Books: The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford
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Mark Rutherford >> The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford
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About the Greek and Latin and the secular part of the college
discipline I will say nothing, except that it was generally
inefficient. The theological and Biblical teaching was a sham. We had
come to the college in the first place to learn the Bible. Our whole
existence was in future to be based upon that book; our lives were to
be passed in preaching it. I will venture to say that there was no
book less understood either by students or professors. The President
had a course of lectures, delivered year after year to successive
generations of his pupils, upon its authenticity and inspiration. They
were altogether remote from the subject; and afterwards, when I came to
know what the difficulties of belief really were, I found that these
essays, which were supposed to be a triumphant confutation of the
sceptic, were a mere sword of lath. They never touched the question,
and if any doubts suggested themselves to the audience, nobody dared to
give them tongue, lest the expression of them should beget a suspicion
of heresy.
I remember also some lectures on the proof of the existence of God and
on the argument from design; all of which, when my mind was once
awakened, were as irrelevant as the chattering of sparrows. When I did
not even know who or what this God was, and could not bring my lips to
use the word with any mental honesty, of what service was the "watch
argument" to me? Very lightly did the President pass over all these
initial difficulties of his religion. I see him now, a gentleman with
lightish hair, with a most mellifluous voice and a most pastoral
manner, reading his prim little tracts to us directed against the
"shallow infidel" who seemed to deny conclusions so obvious that we
were certain he could not be sincere, and those of us who had never
seen an infidel might well be pardoned for supposing that he must
always be wickedly blind.
About a dozen of these tracts settled the infidel and the whole mass of
unbelief from the time of Celsus downwards. The President's task was
all the easier because he knew nothing of German literature; and,
indeed, the word "German" was a term of reproach signifying something
very awful, although nobody knew exactly what it was.
Systematic theology was the next science to which the President
directed us. We used a sort of Calvinistic manual which began by
setting forth that mankind was absolutely in God's power. He was our
maker, and we had no legal claim whatever to any consideration from
Him. The author then mechanically built up the Calvinistic creed, step
by step, like a house of cards. Systematic theology was the great
business of our academical life. We had to read sermons to the
President in class, and no sermon was considered complete and proper
unless it unfolded what was called the scheme of redemption from
beginning to end.
So it came to pass that about the Bible, as I have already said, we
were in darkness. It was a magazine of texts, and those portions of it
which contributed nothing in the shape of texts, or formed no part of
the scheme, were neglected. Worse still, not a word was ever spoken to
us telling us in what manner to strengthen the reason, to subdue the
senses, or in what way to deal with all the varied diseases of that
soul of man which we were to set ourselves to save. All its failings,
infinitely more complicated than those of the body, were grouped as
"sin," and for these there was one quack remedy. If the patient did
not like the remedy, or got no good from it, the fault was his.
It is remarkable that the scheme was never of the slightest service to
me in repressing one solitary evil inclination; at no point did it come
into contact with me. At the time it seemed right and proper that I
should learn it, and I had no doubt of its efficacy; but when the
stress of temptation was upon me, it never occurred to me, nor when I
became a minister did I find it sufficiently powerful to mend the most
trifling fault. In after years, but not till I had strayed far away
from the President and his creed, the Bible was really opened to me,
and became to me, what it now is, the most precious of books.
There were several small chapels scattered in the villages near the
college, and these chapels were "supplied," as the phrase is, by the
students. Those who were near the end of their course were also
employed as substitutes for regular ministers when they were
temporarily absent. Sometimes a senior was even sent up to London to
take the place, on a sudden emergency, of a great London minister, and
when he came back he was an object almost of adoration. The
congregation, on the other hand, consisting in some part of country
people spending a Sunday in town and anxious to hear a celebrated
preacher, were not at all disposed to adore, when, instead of the great
man, they saw "only a student."
By the time I was nineteen I took my turn in "supplying" the villages,
and set forth with the utmost confidence what appeared to me to be the
indubitable gospel. No shadow of a suspicion of its truth ever crossed
my mind, and yet I had not spent an hour in comprehending, much less in
answering, one objection to it. The objections, in fact, had never met
me; they were over my horizon altogether. It is wonderful to think how
I could take so much for granted; and not merely take it to myself and
for myself, but proclaim it as a message to other people. It would be
a mistake, however, to suppose that theological youths are the only
class who are guilty of such presumption. Our gregarious instinct is
so strong that it is the most difficult thing for us to be satisfied
with suspended judgment. Men must join a party, and have a cry, and
they generally take up their party and their cry from the most
indifferent motives.
For my own part I cannot be enthusiastic about politics, except on rare
occasions when the issue is a very narrow one. There is so much that
requires profound examination, and it disgusts me to get upon a
platform and dispute with ardent Radicals or Conservatives who know
nothing about even the rudiments of history, political economy, or
political philosophy, without which it is as absurd to have an opinion
upon what are called politics as it would be to have an opinion upon an
astronomical problem without having learned Euclid.
The more incapable we are of thorough investigations, the wider and
deeper are the subjects upon which we busy ourselves, and still more
strange, the more bigoted do we become in our conclusions about them;
and yet it is not strange, for he who by painful processes has found
yes and no alternate for so long that he is not sure which is final, is
the last man in the world, if he for the present is resting in yes, to
crucify another who can get no further than no. The bigot is he to
whom no such painful processes have ever been permitted.
The society amongst the students was very poor. Not a single
friendship formed then has remained with me. They were mostly young
men of no education, who had been taken from the counter, and their
spiritual life was not very deep. In many of them it did not even
exist, and their whole attention was absorbed upon their chances of
getting wealthy congregations or of making desirable matches. It was a
time in which the world outside was seething with the ferment which had
been cast into it by Germany and by those in England whom Germany had
influenced, but not a fragment of it had dropped within our walls. I
cannot call to mind a single conversation upon any but the most trivial
topics, nor did our talk ever turn even upon our religion, so far as it
was a thing affecting the soul, but upon it as something subsidiary to
chapels, "causes," deacons, and the like.
The emptiness of some of my colleagues, and their worldliness, too,
were almost incredible. There was one who was particularly silly. He
was a blond youth with greyish eyes, a mouth not quite shut, and an
eternal simper upon his face. He never had an idea in his head, and
never read anything except the denominational newspapers and a few
well-known aids to sermonising. He was a great man at all tea-
meetings, anniversaries, and parties. He was facile in public
speaking, and he dwelt much upon the joys of heaven and upon such
topics as the possibility of our recognising one another there. I have
known him describe for twenty minutes, in a kind of watery rhetoric,
the passage of the soul to bliss through death, and its meeting in the
next world with those who had gone before.
With all his weakness he was close and mean in money matters, and when
he left college, the first thing he did was to marry a widow with a
fortune. Before long he became one of the most popular of ministers in
a town much visited by sick persons, with whom he was an especial
favourite. I disliked him--and specially disliked his unpleasant
behaviour to women. If I had been a woman, I should have spurned him
for his perpetual insult of inane compliments. He was always dawdling
after "the sex," which was one of his sweet phrases, and yet he was not
passionate. Passion does not dawdle and compliment, nor is it nasty,
as this fellow was. Passion may burn like a devouring flame; and in a
few moments, like flame, may bring down a temple to dust and ashes, but
it is earnest as flame, and essentially pure.
During the first two years at college my life was entirely external.
My heart was altogether untouched by anything I heard, read, or did,
although I myself supposed that I took an interest in them. But one
day in my third year, a day I remember as well as Paul must have
remembered afterwards the day on which he went to Damascus, I happened
to find amongst a parcel of books a volume of poems in paper boards.
It was called Lyrical Ballads, and I read first one and then the whole
book. It conveyed to me no new doctrine, and yet the change it wrought
in me could only be compared with that which is said to have been
wrought on Paul himself by the Divine apparition.
Looking over the Lyrical Ballads again, as I have looked over it a
dozen times since then, I can hardly see what it was which stirred me
so powerfully, nor do I believe that it communicated much to me which
could be put in words. But it excited a movement and a growth which
went on till, by degrees, all the systems which enveloped me like a
body gradually decayed from me and fell away into nothing. Of more
importance, too, than the decay of systems was the birth of a habit of
inner reference and a dislike to occupy myself with anything which did
not in some way or other touch the soul, or was not the illustration or
embodiment of some spiritual law.
There is, of course, a definite explanation to be given of one effect
produced by the Lyrical Ballads. God is nowhere formally deposed, and
Wordsworth would have been the last man to say that he had lost his
faith in the God of his fathers. But his real God is not the God of
the Church, but the God of the hills, the abstraction Nature, and to
this my reverence was transferred. Instead of an object of worship
which was altogether artificial, remote, never coming into genuine
contact with me, I had now one which I thought to be real, one in which
literally I could live and move and have my being, an actual fact
present before my eyes. God was brought from that heaven of the books,
and dwelt on the downs in the far-away distances, and in every cloud-
shadow which wandered across the valley. Wordsworth unconsciously did
for me what every religious reformer has done--he re-created my Supreme
Divinity; substituting a new and living spirit for the old deity, once
alive, but gradually hardened into an idol.
What days were those of the next few years before increasing age had
presented preciser problems and demanded preciser answers; before all
joy was darkened by the shadow of on-coming death, and when life seemed
infinite! Those were the days when through the whole long summer's
morning I wanted no companion but myself, provided only I was in the
country, and when books were read with tears in the eyes. Those were
the days when mere life, apart from anything which it brings, was
exquisite.
In my own college I found no sympathy, but we were in the habit of
meeting occasionally the students from other colleges, and amongst them
I met with one or two, especially one who had undergone experiences
similar to my own. The friendships formed with these young men have
lasted till now, and have been the most permanent of all the
relationships of my existence. I wish not to judge others, but the
persons who to me have proved themselves most attractive, have been
those who have passed through such a process as that through which I
myself passed; those who have had in some form or other an enthusiastic
stage in their history, when the story of Genesis and of the Gospels
has been rewritten, when God has visibly walked in the garden, and the
Son of God has drawn men away from their daily occupations into the
divinest of dreams.
I have known men--most interesting men with far greater powers than any
which I have possessed, men who have never been trammelled by a false
creed, who have devoted themselves to science and acquired a great
reputation, who have somehow never laid hold upon me like the man I
have just mentioned. He failed altogether as a minister, and went back
to his shop, but the old glow of his youth burns, and will burn, for
ever. When I am with him our conversation naturally turns on matters
which are of profoundest importance: with others it may be
instructive, but I leave them unmoved, and I trace the difference
distinctly to that visitation, for it was nothing else, which came to
him in his youth.
The effect which was produced upon my preaching and daily conversation
by this change was immediate. It became gradually impossible for me to
talk about subjects which had not some genuine connection with me, or
to desire to hear others talk about them. The artificial, the merely
miraculous, the event which had no inner meaning, no matter how large
externally it might be, I did not care for. A little Greek
mythological story was of more importance to me than a war which filled
the newspapers. What, then, could I do with my theological treatises?
It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that I immediately became
formally heretical. Nearly every doctrine in the college creed had
once had a natural origin in the necessities of human nature, and might
therefore be so interpreted as to become a necessity again. To reach
through to that original necessity; to explain the atonement as I
believed it appeared to Paul, and the sinfulness of man as it appeared
to the prophets, was my object. But it was precisely this reaching
after a meaning which constituted heresy. The distinctive essence of
our orthodoxy was not this or that dogma, but the acceptance of dogmas
as communications from without, and not as born from within.
Heresy began, and in fact was altogether present, when I said to myself
that a mere statement of the atonement as taught in class was
impossible for me, and that I must go back to Paul and his century,
place myself in his position, and connect the atonement through him
with something which I felt. I thus continued to use all the terms
which I had hitherto used; but an uneasy feeling began to develop
itself about me in the minds of the professors, because I did not rest
in the "simplicity" of the gospel. To me this meant its
unintelligibility.
I remember, for example, discoursing about the death of Christ. There
was not a single word which was ordinarily used in the pulpit which I
did not use--satisfaction for sin, penalty, redeeming blood, they were
all there--but I began by saying that in this world there was no
redemption for man but by blood; furthermore, the innocent had
everywhere and in all time to suffer for the guilty. It had been
objected that it was contrary to our notion of an all-loving Being that
He should demand such a sacrifice; but, contrary or not, in this world
it was true, quite apart from Jesus, that virtue was martyred every
day, unknown and unconsoled, in order that the wicked might somehow be
saved. This was part of the scheme of the world, and we might dislike
it or not, we could not get rid of it. The consequences of my sin,
moreover, are rendered less terrible by virtues not my own. I am
literally saved from penalties because another pays the penalty for me.
The atonement, and what it accomplished for man, were therefore a
sublime summing up as it were of what sublime men have to do for their
race; an exemplification, rather than a contradiction, of Nature
herself, as we know her in our own experience.
Now, all this was really intended as a defence of the atonement; but
the President heard me that Sunday, and on the Monday he called me into
his room. He said that my sermon was marked by considerable ability,
but he should have been better satisfied if I had confined myself to
setting forth as plainly as I could the "way of salvation" as revealed
in Christ Jesus. What I had urged might perhaps have possessed some
interest for cultivated people; in fact, he had himself urged pretty
much the same thing many years ago, when he was a young man, in a
sermon he had preached at the Union meeting; but I must recollect that
in all probability my sphere of usefulness would lie amongst humble
hearers, perhaps in an agricultural village or a small town, and that
he did not think people of this sort would understand me if I talked
over their heads as I had done the day before. What they wanted on a
Sunday, after all the cares of the week, was not anything to perplex
and disturb them; not anything which demanded any exercise of thought;
but a repetition of the "old story of which, Mr. Rutherford, you know,
we never ought to get weary; an exhibition of our exceeding sinfulness;
of our safety in the Rock of Ages, and there only; of the joys of the
saints and the sufferings of those who do not believe."
His words fell on me like the hand of a corpse, and I went away much
depressed. My sermon had excited me, and the man who of all men ought
to have welcomed me, had not a word of warmth or encouragement for me,
nothing but the coldest indifference, and even repulse.
It occurs to me here to offer an explanation of a failing of which I
have been accused in later years, and that is secrecy and reserve. The
real truth is, that nobody more than myself could desire self-
revelation; but owing to peculiar tendencies in me, and peculiarity of
education, I was always prone to say things in conversation which I
found produced blank silence in the majority of those who listened to
me, and immediate opportunity was taken by my hearers to turn to
something trivial. Hence it came to pass that only when tempted by
unmistakable sympathy could I be induced to express my real self on any
topic of importance.
It is a curious instance of the difficulty of diagnosing (to use a
doctor's word) any spiritual disease, if disease this shyness may be
called. People would ordinarily set it down to self-reliance, with no
healthy need of intercourse. It was nothing of the kind. It was an
excess of communicativeness, an eagerness to show what was most at my
heart, and to ascertain what was at the heart of those to whom I
talked, which made me incapable of mere fencing and trifling, and so
often caused me to retreat into myself when I found absolute absense of
response.
I am also reminded here of a dream which I had in these years of a
perfect friendship. I always felt that, talk with whom I would, I left
something unsaid which was precisely what I most wished to say. I
wanted a friend who would sacrifice himself to me utterly, and to whom
I might offer a similar sacrifice. I found companions for whom I
cared, and who professed to care for me; but I was thirsting for deeper
draughts of love than any which they had to offer; and I said to myself
that if I were to die, not one of them would remember me for more than
a week. This was not selfishness, for I longed to prove my devotion as
well as to receive that of another. How this ideal haunted me! It
made me restless and anxious at the sight of every new face, wondering
whether at last I had found that for which I searched as if for the
kingdom of heaven.
It is superfluous to say that a friend of the kind I wanted never
appeared, and disappointment after disappointment at last produced in
me a cynicism which repelled people from me, and brought upon me a good
deal of suffering. I tried men by my standard, and if they did not
come up to it I rejected them; thus I prodigally wasted a good deal of
the affection which the world would have given me. Only when I got
much older did I discern the duty of accepting life as God has made it,
and thankfully receiving any scrap of love offered to me, however
imperfect it might be.
I don't know any mistake which I have made which has cost me more than
this; but at the same time I must record that it was a mistake for
which, considering everything, I cannot much blame myself. I hope it
is amended now. Now when it is getting late I recognise a higher
obligation, brought home to me by a closer study of the New Testament.
Sympathy or no sympathy, a man's love should no more fail towards his
fellows than that love which spent itself on disciples who altogether
misunderstood it, like the rain which falls on just and unjust alike.
CHAPTER III--WATER LANE
I had now reached the end of my fourth year at college, and it was time
for me to leave. I was sent down into the eastern counties to a
congregation which had lost its minister, and was there "on probation"
for a month. I was naturally a good speaker, and as the "cause" had
got very low, the attendance at the chapel increased during the month I
was there. The deacons thought they had a prospect of returning
prosperity, and in the end I received a nearly unanimous invitation,
which, after some hesitation, I accepted. One of the deacons, a Mr.
Snale, was against me; he thought I was not "quite sound"; but he was
overruled. We shall hear more of him presently. After a short holiday
I entered on my new duties.
The town was one of those which are not uncommon in that part of the
world. It had a population of about seven or eight thousand, and was a
sort of condensation of the agricultural country round. There was one
main street, consisting principally of very decent, respectable shops.
Generally speaking, there were two shops of each trade; one which was
patronised by the Church and Tories, and another by the Dissenters and
Whigs. The inhabitants were divided into two distinct camps--of the
Church and Tory camp the other camp knew nothing. On the other hand,
the knowledge which each member of the Dissenting camp had of every
other member was most intimate.
The Dissenters were further split up into two or three different sects,
but the main sect was that of the Independents. They, in fact,
dominated every other. There was a small Baptist community, and the
Wesleyans had a new red-brick chapel in the outskirts; but for some
reason or other the Independents were really the Dissenters, and until
the "cause" had dwindled, as before observed, all the Dissenters of any
note were to be found on Sunday in their meeting-house in Water Lane.
My predecessor had died in harness at the age of seventy-five. I never
knew him, but from all I could hear he must have been a man of some
power. As he got older, however, he became feeble; and after a course
of three sermons on a Sunday for fifty years, what he had to say was so
entirely anticipated by his congregation, that although they all
maintained that the gospel, or, in other words, the doctrine of the
fall, the atonement, and so forth, should continually be presented, and
their minister also believed and acted implicitly upon the same theory,
they fell away--some to the Baptists, some to the neighbouring
Independents about two miles off, and some to the Church, while a few
"went nowhere."
When I came I found that the deacons still remained true. They were
the skeleton; but the flesh was so woefully emaciated, that on my first
Sunday there were not above fifty persons in a building which would
hold seven hundred. These deacons were four in number. One was an old
farmer who lived in a village three miles distant. Ever since he was a
boy he had driven over to Water Lane on Sunday. He and his family
brought their dinner with them, and ate it in the vestry; but they
never stopped till the evening, because of the difficulty of getting
home on dark nights, and because they all went to bed in winter-time at
eight o'clock.
Morning and afternoon Mr. Catfield--for that was his name--gave out the
hymns. He was a plain, honest man, very kind, very ignorant, never
reading any book except the Bible, and barely a newspaper save Bell's
Weekly Messenger. Even about the Bible he knew little or nothing
beyond a few favourite chapters; and I am bound to say that, so far as
my experience goes, the character so frequently drawn in romances of
intense Bible students in Dissenting congregations is very rare. At
the same time Mr. Catfield believed himself to be very orthodox, and in
his way was very pious. I could never call him a hypocrite. He was as
sincere as he could be, and yet no religious expression of his was ever
so sincere as the most ordinary expression of the most trifling
pleasure or pain.
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