correspondent. 'In 1871 I went to Africa as prejudiced as the biggest atheist in London. But there came for me a long time for reflection. I was out there, away from a worldly world. I saw a solitary old man there, and asked, "Why on earth does he stop here? Is he cracked, or what? What is it that inspires him?" For months after we met, I simply found myself listening to him, wondering at him, as he carried out all that was said in the Bible: "Leave all that ye have, and follow me." But, little by little, his sympathy became contagious. Seeing his piety, his gentleness, his zeal, his earnestness, and how quietly he did his duty, I was converted by him, though he had not tried to do it.' Not long after, in 1873, that old man was found dead on his knees, by the side of his lowly cot, in his mud hut, in the heart of Africa, with none but black faces round him. And the faithful blacks, for whose sake he had left all and succumbed to his endless hardships, smeared his corpse with pitch, and covered it with palm-leaves, and carried it on their shoulders, 300 miles to Zanzibar. A ship bore it to England, and it was buried, amid the tears of the noble and the great, in the nave of Westminster Abbey. The traveller was Mr. H. M. Stanley; the aged missionary, whose life is the pledge of future regeneration for miserable and distracted Africa, was David Livingstone. And though he died and saw no fruit of his labours, it is to him and to the text which had grown so luminous to him that we owe the translation of the Bible since his death into fourteen languages of Africa, and the extension of the British protectorate over 170,000 square miles. These are avowedly but chance and casual examples; but the instances are numberless in which single texts have DAVID LIVINGSTONE 297 thus become luminous and vivifying for individual souls. And hence we may see that the Bible is no mere earthly volume, but resembles some great ocean, upon which the Spirit, 'dovelike, sits brooding o'er the vast abyss;' no mere earthly volume, but rather like some great collection of Sibylline oracles, pregnant with the fate of nations; like some field of the bread of life, over the billows of whose golden grain pass the breathings of the Holy Spirit of God; like some magic palimpsest 'whose leaves are, as it were, blown to and fro by the winds of destiny.' It will not even be pretended that any book in the world, or all the books in the world put together, have wrought such vast and beneficent conversions-such deliverances from darkness unto light, and from the power of Satan unto God-as have been and are day by day being wrought by the voice of God speaking to us from the Holy Scrip Is not this single fact sufficient to prove their unique preciousness, their transcendent supremacy? CHAPTER XX THE BIBLE THE CHIEF SOURCE OF HUMAN CONSOLATION. 'Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God.'-Is. xl. 1. 'Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.'-Matt. v. 4. THE story is told that some great Sultan once bade his Grand Vizier write or compile a history of the human race. With long toil the task was accomplished, and the Grand Vizier went to the Sultan with fivescore asses laden with five hundred volumes of historic lore. 'Abridge! abridge!' said the alarmed potentate. 'Sire,' answered the Vizier, 'all these volumes may be compressed into a single line "They were born; they suffered; they died."' Without pressing to wrong and exaggerated conclusions the verse of Job, 'Man is born to trouble, as the sparks fly upwards;' without accepting this as in any sense a complete epitome of life; maintaining that in human life the elements of natural and innocent happiness do, or, but for our own fault, may preponderate; still pain and misfortune and mental anguish belong so completely to the universal experience of mankind, that any source whence we may derive comfort either in the form of an immediate alleviation for misery, or of a sure and certain hope of 1 Job v. 7. THE BOOK OF CONSOLATION 299 something which lies beyond this dark horizon, cannot but be inestimably precious to the suffering race of man. "The Persian king,' it has been said, 'could not find the names of even three happy men to write on his wife's tomb, or the philosopher would have recalled her from death. Every son of Adam has his task to toil at, and his stripes to bear for doing it badly.' Well may the poet exclaim : O purblind race of miserable men! How many among us at this very hour I have already quoted the unsuspected testimony of Ernest Renan, who says that, after all, the Bible is the great Book of Consolation for Humanity. Dwelling as I am on the matchless value of the Holy Book, it may help us to realise this element of its preciousness if I give some instances to show how it may bring us peace, when no other book can lead us so directly to the source of peace, during this 'peevish April day' of life, when so often even after the rain the clouds return. 'Our finite miseries,' said Victor Hugo, 'shrink into nothing before the infinitude of hope!' Yes, that is true, and is an eminently Christian sentiment: but hope for the future is not, when taken alone, sufficient to give us blessedness and peace in the present. Yet that unbroken blessedness and peace-like the stillness of the inmost heart of the ocean, however fiercely the billows may roll over its storm-swept surface-is what the true Christian 1 Tennyson, Enid and Geraint. can learn from the Book of God. The consolation really offered by the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews to his despoiled and suffering brethren is not (as in the erroneous and weakened reading of our Authorised Version) that they had a better and abiding substance in heaven, but that they had themselves—their own ennobled and purified personality—for a possession better than any which earth could either give or take away, and abiding.1 This is strikingly expressed in a scene described in a great work of fiction. A faithful but humble enthusiast, ragged, beaten, crushed, breathless, in peril of violent death at the hands of a bloodthirsty and howling crowd, looks up amid the glare of lanterns, and sees that he has been rescued by the exertions of a beautiful youth in authority, who has kept back the raging mob. Next day, while still a prisoner, he is visited by this generous youth, and says to him: 'Do you think that when I saw you last night, in your courtier's dress of lace and silver, calm, beneficent, and powerful for good, you did not seem to my weak human nature and my poor human instincts, beautiful as an angel of light? Truly you did. Yet I tell you-speaking by a nature and in a voice more unerring than mine-to the Divine Vision, of us two at that moment you were the one to be pitied; you were the outcast, the tortured of demons, the bound hand and foot, whose por tion is in this life, who, if this fleeting hour be left unheeded, will be tormented in the life to come.' 2 Yes! Faith alters the perspective, reverses the appearances of life; it strips the seemingly happy of their guise of bliss, and robes the seemingly naked in royal apparel. It says in no uncertain voice, 'Sperate miseri; 1 Heb. x. 34, reading avrovs, and omitting iv ovpavý. 2 John Inglesant. |