Mark Rutherford’s Deliverance

vault, brought into the daylight, and led into an open expanse. We tried above everything to interest them, even in the smallest degree, in what is universal and impersonal, feeling that in that direction lies healing. We explained to the child as well as we could some morsels of science, and in explaining to him we explained to the father as well. When the anguish begotten by some outbreak on the part of the wife more violent than usual became almost too much to bear, we did our best to counsel, and as a last consolation we could point to Death, divine Death, and repose. It was but for a few more years at the utmost, and then must come a rest which no sorrow could invade. “Having death as an ally, I do not tremble at shadows,” is an immortal quotation from some unknown Greek author. Providence, too, by no miracle, came to our relief. The wife died, as it was foreseen she must, and that weight being removed, some elasticity and recoil developed itself. John’s one thought now was for his child, and by means of the child the father passed out of himself, and connected himself with the future. The child did in fact teach the father exactly what we tried to teach, and taught it with a power of conviction which never could have been produced by any mere appeals to the reason. The father felt that he was battered, useless, and a failure, but that in the boy there were unknown possibilities, and that he might in after life say that it was to this battered, useless failure of a father he owed his success. There was nothing now that he would not do to help Tom’s education, and we joyfully aided as best we could. So, partly I believe by us, but far more by nature herself, John’s salvation was wrought out at least in a measure; discord by the intervention of another note resolved itself into a kind of harmony, and even through the skylight in the Strand a glimpse of the azure was obtained.

I hope my readers, if I should ever have any, will remember that what I wish to do is to give some account of the manner in which we sought to be of service to the small and very humble circle of persons whom we had collected about us. I have preserved no record of anything; I am merely putting down what now comes into my mind⁠—the two or three articles, not thirty-nine, nor, alas! a third of that number⁠—which we were able to hold. I recollect one or two more which perhaps are worth preservation. In my younger days the aim of theologians was the justification of the ways of God to man. They could not succeed. They succeeded no better than ourselves in satisfying the intellect with a system. Nor does the Christian religion profess any such satisfaction. It teaches rather the great doctrine of a Remedy, of a Mediator; and therein it is profoundly true. It is unphilosophical in the sense that it offers no explanation from a single principle, and leaves the ultimate mystery as dark as before, but it is in accordance with our intuitions. Everywhere in nature we see exaction of penalties down to the uttermost farthing, but following after this we discern forgiveness, obliterating and restorative. Both tendencies exist. Nature is Rhadamanthine, and more so, for she visits the sins of the fathers upon the children; but there is in her also an infinite Pity, healing all wounds, softening all calamities, ever hastening to alleviate and repair. Christianity in strange historical fashion is an expression of nature, a projection of her into a biography and a creed.

We endeavoured to follow Christianity in the depth of its distinction between right and wrong. Herein this religion is of priceless value. Philosophy proclaims the unity of our nature. To philosophy every passion is as natural as every act of saintlike negation, and one of the usual effects of thinking or philosophising is to bring together all that is apparently contrary in man, and to show how it proceeds really from one centre. But Christianity had not to propound a theory of man; it had to redeem the world. It laid awful stress on the duality in us, and the stress laid on that duality is the world’s salvation. The words right and wrong are not felt now as they were felt by Paul. They shade off one into the other. Nevertheless, if mankind is not to be lost, the ancient antagonism must be maintained. The shallowest of mortals is able now to laugh at the notion of a personal devil. No doubt there is no such thing existent; but the horror at evil which could find no other expression than in the creation of a devil is no subject for laughter, and if it do not in some shape or other survive, the race itself will not survive. No religion, so far as I know, has dwelt like Christianity with such profound earnestness on the bisection of man⁠—on the distinction within him, vital to the very last degree, between the higher and the lower, heaven and hell. What utter folly is it because of an antique vesture to condemn as effete what the vesture clothes! Its doctrine and its sacred story are fixtures in concrete form of precious thoughts purchased by blood and tears.

I fancy I see the sneer of theologians and critics at our efforts. The theologians will mock us because we had nothing better to say. I can only reply that we did our best. We said all we knew, and we would most thankfully have said more, had we been sure that it must be true. I would remind, too, those of our judges who think that we were such wretched mortals, blind leaders of the blind, that there have been long ages during which men never pretended to understand more than