by wise counsels and
supported by authority you might come to satisfactory conclusions; but
adrift on the wide sea of dissent, and private opinion, and
indi-
vidual interpretation, you are lost. To the Church came the promise and the Spirit; believe in the Church is your only ark."
"If any, then the Roman Catholic at once, frankly and without
reserve," said Joshua. "If the keys of life and death are held
by a governing body, they are surely held within the Vatican; and if I must
enter into the virtue of unquestioning obedience, I would rather accept it
in its totality. Your ritualism seems to me like Canute and the waves.
'Thus far and no farther,' you say to private inquiry; and
'only so much and so much will we take of tradition and the vitality
of past ages.' Where is your standing-point? where your logical
foothold? By what authority do you reject and accept at will? and by what
mea-
sure do you set the length of the tether of reason?"
"If you are for the whole history of the Church you must read more
closely than you have done," said the Superior a little
evasively.
"Forgive me, sir," continued Joshua earnestly; "I know
you will, whatever I say; for I am speaking now heart-open, man to man, and
there is no question of discourtesy or of courtesy; but with all my
personal love and admiration for the professors of your creed, the creed
itself is tainted with an insincerity I cannot digest. And your position,
standing as you do in the front, between yearning souls demanding the
support of authority, the moral protection of infallibility, and the only
Western Church that can give it logically, is, to my
way of thinking, both dangerous to yourselves and cruel to the people. Why do you not go over to Rome at once, sir, since your commission is self-appointed and irregular?"
The Superior smiled gently. "I never argue," he said;
"for I never found any good to come of it. These questions are
matters for spiritual reception, not dialectical discussion. Use the
appointed means and the grace of our Lord will find you."
"I have used them; I do use them; and yet I cannot get
conviction," Joshua made answer, as sorrowfully as frankly.
"Persevere!" said the Superior solemnly; "the promises
of God never failed yet."
Joshua did not speak. He remembered his trial of the material promises
and how
they failed; but he did not go into that with the Superior. He had learnt to look back on the phase through which he had passed then as a boyish craze, sincere if you will, but a craze all the same. Yet it had struck into him, and, perhaps unknown to himself how much, had helped greatly to modify his views. It had broken down his belief in the literal exactness of the Scriptures, and the science-lectures he attended event the same way; and when one's childlike confidence has received its first shock, it is long before anything like an analogous faith is reconstructed out of more mature knowledge.
At this time Joshua's mind was like an unpiloted vessel. He was beset
with doubts, in which the only thing that kept its shape or place was the
character of
Christ. For the rest, everything had failed him.
"What," he said to me at this time, "if the spiritual
life is as little real as that act of faith in which we all failed?--if
what we call conviction is only a state of the mind--a subjective condition
owning no absolute without--a state as good and righteous for the Buddhist,
for the Mohammedan, for the Hindoo, as for the various Christian
denominations? We are all convinced. Every creed has had its martyrs and
enthusiasts and its well-trained, well-balanced professors, all as firmly
convinced of its truth and of its being the one truth only, as the Superior
is convinced of the absolute rightness of Anglicanism, as the Pope believes
in the infallibility of his Church, and the whole Christian world in
the impregnability of the Bible and its literal exactness. I cannot focus God as these men are able to do; and yet I feel it better to be rooted than wandering, as I am wandering now, unfixed and unnourished. If you are rooted you can grow; but floating, hovering, what is the soul but as one of those winged seeds carried about by the wind and fastened nowhere?"
"And yet," I answered, "it is better to be unfastened
from a fallacy than to be rooted on it. There must be the moment of
suspension when you are in progress. To mount a ladder you must leave the
rung on which you stand, and before you have your foot on the other it is
nowhere--only in space. The time of doubt is a time of pain, but it must be
passed through if we would believe the better thing. To have lost the
old land-marks--left them behind us--is not necessarily to have lost the right way, Joshua!"
"Ah! but to have been so near to God as I once felt myself--to
have lived in the light--and now to be so far off--to be in darkness and
alone!" he sighed.
"The darkest hour is that before dawn," was my reply.
"Even at this moment God may be preparing you for
conviction."
I do not think that what is called the Evangelical school ever warmed
Joshua as the Ritualists had done. If the assumptions of the Church, clad
in her venerable authority, seemed to him excessive, the assumptions of
sectarianism, where each man is an independent pope and quite as bigoted as
the real one, were more so. And he could
not come to believe that faith, which is a thing we cannot give ourselves, which will not come for the seeming, and which, when we have it, is as likely to lead us wrong as right--unless all beliefs are true alike; which sectarianism does not admit--is the one sole means of salvation, without which we are lost. It seemed to him a theory entangled in contradictions. Faith is the gift of God; no one can believe at will, but only as God gives him grace to do so; but if you do not believe you are damned, and God punishes you for not having what He will not bestow. Again, you have to distinguish between your various kinds of faith, and you must discern accurately which kind is sent by God and which by the devil. No outward test can tell you: for the Calvinist holds the Romanist in deadly error; the Romanist damns
the heretic with no hope of mercy; the Anglican talks about the deadly sin of dissent; and not one of them all regards the Unitarian, the Jew, or the Pagan, as in any sort of possibility a child of God, or as aught but a confirmed, if unconscious, son of the devil. What known test then can be applied to all these conflicting schools? To Joshua's mind, none; and the more he sought for the unerring truth--truth centralised, unified, focussed--the less, it seemed to him, he found it, and the more dignity and grandeur and charity he felt resided in the wide creed of Universalism.
During this time he did not neglect what I suppose may be called secular
life. He attended all such science-classes as he had time for; and being
naturally quick in study, he picked up a vast deal of knowledge in a
very short time; he interested himself in politics, in current social questions, specially those relating to labour and capital, and in the condition of the poor. This, above all, was his main subject; and perhaps more than any thing else, the fact that all the sects and denominations he had searched into accepted the class divisions of the present time as final, and thought that it was enough to preach the Gospel to the poor--that is, to preach to them submission and patience, and belief that Christ was God, and then leave them to their physical wretchedness and social degradation as to things that must be, and with which they must make themselves content--had turned him from communion with them, one and all. It was such a comfortable way of getting rid of a difficulty, he used to say. It
was offering a potential heaven as a bribe to induce the starving and the down-trodden to be patient with their sufferings, and submissive to the unjust tyranny of circumstances. It was shirking the question of Christian equality altogether, and nullifying the whole teaching and tendency of Christ's life.
So his time passed, and his thoughts went more and more into the
rationalistic channel; till at last one evening, when I and other of his
friends were sitting with him, he made his declaration.
"Friends," he said, "I have at last cleared my mind
and come to a Belief. I have proved to myself the sole meaning of Christ;
it is Humanity. I relinquish the miracles, the doctrine of the Atonement,
the doctrine of the Divinity of Jesus, and the
unelastic finality of His knowledge. He was the product of His time; and if He went beyond it in some things, He was only abreast of it in others. His views of human life were oriental; His images are drawn from the autocratic despotism of the great and the slavish submission of the humble, and there is never a word of reprobation of these conditions, as conditions, only of the individuals according to their desert. He did His best to remedy that injustice, so far as there might be solace in thought, by proclaiming the spiritual equality of all men, and the greater value of worth than status; but He left the social question where he found it--paying tribute even to Cæsar without reluctance--His mind not being ripe to accept the idea of a radical revolution, and His hands not strong enough to accomplish it, if even
He had imagined it. But neither He nor His disciples imagined more than the communism of their own sect; they did not touch the throne of Cæsar, or the power of the hereditary irresponsible Lord. Their communism never aimed at the equalization of classes throughout all society. Hence, I cannot accept the beginning of Christian politics as final, but hold that we have to carry on the work under different forms. The modern Christ would be a politician. His aim would be to raise the whole platform of society, he would not try to make the poor contented with a lot in which they cannot be much better than savages or brutes. He would work at the destruction of caste, which is the vice at the root of all our creeds and institutions. He would not content himself with denouncing sin as merely spiritual evil; he
would go into its economic causes, and destroy the flower by cutting at the roots--poverty and ignorance. He would accept the truths of science, and he would teach that a man saves his own soul best by helping his neighbour. That, indeed, He did teach; and that is the one solid foothold I have. Friends, Christianity according to Christ is the creed of human progress, not that of resignation to the avoidable miseries of class; it is the confession that society is elastic, and that no social arrangements are final; that morals themselves are only experimental, and that no laws are divine--that is, absolute and unchangeable by circumstance. It is the doctrine of evolution, of growth; and just as Christ was the starting-point of a new era of theological thought, so is the present the starting-point of a new era of social fact.
Let us then strip our Christianity of all the mythology, the fetichism that has grown about it. Let us abandon the idolatry with which we have obscured the meaning of the Life; let us go back to the MAN, and carry on His work in its essential spirit in the direction suited to our times and social conditions. Those of you who still cling to the mystical aspect of the creed, and who prefer to worship the God rather than imitate the Man, must here part company with me. You know that, as a youth, I went deep into the life of prayer and faith; as a man, I have come out into the upper air of action; into the understanding that Christianity is not a creed as dogmatised by churches, but an organization having politics for its means and the equalization of classes as its end. It is Communism. Friends! the doc-
trine I have chosen for myself is Christian Communism--and my aim will be, the Life after Christ in the service of humanity, without distinction of persons or morals. The Man Jesus is my master, and by His example I will walk."
be worshipped under emblems; and now the frank acceptance of that Humanity alone, of the Man as a teacher, and of the Life as an example to be faithfully followed; more especially in its tenderness to sinners and its brotherhood with the poor and outcast. It was an abandonment of the dead mystical for the living real; but I doubt if any single sect among all the hundreds into which the Christianity of Jesus is shredded, would have recognised him as a brother Christian, or have believed that Christ would do aught else to him in the Last Day but deny him as a "thief and a robber."
And now Joshua began to carry out his programme of life with more fixed
lines. He disdained nothing that could advance him in knowledge and
intellectual strength: and I have often heard him say that the
great marvels of science, such as were shown us in the lectures to working men that we attended, stirred his soul to religious feeling just like the passion of prayer. And what he knew and valued for himself, that he was eager to impart to others. And it was this which made him begin his "night school," where he got together all who would come, and tried to interest them in some of the more taking "fairy tales of science," as well as to teach them a few homely truths in the way of cleanliness, health, good cooking, and the like; with interludes, so to speak, of lessons in morality; winding up with a few simple prayers and an attempt to make his hearers feel the Presence and the Power of God. All came to this meeting who would; thieves and drunkards, lost women and gutter-children--no matter who: there was a
kindly welcome for all; no preaching at them for their sins; no expression of spiritual or moral superiority, but just the great loving equality which does the degraded so much good, and gives them, if only for a moment, a flash of natural self-respect and the glorious sense of inclusion and brotherhood. So that you see his life was not a meagre one; and while he blessed others so far as his power went, he grew daily riper in his own thoughts, and fuller of knowledge, and more clear as to what he meant.
We were very poor all this time: that of course we understood we must
be. We were accustomed to it, and would have been more embarrassed with a
lot of surplus money to spend, if we had had to spend it on ourselves, than
we were to make the best of the little we
possessed. But we did look to live like decent men, and not like savages. And we desired the same for our order. Yet how was that possible in the conditions in which we found ourselves? And we were only two out of thousands.
We lodged in a stifling court, Church-court, where every room was filled
as if cubic inches were gold, as indeed they are to London house-owners, if
human life is but dross. Children swarmed like rabbits in every house, and
died like sheep with the rot. It was sore to see them, poor little, pale,
stunted, half-naked creatures, playing about the foul uncleansed pavement
of the court, from the reeking gutter of which they picked up
apple-parings, potato-peelings, fish-heads, and the like, which I have seen
them many a time wipe on their rags
and eat. "The bronchitis" it was called that sent so many of them to the hospital and the graveyard, but the real word was poverty: poverty in everything; in food, in clothing, in care, in lodging. It made one's heart ache to see them--them and their parents too: the hopeless misery of their lives and the moral degradation following. And it made one think with deep amazement of what the wisdom of that nation could be which leaves its riches to rot in the gutter for want of looking after and tending; not to speak of the religion, which contents itself with building churches, and endowing foreign and colonial bishoprics, while its own immortal souls perish for lack of the Bread of Life squandered in baskets full on the altars to Baal! Where to find the issue? How to fill up the great chasm between the
rich and the poor, the virtuous and the vicious, the learned and the ignorant, the civilised and the brutish?
"There is only one way out of it," said a noted M.P. to
Joshua one day, a great political economist and a strict Malthusian:
"abstinence; if you wish to see the poor raised you must lighten the
labour market by bringing fewer labourers into it. That is the first
necessity. Leave off having children, live frugally, and put by money, and
as many of you can, emigrate."
"Is this not omitting one important factor from your calculations,
sir?" said Joshua.
"What do you mean?" asked Mr. --
"Merely the human nature there is in humanity," said Joshua.
"Do you think the poor have no instincts? Is not a wife
or a husband, a home where there are little children, sometimes a day's pleasure, and the old family ties of father and mother and brothers and sisters--are not all these as dear to them as to the rich? Why should they be required to forego these that the rich not be called upon to share?"
"Would you destroy the existing order of society?" said the
M.P. sternly.
"Destroy it? aye! root and branch, if need be! In no civilised
community--not to speak of a Christian one, if Christianity meant
anything--ought there to be such places as Belgrave-square and
Church-court. Keep your Belgrave-square by all means, but let the
Church-courts be made at least wholesome and decent."
"You have the remedy in your own hands," said the M.P.
"So long as you
will marry on nothing, spend all you get, and breed paupers, paupers you must remain, wallowing in filth and wretchedness. The whole question is as much a matter of exact science as any other mathematical problem; and you are to blame, Davidson, that you do not abandon your foolish rant about Christian charity and human rights, and apply yourself to the only way out of the difficulty--the science of Political Economy."
Joshua smiled sadly. "Political Economy is not quite human enough
for us, sir," he said. "It rests too on the basis of these very
existing conditions of society that I do not care for; I would rather see
something more radical, going straight to the root of the evil."
"You are an enthusiast," said the M.P. coldly. "I tell
you again, Political Economy
does go to the root of the evil; and the only thing that does."
"Then Christianity is wrong," said Joshua.
And the M.P. was silent. He had never confessed himself on the subject
of religion, and never would. Not his most intimate friends knew what he
believed or what he did not believe. All that the world saw was that he
went to church, made the orthodox bow at the Name in the Creed, and wrote
books and pamphlets full of anti-Christian, hard-headed doctrines, without
ever once alluding to religious dogma. When he was called an infidel by his
foes he hit out savagely, and said, "Prove it." And no man
could: only every man felt that his whole teaching, from first to last, was
absolutely devoid of all Christian feeling; that pity, charity, warmth, and
love
were as far from him as heaven is from the earth; and that he squared the accounts of humanity with the most sublime unconsciousness that such disturbing elements as passions or the sentiment of rights existed to upset his sums and prove his sociology for the present at least imperfect.
And the result of the conversation was, that Mr. --, the M.P., who is a
worthy man, upright and honourable, but practically one-sided because so
utterly undisturbed by weakness or passions of any kind, and therefore
unable to allow for them in another, denounced Joshua as a mischievous
agitator and an ignorant fanatic, and warned those of us whom he knew to
beware of him. Yet Mr. -- was as hearty as Joshua himself in his desire to
see the regeneration of the working class: but as Joshua said, and I
thought said well too; "He advocates our making ourselves so slender that we can slip through our bands and fetters, while I hold that we should make ourselves strong enough to force those who hold the fastenings to loosen them. We both mean the same thing in the end, liberty and social advancement; but we differ as to the means."
Our court was one of just ordinary moral character, neither strictly
respectable nor the reverse. We had all sorts; from the man who would
harbour a pal in trouble and stow away swag not honestly come by till the
police scent grew cold, to the decent workman doing his best to be
respectable, and to keep his girls pure and his boys honest; from the hard
working-woman slaving night and day to make her two poor ends meet, to the
idle slattern who was drunk
half her time, and begged in the streets the other half; from the fond mother with her pretty pride in Sunday frocks or bits of coloured bows, to the husbandless wench whose half-starved children, as naked as crows and nearly as black, were knocked about as if they were street dogs, and on the highway to the gallows through neglect; from the virtuous spinster proud of her character and intolerant of looseness, to the poor flaunting girl who got her living in the streets, leastwise eked out her scanty wages from slopwork and the like by prostitution, more or less avowed.
One of these girls lived just opposite to us. Her name was Mary Prinsep.
He had seen her at a music-hall we went to by times: for Joshua was not one
of those prudes who are afraid of ap-
pearances, and as he wanted to learn the world on all sides he went to all sorts of places and talked to all sorts of people--to these poor girls, as well as to any one else, and just as he would to any one else; seeking to know the causes of things, and why they went on to the streets, and if they would keep out of them if they could, and so on.
Any one who knows anything about us working men as we are and not by
fancy portraits, knows the profound contempt, and more, in which as a class
we hold the professed prostitute, or the woman of our own homes who lets
herself be seduced by a gentleman. A base child--nay, more than one, and by
different fathers too--if by men of our own class is not so unpardonable an
offence. We think it a pity, of course and
we would rather not have it happen to our daughters and sisters; but we get over it; and the women not unfrequently marry, and marry well, when the thing has blown by a little. But the poor, painted, bedizened wreck of womanhood who goes about the streets at the West-end, and sells herself to club-gentlemen and the like, is of all things that of which we have the most abhorrence. I don't pretend to explain it, and very likely it is only a matter of class jealousy when all is said and done; but I mention it as a kind of introduction to what I have to say of Mary Prinsep. I want it to be seen that it was no indifferentism to her trade which actuated Joshua; but, on the contrary, that it was the large and generous humanity in him which made him able to accept even a streetwalker as his sister and his friend.
Mary was very young and very ignorant. She had been brought up any how,
and had been neglected and untaught from the beginning. There was no
romantic history attached to her. She was no "soiled dove"
whose feathers had once been white and shining; she was the daughter of a
dram-drinking charwoman, sent out to mind children when quite a child
herself, brought up to no trade, and knowing nothing now but the streets
and the music-halls. But she had so much to the good, that she did not
drink--at least not much--they all drink some; and she had never been in
trouble or locked up. She was merely one of the abandoned--abandoned by
society from her birth, and left to sink or swim in the foul streams of the
metropolis as she best could. She had been picked up by a gentleman a
few years ago when she was about fifteen; and he had taught her a good deal both of refinement and womanly ways. She had been grateful to him at the time, but she scarcely loved him. He was older than herself; in fact, an old man comparatively; married, with grown-up daughters and sons, a churchwarden, and a fine Christian gentleman living out at Bayswater in the very odour of class respectability. But he had an eye for pretty girls; and he had placed Mary in a little house at Bow, where, as I said, she had learned some things that were useful to her, being a girl of great natural quickness, and, if she had had fair play, of refined taste and good disposition. In time he got tired of her. Such men always do: for what was there in an ignorant girl like to keep him when he had had enough of
her beauty? So, making her a handsome present--oh! he behaved to her quite handsomely!--he parted with her, and Mary had to turn out into the streets with a ruined character and a taste for good living. She had learned however, during her two or three years of "protection," to keep herself and her place tidy, and to do needlework after a fashion, but not sufficiently well to keep her. Twelve hours a day of slop-work would not feed, clothe, and lodge her; flower-selling would not; but her youth and good looks would. So she sold them, as all she had to sell; and got bread of the devil's baking because she could not get it any way else.
It was a bad life; and she felt it was. And it was a hard life too.
Those who see these girls only in their show-hours, dressed in the height
of the fashion and queening it
at night-houses and the like, have no idea of the wretchedness of the reality for the poorer kind; for there are classes even here. No wonder they take to drink, poor souls, suffering as they do--merciful Heaven, how they do suffer! And how some of them loathe their lives as they go on, and go down, and wish they had died before they took up the trade! Not that I say for an instant they go moaning about in eternal agonies of remorse or horror--human nature does not live at such high pressure; but a lot of them do hate their business nevertheless, when the drink is not in them and their vanity is not flattered.
But--virtuous women will start at this--they look on themselves, like
all the poor, as martyrs to society. They think that, as men and things
are, they must be; that they
make the virtuous wife, the chaste maiden, possible. In their blind way they are vaguely conscious that the root of this fine flower of western civilisation, the rich monogamous Christian home, is planted in the filth of prostitution, and that to them is owing the "self-restraint," so much admired in gentlemen who do not marry until they can afford to have a family, and so often offered as an example to us working men who love honestly one of our own sort, and do not as a rule go among these girls. And the more thoughtful of them, conscious of their economic uses, resent the opprobrium dealt out to them, and pity themselves angrily as victims rather than criminals, the scapegoats not the polluters of society.
To be sure, they do not fret at the scorn of the great ladies whom they
help to keep
virtuous, for they have their compensations. Fine ladies think that because they would not brush skirts with a prostitute, therefore no one will, and that all life shows them the same aspect of repulsion and horror. It is nothing of the kind. Decent women of the poorer class, consort with them, if not cordially yet humanely; then they have friends of their own sort, and many of them; and we know that a multitude of evil doers makes the evil done seem light to each. The gentlemen who go with them are often kind and playful, and no more brutal than most men are to most woman outside the artificial restraints of society. Sometimes, of course, they are vile enough; but these are the men who would be brutal to their own lady-wives and daughters. So that the poor Girls, as they call themselves, are not
quite shut out from all human sympathy like the lepers of old--though indeed the circle is terribly narrowed! And though many of them have fits of self-loathing and regret, others take matters more coolly, and look on their profession as a legitimate trade, as lawful as a publican's who sells the gin that robs a man's family of bread, and makes him perhaps a murderer as well as a madman.
Mary Prinsep was what the world calls lost--a bad girl--a castaway--but
she might have been a saint for the natural virtue that was in her. I have
reason to speak well of her, for to her we owe the life of Joshua.
Soon after we came to know her, Joshua fell ill in our wretched lodgings
where we lived and did for ourselves. He did not like to go to the
hospital, nor did I like it for
him. We both had a strong feeling against accepting the charity of society; so I said he should not go, and that I would work harder for him and myself too. But by my harder work--overtime, and the like--I was obliged to leave him for twelve hours and more at a stretch; and Mary Prinsep, whose "friend" had just left her to go into a west-end "dress-house," poor wench! came over and nursed him, and kept him alive.
She it was who made up the fire, cooked his broths and messes, gave him
his medicine, washed his clothes, and kept him clean and comfortable. And
when I came home from work, and found her there, with everything arranged
so nicely and as only a woman can--Joshua's bed made and him settled for
the night, and my own supper ready, and hot water for cleaning
myself--for we had but one room between us--as one of the great family of the frail, the suffering, I could not feel anything like virtuous horror of her. She was our sister--our sister of sorrow, of poverty, of affliction.
Gladly would Joshua have lifted her out of her life into something purer
and nobler. He was so poor himself with all he did and gave away, he had
much ado to live on the leavings; and as for marrying, that was as unlikely
as murder! So that he could neither put her into any way of business
independently, nor give her a home that the world would not misjudge. We
did what we could, however. I say we intentionally, as it
makes the whole thing clear to those who are candid enough not to wilfully
misunderstand. We helped her all we could, and she helped us. We worked for
her
food, while she gave us her time and did our chores. And so in this way we made it unnecessary for her to continue her sad trade.
This got us the name of associating with bad women; for it was said that
we lived partly on her earnings; and made us to be shyly looked on by our
shopmates. But Joshua's mind was set to do the thing that is right; and
what men said against him, not understanding facts or motives, hurt him no
more than that dogs should bark at shadows. That which is, not that which
seems, nor what folks choose to say, was what he lived for; and Mary
Prinsep was only a text and an occasion, like others.
And even when, one day, the men fairly hooted him down and hustled him
into the street, and me along with him, because
when he was chaffed savagely about "his girl" he answered them mildly enough; "Mates, did our great Master receive Mary Magdalene and all sinners, or did He not? And if He did--as you may find for yourselves--am I too pure to help them?"--He only said to me, wiping the mud from his torn coat; "You are not afraid, John? You'll go on the right way, whatever comes of it?"--and not a word even of impatience against those who had misused us, calling us "canters," "white-livered hypocrites," and worse words still. No, I was not afraid, I said. I would stand shoulder to shoulder with him through it all; and where he led, there would I follow, if we sunk up to our very necks in the slough of the world's reproach. And we were not far off.
very blood ran the hereditary taint; a thief, the son of thieves, the grandson of thieves; a thing of mud from head to heel, inside and out; dirty, dissipated, shiftless, and with no more moral principle in him than he had of education. His only morality indeed, was his cleverness in being able to break the law without being found out; and when he was most down on his luck, he was disposed to think most meanly of himself.
He was one of those who stink in the nostrils of cleanly, civilised
society, and who are its shame and secret sore. And cleanly, civilised
society, not being able to make a good job of him as he stood, thrust him
out of its sight, and tried to forget him behind the prison grating. There
was no place for Joe in this great world of ours. There was no work for him
to do, because he could do
none requiring any of the deftness got by practice; and if by chance he got a job anywhere, he lost it mysteriously in a day or so; and, double as he might, he found the dogs of detection too sharp for him.
So he said to Joshua one night in his blithe way--poor Joe! he had not
fibre enough in him to take even his misfortunes seriously!--that there was
nothing for him but the old line along with his pals, making a running
fight of it, now up now down, as his luck went.
"We'll see if something better won't turn up," said Joshua.
"Burglary's a bad trade, Joe."
"Only one I've got at my fingers' ends, governor," laughed
the thief; "and starvation is a worse go than quod."
"Well, till you've learned a better, share
with us," said Joshua. "If we have no widow's cruse--" "Blowed if I know what that means!" put in Joe, "--we have what does as well," continued Joshua; "and it's better for four to go short than for one to be rationed at the hulks."
So now our little home circle was increased by one more; and we had
added a burglar to the prostitute.
"It is what Christ would have done," said Joshua, when he
was remonstrated with. "He lived among the lepers whom no man would
touch, and whose very presence was pollution. But he healed some among
them; and so will I these."
But the police did not see it. They do not understand practical
Christianity in Scotland-yard, save as a generous kind of fad or pastime in
a swell with more money
than brains, and a lot of idle time on his hands. And then they laugh at it behind backs, and ridicule him for being green. But when it came to a poor journeyman carpenter housing a jail-bird, and consorting with bad characters daily, they had but one conclusion to come to--the carpenter was no better than his company. Wherefore, "from information received," Joshua and I, who had long been looked on askance by our mates as I said, were called up before the master, and had our dismissal from the shop. His other men, he said, objected to us; and, by the Lord, from all he had been told he did not wonder at it! And he gave us a caution--kindly meant, if harshly said--not to keep such company as we did, if we wanted to be respected by master or mate, and to remember that "birds of a
feather flock together," and if we chose such birds as he was told we did, we could look for nothing else than to be classed along, with them. On which he paid us our week's wages, and we found ourselves next thing to penniless in the wilds of London.
But Joshua was disturbed. He told both Joe and Mary, on the evening, we
were discharged, that he would not forsake them come what might. It should
still be share and share alike; only let them be of good courage and a
clean conscience, and things would go well. How, nobody knew; but this is
what he said, and promised.
And Mary, looking up into his face with a look that made her like an
angel--for indeed she was a pretty girl!--said, "If I have to starve,
Joshua, I'll never go back to the streets again!" and poor Joe, first
laughing, and then sobbing like a woman, said, "You'd have done better to have left me to my little game, governor! I've brought you bad luck, you see; and I'm no good, you see, when you've done your best!"
"Don't carry on like that, Joe," said Joshua. "I shall
have done something, if I save you both: and I will."
I could not help thinking that this "I will," said with such
manly courage, such deep religious firmness, was a greater trial of faith
than the boyish exaltation in the Rocky Valley so many years ago; and that
to save from the streets a girl who was not able to do anything, else that
the world wants, and to put honesty and a clean name into such a poor
conscienceless waif as Joe, were greater deeds than to cause a stone to
move out of its place in the Name of the Lord.
And all of us, his old Cornish friends who had come up to be near him,
and some new friends he had made in London, swore we would never desert
him, but would stand by him to the last. For we looked that he should do
something in his day, as I said before--something to advance the world, and
towards the solution of the great questions perplexing society at this
moment. True, we were a poor, moneyless lot--all working men, no science
among us, no political power, no social status, no political-economy
knowledge of the right sort; a handful of enthusiasts set out to realise
Christ at one time by faith, and now by works. But we had a soul among
us--a leader in whom we believed; and we trusted in ourselves. And
one by one we all got to work again somehow, and floated in the shallow but sufficient water to which we were accustomed. But it was a hard time; and, bit by bit, everything we possessed passed over the pawnbroker's counter, even to our tools. And when they went, it seemed as if all hope had gone.
But when we were at the worst, and things looked as though they had
given over all thought of mending--for we were getting whersh and weak for
want of food--Joshua received a letter enclosing a five-pound note,
"from a friend." We never knew where it came from, and there
was no clue by which we could guess. It was very certain that neither had
Mary earned it in the old way, nor had Joe stolen it; but who sent it
remained for ever a mystery. I always thought
that Mary had had a hand in it, and I think so to this day. I believe, though I don't know, that she borrowed it of an artist to whom she went to sit for a model; for she did not make any secret of this; and that she paid it back honestly when we were in funds again. However that might be, it came at the very nick of time; and immediately after, both Joshua and I got the offer of a job at Messrs. -- in Curtain-road, which we could not have accepted had we not had money wherewith to take our tools out of pawn. It was a sharp pinch while it lasted, but, God be praised, it passed without doing real harm to any one. And Joe and Mary still bided with us.
By this time Joshua's strange doings in Church-court had got known to
some of the gentlemen who practise philanthropy. His
night-school for those who would learn either prayer or secular knowledge of him--his charity dinners, when he could get enough money together to give them--his goodness to the children, to the lost, to the starving--all this had got wind; and just as he wanted help most, the news of his doings brought him the famous Mr. C. anxious to know how a man like him could carry on charities, apparently on nothing, which cost himself a large income to keep up.
He was a good man, this Mr. C.; up to his lights, none better; but his
lights were few and feeble, and he drew a line hard and fast where Joshua
did not. His line was respectability. He distinctly refused to aid those
who were hopeless paupers, or those of bad repute. He would help
respectable poverty, and help it substantially though always
afraid of overdoing it and inducing a habit of reliance on extraneous aid; but beasted, shiftless, drunken poverty--poverty that lied and whined and drank gin and got relief from half-a-dozen charities at once--poverty that was its own cause and that never stirred a hand to help itself--for this he had no pity, and to it gave no help.
"To encourage pauperism" and "to offer a premium for
vice" were the two things of which he was most afraid in his dealings
with the poor; but he held out a helping hand gladly enough to the
"deserving" and the "respectable" poor, and he was
a warm patron of reformatories, refuges for soiled doves, and the like
half-punitive places of retreat for sinful flesh, where they might repent
of their evil past, and be made fit to
take up a lowly place among the respectable members of society once more;--but always, in a sense, a place of humiliation and penitent degradation.
As he came along at this time, and was handy, and as Mary's friend, the
artist, had gone to Italy for some months, and she had no other patron of
the like kind, so was out of work as one may say, to him Joshua told the
whole story of both her and Joe Traill; also how he had kept them in the
best way he could from the evil to which society had driven them in former
days: he did not add the rider of how society had revenged itself on him as
on them, and cast us all out in company. But now, he said, he was desirous
of placing them both where their temptation would be towards
honesty; where it would be better for them to be
honest, and where falling back would plunge them into misery as well as shame.
Mr. C. listened attentively. He was evidently touched by the high spirit
of the man, but he greatly questioned the wisdom of his ways. For Joe, he
said, he scarcely knew what to propose. He shrank from committing himself
to the patronage of a convicted thief, who was not a boy to be sent to a
reformatory and disciplined into good ways. It was out of his line
altogether, and he had no machinery at hand for him. Had he been a
broken-down, sober, honest, and industrious chap, who had failed through
sickness or any blameless misfortune, he would then have given him a lift
willingly; but a man who had slipped into the dark ways of crime, who had
got into houses at dead of night with a crow-
bar and a jimmy--he shook his head, and said he did not like to have anything to do with him. It was offering a premium to vice to take trouble to place this unsatisfactory waif and stray, when hundreds of honest men, who had never gone wrong, were perishing for want of aid.
"As for that," said Joshua, "I ask nothing, whether
this man sinned or his parents; or neither. He is in want; and, to my way
of thinking, his need is his claim, not his respectability."
Mr. C. looked dubious. "We must draw a line," he said.
"Christ drew it at the Pharisee," answered Joshua
simply.
"To make no difference between vice and virtue--to treat the one
as tenderly as the other--would soon be to obliterate all
difference between them in minds as well as in practice," said Mr. C.
"And what, then, do we say to the parable of the men who worked
unequally, and who got the same wages at the end?" said Joshua.
"My good fellow," cried Mr. C. a little impatiently,
"it would be perfectly impossible to try and live strictly after the
Bible. 'Counsels of perfection' are all very well, but they are
impracticable for the world as it is."
"I have to find that out yet," said Joshua. "Then you
will not help me with poor Joe?"
"Do not say I will not--I cannot," said Mr. C. "How
can I ask my poor, honest pensioners, or my respectable workmen, to receive
a convicted thief among them?"
"'And forgive us our trespasses, as we
forgive them that trespass against us.' Does that mean only petty, personal affronts, sir, or does it mean trespass against our patience, our hope, our faith, our principles? Does it not mean the everlasting Love, whether we call it charity or humanity, by which we would raise the fallen and help the weak?"
"As for that," retorted Mr. C., "there are texts
enough against consorting with evil. You cannot touch pitch, Mr. Davidson,
without being defiled."
"Christ lodged in the house of Simon the leper. Mary Magdalene
loved Him, and He her. I want no other example, sir. What the Master did,
His followers and disciples may imitate!"
"You are an enthusiast," said Mr. C. just as the M.P. had
said before him, and
both meant that enthusiasm was ridiculous; "and some day these fine theories of yours will come to a cruel downfall. You will be harbouring some ruffian who will turn against you, and perhaps cut your throat for your pains. I tell you I know these people--they are incorrigible."
"Then what would you do with them, Mr. C.?"
"You can do nothing with them!" he answered.
"But they cannot be let to starve," said Joshua
earnestly.
"I do not see that it is any one's duty to feed them, when they
will not feed themselves save by vice and crime," answered the
philanthropist. "I would make all rogues, male and female, show some
tangible signs of repentance and good living
before I would help them or countenance them in any way. Believe me, your universal charity is the most disastrous line you could adopt."
"Then Christ was wrong," said Joshua: "and so we have
come round to our starting-point again. So this is decided--you will not
give Joe Traill a trial?"
"No; I would rather not have anything to do with him," said
Mr. C., who had talked himself cross and determined. "I should never
be easy with the fellow. I have no fancy for burglars, and I don't believe
in their reformation. All my men are picked men; not a loose character
among them. I could not ask them to admit a convicted thief as one of them;
and if I did, my own influence over them would be gone. It is because they
know I
would never pardon the smallest dereliction of duty that I keep them up to the mark: with what face then could I place among them such an unsatisfactory companion as your protégé? The thing would be impossible! With the woman perhaps I can do something. If she is young, she cannot be wholly hardened, and I could get her into the -- Street Reformatory."
"No," said Joshua, "I will not consent to her going
into a reformatory. It is not that she needs. In a reformatory she will be
continually reminded of what I want her to forget. She would be made morbid
by incessant thought about herself; taught to say penitential psalms when
she should be set to learn some skilled employment that would be of use to
her in the future. I wish her to be kept virtuous through self-respect,
and by being placed beyond the need of going back to such a life. I do not want her to be weakened by a self-torturing contrition for the past, or terrified at the prospect of eternal damnation for the future. I want her to be lifted up, not cast down."
"You surely do not make light of repentance!" cried Mr. C.
warmly. "What other assurance have we that she will not fail
again?"
"The best assurance, sir, will be to teach her self-respect and
the means of gaining an honest living," said Joshua.
"You are a rank materialist, Davidson!" said Mr. C. "I
cannot stand your referring sin to mere social conditions. Are there no
such things as sins in high places? Poverty and ignorance are not the only
roots of human wickedness!"
"About the strongest though," Joshua answered.
"And the sins of luxury--"
"Make Mary Prinsep and her class," interrupted Joshua.
"See here, sir, what are you asked to do?--to repair, in a very small
way, the evil done by society. You represent society at this moment, and
you are asked to undo a portion of your own bad work."
"Pshaw!" said Mr. C. "I have not made
Mary bad!"
He was an individual kind of man, and never saw beyond his own
point.
"Well," he then said, "I will do what I can for the
young woman. My wife wants an under-servant; I will put the case to her;
but I rely on you," he added, old habits of thought coming back to
steady
him in this sudden taking-off of his feet, as it were; "I rely on you that I am dealing with a woman substantially repentant, and so far purified; and that she will not corrupt the rest. For it is a dangerous experiment at the best."
"She is good enough for any one to trust and to love," said
Joshua warmly; and Mr. C. looked at him with a sharp, suspicious glance
that quite changed his face. "And I thank you heartily," Joshua
went on to say, unconscious that he had caused the slightest discomfort in
the gentleman's mind; "you have done a good work to-day--a work of
brotherhood with Christ."
"I trust I am not doing wrong," said Mr. C. doubtfully;
"but it is against my principles, you know. I cannot help feeling
that I am rewarding a woman, because she has lived a life of infamy, with a position which hundreds of virtuous girls would be rejoiced to fill."
"If your economic conscience troubles you, sir, lay it at rest by
the answer our Lord made to Himself, when He asked the Canaanitish woman if
it were meet to cast the children's bread to dogs."
"For all that, I cannot think it a duty to reward vice,"
persisted Mr. C. "And in doing what I am doing now, I wish it to be
distinctly understood that it is at your instance."
"Which means that you refuse the responsibility?"
"It does."
"So be it, sir. I accept it."
"That will not help me much if the thing
turns out ill," said Mr. C. in a discomposed voice.
"Oh, sir, have faith in human nature!" said Joshua
earnestly--so earnestly that I believe the tears were in his eyes: they
were in his voice.
"It is because I know human nature that I have so little faith in
it," said Mr. C. "Every one wants the help of strict moral
principle to enable him to steer clear of the temptations so sure to beset
him, and these fallen brothers and sisters are but leaky vessels at the
best. If human nature was the grand thing you say it is, Mr. Davidson, of
what need the coming of Christ? You are a Christian."
"And it is because Christ lived that I believe in humanity,"
said Joshua.
On which, Mr. C. said, with a smile,
"There is no doing anything with you, Mr. Davidson; you are as unconvinceable as a woman," shook hands with him kindly enough, and left.
A day or two after this he came again, with many kind words, much regret
and I doubt not genuine, but--his wife was as afraid of our poor Mary as he
had been of Joe Traill, and refused to take her into her house. If the
other servants should ever know; if Mary had imposed on Joshua, and was
really of no good; if she should corrupt the younger ones; and then the
repute of their house--the duty they owed their neighbours to keep up a
stainless appearance. No, there could be no home for her there; but the
lady sent a note, full of that half-censorious advice a virtuous woman
knows so well how to administer to her fallen
sisters--a parcel of tracts (Mary could not read), and a renewal of her husband's offer to get her in the -- Street Reformatory. After which perhaps some kind Christian person would be found to take her, she said, endorsed as she would then be by the Lady Superintendent of the establishment. For without casting any slur on Mr. Davidson, she went on to say, the voucher of only a young man was not quite satisfactory to a mistress who cared for the honour of her house. And perhaps she was right. But then Joshua was not like other young men; only she did not know this and Christians think it no sin to suspect all manner of evil of each other, unless they know for certain it does not exist.
Well, it was a disappointment; but
Joshua was not a man to be cast down for one blow or a dozen; so he set to work to find some one who would take her, knowing her past life; and at last lighted on a good, tender-hearted, but timid woman, who received her in full faith so far as the girl herself was concerned, but on the express condition that no one should ever know what she had been, and that there was to be no kind of communication between her and ourselves, or any of her old Church-court friends. To these terms Joshua advised her to submit; so with many tears poor Mary went away to take the place of kitchen-maid in a family living at a little distance from London, where, as the lady said, she had a chance now of redeeming herself, and a new start given her altogether.
"And if I do well, Joshua, you will be
pleased with me?" she said as she was bidding us good-by.
"More than pleased, Mary," he said. "You know that I
trust you, and that we both love you--John here as well as I."
Mary's face was as white as the frill round her neck.
"Joshua!" she said, looking up at him, "give me one kiss
before I go; it will help me."
Joshua bent his noble head and kissed her tenderly.
"God be with you, sister!" he said, and his voice a little
failed him.
"And I will say the prayer you taught me, Joshua, regularly
morning and evening when I ain't too sleepy," said Mary simply.
"And you will pray for me too?"
"As I do ever, my girl," said Joshua: "and I believe
that God hears us!"
"Then He will hear me!" said Mary with a kindling face;
"and I'll pray harder nor ever for the thing I want!"
Poor Mary! prayer was naught but a "charm" to her as yet.
She had never heard one, never offered one, till Joshua taught her the
Lord's Prayer, with a childish hymn and a childish "God bless all I
love" at the end; and she repeated what she had been taught as a
young child might; believing that it did good because she had been told so
by one she loved and trusted, but realising nothing more. Or if she
realised anything, it was that she prayed to Joshua, grown very great and
strong, and a long way off.
to speak, through which flowed the power of the Church; and this much more had he been a Roman Catholic, and of any Order. Had he been a Unitarian, a stickler for respectability and that the poor he relieved should be deserving, like Mr. C. and the charity-organisation people; or a Political Economist, giving lectures on the law of supply and demand, and the immorality of large families; had he belonged to any body whatsoever, he would have been supported. But, as he was--a man working on the Christ plan, and that alone; dealing with Humanity by pity and love and tolerance--he was as stranger and an alien.
The whole force of home missionaries of every denomination
discountenanced him as an infidel, unsound, irregular; and in whatsoever
they disagreed among themselves,
they all agreed in their ill estimate of him. The police were suspicious of him, and set him down as a doubtful character who harboured criminals; and the very people to whom he gave himself--accustomed as they were to be scouted by every man and woman pretending to clean hands and a pure life, or, at the best, to be preached at and urged to remorse--misdoubted him. The absence of abhorrence in his dealings with them looked to some like a trap, to others like encouragement. And yet they could scarcely think that!--with all his endeavours to put them into a better way of life, and to lift them out of the necessity of crime by giving them the alternative of honesty made possible, because giving them work sufficient for their daily wants.
But he soon began to see that the utmost
he, or a dozen such as he, could do, was only palliative and temporary. He might save one out of a thousand, and he would do well if he did that; but what is one out of a thousand cleansed and set in a safe place, to the nine hundred and ninety-nine left in their filth at the bottom of the abyss? Things have gone too far in England now for private charities to be of much use. Wh