Friends and Neighbors Part 1

Friends and Neighbors.

by Anonymous.

PREFACE.

WE were about preparing a few words of introduction to this volume, the materials for which have been culled from the highways and byways of literature, where our eyes fell upon these fitting sentiments, the authorship of which we are unable to give. They express clearly and beautifully what was in our own mind:--

"If we would only bring ourselves to look at the subjects that surround as in their true flight, we should see beauty where now appears deformity, and listen to harmony where we hear nothing but discord. To be sure there is a great deal of vexation and anxiety in the world; we cannot sail upon a summer sea for ever; yet if we preserve a calm eye and a steady hand, we can so trim our sails and manage our helm, as to avoid the quicksands, and weather the storms that threaten shipwreck.

We are members of one great family; we are travelling the same road, and shall arrive at the same goal. We breathe the same air, are subject to the same bounty, and we shall, each lie down upon the bosom of our common mother. It is not becoming, then, that brother should hate brother; it is not proper that friend should deceive friend; it is not right that neighbour should deceive neighbour. We pity that man who can harbour enmity against his fellow; he loses half the enjoyment of life; he embitters his own existence. Let us tear from our eyes the coloured medium that invests every object with the green hue of jealousy and suspicion; turn, a deal ear to scandal; breathe the spirit of charity from our hearts; let the rich gushings of human kindness swell up as a fountain, so that the golden age will become no fiction and islands of the blessed bloom in more than Hyperian beauty."

It is thus that friends and neighbours should live. This is the right way. To aid in the creation of such true harmony among men, has the book now in your hand, reader, been compiled. May the truths that glisten on its pages be clearly reflected in your mind; and the errors it points out be shunned as the foes of yourself and humanity.

FRIENDS AND NEIGHBOURS.

GOOD IN ALL.

THERE IS GOOD IN ALL. Yes! we all believe it: not a man in the depth of his vanity but will yield a.s.sent. But do you not all, in practice, daily, hourly deny it? A beggar pa.s.ses you in the street: dirty, ragged, importunate. "Ah! he has a _bad_ look," and your pocket is safe. He starves--and he steals. "I thought he was _bad_." You educate him in the State Prison. He does not improve even in this excellent school.

"He is," says the gaoler, "thoroughly _bad_." He continues his course of crime. All that is bad in him having by this time been made apparent to himself, his friends, and the world, he has only to confirm the decision, and at length we hear when he has reached his last step. "Ah!

no wonder--there was never any _Good_ in him. Hang him!"

Now much, if not all this, may be checked by a word.

If you believe in Good, _always appeal to it._ Be sure whatever there is of Good--is of G.o.d. There is never an utter want of resemblance to the common Father. "G.o.d made man in His own image." "What! yon reeling, blaspheming creature; yon heartless cynic; yon crafty trader; yon false statesman?" Yes! All. In every nature there is a germ of eternal happiness, of undying Good. In the drunkard's heart there is a memory of something better--slight, dim: but flickering still; why should you not by the warmth of your charity, give growth to the Good that is in him?

The cynic, the miser, is not all self. There is a note in that sullen instrument to make all harmony yet; but it wants a patient and gentle master to touch the strings.

You point to the words "There is _none_ good." The truths do not oppose each other. "There is none good--_save one._" And He breathes in all.

In our earthliness, our fleshly will, our moral grasp, we are helpless, mean, vile. But there is a lamp ever burning in the heart: a guide to the source of Light, or an instrument of torture. We can make it either.

If it burn in an atmosphere of purity, it will warm, guide, cheer us. If in the midst of selfishness, or under the pressure of pride, its flame will be unsteady, and we shall soon have good reason to trim our light, and find new oil for it.

There is Good in All--the impress of the Deity. He who believes not in the image of G.o.d in man, is an infidel to himself and his race. There is no difficulty about discovering it. You have only to appeal to it. Seek in every one the _best_ features: mark, encourage, educate _them._ There is no man to whom some circ.u.mstance will not be an argument.

And how glorious in practice, this faith! How easy, henceforth, all the labours of our law-makers, and how delightful, how practical the theories of our philanthropists! To educate the _Good_--the good in _All_: to raise every man in his own opinion, and yet to stifle all arrogance, by showing that all possess this Good. _In_ themselves, but not _of_ themselves. Had we but faith in this truth, how soon should we all be digging through the darkness, for this Gold of Love--this universal Good. A Howard, and a Fry, cleansed and humanized our prisons, to find this Good; and in the chambers of all our hearts it is to be found, by labouring eyes and loving hands.

Why all our harsh enactments? Is it from experience of the strength of vice in ourselves that we cage, chain, torture, and hang men? Are none of us indebted to friendly hands, careful advisers; to the generous, trusting guidance, solace, of some gentler being, who has loved us, despite the evil that is in _us_--for our little Good, and has nurtured that Good with smiles and tears and prayers? O, we know not how like we are to those whom we despise! We know not how many memories of kith and kin the murderer carries to the gallows--how much honesty of heart the felon drags with him to the hulks.

There is Good in All. Dodd, the forger, was a better man than most of us: Eugene Aram, the homicide, would turn his foot from a worm. Do not mistake us. Society demands, requires that these madmen should be rendered harmless. There is no nature dead to all Good. Lady Macbeth would have slain the old king, Had he not resembled her father as he slept.

It is a frequent thought, but a careless and worthless one, because never acted on, that the same energies, the same will to great vices, had given force to great virtues. Do we provide the opportunity? Do we _believe_ in Good? If we are ourselves deceived in any one, is not all, thenceforth, deceit? if treated with contempt, is not the whole world clouded with scorn? if visited with meanness, are not all selfish? And if from one of our frailer fellow-creatures we receive the blow, we cease to believe in women. Not the breast at which we have drank life--not the sisterly hands that have guided ours--not the one voice that has so often soothed us in our darker hours, will save the s.e.x: All are ma.s.sed in one common sentence: all bad. There may be Delilahs: there are many Ruths. We should not lightly give them up. Napoleon lost France when he lost Josephine. The one light in Rembrandt's gloomy life was his sister.

And all are to be approached at some point. The proudest bends to some feeling--Coriola.n.u.s conquered Rome: but the husband conquered the hero. The money-maker has influences beyond his gold--Reynolds made an exhibition of his carriage, but he was generous to Northcote, and had time to think of the poor Plympton schoolmistress. The cold are not all ice. Elizabeth slew Ess.e.x--the queen triumphed; the woman _died._

There is Good in All. Let us show our faith in it. When the lazy whine of the mendicant jars on your ears, think of his unaided, unschooled childhood; think that his lean cheeks never knew the baby-roundness of content that ours have worn; that his eye knew no youth of fire--no manhood of expectancy. Pity, help, teach him. When you see the trader, without any pride of vocation, seeking how he can best cheat you, and degrade himself, glance into the room behind his shop and see there his pale wife and his thin children, and think how cheerfully he meets that circle in the only hour he has out of the twenty-four. Pity his narrowness of mind; his want of reliance upon the G.o.d of Good; but remember there have been Greshams, and Heriots, and Whittingtons; and remember, too, that in our happy land there are thousands of almshouses, built by the men of trade alone. And when you are discontented with the great, and murmur, repiningly, of Marvel in his garret, or Milton in his hiding-place, turn in justice to the Good among the great. Read how John of Lancaster loved Chaucer and sheltered Wicliff. There have been Burkes as well as Walpoles. Russell remembered Banim's widow, and Peel forgot not Haydn.

Once more: believe that in every cla.s.s there is Good; in every man, Good. That in the highest and most tempted, as well as in the lowest, there is often a higher n.o.bility than of rank. Pericles and Alexander had great, but different virtues, and although the refinement of the one may have resulted in effeminacy, and the hardihood of the other in brutality, we ought to pause ere we condemn where we should all have fallen.

Look only for the Good. It will make you welcome everywhere, and everywhere it will make you an instrument to good. The lantern of Diogenes is a poor guide when compared with the Light G.o.d hath set in the heavens; a Light which shines into the solitary cottage and the squalid alley, where the children of many vices are hourly exchanging deeds of kindness; a Light shining into the rooms of dingy warehous.e.m.e.n and thrifty clerks, whose hard labour and h.o.a.rded coins are for wife and child and friend; shining into prison and workhouse, where sin and sorrow glimmer with sad eyes through rusty bars into distant homes and mourning hearths; shining through heavy curtains, and round sumptuous tables, where the heart throbs audibly through velvet mantle and silken vest, and where eye meets eye with affection and sympathy; shining everywhere upon G.o.d's creatures, and with its broad beams lighting up a virtue wherever it falls, and telling the proud, the wronged, the merciless, or the despairing, that there is "Good in All."

HUMAN PROGRESS.

WE are told to look through nature Upward unto Nature's G.o.d; We are told there is a scripture Written on the meanest sod; That the simplest flower created Is a key to hidden things; But, immortal over nature, Mind, the lord of nature, springs!

Through _Humanity_ look upward,-- Alter ye the olden plan,-- Look through man to the Creator, Maker, Father, G.o.d of Man!

Shall imperishable spirit Yield to perishable clay?

No! sublime o'er Alpine mountains Soars the Mind its heavenward way!

Deeper than the vast Atlantic Rolls the tide of human thought; Farther speeds that mental ocean Than the world of waves o'er sought!

Mind, sublime in its own essence Its sublimity can lend To the rocks, and mounts, and torrents, And, at will, their features bend!

Some within the humblest _floweret_ "Thoughts too deep for tears" can see; Oh, the humblest man existing Is a sadder theme to me!

Thus I take the mightier labour Of the great Almighty hand; And, through man to the Creator, Upward look, and weeping stand.

Thus I take the mightier labour, --Crowning glory of _His_ will; And believe that in the meanest Lives a spark of G.o.dhead still: Something that, by Truth expanded, Might be fostered into worth; Something struggling through the darkness, Owning an immortal birth!

From the Genesis of being Unto this imperfect day, Hath Humanity held onward, Praying G.o.d to aid its way!

And Man's progress had been swifter, Had he never turned aside, To the worship of a symbol, Not the spirit signified!

And Man's progress had been higher, Had he owned his brother man, Left his narrow, selfish circle, For a world-embracing plan!

There are some for ever craving, Ever discontent with place, In the eternal would find briefness, In the infinite want s.p.a.ce.

If through man unto his Maker We the source of truth would find, It must be through man enlightened, Educated, raised, refined: That which the Divine hath fashioned Ignorance hath oft effaced; Never may we see G.o.d's image In man darkened--man debased!

Something yield to Recreation, Something to Improvement give; There's a Spiritual kingdom Where the Spirit hopes to live!

There's a mental world of grandeur, Which the mind inspires to know; Founts of everlasting beauty That, for those who seek them, flow!

Sh.o.r.es where Genius breathes immortal-- Where the very winds convey Glorious thoughts of Education, Holding universal sway!

Glorious hopes of Human Freedom, Freedom of the n.o.blest kind; That which springs from Cultivation, Cheers and elevates the mind!

Let us hope for Better Prospects, Strong to struggle for the night, We appeal to Truth, and ever Truth's omnipotent in might; Hasten, then, the People's Progress, Ere their last faint hope be gone; Teach the Nations that their interest And the People's good, ARE ONE.

MY WASHERWOMAN.

SOME people have a singular reluctance to part with money. If waited on for a bill, they say, almost involuntarily, "Call to-morrow," even though their pockets are far from being empty.

I once fell into this bad habit myself; but a little incident, which I will relate, cured me. Not many years after I had attained my majority, a poor widow, named Blake, did my washing and ironing. She was the mother of two or three little children, whose sole dependence for food and raiment was on the labour of her hands.