IV
HAIRBREADTH ESCAPES
The loss of the Titanic will always be spoken of as one of the world’s most thrilling and dramatic tragedies. Mr. L. Beesley, until lately Master of Science at Dulwich College, has written a picturesque and vivid volume telling in graphic detail the story of that fearful night. He describes his own wonderful escape from the ill-fated ship, and instances also many of the hairbreadth escapes of his fellow passengers. And this has set me thinking. For it seems to me that hairbreadth escapes have a philosophy of their own. All through life hair-breadth escapes are the only things we really care to hear about or read about. If you find a boy curled up in a cosy chair, absorbed in a book, you may be perfectly certain that his flushed face and flashing eyes betoken an exciting stage of a hairbreadth escape. The hero has just succeeded in scaling the prison wall, or he has just broken from a fierce tribe of Red Indians, or he is flying for his life from a horde of cannibals. Or — to take life at its other end — if you chance to find the arm-chair occupied by the boy’s grandfather, and are happy enough to catch him in a garrulous mood, he will at once plunge into the story of his hairbreadth escapes. Even Paul, in writing to Corinth, succumbed to this inevitable tendency. It is ever so. And, just because it is ever so, the three most popular books in the language are simply crammed from cover to cover with astonishing records of hairbreadth escapes. I refer, of course, to the Bible, to Pilgrim’s Progress, and to Robinson Crusoe.
Look, for instance, at the Bible. Here are Lot’s escape from Sodom, Isaac’s escape from the altar, Joseph’s escape from the pit, Israel’s escape from Egypt, Moses’ escape from Pharaoh, Elijah’s escape from Jezebel, David’s escape from Saul, Jonah’s escape from the deep, Jeremiah’s escape from the dungeon, the Hebrew children’s escape from the burning fiery furnace, Daniel’s escape from the lions, Peter’s escape from prison, Paul’s escape from shipwreck, John’s escape from exile, and very many more. Did ever book contain so many astounding adventures? Then Bunyan’s immortal classic is all about Christian’s escape from the City of Destruction, his escape from the Slough of Despond, his escape from Apollyon, his escape from Vanity Fair, his escape from the Flatterer’s net, his escape from Giant Despair, his escape from the Valley of the Shadow, and his escape from the waters of the river. And as for Robinson Crusoe, there is a hairbreadth escape on almost every page.
The same argument holds good if we turn from biblical biographies to those of later times. The most impressive passages are the hairbreadth escapes. John Wesley never forgot his deliverance, as a child, from the burning parsonage. ‘The memory of it,’ his biographers tell us, ‘is still preserved in one of his earliest prints. Under his portrait there is a house in flames, with this inscription: “Is not this a brand plucked out of the burning?” He remembered this remarkable event ever after with the most lively gratitude, and more than once has introduced it in his writings. ‘Everybody remembers Dr. Thomas Guthrie’s miraculous escape on the cliffs of Arbroath, John Knox’s extraordinary deliverance in rising from his study chair a second or two before it was shattered by a bullet, John Howard’s wonderful escape from the hand of the assassin, and George Washington’s similar adventure at White Plains. And as to David Livingstone, Mr. Silvester Horne tells us that, besides his historic escape from the lion, he sometimes met with as many as three positively hairbreadth escapes in a single day. I suppose the true inwardness of such escapes, and the element about them that has most profoundly moved us all at some time or other, was never better expressed than by the wild and dissolute Lord dive. Thrice he attempted suicide, and thrice the revolver unaccountably refused to do his awful will. At the third failure he flung the weapon down, exclaiming, ‘Surely God intends to do some great thing by me that He has so preserved me!’ And he became the victor of Plassey and the founder of our Indian Empire.
But life has most wonderful escapes, quite apart from pistols and precipices, from floods and flames. Mr. H. G. Wells contributed a very striking article to the Daily Mail the other day, in which he emphasized the modern tendency to escape. ‘The ties that bind men to place,’ he writes, ‘are being severed; we are in the beginning of a new phase in human experience. For endless ages man led the hunting life, migrating after his food, camping, homeless, as to this day are many of the Indians and Esquimaux in the Hudson Bay Territory. Then began agriculture, and for the sake of securer food man tethered himself to a place. The history of man’s progress from savagery to civilization is essentially a story of settling down.’ Then Mr. Wells goes on to show us how the tide turned. The day of the traveller dawned. Railway trains, motor-cars, Mauretanias, Titanics, aeroplanes, and cheap fares became the order of the day. Migration is the watchword of the world. The earth has, almost literally, a floating population. ‘The thing is as simple as the rule of three,’ Mr. Wells concludes. ‘We are off the chain of locality for good and all. It was once necessary for a man to live in immediate contact with his occupation, because the only way for him to reach it was to have it at his door, and the cost and delay of transport were relatively too enormous for him to shift once he was settled. Now he may live twenty or thirty miles away from his occupation, and it often pays him to spend the small amount of time and money needed to move — it may be half-way round the world — to healthier conditions or more profitable employment.’
Mr. Wells’ article is the story of a great escape. Men do not now live like poor Tim Linkinwater, sleeping every night for forty-four years in the same back attic; glancing every morning between the same two flowerpots at the dingy London square, and convinced that nowhere in the world was there a view to rival that landscape! No; we have escaped, and we keep on escaping. It becomes a habit. Every holiday is an escape, often a hair-breadth escape.
‘There is one person from whom you must contrive to escape,’ said Doctor Sir Deryck Brand to Lady Inglesby, his patient, in Mrs. Barclay’s Mistress of Shenstone.
‘One person—?’ queried Lady Inglesby.
‘A charming person,’ smiled the doctor, ‘where the rest of mankind are concerned, but very bad for you just now!’
‘But whom?’ questioned Lady Inglesby again; ‘whom can you mean ?’
‘I mean Lady Inglesby!’ replied the doctor gravely.
And Lady Inglesby soon learned the joys of a hairbreadth escape, for, from the seaside inn at which she stayed incognito, she wrote:
‘It was a stroke of genius, this setting me free from myself; the sense of emancipation is indescribable!’
Every composure of a weary head upon a soft pillow is an escape, a breaking loose from the cares that relentlessly pursue, an immigration into the land of sweet unconsciousness or radiant dreams. Every indulgence in really refreshing recreation is an escape. Every pleasure is an escape. I noticed that the theatrical editor of the London Graphic, in the issue that was crowded with pictures of the coal strike, headed his page ‘A Way of Forgetting all About the Strike.’ ‘In all good deer forests,’ he wrote, ‘there is a sanctuary — to which the deer can retire with complete immunity—not because their lord and master is philanthropic, but because he knows that, if he shoots everywhere in his land, the deer will cross the border into his neighbour’s demesne and probably not return. At such a moment as the present—the great industrial war being in full swing—we all need a sanctuary to which we can retire from the rumours of war, from strikes, from newspaper jeremiads, and from all other depressing influences. The retirement is not an act of cowardice. It is necessary as a resuscitation. It helps one to get on the top of things, to see life in perspective, and with some sort of common sense.’ From such a source, that passage is wonderfully suggestive. ‘A way of forgetting!’ ‘A sanctuary!’ ‘A retirement!’ The man who has found this way of forgetting, this sanctuary, this retirement, has escaped—that is all.
Or think what an excellent means of escape a really good book represents. ‘Is your world a small one?’ asks Myrtle Reed. ‘Is it small and made unendurable to you by a thousand petty cares? Are the heart and soul of you cast down by bitter disappointment? Would you leave it all, if only for an hour, and come back with a new point of view? Then open the covers of a book!’ And we have all fallen in love with Mr. Edward Thomas’ village scholar in Horae Solitariae. ‘He finds a refuge from the shadows of the world among the realities of books.’ He set his little cabin door between the restless world and himself, wandered across to his bookshelves, and felt a supreme pity for plutocrats, plenipotentiaries, and princes!
Nor is this all. For in Mark Rutherford’s Deliverance the genial and lovable philosopher says a very striking thing. In the poky little window of a small undertaker’s shop in a London slum he saw, between two dismal representations of hearses, a rude cross. It powerfully impressed him. ‘The desire to decorate existence in some way or other,’ he says, ‘is nearly universal. The most sensual and the meanest almost always manifest an indisposition to be content with mere material satisfaction. I have known selfish, gluttonous, drunken men spend their leisure moments in trimming a bed of scarlet geraniums, and the vulgarest and most commonplace of mortals considers it a necessity to put a picture in the room or an ornament on the mantelpiece. The instinct, even in its lowest forms, is divine. It is the commentary on the text that man shall not live by bread alone. It is evidence of an acknowledged compulsion — of which Art is the highest manifestation — to escape.’ The italics are his, not mine. In the rude cross that adorned the shabby and gloomy window, Mark Rutherford saw a hint of an exit, a way out, an escape. Just as the geraniums and the pictures are an escape from the sordidness and ugliness and bareness of London squalor, so the cross in the undertaker’s window pointed a way of emancipation to aching and breaking hearts.
Now, this is leading us very near to the heart of things. For surely the Christian Church, with her atmosphere of charity and purity and peace, is a most gracious and grateful escape. And even death itself, by the time that it comes, is to most people a gentle and welcome deliverance.
But I really believe that, after all, the finest thing ever said or sung about an escape is that blithe note of one of Israel’s sweetest singers. ‘We are escaped!’ he sings as he looks back upon the Captivity. ‘The snare is broken, and we are escaped!’ It is like the gay outburst of the birds in an English grove whilst the torn meshes of the nets around bear witness to the perils from which, with ruffled plumage, they have lately been delivered.
‘We are escaped!’ cried the Jews as they exultantly re-entered Jerusalem, and gave way to transports of gratitude and delight. ‘The snare is broken, and we are escaped!’
‘We are escaped!’ cried old Theodore Beza, his hair white with the snows of eighty winters, as he went up to the ancient church at Geneva after the long agony of persecution and oppression was past. ‘The snare is broken, and we are escaped!’ And every year, on the anniversary of that historic proclamation of three centuries ago, the great psalm is chanted by the people gathered in the same building.
‘We are escaped!’ cried William Knibb, as he announced to the slaves of Jamaica the victory of the Abolitionists. ‘The snare is broken, and we are escaped!’
‘We are escaped!’cried the dying McCheyne. In the collapse of the body, a strange darkness had overtaken him. He asked to be left alone for half an hour. When his servant returned, his face was radiant and his voice triumphant. ‘I am escaped!’ he exclaimed. ‘The snare is broken, and I am escaped!’
Said I not truly that it was like the melody of birds in a sweet English grove whilst the torn and tangled snares lay all around? ‘The comparison of the soul to a bird is beautiful,’ says Dr. Maclaren. ‘It hints at tremors and feebleness, at alternations of feeling like the flutter of some weak-winged songster, at the utter helplessness of the panting creature in the toils. One hand only could break the snare, and then the bruised wings were swiftly spread for flight once more, and up into the blue went the ransomed creature, with a song instead of harsh notes of alarm : We are escaped! we are escaped! we are escaped!’
Dr. J. H. Jowett, of New York, told the other day the story of a dream. A friend of his dreamed that he was a hare, with the hounds in hot pursuit. They were rapidly overtaking him, and he could feel their horrid breath as they drew nearer. Presently, as he reached some bare and rocky heights, he discovered that, instead of hounds, they were his own sins that chased him, and that he was a flying soul. Far up towards the summit of the hill he saw a cave, f flooded with a most unearthly light. At the entrance there shone resplendently a Cross. He hurried to it, and, as he reached it, the hideous things that had pursued him slunk dejectedly away. He awoke and; knew it was a dream. But the dream led him to the Saviour. And it led him to the Saviour because he saw that, of all life’s miraculous and hairbreadth escapes, the escape by way of the Cross is by far the most wonderful and by far the most amazing.
F.W. Boreham
0 Comments