Faces in the Fire Part 3

VII

NOTHING

Nature, they say, abhors a vacuum. For the life of me, I do not know why. But then, for the matter of that, I do not know why I myself love many of the things that I love, and loathe many of the things that I abhor. Nature, however, is not usually capricious. Some deep policy generally prompts her strange behaviour. I must go into this matter a little more carefully. First of all, what is a vacuum? What is Nothing?

I was at a prize distribution not long ago, and as I came out into the street I came upon a little chap crying as though his heart would break.

He was quite alone. His parents had not thought it worth their while to accompany him to the function, and thus show their interest in his school life. Perhaps it was owing to the same lack of sympathy on their part that he was among the few boys who were bearing home no prize.

'Hullo, sonny,' I exclaimed,'what's the matter?'

'_Oh, nothing_!' he replied, between his sobs.

'Then what on earth are you crying for?'

'_Oh, nothing_!' he repeated.

I respected his delicacy, and probed no farther into the cause of his discomfiture, but I had collected further evidence of my contention that there is more in Nothing than you would suppose. Nor had I gone far before still further corroboration greeted me. For, at the top of the street, I came upon a group of lads in the centre of which was a boy with a very handsome prize. I paused and admired it.

'And what was this for?' I asked.

'_Oh, nothing_!' he answered, with a blush.

'But, my dear fellow, you must have done something to deserve it!'

'_Oh, it was nothing_!' he reiterated, and it was from his companions that I obtained the information that I sought. But here again it was made clear to me that there is a good deal in Nothing. Nothing is worth thinking about. It is a huge mistake to take things at their face value.

Nothing may sometimes represent a modest contrivance for hiding everything; and we must not allow ourselves to be deceived.

An old tradition a.s.sures us that, on the sudden death of one of Frederick the Great's chaplains, a certain candidate showed himself most eager for the vacant post. The king told him to proceed to the royal chapel and to preach an impromptu sermon on a text that he would find in the pulpit on arrival. When the critical moment arrived, the preacher opened the sealed packet, and found it--_blank_! Not a word or pen-mark appeared! With a calm smile the clergyman cast his eyes over the congregation, and then said, 'Brethren, here is Nothing. Blessed is he whom Nothing can annoy, whom Nothing can make afraid or swerve from his duty. We read that G.o.d from Nothing made all things. And yet look at the stupendous majesty of His infinite creation! And does not Job tell us that Nothing is the foundation of everything? "He hangeth the world upon Nothing," the patriarch declares.' The candidate then proceeded to elaborate the wonder and majesty of that creation that emanated from Nothing, and depended on Nothing. I need scarcely add that Frederick bestowed upon so ingenious a preacher the vacant chaplaincy. And in the years that followed he became one of the monarch's most intimate friends and most trusted advisers.

We must not, however, fly to the opposite extreme, and make too much of Nothing. For the odd thing is that, twice at least in her strange and chequered history, the Church has fallen in love with members of the Nothing family, and, after the fashion of lovers, has completely lost her head over them. On the first occasion she became deeply enamoured of Doing Nothing, and on the second occasion she went crazy over Having-Nothing. I must tell of these amorous exploits one at a time. The adoration of Doing-Nothing had a great vogue at one stage of the Church's history. Who that has once read the thirty-seventh chapter of Gibbon's _Decline and Fall_--the chapter on 'The Origin, Progress, and Effects of the Monastic Life'--will ever cease to be haunted by the weird, fantastic spectacle therein presented? Men suddenly took it into their heads that the only way of serving G.o.d was by doing nothing. They swarmed out into the deserts, and lived solitary lives. They took vows of perpetual silence, and ceased to speak; they ate only the most disgusting food; they lived the lives of wild beasts. 'Even sleep, the last refuge of the unhappy, was rigorously measured; the vacant hours rolled heavily on, without business and without pleasure; and, before the close of each day, the tedious progress of the sun was repeatedly accursed.' Here was an amazing phenomenon. It was, of course, only a pa.s.sing fancy, the merest piece of coquetry on the Church's part. It is unthinkable that she thought seriously of Doing-Nothing, and of settling down with him for the rest of her natural life. The glamour of this casual flirtation soon wore off. The Church discovered to her mortification that there was nothing in Nothing. Saint Anthony, of Alexandria, who felt that the life of the city was too full of incitement to frivolity and pleasure, fled to the desert, to escape from these temptations. He became a hermit. But he gave it up, and returned to Alexandria. The abominable imaginations that haunted his mind in the solitude were far more loathsome and degrading than anything he had experienced in the busy city. Fra Angelico, who also fell in love with Doing-Nothing, says that he heard the flapping of the wings of unclean things about his lonely cell. And Francis Xavier has told us of the seven terrible days that he spent in the tomb of Thomas at Malabar.

'All around me,' he says, 'malignant devils prowled incessantly, and wrestled with me with invisible but obscene hands.' It is the old story, there is nothing in Nothing; and he who falls in love with any member of that family will live to regret the adventure. I remember being greatly impressed by a sentence or two in Nansen's _Farthest North_. He is describing the maddening monotony of the interminable Arctic night.

'Ah!' he exclaims suddenly, 'life's peace is said to be found by holy men in the desert. Here indeed is desert enough; _but peace_!--of that I know nothing. I suppose it is the holiness that is lacking.' The explorer was simply discovering that there is nothing in Nothing but what you yourself take into it.

One would have supposed that, after this heart-breaking affair with Doing-Nothing, the Church would have been on her guard against all members of the Nothing family. But no! she was deceived a second time--in this instance by the wiles of Having-Nothing. I allude, of course, to the story of the Mendicant Orders. We all know how Francis d'a.s.sisi fell in love with Poverty. One day, to the consternation of his friends, they received a letter from the gay young soldier, telling them of his intention to lead an entirely new life. 'I am thinking of taking a wife more beautiful, more rich, more pure than you could ever imagine.' The wife was the Lady Poverty; and Giotto, in a fresco at a.s.sisi, has represented Francis placing the ring on the finger of his bride. The feminine figure is crowned with roses, but she is arrayed in rags, and her feet are bruised with stones and torn with briars. Francis borrowed the tattered and filthy garments of a beggar, and sought alms at the street corners that he might enter into the secret of poverty; and then he and Dominic founded those orders of mendicant monks which became one of the most potent missionary forces of the Middle Ages.

But once again the Church found out that her affections were being played with. There is no more virtue in Having-Nothing than in Doing-Nothing. They are both good-for-nothing. It may be that some of us would be better men if we had less money; but then, others of us would be better men if we had more. It may be that, here and there, you may find a Silas Marner who has been saved by sudden poverty from miserly greed and hardening self-absorption. But, for one such case, it would be easy to point to hundreds of men who have been driven by poverty from the ways of honour, and to hundreds of women who have been forced by poverty from the paths of virtue. It all comes back to this: there is nothing in Nothing. Doing-Nothing and Having-Nothing are deceivers--the pair of them; and the Church must not be beguiled by their blandishments. Work and money are both good things. Even William Law saw that. His _Serious Call_ has often almost made a monk of me, but a sudden flash of common sense always breaks from the page just in time.

'There are two things,' he says in his fine chapter on 'The Wise and Pious Use of an Estate,' 'there are two things which, of all others, most want to be under a strict rule, and which are the greatest blessings both to ourselves and others, when they are rightly used.

These two things are our time and our money. These talents are the continual means and opportunities of doing good.' Beware, that is to say, of Doing-Nothing, of Having-Nothing, and of the whole family of Nothings. It is not for nothing that Nature abhors them.

And now it suddenly comes home to me that I am playing on the very verge of a tremendous truth. There is nothing in Nothing. Let me remember that when next I am at death-grips with temptation! Cupid is said to have complained to Jupiter that he could never seize the Muses because he could never find them idle. And I suppose that our everyday remark that 'Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do' has its origin in the same idea. John Locke, the great philosopher, used to say that, in the hour of temptation, he preferred any company rather than his own. If possible, he sought the companionship of children. Anything rather than Nothing. It reminds us of Hannibal. The great Carthaginian led his troops up the Alpine pa.s.ses, but he found that the heights were strongly held by the Romans. Attack was out of the question. Hannibal watched closely one night, however, and discovered that, under cover of darkness, the enemy withdrew for the night to the warmer valley on the opposite slope. Next night, therefore, Hannibal led his troops to the heights, and, when the Roman general approached in the morning, he found that the tables had been turned upon him. There is always peril in vacancy. The uncultivated garden brings forth weeds. The unoccupied mind becomes the devil's playground. The vacant soul is a lost soul. There is nothing in Nothing.

But for the greatest ill.u.s.tration of my present theme I must betake me to Mark Rutherford. The incident occurred at the most sunless and joyless stage of Mark's career. From all his wretchedness he sought relief in Nothing. He kept his own company, wandered about the fields, abandoned himself to moods, and lost himself in vague and insoluble problems. But one day a strange thing happened. 'I was walking along under the south side of a hill, which was a great place for b.u.t.terflies, when I saw a man, apparently about fifty years old, coming along with a b.u.t.terfly net.' They soon chummed up. 'He told me that he had come seven miles that morning to that spot, because he knew that it was haunted by one particular species of b.u.t.terfly; and, as it was a still, bright day, he hoped to find a specimen.' At first Mark Rutherford felt a kind of contempt for a man who could give himself up to so childish a pastime.

But, later on, he heard his story. Years before he had married a delicate girl, of whom he was devotedly fond. She died in childbirth, leaving him completely broken. And, by some inscrutable mystery of fate, the child grew up to be a cripple, horribly deformed, inexpressibly hideous, as ugly as an ape, as l.u.s.tful as a satyr, and as ferocious as a tiger! The son, after many years, died in a mad-house; and the horror of it all nearly consigned his poor father to a similar asylum. 'During those dark days,' he told Mark Rutherford, 'I went on _gazing gloomily into dark emptiness_, till all life became nothing for me.' _Gazing into emptiness_, mark you! Then there swept across this aching void of nothingness a beautiful b.u.t.terfly! It caught his fancy, interested him, filled the gap, and saved his reason from uttermost collapse. He began collecting b.u.t.terflies. He was no longer _gazing into emptiness_. And the moral of the incident is stated in a single sentence. 'Men should not be too curious in a.n.a.lysing and condemning any means which Nature devises to save them from themselves, whether it be coins, old books, curiosities, fossils, or b.u.t.terflies.'

'Any means which Nature devises.' We are back to Nature again.

'Nature abhors a vacuum'; it was at that point that we set out.

I see now that Nature is right, after all. I can never be saved by Nothing. The abstract will never satisfy me. I want something; aye, more, I want _Some One_; and until I find _Him_ my restless soul calls down all the echoing corridors of Nothingness, 'Oh that I knew _where I might find Him_!'

VIII

THE ANGEL AND THE IRON GATE

It is of no use arguing against an iron gate. There it stands--chained and padlocked, barred and bolted--right across your path, and you can neither coax nor cow it into yielding. So was it with Peter on the night of his miraculous escape from prison. 'Herod,' we are told, 'killed James with the sword, and, because he saw that it pleased the Jews, he proceeded to take Peter also.' There he lay, 'sleeping between two soldiers, bound with chains, whilst the keepers before the door kept the prison.' He expected that his next visitor would be the headsman; and whilst he waited for the _executioner_, there came an _angel_! This sort of thing happens fairly often. They are sitting round the fire, and the lady in the arm-chair is talking of her sailor-son.

'Ah!' she says, 'I haven't heard of him for over a year now, and I begin to think that I shall never hear again.'

There is a sharp ring at the bell. She starts.

'Something tells me,' she continues, 'that this is a message to say that the ship is lost, and that I shall never see my boy again.'

Even whilst she speaks the door is opened, and her last syllable is scarcely uttered before she is folded in the sailor's arms.

The principle holds true to the very end. It is a sick-room, and the pale wan face of the patient looks very weary.

'Oh, how I dread death!' she says; 'I cannot bear to think that I must die.'

An hour later the door of the unseen opens to her, and there stands on the threshold, not Death, but _Life Everlasting_!

Peter very, very often waits for the executioner, and welcomes an angel.

I

During the next few moments Peter scarcely knew whether he was in the body or out of the body. Was he alive or was he dead? Was he waking or was he dreaming? 'He wist not that it was true which was done by the angel, but thought he saw a vision.' He walked like a man with his head in the clouds. Doors were opening; chains were falling; he seemed to be living in a land of enchantment, a world of magic. But the iron gate put an end to all illusion. 'They came to the iron gate,' and, as I said a moment ago, an iron gate is a very difficult thing to argue with. The iron gate represents the return to reality. After our most radiant spiritual experiences we come abruptly to the humdrum and the commonplace. It was Mary's Sunday evening out. Mary, you must know, is a housemaid in a big boarding establishment, and her life is by no means an easy one. But Mary is also a member of the Church. On Sunday she was in her favourite seat. Perhaps it was that she was specially hungry for some uplifting word, or perhaps it was that the message was peculiarly suitable to her condition; but, be that as it may, the service that night seemed to carry poor Mary to the very gate of heaven. The Communion Service that followed completed her ecstasy, and Mary seemed scarcely to touch the pavement with her feet as she hurried home. She fell asleep crooning to herself the hymn with which the service closed:

O Love, that will not let me go, I rest my weary soul in Thee; I give Thee back the life I owe, That in Thine ocean depths its flow May richer, fuller be.

She knew nothing more until, in the chilly dark of the morning, the alarum clock screamed at her to jump up, clean the cold front steps, dust the great silent rooms, and light the copper-fire. 'And she came to the iron gate.' There come points in life at which poetry merges into the severest prose; romance yields to reality; the miracle of the open prison is succeeded by the menace of the iron gate.

II

As long as Peter had an iron gate before him, he had an angel beside him. It was not until the iron gate had been safely negotiated that 'forthwith the angel departed from him.' Mary made a mistake when she fancied that she had left all the glory behind her. The angel is with us more often than we think. A devout Jew, in bidding you farewell, will always use a plural p.r.o.noun. And if you ask for whom, besides yourself, his blessing is intended, he will reply that it is for you and for _the angel over your shoulder_. We are too fond of fancying that the angel is only with us when the chains are miraculously falling from off our feet, and when the doors are miraculously opening before our faces. We are too slow to believe that the angel is still by our side when we emerge into the night and come to the iron gate. It is a very ancient heathen superst.i.tion. 'There came a man of G.o.d, and spake unto the king of Israel, and said, Thus saith the Lord, because the Syrians have said, "The Lord is G.o.d of the _hills_, but He is not G.o.d of the _valleys_,"

therefore will I deliver all this great mult.i.tude into thine hand, and ye shall know that I am the Lord.' We are always a.s.suming that He is the G.o.d of the mountaintops, and that He leaves us to thread the darksome valleys alone; and our a.s.sumption is a cruel and unjust one. As long as Peter had an iron gate before him, he had an angel beside him.

III

The converse, however, is equally true. As long as Peter had an angel beside him, he had an iron gate ahead of him. Angels do not walk by our sides for fun. 'Are they not all ministering spirits, sent forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation?' If there is an angel by my side, depend upon it, there is work that only an angel can do in front of me. Mary's radiant experience that Sunday evening was directly and intimately related with the brazen yell of the alarum clock on Monday morning. It was not intended as a mere temporary elevation of the spirit, but as an a.s.surance of a gracious presence--a presence that should never be withdrawn as long as a need existed. It is part of the infinite pathos of life that we misinterpret our visions. Jacob beheld his staircase leading from earth to heaven, with angels ascending and descending upon it. And straightway, as he prepared to leave, he began to say good-bye to the angels! 'Surely,' he exclaimed, 'the Lord is in _this place_! How dreadful is _this place_! _This_ is none other but the house of G.o.d, and _this_ is the gate of heaven! And he called the name of _that place_ Bethel!' And thus he missed the whole meaning of the beatific vision. The vision was to warn him of the perils that awaited him, and to a.s.sure him that 'behold, I am with thee in _all places_ whither thou goest.'

'_All places_!' said the Vision.