Books: The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford
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Mark Rutherford >> The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford
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10 This etext was produced from the 1913 Hodder and Stoughton edition by
David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MARK RUTHERFORD
EDITED BY HIS FRIEND REUBEN SHAPCOTT
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
The present edition is a reprint of the first, with corrections of
several mistakes which had been overlooked.
There is one observation which I may perhaps be permitted to make on
re-reading after some years this autobiography. Rutherford, at any
rate in his earlier life, was an example of the danger and the folly of
cultivating thoughts and reading books to which he was not equal, and
which tend to make a man lonely.
It is all very well that remarkable persons should occupy themselves
with exalted subjects, which are out of the ordinary road which
ordinary humanity treads; but we who are not remarkable make a very
great mistake if we have anything to do with them. If we wish to be
happy, and have to live with average men and women, as most of us have
to live, we must learn to take an interest in the topics which concern
average men and women. We think too much of ourselves. We ought not
to sacrifice a single moment's pleasure in our attempt to do something
which is too big for us, and as a rule, men and women are always
attempting what is too big for them. To ninety-nine young men out of a
hundred, or perhaps ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine
out of a hundred thousand, the wholesome healthy doctrine is, "Don't
bother yourselves with what is beyond you; try to lead a sweet, clean,
wholesome life, keep yourselves in health above everything, stick to
your work, and when your day is done amuse and refresh yourselves."
It is not only a duty to ourselves, but it is a duty to others to take
this course. Great men do the world much good, but not without some
harm, and we have no business to be troubling ourselves with their
dreams if we have duties which lie nearer home amongst persons to whom
these dreams are incomprehensible. Many a man goes into his study,
shuts himself up with his poetry or his psychology, comes out, half
understanding what he has read, is miserable because he cannot find
anybody with whom he can talk about it, and misses altogether the far
more genuine joy which he could have obtained from a game with his
children or listening to what his wife had to tell him about her
neighbours.
"Lor, miss, you haven't looked at your new bonnet to-day," said a
servant girl to her young mistress.
"No, why should I? I did not want to go out."
"Oh, how can you? why, I get mine out and look at it every night."
She was happy for a whole fortnight with a happiness cheap at a very
high price.
That same young mistress was very caustic upon the women who block the
pavement outside drapers' shops, but surely she was unjust. They
always seem unconscious, to be enjoying themselves intensely and most
innocently, more so probably than an audience at a Wagner concert.
Many persons with refined minds are apt to depreciate happiness,
especially if it is of "a low type." Broadly speaking, it is the one
thing worth having, and low or high, if it does no mischief, is better
than the most spiritual misery.
Metaphysics and theology, including all speculations on the why and the
wherefore, optimism, pessimism, freedom, necessity, causality, and so
forth, are not only for the most part loss of time, but frequently
ruinous. It is no answer to say that these things force themselves
upon us, and that to every question we are bound to give or try to give
an answer. It is true, although strange, that there are multitudes of
burning questions which we must do our best to ignore, to forget their
existence; and it is not more strange, after all, than many other facts
in this wonderfully mysterious and defective existence of ours. One
fourth of life is intelligible, the other three-fourths is
unintelligible darkness; and our earliest duty is to cultivate the
habit of not looking round the corner.
"Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry
heart; for God hath already accepted thy works. Let thy garments be
always white, and let not thy head lack ointment. Live joyfully with
the wife whom thou lovest all the days of the life of thy vanity, which
He hath given thee under the sun, all the days of thy vanity: for that
is thy portion in life."
R. S.
This is the night when I must die,
And great Orion walketh high
In silent glory overhead:
He'll set just after I am dead.
A week this night, I'm in my grave:
Orion walketh o'er the wave:
Down in the dark damp earth I lie,
While he doth march in majesty.
A few weeks hence and spring will come;
The earth will bright array put on
Of daisy and of primrose bright,
And everything which loves the light.
And some one to my child will say,
"You'll soon forget that you could play
Beethoven; let us hear a strain
From that slow movement once again."
And so she'll play that melody,
While I among the worms do lie;
Dead to them all, for ever dead;
The churchyard clay dense overhead.
I once did think there might be mine
One friendship perfect and divine;
Alas! that dream dissolved in tears
Before I'd counted twenty years.
For I was ever commonplace;
Of genius never had a trace;
My thoughts the world have never fed,
Mere echoes of the book last read.
Those whom I knew I cannot blame:
If they are cold, I am the same:
How could they ever show to me
More than a common courtesy?
There is no deed which I have done;
There is no love which I have won,
To make them for a moment grieve
That I this night their earth must leave.
Thus, moaning at the break of day,
A man upon his deathbed lay;
A moment more and all was still;
The Morning Star came o'er the hill.
But when the dawn lay on his face,
It kindled an immortal grace;
As if in death that Life were shown
Which lives not in the great alone.
Orion sank down in the west
Just as he sank into his rest;
I closed in solitude his eyes,
And watched him till the sun's uprise.
CHAPTER I--CHILDHOOD
Now that I have completed my autobiography up to the present year, I
sometimes doubt whether it is right to publish it. Of what use is it,
many persons will say, to present to the world what is mainly a record
of weaknesses and failures? If I had any triumphs to tell; if I could
show how I had risen superior to poverty and suffering; if, in short, I
were a hero of any kind whatever, I might perhaps be justified in
communicating my success to mankind, and stimulating them to do as I
have done. But mine is the tale of a commonplace life, perplexed by
many problems I have never solved; disturbed by many difficulties I
have never surmounted; and blotted by ignoble concessions which are a
constant regret.
I have decided, however, to let the manuscript remain. I will not
destroy it, although I will not take the responsibility of printing it.
Somebody may think it worth preserving; and there are two reasons why
they may think so, if there are no others. In the first place it has
some little historic value, for I feel increasingly that the race to
which I belonged is fast passing away, and that the Dissenting minister
of the present day is a different being altogether from the Dissenting
minister of forty years ago.
In the next place, I have observed that the mere knowing that other
people have been tried as we have been tried is a consolation to us,
and that we are relieved by the assurance that our sufferings are not
special and peculiar, but common to us with many others. Death has
always been a terror to me, and at times, nay generally, religion and
philosophy have been altogether unavailing to mitigate the terror in
any way. But it has been a comfort to me to reflect that whatever
death may be, it is the inheritance of the whole human race; that I am
not singled out, but shall merely have to pass through what the weakest
have had to pass through before me. In the worst of maladies, worst at
least to me, those which are hypochondriacal, the healing effect which
is produced by the visit of a friend who can simply say, "I have
endured all that," is most marked. So it is not impossible that some
few whose experience has been like mine may, by my example, be freed
from that sense of solitude which they find so depressing.
I was born, just before the Liverpool and Manchester Railway was
opened, in a small country town in one of the Midland shires. It is
now semi-manufacturing, at the junction of three or four lines of
railway, with hardly a trace left of what it was fifty years ago. It
then consisted of one long main street, with a few other streets
branching from it at right-angles. Through this street the mail-coach
rattled at night, and the huge waggon rolled through it, drawn by four
horses, which twice a week travelled to and from London and brought us
what we wanted from the great and unknown city.
My father and mother belonged to the ordinary English middle class of
well-to-do shop-keepers. My mother's family came from a little
distance, but my father's had lived in those parts for centuries. I
remember perfectly well how business used to be carried on in those
days. There was absolutely no competition, and although nobody in the
town who was in trade got rich, except the banker and the brewer,
nearly everybody was tolerably well off, and certainly not pressed with
care as their successors are now. The draper, who lived a little way
above us, was a deacon in our chapel, and every morning, soon after
breakfast, he would start off for his walk of about four miles,
stopping by the way to talk to his neighbours about the events of the
day. At eleven o'clock or thereabouts he would return and would begin
work. Everybody took an hour for dinner--between one and two--and at
that time, especially on a hot July afternoon, the High Street was
empty from end to end, and the profoundest peace reigned.
My life as a child falls into two portions, sharply divided--week-day
and Sunday. During the week-day I went to the public school, where I
learned little or nothing that did me much good. The discipline of the
school was admirable, and the headmaster was penetrated with a most
lofty sense of duty, but the methods of teaching were very imperfect.
In Latin we had to learn the Eton Latin Grammar till we knew every word
of it by heart, but we did scarcely any retranslation from English into
Latin. Much of our time was wasted on the merest trifles, such as
learning to write, for example, like copperplate, and, still more
extraordinary, in copying the letters of the alphabet as they are used
in printing.
But we had two half-holidays in the week, which seem to me now to have
been the happiest part of my life. A river ran through the town, and
on summer Wednesdays and Saturdays we wandered along its banks for
miles, alternately fishing and bathing. I remember whole afternoons in
June, July, and August, passed half-naked or altogether naked in the
solitary meadows and in the water; I remember the tumbling weir with
the deep pool at the bottom in which we dived; I remember, too, the
place where we used to swim across the river with our clothes on our
heads, because there was no bridge near, and the frequent disaster of a
slip of the braces in the middle of the water, so that shirt, jacket,
and trousers were soaked, and we had to lie on the grass in the
broiling sun without a rag on us till everything was dry again.
In winter our joys were of a different kind but none the less
delightful. If it was a frost, we had skating; not like skating on a
London pond, but over long reaches, and if the locks had not
intervened, we might have gone a day's journey on the ice without a
stoppage. If there was no ice, we had football, and what was still
better, we could get up a steeplechase--on foot straight across hedge
and ditch.
In after-years, when I lived in London, I came to know children who
went to school in Gower Street, and travelled backwards and forwards by
omnibus--children who had no other recreation than an occasional visit
to the Zoological Gardens, or a somewhat sombre walk up to Hampstead to
see their aunt; and I have often regretted that they never had any
experience of those perfect poetic pleasures which the boy enjoys whose
childhood is spent in the country, and whose home is there. A country
boarding-school is something altogether different.
On the Sundays, however, the compensation came. It was a season of
unmixed gloom. My father and mother were rigid Calvinistic
Independents, and on that day no newspaper nor any book more secular
than the Evangelical Magazine was tolerated. Every preparation for the
Sabbath had been made on the Saturday, to avoid as much as possible any
work. The meat was cooked beforehand, so that we never had a hot
dinner even in the coldest weather; the only thing hot which was
permitted was a boiled suet pudding, which cooked itself while we were
at chapel, and some potatoes which were prepared after we came home.
Not a letter was opened unless it was clearly evident that it was not
on business, and for opening these an apology was always offered that
it was possible they might contain some announcement of sickness. If
on cursory inspection they appeared to be ordinary letters, although
they might be from relations or friends, they were put away.
After family prayer and breakfast the business of the day began with
the Sunday-school at nine o'clock. We were taught our Catechism and
Bible there till a quarter past ten. We were then marched across the
road into the chapel, a large old-fashioned building dating from the
time of Charles II. The floor was covered with high pews. The roof
was supported by three or four tall wooden pillars which ran from the
ground to the ceiling, and the galleries by shorter pillars. There was
a large oak pulpit on one side against the wall, and down below,
immediately under the minister, was the "singing pew," where the
singers and musicians sat, the musicians being performers on the
clarionet, flute, violin, and violoncello. Right in front was a long
enclosure, called the communion pew, which was usually occupied by a
number of the poorer members of the congregation.
There were three services every Sunday, besides intermitting prayer-
meetings, but these I did not as yet attend. Each service consisted of
a hymn, reading the Bible, another hymn, a prayer, the sermon, a third
hymn, and a short final prayer. The reading of the Bible was
unaccompanied with any observations or explanations, and I do not
remember that I ever once heard a mistranslation corrected.
The first, or long prayer, as it was called, was a horrible hypocrisy,
and it was a sore tax on the preacher to get through it. Anything more
totally unlike the model recommended to us in the New Testament cannot
well be imagined. It generally began with a confession that we were
all sinners, but no individual sins were ever confessed, and then
ensued a kind of dialogue with God, very much resembling the speeches
which in later years I have heard in the House of Commons from the
movers and seconders of addresses to the Crown at the opening of
Parliament.
In all the religion of that day nothing was falser than the long
prayer. Direct appeal to God can only be justified when it is
passionate. To come maundering into His presence when we have nothing
particular to say is an insult, upon which we should never presume if
we had a petition to offer to any earthly personage. We should not
venture to take up His time with commonplaces or platitudes; but our
minister seemed to consider that the Almighty, who had the universe to
govern, had more leisure at His command that the idlest lounger at a
club. Nobody ever listened to this performance. I was a good child on
the whole, but I am sure I did not; and if the chapel were now in
existence, there might be traced on the flap of the pew in which we sat
many curious designs due to these dreary performances.
The sermon was not much better. It generally consisted of a text,
which was a mere peg for a discourse, that was pretty much the same
from January to December. The minister invariably began with the fall
of man; propounded the scheme of redemption, and ended by depicting in
the morning the blessedness of the saints, and in the evening the doom
of the lost. There was a tradition that in the morning there should be
"experience"--that is to say, comfort for the elect, and that the
evening should be appropriated to their less fortunate brethren.
The evening service was the most trying to me of all these. I never
could keep awake, and knew that to sleep under the Gospel was a sin.
The chapel was lighted in winter by immense chandeliers with tiers of
candles all round. These required perpetual snuffing, and I can see
the old man going round the chandeliers in the middle of the service
with a mighty pair of snuffers which opened and shut with a loud click.
How I envied him because he had semi-secular occupation which prevented
that terrible drowsiness! How I envied the pew-opener, who was allowed
to stand at the vestry door, and could slip into the vestry every now
and then, or even into the burial-ground if he heard irreverent boys
playing there! The atmosphere of the chapel on hot nights was most
foul, and this added to my discomfort. Oftentimes in winter, when no
doors or windows were open, I have seen the glass panes streaming with
wet inside, and women carried out fainting.
On rare occasions I was allowed to go with my father when he went into
the villages to preach. As a deacon he was also a lay-preacher, and I
had the ride in the gig out and home, and tea at a farm-house.
Perhaps I shall not have a better opportunity to say that, with all
these drawbacks, my religious education did confer upon me some
positive advantages. The first was a rigid regard for truthfulness.
My parents never would endure a lie or the least equivocation. The
second was purity of life, and I look upon this as a simply
incalculable gain. Impurity was not an excusable weakness in the
society in which I lived; it was a sin for which dreadful punishment
was reserved. The reason for my virtue may have been a wrong reason,
but, anyhow, I was saved, and being saved, much more was saved than
health and peace of mind.
To this day I do not know where to find a weapon strong enough to
subdue the tendency to impurity in young men; and although I cannot
tell them what I do not believe, I hanker sometimes after the old
prohibitions and penalties. Physiological penalties are too remote,
and the subtler penalties--the degradation, the growth of callousness
to finer pleasures, the loss of sensitiveness to all that is most nobly
attractive in woman--are too feeble to withstand temptation when it
lies in ambush like a garrotter, and has the reason stunned in a
moment.
The only thing that can be done is to make the conscience of a boy
generally tender, so that he shrinks instinctively from the monstrous
injustice of contributing for the sake of his own pleasure to the ruin
of another. As soon as manhood dawns, he must also have his attention
absorbed on some object which will divert his thoughts intellectually
or ideally; and by slight yet constant pressure, exercised not by fits
and starts, but day after day, directly and indirectly, his father must
form an antipathy in him to brutish, selfish sensuality. Above all,
there must be no toying with passion, and no books permitted, without
condemnation and warning, which are not of a heroic turn. When the boy
becomes a man he may read Byron without danger. To a youth he is
fatal.
Before leaving this subject I may observe, that parents greatly err by
not telling their children a good many things which they ought to know.
Had I been taught when I was young a few facts about myself, which I
only learned accidentally long afterwards, a good deal of misery might
have been spared me.
Nothing particular happened to me till I was about fourteen, when I was
told it was time I became converted. Conversion, amongst the
Independents and other Puritan sects, is supposed to be a kind of
miracle wrought in the heart by the influence of the Holy Spirit, by
which the man becomes something altogether different to what he was
previously. It affects, or should affect, his character; that is to
say, he ought after conversion to be better in every way than he was
before; but this is not considered as its main consequence. In its
essence it is a change in the emotions and increased vividness of
belief. It is now altogether untrue. Yet it is an undoubted fact that
in earlier days, and, indeed, in rare cases, as late as the time of my
childhood, it was occasionally a reality.
It is possible to imagine that under the preaching of Paul sudden
conviction of a life misspent may have been produced with sudden
personal attachment to the Galilean who, until then, had been despised.
There may have been prompt release of unsuspected powers, and as prompt
an imprisonment for ever of meaner weaknesses and tendencies; the
result being literally a putting off of the old, and a putting on of
the new man. Love has always been potent to produce such a
transformation, and the exact counterpart of conversion, as it was
understood by the apostles, may be seen whenever a man is redeemed from
vice by attachment to some woman whom he worships, or when a girl is
reclaimed from idleness and vanity by becoming a mother.
But conversion, as it was understood by me and as it is now understood,
is altogether unmeaning. I knew that I had to be "a child of God," and
after a time professed myself to be one, but I cannot call to mind that
I was anything else than I always had been, save that I was perhaps a
little more hypocritical; not in the sense that I professed to others
what I knew I did not believe, but in the sense that I professed it to
myself. I was obliged to declare myself convinced of sin; convinced of
the efficacy of the atonement; convinced that I was forgiven; convinced
that the Holy Ghost was shed abroad in my heart; and convinced of a
great many other things which were the merest phrases.
However, the end of it was, that I was proposed for acceptance, and two
deacons were deputed, in accordance with the usual custom, to wait upon
me and ascertain my fitness for membership. What they said and what I
said has now altogether vanished; but I remember with perfect
distinctness the day on which I was admitted. It was the custom to
demand of each candidate a statement of his or her experience. I had
no experience to give; and I was excused on the grounds that I had been
the child of pious parents, and consequently had not undergone that
convulsion which those, not favoured like myself, necessarily underwent
when they were called.
I was now expected to attend all those extra services which were
specially for the church. I stayed to the late prayer-meeting on
Sunday; I went to the prayer-meeting on week-days, and also to private
prayer-meetings. These services were not interesting to me for their
own sake. I thought they were, but what I really liked was clanship
and the satisfaction of belonging to a society marked off from the
great world.
It must also be added that the evening meetings afforded us many
opportunities for walking home with certain young women, who, I am
sorry to say, were a more powerful attraction, not to me only, but to
others, than the prospect of hearing brother Holderness, the travelling
draper, confess crimes which, to say the truth, although they were many
according to his own account, were never given in that detail which
would have made his confession of some value. He never prayed without
telling all of us that there was no health in him, and that his soul
was a mass of putrefying sores; but everybody thought the better of him
for his self-humiliation. One actual indiscretion, however, brought
home to him would have been visited by suspension or expulsion.
CHAPTER II--PREPARATION
It was necessary that an occupation should be found for me, and after
much deliberation it was settled that I should "go into the ministry."
I had joined the church, I had "engaged in prayer" publicly, and
although I had not set up for being extraordinarily pious, I was
thought to be as good as most of the young men who professed to have a
mission to regenerate mankind.
Accordingly, after some months of preparation, I was taken to a
Dissenting College not very far from where we lived. It was a large
old-fashioned house with a newer building annexed, and was surrounded
with a garden and with meadows. Each student had a separate room, and
all had their meals together in a common hall. Altogether there were
about forty of us. The establishment consisted of a President, an
elderly gentleman who had an American degree of doctor of divinity, and
who taught the various branches of theology. He was assisted by three
professors, who imparted to us as much Greek, Latin, and mathematics as
it was considered that we ought to know. Behold me, then, beginning a
course of training which was to prepare me to meet the doubts of the
nineteenth century; to be the guide of men; to advise them in their
perplexities; to suppress their tempestuous lusts; to lift them above
their petty cares, and to lead them heavenward!
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