One Snowy Night Part 6

"Rather awkward ones, sometimes. Thoughts of hatred, for instance, may issue in murder, and that may lead to your own death. If the thoughts had been curbed in the first instance, the miserable results would have been spared to all the sufferers. And 'no man liveth to himself': it is very seldom that you can bring suffering on one person only. It is almost sure to run over to two or three more. And as the troubles of every one of them will run over to another two or three, like circles in the water, the sorrow keeps ever widening, so that the consequences of one small act or word for evil are incalculable. It takes G.o.d to reckon them."

"Eh, don't you, now!" said Isel with a shudder. "Makes me go all creepy like, that does. I shouldn't dare to do a thing all the days of my life, if I looked at every thing that way."

"Friend," said Gerhardt gravely, "these things _are_. It does not destroy them to look away from them. It is not given to us to choose whether we will act, but only how we will act. In some manner, for good or for ill, act we must."

"I declare I won't listen to you, Gerard. I'm going creepy-crawly this minute. Oh deary me! you do make things look just awful."

"Rubbish!" said Haimet, driving a nail into the wall with unnecessary vehemence.

"It is the saying of a wise man, friends," remarked Gerhardt, "that 'he that contemneth small things shall fall by little and little.' And with equal wisdom he saith again, 'Be not confident in a plain way.'" [Note 5.]

"But it is all nonsense to say 'we must act,'" resumed Haimet. "We need not act in any way unless we choose. How am I acting if I sit here and do nothing?"

"Unless you are resting after work is done, you are setting an example of idleness or indecision. Not to do, is sometimes to do in a most effectual way. Not to hinder the doing of evil, when it lies in your power, is equivalent to doing it."

Haimet stared at Gerhardt for a moment.

"What a wicked lot of folks you would make us out to be!"

"So we are," said Gerhardt with a quiet smile.

"Oh, I see!--that's how you come by your queer notions of every man's heart being bad. Well, you are consistent, I must admit."

"I come by that notion, because I have seen into my own. I think I have most thoroughly realised my own folly by noting in how many cases, if I were endued with the power of G.o.d, I should not do what He does: and in like manner, I most realise my own wickedness by seeing the frequent instances wherein my will raises itself up in opposition to the will of G.o.d."

"But how is it, then, that I never see such things in myself?"

"Your eyes are shut, for one thing. Moreover, you set up your own will as the standard to be followed, without seeking to ascertain the will of G.o.d. Therefore you do not see the opposition between them."

"Oh, I don't consider myself a saint or an angel. I have done foolish things, of course, and I dare say, some things that were not exactly right. We are all sinners, I suppose, and I am much like other people.

But taking one thing with another, I think I am a very decent fellow. I can't worry over my 'depravity,' as you do. I am not depraved. I know several men much worse than I am in every way."

"Is that the ell-wand by which G.o.d will measure you? He will not hold you up against those men, but against the burning snow-white light of His own holiness. What will you look like then?"

"Is that the way you are going to be measured, too?"

"I thank G.o.d, no. Christ our Lord will be measured for me, and He has fulfilled the whole Law."

"And why not for me?" said Haimet fiercely. "Am I not a baptised Christian, just as much as you?"

"Friend, you will not be asked in that day whether you were a baptised Christian, but whether you were a believing Christian. Sins that are laid on Christ are gone--they exist no longer. But sins that are not so destroyed have to be borne by the sinner himself."

"Well, I call that cowardice," said Haimet, drawing a red herring across the track, "to want to burden somebody else with your sins. Why not have the manliness to bear them yourself?"

"If you are so manly," answered Gerhardt with another of his quiet smiles, "will you oblige me, Haimet, by taking up the Castle, and setting it down on Presthey?"

"What are you talking about now? How could I?"

"Much more easily than you could atone for one sin. What do you call a man who proposes to do the impossible?"

"A fool."

"And what would you call the bondman whose master had generously paid his debt, and who refused to accept that generosity, but insisted on working it out himself, though the debt was more than he could discharge by the work of a thousand years?"

"Call him what you like," said Haimet, not wishing to go too deeply into the question.

"I will leave you to choose the correct epithet," said Gerhardt, and went on with his carving in silence.

The carving was beginning to bring in what Isel called "a pretty penny."

Gerhardt's skill soon became known, and the Countess of Oxford employed him to make coffers, and once sent for him to the Castle to carve wreaths on a set of oak panels. He took the work as it came, and in the intervals, or on the summer evenings, he preached on the village greens in the neighbourhood. His audiences were often small, but his doctrines spread quietly and beneath the surface. Not one came forward to join him openly, but many went away with thoughts that they had never had before. Looked on from the outside, Gerhardt's work seemed of no value, and blessed with no success. Yet it is possible that its inward progress was not little. There may have been silent souls that lived saintly lives in that long past century, who owed their first awakening or their gradual edification to some word of his; it may be that the st.u.r.dy resistance of England to Papal aggression in the subsequent century had received its impetus from his unseen hand. Who shall say that he achieved nothing? The world wrote "unsuccessful" upon his work: did G.o.d write "blessed"? One thing at least I think he must have written--"Thou hast been faithful in a few things." And while the measure of faithfulness is not that of success, it is that of the ultimate reward, in that Land where many that were first shall be last, and the last first. "They that are with" the Conqueror in the last great battle, are not the successful upon earth, but the "called and chosen and faithful."

"If any man serve Me, let him follow Me,"--and what work ever had less the appearance of success than that which seemed to close on Calvary?

Note 1. "William, son of the fat priest," occurs on the Pipe Roll for 1176, Unless "Grossus" is to be taken as a Christian name.

Note 2. Servant or slave of Michael. The Scottish _gillie_ comes from the same root.

Note 3. These are the tenets of the ancient Waldensian Church, with which, so far as they are known, those of the German mission agreed.

(They are exactly those of the Church of England, set forth in her Sixth, Ninth, Tenth, Eleventh, Seventeenth, Nineteenth, Twentieth, Twenty-Second, Twenty-Fifth, and Thirty-First Articles of Religion.) She accepted two of our three Creeds, excluding the Nicene.

Note 4. Ecclesiasticus nineteen 1, and thirty-two 21. The Waldensian Church regarded the Apocrypha as the Church of England does--not as inspired Scripture, but as a good book to be read "for example of life and instruction of manners."

CHAPTER THREE.

THE JEWISH MAIDEN'S VOW.

"To thine own self be true!

And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man."

Shakespeare.

"There's the Mayor sent orders for the streets to be swept clean, and all the mud carted out of the way. You'd best sweep afore your own door, and then maybe you'll have less rate to pay, Aunt Isel."

It was Stephen the Watchdog who looked in over the half-door to give this piece of information.

"What's that for?" asked Isel, stopping in the work of mopping the brick floor.

"The Lady Queen comes through on her way to Woodstock."

"To-day?" said Flemild and Derette together.

"Or to-morrow. A running footman came in an hour ago, to say she was at Abingdon, and bid my Lord hold himself in readiness to meet her at the East Gate. The vintners have had orders to send in two tuns of Gascon and Poitou wine; and Henry the Mason tells me a new cellar and chimney were made last week in the Queen's chamber at Woodstock. Geoffrey the Sumpter was in town yesterday, buying budgets, coffers, and bottles. So if you girls want to see her, you had better make haste and get your work done, and tidy yourselves up, and be at the East Gate by noon or soon after."

"Get their work done! Don't you know better than that, Stephen? A woman's work never is done. It's you lazy loons of men that stop working and take your pleasure when night comes. Work done, indeed!"