Weighed and Wanting, George MacDonald [ebook reader android txt] 📗

most heartless scoffer may be suddenly surprised by emotion in a way to him unaccountable; of all its approaches and all the preparation for it he has been profoundly unaware. During that fortnight, Vavasor developed not merely elements of which he had had no previous consciousness, but elements in whose existence he could not be said to have really believed. He believed in them the less in fact that he had affected their existence in himself, and thought he possessed what there was of them to be possessed. The most remarkable event at once of his inner and outer history, and the only one that must have seemed almost incredible to those who knew him best, was, that one morning he got up in time to see, and for the purpose of seeing, the sun rise. I hardly expect to be believed when I tell the fact! I am not so much surprised that he formed the resolution the night before. Something Hester said is enough to account for that. But that a man like him should already have got on so far as, in the sleepiness of the morning, to keep the resolve he had come to in the wakefulness of the preceding night, fills me with astonishment. It was a great stride forward. Nor was this all: he really enjoyed it! I do not merely mean that, as a victorious man, he enjoyed the conquest of himself when the struggle was over, attributing to it more heroism than it could rightly claim; nor yet that, as any young human animal may, he enjoyed the clear invigorating clean air that filled his lungs like a new gift of life and strength. He had poetry enough to feel something of the indwelling greatness that belonged to the vision itself-for a vision and a prophecy it is, as much as when first it rose on the wondering gaze of human spirit, to every soul that through its eyes can see what those eyes cannot see. He felt a power of some kind present to his soul in the sight-though he but set it down to poetic feeling, which he never imagined to have anything to do with fact. It was in the so-called Christian the mere rudiment of that worship of the truth which in the old Guebers was developed into adoration of it in its symbol. It was the drawing of the eternal Nature in him towards the naturing Eternal, whom he was made to understand, but of whom he knew so little.

When the evening came, after almost a surfeit of music, if one dare, un-self-accused, employ such a word concerning a holy thing, they went out to wander a little about the house in the twilight.

"In such a still soft negative of life," he said, "as such an evening gives us, really one could almost doubt whether there was indeed such a constantly recurring phenomenon in nature as I saw this morning!"

"What did you see this morning?" asked Hester, wondering.

"I saw the sun rise," he answered.

"Did you really? I'm so glad! That is a sight rarely seen in London-at least if I may judge by my own experience."

"One goes to bed so late and so tired!" he replied simply.

"True! and even if one be up in time, where could you see it from?"

"I have seen it rise coming home from a dance; but then somehow you don't seem to have anything to do with it. I have, however, often smelt the hay in the streets in the morning."

Hester was checked by this mention of the hay-as if the sun was something that belonged to the country, like the grass he withered; but ere she had time to explain to herself what she felt, the next thing he said got her over it.

"I assure you I felt as if I had never seen the sun before. His way of getting up was a new thing to me altogether. He seemed to mean shining-and somehow I felt that he did. In London he always looks indifferent-just as if he had got it to do, and couldn't help it, like everybody else in the horrible place. Who is it that says-'God made the country, and man made the town'?"

"I think it was Cowper, but I'm not sure," answered Hester. "It can't be quite true though. I suspect man has more to do with the unmaking than the making of either. We have reason to be glad he has not come near enough to us yet to destroy either our river or our atmosphere."

"He is creeping on, though. The quarries are not very far from you even now."

"The quarries do little or no harm. There are a great many things man may do that only make nature show her beauty the more. I have been thinking a good deal about it lately: it is the rubbish that makes all the difficulty-the refuse of the mills and the pits and the iron-works and the potteries that does all the mischief."

"So it is! and worst of all the human rubbish-especially that which gathers in our great cities, and gives so much labor in vain to clergyman and philanthropist!"

Hester smiled-not that she was pleased with the way Vavasor spoke, for she could not but believe he would in his rubbish include many of her dear people, but that she was amused at his sympathetic tone towards the clergy as generally concerned in the matter. For she had had a little experience, and had listened to much testimony from such as knew, and firmly believed that the clergy were very near the root of the evil; and that not with the hoe and weeder, but with the watering pot and artificial manure, helping largely to convert the poor-into beggars, and the lawless into hypocrites, heaping cairn upon cairn on the grave of their poor prostrate buried souls. But thank God, it is by the few, but fast increasing exceptions, that she knew what the rest were doing!

But perhaps he meant only the wicked when he used the word.

"What do you mean by the human rubbish, Mr. Vavasor?" she asked.

He saw he must be careful, and would fence a little.

"Don't you think," he said slowly, and measuring his words, "that in the body politic there is something analogous to the waste in matter?"

"Certainly," she answered, "only we might differ as to the persons who were to be classed in it. I think we should be careful of our judgment as to when that state has been reached. I fancy that is just the one thing the human faculty is least able to cope with. None but God can read in a man what he really is. It can't be a safe thing to call human beings, our own kith and kin, born into the same world with us, and under the same laws of existence, rubbish ."

"I see what you mean," said Vavasor to Hester. But to himself said, "Good heavens!"

"You see," Hester went on-they were walking in the dark dusk, she before him in a narrow path among the trees, whence she was able both to think and speak more freely than if they had been looking in each other's face in the broad daylight-"you see, rubbish with life in it is an awkward thing to deal with. Rubbish proper is that out of which the life, so far at least as we can see, is gone; and this loss of life has rendered it useless, so that it cannot even help the growth of life in other things. But suppose, on the one hand, this rubbish, say that which lies about the mouth of a coal-pit, could be by some process made to produce the most lovely flowers, or that, on the other hand, if neglected, it would bring out the most horrible weeds of poison; infecting the air, or say horrible creeping things, then the word
rubbish would mean either too much or too little; for it means what can be put to no use, and what is noxious by its mere presence, its ugliness and immediate defilement. You see, Mr. Vavasor, I have been thinking a great deal about all this kind of thing. It is my business in a way."

"But would you not allow that the time comes when nothing can be done with them?"

"I will not allow it of any I have to do with, at least before I can say with confidence I have done all I can. After that another may be able to do more. And who shall say when God can do no more-God who takes no care of himself, and is laboriously working to get his children home."

"I confess," said Vavasor, "the condition of our poor in our large towns is the great question of the day."

"-which every one is waking up to talk about," said Hester, and said no more.

For, as one who tried to do something, she did not like to go on and say that if all who found the question interesting, would instead of talking about it do what they could, not to its solution but to its removal, they would at least make their mark on the rubbish -heap, of which not all the wind of words would in ten thousand years blow away a spadeful. And yet is talk a less evil than the mischief of mere experimenters. It is well there is the talk to keep many from doing positive harm. It is not those who, regarding the horrors around them as a nuisance, are bent upon their destruction, who will work any salvation in the earth, but those who see the wrongs of the poor, and strive to give them their own. Not those who desire a good report among men, nor those who seek an antidote against the tedium of a selfish existence, but those who, loving their own flesh and blood, and willing not merely to spend but to be spent for them, draw nigh them, being to being, will cause the light to rise upon such as now sit in darkness and the shadow of death. Love, and love alone, as from the first it is the source of all life, love alone, wise at once and foolish as a child, can work redemption. It is life drawing nigh to life, person to person, the human to human, that conquers death. This-therefore urges people to combine, seeking the strength of men, not the strength of God. The result is as he would have it-inevitable quarreling. The unfit brought in for strength are weakness and destruction. They want their own poor way, and destroy the work of their hands by the sound of their tongues. Combinations should be for passing necessities, and only between those who can each do good work alone, and will do it with or without combination. Whoever depends on combinations is a weakness to any association, society or church to which he may imagine himself to belong. The more easily any such can be dissolved the better. It is always by single individual communication that the truth has passed in power from soul to soul. Love alone, and the obligation thereto between the members of Christ's body, is the one eternal unbreakable bond. It is only where love is not that law must go. Law is indeed necessary, but woe to the community where love does not cast out-where at least love is not casting out law. Not all the laws in the universe can save a man from poverty, not to say from sin, not to say from